A Game of Proof (The trials of Sarah Newby)

by Vicary, Tim

  Such as how to defend Simon. And his apparent connection with Gary Harker.

  Sarah closed her eyes, and a childhood memory came to her, of a trip to the beach at Blackpool when she was small. She had been exploring a rock pool with her father and they had seen a small crab scurry for shelter under a stone. Sarah had been afraid to pick up the stone and so her father had lifted it for her. But under the stone, instead of the tiny crab which she expected, was a much, much bigger one. A huge crab, its shelly body as wide as her face, its vast serrated pincers raised in fury, its eyes on stalks swivelling intently towards her pink little toes, six scaly legs clattering sideways towards her while she screamed and screamed ...

  She shuddered at the memory, then glanced at Lucy doodling on a pad of paper. Outside, the evening rush hour was beginning.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve kept you. You’ll be wanting to go home,’ she said.

  Lucy smiled. ‘Why now? I’ll just sit in a jam. They won’t expect me till seven.’

  Sarah took a step nearer the stone in her mind. ‘The only thing I’d regret about Gary, would be if he’d really committed all these attacks, as Terry Bateson thinks he did.’

  Lucy considered this. ‘There’s evidence to disprove that.’

  ‘In one of the cases, yes. They found some DNA on a hair from Karen Whitaker’s attacker that wasn’t a match for Gary.’

  ‘There you are then. It wasn’t him.’

  ‘He could still have murdered the first one. The prostitute, Maria Clayton.’

  ‘Could have. But there’s no evidence. Come on, Sarah, you know this. They wanted to charge him with that before, but the CPS turned them down. They couldn’t prove it then and they can’t now. A hundred men could have done it.’

  ‘Including my son? Simon?’

  This was the sort of remark that Lucy feared. She studied Sarah cautiously before answering. An answer that was intended to rebuild confidence.

  ‘Including your husband and my husband and any man without an alibi, if it comes to that. Come on, Sarah - suspicion and innuendo isn’t any sort of proof.’

  But Sarah had her hands around the stone now. She was going to lift it. ‘The thing is, Lucy, Terry Bateson has always thought that these attacks are the work of one man; the Hooded Killer the Evening Press writes about. But he can’t prove it, because for a start, one of the attacks - the one on Whitaker - was definitely committed by someone else. So he’s wrong.’

  ‘So he’s wrong, yup,’ Lucy nodded. ‘Not the first time a policeman’s been wrong.’

  ‘He’s wrong about the idea that it was one man, Lucy, yes.’ Sarah’s next words came out in a whisper. ‘But what if it was two?’

  ‘Two?’ Lucy wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. ‘Two men raping together?’

  ‘Not necessarily raping together, no, but ... co-operating. You know, maybe one does it one time, the other the next. One acting as lookout for the other, that sort of thing?’

  Not just one huge crab under the stone, but two. Both with claws raised, both with faces that she recognized!

  ‘Oh come on, Sarah! Now you’re really in the realms of fantasy.’

  ‘Am I? Probably, I hope so. But look at what we know. We know - so long as the forensic examination supports it - that Gary raped Sharon Gilbert. We know he claims he was with someone else that night, this fellow called Sean whom no one could find ...’

  ‘We proved he existed, remember? That was one of our better moments.’

  ‘True. But even if we accept that this Sean exists, it doesn’t mean it was him who was with Gary that night, does it? What if it was Simon?’

  ‘We don’t know that anyone was with him, Sarah.’ This was just the sort of reaction Lucy wanted to suppress. But Sarah’s imagination was in full flight.

  ‘Well he said someone was, didn’t he? And it seems Gary went into a shed - Simon’s shed - to change his clothes and dump his hood before he went home. How did he know there’d be clothes in that shed if Simon hadn’t told him? How did he know the shed even existed?’

  Will Churchill strode back and forth, like a maths teacher Terry had once known. ‘Look, there’s still one question that hasn’t been answered by any of you lot.’ He tapped his teeth with a pencil. ‘And that is, what exactly is the connection between this woman’s son and Gary Harker? I mean, I know what you think he was doing in that shed, Terry, changing his clothes after the rape - but why there? Did the boy know what Gary’d done, or didn’t he? Was he an innocent in all this, or an accomplice?’

  ‘What about the other way around, sir,’ Tracy suggested. ‘Was Harker completely unconnected with the murder of Jasmine Hurst? Or was he an accomplice there too?’

  A tremor of excitement passed around the room. The three men - Churchill, Terry, and Harry - shivered as though someone had walked over their graves. Churchill waved his pencil at Tracy in a chauvinist compliment. ‘Not just a pair of pretty legs, eh, sergeant? There’s a brain behind that beauty, gents!’ Then before Tracy had time to take offence, he continued: ‘And that, of course, could be another reason why Mrs barrister Newby won’t sign a statement against Harker! Because he knows something about her son which he might blurt out in court!’

  ‘Oh, wait a minute, sir,’ Terry protested. ‘She must hate him more than we do - it’s not Harker she’s trying to protect, it’s her own reputation!’

  ‘She still has one, does she? I’m not so sure, Terence. She got him off the rape charge, she met him in that shed in the middle of the night - how do we know there isn’t something in Gary’s story after all? I mean what was she doing there? Not looking for sex maybe but what about the balaclava and those clothes and the rest of it? Maybe she was doing a deal with Harker to get rid of them. In which case she’d be an accessory after the fact.’

  ‘Accessory to what, sir?’ Tracy asked. ‘The rape of Sharon or ...’ Her sentence hung unfinished in the air. They tested the extraordinary possibilities in their minds. More than one crime might be linked by the events in this shed. A keen, hungry grin began to play around Will Churchill’s lips - like a wolf sighting his prey.

  ‘Her reputation she’s trying to protect, you said, Terence? She’ll need to, won’t she, if it turns out she not only knew Harker was guilty of rape, but that her own son helped him, and that son’s guilty of murder! The Bar Council won’t look too kindly on that, will they?’

  ‘It’s not possible,’ Terry said. The whole idea shocked him. ‘There’s no proof, nothing to connect her with either the rape or Jasmine Hurst’s murder ...’

  ‘Only the fact that Gary did the one and her son did the other; Gary and Simon seem to know each other; and she met Gary in her son’s shed!’

  ‘Yes, but she didn’t choose to meet him there,’ Terry insisted. ‘It was an accident. She went to park her bike, and there was Gary getting his watch back.’

  ‘Just a coincidence, eh, Terence? That’s not what Gary said.’

  ‘The man’s a nutter! A fantasist! Anyway we saw what he was doing.’

  ‘Then why won’t she press charges?’

  ‘To avoid publicity, sir,’ Terry repeated. ‘You understand her, don’t you, Trace?’

  Tracy frowned. ‘I understand, sure, but there are other explanations. What we need to know, surely, is what the connection between Gary and Simon actually is. Until then ...’

  ‘Right.’ Churchill stood up. ‘We’d better be quick. You haven’t released him, have you?’

  ‘No, sir. We’ve got him till ten thirty tonight, unless we charge him.’

  ‘Right then. Come on, Terence; let’s you and me go and see this thug, shall we?’

  As they were leaving Sarah sighed and said: ‘If only it could be Gary that killed Jasmine. But the pig was on remand, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lucy said putting on her coat. ‘No! No, he was free then, surely?’

  ‘I thought it was the day the trial ended?’

  ‘No. Your memory’s playing tricks.’

  They
stared at each other in shock. A wild hope lit in Sarah’s eyes. ‘What are the dates?’

  Feverishly, they scrabbled in Lucy’s desk diary. ‘There, I was right! Last day of trial, Thursday 13th. Gary was released at what? Three, four o’clock. And Jasmine’s body was found next morning, the 14th. She was killed around midnight on the 13th.’

  ‘So he could have done it!’ Sarah breathed.

  ‘Yes, but what motive would he have? What reason?’

  ‘That man doesn’t need a motive, Lucy. He’s a monster. He raped Sharon and he attacked me. He ought to have been grateful to me if anything - I’d got him off, for Christ’s sake. But when I met him in that shed I was just there, I was a woman, I asked him what he was doing and he snapped. Did what he’s good at. He might have killed me if the police hadn’t turned up.’

  ‘Yes, but how would he have met Jasmine?’

  ‘I wish we knew,’ Sarah breathed quietly. ‘I wish we knew.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ‘NOW THEN, Gary,’ Terry began. ‘How well do you know Simon Newby?’

  Gary shrugged. ‘I’ve met him, around. On building sites and such.’

  ‘Mate of yours, is he?’

  ‘I know him, yeah.’

  ‘All right, tell me about him. What do you know?’

  ‘His mum’s got a juicy arse.’

  ‘Apart from that, Gary. We’ve been through all that.’

  ‘Been through it, copper? You wish!’ Terry tried to keep his face neutral, but Gary could see the effect his words were having. Churchill intervened, in his sneering southern accent.

  ‘What about her son, then, Gary? D’you fancy him too?’

  ‘You shut your filthy mouth! Anyhow he’s got his own bird. The dead one.’

  ‘Oh yes. Justine.’

  ‘Jasmine.’

  ‘Jasmine, sorry.’ Churchill corrected himself slyly. ‘You met her then?’

  ‘Yeah. So?’

  ‘Fancy her, did you?’ Terry resumed, intrigued by this discovery..

  ‘She was all right. Better’n he deserved.’

  ‘What did she look like, Gary?’ Churchill asked. ‘Describe her for us, will you?’

  Gary thought for a moment. ‘Well. Quite tall for a girl. Stunner to look at. Long brown hair, pretty face. Big tits.’ He laughed, making a squeezing motion with his hands. ‘Like melons.’

  A little worm of excitement woke at the base of Terry’s spine, and began to crawl up towards his brain. ‘Did you touch them, then, Gary?’

  ‘No chance. The lad would have killed me.’

  ‘But you’d have liked to touch them?’ Terry persisted. ‘If you could?’

  Gary eyed him pityingly. ‘Not getting enough, are you, copper? I could take you places ...’

  Smoothly, Churchill took over. ‘You say young Simon would have killed you. Is that how he behaved then, when she was around? A bit violent, protective, perhaps?’

  ‘Him, violent?’ Gary laughed scornfully. ‘Say boo to him and he shits his pants. I’ve seen it. Girls might be scared of him but no one else.’

  The two detectives were silent for a moment, each, from their different perspectives, taking this in. It said as much about Gary as Simon, Terry thought. The casual menace in the villain opposite them came from his sheer muscular bulk. How would a woman feel, confronted with such brutal, overwhelming force? A woman like Sarah, Sharon, even Jasmine Hurst perhaps ...

  ‘So how often did you meet Jasmine, altogether?’ Terry asked.

  Gary shrugged. ‘Three, four times, perhaps. Can’t remember.’

  ‘Always at Simon’s house?’

  ‘Think so. Yeah.’

  ‘Think hard, Gary. You never met her anywhere else? Didn’t follow her home, maybe, try to get your hands on those breasts like - what was it - melons?’

  ‘You’re obsessed, you are,’ Gary jeered. ‘You need help. And no ...’ He spoke directly into the microphone. ‘I did not follow Jasmine home. Nor did I shag her. Or murder her. How could I - I was in court!’

  ‘Nobody’s accused you of murdering her, Gary,’ Terry said smoothly. ‘But in fact you weren’t in court when this girl was murdered. You were released that afternoon, and she was killed between nine and midnight that night. So where were you were for the rest of that day?’

  Gary’s jaw fell open. ‘You’re not accusing me ...’

  ‘You brought the subject up, Gary. Not me. Answer the question.’

  ‘I ... well, I went home, to get changed and have a wash. Then I went out for a few jars.’

  ‘To which pub?’

  ‘The Lighthorseman, if you want to know. They had the football on the big screen. Arsenal vs Real Madrid.’

  ‘Who won?’

  ‘Real, 3-2. There were half a dozen lads there who saw me.’ He gave Terry the names, sneering triumphantly. ‘I stayed till closing time, then went home to bed.’

  ‘Did you see Jasmine that night? Or Simon?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right, Gary, that’s very helpful.’ Churchill intervened impatiently. ‘Now let’s get back to why you’re here, shall we? This business of sexually assaulting Simon’s mother - your own barrister, for Christ’s sake, the woman who got you off! Come on, son, help me out a bit. I’ve not come across this sort of thing before.’

  ‘I told your mate there,’ said Gary stubbornly, nodding at Terry. ‘She asked for it.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, and I’m the king of China’s grandmother. Listen, Gary, what I want to know is, why you were in that shed in the first place. Simon Newby’s shed.’

  Gary stared back, bemused. No sensible answer seemed to occur to him.

  ‘You found a watch, Gary, I believe,’ Terry prompted helpfully. ‘And a ring, and some clothes which we’ve sent for forensic analysis.’

  ‘Did Mrs Newby see these things?’ Churchill asked. ‘Or talk to you about them?’

  Gary looked confused. ‘What would she do that for?’

  Churchill leaned forward, staring intently into Gary’s face. ‘Well, think about it, Gary. This woman, your barrister, meets you in this shed at night. It’s a surprise to both of you. You have an argument, and you resolve this argument by trying to rape her, like the dickhead you are. So what was this argument about? She saw you trying to get rid of the evidence, was that it? She realized for certain that you were guilty, and ...’

  ‘No!’ A cunning grin crossed Gary’s face. ‘I wasn’t trying to get rid of that stuff. She was.’

  ‘What?’ This time, even Churchill was taken aback. There was a stunned silence, from which Terry recovered first.

  ‘You’re talking out of your arse again, Gary.’

  ‘Am I? You prove it then.’

  ‘I don’t have to. It’s as big a load of crap as you told us yesterday.’

  ‘Are you going to charge me with raping her then?’

  If there was such a thing as low criminal cunning, this bastard had it, Terry thought. He wasn’t bright, he was a common violent thug who’d spent a large part of his adult life in prison and yet, when he was confronted with seemingly irrefutable proof of his guilt, his mind instantly homed in on the one route of escape. No one had told him that the charge of attempted rape was likely to be dropped, but he had guessed nonetheless.

  Churchill tried to cover it up. ‘Just answer the questions, son, then we’ll see. Look, with you in that shed was all the evidence we needed to convict you of raping Sharon Gilbert, right? Are you seriously trying to tell us that your barrister was trying to hide it, not you? Why on earth would she do that?’

  ‘I were found not guilty, remember?’

  Churchill gazed at him wearily. ‘Yeah, sure. The courts get it wrong sometimes. But come on, Gary - all that stuff in the shed proves your guilt, for Christ’s sake! The watch, the ring, the hood - Sharon Gilbert’s identified the lot, you know.’

  ‘So? It doesn’t mean I put them there, does it? I just found them - my watch, anyhow.’ Gary hesitated, looking from Churchill t
o Terry, who smiled mockingly, not believing a word. ‘And then she comes in and says ...’

  ‘Yes, Gary, what did she say? Come on now. Make it up quick or we won’t believe you.’

  ‘She says get rid of it quick, my son did it.’

  Terry burst out laughing. ‘Oh, very good, Gary, well done! Brilliant. You’re saying your barrister came into the shed, saw you pawing all this evidence that proves your guilt, and said get rid of that quick because my son raped Sharon Gilbert. Is that it?’

  ‘It was in his shed.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. But instead of helping her get rid of it, you tried to rape her, remember. Is this an example of your social skills, or what?’

  ‘It’s not bloody funny, copper ...’

  ‘... not good manners though, is it? Your idea of etiquette?’

  ‘ ... I could go down for eight years ...’

  ‘And so you should.’ Terry was still smiling at the sheer effrontery of it all, but Churchill, to his surprise, put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Just a minute, Terence. Gary, are you seriously asking us to believe that your barrister, the woman who defended you, told you that her son, Simon Newby, raped Sharon Gilbert?’

  Gary nodded defiantly. ‘That’s what I said, yeah.’

  ‘And you’re prepared to make a statement to that effect?’

  ‘I might.’

  The room fell silent. Terry was appalled. What was Churchill playing at? A pulse began to throb violently in his ears. ‘Come on, Gary, this is total crap and you know it. Sharon identified you, not Simon - and so did her little kid, remember? The little boy who tried to protect his mum when you were raping her in front of him, you great hulking thug ...’

  ‘I were found not guilty!’

  ‘Yes, but you were guilty, weren’t you? Everyone knows that - even your barrister, who actually got you off. And how do you reward her? By trying to rape her and then accusing her son of your own filthy crime! You make me sick, you do!’