The Widow

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I’ve spent a lot of time watching people. Not just in cafés and railway stations, but as a job. As a journalist, I’ve been a professional watcher – a ‘trained observer’, we like to joke – picking up the body language and verbal tics that make us individuals and interesting to others.

Over the years, I’ve interviewed the victims, the guilty, the famous and the ordinary people affected by tragedy or good fortune. But, strangely, it is not always the people in the spotlight that have stayed with me. It is often those on the periphery, the bit players in the drama, who continue to haunt me.

In big trials – notorious and terrible crimes that make headlines – I have found myself watching the wife of the man in the dock and wondering what she really knew, or allowed herself to know.

You will have seen her too, on the news. You may have to look carefully, but she’s there, standing quietly behind her man on the court steps. She nods and squeezes his arm as he protests his innocence because she believes in him.

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