Chapter 47

The courtroom was full.

Not unusually full for a high-profile trial – but fuller than the previous hearings, the gallery packed with the particular mix of people that endings attracted. Journalists. Legal observers. People who had been following the case in the papers and had come to see how it finished. A row of law students near the back with notebooks open.

Becky walked in at one fifty-five.

She set her files on the table. She arranged them in the order she needed – not because she would refer to them much, she knew the argument by heart, but because the arrangement was part of the ritual. The preparation. The last moment of organising before you stopped organising and just went.

Heng was beside her. He set the water glass at the correct position and straightened the exhibit list and looked at her.

“Ready,” he said. Not a question.

“Ready,” she said.

She looked at the gallery without appearing to look at it. Engfa’s two people – still there, still positioned, still doing what they had been doing all day. Irin in the fourth row, hands folded in her lap, the particular stillness of someone who had come to watch something they had been invested in for a long time.

Charlotte near the end of the fifth row.

She had not told Charlotte she was coming. She was there anyway. Of course she was.

Becky looked at the lawyers’ table.

She did not look at the back of the gallery.

She knew Freen was not there. Freen had said she would be outside. She had said it quietly in the corridor before Becky went in – I’ll be outside – and Becky had nodded and that was that.

Outside was right. Outside was where Freen needed to be.

The judge entered.

Everyone rose.

—

She started the way she always started.

Quietly. Building the foundation first, the way you built any argument – not with the most dramatic point but with the one that everything else rested on. The procurement chain. Seven years. Four authorisation signatures. A paper trail that the defence had tried to challenge and had failed to break.

Her voice was steady.

She had known it would be. She had been doing this for ten years and her voice was always steady in this room. The courtroom was the one place where everything external fell away – the anger and the exhaustion and the two months of everything that had happened – and there was just her and the argument and the judge who was listening.

She built toward the names.

She said them clearly, each one, with the evidence attached to each one – not dramatically, not with emphasis, just factually. This name. This signature. This date. This amount. This is what happened and this is how we know and this is why it matters.

She moved to the victims.

This was the section she had rewritten four times. The section that had finally come right on the night before the operation, four sentences that were right, the section that asked rather than argued. She delivered it the way she had written it – directly, simply, as a person speaking to another person about something that mattered.

The courtroom was very quiet.

She gave the judge the last paragraph.

She sat down.

—

The defence gave their closing.

She listened. She listened the way she always listened – completely, without reacting, noting the strong points and the weak ones. There were two strong points. She had known they were coming and she had addressed both of them in her argument.

When they finished the judge asked two questions.

She answered both.

The judge adjourned for deliberation.

—

It took forty-seven minutes.

Becky sat at the lawyers’ table and drank water and looked at her exhibit list and thought about nothing in particular. Heng sat beside her and did the same. Neither of them spoke.

The gallery murmured behind them. People shifting in their seats, checking phones, the restless energy of a room waiting.

Irin, from the fourth row, caught Becky’s eye once.

Becky looked at her exhibit list.

The judge returned.

Everyone rose.

Everyone sat.

The judge read the verdict.

Guilty on all counts.

—

The courtroom reacted the way courtrooms reacted – the gallery noise rising immediately, the defence counsel conferring in low urgent voices, journalists already reaching for phones. The particular controlled chaos of a verdict landing.

Becky sat for a moment.

She looked at the exhibit list in front of her.

She had spent eight months on this. Eight months of documents and witness prep and authentication arguments and motions and late nights and one two-sided paralegal and a closing argument that had needed four rewrites before it was right.

Eight months.

Guilty on all counts.

She put the exhibit list in her folder.

She stood up.

Heng made a sound beside her. She looked at him. His eyes were very bright.

“Don’t,” she said.

“I’m not,” he said. His voice was completely unsteady. “I’m completely fine.”

“Heng.”

“I’m fine.” He wiped his eye. “Completely fine.”

She put her hand briefly on his arm. Then she picked up her files and turned.

—

Outside in the corridor Irin was waiting.

She didn’t say anything. She just stepped forward and hugged her – properly, both arms, the hug of someone who had been sitting in a courtroom for two hours waiting for this moment.

Becky let herself be hugged.

“Eight months,” Irin said into her shoulder.

“Eight months,” Becky said.

Irin pulled back. Her eyes were wet. She looked at Becky’s face and seemed to find whatever she was looking for there.

“Go,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”

Becky went.

—

Charlotte was at the end of the corridor.

She was standing apart from the small crowd of journalists and observers that had spilled out of the courtroom. Composed. Jacket straight. The particular stillness of someone who was holding something together in public that they would put down somewhere private later.

Becky walked to her.

They looked at each other.

Charlotte opened her mouth.

“Don’t,” Becky said.

Charlotte closed it.

Becky looked at her. Her sister. The person who had been scared enough to call Engfa. Who had managed everything from the top of the firm for eight months and two months before that and had not told her and had been right and wrong simultaneously.

“Later,” Becky said. “We’ll talk later.”

“Yes,” Charlotte said.

Becky looked at her for a moment longer.

Then she did something she hadn’t planned. She stepped forward and hugged Charlotte – brief, firm, the way they hugged when they were both pretending not to need it.

Charlotte hugged her back.

Neither of them said anything.

Becky let go first.

She picked up her bag from Heng who had appeared silently beside her – Heng was very good at appearing silently when needed – and walked toward the courthouse stairs.

—

The steps were wide and the afternoon sun was on them.

Bangkok at three in the afternoon – hot, loud, the city going about its day in the complete indifference of a city that didn’t track individual trials or individual verdicts or the particular weight of eight months landing on a courthouse staircase.

Becky stopped at the top of the steps.

Freen was at the bottom.

Civilian clothes – dark jacket, no tie, nothing that marked her as anything except a person waiting at the bottom of some courthouse steps. She was looking up. She had been looking up since the doors opened.

Becky walked down.

The steps took maybe twenty seconds. She was aware of each one. The sun on the stone. The noise of the street. The city around them going about its Tuesday afternoon.

She reached the bottom.

They stood a foot apart.

“It’s over,” Becky said.

“It’s over,” Freen said.

They looked at each other.

Becky looked at the closed eyebrow – still taped, slightly swollen now. The bandaged hand. The careful way Freen was standing that she was doing her best to hide.

She looked at her face.

Freen looked back.

“You came back,” Becky said.

“I told you I would.”

“You did.”

The city went past around them. A taxi. A group of students. Someone on a phone. The ordinary Tuesday afternoon of a city that had no idea what had just finished inside the building behind them.

Neither of them moved.

They stood at the bottom of the courthouse steps in the noise of Bangkok and the afternoon sun and the specific quiet that existed between them even when everything around them was loud.

Becky looked at the bandaged hand at Freen’s side.

She reached out and took it.

Carefully. The good side, the right hand, away from the cuts. She took it and held it and Freen’s fingers closed around hers.

They stood like that for a while.

Neither of them said anything else.

There was nothing else to say right now. The argument was delivered and the verdict was in and the man who had spent seven years moving weapons through official channels was going to spend the next portion of his life explaining that to a tribunal.

And Freen was here.

At the bottom of the courthouse steps.

Holding her hand.

That was enough.

That was everything.