Guilty Innocence by Maggie James Page B

was denied her right to these things? A culture has emerged in this country of prioritising the criminal over the victim and it has to stop.’
    ‘You think they were released too early?’
    Michelle Morgan snorts her contempt into the reporter’s microphone.
    ‘Of course they were. Ten years for the murder of a defenceless toddler? The sentence was an insult to my dead daughter.’ The camera pans away from Michelle, showing the trees, the field behind her, with the explanation that the wooden farm building where Abby Morgan died has long since been destroyed. A few more platitudes from the reporter and then the link ends.
    Natalie wonders about Rachel’s father, conspicuous by his absence in the video. She braves the Wikipedia link, but it yields no explanation as to why Matthew Morgan – his name is now added to her scant knowledge about the family – doesn’t appear with his wife and children. No mention of his death or emigration.
    Unable to help herself even though she’s aware she’s indulging in a form of self-flagellation, Natalie clicks on the links to footage from earlier years. Michelle Morgan is always there, along with Rachel and Shaun; Matthew Morgan never is. Little difference exists between the links; Michelle says much the same things, her anger unabated, and Rachel looks downtrodden and unhappy, her arms folded to ward off the television cameras. Shaun always stands alongside his mother, Natalie notes, with Rachel on the other side of her brother. Never beside Michelle Morgan. Natalie watches, fascinated, as Abby’s sister morphs from awkward adolescence through to womanhood, her copper hair long at first, then migrating up around her ears in an unflattering pixie cut before settling into the long straight style of recent years.
    She switches her focus to Shaun Morgan, Michelle’s oldest child. He’s a looker, the gangly teenager of the earlier video links changing into a solid, easy on the eye man. Each year, he stands, rock-like, beside his mother and sister. Like Rachel, he never speaks, allowing Michelle her starring role in her own personal tragic play.
    Natalie’s seen enough of the Morgan family. She does a fresh search on Joshua Barker, and close to three hundred and fifty thousand results ping back at her. Numerous newspaper articles quoting Michelle Morgan’s views on the subject of his release. Another one claims to be an interview with a social worker in regular contact with Joshua Barker during his detention at Vinney Green. The picture she paints doesn’t tally in any way with the man Natalie’s been dating. For one thing, Mark has never displayed any hint of aggression, which is why his conviction for child murder confuses the hell out of her. Yet here is this woman claiming multiple incidents of violence from Joshua Barker; how he beat up other inmates, how he frequently trashed his room, how the staff confided in her that they feared him.
    ‘Being with him always sent a chill down my spine,’ the woman tells her interviewer, in deliberately theatrical tones. Her clichéd phrasing betrays her secret enjoyment of her fifteen minutes of fame. ‘He’s already shown what he’s capable of. I often thought – what if I ended up being his next victim?’
    Natalie’s brain imagines an eleven-year-old boy, capable of murder, then morphs him down through the years as he breaks furniture and punches noses in the cinema of her mind. She watches this boy as he terrorises inmates and staff but somehow the movie in her head stops short of fusing the image with Mark Slater. The two simply don’t tally up and nothing Natalie does will get them to splice together. The dichotomy confuses her no end. If she’s unable to believe Mark Slater emerged from the chrysalis of Joshua Barker, how the hell can she believe him guilty of murdering a two-year-old child?
    ‘I didn’t do it, Nat.’ His words come back to her, and she remembers how young he was when Abby Morgan died. Is it really