Courting Trouble (29 page)

‘The police have already proved that the phone footage of your rape has been doctored and is therefore inadmissible, so it can’t be shown in court. Which is one less humiliation to endure,’ Roxy added.

‘I wanna stand up to ’em. Face to face. I’m no coward!’ Chantelle uttered these fighting words in a childish lilt, all big eyes and innocent expression.

‘We have all the evidence – the forensics, your testimony, the prior records of the thugs who attacked you . . . And we have you, Tilly . . .’ Roxy rallied. ‘As everyone knows, a jury is a group of twelve people summoned at random to decide who has the better barrister. And we have the best barrister in London. What could possibly go wrong?’

My indomitable mother believes there are no fiascos, only opportunities. I, on the other hand, tend to believe there are only opportunities for fresh fiascos. Her sentiments about me were so honeysweet they could be poured on a crumpet. But I knew that the case would be hard and that I would need to draw on all my strengths to win it. Which is why I went to bed with the only confectionery left in the house – a packet of cooking chocolate. And why I was sitting up beyond the witching hour, silently devouring it.

‘Oh, hello.’ The female lawyer who stole my husband had a voice like cold water and breath like peppermint. With her pale skin, blonde hair and icy expression, Petronella resembled a warrior princess in an Icelandic saga. Today, her golden mane was strangled back into a tight bun. The flesh of her face was pumped up with fillers, which made her cheekbones look high and prominent but also pulled her mouth upwards into a mirthless smile. She was alighting from my husband’s purloined Porsche outside Southwark Crown Court.

‘Terribly hot, isn’t it,’ she said, through lips that were a slash of glossy pink. ‘No air-conditioning in court either, can you believe it? At least it won’t be a long trial. Rape trials usually collapse. At least they do if I’m defending,’ she added, with a smug note of certainty.

When I realized Petronella was representing the two rapists, I tried to keep my gaze absolutely neutral and unperturbed. September had turned into an Indian summer. The wind was blowing like a hair-dryer on high and my temper was running hotter. I followed her into the crusty, dusty Crown Court building without speaking. It was only when we reached the robing room that I managed to say, through lips that didn’t feel like my own, ‘So, how is my husband?’

Her tight, serrated smile was like an oyster, milky-white and sharp as a razor, made for making cutting remarks. ‘Oh, he pampers me like a princess. Although you know what? It’s tiring sometimes, being beautiful. Not Stephen of course, but other people presume I’m too pretty to be intelligent. I wish I could make myself less attractive . . . So tell me’ – she looked me up and down – ‘how do
you
do it, Matilda?’

I stared at my old college rival as she adjusted her robes. Steve always said that I didn’t ‘make the most of myself’. Which is true. I invariably do my make-up in the rear-vision mirror at traffic lights or bumping along on the Tube, a technique which takes fifteen seconds tops. A swipe of rouge, a lick of mascara, a dab of lippy and, if I really want to impress and the lights are red for long enough for me not to take my eye out, a line of kohl pencil. I did go the extra make-up mile on my wedding day, with a little foundation and eye shadow. But I usually get by on a winning smile and charisma.

The perfectly coiffured and coutured Petronella, however, made me feel I should get my mirrors insured. She swept from the robing room. I trailed, flabbergasted, behind her. When Roxy bumped into the Piranha in Prada walking into the court room, my mother’s bouffant puffed up around her head like a cobra’s hood.

‘How can a woman defend a rapist?’ Roxy said to me, loud enough to be heard on the Mir space station. ‘So much for sisterly solidarity, eh? A case of Hear No Feminism, See No Feminism, Speak No Feminism.’

‘She’s hungry for success at any cost. Mind you, it’s the only thing she is hungry for,’ I marvelled, holding my stomach in. ‘Have you seen how thin she is?’ Yes, I’m a feminist, but I would have killed there and then for some support hose.

‘Are you sure she’s actually human?’ I asked my mother.

‘Apart from the drinking blood, hanging upside down to go to sleep and sucking the souls out of newborn babies, you mean?’ My mother poured me a lemon-balm-and-camomile-infused tea made from home-grown flowers which she’d brought in a hipflask. But not even a medically induced coma could calm my nerves now.

The usher brought the court to order and the judge entered.

The judge was old – Galapagos Island-turtle old. His lips, surrounding lettuce-green teeth, looked like two slugs copulating. When he spoke, his worm-white jowls quivered and the way he sat at the bench, all straight-backed and aloof, reminded me of a recently installed dictator. After the jury was sworn in, he clasped his hands together and nodded towards me. Silence erupted. A deafening silence. Giving evidence in a criminal trial is daunting. When the witness is a teenager asked to provide graphic detail in public about sexual offences committed against her by numerous men in front of a room full of strangers, it’s the equivalent of entering a lion’s den. It was my job to make sure Chantelle wasn’t torn limb from limb and eaten alive.

I glanced at Phyllis in the public gallery. In the weeks leading up to the case, Phyllis had become a woman who subsisted on a diet of anxiety, unleavened by the smallest crumb of joy. She sat perched on the edge of her seat, her hands clenching and unclenching. Only Roxy appeared unperturbed. She blew me a big, juicy kiss which was the sign to launch into proceedings.

Despite the fact that my anxieties were so enormous they could be awarded National Park status, I made a strong opening address to the jury, outlining the facts of Chantelle’s brutal rape. I then called the sixteen-year-old to the witness box, where I proceeded to draw the story out from her as gently and discreetly as possible. Chantelle’s fidgeting hands reminded me of the terrified beating of an insect’s wing.

The rape tableau had played ceaselessly in my mind for months, on a spool. When I asked Chantelle whether she knew the men who’d raped her, she described them perfectly, without a glance in the direction of her assailants, stating in a clear voice their names as Stretch and Bash, and adding that they were well known on the estate.

The accused, sitting rigid in the dock, registered a look of innocence that was so contrived it was hilariously parodic. The jury seemed less critical, possibly because this was the new and improved version of the men I’d first met. Bash, the lean and mean one, was still muscled like a fighting dog but had cropped his hair into a buzz cut, as though on day release from a Mormon prayer meeting. Stretch had removed his suit jacket in the heat. His chest appeared to have been covered in superglue and rolled in black hairs. Nestling there, amid the foliage – in fact, highlighted by the darkness of the undergrowth – was a large Christian cross. This ploy was as subtle as a fart in a space suit, but could possibly sway one or two of the more gullible Catholic jurors.

When it was Petronella’s turn to cross-examine Chantelle, she started softly. In an effort to charm the jury and disarm the teenager, her voice, which normally held the hauteur of a sequestered duchess, all rounded vowels and clipped ‘t’s, was suddenly as cloying and tangy as clear honey. I could sense the jurors warming to her, totally unaware that Petronella was the type of person who would make steak tartare out of endangered species.

As I’d predicted, it wasn’t long before she began to ask Chantelle about how she’d been dressed on the night in question, leading the girl into accepting that perhaps she dressed ‘older than her age’ and wore make-up and fashions ‘more appropriate to a woman in her twenties’.

I immediately interjected. ‘Can’t you smell that whiff of brimstone, people?’ is what I wanted to shout to the jury, but I said instead, ‘What bearing does this have on the case? Should all girls lock themselves away and wear chastity belts because males are not expected to monitor and control their behaviour?’

‘Your Honour,’ Petronella purred, ‘Wearing provocative clothing is like a bank storing all its cash by the door.’ She went on to draw a parallel between foolish people who leave their laptops on the back seats of their car.

‘I’m sorry, Your Honour, but that infers that Chantelle wanted to be raped. That she “asked for it” . . . Let’s compare that to murder, shall we? No one ever thinks “Maybe the murder victim wanted to die. Perhaps it was a consensual death.”’

The jury tittered and the judge tightened up the gristle that passed for his lips. He tsked his tongue and sighed at my interruption, but reluctantly asked Petronella to desist in her line of questioning on the plaintiff’s attire.

‘Rape isn’t always rape, though, is it, Chantelle? Consensual sex that gets out of hand is a long way off being snatched off the street or systematically violated. Did you lead them on? Not make yourself clear? Change your mind too late? Are you a victim, or just a naughty girl doing grownup things you bitterly regret?’

‘No!’ Chantelle gasped.

I glared at Petronella, disgusted. Clearly, the woman needed to go to the vet to get her claws trimmed. Why wasn’t the judge stopping this barrage of commentary? The man must be wearing headphones under his wig. I tried to interject once more, but he silenced me with his hand.

‘Go on,’ he encouraged the Piranha in Prada. What a shame it wasn’t an American court, I thought, so I could make rude remarks about his tiny gavel . . . or preferably use it as a meat tenderizer and pulverize him into pâté.

‘Yes, there was sexual activity, but it was not of my clients’ doing, was it, Chantelle? Despite them being older and stronger than you, you might say it was forced upon
them
, wasn’t it? Because you are not a Little Miss Muffet, are you? Indeed, you have quite a lot of experience, haven’t you? Isn’t it true that you and your friends refer to each other as SB1 and SB2 and SB3, etc. Would you mind telling the jury what that stands for?’

Chantelle looked horrified. ‘It’s a joke,’ she spluttered. ‘We call each other that for a laugh.’

‘Call each other what, Miss O’Carroll?’

Chantelle’s face flickered and tensed. ‘Slut Bag 1, Slut Bag 2,’ she whispered.

And I was up on my feet again. ‘Rape is the crime, not facetious texting to friends.’ My angry words clanged around the court room like traffic. But Petronella insisted on her line of attack.

‘And would you be so kind, Chantelle, as to clarify for the jury if this is you, twerking?’

I’d had enough. I demanded the court be cleared while I made a legal argument to the judge to prevent this brutal line of questioning. But pouting Petronella, whose eyelash-batting average would rival Donald Bradman’s, effortlessly smoothed all her requests past the drooling lech. Why couldn’t the old fool see that Petronella is good at flirting, the way a shark is good at being predatory?

After the jury filed back in, he permitted the defence to show the grainy phone footage of Chantelle in teeny shorts and a bra top, performing a Miley Cyrus-type dance involving rump-shaking gyrations during which she rubbed her posterior up against boys on some dancefloor. The judge, bushy eyebrows bristling, asked for clarification.

‘Twerking, Your Honour, is a sexually suggestive dance move from Jamaican dance-hall culture. I put it to you, Chantelle, that this tongue-flashing twerker we see before us in this phone footage is not the innocent your lawyer is leading us to believe you to be. Dressing older than your age, dancing provocatively, calling yourself a “slut” . . . isn’t it true that you were in as much control of the situation as the men? You were like a spider – predatory in all your actions, totally sexually experienced and older than your chronological age.’

Chantelle’s blue eyes blinked and blinked.

I made yet another gazelle-like leap to my feet. ‘Objection, Your Honour. It sounds as though the defence is describing a voracious temptress. Jessica Rabbit perhaps? Samantha from
Sex and the City
? We are talking about a sixteen-year-old girl who was raped. Dancing is not against the law, I believe, unless living under the Taliban.’

Once more, the jury gave a little sympathetic titter, but Petronella continued to attack Chantelle like a wasp eats a fallen peach. She revealed medical, school and social services records. The judge glanced through the sensitive material and, showing the compassion of a piece of petrified wood, decided it was relevant. I seethed silently. As for Petronella, the woman was clearly so evil I began to wonder if she offered a 15 per cent discount to clients who’d trade in their souls.

‘Is it true you approached the school nurse to ask about contraception?’

This time I leapt up so quickly I made a gazelle look sluggish. ‘I object to this line of questioning! It doesn’t matter if you are a sixteen-year-old virgin, a practising prostitute, or paralytic and lying naked on a bench. The blame lies with the perpetrators of rape, not with the victim. If a man takes it upon himself to rape a woman, he is guilty of breaking the law,’ I clarified, restraining myself from adding that, clearly, Petronella’s vile personality was her own chief contraceptive method.

The judge silenced me once more with his gnarled hand. He peered at the world beneath veined saggy eyelids, then addressed Petronella in the lock-jawed diction practised only by the Queen and a couple of inbred lords. ‘Miss Willets, I don’t think some of these questions are necessary. The sexual experience of the plaintiff is not relevant.’

I ground my teeth, thinking ‘you old bastard’. Yes,
I
know,
you
know, and
Petronella
knows the questions aren’t relevant, but now the jury has heard them they’ll imagine that the wickedly wanton and experienced Chantelle has seen more ceilings than Michelangelo. Having already compared Chantelle to a sexy, grown-up, make-up-wearing spider, Petronella then posited the notion of revenge.

‘You were obviously keen on having sex with these two men because they’re held in high esteem on the estate. It would get you kudos with your friends. So you ran around in high heels and short skirts, trying to get their attention, positively gagging for it.’