Another nail in my coffin, thought Jackie in despair, her hands involuntarily gripping the wooden rail of the dock. As the evidence droned on around her, she looked despondently round the courtroom. In her seventeen years as a journalist, she’d had little experience of the courts. While she’d been a young trainee on a weekly paper in Ayrshire, she’d occasionally covered routine cases in the Sheriff Court. But after that, she had become a feature writer and had never even crossed the threshold of the imposing High Court building by the Clyde.
It wasn’t an environment she felt comfortable with, unlike the crowd of news reporters crammed into the press bench. All men, for crime reporting was still a male preserve in Glasgow. They sat there, hour after hour, like eager jackals, taking down every detail in their meticulous shorthand. And tomorrow, she knew, the bricks of evidence that were slowly building a wall round her would be reassembled to provide the foundations of sensational stories that would strip all her privacy from her. She knew most of these men. That was the hardest part of all. For ten years, she had been a leading freelance feature writer in the city, working for all the major newspapers and magazines. These were men she’d laughed with, gossiped with, drunk with. Now, as she studied them intent on their task, they looked like strangers. Familiar features seemed to have shifted, hardened, changed somehow. She wasn’t their pal Jackie any more. She was a brutal bitch, an animal with a perverted sexuality who had killed one of their number. In life, Alison Maxwell had been a talented Scottish Daily Clarion feature writer with a dubious personal reputation. In death, she had been promoted to the Blessed Martyr of Fleet Street.
When she could no longer bear to look at her former colleagues, Jackie turned her eyes to the jury. Nine men, six women. A spread of ages from early twenties to middle fifties. They looked for the most part like solid, respectable citizens. The sort of people for whom her first crime was being a lesbian, a state from which any other crime might naturally flow. When she’d been led into the dock on the first morning, they had looked at her curiously, weighing her up as if calculating the likelihood of her guilt. But as the prosecution had steadily built its case, they had shown an increasing reluctance to look at her, contenting themselves with furtive glances. She began to wonder if she’d been right to listen to her solicitor’s advice about her clothes. The series of smart, feminine suits and dresses she’d chosen for the trial made her look too normal, she feared. Almost as if she were one of them. Perhaps they’d have been more open-minded about the evidence placed before them if she hadn’t disturbed them with that subtle threat. Maybe they’d have been less unnerved by her if she was standing there with her copper hair cropped short, wearing a Glad to Be Gay sweatshirt. Then they could have treated her more like Exhibit A.
Wearily she sighed, and tried to raise her spirits with a glance at the one person she could be certain still believed in her innocence. In the front row of the public benches, her fine, white-blonde hair falling round her head like a gleaming helmet, Claire Ogilvie sat taking notes. Her neat, small features, dwarfed by the huge glasses she wore, were fixed in concentration, except when she looked up at Jackie. Then she would give a small, encouraging smile, which against all odds and logic kept a flicker of hope alive in Jackie’s heart. In the five years they’d been together, she’d never had to rely so much on Claire. Whatever happened at the end of the trial, she’d never be able to repay that debt.
As soon as the police had arrived that October evening to arrest Jackie, Claire had been on the phone to one of Glasgow’s top criminal lawyers, who had responded to the call of a fellow solicitor with a speed astonishing to anyone familiar with the procrastinations of his breed. Jim Carstairs had actually been waiting at the Maryhill Police Station when they’d brought her in to charge her with the murder of Alison Maxwell. Although Claire Ogilvie’s flourishing commercial law practice never dealt with criminal law, she always sent any of her clients who needed a good trial lawyer to Macari, Stevenson and Carstairs, so Jim had pulled out all the stops for Jackie. But it had made little difference. Because of the gravity of the charge, bail had been refused, and she’d spent the last eight weeks on remand in the women’s prison near Stirling. In spite of the demands of her clients, Claire had somehow contrived to visit her almost every day. It had been the only thing that had kept Jackie going when she felt the walls closing in and heard the voices of madness in her head. There had been times when she’d even begun to wonder herself if she’d killed Alison in a moment of insanity that she could no longer recall.
But through it all, Claire had been there, practical, indomitable, supportive. Although Claire concentrated on commercial and contract law herself, she had many friends with criminal practices, and she knew only too well the costs of mounting a first-class defence. So, the morning after the bail hearing, she’d put their fashionable three-bedroomed first-floor flat on the market. Because of its size and its position on a sunny corner near the University, it had been sold within days, thanks to the efficient processes of the Scottish property laws. Claire had dutifully paid half the proceeds into Jackie’s bank account to fund her lover’s defence. She had promptly bought herself a new home, free from all past associations, in a newly renovated block in the heart of the Merchant City, the yuppified district in the city centre where property developers were busily cashing in on the aspirations of the suddenly rich. Claire told herself she had no doubts about Jackie’s innocence; but she was nobody’s fool when it came to the law. She’d had enough discussion with Jim Carstairs to realise that Jackie’s chances of walking away from this murder indictment were so slim as to be negligible. Although Jackie was unaware of it, the ever-practical Claire Ogilvie had already started to rebuild her life.
Part of that rebuilding took the shape of the attractive, dark-haired woman who sat next to her during the trial. As far as Jackie was concerned, Cordelia Brown was simply a friend who had done her best to help the defence in the build-up to the trial. In her despair at ever clearing her name of the charge, Jackie had dredged up the name of one person that she believed might be able to find out the truth. When Claire had gone looking for Lindsay Gordon she had quickly discovered that Cordelia was their only hope of finding her. But their efforts had been fruitless. Like everything else that had happened to Jackie since her last visit to Alison’s flat, things hadn’t worked out according to plan. But for Claire, it was a very different story.
Duncan Leslie got to his feet and slowly surveyed the jury. The trial was almost over, and he was filled with a quiet confidence. He had spun his web around Jackie Mitchell. Now, all he had to do was to draw the threads together to present her to the jury as a tightly wrapped cocoon with no prospect of escape.
‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,’ he began, pacing slowly backwards and forwards in front of the jury box. ‘This has not been a pleasant case for any of us. A woman has been brutally killed in the one place where she could reasonably hope to be safe – in the bedroom of her own flat, in the arms of her lover. The defence have tried to cloud your judgment with tawdry allegations about the victim of this particularly horrific crime. But I’d like to remind you that it is not Alison Maxwell who is on trial here today – it is her killer, Jackie Mitchell.
‘You have heard how, on the afternoon of 16 October, Jackie Mitchell visited Alison Maxwell in her flat, thus betraying her own live-in lover. The two women went to bed together and had sex. A quarrel followed. Jackie Mitchell then left the flat. Within minutes of her departure, Alison Maxwell’s strangled body was discovered, still warm. None of these facts is in dispute.’ Leslie stopped walking to and fro and turned to face the jury, fixing them one by one with an unblinking stare that, more effectively than any histrionics, gave force to his words.
‘My colleague for the defence is asking you to believe that in those few short moments, a third party managed to enter a block of flats protected by security entryphones and contrived to get into Alison Maxwell’s flat, leaving no signs of any break-in. Then this unknown assailant strangled her with Jackie Mitchell’s own scarf – a method of killing, incidentally, which does not lend itself to speed. This mysterious murderer then managed to make a clean get-away. And during all this, our killer was never seen, never heard.
‘If you believe that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, then I expect