I was eating an apple when I picked up the slim bundle of papers from my pigeonhole. I looked, without thinking too much, at the top sheet, and could see that it was a letter from my instructing solicitors in McCloud’s case. It said simply, ‘Counsel will note the content of the Notice of Additional Evidence sent to us by the Crown!’
The exclamation mark should have told me that something significant was contained in the new evidence. Solicitors don’t usually use exclamation marks.
I opened it and started to read as I made my way up to my room. It was a statement from a DC Simons. My first thought was that it was what we call continuity evidence – when a police officer makes a bland and usually uncontroversial statement saying that he oversaw the placing of tapes or evidence in a safe place, so that no one can suggest that something has been tampered with – but this statement was much, much more significant. In the case of Kenny McCloud, it was absolute dynamite.
I telephoned my solicitor straight away and asked them to arrange a conference with McCloud for the next day. Then I put my head on my desk and tried to chase away the images that were forming in my head of the vile timber yard and the most evil man I had ever met whipping his two little daughters with a dog chain, before tying them up and raping them.
The next day, I met Harry Ashton outside Pentonville for the second time. He looked grim-faced at me. ‘You’ve seen the new evidence then?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Not great for Kenny is it?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘nor his daughters.’
‘No,’ said Harry, and his already grim face became even grimmer.
We entered Pentonville and made our way through the security and the endless heavy locked doors until we reached the room where Kenny McCloud sat waiting for us.
He seemed more alert than last time, but in every other respect was the same crumbling, decaying human wreck as before.
‘Good morning, Kenny,’ I said, deliberately using his Christian name. He nodded in response, then exchanged a look with Harry Ashton. He knew that he might be able to kid me, but he wouldn’t get anything past the old copper.
I sat down opposite him and looked him firmly in the eye, and took a breath. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘Mr McCloud, the last time we met you told me that you were innocent of these allegations.’
‘Aye,’ he said, his head trembling just a little as he fixed his eyes on mine.
‘And I respect that,’ I continued, ‘I respect your right to have a trial. And if we have a trial in this matter, then I can assure you that I’ll do everything I can to put your case before the jury in the best way I can.’
‘If,’ he said, his eyes narrowing as he stared at me, ‘you said if we have a trial.’
I nodded slowly at him, then pushed the Notice of Additional Evidence across the table towards him.
‘We received this yesterday,’ I said, ‘it’s a new statement from the leading Detective in this case.’
He glanced down at it, then back at me.
‘Would you like me to read it out to you?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, ‘you can just tell me what it says.’
I began, ‘The Detective has acquired your medical records and the medical records of your daughters going back to the 1970s.’
His eyes narrowed further as he considered this.
‘It appears that in 1976, you suffered from genital warts and also venereal disease, syphilis.’
He nodded.
‘Is that true?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve been through the records and it is clear that someone with your name, date of birth and address, was treated for both of these conditions from May 1976.’
He gritted his teeth and began breathing heavily out through his nose.
‘It also appears that both your daughters were also treated for genital warts and syphilis at the same time.’
I watched now as his eyes screwed shut, his breathing becoming heavier. I glanced at Harry Ashton, who sat with his mouth slightly open staring at the sight of Kenny McCloud drowning under the weight of what he was being presented with.
‘Look,’ I continued as gently as I could, more gently than the situation deserved, more gently than this man who had poisoned his own daughters with his inhuman lust deserved.
‘You do realise what this means don’t you?’
Without opening his eyes, without altering his heavy bull-like breathing, he nodded.
‘It means that it is going to be almost impossible for you to win your trial. Medical evidence in a case like this is absolutely damning.’
He continued to nod and I noticed now that tears were pushing themselves through his screwed-up eyes.
‘I will do what you tell me, Mr McCloud,’ I said. ‘If you still want to put this matter before a jury, then I will respect your right to do that, but …’ I paused, and Harry Ashton finished my sentence for me ‘… but you’d be mad to do so.’
At this point something strange happened, something unexpected, something that you could never be taught about in any textbook or university seminar. McCloud reached his hand across the table and placed it on top of mine. It felt cold and clammy. I wanted to move it, I wanted to move away from the table and run as far away from this monster as I could and scrub my hands with hot soapy water. I had never experienced a situation like this, I had never been this close to someone who had so brutalised the lives of two children: my childhood contained nothing like this, my childhood was about bikes and fun and games and being told off for not going to sleep and not doing my homework and then kissed on the forehead before bedtime. My childhood was about being dropped off at school and having sweets on a Friday night and moaning about going to the supermarket with my mum. There was none of this darkness in my childhood, there was no timber yard, no dog lead, no waiting with dread to be told by my stinking father that I had to go for a ‘walk’ with him.
Yet here I was with this man, in his story, the story of him and his weakness and his daughters who had their one and only chance of a happy childhood destroyed by the man who was now holding my hand.
We sat like that for a minute or so, until I had to ask the question, ‘Do you want to plead guilty now, Mr McCloud?’
He nodded, all the while never opening his eyes, all the while keeping his hand on mine.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘look, I’ve got to ask you this as well – you don’t have to answer, but it may help both of us if you do.’
He opened his eyes now and looked at me, finally moving his hand away from mine liberating me from his icy grip, to wipe the tears from his face and smear the lens of his glasses.
‘Are your daughters telling the truth about what happened to them?’
He took a deep breath then averted his eyes from mine to the desk, then shook his head slowly. ‘I won’t answer that, Mr Winnock.’
‘Alright,’ I said, ‘but you realise that I can’t really say much on your behalf when you’re sentenced if you don’t tell me much now.’
He nodded. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘that’s fine.’
I got him to endorse my brief with his instructions that he intended to enter a guilty plea of his own free will, then I shook his hand, feeling once again its clammy stickiness and wishing that I could plunge my own hand in a tub of ice-cold water.
A week later, Kenneth Ernest McCloud was sentenced to sixteen years imprisonment for the rape and indecent assault of his two daughters.
They were both present in court when he was sentenced. They sobbed as the facts of that dark time and that dark place were opened to the court. I turned towards them at one point: two shaking, terrified, middle-aged women, now desperate to grasp what they had left of life, what he had left them to live with.
In mitigation, I simply asked the Judge to give him credit for pleading guilty. There was nothing else I could properly do or say – my job was done.