The Allegations

by Mark Lawson

  ‘Jennifer!’

  The conversation faltered at this reminder of the marital disputes in which he would use her full name punitively.

  ‘All I’m saying is she sounded your type on the phone.’

  ‘Look, I know I was a crap husband to you but I promise you I’m improving.’

  ‘Oh, great. So I’m like the schmuck who sold the land before they struck oil on it.’

  Jenny looked down, busied herself with stirring and drinking. He sensed old hurts returning. His own flashbacks were not to rows, lies and silences but to winter walks, her nose pink under that Cossack hat he bought her, and waking up slowly on Sunday mornings. He had a stabbing understanding of why Facebook and Friends Reunited reignited so many old flames.

  With her hair cut shorter than before and more expertly dyed, she looked healthy and high-spirited. A partner who has willingly left feels the opposite of a lover’s jealousy, actively wanting the other to be seduced to diminish their guilt of betrayal. He hoped that her current bloke – David, reported by Phee to be a Maths professor with four kids from two marriages – would be enough to tear the final pages of hatred from the Book of Ned.

  She gave him the look of a mother to a sick child. ‘I’m not stupid enough to ask how you are. But …’

  ‘I don’t want to end up like Dreyfus, with people saying: “Enough already about the persecution.” But … I suppose everyone imagines the knock on the door, don’t they?’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘I think so. If you grew up with the Birmingham Five, the Guildford Four, I think you always fear one day it might be …’

  ‘The Winslow One?’

  Fierce teasing had always been her way. When they were married, he could have told her to fuck off, but he restricted himself to an exasperated face. ‘I’m serious. It’s a sort of apocalyptic version of finding out you were adopted – everything you’ve ever believed about your past and your self is … is … overthrown. Everyone assumes that it could never happen to them but …’

  ‘Not if … not if they haven’t …’

  ‘Done anything? No, well, this is the point: some of us haven’t …’

  Raising his voice, he sensed the elderly couple behind them – drinking tea and reading the courtesy tabloids scattered on the tables – and compromised with a sort of whisper-shout. He continued more levelly: ‘At least, in the golden age of injustice, they planted evidence on people and classy stuff like that. But now someone says something about you and next day you’re off work and wondering whether to buy one of those things to remind you when to take your drugs.’

  ‘It can seem very unfair,’ Jenny said.

  She had hit a placatory note and he echoed it: ‘Thank you for thinking about helping me.’

  ‘Nobody wants to see someone they’ve …’ She left the past participle blank. ‘ … going through something like this.’

  Phee had passed on Claire’s request to Jenny, who had agreed in principle, but with the condition that she wanted first to meet Ned, who was eventually persuaded by his solicitor that this was not a police trick. He regretted his concession when Jenny asked: ‘So did you rape those women?’

  ‘Jennifer!’

  ‘Remember I’ve been lied to by you, so I’ve got something to measure the needle against.’

  Once past the shock of the question and the lie detector metaphor, he felt that this was very Jenny. She probably would come through as a witness for him but was protecting herself by some detective work first, a conversation that also permitted some delayed revenge. He gambled on the deafness of the pensioners at the next table.

  ‘No. Absolutely not. I’ve already had the argument with Dee about ski masks and strangers but these – both cases – were … relationships …’

  ‘When did they happen?’

  A memory of the stack of detective fiction always on her side of the bed.

  ‘Er, 1976 … and … and more recently …’

  A note of hope behind the incredulity: ‘Emma?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘But recently means … what … ten? … twenty? …’

  ‘After you, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘Poor Emma.’

  A tangible relaxation in Jenny. If Ned had been a rapist, it had been before and after her, which probably shouldn’t matter but seemed to, with the bonus that he had cheated on the woman he had betrayed her with.

  ‘And, if you didn’t do it, then why do they say that you did?’

  Another detective-level question. Perhaps they should close Hendon Police College and just give the candidates a hundred cop novels to read.

  ‘That’s … obviously that’s crucial. What I think is that, if the news is full of swine flu or Ebola or whatever, everyone starts to think they’ve got it …’

  ‘Well, you certainly would.’

  ‘And so if something is suddenly everywhere, then … I never thought I’d been bullied at school or at work – it was just stuff that goes on in classrooms and offices – but then, when they start publishing codes and putting names on it, you start to wonder if you were. And with … with … this one, when every headline is saying that there was this undetected epidemic, I suppose people start to think, well, maybe that night …’

  He wondered about saying the next bit, thinking that it was the sort of thing that led to people on Twitter being forced into hiding. But this was a private conversation in a cafe on the edge of an industrial estate. ‘And … and … I suspect that sometimes people get to a point in their lives when other stuff has gone against them and they start to think …’

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud!’

  The swish of a raincoat draped over a chair as one of the tea-drinkers turned to target the argument.

  ‘Ssshhh! If I get barred from The Best Cafe, it’s sitting on the kerb drinking takeaway next.’

  ‘But I mean, it’s bitter vengeful women, is it? Well, bloody lucky you haven’t had a charge from me, then.’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s a women thing … there’ve been teachers – male and female – accused by old pupils: boys and girls. In custody battles, mothers are branded sluts or drug addicts by their ex-husbands. If you want to get someone, allegations are the best ammunition and sex is Semtex …’

  ‘Oh, Lord, are you going to start a campaign group? I don’t want to switch on the news and see you bungy-jumping from Big Ben in a Spiderman suit.’

  ‘This isn’t about me, Jen …’

  ‘You’ll appreciate my scepticism on that.’

  ‘This could happen to absolutely anyone, except people who Tweet, apparently. There are genuine victims of paedophiles and … and …’ – more mouthing than speaking – ‘rapists out there. But, if you test for something in a whole population, you’ll get false results. Especially if you assume in advance that every result is positive.’

  In the over-loud voices of those with weakened hearing, the couple behind were discussing the parts of the argument they had gleaned. Ned heard the words: poor woman. He laughed.

  ‘What’s set you off?’

  ‘I was just thinking that Darby and Joan over my shoulder will be thinking we’re heading for divorce.’

  Jenny smiled. ‘Phee’s solidly in your corner, which is good.’

  ‘That’s tactfully put. I don’t know what to do about Dee.’

  ‘Look, when have those two ever been on the same side over anything?’

  ‘That’s what …’ He stopped.

  ‘What Emma said. It’s okay. You can say her name. In a minute, I’ll tell you how amazing David is in bed.’

  Although it was a joke, and offence was one of the reflexes subdued by his medication, Ned still felt a competitive twinge, but forced a grin.

  ‘Look, Jen, I can see how tough it is for the girls. The last thing children want to think about is their parents’ sex lives …’

  ‘Yeah. Despite – or is it because of – being evidence of it. Do you worry about them?’ />
  ‘What? Of course. All the time, in the background, on and off. But, if you let it get too specific, you’d never sleep …’

  ‘I just hope they’re okay. You read these stories about women – this almost never happens to men – whose lives are ruined simply because they got involved with the wrong bloke.’

  ‘Are you talking about us?’

  ‘What? No. Ned, you, you may remember me making this point at times before – not everything that everyone says is always about you. No, I mean those girls, women, you read about who marry someone, live with them, even just go back to their house once for a drink and they get murdered or, or …’

  ‘Raped?’

  ‘No. No. I’m just saying that I think that people, the girls’ generation particularly, they’ve made it all so casual. This, this’ – Jenny had always been a nervous swearer and whispered the expression – ‘fuck-buddies thing they have apparently, I mean, how can that really work? Who you … hook up with, and how, can have such terrible consequences for your life. Our daughters’ lot are trying to make sex the simplest thing in the world at the exact moment that people are being locked up in cells over a, a shag they had forty years ago. I just hope the girls are being careful …’

  ‘Dee just seems so moralistic about it.’

  ‘I’ve told you. And, if Phee was, then she wouldn’t be.’

  ‘Sure, sure. They’re the world’s least similar identical twins. But when the point of dispute is whether Dad is … a … a …’

  He couldn’t say it.

  ‘Well, Dad isn’t.’

  Though opaquely phrased, it was the endorsement he sought. ‘So does that mean … ?’

  ‘Look, show me a woman who hasn’t sometimes had sex when she didn’t want to …’

  ‘Yes, well, that might not be a helpful line to take in court.’

  ‘Ned, you’re an arrogant, faithless, philandering bastard, but you’re not a rapist.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, sincerely.

  When they said goodbye at the corner, he kissed her cheek, awkwardly but warmly.

  The Literature of False Accusation (5)

  Summary: A twelve-year-old cadet, Ronnie Winslow, is sent down from the Royal Naval Academy at Osborne, having been found guilty by a secret internal investigation, at which he was not represented, of stealing a five-shilling postal order from a classmate and then cashing it. The boy insists to his wealthy businessman father, Arthur Winslow, that he is innocent and the family tries to retain Sir Robert Morton, a leading KC, to sue the Admiralty to withdraw a charge that will result in the family being shunned by society and the boy becoming unemployable.

  Morton, in a mock cross-examination, reduces Ronnie to tears and incoherence by accusing him of lying. The Winslows are appalled by this brutality and the truth that the interrogation apparently reveals. But, in one of the great reversals of audience expectation, Sir Robert drawls: ‘The boy is plainly innocent. I accept the brief.’ He subsequently explains that, during his interrogation, Ronnie volunteered several potentially incriminating details and refused a loophole offered (that he had briefly stolen the postal order as a practical joke) which could have reduced the charge to a lesser one.

  After public and government pressure to drop the case, Sir Robert demolishes the eye-witness evidence of a postmistress and wins the case.

  Reader Review: The Winslow Boy had been the favourite play of Ned’s father. A family outing to a London production – probably, from the dates, for his dad’s last birthday – was one of his final memories of him. The play held special meaning for this reason and also because that theatre trip was the only time he had seen his father cry, Val Marriott producing a large handkerchief and thunderously blowing his nose at the moment of the cadet’s acquittal. Subsequently, Ned had wondered if his father had ever been the subject of a calumny.

  With some guilt, Ned, in his TV series about the 1950s, had used the plays of Sir Terence Rattigan as an example of the stultified culture blown away by youthful revolution although, in that documentary and many others, he had knowingly attempted versions of Sir Robert’s stunning misdirection: building up facts to lead viewer-jurors to a certain conclusion before proving it untrue. He went to see the play whenever it was on – most recently, a couple of years previously, at the Old Vic – and, during intermittent culls of the DVDs stacked in the TV room, the 1999 movie version, improbably directed by the combative American dramatist David Mamet, had always remained in the survivors’ pile. The play had no influence on his decision to live in Winslow but, once he did, the connection pleased him.

  Sent down from the Academy himself, he filled one of the suddenly empty hours by reading the text again. It was only the awareness of how strongly he was identifying with Ronnie that made him see the extent to which he had previously empathized with Morton. The KC was no longer the brilliant barrister Ned had once dreamed of becoming but a template for the QC he might himself need. But, in any test questioning, the only loophole he could be offered was that the sex had been consensual, whereas the Winslow boy had never touched the postal order.

  He had occasionally seen it as a weakness that the audience is sure of Ronnie’s innocence so soon. But Rattigan’s subject was the ordeal of false accusation, during the ‘two years’ it takes to clear Ronnie’s name. Writing in 1946, Rattigan could not have been expected to represent the prejudicial pressure of social media. It turned out, though, that the dramatist weirdly almost had. Morton complains about the guilt implied in a popular song, ‘How, Still, We See Thee Lie, or the Naughty Cadet’, which includes a refrain rebuking Ronnie: ‘How dare you sully Nelson’s Name, Who for this Land Did Die?’

  Equally timeless was the instinctive assumption of many citizens that it would be impossible for the authorities to have got it so wrong. ‘Their ways of doing things may seem to an outsider brutal – but at least they’re always fair,’ says Ronnie’s sister’s boyfriend. ‘There must have been a full inquiry before they’d take a step of this sort.’ (Ned scanned these lines and e-mailed them to Tom.)

  An Almost Optimistic Dream

  Surprisingly, despite having no history or experience as a Formula 1 driver, Ned won the Belgian Grand Prix. But, as he was spritzed with fizz on the podium, Lewis Hamilton sulking on the second step, it was announced that stewards had upheld a complaint from Fernando Massa and that the entire race would be restaged. ‘You beat him once. You’ll beat him twice,’ Tom Pimm in red mechanics overalls bullishly encouraged him. But, as he was led back to the starting grid, Ned wondered how to tell the engineers that he had never before driven above speeds of 100mph and was worried that he was too fat to fit into the car. Waking with the tainted-water after-taste of Diazepam and Sertraline, he checked the bottom of his oversized UME sleep T-shirt to check that the champagne-spraying had not been a nocturnal displacement of peeing or a wet-dream. What did all that mean? That there would be no trial or a trial that he won and then lost on appeal?

  A Positive Response

  Instead of the usual single manila wallet on Claire’s desk, there were two this time, the top one bulging. A rivulet of sweat stung Ned’s eye before he was able to fish a tissue from his pocket. He always feared new paperwork would be fresh charges or amplifications of the existing ones.

  But his solicitor tapped the highest stack and said: ‘This is very good.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s the Saint File.’

  ‘I don’t know how religious you are …’

  ‘My ancestors were animists.’

  ‘But you do know that saints are only created after death and most of them were persecuted and martyred?’

  ‘Okay, well, actually yours is more a Not A Saint But file. We’ve got thirty-six people willing to say that you could be a bit up yourself but you didn’t deserve this …’

  ‘Thanks!’

  ‘No, it’s good. Look, you want a bit of grit in these testimonies. It makes them more credible. People know people are flawed – e
xcept for themselves of course. It’s a basic human truth. This is a very positive response.’

  She passed him the cover sheet that listed the three dozen witnesses to his general decency. As with many aspects of his ordeal, there was something posthumous about it: reading the book of condolence. With fondest memories from … Tom Pimm, Jenny Marriott, Ciara Harrison, Jack Beane plus another editor, the MD and two publicists at his publisher, numerous producers and technicians who had worked with him in television and the makings of an impressive top-table placement at a British History Society annual dinner.

  The alphabetic arrangement of the names, though, made it easy to detect absentees.

  ‘No Tony?’ he asked, adding, when Claire looked inquiringly, ‘Blair. No Helen Pimm?’

  ‘Look, you never get a total take-up on these things. He’s busy trying to stop wars. Counterintuitively, some would say. And maybe Mrs P. reckoned Tom could speak for both of them.’

  Ray (2)

  ‘Ned, it’s me.’

  ‘Oh, hi, darling, hi.’

  ‘Look, odd question. But do Manchester City have a famous player called Ray?’

  ‘That is an odd question. Why?’

  ‘It’s boring. Do they?’

  ‘Let me … not that I know of … but ask Tobes. He’s Statto …’

  ‘Yes. I … what was that?’

  ‘Dr Rafi just called my name on the tannoy. Talk later. Love you.’

  ‘See you.’

  The Literature of False Accusation (6)

  Summary: Betty, the ten-year-old daughter of an American religious minister suffers a mysterious illness, which local women attribute to witchcraft; the priest’s young niece, Abigail, was seen dancing in the woods the previous night with a black servant, Tituba. An expert in necromancy comes to the town and, during his investigations, Tituba and Abigail report up to a hundred local women for having consorted with the devil, including Elizabeth Proctor, the wife of a local farmer, John, with whom Abigail had an affair seven months before. During a trial that is interrupted when a complainant claims to have seen Satan in the form of a yellow bird on a roof beam, Elizabeth’s attempt to save John by denying his adultery, which he has already confessed to the investigators, inadvertently puts him at risk of hanging, which he can only avoid by confirming that his wife is a witch. Proctor and another local man, Giles Corey, decide to die rather than lie.