by J M Gregson
They had welcomed her offer delightedly, thanked her for her understanding, agreed secretly among themselves that she was a brick and that they were going to take her to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-onAvon as a small reward for her efforts to accommodate them.
Now, as Bert picked at his breakfast and Eleanor made ready to drive him to the tutor’s house, this practice exam did not seem such an excellent idea. For the second time this week, their sons were full of invention on Bert’s behalf. ‘You can produce an excuse and they’ll take it into account,’ fourteen-year-old Jack volunteered, full of the knowledge derived from GCSE rumours at school. ‘You could say Oscar died this morning and you were stricken by grief.’
The golden retriever looked up enquiringly from his basket at the mention of his name. ‘But he’s only three. It wouldn’t be convincing,’ said Luke.
‘Dad could say he’d been run over. But he’d have to weep buckets and be very convincing. And Mum would have to write a note to say what had happened and how Dad was very sensitive and very attached to Oscar and how it had devastated him and would ruin his exam performance.’
‘I’ll be writing no notes,’ said Eleanor Hook decisively.
‘It’s only a practice for the real thing,’ said Bert. ‘I’m not at all worried about it. And you two will be late for school if you’re not out of here in five minutes.’
Jack examined his father critically with his head on one side. ‘You look pale, Dad. Not nervous, are you?’
‘No, I’m not. And if you don’t-’
‘Because you won’t do yourself justice if you’re nervous, you see. Mrs Fogarty told us that during geography. It’s elementary psychology, she said.’
‘Get out!’
‘All right, Dad, don’t throw your toys out of the pram. It’s only natural you should be a bit on edge about an exam. At your age, I mean. Only natural.’ Jack avoided his father’s huge lunge at him across the table and was gone with a bright farewell smile.
Eleanor Hook tried not to smile at the recollection of her boys’ banter as she drove her husband to his experimental exam. The lads were growing up fast, but it probably wasn’t the time to mention that to Bert.
Her husband had just noted the first yellow leaves on the chestnut trees and hoped that wasn’t an omen of his own decline into autumn. ‘It’s only September,’ he said, suddenly and resentfully.
Eleanor wondered how to react to this abrupt temporal observation. She glanced sideways at her normally relaxed passenger. ‘You do look a little pale, as a matter of fact.’
He looked at her resentfully and sank deeper into his seat. ‘Not you as well. I thought higher education was supposed to broaden your horizons. I suppose it might, if you had the support of your family.’ They journeyed another mile through the forest and then he said reluctantly, ‘You’ve all been quite good, really, haven’t you? You in particular have been very supportive.’
She grinned. ‘We’re all very proud of you, actually, Bert Hook. The boys think it’s tremendous that you’re going for a degree at the ancient age of forty-three. But you can’t expect boys to say that, can you?’
He smiled his first smile of the day, which disappeared abruptly as his tutor’s house came in sight. ‘We’re there.’ He gave her a brief, unexpected kiss and then disappeared without looking back at the car. He was walking very stiffly, she thought, as he did when he went to give evidence in court. He always lost his natural roll when he was nervous.
If Bert Hook had known what Priscilla Godwin was feeling, it would have put his anxieties about a dummy-run examination into a proper context.
She knew what she must do, but it nevertheless cost her a great effort of will. She sat by the phone for several minutes before she rang the police station at Oldford at eight o’clock on Friday morning. It was a man who answered. Of course it was a man: she had known it would be a man. Priscilla said as calmly as she could, ‘I want to report a rape.’
The young uniformed officer had been well trained. He spoke as calmly as if it had been the enquiry about a missing dog which he had just dealt with. ‘You want the Sapphire Unit. Hold the line for a moment, please.’
For an absurd moment, Priscilla thought there must be some connection with her grandmother’s antique brooch, which lay still where it had fallen last night after it had been tom from her blouse. Then she heard a woman’s voice, calm, deep, reassuring as treacle. Like a large middle-aged bosom in which you could bury your face.
Priscilla said again, ‘I want to report a rape.’
‘Are you the victim?’
‘Yes.’
‘Name. Please.’
She gave it them. It sounded like someone else entirely.
‘When did this assault take place?’
‘Last night.’ She thought she detected a sigh, but she might have imagined it. ‘I know I should have reported this sooner, but my mind was in splinters. I suppose I couldn’t believe what had-’
‘That’s all right. We’ll take it from here. Are you speaking from the place where this incident took place?’
It had been reduced to first an assault and then an incident. She wanted to yell into the phone that this was rape, that she had the cuts and bruises to prove it; that the mental cuts and bruises were bleeding still within her skull. Instead, she said dully, ‘Yes, I am.’
‘Is this a domestic incident?’
For a moment, she could not think why the calm voice was asking that. Then she said with a start, ‘No. I’m not married. I live here alone.’
‘And you are alone there at the moment?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what is your address?’
She gave it, spelt out the address of the road, her brow furrowing with impatience at the delays of bureaucracy. ‘I’ll come in to the station straight away. I can be with you in twenty minutes.’
‘No, don’t do that. Stay where you are, please. There may be evidence we can collect to support a prosecution.’
She didn’t want a prosecution. She wanted someone to go round and beat Richard Cullis insensible, or, better still, to do what he had done to her, while he screamed as she had done. But she knew that was impossible even as she thought it. ‘All right. How long will you be?’
‘We’ll be there just as quickly as you said you could come to us: in twenty minutes.’
She began to give directions, but the woman said they knew the way. The calm voice said, ‘We’ll be on our way within a minute, Priscilla. Please don’t touch anything at all. People tend to tidy up when they know we’re coming, but that’s the worst thing you could do. Have you washed yourself?’
‘Yes, I had a shower. Some time during the night, I couldn’t say exactly when. I shouldn’t have done that, should I?’
‘It would have been better if you hadn’t, but people often do. It’s a natural reaction. Don’t worry about it, what’s done is done. But please sit still and don’t touch anything at all until we’re with you. Don’t even go to the toilet: we shall need a urine sample from you.’
‘All right.’ Priscilla Godwin put down the phone and stared at it for a moment. Then she sat stiff and unmoving on the upright chair beside it, obedient as a schoolgirl.
Ben Paddon was weighing out granules of a new diabetes drug when Richard Cullis came into the lab.
They exchanged good mornings and then conducted a staccato conversation about the experiment Ben was conducting. He was cautious after the excitements of the All God’s Creatures group meeting on the previous night, knowing that he should not really have announced himself there as the mole at Gloucester Chemicals. He would need to be more careful than ever now not to give anything away to the people around him at work.
The normally urbane and articulate Cullis was not able to carry the dialogue forward as easily as he would normally have done, preoccupied as he was with what had happened between him and Priscilla Godwin on the previous night. After another long pause, when he knew he should have been movin
g away, he said, ‘You haven’t seen Miss Godwin this morning, have you?’
‘No. She’s usually around by now, though.
Have you tried the other lab?’
‘I was in there earlier, but I didn’t see her. Perhaps she’s taken a day’s leave. I wanted a quick word with her about the work she’s doing on the Alzheimer’s drug, but it’s nothing that can’t wait.’
Ben, aware that the boss was about to move off, said, ‘Have those detectives finished their work here now?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Can’t think they’re going to find any saboteurs in here. Bit of a wild-goose chase, I thought.’
‘Apparently the CID thought that, too. But you can’t be too careful, I suppose.’
‘No. Well, I’m glad it’s been cleared up. We can get on with our work without interruptions now. Will you be taking any notice of these threats? Will there be any adjustments to the testing of drugs on animals?’
‘Emphatically not. Legislation requires that we measure the effect of drugs thoroughly on animals before there is any question of them being approved for human use. And we certainly don’t want to be held to ransom by idiots like the All God’s Creatures crew, do we?’
‘Indeed we don’t!’ Ben put all the enthusiasm he could muster into his agreement. Privately he was telling himself that this pompous twit hadn’t been so brave with Scott Kennedy’s knife at his throat.
Cullis wanted to tell him to ask Priscilla Godwin to come into his office, if and when she arrived. But he decided it was best not to look too anxious in front of this junior researcher. He turned away, then thought of a less suspicious reason for his presence here. ‘I hear you’re a bit of a sportsman, Ben.’ He looked dubiously at the tall man’s lanky and uncoordinated frame.
‘I play a bit of cricket and tennis. Had quite a good innings for our midweek limited-overs team last month.’
‘Yes, I remember now.’ Richard didn’t, of course, and he doubted whether Paddon believed that he did, but that scarcely mattered. ‘I don’t suppose you play golf, though, do you?’
‘Not regularly. But I played quite a bit when I was younger. My dad was rather a fanatic.’ Ben didn’t admit to that when he was with his animal rights friends: golf wasn’t a game that many of them approved of.
‘You might be interested in the company golf day in October, then. There’ll probably be a note round today to give everyone the details. It was originally just seven or eight of us going off for a day’s golf, but it’s grown like Topsy. The board has approved it as an official outing and I’ve managed to persuade them to subsidize it handsomely. It will cost you hardly anything and be a day away from the trials of research.’
‘You can count me in then, Richard.’ Ben felt rather daring: it was the first time he could remember addressing his boss by his first name, though others did it all the time. ‘I’ll get out my clubs and go to the driving range for a practice.’ He joined in every works activity he could: the more normal you looked, the more you became one of the crowd, the less anyone was likely to suspect what you were really planning.
‘You do that. I expect we shall have a fun competition between the different sectors of the firm on the day, so you’ll have to come up trumps for research and development!’
‘I shall hone my limited skills, Richard.’
Ben watched the Director of Research as he went off to the other end of the lab to speak to someone else. He wasn’t surprised by Cullis’s view that they should take no notice of the threats about animal experiments. And Ben knew enough about life to realize that it had been a major mistake to reveal his identity to the All God’s Creatures group meeting. Now that they all knew the identity of their undercover man at Gloucester Chemicals, it was only a matter of time before his cover would be blown. The cross-section of people involved all believed passionately in what they were doing, but discipline wasn’t their strong point.
His tenure here was thus now limited. It might be time for drastic action, for some big gesture which would bring things to a head.
The forty-year-old policewoman and the medic she brought with her were in Priscilla Godwin’s flat within twenty minutes, as she had promised. They saw a woman moving with the stunned calmness which was familiar to them in rape victims. Experience made them aware that hysteria might not be far beneath this veneer of self-control.
They asked her to provide the urine sample they had warned her they would need and Priscilla moved wordlessly into her bathroom, like one in a trance. She handed them the little plastic container without the nervous joke with which most people clothed their embarrassment. The black woman whose phone voice she had found so deep and comforting now introduced herself as Sergeant Fox. She was older than Priscilla, and considerably larger. Priscilla asked, ‘Why do you take a sample?’
‘Standard practice, love. It can show up a drug, providing traces of it remain. Do you think you were drugged last night?’
‘No.’ It had never occurred to her. ‘Unless you count alcohol as a drug.’
‘You’d be surprised how often drugs are used. You’ve perhaps heard of Rohypnol; there’s also one called GHB.’
She gave them the beginnings of a smile. ‘I know about drugs. I’m a research chemist at Gloucester Chemicals.’
‘Then you’ll probably know that any evidence of GHB is gone within twelve hours, but traces of Rohypnol can be found up to three days after its administration.’
‘I don’t think you’ll find evidence of drugs in my urine.’
‘That’s a pity. The administration of a drug without the recipient’s consent is the strongest evidence we can have in a court case.’
Priscilla was silent. Her thinking, which had been dominated by a wild desire for revenge upon the man who had violated her, had not got as far as a court case. She tried to speak rationally, to get inside the mind of the man she now hated. ‘I’m sure he thought he wouldn’t need drugs. He works with me at Gloucester Chemicals and he would know all about them, but I think he thought he’d charm the pants off me without the need of date-rape drugs.’
‘We’d better have your account of exactly what happened last night. Take your time and don’t leave anything out. If Dr Haslam or I stop you to ask a question, it will be because we need to clarify our own understanding of what took place, so bear with us.’
Priscilla began by trying to describe her relationship with Richard Cullis before last night, of the friendship and the working relationship which had led her to consent to going out to a pub for the first time with him. The thin woman whom she now knew was Dr Haslam had been watching her very closely. Now she said, ‘You knew this man quite well, then.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry if the facts aren’t convenient. I can’t help it that it wasn’t a stranger who snatched me off the street, can I?’
The policewoman’s dark face nodded understandingly at this little surge of pique. ‘You can’t alter the facts, dear. Ninety per cent of women who are raped do know their attacker. It’s just that juries tend to take attacks by strangers more seriously and convict more readily in those cases. It’s a fact of life, I’m afraid.’
‘I’m sorry for flaring up like that. I’m not being very helpful, am I? I don’t quite know where I am at the moment.’
‘You’ve taken the first step. You’ve recognized rape for what it was and reported it. Forty per cent of women don’t even report rape. A lot of them blame themselves. And you’ve come to the right people. The Sapphire Unit is specially set up to deal with rapes and is staffed by experienced people like Dr Haslam and myself. It’s important that you are totally honest about what happened. Nothing you can say will shock us.’
‘Why do so many women not even report it?’ The big, consoling shoulders shrugged. ‘A variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s fear of reprisals. The commonest one is that they think if they’ve drunk alcohol no one will believe that they didn’t consent to sex.’
‘I’d been drinking. I wasn’t drunk, though
.’ A wry smile crept on to her sympathetic black face. ‘It might be better if you had been, love. The law now considers that a woman who is drunk is incapable of consenting to sex.’
‘I wasn’t drunk. And I didn’t bloody consent. No way.’
Dr Haslam said quietly, ‘How much had you drunk when this assault occurred, Priscilla?’
This was one question she was prepared for.
She been thinking about it through the long hours of the night. But she still hadn’t the precise answer which as a scientist she felt she should be able to give them. ‘I had a gin and tonic when I got to the pub - we’d originally arranged just to go out for a drink. It wasn’t until later that I found he’d booked a meal for us.’
‘And no doubt you had wine with the meal.’
‘We had a bottle of claret. I couldn’t say how much of it I drank, but I think now that it was considerably more than he did. He was driving, as he reminded me, but I think now that that was the excuse he offered for making sure I had most of the bottle.’
‘Anything else?’
‘A brandy with the coffee at the end of the meal.’
Dr Haslam made a note, her face professionally impassive. ‘I realize, as you will, that there can be nothing objective about this. But how much would you say that your normal reactions were affected by drink?’
Priscilla frowned with concentration. She found unexpectedly that this request for detail was some sort of consolation, perhaps because it treated her as a scientist and an intelligent woman rather than the dumb and stupid victim she had seen in herself until now. ‘I’d definitely have been over the limit for driving. I suppose the best and totally unscientific description I can give of my condition was that I was pleasantly pissed. Pleasantly because at that stage I had no idea of what was coming. God, how could I have been so stupid?’
