“These charges represent a very serious set of offences,” Mr Justice Eddington told the court, as Wainwright was sentenced.
Wainwright was convinced of perjuring himself in an affidavit to the high court during a libel case brought against The Clarion newspaper and his own biographer, Henry Dashwood, last year, following the publication of a story detailing an extramarital affair between Wainwright and a hairdresser, Vivian Jelson. He was also found to have perjured himself during the libel trial.
He was sentenced to 18 months for the first count of perjury, and a further 18 months for the second. The sentences will run concurrently.
Additionally, he was ordered to pay £150,000 costs and was told that he would serve at least one year of his sentence.
Following sentencing, Wainwright was taken to HMP Hendon, north west London, to begin his prison stay.
He plans to appeal the verdict, his solicitor, Anne Marsden, said after the hearing.
* * *
Continued on page 2.
From The Oakland Girlfriend
September 1997
Yes I Am, Says English Aristo
* * *
Reclusive English aristocrat and art connoisseur Lady Rose Winchester, widow of deceased Fairlight Media CEO Sir Sebastian Winchester and rumoured owner of the world’s largest collection of Roy Lichtenstein paintings, confirmed this week what some of us have suspected for a while: she’s one of us.
* * *
At a benefit for the Bay Area Children’s Society held Friday night at San Francisco’s Museo de los Arroyos, Lady Rose and her date - a woman she named only as “Kate” - cuddled up and smiled for the cameras and seemed delighted to be spending the evening in each other’s company.
* * *
Asked directly whether this public appearance constituted an official coming out, she answered: “Absolutely. Let all your readers know - I’m gay, and I’ve never been happier.”
Chapter 12
Cow Hollow, San Francisco
September 1997
Bulldog’s was an embarrassment of Anglophilia - its tightly stacked shelves awash with boxes of PG Tips, family-size bars of Dairy Milk and, to El’s mild horror, jar upon jar of potted beef. Strings of Union Jack bunting hung low from the strip-lit ceiling, the little flags dancing in the breeze blowing in from the marina with every swing of the entrance door. An elaborate shrine to the Princess of Wales had been erected by the checkout, a ten inch framed photograph at its centre - testament to the grief still keenly felt at the loss of Diana by the eponymous Bulldog, an expat Mancunian marketing manager turned grocery store proprietor and, since settling in the Bay Area, proudly out leather queen.
There was nothing there that El couldn’t have picked up at a third of the price from her local supermarket or the Departures lounge at Heathrow, but she browsed the aisles avidly regardless, studying the labels on every tin of baked beans and packet of chocolate Hobnobs with the ferocity of purpose of a mystery shopper on the lookout for points to deduct from the final tally. There were, she noted as she made her rounds, mercifully few other customers in the store to block her path or disrupt her line of sight; partly, she imagined, because it was the middle of the day, and partly because - as Rose, who knew the city best of all of them, had suggested - Bulldog’s had at least two rival, but more recently established British-themed food retailers snapping at its heels and eating into its profit margins.
(“I don’t rate them, though,” Rose had added of the newcomers. “They’re American-owned, both of them. I nipped in to get a few things from the one on Chestnut Street when I was last over here, and the woman behind the counter handed me a pumpkin when I asked her where she kept the orange squash”).
She was on her third lap of the chilled section when she saw him, loading smoked back bacon and thick-veined Stilton into a shopping cart: a stocky, grey-haired walrus of a man, all luxuriant eyebrows and well-cultivated moustaches, his wide chest and substantial gut covered by a brown short-sleeved shirt open at the neck and, incongruously, the tight-fitting khaki trousers of a teenage undergraduate. His fair skin was pink and his nose peeling, a casualty of the hot late-summer sun and what she guessed was his own refusal to capitulate to sunscreen. He was, to her at least, as screamingly English to the naked eye as the contents of his trolley.
She accelerated, making a beeline for his fridge, stopping just short of his broad back.
“Sorry,” she said, reaching around him for a block of Red Leicester, “can I just squeeze past you there, love?”
He spun around to look at her, his attention captured.
It was the voice, she thought; the echoes of Halifax, or possibly Wakefield, in her short vowels and affectionate colloquialism. It would have fallen on him, in this place, like the opening chords of a song half-remembered from childhood; would have sounded, more than anything he’d heard recently, like home.
“You don’t get many of you ‘round here,” he said, his accent a gruffer variation on the one she’d offered him. He smiled at her as he spoke, the action drawing his moustaches up into his nostrils.
“Many of me?” she asked.
“Yorkshiremen,” he answered. “Or women, I should say. Where are you from, lass?”
“Leeds,” she told him, deciding as she said it that it was a better choice than the smaller towns she’d been debating - that a big city might afford her that bit more wiggle room to fudge the cultural and geographic specifics, should she need to. “Though I’m surprised you can tell, I’ve lived in London so long.”
He chuckled knowingly.
“You and me both,” he said.
She dropped the cheese into her basket and took a step to the right, moving as if to extricate herself politely from the conversation.
(“You sure about this?” she’d asked Ruby and Sita, when they’d proposed Bulldog’s as a likely place to engineer the first, accidental meeting - finding it difficult to believe that a man in his position would stoop to doing his own shopping at all, when an assistant could be dispatched to any shop from Oakland to San Mateo at the drop of a hat.
“Totally,” Ruby had said. “He does everything himself, always has. Does the shopping, mows the lawn, changes the lightbulbs… you name it. You know the sort - rich as Croesus, but prides himself on being just like the rest of us commoners. Typical Northerner, if you ask me. Like one of them mill owners out of Elizabeth Gaskell.”
El, knowing Ruby considered El’s Midlands hometown Up North and El herself as Northern as a Gateshead miner, had bitten her tongue).
“What brings you all the way out here?” he asked her, prolonging the dialogue exactly as she’d hoped he would.
He was lonely, she thought. Lonely and homesick.
“Oh, you know,” she said vaguely, “work stuff. Thought I might get a bit of time off to go and have a look around, maybe rent a car and drive up to Wine Country, but it hasn’t happened yet.”
“What is it you do for a living, then?”
She let herself look nervous - reluctant to give away personal details to the strange old man who’d cornered her in the dairy section.
He saw her unease; seemed to understand he’d have to assuage it somehow, if he was going to persuade her to keep talking.
“Don’t look so nervous,” he said, smiling again. “I’m old enough to be your dad. It’s just nice to talk to someone who doesn’t sound like they just walked off the set of Baywatch. You’ll see what I mean, if you stop here long enough.”
She relaxed her shoulders; rearranged her body into a less defensive posture.
“I’m a programmer,” she said, tucking a loose handful of her newly pink hair behind one ear. A strand of it caught, painfully, on the trail of silver earrings Sita had set into the lobe and cartilage.
(“Better verisimilitude than comfort, darling,” Sita had told her, as she’d approached her with the piercing gun. “These are the sacrifices we make for our art”).
“One of them Silicon Valley types, eh
?” he asked.
“Hardly,” she said. “But I’ll happily take a cheque off them, if they make me an offer. I just need to persuade them that what I’ve got is worth their money.”
His pupils widened slightly, his professional interest stirring. There was nothing in the background research Ruby had compiled to suggest he’d ever invested in technology - but she supposed you could only stay in San Francisco for so long before the Gold Rush called to you, the smell of newly-minted tech cash drawing you in as irresistibly as a Looney Tunes rabbit lured to an open window by a blueberry pie.
“Selling something, are you?” he said.
She shrugged, bashful.
“Just some software,” she said. “Nothing very exciting.”
“What’s it do, then, this software?”
She eyed him up, suddenly wary again.
He realised his mistake - that he’d pushed too hard, asked too many questions - and backtracked.
“Sorry,” he said, his moustaches drooping. “Never know when to stop talking, me.”
“You’re alright,” she said - warming to him in his moment of what seemed like genuine remorse, and ignoring the lightning-flash of guilt that shuddered through her as a consequence.
He looked down at his trolley, the blue cheese and bacon he’d layered on to an already substantial mound of Jaffa Cakes, Walkers Crisps and salad cream.
“Listen,” he said. “There’s a cafe up the road, a proper one. Let me get them to put this behind the counter, and then what do you say I buy you a cup of tea, if you’ve not got owt else on this morning?”
She bit her lip, showing him she was considering the offer - the small reward of a friendly face and a familiar accent in an alien place competing with the more significant risk of agreeing to a drink with a perfect stranger who might well be interested in more than just her software.
“That’s very kind of you,” she said, “but…”
“No funny business,” he added quickly. “Just a sit down and a natter, one weary traveller to another. Go on.”
She studied him again, weighing up the threat and the promise.
“I don’t even know your name,” she said.
This time he beamed, the moustaches curling at the edges.
“That’s easily remedied,” he said. “It’s Ted. Ted Wainwright.”
She allowed herself a second’s pause, then inhaled sharply - her wariness turning to shock, then mortification.
“Oh my God,” she said slowly. “I should have known. I thought I recognised your face. You’re that Ted Wainwright, aren’t you? You were on that show on Channel 4, that business rescue thing. MD SOS?”
“That were me,” he said, with no trace of ego. “Though it feels like a hell of a long time ago now, that does.”
You’re wondering if I know the rest of the story, aren’t you? she thought. If I read about you in the papers. Or saw you on the news, when they took you down in handcuffs.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” she said weakly - more trusting now, her guard more obviously down. A little bit starstruck, even.
“And you,” he replied. “But fair’s fair. Now you know my name, shouldn’t I get to hear yours?”
She willed herself to blush; concentrated, and felt the creep of embarrassment travel up her neck and onto her cheeks.
“Right,” she said haltingly. “Yeah, of course. Sorry, yeah. I’m Angela. Angela Di Salvo.”
Over three cups of weak black tea and a plate of heavy buttermilk scones, she told him her story - what it was that had brought her to the city.
She wasn’t just a programmer, she said; she was a computer games programmer, one of a handful of in-house developers at a twelve-strong studio on the Isle of Dogs. They specialised in puzzles and point-and-click adventures, their most lucrative output the multi-title Gerbils! franchise, wherein players were tasked with guiding a pair of brainless pet rodents from their owners’ garden to the safety of their indoor cage while navigating a succession of ever-more-deadly domestic booby traps. It was fun, satisfying and generally well-paid work, made more satisfying still when the founder of the studio, inspired by the actions of his larger US competitors, had encouraged his team to spend one day of every working week developing their own side-projects - and, bucking the current trends of the industry, had allowed them to retain the rights to any intellectual property these side-projects generated.
She’d always been interested in graphics editing and image-manipulation - it was one of the interests that had led her to game design in the first place. And when, flicking through a magazine in the staffroom on her lunch break, she came across an article about life on the run for long-term fugitives, an idea for a side-project occurred to her.
Existing age-progression software, she knew - the kind the police used to predict how criminals might look, twenty or thirty years after they’d disappeared from public view - commonly relied on a degree of artistic interpretation: on the image creator making predictions about the way the suspect’s appearance would evolve over time, based on anything from a single photograph to a lifetime’s worth of photo albums and the faces of the suspect’s immediate family, and then drawing on these predictions to sketch out a line or wrinkle here, a receding hairline there, a thickening of the nose or a softening of the jawline.
Other, newer alternatives drew on larger-scale data - the photographs of a hundred people, or a thousand, or a hundred thousand of the same sex and ethnic group - to estimate how the individual’s face might change over a similar time-frame; an algorithm here replacing the human touch in divining the relevant changes, but the look of the aged-up image still, ultimately, a matter of guesswork and prognostication.
But what if, she wondered, there were a way to remove the guesswork? To guarantee the accuracy of the final outcome?
“It got me thinking about forensic anthropologists,” she told Wainwright, “and the way they do facial construction when they’ve got nothing but a skull to work with. They use software - but they also use modelling clay, stuff like that. They work out which bits of bone fragments go where, and then fill in the gaps, until they’ve got something that looks like a real person. It’s not always 100% accurate, what they end up with - it doesn’t always stand up in court, for example - but a lot of what I’ve seen looks pretty good to me. So I asked myself: how would you go about writing the code for a piece of software that reconstructed a living face the same way?”
(“You do know there’s already people starting to do this sort of thing in the States, don’t you?” Karen had said, when Ruby had first floated the idea for the rope. “At the Smithsonian, places like that? It’s not exactly an established field, but it’s getting a bit of traction. It’s not new new, is what I’m saying.”
“And how well do you think a bloke like Wainwright knows the ins and outs of the Smithsonian?” Ruby had answered, half-rhetorically. “Reckon he subscribes to Forensic Anthropology Today, do you?”)
Writing and testing the code took months; far longer than it would have done, had she been able to dedicate a solid block of time to the task. Six months in, she was sleep deprived, exhausted - her every waking moment spent darting back and forth between Gerbils Unbound!, the latest entry in the series (scheduled for release in early January 1998) and the project she’d come to think of, privately, as Dorian Gray.
And then, finally, it was finished.
“Did it work?” Wainwright asked her. He was on the edge of his seat, she noticed; hanging on her every word.
“There’s still a small error margin,” she conceded. “But we’re looking at an overall accuracy rate of something like 98%. I’ve run over four thousand historical face-shots through it so far, and nearly every one has been a nigh-on perfect match for the person as they look now.”
“Historical face-shots?”
“You know… baby photos, pictures from birthday parties, that sort of thing. You run them through the program, and digitally compare what it generates with the person
as they look today. It’s dead easy to use, now it’s up and running. Though it’s still in beta, obviously. It’ll need more work doing to it before it’s ready to go to market.”
His eyes were saucers now, his mouth virtually hanging open.
It was the baby photos, she thought - disgusted with herself, with how well she’d played him. The baby photos sealed it. Got him on the hook, just like you knew they would.
“You said you were selling it, this bit of software?” he said, trying to play it cool, to keep his excitement – and his burgeoning hope - in check.
“It’s what I’m here for,” she said. “I’m back to back with meetings all week.”
“Potential buyers?”
She nodded.
“Investors too. Thought I’d best hedge my bets in case none of the buyers bite, so I’ve got a couple of venture capitalists lined up tomorrow and Friday. You don’t know ’til you try, do you?”
He took a small, reluctant bite of his scone, almost certainly for the show of it; swallowed it down before he could possibly have tasted it.
“How does it work, then?” he asked.
She laughed.
“Give me a hundred thousand for it, and I’ll tell you anything you want,” she said, smiling to soften the blow of the rebuff. “Pounds, not dollars. Otherwise that’s a trade secret you’re asking me to give away.”
“That’s how much it’s worth? A hundred grand?”
She looked down at her plate self-consciously.
“Could be,” she said quietly. “Let’s see what the VC says tomorrow. I might have got it all wrong.”
She could feel it these days - that gossamer-fine heartbeat of a moment, right before the mark tipped from almost to all in. She felt it now; could see it in his tapping fingers, the infinitesimal twitch of his eyelid.
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 11
