Courting Trouble (31 page)

In Petronella’s final speech, she depicted Chantelle as a cold-blooded slattern, hell bent on premeditated revenge because the men she had seduced did not reward her with gang membership. ‘Was Chantelle blameless? . . . Can one hand clap, ladies and gentlemen?’ She painted the sixteen-year-old as an arch-manipulator, pressing her befuddled grandmother into committing a murderous revenge on her behalf. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve heard from a young woman who we say is unstable and has not had the benefits of a proper upbringing.’

After this ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ innuendo, she ran the whole clichéd ‘rape accusations ruining the lives of innocent men’ line. She spoke as rapidly as a sewing machine, threading words together, stitching Chantelle up. She used the phrase ‘cried rape’ over and over, making Chantelle out to be a scheming harridan who used her sexuality as a weapon to hurt men. I was used to defending, not prosecuting. It was agonizing not to have the last word. I had to tie my tongue in knots to stop from interjecting. All I could do was grind my molars into a pulp.

‘Members of the jury . . .’ Petronella had the face of a news anchor trying to look serious while reading from the autocue about the death of someone they have never heard of. ‘The two men accused here today may seem somewhat unsavoury, but no man should be put through the horror of a false rape allegation. You must be sure of guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. Also remember that you’re dealing with a woman who’s been found to be lying. She said under oath that she was raped and so hurt that she lay in hospital, unable to move. But in reality she left the hospital after coercing her poor, addled grandma into taking her to the estate to sort out the testicles of the men who had rejected her.’

Roxy’s mouth twitched and then set into a grimace. That was when I understood that we were going to lose the case.

When the judge addressed the jury, my case became the legal equivalent of flying over the Atlantic, well known for not having anything solid you can actually land on, and the pilot announcing that he had a ‘minor engine problem’. The judge instructed the jury that they could not convict unless they were sure that the sex was not consensual.

The light in Phyllis’s eyes was slowly extinguished.

When the jury found the defendants not guilty, the two rapist thugs whooped. Bash gave me a sign with his finger which could not be mistaken for the Vulcan symbol for ‘Peace and Prosperity’.

I looked at Phyllis’s suffering face. I felt misery rise up from her like steam. The not-guilty verdict began to cling to me like a chill. The deadening weight of failure settled into my body. As the court room emptied, silence pressed down like a low ceiling. Supporters gathered around Phyllis and Chantelle as if at a graveside.

Chantelle was lost in her own private torment. She gazed at me out of huge blue eyes with the peculiarly helpless, agonized expression of someone who knew it had all gone wrong but didn’t really know why. All her eye make-up was washed away with crying. The vile video of her rape had gone viral, for nothing. Zilch. Nada. Sweet FA.

‘I’m sorry,’ I told them.

‘It wasn’t your fault, Tilly. The conviction rate for rapists is limbo low. We knew the odds were against us going in.’

‘I should have insisted Chantelle gave video evidence . . . I was the one who talked her out of sitting behind a screen . . .’

Roxy was working hard at turning up the corners of her mouth. ‘We need to change the court culture. Judges need to stop that kind of aggressive cross-examination which leaves the victim in shreds.’

Countess Flirtalotsky was twanging with indignation and anger. Drawn up to her full six-foot-one, stick-thin height, she resembled a malignant tuning fork. I presumed she was angry about how much my defeat would cost her, but then she said, ‘Raped by men, then raped again by the judicial system. You’d get a fairer trial in fucking Russia, dah-ling!’

Phyllis’s face had slammed shut. Her eyes fixed on something I could not see. ‘I’m more glad than ever that I shot those scum in the nuts now,’ she said bitterly.

My heart felt full of sludge. ‘Oh, Phyllis,’ I said sadly. ‘It’s never right to take the law into your own hands. We would have won if that nurse hadn’t turned up.’ But Phyllis was no longer listening. Useless defiance is what remains after everything else has been scoured away. The last thing she wanted, I knew, was sympathy. And so I said no more. I had to get some fresh oxygen into my lungs. I left the court, fogged with gloom.

The day had darkened, with rainstorms gathering. The sun suddenly came out from behind a grey cloud. It flickered briefly, then retreated back under cover, dispirited by what it had glimpsed below. There was no breeze. I saw flags on a high building hanging limp against their poles. I knew just how they felt. I stared across a dirty road at brightly coloured advertisements of products I would never buy. A woman thrust a flyer at me. ‘Jesus wants to know you,’ she said.

‘Yeah, well, I don’t want to know him – not at the moment, thanks very much.’

Then I saw Nathaniel striding across the busy road towards me. ‘Sorry to miss the trial. I had to help source bail for a re-offender. You look like hell,’ he said.

‘At this point, hell seems like a major improvement over a life in the law.’

‘Oh, no.’ He screwed up his eyes, as if in pain. ‘What happened?’

The words I had to find felt heavy and sour in the back of my throat. ‘I lost the case . . .’

‘Oh, Matilda. It wasn’t your fault.’

I silenced him with my hand. ‘Nathaniel, thanks, but there really is nothing you can say right now to make me feel better.’ In truth, my confidence level had sunk so low, you’d need a pressurized mini-sub to find it.

‘Come home with me. I’ll cook you some supper and rub your feet and pour you some wine. There are times when it is imperative not to stay sober. Funerals, weddings, and after losing a trial. Not to be drunk in these circumstances indicates you are either a Baptist, a Muslim or an alien.’

‘No, thanks. I think I just need to use my body as a repository for chocolate for a while.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Jack Cassidy, that’s what went wrong. He ratted me out, as revenge for beating him in Phyllis’s court case. He betrayed me to the defence team. Which allowed two violent rapists to walk free.’ I thought back to the time the press had massed outside our house. I’d told Jack on the phone that Phyllis and Chantelle were at my home. Had he leaked our address?

I clearly needed to ask my mother if she had drunk during pregnancy, because falling for a monster like Jack Cassidy in the first place had to prove that I was a few neurons short of a synapse . . . And explain why failure seemed to be the only thing I was a success at.

My brilliant and mature lawyering skills became even more strikingly evident when I burst out crying and sobbed into Nathaniel’s shoulder.

The trouble with the future is that it’s not what it used to be. That was my first thought when I woke at lunchtime the day after losing Chantelle’s trial. My second thought was not to neglect the present – not when you’re lying in the warm arms of a man who has spent the night adding a few new chapters to the
Kama Sutra.

A hazy vanilla light seeped into Nathaniel’s bedroom. His tall, antique-filled house was on a small Georgian square which had miraculously survived the Blitz, unscathed, when London’s docklands were flattened. With St Katharine Docks to the right and Canary Wharf further downriver, the house was an architectural gem, nestled in a crook of the twisting Thames. Through the bow window the river glistened as whipped-cream clouds sailed overhead and a plane embroidered the blue sky with vapour. Sighing contentedly, I shrugged myself deeper into his embrace, close against his chest, and inhaled his strong, heady scent. When I looked up into his face, Nathaniel’s smile came out like the sun.

‘Breakfast in bed, m’lady?’

I took a nibble of his earlobe. ‘Um, actually, I think you are my breakfast in bed.’ Corny, but allowable under the Post-orgasmic Cute Phrases Lovey-dovey Clause.

‘I’ve got to go and check in on a client, so why don’t I pick up some croissants en route? I’ll be back in an hour, after which I’ll spoil you rotten.’ He nibbled my ear now.

‘You’re just too good to be true, Nate. Are you sure you’re not a mirage or a hologram or something?’

Nathaniel’s face took on a serious cast. ‘I’m only good now to make up for being bad in the past. I did some truly unethical things as a banker. Things I’m not proud of. I’m just trying to make amends. Speaking of which, will you come with me tonight to a charity fundraiser for Reprieve? It would be such a delight to have you on my arm. Middle Temple Hall. Seven.’

He nipped a line of kisses down my neck and I felt a volt of excitement shoot up my thighs and pulse between my legs. I stayed silent as I watched him pull on his jeans, but only because I’d totally run out of superlatives. As he lifted his strong arms to shrug on a T-shirt, his muscled stomach sucked inwards and his broad ribcage rose. His face, neck and the V-shaped triangle at the base of his throat were honey-coloured and darker than the rest of his taut torso. After he’d bounded down the wooden stairs, his biker boots beating out a rhythm on the old and worn wood, I lay in bed and thought about the marvel that was Nathaniel Cavendish.

The first time we’d been to bed together, I’d jettisoned him out the door to get back to Jack. The stupidity of it made me groan aloud. What had I been thinking? Or rather,
not
thinking. Anyone would presume I’d spent a lifetime doing sit-ups underneath parked vehicles, because the man was so damn perfect he could star as the protagonist of a Hollywood rom com. He attended charity events, helped the less fortunate, made his own bread . . . the man harvested his own honey, for God’s sake.

‘Bumblebees, like feisty, funny feminists, are teetering on the verge of extinction. Your numbers have dwindled alarmingly in recent years. You need nurturing and protection,’ he’d said to me while kissing my hand. Not only was he attentive and concerned, he was also practical – a Swiss Army man. Handy for everything, able to mend fuses, change car tyres, open bottles with his teeth and, oh! what nifty additional extras . . . One night with him had released me from the tinnitus buzz of self-reproach after losing Chantelle’s court case. I was like the donkey that had finally caught up to the stick holding the carrot. And it was time I showed my appreciation.

I threw on one of Nate’s T-shirts and padded down the stairs into the kitchen. The reason I don’t cook is because I don’t want to go down for manslaughter. I’d only ever once attempted anything more complicated than tuna surprise . . . and had nearly fallen into the blender and made a crudité of myself. My mother loves to tell people how I once went to the corner shop and asked for a ‘pinch of nutmeg’ and a ‘clove of crushed garlic’.

I peeked into his fridge. The fridges of most of the bachelors I know contain a few petrified lumps which could once have been chorizo, some chutney bottled during the reign of Alfred the Great and some yoghurt whose expiry date reads ‘When Tyrannosaurus Rex Roamed the Earth’. But Nathaniel’s fridge was groaning with gourmet delicacies. There was really no excuse not to try to concoct something.

First, I’d chop the onions. Not wanting red eyes, I rummaged through his laundry looking for swimming goggles and found a mask and snorkel. Donning this aquatic apparatus, I diced away happily. I managed to brown the onions without any major disasters, thanks to the fact that, without watering eyes, I could see what I was doing. Then I threw in some bacon. As I cracked eggs into a saucepan, I began to wonder why everybody made such a fuss of Domestic Goddesses and Gourmet Love Gods. This wasn’t so hard. I was getting on with Nathaniel’s kitchen like a stove on fire . . . Except for the fact, that – um . . . it was.

Roxy always jokes that I use my smoke alarm as a timer. And, today, it proved terrifyingly true. Moments later, black smoke was billowing from the hob. The tea towel I’d left too near the flame had caught fire. As I dealt with the miniature inferno, the bacon spat fat in every direction. The fire alarm in the hall made sure everybody in a ten-mile radius would know about my gastronomic faux pas. It screeched into eardrum-grating life. The high-pitched shriek was cranium-piercingly loud and toe-curlingly constant. Turning off the gas rings, I scrambled up on to a chair to prod frantically at the alarm. When I failed to silence it, I tried to detach it from its base so I could smother it in cushions or hurl it out of the window. I tugged on the contraption with all my might . . . Which proved too much might, as I was immediately showered in ceiling plaster. It fell around me with the soft, snuffled thud of snowflakes. But that’s not all that came tumbling earthward. The hall was now intriguingly carpeted in money. Great wads of ten-, twenty-and fifty-pound notes wafted carpet-ward amidst the ceiling plaster.

I stood, shrieking smoke alarm in hand, staring in bemused shock at the impromptu windfall. When Nathaniel walked in, the moment was frozen in time: me, wearing a snorkel and goggles, covered head to toe in plaster dust, him bug-eyed with bemused disbelief.

Nathaniel took the smoke alarm from my hand and gently squeezed out the battery. The sudden silence was equally deafening. ‘You’re obviously as good at DIY as you are at culinary pursuits, Tilly. I take it that you always cook in a snorkel in preparation for the high-pressure hoses of the fire brigade?’

I’d forgotten about the goggles. Through perspex sockets I watched Nathaniel kick at the cash on the carpet. ‘What the hell’s all this?’ he asked, scooping up a bundle of money. His expression hardened, and he spoke gravely. ‘Bloody idiot!’ His voice sounded as though he’d eaten cut glass for breakfast.

‘Who?’ My own voice was now as nasal as my mother’s Aussie twang. I pushed the scuba-diving goggles up on to my crinkled forehead and spoke normally. ‘Who are you talking about?’

‘Sorry. I’m house-sitting this place for a banking mate of mine, Christopher Grayling, who went to the dark side,’ he said, brushing plaster dust off my legs. ‘In fact, he’s the one who needs goggles and snorkel, as he really has dived into the deep end.’