KATE
7 December 2018
Thirty-five
My wig slumps on the desk where I’ve tossed it. My heels scissor where I’ve kicked them. The start of December: the end of a very long week.
Outside my office, the sky explodes with colour: powder blue; burnished orange; a near-fluorescent pink. The air is crisp with the promise of frost: it will be cold, tonight, for anyone bedding down in a nest of cardboard. I think of the girl who disappeared last winter; hope, against all expectation, that she is somehow managing a better life.
A clatter of steps on the staircase: a rush for drinks before the first of the Christmas parties. Perhaps I should join my junior colleagues for it’s been a good week. Things are going well in my people-trafficking case. I’m prosecuting, of course. Sixty Afghan immigrants, aged two to sixty-eight, packed into a shipping container and smuggled into Tilbury Docks. Each of the five defendants has their own counsel and there are various claims and counter-claims that have made the process cumbersome and sometimes tedious. But it’s been refreshing to work on a case about power and exploitation that doesn’t involve sex.
We’ll have final speeches next week. I look down at my closing speech, written when I first received the trial documents; rewritten this week to include the critical points winkled out in cross-examination. I have polished it until not one word is superfluous; have rehearsed it until it is pitch perfect. I don’t need to practise it again.
Besides, it’s a Friday night. There are other things I could do. I have a ‘date’ tomorrow. The thought makes me cringe. Ali set it up: Rob Phillips, a lawyer from college, whom she met at that gaudy last year. Divorced. Two kids. My instinct was to turn it down very firmly: I want no reminders of that place and, besides, he has too much baggage. But then, we all have baggage. I’m finally trying to shed mine. Since the trial, I’ve sought help and talking has improved things: reduced the flashbacks; countered the self-loathing. It’s still not something I find easy, though, in any way.
Still, a lot has changed since the acquittal. I’ve rowed back from prosecuting sexual offences and turned to more generalised crime, though it’s serious stuff and still high-profile. There’s this trafficking case; and, coming up, the trial of a gang who stole art to order: £40 million worth of Chinese jade and porcelain filched from provincial museums. The demand for sexual offence work is still there – and the flood of historic sexual abuse grows ever wider and faster flowing, spilling from entertainment into football, now; and no doubt other sports. Occasionally, I’m tempted to venture back – particularly when I think of adult victims being ripped apart and disbelieved for a second time. But then my sense of self-preservation kicks in. I’m sure I will return but I can’t stomach the daily diet of it any longer. Not at the moment. Not for a while.
I lean back in my chair: focusing on stretching the length of me, enjoying the sensation of my nerves firing from toes to fingertips. It’s been two years since Brian handed me that billet doux of documents and reopened the wounds I’d told myself had long healed over. Over nineteen months since James Whitehouse stood up in the dock at the Old Bailey and was cleared.
Time to move on – for others have, not least Sophie who was granted a ‘quickie’ divorce in March on the grounds of his ‘unreasonable behaviour’. The news allowed the papers to rehash the case and hint at the Libertines’ antics – and yet it doesn’t seem to have done him any harm. He’s back in government: junior minister in the Department for Transport with responsibility for rail security and building development. A deeply dull if worthy post that doesn’t appear to be a reward but that will earn him some brownie points and let him hustle his way back: I bet a hundred quid he’ll be promoted in the next ministerial reshuffle. The thought leaves a bitter taste, as does a recent photograph of him with the PM, apparently sharing a private joke, for he has clearly been rehabilitated: his career resurrected and that friendship rekindled – if it was ever allowed to die down.
He has a new girlfriend, too: far younger than his ex-wife; a City lawyer in her late twenties. A photo of her at the time of the divorce showed her striding along Threadneedle Street; head down; face obscured behind a sheet of dark, ironed hair. I had expected someone less intelligent and wondered why such a bright woman would be involved with someone once accused of rape. But, of course, his charm is indelible; and he was acquitted. No smoke without fire? Not, it seems, where James Whitehouse is concerned.
My stomach grumbles and I take a sip of Diet Coke. That’s another change: I’ve stopped drinking spirits and, these days, my fridge is stocked with food. White wine plays a part, but I eat now: I’m no longer scrawny – but lean.
My life’s a little more balanced, too, and if I still seem obsessed with James Whitehouse then, believe me, I’m not. I can go days, weeks even, without thinking of him – yet the fact he was acquitted still rankles; an irritant that seems to mock me. And, despite his job apparently being low-profile, I still catch glimpses of him in the papers; am constantly reminded of him – and of my professional failure – whenever I appear at the Bailey. It’s a footnote to my teenage obsession, or perhaps a minor counterpoint: dog-whistle quiet but just within earshot. If his name’s mentioned, if there’s the slightest whiff of a connection, it’s something I can’t help but hear.
I’m thinking about all this as Brian knocks on the door. A brisk rat-a-tat-tat, distinct to him, that means business.
‘Come in.’ I smile as he enters, relieved to be distracted. ‘Have you got something juicy?’
The tops of his ears are tinged pink and he is smirking as if trying to suppress a secret. There’s no sheaf of documents; no billet doux in his hands, though; only the Chronicle, London’s daily paper.
‘What is it?’ There’s a sparkle in his eyes and I’m impatient to know the reason. He glances down, enjoying his momentary power.
‘Old Jim Stephens has been busy.’ He whistles through thinned lips.
I’d forgotten he knew the journalist: a contact from years back when Fleet Street meant Fleet Street; newspaper offices crammed into the stretch of London running down to the Royal Courts of Justice; news reporters working within spitting distance of where we are now and the other Inns of Court.
‘Quite a splash he’s got . . .’
‘Oh, give it here.’ I reach across, impatient with his teasing. He dances backwards two steps, a little jig, then relinquishes it with a grin he can only get away with because we’ve worked together for over twenty years.
‘Interesting, eh?’
I’m dimly aware of him looking at me, hoping for a reaction, but I can’t glance at him, I’m too preoccupied by the words on the page. The air seems to still: one of those pin-sharp moments – like the moment I got my Oxford letter; like that moment in the cloisters, the rasp of stone on my back, his voice in my ear.
‘PM QUIZZED OVER OXFORD DEATH’ reads the headline in bold capitals across the front of the paper above a photo of the prime minister, looking simultaneously grim-faced and shifty. ‘Thames Valley Police reopen investigation into pal’s drug death in 1993,’ the first of two bullet points adds. I read the second bullet point – and my heart begins to thud. ‘Minister James Whitehouse also to be questioned over upper-class death.’ And the blood is galloping through my head, now; a great surging whoosh as I drink in the details, key words springing from the text: death . . . drugs . . . exclusive drinking club . . . debauchery . . . the Libertines . . . and a date in early June 1993.
And it is the same date when he raped me: 5 June. This death – of the Hon. Alec Fisher – happened the same early summer’s night when he ran into me in the cloisters. I remember the Libertine outfit I’d secretly thought rather dashing: cream silk shirt with cravat, fitted waistcoat, the trousers he’d zipped himself into, hiding the evidence of what happened away. I remember the fact he seemed to have come from a party – his breath sweet with whisky and a hint of Marlboro Lights. And above all, I remember his intense nerviness. Eyes dilated not with coke but with the adrenalin that had sent him powering around the quad; and an energy, a recklessness, a compulsion for physical release that perhaps wasn’t just about wanting sex and not giving a damn how he got it – who he had to overpower to get it – but was a reaction to a sensation just as powerful. Was a response to his intense fear.
Death. Sex. Power. They were all at play that night. I make a curious sound, halfway between a gulp and a catch at the back of my throat, and pretend to turn it into a cough, hoping it escapes Brian’s attention. I swig at the Diet Coke, furiously thinking as I tip my head backwards and hide my pricking eyes.
But: ‘You all right, miss?’ My clerk crouches down by me; concerned, paternal, peering into my face; spotting, I know, the tears that turn my gaze glassy. How well does he know me? How much does he really guess? He has seen me grow from pupil to junior to QC; has watched me mature, as a barrister and woman, and has caught me crying – most recently, not that long ago: one evening when I thought everyone had left the office, just after James Whitehouse was acquitted.
‘I’m fine,’ I say briskly in a tone that is fooling no one. ‘What incredible news, as you say.’ I clear my throat. ‘He must be pretty sure of his sources.’
‘Can’t run something like this without knowing it’s true.’
‘What’s the BBC saying?’ I reach for my laptop, eager to deflect his attention; searching for the latest news; and all the time wondering if this is it: the point at which James Whitehouse’s boundless, unfathomable luck runs out.
‘Oh, they’re running the story,’ Brian says, and I’m not sure if I can deal with this: any further, terrible, daily reminders of what James and his Oxford cronies got up to – and yet, a bubble of hope floats up inside me; a delicate feeling that builds because I know, simultaneously and with a flinty certainty, that of course I can deal with it; I can cope with whatever sordid details emerge. Because Jim Stephens and his colleagues will be truffling for the truth and I am on the side of the truth, rather than merely on the side of the winners and, if some darker truth comes out; and if James Whitehouse falls from grace, at last, then somehow I will feel exonerated and, irrational though I know this is, I will no longer be to blame for what happened in any way at all.
Brian is talking as this conviction grows inside me; and the tone of his voice – soft yet gravelly with its Cockney twang – has shifted, I realise; no longer conversational or gossipy but so unexpectedly tender that I stop scrolling through the BBC News home page and listen to what he has to say.
He is watching me, closely, and it’s as if he knows exactly what I need to hear. And, though I know the law does not always punish the guilty – that a skilled barrister can win even if the evidence is stacked against her client; that advocacy is about being more persuasive than your opponent – I also know that, in the court of public opinion, things are rather different and more than one morally questionable act seems more than a coincidence; can – if uttered sufficiently often and loudly – completely ruin a man.
I think all this as Brian talks and his words encapsulate this conviction so that it is wrapped tight and presented to me as a finished package; a fact far sweeter than any billet doux.
‘Don’t you worry,’ he says, and his smile mirrors mine; the merest ghost of a smile, it is so tentative, but a smile, nonetheless. ‘He’s not going to get away with it this time.’