The Little Prisoner (24 page)

‘Don’t look at them,’ my officer instructed, trying to move me forward quickly. ‘Don’t look at them, they’re just trying to unnerve you.’

I was shaking with fear, but I stared back at them as if I didn’t care. The tension had been building towards this moment for a year, never mind the twenty or more years before that. I wasn’t going to back down now. I had no respect for any of the people who had caved in and refused to back me up. After all he’d done to them as well. I stared back defiantly at my brother and uncle and shook my head, as if telling them that I couldn’t believe what they were doing, that I was disappointed in them as men. I have no way of knowing whether they felt any shame or whether they had grown so used to obeying Richard that they actually believed it was right and normal. It certainly seemed he had been very successful in his campaign to convince them that ‘families must stick together no matter what’.

Once I was inside the courtroom I bent my head to let my hair fall forward across my eyes, curtaining out everything except what was directly in front of me. I didn’t want to see Silly Git’s face if I could help it. I didn’t want to imprint it afresh on my mind. I’d managed to put my memories into places where I could cope with them most of the time, I didn’t want any fresh images to haunt me in the small hours of the morning. To my relief I realized that as long as I kept the hair falling forward, he was going to be sitting outside my line of vision. I knew two of my friends were in the gallery, but I couldn’t see them either.

My first day in the witness box was hard, as my barrister went over my childhood in every embarrassing detail. Everything had to be spelled out graphically, so that there could be no danger of any misunderstanding on the part of the judge or the jury and so that it could all be put down on the record. It was no good me referring coyly to ‘his thing’ if I meant ‘his penis’. Every sex act had to be described without any modesty. There was nowhere for me to hide.

Although I was embarrassed to be talking about such things in front of strangers, I knew that my barrister was doing the right thing. He’d told the police that he had never worked on any case before where he was so determined to get justice for his client and to ensure that the defendant was imprisoned for as long as possible.

I noticed that Richard’s defence lawyer was a striking-looking young black woman. She reminded me of the disco diva Grace Jones. I knew Richard wouldn’t like that, holding the racist views that he did. And the chances were that he would have made his views known to her.

All the time I was giving evidence I kept my hair down, screening out his face, and that also helped to cover my embarrassment a little. I didn’t want to see people pitying me in case I wasn’t able to keep control of my voice. I was determined not to choke up, to ensure that I did the job as well as I possibly could. Every so often Silly Git would let out a rasping warning cough to let me know that even if I couldn’t see him through my veil of hair he was just feet away from me, reminding me of all the threats he had made to me over the years about what would happen if I ever dared to tell anyone about our secrets, trying to bring me back down to the little girl he had pinned against the wall with a carving knife to her throat. He must have been able to see what agony I was in on that stand and he would have known he could have put a stop to it at any second if he had just decided he had done enough to me and had stood up and admitted it all. This was his one last chance to do something decent for the little girl he had taken responsibility for all those years ago, but he said nothing.

All I could see past my hair was the judge and one man sitting at the end of the jury. The juryman looked about forty years old and was wearing a leather jacket. As I told my story, he put his head in his hands several times and wept. I averted my eyes to cut the image out and just kept answering the questions. I felt bad for upsetting him.

I was dreading the time when my barrister would have asked all the questions he wanted to ask and it would be the turn of the opposition. Finally the moment came and Richard’s lawyer stood up to confront me, her aim to prove that I was lying and had made the whole story up.

In all the courtroom dramas I had ever seen the opposing lawyers always managed to twist things to mean something different, making witnesses appear other than they were. But as the case continued, nothing this woman asked me seemed to be difficult to answer. All her questions just required honest replies and when I gave them she seemed to have nothing further to say. Once or twice she actually seemed to make things worse for her client by asking me about events that my own barrister hadn’t thought to mention, all of which made Richard look and sound even more evil.

At one stage she asked me about his racial views, with regard to my status in the family as the ‘Paki slave’, and I had to tell her that he hated everyone of any other race and had tried to teach us to do the same. She asked if I had any racist opinions and I could honestly answer that I didn’t.

When I was finally allowed to leave the witness box I noticed the floor was littered with a confetti of shredded paper from where I had been unknowingly plucking nervously at a ball of tissues.

At the end of my second day in the box, when I thought I had reached the end of my tether and could go no further, the judge apologized to me.

‘I’m sorry, Jane,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid you are going to have to come back again tomorrow.’ My head dropped forward in a mixture of exhaustion and despair. ‘I know, I know,’ he went on as soothingly as he could. ‘I’m sorry, but we do want this all cleared up, don’t we?’

Having got this far I wasn’t going to back out now.

My dad still hadn’t made an appearance. I guess he thought it would be too hard to hear everything that had happened to his daughter being spelled out in detail.

The next day the judge stopped the proceedings and spoke to my barrister. ‘I think we need to stop and change the direction of this case,’ he said.

My heart sank. What did he mean?

‘I don’t think this is actually a case about child abuse,’ he went on.

Not about child abuse? Then what were we all doing there? Hadn’t he been listening to a single word of what I had been saying?

‘I think,’ he continued, ‘it’s about control and fear.’

‘Yes!’ I thought, my spirits soaring. At last the authorities understood what had been going on. That was what it had been about from the first day I came back from the foster home. It wasn’t that Richard was just a paedophile, because he had continued his abuse long after I had turned into a woman; it was about something even more premeditated and cold-blooded than that. He had tried to steal my whole life, and had succeeded in getting away with seventeen years of it before I managed to stop him, although it could have been argued that he had stolen the following years as well by leaving me in such a vulnerable and unhappy state.

After a break in the proceedings I was being led back into the courtroom by a victim liaison officer, an elderly lady. Up till then they had been careful to take me in and out of a different door from Silly Git, or if they hadn’t then they had made sure we didn’t meet, which was making me feel more confident. Hiding behind my hair, I had still been able to avoid seeing him and remembering his face too clearly. As I came back in through the door with my head down I saw a pair of shoes directly ahead of me, blocking my way. I looked up, straight into a face that made me feel sick with fear. The pale snakelike eyes and the ginger hair were the same, although he looked a little stockier than I remembered him.

‘Get me out of here,’ I hissed through gritted teeth, feeling his eyes boring into mine and his thoughts getting back inside my head. ‘Get me out, get me out.’

‘Calm down, for heaven’s sake,’ the lady said, irritated by such a show of emotion. ‘Come through here.’

She led me into a room off the court, which had a glass door. He followed us, but didn’t come in, standing outside the glass, just staring at me with no expression.

‘Get the police!’ I screamed. ‘Get the police!’

‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ she was losing patience now. ‘Who is it you’re worried about? Is it him?’ She gestured towards the immobile figure on the other side of the glass with the dead, staring eyes.

‘Get someone!’ I screamed and she realized there was no way she could calm me down. She walked towards the door. ‘Don’t leave me!’ I screamed, suddenly envisaging him and me in the room alone. The woman was panicking now, aware that she didn’t know how to handle the situation.

At that moment Marie and another police officer arrived. Finding me standing in the corner of the room, hiding my face against the wall like a child in trouble, they came to the rescue, furious with everyone and getting me to safety.

‘He’s going to kill me,’ I moaned as Marie put her arm round me. ‘I’m dead.’

‘No, he won’t, Jane,’ she soothed me. ‘He can’t do anything now. You’re doing fine. It’s nearly over.’

I wanted to be in the courtroom to hear Richard’s testimony once I had said all I had to say. He had been willing to sit there and listen to me as I squirmed with embarrassment relating every detail of my humiliation through the years, so it seemed only fair that I should witness his humiliation.

‘We can’t stop you coming in,’ Marie said, ‘but we really don’t think it would be a good idea. They’re going to tell all sorts of lies to try to make you look bad and to make out that you are a liar and a fantasist. You’ll find it very hard to listen to.’

I took her advice. I’d already had a taste of the sort of things my stepfather’s barrister had been briefed to try to pin on me. She had tried to imply that I was a regular drug user and that my flats were always full of men, both of which were accusations I could easily dismiss. I might have had the odd puff of pot in my time, but the thought of experimenting with anything harder when you already have a head full of demons like mine would be too terrifying to contemplate.

They had also tried to claim that my welfare had been monitored by social services, but my barrister had made that claim look foolish. They had suggested that I was paranoid, believing that everyone and everything was against me, and that I was an attention-seeker, but the judge and jury didn’t seem impressed by any of that either. The worst thing they said was that if I had been interfered with, then it would have been my granddad who had done it, not my stepdad.

Over the next few days I heard odd snippets about what was happening in the courtroom. Steve, Paul, Uncle John and Hayley all did their bits, while everyone else in the family came forward to swear blind that Richard had never hit them and that he was a sweet, gentle man, just an ordinary bloke.

Apparently at one point in the proceedings my brother Pete took exception to something my barrister said and jumped over the barrier to try to take a swing at him. Years of training in the boxing ring, coupled with the philosophy that violence was always the answer to everything, were now working against my family. The more they postured and threatened and swaggered, the more they confirmed the way they were.

Finally it was over. We had said all that we had to say and it was up to the jury to decide whether or not I was telling the truth. If they thought that I was, then the judge would have to decide what to do about it.