He never faced me; it was like he was afraid of looking in to my eyes. In my office, I had a mirror along one wall, and he used to stand there, facing the mirror, and look at my reflection. I got used to it.
I suppose we would’ve looked very odd, talking to each other’s reflections. But somehow it didn’t feel strange. By the time he trusted me, it had become a habit. At one point, I moved my desk closer to the mirror, so that I could write while I talked to him – or rather, talked to the image of him.
He was a gentle man, and rarely spoke unless I asked him a question. He would sometimes turn his head and gaze out of the window for ten minutes or so. When I first knew him, I tried to repeat whatever question I had asked. Later, I learned to let him gaze; he would come back and talk when he was ready. He always gave me the impression of being on the verge of tears, but he never cried. The only time I saw a single tear escape him was when it was too late.
I’ve had many men stand in my office and tell me they’re innocent, over the years. Some I believe, some I don’t. It doesn’t matter, really. It didn’t take me long to work out that my job consisted much more of telling stories about the guilty than truths about the innocent. But somehow I believed this one. It was his manner, his softness. Men who have committed a crime either sit there and take what the system deals to them, because they know they deserve it, or protest loudly and brutally. He didn’t do either of those. He was quiet and mild, but firmly attested that he had not done anything wrong.
Like most of my clients, he was assigned to me, rather than seeking me out. We met at the police station, inside his cell where there was no mirror to guide us. When I first walked in, he turned away from me and muttered that he didn’t want a lawyer, that he had loved Sadie, and that he was innocent. I asked him to sit down, and he shook his head, still facing away. I knew then that it was going to be a difficult case. Bail was set at some ridiculous amount – over a million, if I remember correctly – but someone paid it. He was rich and handsome. Not particularly charismatic, but in other circumstances I may have found him charming.
Over the following weeks, I sat in front of the mirror in my office and gained his trust. I wish I hadn’t.
He was affronted when I suggested an insanity plea.
“I’m not mad,” he said, looking horrified. I explained that it was just a plea, a way out, and much easier to work with than simply “not guilty”. Half an hour later, he was still flatly refusing, insisting that he wasn’t insane. I gave up. His breakup with Sadie was painful and far too coincidental; there were no other suspects for a murder. I’m not a cop. My job isn’t necessarily to find the right answer; it’s just to find another answer. Suicide was the only thing left, so that’s the story I worked with. But gradually, I began to believe it.
He spoke to me, through that mirror, day in and day out for months. I asked the questions I needed to know and he gave me the answers he wanted me to have. He preferred to talk about his life with Sadie and his love for her, rather than her death. How could a man who loved like that be guilty of such a heinous crime? He couldn’t.
Court cases always take much longer than people believe. And falling in love always takes less time than people believe. So when he laid his hand on my shoulder for the first time, in thanks, I was surprised to feel a tingle down my spine and the settling of my stomach. I told myself that he was a client and a possible criminal. I told myself that it was impossible to fall for someone who you only spoke business with. I told myself it was impossible to fall for someone whose face you had never looked directly into.
Many weeks later, his lips brushed mine. He was leaving my office and I held out a hand for him to shake, watching in the mirror as though we were characters in a film. I was outside my body, just observing, as the man’s face bent toward the woman’s and she held her breath.
Weeks later still, I kissed him properly. I was in a bar down the road, one I frequented after work. It was jazz night. I saw the back of his head leaning over a drink and I cautiously skimmed my fingers across his shoulders as I sat down beside him. Automatically, we both looked at the shiny metal of the bar taps and smiled at each other’s distorted face. I didn’t try to look at him. This was our thing, what made us special. One for My Baby (and One More for the Road) was playing in the background and I laughed as I tasted his lips fully. Grape juice. The man wasn’t even drinking a beer.
And then there was that night… that Wednesday night in November, when I watched in my bedroom mirror as he undressed me. It was exhilarating. I woke up on Thursday with the mirror still in front of me, and the warmth of his body heat still clinging to mine. He had left.
At two o’ clock in the afternoon, he walked into my office with his head down, and glanced at the mirror. I looked at it too, our mutual security blanket, and saw his eyes flicker from side to side.
“Don’t worry about tomorrow. We’ll be fine,” I reassured him.
He struggled to say anything, and paced the room. Every now and again he would look at the mirror and reach toward me, then think better of it. I tried to calm him, but he barely heard a word I spoke as he paced frantically. Finally he forced the words out.
“I loved her,” he said, desperately.
“I understand,” I said, again, trying to calm him.
“That’s why I had to kill her.”
I looked up, to the image of him staring at me in the mirror, chest heaving, eyes flickering in agitation.
“What?”
“I had to, I had to do it,” he repeated. His hand closed over mine.
“She needed to die.”
He had moved behind me, crushing me to his chest, and his breath was warm as it flowed over my neck and chin. It was the breath I recognized, breath that belonged to a sweet and gentle man. It was sexy breath, breath filled with warmth and laughter and passion – and somewhere in there, madness.
I pulled back, and turned away from the mirror to face him. There was so much I hadn’t seen. At the corners of his smile – revenge. Just behind his ear – darkness. And there – there it was, clinging to his eyelashes. Madness. The face I was now seeing for the first time was the face of a madman.
“No,” I managed, stumbling backwards. I needed to get out of this room, away from this man who I’d never met before. What if he killed me, too?
“I won’t hurt you, baby,” he murmured, that first tear trickling down his cheek. He laid a hand on my arm and I flinched. I’d felt his touch so many times before. But every embrace and every kiss and that night – it had all been an illusion. I’d had a relationship with somebody’s reflection, somebody I don’t even know.
“We go to court tomorrow,” I said, refusing to look into his face. I glanced at the mirror. It was so easy, to fall back into this habit. I could converse with a murderer through the safety of a looking glass. I could smile and laugh and fall in love as long as I had the illusion I so desperately needed.
“I’ll see you then,” I whispered, watching myself plant a kiss on his cheek and walk out.
I couldn’t sleep. Only last night I had lain in this same bed and fallen asleep curled into a man who I now knew had killed Sadie Edgecombe. I was supposed to walk into court in the morning and convince a jury that it had been suicide.
I was plagued by memories. The feel of his breath on my neck. The smell of grape juice and spearmint tic-tacs. The mirror showing him bite his pinky finger as he tried not to smile. The photographs of Sadie’s body.
When you’re a defense lawyer, you build entire relationships on crimes that people might have committed. When you stop being a lawyer and become a person, those crimes break down entire relationships you have built on trust or love or other inadequacies of human judgement. I could defend hundreds of guilty men, and win without a second thought, but I had believed him to be innocent – and that made all the difference.
The dawn broke silently, birds fighting for the first food somewhere else today. The clouds were soft and swept over the horizon a few steps behind the night, leaving a clear and sunny day. It felt wrong; it was the kind of day reserved for a wedding, undeserving of the most difficult court date of my career. My sheets were twisted and sweaty from a night of apprehension. I forced myself to get dressed.
“My client,” I began, with every intention of finishing him. But I stopped. Flashing in the judge’s glasses was me. Except it wasn’t me, it was just an image, an illusion, a reflection. There was no revenge at the corner of my smile, or darkness behind my ear or madness clinging to my eyelashes. Yet I knew all those features were there. It was just that this image didn’t reveal it.
I looked past the glasses, into the judge’s face. It was the face of a human, just like mine. Just like the face of the man sitting behind me. It had madness caught on the eyelashes. It had wisdom caught in the lines, and beauty caught in the pupils. It had life caught in it. “My client,” I began again, “Is not a killer.”
The judge looked at me, expectantly. I turned to the jury and said what I’d known all along.
“He’s just like you and me.”