Without Consent

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Take ourselves by storm. I’ll fix it. Think of it like a medical appointment. This way you haven’t got enough time to plan an escape.’

  He grinned again, the smile which was imprinted on her imagination. Bailey’s smile lit up his lined face and made it look like a map. Age was only intermittently kind to him: he could look cadaverous, but his eyes were brilliant, aware of her ambivalence about marriage; accepting it. He was not bullying her, just following out their mutual conviction that this was the best thing to do. God knows where we’ll drift if we don’t.

  You will be a very distinguished old man, Helen thought, and how well, how very well you know me. I do not think I really deserve you at all.

  Ryan loved the City of London with a passion. He could have opted to be a City of London constable instead of an officer serving with the Metropolitan, had it not been for the little matter of family tradition, and the more important detail of his size. Six foot had been the minimum for the City; some of the men looked like giants in their helmets. He was only five ten in stocking feet. In boyhood, he had attempted to stretch his own size by holding on to the wardrobe door with his outstretched arms, his feet hooked under his bed, maintaining the pose until it hurt. In retrospect, he reckoned this exercise had stunted his growth rather than increased it. I should’ve been stopped, he told himself; I should have been stopped from doing a lot of things. Dozens of defendants had told him the same.

  The City was quiet on the brink of dawn, with a pink sky flowering above it. Six o’clock in the morning and the place was beginning to exhale the dark, inhale the prospect of the day. Too soon for all the ants to begin scurrying. St Paul’s station disgorged cleaners and dealers into tall and taller buildings. The steps of the cathedral were empty of tourists. Ryan felt as if he was a free man, in charge of his car, without hindrance from traffic, therefore in charge of his own destiny. Life might have been different if his career had been spent in the heart of the financial centre, where crime was white collar and committed on paper and the pubs shut at seven, turning it into an elegant and substantial no man’s land, inhabited by security guards and less temptation.

  He cruised past the Central Criminal Court, crossed the lights and entered into the square by St Bartholomew’s. The contrast delighted him; beautiful buildings: the church, the ancient hospital, and the throng of the meat market which had been in full swing since five. If all else failed, he might become a porter, lugging carcasses into vans, but porters operated a closed shop, even if his size didn’t count. Shame; he enjoyed working the early shift. Ryan stopped to buy coffee, sipped the froth, replaced the cap, and put the carton on the passenger seat, carefully. The pink of the sky was fading. He turned the car east.

  ‘What did you do with your jacket?’ his wife had asked, persistently. ‘How did you lose your jacket?’ Then she tried to make a joke of it. ‘I don’t know, one of your best jackets remaining in custody; you could have given it to the charity shop. I don’t understand you, really I don’t.’

  Ryan could see that she was being courageous and that he, by sticking to his story of simply forgetting the jacket, was making things worse. He had always been so punctilious, if generous, about clothes. If he had said he had given the thing away, he might have stood a better chance of being believed, and if his wife doubted his story, she was making a spirited attempt to hide it, although incredulity leaked through the façade, like honey through a comb.

  No jacket this fine morning. Jeans, old trainers, sweatshirt and a two-day growth of stubble. He might have been back in the old days of early-morning stake-outs with Bailey, dressed like the yob they were trying to catch, hoping to find him at home with his pyjamas round his ankles. Ryan tried to remember how many times he had conducted a raid on the wrong house, always careless about reading the warrant when he was all fired up and ready to go; he shivered to remember how Bailey’s subsequent ingratiation with outraged citizens had saved his bacon. That and countless other times.

  Could details of the defendant’s past behaviour be given in evidence? Ryan wondered. Would he be vilified for all his flirtations? The female’s sexual history could not be given in evidence, that he knew, but could they put the historical screws on him?

  For the moment Bailey’s help lay only in all that early training in self-discipline. Much of which had been ignored.

  I loved you, you sod.

  Ryan reached the public house where he had encountered Shelley Pelmore on the night in question. It stood, locked and barred, with a pile of rubbish sacks outside; only the pubs in Smithfield were open at this hour, another reason for the attraction of the City. He waited outside with the engine idling, an underpowered car, to his mind, but reliable enough for his short-distance-driving wife. His own car, like his jacket, was still in police custody. Ryan remembered with a stifled groan, how new that car was, how much of a novelty to him. If the car had been an old banger, more like the Peugeot, would he have given the girl a lift? Probably not. He had wanted her admiration and respect; he was still a show-off, and she would have despised a runabout like this.

  He drove on, taking the route he had used from the first pub to the second, remembering something else. That car, his car, had been so new that it had still had paper covering the rubber floor mats in the front. The girl had remarked on it, torn the paper on her side with the heel of her shoe when she got in. For no reason he could fathom, he had found this annoying, and since the annoyance highlighted a fussiness of which he was faintly ashamed (a car was only a car, for fuck’s sake), he had crumpled up the paper and thrown it away. That had been on the way home, when he was sick of her silliness. She’d remembered the paper, of course.

  Stupid, worthless little cunt. Silly bitch.

  The backstreets shaded him from the early sun, which hit the windows of The Wheatsheaf, an incongruous name for a pub hard by a station, in territory best described as an urban wilderness of roads, but still the best of the local soulless drinking barns. By now, Ryan was halfway home again, going against the traffic which was perceptibly heavier. Pedestrians were still abed. He left the vehicle and crossed the road, uncertainly. Which way were they supposed to have gone, he and the girl?

  He had pretended not to understand the question during his interview, where all his energies had been spent in saying nothing and avoiding Bailey’s eyes and his all-too-familiar voice. Instead he had listened to his lawyer asking for clarification of this and that, making sure they both knew the exact extent of the allegation and its geography. An interview under caution, even where the suspect remains stubbornly silent, must describe the case against him completely. Bailey knew that. Ryan had known that too, even as he had clung to the dim hope that Bailey’s comprehensive questions, articulating every detail of the accusation, were designed to help him build a defence. Really he knew otherwise: Bailey was only being as thorough and beyond reproach as Bailey normally was. There had been an ice-cold atmosphere in that interview room.

  There was a slight morning mist over the park where, according to the questions, he had stopped the car and dragged her out, put on his condom, tried to do the business after a few choice threats and blows, left her there and driven off. Only a prat, and a very angry prat, would have done that, but he had been angry. What was he supposed to have done with his condom? Ryan brushed away a fly which buzzed round his head, sounding almost friendly. A careful prat, more careful than the average rapist who never used rubbers, would have taken it away, put it somewhere, like on the floor of his car, possibly, then chucked it. He would have put it on the paper on the floor, passenger side, which she had torn with her heel. That would have been why they asked him about the paper, wondering out loud why he had chosen that evening, of all others, to dispense with it on the way home. Because it was torn. If he had decided to break his silence and say what a clever bitch to remember the paper at all, he would have been doubly damned. It was always the details which counted. Hairs and fibres and paper.

  Any amount of penetration is
sufficient.

  There was a crowd of chattering starlings above the trees in the park. He knew this lovely shabby park well. It was somehow preserved while the buildings around it, marooned but still splendid, bore witness to better days. The trees, in full leaf, screened the small area of grass, making it cool; the planting of blooms was meticulous. Pinks and blues in serried rows, neatly interspersed with greenery. Ryan loved gardening, an anomalous but not uncommon addiction for a policeman and the one thing which reconciled him to living in the suburbs. That and his kids.

  There was an old lag sitting on a bench. By daylight, this was an old lags’ park and Ryan wondered how many of them, old, young, indifferent, knew about the mortuary at the far end with the separate entrance for wagons, next to the coroner’s court. You could hear the refrigeration hum, close to. Ryan fished his cigarettes out of his pocket, proffered two and watched a wizened and dirty hand take them from his own fingers and hide them in one of many pockets.

  ‘They can accuse me of anything,’ Ryan told him earnestly. ‘Anything at all. Only they mustn’t ever suggest I’d roll all over the flowers … Think of that! Would I ever?’

  The man nodded. The day had begun. Ryan heard the squeak of a baby carriage and saw a woman coming towards him, making noises at the infant in the pram. He wondered if the child was hers, or if she was simply employed to guard it, and whether he could ever think fondly of any baby which was not his own. The sun through the trees caught the brown of the girl’s hair, dishevelled round a pretty, utterly preoccupied face. I may never look at another woman again, Ryan thought, except in a magazine.

  He felt the time without looking at a watch. Parking restrictions in half an hour. Shelley Pelmore lived three streets east. Ryan tried to envisage the easiest route between that address and this park and then tried to envisage the route a girl might take late at night. One route if she were trying to get home without being seen, another if she was simply trying to be quick. He jogged the first choice in ten minutes, the alternative, back to his car, in eight.

  That was enough for this morning. Give it another half-hour and his wife would be awake, ready to resume her persona of stoic, all-forgiving, casual calm, and only ask him one more time about his jacket. She would never once dare to ask, did you fancy that girl? Did you? Afraid of forcing him to admit the truth. Oh yes, I did, I did, I did. I wanted her.

  Helen West had taught Rose the importance of the written word. Rose did not realize quite what a flair she had for it. She could write as she spoke, with the same clarion quality, never pausing for a better way to say it, as if she had understood all along that a person who will not listen is also one who will not read, so there was nothing to be achieved by compromise or prettying it up. Rose had had an excellent education in the fundamental rules of self-expression. Granny next door had done that. Dead now, like her mother. Rose had the kind of family history which might have curtailed her capacity for love, instead of increasing it.

  Now look here, Mike, you bum, I’m sorry we had that row yesterday, although I’m not sorry, really. I’m only saying I am because I can’t tolerate sulking. I hate those plants, always have; they look so bleeding dismal and I don’t care who the fuck grew them, neither of us has time to water the buggers so they’re dead, OK? You said our attitude to living things made us incompatible. You do talk a load of shit. Go on then, leave if you want, before it’s too late. Getting out of a wedding is far less trouble than a divorce. You don’t have to do this bridegroom stuff if you don’t want, even if it was your idea. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want, right?

  As long as some things are clear. You’ve given me more breaks than I ever knew existed and I just want to say thanks for that, and if anyone ever bad-mouths you when I’m around, I’ll break their jaw …

  It took five minutes to write. Rose cut the crap about how she loved him to death and felt she would die without him. If he didn’t know now, he never would. She left the note on the kitchen sink, thought about splattering water on it to look like tears. Naa, that was creepy and she knew what ailed him: all that stuff about family planning and pills; they never agreed. And then pre-wedding nerves and everyone getting at him. Hated to be on show, did Mike, unless it was in some sporting event, and he could not regard his nuptial celebrations as that, he took them far too seriously. He’d hang for her and she for him, but he regarded their wedding as a solemn sacrament, while she viewed it as the best party ever.

  A man on the crowded underground stood too close; closer than he needed. Rose twisted round, so that the overlarge buckle of her handbag hit him in the soft of the groin, making him flinch. She smiled at the ring on her hand and then smiled at him with her white teeth clenched in a growl.

  A woman loved.

  She thought of the man she had told about all of this, in the clinic.

  It reminded her of another thing Michael didn’t always like: her, talking too much.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘It must be proved that the accused had sexual intercourse with the complainant. The prosecution must prove either that the girl physically resisted or, if she did not, that her understanding and knowledge were such that she was not in a position to decide whether to consent or resist. If, however, a woman yields through fear of death or through duress, it is rape.’

  He did so prefer the legal text.

  No one has ever been afraid of me, he told the screen. There was never any need. I would never make a woman pregnant and that is so often their greatest fear. Besides, they will let me do anything. They all need love.

  It is noble in me to give it.

  There was a difference, of course, between a woman and a girl, but no difference in their peculiar kind of endurance. Insane stoicism. Didn’t they know how to avoid? To take the pleasures of passion without the risks of childbirth and disease? What issue of consent could there ever be if women from recent history submitted to this?

  ‘In the application of leeches, so often necessary in cases of inflammatory congestion of the cervix uteri,’ he read, ‘the patient should be placed in the same position as for labour and a conical glass passed up to the uterus; care being taken that no part of the vagina is left around the rim … as the bites of the leeches are not painful when the uterus only is wounded, but excessively so if the vagina is … Eight or ten being the usual number, the speculum applied closely to the uterus, carrying the leeches along with it, and allowed to remain until the leeches fill… generally, twenty minutes.’

  He had never seen a leech, except in illustration. They had a greater association with jungles than surgeries in these unenlightened days, but, come to think of it, both places had plenty in common, and a medical man was really only a kind of leech.

  ‘Occasionally it is necessary to detach one … readily done by dipping a camel-hair pencil in a solution of common salt and applying it to the head … It is a good plan to apply the speculum so that the mouth shall be external to its margin, as in some cases, troublesome symptoms arise from a leech crawling into the cervix uteri and there adhering …’

  He gave a brief snort of laughter, which echoed loudly in the quiet of the library. There was often something comical in the most pedantic of texts. He turned the laugh into a cough and rubbed his head, in order to look as if the cough troubled him. Then he examined his neatly trimmed nails and wiped his hands down the synthetic fibre of his trousers. Silence prevailed. In the late afternoon, the heat had become stultifying, even in here. He thought of the hungry little leeches and he thought of ice in a long glass, a mild form of anaesthetic to the skin, a deceptive ameliorator of heat. Ice and leeches; they might have done for him as well as anything else. No one should despise primitive medicine in favour of the supposedly more sophisticated.

  A leech could be useful. Provided it remained detached about its business. Common salt will detach a leech. Air will dispatch, and detach, the woman or the girl.

  I want to be loved, he admitted.

  I want, even more, to be
in control of passion.

  They called it the Rape House. It stood two streets distant from the police station, conveniently placed for Sainsbury’s and the market. Inside were five small rooms of miniature, late-Victorian terraced building, similar in size to the home nurtured by Anna Stirland, less than a mile distant. The area was roughly boundaried, tapering away into the complicated wilderness of King’s Cross on one side, some of the streets gentrified, some defiantly refusing. The Rape House – for use of vulnerable persons only – lacked the polish of its neighbours and the key tended to stick in the lock, making DS Ryan repeat one of his familiar ribald comments, ad nauseam. ‘Can’t get it in,’ he would mutter. ‘Story of my life.’ Ryan’s remarks did not always stop on the right side of downright offensive. Personally, Sally Smythe did not think it mattered as long as his actions showed respect and he didn’t wisecrack in front of the punters. Sex remained the stuff of rude humour, whatever anyone did for a living, she thought. Police officers were allowed bad taste, same as doctors.

  The local authority had given the house to the police, for indefinite use, as an alternative to the rape suite inside the police station, which had been comfortable enough, but only reached via the front desk and a mile of corridor, which was enough to make any nervous victim back out quickly. No paperwork was done in the Rape House; no computer terminal was visible. The décor reminded Bailey of a dentist’s waiting-room: three prints on the wall showing landscapes, each aligned with the other in remarkable precision; a chintzy sofa; glass coffee-table and venetian blinds to block out the light. There was a slight smell of disuse in the kitchen, drifting into the surgery, and another room designated for use as a nursery; enough residual stuffiness to indicate that no one lived in the house. Nightmares might find themselves embedded in the clean walls, but no one slept here.