Trigger warning: child murder
The man spoke so quietly that I could hear the phlegm move in his throat as he addressed the jury. He was the defendant’s lawyer, and looked exactly how you are imagining him in your head as you read this - a broad, grey man in a broad, grey suit. He wore a gold watch, that I imagined a girlfriend gifting him when he graduated law school, on the steps of a university that they wouldn’t be able to afford to send their own kids to. He was also wearing glasses with a tiny crack in the left lens. The average person might not have noticed this detail but, for me, it somehow undermined everything that he was saying. How can a jury be expected to take a person seriously, if they don’t even notice that the glasses on their face are broken? Apparently, he was in his thirties but I would have guessed he was much older; he had the air of somebody who had been pushed into practicing law by overbearing parents, and now quietly resented them every time he had to defend a murderer. He rolled the television set into the courtroom so slowly that I could hear a click every time the wonky wheel completed a full rotation. He paused for a brief moment before pressing play, as if reluctant to present his evidence to the jury. The screen lit up, and displayed a title, introducing the video. It read ‘Evidence #456: An Interview With a Killer’.
The screen flickered into focus, and showed a large room filled with sunbeams that suggested the video was filmed very early in the morning. I watched myself trudge through the door, as the guard removed my handcuffs, scoffed and locked the door behind me. There were stacks of chairs and tables neatly folded away in the corner, and wooden floorboards worn smooth from years of nervous, shuffling footsteps. I noticed that the windows were strategically positioned at a height that made them impossible to climb out, even for the tallest of inmates. On the opposite wall, there were three booths, separated by fencing material. I remember marvelling at how cruel that was, even in the rare moments of privacy the prisoners were granted, they were forced to listen to the conversations of the people around them, never once being able to speak freely, even to their loved ones. I wonder who designed those booths – is there a designated person hired, whose jobs it is to imagine new ways to strip the inmates of the little dignity they are allowed? Did they enjoy chipping away at our sanity? They had to clear the visiting room whenever someone came to visit me, since I had to be separated from the rest of the prison population. I remember being shocked by the sensation of sunlight on my face when I walked through that room, and marvelling at how it was the only room in the prison, that I was allowed in, that had a window. I had only been in that room a few times before, when speaking with my lawyer. There was an professional video camera balanced on a tripod in the centre of the room, positioned at an angle so that the audience could get a view of both me and my interviewer.
The man on the other side of the glass was terrified. He had small, blue eyes that darted across my face as I spoke to him, as if he was looking for any tiny change in my expression. He was exactly as I imagined him, except for one detail - he was wearing a prison jumpsuit like the one I was wearing. His jumpsuit was littered with food stains, and hung from his tiny body in a way that made him look even smaller than he already was. I wondered if this was his attempt at patronising me. Did he ask to wear a jumpsuit for the interview in the hope that I would see him as an equal? If so, he was sorely mistaken. I found his wardrobe choice to be condescending – did he think that I enjoyed wearing this thing? He began the interview by explaining my charges to the camera, and I stopped listening. I won’t bore you with the details – I killed my sister. I was thirteen years old. She was four. The babysitter discovered the body. But that was a lie. She couldn’t find a fly in a compost heap, it was me that took her to the body. He began questioning me about my crime, and I stared blankly at him. He eventually had the sense to change the topic of conversation.
“What are you reading at the moment?” he asked hesitantly.
His question snapped me out of my trance. It was clearly a psychological trick, asking me an innocent question about myself in an attempt to build some kind of rapport between us. I imagined him learning this trick from some criminology professor in a dusty lecture hall as a teenager. I imagined him studying people like me, like a biologist studies bacteria in a petri dish. I replied with a stutter.
“I-I’m reading lots of things.”
That was not a lie.
“Like what?”
“Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.”
That was a lie.
“Oh, that’s nice. I haven’t read that one yet, would you recommend it? ”
“Absolutely. I am also reading a collection of short stories from a small magazine called The Hedgehog. Have you heard of it?”
“Actually, yes. Yes, I have heard of it. Believe it or not, one of my short stories was published in that magazine when I was a teenager.”
“I know.” I replied.
That was not a lie.
“Oh.”
What a stupid man. He had researched every aspect of my life before this interview, had it not occurred to him that I would research his? What kind of psychopath did he take me for?
“Did you like it?”
“Like what?”
“Did you like my story, that was published in The Hedgehog?”
“No, not really. If I’m honest, it bored me. I found it to be monotonous and pretentious”
His story was about his mother’s cancer diagnosis, and how it affected his family. I wasn’t lying, it was boring as hell. I was almost impressed by how he took the most traumatic event of his young life and turned it into such a boring, amateurish piece of literature.
“Why did you kill her?”
“Excuse me?”
“Why did you kill her? I can see that you don’t respond well to small talk, so there you have it – I’m here to find out why you killed your sister. You are aware that you were charged with her murder, aren’t you? The evidence was overwhelming. You didn’t even bother to clean the knife, for fucks sake. You just left it in the kitchen sink, along with the dirty plates from the night before. I know what you did, Mr Wilson, so spare me the bullshit. What I am here to ask you is why. Has it never occurred to you that there is a family out there that wants answers? You might be locked up, but their suffering is far from over.”
We stared at each other for a moment, as he caught his breath. I doubt that he had ever yelled at another person that way before in his life, and he was pleasantly surprised that he had it within him to talk to me like that. I imagined him being badly bullied in school, devilishly intelligent but unable to verbalise his opinions. Did the other boys tease him, unable to compete with him academically and so relied on the rugby pitch to assert their dominance? I imagined this haunting him long into his adult life – did he sit in boardrooms, tortured by the sound of ideas bouncing around his skull, knowing that he is too intimidated to speak? Would this interview be a turning point in his life? Would he grin at his reflection in the rear view mirror on the car ride home, patting himself on the back for standing up to a murderer?
“Has it ever dawned upon you? The gravity of what you have done? Call me an optimist, but I refuse to believe that a human could do that to another person and just walk away without an ounce of guilt.”
“That’s not true, I feel guilt. There was a moment where I thought of letting her live.”
That was a lie.
“Really?” he asked, in a tone that told me he wasn’t expecting that answer. I saw in his eyes, the elation at the prospect of going back to his office and telling the editor of whatever newspaper he worked for that he had got some kind of confession out of me. So, I humoured him.
“S-she struggled in the beginning, as you might expect. Kicking, clawing, biting. But there was this moment where she stopped, and realised that she wasn’t going to be able to fight her way out of this. She switched from fighting to pleading. She just looked at me with this pathetic, blank expression and spluttered out the word ‘please’.”
That was not a lie. I remember that moment with particular clarity. I had never shared that with anybody before, and I felt a wave of relief wash over me as I began to tell the story, even if I didn’t trust the man.
“I recognised that pleading look in her eyes, from the TV. Earlier that week, we had watched this film with Hugh Grant in, of which I don’t remember the name. But, there was this moment where the girl that Hugh Grant was in love with had that same expression on her face as she yelled at him. He embraced her before she had even finished her sentence, sobbing into her shoulder and apologising. She forgave him, and they walked home together, hand in hand. She lay on his lap, reading a book and smiling. It dawned on me, that’s what I should want to do. A normal person would want to stop, apologise to her, call an ambulance. But I just… didn’t want to. I wanted to finish what I had started, and so I slit her throat. And then I put the knife to wash, and walked upstairs to get the babysitter.”
That was not a lie. I was arrested thirty minutes later, and I’ve been here ever since. I think about that night often. The lawyer reached across the screen, and turned it off with a solemn expression.
“On Tuesday 17th May 2020, my team and I conducted an experiment, involving the accused. I would like to take this opportunity to remind the jury that this experiment, whilst unconventional to say the least, is admissible as evidence in this court since the accused signed an agreement to be recorded. We simply placed him into an empty room, and he began talking to his own reflection. Since he refused to confess his crime to his lawyers, we thought that this would be the only way to bring a sense of justice to the family that he tore apart with the senseless murder of his sister. I would like to go one step further, and argue that Mr Wilson’s diagnosis as a psychopath is incorrect, and he is actually just an emotionally stunted individual. I believe that he faked the symptoms of psychopathy in a desperate attempt to lessen his prison sentence. In short, this man is a murder, a coward and a lier”.
‘I’m sorry.’ I spat the apology out, directed at nobody in particular. That was not a lie. Not a lie.
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1 comment
Very intense and vivid. Kept me wanting to know what he was going to say next. I like how you had him imagining the other guy's backstory and thoughts.
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