In Your Defence

by Sarah Langford

  Two hours later the high court judges in their oak-panelled court granted my appeal against Dan’s sentence. He – like Kit – would no longer serve three life sentences, but sixteen years instead. The appeal judges said they did not consider either defendant sufficiently dangerous to warrant the other kind of sentence they could have imposed: an indeterminate sentence for public protection.8 This was the sentence that would, even after it had been abolished, cram prisons with inmates locked up for years beyond their release date because of their inability to prove their rehabilitation. As I listened to the appeal judges discuss and discount it, I did not appreciate at the time that Dan had in fact avoided a fate worse than life imprisonment. A sentence that was not what it seemed. A sentence that had no end.

  After the appeal hearing was over I went down to the cells below court to see Dan and to explain what had happened. I went to say goodbye. I was alone – Joe was involved in another trial. Dan was, as he always had been, affable and polite.

  ‘I really appreciate it, Sarah. Thank you, for everything you’ve done.’ I found it hard to look at him and concentrated instead on calculating his new release date in my notebook. The time he had already served would be taken off, I explained, and he would spend the rest of one half of the sixteen years inside. Then he would be released on licence for the rest. He would be given a list of licence conditions: reporting, signing in and so on. If he committed another crime, he would go back to prison to serve out the rest of the sentence. He was thirty-one when he was first remanded. His sentence would finish when he was forty-seven. Most of his middle life.

  I walked over the crossing outside the Royal Courts of Justice and went, on impulse, to a nearby newsagent on the Strand. I bought a lighter and a packet of cigarettes, turned back on myself and, one after the other, smoked several of them standing underneath the awning of a café, cradling the coffee I had bought as cover. I rarely smoked and almost never during the day. The act of doing so in the morning, somewhere that I was likely to be seen by someone I knew, felt both rebellious and childish. I stared at the Gothic Victorian beauty of the building opposite. I could not make out the detail of it from where I stood, but I knew that, on top of the central arch at its highest point, was a statue of Jesus. I thought of Dan, the television mugshot now replaced by the face I had seen a few minutes earlier. I thought of Maria, and of the sorry procession of witnesses who had followed her. I thought of Mr Murder. And I thought of our imperfect justice; of a system striving for righteousness even though our humanity ensured it was, so often, beyond its reach.

  I rolled over the case in my mind. The evidence seemed so familiar that its gravity had lost its sting. Did I believe everything had happened as Maria said? No, I didn’t, because the other evidence didn’t support it. But did I believe that a vulnerable addict driven by a gang of violent drug dealers to a flat in a city she did not know and could not reasonably have left may have offered them sex while she was withdrawing from drugs in an effort to pay for more? Yes, I did. Did I think it was rape? Yes, I did. I thought of the words from Mark’s closing speech, which had haunted me since I heard them. These were raw, commercial, sordid acts of relief for the two defendants who bought them from her. That was the reality, otherwise every single punter Maria went with would risk being called up in court on a rape charge. Did I believe that every time a man picked up a prostitute whom he knew was selling herself to feed an addiction that controlled her, or to pay a pimp, or both, he was committing rape? Yes, I thought, stubbing out my cigarette on the paving slab, grinding the butt with my shoe. Yes, I did. It was these women who risked having to sign cautions for soliciting until the police grew tired of warning them off and added another offence to their list of convictions.9 But it was the men to whom they sold themselves – who must know the circumstances they were exploiting – who were really guilty of a crime. I did not, nor would I ever, know the truth of Dan’s involvement: how often he had met the gang before, what he knew, what he really believed. But I did think that he was guilty.

  My mouth was dry and I drained my takeaway cup, the taste of scorched coffee mixing with old smoke. I turned left, down an alleyway towards Temple, and headed towards chambers, ready to pick up the next day’s case.

  9

  Helena

  Brighton County Court

  Children Act 1989

  Section 1 – Welfare of the child

  (1) When a court determines any question with respect to—

  (a) the upbringing of a child; or,

  (b) the administration of a child’s property or the application of any income arising from it, the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration.

  CONDENSATION MISTED MY view out of the train window. It was early and the world outside was still in darkness. Two A4 files with tabbed pages sat, unopened, on the train table in front of me. They were the result of twelve months of bitter arguments between my client, Helena, and her husband, Ed, over their three-year-old twins. I was on my way to Brighton County Court, where a judge would decide their children’s future for them because they could not. Tucked into the top of one of the files were the documents I was obliged to prepare for this final hearing. While typing them, I had realized that over the last year not a month had passed without husband and wife swinging verbal punches at one another in a courtroom. Their divorce had, by law, encouraged them to turn to blame.1 They were required to list examples of why the other’s behaviour was unreasonable whether they wished to or not, and so the tone was set. Six applications, fifteen court appearances, two appeals – an exhausting and costly fight, even if the arguments themselves were all too familiar to those who heard them. And all for something which, experience had taught me, was likely to elude both parties long after today was over. Because what they really wanted – above resolution, even above achieving their demands – was their day in court. They believed that the only way bitterness could release its grip was to have this person – whom once they had loved more intimately than anyone, but who now appeared a stranger to them – answer to their crimes. They wanted to expose this person before someone with official independence, who would, they hoped, turn and say ‘You are the good one, the better person, the better parent.’ My job has taught me to understand the power of a judgment; how a compromise will not grant the vindication that drives some people to court. They need to be able to say The judge made me, because that means that they have not, as they see it, agreed to lose. It is not until it is over that they realize that no one – not me, nor the judge, nor the law – is able to give them the release they so long for.

  I stared out of the window in the suspended quietness of the nearly empty carriage as the train pulled away from Victoria Station and the city began to bleed into suburbia, dreading what lay ahead. I realized I could make out Christmas lights, tiny orbs of red and green glowing in the windows of the houses visible from the railway line. At my feet, tucked under the table, was a weekend bag of clothes. Tonight, when the case was over, I would catch another train home, back to my parents. For today was not only the climax of twelve months of work; it was also Christmas Eve.

  Helena and Ed had met eight years earlier in the sticky city heat of midsummer. They married six months afterwards and, for the first time that winter, snow fell in their seaside city, as though the world had saved its chilled confetti as a gift. The ceremony took place in a small room furnished with a large wooden table and four metal-legged chairs, their seats covered in worn pink plush. Helena wore a yellow dress and said she did not care about the civic melancholy of the place. Afterwards they went with their quartet of witnesses to a restaurant, where their booking had been overlooked and Ed rowed with the staff. Eventually a table was found and Helena became effusive with gratitude, whispering an apology on behalf of her new husband, taking care that he overheard her.

  Their twins were born after the desperate agony of miscarriage and rounds of IVF. Afterwards these longed-for babies seemed to sit within the cracks that had
opened in their parents’ marriage. Throughout their young lives the children never truly knew familial peace, but it was not until they turned three and Christmas wreaths and trees and lights filled the family’s terraced street that the war began in earnest. On Christmas Eve, after threatening for months that he would do so, Ed left. As other parents conspiratorially took bites from fireside carrots and half-drank glasses of milk, he thundered down his front path, a shopping bag of clothes banging about his leg. The twins slept through the row despite its intensity and volume, and Helena was left alone to lay their stockings by their beds, holding her breath so she did not wake them with her sobs.

  The next day Ed came back to the house, demanding to see the children. It was Christmas Day! he cried. Helena’s attempt to slam the front door was blocked by his foot and there was a tussle. Ed, without warning, let go and the door sprang back, striking Helena in the face and causing hot tears of pain and shock.

  As I scanned through the papers in the train’s bright artificial light, I wondered again where the twins had been when the police arrived that Christmas morning, responding to Helena’s call. There was little mention of them in the officer’s short report, which reduced the altercation to a single paragraph. Were they watching from the stairs, or in their room among the debris of unwrapped stockings, listening to this adult world of shouting and strangers’ voices? They were absent from everyone’s account of the incident and I was reminded of something a judge once said to me, in answer to my submission that my client was only thinking of her children. ‘Miss Langford,’ he sighed, ‘if the people who appeared before me actually put their children’s interests before their own, my court would be an empty one.’

  After the police had calmed him in their car, Ed, horrified by the blue lights reflected in his neighbours’ windows, accepted the caution they offered.2 It was not a criminal conviction, the officers explained. If he admitted it, then that would be it – the matter would be over. They warned him to leave Helena and the children alone, and to seek his remedy through the courts.

  Ed retreated to his mother’s house on the other side of town to wallow in his fury and prepare his fight. In his absence, Helena began to plan a new life without him, back among the fields of her childhood. As she researched schools and looked for somewhere to rent near the house where her parents still lived, she prepared herself for the solicitor’s letter that Ed had threatened would come. She knew he would demand to see the children and she knew that she was going to refuse, for reasons she had magnified in her mind. She told herself he was volatile, unreliable – that she had a duty to protect her children. But her refusal was, in truth, founded on another reason she could not admit: that this brave new world frightened her and this was one way she could regain some control.

  When Ed’s letter arrived she read it with shaking hands. Among the accusations of poor parenting and allegations that she was teaching the children to hate him, Helena realized that she was wrong. Ed did not just want to see the children. He was going to do everything in his power to take them from her.

  Three months after Ed walked out, my instructing solicitor, Emily, showed me into the strip-lit conference room in Brighton County Court where Helena was waiting to meet me for the first time. She half-stood as I entered the room, the wooden bracelets on her arm clacking together as she held out her hand. She retook her seat and crossed her legs, the tip of her ankle boot clicking a nervous rhythm against the metal table leg. One of her hands moved unconsciously to the beads on her necklace, which she began to finger as though it were a rosary. I sat down opposite her, pushed my file out of the way across the table and wondered, as I always do when I meet clients for the first time, what judgements she was forming of me as simultaneously I formed my own of her. Did she take in the black suit, low heels and pulled-back hair? The files, the notepad, the pen? Was she relieved that I looked like a lawyer? Did she think I would be older? Did she hope I was a bitch?

  I watched her as she hesitated, unsure how to say all the things she so wanted me to understand, desperate to explain the cavernous gap between the person she had read about in the papers before us and the person she believed herself to be. Lawyers, like politicians and journalists, were not the kind of people Helena had much contact with. They, she believed, hovered over the carrion of other people’s lives, making money from their misery. She, in her middle-class bohemia, had no need of them. She was intelligent and reasonable; she read biographies and broadsheets, visited galleries and independent cinemas, ran local book groups, shopped at farmers’ markets. She took good, mid-price wine to supper parties and thumped the table about perceived political injustice with friends just like her as she drank it. Yet, somehow, Helena found herself in a courthouse sitting opposite a lawyer – her lawyer! – unable to explain exactly how she had reached this point. The only possible answer was clear to her. It was all Ed’s fault.

  At Helena’s feet was a large cloth bag filled with paperwork containing her record of grievances, carefully highlighted and underlined to help recall all the slights and wrongs meted out by her husband. Her notebook lay open on the table in front of us, filled with pages of her writing. Into the spiral binding she had clipped a pen: a thick multi-biro with a circle of different coloured nibs. Later, as she sat beside me in court, I would watch her click through the colours as she made notes, trying to work out how she divided the choices. Green for lies? Red for injustice? Yellow for truth? Looking at her notebook, I wondered which of Ed’s secrets, confided in intimacy, she had betrayed. Confession changed to accusation: the meaning twisted, the context missing. Had he – now sitting in his own conference room with his barrister just across the hall from us – done the same? I have seen it often. Those threads of confidence which once had bound the two together now used to strangle one another instead. Sometimes I picture my clients and their ex-partners going through their statement – a final check, requested by their solicitor before signing to the truth of it – and imagine how those paragraphs of revelation must cause their heart to race with treachery. But then they remember: To hell with it, he asked for it. If he’s going to stoop that low, then so can I; two can play at that game. He deserves everything he gets.

  I opened my notebook. I had drawn, as I always do when preparing these cases, a family tree: inked lines mapping out the myriad complicated familial connections, which the court can choose to keep or to cut. Underneath this I had listed the key dates from the case. One I had underlined: 24/12. A quartet of numbers so loaded with nostalgia and magic, now to be remembered by Helena as the day her family finally broke.

  I smiled at her, willing her to listen rather than talk, and began the speech I always give. This first hearing today was just a directions hearing – a short appearance, probably no longer than half an hour. There was no bewigged judge elevated above the court, nor rows of benches – it was just a room, the judge behind her desk, some tables in front of her, pushed together to form a large rectangle. We would sit on one side, Ed and his lawyers on the other. The judge would have seen a letter from the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (CAFCASS), which we would be shown in court.3 Helena nodded in confirmation: yes, she had spoken to a man on the telephone, but he had seemed in a hurry, it had all been too rushed, she hadn’t got to tell him everything she wanted. It was just an initial risk assessment letter, I said, to flag up anything the court needed to know about. CAFCASS were independent social workers who were there only for the children – to give them a voice and the court an independent view. Their role was not to decide which parent to believe; that was the judge’s job alone. I waited for the words to sink in, knowing that when we were given a copy of the CAFCASS letter in court I would have to deflect Helena’s rage at the pack of lies that Ed had told.

  I also knew that, after reading the letter, our judge would turn to each of the parents and try to persuade them to put their arguments aside and reach an agreement for the sake of their children. Anticipating this, I would have to try
to persuade Helena to settle something – to offer Ed some contact with the children – but her anger seemed too great. Ed had stopped paying the rent when he left, she said. She had been warned that her landlord might evict her. She spoke of her desire to move away. She had found a nursery – a village Montessori with a forest school. I shot Emily a look and she quietly shook her head, as though she did not believe Helena would go against the advice I knew she must have given her and unilaterally move her children, without telling Ed.4 Her parents, Helena said, were willing to help her rent a small cottage, but she didn’t want him to know that. Ed would come after her parents’ money, she knew he would. Not that they were rich, but he had been chippy with them throughout their marriage and if he knew they were helping her he would just use it as an excuse not to pay her anything. And he should pay: he was working full time and she could not bear the cost of both children alone. She looked at me. If she did want to move, did she even need to tell him? He was the one who had stopped paying the rent – he was forcing her out! Couldn’t she just go: restart her life? What business was it of his where she lived? She was worried he would turn up at the house at any moment, as he had on Christmas morning. She thought he might be spying on her, trying to collect evidence against her. It was just the sort of thing he would do, hide in his car, watching them, making notes in a stupid little book.

  Helena leaned across the table. Ed, I must understand, had only brought this application to spite her. I didn’t know what he was like but she did. How could he possibly think he could be the primary carer, look after the twins by himself and hold down a full-time job as well? He loved his work too much: he had always put it first; there was no way he would give it up. She couldn’t remember a time when he had taken the twins by himself. He had no idea how to parent. Helena’s mother had said she could help with childcare if Helena were to find some part-time work. Ed’s mother couldn’t do the same: she worked herself; she wouldn’t be able to spare the time. She might be prepared to let the children see Ed if his mother was there, but that was it. He could not see them alone because for him it was all about control – it always was with him. Of course she didn’t want to stop him seeing the children – he was their father after all, even if he didn’t act like it. He was obsessed by the idea that she had only wanted children and not him – he would say he was nothing more than a sperm donor. Sometimes she wished he had been, then it could just be the twins and her. Their little team of three. Ed was so strict with them, always telling them off, correcting them. Blowing up everything into a drama. He wanted to quash their spirits, whereas she wanted them to grow up free, confident in themselves. They were, she concluded, quite frankly much better off without him. I wondered if she saw me flinch.