‘Nope,’ I say. ‘Nothing really. I’ve lived a pretty dull life.’
I know it’s just a coincidence. I know she’s only saying Sassy Girl because there was one on every high street. I’m certain she doesn’t know that Simon Artemis is my father. She wouldn’t know who Simon Artemis was. She doesn’t know who owns that shop, whose stuff she was shoving down her pants to flog on a Saturday morning. I look back at Kelly, but she’s lost interest, immersed in applying a top coat to her newly painted toes. I grab my notepad and head to the computer room to go over my meeting with Thorpe. But I find that my fingers are already lightly pulling at the skin on my throat. I don’t like coincidences.
*
I find a space in the so-called computer room as far away from other people as possible and sit down. The room has three chunky monitors which look like they were donated by Amstrad back in the early Eighties. Supposedly, computers are being slowly allowed into cells in some places, but Limehouse seems to be low down on the list of prisons to receive such privileges. There are computer literacy courses available here, as if anyone wants to learn how to send emails and write a word document, when really most of us are just here to browse Facebook and search for that ex who dumped you for the girl who worked in HR, to see if they’re happy.
I write down everything my lawyer said in bullet points and go over them again and again, until I think I’ve got it all. Isn’t it absurd? Everything that I’ve done in the past few years, all the plans and all the death. The tunnel vision ambition I’d cherished, fuelled and successfully achieved and then … this.
She fell and I was arrested, charged, and tried with murder. She fell like the drunken emaciated mess she was and I ended up here in a tracksuit paying a man in tortoiseshell glasses hundreds of pounds an hour to try and find proof of my innocence. How can you prove something didn’t happen when the only witness is you? Caro will never be able to tell the truth about that night, and I suspect she wouldn’t even if she could. She’d find this amusing.
I’ve been in close proximity to death, if you forgive the perverse brag. I’ve found that seeing death happen in real time often panics people, makes them nut out – scream and cry and faint and run in circles. Thankfully, it’s never had that effect on me. I’ve always known it was coming, perhaps that’s the difference? But with Caro, I had no idea. She wobbled sure, but the suggestion that she might actually fall never entered my head. Perhaps it just felt too obvious – people fall off balconies drunk in Magaluf, not in Clapham. And it was amazingly sudden – and so quiet. She didn’t shriek or wail. There was no hand to grab onto as in a movie. One minute she was there, the next she wasn’t. If I hadn’t been watching her, been inches away from her face, I wouldn’t have believed it. And so I panicked. My usual detached approach to witnessing the end of a life deserted me and my vision went blurry. I sank to my knees, holding onto the stone spindles, looking between them to see if I could spot her. But all I saw was the well-clipped hedge which surrounded the flats. I didn’t yell, or run to fetch someone. I didn’t even notice my phone in my hand. Nobody really knows how long I sat there, but it can’t have been more than a couple of minutes. Jimmy told the police that he came to find out why we were still outside long after the time it would take to smoke a cigarette. He told them that I hated her. Jimmy told the police a lot of things.
*
I heard footsteps and turned towards the French windows. He stood there and I looked up, suddenly aware of reality.
‘Where is Caro, Grace?’ He didn’t wait for a response. I pointed （I think I pointed） towards the balcony and he stepped over me and looked down. I never saw what he saw. I didn’t look. And by the time we were allowed to leave the flat later that morning, she was gone. But Jimmy saw her. And he didn’t scream or moan or let out a guttural wail like you’d imagine. He just turned back towards me, crouched down and grabbed at my hands like he wanted to rip my arms from their sockets.
‘What have you done?’ he whispered, his face screwed up in confusion and shock. ‘What the fuck have you DONE?’
I just looked at him. He lurched to his feet, crashed back through the French doors and I heard the flat door slam. The girl inside whose face I have completely forgotten must have called the police. I was still sitting on the balcony when they arrived, wailing sirens and three uniformed officers. They were quickly followed by an ambulance, which seemed strangely funny to me, a true triumph of hope over experience. She was dead, wasn’t she? Such a performance.