Grave Doubts (3 page)

‘It was the second time that the defendant invited me to join him for a date. On the first occasion he didn’t turn up, although it was from that night I had the sense that I was being followed.’

‘A “sense”, Sergeant, is not evidence as you well know, and the
facts
are that despite a significant police presence, there were no sightings of the defendant following you. Is that correct?’

‘Yes, sir.’ She resisted the desire to tell the jury that her car had been vandalized and her rubbish searched. It had all happened in the five days between the first and second invitations but as there’d been no trace of the defendant it was purely circumstantial.

‘On February 12
^th
I followed the directions I’d received from the defendant. I arrived at the meeting point, which was by the bandstand in Harlden Park, three minutes late at five thirty-three p.m. I waited until six fifteen and then left. To reach my car, I had to walk back through the rose garden and along a path through rhododendron bushes.’

‘Why didn’t you choose a better lit route? It was dark, after all.’

‘That would have taken me fifteen minutes instead of five and normally the path is well lit.’

‘Continue.’

‘As I entered the shrubbery, there was a noise from the bushes so I looked around to find another way. There wasn’t one so I walked on.’

‘You make yourself sound alone but you were, in fact, surrounded by police and were carrying a wire, is that not so?’

‘I was wired. However, the problem with the bandstand rendezvous was that it meant the officers watching had to remain on the edge of the park. There were two posing as a courting couple, and another three playing football on the grass, but as the light went they had to leave. Four other officers were in the car park, two on benches in the rose garden – they were the closest – and the rest held a loose perimeter.’

She felt the slightest tremor start in her throat. Despite the counselling, this was the most difficult part of her testimony. Memories of the attack infested her sleep, creating vivid nightmares overlaid with images of his other victims. She lost the momentum of her narrative and waited for him to ask a question.

‘You have a remarkable physical resemblance to the victims of the attacks you were investigating. Did that cause you any particular distress?’

‘No.’

Nightingale sensed that he was changing tactics. Perhaps Stringer wasn’t confident that he’d be able to convince the jury the police had used THE GAME to entrap his client so now he was going to attack her account of the attempted rape. It was a moment that she had been dreading. Apart from the police account of the attack on her and the traces recovered from her fingernails there was no other physical evidence. The rapist had never left semen, saliva or even a hair follicle on his victims. When they’d searched his flat SOCO had found it pristine, without even fingerprints and with nothing to connect him to the crimes. Faced with such lack of evidence, the CPS had decided to concentrate prosecution on three rapes that were identical in method to the attack on Nightingale. Four others, including one that had resulted in the victim’s death had been left on file. In these the victims had been attacked in their own homes, not outside, and none of them had been able to pick the defendant out of a line up.

‘Let us turn to the “attack” in which the defendant, by the way, sustained material injuries. I put it to you that it was you who approached the defendant and encouraged him into a physical embrace, which
you
subsequently rejected, violently?’

‘No, that is not true.’

‘Do you exercise regularly?’

‘Pardon?’ She was thrown by the question. He repeated it tersely.

‘I run.’

‘Have you engaged in self-defence classes?’

‘Only as part of routine police training.’

‘But you are fit and strong, are you not? Quite capable of taking the fight to a man.’

He was deliberately baiting her and would use any show of emotion to his advantage. The thought made her angry but in a way that sharpened her wits and drove all signs of emotion beneath the surface.

‘I didn’t attack the defendant. He leapt out at me and knocked me to the ground. There’s evidence to prove that he lay in wait within the bushes for some time.’

‘How tall are you?’

‘Five ten.’

‘How much do you weigh?’

‘I really don’t know.’

‘Come, come, Sergeant, I thought all ladies knew to the ounce what they weighed.’

‘I don’t.’

‘I see.’ His tone implied that she was avoiding the question.

‘Would you take a look at the defendant, please.’

Nightingale licked her dry lips. She had avoided meeting his eyes since she had taken the stand. With a slight twist of her head she directed her gaze to the defendant’s chest. His chin and mouth were just at the top of her vision and she flicked her eyes down a fraction.

‘How tall would you say he was?’

‘A giant,
’ she thought. ‘I don’t know.’

Another exasperated sigh.

‘He’s five foot nine, Sergeant, shorter than you are.’ He left a significant pause. ‘Hardly an overpowering assailant for a fit, tall woman like you.’

‘From the ground, with a knife at one’s throat, all men look tall…sir.’ Some of the women on the jury nodded in sympathy and Nightingale pressed her advantage. ‘And as for my attacking him, I was in no fit state to do so. I received a concussion – the X-rays show deep bruising to the back of my skull,’ she felt again the crack of her head as it made contact with the paving, ‘a sprained wrist and dislocated shoulder, bruising to my face and thighs,’ his strength had been terrifying, ‘and I had to have dental work on two of my teeth.’

‘So you say, Sergeant, but how does the jury know that those injuries were not inflicted by yourself or your colleagues in an attempt to build up evidence against my client?’

His callousness made her gasp and to her horror tears filled her eyes, yet when she risked a glance at the prosecution table they were hiding smiles. Confused she turned to the jury. Five women, seven men; all looked shocked, one openly angry. Stringer had miscalculated.

‘Excuse me,’ she whispered as she took a shaky sip of water.

‘Are you all right?’ The judge leant forward solicitously. ‘I’m sure,’ he said with a meaningful glance towards Stringer, ‘that this cross-examination is nearing its end.’

It was. The defence asked a few more questions but the heat had vanished from his attack. After ten minutes Nightingale left the stand and the judge called a recess for lunch.

As she drove home she replayed the prosecution’s words of praise but they meant nothing to her. She worried over every hesitation and weak answer, convinced that she could have handled the cross-examination better.

On the top floor, high enough to have a view over the trees, Nightingale slipped her key into a sturdy Yale lock and was home at last. This was her place. The only tiny blessing from her parents’ death was that she was now financially independent. They had not left her so much that anybody would consider her wealthy but sufficient to be able to put down a deposit and start buying her own home. She raised a hand to ward off a fly and brushed aside the unwelcome reality that there had been a benefit from their deaths. The thought filled her with guilt and her stomach ached in physical response.

A light was blinking on her phone; three messages. Her brother had called, sounding exactly like their late father.

‘Look, come and spend the weekend. I’m off on Sunday and Monday for a change.’ At twenty-seven, he’d qualified and was dutifully serving his time before moving on to try and become an orthopaedic surgeon.

She shook her head. He was her only family now, but she found Simon and his wife Naomi depressing company. They inhabited a world where domestic bliss was commonplace and Nightingale felt like an alien whenever she visited. They also insisted on calling her Diane, her mother’s chosen name for her, despite the fact that she had determinedly called herself by her middle name since senior school.

The new message light was still flashing. She felt too exhausted to care who else had called but dragged her mind away from memories of childhood arguments and pressed the play button for the second time to be greeted by silence and heavy breathing. The third message was the same. She deleted them both, cursing the crank caller who must have selected her number at random, and abandoned herself to sleep.

The prisoner smoothed out the three-day old newspaper and folded a crease precisely around the article he wanted, before jerking the page sharply. The cheap paper parted obediently and he repeated the motion to isolate the exact columns with a small grunt of satisfaction. He wasn’t allowed scissors. They had him on suicide watch given the length of his sentence and the results of a psychiatric profile.

His psychiatrist had leapt at his vague hints of interest in the reporting of his crimes and had suggested the scrapbook. Griffiths found maintaining it surprisingly satisfying. He laughed at some of the ridiculous theories they’d printed about the motives for his crimes. They made him sound dangerous, erratic, a man to keep well away from. It had helped to build his reputation in here, though being inside for rape was a dangerous ride. Although he was hated, as sex offenders always were, he was no longer attacked. There was a man still recovering in the infirmary who served as a lesson to the others. But the guards made sure that he suffered and the other inmates turned a blind eye.

He’d accumulated every printed inch of coverage since the trial but press comment had reduced to almost nothing now and the realisation that he was already old news depressed him almost as much as his confinement. How could he keep his demand for an appeal public? He placed the small clipping on a page beside a scrap of his own writing. His observations on life helped to keep the dark side away. As he dabbed the non-toxic glue carefully along the edges of his latest cutting he tried to decide what to do next. A few short weeks into his sentence and he was already planning. Not like the rest of them in here. Perhaps a conversion to some religion would help his appeal; a born-again Christian was always popular.

He rehearsed whole conversations in his mind. At one point he was almost moved to tears. He was a masterful role player, it was why he’d been invincible playing THE GAME but they wouldn’t allow him near a computer. One of the guards had told him it was the last privilege he would ever be granted. He knew that there were websites on him because the press reported on them. A few were vile, defamatory, set up by family and friends of the victims as acts of revenge. News of them left him cold. The one of more interest was the site that critiqued his ‘crimes’ and proclaimed his innocence. He recognised the prose.

His door was opened without warning and he glanced at his watch, confused. This wasn’t right. When he saw Saunders’ grinning face he felt fear and hoped that it didn’t show.

‘Visitor. Come on, move your arse.’ The guard kicked him hard on the buttocks, reawakening old bruises. He was one of the worst abusers and the others just turned their backs whenever prisoner 35602K was the subject of Saunders’ close attention.

He walked into the visitors’ room and glanced around, studying the occupants openly until Saunders nudged him in the back. Desks were arranged so that the guards could walk among them, the tatty orange plastic chairs bolted to the floor.

The presence of other inmates and the curious eyes of their guests disconcerted him.

Saunders directed him to the empty chair at the end of the line opposite a tall figure in a smart jacket who was bending down as if tying a shoelace. He tried to control his rapid blinking and squared his shoulders despite the acute sense of exposure at his back. His mysterious visitor started to straighten. The shape of the head and line of the chin were as familiar as his own. His heart lurched and his throat tightened with nerves. They hadn’t spoken since before his arrest. Tripping over his left foot in his anxiousness he hurried over to the empty chair.

‘You shouldn’t have come! Not here, among all…this.’ The person sitting opposite regarded him silently with eyes the colour of arctic ice. ‘It’s not appropriate for you to be here. It’s beneath you.’

‘As it is you, yet here you are.’ The implied criticism was clear, despite the carefully controlled tone.

‘I let you down. I had no idea she was filth.’

‘You broke the rules.’

‘I…I wanted to meet her properly.’

‘Rubbish.’ His visitor looked away in disgust. ‘You were lazy, admit it.’

‘I was lazy.’

‘Say it again, “I was lazy”.’

‘I was lazy.’

‘I was stupid, say it.’

‘I was stupid. Look D—’

‘No names. Are you a complete idiot?’

‘Sorry.’ Griffiths hung his head, not daring to say more until bidden to do so.

‘I watched it all in court, every day.’

‘I saw you. You cared enough to be there for me.’

The man didn’t acknowledge the remark but he smiled in a way that made Griffiths wince.

‘Until the end, I thought you were going to win. The policewoman’s evidence was a travesty. It should have been disallowed.’

‘If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t be here now. I never made a mistake.’ There was a plea in his tone. ‘All I did was invite her for a second time.’

‘But that was against the rules. You know what happens when you get too involved. You did it once before but I was able to get you out of the mess you made in time. Remember?’

‘It wasn’t fair. She trapped me.’

‘I know, most inconvenient. After all the efforts I’ve made on your behalf it would be a shame to see it…wasted.’

‘What are you going to do about her?’

‘Don’t worry. I’m dealing with it in my own way.’

‘Once I’m back with you I’ll do anything, everything you want and I won’t ever break the rules again.’

‘We’ll see.’

Griffiths felt his ego shrivel. One look from those eyes could crush him. If the man opposite wanted him free then there was hope, but he had to make him believe that he was worth the effort. One of the guards walked over, stared at them pointedly and walked away slowly.

‘Who was that?’

‘Saunders, a sadistic bastard. One of the worst. He’s abusive and pays me particular attention.’

The visitor’s eyes followed the guard’s back across the room, their expression unreadable.

‘He’s abused you?’

‘Regularly.’

‘You’re not his property to spoil as he wishes. I dislike people who have so little personal power that they have to find positions of authority to exploit. You say his name is Saunders. I imagine he lives locally.’ The visitor stared at the guard, lost in thought.

Griffiths pawed at the table.

‘I can’t stay in here. I have to get out.’ There was a rising note of hysteria in his voice.

‘Careful. You can’t show any weakness. I’m working on it, don’t worry.’

‘An es—?’ The visitor raised a hand and Griffiths shut his mouth.

‘Impossible but an appeal…that’s far more promising.’

‘But it’ll take years and my lawyer says it may fail – 50:50 at best.’

‘Have faith. If there are fresh…developments, shall we say, in the meantime your chances will be much greater. Leave it with me, I’ll soon convince the public that the police arrested the wrong man.’

‘How will I know what’s going on?’

‘Do you remember when we were at school, how we used to send notes to each other in code? I’ll send you some books but you’ll need to be patient. Some things take a while to sort out, though,’ he looked at Saunders and smiled, ‘I’ll see what I can do to make your time in here a little more bearable.’

His visitor rose and left without another word.

Griffiths was returned to his cell, his emotions a scrambled mess. One moment he felt the most intense excitement and pleasure, the next numbing inadequacy. When he was positive he was sure that something would happen because the visit proved he was too important to be left to rot. Then he would remember that look, the eyes tearing into his soul revealing the depths of his failings. He paced his cell, muttering out loud against the betrayals and wounds inflicted on him since childhood. Self-pity slid into anger, familiar and warming, then rage as he thought of all the people who deserved punishment and of the scores he would settle once he was free.