The Last True Sentence

Chapter Nine: The Testimony of Syntax

In January, a grey sky hung overhead at the federal courthouse, and the trial of Gideon Thorne and the estate's executor, Martin Voss, got underway. Iris had heard it called “The Sentence Trials", and she liked the name – it was a touch premature but quite fitting. Her testimony was to be three days long, and she was the prosecution's star witness. She had practiced on her own and had drilled into her mind the elements of the courtroom: the mahogany pews crammed with print and television correspondents, the sketch artists, the faces of the victims' families in the gallery, and the gaze of the defense attorney, a famous litigator by the name of Julian Cross.

The only thing Cross could do was to discredit Iris Vance. He came to the witness stand with a thin smile on his face and a pile of papers in his hands on the first day of cross-examination. He started from the beginning with the Mallory case and walked Iris through all of the aspects of how she had made such a terrible mistake. On the tape, he heard her voice in the 911 call she made that night, when Mallory was murdered, saying she had received a threatening message from a writer who had signed it "2". Iris's cold, folded hands listened as her former self was unraveling. At the end of the recording, Cross addressed the jury.

Dr Vance, you didn't seem to be all right that night, did you? You had been drinking heavily as an FBI expert on an important, high-profile case.”

"Yes," Iris replied firmly. “I once was an alcoholic; I have been in recovery for a few years now.

“And, while you were doing your analysis of the so-called Roy manuscript, did you drink?”

“No, I've been sober since before I got the job.

Cross’s eyes narrowed. “But you were so fragile, so delicate, weren’t you? Your sister has been lost, and you are striving for redemption. Couldn't you have meant the actual trauma you faced and had it come out in the fictional work?

Iris took a breath. This moment had been drilled into her mind a thousand times. What I found is quantitative and replicable; it is not based on emotion, and I've submitted my raw data to the court – any competent linguist can verify my findings.

Cross went on, saying that the acrostic code was a coincidence, the Polaroids could be planted, and Celia's footnotes were just the ramblings of a disturbed woman. Each of the attacks was silenced by Iris' subdued accuracy, and she'd once been the most accurate of the Bureau. However, there were a great deal of emotional costs. She would go back to her hotel room each night and sit silent, those words haunting her. Leeo was always there and would give her a cup of herbal tea and sit with her until the shaking had stopped.

It was the prosecution's call for Dr Harold Fenwick that made the difference. Fenwick's evidence under direct examination by Coleman implied that the linguistic evidence did support a dual-author hypothesis and that the patterns of syntax were “atypical for a single integrated authorial consciousness". He was an abysmal player on cross, and Fenwick was very obviously at ease with signing up to ensure that he gave a good report for the defensive team, so much so that he admitted as much on cross. The admission was a huge blow to credibility for the defense.

However, the most graphic part of the trial, which never occurred in the presence of experts, was the testimony of witnesses. It was presented when the prosecution produced a video deposition of Munro, Celia's mother, who was too ill to make the journey. It was a recording of Elena, her voice very faint but clear, holding a photo of Celia in her care facility.

“Well, my daughter wasn't as crazy as it sounds,” Elena explained. “She was brave,” she said, placing a shivering finger to the defence table but pointing at the man who was not the killer. “She wrote the truth in the margins, and no one else would. And the truth rises up like a tree.”

The jury was greatly affected. In the gallery, Iris started to shed her tears. Grief from her mother's heart echoed in Celia's voice, making law and logic irrelevant in the courtroom.

The verdicts were read out – guilty on both charges for Thorne and guilty for Voss – and there was a hushing noise in the gallery. Iris did not cheer. She sat still, taking each moment in, thinking about Ellie and Celia and all the other women of whom her name was now known. The term 'justice' seemed an odd one to use in relation to what had happened. It was not restoration; there was no restoration possible. What was lost could not be restored. It was an acceptance, an official acceptance that the story had been shared and heard.

The daughter of Lena Holt, the first identified victim, approached Iris after the trial. The woman had the eyes of her mother and was in her forties. She didn't say anything to Iris, but in the hug Iris knew that Iris' work had not been a work of her own redemption. It had been about bringing the stories back to the people who were the owners.

Iris started to write a new document in her hotel room on her laptop computer that night. It was not for the FBI and was never to be archived. It was the first chapter of a memoir of life. She wrote the first sentence: 'My sister disappeared' in a sentence, and for my life, I've been analyzing the grammar of grief. The words were like a door opening and a path into a future that she had never dared to imagine. So she would write the book, she decided. The money raised would all benefit a foundation she would start in Ellie and Celia's names to help families of missing persons and to further forensic linguistic research. A confession was the last "real" sentence in the Roy manuscript. The final time she would be my true sentencer, it would be a gift from her.