‘Oh, hello.’ The female lawyer who stole my husband had a voice like cold water and breath like peppermint. With her pale skin, blonde hair and icy expression, Petronella resembled a warrior princess in an Icelandic saga. Today, her golden mane was strangled back into a tight bun. The flesh of her face was pumped up with fillers, which made her cheekbones look high and prominent but also pulled her mouth upwards into a mirthless smile. She was alighting from my husband’s purloined Porsche outside Southwark Crown Court.
‘Terribly hot, isn’t it,’ she said, through lips that were a slash of glossy pink. ‘No air-conditioning in court either, can you believe it? At least it won’t be a long trial. Rape trials usually collapse. At least they do if I’m defending,’ she added, with a smug note of certainty.
When I realized Petronella was representing the two rapists, I tried to keep my gaze absolutely neutral and unperturbed. September had turned into an Indian summer. The wind was blowing like a hair-dryer on high and my temper was running hotter. I followed her into the crusty, dusty Crown Court building without speaking. It was only when we reached the robing room that I managed to say, through lips that didn’t feel like my own, ‘So, how is my husband?’
Her tight, serrated smile was like an oyster, milky-white and sharp as a razor, made for making cutting remarks. ‘Oh, he pampers me like a princess. Although you know what? It’s tiring sometimes, being beautiful. Not Stephen of course, but other people presume I’m too pretty to be intelligent. I wish I could make myself less attractive . . . So tell me’ – she looked me up and down – ‘how do you do it, Matilda?’
I stared at my old college rival as she adjusted her robes. Steve always said that I didn’t ‘make the most of myself’. Which is true. I invariably do my make-up in the rear-vision mirror at traffic lights or bumping along on the Tube, a technique which takes fifteen seconds tops. A swipe of rouge, a lick of mascara, a dab of lippy and, if I really want to impress and the lights are red for long enough for me not to take my eye out, a line of kohl pencil. I did go the extra make-up mile on my wedding day, with a little foundation and eye shadow. But I usually get by on a winning smile and charisma.
The perfectly coiffured and coutured Petronella, however, made me feel I should get my mirrors insured. She swept from the robing room. I trailed, flabbergasted, behind her. When Roxy bumped into the Piranha in Prada walking into the court room, my mother’s bouffant puffed up around her head like a cobra’s hood.
‘How can a woman defend a rapist?’ Roxy said to me, loud enough to be heard on the Mir space station. ‘So much for sisterly solidarity, eh? A case of Hear No Feminism, See No Feminism, Speak No Feminism.’
‘She’s hungry for success at any cost. Mind you, it’s the only thing she is hungry for,’ I marvelled, holding my stomach in. ‘Have you seen how thin she is?’ Yes, I’m a feminist, but I would have killed there and then for some support hose.
‘Are you sure she’s actually human?’ I asked my mother.
‘Apart from the drinking blood, hanging upside down to go to sleep and sucking the souls out of newborn babies, you mean?’ My mother poured me a lemon-balm-and-camomile-infused tea made from home-grown flowers which she’d brought in a hipflask. But not even a medically induced coma could calm my nerves now.
The usher brought the court to order and the judge entered.
The judge was old – Galapagos Island-turtle old. His lips, surrounding lettuce-green teeth, looked like two slugs copulating. When he spoke, his worm-white jowls quivered and the way he sat at the bench, all straight-backed and aloof, reminded me of a recently installed dictator. After the jury was sworn in, he clasped his hands together and nodded towards me. Silence erupted. A deafening silence. Giving evidence in a criminal trial is daunting. When the witness is a teenager asked to provide graphic detail in public about sexual offences committed against her by numerous men in front of a room full of strangers, it’s the equivalent of entering a lion’s den. It was my job to make sure Chantelle wasn’t torn limb from limb and eaten alive.
I glanced at Phyllis in the public gallery. In the weeks leading up to the case, Phyllis had become a woman who subsisted on a diet of anxiety, unleavened by the smallest crumb of joy. She sat perched on the edge of her seat, her hands clenching and unclenching. Only Roxy appeared unperturbed. She blew me a big, juicy kiss which was the sign to launch into proceedings.
Despite the fact that my anxieties were so enormous they could be awarded National Park status, I made a strong opening address to the jury, outlining the facts of Chantelle’s brutal rape. I then called the sixteen-year-old to the witness box, where I proceeded to draw the story out from her as gently and discreetly as possible. Chantelle’s fidgeting hands reminded me of the terrified beating of an insect’s wing.
The rape tableau had played ceaselessly in my mind for months, on a spool. When I asked Chantelle whether she knew the men who’d raped her, she described them perfectly, without a glance in the direction of her assailants, stating in a clear voice their names as Stretch and Bash, and adding that they were well known on the estate.
The accused, sitting rigid in the dock, registered a look of innocence that was so contrived it was hilariously parodic. The jury seemed less critical, possibly because this was the new and improved version of the men I’d first met. Bash, the lean and mean one, was still muscled like a fighting dog but had cropped his hair into a buzz cut, as though on day release from a Mormon prayer meeting. Stretch had removed his suit jacket in the heat. His chest appeared to have been covered in superglue and rolled in black hairs. Nestling there, amid the foliage – in fact, highlighted by the darkness of the undergrowth – was a large Christian cross. This ploy was as subtle as a fart in a space suit, but could possibly sway one or two of the more gullible Catholic jurors.
When it was Petronella’s turn to cross-examine Chantelle, she started softly. In an effort to charm the jury and disarm the teenager, her voice, which normally held the hauteur of a sequestered duchess, all rounded vowels and clipped ‘t’s, was suddenly as cloying and tangy as clear honey. I could sense the jurors warming to her, totally unaware that Petronella was the type of person who would make steak tartare out of endangered species.
As I’d predicted, it wasn’t long before she began to ask Chantelle about how she’d been dressed on the night in question, leading the girl into accepting that perhaps she dressed ‘older than her age’ and wore make-up and fashions ‘more appropriate to a woman in her twenties’.
I immediately interjected. ‘Can’t you smell that whiff of brimstone, people?’ is what I wanted to shout to the jury, but I said instead, ‘What bearing does this have on the case? Should all girls lock themselves away and wear chastity belts because males are not expected to monitor and control their behaviour?’
‘Your Honour,’ Petronella purred, ‘Wearing provocative clothing is like a bank storing all its cash by the door.’ She went on to draw a parallel between foolish people who leave their laptops on the back seats of their car.
‘I’m sorry, Your Honour, but that infers that Chantelle wanted to be raped. That she “asked for it” . . . Let’s compare that to murder, shall we? No one ever thinks “Maybe the murder victim wanted to die. Perhaps it was a consensual death.”’
The jury tittered and the judge tightened up the gristle that passed for his lips. He tsked his tongue and sighed at my interruption, but reluctantly asked Petronella to desist in her line of questioning on the plaintiff’s attire.
‘Rape isn’t always rape, though, is it, Chantelle? Consensual sex that gets out of hand is a long way off being snatched off the street or systematically violated. Did you lead them on? Not make yourself clear? Change your mind too late? Are you a victim, or just a naughty girl doing grownup things you bitterly regret?’
‘No!’ Chantelle gasped.
I glared at Petronella, disgusted. Clearly, the woman needed to go to the vet to get her claws trimmed. Why wasn’t the judge stopping this barrage of commentary? The man must be wearing headphones under his wig. I tried to interject once more, but he silenced me with his hand.
‘Go on,’ he encouraged the Piranha in Prada. What a shame it wasn’t an American court, I thought, so I could make rude remarks about his tiny gavel . . . or preferably use it as a meat tenderizer and pulverize him into pâté.
‘Yes, there was sexual activity, but it was not of my clients’ doing, was it, Chantelle? Despite them being older and stronger than you, you might say it was forced upon them, wasn’t it? Because you are not a Little Miss Muffet, are you? Indeed, you have quite a lot of experience, haven’t you? Isn’t it true that you and your friends refer to each other as SB1 and SB2 and SB3, etc. Would you mind telling the jury what that stands for?’
Chantelle looked horrified. ‘It’s a joke,’ she spluttered. ‘We call each other that for a laugh.’
‘Call each other what, Miss O’Carroll?’
Chantelle’s face flickered and tensed. ‘Slut Bag 1, Slut Bag 2,’ she whispered.
And I was up on my feet again. ‘Rape is the crime, not facetious texting to friends.’ My angry words clanged around the court room like traffic. But Petronella insisted on her line of attack.
‘And would you be so kind, Chantelle, as to clarify for the jury if this is you, twerking?’
I’d had enough. I demanded the court be cleared while I made a legal argument to the judge to prevent this brutal line of questioning. But pouting Petronella, whose eyelash-batting average would rival Donald Bradman’s, effortlessly smoothed all her requests past the drooling lech. Why couldn’t the old fool see that Petronella is good at flirting, the way a shark is good at being predatory?
After the jury filed back in, he permitted the defence to show the grainy phone footage of Chantelle in teeny shorts and a bra top, performing a Miley Cyrus-type dance involving rump-shaking gyrations during which she rubbed her posterior up against boys on some dancefloor. The judge, bushy eyebrows bristling, asked for clarification.
‘Twerking, Your Honour, is a sexually suggestive dance move from Jamaican dance-hall culture. I put it to you, Chantelle, that this tongue-flashing twerker we see before us in this phone footage is not the innocent your lawyer is leading us to believe you to be. Dressing older than your age, dancing provocatively, calling yourself a “slut” . . . isn’t it true that you were in as much control of the situation as the men? You were like a spider – predatory in all your actions, totally sexually experienced and older than your chronological age.’
Chantelle’s blue eyes blinked and blinked.
I made yet another gazelle-like leap to my feet. ‘Objection, Your Honour. It sounds as though the defence is describing a voracious temptress. Jessica Rabbit perhaps? Samantha from Sex and the City? We are talking about a sixteen-year-old girl who was raped. Dancing is not against the law, I believe, unless living under the Taliban.’
Once more, the jury gave a little sympathetic titter, but Petronella continued to attack Chantelle like a wasp eats a fallen peach. She revealed medical, school and social services records. The judge glanced through the sensitive material and, showing the compassion of a piece of petrified wood, decided it was relevant. I seethed silently. As for Petronella, the woman was clearly so evil I began to wonder if she offered a 15 per cent discount to clients who’d trade in their souls.
‘Is it true you approached the school nurse to ask about contraception?’
This time I leapt up so quickly I made a gazelle look sluggish. ‘I object to this line of questioning! It doesn’t matter if you are a sixteen-year-old virgin, a practising prostitute, or paralytic and lying naked on a bench. The blame lies with the perpetrators of rape, not with the victim. If a man takes it upon himself to rape a woman, he is guilty of breaking the law,’ I clarified, restraining myself from adding that, clearly, Petronella’s vile personality was her own chief contraceptive method.
The judge silenced me once more with his gnarled hand. He peered at the world beneath veined saggy eyelids, then addressed Petronella in the lock-jawed diction practised only by the Queen and a couple of inbred lords. ‘Miss Willets, I don’t think some of these questions are necessary. The sexual experience of the plaintiff is not relevant.’
I ground my teeth, thinking ‘you old bastard’. Yes, I know, you know, and Petronella knows the questions aren’t relevant, but now the jury has heard them they’ll imagine that the wickedly wanton and experienced Chantelle has seen more ceilings than Michelangelo. Having already compared Chantelle to a sexy, grown-up, make-up-wearing spider, Petronella then posited the notion of revenge.
‘You were obviously keen on having sex with these two men because they’re held in high esteem on the estate. It would get you kudos with your friends. So you ran around in high heels and short skirts, trying to get their attention, positively gagging for it.’
‘No.’ Chantelle shook her head. In the glare of the courtroom fluorescents, the tiny teenager was striving to become invisible. Her eyes flinched from everything.
‘But, after having consensual sex with my clients, you were still denied membership of their posse and you wanted revenge, isn’t that right? So you concocted this rape scenario. I want to ask you straight out why are you telling lies?’
‘I’m not telling lies.’ Chantelle’s frightened blue eyes filled with tears and her face twisted up in anguish.
‘The truth is, you’re a compulsive liar.’
‘Was you there? Was you there?’ Chantelle shouted back at her. The girl’s raw misery and pain was apparent to all, except Petronella.
‘You’re telling lies.’
‘No, I’m not! Shut up! Shut up!’
‘You wanted the police to bring a prosecution in this matter, didn’t you? So, take the jury into your confidence – why didn’t they proceed?’
‘I dunno why,’ she whimpered.
‘Even though you were lying in hospital, unable to move after this allegedly brutal attack – you were unable to move, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘I suggest that you were play-acting. I suggest that they knew you were not a reliable witness. Because you’re a lying little minx, aren’t you?’
I was yo-yoing up and down, making so many objections the jurors must have thought I was auditioning for a fitness video. I demanded that the prosecution stop badgering the witness. The women on the jury were also uncomfortable with the attack. They shifted in their seats and looked away. But the judge remained robotic and inflexible – think German tank invading Poland. Petronella, sensing that she was losing sympathy, changed tack.
‘Perhaps you’re not lying. Perhaps you just can’t remember the details because you were high on drugs. Your mother is a drug-addicted prostitute currently in prison for drug smuggling, is that right?’
Chantelle gave an almost imperceptible nod. Her face was a blur of misery. I looked at the judge. I could not believe he was not going to reprimand Petronella. With his ancient-tortoise overbite and shoulder-length ear hair, he was clearly too old to be allowed to operate heavy machinery – like a law book.
‘Your Honour, there’s a matter of law.’ I was up on my feet once more. This court case was becoming so aerobic I was practically hyperventilating. ‘I’m afraid the jury will have to leave the court room again.’
I watched the jury file past me with Petronella’s question still ringing in their ears. Once the court room was cleared, my oleaginous opponent immediately apologized.
‘I’m so sorry, Your Honour. I got carried away,’ she simpered, all moist pout and batting lash. ‘I shouldn’t have asked that question.’ Petronella was putting on such a show for the judge, she might as well have done some jazz hands.
The ‘impartial’ judge, who made lip farts when he disagreed with anything I said – which was everything – responded by giving Petronella a verbal pat on the head. ‘No harm done. The jury will be told to put that thought out of their minds,’ he concluded, proving that he was the only living brain donor in world history, because the damage was already done. When the jury returned five minutes later, despite the judge’s instruction to strike that comment from their collective consciousness, I could feel suspicious glances directed at this daughter of a convicted felon.
The defence continued its hackneyed attack. ‘These young men are the real victims here,’ Petronella asserted. ‘Because isn’t it true, young lady, that this was merely consensual sex that just got a bit rough?’
This time I jumped up as if I’d been bitten on the backside by a bullet. ‘Are you seriously implying that this little girl egged on these two poor, vulnerable, grown men? Yes, because there’s nothing a beautiful, bright young girl wants more than to be gang-banged by two thugs on a cold, dog-faeces-riddled stairwell.’ I wanted to shout, ‘Look at them! Both men are so ugly, when they were born the doctor slapped their parents’ – although this was a difficult concept to get across using only my eyebrows. But I could definitely feel a shifting of opinion in our direction. Despite the judge’s bias, the majority of the laser-eyed jury were not wearing rat-bag filters on their glasses.
Still, a lawyer learns to be fluent in body language, and I intuited that, thanks to Petronella’s insinuations, three or four jurors were clearly of the opinion that Chantelle possessed what Portia’s male classmates called ‘margarine legs’, i.e. easily spread. And even though it shouldn’t, it would cloud their judgement on her rape.
Finally, it was time for my re-examination. I breathed a sigh of relief. This was my chance to recoup.
I immediately got Chantelle to explain that, yes, she’s a normal, fun-loving teenage girl who likes to wear high heels and short skirts but that she had never had sex prior to the attack. I took her through the grim and gruesome rape in all its heart-wrenching detail, providing medical evidence of her injuries.
Sometimes in court, it’s best to eschew virtuoso verbal high-wire acts and keep it simple. ‘Chantelle, were you raped?’ I asked gently.
‘Yes,’ she bleated.
‘And are you telling the truth?’
‘Yes.’
By the time Chantelle, wrung out and shaking, was allowed to leave the witness box, a few of the female jury members were dabbing at their eyes. Despite all the bullying, the tiny teenager hadn’t given up. There were still small corners of hope in her, like air pockets in a ship that was going down.
Petronella opened her case and called for the defendants. Roxy snickered loudly when both men promised to tell the truth. She laughed even louder when they continued to claim their innocence. The jury’s body language had also turned hostile. Petronella set about dismissing Chantelle’s injuries as the side effects of playfully rough sex, but her words were just running into each other like raindrops down a window-pane. I turned to see how Phyllis was coping. A glimmer of optimism had seeped into her eyes like a timid guest.
In my cross-examination of the pair, I took apart their characters before moving on to specifics. ‘Rape has become a rite of passage for many gang members, hasn’t it? I put it to you that you deliberately went after Chantelle because she refused to succumb to peer pressure. Because she wouldn’t give you a “a shiner”, which is the term your posse use for forced fellatio. Then you left her beaten and broken, with a bruised and bleeding vagina and the words “Dirty bitch” and “Wash this” scrawled, by you, on her abdomen. This was my client’s welcome to womanhood. And you inflicted this upon her, didn’t you?’
The icing on my argument was to enlist a handwriting expert to confirm the high probability that the words inked on to Chantelle’s abdomen indicated the writing style of one of the defendants, a clever ploy Petronella hadn’t anticipated.
By the time the brow-beaten defendants skulked out of the witness box, I was mentally tweaking my closing address, which would convince the jury to bring in a guilty verdict and send these rapists off to prison. Then, all of a sudden, Petronella announced that she’d like to call a final witness. I glanced up, surprised. As the redhead swept into the court room, my mind whirred and stopped and whirred and stopped like a broken clock. Where had I seen her before? It took me a moment to recognize the woman, because this time she had her clothes on. The last time I’d seen Nurse Baddington, she’d been cavorting around Jack’s living room in her lingerie. After she had sworn on the bible and been introduced to the jury as the nurse attending Chantelle on the night of the alleged rape, Petronella asked if it was true that Chantelle had disappeared from the hospital between the hours of nine and ten.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Life had just dropped a saucepan lid on a hard-tiled kitchen floor. The impact rattled around my cranium, clanging. How could they know this when I had the hospital record? Jack must have quizzed the nurse during pillow talk, discovered that Chantelle had gone missing and slipped the information to the defence team. But I couldn’t comprehend it. Could Jack really be so vengeful and malicious as to sabotage Chantelle’s case? It was as though I were underwater in some old, heavy diving suit and the thought was being piped laboriously down to me, thoughts instead of oxygen. Jack!
‘Is there a hospital record of this?’ Petronella probed the nurse.
‘No. The record went missing. Presumed stolen.’
The room pitched around me like a rolling ship. How could I ever have trusted the man? Beside me, Chantelle screwed up her eyes as if in pain.
The judge’s grey, disordered eyebrows were working overtime to show his curiosity. ‘Would you be so kind as to explain the relevance of this, please?’ he asked Petronella courteously.
Petronella’s black eyes glittered. She went on to explain how Chantelle’s grandmother had been tried in an attempted-murder case, in which she admitted taking a firearm around to the residence of the two accused men and firing at their genitals, seriously injuring one and grazing the other. ‘I put it to the court now that the alleged “victim”, the alleged “beaten”, “broken” and “bruised” victim in this case, got up off her alleged “sick bed” and trotted down to the estate with her grandmother to point out the men upon whom she wanted revenge.’
A murmur of disapproval ran through the jury. The tiny girl beside me was flushed and trembling. I turned to see Phyllis: her face was paralysed. After a few more perfunctory queries to the nurse, the judge called Chantelle back to the witness box. A faint shudder coursed through her etiolated frame.
‘Do I have to?’ she mewled.
My heart shrank like a raisin. I nodded.
Petronella gave my client a cold, hungry stare – the stare of a raptor about to seize a rabbit. Her voice was sinuous and exact; the richness of her tone oozed confidence. ‘Did you leave the hospital on the night in question, to point out these two men to your grandmother?’ She indicated her clients, who were the picture of outraged innocence. ‘The men upon whom you wanted revenge, because, after having sex with them, they didn’t let you join their posse and chilled you out?’
Chantelle’s pale skin was so taut with tension it seemed stretched across her skull and nailed behind her ears.
‘Let me remind you that you are under oath.’ Petronella’s voice set my teeth on edge. It was falsely cheery, her smile as sharp and sweet as icing. ‘Did you leave the hospital with your granny?’
Chantelle’s face froze and the words came out slowly and haltingly. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I didn’t want ’er to attack the wrong men.’
I suddenly felt as though I were walking on the moors, had lost my footing, and was sliding down towards the bog, clutching at tangles of gorse and weeds which came out of the chalky soil in my hands.
‘So, you’re not quite the innocent little victim portrayed by the prosecution, are you? Yes, you’re playing innocent now. But you incited your grandma to assault these men upon whom you wanted revenge because they wouldn’t accept you into their gang. When they blew you out, you got your grandma to blow off their testicles.’
‘No! No! It weren’t like that!’
Petronella, going in for the kill, was as excited as a barracuda in a shoal of fat fish. ‘You are prepared to lie to this jury. I asked you quite specifically whether you were unable to move. You told this court you were unable to move, didn’t you?’
‘Gran! I want my gran!’
A male member of the jury who’d looked quite sympathetic earlier now lifted his eyebrows high in fastidious disdain. A female juror made a moue of disgust.
When it was my turn to re-examine, I tried to cast the event in a better light, but Chantelle was traumatized, dazed, a glazed look in her eye. ‘When your grandmother, heartbroken and furious, told you she was determined to confront the men who had raped you and was taking your grandpa’s old hunting gun with her for protection . . . how did you feel?’
Shattered, the pain-racked little girl said nothing.
‘Did you know how your grandma was feeling?’
Chantelle stared at the floor, stonily.
‘Was she scared?’
Silence.
‘Were you frightened they would turn the gun on your grandma?’ My words went crashing and rattling around the court room like trapped birds.
‘You were still really hurt – bleeding and covered in bruises, when you staggered out of your hospital bed to protect your grandma, isn’t that right?’
The judge barked a command down to me. ‘Stop leading the witness.’
‘Were you in pain when you left the hospital?’
Turning slightly, I noticed that Chantelle’s attackers were now directly in her line of vision. Bash was twitching excitedly, like a spider. Chantelle had hung her head to avoid their gaze, but it was making her look shifty in the eyes of the jury. Then the poor girl began rocking. When she gave a high-pitched gulp, I knew that I had to let the child go. We would have to rely on my closing speech. It was all we had left.
As soon as Chantelle limped out of the witness box, I started talking. But I could feel the case slipping away from me, like thinning ice cracking beneath my feet. I talked faster, accelerating like mad to save us all from drowning. I described the men in the dock as wolves in a lambing shed, prowling the estate and preying on girls, exploiting them sexually, filming the abuse, then blackmailing them into working for their gangs as drug couriers or prostitutes. I explained that if the jury found the defendants not guilty, it would discourage other victims from coming forward and allow rapists to attack with impunity. I threw everything I could at the jury before the judge could stop me. I wove in the terrible murder and domestic-violence statistics which proved that women were runners up in the human race. I bemoaned the fact that rape had gone mainstream. How pub crawls and parties now have themes such as Rappers and Slappers or Geeks and Sluts.
Cases are tried before a live jury – at first. When I heard a juror yawn and saw another rest his face on his hand as though about to go to sleep, I realized I was losing them, but I ploughed on. Yes, it was heavy-handed, but my only option now was to club the jury into submission. I pleaded with the jury to take a stand against violence perpetrated on innocent women, concluding with a list of the defendants’ prior misdemeanours – a list which made War and Peace look like a haiku . . . But then a couple of jurors coughed, and that was when I knew it was time to sit down and shut up.
In Petronella’s final speech, she depicted Chantelle as a cold-blooded slattern, hell bent on premeditated revenge because the men she had seduced did not reward her with gang membership. ‘Was Chantelle blameless? . . . Can one hand clap, ladies and gentlemen?’ She painted the sixteen-year-old as an arch-manipulator, pressing her befuddled grandmother into committing a murderous revenge on her behalf. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve heard from a young woman who we say is unstable and has not had the benefits of a proper upbringing.’
After this ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ innuendo, she ran the whole clichéd ‘rape accusations ruining the lives of innocent men’ line. She spoke as rapidly as a sewing machine, threading words together, stitching Chantelle up. She used the phrase ‘cried rape’ over and over, making Chantelle out to be a scheming harridan who used her sexuality as a weapon to hurt men. I was used to defending, not prosecuting. It was agonizing not to have the last word. I had to tie my tongue in knots to stop from interjecting. All I could do was grind my molars into a pulp.
‘Members of the jury . . .’ Petronella had the face of a news anchor trying to look serious while reading from the autocue about the death of someone they have never heard of. ‘The two men accused here today may seem somewhat unsavoury, but no man should be put through the horror of a false rape allegation. You must be sure of guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. Also remember that you’re dealing with a woman who’s been found to be lying. She said under oath that she was raped and so hurt that she lay in hospital, unable to move. But in reality she left the hospital after coercing her poor, addled grandma into taking her to the estate to sort out the testicles of the men who had rejected her.’
Roxy’s mouth twitched and then set into a grimace. That was when I understood that we were going to lose the case.
When the judge addressed the jury, my case became the legal equivalent of flying over the Atlantic, well known for not having anything solid you can actually land on, and the pilot announcing that he had a ‘minor engine problem’. The judge instructed the jury that they could not convict unless they were sure that the sex was not consensual.
The light in Phyllis’s eyes was slowly extinguished.
When the jury found the defendants not guilty, the two rapist thugs whooped. Bash gave me a sign with his finger which could not be mistaken for the Vulcan symbol for ‘Peace and Prosperity’.
I looked at Phyllis’s suffering face. I felt misery rise up from her like steam. The not-guilty verdict began to cling to me like a chill. The deadening weight of failure settled into my body. As the court room emptied, silence pressed down like a low ceiling. Supporters gathered around Phyllis and Chantelle as if at a graveside.
Chantelle was lost in her own private torment. She gazed at me out of huge blue eyes with the peculiarly helpless, agonized expression of someone who knew it had all gone wrong but didn’t really know why. All her eye make-up was washed away with crying. The vile video of her rape had gone viral, for nothing. Zilch. Nada. Sweet FA.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told them.
‘It wasn’t your fault, Tilly. The conviction rate for rapists is limbo low. We knew the odds were against us going in.’
‘I should have insisted Chantelle gave video evidence . . . I was the one who talked her out of sitting behind a screen . . .’
Roxy was working hard at turning up the corners of her mouth. ‘We need to change the court culture. Judges need to stop that kind of aggressive cross-examination which leaves the victim in shreds.’
Countess Flirtalotsky was twanging with indignation and anger. Drawn up to her full six-foot-one, stick-thin height, she resembled a malignant tuning fork. I presumed she was angry about how much my defeat would cost her, but then she said, ‘Raped by men, then raped again by the judicial system. You’d get a fairer trial in fucking Russia, dah-ling!’
Phyllis’s face had slammed shut. Her eyes fixed on something I could not see. ‘I’m more glad than ever that I shot those scum in the nuts now,’ she said bitterly.
My heart felt full of sludge. ‘Oh, Phyllis,’ I said sadly. ‘It’s never right to take the law into your own hands. We would have won if that nurse hadn’t turned up.’ But Phyllis was no longer listening. Useless defiance is what remains after everything else has been scoured away. The last thing she wanted, I knew, was sympathy. And so I said no more. I had to get some fresh oxygen into my lungs. I left the court, fogged with gloom.
The day had darkened, with rainstorms gathering. The sun suddenly came out from behind a grey cloud. It flickered briefly, then retreated back under cover, dispirited by what it had glimpsed below. There was no breeze. I saw flags on a high building hanging limp against their poles. I knew just how they felt. I stared across a dirty road at brightly coloured advertisements of products I would never buy. A woman thrust a flyer at me. ‘Jesus wants to know you,’ she said.
‘Yeah, well, I don’t want to know him – not at the moment, thanks very much.’
Then I saw Nathaniel striding across the busy road towards me. ‘Sorry to miss the trial. I had to help source bail for a re-offender. You look like hell,’ he said.
‘At this point, hell seems like a major improvement over a life in the law.’
‘Oh, no.’ He screwed up his eyes, as if in pain. ‘What happened?’
The words I had to find felt heavy and sour in the back of my throat. ‘I lost the case . . .’
‘Oh, Matilda. It wasn’t your fault.’
I silenced him with my hand. ‘Nathaniel, thanks, but there really is nothing you can say right now to make me feel better.’ In truth, my confidence level had sunk so low, you’d need a pressurized mini-sub to find it.
‘Come home with me. I’ll cook you some supper and rub your feet and pour you some wine. There are times when it is imperative not to stay sober. Funerals, weddings, and after losing a trial. Not to be drunk in these circumstances indicates you are either a Baptist, a Muslim or an alien.’
‘No, thanks. I think I just need to use my body as a repository for chocolate for a while.’
‘What went wrong?’
‘Jack Cassidy, that’s what went wrong. He ratted me out, as revenge for beating him in Phyllis’s court case. He betrayed me to the defence team. Which allowed two violent rapists to walk free.’ I thought back to the time the press had massed outside our house. I’d told Jack on the phone that Phyllis and Chantelle were at my home. Had he leaked our address?
I clearly needed to ask my mother if she had drunk during pregnancy, because falling for a monster like Jack Cassidy in the first place had to prove that I was a few neurons short of a synapse . . . And explain why failure seemed to be the only thing I was a success at.
My brilliant and mature lawyering skills became even more strikingly evident when I burst out crying and sobbed into Nathaniel’s shoulder.