Invisible (24 page)

‘Yes.’

‘With
some other single female friends?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘All single ladies together,
having a few drinks and a holiday romance or two; that would be fair to say,
would it not?’

‘I can’t speak for the
others, but I wasn’t interested in having a holiday romance.’

‘Oh come, all girls
together, what happens in Turkey stays in Turkey…’

It reminded me of when I’d
been questioned by the police about my sex life, and DS Chapman had tried
desperately to get me to admit to stuff that plain wasn’t true.
All misleading insinuations and pathetic attempts to create a fake
connection to get me to ‘open up’.
Seeing it happen to someone else now
was infuriating; despite myself, I could feel anger rising.

Miss E wasn’t falling into
their trap any more than I had though. She answered every question calmly. I
don’t know how she did it; she stayed far stronger than I had.

They threw it all at her,
implying she was a party girl who’d got drunk and had sex with anything that
moved on holiday, despite there being no evidence of this. They sank to an
all-time low though when they basically said that she was lying about her
pregnancy. She was using the rape to cover the fact that she was actually
pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, the barrister said, and that she’d been forced
into such desperate measures because, as a Catholic, her parents would
otherwise have disowned her for becoming pregnant out of wedlock.

How dare they? Hasn’t she
been through enough already? Could I have kept a child conceived in such a way?
I don’t think so. No one knows for certain how they’ll react until they’re
actually in a situation of course, but I think I’d look at that baby and feel
disgust. I’d see its father, relive that horrific attack every time, and be
scared it had inherited his bad blood. I felt she should be applauded not
vilified.

This was my team attacking
her now though. They were the people I was supposed to be rooting for. Instead
I felt horrified. I wanted to jump up and defend her.

At least Daryl looked as
thunderstruck as me by what was happening. After her cross-examination had
ended and she was told she could leave the witness box, he couldn’t take his
eyes off her as she walked from court. Still, at the end of the session he
gathered himself as his guards led him away, looked over at me and, as had
become our little ritual, we mouthed ‘I love you’ to one another.

Outside, the news that the
Port Pervert had fathered a child seemed to have driven the crowd into an even
greater frenzy. The noise was almost ear-bleeding as faces and cameras were
shoved at me. Beside me one of the protection officers stumbled, almost going
down as he tried and failed to absorb the ebb and flow of the storming mob.

I was terrified, my heart
hammering painfully against my chest, lungs burning as if I was running a
marathon rather than walking slower than a death march as I pushed on, on, on,
through the wall of baying people, head constantly flashing this way and that
as I tried to see a way forward.

Even in the car I wasn’t
safe, people hammering on the windows and roof, hailing down blow after blow
and stopping me from driving away. I had to fight the urge to floor it,
scattering bodies this way and that in my desperation to break free, and
instead edge forward slowly, oh so slowly like a ship making its way through an
ice flow.

Thank God the house was free
of media – they all seem to have taken themselves off to the court. I parked
the car and ran like a woman possessed to the front door, keys jangling in my
shaking hands. Once through it, I slammed the door shut, ran to the sofa and
curled up on it like a child, hugging one of Daryl’s jumpers and trying to
breathe in his smell, although it’s disappeared now. Trying to imagine the time
(hopefully just days away now) when he will be home and I can hug at last the
real thing.

Sunday 10

It’s 11.30pm and I’ve just
got home. I spent the weekend at my parents’ house, and it was so lovely to get
away for it all for a while. I spent a lot of time in the garden just looking
at the flowers coming up and taking in that wonderful ‘spring has sprung’
feel
. It all feels a world away from court. I don’t get to
go out into my garden any
more,
too paranoid of the
neighbours glaring at me or shouting something (or even throwing something over
the fence, then denying it) so it’s fantastic to get some fresh air.

While I was there Kim called
to see how I was doing. We had a good old catch up chinwag, and she asked all
about how I was coping with the trial. I’ve noticed she does that a lot,
carefully choosing her words – I don’t think she actually believes Daryl is
innocent but has vowed to stand by me and support me all the way, and I really
appreciate that. I get the feeling that if she asked how the court case itself
were going she wouldn’t be able to keep her own judgement from her voice, so
instead she always asks how I am feeling about things. She doesn’t give a toss
about Daryl, but she doesn’t have to; I know she cares about me as my absolute
greatest friend (probably my only friend these days, but that’s a technicality)
and for that I love her to bits.

So, I told her how I was
feeling. How am I feeling?
A weird mixture of trepidation,
fear, and excitement.
I just want this to be
over,
and finally I can see the finish line. Afterwards we talked about her, but when
I asked her what she’d been up to lately I noticed she kept letting the
conversation slide away. I tried three or four times but to no avail.

‘Oh, we don’t need to talk
about me’, ‘It’s the same old same old’, and the classic ‘yeah, I’m good…so
anyway, how are you feeling about tomorrow’ subject change were just some of
the things she said to avoid talking about herself. Is she keeping something
secret from me?

Anyway, it’s time for me to
go to bed. I need to be fresh for tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to it:
tomorrow’s the day when the bombshell is dropped and proof that Daryl is
innocent will be produced. I’m hoping that once that
happens
the case will be dismissed. Just think
,
it’s possible
that this time tomorrow I could be going to bed with my husband!

Monday 11

It’s only the second week of
court and already I feel like a battle-scarred veteran. Standing in the hallway
trying to find the courage to leave the house; facing the screaming crowd;
fear, security pat down, find my seat; the nervous, jangling calm of the court
just before the session begins. I somehow face it all and survive. As stressful
and horrifying as everything is, I could face it this morning with renewed
strength and even excitement, thinking to myself: ‘This could be the last time
you’ll ever have to do it.’

As I looked around the room as
people in the public gallery took their seats, I was shocked to spot her: Miss
E, my pregnant doppelganger. I found myself staring at her, fascinated and
horrified all at once. She’s actually going to sit through the rest of the
court case? She’s the only one of the women who’s chosen to do that though.

She must have nerves of steel,
because if I believed my rapist was in the room I wouldn’t have the courage to
be in there with him unless I absolutely had to – unless of course she doesn’t
truly believe it is Daryl, now that she’s seen him in the flesh. Not that she
got a look at her attacker, but if…well, at that moment my mind ran away with a
crazy scenario where she suddenly decided to speak out in Daryl’s
defence
, saying it wasn’t him who hurt her.

But that wasn’t the only
reason I kept looking at my ‘twin’. I couldn’t help thinking that hopefully
this time next year I’d be like her; heavily pregnant with my own child.

As my gaze slid away, I felt
her turning to study me. It must be as odd for her really. I wonder what ran
through her mind as she
realised
I was Daryl’s wife.

First to take the stand today
was the murder victim’s husband, Tony
Scrivens
. Julie
Scrivens
was found beaten, raped and dumped on some
wasteland, cast aside like she didn’t matter.

The court was shown some
photos of her and Tony; they looked really happy together, always seemed to be
laughing. He painted a picture of an ordinary woman with ordinary dreams;
someone
like
me. Both of us had been going along with
our lives, minding our own business when suddenly through no fault of our own
something horrific had happened. Poor Julie though had paid with her life.

Tony talked of how Julie had been
going on a rare night out to the pub with some friends, leaving straight after
work. Cried as he confessed that she hadn’t wanted to go, but he’d pushed her
because he wanted her to have some fun as her mum had died a few months before
and it had affected her profoundly. Poor fella obviously blamed himself. The
last time he’d seen her had been that morning, at 7.30am, when he’d kissed her
goodbye and left for work as a bus driver.

‘If I’d known it was the last
time I’d ever see her…’ he sobbed. ‘…I didn’t know…’ I wasn’t the only person
in the room who was wiping tears from their face as he spoke. ‘T-to think, she
didn’t even make it to her n-n-night out,’ he spluttered, before disintegrating
into tears.

Confusion washed over me. She
didn’t make it to her drinks out? But she was attacked at night wasn’t she?
That’s what I’d understood from the scant newspaper reports I’d read.

DI Baxter was next in the
witness box, and swore his oath. He started by explaining that police had first
become aware of a serial rapist on a violent spree because of the
Tilbury
attacks, which had included two rapes and one attempted
rape that had escalated to murder.

‘It was only when Interpol
contacted local police in connection with the crime in Turkey that the accused
came to our attention. He’d become a person of interest to them because his
description matched the attacker in
Olu
Deniz
, they knew he’d been in the area at the time, and
they’d tracked him down to his hometown. They were contacting the local police,
asking them to go to his home and bring him in for questioning,’ DI Baxter
said.

I tilted my head, interested.
So that’s how Daryl wound up in this mess; this was all new to me.

‘The officer who happened to
take the call had by coincidence just moved constabularies.
Previously he’d had some involvement with the
Tilbury
inquiry, and noticed some similarities between the attacks.’

I frowned, confused. What
similarities? The Turkey victim hadn’t been bound with duct tape, a condom
clearly hadn’t been used, no weird latex gloves had been worn… To me this
sounded like desperation; they were trying to see clues where there were none.

DI Baxter continued. ‘The
officer made some calls to the Essex police force, and also did some digging on
his new patch. Thanks to his hard work, he
realised
that there had also been a similar incident in his new locality. A taskforce
was created and Operation Global was launched, which I headed, as we
realised
that the accused was the common link to all the
crimes – he lived a few miles from the first attack, and in his capacity as a
lorry driver he was familiar with
Tilbury
Docks and
surrounding area having often picked up or dropped off goods there. In
addition, he had holidayed in the resort of
Olu
Deniz
at the same time as a rape was conducted.’

‘Coincidence,’ I breathed, not
loud enough for anyone to hear. I just wanted to reach the bit where they
realised
Daryl was 30,000 feet in the air at the time of
the murder, surrounded by around 200 witnesses. But the inspector just droned
on.

‘We started to look at his
work as a lorry driver, identifying that the accused often did a run from a
paper mill in Manchester to
Tilbury
Docks and back
again. This was how we made the connection between him and the second rape in
what we now know to be a six-crime series.’

Then he described how Daryl
had been arrested – and the most bizarre pantomime I’ve ever seen was then
played out. He and the Crown Prosecutor produced identical-looking pieces of
paper that turned out to be transcripts of my husband’s police interview, and
then they read them aloud, like a script. DI Baxter played
himself
,
while the QC played Daryl. It was so odd I almost felt like laughing, but
instead chose simply sitting there with my mouth open in amazement.

‘The accused said “no comment”
to all questions apart from the following,’ explained the inspector, setting
the scene. He cleared his throat, an actor preparing for his role… ‘Were you in
Tilbury
on the night of Sunday 3 February?’

‘I’m not saying anything that
might incriminate me,’ the barrister for the prosecution playing Daryl read
from the script.

‘What if we said to you we
could prove you were?’

‘You’ve got nothing. I know
you’ve got nothing.’

‘We have all kinds of
evidence, Daryl. Come on, you’ll feel better if you tell us everything.’