House of Correction
to begin. There was so much.So she began to leaf through the pile to try to get a sense of it all. There was a sheaf of images from the CCTV looking outward from the shop. There was nothing obviously dramatic about any of them. They showed a car or a person walking past. She turned one of them round. There was no explanatory caption, just a reference number. But on the images themselves there was a time code. As she flicked through them she was stopped by a familiar image: herself, blurry but unmistakable, hands pushed into the pockets of her jacket. The accused. She even looked like the accused, hunched over, like she was trying to hide even from herself.
She lifted up the photo and peered at it more closely, then caught sight of what lay underneath it. An A4 image, beautifully in focus, of the body. Stuart’s body, overweight, balding and dead. She recoiled, squeezing her eyes shut, and sat for a few seconds trying to catch her breath. Then, cautiously, she opened her eyes and allowed the photo to slide back into focus. His limbs at unnatural angles, his eyes open, his bearded jaw slack. She lifted up the photo to see the one beneath: Stuart from above. Then from one side, then the other. Then of wounds, multiple wounds. This was easier to look at for they were just marks on a surface that didn’t need to be skin or belong to a body, to a man she had once known. Had once, she made herself acknowledge, been involved with or abused by, or whatever the word was for a relationship between a teacher and his fifteen-year-old student. Touched. Fondled. Fucked. She stared, her eyes burning. She felt sick with self-loathing.
Tabitha made herself look at each picture, turning them facedown afterward. Then she looked briefly at the transcript of her own interview. She couldn’t bear to read the whole thing, word by word. Mostly it looked like gibberish; she had said things like “no, no” and “please” and “I don’t know” and “blood” and “I want this to be over.” But certain moments stood out. She was asked if she had any bad feelings toward Stuart Rees and she said no. But what was she meant to say? “Actually we slept together when I was fifteen but that has nothing to do with anything.” Were you meant to spontaneously put forward information that would damage your own case? Tabitha didn’t know but she did know that it could be made to look bad.
She flicked through the other statements under hers, again without reading them. What could these people have to say about her? They barely knew her. Nobody apart from her and Stuart even knew about the sexual involvement. Tabitha stopped herself. That wasn’t true. At least one person knew. They not only knew but they had written to the police to tell them about it. Who? The obvious person was Laura Rees, the grieving widow. But why would she write an anonymous letter? Why not just tell the police directly?
The other statements were from Andy, who had found the body with her. There was Dr. Mallon, the local GP. What did he have to say? He wasn’t even her doctor. There was the vicar, Melanie Coglan. At the top of one of the forms, she saw the name Pauline Leavitt and she had to pause for a moment as she made herself remember who that was. Yes, she said to herself finally, she was an old woman who walked around the village with her fat Jack Russell and a stick she would wave at cars if she thought they were driving too fast. They used to nod at each other vaguely. But did she even know who Tabitha was?
She was so curious that she actually read that statement. The language was strange. It sounded like it had been filtered through the police officer she had talked to:
Sometime in the days before December 21 I saw Tabitha Hardy talking to Stuart Rees while I was out walking with my dog. They both seemed agitated. She was saying something like: “I’ll get you. I promise that I’ll get you.”
Tabitha put the paper down and thought for a moment. Her first impulse was almost to laugh at the absurdity of this. She couldn’t possibly have said anything of the kind. If she was going to kill Stuart, just for the sake of argument, would she threaten him in the middle of the village with an old woman and her dog walking by? It was ridiculous.
But it didn’t matter what Tabitha thought was ridiculous. The police hadn’t thought it was ridiculous. They had taken it down as a statement and offered it as part of their prosecution. What would a jury think? Tabitha tried to concentrate hard. Had Pauline Leavitt really seen and heard anything like that? In a way it didn’t matter what Pauline Leavitt had “really” seen. She had given a statement that she had seen Tabitha and Stuart and that Tabitha had said those incriminating words. Presumably she was willing to go into the witness box and repeat the accusation under oath. Was there any way that Tabitha could prove that it hadn’t happened? What would proof of that even look like?
Tabitha read over the words again. Perhaps she could claim that the words referred to something else, that they had been taken out of context. It didn’t look good, though.
She wrote her first note: “Pauline Leavitt: threat?”
Right at the bottom of the pile was a single sheet of paper. At the top, underlined, it read: “Tabitha Hardy. Prosecution Case: Initial Details.”
And there, below it, in a few paragraphs, stark and surprisingly short and matter-of-fact, was the case against her:
Charge:
That on December 21, 2018, between 10:40 A.M. and approximately 3:30 P. M., Tabitha Hardy unlawfully killed Stuart Robert Rees.
The body was found in the outer shed of Miss Hardy’s house, Aston Cottage, Okeham, Devon, by