Courting Trouble (26 page)

‘You’ve heard from Mr Cassidy, and he’s told you that you have to be the guardians of the system: that you can’t take the law into your own hands. But ask yourself’ – I was careful to make eye contact with each and every one of the jurors as I spoke – ‘who
are
the people taking the law into their own hands? Phyllis has never broken the law. But these men?’ Phyllis’s minor shoplifting charge was so long ago it had been erased by the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. But I spared no grizzly detail of the witnesses’ past crimes. The vivid pictures I painted were so vile that the jurors were clearly wondering how these men could hide their cloven hooves in their shoes.

A barrister’s most effective ploy in emotive cases like this one is to pluck at the heartstrings of the jury. I strummed each juror individually as though they were the most precious lyres and lutes, harping on the grandma’s horror and subsequent rage, making them all feel that it was their own child who had been violated that day. I noted the body language of each juror and particularly eyeballed the more dubious ones. ‘If your child was raped, beaten and grossly abused, would you sit on your hands?’ I reminded them that the dear old gran had only wanted to tackle the men verbally. She went armed simply for self-protection. ‘But on confronting the men she was so distressed that she had no control over her aged arthritic fingers. Presented with these wicked, gloating men, she feared even for her own safety – she was so fearful that, driven mad with terror and grief, she pulled the trigger on a reflex.’

My next tactic was to flatter their intelligence. ‘As you know, for a crime to be committed, in law, there has to be
mens rea
– an intention to kill or cause serious harm. This poor, gentle gran had no such intention. You may think the Fates took a hand in putting her finger on the trigger, but that was never her conscious intention.’

I then addressed the three male jurors directly, intent on ego massage and mild manipulation.

‘Of course, most of the men in this world are decent. It’s so hard for kind, law-abiding, gentle men like you to understand how other males could behave in this violent, malicious way. But they do. And Phyllis believed that these two men had.’

As men, in general, prefer facts, I then resorted to lists and statistics.

‘I want you to imagine also what life is like for women on Britain’s council estates. Two women die a week in Britain at the hands of their partners. Violence is a bigger threat to the health of European women than cancer.’

I could have gone on for hours, listing man’s inhumanity to woman, but I didn’t want to overwhelm them. There’s nothing worse than a lawyer who talks for so long that the usher’s snores wake up the jurors. But I managed to weave in some stats without inducing collective narcolepsy. I let them know that in the last year, in England and Wales alone, 69,000 women were raped. Over 400,000 were sexually assaulted; 1.2 million suffered domestic abuse. Then I detailed the shamefully low rate of conviction.

Jack muttered a sarcastic aside which only I could hear. ‘So, tell me, does Oprah know you’re available?’

Ignoring him, I utilized all my rhetorical powers, speaking in cadences not unlike a charismatic preacher’s, in sentences that built and rolled and rallied in a great rhythmic refrain. I rammed home the point that failure of governments to protect the rights of women continues to hinder gender equality all over the globe. ‘It’s a grave injustice which holds us back as a society. A conviction in this case will only empower men like this.’

It was time to lay it on with a trowel – or not just a trowel; a steamroller.

‘The prosecution maintains that my poor, traumatized grandma took the law into her own hands. But how often does the law wash its hands of unimportant women like this doting, downtrodden pensioner and her darling innocent little granddaughter? Put yourself in Phyllis’s shoes – cheap, vinyl, worn down at the heel. The shoes of a decent, hardworking, law-abiding cleaning woman who is always walked over . . . Members of the jury, don’t let them walk all over her today.’

Good advocacy is the ability to keep the jury from coughing. By the time I sat down, I realized that there hadn’t even been a little throat-clearing during my summing-up – the court room was a total cough-and snore-free zone. What’s more, Jack knew it, too. He sat with folded arms and a bolted-on expression. Glancing up at the public gallery, my eyes snagged with amazement on to Nathaniel. I didn’t know he was back from his conference and he hadn’t told me he was coming to watch the trial. His eyes were resting on me with keen admiration.

Judge Jaggers, who was of the I Sentence You to Prison until Such Time as You’re Found Innocent school of justice, began his summing-up. The judge is supposed to be impartial, but while he’d greeted every one of Jack’s quips with appreciative bonhomie, whenever I’d spoken he’d displayed the relaxed, friendly demeanour of a CIA operative. And he reinforced his disapproval by practically instructing the jury to convict.

‘The defendant decided that these men were rapists, which put them outside the law, then felt entitled to take the law into her own hands. What you must ask yourself, members of the jury, is whether this vicious act of revenge had anything to do with the law or justice. I think not. Look deep into your conscience and ask yourself this question: are we citizens or savages?’

He sent the jury out to make their deliberations. As they filed from the court, Jack winked victoriously at me before strolling out, his witnesses in surly tow. I turned to face my mother with a heavy heart.

‘Let’s call David Attenborough urgently. Judge Jaggers has just proven that dinosaurs definitely do still roam the earth,’ Roxy said, trying to make light of it.

Women who’ve given birth are better equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of life. After all, we’ve been stitched up and experienced acute pain. But, looking at Phyllis’s stricken face, how I longed for an anaesthetic.

While the jury deliberated, Phyllis, Roxy, the Countess and I sat in the cafeteria. The scratched modern plastic furniture clashed with the paint-clogged Victorian woodwork. Seconds plodded by, each separated from the next by an eternity.

‘This law malarkey is too soul-destroying. I want a new career,’ Roxy said conversationally. ‘There’s a woman who breaks in the Queen’s shoes. Not a chauffeur but a shoe-ffer. That would be perfect for me.’

But nobody was in the mood to banter. We said little and ate less. Roxy squirted Bach’s Rescue Remedy down our throats to calm our nerves, but it had about as much effect as a parasol in a gale-force hurricane. The fluorescent light above buzzed and crackled and bathed us all in its sickly yellow, almost furry glow. As time dragged on the atmosphere grew heavy, almost solid. The London traffic made a distant, surging sound, like a flooded, angry river. Visiting jail is like taking a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat. If I lost the case, Phyllis would be treading water there for the next ten years. She would probably die of old age in prison, if some maniac didn’t kill her first. My stomach turned at the thought.

Across the canteen from us slumped the two witnesses, wiping up the gravy on their plates with slabs of bread. Bash – the wiry, thin one with the ferret face – gave me a smirking salute. In his mouth bobbed an unlit cigarette. He removed it to wriggle his tongue at me lewdly.

I looked away, unable to describe my feelings about either of them without recourse to slang terms for faeces.

When the clerk called us back into court I couldn’t tell if it was a good or a bad sign that the jury’s deliberations had taken only one and a half hours. Bash bounced by on the balls of his feet. ‘Why did the feminist cross the road?’ he said to Stretch, for our benefit. ‘To suck my cock.’

Building down our hopes, we set out like prisoners off to our execution. Back in court, Stretch and Bash sat with the police. Bash balanced himself on the edge of his seat, as though ready to leap up with jubilation. He jigged his knee up and down and thrummed his fingers on the desk in time to some jangled rhythm in his head. Stretch flexed his muscular arms and gazed up distractedly at the ceiling as though High Command on Planet Neptune were telling him it was time to start Phase Two.

Phyllis sat in the dock, bent almost double, head angled towards her knees, arms wrapped around her flabby midsection. All I could think about was not giving Jaggers or Jack the pleasure of seeing me cry in front of them. It was an impossible case to win. We might as well have opened a glassware shop in downtown Baghdad. The tension was nerve-twanging . . . But not for Jack. He strolled back into court, pausing by my table to look me up and down.

‘I like the shoes . . . they show off your legs so nicely. Especially when your robes gape and I can see your short skirt. I’m going to talk to the judge about having you arrested for persistent inner-thigh exposure, as it’s really quite distracting.’

His cockiness was infuriating, but there was no time to retort because the usher was issuing the command ‘All rise.’

I jumped up out of my chair with an alacrity my body hadn’t seen since I accidentally electrocuted myself on a hairdryer in my mother’s bathroom. Jack’s dodgy clients rose simultaneously, too, as though doing callisthenics. We all turned to face the jury forewoman, who was looking straight at me. I couldn’t tell if she was sympathetic because we’d lost the case or just possessed a face which had a gravitational pull towards melancholy.

‘Do you have your verdict?’ Judge Jaggers asked, doing his over-the-top-of-his-spectacles peering routine, no doubt practised before many mirrors.

Devon had moistened again beneath my armpits. I looked at Phyllis in trepidation. Negative thoughts looped through my mind. Why had she entrusted her life into my hands? I mean, I was clearly out of luck. If I won a car in a raffle, it was bound to be a Skoda.

In the list of the most terrible words anyone could ever utter, besides ‘Incontinence hotline. Please hold’, ‘Your client is guilty’ is by far the worst. On the other hand, there’s no doubt that the most beautiful words in the English language, besides ‘You’ve won the lottery,’ ‘Peace has come to Syria’ and ‘Brad Pitt would like your hand in marriage’ are ‘not’ and ‘guilty’. Especially when uttered in the same sentence.

When the forewoman uttered the words which saved my client from prison and trounced my enemy, it took a moment for the reality to sink in, especially when I looked up to see Phyllis crying steadily. She was making proper wa-wa-waaaaahs, with gulping and coughing and hiccuping, which is why I thought we’d lost. But then I heard Roxy. The noise of her victory hoot rivalled, in decibel levels, a Harrier Jump Jet.

When I’d regained my senses, I strolled across to reclaim my one remaining square of purloined chocolate from the prosecution. ‘Like the Great Wall of China, your ego is visible from outer space. I think I’ll suggest
you
are arrested for persistent inflated-ego exposure, as it’s really quite distracting,’ I said. Revenge tasted even sweeter than the stolen chocolate which I reclaimed and devoured in one greedy gulp.

A gridlock of journalists were scrumming for position on the court steps. For days, the press had been crawling over Phyllis’s case like African ants over a corpse. The verdict was not what they had expected. The press now scuttled towards us like insects, microphones thrust forward. Roxy took centre stage, Phyllis at her side. As the crowd crushed in, an aggressive reporter mosquitoed around me, demanding comment. I glanced about wildly, desperate for a way out. Cameras flashed. I saw stars, like a cartoon character. Blinded, I lost my footing in my vertiginous heels, wobbled and lurched face forward into the mob. I was saved from a humiliating front-page nose-dive by a warm hand on my upper arm.

‘Elbowing you in the ribs as you pass is paparazzi speak for “Excuse me”.’ It was Nathaniel’s voice. He pulled me into his body, and the warmth of his skin radiated into mine. ‘Motorcycle escort, m’lady?’

Nathaniel’s height and musculature meant the crowd unclotted to let him pass. On the corner of the street, he unchained his motorbike and patted the seat behind him. I straddled the bike and curled into his strong back.

An hour later, I was on my third Martini and about two drinks away from suggesting we find a whipped-cream orgy for like-minded singles. Phyllis, the Countess and a few select supporters had come back to our little home for a drink.

As the afternoon wore on, Roxy, as impetuous as ever, decided that the best way to celebrate Phyllis’s freedom was to whisk her away to a music festival in Dorset. Portia and Chantelle were invited, too. My mother, who was still a mung-bean-munching Bohemian at heart, immediately got busy packing rainbow-coloured jumpers, Joni Mitchell CDs, tofu and tempeh.

‘Tilly, you must come!’ she enthused. ‘What a way to celebrate our feminist victory!’

I shuddered at the memory of my many childhood music-festival excursions. ‘Mum, I’m too exhausted. Eight people in a two-man tent will mean no chance of rest, and not just because some venomous insect will be constantly blinking its 9,000,623,002 eyes at me in the dark . . .’

Roxy recruited the Countess instead. Now, the Countess will sleep in any bed – providing it’s a four-poster Marie Antoinette-type antique or a heated waterbed filled with Perrier. She consequently set about booking a luxury camper van, driven by her new bodyguard, having sacked Danny’s old undercover pal.

‘I really should stay ’ere and cook yer somethin’ nice to say thanks,’ Phyllis offered, grasping my hand gratefully.

I had to admit, it was tempting. Burning the midnight oil preparing for Phyllis’s case, I’d lived on so much tea and toast I’d given myself a toaster tan. But then I looked at the fatigued face of my now-infamous gran. It was hard to spoil Phyllis O’Carroll. She had been shaped by resistance and had no concept of the joys of trust, of letting go and frivolous hedonism. I could see how excited she was by the thought of getting out of London with her granddaughter.

‘Don’t worry!’ Nathaniel placated the old lady. ‘I’ll concoct some culinary delight for our learned counsel,’ he said, smiling at me.