In Your Defence

by Sarah Langford

  They stopped twice more after that. When the others returned the first time, they had a girl with them. She had thin brown hair and a face blotched with fear. The van door slid open on its runner and she climbed into the back, followed by Drax and Scat. Kit climbed into the passenger seat and gave Dan directions to the place he was to go to next. The music was still playing, but now and again Dan heard snatches of what was being said. The girl called Drax by a different name – Cash – and Dan heard others too. Bruiser. Enemy. Devil. Blade. Ghost. Mr Murder. Street names for drug dealers. Names that spoke of violence and power. They had smoked all the way from London and Dan started to realize he was high, but the others didn’t seem to be and so he tried to focus on Kit’s directions and ignore what was going on in the van behind him.

  Eventually they reached a large council estate with several tower blocks of flats, surrounded by painted green railings and scrubby patches of grass. Kit asked Dan to drive slowly around the block. On their third circuit someone in the van shouted, ‘There she is!’ Kit motioned at Dan to pull up beside a girl walking quickly along the pavement, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up. Kit opened his door and jumped out, followed by the others, leaving the brown-haired girl trapped inside, alone. Dan got out of the van as the three men caught up with the girl on the pavement, encircling her. As she turned round to face them, Dan saw her short dark hair, and that she was very thin, her hollow eyes and sallow skin making him sure she was a junkie. He leaned against the van and looked up at the summer sky, glad of the fresh air. He could hear the girl saying something about stealing, about going to her house, and then, as he looked back towards the group, he saw Kit and the others begin to hustle her towards the van. As Drax passed him he gestured to the driver’s side. ‘Get in, then,’ he ordered. Dan looked at him, hesitated, then opened the door and climbed back behind the wheel.

  The following morning Dan woke as an indigo dawn began to break through the bare windows. Outside, the grey London streets were empty. He felt a rough dryness in his mouth, blood rushing to his head as it began to pound. He was, he realized, still drunk. It took a few seconds for him to remember where he was. In a flat – someone else’s flat – on the bare mattress of a bed. Kit was asleep on a chair by the window, half dressed. The second girl they had picked up in the van lay on the bed with Dan, asleep. They had, Dan remembered, dropped the first girl off after picking this one up. He looked at her back as it curled away from him, her legs drawn up to her chest. What was her name? He noticed that she had, at some point, put her clothes back on again. Maria; her name was Maria. Dan thought suddenly of his girlfriend and, as a series of images spooled through his mind like a film reel, he felt panic start to swell. He remembered the van parked outside and that he was supposed to deliver it back to his boss that Saturday morning. He rolled away, off the bed, steadying himself before he picked up his clothes. He noticed that there was a condom lying wilted on the bedroom floor. Leaving it, he walked into the living room. Drax and Scat lay asleep on two sofas. There was another man, also asleep, whom Dan had been asked to pick up when they had decided to drive the girl from Southampton back to London and to this flat. He walked past the three of them and let himself quietly out, unnoticed.

  Later that afternoon Maria stood in Waterloo station by a phone booth and clicked in some coins. She had found them at the bottom of her handbag; they had fallen through a hole in its lining and she had crouched on the floor of the station, using her fingers as pincers to draw them out. She tried to steady herself as she waited for her girlfriend, Lola, to pick up the phone. She wondered if she should have found a place to smoke a hit first. The heroin that one of the men had given her that morning was starting to wear off, and she could feel the fringes of pain begin to creep along her skin. She knew that Lola would be worried about her; that she would have called their friends, telling them that Maria had been taken by the dealers, that she was terrified they were going to do what they had done to that other girl when they drove her to a junkyard, stripped her, and beat her black and blue. Please, thought Maria, please, just don’t let Lola have called the police.

  Lola picked up the phone and, when she heard her voice, Maria started to cry. For the past two years Lola had given Maria safety and shelter and food and money and love – above all, love – the like of which Maria had never known. Now she had messed it all up. Lola knew that Cash and the others in the gang were dealers. Lola had bought drugs from them herself once – a few tabs of ecstasy. What Lola didn’t know was that Maria was selling heroin for them. The first two drops had gone okay. Maria had sold the drugs and met up with Cash in a fast-food place. She had given him the money and he had loaded her up with another £1,000-worth of gear to sell. Cash knew Maria would smoke some of her stash – that was their deal – but as long as the money kept coming, he didn’t care. But then Maria had a hard week. Her benefits were £150 per week, but her habit was now at £60 a day. Her addiction had consumed her body and mind for the last ten years. One leg had swollen to twice its size with cellulitis and her veins had collapsed. Sometimes she felt as though she might die without the drug. And there, in front of her, was the money from the first few deals and the magic powder that could make her feel human again. So Maria spent Cash’s money and smoked his drugs, and tried to hide from him until he and his gang finally found her, as she always knew they would.

  ‘Where are you?’ said Lola. ‘Are you all right? What’s happened?’

  Maria drew a breath, told herself to focus.

  ‘It was Cash. I’m okay. I’m getting on a train home now from London. Please – just don’t tell anyone or do anything, all right?’

  She hung up and walked through the station to her platform. When she saw the guard turn and walk towards the train, she took her chance and jumped the gate. No one stopped her. She rounded her shoulders and got on the train, looking for the nearest toilet. When she found it she sat on the seat and reached for the lighter and foil in her bag. A minute later she was leaning back, letting her head rest against the wall, feeling the warmth start to spread into her limbs as the drug flooded through her.

  I sat next to my leader, Joe, in Winchester Crown Court. We were crammed into three rows of benches – barristers in the first two rows, solicitors in the third – with a fortress of files separating one legal team from the other. The trial was about to start.

  Dan – our client – had put forward the same defence as Kit. Maria had got in the van. She may have been frightened – she had smoked the drugs she was supposed to sell after all – but there was no violence. Kit had directed Dan back to a flat on the outskirts of London, then he and Dan had left and gone out drinking. They had come back to find everyone asleep except Maria, who was withdrawing and wanted heroin. Kit had said no: she couldn’t pay for it, that’s how she’d got into this mess. Both men said it had been Maria’s idea to trade sex for drugs. She had suggested it; she had supplied the condoms. Dan had gone along with it. The next morning Dan had left before anyone else had woken. He did not deal drugs. He was not part of any gang. He was innocent.

  The fifth man, who had recently joined the trial, was, the prosecution said, the most dangerous of them all. He was the man the others had picked up on the way back to London; the one who had led the torture to which Maria said she had been subjected. The ringleader, the mastermind. Mr Murder. The police had been looking for him for months and now they had him. But Mr Murder had an audacious defence. He had chosen to plead guilty to the charge of conspiracy to supply heroin, but deny kidnapping and false imprisonment. He was, he admitted, a drug dealer, but he had not been in the van that evening. No, no, he said. That must have been another man. Because he was no ordinary drug dealer – he was the biggest one the south coast had ever seen, and he would not waste his time on a petty little drug run like this one.

  The jury filed into court as our high court judge peered down at the courtroom.2 Of the ten barristers before him, four of us were circuiteers who had joined
the Western Circuit – one of six legal geographical areas distinct from London.3 With the exception of my leader, Joe, I knew the others well. One was Kit’s barrister, Mark. Popular among his contemporaries, he was slightly but authentically eccentric. I sometimes caught him sketching portraits of a witness or the judge in his notebook, closing it gently if he thought anyone was watching him. Another was his junior, Lucy, who was as elated as I was to have the chance of a junior brief. The other barristers were all from the capital and were affectionately known as ‘The PLCs’ – The Proper London Counsel – by all the circuiteers.

  At the back of the large, wood-panelled courtroom, the five defendants sat in the dock, Dan among them. I had smiled at him when he came up from the cells and into court, and he had nodded in return, jostling and laughing with the other defendants as they took their seats. I wondered if he was faking it, this ease with the justice system. The closest he had come to a courtroom before now was a minor theft offence many years ago. I watched him alongside those whose criminal experience was so much greater than his own and wondered if time in prison was all he had needed to become indistinguishable from them.

  The members of the jury were taking their oath, one by one, in front of the men whose fate lay in their hands. Some flicked glances towards the dock; others openly stared. I knew why. When lined up next to each other, the five defendants were an impressive sight. With little to do in the eighteen months spent waiting for their trial, they had passed long hours working out in their cells. Now their torsos strained against the fabric of their sweatshirts and, as they sat back on their chairs, legs spread, their power radiated across the courtroom.

  Once the jury were sworn in and introductions completed by the judge, the prosecutor, Philip, leaned across the defence advocates and began to give his opening speech. Three of the defendants, he explained, had already pleaded guilty to dealing drugs but denied the other charges. Dan and Kit – he gestured towards the dock with a wave of his arm – denied them all. Tomorrow the jury would hear from the complainant, Maria, and she would make them sure, Philip said gravely, that all five men were – beyond any reasonable doubt – guilty.

  Maria stood in the witness box the following morning looking frail and thin, shielded from the dock by a screen.4 She was wearing a grey jumper and black polyester trousers which were an unnatural fit as though, in a panic that she had nothing to wear, she had borrowed them from someone much larger. Maria was no stranger to a courtroom, but it was the dock that she was familiar with, not the witness box. She looked out at us with an expression that was hard to read. Guarded, tough, suspicious of us all.

  Philip began slowly to draw out her evidence. She had not wanted to go with the defendants that day, she said. She had been afraid they would hurt her because she owed them money. She had protested. They had dragged her inside the van and hit her. The threats, the violence, the negotiations over where she was going to get the money to repay them had continued all the way to London. They had taken her to a flat almost bare of furniture and with no electricity. That’s when two of the men had left to go out drinking, and the other three had tortured and beaten her. When these men had eventually fallen asleep, the two other men had come back. She said she had been withdrawing from heroin by then, but denied that she had agreed to have sex with the men in return for drugs. She was not a prostitute, she said – or at least, not then she wasn’t. She had struggled and resisted and told them no, but they had taken her into the bedroom and both had raped her. Afterwards one had given her some heroin to smoke. When she woke up, one of the two men had gone. She had been beaten again and told she must sell more drugs to pay back the debt she owed. She could not see that she had any choice. She was loaded up with a new stash of drugs to sell then dropped at the railway station to find her own way home. She knew who the defendants were – she recognized most of them from previous drug drops. She had picked them all out at an identification procedure. All except one. Mr Murder.

  After the court had finished for the day and we were packing up papers, Lucy turned to me. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I mean, if that’s true – what she just described – it’s pretty bloody bad, isn’t it?’

  It was pretty bloody bad. It was also, I was as sure as I could be, true. The sadistic beatings Maria had described held a level of detail that could only have come from experience. What I did not know was whether Maria’s beating had happened that night, in that flat, or whether she had transposed it from another time in a life full of chaos and crime, homelessness and prostitution. Or maybe it had happened to someone else, someone who had told her in the way she had just told us. For the other barristers and I, unlike the jury, knew what evidence was coming. We knew which witnesses from Maria’s world were going to come to court – some freely, some against their will – to tell their own stories. We knew that once these stories had been told, the jigsaw pieces of Maria’s case just might not fit together quite so well.

  It was Lola – not Maria – who had called the police the night Maria arrived home. Maria refused to make a statement and said she did not want to talk to them. The officers who went to her house said Maria had a bruise to her right eye, but no other marks on her face. It was not until the following evening that Maria told Lola what had happened and that she had been raped. Lola immediately called the police again and arranged for Maria to come in for a vulnerable witness interview and a medical examination. Maria then described to the police and doctor a prolonged and vicious beating and gave details of a rape in which she had continuously struggled. Yet when she was examined the only injuries the doctor could find were the bruise under her right eye and a wide patch of reddening to her left cheek. She had no bruises, marks or abrasions to her legs, head, chest, back, arms or anywhere else, externally or internally. Nothing was there, except the sad and fading scars she had previously inflicted upon herself.

  Maria, it transpired, had tried to destroy the evidence that could – and did – identify her alleged rapists. Lola had discovered Maria’s clothes in the washing machine after Maria failed to start the cycle correctly. She had taken them out, found semen stains on both her jacket and her jeans, bagged them, and handed them to the police.

  Maria had denied again and again that she was a prostitute. She was in a lesbian relationship, she said, with someone she loved and who loved her back. She had only started walking half-lit streets at night in search of payment after – indeed because of – the rape. But that was not what the other witnesses said. Oh yes, agreed one, Maria was a prostitute all right – same as she was. She had been for years. Everybody knew it.

  There was one final piece that did not fit. The police had offered Maria and Lola witness protection for as long as it took for the trial to be over – longer if necessary. They would get food vouchers and subsistence payments as well as the guarantee of safety. It was many days before they took up this offer of protection. In evidence, Maria admitted that during the whole of this time – in between her interviews and examinations – she was still dealing the drugs that Cash had given her when he had dropped her at the railway station in London. She met buyers, took their money, then handed it over to Cash in return for a second batch of drugs. It was only after she had got this second stash that she went with Lola into witness protection. She took the money she had made from selling half of the batch and the rest of the drugs with her, despite the rules that said she could not.

  The evening after Maria’s evidence I read my notes over and over again. I could not work out why she would lie. She had so much to lose. These men were not the only ones in their gang: there was always someone higher up the chain, running the show, ready to punish those who turned. I was used to unanswered questions in almost every case, but there was usually a reason why someone would come to court and make something up. A reason that explained why they would take this risk. And, as I read through Maria’s evidence again, I found it.

  Towards the end of her evidence Maria had used a phrase which struck me. Lola had given her
an ultimatum, she said, the night before she decided to accept the police’s offer of witness protection. She’d had enough, Lola said. It was Cash or her. If Maria didn’t stop dealing, then it was over. Lola would kick her out and she’d be on her own, again. I drew a circle around the words in my notebook. That was it – that was the thread to pull on. If Maria lost Lola she lost everything. Lola was more important to Maria than being arrested for perjury or wasting police time. She did not care about prison or being in trouble with the police – her world had been shaped around these things. Lola was even more important than a lifetime of watching over her shoulder for Cash’s gang if she gave evidence against them. I realized that this was not just a tale of deprivation and exploitation. It was, at its heart, a story about love. Maria knew that if she confessed to getting into the van or to exchanging sex for drugs – to doing what she had, in effect, already been doing behind Lola’s back – then that would be the end of two years of safe reprieve. Maria had not been trying to wash out the semen stains to hide them from the police; she had tried to wash them away to hide them from Lola. The redness that marked her face two days after her return but had been absent the night the police came was a new injury. It had come from the argument with Lola when she had glimpsed Maria’s double life. What could Maria possibly say to explain the semen and her absence – except: I was taken, I was beaten, I was raped. And once she had said it she had to stick to it, not for fear that she might get in trouble with the police, but in the certain knowledge that, otherwise, she would lose Lola.

  At 9 a.m. the following day, I trailed through the late-January wind to court. The brutalist façade of the courthouse was speckled with flint and in the morning gloom of winter it had a menacing feel to it. I was aware of a quiet thrill of excitement as I walked into court with my new theory. Joe was not yet there, but I found Mark in the robing room, flicking through his notes. He looked up and greeted me. I sat down opposite him and told him what I thought.