Tattletale

by Sarah J. Naughton

  I take her by the shoulders and look into her eyes.

  ‘They might not believe you, Jody. But they’ll believe me.’

  Then I smile.

  He won’t know what hit him.

  New Year’s Eve

  39. Mags

  Jody and I have Christmas together. I intend for us to spend it quietly, in memory of my brother, but then I think screw it, and book us into Claridges for Christmas dinner and a room for the night. It costs more than my flights, but we agree that Abe would love the idea of us being here. He would appreciate the spa-brand toiletries, the Egyptian-cotton bedding and deep-pile dressing gowns Jody swans around in. I tell her that they, and the contents of the mini bar, come with the room and she should help herself.

  Over breakfast on Boxing Day I explain my plans for New Year’s Eve. She blanches, but I reassure her that everything will be all right and, trusting soul that she is, she believes me. Later she returns to St Jerome’s in a cab with both our cases, while I head off to the Boxing Day rugby fixture.

  My father loved rugby, my brother too. Just being at the ground takes me back to my childhood. A bit of sentimental nostalgia to ease my homesickness, which is always worse around Christmastime, especially since I’ve just lost my brother. I couldn’t resist popping in on my way past, during one of the longs walks that I’ve taken to making, to clear my head and process the last month’s sad events.

  This is what I tell the old duffers propping up the bar at half-time. Clive and his merry band compete to impress me, with their stats knowledge and witty banter. They buy me drinks and I’m careful to explain that I’m off alcohol since my brother’s accident (we think drinking may have exacerbated his depression). Not that it stops me enjoying myself, I insist. New Year’s Eve is my favourite night of the year, although this year it will be a lonely affair …

  Right on cue they bring up the party I’ve known about ever since I started researching the team.

  Would I like to come, as their special guest, in memory of my brother?

  ‘I wouldn’t know anyone.’

  ‘You’d know us!’ They link arms, all rivalry for my attention forgotten.

  ‘That’s very kind of you. I might just take you up on it.’

  My day’s task successfully fulfilled, I can concentrate on the rest of the match. I spot him at once, from Jody’s description and the name printed on the back of his shirt, and am relieved to discover how easy it is to dislike him: the way he stalks the pitch as if he owns it, the casual violence against players that oppose him, the unsportsmanlike crowing over points scored, and petulant protests when they don’t go his way.

  He comes within touching distance of me as he clumps past on his way to the dressing room, his flesh red with the blood pumping around his muscles, nostrils flared, smelling of sweat and victory. So big, so powerful. He must think he’s invincible.

  I smile and wave at the old duffers making their way back to the bar, and then I head for the bus stop.

  He’s clearly not expecting the call. I sense wariness in the careful neutrality of his tone but he’s still in London and agrees to meet me in a coffee bar in the city, near to the bank where he works. They’re in the middle of a corruption scandal, he says – that’s why he hasn’t yet returned to the US – so he won’t be able to stay long. A get-out clause if he needs one.

  I arrive early and scroll through all the possible ways I can frame the request I plan to put to him, all my possible bargaining tools. Free legal advice with his divorce, sex, money. I know gangsters; I can feel that greasy aura that tells you a person has a price, and usually how much it is. Daniel never had it.

  He arrives before I’ve come up with anything.

  He looks better than last time. His skin is smooth and his hair has grown and started to curl. He wears a grey suit with an open shirt and a pink tie flops like a dog’s tongue from his pocket.

  Clearly married life is doing him good. I resist the urge to say so as I rise from the low-slung armchair. It will sound like sour grapes.

  He hugs me, without a word, and for a moment I let myself sink into him. His neck smells of soap. Lucky Donna.

  Then I take a deep breath and pull away. He’s not mine to enjoy.

  ‘Another coffee?’ he says.

  ‘Latte, please. No sugar.’

  He brings the drinks on a tray with two pieces of cake.

  My lip twitches. ‘No sugar, but I want a super-healthy chocolate brownie?’

  ‘You could do with putting on a few pounds. You don’t look great.’

  ‘Gee, thanks. You do.’

  Shit, shit. We both studiously look in opposite directions.

  ‘I meant,’ oh, here I go, ‘you look well. You must be happy. I’m glad it’s all working out. With Donna.’

  He cuts his brownie in half and clears up the crumbs with a licked fingertip.

  ‘So, what can I do for you? After some investment advice?’

  I look away. I deserve the insult.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says quietly.

  ‘Don’t be. I asked for it.’

  His face is as expressionless as it has been since he arrived, then, heart-breakingly, he smiles. ‘You did.’

  I sigh. Too late now.

  ‘I wanted to ask you something. To do something for me. A small thing.’

  He watches me steadily, sipping his coffee. He knows it isn’t a small thing.

  I feel myself redden. It’s an odd sensation. I haven’t blushed since I was a child. The truth is, I have no idea how to approach this. I could pretend it was all true. Truth is what you can make people believe. I could make him believe the lie.

  Or I could tell him the real truth.

  I close my eyes and step out into the abyss. ‘Someone might ask you … about the nights we spent together.’

  His mug pauses halfway to his lips.

  I take a deep breath. ‘There’s a court case. I’ve made a rape claim against someone and they will want to imply that I enjoy casual sex.’

  He pales. ‘Bastard.’

  I hold up my hand. ‘It’s not as simple as that, Daniel.’

  He leans towards me, head bent, waiting for me to continue.

  I sip my coffee and put it down on the table. It’s too milky, half cold. My hand is trembling and the liquid sloshes over the untouched brownie. Sweat is breaking out around my hairline.

  ‘I want you to say we didn’t sleep together.’

  He frowns. ‘But I asked the concierge for condoms.’

  ‘Say we changed our mind, decided to wait. You’re the only potential weakness in the case.’

  He swallows. ‘What did he do to you? The rapist.’

  Around us the noise of the café becomes muffled, as if we are enclosed in a bubble, a quivering wall of tension surrounding us.

  ‘He killed my brother.’

  I tell him everything. When I’ve finished there is a horribly long silence during which I want to stab myself with the brownie knife. What a stupid thing to do. I came here to patch up a potential weakness in my case, and now I’ve blown a hole in it so big it might not even get to court. Daniel might march straight to the police and tell them everything. They’ll assume I’ve been taken in by Jody’s lies and may be lenient with me, given my ­recent bereavement, or they may just charge me with wasting police time. Otherwise it’s perverting the course of justice. If Jody’s called in, it might very well be prison for her this time – for both of us.

  I blunder to my feet, knocking over the cardboard cup, spilling beige milk all over the table.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come. Please, please forget everything I told you. Please don’t go to the police.’

  ‘Mags—’

  ‘He’s a bad person, Dan. Don’t feel the need to protect him. He did rape her, the first time. Her social worker is a hundred per cent sure. She had injuries and—’

  ‘Mags! Calm down.’

  My heart is pounding and I can barely catch my breath. I sink back into the c
hair. He reaches across the table, his sleeve dragging through the puddle of coffee.

  I grip his hand like a terrified child, but after a moment he lets go, slipping his fingers from mine and getting up.

  ‘Let me think, OK?’

  And then he’s gone. A dark shape in the huge mirror on the wall opposite me, as he passes the window and is lost in the crowd.

  What have I done?

  March

  40. Mags

  The Crown Prosecution Service team’s junior lawyer, Rauf Chaudhry, is a young Pakistani who took his degree at some crappy college in the Midlands, but I suspect he’s going to be seriously good one day. He’s clearly rabidly ambitious and when he finds out I’m a lawyer myself, pumps me for information about the US legal system.

  His official role is to keep me informed about how the trial’s progressing, but I tell him that after I’ve given my witness statement I intend to sit in on proceedings. He does his best to persuade me to present my evidence via video-link, as is the right of all rape victims, but I tell him that I want to face my attacker. I add, with a meaningful smile, that I also want to make sure the CPS doesn’t balls up the case.

  I wear a navy suit to court, no make-up, tie back my hair, put on my reading glasses. My rapist will struggle even to recognise me. No one in the court will remember me after the trial ends.

  I’m the first witness and the court falls silent as the heels of my low pumps tap up to the stand. I can feel eyes upon me, trying to penetrate my drab disguise, to see the trembling victim – or the drunken slut beneath.

  The jury’s an even split, male and female, many of them under forty, which is good. Old prejudices about women who ask for it – with their clothes or their alcohol consumption – die hard.

  That’s why I stuck to Coke on the night of the rape. He said he’d tell you I was drunk, I told the police, that you wouldn’t believe a word I said. The blood and urine test proved I was stone-cold sober, giving credence to my assertion that I’d just gone outside for a wee because the toilets were blocked. You’re not allowed CCTV in a toilet so there was no evidence of me stuffing the bowl with hand towels until the water rose to the rim. It wouldn’t even occur to them to suspect.

  I face the court, unsmiling, and when the judge tells me to begin I give my version of the events of New Year’s Eve with quiet determination, studiously avoiding the accused’s eye – no tears. I’ll let the photographs and the DNA do the work for me.

  His girlfriend sits, stony-faced, listening intently. Sophie, I think. A standard-issue blonde with orange make-up and heavy eyeliner. After a few minutes she gets up and walks out of the court without a backwards glance. It wasn’t hard to convince her that her boyfriend was a rapist. This makes me feel better.

  I talk for half an hour or so and by the end the jury are sipping their water and fanning their faces.

  It’s all gone very well, I think, and it’s hard to stop myself smiling as the judge calls for a break in proceedings before my cross-examination by the defence barrister.

  Rauf is waiting for me outside and escorts me to a witness room with a coffee machine and a sagging sofa pocked with cigarette burns.

  ‘I think that went pretty well, don’t you?’ I say, flopping onto the sofa and kicking off the frumpy shoes. But my smugness falters when he turns back from the coffee machine and hands me my drink.

  ‘What?’

  He shrugs. ‘It sounded like you were reading a script. The jury didn’t warm to you.’

  ‘Frankly, it doesn’t matter whether they warmed to me or not. It’s an open-and-shut case. Wait till they see the photos.’

  He gives me a penetrating glance then, which makes me wonder if he’s guessed I’m hiding something. I can’t tell him the truth, or he’d have to drop the case, but I want him to understand.

  ‘He a violent rapist, Rauf. He deserves to go down. And he will.’

  Rauf runs toffee-coloured fingers through his hair and leans against door. ‘You’ve been living in the US too long. The white British male is an endangered species. Look at him, standing there in his too-tight suit, big hands hanging by his side because he doesn’t know where else to put them. It’s pathetic. The older women will want to mother him, the white men will see themselves. It only needs one or two prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt – that he’s too thick or too unreconstructed to know when a woman means no.’

  Before I can say anything the tannoy system announces that the court is about to go back into session. Rauf opens the door for me and as I move past him he murmurs, ‘I want us to win this case as much as you do so just try and be a bit more … victim-y, OK?’

  I smile indulgently, but as I follow him out into the corridor I’m feeling rattled. And now I must face cross-examination. I know how brutal that can be. I’ve done it myself.

  This time I study the jury more carefully. A young overweight woman squeezed into a wrap-dress casts fluttering glances at the defence bench as the accused whispers with his brief. Is she one of those insecure, desperate types who writes to serial killers in prison, and occasionally marries them? Perhaps she will resent me for being slim and successful. Beside her is an elderly Asian man. He’s beardless and in Western dress, but may still frown upon women who go out to parties without a chaperone.

  Then there’s the token middle-aged white guy: bald, overweight, tattoos peeping from his shirt cuffs, he looks like an older, poorer version of the man in the dock. Shit. Maybe Rauf was right. I need to get them onside. Show some vulnerability.

  Except that’s the one thing I’m no good at. I can shut down but I can’t open up.

  I should take some tips from Jody, who trembled so much when I said goodbye to her this morning that she resembled an out-of-focus photograph. I told her she didn’t have to attend if she didn’t want to, but as I take the stand again I spot her, shrinking behind a pillar on the back bench. She keeps her head down and worries at the buttons of her cardigan as the judge speaks. By contrast Mira, beside her, is straight-backed, her eyes alive with intelligence as she follows the proceedings as best she can. She came back from Albania ostensibly to give Jody and me some moral support. But I think it’s more than that. I think she knows what’s going on, though neither of us has told her. I think she’s here for Loran. To bear witness as the murderer of the man he loved is brought to justice.

  Or not.

  Not if I can’t play my part.

  Come on, Mags, I tell myself as the defence barrister gets up. Make it up. Put on a show. Pretend you’re trying to convince your dad how sorry you are for smoking at the bus stop so that he’ll stop cutting up your little tart’s clothes.

  She’s tall and rangy, with thin dark hair that looks painted to her head and a hooked nose like a bird of prey. As our eyes meet I think I see a flash of recognition, one lawyer to another, both of us determined to play the trial like a game of chess. I look away quickly, dipping my head, the picture of demure trepidation.

  But she’s not stupid.

  ‘It takes guts to face your supposed rapist in court, Miss Mackenzie, especially since you could have given your evidence behind a screen.’

  I straighten my back and swallow hard. Here we go.

  ‘And only a very self-assured young woman would walk alone into a party full of strangers. Just as it takes a certain devil-may-care confidence to urinate outside when other women are waiting patiently for the toilet to be unblocked. And yet,’ she glances at the jury, ‘we are being asked to believe that you are a shrinking violet, unable to defend yourself against my client, too frozen with terror to be able to utter an audible peep to alert the partygoers to your plight.’

  ‘The countdown to midnight was happening,’ I say. ‘It was too noisy.’

  She ignores this. ‘You are a lawyer, Miss Mackenzie. Last year you defended a man charged with evading forty million dollars’ worth of US tax, a man who, in his twenties, was convicted of the murder of three business rivals.’

  I scowl at the C
PS barrister. Come on: object.

  ‘I put it to you, Miss Mackenzie,’ she says, ‘that you are a strong, clever, calculating young woman who is, for reasons best known to yourself, trying to manipulate the court.’

  ‘What possible reason would I have to put myself through this?’ I say, but I know at once I have made a mistake. She has caught the flash of anger in my voice, even if the jury hasn’t. She knows this line is worth pursuing.

  ‘You left home at sixteen, am I right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why was this?’

  ‘My relationship with my parents broke down.’

  ‘Your parents? Or just your father?’

  ‘My parents.’

  ‘Is it the case that you reported your father to the police for false imprisonment?’

  I hesitate. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that you claimed he had beaten you, but no charges were pursued because he said you had attacked him and fallen when he pushed you away.’

  I nod. She has spoken to my teachers.

  ‘So, there has been a history of making false claims in your past?’

  ‘They weren’t false claims.’

  ‘Your father was retired from his role in the Mountain Rescue for health reasons. What were these?’

  ‘He had a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘And your brother recently committed suicide.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you believe mental health problems run in your family?’

  My lip curls. ‘No.’

  She gives a small smile, flagging up to the jury my reluctance to co-operate. The glances they shoot in my direction are closed and hostile. Rauf was right. They don’t like me.

  ‘I put it to you, Miss Mackenzie, that as a young girl with a bullying father, you developed a hatred for men that has continued to this day and has rendered you unable or unwilling to form meaningful relationships. This fact, and your strongly religious upbringing, has resulted in a very conflicted sexual identity. After sexual relations you are so disgusted with yourself you have to lay the blame on someone else – in this case, my client. I suggest that the mental health problems that dogged your father and brother also affect you; that they drove you to make false accusations in the past, and that the cry of rape against my client is just another of these.’