Verdict Unsafe (2 page)

“Yes.”

“What had you been doing?”

“A punter,” she said guilelessly, to appreciative smiles.

“In other words, you had been committing an indecent act in a public place. And it wasn’t the first time, was it?”

“No.”

“But you weren’t charged, were you? You weren’t even cautioned. They simply let you go. Why?”

“I don’t know, do I? They just came and said I could go home.”

“Very well. But you must have been keen to make up for the time lost at the police station—is that why you approached Mr. Drummond?”

“No! He grabbed me!”

“Is Mr. Drummond known to you?”

She shrugged. “I’ve seen him up the Ferrari,” she said.

“The Ferrari is a drinking club in Malworth, my lord,” said Hotshot. “And is known to be frequented by prostitutes.”

Judy smiled a little at the description, which made it sound like a Soho vice den. Malworth had once been a large, thriving market town with, Judy was sure, a large, thriving prostitution industry, as prosperous traders had come to do business. But by the turn of the century the Corn Hall had been turned into a concert hall, and Victorian factories had sprouted up to the north of the town, along with workers’ cottages and a park. Parkside was where favors were bought and sold; the rest of Malworth had become genteel.

One by one the old factories had closed, and Parkside had been allowed to die with them, leaving it only one industry, and that with only sporadic and uncertain custom. The Ferrari Club was in Parkside, and the odd girl or two trawled for custom there, or hopefully patrolled the park.

“Mr. Drummond used prostitutes from the Ferrari, didn’t he?” Hotshot asked.

“I dunno.”

“Oh, come on!”

“One,” she said sulkily. “Rosa.”

The fabled Rosa had been produced by Drummond not long before the case had come to trial, but all efforts to trace her had failed. Judy had doubted her very existence at one point.

“When was the last time you saw her with Mr. Drummond?”

“The last time she was there. I saw her go out of the club with him, then I saw her again after she’d done him, and she said—”

Harper held up a hand. “Don’t tell us what anyone said to you. At what time did you see Mr. Drummond with Rosa?”

“He always came in at the same time. About half nine.”

“Do you remember what date that was?”

“No. It was September, I know that. And the next day everyone was saying there had been another rape—I think that’s why she packed it in.”

“And did Mr. Drummond ever use your services after Rosa ‘packed it in’?”

“No.”

“I think he did, on one occasion. I think that in the early hours of Monday the twenty-eighth of October you turned into Hosier’s Alley on your way home, saw Mr. Drummond, and recognized him as a potential ‘punter,’ didn’t you?”

“No. I never saw him! He grabbed me and pulled me in there! He was wearing a mask—I didn’t even know it
was
him!”

“I suggest that he paid you for sex, but when you heard people coming down the alleyway, you told Mr. Drummond to go. He wanted his money back, and you shouted, swore at him. That’s when he put his hand over your mouth, isn’t it, to try to quieten you?”

The girl’s head was shaking, all the time. “No,” she said. “No. He was raping me—he ran away when he heard these men coming.”

“When one of these men ran to detain Mr. Drummond, did you warn him that he had a knife?”

“I couldn’t speak—I couldn’t stop crying!”

“There was no knife, and no assault, was there? You propositioned Mr. Drummond—isn’t that what really happened?”

“No!”

“Why not? That’s what you do, isn’t it?”

“I don’t do it like that, not in the street!”

“Oh, come on,” said Harper. “Your activities are a matter of public record, Miss Benson. Of course you do it in the street. In doorways, in alleyways—anywhere anyone pays you to do it, don’t you?”

“Not like that! Not like what he made me do! I would never have done it like that!”

Harper allowed a silence to follow the girl’s indignant statement, reinforcing it in a way that making her repeat it would not have done.

“Are you putting forward as evidence of your nonconsent the contention that you do not offer anal intercourse as a service?” he asked, after a long moment.

The girl looked blank, not having understood a word of the question, and shook her head. “No,” she said.

Whitehouse got to his feet. “My lord, I fail to see the relevance of this line of questioning, and I suspect that the witness did not in any event fully understand the last question put to her by my learned friend.”

The judge looked at Whitehouse, and shook his head slightly. “The witness is accusing the defendant of a very serious sexual assault,” he said. “His defense is that he paid for her services, and her contention seems to be that she does not offer anal intercourse as a service. I think that is of considerable relevance. However …” He turned to Harper. “… Mr. Harper, I, too, feel that both the question and its implications should be made clearer to the witness before she answers. The jury will disregard the witness’s last reply.”

The witness was looking bewildered, and the judge leant over to talk to her. “Anal intercourse is another way of saying that he used your back passage,” he said, and her face cleared. “Now,” he went on, “you have said that this is something that you would never have agreed to, and if that is the case, it would be an indication that you were indeed sexually assaulted. But if you do sometimes agree to it—even if at that time you did not—you must say so, because you have sworn to tell the truth. Do you understand?”

Wide-eyed, worried, she nodded solemnly.

“Please rephrase the question using words with which the witness is familiar, Mr. Harper.”

“I am obliged, my lord,” said Harper, and turned back to the girl. “You have said that you would never have agreed to performing sexual intercourse
like that,”
he said. “So the question is quite simple. Have you ever allowed a customer to have sex with you like that?”

She looked from Harper, to Whitehouse, to the judge, then back to Harper, a skinny little fox cub trapped by the hounds, trying to work out if she could escape being torn limb from limb. Her only point of reference was that if she told a lie, her case would be strengthened, whereas the truth would damage it, because she had allowed anyone to do anything they wanted
with her since before puberty. Judy crossed her fingers, hoping that she had taken her oath seriously. Tell the truth, she silently begged her. Tell the truth.

“I’ll repeat the question,” said Harper. “Have you ever allowed a customer to have sex with you
like that?”

“No,” she said firmly, shaking her head.

Judy closed her eyes, then opened them again as the girl continued speaking.

“I wouldn’t get down on my hands and knees on a muddy street for any bugger!” she said.

The tension which had been generated by her evidence was broken, and the room erupted. Even Harper gave the girl a little smiling nod as the laughter at his expense died away. And the cause of all this merriment stood in the witness box, terminally puzzled.

Then Harper frowned slightly, and looked through the papers in front of him, pulling out a typewritten statement, flicking through it. He looked up from it. “You don’t know the word ‘anal’?” he asked.

The puzzled frown was back, and she shook her head. “No,” she said.

“That’s odd,” he said. “Because you used it in your statement to the police. Do you know what the word ‘subjected’ means?”

“No.”

“You used it, too. In the same sentence. ‘He subjected me to an anal assault,’” he quoted. “Did you say that?”

She shook her head, her mouth opening slightly.

“Can you tell me what the word ‘genitalia’ means?”

The girl looked quite blank. No embarrassment, which there would have been, had she had the slightest idea of its meaning. She shook her head.

“You used it in your statement, too. ‘He touched my genitalia with the blade of the knife.’ Did you say that?”

She shook her head, going pink now that she had worked out what it meant.

“‘Straddled’? ‘Corroborated’? Do you know what they mean?”

She just stared at him, her face reddening, panic and acute embarrassment at the thought of what they might mean not allowing her even to shake her head.

“‘My head was forced down to the ground and he straddled me, and subjected me to an anal assault. This can be corroborated by the two witnesses, one of whom gave chase.’” He held the statement up. “You didn’t use any of these words, did you?”

“No,” she said, her voice a whisper, her face stricken.

“But you signed it as a true record of what you had told the police,” said Harper.

“I … I can’t … I’m not good at reading and writing and things,” she said. “They just asked me questions about what had happened to me, and I signed what they wrote down.”

“No further questions,” Harper said.

“Mr. Whitehouse, do you wish to re-examine?”

Whitehouse rose, and thought for a moment before he spoke. “Is what you told the court today a true account of what happened to you in the alleyway?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said firmly, shooting a look at Drummond as he sat meekly in the dock.

“And is it what you told the police that night?”

“Yes. I can’t help what they wrote down!”

Whitehouse smiled. “Did you use the same words to tell them what had happened as you did today in court? For instance, you told the court that the knife had touched your private parts—is that the expression you used to the police?”

The girl blushed ferociously. “No,” she said.

“No,” said Whitehouse. “Could that be why the police paraphrased what you had said?”

Blank terror.

“I know you don’t know what that means,” said Whitehouse soothingly. “But I’m sure my learned friend does, and I imagine the jury does. No further questions, my lord.”

“The witness may step down,” said the judge, and the witness almost fell down from sheer relief.

Now it was the turn of the two men who had found her, and
each told substantially the same story. They had entered the alley from John Wesley Road, and had come upon a young woman on all fours on the ground with a man kneeling over her. The man had run away along the alley toward Andwell Street as they had approached. The girl’s blouse had been undone, and her leopard-skin pants had been around her knees. She had been in considerable distress.

“You didn’t call the police, did you?” Harper asked the man who had stayed with her when the other had gone after Drummond “Did it seem to you that the situation didn’t merit the attendance of the police?”

“Of course it did,” he said. “But I didn’t have to call them—a police car came almost straight away.”

“Is that so?” said Harper. “How fortunate.”

The area car officer arrived next. He and his colleague had been answering what had turned out to be a bogus nine-double-nine call about youths smoking crack cocaine in one of the empty buildings, when they had heard a commotion farther down the road. They had attended the incident at one thirty-six
A.M
.

Harper rose to cross-examine. “You told my learned friend that the young woman was in some distress, and complained that the defendant had sexually assaulted her,” he said. “Can you tell the court her exact words?”

The constable requested leave to consult his notes, and turned to the appropriate page. “I asked what the trouble was, to which she replied, pointing to the defendant, ‘That fucking bastard raped me; he did me up the sodding ass.’”

Judy saw the girl color up as her unladylike words were read out, and smiled.

“More angry than distressed, would you say?”

Whitehouse rose. “While I am obliged to my learned friend for drawing the court’s attention to the immediate complaint of sexual assault made subsequent to the incident, and incidentally clarifying the perceived necessity to bowdlerize the victim’s statement, I don’t think that this witness’s opinion as to the victim’s emotional state should be sought,” he said.

The judge agreed.

“You then used your radio to request CID assistance, is that correct?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“And did you use the words ‘the Stealth Bomber’s been grounded’?”

“Yes, I did, my lord.”

It was the duty detective inspector who had been thus summoned who was next to give evidence.

“Did the complainant make mention of a knife?” asked Whitehouse.

“She did, my lord. We couldn’t find anything that night, but a knife was found the following morning on the riverbank close to the mouth of the alleyway where it adjoins Andwell Street. The river level had dropped sufficiently for the knife to be revealed.”

With that evidence, court was adjourned for the day, and Judy left with the public who had packed the gallery. She had decided how she was going to spend her leave; she was going to see this trial through.

“All those having business with the Queen’s Justices and this court draw near and give attention.”

Harper drew near and gave attention, knowing only too well that yesterday had not been one of his finest hours. The assault on the jury’s emotions of a little doe-eyed wisp of a girl, barely out of her utterly deprived childhood, describing calculated, deliberate terror being inflicted on her by a six-foot-tall, well-built, privileged youth was all but impossible to combat. When he had scored a point, which had been but rarely, he had looked a bully; when she had, he had looked a fool.

All he could do now was work very hard to rid the jurors’ memories of that, and concentrate on cop-bashing, which went down reasonably well even with white-collar middle-class types these days. Not that it would work. But he would try.

*   *   *

It was the man who had briefly been Judy’s boss, the quietly spoken DCI Merrill, who was giving evidence first this morning. He was handed the typewritten transcription of Drummond’s statement, and was invited to read it to the court, something to which Judy could tell he had clearly not been looking forward.