by Vicary, Tim
‘No. Of course not. I wanted her back.’
‘Exactly. You’d betrayed her with another girl, but you wanted her back. The one thing that you couldn’t accept was the idea that this vulnerable young student should open her eyes and see you for the heartless monster that you are. You couldn’t stand that. So when she came back to collect her things, you forced her to stay, didn’t you, David?’
‘Not forced, no. I persuaded her!’
‘Well, so you say. She came to your flat to collect her things and you persuaded her to take off her clothes and have sex with you on the floor. It wasn’t love, was it? You did it to humiliate her, to show her who was in control. You’re a powerful, violent young man, David. The only reason she had sex with you was to appease you, because she was afraid.’
‘No!’ An odd smile crossed his face. ‘I told you, she liked it!’
‘She liked it so much that she committed suicide afterwards - is that your story?’
‘No, well - I don’t know why she killed herself, do I?’
‘No, David, of course you don’t, because she didn’t commit suicide at all. The pathologist has told us that. The lethal cuts were on her right wrist, not her left. The bruises on her head and neck were caused by someone holding her down, underwater, until she nearly drowned. That was you, David, wasn’t it? After you raped her, you killed her.’
‘No.’
‘Didn’t you, David? Can you look these jurors in the eye and tell them that? I doubt it. You raped Shelley Walters, on the floor of your flat. You humiliated her, so that afterwards, she got in the bath to make herself clean. To wash the stink of you off her body, I expect. That’s what girls do when they’ve been raped. But you didn’t leave her alone even then, did you? You followed her into the bathroom.’
‘No! She shut the door, I’ve told you.’
‘You went into the bathroom, David. What did she say to you, when you went in? Something that annoyed you, perhaps - that she didn’t want you there, that you’d raped her and she was never coming back? Was that when you decided to kill her?’
‘No ... she didn’t say anything. You weren’t there.’
‘So why are there bruises round her neck, then, David? Bruises caused by someone trying to drown her? Because she struggled, didn’t she, David? Struggled to get her head above water, trying to breathe - and you held her down with those powerful muscular arms of yours until she stopped moving, she lost consciousness.’
‘No. This didn’t happen.’
‘I think it did, David. You held her down until you thought you’d drowned her. Then you stopped and thought, this won’t do, this doesn’t look good, this girl’s alone with me in my flat and I’ve murdered her. So in order to disguise what you’d done, you went into the kitchen, found a knife and cut her wrists to make it look like suicide. Then you went out to the shop to give yourself an alibi. That’s what happened, isn’t it, David? You went out to buy a bunch of flowers for a girl you’d left half drowned and bleeding to death in your bath.’
‘Then why was she still alive when I came back, then? You tell me that! Twenty minutes later and she was still alive. It’s not possible, is it?’
It was a serious, damaging blow, right at the end when she had him on the ropes. Sarah saw several jurors nodding thoughtfully. She took the only line open to her.
‘It’s not possible because it’s not true. Mr Patel was perfectly clear in his first statement to the police. You were in his shop for less than five minutes. That’s the truth, isn’t it, David?’
‘That’s not what he said when he stood here, yesterday.’
‘Mr Patel was confused. He couldn’t remember how long you were there. But you know, don’t you, David? You went to his shop deliberately to create an alibi.’
‘No. I went there to buy flowers to show that I loved her. She killed herself while I was out. I didn’t know she was going to do that, how could I? She was a mad girl. You heard that psychiatrist. She was depressed.’
‘So depressed that you decided to kill her.’
‘No! I didn’t kill her, she killed herself.’
There was nowhere to go from here, Sarah decided, she had reached an impasse. The only other possibility was that David had driven Shelley to suicide, which would make him morally guilty, but not legally. That was an avenue for Savendra to explore, not her.
She saw no grief on David Kidd’s face, no remorse or regret. Only the look of a man who has seen a way to save his own skin, and is determined to do it, whatever the cost to others. His lip curled in a smile of contemptuous triumph. His face was flushed, his eyes shone with the knowledge that she’d failed to break him down.
Sarah stood for a moment, silent, hoping the jury would see in his face what she did.
Then she folded her gown about her, and sat down.
27. Scorn
THE FINAL day of the trial began for Sarah with another row. This time it was about her daughter Emily, who announced that she was going to London this weekend with Larry on an anti-globalisation protest. Sarah was relaxed about this, Bob was not. He claimed to be worried about injury or drugs, but Sarah thought it had more to do with his application for the headship of the Harrogate school. He didn’t want his chances ruined by tabloid headlines like ‘York head’s daughter assaults police. Home discipline fails.’
It wasn’t discipline, Sarah thought, that was failing in their home, it was something else. Day by day they were drifting apart. A half-hearted attempt at reconciliation with Bob last night had collapsed. She’d sat up with her speech until one a.m. instead of accompanying him to bed as he’d asked. The two text messages he’d had from his secretary over supper hadn’t helped either. The wound to their marriage was not healed, and rows like this morning’s scratched the injury raw.
It hurt. She watched enviously as Savendra approached the court with his fiancee, tired and yawning. Young love fades into memory, she thought, marriage into a joint investment, a convenient housing arrangement with a man whose mind slid away from hers as her body slid from his in bed. Work is the best therapy. Maybe if he gets that job, and I send this lad to prison, we can attempt a reconciliation.
Behind Savendra she saw Terry Bateson, approaching court with that long easy stride of his. He smiled as he saw her, and her heart lifted slightly, as it often did when she saw him. Here was a man who at least shared and understood the demands of the work which filled so much of her time, and seemed to value her for what she did. Just as she, on the whole, valued him, despite his irritating carelessness with the evidence of the shopkeeper, Patel. She met him outside the main entrance, and they strolled quietly along the verandah outside the court.
‘So, this is it. Judgement day,’ Terry said. ‘Are you nervous?’
‘Always. I wouldn’t be any good if I wasn’t. There’s only my speech left, then it’s out of my hands. Have you come to watch?’
‘For an hour or so, yes. And I’ll try to be back for the verdict. When’s that - about three?’
‘Sometime like that. Speeches and summing up should be over this morning, and then ... as long as the jury take to make up their minds.’
‘A long wait for you. And the girl’s family,’ said Terry thoughtfully.
‘Yes. That’s the worst part of every trial - waiting. Oh, God, look at this!’ They had reached the end of the verandah, and a sudden gust of wind swirling round the corner of the building set Sarah’s gown flapping around her like a sail, and she had to clutch her skirt to hold it down. Her wig blew out of her hand, and Terry ran to retrieve it, while she stepped back into the shelter of the building, laughing.
‘Thanks.’ They stood with their backs to the wall of the court until the wind died down, watching white fluffy clouds chasing each other through a blue sky behind Clifford’s Tower, the Norman castle on its grassy mound. For a second, Sarah wished she could spend the day like this, walking the hills in the open air with this man beside her, instead of the long hours of trauma in crowded rooms which
would face her soon. She looked up at him, smiling at the way the wind had ruffled his hair across his forehead. ‘I’ll need a holiday after this,’ she said. ‘Not that I’ll get one.’
‘Won’t you? Pity. You deserve it. Where would you go?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Anywhere. A day at the seaside would do.’ For a moment their eyes met and she wondered, what does he see in me, really? Just a bossy, aggressive barrister, or something more? A woman that if he’d met elsewhere, in different circumstances ...
But the moment blew away as swiftly as it had come. She saw Shelley’s parents and sister approaching the court, holding their coats in the blustery wind, and turned back towards the main entrance to meet them. Terry fell into step by her side.
‘It’s going to be a hard day for them,’ she said. ‘Even if we win.’
‘What do you mean, even if? There’s no question of it, is there? He murdered the girl, we all know that. Surely the jury will see it.’
Sarah stopped near the entrance. Shelley’s family were at the foot of the steps. She looked up at him, shaking her head slowly. ‘Sometimes, Terry, you’re charmingly naive for a policeman. This jury contains some of the roughest looking characters I’ve seen for a long time, and your boss’s contribution to this case has given them the perfect excuse for revenge against the police if they want one. It’s quite possible we’ll lose this case, Terry - I’m warning you now.’
‘You’ll win, Sarah. You always do, when it matters.’
‘Well, thanks for your confidence. I’ll do my best, of course. But ... wish me luck.’ She touched Terry’s hand briefly, and walked past him to meet Shelley’s family.
Entering court, Sarah put her doubts behind her and began to take the jury through the evidence for the final time. Several of them - the shaven-headed young men and the girl in the tracksuit - still worried her. She spoke as simply as possible.
‘Why do the prosecution say this is murder? Well, firstly, we have the pathologist, who told us how her wrists were cut. The artery in her right wrist was pierced, while that in her left was not. Why is this so important? Because Shelley Walters was right-handed. So if she had wanted to cut her own wrists she would have picked up the knife in her right hand and plunged it into her left wrist, wouldn’t she? Think about it for yourselves. No right-handed person would cut their right wrist first; it just doesn’t happen.
‘So that’s it, isn’t it, members of the jury? I could sit down now, it seems to me, and the case is proved. She didn’t cut her own wrist, the pathologist says. Someone else did it for her. So she was murdered. In David Kidd’s bath. In David Kidd’s flat. When no one but David Kidd was there. End of story. That should be enough to convict him outright.
‘But there is more evidence, equally clear, equally damning. There is the knife that killed her, found on the bathroom floor. A knife belonging to David Kidd, with David’s fingerprints on it. Not Shelley’s fingerprints, just his, in her blood.
‘Then there are the bruises on her head and neck. What do they tell us? Well, the pathologist says, they are pressure marks, caused by someone holding Shelley underwater, so that she would drown. And she was drowning too - she had water in her lungs, bloody froth in her mouth.’
Watching from the public gallery, Shelley’s sister Miranda trembled with a sudden memory of the dank, brackish water in that tank in the forest, where she had so nearly drowned as a child. She remembered how it sucked the strength from her body, as her splashes grew feebler; she remembered how it got into her ears and mouth and nose, leaves and small beetles making her sneeze, the water creeping back again, dank and insidious and inevitable ...
Shelley had saved her from all that. But no one had been there in David’s flat to save Shelley. Tears misted her eyes, as she listened to the damning words of the prosecutor, describing how David Kidd had first killed her sister, then bought her flowers, to give himself an alibi.
Kathryn clasped Miranda’s hand in her own. Mrs Newby, she felt, was putting the case well. Kathryn’s initial distrust of the woman had changed to respect. She had treated the psychiatrist with the scorn he deserved, and exposed David’s lies. Soon her daughter’s murderer would be locked away, and she could relax. Kathryn felt the little diamond engagement ring on Miranda’s finger, the smooth wedding band behind it. One child at least was still alive, with a loving husband and daughter. Maybe I’ll move to America when all this is over, she thought wistfully. Why not? There’s nothing here but memories, horror, and sadness. Why not sell up, and make a fresh start?
Leave Kidd here to rot in his dungeon.
Sarah dealt with the shopkeeper’s evidence briefly. The man was confused, she said, that was understandable when recalling events that took place so long ago. Events, moreover, that he had no reason to think were important at the time. ‘Use your own experience, members of the jury. Could you say how long you spent in a shop even yesterday, if I asked you now? Two minutes, five, ten - do you really remember? Yet when Mr Patel stood in this court he was trying to recall things from months past. He was not dishonest, he was simply confused.’
Sarah paused to survey the jurors. They were listening, yet she sensed, somehow, that her points were not going home as they should. Several studied her sceptically, with that irritating certainty of youth that everyone in authority is lying - it’s only a matter of finding out how, if you can be bothered. Calmly, she controlled her voice. It was all she had to persuade them.
‘So we should put Mr Patel’s evidence aside, and concentrate on the hard simple facts. Facts that we know to be true. Shelley Walters was killed in that flat. The bruises on her head and neck, the cuts on her wrists, all show that this was murder, not suicide. David Kidd’s fingerprints were found on the knife, no one else was in the flat but him. In my view that evidence proves, beyond all reasonable doubt, that Shelley Walters was murdered, and David Kidd murdered her. In the light of that evidence, it is your duty to find him guilty.’
As she sat down, the girl in the tracksuit yawned.
28. Devil’s Advocate
AS SAVENDRA got to his feet he swayed slightly with exhaustion. He had spent the night wrestling with a speech which had become a nightmare. Always before, the ethics of the Bar had seemed clear: every client was entitled to a defence, and it was his job to provide it. But never before had he defended someone quite so reprehensible, on such a serious charge. It was a vital week for him - his first murder defence, his wedding next week - and yet he was consumed by horror at the thought that the words he was about to speak might save the man who, he was convinced, was morally responsible for Shelley Walters’ death.
Morally, and perhaps legally too. That was the dilemma he had wrestled with throughout the night. Did the fact that Shelley had been doped with rohypnol make it impossible for her to have killed herself, or just highly unlikely? Savendra didn’t know. It depended, he supposed, on the strength of the dose, her size and bodyweight, and exactly how long before her death she had taken the drug. All of these things could have been debated in open court, if the wretched pathologist had done his job properly and discovered the traces of the drug in her bloodstream. But he hadn’t; and so Savendra was burdened with the weight of knowledge which the ethics of client confidentiality forbade him to disclose. He was trapped; all he could do was lay his client’s defence before the jury, and hope they were blessed with wisdom. He stood now and faced them - two elderly women, four middle aged men, two with beer bellies, four young men with shaven heads, two vacant looking girls, one surreptitiously chewing gum - and began.
Grimly, he told them that they should convict only if they were sure, beyond reasonable doubt, of David Kidd’s guilt. Otherwise, they must acquit. He explained how the bruises might have been caused by David’s clumsy attempts at first aid, the fingerprints on the knife by David’s picking it up when he found it beside the bath, his lies by panic and distress. He reiterated his theory that Shelley had made a tentative attempt to cut her left wrist first, and then sta
bbed her right wrist more strongly, causing the fatal injury. The cleverness of this idea no longer impressed him; the words tasted sour in his mouth.
But he had better arguments to make. ‘Now that Mr Patel has changed his mind, the whole prosecution case collapses. It is, quite simply, not plausible that she would remain alive, in that bath, more than twenty minutes after her artery was pierced.
‘So for all four points of the prosecution’s evidence - the bruises, the fingerprints, the cuts, and the timing - there is an alternative explanation, a doubt. And the benefit of that doubt must go to the defendant.’
He glanced at the jurors, several of whom, to his dismay, looked reasonably impressed. Now came the really cruel part of his task. He could feel the eyes of Shelley’s family boring into the back of his head. This is why we get paid so much, he thought; to say really nasty things clearly. To tell a lie for a fee.
‘Well, members of the jury, if this wasn’t murder, there’s only one alternative, isn’t there? It must have been suicide. But why should Shelley Walters, a healthy young girl with all her life ahead of her, commit such a terrible act? It gives me no pleasure to say this, but here too there is an alternative explanation. One which, if you accept it, doesn’t lead to murder at all.’
‘This is a tragic love affair. Shelley Walters, in her first year at university, meets David Kidd, and falls in love with him.’ He glanced over his shoulder, surveying his client in the dock with distaste. ‘You have seen Mr Kidd; you may not like him very much. You may even think like Mrs Newby, that Mr Kidd is a monster - a cold, selfish sexual predator. You may be right. But that does not make him a murderer.’
He ploughed grimly on, going through the psychiatrist’s evidence, the stress that Shelley had suffered, with her mother pulling one way, and David Kidd pulling the other. Her discovery of him in bed with another girl.
