‘And I…uh…I wanted to find out more about her, who she was. I wanted to know what she was going to do next.’
‘Can you explain to the court how you did this through your email exchange masquerading as Rose?’
‘I can.’
More sentences from the emails are projected onto the screen, ones in which I describe the desert, and then when I talk about getting my head together.
‘I didn’t know exactly,’ Nick says, ‘but from her descriptions I had a pretty good idea of where she might be. In the desert, that is. And I suppose I put two and twotogether—worked out the connection between Kate, uh, the defendant, and that prison letter I saw on her kitchen table. I looked up the name I’d seen on it—Gemma Toombs—and found a whole lot of information about an abducted schoolgirl from ten years ago. And then I saw the photographs of her, and even though Kate looks different now, I mean, she’s still the same person…I mean, it’s clear, isn’t it?’
He gestures to me, and I give him a small smile. Here I am, Nick, the Gemma behind the Kate,hello!
Then onto the screen comes the final email I wrote to Rose: the one I typed in the petrol station on my charging phone, after I left you in the hole.
‘And what was different about this email?’ Mr Lowe asks.
‘It was this email that made me think there could be something bad happening. See where it says that what she needed to find was dead? Gone? That got me worried.’
Mr Lowe gets his pointer out again and traces my words as he reads them out loud.
I saw what I needed to for the last time…whatever it was I needed to find is dead, gone.
Mr Lowe repeats the words, emphasising thedeadandgone.
One of the older women in the jury raises her eyebrows.
‘Was that when you alerted the police?’ Mr Lowe asks.
‘It was.’
The start of the end. The police found Eric Symonds at the petrol station and then Tony Kowalski, the tour operator. They alerted the hire-car company, who said there was a tracker on the vehicle.
Judas car. Reliable goody-two-shoes car.
Should have known.
That tracker was there when you fixed the car’s undercarriage. You saw it. You had to disappear.
When Jodie gets up to cross-examine, I know what her line of argument is going to be. She questions the validity of the email exchange as evidence; she casts doubt in the jury’s mind about the reliability of Nick as a witness.
‘This evidence demonstrates a propensity for lying, fakery,’ she says. ‘Is this the kind of witness we can put our trust in? Mr Avery, I’m interested in why you decided to write that first email. How long after your altercation with the defendant was that?’
None of us is who we say, it seems.