He Said/She Said(34)
A slot machine nearby starts spewing out coins, the hard-rain clatter bringing me back into the room. The bar is emptying into the ballroom.
‘We’d better go and get our name tags,’ I say. ‘The talk starts in a minute.’ We both drain our glasses and set them back on the bar.
My knife is heavy in my pocket, a reminder of how close I came to a stupid, potentially fatal, mistake. The memory of the glinting steel raises a stark secondary dilemma. There is no point in getting Beth out of the way if Laura doesn’t know she’s safe. If I had to use my knife – or my hands, come to think of it, and I know how far I am prepared to go to protect my wife – would I tell Laura? Could I tell Laura? Could she live with me? Even knowing I only acted for her, would she still love me?
Chapter 18
LAURA
10 May 2000
After the ordeal of the witness box, Wednesday was something of a relief. The professionals were being called in today. Our parts had been played, and nothing we could do now would influence the trial. The thought that I might have already sabotaged it was a steel band, tight around my skull, but at a base-rock level of morality, I felt no guilt. My lie was a route to the truth: therefore, truth it was. I thought back to Kit’s mechanical performance in the dock, his dogged adherence to the facts, and knew he would never see it that way.
Kit and I were together in the public gallery for the first time, islanded by Jamie’s supporters around us, our hands locked together. The day started with no preamble or recap, but rather recommenced as a play does after the interval. Polglase got to his feet and said, ‘I’d like to call the officer in the case, Detective Sergeant Carol Kent, Devon and Cornwall Police.’
Kent took me by surprise when she swore on the Bible, and I didn’t need to look at Kit to know he was rolling his eyes. I wondered for the first time about the assumptions jurors made about witnesses’ choice of oath. If I worked in court, if it were my boring everyday job instead of a horrible, once-in-a-lifetime ordeal, I’d make a game of guessing who would swear on a holy book and who would not.
Kent’s testimony filled in some of the gaps; we discovered that by the time the patrol car came to pick her up, Beth had recovered enough to give her name and her address, although it would be some hours before the whole story came out. I learned that Beth had met Jamie around a campfire the previous evening, and that she’d given him the brush-off then. We also heard about Jamie’s subsequent arrest. Rather than the police-chase of our conjecture, he had approached a uniformed officer and calmly told him that he had been wrongly accused of sexual assault. That doesn’t look good for Beth, I thought. But these were minor stops on the way to the prosecution’s real concern; the physical evidence.
Much of it was boring information that seemed irrelevant to the case; Polglase spent half an hour mining Kent for details of Pip, the beautiful police dog I’d seen. As this went on, I realised that it is more tiring to be bored than engaged, and unable to see the point of this line of questioning at the time, I wondered if it was a trick to exhaust the jury. Kit’s eyes kept returning to the digital clock on the clerk’s desk, blocky red digits that tore their way through the seconds, their pace at odds with the dragging day.
There was a brief foray into physical theatre when DS Kent put on a pair of Thai fisherman’s trousers. Polglase kept a straight face despite sniggers from the jury. ‘DS Kent, if this were your garment, and you were entering into consensual sex, even partially clothed, enthusiastic, consensual sex, how would you allow yourself to be penetrated?’
‘I’d undo them,’ said DS Kent. ‘There’s physically no other way. You can’t just slide them over your hips. If you wanted to access a woman’s genital area, you’d have to be pretty forceful.’
I had a flashback to Beth’s white leg, smeared with mud. I thought I’d suppressed my shiver but Kit closed his hand tighter on mine, as if to anchor me.
Polglase hooked his thumbs behind the lapel of his gown. (They must teach them to do this in law school.) ‘Thank you, DS Kent.I believe that we are able to share with the jury the actual trousers worn by the complainant on the day of the rape.’
A junior officer produced a plastic evidence bag. Someone on the jury actually said, ‘Oooh,’ and was shushed by a frown from the judge.
‘They’re very muddied as you’d expect,’ said Kent. ‘There’s fraying on the right-hand side where the tie is joined on to the body of the garment, consistent with a sharp tug.’ She’s on Beth’s side, I thought; she wants a guilty verdict as much as I do.
‘Thank you, DS Kent.’
Fiona Price swooped like an eagle. ‘These are incredibly cheap trousers, a few pounds each, sold widely at festivals such as the one on the Lizard. Can you categorically state that this minuscule rip is not simply a result of poor manufacturing? Or that it’s not wear and tear?’
Kent’s pause was deliberate; a drawn-out beat in which the two women eyeballed each other. Kent blinked first. ‘No,’ she said, her voice sagging with resignation.
During the cross-examination, Price rebutted each of the prosecution’s once-convincing arguments. It was like trying to keep track of a dozen shuttlecocks, all volleying back and forth at once. Surely the jurors must be dizzied by it; surely that was her intent. I had to close my eyes and will into my head the image of Jamie’s face above Beth’s, and I had to admit that the only reason I knew was because I knew.