The Crown’s case continued for the next couple of days. Two days in which we had mostly uncontentious evidence: there was the pathologist’s evidence, which was delivered by a strikingly handsome grey-haired bloke who looked as if he belonged on the TV. He told a riveted court that Gary Dickinson had died because of massive trauma to his head, which had caused a severe cerebral contusion to his lower cranium and a subarachnoid haemorrhage, which, in plain English, is having your head smashed in.
He had diagrams and reconstructions and told us that Gary Dickinson would have died within three minutes of landing.
This was a poignant piece of evidence. This is the exact moment when the gravity of the trial really hit home – three minutes from fall to death. Three minutes to have your physical existence here on earth ended. That resonated with all of us except, perhaps, the Judge and the Fishmeister, who had both heard it all before.
We then had the telephone reports which showed the dreaded text messages, and some toxicology reports which showed that Gary Dickinson had had a small amount of alcohol that night and, possibly, a small amount of cocaine. Whilst Tasha had had quite a lot of alcohol and was twice the legal drink drive limit (not that she had planned to go anywhere in a car) and had had a moderate amount of cocaine.
Then the interviews, which had been so painstakingly edited a couple of nights before, were read out, and that was it – the Crown’s case was over.
‘That is the case for the Crown,’ said Roger Fish, and did a rather elaborate bow towards the jury.
I had been sitting next to Kelly throughout. Neither of us had mentioned the night at mine – well, not in detail. I wasn’t sure if we’d do it again or if she just saw me as a bit of fun. I didn’t know.
But now wasn’t the time to think about that, now was the time to start our case, and that would start with Tasha.
Before she gave her evidence, we went to see her, to give her one last pep-talk, to make sure that she was as ready as she could be. And to tell her the bad news that we hadn’t been able to track down anyone to back up her account of what Gary Dickinson had done to her.
I asked Charlie if he didn’t mind if I said a few words to her. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘feel free.’
Tasha was quiet. She looked petrified. It was funny how her mood would transform her physical appearance. She would grow and harden when she was angry, then visibly appear to soften when she was sad or despondent. Now, she was petrified, and that seemed to make her smaller.
I sat down opposite her and smiled. ‘Are you alright?’ I asked, which, on reflection, was a monumentally dumb question.
She nodded, but we both knew that she was far from alright.
‘It’s your turn now, Tasha,’ I began. ‘You’re the star now; because, whether we like it or not, the jury have been waiting all week to hear from you.’
She nodded again.
‘And I know that nothing I can say is going to make you less nervous. You’re petrified, I know that. Christ, I’m petrified for you. But you’ve got to remember three things, okay?’
I paused to make sure that she was listening to me, that my words were making their way into the emotional maelstrom that was her consciousness.
‘First, you’ve got to tell the truth, just like you’ve always told me and Kelly – okay? No one can ask any more of you than that.’
She nodded and tried a little smile.
‘Second,’ I continued, ‘don’t forget that we’re here to protect you. If the questioning becomes too personal or inadmissible, Charlie will get to his feet to stop it.’
She smiled painfully as Charlie looked on like an uncle.
‘And, finally Tasha, you’ve got to remember that this is your chance to tell your side of the story. So go up there and do your best, okay? We’re all behind you rooting for you.’
I wasn’t sure if I was expecting whooping and high fives at the end of my talk, but I didn’t get it. Instead Tasha looked nervously towards the floor then up at me, wiped her eyes and gave me a thin-lipped nod.
Her evidence was difficult.
I can put it no better than that. She struggled with some of the questions, particularly when we asked her about her childhood and her teenage years, when she was taking drugs and living a rather crazy existence.
She became emotional when she described how she had had a baby taken away from her and how, because of that, she had vowed never to have another child, until she met Gary.
‘Did you love him?’ asked Charlie.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Then we got to the night itself. She told us how she had been out and how she was supposed to have been meeting one of Gary Dickinson’s friends, a man called Rio.
‘For what reason?’ asked Charlie, and Tasha did this sly smile before she answered, which I knew was a mixture of nerves and embarrassment, but came across as a bit suspicious. I worried about that. I worried how a jury would interpret her smile, how a little thing like that could give them a particular impression, an unfair impression, which would be her downfall.
‘He wanted me to go with them,’ she answered.
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Charlie. And Tasha paused, then looked upwards with the shame, then answered, ‘He wanted me to have sex with them.’
‘How did you feel about that?’
‘I felt dirty.’
Charlie paused. He knew that the rhythm of her evidence was important, he knew that he had to allow some of her answers to make their way into the minds of the jury.
He asked her about taking cocaine, and she admitted that she had – it was better that that particular detail came from his friendly questioning than the hostile cross-examination that would be coming via Roger Fish. Then he moved on to the actual incident.
‘How did you feel?’
‘Upset.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of what he had wanted me to do with his friends.’
‘How was he with you?’
‘He was angry with me – because I hadn’t met up with them.’
He then asked her about the way in which he would hurt her – and the jury watched, enraptured, as she described what he used to do to her, the way he would form both his hands into fists and bring them down on both sides of her head. She showed the jury the way he did it, bashing her own fists against her temples.
‘How did that feel?’
‘It made me want to pass out with the pain.’
‘Why did you rush towards him?’
‘I wanted to hug him, I thought that he wanted me to hug him, I thought everything was going to be alright, that I was going to be safe.’
‘When you rushed towards him what did he do?’
‘He formed his hands into fists.’
‘What did you think was about to happen?’
‘He was going to hit me instead. He’d conned me.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I pushed him hard on the chest with both my hands.’
‘And what happened to him?’
Tasha started to sob as she answered this question.
‘He fell,’ she managed, ‘he fell backwards over the banister.’
Roger Fish got up slowly to cross-examine her. He knew that this was a tricky exercise. He knew that if he went too hard on her, bullied her, shouted at her, then she would cry and the jury might feel some sympathy for her and antipathy towards him. He started carefully.
‘It’s an awful thing that he was making you do,’ he said, his voice gentle and friendly.
Tasha nodded in response.
‘You must have hated him?’
She nodded again. ‘Sometimes I did, but mostly I loved him, he could be kind and generous when he wanted.’
‘But not on that night.’
‘Well …’
‘Well, he wasn’t, was he?’ continued Fish. ‘He was horrible to you that night, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, he was.’
‘You must have been angry.’
‘I was upset more than angry.’
‘Come now, you were angry – you screamed at him, didn’t you?’
Tasha shrugged. ‘Yes, I did scream at him, because I was so upset.’
‘Okay,’ said the Fishmeister, his voice never changing from its soft tone. ‘You were upset. In fact you were so upset that you wanted to kill him.’
‘No,’ said Tasha. I knew what was coming next.
‘Well,’ said Fish, ‘let’s have a look at that text message you sent him that night.’
I groaned. Here it came.
‘A couple of hours before you killed him, you sent Gary Dickinson a text message saying, “I don’t ever wanna C U again, U come near me and I’ll kill U”.’
Tasha’s lips thinned. The jury stared at her. They knew the importance of this, they stared at Tasha and Roger Fish, standing no more than ten metres from each other, locked in an intense exchange. Two people who would never ever converse again as long as they both lived but at that moment engaged in a deep, deep intimacy.
Fish repeated, ‘You come near me and I’ll kill you And that is exactly what you did, didn’t you, Miss Roux? You killed him, just as you’d threatened.’
Tasha emitted a sound as though her soul was leaving her body, her eyes were red and tears started to roll down her cheeks.
The rest of Tasha’s cross-examination was just as painful. She struggled with questions about drugs and drink and anger. At times she seemed evasive and at times she came over as rock-hard, streetwise, capable of violence. By the end Fish was mocking her for the fact that she had never mentioned to anyone the way in which she was now saying that Gary Dickinson hit her.
‘So you’re now saying that Gary Dickinson used to hit you like this?’ he said, putting his two fists against his own head in a rather limp and unthreatening way.
‘Yes, but it wasn’t like that, it was much harder, he would pound me,’ responded Tasha.
‘Why didn’t you say this to the police?’ His voice less gentle now.
‘Because I was just trying to blot it out of my mind. He did it all the time. I hated it. I thought that one day, he would kill me by doing that.’
‘That’s a lie isn’t it, Miss Roux?’
‘No,’ she wailed. ‘No.’
‘You wanted him dead and as he stood there, vulnerable, by the side of that banister, you saw your chance. That’s right isn’t it?’
Tasha shook her head, sobbing uncontrollably now. Roger Fish sat down. As far as he was concerned his work was done, the witness was defeated.
The Judge looked at Charlie. ‘Is that your case, Mr Parkman, or will you be calling any further evidence?’
Charlie sighed. ‘Can I have five minutes, My Lord, before I formally close the case for the defence?’
‘Very well.’
We traipsed out of the court. Dejected. I felt helpless, our grasp on the case weakened and tentative, everything slipping away from us. It was almost over.
And that’s when I saw her. Striding purposefully down the corridor, past the courtrooms, past the busy barristers and lawyers, past the court attendants, witnesses, criminals, families and victims and all the people who come to the Crown Court: Shandra Whithurst, large and confident and looking straight at us. She smiled a massive sunny summer’s day of a smile at Charlie.
‘I’ve found them,’ she said, her voice booming along the ancient stone and brickwork. And with that she motioned to two women who were walking a few yards behind her – the first I recognised immediately as Lilly Spencer, the second, I didn’t know.
‘This is Lilly and this is Taylor,’ said Shandra.
And I felt my own face break out into a massive grin. I knew immediately that Shandra had tracked down not just one, but two of Gary’s former girlfriends, and both were now here in court willing to give evidence.
By the time Lilly Spencer and Taylor Lumsden had finished giving their evidence, the case against Tasha Roux was very different.
Charlie examined both of them perfectly.
‘Do you know Tasha Roux?’ he asked them.
‘No.’
‘Have you ever met her?’
‘No.’
This was vital. They were independent witnesses, they had no axe to grind, no cause to further, no wool to pull over anyone’s eyes. They were here to simply tell the jury what they knew and both of them told the jury that they had been in relationships with Gary Dickinson. Both of them were able to describe how initially he had been loving and then had become controlling and aggressive.
Crucially though – bloody, bloody crucially – both Lilly Spencer and Taylor Lumsden described being assaulted by him, and both of them described the way he had done it: two fists, one knuckle extended, pounding against both sides of their heads. Taylor said it happened twice to her before she moved house to get away from him; but, for Lilly, it happened a lot – she cried as she described it. ‘I felt like he might kill me,’ she told the court, and the court shook with the resonance of that.
I listened, my whole body quivering with the joy that we had presented evidence to the jury to prove that Tasha Roux wasn’t lying.
Later I would ask Shandra how she had found them and she told me she, like me, had gone to the Purple Velvet Club to try to speak to Lilly Spencer.
‘But how did you manage to persuade her?’ I asked.
‘Well I was sober for one thing, Mr Winnock,’ she told me, then added, ‘I’m not a fancy lawyer, you see, so I was able to tell Lilly that I was normal and that giving evidence to help another girl wasn’t a bad or crazy thing to do, but a normal thing to do.’
I nodded. I got that.
‘And how did you find the other girl, Taylor?’ I asked.
‘Facebook.’
I should have guessed. Bloody marvellous Facebook.