The night before the court case, I was so nervous I slept for about one minute, during which I woke up at least three times. Roxy suggested I take tranquillizers, but I was too worried about the effect of tranquillizers to take any. If only there were a tranquillizer I could take to make me calm enough to take tranquillizers, I told her.
On the morning of Phyllis’s trial, as our minicab crossed London, the vast Victorian mausoleum of the Old Bailey loomed up before me. The Old Bailey is one of the best known buildings in London. Its infamous trials have included Oscar Wilde’s tragic criminal libel debacle and, from the sublime to the vicious, a Who’s Who of psychopathic murderers from Dr Crippen and John Christie to the Yorkshire Ripper and the Kray twins . . . And yet it seems carelessly to shrug off its own importance. The scrappy streets around the building twist their way up towards the pudding dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, which is itself dwarfed by the skyscrapers of the financial district rising up like jagged teeth behind it.
Roxy, Phyllis and I alighted from the minicab outside the court. I looked up at the imposing golden statue of Lady Justice, with her sword in her right hand and the scales in the other, and noticed that she was sensibly barefoot. I, however, was strapped into my highest heels, even higher than usual, because one of Roxy’s rescue dogs, a German shepherd she claimed was merely ‘fun-loving’ but looked as though it could drag you down into the underworld, had chewed through my favourite black court shoes. I’d seen him, ten minutes before I was due to leave home, disappearing outside with my footwear between his foaming incisors. I was now wearing my only other good, black pair, shoes which were so vertiginous I reserved them for first dates only. Those extra five inches meant I was practically en pointe. Which rather imperilled the impression I was trying to create for my first appearance at the Old Bailey of a cool, suave, legal-eagle sophisticate.
As Roxy and Phyllis slalomed ahead through the crowd, I gingerly negotiated the pavement behind them like a toddler taking to the ice. The area was jammed with braying reporters, which meant the ground was crawling with the electrical snakes of TV cables – yellow, black, poison-green – any one of which could trip me up.
‘L’atmosphère est très primitive,’ surmised Countess Flirtalotsky when I finally made it through the barriers of the metal detector. Despite the brightness outside, it felt cold in the court building, as though sunlight had never entered here. Roxy and I exchanged a glance before we parted. My mother’s look was full of confidence and pride. Mine was the opposite.
‘I don’t look like a big ball of anxiety to you, do I?’
‘Darl, if you were any more unwound I’d have to mop you up. But I have every faith in you, Tilly.’ She took out a flask and gave me one of her home-made energy-boosting ginseng drinks – although I suspected a kilo of cocaine might prove more beneficial. ‘Most barristers are either brilliant brainiacs, versed in clause-this and sub-clause that . . . or people-pleasing jury charmers. You have a most unusual combination of both skills. Which is why this will be Pandora’s finest moment.’
She squeezed my hand before escorting Phyllis across the baroque Grand Hall towards the court room, where she would be placed into custody then seated in the dock between two prison officers. Phyllis walked towards her fate as if against a tide, dragging her limbs. I watched as she crumpled on to a bench, head in hands, quietly sobbing. Roxy leant down to speak soothing words. If I lost the case, the old lady would be led into the labyrinth of dark, eerie tunnels below, first to a cell, then straight to prison for a ten-year stretch . . . No pressure then.
A court usher derailed my train of thought to ask if I was nervous about appearing against Jack Cassidy, who had never lost a case here . . . I replied no, but was thinking – nerves? What nerves? . . . I always spray my hair with a deodorant that protects for eighteen hours, spritz my pits with breath freshener, floss my toes and put my tights on backwards.
I wandered off through a warren of hallways, along which eccentric-looking persons hurried past wearing White Rabbit expressions and stiff horsehair wigs. With twenty courts in operation, there were so many barristers it was like following a flock of crows, the black wings of their gowns flying out behind them.
I took the lift up to the fourth floor. Barristers streamed towards the robing room. But there was no sign of Jack in the throng. In the women’s changing room I adjusted my wig, shrugged on my robes and tried not to throw up my breakfast.
Court room number twelve had a church feeling. It was full of oppressive, heavy nineteenth-century mahogany, ornately carved and imperious. I took my seat at the bench assigned to the defence team, to the immediate right of the jury box and facing the judge’s bench, and pretended to be busy with my papers.
The more conventional lawyers at the Bar had always looked at me the way one might study a bizarre decorative item at someone’s house bought as a ‘talking piece’. But that reaction was tame compared to the frisson of disapproval which rippled around the room when my solicitor burst into the court in her leopardskin miniskirt and matching wedges with a crumpled Phyllis in tow. Roxy was as out of place as an iridescent parakeet schooled in profanities holding forth in a prayer meeting.
But the hushed reverence in the room was only truly disturbed when Jack Cassidy strode into view. As he swept past me, robes billowing, wig rakishly askew, the attention of the entire court room shifted to him like flowers turning to the sun. The man was perfumed with success.
‘Good morning, Ms Devine.’ He paused and looked down on me, as I sat at the defence bench. ‘. . . What? No barbed jibe at my expense? Obviously, you’re not quite yourself today . . . I noticed the improvement immediately.’ Jack gave me a sly smile, full of cocksure confidence and devilment.
I passed him the tissue tucked up my sleeve. ‘Wipe your mouth, Jack. There’s still a little bit of bullshit on your lips. Or, better still, why don’t you travel light and leave your sarcasm at home.’
He answered my query by leaning across my bench and stealing my emergency bar of Green and Black’s dark organic, half hidden on the seat beside me.
Before I could remonstrate, the usher called the court to order as the judge lumbered in and sat at his bench, plump as a cushion. Oh no. My heart sank to Jules Verne depths. If only I’d thought to pack some cyanide tablets, now would have been the perfect time to take them, I ruminated, as the dreaded Judge Jaggers, newly promoted to the Old Bailey, arranged his black robes around him then peered sanctimoniously at me over his half-moon specs. If only my desk had an emergency airbag to cushion the blow so I could thump my head on the table in despair. That, or an eject button.
I tried to calm my hyperventilation by looking around the court room. Phyllis was now in the dock at the back of the court, flanked by guards. Roxy was seated directly behind me in order to fire brilliant ideas at my back, while the judge would no doubt fire destructive comments at my face. Jack took his seat at the prosecution bench on my right. When we were all settled, the judge gave the nod and the jury usher brought in twenty potential jurors. They blinked like newborn fieldmice under the harsh fluorescents. Twelve names were drawn from a box by the clerk of the court. The other potential jurors were dismissed. After taking an oath and swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the selected jurors, nine women and three men, sat in overawed silence on their wooden pews, peering up at the judge’s bench as though it were a pulpit.
‘Will the defendant please stand.’ Phyllis was helped to her feet by the officers as the first charge was read out: attempted murder.
‘How do you plead?’ the clerk of the court asked. ‘Guilty or not guilty?’
Phyllis mumbled.
‘Speak up!’ Judge Jaggers boomed. His voice was as sonorous as Big Ben, ringing out across the capital.
Despite the potential of a full ass-over-tit high-heel tumble, I pushed up from my seat and tottered unsteadily to the dock to hold her hand. ‘Phyllis?’ I said in an encouraging tone, as though offering her a slice of sponge cake.
‘Not guilty,’ she muttered.
‘Speak up!’ the judge grumbled. He was clearly going for first place in the Mr Caring and Sharing Compassion Championships.
I gave her a heartening nod and her arthritic fingers a gentle squeeze.
‘Not guilty,’ she sniffled. The further charges of causing grievous bodily harm and discharging a firearm to endanger life were also read out, and Phyllis duly repeated her not-guilty pleas.
After I’d taken my seat, the judge reminded the members of the jury of their grave responsibilities. He glowered at me once more before nodding approvingly at my nemesis. Jack rose to his feet and began to speak in his velvety, honeyed vowels.
‘Let me start by saying to you, members of the jury, this case comes before us against a background where rape is alleged. Let me say to you that this matter is still to be resolved by the courts. But you must firmly have in your mind that, even if a rape did take place, it does not justify the taking of a firearm and exacting revenge. There is no place for revenge in our system of justice. The reason we have police and courts is precisely so that people do not go off and seek vengeance for perceived wrongs.’
The timbre of his voice was mesmerizing and the female members of the jury were following him with rapt attention. They’d clearly already found Jack guilty – guilty of being totally adorable. ‘Hold me in contempt,’ their eyes seemed to say, ‘or just hold me.’
‘In this case, I, on behalf of the Crown, allege, and will prove to you, that Phyllis O’Carroll, hearing an account from her granddaughter, rather than engaging the authorities and the police, took the law into her own hands and tried to kill two people.’
Even at this distance, I could catch his scent, a scent that still had the power to intoxicate and unnerve. I clung to my cloak lapels like a caricature of an overly confident lawyer from an old Punch cartoon and stared straight ahead, in an attempt to give the impression of a barrister not on the brink of a complete coronary embolism.
‘Taking the law into your own hands, ladies and gentlemen, is a recipe for chaos and social disorder. And so, I remind you, as a jury, of your responsibility to society as a whole. We are not here trying the allegation of rape. We are trying the conduct of Phyllis O’Carroll, who took the law into her own hands in the most serious way possible. I call my first witness, Peter Simmons.’
The man I knew as ‘Stretch’ hobbled into court with an exaggerated limp, wincing with each overacted step. Gone were the leather jacket, biker boots and Hun/Goth-infested Dark Ages barbarian look. His frizzy hair had been straightened into a wiry halo, his tall, muscular frame squeezed into an incongruous and ill-fitting suit. He was still gargoyle-ugly but groomed to within an inch of his lowly life.
Having set the scene, Jack asked him to tell the court what the angry grandmother had done to him. As he began, with difficulty, to describe the experience of being shot in the testicle, I saw the men on the jury grimace and cross their legs in such flinching unison it could have been choreographed.
The judge, looking squeamish, addressed the witness gently. ‘Mr Simmons. I know these are matters about which any man would find it difficult to speak. But you are going to have to talk about these sensitive concerns. Which is why I just want you to know that the court understands the . . . delicacy involved.’
‘She shot me fuckin’ ball off!’ Stretch cried out, not so delicately. ‘The old bag turned up rantin’ that we’d raped her granddaughter and just shot at me gonads. The crown jewels of the family! She knocks on the f-ing door. Next fing I know, she blows me ball off. Thank me lucky stars I’ve still got me tonsil tickler.’
The judge raised a brow. ‘Your what, Mr Simmons??’
‘Me meat popsicle . . . Me beef thermometer . . .’ When the judge looked no wiser, he continued: ‘Me stinky pickle . . . Me baloney pony . . . Me pork sword . . . Me . . .’
‘Yes, thank you, Mr Simmons. Your manhood, I think you’re referring to,’ Jack clarified. His very use of the term had the female jurors swooning. I, too, was preoccupied by thoughts of Jack’s big, throbbing organ – the one between his ears. In this court case, that was the only place where size would count.
‘Would you like to take a break to compose yourself?’ Judge Jaggers asked solicitously, tilting his head towards the witness with compassion.
The judge’s obvious sympathy prompted Jack to glance across at me with one of his trademark smug smiles, then break off a piece of my chocolate bar and surreptitiously eat it with lip-licking pleasure. I kept my poker face intact but turned slightly to catch Roxy’s eye. My mother has never learnt to school her features into impassivity. Seeing the judge favouring the prosecutor and Chantelle’s rapist meant that angry emotions were chasing each other across her face.
I was more determined than ever to ensure that Stretch had the words ‘long’ and ‘prison’ precede his name but, when it was my turn to cross-examine, I was sweating more than a Colombian at Customs. I rose and, high heels pinching, tiptoed towards the one-balled warrior. What I wanted to ask Stretch was ‘So, tell me, how long have you known about your third chromosome?’ but I said instead – ‘You’re quite a big fish on the estate, aren’t you, Mr Simmons, or Stretch, as I think you prefer to be known. Is that right?’
‘Well, yeah,’ he peacocked. ‘I get about a bit.’
‘You’re cock of the walk, so to speak.’
‘Yeah . . . I’m well respected an’ that. I know how to handle meself,’ he preened.
‘Wouldn’t it be fair to say that people are scared of you?’
‘I don’t take no crap, if that’s what you mean.’ His huge chest puffed outwards until I thought the buttons might ping off his shirt and hit jury members in the eye.
‘And you wouldn’t take any rubbish, especially from an old lady, would you? I mean, how would that look on the estate? So, anyone coming around to see you is going to be scared and probably armed, isn’t that fair to say? Because of your fierce reputation.’
‘P’robly. Yeah.’ The thug’s mind was clearly wandering – and it really was too small to be allowed out on its own – which meant that now was my moment.
‘But isn’t it true that this frightened, frail old grandma just came around to tell you not to trash her granddaughter’s reputation? That it would be unacceptable to belittle the girl by calling her a slut or a slag?’
It was then that Jack tried his best to distract me. He gave me a mischievously gloating wink before devouring most of my purloined chocolate bar in one great gulp. I felt an overwhelming urge to teach the man a lesson. What I was about to do wasn’t fair. But then, neither is life. As Roxy said, if life was fair, then Elvis would still be alive and all the impersonators would be dead. Vacillating for a moment, I glanced quickly at the jury.
On the one hand, I totally believe in the jury system and the ability of ordinary men and women to discern the truth . . . On the other hand, it’s also true that a significant proportion of the population believe that the moon landing was faked. Which is why I next heard myself say—
‘Wasn’t your favourite weapon close at hand?’
‘What weapon?’
‘You are a man who carries a knife, aren’t you, Mr Simmons?’
I hadn’t intended to take the Roxy route but, when the odds are against you, a female barrister’s just gotta get even.
‘Knife? What fuckin’ knife. I never pulled no knife!’
‘Why are you mentioning pulling a knife, Mr Simmons? I made no mention of you pulling a knife? . . . Did you pull a knife?’
‘Fuck, no!’
‘My client saw you reach for your pocket and in her terror cannot recall the next seconds. Was it your knife that frightened the poor old lady?’
‘Objection, My Lord.’ Jack uncoiled to his feet with languorous disdain. ‘A suggestion is being made that there was a knife. There is no evidence of a knife.’ Gone were his velvet vowels. The prosecutor’s words were crisp, clipped and precise. Jack is a master of insouciant understatement, but when roused, you’d rather be pinned down by mortar fire in the middle of a war zone than endure one of his verbal volleys.
‘My Lord, I was asking the witness whether he’s a habitual carrier of a knife.’ I sent out my own salvo. ‘It was the witness who then insisted he had not used any knife – rather precipitously, the jury might think. His own answers raise the question. It is my case that he reached for his pocket and, in terror of what he was about to produce, my client shot him.’
The judge harrumphed, as if to belittle my defence, but allowed me to continue.
‘After the shot was fired, there were – what? – thirty or so people crowded around you, correct? Friends. Allies. Gangland compatriots . . . Any knife would disappear very quickly, wouldn’t it?’
Jack took the moral high ground with his eyebrows then leapt up. ‘It’s mere conjecture, My Lord.’
Prompted by Jack, the judge disdainfully dismissed my line of questioning. But the doubt had been sown in the minds of the jury. I felt a bit squeamish – but I hadn’t lied. Lying in court would get me struck off. This was just a little bit of gamesmanship, and, after all, life is full of games – games which women usually lose.
Jack shot me a withering look before bringing in his second witness, the more sinister thug nicknamed, appropriately, ‘Bash’. His wild hair was now perfectly smooth, like plastic. His shoes were shined, jaw cleanshaven, his suit expensive and immaculate, except for a tie that looked too tight. It wasn’t the only noose I’d like to see around his neck, I thought, as he spun an identical story to the court.
During my cross-examination, despite Bash’s polished appearance, I soon sensed that the jury disliked his monosyllabic hard-man attitude, especially the way he looked at me with the slow lizard blink of a top-order predator. The man had all the charm of a drug baron’s hitman – possibly because he was one. I asked in a very loaded way whether he had seen a knife that night. His shifty look and diffident ‘Nope’ was greeted with scepticism by the jury.
I knew he had prior convictions – basically, the piece of pond scum had been in so many police line-ups he could just wave at the witnesses and say ‘Remember me?!’ So when he foolishly denied that he had any ‘previous’, I pressed him. ‘Are you absolutely clear on that point?’ When he gave a haughty nod, I continued, ‘Well, let me make it clear that the point I’m suggesting is that you have invented your account because you are a complete stranger to the truth.’ I put his previous-convictions sheet under his nose and got him to read it out to the jury, making him repeat his GBH and sexual assault offences. Mistrust rippled through the jury box.
After the officer in charge of the case confirmed that these were indeed Bash’s previous convictions, Jack concluded with a standard ‘My Lord, this is the case for the prosecution.’ His conclusion may have been standard, but the gravitas and charm he oozed was definitely not. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the female jurors committed a joint crime right then and there, just on the off chance that he might represent them, preferably after a strip search.
The judge announced an adjournment, and Phyllis, looking bewildered and terrified, was handcuffed to a police officer then led down to the cells. I spent the nail-gnawing recess going over my choices. I had thought about opening with a speech to the jury outlining the defence case. But sometimes it’s more powerful and authentic to let the defendant go into the witness box straight away to tell their side of the story. But I wasn’t confident that Phyllis wouldn’t wobble on the detail; so I decided to woo the jury first.
When court resumed, I utilized every sympathetic adjective in my linguistic armoury to paint Phyllis as a doting, docile grandma. I conjured up so many cosy, nostalgic images of the jurors’ own grannies that the aroma of home-baked biscuits was practically wafting through the air. By the time I concluded my opening address the jury were so sweet on my dear old gran, I worried I’d given them all diabetes.
I now turned to Phyllis, who sat rigid on her stiff-backed chair in the dock, still flanked by uniformed prison officers. In a loud, clear voice, I said, ‘I now call Phyllis O’Carroll.’ The trembling gran was escorted to the witness box, where she took an oath. She was holding on to the railing in front of her as if trying to squeeze blood from it. I took Phyllis through her evidence, as carefully as a trainee in a minefield, guiding her to the safety of the right answers without setting off any unexpected explosions. But when asked to explain to the jury what had happened on the night in question, Phyllis suddenly employed a weird Reading Aloud to a Classroom Full of Children voice. Her delivery was so wooden, she was practically a fire hazard. Overawed by the surroundings, the poor woman was trying hard to enunciate, which strangled her natural oratorical flow and struck a false note with the jury, who shifted uncomfortably, instinctively dubious of her sincerity. When I asked if she had heard rumours that Bash always carried a knife, Jack objected, saying that I was inviting hearsay evidence. I insisted that if my client knew Bash was a local knife wielder as well as a rapist, it would explain her frame of mind as she courageously set off to see him.
Phyllis’s head was swivelling so fast from one side of the court room to the other that she resembled a meerkat watching tennis. Jack objected once more, but this time Judge Jaggers reluctantly, almost apologetically, allowed my point. ‘Well, Mr Cassidy, it may be speculation but Miss’ – he made a theatrical scramble to find my name on the court papers, thus signalling to the jury that I was so insignificant as a barrister that judges had never heard of me, even though Jaggers knew my name so well he’d once got me sacked – ‘Miss . . . Miss . . . Devine’s defendant is entitled to put her case to the court.’
I then asked Phyllis if she saw a knife. She hesitated. My toes were plaited in dread, as I waited for her answer. Then she replied hesitantly that she wasn’t certain . . . but she did see him put his hand to his pocket.
‘Yer Majesty, I was quakin’. I reckoned that I was about to be ripped from me gullet to me fanny. An’ that’s when the gun went off.’
When it was Jack’s turn to cross-examine the defendant, he smirked condescendingly at me before turning a sympathetic smile in my client’s direction. Jack Cassidy’s great skill as a cross-examiner is never to examine crossly. He treated Phyllis with the utmost care and kindness. He was respectful and gracious as he led her towards the suggestion that, driven mad by grief, she’d picked up a gun, a gun she just happened to have in her cupboard, and gone around there to teach those boys a lesson they wouldn’t forget. Lulled by his lovely, deep, lilting voice, it was hard not to agree with all of his utterances, just to keep him talking. ‘You went around there to kill them,’ Jack insisted. ‘Because you were full of outrage about what you thought they’d done, isn’t that right?’
Behind me, Roxy gave a derisive snort which, to her mind, was probably quiet but, to normal people in the stillness of a court room, sounded a lot like a hippo in the final stages of labour.
The judge glowered in my mother’s direction, while respectfully apologizing to Jack for the interruption. ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Cassidy. Please continue.’
‘Thank you, m’Lord . . . You’ve been a mother to that grandchild of yours. Your own child is in prison for drugs-related crimes, yes?’ Phyllis nodded and hung her head. ‘You felt you’d failed one child and then, oh, what torture, to feel you’d failed another. You went around there to kill them for what you thought they’d done to your granddaughter. And I ask you to tell the truth to this court. You went around there to shoot the men who you thought had attacked your beloved grandchild. That was your intention, yes?’
There was a pause. All eyes were now on the wilted grandmother. ‘Yes,’ said Phyllis softly.
There was a theatrical gasp in the court room as people mumbled their surprise. Judge Jaggers scowled once more, ensuring silence immediately swooped down and tightened its grip on the court. Jack sneaked another tiny victorious smile in my direction and licked his chocolatey fingertips. A sweat patch the size of Devon had appeared under each of my armpits. What was she thinking? How could I interrupt Phyllis’s journey into the centre of self-annihilation?
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Roxy’s leopardskin wedge jacking up and down, as if she were working an invisible bicycle pump. Stretch and Bash were now sitting beside Jack. They wore cocksure grins that flickered on and off like faulty lightbulbs.
‘Please continue,’ Jack coaxed Phyllis kindly. ‘I know it’s hard for you, my good woman.’
I looked at Phyllis, willing her not to give in to Jack’s persuasive charms. Fat chance, I thought bitterly. The female jurors could toast marshmallows on their faces, they were so hot and bothered by the debonair presence of prosecutor Jack Cassidy.
‘My first instinct, when I saw that child of mine, all beaten up and bruised an’ that, was to kill ’em . . .’ The regions beneath my armpits now expanded to include all of mainland Britain. A tense hush fell over the court room like a fog. ‘But, well, I ain’t no fool. You don’t get to be seventy-odd and have lived the life I’ve lived . . . and not know the consequences of doing somethin’ as feckin’ crazy as that.’
I felt myself unclench. I tried to devise a facial expression to cover up my glee. I furrowed my brow in a learned, weighty way, as though calculating mc2. But I couldn’t help sending a surreptitiously smug smile of my own back in Jack’s sanctimonious direction.
‘. . . But I also know what bastards those blokes are. I went round there with a gun so those animals would listen to me. Then he’ – she pointed at Stretch – ‘pulled a knife on me. Or so I thought. An old granny. I was that terrified that I don’t even remember pullin’ the trigger.’
Phyllis swayed as though she were being buffeted by the fiercest winds, despite the fact we were safely indoors. An Oscar nomination could not be far off for the wily old woman. As the day’s proceedings came to a close, I felt the jury lean ever so slightly in Phyllis’s direction.
On day two, I was feeling much more confident. Put it this way, I’d only had about four heart attacks during breakfast, down from ten per minute during the previous day’s trial. But I also hadn’t forgotten that the rapist thugs did have a powerful secret weapon – Jack Cassidy. And the judge. As the morning wore on and Judge Jaggers denied all my objections and indulged Jack’s every line of questioning, I wondered if it would be inappropriate to ask him if he only enjoyed being a judge so he could wear a wig to hide the horrible alien life form sprouting from his head, otherwise known as the world’s worst comb-over?
For Jack’s closing argument, my nemesis utilized every ounce of his captivating magnetism. He was more disarming than a UN peacekeeping force. Jack’s arguments sneaked up on the jury so stealthily they might as well have been dressed in camouflage combat fatigues. By the time Jack delivered his passionate, damning closing speech, in which he accused the septuagenarian grandma of the premeditated attempted murder of two innocent men who were attacked, in cold blood, in their own home, Phyllis had crumpled in the dock, hiding her face in her hands, and every one of the women on the jury had not just fallen for his act but seemed totally ready to leave their husbands, run off with him and live orgasmically ever after.
After Jack had sat back down, flicking his robes back with toreador flamboyance, the judge called on me to address the jury. I took a sip of water so that I could be doing something else with my lips besides trembling. It was tepid and stale. I swallowed hard, reminding myself that the closing speech is the part of the trial I most relish. I like knitting all the threads of the case together: drawing the jury in, until they’re in the palm of my metaphorical hand. I steeled my nerves, then stood to face the jury.
‘You’ve heard from Mr Cassidy, and he’s told you that you have to be the guardians of the system: that you can’t take the law into your own hands. But ask yourself’ – I was careful to make eye contact with each and every one of the jurors as I spoke – ‘who are the people taking the law into their own hands? Phyllis has never broken the law. But these men?’ Phyllis’s minor shoplifting charge was so long ago it had been erased by the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. But I spared no grizzly detail of the witnesses’ past crimes. The vivid pictures I painted were so vile that the jurors were clearly wondering how these men could hide their cloven hooves in their shoes.
A barrister’s most effective ploy in emotive cases like this one is to pluck at the heartstrings of the jury. I strummed each juror individually as though they were the most precious lyres and lutes, harping on the grandma’s horror and subsequent rage, making them all feel that it was their own child who had been violated that day. I noted the body language of each juror and particularly eyeballed the more dubious ones. ‘If your child was raped, beaten and grossly abused, would you sit on your hands?’ I reminded them that the dear old gran had only wanted to tackle the men verbally. She went armed simply for self-protection. ‘But on confronting the men she was so distressed that she had no control over her aged arthritic fingers. Presented with these wicked, gloating men, she feared even for her own safety – she was so fearful that, driven mad with terror and grief, she pulled the trigger on a reflex.’
My next tactic was to flatter their intelligence. ‘As you know, for a crime to be committed, in law, there has to be mens rea – an intention to kill or cause serious harm. This poor, gentle gran had no such intention. You may think the Fates took a hand in putting her finger on the trigger, but that was never her conscious intention.’
I then addressed the three male jurors directly, intent on ego massage and mild manipulation.
‘Of course, most of the men in this world are decent. It’s so hard for kind, law-abiding, gentle men like you to understand how other males could behave in this violent, malicious way. But they do. And Phyllis believed that these two men had.’
As men, in general, prefer facts, I then resorted to lists and statistics.
‘I want you to imagine also what life is like for women on Britain’s council estates. Two women die a week in Britain at the hands of their partners. Violence is a bigger threat to the health of European women than cancer.’
I could have gone on for hours, listing man’s inhumanity to woman, but I didn’t want to overwhelm them. There’s nothing worse than a lawyer who talks for so long that the usher’s snores wake up the jurors. But I managed to weave in some stats without inducing collective narcolepsy. I let them know that in the last year, in England and Wales alone, 69,000 women were raped. Over 400,000 were sexually assaulted; 1.2 million suffered domestic abuse. Then I detailed the shamefully low rate of conviction.
Jack muttered a sarcastic aside which only I could hear. ‘So, tell me, does Oprah know you’re available?’
Ignoring him, I utilized all my rhetorical powers, speaking in cadences not unlike a charismatic preacher’s, in sentences that built and rolled and rallied in a great rhythmic refrain. I rammed home the point that failure of governments to protect the rights of women continues to hinder gender equality all over the globe. ‘It’s a grave injustice which holds us back as a society. A conviction in this case will only empower men like this.’
It was time to lay it on with a trowel – or not just a trowel; a steamroller.
‘The prosecution maintains that my poor, traumatized grandma took the law into her own hands. But how often does the law wash its hands of unimportant women like this doting, downtrodden pensioner and her darling innocent little granddaughter? Put yourself in Phyllis’s shoes – cheap, vinyl, worn down at the heel. The shoes of a decent, hardworking, law-abiding cleaning woman who is always walked over . . . Members of the jury, don’t let them walk all over her today.’
Good advocacy is the ability to keep the jury from coughing. By the time I sat down, I realized that there hadn’t even been a little throat-clearing during my summing-up – the court room was a total cough-and snore-free zone. What’s more, Jack knew it, too. He sat with folded arms and a bolted-on expression. Glancing up at the public gallery, my eyes snagged with amazement on to Nathaniel. I didn’t know he was back from his conference and he hadn’t told me he was coming to watch the trial. His eyes were resting on me with keen admiration.
Judge Jaggers, who was of the I Sentence You to Prison until Such Time as You’re Found Innocent school of justice, began his summing-up. The judge is supposed to be impartial, but while he’d greeted every one of Jack’s quips with appreciative bonhomie, whenever I’d spoken he’d displayed the relaxed, friendly demeanour of a CIA operative. And he reinforced his disapproval by practically instructing the jury to convict.
‘The defendant decided that these men were rapists, which put them outside the law, then felt entitled to take the law into her own hands. What you must ask yourself, members of the jury, is whether this vicious act of revenge had anything to do with the law or justice. I think not. Look deep into your conscience and ask yourself this question: are we citizens or savages?’
He sent the jury out to make their deliberations. As they filed from the court, Jack winked victoriously at me before strolling out, his witnesses in surly tow. I turned to face my mother with a heavy heart.
‘Let’s call David Attenborough urgently. Judge Jaggers has just proven that dinosaurs definitely do still roam the earth,’ Roxy said, trying to make light of it.
Women who’ve given birth are better equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of life. After all, we’ve been stitched up and experienced acute pain. But, looking at Phyllis’s stricken face, how I longed for an anaesthetic.