by Bri Lee
‘I don’t see him here,’ I said, glancing to Dad for guidance.
He shrugged. ‘Let’s just go in then, I guess,’ and moved toward the double doors.
The small courtroom’s standing space was packed with professionals but all the seats were empty, so I picked a row and moved right to the end.
‘What if he doesn’t come?’ I whispered to Vincent next to me as we sat down. I was thinking about how much the taxi into the city had cost my parents, because parking would be too expensive, and then how much they’d paid for coffee and breakfast while they waited for me. My mother would be calculating it whether she wanted to or not: middle-class habits die hard. ‘Why isn’t he here?’ I asked the same question differently.
‘Just wait and see,’ Vincent said, and shrugged.
Minutes passed, my stomach clenching every time the courtroom door opened, my ears straining until they finally picked up a thread.
‘The matter of Levins?’ someone said, and I looked up and saw Samuel’s barrister, Carter. The prosecutor took a moment looking through his stack of cases, and the barrister smiled patiently. I saw freshly printed pages in his hand, covered in writing and stapled, and he had a heavy compact leather case wheeling behind him. The instant realisation that he was prepared—well prepared—and the length of what he had prepared for made my stomach constrict so quickly that my throat tightened and my body shifted in my seat.
‘What’s up?’ Vincent asked.
‘What is all that stuff?’ I asked him back, nodding to the barrister, panicking. ‘Why has he got so much fucking stuff?’
But I knew the answer to my own bleating. A barrister doesn’t need pages of notes and a folder of materials if his client is entering a guilty plea. The day was just beginning, and I wouldn’t be spared a fight. Until then I hadn’t realised just how much hope I had held that the day would end in rejoicing. I still clung to the memory of the dream I’d had over a year earlier—the one of my family embracing in the sunshine after Samuel pleaded guilty. I thought that moment might have come simply because it was so overdue.
‘Silence, all stand,’ the clerk called out, interrupting my demoralised panic, and the room obliged, but not for long. People came in and out, whispering loudly, exchanging briefs and handshakes. The magistrate made her way through a huge stack of matters, hearing what counsel had to say about time estimates and intentions for proceedings, and allocating the matters to different courtrooms and magistrates.
I kept my eyes locked on Samuel’s expensive champion, searching him for an indication of evil, but all I saw was professionalism. I stewed in the fear it gave me.
He must have seen his moment, and stepped up to the bar table. ‘Your Honour, might I raise the matter of Levins?’ he asked.
‘Levins, Levins, Levins,’ she repeated, moving folders from one pile to another, ‘ah yes, what’s happening with this matter?’
‘An application to cross-examine, your Honour,’ he replied. ‘My estimate would be forty-five minutes.’
‘Very well,’ she said, making a note for the clerk and allocating us a different courtroom, announcing it and moving on.
I stood up to leave, and Vincent and my parents followed my lead, and the barrister saw us as he turned from the bar table, and he assessed us quickly then left through the doors first, hurrying ahead. We moved to the elevators and he was already gone.
On a higher level with only two courtrooms, things were much quieter—silent, even—and we spotted the right number above yet another set of double doors. This time we didn’t pause. I pushed them open and saw Samuel sitting there in the front row, his head bowed in concentrated conversation with his solicitor, and I turned on my heel and picked a line among the empty rows on the prosecutor’s side of the room. The four of us filed in and sat down.
Carter saw us and something came across his face. He turned to Samuel, raised his eyebrows in a questioning expression, jabbing his head in our direction. Samuel turned, looking over his shoulder at us, and quickly turned back around, and nodded. We sat six rows behind him and on his right, and I knew all our eight eyes were burning down onto his neck. Adrenalin rushed through me. It was a fundamental shifting of shame, and as it lifted from me and settled on Samuel I felt what I could only describe as a surge. A chest-beating, wings-expanding battle cry.
The barrister grimaced and I knew then that I had tasted blood. Something of the strength of character I thought would only come once the whole ordeal was over, some sense of invincibility, of absolution, arrived inside me.
Aside from the people he paid, Samuel’s side of the courtroom was empty. No parents, no friends, no partner. I was armoured, flanked, and bolstered with love. What he sought to keep hidden was being dragged into the light.
My champion emerged a moment later and her name was Sarah. She walked up to our row with the confidence of a busy person, and when she shook my hand I liked her immediately.
She looked right at my face and smiled. ‘You must be Miss and Mrs Lee?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Mum and I answered.
‘My name is Sarah. I’m from the DPP and I’ll be handling your file. Unfortunately I’ll need both of you to wait outside today. As counsel and I will be discussing witness statements, they would be able to argue that your evidence had been compromised if you heard what we were talking about.’
I felt the wings I’d just grown get clipped, a bullet to the beating chest. How could I have been so stupid? Of course I wasn’t allowed to listen to the pre-trial arguments for my own damn trial.
‘Of course,’ I replied with a smile, moving past Vincent to the edge of the row, ‘we’ll just wait outside then?’
‘Yes, and Mr Lee, I presume,’ Sarah addressed my dad, ‘you’re not going to be called as a witness so you can stay, but you can’t speak to either your daughter or Mrs Lee about the proceedings.’
Dad nodded and went to stand up, but I stopped him. ‘Can you and Vincent please stay here and let me know if anything procedural happens? Any new dates and stuff?’ And they agreed.
Mum and I took a seat outside.
‘It’s so frustrating!’ I said, my teeth clenched. ‘I just feel like there’s nothing I can do. I’m not even allowed to listen.’
‘I know,’ she said, and held my hand, making small strokes on it with her thumb like she’d done whenever I was sick as a child. ‘At the police station when we last went there for the extra statement, Sean kept asking me what I thought you wanted to get out of all this, why you’d go through all this.’
‘I just want something on his record,’ I said, annoyed. How many times would Sean ask? I wanted him to do his fucking job and get some fucking justice.
We waited for ages. The whole thing ended up taking well over four hours, and Vincent popped out to tell us that the magistrate was displeased with Carter’s original 45-minute estimate. Vincent went back inside to the courtroom and Dad came out to go to the bathroom and get a coffee, then came back and swapped with Vincent again. I felt completely useless. Every time the courtroom door opened, my gut fell through to the floor.
Mum ran out of random things to say. ‘You know I’m just waffling,’ she said, ‘to keep us both distracted.’
‘Thank you.’ I smiled at her, before dropping the expression and returning my gaze to where it was trained on the double doors.
Finally Sarah came out and asked if Mum would be available on a certain date, and she said ‘yes’ and Sarah disappeared again. Everything fell away and all I heard was my heart beating—the blood pumping in my ears. Five minutes later she re-emerged and ushered us into a small conference room. It had a band of clear glass at the bottom, the rest was frosted, and I watched the feet go past until I saw Samuel’s shoes appear on the right, take steps, and disappear to the left. He was gone.
‘Well,’ Sarah said, ‘some of these barristers will try to get away with as much as they can when they’re not in front of a jury, but overall I’d say today went well for us.’
<
br /> I found out that Carter’s first application was to cross-examine me on the entirety of my statement, and that the magistrate rejected his request immediately. Sarah asked me and Mum all kinds of questions, and seemed both frustrated and happy by our answers. As we knew, the only question truly being asked was in what year the offending had occurred. I repeated what I’d told Sean about the trampoline, and Mum mentioned that Dylan’s broken nose was fixed at a Mater children’s hospital.
‘Why isn’t any of this in the brief!?’ Sarah said, sounding exasperated.
‘We’ve told Sean all of this,’ Mum said, confused, ‘a few times, I think.’
‘Well, if everything you just told me was provided to me in the brief, today probably wouldn’t have even been necessary.’
‘That’s good news, though—I mean, for me, right?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely,’ she replied. ‘Your mum is the only one who needs to answer any questions before we present an indictment, and the magistrate has ordered that she can only be asked certain things about the timing and dates, nothing else.’
We met Vincent and Dad outside, and decided to all go for lunch together.
‘We’re only here today because Sean can’t do his fucking job,’ I said to Vincent.
‘What’s new?’ he replied as we walked out through security into the light.
‘At first I was angry, but then I was thinking, how much do you think Samuel paid for today?’
‘A few thousand at least, I’d say,’ he replied, ‘to prepare all that material, then to be in submissions for so many hours.’
‘And it was all a waste!’ I said. I squeezed his hand and grinned, and he kissed me, and the four of us got dumplings.
MY WHOLE FAMILY WAS IN Noosa for our annual winter beach trip the weekend before the pre-trial hearing on 31 July. Vincent and I went for a walk through the national park nearby, as we had done each year, and I was glad that twelve months ago when I was last there nobody knew that Samuel still wouldn’t have pleaded guilty an entire year later, or I might have given up. I tried to pretend the impending Monday wasn’t tainting the weekend.
‘I’m nervous,’ Mum said on Sunday night when nobody else was around. She wouldn’t bring it up in front of the boys.
‘You’re nervous?’ I replied, irritated.
‘Well, you don’t have to do any talking,’ she jabbed back.
‘I’m going for a walk.’
I looked out at the ocean and wondered if the following day might end it all, or if I would return to Noosa, a whole year later, still churning and snappy. The unit had new couches and new wi-fi: a time stamp. What would change next winter? Maybe the local coffee stand would finally take debit cards, and maybe my mother would be nervous about having to give evidence at a trial in the District Court.
The next morning the four of us—Mum, Dad, Vincent and I—went up in the elevator and found the right courtroom together.
‘Want to sit over there, facing out the window?’ Mum asked me, pointing to the far side of the floor.
‘No, I want to sit right here, where I can see everything,’ I replied, and dropped my bags. A small interview room was annexed to the courtroom we’d been allocated, and I’d seen Samuel’s shoes through the non-frosted section of the glass near the floor. I may have been locked out of the courtroom, but I was determined to make my presence known.
Mum was clearly still nervous. Vincent and Dad went into the courtroom, and when Sarah arrived a moment later she told us to wait there, and that she’d come out to get Mum ‘in a minute’. The ‘minute’ was more like twenty, and Mum was fidgeting and talking a lot. She said something about how I should be grateful that Vincent was coming along to all the court dates. Finally Sarah emerged and walked toward us, and Mum stood up.
‘Do you take an oath or affirmation?’ Sarah asked her.
‘What?’
‘Do you swear on the Bible, or just make a promise?’ she clarified, but Mum’s panic was blocking her ears.
‘To who?’ She looked at me, frightened.
‘You have to promise to tell the truth when you go in,’ I said, touching her arm. ‘And do you want the religious version or the non-religious version?’
‘Oh, non-religious,’ she said.
I smiled and nodded at her, watched them walk away together, then slumped back into my chair and waited. A television in the corner showed a white man with a gross neck beard going around Japan, eating their hottest chillies and making grotesque gestures, surrounded by beautiful Japanese women applauding. After every challenge that he completed, a big stamp of words would slam onto the screen, ‘Man versus Heat’, with a sound effect like weights dropping. Everything seemed incredibly absurd.
The pre-trial hearing only took about fifteen minutes. Everyone came out of the double doors at once, and I saw Samuel leaving quickly, his hands in his pockets. He looked a bit like the man in the chilli show—like shit.
‘Well, that went really well,’ Sarah said to all of us standing in a semicircle.
Vincent grabbed and squeezed my hand and smiled at me.
‘But Samuel didn’t enter a plea?’ I asked. I had thought if it went ‘well’ enough, he might just plead on the spot.
‘No, the matter has been transferred up to the District Court. It’ll take me about three months before I have time to do the paperwork to present an indictment, and then it’ll get given a date for trial.’
I exhaled. ‘Okay.’
‘But today couldn’t have gone any better,’ Sarah turned to Mum, ‘you did really well.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
The four of us went for coffee afterwards, and Mum and Dad told us about how the police had tried to organise drones to fly around the neighbourhood of the family home to get aerial photos of the spaces in the backyard, where the trampoline had been, but had been so disorganised that they failed, twice. People hadn’t shown up, things hadn’t worked.
‘Was it Sean?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Dad said, ‘once just him and someone else, and the actual drones never arrived, and the next time there were about six other officers. It was ridiculous.’
‘And were the photos used in court?’
‘No!’
Vincent and I said goodbye to my parents and went to the shops to buy socks. At lunchtime we made our way to the food court and were stepping off an escalator when Vincent grabbed my hand. ‘Samuel, nine o’clock, change direction, this way.’
And we turned right and walked outside, all the way to our bus stop.
‘Did he see us?’ I asked when we were safe on the bus.
‘No.’
‘What was he eating?’
‘Sushi.’
‘Did he look happy?’
‘No.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Come on.’
‘He looked like a miserable man who’s been rightly accused of molesting a child, and who has just spent another few thousand dollars fighting an inevitable outcome, and then has to go eat some sushi for lunch.’
‘He was alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Did I tell you my parents got a Christmas card from his parents last year?’
‘What?’
‘I know, he hasn’t told anyone.’
I got another letter from the DPP three weeks later. The same flowchart and list of definitions, but this time the bubble one step further was highlighted. The next bubble was ‘indictment presented’, but then there was a bubble below it saying ‘mentions’ before the flowchart split into two—‘Not Guilty Plea/No Plea’ compared to ‘Guilty Plea’. I got confused. How could he not enter a plea at all if the indictment had been presented? How many times would I need to be reminded, in new or different ways, that the stuff I’d seen as an associate was the very end of the long journey?
I remembered the research I’d been doing into sex offenders and dug up the statistics sheet from the ABS. Seventy per cent
of people accused of criminal offences plead guilty, but the number drops to about 30 per cent for sex offences. Each step of the flowchart is risky for a complainant. This time the letter said: ‘If an indictment is presented…It is important to note that it could be some time before this matter is listed for a significant court event…We will advise you once a date has been set and if or when you are required to attend court.’
Then, on a total whim a few weeks later, 22 August, I called the number on the letter and asked for Kirsty, and was informed that I had a new victim liaison officer: Dan was my third. Was it normal to go through three VLOs? I didn’t know anything about why they were changing. Dan was out at lunch.
When he called me back I was walking around Coles, and he told me the good news that the indictment against Samuel was being presented on 5 September, a full month ahead of schedule. I was ecstatic for a split second, then my stomach sank—Vincent and I had scheduled a week away to celebrate our fifth anniversary.
I asked Dan if someone would be in touch with me about the outcome of the indictment being presented, or if I should attend myself, and he said he’d make sure a letter got posted to me. I scoffed silently. As soon as he’d said the date a new little egg timer had started in my mind. There was no way I was going to wait until a letter maybe arrived in the post weeks later, if at all, to find out what happened.
I would have been livid if Vincent had asked to cut our time away in half, but when I called him on the phone to tell him the news he immediately offered that we drive back to attend the indictment. I felt as if I had to choose between him and Samuel: between my past and my future.
‘Well, either he pleads guilty and we go out and have the biggest bender of our entire lives, on me,’ I said down the line, ‘or he says “not guilty”, and I’m glad I didn’t interrupt our holiday for bad news.’ I was walking along the makeup and razor blades aisle.
‘Yeah, sounds great, it’s totally up to you,’ Vincent replied.
‘Even if he pleaded guilty, it would be listed for sentence on a separate date anyways, and I’d definitely go to that. I think this is fine.’
