Courting Trouble (28 page)

I now noticed just how sozzled Jack was. I’d never seen him drunk before. ‘Look at yourself, Jack. Nearly forty and still acting like a student . . . Is this really what you most want in the world?’

‘No.’

For a fleeting moment, I thought he was going to say something heartfelt and recapture the emotion of the morning.

‘What I really want is a limber lingerie model who owns a vineyard and has an open-minded sister, who likes to wrestle in jelly . . . No. Make that
two
sisters.’

‘You’re so much smarter than this. Why, when it comes to women, do you always take an IQ test and fail?’

‘I think the brain is an overrated organ,’ he drawled. ‘It’s not only all spongy and inert, but grey. Why should it wield power over other parts of the body which provide so much more pleasure?’

‘You know what?’ I spoke in a strained BBC announcer’s accent. ‘I’m the one who has failed her IQ test ever to have thought that you could change.’

I rushed out into the night, furious with myself. The rain washed the tears from my face. But not the taste of Jack Cassidy from my lips. There was nothing the rain could do about that.

Experience is a wonderful thing, I realized. It allows you to recognize a mistake when you make it all over again.

A pretty good indication that your life has gone to hell is when you find yourself eating the cooking chocolate at three in the morning. Although our court victory did afford us a day or two’s grace, post win, offers of work came pouring in. After eighteen months of feeling ostracized by our profession, Roxy and I now adopted the brace position for legal stardom. Not only had we been approached by a sultana – no, not a dried fruit but the genuine wife of a sultan, who needed defending after cutting up her philandering husband’s Savile Row suits – but there was also a female politician claiming duress after her circuit judge husband forced her to take his driving points. Both cases would be very high profile. From overseas, we had a money-bags Malaysian actress who’d been caught, um, with her mouth full, and wanted to pay us a small fortune to write an opinion challenging her government’s absurd sexual-offence laws banning oral sex. ‘Do you think we’re biting off more than we can chew?’ Roxy tee-heed.

Another wealthy woman wanted us to sue her ex-husband for emotional distress. During their acrimonious divorce, he’d told the judge that he had no intention of getting married ever again and cut off his wedding-ring finger right there and then, before presenting it to our client. ‘Well, it’s one way of sticking your finger up at the British divorce laws,’ my mother commented wryly.

With prosperous, paying clients for the first time, Roxy’s holiday home in the Dordogne, bespoke Versace suit and BMW sports car of her dreams were tantalizingly within reach . . . Finally, Pandora’s would be able to prop itself open without the patronage of the Countess. She had already announced that she intended to spend the money she’d save on a diving school in Cuba, just so she could say to people, ‘I’m off to scuba in Cuba.’

Roxy and I had decided that Phyllis and Chantelle should keep living with us while the council found them a new flat on another estate. Yes, it was for their protection, but also because it would take a little time to wean ourselves off Phyllis’s excellent cooking.

Five days after her trial victory, Phyllis received a letter from the Crown Prosecution Service. Roxy and I brought it home from the office after work. We presumed it was the CPS’s formal notification to Phyllis, as Chantelle’s guardian, about the upcoming rape-trial date.

Our gourmet gran was busy concocting something complicated from her advanced cordon-bleu book. I called her culinary concoctions ‘quiz-uine’ as I was never one hundred per cent sure what went into them, but they were so mouthwateringly wonderful that I had been about to invite Nathaniel over for a celebratory supper, when Phyllis finally opened the envelope.

The letter from the CPS wasn’t so much a ‘to do’ list as a ‘to don’t’ one.

The formal notification, which Roxy read aloud, stated that the CPS was not proceeding with the rape charges, which would now be dropped. ‘We’ve applied our test as to whether to prosecute and we consider there is no realistic prospect of conviction.’ The letter went on to cite the reluctance of the alleged victim to testify, cataloguing the panic-stricken calls Chantelle had made to the police voicing her intention of perhaps withdrawing her evidence. ‘The CPS has to be robust when quality-assuring cases to maximize CPS efficiency.’

‘What does it mean?’ Phyllis asked, befuddled, leaving her boiling pots to hiss and rattle on the stove behind her.

I could feel Roxy going limp next to me. ‘What it means is that a woman’s word is worth less than a man’s.’ She was deflating faster than a pool-side Lilo at the end of summer.

‘What it
means
is that Jack Cassidy is a bad loser,’ I clarified. I could definitely see his hand in this. Appointing Jack as Senior Treasury Counsel was like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. Sore at losing the case against Phyllis, and also his carnal conquest, he’d obviously advised the CPS to drop the case against the two alleged rapists.

Roxy was now fuming more than the abandoned pans. She lit up a cigarette and opened the kitchen door. She spent the next few minutes pacing the garden as she incorporated every obscene term for the male reproductive organ into her explanation of events.

‘What are you sayin’?’ Phyllis reiterated, unable to fathom the nuances and undercurrents of legalese.

‘What those drongos don’t understand,’ Roxy bellowed from somewhere near the herbaceous border, ‘is that victims vacillate and are inconsistent because they’re traumatized.’

I tried to clarify. ‘It’s all to do with cutbacks in police and CPS resources. Despite a big increase in reported rapes, the number of people charged with rape by the CPS has fallen by 14 per cent.’

Roxy shook her head in disbelief.

‘You mean, Chantelle’s rapists will get away with it?’ asked Phyllis, in an annihilated voice.

‘Yes,’ Roxy said.

Phyllis dropped a baking tray with a cymballic crash and let out a wounded sob. Her hand chilled my arm in a death grip. She looked at me with pitiful, pleading eyes. ‘Is it true?’

‘No,’ I heard myself saying. ‘It doesn’t mean we can’t bring a private prosecution. I will waive my fees.’

‘As will Pandora’s,’ Roxy rallied, stubbing out her fag and barging back inside, reinvigorated. ‘But’ – she hesitated – ‘what about our big-paying cases?’ Her voice was wistful as she watched her new sports car purring off into the Dordogne sunset . . .

‘They’ll have to wait,’ I said, putting my arm around Phyllis’s hunched shoulders. ‘We have more important work to do.’

‘But Tilly, if we lose, we’ll have to pay defence costs, which could run into £30,000 or £40,000,’ Roxy fretted.

‘So we’ll obviously need a financial backer . . .’

A tinkling sound drew our attention to the living room. The Countess was ringing the little bell she’d used to summon us while recovering from surgery. The black-clad woman had become such a permanent fixture in our lives, either slumped into one of the bulbous office armchairs or lying supine on our Camden couch, that I’d forgotten she was there. She was starting to make those stick insects whose camouflage trademark is that they haven’t moved since the Stone Age look like hyperactive fidgets.

The Countess took a slug of her vodka tonic. ‘I used to be an advocate of Murphy’s Law – if anything can go wrong, it will. But after hearing that pathetic letter, my new view on Murphy’s Law is that Murphy was a fucking optimist . . . So, to hell with it, girls.’ She raised her glass in salute. ‘Count me in.’

‘What about your scuba in Cuba?’ Roxy asked.

‘Hey, if God had meant us to scuba dive in the ocean, we would have been born wearing shark-proof metal cages.’

Once the press reported news of our private prosecution, the abuse and death threats directed at Pandora’s tripled. To every complaint, my indomitable mother sent the same reply – ‘If you have a problem with me or my daughter or our practice, please write it nicely on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, fold it neatly . . . then shove it up your arse.’ But, despite Roxy’s casual dismissal of danger, I took extra precautions with Portia, driving her everywhere and monitoring her whereabouts. I also notified the police of anything I deemed suspicious or scary. I wanted to call on Danny’s bodyguard and surveillance services, but had no doubt that my mother would drop me off at the nearest orphanage with a note pinned to my pyjamas if I did. Still, I secretly hoped he was out there in the shadows, watching over us . . .

It was an unusually hot summer. The private prosecution was scheduled for the first week of September. A court case is a mental decathlon. I trained for the case day and night by slaving over a hot case file. The sun outside my office window was like treacle dripping off a sluggish spoon. As tempting as it was to frolic, I turned down all Nathaniel’s invitations to open-air concerts, summer fairs and river regattas.

Matters were hotting up on social media as well. The closer we got to the rape-trial date, the more sinister the abuse oozing through the airwaves. A week before the trial, Chantelle received a message on her new Snapchat account saying that, unless the private prosecution against the two men was dropped, the sex tape, in which the footage had been edited and overdubbed to suggest pleasure and the identities of the men obscured – would be posted on the Internet.

Chantelle’s little mouth gaped wide below two saucershaped eyes that looked like they hadn’t blinked in weeks. But she strapped a shock absorber to her brain and held fast.

A week later, as threatened, her attack was posted online and began turning up on endless illegal websites. The police were involved, but would have little luck outwitting highly skilled cyberstalkers who knew how to stay one click ahead of the law.

‘Twitter trolls are like some weird thought experiment that has broken out of the lab and infected millions,’ I explained to Phyllis. ‘As yet, there’s no known cure for this electronic pandemic, except to ignore it.’

But how do you ignore a bomb exploding in your life, embedding shrapnel in everyone you love? Phyllis ground her jaw and heaved with sobs. Chantelle lay in a foetal ball in her bed, shell-shocked, back in startled-deer mode. The next body blow came in the form of a Twitter message on her new account warning that, if she didn’t withdraw her evidence, a bomb would be detonated outside our house at precisely 9.30 that very night.

‘In the middle of
Downton Abbey?
. . . Has this person no heart?’ Roxy flippantly responded . . . until she saw the name of the Tweeter’s site. It was called
@killchantellenow
. The accompanying profile photo was of a man in a vampire mask, blood dripping from black, feral fangs. Sickened, I immediately blocked his account. But he had another account up and running moments later with the message ‘It’s great to be back after 30 seconds. Lol.’ Followed by ‘After strangulation, which organ in the female body remains warm after death? My cock.’

An involuntary shiver shimmied through my frame. The bomb threat was restated, too. This time with our exact street address. While Roxy called the police, I blocked the man once more. Seconds later, the same vampire mask loomed up on the screen again. ‘Drop the case or you die . . . slowly . . .’ he said, his voice scrambled into a metallic, unidentifiable buzz. Two drops of blood fell from his fangs and sizzled before the screen went blank.

Chantelle began rocking. She moaned in pain. Then she threw up, right across the kitchen table. Phyllis’s skin was the colour of an overcooked roast – completely grey. She started palpitating and I made her lie down immediately. The police soon confirmed that the accounts were bogus, the culprits untraceable.

We evacuated the house while the police combed the premises. Roxy called a round-table conference at the outdoor table of a café in Regent’s Park so she could smoke. A summer storm was brooding and the air was sullen and oppressive.

‘Chantelle, we can cancel the private prosecution right now. It’s your choice,’ I told her gently.

‘But let me just remind you that it’s always darkest just before the dawn . . . If you’re going to steal your neighbour’s newspaper, then that’s the time to do it.’ Roxy gave a hearty laugh, then added, between cigarette puffs, ‘Public shame constantly stops girls from pursuing rape cases. Today, it’s tweets. Yesterday, it was scarlet letters branded on to their foreheads. But my profound view on the subject is . . .
Bugger those bastards!
’

‘Mother, you’re chainsmoking. Slow down,’ I chastised her. ‘I doubt the nurse will be all that understanding when you tell her you didn’t realize you were in a non-smoking lung-cancer unit.’

‘The thing is,’ she puffed away, ignoring me, ‘why should those vile shits get away with it? They have the sexual compassion of a praying mantis.’

‘Chanty?’ Phyllis coaxed, resting her pikelet pile of chins on her hand and looking into the terrified eyes of her granddaughter. ‘It’s up to you, pet. I’ll stand by you whatever, for ever. You know that.’

The once-pretty girl was now so pale, thin and bedraggled with worry that if she went into the House of Horrors she’d come out with a job offer. ‘What more can they do to me?’ the teenager said desolately.

The summer storm broke. Pelting rain slammed into the soil, ploughing it up like a volley of wet gunfire. The trees became a snarled wall of limbs and leaves. We sat, sheltered beneath an awning, watching the downpour. Something about the weather steeled Chantelle, and she drew herself up in her chair, adding, in a perfect imitation of my mother’s Aussie accent,
‘Bugger those bastards.’

Roxy looked as though she wanted to run down the road doing the click-heeled dance from
The Wizard of Oz.
‘That’s the spirit! And you don’t have to face your attackers in court. We can have screens. Or you can testify by video link, which is just like watching the telly . . .’

‘Only it’s not as effective,’ I explained, my invisible lawyer’s wig already jammed on to my head. ‘The jury thinks it looks shifty. It’s much more effective if you can look the jury in the eye. If you feel up to it?’