One Law For the Rest of Us

by Peter Murphy

  Some minutes later, as Gareth and Ben were chatting, Anthony Norris approached.

  ‘Anthony,’ Gareth said. ‘I’m sorry we can’t congratulate you on Silk today, but I’m sure it won’t be long delayed.’

  Norris lit a cigarette. ‘It’s that bloody case,’ he replied, ‘the one that started all this fuss about sexual abuse. If I hadn’t represented that bloody priest, I’d have my silk gown too, just like Kenneth.’

  Gareth smiled. ‘It does seem to have caused a bit of a furore, doesn’t it?’

  ‘A furore? The whole country is up in arms, Gareth. Women are coming forward in their thousands. Sexual abuse is becoming an industry, and the name of Desmond Gerrard is anathema.’ He turned to Ben. ‘I told you this would happen. Just wait till it’s your turn.’

  ‘You told me that they would stop appointing our heads of chambers to the bench, Anthony,’ Ben pointed out, ‘and that Kenneth wouldn’t get Silk. But both of those things have happened.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ Norris replied. ‘It’s my career that’s suffered. There’s a black mark against my name.’ He turned back to Gareth. ‘Couldn’t you look into it for me, Gareth? I’m sure you know the people to talk to.’

  Gareth placed a hand on Norris’ shoulder. ‘Anthony, this was your first time of asking, wasn’t it? It’s not unusual to be turned down the first time. I’m sure you’ll get it next time. It’s just the way these things work. You have to be patient.’

  ‘I’m the first one in chambers it’s ever happened to,’ Norris protested.

  Gareth nodded. ‘Yes… well, I’m sure there’s a reason, but I can’t imagine it has anything to do with the case. Quite the contrary, really. They like to see that you’ve been involved in some important high-profile cases. It gives them confidence that you can handle more complicated work – the kind of work you would expect to be doing as a Silk. I honestly can’t see that case doing you any harm, Anthony.’

  ‘So, what should I do about it?’

  Gareth shrugged. ‘There’s nothing you can do, except carry on, and try not to let it get you down. That would be my advice.’

  Norris shook his head and walked away to refill his glass.

  ‘Do you think he’ll get it next time?’ Ben asked.

  ‘I don’t know, Ben,’ Gareth replied, ‘but if he doesn’t, I assure you, it will have nothing to do with Father Desmond Gerrard.’ He took a sip of his champagne. ‘If I were you,’ he added, ‘I would start work on your own application. Make sure you put me down as a referee.’

  62

  Monday 3 October 1977

  As the lengthy filmed segment drew to a close, the veteran presenter tweaked his trademark bow tie once again and made a final adjustment to his spectacles before looking into the camera.

  ‘Good evening. In this special edition of Panorama, we have two guests live in our studio. They are the author Simon Lester, and Audrey Marshall, the woman whose stand against some people in high places appears to have shaken the British establishment to its foundations in recent days. Welcome, to both of you.

  ‘Mr Lester, let me start with you. Ever since your book One Law for the Rest of Us was published, we’ve had a wave of reaction from almost every section of society, from the very highest in the land to the man and woman in the street. And of course, even before your book was published, it was one of the most badly kept secrets of all time.’

  Simon laughed. ‘Yes, your government did its best to keep us quiet; but when people are ready to speak out, you can’t silence them forever. Eventually, the dam was bound to burst: it was just a matter of time.’

  ‘I’ve had my copy for months,’ the presenter said, smiling. ‘I’m not going to say how I got it, but I will say that it wasn’t particularly difficult.’

  ‘No. I think many people in Great Britain had copies before the injunction was lifted and we published officially. Even for those who didn’t have the book, it wasn’t hard to find out what was in it.’

  ‘Mr Lester, let’s go over the fall-out, as we understand it to be today: although we know that whatever we say today may be overtaken by events even before this programme ends. As our filmed report just now showed, it’s all been moving at a breath-taking speed.’

  ‘It has, indeed. It’s hard to know where to start. We know that the Attorney General has rescinded the order he made preventing the prosecution of Lord AB, Sir CD and the Right Reverend EF. We now expect that they will be going to trial at the Old Bailey in the near future.’

  ‘Yes,’ the presenter said, ‘and before we go any further, it’s only fair to note that in your book, you make no criticism of the Attorney General personally for the order he made originally, preventing the trial from going ahead?’

  ‘That’s correct. The Attorney received representations from the defence lawyers; they made reasonable arguments to him on behalf of their clients, and he acted properly at the time. It’s right to say also that he acted immediately to revoke his order once it became clear that he hadn’t been given the full picture, shall we say.’

  ‘He’s now given the green light to the Director of Public Prosecutions to conduct a comprehensive investigation, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, and the expectation is that the Director will proceed, not only against those three men, but against any others who may be identified in connection with child sexual abuse in other schools.’

  ‘Yes: and in fact, the BBC understands that the Director is already examining the records of a number of schools, including the five other schools named in the papers found in the rooms of Father Desmond Gerrard, the headmaster of Lancelot Andrewes School.’

  He paused.

  ‘And on the subject of Father Gerrard: according to who you ask, he either committed suicide or was murdered, on the eve of the trial of the civil action brought against him in the High Court. His death has become one of the darkest of all the many dark aspects of all this, hasn’t it? Do you have any thoughts about it?’

  Simon shrugged. ‘We may never know for sure. The inquest remains open in case further evidence comes to light. The case has some strange features: no suicide note was ever found, and the police haven’t been able to trace the source of the cyanide. But I’m picking up some hints from one of my sources that further evidence may come to light, suggesting that Gerrard was in fact murdered.’

  The presenter smiled. ‘Would this be the famous Source X-ray, as you call him in your book, who, you say, is highly placed in one of our security services?’

  Simon returned the smile enigmatically. ‘No comment.’

  ‘Fair enough. But if Gerrard was murdered: why?’

  ‘In my opinion? He knew too much. He knew all the men who were abusing those girls, and his world was crumbling. He was going down, one way or the other, and if he’d been tempted to speak out in an attempt to save himself, he would have taken them down with him.’

  ‘So, if Gerrard was murdered, there must be a lot of suspects?’

  ‘Yes, there are, and maybe we will never know who did it.’ Simon smiled again. ‘On the other hand, we live in a strange world, don’t we? Who knows? We may not have heard the end of the story yet.’

  ‘And – I can tell from looking at your face – that’s all you’re going to say about that tonight, isn’t it?’

  Simon laughed. ‘That’s correct, sir.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ the presenter said. ‘Let’s move on to the victims of the abuse. A growing number of women have now come forward to complain of having been victims of sexual abuse at as many as nine schools. In some cases, the complaints go back for many years, and they have been naming the men they say abused them.’

  ‘Yes. The latest figure I have is in excess of eighty, and I don’t think the list is anywhere near being closed yet. I also understand that they implicate a large number of men, many prominent in public life, particularly in churches
of several denominations, but also in Parliament, government, the courts, and – to an increasing extent – show business. They haven’t all been named as yet, of course.’

  ‘We’re still using initials, are we?’ the presenter asked, smiling.

  ‘Apparently, and we may have enough to use up the alphabet several times over. We may need to go to three or four initials instead of just two.’

  ‘One intriguing fact,’ the presenter continued, ‘is that the papers found in Father Gerrard’s rooms seem to suggest at least one link between the various schools, other than Gerrard himself.’

  ‘Yes. A man called John Singer, who I mention in my book, was acting as a solicitor on behalf of all the schools. What his exact role was in all this isn’t clear as yet, but, as you reported in your news programmes on the BBC last week, Singer has been arrested and his offices searched.’

  ‘Last Wednesday, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘Yes. And I have a source – not Source X-ray, but a source I believe to be highly reliable – who tells me that Singer has been interviewed by the police, and has offered to cooperate with them and give evidence, in return for immunity. If that is confirmed, we can expect to see a whole series of criminal trials lasting for some considerable time.’

  ‘Extraordinary,’ the presenter said. ‘This saga is going to run and run, isn’t it?

  ‘It certainly seems so, sir.’

  The presenter shook his head. ‘You’ve been working on this story for a long time now, Mr Lester, beginning with your meetings with Audrey Marshall, interviewing other witnesses, including her young daughter Emily, trawling through thousands of pages of documents. Looking back on it all now, how do you see your role in the story?’

  Simon smiled. ‘That’s an interesting question. I haven’t really given much thought to it; I’ve been so busy with the story, and with the book.’

  He thought for a moment or two.

  ‘I guess I would see my role as a modest one, but no less important for that. I’ve always felt that every democracy needs several layers of protection. If you only have one layer, it’s too easy for the powerful and the unscrupulous to override it, to cover up their wrongdoing and that of their friends. In the States, we have several safeguards written into our Constitution, with our separation of powers between the different branches of government. Here in Great Britain, you also have safeguards, but they’re not as easy to see because you don’t have a written constitution.’

  ‘We still have them, though, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes. The law is, and must be, the first line of defence; and in most cases the law is enough. But this case shows that even the law can be manipulated sometimes. After the law, the next line of defence is the press. But the press doesn’t always get to the truth. They may not have the means, or they may not have the will, because of their allegiances, or those of their publishers.’

  ‘So, who do you turn to when the law and the press fail you?’ the presenter asked.

  Simon smiled. ‘I guess you turn to a guy with a typewriter on East Seventy-Second Street.’

  The presenter laughed.

  ‘Mrs Marshall, let me turn to you. How do you feel about all of this?’

  63

  Audrey Marshall

  How do I feel about all this? Good question. During my appearance on Panorama, I gave it a fairly anodyne answer. I wasn’t being intentionally evasive. I’ve never been very comfortable talking to large numbers of people; and although in the glare of the studio lights I was only directly aware of the presenter, Simon, and the camera operators, I knew that there were a lot of people listening to me and watching me out there, and the knowledge inhibited me. And quite apart from that, it’s a complicated question: one I’m not sure I could answer fully in a week of talking, never mind a minute or two of one edition of Panorama. But it is an important question: and I’ll do my best to answer it now.

  Looking back over my life, and especially my life since Emily confided in me in January 1972, I remember feeling, in no particular order: distress, anxiety, fear, horror, hopelessness, despair, anger, rage, vengefulness, and an enveloping blackness that never seemed to lift. Sometimes I felt them in combination; sometimes they lasted for months, or even years, on end; sometimes they succeeded each other in rapid succession; and sometimes they ran together, like paints from an artist’s palette left out in the rain, until they merged, and I could no longer distinguish one from another.

  In the end, they would have destroyed me: I can see that clearly now. If I hadn’t come to the realisation that I couldn’t let this be about me anymore, I would eventually have given up. I would probably have gone the same way as Joan: hanged myself in the quiet of an ordinary afternoon: or fallen as if by mishap under a train; or hoarded the pills Linda Gallagher gave me until I had enough for an accidental overdose. But when I decided not to let it be about me anymore, a remarkable thing happened. I was able to open my heart back up, and let in others who had also suffered: and as I started to open myself up, as I began to focus on the suffering of others, I saw something so incredible that it stopped me in my tracks. I saw that I was actually one of the lucky ones.

  Once people got to know about Simon’s book, so many victims began to find the courage to come out, and to speak their pain and anger, and to demand redress for their suffering: at first one or two here and there; then a trickle, then a stream; and finally a flood – not only women who had been pupils at the schools we knew about, but victims of other schools, and of churches, and of doctors, and of youth leaders, and of show business celebrities, and of employers, and of members of their own families. Often, they wrote to me, because my name was already out there, and they felt I was someone they could talk to. At first, I shied away from them: I didn’t want to know. I’d had enough. I wanted to hide away with my family: I wanted to avert my eyes from horror on such a scale. I wanted to pretend that I could ignore it and get on with my life. But that didn’t last long: it was impossible for me to turn my eyes away when I had already seen so much, and when these women knew my story from the book. They knew I was one of them. I was already present in their lives. I’d played a part in enabling them to come forward for help, and for justice. I couldn’t turn my eyes away from them now.

  So, I decided to make my presence count. I replied to everyone who wrote, and it was then that I began to see how lucky I was. There were women out there who had tried to take their own lives; women who had turned to drink or drugs; women who had fallen victim over and over again to a series of abusers posing as lovers; women whose sex lives had become terminally dysfunctional; women whose husbands and lovers, unable to understand what was going on with them, had turned against them and abandoned them; women whose children had done the same: women whose lives had been torn apart as they looked helplessly on.

  My own nightmares have never completely gone away, but they have subsided. I’ve made peace with my loss of Joan, and with the loss of so much of my childhood and my young life. I have my family. We are safe and well. Ken and I are strong together. Emily is strong, too. She gives every appearance of having come out of it unscathed. She hasn’t, of course: her demons are going to surface sooner or later. But we’re prepared. We talk frankly to her about sex, and love, and men to avoid, and men to embrace, and although she knows more about the mechanics of sex than she should at her age, at least now, she’s learning about it from those who love her, not from men who are abusing her. When her demons surface, she will have the tools to confront them, and loving parents to confront them with her. Compared to many women I’ve spoken to, we’re living a dream.

  So, I’ve made my life about reaching out, as much as I can. I’ve started a network of women who can help and support each other. I’d known for a long time that I would eventually have to leave my position with the diocese: Bill Hollis has remained a good friend, but the job held too many memories, too many bad feelings. I couldn’t stay
there. So, I gave notice, and now I’m working on the network full time. The spare bedroom at home has become our office, where, with Emily’s help, I keep files so that I can keep in touch with every woman who contacts me. I also put them in touch with each other, and with men and women who can help them. Julia is putting together a list of lawyers up and down the country who are willing to represent them. A friend of Ginny’s, a clinical psychologist, is putting together a list of colleagues who will offer crisis counselling. The Bishop of Ely has offered to become our patron. Ken is setting the network up as a registered charity. We’re calling it the One Law Foundation.

  Returning to my feelings, I’d always imagined that when the abusers were finally put on trial, when they were finally called to account and sentenced for their crimes, and when their victims were finally vindicated and received justice, I would feel elation, and I would revel in their downfall. I wanted them locked up, and I wanted to be the one entrusted with the task of throwing away the key. I know many women who feel that way, and they’re fully entitled to their feelings. Their abusers are going to fall a long way down, and they’re going to fall hard. They will have a long time to reflect on the damage they did to so many young lives, and on the insult they added to injury by covering up such a long history of calculated, cynical wrongdoing. Their victims are entitled to rejoice in their richly deserved fate. But I can’t join in. I just can’t find satisfaction in such a colossal waste of human potential.