The Coincidence (The Trial Trilogy) Read online

  The Coincidence

  David B. Lyons

  Copyright © 2021 David B. Lyons

  The right of David B. Lyons to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-9160518-6-7

  Created with Vellum

  Praise For David B. Lyons

  “An outstanding novel” – The Book Magnet

  “Keeps you guessing right until the end” – Irish Daily Mail

  “Incredibly clever” – The Writing Garnet

  “Impossible to put down” – The Book Literati

  For Lin

  The coincidence that occurs in The Coincidence was inspired by a true story.

  3,000 days ago…

  ‘We all here cos o’ coincidence.’

  Those were the first words Christy ever spoke to Joy. Up until that point in their brief journey together, Joy had been content to just stare down at the filthy shoelaces of her Converse trainers rather than at the intimidating, lanky woman sat across from her.

  ‘Life for everyone is a gift from God, alright… the God o’ coincidence,’ she continued.

  Christy’s accent was a marriage of her natural Nigerian husk to a southern Texan drawl. She had learned to speak English by listening to the sermons of Terence Huntcastle; a famed Christian pastor who hailed from Dallas and who ran one of the biggest superchurches in the whole of America. She played his tapes non-stop on a smashed Sony Walkman during her seeking of refuge from Nigeria over twenty-five years ago, and can still rattle off each of those sermons word for word today.

  ‘A one in five hundred million miracle we all are. You’re a one in five hundred million miracle, curly-haired girl, you know that?’

  Joy slowly lifted her gaze from her shoelaces and met Christy’s bloodshot eyes for the first time.

  ‘S’true. When yo dadda made sweet, sweet love to yo momma and orgasmed his ball sack inside her, five hundred million of his little swimmers began a mega race to yo momma’s golden egg.’ Christy leaned as forward as she could. ‘And you know which little swimmer won that one in five hundred million race, curly-haired girl? You. You, Joy Stapleton! You literally are a coincidence. We all are.’

  Joy’s heart sank. Not because Christy was preaching, but because she had mentioned her name. Though she knew she shouldn’t be surprised by that. Her tiny frame, covered by her oversized curly mane would be, by now, unmistakable to anyone in the country. And likely would be for the rest of her life.

  That short one-way conversation was pretty much all Christy and Joy shared while the van chicaned its way around the mazed inner city streets of Dublin, until its engine finally died. Then the two front doors of the van opened and slapped shut in unison, before footsteps clacked against concrete. Christy leaned as forward as she could again.

  ‘Yo gon’ be fine, Joy. Just keep yo pretty head down.’

  ‘Welcome home, ladies,’ the big fat ginger one said, pulling the back doors open, blinding his passengers with the low sun. When he stepped into the van, it sunk under his weight and Joy had to hold her breath to stave off the heavy stench of B.O. as he bent over to free her wrists. Then he exposed the top of his ass crack just inches from her face when he turned to free Christy.

  ‘Step down,’ he said, motioning to the bright outside world. It was freezing cold that afternoon, but the sun was still shining low in the sky, highlighting the cloud of Joy’s exhalations as she stepped onto the concrete yard.

  The tall cranky looking one was waiting for them, standing with her hands on her hips by the back wheel of the van. She and Fatso then led the women towards a grey stone wall that seemed to stretch as wide as the eye could see. There was a small blue wooden door in the middle of the wall that they made their way towards, then Fatso stared up into the CCTV camera hanging above it and, without much pause, the blue door buzzed open. The four of them entered a much smaller concrete yard, though this time the door on the wall opposite wasn’t wooden, nor was it small. It was wide. Very wide. And made of steel.

  Fatso stared again into a camera that hung over it until another buzz sounded. And when the steel door was pushed open, a chorus of screeches immediately echoed from the distance and within that split moment Joy’s whole body paused; her feet, her thoughts, her breathing. The screeches were quite literally her worst nightmare coming true.

  ‘Don’t mind the noise,’ Christy whispered over Joy’s shoulder. ‘S’not as bad as it sounds.’

  ‘You first,’ a voice from the shadows shouted. Joy blinked her eyes, ridding them of the glare of the outside world, before she could make out the figure of a woman standing behind an arched-wooden desk. She trundled over with Fatso still flanked by her side. ‘Well, I guess I don’t need to ask your name, now do I?’ the woman behind the desk said. ‘So, let’s start with question number two, huh? Date of birth?’

  Joy swallowed, tasting the last of her pride as it slid down her throat.

  ‘First of January. 1986.’

  ‘Well, congratulations, Joy. I can confirm you’ve definitely come to the right place.’

  Fatso sniggered, then covered his mouth with his fingers when the woman behind the desk glared at him.

  ‘Empty your pockets. I need all belongings in here,’ the woman ordered as she slid a blue tray across the desk.

  ‘I, eh… I don’t have anything on me,’ Joy replied, stiffening her nose in an attempt to stall the tears.

  ‘Except for this,’ Fatso said. He stuffed his chubby fingers into Joy’s jeans pocket, fumbling for longer than was necessary before pulling out a photograph. He carelessly skim-threw it into the tray, and the woman behind the desk took a long stare at it before glancing back up at Joy.

  ‘That it?’

  ‘S’all’s she’s got,’ Fatso replied.

  ‘I, eh… I was told I could take that with me,’ Joy said, her voice quivering.

  The woman clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, then picked the photo up and stared longingly at it before handing it back to Joy.

  ‘Okay, but I’m gonna have to take the laces out of those trainers.’

  Joy looked down at the filthy laces she had spent the majority of the van ride staring at, then dipped to her hunkers to yank them from her Converse. She had barely dropped them into the tray by the time Fatso was grabbing at her elbow again, guiding her past the wooden desk with a firmer grip than she felt was necessary and leading her towards another steel door. He didn’t have to nod at a hanging CCTV camera to open this one. Instead, he pressed one of his chunky fingers to a keypad until the door clicked open. Then he pushed Joy inside with more force than, again, she felt was necessary, before slamming the door shut.

  ‘Ah, well, if it isn’t Joy Stapleton,’ a sweet voice inside the hollow room said.

  Joy spun around to see another one of them standing in front of her, clad – same as ’em all – head to toe in navy. Only this one looked different. She wasn’t menacingly grinning, nor furrowing her brow. She actually had kind eyes; eyes not too dissimilar to Joy’s best friend Lavinia – or former best friend as she surely was by now.

  ‘Strip!’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Strip. It means take
off all your clothes.’

  ‘I know what it means… It’s just… what, here? Now? In front of you?’

  The woman smiled her kind eyes. And then a long silence settled between them before that kind smile abruptly dropped from her face.

  Joy huffed out a sigh, before pulling her arms from the sleeves of her jumper and lifting it over her head, taking her T-shirt with it.

  ‘Everything else,’ the woman said, the glint in her eye threatening to return.

  Joy reached around and undid the clasp of her bra, revealing her goose-pimple covered breasts before dropping it to the concrete. Then she kicked off her laceless Converse trainers and shimmied her way out of her jeans.

  ‘Lemme see that bush,’ the woman said.

  After a pause of silence, Joy plucked up enough courage to hook a thumb either side of her knickers before yanking them down.

  ‘Now turn around.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Turn around. And interlink your fingers on top of those lovely curls for me.’

  A chill ran down Joy’s spine; partly because of the intimidation, but mostly because of the cold. Though as the goosepimples raced their way around her tiny frame, she relented and finally spun to face the back wall, noticing the yellow paint was stained a vomit-inducing shade of brown in each of the corners.

  ‘Now squat.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Squat. Bend your knees and lower your ass.’

  Joy held her eyes closed and then, widening her stance, began to bend her knees – until the steel door clicked open once again and Christy skidded into the room, pushed in with much the same force as Joy had been.

  Joy stood back upright immediately, holding one arm across her breasts; her other hand covering her bush.

  ‘Looks like you gettin’ all comfortable up in here already, Joy,’ Christy said, grinning her stained teeth.

  ‘You start stripping,’ the woman in navy ordered her before turning back to Joy. ‘And you start squatting.’

  So, Joy refaced the wall, placed her hands back on top of her hair and bent her knees, lowering and pushing her ass out as quickly as she could before standing back upright.

  ‘No, no, no,’ the woman called out. ‘Slower!’

  ‘Hey, you don’t think she got somethin’ up there, right?’ Christy said, cackling. ‘She got such a tight lil ass you couldn’t fit a tic-tac in that thing. Ma right, sista?’

  Joy stiffened her nostrils with irritation, then bent her knees even further before ever-so-slowly lowering her ass as if she was sitting on an imaginary loo.

  ‘See, not even one of those curly pubes fell out,’ Christy said as Joy stood back upright.

  The woman, ignoring Christy, paced over to Joy, placed a hand to her shoulder and guided her with a forced shove against the stained yellow wall behind her. Then she reached above Joy’s head and pulled a gauge down to the top of her curls.

  ‘Five foot, two inches,’ she said before biting off the lid of her pen to scribble on her notes. ‘Stand up here,’ she said, pointing the pen at the weighing scales in the corner.

  Joy stepped onto the board while staring over her shoulder at Christy undressing. She took in the back of Christy’s long, brown legs and slowly lifted her gaze up the length of her spine till she was staring at her bowed elongated neck. Christy had the physique and posture of a super model. And probably could have been one too had she trod a path in life that hadn’t turned her teeth yellow and her eyes red.

  ‘Seven stone, ten,’ the woman said. ‘I think you’ll need to eat a few McDonalds while you’re here.’

  ‘Huh?’ Joy said, stepping down from the scales. ‘We get McDonalds here?’

  Both the woman and Christy laughed so loudly that it echoed around the concrete room. And when the woman had decided the joke was no longer funny, she spun around to pull open a steel cabinet door, from which she removed a neatly rolled up grey jumpsuit.

  ‘Here, wear this,’ she said tossing it at Joy. ‘It’s the smallest one we have.’

  ‘Oh, yo really gonna look like Krusty the Clown now,’ Christy said, cackling from the back of her throat again.

  When Joy finally smothered herself in the jumpsuit – the sleeves so long it looked as if she had two baby elephant trunks for arms – the woman turned and snatched at a door on the opposite side of the room.

  ‘Way to break your duck, Aidan,’ she called out. ‘I’ve got a VIP for you. None other than Joy Stapleton.’ Joy peered around the door frame to see who the hell this Aidan was. He looked young. And fresh; his face still producing acne, his forehead void of wrinkles. He was nice looking in the way Dublin men can be nice looking; black hair, pale skin and piercing blue eyes. Eyes that reminded her of Shay’s.

  ‘She’s Elm House, E-114.’

  ‘E-114, got it,’ Aidan said, nodding. He swallowed and then awkwardly stepped aside, welcoming Joy to join him on the steel-grated landing. As soon as she took one step on to the grate, the screeching that had earlier sounded distant raised intimidatingly in volume.

  ‘Oh wait,’ Joy said, gasping and spinning back. ‘I forgot my photo. I need my photo. It’s in my pocket.’

  The woman knelt down and felt around Joy’s jeans before retrieving the polaroid. She stared at it and paused, before eyeballing Joy.

  ‘Whatever makes you sleep at night,’ she said, handing the photo back.

  Joy crossed her brow as she snatched at it, then whispered, ‘It was a coincidence.’

  Then the woman shrugged one shoulder before slamming the door shut just inches from Joy’s nose.

  Aidan was looking sheepish when Joy turned back around to face him, then he motioned towards a large steel staircase at the far end of the landing.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, as they took the first step. ‘They say the noise isn’t as bad as it sounds.’

  ‘Jaysis, it’s yer one, innit?’ a voice called out when Joy and Aidan had reached the top of the stairs. And then, without pause, a cacophony of wolf whistles echoed, bouncing around the landings both above and below them.

  ‘Ignore them,’ Aidan said out of the side of his mouth. Then he stopped in his tracks suddenly, causing Joy to crash into the back of him.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘it came on me all of a sudden. E-114. This is you.’

  He pushed at the door and stepped aside, inviting Joy to enter first. It wasn’t as grim as she had feared it would be; brighter and actually roomier than she had imagined. But she mostly felt relief when she first stepped inside; relief because there was only one bed in there.

  ‘You’ll, eh… you’ll get three rounds of clothes brought in… so you won’t have to wear the jumpsuit all the time,’ Aidan informed her as Joy stared into the lidless steel toilet bowl in the back corner of the room. When she turned back around, she met Aidan’s blue eyes and he nodded kindly before taking two steps backwards.

  ‘This has to be locked,’ he said gripping the door. ‘It’s just precautionary for the first twenty-four hours. It’s what happens when you’re high-profile. We’ll, eh… we’ll bring you some food in the next couple of hours.’

  ‘Can you, eh… get me some sellotape or Blu-Tac or something? I just wanna hang this on the wall beside my bed … please?’

  She held the photograph up and Aidan blinked at it, before slowly nodding.

  ‘Lemme see what I can do,’ he said.

  Then he took one more step backwards, dragging the door with him and slamming it closed with an echoed clank.

  And that was it. She was alone. Finally. Her freedom well and truly taken.

  She attempted to look about herself, only there wasn’t much to look at. So, she ran her fingers over the thin blue mattress laying on top of her steel-block bed, before opting to perch her ass on to the edge of it.

  ‘Hey,’ a voice yelled before loud banging slapped against Joy’s steel door. ‘I think I know your face from somewhere… or is that just a coincidence?’

  The cacophony of laughter that followed
shook Joy more so than the banging against her door had.

  ‘Yeah, I know who she is,’ another voice shouted when the laughter had died to near silence. ‘Wasn’t she in all the papers for winning Mother of the Year or somethin’?’

  The cackles grew in volume, as if all the women outside were competing for the loudest laugh.

  To drown the noise out, Joy dropped the photograph on to her thin pillow, then lay her face beside it, wrapping her elbows around her head to smother her ears. Sometimes, when she stares at the photo long enough, she can hear Reese’s laugh. And Oscar’s giggle.

  ‘Hey, child killer,’ a voice roared, before the door received another bout of slapping. ‘Don’t you dare think you’re gonna have an easy time of it in here, ya hear me?’

  ❖

  ‘Your Honour, my client,’ Gerd Bracken says, while remaining seated, ‘has spent the last eight years and two months incarcerated in Mountjoy Prison because of nothing more than mere coincidence. A coincidence, I should add, that in the grand scheme of coincidences is not even that coincidental.’

  He scoots back his chair, gets to his feet and strolls, slowly, to the middle of the courtroom floor. Judge Delia McCormick peers over the rim of her retro 1950s-style glasses to squint at him, already intrigued. She’d been working up to this trial for months, was staggered it fell into her lap. A retrial – the retrial – of the biggest mystery that has plagued the entire nation for well over a decade. She was initially hesitant to take on the role, especially as it was all on her; no fellow judges to debate legal arguments with; no jury to rely on for a verdict. But after careful consideration and painstaking research – not to mention discussion after discussion with both her annoying son, Callum, and her persuasive boss, Eddie – Delia finally accepted the pressure of presiding over the Joy Stapleton retrial. She knew the weight of the world would push hard onto her shoulders, knew the media would sensationalize every word she’d speak, and that the judicial system would scrutinize every move she’d make. But as both Callum and Eddie repeated to her regularly during her dilemma: why become a trial judge if you don’t want to preside over the biggest case there’s ever been?