by Vicary, Tim
‘I have already directed the jury to ignore both remarks and will repeat those instructions in my summing up. In my opinion that will suffice to ensure your client the fair trial which he undoubtedly deserves.’
The words appeared impeccable but the sarcastic final phrase was a deliberate reference to the fact that everyone in court - except, she hoped, the jury - regarded Gary Harker as an unpleasant thug who was almost certainly guilty and belonged in prison. Not that the judge had actually said that, of course, but ...
‘In that case, my lord, I hope that any uncharitable references to Ms Gilbert’s character which may come out in court will be treated with equal leniency.’
It was waspish, petulant, and unwise. The judge’s face grew cold. ‘You mistake me, Mrs Newby. There was no lenience in my directions this afternoon, and there will no leniency either for you or your client. This is a most unpleasant rape case and will be tried with proper respect shown to the victim. I would have thought that you, as a young woman, would appreciate that.’
Young woman, Sarah thought. Odd how a phrase that might be a compliment in one context could be an insult in another. Foolishly, she floundered on. ‘Of course, my lord, but she does have a very chequered history and if my client’s record is to be brought before the jury then in all fairness ...’
‘You fail to grasp the point, Mrs Newby. Your client’s record has not been brought before the jury and it will not be unless you choose to tell them about it yourself. Therefore it would be quite improper for you to make irrelevant accusations about Ms Gilbert’s sexual past. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes.’ Sarah bit her lip, counted to ten under her breath, and said, ‘I am grateful to your lordship.’ Then she got to her feet and moved to the door.
The men, either out of reflex politeness or as a further subtle insult, rose to their feet when she did, but did not immediately follow her to the door. When she opened it and turned to bow she saw an ironic smile on the judge’s heavy jowl.
‘After all, Mrs Newby, we’re all feminists here, you know.’
She strode down the softly carpeted corridor, seething with anger and humiliation. Halfway along she paused, wondering if she heard laughter from the judge’s chambers, from which Julian and his junior had still not emerged. Then she burst into the robing room and tore at the stud in her stiff collar with her fingers.
I’ve made a complete mess of it, she thought. My biggest case so far and on the very first day I antagonise the judge to no purpose whatsoever. I sound off about justice with as much emotional control as a teenager on her first date, and now they’re going to be needling me about it for the rest of the week.
She glanced into the mirror and saw with relief that her face was only slightly flushed, not nearly as hot as it felt. It was an attractive face, with neat shoulder length dark hair and hazel eyes around which a network of tiny wrinkles had begun to appear. Perhaps they had always been there but she had only noticed them since she had begun to wear contact lenses eighteen months ago. There’s the problem. Your vision improves and you see faults in yourself, she thought wryly.
As Sarah unbuckled her collar another barrister came into the room - Savendra Bhose, a young Indian from her own chambers. Although he was seven years younger than her they had qualified at the same time, and apart from Lucy he was the person she felt closest to at work. He smiled. ‘Hi! The big rape defender! How’d it go?’
‘Dreadful!’ Sarah dropped her wig into her briefcase. ‘The victim’s as hard as nails, shoots her mouth off about my client’s record, and when I complain the judge tells me he’s a feminist!’
‘What?’ Savendra laughed. ‘You don’t mean old Baskerville Gray?’
‘Yes, the old bloodhound himself. He must be sixty-five if he’s a day, and eighteen stone into the bargain, and he’s in there now with his buddy Julian choking over his port because he told me to respect the rights of women!’
Savendra grinned delightedly. ‘Well, so you should, you know! The man has a point. The world’s changing - even women and blacks can vote nowadays.’
‘Really? I hadn’t heard. No one tells me anything.’ Sarah smiled ruefully. ‘I just blew it, that’s all. Rushed in like a rookie and asked for a retrial and of course he told me the grounds weren’t strong enough and it would be a waste of public funds, etcetera , etcetera ... but what am I to do, Savvy, eh? Sit there and smile meekly while they pull a fast one on me?’
‘That hardly sounds like you ...’ Savendra began, but got no further before Julian Lloyd-Davies swept in. He nodded at Sarah. ‘No hard feelings, I hope?’
She picked up her briefcase and made for the door. ‘Of course not. It was a long shot anyway.’
He smiled genially. ‘Like the whole case, I should think.’
‘Yours, do you mean? I’ll tell my client that - he’ll be delighted!’
She winked at Savendra and left. Pleased with her smart remark, she ran down the wide eighteenth century staircase to the entrance hall, where Lucy Sampson sat amid a cluster of security guards, witnesses, and departing students. Lucy, a large, motherly solicitor in a baggy black suit, rose to her feet expectantly.
‘Any luck?’
‘No, sorry, I just set them all against me. Come on, let’s go and see Valentino.’
The two women made for the staircase to the police cells, where Gary Harker would be held until the Group 4 van took him back to Hull prison for the night. As they went through the door they left the imposing pomp of the courtroom with its ancient oak panelling, stucco pillars and exotic domed ceiling, and entered a grey, comfortless world of bare stone corridors and clanging cell doors. At the foot of the stairs they met a detective on his way out.
‘Aha, the devil’s advocate! Hello, Sarah. And Lucy Sampson, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. My solicitor.’ Sarah smiled coolly at DI Terry Bateson, one of the few CID men she actually liked. Bateson, as usual, was managing to make his double-breasted suit hang crumpled around him like a tracksuit. Perhaps it was something to do with the tie, strung several inches below the top button; or the loose-limbed, broad-shouldered frame that supported the clothes, but every time Sarah saw the man he looked more like an athletic teenager than the senior criminal detective that he actually was. And despite her cool smile, conversations with Terry seldom failed to flutter her. He was a widower, too, which made him all the more attractive.
It was Terry who had charged Gary with rape; and as the officer investigating the murder of Maria Clayton and the attempted rape of Karen Whitaker, he suspected that Gary was guilty of these crimes too. Maria Clayton, an up-market prostitute, had been found strangled on Strensall Common a year ago. Her hands had been bound behind her with the belt of her own raincoat, and the belt looped through its buckle round her neck, so that the harder she struggled the tighter the noose became. It seemed she had been half-strangled like this and then throttled with her attacker’s hands. She had been sexually assaulted and there was a small cut in her neck. Her dog, a Yorkshire terrier, was found with its throat cut in a ditch.
Karen Whitaker, a university student, had been posing nude in the woods for her boyfriend to photograph when the couple were attacked by a hooded assailant with a knife, who snatched their camera, handcuffed the boy to the steering wheel of his car, bound Karen’s hands with tape, and was attempting to rape her when the boyfriend managed to set off the car alarm and attract some walkers, who chased the attacker away.
This attack, which happened less than three weeks after the Clayton murder, led to the Hooded Knifeman articles in the Evening Press; and when Sharon Gilbert was raped a month after that, the pressure on the police to make an arrest was enormous. But although Gary was Terry’s prime suspect for all three attacks, the evidence he had to link him to the first two was very thin. Gary had been one of a small team of builders who had built an extension to Maria Clayton’s kitchen six months before her death, and had boasted of having sex with her once. He had also been one of a gang
of builders repairing Karen Whitaker’s hall of residence, and had seen the naked pictures in her rooms. But scores of men had visited Maria Clayton’s house, and dozens of students and building workers had known about Karen Whitaker’s exhibitionist hobby. A smudged footprint from a size 9 Nike trainer had been found near the scene of both crimes, and a battered pair of size 9 Nike trainers had been found in Gary’s flat; but this, as Lucy had pointed out scornfully when the police presented it, would put about two million other men in the dock alongside Gary. Although she had been sexually assaulted, no semen or body hairs were found on Maria Clayton’s body, but Terry’s team had been triumphant when they had found a male hair stuck to the tape used to bind Karen Whitaker’s hands. But their triumph turned to ashes when DNA analysis of the hair turned out not to match Gary, effectively acquitting him of the Whitaker assault. Despite the similarities between the cases, the evidence was simply not there to prosecute Gary for anything except the rape of Sharon Gilbert.
‘I hope you haven’t been harassing my client, Terry,’ Sarah said, half seriously.
‘I never touched him, Sarah,’ Terry protested, dryly. ‘Personally, I think someone should cut off the man’s dick and float it away on a weather balloon, though I’ll deny it if you ask me in court. But tell me - how can you ladies bring yourselves to defend a bastard like that? He’s a menace to every woman in Yorkshire. You do realise that, don’t you? Next time it could be someone like you. He’s killed already, you know.’
‘If you’re still trying to link him to the Clayton murder, Terry, he’s not charged with that here today,’ Sarah said firmly. ‘As you well know.’
‘Well he damn well should be!’ Terry snapped. ‘So the jury could see the similarities. Same cut in the neck, same method of bondage ...’
‘Different women, different places, Terry. And no evidence that my client was even there.’
‘A client with a record three pages long, including four assaults on women ...’
‘None particularly serious ...’
‘Oh, sure? Until it’s your face on the end of his fist!’ Terry stopped, aware that he was losing his temper. Again. It was happening too often these days. This was not the impression he wanted to convey, of some emotional, out-of-control bully. Not to this woman of all people. But he did care, strongly, about convicting Gary Harker. He took a deep breath and began again.
‘Look, I hear you tried to get the case thrown out this morning. How can you, as a woman, square a trick like that with the search for justice? Tell me that.’
Sarah touched his arm softly. ‘I’m not a woman, Terry, I’m a barrister. My job’s to play the game in defence of my client. The game of proof. And when I play, I play to win.’
Terry shivered. Perhaps it was her hand, the delicate fingers gently touching his arm; but it was also the cynical, lightly spoken words, the opposite of all he believed the law should be about, that frightened him. The three attacks on women had been his main investigation over the past six months, and the single positive result so far was Gary’s appearance in court today.
Now Sarah Newby, of all people, was defending him.
He scowled. ‘Well, I wish you the worst of luck. The sooner the vile pillock’s banged up for life the better. You can tell him that from me.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Sarah smiled, and took her hand from his arm. ‘I might hurt his feelings. And that would never do, would it?’
Terry Bateson watched her go. It annoyed him intensely to see Sarah defending this case. He hated defence lawyers; he regarded them as a sort of parasite growing fat on the wounds of society. They worked in the courts of law but the one thing that seemed to concern them least was justice. If they could get a man released on a technicality they would, with no concern for the hard, sometimes dangerous detective work that had led to the arrest in the first place, or for the effect on the public of a smirking villain released to rape, rob or burgle once again. How would those two women feel, he wondered, if Harker broke into their homes and did to them what he had done to Sharon Gilbert?
Serve them bloody well right. But even as he thought it the idea made him ill. Not Sarah Newby, please God not her.
He had first met her when she had prosecuted two of his cases a year ago. The case against the first man had been thin, and the defendant and his expensive London barrister had come into court laughing, convinced he would get off. Terry’s heart had sunk, certain he was about to see two months of police work trashed. His first sight of the pretty, dark-haired prosecution barrister had discouraged him further. In her late thirties, and only recently qualified, he’d heard. Nice legs, but probably no brain. But in fact it was the expensive London brief - only an ageing junior rather than a silk, for all his Savile Row suit and Jermyn street shirt - who had failed to do his homework, not Sarah. The trial had ended with the defendant sweating in the witness box, snared like a fat fly in the web of his own lies. At one point a juror had actually laughed aloud. And her performance in the next case had been even better. Terry had become a fan. And, he thought, a friend.
But now she was on the other side, defending Gary Harker of all people. Her cynical words echoed in his mind. ‘My job’s to play the game in defence of my client. The game of proof. And when I play, I play to win.’
He respected her too well to think it was bluff - she really thought she could get the bastard off. All those virtues which had so admired in her as a prosecutor were to be deployed in defence of a violent rapist. She didn’t care that Gary was probably the biggest danger to local women for many years. It was her own performance she was interested in. She was just like all the other lawyers after all; a hired advocate, a hooker who would prostitute the truth for a fee slipped into the pocket in the back of her gown.
Let her cope with Gary Harker then. She chose him.
Gary was sitting on the blue plastic mattress in his cell. It was the same colour as the graffiti-scarred walls, and matched the tattoos of the grim reaper on his right bicep and the snake that writhed around his solid neck and appeared about to savage his left ear. He scowled at his lawyers morosely as they came in.
‘Well, what did I tell you? Lying bitch, ain’t she?’
Sarah folded her arms in her gown and leaned against the door. Lucy stood by her side. The only other choice was to sit on the bed beside Gary, and neither woman fancied that.
‘I tried to persuade the judge to dismiss the jury because she referred to your record, but I’m afraid he didn’t agree.’
‘No, well, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Gary looked unsurprised by the news. ‘What did you think of Sharon?’
Sarah shrugged. ‘She made a good impression. Any woman would, with a story like that.’
‘Aye. Well, she’s a lying bitch who made the whole fucking thing up!’
Silence. Neither woman could think of any response. At last, in a tone of weary disgust, Lucy said: ‘It’s no part of our case to say she wasn’t raped, Gary. It’s a fact that she was.’
‘Yeah, well, maybe. But it weren’t me. If she’s telling the truth then there’s some shite out there who needs his throat ripped out! And I’ll do just that if I ever find him, the little pisshead!’
‘Yes.’ Sarah contemplated her client with distaste, considering what would happen if she put him on the stand. What would impress the jury most - the sincerity of feeling with which he denied the charge, or the foul language he would use to do it? She imagined Julian Lloyd-Davies needling him with his deliberately languid, pointed questions. The man might run amok, bursting out of the witness box like a tethered bear snapping its chain, and try to kill them all.
He could, too, with those muscles. That would liven the court up.
She wasn’t obliged, of course, to put him on the stand at all. She could simply tell the court that he denied the charges and rely on her ability to cast doubt on the prosecution case. But she was unlikely to win like that, since the law now specifically allowed the judge to comment adversely to the jury abou
t a witness’s refusal to give evidence on his own behalf.
But if he did give evidence, Lloyd-Davies would shred him into small slices, like salami.
‘Look, Gary,’ she began. ‘I need to know I’ve got everything right. Tell me again exactly what happened at the hotel, first of all.’
For a while she checked details. She doubted Gary’s innocence, but it was possible, after all. He certainly denied all guilt. It was the jury’s job to decide whether they believed him or not.
Anyway, tomorrow she had Sharon to deal with.
On the way out of the court Sarah nodded at a couple of the barristers from Court Two. They would know she was defending a difficult rape case on her own, which was a step up. If she did well, her status would rise. And she didn’t intend to lose; not without a fight, anyway. From her point of view, the prejudice and weight of evidence against Gary were a bonus. If she lost, few people would blame her, but if she won, more serious cases would follow.
She walked out into the afternoon sunshine. The eighteenth century architect had not designed the elegant court building so that people could look out of it, so it was easy to forget, in the windowless dome of the courtroom and the claustrophobic cells beneath, that there was a quite different world immediately outside. In front of Sarah tourists queued up to visit the Castle Museum and the Norman castle, Clifford’s Tower. Tourists and children carrying balloons and ice cream glanced up idly at the statue of Justice above the court. For a moment Sarah stood on the court steps, breathing in the soft breeze and luxuriating in the warmth like a cat.
But the machinery of justice ignored the weather. Below Sarah the prison van waited, its tiny cells with square blackened windows designed to ensure that neither Gary nor any of the other prisoners had even the smallest sensation of freedom between York and their remand cells in Hull.
