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TWENTY-EIGHT
I look at the photo of Farah Lawson, the Shadow’s eighth murder victim. The CPS displayed it on an easel at Matty’s trial. A picture taken at a dinner with friends, fellow nurses from the hospital where she worked. She was the kindest person, they said. Nothing was ever too much trouble. Her whole life ahead of her.
The prosecutor used their words during the court case, an over-emotive line of argument that prejudiced the jury against Matty according to many of his advocates. People who, unlike me, have refused ever to countenance his guilt.
‘Her whole life ahead of her,’ Tristan Ambrose QC told the court. ‘Until the defendant so cruelly ripped it from her.’
Matty’s barrister objected, argued the phraseology was ‘prejudicial and irrelevant’.
It’s relevant to me though. The life she could have had, the part I might have played in her losing it.
I didn’t go to the trial, nor did my mother. I wonder now if it would have been better or worse if we had. Reading through the transcripts is one thing, but they don’t show how Matty reacted to the evidence against him.
Did he really seem rapt when the post-mortem images were presented, as some journalists suggested? Was the smile he’s supposed to have flashed to the gallery every morning actually born out of nerves rather than hubris, as it was portrayed in the red tops?
He may have worn a mask with us, but five years is a long time. Long enough to learn a person’s tells, the micro expressions that speak to their true feelings.
What might his face have told me if I’d watched it in court? What clues might his eyes have revealed? What hidden truth might I have divined from them?
The journalists who did follow the trial, analysing every detail as it unfolded in the Old Bailey day after day, all reported the same thing. Matty looking confident and relaxed, joking with his lawyers, smiling at the crowd.
And it was quite a crowd. So big, there wasn’t room for them all in court. Women lined up for hours in the cold to get a seat in the gallery. Hundreds of them, infatuated with his good looks, despite the constant stream of grim photos and crime scene evidence.
There are court drawings of them twirling their hair around their fingers and fluttering their lashes at Matty. TV clips of fresh-faced teens unable to believe he was guilty.
‘I’m not afraid of him,’ one woman told the cameras, a petite curly-haired brunette. 5’3. Just his type. ‘He doesn’t look like the sort to kill somebody.’
I trace Farah Lawson’s face with my fingertip. She seemed so grown up to me back then, but now I can see she was barely an adult.
‘What he did to her,’ her mother told a Newsnight interviewer. ‘My baby girl, thrown out like rubbish. Left for the rats.’
I pick up another article and another. So many clippings; yellowed over the years, the newsprint faded and smudged.
Janice thinks I’ve got rid of them. I promised her I have.
‘Self-destructive,’ she calls my obsession with the past, the way I pore over it. The way I won’t let it go. She doesn’t understand though. I can’t turn my back on what happened until I know for sure what he did. If he did it.
I didn’t go to his trial, so now I must weigh up the evidence for myself. And in some ways, I’m the only one who can judge. After all, I knew him in a way a jury never could. Yet all these years of searching for answers, and I’m still no clearer than I was at the start.
We are our memories. I forget who said that, but it resonates all the same. If I can’t trust my memory, how can I trust myself?
Another article, the second letter sent to the Tribune, featured on their front page. I read it again, even though I could recite it by heart I’ve read it so often. And even though there’s nothing new in it, a shiver tiptoes down my spine. A ghost walking over my grave.
Enough, I tell myself.
I put the clippings away. Snap the box shut.
It was Matty’s idea to collect them. A sign of his innocence or his guilt? A double bluff? A boast?
Whatever his reason, my mother wasn’t keen.
‘Bit morbid, isn’t it?’
The same way I’d described her box of childhood treasures. The little animal bones.
I tried explaining it was my way of getting a handle on what was happening. Ever since he’d started up again, I’d worried the killer would come after her. Not that she’d give me any airtime on that score, or consider changing her route home from work.
‘Some things you can never get a handle on,’ she told me, giving the clippings box a sidelong look. ‘And others it’s best not to understand.’
