Courting Trouble (7 page)

‘And what did you say?’ I prompted.

‘“Okay, swing ’em.”’

Roxy snorted out a laugh.

‘Then I recocked the rifle . . .’

‘Unfortunate terminology, under the circs,’ my mother commented wryly.

I levelled another disapproving glance in her direction. Parents can be such a disappointment. It’s such a shame when they don’t fulfil the potential of their early years. ‘Roxy, what are you thinking!’ I scolded. ‘Two men have been maimed here.’

‘What I’m thinking is what a good shot you are, Phyllis. I mean, what was the angle of the dangle?’

I took aim, too, and shot my mother another scalding look. ‘Technically, you’ll be under arrest for attempted murder, as the victims might die,’ I sombrely informed the distressed gran. Her face was suddenly as rumpled as an unmade bed.

‘But you didn’t want to hurt them, did you, Phyllis?’ my mother coaxed. ‘No . . . Your granddaughter was raped. A fog came over you. You felt enraged. You decided to go door to door to find the culprits. You took the gun to arm yourself because that end of the council estate is very rough . . . You saw the men and felt overcome with rage and, before you knew what had happened, you’d shot them.’

Phyllis shook her head. ‘No. Those poxy bastards raped my darlin’ granddaughter. I wanted to take their balls off so they could never do anythin’ like this to any other girl.’

‘No,’ my mother reiterated patiently. ‘What I understand you to mean is that you took the gun around to wave at them, to frighten them. To warn them not to say anything that would degrade your lovely girl. That she was asking for it, or some such rubbish . . .’

‘Um . . . Mother, do you really think you should be coaching the defendant?’

Roxy darted a crafty look my way. ‘Coaching is contrary to the rules of practice, Tilly. I am merely assisting Phyllis to recall her confused emotions.’ She turned back towards the old lady. ‘Surely you just wanted to warn them not to say anything bad and untrue about your granddaughter, calling her a slut or a slag . . .’ Roxy shushed me with her hand. ‘You only took the gun to give them a scare . . . and to protect yourself.’ She was speaking in the calm, steady, authoritative tone of an air-traffic controller who has to instruct an untrained flyer how to land the plane after the pilot has lost consciousness. ‘And then, when they answered the door, terrorized by such frightening scum, before you knew it, you’d fired the rifle. That’s what happened, isn’t it?’

‘I’m not listening to this, Roxy.’ My mother’s legal ethics were proving harder to find than a supermodel’s pantry. ‘Lawyers are not supposed to put words in a defendant’s mouth and create a defence,’ I explained to Phyllis.

‘I’m not – absolutely not – creating Phyllis’s defence . . . I’m merely helping her to articulate, in a more effective way, what happened, aren’t I, love?’

I fired off another censorious glare in Roxy’s direction. That was the biggest understatement since the captain of the
Titanic
said to his crew, ‘Did you chaps just feel a bump?’ If it was found out that she had fabricated evidence, my mother would be banged up faster than you could say ‘pepper spray’. I took her aside, rather forcefully.

‘Our practice is not exactly thriving, Roxy. The maledominated Bar is dying to see us fail. We have to be above reproach. If you keep up this unethical behaviour, I’ll have you incarcerated in a maximum-security old persons’ home. I’m not kidding. As your only child, don’t forget that your fate falls to me!’

‘Matilda, I think you’re confusing what happens in law school with what happens in real life. Women who’ve been traumatized can’t accurately articulate what happened. They go into a post-traumatic-stress stupor. It’s why we try not to put the victims of domestic abuse into the witness box – they’re so beaten down, they’re like robots. I’m just helping Phyllis to remember the events. Of course part of her wanted to kill them, but she’s not daft. She went around there in a mad, confused muddle. She wanted to stop them destroying her granddaughter’s life any more by slagging her off, but was scared out of her wits and—’

I left my mother illegally coaching her client and dialled the police. After giving a brief account of the facts, I hung up and returned to the grieving gran. She sat staring at her shoe with forensic absorption while Roxy topped up her drink. ‘Are you okay, Phyllis?’

‘Call me Phizz. That’s what my friends call me. I have to remain strong, ’cause that’s what a mother has to be. My daughter, she was the best dancer in school. Had all the main parts in the plays an’ that. Then she got in with a bad crowd. Left school. Worked in a club in Soho. She couldn’t catch the Tube without dancin’. She’d see that pole and off she’d go . . . But then came the drugs. Her “medicine”, she called it.’ Phyllis suddenly dry-retched. I moved back hastily from the line of fire. But then she stopped gagging and slumped in the chair, stricken. ‘I came straight to you, Roxy ’cause you know ’ow to give little people a voice.’

Roxy poured her another slug of vodka and patted her hand consolingly.

‘Once, I used to be frightened to question the headmistress,’ Phyllis went on. ‘Now, I would stand up to the queen. When it involves yer kids, you’d stand up to anyone. If yer child is hurt, it hurts more than someone hurtin’ you. Any mother can tell you that. Or any grandma.’

There was such dignity about her, it struck me that she could have been the queen of some remote European principality, and not a cleaning lady living on a council estate. Phyllis’s small green eyes, buried in her cabbage-round face, filled with tears.

‘I swore to protect my darlin’ granddaughter.’ Her shoulders drew together and her body twisted in a spasm of grief. As she cried, something cracked open in her and I could see straight through to her heart. It was a good heart. It had worked hard and been kind to strays, and fed pigeons, and scrimped and gone without for her girls.

As we waited for the police, my mother said, ‘Phyllis is going to plead not guilty. And I’d like to instruct you in this case, Matilda.’

‘I’m not free.’

‘Yes, you are. I checked your diary.’

This is the downside of working and living in the same house as your instructing solicitor. ‘Does Phyllis have any other convictions?’

‘She has one conviction, yes, for non-traditional shopping.’

‘You mean shoplifting.’

‘Well, yes . . . But times were tough. She had mouths to feed.’

‘We’re not in
Les Misérables
, Mother,’ I boomed. ‘We do have benefits here in Britain, you know.’

‘Shhh.’ Roxy moved me out of earshot of the traumatized gran and whispered sarcastically, ‘Tell me, Tilly, with your diplomacy skills, have you ever considered a career in hostage negotiations? Will you just come and meet the little girl? She’s still in the hospital.’

‘This is exactly what I mean about you getting too close to the client. I can’t take the case if she pleads not guilty. Phyllis has just told us she shot these men in cold blood.’

‘So would I, if they did that to my granddaughter.’

‘But you can’t just take the law into your own hands. That makes you no better than Ku Klux Klan lynch mobs . . . It’s spine-chilling. Think of Anne Boleyn, Joan of Arc and the women of Salem, all executed after trials consisting of hysterical accusations of witchcraft. Just think of all that and it will make you respect the order of things – the slow taking of statements, the boxes of evidence, which are turned into documents, then the documents into a case and a case into a conviction . . . and justice is done. It’s the birthright of every British citizen to have a fair trial. It’s the centre of my moral compass. It’s the foundation of my love of the law.’

‘Jesus wept. Have you taken a Pollyanna pill or something? I didn’t realize I’d given birth to Atticus friggin’ Finch.’

‘They might not even be the right blokes. Then what?’ I turned my attention back to the pocket-sized pensioner lost in our big leather armchair. She looked paler than the snow which had started falling outside the window. ‘Is there anything I can get you, Phyllis, before the police arrive?’

Her lips were quivering with the effort to stop crying. ‘Well . . . I could do with a little lippy.’

Roxy extracted a peach-coloured lipstick from her handbag and handed it to her. A few minutes later, I heard the car tyres hit the kerb as the squad car jerked to a halt outside. I peeked through the curtain to see two uniformed policemen getting out.

‘Now, Phizz,’ my mother instructed, ‘when the police arrive, as your solicitor, let me do the talking. Don’t say anything.’

‘But I wanna tell ’em what ’appened.’

‘No, you don’t. Let me handle it,’ I heard Roxy stress as I moved down the hall to open the door. ‘Okay?’

I ushered the officers into the living room. ‘The scumbags raped my granddaughter,’ Phyllis immediately blurted.

‘Say no more,’ Roxy admonished. ‘My client doesn’t want to speak.’

‘Yes, I do!’

‘No. You. Don’t.’

‘Two poxy druggie gang members raped my darlin’ granddaughter in a stairwell on the estate. On her sixteenth birthday. So I took me ‘usband’s old huntin’ gun and I ended up shootin’ them in the goolies. At least it means that they can’t do it to any other little girl.’

The radio strapped to the policeman’s shoulder made a sudden, violent sound, like the cough of a dying man. With end-of-shift weariness, he spoke into it to ask for a firearms officer to come and make the gun safe. The other policeman, who had the twitchy alertness of a small rodent, began his spiel. ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court, and anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

Phyllis sat in numb silence as one of the policemen dusted her fingertips for gunshot residue. The firearms officer arrived next. ‘Where’s the gun?’ he demanded. I pointed to the broom cupboard.

The uniformed policemen now cuffed Phyllis and led her outside. She looked up at us with the bewildered, frightened, shiny eyes of a small marsupial, disturbed in the dark.

‘I’ll come with you to the station to see what time you’re being interviewed in the morning,’ Roxy said soothingly. ‘Then there’ll be a bail hearing and we’ll get you out.’

‘Please go to the ’ospital and tell Chanty where I am. She’s got nobody else to watch out for ’er . . . My one prayer for my granddaughter was to keep her safe from rape and drugs and violence. And I failed ’er . . .’ Phyllis’s voice cracked.

It was then, while I was standing shivering in our doorway, flanked by uniformed officers, a handcuffed, blood-soaked potential murderess sobbing in my arms, that Portia was dropped home from the birthday party by her best friend’s prissy mother. I had an inkling this would pretty much ensure that I wouldn’t be awarded any Advanced Parenting Proficiency Certificates at the next PTA meeting.

As Portia bounded towards me, I looked at my cherished child. She was a fair-skinned, bow-lipped girl with dancing eyebrows which seemed to lead a gymnastic life of their own above her sparkling eyes. She smiled at me, her eyes full of life and laughter – a young, happy, hearty girl on the brink of womanhood. With a sickening thud, I thought of Chantelle in the hospital. My only prayer for my daughter was this: ‘Dear Lord: no tattoos. May neither a Sanskrit symbol for eternal love nor a dolphin leaping over a rainbow ever stain her tender haunches.’

What a charmed life we led compared to Phyllis and Chantelle. I felt a sudden stab of protective love for my daughter, which caught me completely off guard.

‘Roxy,’ I called out after my mother, who was escorting the grieving gran down to the police car. ‘First thing in the morning, we’ll leave for the hospital.’

My daughter took in the scene. ‘Hi Mum, another quiet night at Pandora’s then?’

If jumping to conclusions were an Olympic category, I would be a gold medallist. The conclusion I jumped to the morning after Phyllis’s arrest was that there was no way on God’s earth that the old woman was going to get bail. Roxy called me from the police station to give me an update, or a ‘Bollock Bulletin’, as she called it. A 29-year-old man who went by the name of ‘Stretch’ because of his six-foot-two height had lost one testicle. Thirty-year-old Basharat Kureishi, nicknamed ‘Bash’, had suffered only a genital graze. But both had spent a painful night getting needlepoint in their nether regions. After interviewing the hospitalized victims, the police had charged Phyllis with attempted murder. The paperwork had been emailed to the Crown Prosecution Service and the hearing was fixed for the following morning.

As soon as my mother’s Midget sports car mounted the kerb outside our house – her preferred parking manoeuvre – we headed straight for the hospital to honour our promise to Phyllis to check on her poor granddaughter.

Phyllis’s girl lay pale as paper on her hospital bed. She looked like a thing made of skin and bones pretending to be a teenager. Her back, a xylophone of spine and ribs, was visible through the thin white gown. A worm of blood inched up the tube from her wrist. Her head was bandaged, as were her hands. She had a bruise the size of a man’s hand around her throat and a bad, bloodless look to her face.

Her long body lay awkwardly, as though not used to solid ground. Poor panting little fish, I thought. Presuming she was sleeping, I scooted a chair up to the bed, but as I did so her eyelids fluttered open. Her luminous orbs fleetingly held mine. They were bare and round as lightbulbs. She blinked in bewilderment, as if she’d just stumbled out of some remote jungle and was perplexed by the world she discovered around her. She drew a shuddering breath and started making a whimpering, squeaking noise, like a stuck drawer.

‘It’s okay, love. We’re friends of your gran’s. I’m Roxy, and this is my daughter, Matilda. We just came by to tell you that your gran is not going to be around for a few days. When she saw what happened to you she went after those scumbags. And, well, she’s with the police right now . . . helping with their enquiries.’

‘Water,’ the girl asked quietly.

I noted there was no water jug on the side table and crossed to the door to accost a passing medic. ‘Nurse?’