Innocence Read Online Free PDF Page A

happened, if not how , and promptly collapsed.
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    Nervous exhaustion, the doctor said, and not surprising after the ordeal Reed had been through. Complete rest was the only cure.
    When Reed felt well enough, a few days after the trial had ended in uproar, his solicitor dropped by to tell him what had happened. Apparently, another schoolgirl had been assaulted in the same area, only this one had proved more than a match for her attacker. She had fought tooth and nail to hang onto her life, and in doing so had managed to pick up a half brick and crack the man’s skull with it. He hadn’t been seriously injured, but he’d been unconscious long enough for the girl to get help. When he was arrested, the man had confessed to the murder of Debbie Harrison. He had known details not revealed in the papers. After a night-­long interrogation, police officers had no doubt whatsoever that he was telling the truth. Which meant Reed couldn’t possibly be guilty. Hence motion for dismissal, end of trial. Reed was a free man again.
    He stayed at home for three weeks, hardly venturing out of the house except for food, and even then he always went further afield for it than Hakim’s. His neighbors watched him walk by, their faces pinched with disapproval, as if he were some kind of monster in their midst. He almost expected them to get up a petition to force him out of his home.
    During that time he heard not one word of apology from the undertaker and the bible salesman; Francis still had “stuff to do . . . things to organize”; and Camille’s answering machine seemed permanently switched on.
    At night Reed suffered claustrophobic nightmares of prison. He couldn’t sleep well and even the mild sleeping pills the doctor gave him didn’t really help. The bags grew heavier and darker under his eyes. Some days he wandered the city in a dream, not knowing where he was going, or, when he got there, how he had arrived.
    The only thing that sustained him, the only pure, innocent, untarnished thing in his entire life, was when Debbie Harrison visited him in his dreams. She was alive then, just as she had been when he saw her for the first and only time, and he felt no desire to rob her of her innocence, only to partake of it himself. She smelled of apples in autumn and everything they saw and did together became a source of pure wonder. When she smiled, his heart almost broke with joy.
    At the end of the third week, Reed trimmed his beard, got out his suit and went in to work. In the office he was met with an embarrassed silence from Bill and a redundancy check from Frank, who thrust it at him without a word of explanation. Reed shrugged, pocketed the check and left.
    Every time he went into town, strangers stared at him in the street and whispered about him in pubs. Mothers held more tightly onto their daughters’ hands when he passed them by in the shopping centers. He seemed to have become quite a celebrity in his home town. At first, he couldn’t think why, then one day he plucked up the courage to visit the library and look up the newspapers that had been published during his trial.
    What he found was total character annihilation, nothing less. When the headline about the capture of the real killer came out, it could have made no difference at all; the damage had already been done to Reed’s reputation, and it was permanent. He might have been found innocent of the girl’s murder, but he had been found guilty too, guilty of being a sick consumer of pornography, of being obsessed with young girls, unable to get it up without the aid of a struggle on the part of the female. None of it was true, of course, but somehow that didn’t matter. It had been made so. As it is written, so let it be. And to cap it all, his photograph had appeared almost every day, both with and without the beard. There could be very few ­people in England who would fail to recognize him in the