Courting Trouble (24 page)

‘To Chantelle – the bravest girl I know. To Phyllis, who taught her everything she knows. To victory, because we are bloody well going to win this. To my brilliant barrister daughter, Tilly, who is going to win it for us . . . To Portia – who will one day follow in the family’s high-heeled footsteps and become a legal eagle. To the Countess, who pays for the grog and chocolates which fuel our feminist enterprise . . . And to Pandora’s – where we think outside the bloody box!’

The night before the court case, I was so nervous I slept for about one minute, during which I woke up at least three times. Roxy suggested I take tranquillizers, but I was too worried about the effect of tranquillizers to take any. If only there were a tranquillizer I could take to make me calm enough to take tranquillizers, I told her.

On the morning of Phyllis’s trial, as our minicab crossed London, the vast Victorian mausoleum of the Old Bailey loomed up before me. The Old Bailey is one of the best known buildings in London. Its infamous trials have included Oscar Wilde’s tragic criminal libel debacle and, from the sublime to the vicious, a Who’s Who of psychopathic murderers from Dr Crippen and John Christie to the Yorkshire Ripper and the Kray twins . . . And yet it seems carelessly to shrug off its own importance. The scrappy streets around the building twist their way up towards the pudding dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, which is itself dwarfed by the skyscrapers of the financial district rising up like jagged teeth behind it.

Roxy, Phyllis and I alighted from the minicab outside the court. I looked up at the imposing golden statue of Lady Justice, with her sword in her right hand and the scales in the other, and noticed that she was sensibly barefoot. I, however, was strapped into my highest heels, even higher than usual, because one of Roxy’s rescue dogs, a German shepherd she claimed was merely ‘fun-loving’ but looked as though it could drag you down into the underworld, had chewed through my favourite black court shoes. I’d seen him, ten minutes before I was due to leave home, disappearing outside with my footwear between his foaming incisors. I was now wearing my only other good, black pair, shoes which were so vertiginous I reserved them for first dates only. Those extra five inches meant I was practically en pointe. Which rather imperilled the impression I was trying to create for my first appearance at the Old Bailey of a cool, suave, legal-eagle sophisticate.

As Roxy and Phyllis slalomed ahead through the crowd, I gingerly negotiated the pavement behind them like a toddler taking to the ice. The area was jammed with braying reporters, which meant the ground was crawling with the electrical snakes of TV cables – yellow, black, poison-green – any one of which could trip me up.

‘L’atmosphère est très primitive,’
surmised Countess Flirtalotsky when I finally made it through the barriers of the metal detector. Despite the brightness outside, it felt cold in the court building, as though sunlight had never entered here. Roxy and I exchanged a glance before we parted. My mother’s look was full of confidence and pride. Mine was the opposite.

‘I don’t look like a big ball of anxiety to you, do I?’

‘Darl, if you were any more unwound I’d have to mop you up. But I have every faith in you, Tilly.’ She took out a flask and gave me one of her home-made energy-boosting ginseng drinks – although I suspected a kilo of cocaine might prove more beneficial. ‘Most barristers are either brilliant brainiacs, versed in clause-this and sub-clause that . . . or people-pleasing jury charmers. You have a most unusual combination of both skills. Which is why this will be Pandora’s finest moment.’

She squeezed my hand before escorting Phyllis across the baroque Grand Hall towards the court room, where she would be placed into custody then seated in the dock between two prison officers. Phyllis walked towards her fate as if against a tide, dragging her limbs. I watched as she crumpled on to a bench, head in hands, quietly sobbing. Roxy leant down to speak soothing words. If I lost the case, the old lady would be led into the labyrinth of dark, eerie tunnels below, first to a cell, then straight to prison for a ten-year stretch . . . No pressure then.

A court usher derailed my train of thought to ask if I was nervous about appearing against Jack Cassidy, who had never lost a case here . . . I replied no, but was thinking – nerves? What nerves? . . . I always spray my hair with a deodorant that protects for eighteen hours, spritz my pits with breath freshener, floss my toes and put my tights on backwards.

I wandered off through a warren of hallways, along which eccentric-looking persons hurried past wearing White Rabbit expressions and stiff horsehair wigs. With twenty courts in operation, there were so many barristers it was like following a flock of crows, the black wings of their gowns flying out behind them.

I took the lift up to the fourth floor. Barristers streamed towards the robing room. But there was no sign of Jack in the throng. In the women’s changing room I adjusted my wig, shrugged on my robes and tried not to throw up my breakfast.

Court room number twelve had a church feeling. It was full of oppressive, heavy nineteenth-century mahogany, ornately carved and imperious. I took my seat at the bench assigned to the defence team, to the immediate right of the jury box and facing the judge’s bench, and pretended to be busy with my papers.

The more conventional lawyers at the Bar had always looked at me the way one might study a bizarre decorative item at someone’s house bought as a ‘talking piece’. But that reaction was tame compared to the frisson of disapproval which rippled around the room when my solicitor burst into the court in her leopardskin miniskirt and matching wedges with a crumpled Phyllis in tow. Roxy was as out of place as an iridescent parakeet schooled in profanities holding forth in a prayer meeting.

But the hushed reverence in the room was only truly disturbed when Jack Cassidy strode into view. As he swept past me, robes billowing, wig rakishly askew, the attention of the entire court room shifted to him like flowers turning to the sun. The man was perfumed with success.

‘Good morning, Ms Devine.’ He paused and looked down on me, as I sat at the defence bench. ‘. . . What? No barbed jibe at my expense? Obviously, you’re not quite yourself today . . . I noticed the improvement immediately.’ Jack gave me a sly smile, full of cocksure confidence and devilment.

I passed him the tissue tucked up my sleeve. ‘Wipe your mouth, Jack. There’s still a little bit of bullshit on your lips. Or, better still, why don’t you travel light and leave your sarcasm at home.’

He answered my query by leaning across my bench and stealing my emergency bar of Green and Black’s dark organic, half hidden on the seat beside me.

Before I could remonstrate, the usher called the court to order as the judge lumbered in and sat at his bench, plump as a cushion. Oh no. My heart sank to Jules Verne depths. If only I’d thought to pack some cyanide tablets, now would have been the perfect time to take them, I ruminated, as the dreaded Judge Jaggers, newly promoted to the Old Bailey, arranged his black robes around him then peered sanctimoniously at me over his half-moon specs. If only my desk had an emergency airbag to cushion the blow so I could thump my head on the table in despair. That, or an eject button.

I tried to calm my hyperventilation by looking around the court room. Phyllis was now in the dock at the back of the court, flanked by guards. Roxy was seated directly behind me in order to fire brilliant ideas at my back, while the judge would no doubt fire destructive comments at my face. Jack took his seat at the prosecution bench on my right. When we were all settled, the judge gave the nod and the jury usher brought in twenty potential jurors. They blinked like newborn fieldmice under the harsh fluorescents. Twelve names were drawn from a box by the clerk of the court. The other potential jurors were dismissed. After taking an oath and swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the selected jurors, nine women and three men, sat in overawed silence on their wooden pews, peering up at the judge’s bench as though it were a pulpit.

‘Will the defendant please stand.’ Phyllis was helped to her feet by the officers as the first charge was read out: attempted murder.

‘How do you plead?’ the clerk of the court asked. ‘Guilty or not guilty?’

Phyllis mumbled.

‘Speak up!’ Judge Jaggers boomed. His voice was as sonorous as Big Ben, ringing out across the capital.

Despite the potential of a full ass-over-tit high-heel tumble, I pushed up from my seat and tottered unsteadily to the dock to hold her hand. ‘Phyllis?’ I said in an encouraging tone, as though offering her a slice of sponge cake.

‘Not guilty,’ she muttered.

‘Speak up!’ the judge grumbled. He was clearly going for first place in the Mr Caring and Sharing Compassion Championships.

I gave her a heartening nod and her arthritic fingers a gentle squeeze.

‘Not guilty,’ she sniffled. The further charges of causing grievous bodily harm and discharging a firearm to endanger life were also read out, and Phyllis duly repeated her not-guilty pleas.

After I’d taken my seat, the judge reminded the members of the jury of their grave responsibilities. He glowered at me once more before nodding approvingly at my nemesis. Jack rose to his feet and began to speak in his velvety, honeyed vowels.

‘Let me start by saying to you, members of the jury, this case comes before us against a background where rape is alleged. Let me say to you that this matter is still to be resolved by the courts. But you must firmly have in your mind that, even if a rape did take place, it does not justify the taking of a firearm and exacting revenge. There is no place for revenge in our system of justice. The reason we have police and courts is precisely so that people do not go off and seek vengeance for perceived wrongs.’

The timbre of his voice was mesmerizing and the female members of the jury were following him with rapt attention. They’d clearly already found Jack guilty – guilty of being totally adorable. ‘Hold me in contempt,’ their eyes seemed to say, ‘or just hold me.’

‘In this case, I, on behalf of the Crown, allege, and will prove to you, that Phyllis O’Carroll, hearing an account from her granddaughter, rather than engaging the authorities and the police, took the law into her own hands and tried to kill two people.’

Even at this distance, I could catch his scent, a scent that still had the power to intoxicate and unnerve. I clung to my cloak lapels like a caricature of an overly confident lawyer from an old
Punch
cartoon and stared straight ahead, in an attempt to give the impression of a barrister not on the brink of a complete coronary embolism.

‘Taking the law into your own hands, ladies and gentlemen, is a recipe for chaos and social disorder. And so, I remind you, as a jury, of your responsibility to society as a whole. We are not here trying the allegation of rape. We are trying the conduct of Phyllis O’Carroll, who took the law into her own hands in the most serious way possible. I call my first witness, Peter Simmons.’

The man I knew as ‘Stretch’ hobbled into court with an exaggerated limp, wincing with each overacted step. Gone were the leather jacket, biker boots and Hun/Goth-infested Dark Ages barbarian look. His frizzy hair had been straightened into a wiry halo, his tall, muscular frame squeezed into an incongruous and ill-fitting suit. He was still gargoyle-ugly but groomed to within an inch of his lowly life.

Having set the scene, Jack asked him to tell the court what the angry grandmother had done to him. As he began, with difficulty, to describe the experience of being shot in the testicle, I saw the men on the jury grimace and cross their legs in such flinching unison it could have been choreographed.

The judge, looking squeamish, addressed the witness gently. ‘Mr Simmons. I know these are matters about which any man would find it difficult to speak. But you are going to have to talk about these sensitive concerns. Which is why I just want you to know that the court understands the . . . delicacy involved.’

‘She shot me fuckin’ ball off!’ Stretch cried out, not so delicately. ‘The old bag turned up rantin’ that we’d raped her granddaughter and just shot at me gonads. The crown jewels of the family! She knocks on the f-ing door. Next fing I know, she blows me ball off. Thank me lucky stars I’ve still got me tonsil tickler.’

The judge raised a brow. ‘Your what, Mr Simmons??’

‘Me meat popsicle . . . Me beef thermometer . . .’ When the judge looked no wiser, he continued: ‘Me stinky pickle . . . Me baloney pony . . . Me pork sword . . . Me . . .’

‘Yes, thank you, Mr Simmons. Your manhood, I think you’re referring to,’ Jack clarified. His very use of the term had the female jurors swooning. I, too, was preoccupied by thoughts of Jack’s big, throbbing organ – the one between his ears. In this court case, that was the only place where size would count.

‘Would you like to take a break to compose yourself?’ Judge Jaggers asked solicitously, tilting his head towards the witness with compassion.

The judge’s obvious sympathy prompted Jack to glance across at me with one of his trademark smug smiles, then break off a piece of my chocolate bar and surreptitiously eat it with lip-licking pleasure. I kept my poker face intact but turned slightly to catch Roxy’s eye. My mother has never learnt to school her features into impassivity. Seeing the judge favouring the prosecutor and Chantelle’s rapist meant that angry emotions were chasing each other across her face.

I was more determined than ever to ensure that Stretch had the words ‘long’ and ‘prison’ precede his name but, when it was my turn to cross-examine, I was sweating more than a Colombian at Customs. I rose and, high heels pinching, tiptoed towards the one-balled warrior. What I wanted to ask Stretch was ‘So, tell me, how long have you known about your third chromosome?’ but I said instead – ‘You’re quite a big fish on the estate, aren’t you, Mr Simmons, or Stretch, as I think you prefer to be known. Is that right?’

‘Well, yeah,’ he peacocked. ‘I get about a bit.’

‘You’re cock of the walk, so to speak.’