Eyes wide, I look out of the window, back to the text, out the window again, trying to make sense of it. Her phone doesn’t recognise the sender as a name from her phonebook, only a number.
It’s from her husband, I reason, snapping the phone shut and replacing it on the table. Obviously. He must have access to a mobile. Don’t some cons smuggle them into jail, hidden in unholy places? Yes, that’s right. That’s it.
But – it mentions ‘the other night’. Lucas hasn’t had a ‘other night’ with his wife since last year. Ah – wrong number! Yes, it’s a wrong number. No. That can’t be it. The message calls her ‘N’.
I glance out of the window again. Natalie’s still talking. Panic hits me: I forgot to delete the message. She’ll know I read it. I pick up the phone again, open it, hesitate, scribble down the number. One check against Simon’s number, then I’ll get rid of it. I delete the message and replace the phone on the coffee table, careful to turn it back so it’s pointing towards where Natalie was sitting. I gulp down a huge swig of tea, as if she’s going to walk back in, inspect the volume in my cup and say: ‘That’s two millilitres too full.’
I wait, heart beating a pitter-patter, thoughts tumbling over themselves.
‘Sorry about that, her cat did a runner while I was feeding him. Total nightmare,’ Natalie says, flopping back on the sofa. She checks her phone. My heart goes kathunk-kathunk-kathunk.
She switches on the Dictaphone and checks it’s running.
‘Where do you want to start?’
I clear my throat.
‘When the jury read out their guilty verdict, how did you feel?’
34
Natalie’s fragile physical appearance belies her steely resolve, the kind required to raise two young children alone and coordinate her husband’s campaign for justice, and above all, keep the faith that he is coming home soon. Can she still believe in a system that has, she believes, wrongly convicted her husband? Her reply shows how a former optician’s assistant from Bury has had a crash course in the judicial process and the power of positive thinking.
‘The courts can make mistakes. The appeal system wouldn’t exist otherwise,’ she says, ‘and Lucas’s legal team are confident that the fresh evidence will be enough to get the verdict quashed, and they won’t order a retrial.’
In her visits to Lucas, she says, they never discuss the possibility his appeal will fail. ‘We talk about the girls, whether I’ve paid the bills. Boring stuff, but Lucas says it keeps him sane.’
While other family and friends collapsed and openly wept when Lucas’s sentence was delivered, Natalie remained composed. What was going through her mind, in those terrible moments? ‘I knew I had to be strong for my husband,’ she explains. ‘He’s innocent, that’s all that matters, and the truth will come out. If I broke down, how would that help him? He looks to me for support. He depends on me.’
I glance up from my notes, feeling light-headed, as if I can’t quite get the ground underneath me to lie flat.
If this is the way it looks, and Natalie is having a fling, I wonder if it pre-dates her husband being locked up. Once upon a time, I’d have been appalled at this. But really: only two people really know what’s going on in a relationship. And sometimes, not even that many, a voice says.
An hour later, I’m running the spellcheck and preparing to send it to news desk. No more than a workmanlike job, not up to competition standard, but I want it finished, done with. I don’t want to think about the number that wasn’t Simon’s.
Ken emails back within twenty minutes. ‘Nice read,’ the message says. ‘We’ll hold it until the week of the appeal. Good pix too.’
If we were on the phone, I’m sure he’d add ‘She’s bang tidy!’ On email, he’s a politician: never get caught out by the reply-instead-of-forward faux pas, never leave electronic record.
The photographer calls me to check the spelling of the twins’ names. ‘Weird she didn’t have any photos of her husband out, wasn’t it? She had to go searching for one we could use.’
‘Probably too painful for her to look at,’ I say, and cut the conversation short.
Every job has its small perks and mine comes with the occasional burst of free stand-up comedy or, to give it its formal title, contempt of court. Whenever an unhinged or flamboyant character takes to the stand, word goes round. And it’s not just journos – solicitors and court ushers join in with the whisper. ‘Get in 2, quick’ spreads like wildfire – and suddenly the court fills up with people pretending they have a reason to be there. The favoured pose is sliding into a seat at the back, vaguely scanning the room as if you have an urgent message to deliver to someone you can’t immediately locate and don’t want to disturb proceedings.
Among the greatest hits have been a streetwalker who flashed a tattooed boob at a judge and told him he ‘looked like a client’ (Gretton was absent for that one, off for root canal work – I don’t know which was more painful for him, the teeth or the missed tit), a man with a multiple personality disorder which caused him to answer every question in a different accent, and a drum’n’bass DJ who solemnly took off his shirt in the dock to reveal a t-shirt saying ‘Only God Can Judge Me’. (In front of a dry circuit judge, who lowered his spectacles and said crisply: ‘Unfortunately for you, He delegated discretion in sentence to me.’)
So on Monday lunchtime, when a gangly lad from a weekly paper pops his head around the press room door and says breathlessly: ‘Have you heard …?’ I assume that someone’s happy-slapped a QC or informed a packed courtroom that they’re a high-ranking Scientologist and thus privy to most of the secrets of our puny human universe.
I break off typing up my quotes from the Natalie Shale interview.
‘No, what?’
Instead of issuing directions about where it’s taking place and charging off again, he comes in and spreads a copy of the Evening News on the desk. He thumbs through to the classified adverts.
‘Here,’ he says, jabbing at an extra large announcement in 16pt font, blocked off in a thick black border.
‘Desperately seeking Dick,’ it reads. ‘Zoe Clarke of the Evening News is looking, without success. If you have any information about where she can find Dick, please call –’ and a mobile number follows. ‘She will pay extremely well for information leading to Dick.’
‘Ingenious. What a way with words. Who did this?’ I ask.
The gangly lad sniggers, shrugs. ‘She’s got on someone’s wick, obviously.’
‘It’s really unnecessary,’ I say, and all of a sudden I know why Gretton was so unnaturally buoyant. ‘How did you know about this?’
‘It’s all round the office at yours. Someone called with a tip-off.’
I flip through the rest of the paper and see a double page on the liposuction story, which yielded two guilty verdicts for the doctors, though the nurse got off. It uses the backgrounder and it all bears my byline, no Zoe, despite the first eight paragraphs being solely her work. I scan the ad a second time and go in search of Zoe in court, coming up empty until I spy her through the front windows.
‘Please don’t laugh, I’ve been piss-ripped all day. I’ve had heavy breathing calls and I’ve had enough,’ she says, dragging on a fag with the hunger of a former expert who’s fallen off the wagon with a thud.
‘I’m not going to laugh, I think it’s horrible.