A Game of Proof (The trials of Sarah Newby)

by Vicary, Tim

  Helen looked up at her mum, who nodded for her to go on.

  ‘... I screamed and hit him hard with my riding whip. He didn’t let go at first so I tried to kick him too and then Toby reared and we got away. Then I galloped home and told mum.’

  Terry nodded. ‘You must have been very frightened.’

  ‘I was, yes. Course I was.’

  ‘Did you see what the man did when you got away?’

  ‘No. I looked back once and saw him running into the woods. Then he was gone. I didn’t want to see him.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Terry watched her for a moment in silence. He was fairly convinced she was telling the truth; there seemed no reason not to. ‘How did he speak? Like someone from round here?’

  ‘No. It was a funny accent - not local.’

  ‘And you’re sure he tried to pull you off the horse? You couldn’t have made a mistake - he wasn’t just trying to be friendly?’

  ‘No! What do you mean, mistake? I can feel him doing it, now!’

  ‘All right, I’m sorry.’ He had really upset her now, he saw. She was crying, and her mother reached out to hug her. This was serious, he thought angrily. It could have been very serious indeed. But the great thing was, she had seen his face. And heard his voice.

  He waited for a moment while the tears subsided, then, as gently as he could, said: ‘Listen to me, Helen. It’s important to catch this man, isn’t it? So I want you to do one more thing for me - in a while, when you’re feeling better. I want you to help us make a photofit picture of this man. We’ve got a lady officer who’s very good at that. Will you come and see her, please?’

  She nodded, still with tears in her eyes but determined, too. Encouraged, Terry made the arrangements with her mother and left.

  He sighed as Harry drove down the track, the collie streaking alongside. After Gary Harker’s arrest, this sort of thing should be over. Of course there were other men like Gary, but statistically, Terry knew, this sort of behaviour was odd. Most rapists were known to their victims; more rapes were committed by relatives in the home than by strangers in the woods.

  He thought how angry he would feel if such a thing happened to his own girls. It would be insupportable. I’d kill the bastard, he thought, his hands tightening on his knees. Kill him and ask questions after.

  Chapter Four

  AS SARAH wheeled the Kawasaki into the street something tugged at her memory. She glanced at her watch and swore. 7.40. Her daughter Emily had a school concert that night and she had promised to go. When did it begin - eight? Eight thirty? Pray God it was the latter. Quickly she fastened her helmet, settled herself in the saddle, and turned the key. The engine purred smoothly. I must be quick, she thought. Not so much freedom after all.

  But as the bike wove its way swiftly down the street the old thrill returned. It was so powerful and free, compared to a car. Why shouldn’t she enjoy it, this daily adventure on the roads? It was her reward for long hours of work, for all the disasters of her childhood.

  If Emily was late for the concert and threw a tantrum, so what? Secretly Sarah regarded her daughter as spoilt. What did Emily know of trouble or poverty? Nothing, compared to her mother.

  Sarah had been fifteen when she met Kevin Mills, and he had been seventeen. She had been an ordinary conscientious working-class girl at her local grammar school, not particularly clever or pretty, five foot six with short dark hair. The first risk she had ever taken was to drink two halves of lager and lift her miniskirt for Kevin in the back of his parent’s yellow Ford Cortina; and that risk had ruined her life. She still remembered, almost every day, the lonely dread for weeks afterwards waiting for a period that never came. And then the morning sickness, and telling her mother.

  And Kevin.

  Kevin was of course a devil, a satyr to have seduced an underage schoolgirl, but he had great pride. He was shorter than other boys, but wiry and strong, able to command respect with a look or sharp word. Nobody put him down; he was too dangerous for that. He was also capable of great charm. She knew he’d had other girls but he’d chosen her. She had felt proud and excited to be with him. Not afraid, not then.

  Not even when she told him she was carrying his baby.

  At that moment, he had been brilliant. Or so she had thought at the time. She could remember how the angry pimple on his forehead flared red as the rest of his face went white with shock. But then, when the truth had sunk in, he had puffed out his chest like a little fighting cock - he had been proud! She was pregnant with his baby - he had done it before most other boys on the estate! So two days later he had stood in her front room with her hand in his and told her parents he was going to marry her. Not asked them, told them. At seventeen years old he said he loved her and wanted her children and they were going to get married.

  Such fools they both were.

  They were married when she was sixteen, and the social services found them a council house on the Seacroft estate in Leeds. It was a dreadful estate; their house had damp running down the walls so freely that they saw snails crawling above the cot. The wallpaper was peeling off, the window frames were rotting and the weeds were two feet high in the garden, growing out of the dog muck that the previous tenant’s three rottweilers had left.

  But at first it didn’t matter. It was their own house and they were young and determined and it almost seemed like a game. They furnished it with second-hand carpets and a plastic three piece suite, a brand-new cot from social services for the baby and a mattress on the bedroom floor for themselves. In the kitchen they had a Baby Belling cooker with two electric rings only one of which worked when the oven was on. Her mother gave her a cookbook called Healthy Eating for Less Than a Pound a Day, and Sarah came to know all its recipes by heart. Often things were burnt or underdone but in those first few weeks it didn’t matter because afterwards, so long as the baby was asleep, they could go up to their own bedroom in their own house and make love as long and adventurously as they liked.

  And they did like. When Sarah’s father had described Kevin as a randy little sod he had been telling the exact truth and Sarah, aged sixteen, responded with delight and enthusiasm. That grubby bedroom, with a mattress and a rug on the floor, a stained mirror and an old chest of drawers with paint peeling off it, became for that brief period their version of the Arabian Nights. In those first few weeks of marriage Sarah’s sexuality blossomed as suddenly and completely as a flower in an arctic spring.

  But then it faded, never to be the same again. The demands of real life piled up outside the bedroom door. Unwashed dishes, crying baby, dirty nappies, shopping, social worker, doctor, colds, cystitis, measles, vaccinations, electricity bills, pegging out the washing, rent demands, broken windows, cleaning, cooking, milkman’s bills. Sarah wanted to go home, but she couldn’t - this was home.

  And Kevin was away so much. He was a plumber’s apprentice, off to work at eight in the morning and then not back again for eight, ten, even twelve hours. Then he wanted food, sex, and sleep, in that order. He would play with the baby for a few minutes but wanted it go to sleep afterwards. When it didn’t, he became jealous. When it woke in the night, he was annoyed. When she cooked badly, he became irritable. When she was too tired or ill for sex, he became angry.

  The first time he hit her was when she tried to discuss an electricity bill as they were undressing for bed. She had read about this technique for extracting money from your husband in a magazine in the doctor’s waiting room, whose agony aunt had clearly met no one like Kevin. Kevin just slapped her and continued with his lovemaking as though nothing had happened. The electricity was cut off a week later. She covered the bruise on her face with powder.

  After that he began to stay out longer and longer. She prepared meals for him that dried up in the cooker. What do you want me home for? he asked, cruelly. You’ve got cystitis, you can’t do it. Anyway we need the money. It’s only me that earns it. They screamed at each other over the baby’s head. When she stood in the doorway to
stop him going out he smacked her head against the door post so that it bled. He didn’t come back until one in the morning.

  A week later he told her it was all over. He had met someone else, he said, an older woman called Sheila. He’d got to know her when he’d been fixing her pipes. Sheila and he had the same interests, and he was moving in with her. Now, today. There would be a divorce. She could keep baby Simon but he might want to see him sometimes at weekends when he was older. Teach him to play football. That was what people did, wasn’t it?

  And then he was gone. The bubble burst, just like that. A week before their first anniversary the fairy tale was over. The coldness, the lack of emotional interest, stunned her so much that for the first, and only time in her life, she completely lost the power of action. When the social worker visited two days later Sarah had done nothing - no housework, no washing up, not even fed little Simon, who was howling upstairs. She just sat blankly on the green plastic sofa, staring at the wall.

  The social worker put Simon in a foster home under a place of safety order. Sarah went back to her parents, there was nowhere else to go. The doctor gave her Valium and for a month she walked around like a zombie. Then her mother forced her to sign up for evening classes and take up studying again.

  Which was the best thing my mother ever did for me, Sarah thought now. The one really good thing she did, the old cow. The thing that changed my life.

  Just as refusing to have little Simon in her house was the very worst. The thing that ruined him, perhaps. Unless it was Kevin’s genes.

  Her mother’s plan was for her to make a complete break with the past. Have Simon adopted, never see Kevin again, go back to school.

  The last part of it worked perfectly. Sarah signed up for evening classes to complete her GCSEs and found, suddenly, a voracious hunger for learning. The more she learned the more she wanted to know; the harder she worked the more she wanted to work. It was an escape, a recreation of herself. It was something that gave her control again. It became as necessary to her as breathing. It lasted the rest of her life.

  But the pain, the guilt about her baby Simon didn’t leave her. She didn’t want him to be adopted. As the work replaced the Valium she railed at her hard-faced mother for refusing to have the baby back in the house. No, her mother said. Have him adopted. It’ll hurt now but you’ll thank me one day. It’ll turn out best for you both in the end.

  One night at the evening class she read the papers explaining adoption and then screwed them up. They’re screwing my mind, she thought. That was when the teacher, Bob, found her crying at her desk half an hour after the class had ended. He took her out for a coffee and three months later they were married.

  Bob was everything that Kevin was not - intelligent, well educated, thoughtful, witty, and kind. Where Kevin had been short, cocky and macho, Bob was tall, with a neat beard and glasses, physically weak, gauche and unassertive. Where Kevin had been a ravenous, demanding, insatiable lover Bob was gentle, sensitive, almost shy. He was also idealistic. He was fascinated not by Sarah’s body, as Kevin had been, but by her story. It seemed to him she had lived a whole novel by the age of eighteen. Her hard work and determination to succeed reflected something in himself; her disastrous circumstances challenged him to help her.

  If she married him, he would adopt Simon too. It was the right thing to do.

  And so it might have been, too, if they hadn’t had Emily.

  Not that Emily was a mistake, of course not, Sarah told herself, as she turned her bike onto the quiet country road that led to home. The mistake had been having her so soon after they married. While Bob’s relationship with Simon, his project to demonstrate the benefits of having a teacher for a stepfather, had only just begun. Of course Bob tried to be fair and kind to Simon but his enormous delight at Emily’s birth had been obvious to everyone. Especially to the troubled little boy, who had just come back to live with the mother who had abandoned him, and now had a new baby. And this strange, bearded man who wanted to teach him things.

  Perhaps if we’d waited a year, Sarah wondered sadly. Would that have made the difference? Or were the difficulties in his genes? Simon was Kevin’s son; that had become clearer the older he got. But he was hers too - if only he’d wanted to learn from her and Bob, instead of defying them as he always had. But now he was nineteen and had left home. He had his own life to lead, his own mistakes to make. There was no more she could do.

  Whereas Emily and Bob were at home, waiting for her impatiently. Sarah pushed her guilt about Simon into a drawer at the back of her mind, and closed it. For the moment, Emily and Bob were more important. And things were not going particularly well with them, either.

  As she approached home Sarah saw Bob’s Volvo parked in the drive. When Sarah had first seen this house three years ago she had thought it entrancing. It was a detached modern house, in half an acre of its own grounds. It had a lawn and a golden Robinia tree in front. But it was the back that was its real glory. The spacious rooms had large picture windows which opened onto a fifty metre lawn which sloped away towards a meadow with grazing cows the far side of a little gate. Beyond the meadow was a footpath and willow trees on the banks of the river, and beyond that again, more meadows and the church of a distant village whose bells they could hear on Sunday mornings. Socially it was as far from Seacroft as you could get.

  With Sarah earning fees for the first time and Bob just having become a head teacher they took a deep breath, an enormous loan, and joined the middle classes.

  Or at least, Sarah, Bob and Emily did.

  Simon hated it from the start. He had been sixteen then, beginning his last year at school. The new house meant long bus journeys, and hassle when he wanted to meet his friends. To him it was the final proof that he meant less to his mother than her own lust for success. Two years later he moved into a small terraced house in town, the deposit paid by Sarah and Bob.

  The loss of Simon twitched in Simon’s mind daily, like the nerves from a missing limb. He was the family ghost, the casualty of her conflict with Kevin.

  She parked her bike in the garage, and walked into the dining room. Bob was in his shirt sleeves, eating baked beans and reading the paper. Emily was nowhere to be seen

  ‘Hi!’ she said. ‘Anything for me?’

  ‘Beans in the warmer,’ Bob answered, frowning. ‘You’ve got ten minutes.’

  ‘Why ten minutes?’

  ‘Emily’s concert. She’s got to be there by eight fifteen. Or have you forgotten?’

  ‘Oh Christ!’ She went into the hall and began to peel off her boots and leather trousers. The trousers snagged in her tights, pulling them half down too, and as she struggled, bent over, Emily came down the stairs.

  ‘Mum! For God’s sake!’

  ‘Hello, Em. I’m sorry I’m ...’

  ‘We’ve got to go! I’m late! And nobody wants to see your bum!’

  The tone of mingled exasperation and pure disgust in Emily’s voice made it quite clear to Sarah that the girl saw nothing attractive or funny about her mother’s nether regions. Emily herself had clearly taken pains with her appearance - hair neatly brushed, eye-liner, blusher and lipstick generously applied. The only drawback was the anxious, petulant frown on her face.

  Sarah extracted her leg from the trousers, hoisted up her tights, and smiled encouragingly. ‘You look really nice, Em ...’

  ‘Well, make sure you do. We’ve got to go now, mum!’

  ‘Five minutes.’ Sarah hurried upstairs, changed, brushed her hair quickly, and gulped four mouthfuls of dried baked beans before Bob and Emily hustled her into the Volvo.

  ‘You forgot, didn’t you?’ said Bob, reversing the car. ‘Again!’

  Sarah sighed. ‘It’s an important case and I’m cross-examining tomorrow. Anyway ...’

  ‘Stop!’ Emily screamed from the back. ‘Dad, go back - I’ve forgotten my music!’

  ‘For heaven’s sake ...’

  ‘Why on earth they have a concert the week befor
e their GCSEs I cannot understand,’ Bob said, as Emily dashed back into the house. ‘The poor child’s in a bad enough state as it is.’

  ‘She’s a clever girl. She’ll manage.’

  ‘How would you know?’ Bob snapped. ‘You never see her. She was in a dreadful state when I got home - tears, books and papers all over the place!’

  ‘She did well enough in the mocks.’

  ‘Yes, well.’ Bob fell silent as Emily ran down the drive, got in, slammed the door, and shouted ‘drive!’ in a voice whose nerves contrasted severely with the cool appearance she had presented on the stairs.

  Sarah said nothing. Clearly they were both too wound up to accept comfort from her anyway. Despite what Bob said, Emily was a conscientious student who had got mostly As and Bs in her mock GCSEs a few months ago. If her work ethic lacked the intensity and rigid self-discipline of her mother’s, that was because her life was so much easier. Emily had a comfortable home, loving parents, no babies to look after ...

  Sarah remembered how phenomenally organized she’d had to be in those early years of her marriage to Bob. He’d had a full teaching job and she, with a toddler and a baby to care for, had begun studying two A levels. But it had always been worth it. As she began studying at a higher level, she felt as if wires in her head that had fused together with rust were being cleaned and pulled apart and tuned. It became a pleasure that she couldn’t do without.

  When she got an A in both subjects her addiction was confirmed. Simon was six by then and Emily three. She began an Open University degree, getting up at five each morning to study. She even protected her desk from the prying hands of children by fencing herself in with a playpen. The sight of their mother in there with her books became such a common family sight that the first time little Emily saw a monkey in a cage at the zoo she proudly informed everyone that it was ‘studying.’