Fit Up

by Faith Clifford

  Jeremy’s arms were now by his side, his shoulders slumped, and he was staring at the ground. I quickly looked him up and down for clues, like blood, and to see if his knuckles were bruised. I couldn’t quite believe what I was thinking until finally I had the courage to say, ‘How did he die?’

  Jeremy looked up at me. ‘He died of cancer.’

  A wave of relief swept over me and my reaction to this news was to burst out laughing. Not at Gerard’s demise, but at my overactive imagination.

  Jeremy looked at me, puzzled as to why I was laughing, and I told him I’d thought he had murdered Gerard that afternoon. Still, he was not smiling, and so I asked, ‘Why the face? You look disappointed.’

  ‘I am,’ he said, ‘because I won’t be able to sue him. He won’t know what I have on him and I won’t be able to make him pay.’

  I could see what he meant but, to my shame, I have to admit that I was secretly pleased at this news. Gerard would no longer be in our lives and, more importantly, no longer around to hurt Jeremy.

  I found out that the news had come through a supplier in the industry who had phoned Jeremy about it. As shockingly quick as his death was, and at such a young age (forty-four), it held little concern for me. The only feelings of sorrow I had were for his children and parents. He had been going through a divorce from his wife Jo, and from what Jeremy had told me about how Gerard had treated her, I could only imagine that she was relieved to be free of his overbearing ways. Jeremy had once told me of a time when he overheard Gerard castigating her for spending fifty pence on a call to directory enquiries.

  As we went inside the house, Jeremy said he was off to call Mark Afeeva and tell him the news. The slander and libel case against Gerard had literally come to a dead halt.

  Later on that evening, while reading up on further information from the vast amounts that had been accumulated from textbooks and the internet, Jeremy discovered that although you cannot sue a dead person for slander, we could still sue a company for libel. Suddenly he was fired up once more and began looking jubilantly back at the emails that Gerard had sent. They were all from the Video Action address. He couldn’t wait to call Mark the next morning to see what could be done.

  By the time I got home the next afternoon, Jeremy confirmed that we would be able to serve proceedings on Video Action. Mark was already under way with the Particulars of Claim. Although I was pleased that we still had a case, I was apprehensive. With hindsight, this is where we should have left the case alone and just been content with the fact that, although Gerard would not be facing charges, at least he was out of our life for good. As my grandmother used to say, ‘God pays debts without money.’

  At the beginning of July we kicked off the Gerard litigation, as we called it, by sending our letter of claim off to Yvonne Gerard, Lloyd’s mother and a director of Video Action. This is the pre-action protocol for a case against someone before you take it to the next level with the Particulars of Claim, which is a much lengthier document. In the meantime, we were finalising our letters of claim against Hertfordshire Constabulary and George Fouhey.

  This detailed the events of Jeremy’s case from start to finish, Hopkins’s involvement and the financial and emotional impact it had had on our lives. A similar letter was sent to Fouhey’s home address as we had thought he was an independent computer forensics expert, but this turned out not to be the case. Fouhey was a retired police officer who was engaged as a consultant within the Computer Crime Unit where he would provide invoices for his services. Although Allison Grundy, the police’s solicitor, accepted service for both men, we wondered why Fouhey was not receiving independent representation since he was not actually an employee of Hertfordshire Constabulary.

  Shortly after the letters were sent, we received a response from Hertfordshire Constabulary. When the envelope dropped through the letterbox with the HC logo, we opened it with trepidation. The wording was short; it was an acknowledgement of the letter of claim from Allison Grundy.

  We acknowledge receipt of your letter of 13 July, received on 15 July. In the absence of a specific protocol for claims of this nature it is our practice to adopt the spirit of the CPR personal injury protocol which allows a defendant 3 months from receipt of a protocol letter to investigate the claim and provide a substantive response on liability. We will therefore provide you with our substantive response on or before 13 October 2005.

  Grundy also added that she was willing to accept service for the Fouhey letter of claim, which was interesting. He had obviously been in touch with her quite quickly on receipt of his letter. How was it that a member of the constabulary’s staff could represent an expert witness who was not employed by them? we wondered. We would have to wait and see. It was going to be a long wait until October but at least in the meantime we could focus on the Video Action case.

  At the end of July, however, we received a letter from the solicitors dealing with Gerard’s estate telling us that they had considered the contents of our letter of claim and that their clients did not consider that we had a valid claim against the deceased or his company. It concluded with the threat that, should we issue proceedings, our claim would be vigorously defended.

  While we had expected such a response, we began to wonder how much evidence it would actually take to convince people that a real wrong had been committed against Jeremy. If the boot was on the other foot, would we have responded in the same way?

  August, understandably being holiday time, went quiet on all fronts bar the odd conversation with Mark Afeeva, who was finalising our Particulars of Claim ready for submission before 12 September. Taking legal action was an enormous expense and we were grateful for the break in the proceedings of both cases as it allowed us some respite from the constant work in the evenings. Instead we watched television and went for long walks with Sasha, although all of our conversations revolved around Gerard and the police, which never failed to raise my blood pressure. I was usually a very quiet and placid person but it frightened me how permanently angry I was.

  I took a couple of weeks off work in August as the weather was pleasant but we could not afford to go anywhere. I didn’t mind that; I just wanted a change of scenery and a break from acting as if nothing was wrong at work. Sitting at lunch surrounded by my colleagues who talked with enthusiasm and laughter depressed me. I used to be like them: carefree and contributory to conversations, but it was such an effort to be normal around them, which in turn made me feel tired all the time. Although the criminal case was out of the way, I still felt the pressure of being a manager of a busy department, running a home and rapidly having to become a legal expert. The two weeks stretching out before me gave me a sense of relief, and I was finally able to sleep when I wanted, although the feeling of weariness never disappeared. I had not had a full night’s sleep since the raid and would often go downstairs in the middle of the night to have a cup of tea. Jeremy sometimes joined me or he would stay in bed to read the legal books. I suppose we both badly needed to see a doctor or at least have some sort of counselling, but neither of us wanted to be taking drugs for depression or to help us sleep because we wanted to be in total control of our daily lives.

  The two weeks drifted by and the days merged into one another so much that I had to keep reminding myself what day and date it was, not that it really mattered, but I was worried about my sanity. Each day was becoming a challenge to get through and we had only just started our quest for retribution. What made it worse was that on the days that I felt like this, Jeremy was the opposite. He would be all fired up and in any spare moment his nose would be in his latest favourite book, Police Misconduct. I was glad that he had taken this part of the homework on himself, because I didn’t think I could face such a weighty, probably tedious tome, and my strengths were in putting together the words for litigation, in any case.

  Upon returning to work I felt that on the one hand I had been away for an immensely long time and on the other that I had only just left my desk for a day or two. It
was quiet on the home front with no responses from either the solicitors for Gerard or the police so my mind felt free to concentrate on my work.

  I felt I was living two lives, one between nine to five, or however long the work days might be, and the other early evening onwards.

  Chapter 21

  RETALIATION

  I didn’t know what I expected really. I was not naïve enough to think that there would be letters of admission or apology from either party accompanied by a cheque in settlement at this stage but, judging from their responses, it seemed to me we were only just starting our fight.

  The solicitors for the estate of Gerard who had accepted service of our initial letter of claim had now stepped back from the case. The Gerards had sought further representation from Fiona Campbell of Finers Stephens Innocent Solicitors and her first letter via our solicitors was one of aggression, stating that Jeremy had brought a vicarious claim and would be vigorously defending her clients. She was insisting that he desist from pursuing it.

  This was obviously her opening gambit to see if Jeremy could be intimidated, but it had only made him more determined. I was a little worried, however, as Finers were one of the top companies that specialised in libel and slander and they were very expensive. The Gerards obviously had the money to hire the big guns. Even so, money or not, Mark had said that Jeremy’s case was strong and that a rebuttal would be sent. The gloves were off for this one.

  While we let the solicitor and Mark get on with their work, it was not long before we got a letter from Hertfordshire Constabulary sent directly to Jeremy. It was dated 5 October 2005 and headed ‘Your claim for compensation’. Sitting side by side we started to read the four-and-a-half-page letter from Allison Grundy. She opened by stating that the legal services were acting on behalf of the Chief Constable and George Fouhey and that they had completed their enquiries.

  There was a paragraph about the Landslide Productions Website, details of which we already knew, but then stated that persons logging onto certain parts of the website had to give their credit card details and certain passwords to enable them to view and download images of children in various poses and in various states of undress. Duncan was right, they were still banging on about Landslide being just a child porn website.

  The next paragraph said that there were between 150 and 200 people listed as having logged onto the website. Priority was given to high-profile offenders and then to suspects who had accessed level one images, level one being the highest level of indecency. On seeing this statement, I immediately said to Jeremy that she had got this part wrong, level one was the lowest level, level five was the highest.

  Then she went on about Jeremy’s credit card and that this account was found on the Landslide website. We knew that this was part of a large-scale, worldwide fraud. She went on: ‘This information was laid before the magistrates who were satisfied that this was enough evidence to issue a warrant to search your home.’ Yes, but not good enough to stand up to scrutiny at Jeremy’s first court hearing. This debatable evidence had enabled them to get their boot in our door.

  The next page was a blow-by-blow account of the raid from the knock at the door on 30 October 2003, the two interviews, search of the shop and Jeremy’s release in the afternoon, pending further analysis of Gerard’s computer.

  Then one paragraph caught my interest:

  Mr George Fouhey of the Computer Crime Unit examined the Tiny Computer, 12 level 1 images were recovered from the computer. Mr Fouhey made a statement outlining his findings and told DC Hopkins verbally that the files he had found were in temporary folders. Mr Fouhey was under the impression that you would be charged with incitement to make indecent images and not possession.

  I read this paragraph again, and then once more, as I knew that I was staring at something significant here but I could not quite grasp what it was at this point. I read on and a couple of paragraphs later Grundy stated: ‘At 10.59 a.m. on Monday 19 July 2004 you answered your bail at Watford Central Police Station in company with your solicitor, Mr Hamilton.’ The niggle was back and, all of a sudden, what I had been trying to formulate in my mind came through in a blinding flash. I was so excited about it I could not get the words out to Jeremy in any sensible form. When I tried to explain what I was seeing it didn’t make sense, but by slowly and systematically going through Grundy’s reply to our letter of claim I realised that she had written it in very detailed chronological order. By doing this she had revealed that Hopkins knew that the images were in a temporary internet folder and could not have been downloaded by Jeremy. Fouhey had told him so, even adding that he thought Jeremy would only be charged with incitement and not possession. Had Hopkins heeded this advice, there would only have been the incitement charge, which was dropped at the first hearing in any event, thus putting an end to the investigation.

  Jeremy, picking up on this, said that this meant that when Hopkins interviewed him and showed him those horrible images one by one, asking if he had seen them, he knew full well that he couldn’t possibly have seen them. ‘What a fucking bastard,’ he said. I had to agree. I was right, then, when I said he was not to be trusted when he visited our shop.

  Grundy carried on with how good Hopkins was to have helped Jeremy get computer discs returned quickly so that he could carry on with his business and that he thought that their relationship was quite amicable. That was a ridiculous statement: I am sure that most people dealing with the police would appear to be amicable because you want them gone from your presence.

  The letter went on. Grundy agreed that the incitement charge was dropped following the first appearance at court and that this was the CPS’s decision alone. They had made a number of enquiries during their conduct of the proceedings and one such enquiry involved Duncan’s query of the temporary nature of the files containing the images. George Fouhey had made a second statement on 21 December 2004, she continued, clarifying that the images had been found in temporary files, information that was faxed to the CPS on 21 December 2004. This was another interesting point because Jeremy was in court on the day before for a case management hearing, but this document had not been brought to anyone’s attention until April 2005. She even had the audacity to write that ‘it is not known why the criminal proceedings then continued until April 2005’. Quite clearly someone had sat on this statement and that someone would have had to be Hopkins. Grundy went on:

  …it appears that DC Hopkins had not passed on the information given to him by Mr George Fouhey that the images had been found in temporary files. This was an error on the part of DC Hopkins but it is denied that this error is evidence of negligence or that DC Hopkins acted in any way unlawfully.

  ‘Oh, come on, you can’t possibly believe that!’ I thought. Jeremy hadn’t said much while reading but I was incandescent with rage: ‘So what she is saying is that Hopkins made an error but it doesn’t really matter that he was complicit in the ruination of our business, future income, pension, hopes and dreams because the police are immune from claims of negligence. How bloody well convenient.’ I thought I was going to burst a blood vessel as I struggled to regain my composure.

  Grundy continued: ‘…the existence of temporary files shows that visits were made to the website in question and the computer picked up the temporary files to accommodate easier access should the site be revisited.’ Another error on her part. She was insinuating that the CPS could have relied upon this as evidence of possession, even though forensics had proven that Jeremy had not physically downloaded the files. She still didn’t get it – that you could not be charged if you didn’t know the files were there. Plus the fact that even though the receipt of this computer had been provided in our disclosure bundle to her as having been purchased on 30 March 2000, how Jeremy was supposed to have downloaded images that he was never aware of from Landslide, which was closed down in August 1999, would have been something of a technical miracle.

  We also found out that as a result of our complaint to the Police Standards A
uthority there was no finding of misconduct and no disciplinary action was taken, but that they had revised their position on temporary internet files in that they would not be the subject of criminal proceedings in future.

  So, all in all, they had learned something at our tremendous expense and considered us not worthy for a claim.

  All of Jeremy’s other allegations were denied and Grundy finished off by saying that he should obtain independent legal advice from a solicitor or the Citizens Advice Bureau.

  We agreed with Grundy that there was no evidence of negligence, but it was blindingly obvious to us that Hopkins had indeed been acting unlawfully by suppressing what he knew at a very early stage. Jeremy sent off a letter that evening thanking Grundy, informing her that she had been very helpful.

  Under the Civil Procedure Rules, we were able to represent ourselves, and ask the defendants pertinent questions, so the following week Jeremy sent a letter asking for the working notes of George Fouhey, as these were not disclosed previously together with SAG/1. This was a reference number given to a document in the Operation Ore case. SAG stood for Sharon A. Girling who, at the time, worked for the National Crime Squad. She was the officer who went to the US in 2002 to extract credit card records from the Landslide database and instigated the creation of Operation Ore in the UK – or ‘Operation Flaw’, as it subsequently became known. This exhibit showed the transactions on Landslide made by each person and we indicated to Grundy that if she did not know what this was then she should ask Hopkins. The second question we asked was in relation to her statement that ‘the temporary files show that visits were made to the website in question and that the computer picked up the temporary files to accommodate easier access should the site be revisited’. We asked how she had come to this conclusion.