The Perfect Girl by Gilly Macmillan Read Free Book Online

atmosphere still isn’t quite the usual one of satisfaction, where the audience appears to bask in the pleasure of exchanging opinions about what they’ve just heard. Tonight it seems more conspiratorial. People are huddling, and some are discussing Lucas’s performance, but most, I can tell, are talking about the outburst.
    I strip the cling film from two plates of food that have been laid out on a trestle table at the side of the room. Each has a selection of little snacks on them, which Maria made herself.
    Lucas appears beside me, and he looks white. ‘Well done,’ I tell him. ‘You played beautifully.’ I say this even though it isn’t entirely what I believe, and I touch his arm lightly because he’s a nice kid and I always seem to have this urge to reassure him even though he’s incredibly composed; maybe because he’s incredibly composed.
    ‘Is Zoe all right?’ he says.
    ‘I think so. She’s with her mum. I’ll call them in a minute.’
    ‘Should we go home?’
    ‘I’ll drive you and your dad back very soon.’
    ‘Do you…?’ He wants to ask me about what happened, I can see that written all over his face, but I say, ‘Let’s talk about it later, OK?’
    He looks at me, and now he’s wearing that inscrutable gaze of his again, and after only a fraction of a pause he begins to help me.
    Chris peels away from the crowd discreetly after about twenty minutes, and we find Lucas sitting in a pew in the church, doing something on his sleek little tablet, which he hastily slips into his music bag.
    In my VW bus, they both seem huge: all knees and hunched shoulders.
    We travel mostly in silence.

MONDAY MORNING
     
     
     
     
SAM
     
    Zoe and I didn’t talk for long that first time we met at the police station in Barnstaple. I mostly wanted to introduce myself, to reassure her as much as I could, and explain to her that I was there to help her. I wanted to try to gain her trust before detailed questioning began. And I didn’t want to start that until I’d spoken to the officer on the case, to get disclosure.
    I met him in the custody reception area. After a brief handshake, we took a seat in a room similar to the one that Zoe was waiting in. He had a broad, whiskery face and Punch and Judy red cheeks. His uniform was tight around the belly.
    He handed me the charge sheet and told me that he was going to make an audio recording of the disclosure too. That’s sensible, it’s a record of what’s taken place so there’s nothing to argue over later, because that’s my job, to find holes in the evidence: procedural or actual, it doesn’t matter, either can serve my client.
    He told me what they had, all of it. The police don’t have to do this, they can be slippery, and disclose in stages, drawing the process out if they’re inclined to. I’ve had disclosures that dribble out over hours, interspersed with exhausting client interviews where we’re forced to run a ‘No Comment’ defence because we don’t know what they’re going to pull out of the bag next.
    Zoe’s disclosure was forthright, succinct and the content was as depressing as possible.
    When you get a good, honest exchange with an officer in this situation, normally it restores your faith in your profession, gees you up for the daily grind of criminality, because that well-behaved, professional exchange between you both feels like an honourable thing; it pushes away the thoughts of the shysters and the ambulance-chasers, the doughnut-munchers and the baton-wielders. You become two men, in a room, upholding the law, and there’s a purity to that, a kind of distinction, which is a very rare thing on a day-to-day basis.
    In Zoe’s case, it only made things slightly more bearable, because the facts of her arrest were so unremittingly grim.
    ‘She’d got herself out of the car when we got there,’ he said. ‘But she was definitely the driver. We breathalysed her at the scene, seventy-five mg.’
    My heart sank because that reading