Tim Vicary: A Game of Proof

She winked at Savendra and left. Pleased with her smart remark, she ran down the wide eighteenth century staircase to the entrance hall, where Lucy Sampson sat amid a cluster of security guards, witnesses, and departing students. Lucy, a large, motherly solicitor in a baggy black suit, rose to her feet expectantly.

‘Any luck?’

‘No, sorry, I just set them all against me. Come on, let’s go and see Valentino.’

The two women made for the staircase to the police cells, where Gary Harker would be held until the Group 4 van took him back to Hull prison for the night. As they went through the door they left the imposing pomp of the courtroom with its ancient oak panelling, stucco pillars and exotic domed ceiling, and entered a grey, comfortless world of bare stone corridors and clanging cell doors. At the foot of the stairs they met a detective on his way out.

‘Aha, the devil’s advocate! Hello, Sarah. And Lucy Sampson, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right. My solicitor.’ Sarah smiled coolly at DI Terry Bateson, one of the few CID men she actually liked. Bateson, as usual, was managing to make his double-breasted suit hang crumpled around him like a tracksuit. Perhaps it was something to do with the tie, strung several inches below the top button; or the loose-limbed, broad-shouldered frame that supported the clothes, but every time Sarah saw the man he looked more like an athletic teenager than the senior criminal detective that he actually was. And despite her cool smile, conversations with Terry seldom failed to flutter her. He was a widower, too, which made him all the more attractive.

It was Terry who had charged Gary with rape; and as the officer investigating the murder of Maria Clayton and the attempted rape of Karen Whitaker, he suspected that Gary was guilty of these crimes too. Maria Clayton, an up-market prostitute, had been found strangled on Strensall Common a year ago. Her hands had been bound behind her with the belt of her own raincoat, and the belt looped through its buckle round her neck, so that the harder she struggled the tighter the noose became. It seemed she had been half-strangled like this and then throttled with her attacker’s hands. She had been sexually assaulted and there was a small cut in her neck. Her dog, a Yorkshire terrier, was found with its throat cut in a ditch.

Karen Whitaker, a university student, had been posing nude in the woods for her boyfriend to photograph when the couple were attacked by a hooded assailant with a knife, who snatched their camera, handcuffed the boy to the steering wheel of his car, bound Karen’s hands with tape, and was attempting to rape her when the boyfriend managed to set off the car alarm and attract some walkers, who chased the attacker away.

This attack, which happened less than three weeks after the Clayton murder, led to the Hooded Knifeman articles in the Evening Press ; and when Sharon Gilbert was raped a month after that, the pressure on the police to make an arrest was enormous. But although Gary was Terry’s prime suspect for all three attacks, the evidence he had to link him to the first two was very thin. Gary had been one of a small team of builders who had built an extension to Maria Clayton’s kitchen six months before her death, and had boasted of having sex with her once. He had also been one of a gang of builders repairing Karen Whitaker’s hall of residence, and had seen the naked pictures in her rooms. But scores of men had visited Maria Clayton’s house, and dozens of students and building workers had known about Karen Whitaker’s exhibitionist hobby. A smudged footprint from a size 9 Nike trainer had been found near the scene of both crimes, and a battered pair of size 9 Nike trainers had been found in Gary’s flat; but this, as Lucy had pointed out scornfully when the police presented it, would put about two million other men in the dock alongside Gary. Although she had been sexually assaulted, no semen or body hairs were found on Maria Clayton’s body, but Terry’s team had been triumphant when they had found a male hair stuck to the tape used to bind Karen Whitaker’s hands. But their triumph turned to ashes when DNA analysis of the hair turned out not to match Gary, effectively acquitting him of the Whitaker assault. Despite the similarities between the cases, the evidence was simply not there to prosecute Gary for anything except the rape of Sharon Gilbert.

‘I hope you haven’t been harassing my client, Terry,’ Sarah said, half seriously.

‘I never touched him, Sarah,’ Terry protested, dryly. ‘Personally, I think someone should cut off the man’s dick and float it away on a weather balloon, though I’ll deny it if you ask me in court. But tell me — how can you ladies bring yourselves to defend a bastard like that? He’s a menace to every woman in Yorkshire. You do realise that, don’t you? Next time it could be someone like you. He’s killed already, you know.’

‘If you’re still trying to link him to the Clayton murder, Terry, he’s not charged with that here today,’ Sarah said firmly. ‘As you well know.’

‘Well he damn well should be!’ Terry snapped. ‘So the jury could see the similarities. Same cut in the neck, same method of bondage …’

‘Different women, different places, Terry. And no evidence that my client was even there.’

‘A client with a record three pages long, including four assaults on women …’

‘None particularly serious …’

‘Oh, sure? Until it’s your face on the end of his fist!’ Terry stopped, aware that he was losing his temper. Again. It was happening too often these days. This was not the impression he wanted to convey, of some emotional, out-of-control bully. Not to this woman of all people. But he did care, strongly, about convicting Gary Harker. He took a deep breath and began again.

‘Look, I hear you tried to get the case thrown out this morning. How can you, as a woman, square a trick like that with the search for justice? Tell me that.’

Sarah touched his arm softly. ‘I’m not a woman, Terry, I’m a barrister. My job’s to play the game in defence of my client. The game of proof. And when I play, I play to win.’

Terry shivered. Perhaps it was her hand, the delicate fingers gently touching his arm; but it was also the cynical, lightly spoken words, the opposite of all he believed the law should be about, that frightened him. The three attacks on women had been his main investigation over the past six months, and the single positive result so far was Gary’s appearance in court today.

Now Sarah Newby, of all people, was defending him.

He scowled. ‘Well, I wish you the worst of luck. The sooner the vile pillock’s banged up for life the better. You can tell him that from me.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Sarah smiled, and took her hand from his arm. ‘I might hurt his feelings. And that would never do, would it?’

Terry Bateson watched her go. It annoyed him intensely to see Sarah defending this case. He hated defence lawyers; he regarded them as a sort of parasite growing fat on the wounds of society. They worked in the courts of law but the one thing that seemed to concern them least was justice. If they could get a man released on a technicality they would, with no concern for the hard, sometimes dangerous detective work that had led to the arrest in the first place, or for the effect on the public of a smirking villain released to rape, rob or burgle once again. How would those two women feel, he wondered, if Harker broke into their homes and did to them what he had done to Sharon Gilbert?

Serve them bloody well right. But even as he thought it the idea made him ill. Not Sarah Newby, please God not her.

He had first met her when she had prosecuted two of his cases a year ago. The case against the first man had been thin, and the defendant and his expensive London barrister had come into court laughing, convinced he would get off. Terry’s heart had sunk, certain he was about to see two months of police work trashed. His first sight of the pretty, dark-haired prosecution barrister had discouraged him further. In her late thirties, and only recently qualified, he’d heard. Nice legs, but probably no brain. But in fact it was the expensive London brief — only an ageing junior rather than a silk, for all his Savile Row suit and Jermyn street shirt — who had failed to do his homework, not Sarah. The trial had ended with the defendant sweating in the witness box, snared like a fat fly in the web of his own lies. At one point a juror had actually laughed aloud. And her performance in the next case had been even better. Terry had become a fan. And, he thought, a friend.