Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby) (16 page)

‘Well, the thing is, Simon, we got talking, and ... well, he’s asked me out for a meal.’

‘A date, you mean?’

‘Yes. I suppose you could call it that, Simon. I’ve been asked out on a date.’

19. Peter Barton

W
HEN JANE Carter had been posted to York she had hoped, perhaps naively, that her reputation would have gone before her. She was a serious, dedicated policewoman, and her arrest score in Beverley had been second to none. But here, she found herself in the position of the unknown new girl. The team she was posted to did not seem particularly happy - there was friction between the boss, DCI Will Churchill, and his number two, DI Terry Bateson. Churchill seemed glad to be rid of her, and Terry Bateson was little better. He’d driven her to Bishopthorpe on Monday morning, but on the way he’d stopped off at a chemist and then spent fifteen minutes at his own home, leaving her to twiddle her thumbs in the car outside.

The man seemed obsessed with his family, which Jane found hard to relate to. Unmarried as she was, she’d always thought that a career officer - particularly in the CID - had to make a choice. The irregular, unsocial hours worked by criminals demanded a similar commitment by their pursuers, a lifestyle hard to match with a young family. If I ever have children, Jane thought, my husband will have to care for the kids. But she’d never met a man like that. And anyway, Jane asked herself gloomily on the occasional lonely evenings when she thought about it, what sort of man would that be? Hardly the sort to set her blood racing.

But here was Terry Bateson, a detective inspector, no less - and a single parent as well! To Jane it seemed an impossible combination. Her first week in York only confirmed that judgement. The man seemed obsessed with his daughter’s asthma attack, only half focussed on the work at hand. And now he’d given her this issue of the flasher on the Bishopthorpe cycletrack.

She had a suspicion that Terry Bateson, being a man, didn’t regard this case as very serious, but Jane certainly did. The man had already progressed from stealing knickers from a washing line to stealing them from a bedroom, and from exposing himself in a garden to accosting a jogger on the cycletrack. It looked to her like the early stages of the classic progression of a sex offender, beginning with small offences and then daring himself to try bigger ones. If he wasn’t stopped soon, it could become very serious indeed.

The three women who had seen the man came in to make photofits. The results were reasonably similar. All the images of their persecutor had dark, shoulder length hair, thick eyebrows, and - not surprisingly, perhaps, given the women’s anxiety - a menacing frown. The image made by the jogger - Melanie Thorpe - looked slightly younger than the other two, but the eyes, mouth and nose were close enough. It increased Jane’s belief that she was after a single offender.

Over the next few days she visited shops, pubs and farms, the sewage works and marina at Naburn, and even the imposing riverside palace of the Archbishop of York in Bishopthorpe. She distributed the photofits and asked about any suspicious behaviour towards women. One evening, she even jogged along the cycletrack herself. She wore tightfitting lycra shorts, as Melanie Thorp had done. But no strange men accosted her. She hadn’t expected it, really. She had few illusions about her attractions - or, sadly, lack of them - as far as the male sex were concerned. The only way her face would launch a thousand ships, her younger brother had once cruelly told her, would be if they were full of men fleeing for their lives. So if the pervert was there, he was only one of many whose eyes scanned her briefly, then looked hurriedly away.

The breakthrough came on a Thursday afternoon. A 999 call came in from Bishopthorpe - a girl had been assaulted on the cyclepath. An area car was despatched but within minutes Jane was on her way. She arrived at an address on the south-eastern side of the village, where the cyclepath passed through an estate of small detached houses not far from that of Sally McFee, the woman who had lost knickers and a necklace from her bedroom. A uniformed constable was dealing with an altercation between two men. One, a burly, bald-headed man in his mid thirties, had an armlock on a younger man, who the constable was trying to persuade him to release. A teenage girl was watching, her arms folded, her hair hanging forward over her face.

‘You cuff him,’ the older man insisted. ‘Then I’ll let him go.’

‘If you don’t let him go I’ll charge you with assault,’ the constable insisted, somewhat feebly, Jane thought.

‘Bollocks to that. This is a citizen’s arrest. I called you, didn’t I? Do you want him to rape more teenage girls? Nasty little pervert, he needs gelding!’ He twisted the younger man’s arm behind his back, so that he cried out in pain.

‘Everyone has rights, sir. Why don’t you just release this man, then we can all calm down and I can take a statement.’

Jane strode forward, flashing her warrant card. ‘All right, constable, I’ll take charge of this. I’m a detective sergeant, sir. Is this your house?’ The man nodded. ‘Then I suggest you release this man and go inside. The constable will take charge of the man you’ve arrested and sit with him in his car. That way everyone will be secure and we can take statements from all of you.’ She turned to the girl leaning against the wall. ‘Are you involved in this, love?’

‘Yeah.’ The girl looked up. Her face was sullen, defiant, and streaked with tears. ‘It’s not his fault, though. He’s just stupid. And this other one’s a brute.’

‘Did someone attack you?’

She nodded. ‘Yeah, he did. The young one.’

‘All right, love, come with me.’ As she took the girl’s arm a second car arrived with two young constables. She sent them inside to interview the older man, then sat in her car with the girl.

Her story was simple and, from Jane’s point of view, quite damning. She had already noticed how similar the young man looked to the photofits. Now this girl, Julie Willis, told a story entirely consistent with the women who’d made them. She was seventeen, she said, a student at the sixth form college. She lived in Bishopthorpe and had been walking home as she did most days. When she was halfway home a cyclist had come up behind her. She had seen the young man on the bike before; he was a kitchen porter in her college, and sometimes wheeled away the trolleys with the dirty plates on them. She’d never spoken to him though, so she was surprised when he got off his bike to walk beside her. But they were only a couple of hundred yards from the village and she wasn’t alarmed at first.

‘He was trying to chat you up, was he, love?’

‘I suppose that was what it was, yeah. He wasn’t very good at it, though.’ Julie rolled her eyes and grinned, then dabbed at her tears with a tissue.

‘What sort of things did he talk about?’

‘Just boring crap. The weather, I think, and his bike. It had a lot of gears or something - as if I care! He’s proud of it, I suppose - he needs something to be proud of, with a job like that. But then, well, then he changed ...’

‘Changed how?’

‘Well, he went all weird, you know, talking about things ... you know ...’

‘What things, Julie?’

‘Well, he asked if I was wearing a thong, for a start, and what colour it was. I mean
hello
? I’ve just met this guy! And then he says he’s worn a thong himself once and it felt great. So I’m like, no way, I’m out of here. Only then ...’

‘Yes, what happened then?’

‘Well, we’ve almost reached the houses, in that narrow bit back there. So I’m like, stay cool, Jule, keep walking, just a few more yards and you’re safe. Then it happened, just like that. I mean, he drops his bike and grabs me. I tried to get away but he shoves me up against the wall by the shoulders, so I couldn’t. And he’s saying he loves me and he’s loved me for ages and trying to kiss me, you know, it was horrible.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Told him to piss off and let me go, what do you think? But he wouldn’t. He’s got his hands down my bra, so I scream, and that’s when this other brute turns up.’

‘The older man, you mean, with the bald head? The one in the house?’

‘Yeah, him. He must have heard me, I suppose. I mean I know he saved me and that but he’s a pig too, isn’t he? He was really rough the way he grabbed him - knocked me over too. But I should be grateful, I guess.’

‘Do you know the name of this young man?’

‘No. I told you, I’ve never spoken to him before.’

‘All right. Wait here a minute, will you, love?’ Jane got out and went to the police car, where the uniformed constable was talking to the young man.

‘Have you arrested him yet?’ she asked.

‘Not yet, sarge. I was just taking a state ...’

‘All right. What’s your name, son?’ She turned abruptly to the young man.

‘Who, me? Peter,’ he said, surprised by the interruption. ‘Peter Barton.’

‘Right, Peter Barton, I’m arresting you on suspicion of indecent assault. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you fail to say anything that you later rely on in court. Put the cuffs on him, constable. It seems the man in the house was quite right. I’ll fetch one of the others to help you take him in.’

An hour later, she sat opposite Peter Barton and the duty solicitor in an interview room. To her annoyance, the Detective Inspector, Terry Bateson, sat with her. She’d made the mistake of boasting to him about her arrest and he’d insisted on taking part in the interview. ‘Give me an idea of how you handle things in Beverley,’ he’d said, smiling pleasantly enough. But it felt like another put down all the same. A trivial matter like this, she could handle it perfectly well on her own. But there was no point in making a protest. She was the new girl and he was her senior officer. She repeated the caution and set the tape rolling.

‘Right, Peter, you know why you’re here, don’t you?’

‘No. I didn’t do owt. That feller grabbed me, twisted me arm. It’s him you should arrest, not me!’

Jane studied him. His face was quite red, indignant. Dark shoulder length hair, quite greasy, looked as if it needed a wash, several acne spots on his cheek and chin, dark eyebrows which almost met together as he frowned. He was a big lad, six feet tall, with a powerful physique, but puppyish in the way he moved, as though he had not quite grown into his strength. His first response did not suggest a high powered computer humming behind the dark, sunken eyes. If he really believed he was the victim in this incident, he had a lot to learn.

‘You’ve been arrested on a serious charge of indecent assault. Do you understand what that means, Peter?’

‘I never touched her! She was asking for it!’

Jane sighed. The blatant contradiction between the two phrases lay at the root of most male problems, she thought. Denial and projection, the textbooks called it.

‘You’re talking about Julie Willis, are you? The girl you met on her way home?’

Peter nodded defensively. ‘Julie, yeah.’ He said the name slowly, almost tasting it, as though it were new to him.

‘Know her well, do you?’

‘I’ve seen her about.’

‘Where would that be, Peter?’

‘At the college, where I work.’ The next few questions confirmed that Peter was a kitchen porter at the sixth form college. He’d seen Julie there, while he was clearing away dishes.

‘Have you talked to her - before today?’

‘Not talked. She smiled at me though. I knew she were watching.’

‘She smiled, so you thought she liked you?’

‘Yeah, I knew it. You can tell.’ A foolish grin lit up his face, like a flash of sunlight through clouds. Jane almost felt sorry for him.

‘And so today you decided to talk to her. Tell me about that, Peter, will you? In your own words, from the beginning.’

‘Well, I knew she fancied me, like, and so I’d been waiting, you know, for the right time. So then, I was on me way home, and I saw her in front of me, like. So I thought, this is it, go for it now. I rode up to her, got off me bike, and we were chatting like - it were going right well. She were up for it, I could see she were. Only then he came, that bald bugger, and stuck his nose in. You should arrest him, the shite - he hurt me arm!’

‘Why do you think he attacked you, Peter?’ To Jane’s annoyance, Terry Bateson intervened.

‘How should I know? Ask him. He were jealous, like as not!’

‘What were you doing exactly, when he attacked you?’

Peter flushed. ‘We were, you know - snogging, like.’

‘You and Julie were kissing, is that what you mean?’

‘Like that, yeah. What’s it to do with you, any road?’

‘Nothing, if Julie was happy about it,’ said Jane, resuming the questioning. ‘But she says she wasn’t, you see.’

‘Well, she’s lying, in’t she? She were up for it, she were!’

‘That’s not what she says, Peter. She says you grabbed her, and put your hands inside her bra. Did you do that?’

Peter Barton stared down, his face flushed. His big fleshy hands gripped the sides of the table, his knuckles white, as if he would like to rip it from the bolts holding it to the floor.

‘She was afraid, Peter. She screamed for help.’

‘They all do at first. It means nowt, though.’ He lifted his head to stare straight at Jane, the small dark eyes hot with accusation. ‘
You
know that well enough, don’t you?’

As if,
Jane thought. Thank God. ‘So there’ve been others, Peter, have there?’

‘What?’

‘There’ve been other women apart from Julie. Other girls who’ve fancied you?’

‘May have been. What’s it to you?’

‘Peter Barton, I have to tell you we’ve been investigating a series of nuisance incidents reported by women in the Bishopthorpe area over the past few weeks. A woman in Naburn, for example, reported a man stealing underwear from her washing line. Could that be you, perhaps?’

‘Me? No.’

‘Really? I wonder, Peter. You see, when you were booked in, the custody sergeant went through the pockets of your clothes and wrote down what he found. Do you remember that?’

Silence. Peter looked around the room, as if seeking a way out. Slowly, Jane lifted an evidence bag and put it on the table. ‘For the benefit of the tape, I’m showing the witness a pair of female underpants, found in the pocket of his jacket when he was arrested. Do you recognise these, Peter?’