After some argument the Crown Court Judge allowed full press reporting of the case once it had been made plain by the prosecution that Catherine was not to be prosecuted for perjury. The local rag printed chunks of the exchanges between the bar and the bench.
‘Milord, it is difficult to know which lie we could prosecute if she was charged with perjury,’ the prosecuting barrister had told the judge.
‘I can’t see the point in it,’ the judge had said. ‘Enough is surely enough and the public purse shouldn’t have to pay for a pointless prosecution. What’s happened to the child?’ The judge knew the answer to that, surely. He just wanted it in the public domain.
‘There is now a full care order, Milord, and she is placed for adoption.’
‘Then there must be no reporting that might lead to her identification.’ Jennifer told me that she could not believe her ears when the judge said that.
‘No identification? Is he kidding? What about jigsaw identification? How many barristers are there who have their children removed from them in a second set of court proceedings? How many barristers accuse their step-fathers of sexual assault and are found to have lied at the trial?’
Of course she was right. Everyone knew that the so-called complainant was Catherine Warrenberg and everyone knew that it was her daughter who was adopted. It buzzed around the Temple in no time at all.
Well, Martha has been adopted now for about four years and her name has been changed, so nothing I say will make any difference. How do I know that? I read it in a newspaper. And the papers never lie.
Brian gave an interview the day the trial ended and it appeared in the local rag as ‘My months of hell.’ It described how he said that he had faced a year of misery as he was falsely accused of having sexually abused his step-daughter. I wonder how much he was paid for that. There was a picture of him smiling and walking arm in arm with Geraldine as they left the court building. Another article was headed ‘All bar one,’ a tale of lies and two barristers – the ‘one’ was Martha. There was a pixelated (is that the word?) picture that someone had got off Catherine’s Facebook account showing me and Catherine together with me pushing Martha in her pushchair, save that a zigzag line had been drawn on the picture between Martha and the two of us.
That’s where things had ended up ten months later in July 2004 when the criminal case finally ended in court.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I had spent the night of the bomb drop, the early hours of my 41st birthday when Catherine had first told me what had happened, on a bench on Clapham Common having walked out of the flat without any idea at all where I was going. Finding myself on the Common, I had bought a bottle of whiskey from the all night supermarket near the tube station and got smashed out of my brain on a drink that I hated. In the morning I rang Jennifer.
‘How’s Cornwall?’ she asked when she answered the phone.
‘It isn’t’ and then I ranted at her down the phone.
‘Simon, you are not making sense. Are you drunk?’
‘Yes. Very.’
‘OK. Where are you, Simon? I had better come to pick you up.’
Jennifer picked me up in her car and took me to her home, much to her husband’s irritation, where I went straight to sleep in the spare room. When I woke up and sobered up I talked it through with Jennifer. Two things were obvious. I couldn’t stay in her house – not with her kids and her husband there – and I had to go back to talk things through with Catherine.
I went back to the flat on Sunday but the dominoes did not stop falling. When we tried to talk about what had happened it just kept getting worse and worse. It wasn’t rape – Brian had been too knowledgeable to do anything that involved penetration. He used to lie behind her when he was pretending to read her a story at night and ejaculate between her buttocks; that explained the episode in the kitchen with me. It had started when she was six and had continued, on and off, until she was fourteen. Sometimes once a week, sometimes once a month; as she grew older it was less frequent. When she told her mother – as she did when she was reaching puberty - her mother slapped her and called her a liar although, after that, he only did it very infrequently. It only stopped finally when she told Brian that she would put rat poison in his food if he did it again.
‘How could you have left Martha with them for five months then?’ It was an obvious bloody question.
‘I didn’t. I was there most of the time.’
‘I thought you were only alone with Martha once. That’s what your mum told the judge.’
‘Oh, Simon, get real.’
‘So, that was a lie too?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Catherine, what else was a lie? Did you try to suffocate Martha?’
‘How can you ask that? You know I didn’t.’
‘I don’t know anything now. I don’t even know who you are.’
‘Simon, this is hopeless…fucking hopeless.’
That’s when she went to pieces again.
‘Why did he do it? Why did he do it to me? I was a child!’
‘I can’t answer that.’
‘But he’s still doing it now isn’t he? And you’re letting him. Can’t you see? He’s still ruining my life…our lives. Martha’s life. Right now. Here in this room.’
‘I need to clear my head. I’m going for a walk.’ The conversation was out of control and I just walked out again. I went down to Battersea Park this time and walked along the river front, past the peace Pagoda again. I must have been out for about an hour and a half.
Even now I can’t face writing in any detail about what happened next. I went back to the flat and let myself in. I found Catherine, huddled in the corner of the sitting room in the flat, drunk and with tears pouring down her face. Martha was in her cot, screaming and needing her nappy changed. When Catherine saw me she buried her face in her hands and started to scream ‘go away.’ I went towards her but she shrank into the corner further, cowering and turning her face to the wall away from me. There was an empty bottle of paracetamol next to her. I had never seen anyone in that sort of state before.
‘What have you done? What have you done?’ I asked.
Catherine said nothing but just remained in the corner of the room.
There was nothing for it. I went to the phone and called an ambulance. I picked Martha out of her cot and tried to comfort her. I got a glass of water for Catherine but she knocked it from my hand when I held it for her. I went to change Martha, because the smell was overpowering and she was in obvious discomfort. I tried calling Helen but there was no answer. The only person left was Geraldine and so I rang her and said that she needed to come round urgently.
The ambulance arrived within minutes together with the police. I had told the operator that I thought that my partner had taken an overdose and so it was hardly surprising that the police came as well. Catherine was taken away in the ambulance very quickly. I had to remain with Martha and answer some questions from the police about what had occurred. Geraldine arrived soon after Catherine had left and it was agreed that she would have to care for Martha overnight and I would go to the hospital.
What followed? What followed is that Catherine was transferred to a psychiatric hospital and detained under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act 1983 for assessment and then, under Section 3, for treatment. She was diagnosed as suffering from severe depression with suicidal ideation. Under sedation and therapy she had told them all about what Brian had done to her. She had told them about her mother and how her mother had not protected her as a child against the wicked abuse perpetrated against her by him. She had told them about Martha and that led to inevitable questions about her, too. And that led to the social services becoming involved again and all the questions that I had asked just tumbled out making it impossible for Martha to stay with Geraldine. It meant that Catherine told them all about her lies, about her failure to protect Martha during those five months, the risks that Brian and Geraldine posed to a female child –
everything.
That led, inevitably, to Martha being taken into care, this time with the social services on very sure ground. At one stage they even wanted to re-open the fact finding hearing before the judge, but they didn’t need to. A suicidal, unprotective, untrustworthy and untruthful mother now with acute psychiatric illness, an abusive step-grandfather and grandmother and no one else to care for her. So, once again Martha was the subject of care proceedings. We had certainly kept the legal profession employed.
And Catherine and me? I dropped the engagement ring that I had bought off Waterloo Bridge into the Thames and with it went our relationship. I saw her once, eventually, in the hospital but she became so inconsolably distressed that I was asked not to come again.
‘She can’t face seeing you,’ the sister in charge said.
‘What do you think I should do?’ I asked.
‘Stay away please. She’s really unwell.’ I did as the sister asked. It was the easiest thing to do.
The next time I saw Catherine was after she had given evidence in the Crown court. A gaunt, bowed, grey Catherine. She looked towards me, gave an exhausted half-smile of resignation and walked on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was Dave, the clerk who told me and did so in the true clerks’ language.
‘Things have really gone tits up, sir, I’m afraid.’
‘Tell me about it.’ I thought he was being sympathetic.
‘No, sir, I’m serious.’
He closed the door of my room and sat down opposite me.
‘We’ve had a complaint.’ He passed me the printout of an email. A solicitor, who had been a friend in times gone by, had written saying that a client had complained that I smelt heavily of drink at court the week before. I probably did, although I denied it. By then my practice was already going down the pan, anyway, so it didn’t make much difference.
The legal gossip machine had swung into action well before the criminal trial. How could it not, when Catherine had not turned up for work and was once again caught up in care proceedings? My involvement became known to everyone and, in any event, I was in such a complete state that I had no business representing people. Solicitors didn’t want to instruct me due to the adverse publicity, so my whole career went into a nose dive.
What’s more, I had persuaded myself that there was no point in what I was doing – everyone lies and the truth was just a game. I hated being in court and couldn’t concentrate on papers that I was supposed to read. I was back living in a flat on my own, in Camden as luck would have it, drinking like a fish.
The complaint from the solicitor was smoothed over but only after I had been called to a meeting with the head of chambers and Dave.
‘You can’t go on like this,’ the head said.
‘I just need some time to sort myself out…please can you just give me some time.’ I knew that he was right, though.
‘Well,’ Dave saw his chance and took it, ‘perhaps the best thing is for you to take a break from work. Take a sabbatical. Get your head together.’
‘I’m not sure that I want to do that,’ I said.
‘You may have to. We can’t have you dragging the whole of chambers down. We do have a reputation to maintain.’ The head came out with the obvious line. His advocacy was like that also. Solid. Sound. But not imaginative.
‘I’ll let you know in the morning,’ I said.
‘OK, but I have asked the clerks to clear your diary for the rest of the week.’ I half expected him to ask me to clear my desk.
There was no one to talk to, other than Jennifer.
‘Simon you’re in a hole and you’ve got to stop digging. Take time off and get yourself sorted. If you don’t it’s only going to get worse.’
She was right, of course, and coming from Jennifer it was advice, not demand. And that’s how I ended up in India. Jennifer had been to Kerala with her family and knew that, if I went there, I could avoid the tourist drag of westerners and get some space. So that’s where I went. Career in law – totally screwed. Personal life – trashed. I think I knew from the start that I would never come back.
And the family case when I represented Catherine? What do I make of that now? If the judge had discovered the truth about Catherine he certainly would not have been influenced by Catherine’s good character and solid background. But, at the end of the day, so what? Just because she had been sexually abused as a child, and wanted to conceal it, does not make her guilty of trying to suffocate her daughter. And how should I know what really happened?
The answer to whether I think that Catherine, in her distress and isolation, did try to suffocate Martha lies in this story: A man goes to a fancy dress party stark naked save that he has a condom on the end of his nose. ‘Goodness me, what have you come as?’ asks the hostess. ‘Fuck nose,’ replies the man. Yes, I have told the joke as I said I might. Josh and I used to allude to it whenever we got stuck on a question – ‘fuck nose’ became a relationship based buzz phrase.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I left England with three credit cards, two debit cards, money in three linked online bank accounts in London, next to no clothes or possessions and my tail between my legs. I sold a few odds and sods on Gumtree and dumped the rest, save for my bike and a few other bits of paraphernalia which I left in Jennifer’s garage.
I had decided to clear everything up in London. Dump the lot and see what happened if I ran away. Try it. If it didn’t work I could always come back so I told no one of my thoughts. I didn’t even clear my room in chambers, so God only knows who ended up with my expensive desk, pens and the rest of the crap that I had there. I had two complete changes of clothing, a wash bag, some waterproofs, my favourite cap, my diaries and that is just about it; it was barely worth putting in the luggage hold. I carried with me my laptop and iPod. Music has been my constant companion.
I think that I learnt the tricks of travelling pretty quickly. Never carry all your possessions with you unless you have to. Don’t carry large amounts of cash. Stay in hotels where there is a safe in the room so that your possessions are not all nicked. Carry essential documents and cards in secure places around your body – for me in a money belt tucked into my trousers and a pouch hanging round my neck. Make sure you know where the ATM cash machines are – there are plenty in India but this country only got its first ATM with international facilities in 2002 and so, even now, there are fewer here – the tsunami and civil war didn’t help. Guard your passports and cards with your life, that’s the main rule of the road. Always carry the emergency contact number for the bank in England and check the ATM is working before you use it – if the electricity or phone lines fail while your card is in the machine it gobbles up your card as happened to me in Palace Cross Road in Bangalore.
My sabbatical from work was supposed to last for only three months. I flew out at the start of October 2003 and kept to the plan by coming back to the UK in December, just before Christmas. I had spent the first month in India at Kovalam Beach which is a resort on the south west of Kerala. I have got very little memory of that month as I spent it pissed out of my brain on feni, which is a vile and amazingly strong liquor most of which is distilled - in a test tube, if taste is anything to go by - in Goa. That was the only place that I had a load of cash stolen when, like a complete drongo, I left a pile of money with my clothes when I went swimming in the sea. If you are stupid enough to leave money lying around here or in India it will get stolen.
Eventually I pulled myself off the alcoholic slide and went to the old hill station called Ootacamund which is in the Nilgiri hills, thinking that I might get some peace there. However, it was just an endless hassle; I wanted to be left alone and wasn’t. So, in the end the hotel owner arranged that I should go to stay on a tea plantation in Coonoor, in a chalet complex owned by his so-called cousin.
Coonoor is where I did begin to get my thoughts straight and spent my time there doing next to nothing for about six weeks. I did a bit of walking in the hills, learnt
how they grow and cultivate tea, coffee, pepper and oranges and drew the flora of the hills, including the enigmatic Kurinji ‘blue’ flower that is said to bloom every twelve years; in fact it looks like a purplish pink azalea but makes a beautiful study. But most of the time I sat on the veranda outside my chalet just watching the tea pickers as they moved diligently around the tea plantations working for a pittance.
What was it like in Coonoor? Everything seemed to be suspended when I was there, as if I was living in a dream, detached from the world around me. As if I was dreaming about watching a film. I didn’t drink most of the time but went on the occasional bender in my room - it’s very easy to drink a bottle of spirits in one sitting once you start. I hardly ate anything. I just sat on the veranda. I didn’t cry, not like I have done now. I didn’t talk to anyone either, save to discuss everyday things. I sat there. The only real communication I had was with Jennifer and this email that I wrote to her paints the picture that I remember so well.
‘As I am writing this, the view from the veranda across the Nilgiri Hills is stunning and full of colour and sharp contrast. The tea plantation falls down the hill in front of me towards Coonoor with the rows of tea bushes following the contours across the slope. There is a red earthed path that works its way down the hill with a serpentine and orange hosepipe irrigating its way along its middle. Dotted around the plantation, like telegraph poles with fringes of foliage on top, are the silver trunks of the pollarded trees that afford a meagre shade for the workers and plants below. Amongst the bushes are bursts of colour from the saris of the tea pickers, some bright red, some bright blue, one bright yellow. The workers glide between the orderly green bushes with their heads covered by white cloths, shielding themselves against the unyielding Indian sun; from here, their swift brown hand movements are barely discernible as they snap the leaf-bearing twigs from the tops of the dense plants. The veranda where I am sitting is newly built and heats up in the sun of the day throwing out the distinctive smell of pinewood. The mango juice, contained in a jug to protect against the menacing flies, sits fresh on the bamboo table besides me, next to my laptop and sends out an occasional waft of fragrance. I am alone, there is little noise beyond the distant labours of the plantation and the incessant Indian rumble.’
The Water Is Warm Page 12
