THE HEIR'S REVENGE

chapter 87

I saw Patricia standing at the corner, as confidential as she has always been. She was waiting for us near the courtroom entrance. She shook my hand and said good morning and told me in three sentences what was going to happen in the next two hours. She said it the way she said everything. Clear. Direct. No extra words.

Then she went back to her team.

I went into the courtroom.

The courtroom was filling up.

I found my seat in the gallery. Henry sat to my left. Yemi was already there on my right. She had arrived before us. She was in her work clothes with her hair pulled back and her professional face on but when she saw me she looked at me in the way she looked at me now that was not entirely professional anymore and I was glad she was there.

She looked at the ribbon on my wrist. Then she looked at me. We didn't need to say anything, not yet.

The room continued to get filled with people from different places and with different reasons. There were journalists, Legal team members were arranging their report.

Then the noise changed, the way the sound in a room shifts when everyone in it registers that something significant is happening at the same time.

Victoria Pierce had just entered the courtroom.

She came in from the side door with two officers and her legal team. She was dressed in dark clothes. Simple and expensive the way her clothes were always simple and expensive. Her hair was done. Her posture was exactly what it had always been. Straight back. Chin level.

She had the composed bearing of a woman who had decided that whatever happened in this room she was going to face it the way she had always faced everything.

Without visible weakness.

She would face it like she was the strongest woman in the world. She was never going to break down, not in front of people.

She sat down at the defence table and looked at her lawyer, then at the papers on front of her. She didn't turn back to look at the gallery.

I looked at her back and I saw that styled grey hair of hers she sat down like she was attending one of those important board meeting.

I thought about my mother who was always by six in the morning before the whole family wakes up, then I thought about Lily's parents.

I thought about the fact that Lily parents didn't die but by accident. Then I looked down at the purple ribbon on my wrist.

I wasn't doing this only for myself.

The judge entered at nine o'clock exactly.

Judge Adeyemi. The same judge who had dismissed the Hargrove legal challenge. Small. Close cropped hair. Reading glasses. The manner of someone who had been in courtrooms long enough to be unimpressed by almost everything except the truth.

Everyone stood. She sat. Everyone sat.

She looked at both sides of the room.

Then she said: "We are here in the matter of the Crown versus Victoria Elaine Pierce. Charges of grievous bodily harm with intent in the case of Sarah Blackwell. Two counts of manslaughter in the cases of James and Adaora Blackwell." She looked at the prosecution. "Counsel for the prosecution may proceed."

Patricia Osei stood up.

She stood the way she always stood. Like she had been built for the specific purpose of standing in this room and saying what she was about to say.

She looked at the jury.

Then she began.

She spoke for forty five minutes.

She did not use complicated language. She told the story simply and directly the way Clara Mensah had told it in her article but with the weight of evidence behind every sentence.

She said “ Sarah Blackwell was a young woman of twenty one years old when she disappeared from her family's life. Her father spent eleven years searching for her but he never found her.” She paused, then continued again. “What he found instead was evidence that she had been deliberately poisoned. That the poisoning had been calculated and precise. That it had been designed to destroy her memory while leaving her physically able to function. To erase who she was without killing her body.”

She paused and let that sit.

She looked around for a while, then continued. “The defendant did this because Sarah Blackwell was a threat to her position. Not a legal threat but a personal one. Sarah Blackwell was the mother of the defendant's husband's child and she was kind and genuine and people responded to her and the defendant could not tolerate that so she removed her. It was a careful and deliberate action.”.

She paused again.

I could feel Yemi beside me. Her presence. The particular quality of it that I had come to depend on without fully acknowledging that I had come to depend on it.

Patricia continued.

She talked about Lily's parents. She talked about James and Nora Blackwell who died in a car accident that was not an accident. They were a young couple who were removed because they stood between Victoria's children and a fortune she believed they were owed.

Everyone sat patiently watching her say everything she could.

She talked about evidence, about the medical documents, about Marcus's testimony. About the private confession entered as exhibit forty seven.

She talked about a grandfather who wrote in his journal that he did not have much time left but he had enough. He had to have enough.

When she sat down the courtroom was completely silent.

The silence lasted for several seconds before Victoria's lead lawyer stood up to give the defence opening.

I did not really hear the defence opening.

Not because I was not paying attention. I heard the words. But they moved through me without sticking the way words sometimes do when you have already heard the truth stated so clearly that anything else sounds thin by comparison.

The defence talked about insufficient evidence. About unreliable witnesses. About the complexity of establishing direct causation. About reasonable doubt.