Felix Francis - Guilty Not Guilty

The young woman’s father had turned up at the porter’s lodge enquiring after the whereabouts of his fifteen-year-old daughter, whom he had dropped off there earlier in the evening.

In spite of the fact that she had lied to me about being another student at the college, and that she had fully consented to our sexual activity, I had been arrested for having had intercourse with a minor, with her father demanding loudly that I be sent down for a long stretch in the slammer.

I should have contested the charge in court as the law at the time actually stated that a man under the age of twenty-four who had sex with a girl over thirteen but under sixteen was not guilty of an offence if it was consensual and he had reasonable grounds to believe that she was older. But I was a frightened naive nineteen-year-old and I was badly advised to accept an official police caution because, I was told, that that would be the end of the matter and my university career would not be affected.

What I hadn’t realised at the time was that, by accepting the police caution, I was not only admitting guilt of an illegal act but also acquiring a permanent criminal record. As such, my name had been added to the then newly created sex offenders register for five years and, even though that period had long since passed, the police obviously still had a record of it.

And it didn’t look good.

I so wanted to explain the circumstances, to make the chief inspector realise that it had been a huge misunderstanding and that I wasn’t the one at fault, but I could see that what Harriet had said was right. He believed the worst of me and no amount of explanation would ever change that.

‘Still fond of young girls, are you, Mr Gordon-Russell?’

‘No comment.’

The grilling lasted another half-hour or so but, basically, the DCI asked the same few questions over and over again, and he received the same answer — ‘No comment’. Eventually, he gave up and terminated the interview.

Harriet and I went back into the legal consultation room.

‘I think that went pretty well,’ she said when the door was closed.

‘Pretty well?’ I said with incredulity. ‘I thought it was disastrous.’

‘But it showed they have nothing on you other than Joe’s tittle-tattle, innuendos and the dragging up of past events. Don’t forget, they can’t raise that previous conviction in court as evidence in this case.’

‘It wasn’t a conviction,’ I corrected. ‘It was a police caution.’

‘Okay, I agree,’ Harriet said. ‘Technically a caution is not a conviction, but you know what I mean. And they concentrated all their efforts on the child-abuse thing instead of confronting the reason for your arrest. It shows that they have nothing new to connect you with the murder of your wife. Not enough, I would have thought, to charge you, anyway.’

‘So what happens now?’ I asked.

‘We wait.’

‘For how long?’

‘Legally they can detain you for twenty-four hours, thirty-six with the agreement of a senior officer, a superintendent or above, and they’re almost certain to get that in a murder case. After that they have to apply to a court to keep you longer, up to a maximum of ninety-six hours in total, but I don’t think they have enough to convince a magistrate to extend that long. Then they have to either charge you or let you go. Of course, we’re assuming they won’t find anything incriminating on your phone or computer in the meantime.’

That was beginning to worry me more and more. One hears such dreadful stories of how hackers can remotely get into other people’s computers to do all sorts of stuff such as turn on their webcams to spy on them. God knows what Joe Bradbury might have done to mine.

‘I’ll try and find out some information from them,’ Harriet said. ‘Like if they intend to interview you again today, which I think is most unlikely as they will need time to trawl through your hard drive. I have to get back to London now but I can come back again in the morning if necessary.’

‘So what do I do?’

‘You just have to sit and wait.’

‘In a cell?’

‘I’m afraid so.’ She smiled a sort of lopsided apologetic smile. ‘I could ask them if they have anything you can read but I wouldn’t hold out much hope. They consider that sitting in a cell alone with nothing to do is part of the process of encouraging a prisoner to confess.’

‘Well, I certainly won’t be doing that,’ I said. ‘But something to read would be good.’

I was taken back to cell seven and, shortly afterwards, some reading material in the form of a thick booklet was brought in and handed to me.

They must be having a laugh.

The booklet was entitled Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984: Code of Practice for the Detention, Treatment and Questioning of Persons by Police Officers .

I lay down on the thin blue mattress and stared at the ceiling.

What was happening to my life?

I watched as the daylight coming through the small frosted window diminished to darkness. It was exactly one week ago that I had left to go to Birmingham on that fateful day, with Amelia waving to me from the garden as I’d driven away.

Just a single week. It felt more like half a lifetime.

And the time went on dragging as I lay on the bed feeling sorry for myself. Eventually, in desperation, I sat up and read through the code of conduct booklet. At least then I really did know my rights, which I’d previously signed for, one of which was that I was entitled to have access to this very document.

So they had done me no special favour in supplying it. I was not surprised.

However, another thing of interest that I discovered was that I should be offered three meals within every twenty-four hour period, two light and one main. And, if I had special dietary requirements, I was even be permitted to have food brought in by my friends or family, at my own expense, as long as it didn’t conceal drugs or weapons.

So far today, I’d had absolutely nothing to eat, not even breakfast, and I was hungry, very hungry. That was surely a special dietary requirement. Maybe I could order a super-size takeaway from the Thai Orchid restaurant in Banbury town centre — I was on particularly good terms with the head waiter and I’m sure he would deliver it as my ‘friend’.

If only I could contact him.

I pushed the cell-call button set into the wall next to the door.

I waited for five minutes but nothing happened, so I pushed the button again. This time an eye appeared at the peephole in the door and then the hatch beneath was slid open.

‘What do you want?’ said an unfriendly voice.

‘I’m hungry,’ I said. ‘I’ve had nothing to eat all day.’

Before I had the chance to say I’d like a double portion of Thai green chicken curry with sticky rice, the hatch was slammed shut again.

Damn it. Are they trying to starve me into submission too?

But I hadn’t been ignored.

After a while, the hatch reopened and a cheese sandwich in a cardboard container was held through it. I took it and the small plastic bottle of water that followed. It wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind but it would do.

‘Thanks,’ I said through the hatch just before it was slammed shut again.

It must have taken me all of two minutes to eat the sandwich, although I managed to stretch out drinking the water for just a fraction longer.

Now what?

I lay down again on the bed and once more stared at the ceiling.

At least I knew I’d done nothing wrong and was totally blameless of the crime for which I had been arrested.

I tried to work out in my mind which was worse: to have done something really bad and be facing the prospect of a long stretch in prison, or to be totally innocent but hopeful that this was only a short-term incarceration until innocence was established.