Apple Tree Yard Read online

  Apple Tree Yard

  Louise Doughty

  To

  Everyone who walks around,

  Knowing the truth to be

  Different

  Like the eye, the ear and the elbow, the genome shows no element of design, but is instead filled with compromise, contingency and decay.

  Steve Jones

  We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up.

  Janet Malcolm

  Contents

  Prologue

  part one

  X and Y

  part two

  A, T, G and C

  part three

  DNA

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  The moment builds; it swells and builds – the moment when I realise we have lost. The young barrister, Ms Bonnard, is on her feet in front of me: a small woman, as you probably remember, auburn hair beneath the judicial wig. Her gaze is cool, her voice light. Her black robes look chic rather than sinister. She radiates calm, believability. I have been in the witness box two days now and I am tired, really tired. Later, I will understand that Ms Bonnard chose this time of day deliberately. She wasted quite a lot of time earlier in the afternoon, asking about my education, my marriage, my hobbies. She has been down so many different avenues that at first I am not alert to the fact that this new line of questioning has significance. The moment builds but slowly; it swells to its climax.

  The clock at the back of the court reads 3.50 p.m. The air is thick. Everyone is tired, including the judge. I like the judge. He takes careful notes, raising his hand politely when he needs a witness to slow down. He blows his nose frequently, which makes him seem vulnerable. He is stern with the barristers but kindly to the jury. One of them stumbled over the words of the oath as she was sworn in and the judge smiled and nodded his head to her and said, ‘Do please take as long as you like, Madam.’ I like the jury too. It seems like an acceptable cross-section to me; a slight predominance of women, three black people and six Asian, ages ranging from around twenty to mid-sixties. Hard to believe such an innocuous group of people might send me to prison; even harder to believe it now, while they are slumped in their seats. None of them are in the perky, upright pose they all adopted when the trial began, faces bright, filled with the adrenaline of their own significance. Like me, they were probably surprised at first that the courtroom hours are so short, ten in the morning at the earliest, until lunchtime, finishing no later than four. But we all understand now. It’s the slowness of everything – that’s what’s so exhausting: we are well into the trial now and weighed down by detail. They are feeling smothered. They don’t understand what this young woman is driving at any more than I do.

  And then, in the wood-panelled dock, behind the thick sheets of toughened glass, there is you: my co-accused. Before I took the stand, we were sitting side by side, although separated by the two dock officers seated between us. I had been advised not to glance over at you while the other witnesses were being questioned – it would make me look more like your conspirator, I was told. While I have been on the witness stand myself, you have looked at me, simply and without emotion, and your calm, almost-blank stare is a comfort, for I know you are willing me to remain strong. I know that seeing me here, raised up and isolated, stared at and judged, will be making you feel protective. Your stare may not look intent to those who don’t know you but I have seen that apparently casual glance of yours on many occasions. I know what you are thinking.

  There is no natural light in Courtroom Number Eight and that bothers me. In the ceiling there is an arrangement of latticed fluorescent squares and there are white tubes on the walls. It’s all so sanitised and modern and stark. The wood panelling, the drop-down seats with their green cloth covers, none of it fits: the life-changing drama of why we are here versus the deadening mundanity of the procedures.

  I glance around the court. The clerk, sitting one row down in front of the judge, has sagging shoulders. Susannah is in the public gallery, next to a bunch of students who came in about an hour ago and a retired couple who have been there from the start but who are, as far as I know, unconnected with our case, just theatre fans who can’t afford a West End show. Even Susannah, who is watching me with her usual care, even she is glancing at her watch from time to time, waiting for the end of the day. No one is expecting any major developments at this stage.

  ‘I would like to take you back a bit, in your career,’ Ms Bonnard says, ‘I hope you will bear with me.’ Throughout my examination by her, she has been scrupulously polite. This does not alter the fact that she frightens me, her unnatural composure, her air of knowing something infinitely useful that the rest of us have yet to learn. I guess her to be nearly twenty years younger than me, mid-thirties at the most – not that much older than my son and daughter – she must have had a stellar rise through chambers.

  One of the jury, a middle-aged black man wearing a pink shirt sitting on the far right, yawns conspicuously. I glance at the judge whose gaze is purposeful but heavy-lidded. Only my own barrister, Robert, seems alert. He is wearing a slight frown, his thick white eyebrows lowered, and he is watching Ms Bonnard intently. Later, I wonder if he registered something at that point, some clue in her apparent lightness of tone.

  ‘Can you just remind the court,’ she continues, ‘when was it was you first attended a committee hearing at the Houses of Parliament? How long ago now?’

  I should not feel relief but cannot help myself – it is an easy question. The moment has not yet started.

  ‘Four years ago,’ I reply confidently.

  The young woman makes a show of glancing down at her notes. ‘That was a House of Commons Select Committee on…’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘actually, it was a Standing Committee at the House of Lords.’ I am on sure territory here. ‘Standing Committees don’t exist any more but at the time the House of Lords had four of them, each covering different areas of public life. I was appearing before the Standing Committee on Science to give evidence on developments in computer sequencing in genome mapping.’

  She cuts across me. ‘But you used to work full-time at the Beaufort Institute, didn’t you, before you went freelance I mean? The, er, Beaufort Institute for Genomic Research is its full title I believe…’

  This non-sequitur baffles me for a moment. ‘Yes, yes, I worked there full-time for eight years before reducing my formal hours to two days a week, a kind of consultancy role where I…’

  ‘It’s one of the most prestigious research institutes in the country, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, along with those in Cambridge and Glasgow, in my field, I suppose, yes, I was very…’

  ‘Can you just tell the court where the Beaufort Institute is located?’

  ‘It’s in Charles II Street.’

  ‘That’s parallel with Pall Mall, I believe, it runs down to St James’s Square Gardens?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There are quite a lot of institutes round there, aren’t there? Institutes, private clubs, research libraries…’ She glances at the jury and gives a small smile, ‘Corridors of power, that sort of stuff…’

  ‘I’m not… I…’

  ‘Forgive me, how long was it you worked for the Beaufort Institute?’

  I am unable to prevent a note of irritation creeping into my voice although that is something else I have been cautioned against. ‘I still do. But full-time, eight years.’

  ‘Ah yes, I’m sorry, you’ve said that already. And during those eight years, you commuted every day, bus and Tube?’

  ‘Tube mostly, yes.’

  ‘You walked from Piccadilly?’

  ‘Piccadilly Tube, usually, yes.’
/>   ‘And lunch hours, coffee breaks, plenty of places to eat around there? Pubs after work etc.?’

  At this, counsel for the prosecution, Mrs Price, gives a small exhalation and begins to lift her hand. The judge looks over his glasses at the young woman barrister and she raises the flat of her hand in response. ‘Forgive me, My Lord, I’m getting there, yes…’

  My Lord. My previous experience of criminal courtrooms was limited to television drama and I had been expecting Your Honour. But this is the Old Bailey. He’s a Lord – or she’s a Lady. You may find the wigs and the ceremonial ways that people refer to each other strange or intimidating, I was advised. But I don’t find the wigs intimidating any more than the arcane forms of address; I find them comic. What intimidates me is the bureaucracy, the stenographer clickety-clicking away – the laptops, the microphones, the thought that files are accruing on me, more and more, with every passing word – the whole great grindingness of these procedures. That is what intimidates me. It makes me feel like a field mouse caught in the giant turning blades of a combine harvester. I feel this even though I must be as well prepared as any witness. My husband saw to that. He hired a top barrister, at four hundred pounds an hour, to prepare me. I have remembered, most of the time, to look over at the jury when I give my answers rather than turning instinctively towards counsel. I have taken the advice that the easy way to remember this is to keep my feet placed so that my toes are pointing at the jury. I have kept my shoulders back, stayed calm, made good eye contact. I have, my team is all agreed, been doing very well.

  The barrister has acknowledged the judge’s authority and now looks back at me. ‘So in total, you’ve been working in or visiting the Borough of Westminster for, what, around twelve years? Longer?’

  ‘Longer probably,’ I say, and the moment starts building then, there, a profound sense of unease located somewhere inside me, identifiable as a slight clutching of my solar plexus. I diagnose it in myself even as I am baffled by it.

  ‘So,’ she says, and her voice becomes slow, gentle. ‘It would be fair to say that with all that commuting and walking from the Tube and lunch hours and so on, that you are very familiar with the area?’

  It is building. My breath begins to deepen. I can feel that my chest is rising and falling, imperceptibly at first, but the more I try to control myself, the more obvious it becomes. The atmosphere inside the court tightens, everyone can sense it. The judge is staring at me. Am I imagining it, or has the jury member in the pink shirt on the periphery of my vision sat up a little straighter, leaned forward in his seat? All at once, I dare not look at the jury directly. I dare not look at you, sitting in the dock.

  I nod, suddenly unable to speak. I know that in a few seconds, I will start to hyperventilate. I know this even though I have never done it before.

  The barrister’s voice is low and sinuous, ‘You’re familiar with the shops, the cafés…’ Sweat prickles the nape of my neck. My scalp is shrinking. She pauses. She has noted my distress and wants me to know that I have guessed correctly: I know where she is going with this line of questioning, and she knows I know. ‘The small side streets…’ She pauses again. ‘The back alleyways…’

  And that is the moment. That is the moment when it all comes crashing down, and I know, and you in the dock know too, for you put your head in your hands. We both know we are about to lose everything – our marriages are over, our careers are finished, I have lost my son’s and daughter’s good regard, and more than that, our freedom is at stake. Everything we have worked for, everything we have tried to protect: it is all about to tumble.

  I am hyperventilating openly now, breathing in great deep gulps. My defence barrister – poor Robert – is staring at me, puzzled and alarmed. The prosecution disclosed its line of attack before the trial and there was nothing unexpected in its opening statement or from the witnesses it put on the stand. But I am facing your barrister now, part of the defence team, and your defence and my defence had an agreement. What is going on? I can see Robert thinking. He looks at me and I see it in his face: there is something she hasn’t told me. He has no idea what is coming, knows only that he doesn’t know. It must be every barrister’s nightmare, something that finds him or her unprepared.

  Below the witness stand, sitting behind the tables nearest to me, the prosecution team is staring at me too, treasury counsel and the junior next to her, the woman from the Crown Prosecution Service on the table behind them, and on yet another row of tables behind that; the Senior Investigating Officer from the Metropolitan Police, the case officer, the exhibits officer. Then over by the door there is the victim’s father in his wheelchair and the Family Liaison Officer assigned to look after him. I am as familiar with the cast of this drama as I am with my own family. Everyone is fixed on me – everyone, my love, apart from you. You are not looking at me any more.

  ‘You are familiar, aren’t you?’ says Ms Bonnard in her satin, sinuous voice, ‘with a small back alleyway called Apple Tree Yard.’

  I close my eyes, very slowly, as if I am bringing the shutters down on the whole of my life until this moment. There is not a sound from the court, then someone from the benches in front of me shuffles their feet. The barrister is pausing for effect. She knows that I will keep my eyes closed for a moment or two: to absorb all this, to attempt to calm my ragged breathing and buy myself a few more seconds, but time has slipped from us like water through our fingers and there is none of it left, not one moment: it’s over.

  Part One

  X and Y

  1

  To begin where it began – really, it began twice. It began that cold March day in the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in the Palace of Westminster, beneath the drowned saints and the roasted saints and saints in every state of torture. It began that night, when I rose from my bed at four o’clock in the morning. I’m not a true insomniac. I have never tossed and turned night after night or spent weeks in a dreary fug of exhaustion, grey-faced and careful. Once in a while I find myself suddenly and inexplicably awake – and so it was that night. My eyes sprang open, my mind sprang into consciousness. My God, I thought, it happened… I went over what happened, and each time I went over it, it seemed more preposterous. I rolled beneath the duvet, the motion heavy, closed my eyes, then opened them immediately, knowing that sleep would not come again for at least an hour. Self-awareness: it is one of the chief bonuses of advancing age. It is our consolation prize.

  There is no clarity or insight at that hour. There is only the endless turning and churning of our thoughts, each one more confused and circuitous than the last. And so I rose.

  My husband was sleeping soundly, his breathing rasping, harsh. ‘Men can achieve a persistent vegetative state during the night,’ Susannah once said to me. ‘It’s a well-known medical condition.’

  And so I rose and slipped from the bed, the cold of the room frosting my skin, and took my thick fleece dressing gown from the hook on the back of the door, remembered that my slippers were in the bathroom, and pulled the door to behind me, gently, because I didn’t want to wake my husband, the man I love.

  There may be no clarity or insight at that hour but there is the computer. Mine is in an attic room, with sloping ceilings at one end and glass doors leading on to a tiny ornamental balcony at the other, overlooking the garden. My husband and I have a study each. We’re one of those couples. My study has a poster of the double helix on the wall and a Moroccan rug and a clay bowl for paperclips that our son made for me when he was six. In the corner is a stack of Science magazines as high as the top of my desk. I keep it in the corner so it won’t collapse. My husband’s study has a desk with a glass top and white built-in shelving and a single black and white photograph of a San Francisco trolley car, circa 1936, framed in beech and hung on the wall behind the computer. His work has nothing to do with trolley cars – he’s an expert on genetic anomalies in mice – but he would no more have a picture of a mouse on his wall than he would have a fluffy toy on his easy chair. Hi
s computer is a blank, cordless rectangle. His pens and stationary are all kept in a small grey drawer unit beneath the desk. His reference books are in alphabetical order.

  There is something satisfying about turning on a computer in the middle of the night; the low hum, the small blue light that glows in the dark, the action and atmosphere both replete with the sensation that other people are not-doing this right now and that I shouldn’t be doing it either. After I turned the computer on, I went over to the oil-filled radiator that stands against a wall – I’m usually the only one in the house during working hours and have my own radiator up here. I clicked the switch to low and the radiator made a clicking and pipping sound as the oil inside began to heat up. I went back to my desk and sat down on the black leather chair and opened a new document.

  Dear X,

  It is three o’clock in the morning, my husband is asleep downstairs, and I am in the attic room writing a letter to you – a man I have met only once and will almost certainly never meet again. I appreciate that it is a little strange to be writing a letter that will never be read, but the only person I will ever be able to talk to about you, is you.

  X. It pleases me that it’s actually a genetic reversal – the X chromosome, as I’m sure you know, is what denotes the female. The Y is what gives you increased hair growth around the ears as you age and you may also have a tendency towards red-green colour-blindness as many men do. There’s something in that that is pleasing too, considering where we were earlier today. Tonight, right now, synergy is everywhere. Everything pleases me.