KATE
26 April 2017
Sixteen
Day three, and Olivia Lytton looks more as if she is dressed for a job interview. Gone is the Peter Pan collar; in its place a crisp white shirt and well-cut navy jacket and skirt. Her hair, which she repeatedly tucked behind her ear, yesterday, has been held back with a nest of grips. The effect is to make her look both younger and less elegant. Her cheekbones are more pronounced: she is less attractive, more severe.
She is even paler this morning. I would guess that she has barely slept and her eyes are lit by an artificial brightness powered by adrenalin and the bitter filter coffee bought from the court’s canteen. Olivia’s eyes have hardened. Ali, in a rare undiplomatic moment, once told me that no one could properly understand the pain of giving birth until they had experienced it. In the same way, Olivia could not hope to predict quite how terrifying giving evidence would be. Despite the court’s best efforts to be gentle, I know of few chief witnesses in sexual offences cases who have managed to come through this experience unscathed.
The court is nearly full now. I rearrange my side of the bench: building a fortress with bundles of documents, neatly aligned pens, a jug and glass for water; defending myself with books and files, as the jury settle themselves into their now familiar positions and a clutch of journalists – not just the jaded court reporter from the news agency, with his shiny suit and greasy tie, but the safe hands from the broadsheets and tabloids – sidle onto the press benches and fling their pads down.
Jim Stephens, from the Chronicle, is here: an old-school hack fuelled by beer and fags, his face puce beneath that raven-black hair that perhaps comes from a bottle. One of the few who remember working on Fleet Street when it was Fleet Street, it would be easy to dismiss him compared to the hungry graduate trainees working alongside him. But I read him; and I rate him.
For the third day, Sophie Whitehouse hasn’t arrived.
‘Done a runner,’ Angela Regan whispers, her mouth set in a line of condemnation. My junior, Tim Sharples, a languid fellow with a good line in black humour, catches my eye.
I look at the QC, sharply.
‘Scarpered off to her mother’s in Devon.’ Her tone is grim. This doesn’t look good for her client: this pointed, continual absence of his wife. I busy myself with searching for a document in a ring binder; double-checking out of a needless nervousness; biting back the trace of a smile that Angela, a street fighter of an opponent, must know is playing across my face.
And then there is a hush, which grows into a heavy cushion of silence: the rustles stop and all I can hear is the rhythmic ticking of the clock. We are all poised. I stand, an actor on a stage, until His Lordship indicates that we should get started. I turn to Olivia. For it is time to draw her on, now, to tell the heart of her story.
‘Can I take you back to October 13th?’ I say, my voice moderate and reasonable. ‘The date in question. I think you were due to attend the Home Affairs Select Committee, together?’
‘Yes. James was due to give evidence on the new countering extremism strategies we were about to start implementing.’
‘In everyday English, I think those are ways in which the government aims to stop potential terrorists?’
‘Yes.’ She straightens for she is on safe territory here: civil servant speak which is uncontentious. ‘Normally this would be evidence given in private to the Intelligence Select Committee but there was a slight turf war between the committee chairs.’
‘I think the meeting was first thing in the morning. So what time did you set off?’
‘Just before nine. James was jittery and said that he wanted to talk to me over a coffee.’
I push my glasses up my nose and turn to look at the jury. The officious middle-aged man, his belly straining against his ironed shirt, and a smart navy tie on today, smiles, anticipating my next question – for it is a courtly dance I am playing here and the jury is beginning to predict my every move.
‘You say: “He was jittery?” . . . Why was that?’
‘There’d been an unfavourable comment piece in The Times. It was by a journalist he knew and rated. A contemporary from Oxford; he thought he liked him. It was quite poisonous and he didn’t seem able to laugh it off, like he usually did. He kept repeating the most damaging phrases as if he couldn’t shake them from his mind.’
‘I think we have the article in question here.’ I flip to the relevant page in my file. ‘I think you’ll find it’s document three in your bundle of evidence?’ A rustle of action and a frisson of excitement among the jury at being asked to do something. Frankly I’m amazed the judge has ruled the article admissible, it’s so potentially prejudicial. But I argued it is relevant because it prompted James Whitehouse’s anger before the alleged rape and explains his state of mind.
‘Here it is!’ I hold the document in my left hand, brandishing it firmly and looking around for confirmation. ‘It’s from The Times of that morning, October 13th, and it’s written by a Mark Fitzwilliam. He’s a comment writer on that paper. It’s about the impact of the terror legislation but the part we are interested in starts at the second paragraph and, you may think, constitutes an attack on the defendant.’
I glance at Angela but she lets this go, as discussed pretrial. We are all agreed the article is pretty bloody damning. I clear my throat. ‘If I may begin:
‘ “When James Whitehouse came into government, many hoped he would be a fresh broom to sweep aside some of our more draconian anti-terror legislation. But the close personal friend of the prime minister, and long-standing member of his kitchen cabinet, has surpassed his predecessor by rampaging through our nation’s civil liberties like a member of the Libertine Club intent on trashing an Oxford restaurant: smashing its windows; defacing its walls; soiling its carpet with magnum upon magnum of wasted, emptied champagne.
‘ “As a member of the notorious dining club, James Whitehouse was famed for his breathtakingly arrogant disregard of those who owned or worked in such establishments. Why should he care about the disruption, the grievance, the headache of righting the chaos he and his friends had wreaked when a fistful of fifty-pound notes would always provide a ready solution? Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he had no insight into the effect of his behaviour on those whose livelihoods he trashed. In the same way, this Old Etonian shows a blatant disregard for the impact of the anti-terror legislation on law-abiding British Muslims that he champions, now.” ’
I pause. ‘You say he was “a bit jittery”? Is it fair to say that this article also made him angry?’
‘Your Lordship . . .’ Angela rises, for I am leading the witness.
‘I’m sorry, Your Lordship.’ I bow to the judge. ‘Let me rephrase the question. Could you describe Mr Whitehouse’s response to this article more fully?’
‘He was angry,’ Olivia confirms. She deliberates, and I catch a glimpse of the thoughtful young woman who would have been destined for a good career before it was derailed by sex. ‘Short with me, but also somehow seeking reassurance. It was as if he had forgotten the distance that he’d put between us and wanted to recapture our closeness. It was clear that this had affected him sharply. He seemed vulnerable, for once.’
‘ “It affected him sharply.” How could you tell this?’
‘His body language was stiff: ramrod straight and I had to half-run to keep up with him. Usually he brushed off any criticism but, as we marched to the committee room, he kept repeating phrases as if it had really got under his skin.’
‘If I can stop you, what time was this?’
‘At about nine-fifteen. Normally, the minister would sweep in just before the start so he didn’t have to chat to the backbenchers, unless he wanted to. And he didn’t want to that morning. When he saw the committee members huddled together outside room fifteen, the Lloyd George room, and glancing at him as he arrived, he said something like: “I can’t deal with this,” and he charged off down the corridor in the other direction.’
‘That’s towards the press gallery, to the east?’ There is a rustle of the jurors’ folders.
‘Yes, that’s right. It is.’
I direct the jurors to the relevant map: another corridor stretching away from the central staircase and leading to our crime scene, for which they also have photographs: an unprepossessing, brown-carpeted lift.
‘And what did you do, when he charged off like this?’
‘I followed him.’
‘You followed him.’ I pause, letting the fact sink in: and the implication that she was just being a good employee, attentive to her minister. ‘He said: “I can’t deal with this”; stormed off and you followed him.’ I tilt my head to one side, sympathetic: ‘Can you remember what he said?’
‘He was still muttering under his breath and then he stopped, by the door leading to the press gallery and the lift, and turned to me and said: “I’m not breathtakingly arrogant, am I? Do you think I’m arrogant?” ’
And Olivia stops abruptly for she is like a runner who has been pushing herself to exceed her personal best and finds that she has surpassed herself and is breathless; her face flushed, her energy almost spent.
‘And what did you say when he said that?’ I keep my voice matter-of-fact, and glance down at my open file, as if the answer is of no particular significance.
‘I said he could be ruthless when he needed to be. Cruel sometimes, even.’
‘And how did he respond?’
‘He didn’t like it. “Cruel?” he said – and then: “I’m sorry.” ’
‘And what did you say to that?’ I ask, for we can all imagine how she felt: the jilted lover who finally receives the long-awaited apology.
‘I said . . .’ and her voice dips but the court is quiet: we are all straining to capture her every word and they are words that could damn her.
‘I said that, sometimes, arrogance could be devastatingly attractive.’
On we march through the evidence that could be construed as damaging. He flings open the door from the committee room corridor to the press gallery; stops outside the lift; presses the button and she enters first.
‘And what happened next?’
‘We kissed. Well . . . we sort of collided.’
‘You sort of collided?’
‘I suppose we both moved together at the same time.’
‘You moved together at the same time. There was a strong attraction there, then, although he had “finished with” you, that was the term I think you used, just over a week earlier?’
‘We had been involved for five months . . . We had been lovers,’ and here she looks at me, a little defiant, and I wonder what she thinks of me: if she imagines me as a woman who has never known an irresistible sexual attraction; that melding of mouths and limbs, the jigsawing of bodies that shrinks one’s world to just the two of you – and in those most intimate moments, makes the rest of the world disappear?
I smile, waiting for her to continue. For this is what the jury needs to hear to understand: how she got herself into this situation in the first place. They need to sense her emotional confusion: to appreciate that, despite feeling humiliated and bruised by his treatment, she could not fail to respond when the man she loved so passionately moved towards her for a kiss.
‘You don’t just switch off your feelings for someone when they finish with you. Not after that short a time. Not if you’d wanted it to continue,’ she says. ‘Or at least I don’t. I still found him very attractive. I still loved him.’
‘Can you describe the kiss?’ I need to push her on this.
She looks blank.
‘Was it a chaste peck on the lips?’
‘No.’ She looks at me, perturbed.
I smile. ‘Well, is there a word you might use to describe it?’
She looks embarrassed. ‘I suppose you would call it French kissing.’
‘French kissing?’
‘You know. Passionate kissing, with tongues.’
‘So you kissed, with tongues – and can you remember what happened then?’
‘His hands were all over me. Touching my breasts and my bottom . . .’ She falters.
‘And then?’ I probe gently.
‘Then he . . . he . . . He wrenched at the top buttons of my shirt to get into my bra . . . to my breasts.’
I pause, letting the room take in her humiliation; the casual violence of the moment. Perhaps I seem cold, pushing her to relive it all, and yet I am not: I can imagine all too clearly and I want the jury to imagine what she felt then and what she is feeling now.
‘Can we take this in stages? He was touching your breasts and bottom and wrenched your shirt to get into your bra. Did he get into it?’
‘Yes.’ She is close to tears. ‘He grabbed one of my breasts – my left breast. Pulled it out of my bra and began to kiss and bite it . . .’ She nods and swallows. ‘He kissed it quite savagely.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean that he gave me a love bite – but quite a harsh one.’
‘I think you received a bruise as a result, just above your left nipple?’
She nods, close to weeping.
‘In fact, we have a photograph which you took on your iPhone later that week. It’s photograph A in your bundles,’ I tell the jury, and I hold an A4-sized photo up for them to see. It shows a fat greengage of a bruise, two centimetres by three; a yellowy-brown by this stage, less angry than the reddish-black it must have been in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
‘If you look closely on the left of the bruise,’ I tell the jury, my tone ever-so-matter-of-fact, ‘you can see a slight indentation. The defence’s case is that this is a usual discoloration on a bruise but the Crown submits . . .’ and here I pause and shake my head ever so slightly. ‘The Crown submits that they are caused by teeth.’
I wait for the inevitable gasp. The jurors don’t disappoint. Several glance at the dock and Essex Boy eyeballs James Whitehouse clearly: chocolate eyes not moving from his face.
‘And where were you when this happened?’ I go on, for I must continue before Olivia loses momentum.
‘In the lift. It’s a tiny wooden lift: it says it can hold six people but it can’t possibly. I had my back to the wall and he was in front of me, so I was pushed . . . well, trapped against it. I couldn’t move past.’
‘You couldn’t move – but you must have done something?’
‘I think I yelped in shock and tried to push him. I said something like: “That hurt me.” And then: “No. Not here.” ’
‘You said: “No. Not here.” And why was that?’
‘A kiss in a lift was one thing – something I found exciting – but this was different. Too full-on. Too aggressive. He might have meant the bite to be passionate but it shocked me. It was painful: not something he’d ever done before. And it wasn’t appropriate. He had yanked my breasts out and bitten me but we were meant to be preparing for a select committee. The lift runs from the press gallery to New Palace Yard, where the ministers’ cars wait. It’s a short cut to the committee room corridor. Anyone could have called the lift at any moment and found us there.’
‘So would it be fair to say that you were scared of being discovered?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that you were preoccupied with being late for the meeting?’
‘Yes. But it was more than that. I hadn’t known him to be as forceful as this and he seemed not to be listening: a little like he was a man possessed.’
‘Like a man possessed.’ I pause as the reporters keep their heads down – their headlines and their opening paragraph written for them now – and as the judge takes a note, his black Parker scrolling. The pen stops and so I can begin again.
‘So, in this state, what did he do when you said: “Not here,” and tried to push him away?’
‘He ignored me and grabbed my thighs and my bottom.’
She stops and I tilt my head to one side, a picture of sympathy for the evidence is going to get even grubbier now, the detail more embarrassing and explicit, and yet we need to hear it. The jury senses it, too. Some of them are leaning forward. All of us are rapt; knowing that the kernel of this case – the evidence that my learned friend will dispute and seek to undermine in cross-examination – will be found, bound hard and tight in her next words.
‘And what happened then?’
‘He tugged at my skirt so that it rode over my bottom and up round my waist. Then he thrust his hand between my legs.’
‘If I can ask you to be a bit more specific. You say he thrust his hand between your legs?’
‘On my vagina.’
I wait three beats. ‘He thrust his hand on your vagina.’ My voice softens, quietens, becomes as gentle as cashmere as I wait for the impact of her words to resound around the court.
‘And what happened then?’ I say it so quietly.
‘He pulled at my tights and knickers and . . . yanked them down. I remember hearing the tights laddering and the elastic on my knickers ripping.’
‘If I may stop you there, we have a photograph of the knickers as evidence. If you look at photograph B in your bundle,’ I tell the jury, ‘you can see the ripped elastic.’
A flurry of turned pages and a photograph of a wisp of black lacy nylon: the sort of knickers a lover might wear. The waistband at the top is frayed: the seam pulled loose at the top of the pants as if they have been wrenched in a hurry. It’s not incontrovertible evidence – and the defence will argue they were already ripped – but I feel a rush of sympathy for Olivia who will never have envisaged that her underwear would be pored over like this or make it into print. She is flushing now, crimson blooming on her cheeks, and I push on, for the evidence will only get harder; her experience worse.
‘So, he yanks down your tights and knickers . . . and what happened then?’
‘Then he put his fingers, two of his fingers, his middle and his index, I think, inside me.’
‘And what happened then?’
She looks outraged that I am so relentless. ‘I struggled and tried to push him off, again, to tell him to get off me. But my back was to the lift wall, his weight was pushing against me, and he just wasn’t listening to me.’
‘So he had two of his fingers inside you.’ I pause and speak only to her for a moment, deepening my voice, indicating that I know that the next part will be difficult. ‘And what happened next?’
‘I realised his flies were undone and his boxers were pulled down and I saw his . . . well, I saw his penis poking out.’
‘Was it flaccid or erect at this point?’
Her look is one of intense shame that she has to point this out. I tilt my head and remain impassive. Her voice dips. ‘Erect,’ she manages to say.
And still I push on. ‘And what happened then?’
‘He sort of lifted me up, against the wall, and he shoved it inside me,’ she says, and her voice cracks with pain and perhaps relief that she has got the worst over. ‘He just shoved it inside me even though I had said I didn’t want it.’
‘You said that again, here?’
‘I said something like: “Not here. Someone might see us,” ’
‘Just to be clear: you indicated that you didn’t want this. You said: “Not here.” ’
‘Yes.’ She is emphatic.
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said . . .’ and her voice breaks now and she can barely get the words out, they are so painful. ‘He said . . . He whispered . . .’ Still a pause – and then out the sentence floods and her voice rings clear though I anticipated a whisper. ‘He said: “Don’t be such a prick-tease . . .” ’
The words whip around the court: the c and t, two hard consonants that smash into the silence.
‘And then?’
‘He just kept going.’
‘He whispered: “Don’t be such a prick-tease,” and he just kept going,’ I repeat, more in sorrow than in anger and I pause, letting the jury take in her unrestrained sobs that now fill the windowless courtroom – soaring up to the ceiling and bouncing off those oak benches with their fir-green leather seats.
The judge looks down while he waits for her to compose herself. The jurors put their pens down and lean back. One of the older women – sensible short grey hair; a wide, open face – looks close to tears; while the youngest – a slight, dark-haired woman who I imagine is a student, watches, her face shrouded in the most exquisite pity. They wait, and they tell her with their silence, that they have plenty of time.
Olivia is not in a position to answer calmly just yet; but it doesn’t matter. Those tears – and our understanding silence – will prove more eloquent than anything she has to say.
Judge Luckhurst looks at me and Angela from over the top of his spectacles as her sobs become louder and more ugly: a throaty cascade that shows little immediate sign of abating, although she wipes ferociously at her eyes.
‘Perhaps this might be a good time to adjourn?’ he suggests, his voice gentle. ‘If I could see you back here in twenty minutes: at eleven o’clock?’ He is gracious to the jury.
His clerk, Nikita, stands as he does. ‘Silence. Be upstanding in court.’
I am trembling when I reach the Bar Mess to grab a few moments in which to compose myself. Olivia did well. I could not have hoped that she would have done better although I can predict the points that Angela will push at, in her cross-examination. The bruise: a sign of passion not violence? The prick-tease jibe: is she sure she remembered correctly? That it wasn’t just a ‘tease’ – something that might be whispered lovingly. Those words: ‘Not here. Someone might see us.’ Not – as I had hoped she would elaborate, though it was not there in her initial evidence – a more emphatic, unequivocal ‘No.’
The CPS solicitor, Jenny Green, appeared pleased outside court, and I think Olivia will have played well to His Lordship – although the decision, of course, is not his. I should feel buoyed with relief but the adrenalin is rushing from me, and I feel, momentarily, drained. The inevitable anticlimax, perhaps, after a good performance; but there is also something else beyond this and the low-lying anger that helps power me through such evidence: a residual sadness that hijacks me like a stubborn bully I cannot shift.
I slump in my chair and take a swig from a bottle of water: tepid, now, and tasting of nothing. My cuticles, I notice, are ragged: I need to put myself physically back together; I cannot let myself slip. Just one minute of introspection and then I must refocus. I close my eyes, wallowing in the dizzying blackness, shutting out the sound of my fellow barristers bustling in; and try to draw on my inner strength – that shard of steel that my ex-husband, Alistair, once insisted I had instead of a heart. How little he really knew me; how little anyone knows me, except, perhaps, Ali. I see Olivia in that lift; and shove aside the memory of someone else.
‘Looking thoughtful, Kate?’ Angela – her grey eyes sharp in her doughy face – is brisk as she sweeps aside a paper cup half-filled with cold coffee and slams down her slab of papers. The room is filled with the bustle of counsel scouring laptops, analysing court papers, or reliving the horror of representing certain defendants. ‘By this point he’d drunk fourteen pints of lager and a bottle of vodka.’ ‘But he’s impotent – so that’s his defence.’
I am aware that Angela’s eyes are still on my face. Her presence – her papers; her laptop; her capacious bag plonked right opposite me – feels oppressive.
‘Always thinking, Angela,’ I retort, for my learned friend is ruthless in court and I can’t betray any weakness. I push away from the table, to escape the fetid smell of the room – canteen food congealing on a plate; the windows need opening – and prepare for the next part of the case.
Sometimes, I think as I shuffle my papers together, ensuring that the documents are just so, the jurors must question how I can pry like this. How can I probe into the most distressing moments of a woman’s life and appear so very detached? How can I niggle away at the details: where exactly did he place his fingers? How many? For how long? Where was his penis? Was it erect or flaccid at this point? A pause, just to exploit her anguish. And what did he do then?
Where is your milk of human kindness? That’s something Alistair also hurled at me as our eighteen-month-long marriage imploded: a casualty not just of my inability to open up to him, and of too many late nights working; but an obsession, in arguments, with being utterly ruthless in winning each point.
I know that, in the early days, I thought I had to just keep the questions coming until I ground the witness down and unearthed the salient fact. That’s fine if it’s the defendant in the box; but how can I do this to another woman? Reduce her to a humiliated heap of messy tears?
I do it because I want to get at the truth, and by getting at the truth I can do my best to ensure each rapist, or murderer, or abuser is convicted. I can’t guarantee it. That decision lies with the jurors; but I do everything I can to ensure that’s the case.
And how do I deal with knowing, and repeating, and rehearsing such graphic details? From mouths and tongues that probe, unwanted, to a penis rammed into each and every orifice – for hands on breasts or even vaginas are at the milder end of the continuum of what I hear. I deal with it just as a detective or a forensic pathologist or a social worker does, or should. I practise detachment, developing a neutral façade that is as much of a disguise as any gown or wig.
Of course it doesn’t mean that I don’t feel. I just choose to contain that emotion, or rather to channel it into righteous anger – cold, forensic, focused rather than the white-hot rage that would boil over if I gave it half a chance.
‘His hand was on your vagina?’ I repeat, keeping my voice disinterested and low. A pause and she confirms it. I wait three beats. ‘And what happened then?’
To be fair, I sometimes wonder why so many of us women allow ourselves to wander so directly into the path of danger. Why return to a man who has made an unwanted advance or send a text with a kiss or a smiley face emoji; why engage when it’s the last thing you feel?
But the truth is, women are often scared of antagonising their assailants or they may feel conflicted: not so very long ago they may have been charmed by them. And we women aim to please. It is hardwired into us that we should placate and mollify: bend our will to that of men. Oh, some of us have fought against that – and we’re seen as hard-nosed, difficult, assertive, shrewish. We pay the penalty. Why don’t I have a proper, live-in partner? It’s not just because I’m unsure if I can trust anyone sufficiently. It’s because I refuse to compromise. I refuse to woman up, you might say.
And so, yes, a young woman whose boss has touched her up or whose supposed friend has kissed her might well seek to minimise what has happened. To think the best: that it was an out-of-character mistake, best forgotten or brushed over, whatever the pounding of her heart – and the shot of fear coursing through her – might betray.
But she is a fool – and it is no wonder.
Men can make fools of us all.