Free The Woman on the Train by Rupert Colley Page B

turned out very differently?’
    ‘Objection!’ shouted the prosecutor. ‘The question is pure speculation.’
    ‘Quite,’ said the judge. ‘Objection upheld. Monsieur d'Espérey, may I remind you that a court of law deals in facts, not “what-ifs”.’
    ‘Of course, Your Honour. I do apologise. Speculation it may be, but we know of many, many cases when young men, sometimes boys, were cruelly tortured by the Nazi occupiers and frequently executed, whether they provided information or not. We also know that earlier in the war, those arrested were usually imprisoned for a while and, except for the ringleaders, released. But by the summer of 1942, many more were being executed, often for the slightest transgressions. It is speculation, but my point is that my client knew that without her intervention, this young man, as he was then, would have been under very great danger of torture and possibly execution.’
    When asked, I told the court how, after the war, Hilda had come to see me just the once, in 1966, and that was it. In other words, we were not acquaintances in any sense of the word. ‘Yet, in that conversation, I am right in thinking that you acknowledged your debt to the accused?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Thank you. No more questions.’
    *
    Next came the prosecutor. He paced up and down in front of me, hands behind his back, as if collecting his thoughts. ‘You were here this morning, were you not, so you would have heard the testimony of Madame Kahn. All week, we’ve been hearing similar stories – of habitual beatings, cruelty and maltreatment at the hands of Hilda Lapointe. What did you make of it?’
    ‘I thought… I thought it was appalling.’
    ‘Hmm, interesting. Yet, you are still prepared to stand in a court of law to act as a character witness for the woman who is accused of such barbaric acts?’
    A titter of voices rose from the public galleries. ‘Only because she may have saved my life. I wasn’t to know–’
    ‘But you do now! You’ve known for months, unless you live a life of a hermit, which we all know you do not. Yet, despite this knowledge, you still agreed. You could have said no at any point. You can still say no right this instance!’
    ‘They were only accusations.’ Someone booed.
    ‘Silence!’ said the judge.
    ‘Only accusations? No, not accusations – facts. Her defence here is not that she didn’t commit these crimes, but that she was under orders. So, leaving aside the second point for a moment, these acts are things that actually happened.’
    ‘I… I suppose because I felt I owed her.’ People hissed at me. I felt their loathing for me.
    ‘You owed her? So because you were the beneficiary of this one single act of kindness, you feel you have the right to dismiss all these scores of victims.’ Turning to the jury, he said, ‘I repeat what I said at the beginning of this trial – the number of victims and witnesses number over eighty. Under court instruction, we have asked only a sample to come here this week to give evidence.’ He returned his attention to me. ‘So, despite what we all know to be fact, do you still feel that you owe the accused?’
    I stood there, opened mouthed, shaking. I could feel Isabelle’s eyes bearing down on me; I thought of her parents, of her murdered father. I saw Madame Kahn, gently shaking her head, living every day of her life with the memory that her family had been gassed, of picking that poor woman up from the icy ground. I felt the whole world looking at me, despising me for what I’d become.
    ‘Well, Monsieur, we await your answer.’
    I looked at Hilda and I hated her. Why had she done it, why had she intervened? I remembered our conversation: One day I will be a conductor / Oh, you will, will you? You sound very sure of yourself. I wish you the very best of luck. My life had come full circle, yet here I was consumed with a visceral hatred I’d never experienced before. How could she have done those things? To those