Courting Trouble (30 page)

‘No.’ Chantelle shook her head. In the glare of the courtroom fluorescents, the tiny teenager was striving to become invisible. Her eyes flinched from everything.

‘But, after having consensual sex with my clients, you were still denied membership of their posse and you wanted revenge, isn’t that right? So you concocted this rape scenario. I want to ask you straight out why are you telling lies?’

‘I’m not telling lies.’ Chantelle’s frightened blue eyes filled with tears and her face twisted up in anguish.

‘The truth is, you’re a compulsive liar.’

‘Was you there? Was you there?’ Chantelle shouted back at her. The girl’s raw misery and pain was apparent to all, except Petronella.

‘You’re telling lies.’

‘No, I’m not! Shut up! Shut up!’

‘You wanted the police to bring a prosecution in this matter, didn’t you? So, take the jury into your confidence – why didn’t they proceed?’

‘I dunno why,’ she whimpered.

‘Even though you were lying in hospital, unable to move after this allegedly brutal attack – you were unable to move, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘I suggest that you were play-acting. I suggest that they knew you were not a reliable witness. Because you’re a lying little minx, aren’t you?’

I was yo-yoing up and down, making so many objections the jurors must have thought I was auditioning for a fitness video. I demanded that the prosecution stop badgering the witness. The women on the jury were also uncomfortable with the attack. They shifted in their seats and looked away. But the judge remained robotic and inflexible – think German tank invading Poland. Petronella, sensing that she was losing sympathy, changed tack.

‘Perhaps you’re not lying. Perhaps you just can’t remember the details because you were high on drugs. Your mother is a drug-addicted prostitute currently in prison for drug smuggling, is that right?’

Chantelle gave an almost imperceptible nod. Her face was a blur of misery. I looked at the judge. I could not believe he was not going to reprimand Petronella. With his ancient-tortoise overbite and shoulder-length ear hair, he was clearly too old to be allowed to operate heavy machinery – like a law book.

‘Your Honour, there’s a matter of law.’ I was up on my feet once more. This court case was becoming so aerobic I was practically hyperventilating. ‘I’m afraid the jury will have to leave the court room again.’

I watched the jury file past me with Petronella’s question still ringing in their ears. Once the court room was cleared, my oleaginous opponent immediately apologized.

‘I’m so sorry, Your Honour. I got carried away,’ she simpered, all moist pout and batting lash. ‘I shouldn’t have asked that question.’ Petronella was putting on such a show for the judge, she might as well have done some jazz hands.

The ‘impartial’ judge, who made lip farts when he disagreed with anything I said – which was everything – responded by giving Petronella a verbal pat on the head. ‘No harm done. The jury will be told to put that thought out of their minds,’ he concluded, proving that he was the only living brain donor in world history, because the damage was already done. When the jury returned five minutes later, despite the judge’s instruction to strike that comment from their collective consciousness, I could feel suspicious glances directed at this daughter of a convicted felon.

The defence continued its hackneyed attack. ‘These young men are the real victims here,’ Petronella asserted. ‘Because isn’t it true, young lady, that this was merely consensual sex that just got a bit rough?’

This time I jumped up as if I’d been bitten on the backside by a bullet. ‘Are you seriously implying that this little girl egged on these two poor, vulnerable, grown men? Yes, because there’s nothing a beautiful, bright young girl wants more than to be gang-banged by two thugs on a cold, dog-faeces-riddled stairwell.’ I wanted to shout,
‘Look at them! Both men are so ugly, when they were born the doctor slapped their parents’
– although this was a difficult concept to get across using only my eyebrows. But I could definitely feel a shifting of opinion in our direction. Despite the judge’s bias, the majority of the laser-eyed jury were not wearing rat-bag filters on their glasses.

Still, a lawyer learns to be fluent in body language, and I intuited that, thanks to Petronella’s insinuations, three or four jurors were clearly of the opinion that Chantelle possessed what Portia’s male classmates called ‘margarine legs’, i.e. easily spread. And even though it shouldn’t, it would cloud their judgement on her rape.

Finally, it was time for my re-examination. I breathed a sigh of relief. This was my chance to recoup.

I immediately got Chantelle to explain that, yes, she’s a normal, fun-loving teenage girl who likes to wear high heels and short skirts but that she had never had sex prior to the attack. I took her through the grim and gruesome rape in all its heart-wrenching detail, providing medical evidence of her injuries.

Sometimes in court, it’s best to eschew virtuoso verbal high-wire acts and keep it simple. ‘Chantelle, were you raped?’ I asked gently.

‘Yes,’ she bleated.

‘And are you telling the truth?’

‘Yes.’

By the time Chantelle, wrung out and shaking, was allowed to leave the witness box, a few of the female jury members were dabbing at their eyes. Despite all the bullying, the tiny teenager hadn’t given up. There were still small corners of hope in her, like air pockets in a ship that was going down.

Petronella opened her case and called for the defendants. Roxy snickered loudly when both men promised to tell the truth. She laughed even louder when they continued to claim their innocence. The jury’s body language had also turned hostile. Petronella set about dismissing Chantelle’s injuries as the side effects of playfully rough sex, but her words were just running into each other like raindrops down a window-pane. I turned to see how Phyllis was coping. A glimmer of optimism had seeped into her eyes like a timid guest.

In my cross-examination of the pair, I took apart their characters before moving on to specifics. ‘Rape has become a rite of passage for many gang members, hasn’t it? I put it to you that you deliberately went after Chantelle because she refused to succumb to peer pressure. Because she wouldn’t give you a “a shiner”, which is the term your posse use for forced fellatio. Then you left her beaten and broken, with a bruised and bleeding vagina and the words “Dirty bitch” and “Wash this” scrawled, by you, on her abdomen. This was my client’s welcome to womanhood. And you inflicted this upon her, didn’t you?’

The icing on my argument was to enlist a handwriting expert to confirm the high probability that the words inked on to Chantelle’s abdomen indicated the writing style of one of the defendants, a clever ploy Petronella hadn’t anticipated.

By the time the brow-beaten defendants skulked out of the witness box, I was mentally tweaking my closing address, which would convince the jury to bring in a guilty verdict and send these rapists off to prison. Then, all of a sudden, Petronella announced that she’d like to call a final witness. I glanced up, surprised. As the redhead swept into the court room, my mind whirred and stopped and whirred and stopped like a broken clock. Where had I seen her before? It took me a moment to recognize the woman, because this time she had her clothes on. The last time I’d seen Nurse Baddington, she’d been cavorting around Jack’s living room in her lingerie. After she had sworn on the bible and been introduced to the jury as the nurse attending Chantelle on the night of the alleged rape, Petronella asked if it was true that Chantelle had disappeared from the hospital between the hours of nine and ten.

‘Yes,’ she said.

Life had just dropped a saucepan lid on a hard-tiled kitchen floor. The impact rattled around my cranium, clanging. How could they know this when I had the hospital record? Jack must have quizzed the nurse during pillow talk, discovered that Chantelle had gone missing and slipped the information to the defence team. But I couldn’t comprehend it. Could Jack really be so vengeful and malicious as to sabotage Chantelle’s case? It was as though I were underwater in some old, heavy diving suit and the thought was being piped laboriously down to me, thoughts instead of oxygen.
Jack!

‘Is there a hospital record of this?’ Petronella probed the nurse.

‘No. The record went missing. Presumed stolen.’

The room pitched around me like a rolling ship. How could I ever have trusted the man? Beside me, Chantelle screwed up her eyes as if in pain.

The judge’s grey, disordered eyebrows were working overtime to show his curiosity. ‘Would you be so kind as to explain the relevance of this, please?’ he asked Petronella courteously.

Petronella’s black eyes glittered. She went on to explain how Chantelle’s grandmother had been tried in an attempted-murder case, in which she admitted taking a firearm around to the residence of the two accused men and firing at their genitals, seriously injuring one and grazing the other. ‘I put it to the court now that the alleged “victim”, the alleged “beaten”, “broken” and “bruised”
victim
in this case, got up off her alleged “sick bed” and trotted down to the estate with her grandmother to point out the men upon whom she wanted revenge.’

A murmur of disapproval ran through the jury. The tiny girl beside me was flushed and trembling. I turned to see Phyllis: her face was paralysed. After a few more perfunctory queries to the nurse, the judge called Chantelle back to the witness box. A faint shudder coursed through her etiolated frame.

‘Do I have to?’ she mewled.

My heart shrank like a raisin. I nodded.

Petronella gave my client a cold, hungry stare – the stare of a raptor about to seize a rabbit. Her voice was sinuous and exact; the richness of her tone oozed confidence. ‘Did you leave the hospital on the night in question, to point out these two men to your grandmother?’ She indicated her clients, who were the picture of outraged innocence. ‘The men upon whom you wanted revenge, because, after having sex with them, they didn’t let you join their posse and chilled you out?’

Chantelle’s pale skin was so taut with tension it seemed stretched across her skull and nailed behind her ears.

‘Let me remind you that you are under oath.’ Petronella’s voice set my teeth on edge. It was falsely cheery, her smile as sharp and sweet as icing. ‘Did you leave the hospital with your granny?’

Chantelle’s face froze and the words came out slowly and haltingly. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I didn’t want ’er to attack the wrong men.’

I suddenly felt as though I were walking on the moors, had lost my footing, and was sliding down towards the bog, clutching at tangles of gorse and weeds which came out of the chalky soil in my hands.

‘So, you’re not quite the innocent little victim portrayed by the prosecution, are you? Yes, you’re playing innocent now. But you incited your grandma to assault these men upon whom you wanted revenge because they wouldn’t accept you into their gang. When they blew you out, you got your grandma to blow off their testicles.’

‘No! No! It weren’t like that!’

Petronella, going in for the kill, was as excited as a barracuda in a shoal of fat fish. ‘You are prepared to lie to this jury. I asked you quite specifically whether you were unable to move. You told this court you were unable to move, didn’t you?’

‘Gran! I want my gran!’

A male member of the jury who’d looked quite sympathetic earlier now lifted his eyebrows high in fastidious disdain. A female juror made a moue of disgust.

When it was my turn to re-examine, I tried to cast the event in a better light, but Chantelle was traumatized, dazed, a glazed look in her eye. ‘When your grandmother, heartbroken and furious, told you she was determined to confront the men who had raped you and was taking your grandpa’s old hunting gun with her for protection . . . how did you feel?’

Shattered, the pain-racked little girl said nothing.

‘Did you know how your grandma was feeling?’

Chantelle stared at the floor, stonily.

‘Was she scared?’

Silence.

‘Were you frightened they would turn the gun on your grandma?’ My words went crashing and rattling around the court room like trapped birds.

‘You were still really hurt – bleeding and covered in bruises, when you staggered out of your hospital bed to protect your grandma, isn’t that right?’

The judge barked a command down to me. ‘Stop leading the witness.’

‘Were you in pain when you left the hospital?’

Turning slightly, I noticed that Chantelle’s attackers were now directly in her line of vision. Bash was twitching excitedly, like a spider. Chantelle had hung her head to avoid their gaze, but it was making her look shifty in the eyes of the jury. Then the poor girl began rocking. When she gave a high-pitched gulp, I knew that I had to let the child go. We would have to rely on my closing speech. It was all we had left.

As soon as Chantelle limped out of the witness box, I started talking. But I could feel the case slipping away from me, like thinning ice cracking beneath my feet. I talked faster, accelerating like mad to save us all from drowning. I described the men in the dock as wolves in a lambing shed, prowling the estate and preying on girls, exploiting them sexually, filming the abuse, then blackmailing them into working for their gangs as drug couriers or prostitutes. I explained that if the jury found the defendants not guilty, it would discourage other victims from coming forward and allow rapists to attack with impunity. I threw everything I could at the jury before the judge could stop me. I wove in the terrible murder and domestic-violence statistics which proved that women were runners up in the human race. I bemoaned the fact that rape had gone mainstream. How pub crawls and parties now have themes such as Rappers and Slappers or Geeks and Sluts.

Cases are tried before a live jury – at first. When I heard a juror yawn and saw another rest his face on his hand as though about to go to sleep, I realized I was losing them, but I ploughed on. Yes, it was heavy-handed, but my only option now was to club the jury into submission. I pleaded with the jury to take a stand against violence perpetrated on innocent women, concluding with a list of the defendants’ prior misdemeanours – a list which made
War and Peace
look like a haiku . . . But then a couple of jurors coughed, and that was when I knew it was time to sit down and shut up.