Dr Bailey opened her mouth and looked at the judge.

  ‘What I mean is that, if Dr Sullivan had straps around her arms, there was nowhere secure on the bed to attach them, was there?’

  ‘Maybe they were attached lower down, around one of the legs?’

  ‘That is possible, but if you look at the configuration of the room, the bed is up against a wall, and there is barely one metre on the other side. Not much room for one person, let alone two, and it would be incredibly difficult to secure both hands around the same bed leg, in that constricted area.’

  ‘I accept there isn’t much space, yes.’

  ‘And you called these “faint” marks, when you were talking to Ms Elliott – your own words?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If Dr Sullivan had been struggling, fearing for her life, wouldn’t you expect those marks to be more pronounced, as the straps pulled and tightened?’

  ‘They were certainly quite…indistinct.’

  ‘On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most obvious marks sustained by a person struggling desperately against a restraint, and one being the least, where would these marks sit?’

  ‘Around a three, I’d say. But, like I said, some people just give in, faced with a stronger opponent.’

  ‘Dr Bailey, there was a chair in Dr Sullivan’s room, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A wooden-backed chair with a soft seat. Again, there’s a picture up on the screen. Is that the chair?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you directed that it should be removed from the flat and tested. Why was that?’

  ‘The seat was stained with urine.’

  ‘You thought that was unusual?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Me too. Did you test the urine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It probably came from Dr Sullivan herself.’

  ‘Probably?’

  ‘This will sound surprising, but it’s very hard to know who urine has come from. It can contain cells from the urinary tract, but if someone has been sitting on the chair, that makes it much more difficult to tell.’

  ‘And had Elizabeth Sullivan been sitting on the chair?’

  ‘There were some marks in her groin area, suggesting she had, but they were inconclusive.’

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser, I say. If Dr Sullivan was tied to her bed and raped by Jaden Dodds, and then she had a heart attack and died, why is her urine on the seat of a chair, 6 feet away?’

  Dr Bailey was silent. She moved one hand over her stomach.

  ‘I agree that it’s strange,’ she eventually said. ‘I didn’t see how I could possibly guess how or why it happened. I just confirmed it was probably Dr Sullivan’s urine.’

  ‘And you stopped there, because, like inspector Dawson, you felt you had your man, when Jaden Dodds’ fingerprints and now his DNA were a match.’

  ‘Yes.’ Dr Bailey took a deep breath. ‘Look, perhaps she was tied to the chair and not the bed?’

  Sylvie coughed into her hand, a clear signal to the pathologist to stop hypothesising. But Judith had planned for this very eventuality.

  ‘All right. Let’s examine that theory. If you can wait one moment, I have a very similar chair, which I am going to bring into the courtroom, from a well-known furniture manufacturer. Here you go, and my instructing solicitor, Miss Lamb, is going to assist me. Miss Lamb, can you sit in that chair please? Thank you. Dr Bailey, the usher will hand you two leather straps and I’m going to ask you to tie them around Miss Lamb’s arms, as close as you can to where you think they were on Dr Sullivan. Can you do that please?’

  Dr Bailey rose to her feet, waddled down the steps to the floor of the court and tied the straps around Constance’s forearms.

  ‘Just one moment. You’ve tied those straps very tight, I can see, but your report mentions faint marks.’

  Dr Bailey nodded. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘The straps would have been looser.’

  Judith herself went to join Dr Bailey on the floor of the court as she loosened the straps. Now Constance’s hands were free to move around and she waved them at the jury.

  ‘If Dr Sullivan’s arms had been strapped to the chair, in the place where the marks appear, then, as you can see, she can move around and, if you look carefully, you can see that the straps are constantly shifting up and down and would have almost immediately caused a chafing or rubbing of the skin. Do you see that?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Was there any of that chafing on Dr Sullivan’s arms?’

  ‘No. There wasn’t.’

  ‘So we’ve discounted being tied to the bed, because of the logistical difficulties, and now we’ve discounted being tied to the arms of the chair because the marks on Dr Sullivan’s skin would have been different, leaving to one side in its entirety, the…logistical difficulties of having sex on the chair, particularly non-consensual sex.’

  Constance stood up a little abruptly and Dr Bailey returned to her seat.

  ‘While you are here, Miss Lamb, can you remain standing please, as I complete this point. Dr Bailey, do you know when those marks were sustained by Dr Sullivan, how many hours, or days, even, before she died?’

  Dr Bailey looked across at the jury. ‘In my opinion, somewhere in the twenty-four hours before she died.’

  ‘Twenty-four hours. So we’re not just looking at the twelve hours or so after Jaden left at 9pm that evening but also, at the absolute minimum, the nine hours before he visited – the whole of that day.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now these straps – you say straps rather than ropes; I’m using straps too, by way of illustration – have they ever been located?’

  ‘Not as far as I am aware.’

  ‘Do you know how Dr Sullivan travelled to work in the mornings?’

  ‘No. Do you?’

  ‘Yes. She used to walk or, on cold or rainy mornings, she would catch the number 30 bus. This is a photo of the bus, one of those smaller, single-deckers which can navigate London’s narrower streets. And this is a photo of what it looks like inside the bus on a busy morning. This photograph was taken a week ago on a Friday at 8.30am in the morning. What do you notice?’

  ‘It’s very full.’

  ‘It is, yes. No seats, standing-room only. If you focus, for a moment, on this woman standing in the foreground, what is she doing?’

  Dr Bailey turned her heavy-lidded eyes onto Sylvie. She knew what was coming next.

  ‘She’s holding on to something – looks like a bar by the door,’ she said. Constance stared at her, as she began to follow Judith’s gist, too.

  ‘She is, so that if the bus were to lurch suddenly to one side or brake abruptly, she wouldn’t fall over. Usher, can you bring in exhibit 3, which is Dr Sullivan’s handbag.’ Judith allowed the bag to be shown to the jury. Then she dug underneath her desk and pulled out the identical bag. ‘I took the liberty of purchasing this last week and, as you probably saw from Dr Sullivan’s bag, it has quite a wide leather strap. Now Dr Sullivan didn’t just use this bag as a handbag, she used it to transport notes and books. And that made it fairly weighty.’

  Judith stepped forward and placed the bag, replete with one of her court files inside, over Constance’s arm. ‘If you, Miss Lamb, could reach out, as if you were holding on to that vertical bar, on the crowded bus, please.’

  Constance did as she was told and, within seconds, the bag slid part of the way down from her shoulder to rest half way between her wrist and elbow. She shoved it back up onto her shoulder and, almost immediately, it slipped down again, to hang from her forearm. Judith allowed it to remain there for a few seconds only. When she removed it, there was a wide red band on Constance’s arm.

  ‘Dr Bailey. The journey from Dr Sullivan’s flat to the hospital can take anything between ten and twenty minutes, depending on the traffic. Isn’t it possible that there never were any restraining straps used to hold Dr Sullivan down, in her bedroom? That’s why no straps were ever found? The way she sustained those “indistinct” marks on her arms was from carrying her own bag, full of papers, to and from work that day, or over a few days?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘It’s possible though, isn’t it?’

  Dr Bailey was silent. Judge Oliver stopped writing and looked up.

  ‘Please answer the question, Dr Bailey,’ he said.

  Dr Bailey nodded to him. ‘Yes. If the bag was heavy enough, it is possible,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you. One final area I wanted to explore – and this involves some close scrutiny of the photos taken immediately after Dr Sullivan’s death.’ Judith looked across at Tom and Mr Jenkins as she spoke. Tom had only just returned to his seat after his hasty exit, when Sylvie had taken Dr Bailey through the rape evidence. ‘My Lord, I am aware of members of Dr Sullivan’s family in the public gallery; may I suggest a moment, in case they would like to leave or turn away.’

  Mr Jenkins whispered to Tom, but Tom shook his head violently and scowled at Judith. He wasn’t going anywhere this time.

  ‘Do go on, Ms Burton.’

  ‘If you look at Dr Sullivan’s forehead in this photograph, I’ve blown it up for you, can you see some very faint circular marks – four of them, on the skin?’

  Dr Bailey took a moment to examine the photograph.

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  ‘Do you know what those are?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you hazard a guess at what they might be?’

  ‘If I had to guess, I would say that she had been wearing some kind of headband which had left those marks.’

  ‘I’m going to show you a photograph of Dr Sullivan taken the following day, from your post-mortem.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Are those circles apparent now?’

  Dr Bailey looked carefully again. ‘I can’t see them, no. Now that you mention it, though, there was a tiny amount of something sticky on Dr Sullivan’s forehead, like an adhesive, which I detected.’

  ‘It’s not in your report?’

  ‘Given the cause of death, I concluded it had absolutely no relevance, as I do now.’

  ‘I see. Thank you. No further questions.’

  28

  ‘You were brilliant with Dr Bailey,’ Judith was back at Constance’s office, a box of cold pizza in front of them on the table.

  ‘Thank you kindly. She was a fair witness, I thought. I mean, her assumptions were not necessarily wrong, and I imagine pathologists hate to conclude the victim died of natural causes; it’s so mundane. But they were all premised on Jaden tying Liz to the bed and terrorising her, when it almost certainly never happened.’

  ‘I’m not sure we’re out of the woods, though.’

  ‘I agree. There’s a long way to go yet.’

  ‘That’s a funny point about Liz and the anti-depressants, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sure doctors get depressed as much as anyone else. And she’d been widowed and had all those issues with Tom and his problem gaming.’

  ‘But why have one medicine prescribed and the other one secret?’ Constance tapped her fingers against the side of her head.

  ‘She was probably impatient. She’d been prescribed the Anafranil by her GP; it didn’t work; she couldn’t get another appointment for two weeks, so she got hold of the other stuff – the Wellbutrin – somewhere else. I understand it’s incredibly easy to do these days.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I think it’s not worth you spending more time musing over it, as we’ll never know why. Let’s talk about the chair, shall we? Sorry I had to drag you into the demonstration.’

  ‘It’s all right. I’m used to it by now.’

  ‘At some stage in the hours or days before she died, Liz was tied to that chair. Assuming it wasn’t Jaden and we can’t be certain of that – if he’s guilty, he might have done anything to frighten her – but, assuming it wasn’t him, who might have tied her to the chair? Who else had access to the flat?’

  Constance’s hands fell to the table with a thud. ‘I thought you said she got the marks on the bus?’ she said.

  ‘I got Dr Bailey to admit that Liz might have sustained the marks that way, but, hand on heart, I don’t think that’s what happened. We can’t ignore the urine on the chair, which suggests she was sitting there for a long time, and not voluntarily. And before you say anything else, she couldn’t have been tied to the arms, it must have been to the upright back of the chair. I saw that as soon as we did the demo in court, which means that she couldn’t have tied the straps herself.’

  Constance’s mouth opened and then closed again. She had thought Judith’s impromptu performance with the bag full of books, a moment of genius. Now Judith was saying it was just a distraction.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘A friend or a boyfriend we don’t know about might have had a key. Or Dr Williams? Or Tom?’

  ‘Yes, Tom. Let’s double-check when he was last home, shall we? And who was that friend you spoke to? Sandy something. Press her hard. Maybe Liz had a boyfriend, someone who was abusing her, and Sandy didn’t want to say. Ask her about Dr Williams too.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘And now I recall, when we spoke to Jaden, the two of us, do you remember he said that Liz wanted him to leave, that she was checking her phone a lot? It could have been for messages from another boyfriend. Jaden might have misinterpreted her casual brush-off. Perhaps she wasn’t embarrassed at all. Instead, she needed to check in with someone else and she didn’t want Jaden to hear.’

  ‘You mean like “coercive control”?’

  ‘It’s possible. Maybe not that extreme, but someone who liked to check up on her, or a regular Friday-night call. I just think the chair is important and we shouldn’t just push it to one side and move on.’

  ‘Does that mean you think this was a murder, after all?’

  ‘Oh Lord. I hadn’t even considered that. Yes, I suppose it does. What a mess. I need to give this some further thought, don’t I? Why don’t you go home and call me in a couple of hours? When I’ve had some time to reflect.’

  ***

  Judith’s doorbell rang an hour after Constance had headed home. She pressed her intercom.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Take away for Ms Burton,’ a man’s voice announced.

  Judith frowned. ‘I haven’t ordered a takeaway,’ she said.

  ‘Ms Judith Burton, ordered half hour ago.’

  ‘Which takeaway are you from?’

  ‘Lady, I have some other deliveries, please, so can you let me in, so I can get on.’

  Judith buzzed the door downstairs, opened her front door to the communal corridor and straddled her doorway. Greg took the stairs two at a time. When he reached the top step, he held the takeaway bag out towards her.

  ‘Hello Judith,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be hungry.’

  29

  Constance thought about calling David, Tom’s room-mate, but then she noticed the time, and that he was most likely still in lessons and unable to answer his phone. It wouldn’t take her too long to get to Mill Hill, although if Mr Jenkins had not yet returned, she wondered if she would be allowed to speak to David. In the end, she messaged Mr Jenkins to tell him she was travelling to school to speak urgently to David, and then messaged David separately with her estimated arrival time.

  David was waiting for her in the entrance hall of the school, his anxious face peering out through the window.

  ‘Am I interrupting your lessons?’

  ‘It’s PE last lesson. And I can join late.’

  ‘Do you need someone with you? I did message Mr Jenkins, but I didn’t hear back.’

  ‘We didn’t have someone with us last time,’ he said.

  ‘No, we didn’t. You weren’t at the trial?’

  ‘I asked Tom if he wanted me. He wasn’t sure, but Mr Jenkins said no.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I think he was worried I would talk about it to the other boys.’ He stared at his hands. ‘What was it you wanted? You said it was urgent.’

  ‘It’s about home visits. Did Tom go home a lot? You see I got the impression from Dr Williams – he’s a colleague of Tom’s mum – that he did, but Mr Jenkins seemed to think it was just holidays.’

  ‘Mr Jenkins is wrong. But there’s a surprise.’

  ‘Tom did go home more than usual?’

  ‘He knew she needed to see him, his mum. She really missed him. And sometimes she had to be away during holiday-time; all these conferences she went to. Mr Jenkins wouldn’t give Tom permission, except once when it was his birthday. Said it was too disruptive.’

  Constance waited. She had a feeling that David was about to divulge something to her. She wasn’t disappointed.

  ‘It wasn’t far to his house,’ David continued. ‘Not like some kids who are from Reading or places like that – even Somerset. He could get there in forty minutes, door to door, if the trains were running OK. Sometimes, he just went…and I covered for him. Just to see her for a couple of hours.’

  ‘Tom went home, without telling anyone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And no one found out?’

  ‘I think Mr Pritchard, the caretaker, might have seen him coming back one time, but he never said.’

  ‘Aren’t the gates locked at night?’

  ‘There’s loads of ways around – at least four or five. But mostly, Tom would cycle to the station, leave his bike, bomb it down the Northern line and be back before lights out.’

  ‘The night his mum died. Did he go and see her that night?’

  David shrugged and looked away. When he looked back, he appeared to be on the verge of tears.