He Said/She Said(42)

Chapter 21





LAURA

11 May 2000

‘If I were wrongly accused of a crime as heinous as rape, I’d stand my ground, but you ran away, didn’t you?’ said Nathaniel Polglase.

I held my breath as Jamie evenly returned his gaze. ‘As I said, I was just going to get rid of the drugs in my pocket.’

‘No. You ran away because you had been caught in the act of raping the complainant Miss Taylor, and you hoped to get away with it, didn’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Do you remember when you first approached the police, in their Portakabin cell?’

Jamie couldn’t hide a panicked glance at his counsel. Fiona Price’s nod was almost invisible. I wondered if Kit had seen it. I wondered if the jury had seen it.

‘Yes?’

Polglase looked solemn. ‘The jury has heard DS Kent describe Pip the drugs dog, but I will recap for their benefit as well as yours, Mr Balcombe. There were two police dogs on site at all times that weekend, including a four-year-old Alsatian called Pip, an incredibly sensitive, highly trained animal. To him, even residual traces of drugs are as obvious as a lit joint would be to the human eye. Where was Pip when you were questioned, Mr Balcombe?’

‘He was next to me,’ said Jamie. Kit and I sat up straighter. ‘He was in the corner of the room with his handler.’

Polglase pressed on. In cross-examination he finally seemed to be enjoying himself.

‘Did Pip go for you?’

Jamie’s face expressed exactly my feelings when I’d been cornered by Price.

‘You don’t remember Pip, because he didn’t go for you, did he? He did not smell the cannabis you claim you were so eager to get rid of.’

‘It was gone by then. And I’d had it in a little plastic bag.’

‘In those circumstances traces would still be detectable to a finely trained nose. Mr Balcombe!’ Polglase unveiled a rich tenor. Everyone in the courtroom rose an inch from their seats. ‘This joint never existed in the first place, did it?’

‘It did!’ I heard the little-boy whinge he’d used on Beth in the aftermath.

‘It’s a smokescreen, concocted after the event, something you thought up in the journey between the festival and Helston Police Station, isn’t it?’

‘No!’

‘How much did you have to smoke around the campfire?’ Jamie didn’t say anything. ‘Your statement is here if you need it,’ prompted Polglase. I knew from my own stint in the witness box that when counsel hold out your statement, they are handing you the rope for your own noose. I was glad now of the experience; it helped me understand Jamie’s present discomfort.

‘One puff,’ he admitted.

‘And did you like it?’

‘Not really.’

‘Why, then, did you go and buy some?’

Jamie cast his eyes to the ceiling, as though the right answer would be written there. The jurors wouldn’t have looked out of place with oversized soft drinks and cartons of popcorn.

‘You’re a cunning young man, aren’t you?’ said Polglase.

‘What?’

‘Isn’t it far better we condemn you for the lesser crime of possession than focus on your true transgression, the brutal rape of a vulnerable, lone female?’

Jamie just shook his head. Along the bench from me, his mother mirrored the action. The press were scribbling furiously in their notebooks. I had no need to record anything; even now, I can virtually recite some of the key speeches from the case. Memory, I was discovering, acts completely differently when you give it a little notice. When you know at the beginning of a day that every word will count, even extraneous details imprint themselves in your long-term consciousness. It’s when events sneak up on you that things become disordered. There should be different words for the different ways we can remember.

‘You were lying on one of those counts. Which one?’

‘I’m not lying,’ said Jamie. Oh, but you are, I thought to myself, and they’re going to see through you, just like I did.

‘It almost doesn’t matter. Let’s press on,’ said Polglase. ‘I refer you to Ms Taylor’s testimony from earlier. It’s not just your opinions of the rape that are in conflict. You both arrived on the same day, which was the Wednesday, but that’s about all you agree on. Let’s go through the day before the rape, shall we? It was you who first touched the complainant Miss Taylor’s thigh, wasn’t it?’

Jamie appeared back on safe ground. ‘She pressed up against me.’

Antonia stopped twisting her engagement ring; the diamond caught a shaft slanting through the skylight, and beamed a point of white light across the room.

‘Whose suggestion was it that you accompanied her back to her tent?’

‘Mine. I thought she was vulnerable.’

‘In fact, you insisted on accompanying her despite her several assurances that she would prefer you not to, isn’t that so?’

‘No.’

‘Her actual words at the threshold of the tent were, I believe, ‘‘Not in a million light years.’’ Polglase paused for a pantomime wince. ‘Ouch,’ he said with a little moue. ‘No one likes to be rejected, but that’s got to sting, hasn’t it?