Conviction, page 5
I skim through the brief for the blueprints of the house, and place my finger on the doorway he speaks of. The house is nothing but a burnt-out shell now, set for demolition after the trial. But looking at the blueprint, I imagine how the house used to be: the Darlings running up and down the stairs, sitting down to eat Sunday roast in the dining room facing the grounds. I wonder what Wade sees when he looks at the blueprints. Whether he sees the good memories or the bad. Life or death.
‘We have the floorplan here.’ I trace my finger from the living-room doorway to the stairs, and back again. ‘There is only six, perhaps seven feet between them. You couldn’t make out anything at all, from such a close distance?’
‘Like I said,’ he says pointedly. ‘It was almost impossible because of the smoke. Not just the smoke in the air – it had stung my eyes. It felt like pins had been pierced into them. They wouldn’t stop streaming. But if you were to put a gun to my head…’
I stiffen at his choice of words. It’s a strange description to use. Even more strangely, he doesn’t seem to notice the connection. I remind myself it’s a common figure of speech. But the fact that it didn’t register with him rattles me.
‘I would say he was about my height, and he appeared to be wearing all black. He was wearing a mask or a scarf across his nose and mouth, and a hood over his head. He was holding my rifle.’
‘You knew it was your rifle immediately?’
‘No, only later. As I said… it was difficult to see. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, and we stared at each other for a few seconds. I asked who he was – shouted it at him – and he dropped the gun and ran for the front door. I had locked it before going to sleep, but it was wide open. He bolted out into the night before I had even grabbed the gun.’
Anthony leans forward.
‘He dropped the rifle? Gave you a weapon to potentially injure him with? Why didn’t he shoot you too?’
His right eyelid spasms again.
‘Clearly it was part of the plan to frame me, because I picked it up, putting my fingerprints all over it. I ran to the door but he was nowhere to be seen.’
I think of the photo of the murder weapon tucked inside the brief, covered in my client’s bloody handprints from where he handled the gun after discovering the bodies.
‘What did you do next?’
‘I turned back for the stairs.’ He pauses, holding his breath. ‘I knew I was going to find something bad, but I didn’t know what. Or maybe I did and I didn’t want to believe it. The intruder had come from upstairs, where my family had been sleeping.’
I watch his throat move as he swallows. His eyes sheen over.
‘There was blood on the stairs. Not a lot, just droplets. They must have dripped off him as he was heading for the door. But the higher I got, the more I found. The drops turned to streams. The streams to pools.’
He glances at me briefly, before his eyes fall to the table top. I could see the horror in them, the fear. His hands start to shake, and he subconsciously picks at his nails.
‘You knew it was blood the moment you saw it?’ I ask.
‘No, not completely. I failed to make the connection, or maybe I was in denial from the shock. The only thing lighting my way was the fire roaring on the other side of the windows, making the blood appear black. I just remember the cream carpet was completely soaked. It was wet under my feet. Warm.’
He makes a grimace, as if remembering the feeling. This rings true. The first responders found him barefoot, noting the soles of his feet were red with what would turn out to be his wife’s blood.
I watch his Adam’s apple rise and fall. His face has grown paler.
‘There is a curve in the staircase. It was the feature that made Yolanda fall in love with the place. I remember when we went to view it for the first time. She stepped into the foyer, saw the grand, curved staircase, and looked at me. She was in love. We both were.’ He looks down at his hands, his jaw clenching as he grits his teeth behind closed lips. ‘When I made the turn on the stairs… I found her.’
There is a tense silence. From the outside, it would appear that I am giving him time to collect himself, gather his thoughts. But in truth, I am watching him. Analysing every minute reaction that the memories bring up, to decipher if he is telling the truth or spinning a lie: the muscle twitching at his temple, the tears pooling in his eyes. His whole body is shaking now.
‘She was lying on her back on the staircase… looking up at me.’
His voice breaks, and two tears fall simultaneously down his cheeks.
‘How was she lying on the stairs, Wade?’ I ask softly.
‘Head first, her feet closer to the top. Her nightgown had ridden up, and I could see the gunshot to her knee.’ He covers his mouth; his jaw clenched tight on either side of his face. ‘Blood had soaked through her chest from the shot to her back. And her head…’ A whimper slips out, and he clenches his fist tighter, his teeth harder. ‘Her hair was soaked with it. Her face… her beautiful face…’
All the colour has drained from his complexion. For a moment I fear he might be sick, but I push on. It was difficult enough to get him to open up. He might not allow us a second time.
‘What did you do when you found her?’
‘I sobbed, and held her. She wasn’t stiff – she was floppy, deadweight. I cradled her. Checked her pulse, although I didn’t need to. She was dead, I knew she was – but it was like I couldn’t believe what was right in front of me. I kept telling her to wake up.’
She wouldn’t have been stiff so soon after death. The rigor mortis would have taken at least an hour to set in. I immediately think of questions the prosecution would ask him, if he were in the witness box. If his wife was shot and fell on the staircase, why didn’t he wake from the noise her body would have made? Did he really fail to hear the intruder enter through the front door and pass the open doorway to the living room on his way to the stairs?
He wipes tears from his face with the brutish rub of his fingers. Fresh streams fall in their place.
‘I knew then my children were dead too.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘The house was on fire. Their mother was dead. Had they been alive, they would have called for me. Tried to escape. The only reason for the silence in the house was that they were dead too.’
He takes a deep, heaving breath, and sighs it out of him. He wipes his face again, this time on his shirt sleeve.
‘I tried to move her to the landing, but she was so heavy and slippery from the—’ he stops. When he speaks again, his voice is hoarse. ‘I didn’t want to drop her. I got up and went down the hall to the children’s bedrooms. I was covered in Yolanda’s blood. My hands were black, and my clothes felt wet. Their bedroom doors were open. They always closed them, and had before bed that evening. I was crying.’
His pulse is racing, I can see it beating in his neck and the forked vein at the centre of his forehead. His chest is motionless with a held breath.
‘They had both been shot through the head in their beds…’
He exhales and instantly doubles over as if from a physical blow, and sobs into his hands.
‘Let’s take a break for a moment,’ Antony says. When I turn to face him, I notice his eyes shimmering with unshed tears.
I nod and clear my throat. I am sat in a room with two men, one sobbing, the other trying to compose himself, while my eyes are bone dry.
Perhaps it’s because I’m good at keeping the barriers in place for the sake of professionalism. Or maybe it’s because of my own pain, my own guilt. And if I open that door…
You’re a cold, cold woman, Neve.
I dig my fingernails into the back of my hand to keep the memories at bay. But however hard I try, I can’t rid my mind of the thought of him, as if Matthew is sat on the other side of Wade, staring straight back at me.
* * *
After a fifteen-minute break, we are back at the table ready to proceed. Wade looks wearier than when we started. His eyes are swollen and red again, and I can sense the depression clawing him back into the sorry state we first found him in. I need to get more details out of him before he completely shuts down again.
‘Thank you Wade, we are almost done. After you had discovered the children, what did you do?’
I note that I sound cold, almost clinical, but I can’t give him room to fall apart again.
He closes his eyes with a sigh. Emotionally preparing himself. When he opens them again, he is back in the past, those bright eyes jaded with pain.
‘I don’t know how long I was up there, holding each of them in turn. The smoke… it had made me drunk, almost. I was dizzy and disorientated, and came round in Danny’s bedroom when the windows smashed from the heat and glass showered down on us. I didn’t want to leave them behind, and contemplated bringing them all into the master bedroom so we could all… be together. The only thing that kept me from closing my eyes again and succumbing to the smoke was the thought of the intruder getting away with their deaths.’
I imagine them all lying on the Darlings’ marital bed. Faces frozen and pale like porcelain dolls, with Wade nestled among them, waiting for release.
‘When I returned to the hall, the fire had grown. The smoke made it impossible to see. The air was completely black with it, and the floor was scorching hot from the fire burning below. I got down to my hands and knees and crawled for the stairs. I had to pass Yolanda. One small mercy was that I could barely see her through the tears and the sweat from the heat. I made my way down on my hands and knees, slipping on the…’
He looks down at his hands with such a pained grimace that I wonder to myself if he sees his wife’s blood there, and in what capacity. Literal? Figurative? Perhaps both.
‘The fire was ripping through the ground floor. In the living room, the sofa I had woken on was completely ablaze. The walls were blackening where the fire was burning through from the other side. The path to the front door was blocked by fire. I could barely breathe and coughed so hard that I retched. All I could keep thinking was that I shouldn’t be alive. I shouldn’t be living through this.’
Antony goes to say something, but I stop him with a subtly raised hand, lifting it slightly from the table top. Wade is on a roll, remembering beat by beat. I don’t want to pull him out of it until he’s done.
‘I made my way down the hall towards the kitchen, crawling on my front, completely flat to the floor. The whole time I could smell fuel, and realised I had put my hand in a pool of gasoline. That’s when I saw the door to the cellar and my gun room was open.’
I imagine the fire creeping inside and licking each of the unspent bullets. It takes over two hundred degrees Celsius of heat to set off a bullet, according to my research. I imagine how the gunpowder would have exploded over and over, sending metal shrapnel in every direction. According to the records, Wade had around five hundred rounds stored in the gun room. Not surprisingly, that wing of the house all but burnt to the ground.
‘In your statement, you said the gun room was key-coded.’
‘Yes. I made sure it was secured before going to sleep. Always do. So whoever opened the door knew the access code, and knows me well enough to have chosen my favourite rifle.’
He looks down at the burnt flesh on his hand. His fingernails have grown back in abnormal shapes, small little half-moons hidden deep in the flesh of his gristled fingers.
‘I crawled through the open doorway of the kitchen. It was completely ablaze, but I couldn’t turn back. There was a clear path to the back door, but I was losing consciousness. I could feel myself drifting. The room was getting dark. I must have passed out and come to again, because suddenly I was screaming.’
He clenches his scarred hand into a fist, the warped fleshed growing taut from the strain.
‘Why were you screaming?’
His brow creases as if in pain.
‘My hand was on fire.’
He puts his injured hand in the other and massages the scars with his thumb in small rotations.
‘I managed to get to the back door and open it before I slipped unconscious. The next thing I remember I was in hospital, where I had been in a coma for two days.’
He finishes his story with a mighty sigh, and the breath seems to drain the life out of him. When he meets my eyes, I see how utterly exhausted he his.
‘Thank you, Wade. I know that must have been difficult for you.’
His gaze alters in an instant. He looks at me with such rage that I flinch.
‘How could you possibly know?’
Antony tenses up beside me, and my cheeks flush.
‘How could you possibly know how it feels to hold your family dead in your arms? To wake up in hospital and learn that your entire world has burnt to the ground? Tell me, how on earth could you relate to that?’
His face has grown red with rage, veins snaking from his forehead to his temples. I can feel Antony squirming at my side, eager to jump in should I drop the ball with my response.
‘I apologise if I offended you, Wade. That wasn’t my intention. I only wished to commend you for going through this again – I can only imagine how hard it was for you.’
His expression softens. I move the brief towards me, eager to change the subject and take back control.
‘Firstly, I need to recommend that you don’t give evidence during the trial. I noticed you’re on the list of witnesses. It might seem counterproductive not to speak in your own defence, but you have us to do that for you. If you give evidence in court, you give the prosecution the chance to cross-examine.’
‘The last guy didn’t seem to have a problem with it,’ he says. ‘I’m saying my piece. That’s the end of it.’
Why would Adrian have agreed to something like this? It’s not just bold, it’s reckless.
‘This will make things harder for us—’
‘I’m giving evidence, Ms Harper. I won’t change my mind on this.’
Antony and I share a defeated glance. We’ll try and tackle this again later.
‘The other issue we have is, the only evidence to suggest that there was an intruder in your house that night is your statement. There were no vehicle sightings we could tie to the area for means of the intruder’s transport, no positive identifications of the man you describe. For all intent and purposes, you could be plucking the idea of the intruder from thin air.’
‘It doesn’t change the fact that I’m telling the truth.’
‘No, but it does make it harder for us to convince the jury. As you can imagine, anyone can commit a crime and blame it on a person that no one else can verify. Unless of course, you believe there is someone in your life who meant you and your family harm, who had the motivation to carry out the murders that night. Who might have known the keycode to your gun room, like you said. The Viklund family are known for their illegal activity. Do you think that could have played a part?’
‘No. The Viklunds would know who had done it if that were the case; it wouldn’t be playing out in court.’
‘So you don’t know of anyone who might have done this,’ I retort.
‘I do,’ he replies.
Antony and I look to one another. Wade has never named another possible suspect before, unless both Antony and I missed it in the brief, which I doubt.
‘Who?’ I ask.
The silence echoes through the room again, thrumming like a pulse.
‘My former business partner, Alex Finch. He lost everything, just as I had. Money, the business, his wife was leaving him. But I had something he wanted and could never have.’
‘And what was that?’ Antony asks.
The seconds draw out, the only sound being the tick of a clock behind our heads. Wade sighs again, and meets my eyes.
‘My wife.’
8
Antony and I sit in silence at the back of the wine bar where we have claimed a quiet nook as our own. The table between us is covered with law books, witness statements, pathology reports and police interview minutes, and empty cups from our last round of coffees, before finally going for a bottle of red wine to share. When the waitress had brought it over, she caught a glimpse of the photograph exhibiting the blood on Wade’s clothes and turned completely white, before I tucked it out of view.
Antony’s lips are stained burgundy from the wine, his brow furrowed while he reads over the notes Eddie Chester and Adrian Whittaker had written up on our client’s last movements in the days leading up to the murders.
Wade’s revelation about his business partner continues to echo in my mind, but the sceptic in me refuses to rest. Why would he wait to share this fact, if it would prove he has been wrongly accused of murdering his family?
Wade was arrested at the hospital six days after the murders, and brought in for questioning, with the police interview detailed in notes included in the brief. Wade refused to speak until he had legal representation, answered no comment thereafter, and was held in custody until he was granted bail the following day. The only public comment he has made since his arrest was his written witness statement issued to the courts when he was represented by Chester and Whittaker. I read over it for the umpteenth time, familiarising myself with his account on the page, which I must follow to the letter in my defence. His account hasn’t changed since this original statement: each beat matches up with the details he relayed today during the conference, except for the revelation about Alex Finch. Wade’s motive for concealing such information will have to be highly credible if we are to get it past the prosecution and the judge at this point in proceedings; otherwise, it will appear to be nothing more than a desperate attempt to escape the charges.
The prosecution case against my client is strong. The murder weapon is registered in his name and covered in his fingerprints. The blood of the victims was on his clothes and person. They have their suspected motive: Wade had a mental breakdown due to his financial struggles and planned to kill himself as well as his family to escape the situation he had put them all in, with specialist witnesses to back up their claims. I begin to read over the witnesses the prosecution plans to bring before the jury. We can expect to hear accounts from Yolanda’s mother, the first responders on the scene, the detective on the case, the ballistics expert. The list goes on. They are going to paint the picture that our client fell into a deep depression after the closure of his business and murdered his family in a case of familicide. The explanation of the word has been printed out and clipped to the page.
