by Jill McGown
Wide-eyed, worried, she nodded solemnly.
“Please rephrase the question using words with which the witness is familiar, Mr. Harper.”
“I am obliged, my lord,” said Harper, and turned back to the girl. “You have said that you would never have agreed to performing sexual intercourse like that,” he said. “So the question is quite simple. Have you ever allowed a customer to have sex with you like that?”
She looked from Harper, to Whitehouse, to the judge, then back to Harper, a skinny little fox cub trapped by the hounds, trying to work out if she could escape being torn limb from limb. Her only point of reference was that if she told a lie, her case would be strengthened, whereas the truth would damage it, because she had allowed anyone to do anything they wanted with her since before puberty. Judy crossed her fingers, hoping that she had taken her oath seriously. Tell the truth, she silently begged her. Tell the truth.
“I’ll repeat the question,” said Harper. “Have you ever allowed a customer to have sex with you like that?”
“No,” she said firmly, shaking her head.
Judy closed her eyes, then opened them again as the girl continued speaking.
“I wouldn’t get down on my hands and knees on a muddy street for any bugger!” she said.
The tension which had been generated by her evidence was broken, and the room erupted. Even Harper gave the girl a little smiling nod as the laughter at his expense died away. And the cause of all this merriment stood in the witness box, terminally puzzled.
Then Harper frowned slightly, and looked through the papers in front of him, pulling out a typewritten statement, flicking through it. He looked up from it. “You don’t know the word ‘anal’?” he asked.
The puzzled frown was back, and she shook her head. “No,” she said.
“That’s odd,” he said. “Because you used it in your statement to the police. Do you know what the word ‘subjected’ means?”
“No.”
“You used it, too. In the same sentence. ‘He subjected me to an anal assault,’” he quoted. “Did you say that?”
She shook her head, her mouth opening slightly.
“Can you tell me what the word ‘genitalia’ means?”
The girl looked quite blank. No embarrassment, which there would have been, had she had the slightest idea of its meaning. She shook her head.
“You used it in your statement, too. ‘He touched my genitalia with the blade of the knife.’ Did you say that?”
She shook her head, going pink now that she had worked out what it meant.
“‘Straddled’? ‘Corroborated’? Do you know what they mean?”
She just stared at him, her face reddening, panic and acute embarrassment at the thought of what they might mean not allowing her even to shake her head.
“‘My head was forced down to the ground and he straddled me, and subjected me to an anal assault. This can be corroborated by the two witnesses, one of whom gave chase.’” He held the statement up. “You didn’t use any of these words, did you?”
“No,” she said, her voice a whisper, her face stricken.
“But you signed it as a true record of what you had told the police,” said Harper.
“I … I can’t … I’m not good at reading and writing and things,” she said. “They just asked me questions about what had happened to me, and I signed what they wrote down.”
“No further questions,” Harper said.
“Mr. Whitehouse, do you wish to re-examine?”
Whitehouse rose, and thought for a moment before he spoke. “Is what you told the court today a true account of what happened to you in the alleyway?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said firmly, shooting a look at Drummond as he sat meekly in the dock.
“And is it what you told the police that night?”
“Yes. I can’t help what they wrote down!”
Whitehouse smiled. “Did you use the same words to tell them what had happened as you did today in court? For instance, you told the court that the knife had touched your private parts—is that the expression you used to the police?”
The girl blushed ferociously. “No,” she said.
“No,” said Whitehouse. “Could that be why the police paraphrased what you had said?”
Blank terror.
“I know you don’t know what that means,” said Whitehouse soothingly. “But I’m sure my learned friend does, and I imagine the jury does. No further questions, my lord.”
“The witness may step down,” said the judge, and the witness almost fell down from sheer relief.
Now it was the turn of the two men who had found her, and each told substantially the same story. They had entered the alley from John Wesley Road, and had come upon a young woman on all fours on the ground with a man kneeling over her. The man had run away along the alley toward Andwell Street as they had approached. The girl’s blouse had been undone, and her leopard-skin pants had been around her knees. She had been in considerable distress.
“You didn’t call the police, did you?” Harper asked the man who had stayed with her when the other had gone after Drummond “Did it seem to you that the situation didn’t merit the attendance of the police?”
“Of course it did,” he said. “But I didn’t have to call them—a police car came almost straight away.”
“Is that so?” said Harper. “How fortunate.”
The area car officer arrived next. He and his colleague had been answering what had turned out to be a bogus nine-double-nine call about youths smoking crack cocaine in one of the empty buildings, when they had heard a commotion farther down the road. They had attended the incident at one thirty-six A.M.
Harper rose to cross-examine. “You told my learned friend that the young woman was in some distress, and complained that the defendant had sexually assaulted her,” he said. “Can you tell the court her exact words?”
The constable requested leave to consult his notes, and turned to the appropriate page. “I asked what the trouble was, to which she replied, pointing to the defendant, ‘That fucking bastard raped me; he did me up the sodding ass.’”
Judy saw the girl color up as her unladylike words were read out, and smiled.
“More angry than distressed, would you say?”
Whitehouse rose. “While I am obliged to my learned friend for drawing the court’s attention to the immediate complaint of sexual assault made subsequent to the incident, and incidentally clarifying the perceived necessity to bowdlerize the victim’s statement, I don’t think that this witness’s opinion as to the victim’s emotional state should be sought,” he said.
The judge agreed.
“You then used your radio to request CID assistance, is that correct?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And did you use the words ‘the Stealth Bomber’s been grounded’?”
“Yes, I did, my lord.”
It was the duty detective inspector who had been thus summoned who was next to give evidence.
“Did the complainant make mention of a knife?” asked Whitehouse.
“She did, my lord. We couldn’t find anything that night, but a knife was found the following morning on the riverbank close to the mouth of the alleyway where it adjoins Andwell Street. The river level had dropped sufficiently for the knife to be revealed.”
With that evidence, court was adjourned for the day, and Judy left with the public who had packed the gallery. She had decided how she was going to spend her leave; she was going to see this trial through.
Barton Crown Court, Tuesday 7 July
“All those having business with the Queen’s Justices and this court draw near and give attention.”
Harper drew near and gave attention, knowing only too well that yesterday had not been one of his finest hours. The assault on the jury’s emotions of a little doe-eyed wisp of a girl, barely out of her utterly deprived childhood, describing calculated, deliberate terror being inflicted on her by a six-foot-tall
, well-built, privileged youth was all but impossible to combat. When he had scored a point, which had been but rarely, he had looked a bully; when she had, he had looked a fool.
All he could do now was work very hard to rid the jurors’ memories of that, and concentrate on cop-bashing, which went down reasonably well even with white-collar middle-class types these days. Not that it would work. But he would try.
* * *
It was the man who had briefly been Judy’s boss, the quietly spoken DCI Merrill, who was giving evidence first this morning. He was handed the typewritten transcription of Drummond’s statement, and was invited to read it to the court, something to which Judy could tell he had clearly not been looking forward.
He took a deep breath. “Drummond was asked about the assault on Mrs. Carole Jarvis, which occurred in one of a block of garages behind the houses in Austen Street, Stansfield, at ten-thirty in the evening on the fifteenth of August last year,” he began. “And stated, ’I saw that one getting into her car in Malworth, and I followed her …”
The crude language employed by Drummond sounded incongruous coming from the prim, God-fearing Chief Inspector, who read the words with as little vocal and facial expression as was possible in the circumstances. The catalog of increasingly violent assaults carried out on Carole Jarvis, read in a near monotone, produced a more shocked reaction than it would have done if it had been related gleefully by Drummond himself.
Judy sighed. Mrs. Jarvis had not been the only victim of that particular assault; what had happened to her after she had driven her brand-new car into that garage was appalling, but it hadn’t ended there. Her marriage must have been severely tested once what she had been doing prior to the attack had come to light. But all that would have to be explained at the appropriate time; right now it was Drummond’s version of events, that the court was hearing.
Merrill was nearing the end of Drummond’s blow-by-blow description of the first assault. “‘When I had finished with her, I cleaned her up. Then I cut the tape off her wrists and ankles. I took it away with me so you lot couldn’t trace it.’” Merrill took another breath, and looked at the jury before embarking on the account of the second assault. “Drummond was then asked about the assault on Mrs. Rachel Ashman, which occurred in the ladies’ lavatory of the Percy Road Service Station, Malworth, at eleven-fifteen P.M. on Saturday, September seventh, last year,” he said. “And stated, ‘I pulled her into a toilet at a petrol station. I got her down just like the first one …’”
Mrs. Ashman had been in all evening with her husband and baby. Her husband, recovering from a bad accident at work, had been home for the weekend from hospital, still in a wheel-chair. She had gone out to get some milk from the all-night petrol station, and he had dozed off. The police had awakened him with the news of what had happened to his wife, who had been found by the next female customer who used the toilet. Mrs. Ashman had committed suicide three months ago; she had been twenty-two years old.
Merrill paused before moving on to the third assault. “When asked about the assault on Lucy Rogerson, which took place at Oakleigh Farm, Malworth, at eight o’clock in the evening on the tenth of September last year,” he read doggedly, “Drummond stated, ‘I got that one in a barn right after she’d been with some bloke. I did everything the same. I made her take down her own knickers and undo her shirt, and I did her just the same as the others. After, I cleaned her up—everything.’”
Lucy Rogerson had just celebrated her seventeenth birthday; she had been in the barn with a boyfriend who had been kept secret from her parents, because they would have disapproved. He had left her to walk the three hundred yards to the farmhouse; broad daylight, within sight of home, on her own land—what danger could there be?
Merrill cleared his throat, adjusting his stride to take the final hurdle and get to the finishing post. He gave the details of the fourth assault, and turned back to Drummond’s statement. “When asked about this assault, the defendant stated, ‘I saw her on her own, and I drove past her and took the bike into an alley. I thought I’d be all right because there’s never anyone up that end at night, not even your lot because everywhere’s being demolished and there’s nothing left to nick. I pulled her into the alley. She was wearing these skin-tight leopard-skin pants—I got her to pull them down and unbutton her top—she wasn’t wearing anything underneath, the slag. I’d only just started when I heard people coming, so I ran, but someone came after me and pulled me off the bike.’ Drummond was asked if he had said anything to the women during these assaults, and he replied, ‘I told them not to make a sound, not to make any trouble for me, or I’d cut them open. I told them what to do. And I told them I was the Stealth Bomber, because that’s who I am.’ The statement ends there, my lord.”
“Thank you, Chief Inspector,” said the judge.
“Did you have evidence other than the defendant’s confession on which to base the charges?” asked Whitehouse.
“Later, a positive DNA match was made with a sample of seminal fluid taken from the clothing of one of the victims of the previous assaults. At the time, there was not only the way he was dressed, but the manner in which the assault on Miss Benson had been carried out, and the specific threats made. Also, surgical tape of the type believed to have been used to bind the hands and feet of the previous victims was found in the first-aid kit on the defendant’s motorbike, and he was carrying the sort of wipes used to wash the victims of the other assaults. A search of his bedroom revealed a great deal of literature on the subject of rape and its detection, and several newspaper clippings of the offenses with which he was subsequently charged.”
When Whitehouse had finished his lengthy (questioning of the Chief Inspector, Hotshot Harper made a performance out of sorting out some papers before he rose slowly and looked up at the witness box.
“With regard to the incident on Monday, twenty-eighth October,” he said, “was the alleged victim known to you, Chief Inspector?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“You knew that she was a prostitute who plied her wares on the street, and frequently also performed sexual services on the street, and that she had been arrested for just such an offense earlier in the evening?”
“I did,” said Merrill.
“And yet you had no doubt that her story was true, and that she had been assaulted by the defendant?”
“The forensic medical examiner said that in her opinion the young woman had been the victim of a sexual assault,” said Merrill stolidly. “Saliva found on the defendant’s glove proved to be that of the victim, supporting her contention that he had held his gloved hand to her mouth to prevent her crying for help. That, taken in conjunction with the eye-witness statements, left me with little doubt that an offense had been committed.”
“And—like the arresting officer—you thought you had got your man, the one you were seeking in connection with the other three assaults?”
“Yes,” said Merrill. “In view of the circumstances of his arrest.”
“That he was dressed in black, and possessed a first-aid kit and the means to clean his hands after working on his bike?”
“I think the face-mask clinched it,” said Merrill.
There was muted laughter; the judge immediately silenced it.
“Was he carrying a flick-knife, or any other knife or weapon?”
“No, my lord. But a flick-knife and mask had been found the previous day, which it was reasonable to suppose the rapist had discarded. And in daylight a knife was found close to the scene of the last assault, which could have been the one used to threaten the victim.”
“Do you have any forensic or other evidence that either of these knives was ever owned or handled by Mr. Drummond?”
“No, my lord. The knife found by the river had no fingerprints on it, and the flick-knife had been handled by a number of people before it was handed in. But it was found not far from where the defendant had been stopped by the police for reckless driving two nights previously.”
“Where he had been stopped and badly beaten by one of the officers while the other stood by and watched,” said Harper. “My client was very aware of that during these interviews—were you, Chief Inspector?” said Harper.
Whitehouse rose, and Harper sat down.
“My lord, the officers involved in that assault on Mr. Drummond were not directly concerned with the rape investigation, but in view of the way in which he was dressed, they routinely questioned him about his movements on the dates involved. His replies caused one of them to lose his temper. They have since been convicted of the offense, and dismissed from the police force—there is no justification for suggesting that this behavior was in any way condoned by their fellow police officers.”
Judy, unwittingly instrumental in the downfall of her two ex-colleagues, felt guilty about that, too. Her inadvertent whistle-blowing had created hostility at Malworth; she had been transferred back to Stansfield, to work on a murder investigation. But Colin Drummond had turned out to have vital information about that murder; she had found herself interviewing him, an experience she had no desire to repeat.
They shouldn’t have beaten him up, but Judy knew that the quiet, handsome young man in the dock was not at all the Colin Arthur Drummond they had had to deal with, He had been taunting them with being unable to catch him; she had understood their actions from the moment that Drummond had told her how narrowly she had avoided being his fifth victim, and had promised her that she would be his sixth.
The judge looked a query at Harper, who stood up.
“My lord, I shall be calling one of the police officers involved in that assault on Mr. Drummond to give evidence. My client maintains that no mention of the rapes was made during this incident; he believes that he was beaten up because of a previous encounter with these two officers in which he had come off the better, and that he was being targeted by the police. The next morning he was taken to Stansfield police station on another matter altogether, and was questioned—for the first time—about his movements on the dates and at the times of these rapes. He was released only when he made a formal complaint about the officers who had assaulted him, and that night was visited by the police at his home. The following night he was arrested and taken to Malworth police station, where he was questioned all night about the rapes. He is quite prepared to admit that he admired the exploits of the rapist, and that his mode of dress could have led the police genuinely to believe that he was the rapist, but his contention is that he at no time led them to believe this, and that he eventually confessed to these horrendous crimes in the belief—mistaken or otherwise—that he would be hounded until he did, and quite possibly once again be physically harmed if he did not.”
