CHAPTER 11

TRIBUNAL: HEARING AND INQUIRY

It had taken the best part of a year of detailed, nitpicking investigation, apparently, even to as much as set up a preliminary enquiry. She had been told a tribunal was to examine whether or not there were any criminal charges to face or which might be levied on the charity’s trustees or the Church authorities under whose auspices the ‘home’ had been run and managed. Doubts over the levying of criminal charges - after the abuse she had suffered, and witnessed others suffering? It beggared belief!

The Crown Prosecution Service (the CPS) were apparently undecided as to whether any actual offence had been committed, any crime having taken place for them to prosecute; and there had been legal arguments raging over jurisdiction, based on an obscure medieval charter pertaining to UK sovereignty over the island. Meanwhile, reading between the lines the CPS was seemingly being hesitant in taking on the whole Establishment of the Church, not without overwhelming evidence. But the real, physical, evidence uncovered supporting Alice’s version of events and allegations over what had been going on behind those high priory walls, had for all intents and purposes been scant to the point of non existence. And that beggared belief in itself!

But Alice herself had witnessed the efficiency of the cleanup operation prior to the police and social services raid: The workshops and classrooms dismantled, the punishment blocks, whipping stools, enema tables and all other means of physical chastisement, vanished as if having never existed; the girls somehow made to disappear too, vanishing into the ether like so many stage magicians assistants. Only the nuns had remained - all too well personally implicated and loyal to the Church and their mentor’s teachings to ever speak out - and, it had turned out, the Mother Superior, an erudite, eloquent woman who would have no difficulty twisting the truth and whose loyalty was of course beyond question; just as her soul was undoubtedly beyond redemption. The old, twisted Churchman who had sodomised and scourged so many with impunity, having presumably been considered too unstable, too unreliable, by the shady ecumenical powers behind the throne to be allowed to be left behind, had been miraculously spirited away, as he had from at least two other crime-scenes of abuse in the past.

What remained pretty much came down to Alice’s testimony. The other girl found with her - one Gwyneth Tealsdown (her identity had had to be uncovered through some nifty detective work by ‘Missing Persons’, being unable to remember her own surname and referring to herself as ‘Mary’) - had been declared unfit through reasons of impaired mental competence. Denounced as an incorrigible, out of control, persistent runaway with chronic behavioural issues by the woman who was said to be her legal guardian and who had made quite clear she couldn’t afford to have her home, not given Gwyneth’s behavioural history, the sad-eyed young Gwyneth had been duly shipped off to a secure mental hospital ‘for her own protection’.

This too beggared belief! Just as it beggared belief that the mental institution poor husky, throaty Gwyneth had been shipped off to was a charitable trust-run establishment with links to the Church and several high-ranking Church dignitaries listed quite openly as patrons and several other Church officials sitting on the board of directors. And it definitely beggared belief that the only way Alice could have been privy to any and all of these shenanigans - as that old Irish priest would have said, with his ‘thing’ buried deep in her insides - was because she had been sat down and actually told - and in some graphic detail - by the psychiatric counsellor at the ‘halfway house’ she now resided at. There had been a veiled threat there, she felt sure. It had been nothing explicit, but the way the woman had smiled, like an unassailably superior opponent across a chess board, an inescapable two, perhaps three moves away from checkmate, the way she had looked in to her eyes as if appraising the likelihood of some countering move and seeing none, it had made the message as clear as if written across one of her flipcharts or the whiteboard in her office; go too far in spilling the beans, in struggling against the tide and...

Then again: perhaps she had been imagining things - just like they said she sometimes did. But they said that whenever she mentioned Dr Ecclestone’s involvement, saying the good doctor had been questioned and there was no record of her ever having treated Alice, nor of her visiting Alice’s home, nor as much as ever having met “the esteemed” - their words, not Alice’s - Lady Marchment, Alice’s twice-bereaved stepmother who had since reverted to her titled, maiden name.

Of course Alice had brought up the subject of the security cameras her father had had installed, years before his untimely death; surely there would be records there to corroborate her story. But she’d been told that sadly the property was gone now - and the cameras and security system with it. And besides; even before the sale, a long time before, the old recorders had been thrown out and the tapes destroyed as an accompaniment to the changeover to the friendlier, more compact and discreet, digital system and DVD recording. In any case, even had those old VHS tapes still been in existence, had they not been consigned to the incinerator or whatever, the tapes would have been recorded over, reused countless times since the period Alice was talking about. That so much more time had elapsed than she could have imagined, that her own home had been sold from under her by her scheming stepmother, a woman who Alice now felt sure had been complicit in having her boyfriend locked away, branded as a drug dealer, and who had encouraged Alice to become hooked on prescription tranquilizers and sedatives in order to gain control over her and thus her father’s estate, that all this could have befallen her... It all, all of it, beggared belief.

But then; a lot of things about Alice’s life beggared belief nowadays. It beggared belief, for example, that despite technically being now free of the institution she had been obliged to reside at following her release from the clutches of the Church authorities, she was dressed the way she was; and today, of all days. Her outfit consisted of a dowdy institutional slate-grey tweedy skirt, plain light grey shirt-blouse - in some horrid man-made fibre - and thin slate-grey cardigan to match, a pair of ‘sensible’ polished black lace-up shoes completing the ensemble. None of this exactly seemed suited to bolstering her confidence. Only the lack of a stripy tie and a blazer separated today’s outfit from leaning towards being taken for a particularly antiquated example of a private boarding school uniform. But today’s ‘styling values’ hadn’t been by choice - and that beggared belief in itself.

Strictly speaking the skirt was actually in a fine light-weight serge and its panelled A-line flare did give it a slightly more adult feel. But it was dead plain, like a smooth, flat-fronted triangle of fabric - utility-styling, one might say - had a high, deep waistband which reintroduced that juvenile aspect again, and it was an awkward length, being neither one thing or another, hemmed perhaps two inches below the knee. The later point was a subtle thing perhaps, but it made it look as if it were either a calf-length skirt she’d grown out of, or a hand-me-down given her by some older sibling and which she was yet to grow in to. The nylon lining didn’t do her any favours either; the skirt was fully lined and it crackled with static whenever she sat down.

And that gawkily pre-adolescent ill-fitted look carried over to the button-through cardigan. It suffered from that particular type of draping bagginess that only developed after going out of shape over many, many repeated wash cycles. The sleeves fell just a little too long, draping down over her palms nearly to the base of her fingers with her hands by her sides, while steadfastly also refusing to remain rolled over the subtly wear-worn buttoned cuffs of her blouse.

Once clear of the all-day pyjamas and bare feet or hospital examination gown garb that had characterised her time in the care home she’d have liked to have been able to wear her own clothes; she’d certainly expected to; in theory she’d been able to, was able to - in theory. In practice, she didn’t own any of her own clothes, not any longer. It turned out her entire wardrobe had evaporated along with the proceeds from the sale of the family home - the manor house, stables and grounds her late father had strived so hard all his life to attain. All of that was gone now.

And she still couldn’t grasp how it was that she was the aggrieved one and yet - around one year on - she still found herself living under what amounted to twenty-four hour supervision. Yes, she was no longer confined to a nursing home, had swapped the clinical white walls and tiles of a psychiatric observation suite, for the chintz and flock wallpaper of a detached, suburban ‘halfway house’. The latter was a very normal, practically anonymous, if expansive, grey-bricked double-fronted property tucked around the back of London’s Muswell Hill, amongst a cluster of other equally unremarkable, properties peopled by very everyday, boringly anonymous grey suburban faces. But normality ended at the door, at least in so far as young Alice was concerned. The other residents seemed to have far more freedom than her, the more compos mentis among them coming and going as they pleased, within reason; the place was supposed to be a first step in reintegrating in to society. As for Alice, however; some unknown hand had taken it upon itself to draw up all manner of additional restrictive stipulations safeguarding her care and rehabilitation; and there didn’t seem to be any rush to achieve the latter.

It was true she had her own room, but it was sited high up in one of the turret-like corners of the building, tucked away at the rear where it overlooked the community tennis courts. There, the accountants, city types and the occasional minor self-starter entrepreneur or computer nerd would play noisily until dusk before then adjourning to the local hostelry, a pub dedicated to the man behind the high lattice mast which towered over the nearby Alexandra Palace like Eiffel’s monument in miniature and which Alice could see from her window.

She could see, also, the white-dressed figures darting about, dancing and scampering in green-soled trainers, their rackets on occasion brandished threateningly, held aloft like sabres across the net. They took it seriously down there. She knew they played noisily because she could see their mouths gaping in time with the effort of the shot, or at each other, fists clenching and faces red. She could read the Alpha-male body language, almost smell the testosterone. What she couldn’t do was join in - that went without saying; that would have meant some sort of individual-determined action on her own part. Nor could she hear the action; it was another of her gripes that beggared belief, that she could not be trusted with an open window lest she ‘do something stupid’ as she’d heard the house staff comment.

The one single window was bolted shut and covered behind its screen of chintz curtains, whenever she drew them back, by thick white diamonds of wire mesh. And she still had no key for her door either, despite always worrying on at them about it. Once her room door was shut - as it was mid-evening, come rain or shine - that was it for the night. The only plus was that at least her room was en suite; it had a little plastic shower cubicle and even a real toilet; there was no humiliatingly exposed commode or under-generous bedpan nowadays!

The tennis courts, though, were the preserve of the local residents who paid for their upkeep anyhow. The tarmac courts were guarded jealously, they were decidedly not for the use of ‘those dome-heads and dog-end munchers’ - as she’d once overheard in the street. By this was meant ‘the nutters’ from the ‘big house on the corner’, as Alice and her fellow residents were oft cruelly referred to in bus-queue whispers. The local school children would rarely bother to whisper their opinions; they wore their hearts on their sleeves, even some of those originating from that posh school up in Highgate Village who Alice always thought should have known better. The crowd up from the doldrums of the inner-city-compressive-school-lands of Wood Green, Turnpike Lane and South Tottenham - grim, economically poor, racially ill-mixed areas full of tension and strife and dangerous young men armed with infinitely more dangerous dogs on chain-link leashes - didn’t know any different; they would whoop and catcall if they saw a small escorted group daring to brave the rigours of Muswell Hill Broadway.

Not that Alice wasn’t allowed out; they couldn’t keep her locked up against her will... not any more. Rarely - and only really of late - she was allowed to go around the shops or to Alexandra park as part of one of those escorted groups; but even then Alice had the extra stipulation of having to stay close to the escort, usually being obliged to hold the escort’s hand like a lost child, adding to her sense of shame and humiliation. Usually, though, her sojourns were in the one-to-one supervisory company of the House Mother or warden. A waddling buxom no-nonsense woman, she kept Alice on a short leash, so to speak, and thought nothing of admonishing Alice in shops or in front of passers-by by loudly announcing to all within earshot how lucky Alice had been to be allowed out of the hospital (substituting the name of a well-known local establishment, even though the place had had nothing to do with Alice) and how easily she could be returned there.

It was the House Mother who, presumably acting under instruction, actively discouraged Alice from mixing too much socially with the other residents, often doling her out housework chores that kept her away from the main body of the group and the social areas. Alice was allowed to view television, although the hours were carefully monitored and limited. But once again the House Mother always seemed to arrange it so that Alice’s allotted slot coincided with a period of the day when the majority of the other residents were out on trips or around the shops and only the three or four really bad ‘thumb-suckers and rockers’ they had in residence were gathered in the TV lounge; and at that time the viewing on offer was invariably sing-along infant fare aimed at toddlers; it was what those particular residents liked, it made them feel reassured. But early evenings, when the others were in, were invariably spent down on her hands and knees or at the kitchen sink, a dull green nylon tabard over her ubiquitous garb of even duller grey skirt, cardigan blouse, thick woolly knee socks and clumpy shoes.

The outfit had become a sort of uniform; all the others wore jeans and tee shirts, things bought with allowances or sent by relatives or taken from home. Alice was in effect a pauper now, as the House Mother rarely failed to remind her. She had no allowance, nor clothes of her own, nor - she had been informed - could her stepmother and legal guardian, Lady Marchment be contacted. Not that Alice would have wanted her stepmother contacted in any case; not being within her stepmother’s perverted grasp was the one saving grace in her current situation. Having sold up, Lady Marchment had moved out of the country, Alice had been told, and in any case was currently spending her time on the move, shuttling from country to country, something to do with some sort of charitable work or project she had become involved with out in Angola.

The upshot of all this was that Alice was dependent on poor-house dole-outs for her clothing, every item from the skin outwards. And the House Mother would pick out every stitch for her; at least for today the coarse, fat woolly socks were gone, and the awful bobbly beige bobble hat, like a small, round, woollen tea cosy she was handed whenever it was deemed cold outside had been left behind. She was glad of the latter - the hat, Alice felt, completed what to many Londoners was the uniform of a typical ‘care-in-the-community’ mental patient. Her hair, well in to its recovery from the institution’s butchery, was now a neat shoulder length at the back and was pulled back in a neat ponytail by a grey scrunchie the House Mother had handed her; it would be allowed to grow no longer; the House Mother would take her own scissors to it to ensure it remained neat, she had been told. The socks had thankfully been superseded for today by a pair of nylons the woman had rustled up from somewhere, old fully fashion tan-coloured things with reinforced heels and darker backseams. The latter had necessitated suspenders of course, and that supporting role had fallen to a horrid flesh-coloured roll-on Playtex girdle. Alice had hated the thing on sight, with its sticky rubbery feel and glossy diamond satin-finish panels that pulled her tummy in as flat as a board, carved her waist inwards under her ribs at the sides, while making her backside seem to stick out conspicuously as if twice its normal plump size; she hated it, but knew she had little option, not if she didn’t want to turn up wearing socks.

The long-line bra featured self-conscious bullet cups which made her bustline jut out angrily through the misshaped, wrong-sized cardigan like a 1950s sweater girl - only minus the glamour - but once again she had had little choice if she hadn’t wanted to go bra-less. She had in theory had a choice when she had been handed the full-length heavyweight white nylon slip, but by then she was wallowing in brow-beaten defeat - and besides, she was no longer used to arguing back. But now she was regretting having given in without putting up at least some sort of fight; the petticoat or slip was ever so tight around her bottom and thighs and, despite the relative fullness of the skirt, interfered with her gait to the extent of limiting her step; she had to struggle to keep up with her companions. But the thing zipped up the back - and the zipper was extraordinarily stiff - so even if she got to dive in a restroom or toilet it would prove difficult to struggle out of it now; she was locked in it for the duration.

But for the duration of what, exactly - what could she, or should she, say? For instance, where it came to her stepmother’s involvement, it beggared belief that the woman had been able to sell the family home, liquidate her father’s estate - and her, Alice’s, inheritance - and even empty and closedown Alice’s bank account and the trust fund that her father had set up to support her further education and provide her with a living allowance. But Alice had already been advised that it had all been totally legal and aboveboard, the manner in which it had been carried out.

The crux of the matter was that it all - on paper - seemed to be in Alice’s long-term interests; or had been made to appear so. And Alice had then signed - on the very day of her eighteenth birthday - a series of documents which together amounted to an enduring power of attorney, in effect turning over all decisions regarding Alice’s life, future, financial dealings and property to her stepmother and relinquishing all rights to her father’s estate.

Yes Alice could well remember - she could remember too what had been done to her the first couple of times the paper work had been thrust at her and she’d refused to sign! In actual fact she had held out through no less than four attempts to get her to sign before she had caved in; she was proud of that fact. She remembered too how the documentation had carried the proviso: ‘in sound state of mind’, or something similar. Therein, she had been informed recently - unless she could categorically prove coercion - lay her only defence, the only way of reversing what had since come to pass and reclaiming what was rightfully hers.

She could make good her testimony, try through that to prove the likelihood of coercion but risk being undermined by the expert psychiatric opinion the Church authorities would undoubtedly bring to bear, falling foul of those veiled threats and finding herself in a worse situation, perhaps even going the same way as poor Gwyneth. Or she could simply seek to invalidate the papers she’d signed by submitting to the opinion that at the time she was not of sound mind, thus letting her captors off the hook by letting them claim, as they were claiming, that she was merely a patient, a girl they were trying to help who had been found deranged and wandering aimlessly and who had had to be restrained in a straitjacket and padded cell for her own protection.

The trouble was, the latter approach would both get the Church off the hook as regards her own treatment while simultaneously invalidating any further testimony she might be able to offer regarding those other poor souls, those other girls they’d in effect been holding captive, illegally detained. And there were those she feared with an axe to grind who would use such a diagnosis to put her right back in an institution somewhere, her stepmother being foremost among them... But this was it, she was here now, right here, right now, deep in the palace of the establishment, this marble-hall shrine to the legal profession... And the main thing was - if she wanted to be believed, taken seriously one way or the other - she had to remain calm, remain rational, she must not let them rile her, not let them make her out to be a mental case... even if she did look like one in her rag-bag institutional getup.

***

Approached from along the die-straight white marble passageway the doors of what Alice took to be a courtroom made for an imposing, even intimidating, sight. As they drew nearer so the great doors’ huge brass cauliflower-like doorknobs slowly morphed into the lion’s mane heads they in fact represented. With her two court-appointed officials, strolling one each side of her, guiding her by the elbows as if she were some sort of invalid, Alice was bade take a seat within an alcove set back from the hectic bustling clamour of what turned out to be a central thoroughfare for all manner of briefcase-touting wigs, bespectacled suits and trundling rattling trolleys piled with buff files, folders and manila envelopes pushed by brown coated porters.

The trio, Alice and her two escorts - both tight lipped young women, in their late twenties or early thirties, dressed in the obligatory black or very dark grey pinstriped skirt-and-jacket suits, dark stockings or pantyhose and black heels to match - duly took their places together at one end of a short row of plush red-upholstered gilded (more likely gold-painted) metal frame chairs, the type that seemed to grace town halls and civic centres country-wide in the UK. They sat upright in a subdued line like the three wise monkeys of Chinese legend:

The two poised, sharp-suited, blonds, their shoulder-length hair lacquered into stiff-styled submission, were definitely of the ‘speak-no-evil’ persuasion Alice had decided. Indeed they seemed reluctant to speak to her at all, appearing put out if either one felt obliged to respond to some query or comment she brought up. At best, both seemed to be humouring her with their patronising smiles and down-pat reassurances. At worst they treated her concerns with an ill-disguised pinch of salt, blatantly paying only lip service.

It all made Alice worry that perhaps they had been pre warned or told beforehand that doubting aspersions had been cast on Alice’s reliability, that a rumour was circulating that their witness was a little ‘feeble minded’. It was as if - Alice worried - her testimony was being devalued, undermined, even before she’d had the chance to deliver it. And those presently congregated within, she thought - possibly both those awaiting her to bear witness against them and those waiting to hear, scrutinise and judge her testimony - were likely to prove of the ‘hear-no-evil, see-no-evil’ type. She tried to shake off the latter conspiracy-inspired thought, trying her best to fight against her cynicism, lest it render her powerless before she started; a shiver ran down her spine as if someone had just strolled across her grave, and she absentmindedly played with the rosary in her lap; it gave her comfort, reminded her of the word of God; chastity, discipline, obedience, she felt her lips silently mutter; involuntarily she began to recite Psalm 23 under her singsong breath, the refrain of Crimond running through her mind: “The Lord is My Shepherd, I’ll Not Want.... He lays me down to...”

“Shhhh! Dear... You’re talking to yourself again...” It was one of her escorts, and Alice felt her cheeks ablaze with the hot coals of embarrassment.

In the fullness of time the tall, panelled double doors swung apart admitting Alice into the presence of the enquiry... and Alice’s mouth fell open. The everyday functional aesthetic of the courtroom environment she had readied herself for, here, in this room, had been eschewed in favour of an overly ebullient display of rococo style splendour, a particularly gauche and gaudy example of that fashion’s over-kill ornamentation.

The tribunal panel were seated around an elevated walnut horseshoe shaped bench that took pride of place at the far end of the expansive, high-ceilinged wood-panelled chamber. Behind its central apex, the Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland dominated the wall, the crowned English lion and Scottish unicorn supporting the central quartered shield device glared down on the proceedings from their elevated vantage point as if in disapproval of the travesty Alice now felt certain was about to unfold.

A short, stout blousy woman in inky judicial robes was seated at the centre, bracketed either side by the others of the inquiry panel arranged around the room as two wings. Her plump jowls joining with a double chin that rolled like a pink croissant beneath her chin, it seemed to Alice the woman possessed a dark, merciless streak, something she imagined she could see written in the woman’s sharp perceptive eyes. This old crow, she thought, possessed a dangerously soul-searching gaze, one capable of prising out, microscopically probing, the most well-buried secret.

The woman’s eyes seemed to track her as she hesitantly approached - nervously fiddling with her fingers in front of her plain grey skirt - like a pair of unavoidable spotlights, coinciding on and picking out every blemish, pimple and carbuncle in their all-revealing limelight... No, it felt more revealing than that; it felt more like being X-rayed... all over. And drawing closer, that first-impression label she had subconsciously saddled the tribunal chairwoman with, ‘old crow’, seemed quite apt, the woman’s long sloping nose pressing out beak-like from beneath her roll-curled and corn-rowed straw-gold legal wig, a few sprigs of blatantly dyed coal black hair, intruding onto her finely-lined forehead. It was not an impression in any danger of contradiction by the woman’s tone when she spoke:

“Take a seat please, Miss Marchment... Face forward so that we may get a good look at you, if you don’t mind. And when asked - and only when asked - speak clearly, answer concisely... and restrict your testimony only to the facts at hand, as you know of them... Thank you...” The voice was not only strident, it was raucous, roughened and made overly sibilant by the court’s PA microphone system; what with that and the black robe spread out to either side of her high-backed chair like a bird delousing in the sun, she was indeed very crow-like, the whole room like a murder of crows.

Alice wasn’t sure how to respond, but already there was a problem; they’d got her name wrong: “P,P,Please miss... L... L,L,Lamberton, miss... Alice L,L...Lamberton - that’s my name; Alice L,L,L...L,L,Lamberton... not Marchment... miss... I...” She blurted, nervously, her voice shaky, uncertain and uneven. It had been a long time since she’d used her given name at all, let alone the Lamberton variation of it, her father’s name and the one she had been christened with. For some reason she had particular difficulty with it, spluttering and stuttering over it to such an extent that she had almost given up at the end there, even though her much-despised stepmother’s maiden name, Marchment came flowing out unscathed; she felt sure she’d heard her stepmother’s tinkling little tittering coming from up in the public gallery, the little girlishly mocking giggle the woman reserved for rubbing her stepdaughter’s nose in some humiliation or other she had formulated.

The crow-woman chairperson spread both hands on the bench before her, her shoulders rising as she leaned forward, a faintly audible slap of palms on wood signalling her impatience: “Your Honour... You address me as Your Honour... dear.” Her crowing voice had softened at the very end, an attempt at a reassuring smile creasing her thin-lipped, powdered face, subtle blusher and foundation battling with late-forties-going-on sixties lines; and losing. She looked quizzically across at the usher, a series-eyed, pointed-chin man in his mid to late forties; papers rustled:

Rising to his feet, the usher smiled, indicating the seated girl with the corner of the folder he held in his hand: “It seems the witness’s surname was changed by deed pole at the request of her stepmother upon that lady’s reverting to her former title of Lady Marchment, your honour - and with the young lady’s later agreement upon her having come of age...”

“Ah yes, Lady Marchment...” the chairwoman said thoughtfully “...thank you usher”. Glaring obliquely at Alice out of the corner of one eye, as if it were Alice under investigation rather than giving testimony, she turned her head to whisper with the all too familiar tall and striking bespectacled figure to her right. Then turning back, that struggling sympathetic attempted smile twitching around her lips, she again addressed Alice, all too clearly fighting back irritation that bordered on anger; already! “...So Alice L,L...Lamberton it is” she mimicked “if it keeps you happy - but for the purposes of this hearing’s records...” she shifted her attention to the stenographer as she spoke “...the witness’s testimony will be entered under her legally recognised name; Miss Alice, Poppy, Elizabeth Marchment.” She fixed Alice in her gaze accusingly: “And you, young lady, will restrict yourself to answering the questions that will be posed and calmly delivering your testimony to the best of your ability.”

Alice noted the chairwoman’s less than subtle emphasise on that adjective - calmly - as is if she expected the proceedings to become emotionally charged on Alice’s part, even hysterical; she would show them, though; she would remain calm no matter what! But there seemed so many preconceived impressions and opinions about her washing around - poisoning the air - it seemed to Alice more than ever that the chances of her allegations receiving an impartial audience were becoming vanishingly small. Looking up from fidgeting with her rosary, Alice’s eyes met with one of the two reasons her jaw had dropped and her mouth had gaped open like an idiot when she had been led in - one of two figures, seated side by side on the chairwoman’s right. Involuntarily she averted her gaze, staring down at her lap and the set of jet beads strung with the sign of the cross she’d been allowed to keep with her; she touched the cross and instantly the Apostle’s creed popped into her mind; she had to be prompted by the chairwoman to bring her back to the here and now.

There was something very sinister indeed going on here: This had to be an awful lot more than a simple case of a huge and powerful institution closing ranks, Alice reflected glumly. This was a case of an all but totally unassailable establishment-endorsed organisation in effect being given leave to perform its own housecleaning, with all the reputation-cleansing, face-saving shenanigans that was likely to lead to. It beggared belief: two of the central players, the main perpetrators - at least in terms of Alice’s experience - co-conspirators, seated right there, on the very tribunal panel purportedly convened to investigate the institution they had so very much been part of. And it was an involvement which presumably, Alice realised with horror, only she knew of.

To be the complainant or whistle blower under such circumstances could prove a very dangerous place to be. It was the kind of daunting, foolhardy task which could earn a person such as herself a more-or-less permanent residency as a guest of the type of facility the priory infirmary’s ‘sanatorium’ had been seeking to emulate, albeit on a small scale; straitjacket and all! And there was at least one person seated on that bench who could make that happen, if she was careless enough to point a finger. To make matters worse, there were a least two other faces up there on the panel who were familiar; not perpetrators, for sure, but visitors, Alice felt certain. Whether either one of those knew of the central pair’s involvement, the fashionably dressed attractive woman seated on the chairperson’s right hand with the title ‘professor’ emblazoned on the card in front of her and her far younger PhD colleague , seemed unlikely.

Of course she realized now none of this - all she had been through - would have happened had she not fallen under the care of doctor, now professor, Ecclestone, finding herself first trapped against her will in a church-managed charity home for wayward and intractable girls sited in a remote and secluded priory, then confined to that establishment’s sanatorium. It was true she had gone with the good doctor voluntarily, tripped happily enough in to the passenger seat of her car that cold wet night, but at the time she had seen it as a chance to escape from her stepmother’s clutches. But from the moment she had dimly become aware of that prick in her upper arm an intervention and rescue had become an abduction; and Alice had unknowingly switched status from ‘runaway’ to abductee, and the whole sorry, damning tale took on a far more sinister twist.

She’d come to perceive Dr Anne Ecclestone as her saviour and the calming medication that manipulative woman prescribed - oddly and counter-intuitively - as strengthening her resolve through allowing her the space she needed to think and regroup by relieving her of her overwhelming neurosis. Even now she was loath to admit to herself that her ‘neurosis‘ had likely been an invention of the doctor herself, and the medication she had been prescribed had in effect enslaved her, her growing dependence - and her stepmother’s control of the supply - placing her ever more firmly under her stepmother’s thumb, subject to her will.

Dare she now stand up and point the finger? Or would the mud just come sloshing back all over her? But if she failed now to finger this camouflaged nemesis, how could she expect the testimony she was to give against the rest of them to stand up? How, indeed, could she even begin to narrate the story without naming Dr Anne Ecclestone and her latterly recruited and dangerously vindictive sidekick, Dr Andrea Stavrolidese?

At long last she knew the latter woman’s name - and she at the very least had to pay. That sadistic woman had, as near as damn it, been single-handedly responsible for having chased that poor Welsh girl, Gwyneth, out of her wits. She had quite deliberately instigated a regimen designed to achieve exactly that end, to drive the poor thing out of her mind, just to test some hypothesis that she could take a perfectly healthy young girl or woman and turn her into a mental patient, systematically destroying her mental health in the process. Except it didn’t quite work like that. Alice knew, because the woman had started to work on her, too, towards the end. The woman believed in the carrot rather than the stick (or at least as much as the stick - the cane she’d carried had always been close at hand).

You didn’t drive a person out of her mind, rather it was a case of gently, yet firmly, guiding her down that path, in a stepwise fashion, step by step, little by little, encouraging her to accept some aspect or other of her worsening mental state before leading her on to the next. You rewarded the exhibition of the relevant symptoms with care love and attention and only punished when there was some overt attempt to fight back - and even then, more often than not, simply by the withdrawal of that love and attention rather than by the cane. It was an insidious process which began with something akin to the ‘tethering’ system already in use in the institution, whereby you simply sent the subject to Coventry, that is pointedly ignored her, forbade her to speak or allow others to speak to her, perhaps limit her to whispering if needing to question her... And yes, the cane was much in evidence at this early stage.

The next hour or so turned into kind of a judicial purgatory for the increasingly bamboozled Alice as she found her words being twisted and aspersions cast, first on her truthfulness, then on her mental health. Alice’s ex-boyfriend’s conviction and subsequent jailing for narcotics ‘possession with intent to deal’ was dredged up, the silting mud being slung in her direction steadfastly adhering, along with the only partially disguised suggestion that she might have been involved herself and indeed been fortunate not to have faced prosecution. Her history of addiction to prescription tranquilizers and sedatives was brought up and turned against her, - over and over, time and time again - despite the fact that this unfortunate affliction had come about through no fault of her own.

And even while she was speaking the proceedings and the room around her seemed to intermittently fade and return, leaving her once or twice lost for words and wondering what she had just been saying. The notion that she was wading through a series of imagined flashbacks and false memories came and went but was impossible to shake entirely, leaving her uncertain even as to the validity of her own testimony at times, her confidence steadily waning.

Alice’s assertions that she had been manoeuvred, manipulated, into becoming dependent on tranquilizers by her stepmother (worthy of consideration by some; just; a few quizzical expressions about) with the collusion of a ‘health professional’ (considered increasingly unlikely; the allegation triggering one or two wry amused smiles) and that her stepmother might have been responsible for framing her boyfriend (a couple of audible titters) were near enough disregarded out of hand:

When asked the identity of this health professional or doctor who had proved so easily corruptible, been so willing to become involved in such a plot - and Alice had given the name of Dr Anne Ecclestone, shakily pointing her finger at one of the august figures sitting on the investigating panel itself - well, the room fairly erupted with howls of derision. The chairperson - that plump crow of a woman, her tailored grey skirt suit appearing dumpily beneath her wing-flapping open-fronted black gown as she jumped up from her seat - had to slam her gavel on the table in front of her to quell the row, calling for quiet in strident, ironically raucous tones of her own.

As the witness statements were read through, contemporaneous notes read out by the police officers who had made them and the recollections of the air ambulance men who had attended the scene were tested it became increasingly apparent that, inexplicably, none of the individuals Alice recalled as being central characters and whom she had described in the various statements she had made had been encountered in the raid. Not one; it was as if they had all disappeared off the face of the earth, all been spirited away.

The work rooms which had been set up in the outbuildings had mysteriously reverted to hives of other forms of industrious endeavour. Rows of bespectacled nuns had been discovered bent over sloping oaken desks and wielding tweezers and gold leaf, hand-illuminating, copying and restoring priceless ancient Christian texts, practicing calligraphy, bookbinding, and all those other traditional crafts the great religious houses had traditionally been famed for. Where there had been school rooms, there had been found two or three simply and easily explainable store rooms, piled with easels, desks and chairs et al dating back to nineteenth century when the establishment’s laudably charitable intention had been to ‘administer the gift of literacy to the toiling sons and daughters of the soil’.

As for the brown-dress-uniformed browbeaten workforce described by Alice - of which she had claimed to have been one among many - no trace whatsoever had been found of them, nothing to show for their previous presence, no evidence even to support the allegation that they had even existed. They, too, seemed to have vanished off the planet. Indeed no evidence had been uncovered to suggest a harking back to the dark days of the church in Ireland’s long, brutal history of systematic sexual exploitation, ritualised corporal punishment and abusive clergy and other religious figures. And it was hardly likely nuns would be vulnerable to accusations of misogyny, however ‘sexually repressed’ (‘frustrated’ was the word more usually banded about in the tabloids) they might be represented as in popular media, however morally conflicted some might actually have been.

It all went to undermine the perceived validity of Alice’s testimony, even began to chip away at her ‘fitness to testify’; there began to be queries fielded as to her mental health, her ‘psychological competence to testify’.

Alice couldn’t for a moment fathom what could have become of all those girls that had slaved away with her in the priory work rooms, who had sat alongside her sharing the tedious discipline of the school room, suffering the never ending prayers and recitals of psalms in the chapter house and readings of the scriptures at mealtimes. But what could Alice know of the extensiveness of the network of Roman Catholic missions around the world? It was a diffuse, convolutedly linked tissue of connections and establishments across which many could anonymously vanish in to new posts and positions. And Alice would barely of heard of far-off Angola, even if she had heard the country mentioned, let alone São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda, the Capital, now more modestly named simply Luanda. Sure, she might have guessed, correctly, somewhere in Africa; but she just as likely might have guessed Central or South America or an island of one of the archipelagos in that part of the world. But Angola had a key role to play in the mystery, if only she knew it.

Angola was a mishmash of belief systems, roughly twenty-five percent Protestants, twenty-five percent ‘indigenous beliefs’ but a full fifty to fifty-five percent Roman Catholic, especially in the remoter, western and north western regions of the country. It is within one of those remote north-western Angolan regions - uncomfortably if not suspiciously close to the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo - where we would find, if we were to search hard enough, not one but two Catholic Church-run mission complexes. Huge priory-like complexes - each constructed like a walled fortress, and for good historically-apt reasons - a little delving would have shown that each also had direct historical links to the old priory wherein Alice had been held.

The largest of these missions’ connection with certain of the Chinese state-owned businesses presently buying up large tracts of land and resources around Africa was a lucrative one: You see, the Church mission sweatshops were large and burgeoning - and human labour just another resource after all. While most beavering away under the appalling conditions in the Chinese-run sheds around the village were unashamedly exploited indigenous people, the Catholic mission workshops typically - though not uniquely - exploited an entirely different resource. Finding themselves possessed of excess capacity, the mission administrators had been happy enough to take on the manufacturing overspill from the Chinese. Unashamed, because the fact was that the Angolan government, although oil-rich, had already come to depend upon Chinese investment and expertise in supporting farming and developing the country’s roads and other infrastructure and couldn’t afford to offend their new partners.

The Chinese state-owned manufacturing companies that had set up shop here, while vulnerable to international scrutiny and criticism over worker’s pay and working conditions within their own borders, ironically were vouchsafed within this foreign land. The Angolan authorities could be relied upon to turn a blind eye to almost anything related to Chinese investment. No government inspectors would come calling at any Chinese industrial ‘initiative’ - and the Church mission complex now sheltered under the umbrella of the Chinese.

It was an uneasy symbiotic relationship: The income generated benefited the Church and those within its local hierarchy who quite frankly fared rather well on the back of the deal, a certain section of whom lived in some degree of opulence. And the God-fearing teachings of the church - that brand of ‘hot-gospel’ preaching thrice-daily thumped out within the lavish mission complex and ‘outreached’ to the local community - helped keep the populace under the yoke of their new masters...

It all worked rather well: The nuns of the Church mission - connoisseurs of repressive self-guilt, every one - were experts when it came to instilling rigid discipline into the young women left in their charge. And there were certain other ‘benefits’ the church mission could offer visiting Chinese government men and dignitaries, besides a labour-intensive manufacturing capability - Angolan dignitaries too.

But it was in the capital of Angola’s north-western Zaire Province São Salvador - these days known as M’banza-Kongo - close to the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the latest fresh influx of workers en route for the mission workshops could presently to be found, the prettiest of them undoubtedly destined to sooth some Chinese or Angolan minister’s brow. Home to one of the oldest cathedrals in sub-Saharan Africa - dating back to the 16th century and considered important enough to have been visited by the Pope himself, Pope John Paul (II) in 1992 - despite the close proximity to the Congo’s border the presence of European faces was nothing unusual or remarkable here. Not even a coach load of sullen, crestfallen-looking pale-faced schoolgirls, smartly, if anachronistically, uniformed, trundling past raised more than a couple of eyebrows; not when they were accompanied by a party of nuns from the mission convent sited in the remote north.

The populace were used to the sight of nuns and Catholic religious regalia, were becoming rapidly acclimatised to the presence of foreign visitors - what with the contingents of Chinese and all - and African schools were awash with outdated, colonially influenced, stylistically challenged and often unsuitably juvenile school uniforms; the discipline metered out in African bush schools was strict and legendarily harsh... To any onlookers it was little wonder those pampered western girls were looking glum, then; but that was as far as their thought processes would have ran. They might have found the short-shorn boyish hairstyles a little odd, but the neat straw boaters the girls all wore took care of that. The thick strong nylon cable-tie style wrist restraints each had been wearing since back in the UK would have raised questions, but with their hands resting meekly in their laps, resting on the pleated skirts of their bib-fronted gymslips, these were out of sight and out of mind, as were their sedative-glazed eyes, lolling, listless demeanours and blank, dream-like expressions.

They had cleared UK customs, bound for Rome, armed with Italian passports and garbed in full Muslim dress of black burkas covering everything save for a slit over the eyes, floating through in an unaware tranquilized stupor. Some - the potentially more recalcitrant, requiring the heaviest sedation and loaded with muscle relaxant - had been trundled through seated in wheelchairs; others had waddled stiff-gaited in leg callipers or braces, each aided by a nun. In this manner the party had boarded a special flight laid on by Vatican authorities; a contingent of disabled young Muslim women plucked from abusive backgrounds, bathing in the warmth of Roman Catholic compassion, that they might come to see the true light, hear the true word.

In accordance with the stipulations respecting the Muslim faith, each had passed through a private room, staffed by a lone female immigration officer whose sensitive duty it had been to lift the veil for facial comparison with the girl’s passport photo. It had been simplicity itself for the influence of the Vatican to extend to ensuring one of its own agents had been on hand to take care of the latter aspect - and the kid-gloves, nervous sensitivity of the UK government in forever kowtowing to the Muslims had done the rest. A couple of nights spent in a disused section of a secluded seminary on the outskirts of Rome - in truth a sort of Vatican ‘safe-house’ - and, for the time being still burka-clad, it had been onwards and upwards and off.

Each now having been furnished with a rare Vatican passport - and the diplomatic immunity and privileges which go with one - the precious cargo of potentially blabber-mouthed whistleblowers had been whisked safely well beyond the reach of European legislature. It had meant a temporary doubling of lay persons holding a coveted Vatican passport - the average at any one time varying over the years from forty to forty-five - but it had entailed little trouble on the Vatican’s behalf nor expense. Besides it had been a temporary arrangement; the paper trail could be covered, the bureaucratic traces brushed over like wind-obliterated tracks in the desert; the passports were easily revocable at the stroke of a pen; surely a bureaucratic error perpetrated by a pen pusher in one of the Vatican’s many administrative departments, nothing more than that.

In fact that pen stroke had already been struck, the girls’ passports had already been revoked; the revocation had occurred the very moment they’d cleared that Angolan landing strip, the tell-tale passports had been gathered up for disposal (the physical evidence would perish later, in the mission convent’s incinerator), and the satellite phone call had gone through to the Vatican. From that moment this quaintly-uniformed group of apparent Catholic schoolgirls had in effect become ‘stateless persons’. And the cogs and gears of Vatican bureaucratic influence (or should that be interference?) were already grinding away in the background to ensure the hapless group remained that way, retained that status; non-persons, figures that for all intents and purposes no longer existed.

All manner of false trails were being laid, leading all over the world before petering out, ‘just in case’. Certain databases and computerised travel records were being altered even as their coach trundled on, its rattling old diesel engine coughing black smoky phlegm, the occasional backfire prompting one or two of the less heavily sedated to start upright and look about for help with startled frantically-worried eyes, before once again succumbing to the uncaring drugged bliss.

Those who may at one time have held a UK National Insurance (NI) number or those one or two who might once have held a valid full - or even provisional - driving licence would have found that all traces of it ever having existed had been erased, or more likely transferred to some other individual, some foreign national willing to pay good money for someone else’s identity. This was where certain underworld connections came into play (the term, Mafia, was never to be heard within Vatican corridors). Identity theft, as with people smuggling (the two were inextricably linked), was a lucrative business. There were those who just needed steering in the right direction, who just required tipping off about the relevant details, NI numbers, driving license, bank account details, that sort of thing - the sort of data the Vatican, as a state in its own right, could easily get hold of - and they would do the rest. The Vatican itself didn’t even have to sully its own computer keyboards.

Even Alice herself - still safely back in the UK - wasn’t exempt from the Vatican’s attentions. Nor were the computerised records of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) as immune to tampering as that authority would have like to have believed. Already - even before having entered the tribunal - Alice had been saddled with a long and well documented history of having been in and out of various NHS mental institutions, complete with learned diagnoses and prognoses. And one glance at the latter, signed off on by the eminent pen of the now professor Anne Ecclestone herself - a title earned since returning to academia, even though still retaining her private practice, albeit downsized - would have been enough to prompt any health professional to suggest committal to long-term residential care as an urgent contingency.

Alice couldn’t possibly know it, but she really was a very lucky girl. She too could so easily have been whisked away. But Alice’s stepmother had felt she might still want Alice around the house from time to time in the future; after all, putting Alice to work would certainly be cheaper than hiring domestic help... And the notion had a certain ‘something’, a certain frisson’! For the interim, however, Alice was even luckier; and she had the ever-compassionate professor Ecclestone to thank for her good fortune. There’d be no grotty NHS mental home for our Alice; in an ebullient demonstration of the Christian spirit of compassionate generosity the professor would offer to take the girl under her own personal care, see to it she be found a suitably secure place in a private psychiatric hospital she happened to be a trustee of.

As for those others, those out in Angola: They were likely even now being dizzily disembarked from the battered old green coach, heads still spinning and vision blurred, having arrived in the swelteringly humid compound behind the high, spiked stone block walls of the ‘St Ursulain’s Church mission to Angola’, an ecclesiastical complex originally constructed by Portuguese colonists in the early seventeenth century and peppered by fine examples of Portuguese Colonial religious architecture. Some, helped along by nuns, would already be shuffling unsteadily towards the barrack-like living quarters, solid-looking single-story limestone-block structures with steeply inclined steepled roofs, prison-like bars on the whitewashed windows and heavy red-painted iron doors; others, still weakened by muscle relaxant drugs, would be awaiting transfer by wheelchair.

The lucky ones would likely be those who would become the concubines of visiting dignitaries, or the ‘favourites’ of certain of the nuns. There were the Chinese and certain church dignitaries of course. But there were also one or two local government officials, African men, who required paying off; and a girl or two made for a most generous ‘tribute’. There were those among the African Angolan affluent, or even from the neighbouring Congo, who prized having a white girl at their beck and call, waiting on table with her head bowed in humility at dinner, or gathering up coats and curtsying at the door when guests arrived.

It was odd observation, often made, that it would be the man of the house who would want to buy their white-skinned pet some sort of lavish, short-skirted and multilayered petticoated ‘French maid’ type confection, all heavy duchesse satin and flounced and frilled prim accessories - the kind of thing that they were skilled at knocking up in the mission workshops. The woman of the house, however, was often the one more likely to insist on total nudity, or if her husband persisted in his insistence in dressing the girl in some costume or other, would insist on the confiscation of the girl’s knickers, often delighting in watching her knickerless, short-skirted servant girl down on her hands and knees scrubbing floors or cleaning in and around the toilet bowl with a deliberately short-handled brush. More than one set of nearly transparent harem pants had been ordered by the wife of one local official for their girl; sized and cut to be skin tight and with the gusset removed.

It was always the woman of the house that would be the most spiteful when it came to administering the cane or the strap or whichever implement they chose to keep order. And - depending on the culture of the household - it seemed always the woman who would insist on decking out their prize with tribal markings as a mark of ownership. The latter would usually take the form of a series of chevrons running down each of the girl’s cheeks, though sometimes a design would be cut into, and run across, the top of her breasts or the centre of her buttocks. The wife would usually press into use one of her husband’s razorblades to carry out this task, though one woman, whose family traditionally carried out such marking, was known to have put to use her husband’s needle-point electric soldering iron.

A final indignity that might occur would be if girl was brought before an elder for the traditional act of ritual female circumcision. Whether this was worse for a girl to suffer -or equal to - being ritualistically disfigured so that someone’s husband might not be tempted to so often pluck at low-hanging fruit is open to conjecture.

Of the less fortunate, those left behind to languish in the infernally hot workrooms in their Bri-nylon workhouse uniform dresses, tabards and aprons; some would go on to one day take the vows of ‘Holy Orders’ themselves, becoming nuns and so part of the machinery of this corrupt (and corrupting) Church establishment. Others, their eyesight fading, ruined by the long soul-destroying hours of close needlework in the dimly-lit, continually-shuttered workrooms or hands clawed by tendon damage and ligament contraction would eventually move on to courser work or ironing and then - some now possibly only partially sighted - would be put to work toiling in the fields, tilling the soil like yoked bullocks under the tropical Sub-Saharan African sun until well into middle age.

The appearance of middle age will arrive early here of course; the patterns of old age following on even more rapidly, as the sun’s ultraviolet rays work their wrinkling, leathering magic on soft peaches-and-cream English-country-garden complexions. Teeth will loosen surprisingly, shockingly, early, hair will thin out and arthritis will gnarl and twist delicate fingers like old twigs and knobble knuckles with arthritic nodules like rough barnacle-encrusted pebbles. But then, the life expectancy at birth for the general population is only forty-seven years, and only a little over a third reach forty; so they should perhaps think themselves lucky that by the grace of God they’ll likely survive beyond those years, even if worked to the bone and decrepit.

One can only guess at the additional anguish suffered by a tousle-haired twenty-four or twenty-five year old when, bent over the trestle yet again, bottom bared and awaiting the attentions of the overseer’s cane - a large, portly and profusely sweating tribal African woman - she catches her reflection in a metal tray on the ground. How is she to feel, seeing how the once-taut skin covering those high cheek bones is beginning to sag, how her eyes have dulled and sunken, how the bags have grown beneath, blue-darkening and circled, and how the first few wrinkles are beginning to line her forehead reminding her of her mother’s own, but when that woman had been hitting her forties?

Little wonder, then, if a girl should opt, given the choice - half a chance even - to take her vows, become part of the whip-hand, part of the machinery, an overseer herself. Or even if the life of a concubine or household servant should be preferable, however degrading and humiliating. But these are not considerations that need trouble Alice; her fate has already been mapped out for her... in part. But what proportion of that future will encompass the reassuring cosiness of the straitjacket and comforting routine of the psychiatric ward or the embarrassing, belittling, humility of the maid’s uniform and an existence spent pressed into service under the yoke of her hated stepmother - reduced to the status of a lowly servant girl in what should morally and legally be her own home - still remained to be seen...