Tim Vicary - A Game of Proof

But now she was on the other side, defending Gary Harker of all people. Her cynical words echoed in his mind. ‘My job’s to play the game in defence of my client. The game of proof. And when I play, I play to win .’

He respected her too well to think it was bluff — she really thought she could get the bastard off. All those virtues which had so admired in her as a prosecutor were to be deployed in defence of a violent rapist. She didn’t care that Gary was probably the biggest danger to local women for many years. It was her own performance she was interested in. She was just like all the other lawyers after all; a hired advocate, a hooker who would prostitute the truth for a fee slipped into the pocket in the back of her gown.

Let her cope with Gary Harker then. She chose him.

Gary was sitting on the blue plastic mattress in his cell. It was the same colour as the graffiti-scarred walls, and matched the tattoos of the grim reaper on his right bicep and the snake that writhed around his solid neck and appeared about to savage his left ear. He scowled at his lawyers morosely as they came in.

‘Well, what did I tell you? Lying bitch, ain’t she?’

Sarah folded her arms in her gown and leaned against the door. Lucy stood by her side. The only other choice was to sit on the bed beside Gary, and neither woman fancied that.

‘I tried to persuade the judge to dismiss the jury because she referred to your record, but I’m afraid he didn’t agree.’

‘No, well, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Gary looked unsurprised by the news. ‘What did you think of Sharon?’

Sarah shrugged. ‘She made a good impression. Any woman would, with a story like that.’

‘Aye. Well, she’s a lying bitch who made the whole fucking thing up!’

Silence. Neither woman could think of any response. At last, in a tone of weary disgust, Lucy said: ‘It’s no part of our case to say she wasn’t raped, Gary. It’s a fact that she was.’

‘Yeah, well, maybe. But it weren’t me. If she’s telling the truth then there’s some shite out there who needs his throat ripped out! And I’ll do just that if I ever find him, the little pisshead!’

‘Yes.’ Sarah contemplated her client with distaste, considering what would happen if she put him on the stand. What would impress the jury most — the sincerity of feeling with which he denied the charge, or the foul language he would use to do it? She imagined Julian Lloyd-Davies needling him with his deliberately languid, pointed questions. The man might run amok, bursting out of the witness box like a tethered bear snapping its chain, and try to kill them all.

He could, too, with those muscles. That would liven the court up.

She wasn’t obliged, of course, to put him on the stand at all. She could simply tell the court that he denied the charges and rely on her ability to cast doubt on the prosecution case. But she was unlikely to win like that, since the law now specifically allowed the judge to comment adversely to the jury about a witness’s refusal to give evidence on his own behalf.

But if he did give evidence, Lloyd-Davies would shred him into small slices, like salami.

‘Look, Gary,’ she began. ‘I need to know I’ve got everything right. Tell me again exactly what happened at the hotel, first of all.’

For a while she checked details. She doubted Gary’s innocence, but it was possible, after all. He certainly denied all guilt. It was the jury’s job to decide whether they believed him or not.

Anyway, tomorrow she had Sharon to deal with.

On the way out of the court Sarah nodded at a couple of the barristers from Court Two. They would know she was defending a difficult rape case on her own, which was a step up. If she did well, her status would rise. And she didn’t intend to lose; not without a fight, anyway. From her point of view, the prejudice and weight of evidence against Gary were a bonus. If she lost, few people would blame her, but if she won, more serious cases would follow.

She walked out into the afternoon sunshine. The eighteenth century architect had not designed the elegant court building so that people could look out of it, so it was easy to forget, in the windowless dome of the courtroom and the claustrophobic cells beneath, that there was a quite different world immediately outside. In front of Sarah tourists queued up to visit the Castle Museum and the Norman castle, Clifford’s Tower. Tourists and children carrying balloons and ice cream glanced up idly at the statue of Justice above the court. For a moment Sarah stood on the court steps, breathing in the soft breeze and luxuriating in the warmth like a cat.

But the machinery of justice ignored the weather. Below Sarah the prison van waited, its tiny cells with square blackened windows designed to ensure that neither Gary nor any of the other prisoners had even the smallest sensation of freedom between York and their remand cells in Hull.

Sarah watched it go. Then she and Lucy walked briskly down the steps and turned left to Tower Street, their offices, and work.

While Sarah went back to her office, Terry Bateson collected his colleague, DC Harry Easby, and drove south of York to investigate an incident that had been reported the day before. Easby stopped the car on a bridge over the A64, and the two policemen gazed at the muddy desolation of a building site half a mile ahead. Grimy yellow JCBs toiled like great insects in the mud, while a crane with a wrecking ball casually demolished an abandoned hospital.

‘Looks like progress, sir,’ Harry offered, breaking the oppressive silence between them.

‘Progress?’ Terry grimaced. ‘More like the battle of the Somme, you mean.’

‘That’s how uniform see it,’ Easby nodded. ‘But they pushed the buggers out of their trenches last week, any road. Just look at the hairy sods.’

He nodded towards a wood behind the JCBs. The building site was protected from the wood by an elaborate boundary of eight foot high wire fences, security men and dogs. The fence was festooned with flowers and scraps of paper, and a long whitish banner floated between two tall trees. SAVE OUR TREES, SHOP IN TOWN, it read. The leafy treetops also supported a network of aerial walkways and tree houses, where the eco-warriors lived.

The park-like woodlands that had surrounded the old maternity hospital were being redeveloped for an out-of-town designer shopping centre. Trees planted by Victorians had reached their full, beautiful maturity just in time to become a hindrance to a late twentieth century plan for floodlights, car parks and up-market designer units. The shops would market a style of beauty which would be packaged, bought, worn and replaced every year with something newer, fresher, and more up-to-date. Against this the useless, magnificent trees stood no chance. After all, they made no money and offered nothing but the same, endless, wearisome repetition of natural style — every autumn, every spring the same.

News of the project, however, had spread to the hairy unwashed army of eco-warriors, who had a profound and perverse lack of interest in style, markets and fashion. They came from every hedge, cave, bender and battered caravan in the country. They moved swiftly, with energy, secrecy and determination. The developers’ chain saws were confronted by an army of bloody-minded economic rejects whose main aim, it seemed, was to be seriously injured by the lackeys of global capitalism, and thus become martyrs to the movement. And so the police had become involved, in order to remove the protesters peacefully before one had his arm trimmed off accidentally on purpose. Terry did not envy the Chief Constable his responsibility.

‘Daft buggers!’ said Easby contemptuously. ‘Thousands of jobs, this place’ll bring.’ He drove on, past the village of portacabins where the contractor’s workmen and security guards lived, fenced in with their guard dogs. Terry observed it with distaste.