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Peter Gunning was of no more than average size but his desk and office appeared to be models rather than the real thing. The former was mostly clear, apart from a coffee mug on a stained coaster, several ball-point pens, a pad of paper and a pile of files to his left that looked in imminent danger of falling over. None of the file covers had any visible label or names, and I surmised that they had been turned upside down in the interest of client confidentiality. Along the right hand wall there were three filing cabinets on top of which were piled more of the same kind of files, presumably awaiting filing. In their case, no attempt had been made to hide the labels which were not, in any case, legible from where I sat. Gunning had a full head of reddish-brown hair and an air of competence, not to say self-confidence. His name had not been on the list of seven partners printed on the letter accepting my offer to come in and give the firm a witness statement.
“You’ve already discussed the case with the police, then?”
“I’ve become quite friendly with one of the detective constables. Victoria Dennis. She told me, among other things, that the detective sergeant believed that the attack had been carried out by a woman because of the weapon involved. A hammer.”
“I’m interested in what you told her. Did you mention your, um, belief that our client had been raped by the victim?”
“No. I tended to assume that there wasn’t much she could tell me about the case, so I rather avoided the subject.”
“If the police interview you formally, or even come back with apparently casual questions, it would be better if you just stick to the plain facts, without going into your interpretation of them. Let the police and the CPS come up with their own theories.”
“So, it’s OK to tell them that Lucie came home late and told me that she’d spent the night with Colleran but not that I deduced that he’d coerced her?”
“Exactly.”
“I suppose the rape hypothesis doesn’t really help your case. It would give her a motive.”
Gunning didn’t react to that, so I went on.
“Lucie still doesn’t accept that ‘interpretation’, then?”
“When you got in touch, I took instructions from our client. She authorized me to take a witness statement from you, and to call you as a witness if counsel thinks it’s necessary or desirable, but she expressly said that I was not authorized to disclose to you any information about the case against her or her defence. She told me that I needed to be very careful of you. Apart from anything else, your connection to the police would be sufficient justification for that caution.”
“I see that, and I wouldn’t expect you to tell me anything at all. But I’d like you to understand that all I want is to help Lucie’s case. I’m utterly convinced that she wasn’t responsible for what happened to Colleran.”
“Any idea who was responsible?”
“On that point, I can’t help you. I hardly knew him. At least, I’ve no specific idea. But, if I’m right in believing that he pressured Lucie to sleep with him, it’s unlikely that she’ll have been the only victim. In that case, she won’t be the only one with a plausible motive.”
Gunning told me that he’d issue a witness summons to me once the trial date had been fixed, and cautioned me to be careful about discussing the case. It would be better not to talk about it to anybody except him and the police, and if answering questions from the police, to stick to the clear, unembellished facts. I should avoid talking to Vicky except in the presence of another detective. I readily agreed to all of this.
Several weeks passed without any developments. I noticed on the Telegraph website that Gunning had succeeded in getting bail fixed for Lucie’s release pending the trial. It was granted on condition that she surrendered her passport and signed in three times a week at a South-East London police station. I wondered if that was where she was living but made no attempt to find out. Now was not a time for action. I entertained a fantasy of giving at her trial the vital testimony that put it beyond doubt that she had been wrongly accused. Then—who knows?—she might think that she had reason to be grateful. She would at least understand that I wished her nothing but well.
Once or twice, in the weeks that followed, I found myself tempted to visit Colleran in hospital. Not that visit is the right word. He still hadn’t come out of his coma, and one couldn’t just walk in and sit by his bedside. I expect the hospital authorities had to take care not to let just any old weirdo in to get off on the violence that had put him there. That, of course, was the furthest thing from my intentions. I had meant, and failed abjectly, to kill him outright—cleanly and instantaneously. To, as I put it to myself, excise him surgically from existence with as little pain as possible. If I wanted to see him now, it was certainly not to gloat at his condition but rather to seek whatever reassurance I might find that he was not suffering. Of course, I couldn’t offer that to the hospital staff as a reason why I should be admitted. I had gone before, not long after the attack. Then, I’d explained that I was the boyfriend of one of his students who was herself too upset to see him in his present state, but who had prevailed upon me to go along as her surrogate. I’d had to give Lucie’s name. Now that she’d been charged with his attempted murder, I didn’t think that gambit was going to work again.
Yet, knowing this, I couldn’t seem to avoid coming regularly back to the idea that I must see for myself how he was. However rational the arguments against taking such an absurd risk, I wasn’t able to persuade myself for once and for all that I should stay well away from Colleran. My attitude was, I told myself, starting to verge on obsession.
I heard nothing from Peter Gunning for several months. He’d warned me that, having taken my witness statement, he was unlikely to need to talk to me again until nearer the trial. Even knowing this, I found I was becoming a bit hazy about the details of my conversation with him and the the prospect of being summoned to court to give evidence in Lucie’s defence appeared less real as the weeks went by. Nearly four months passed before anything happened that was worth noting. Early in September I got a phone call from Gunning to say that I’d shortly be served with a witness summons. Lucie’s trial for attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm with intent would start in the third week of October.
There wasn’t much I could do to prepare for the trial. I went over in my head what I’d told Gunning. I felt I knew my story well and, while I was aware that there was every likelihood that the prosecuting counsel would come up with an angle I hadn’t considered, I didn’t think that there was any point in trying to anticipate his cross-examination. The main thing was to have a coherent and self-consistent narrative; then any minor inconsistencies that counsel managed to discover would come across as the normal consequences of an imperfect recall, only to be expected.
When I got to the court I discovered something I should already have been aware of but had managed to overlook: as a witness, I wouldn’t be allowed into the courtroom during the trial until I was called to testify; I wouldn’t be able to listen to the evidence of the other witnesses before I’d given my own. Since I was a witness for the defence, this meant I wouldn’t be able to follow the prosecution case. I reacted to this information with initial panic which I quickly controlled. My exclusion from most of the trial couldn’t be helped if I was to be able to give evidence on her behalf and, knowing that I was responsible for the crime she was charged with, I was determined to help in any way I could. If necessary, I’d confess in the witness box, though I was hopeful that it wouldn’t come to that.
I’d get around the problem of not being able to hear the prosecution witnesses by following the daily reports on various news sites, particularly the Telegraph’s. Strictly speaking, of course, this wasn’t allowed but I was sure I could escape detection. I just had to be careful while giving evidence not to reveal that I knew any more about the case than I was supposed to.
Although I hadn’t known that I’d spend the whole day outside the courtroom, I had expected that there’d be a certain amount of waiting around, so I’d brought along a book on which, unfortunately, I found it completely impossible to concentrate. On subsequent days, therefore, I brought my Palm, onto which I’d downloaded the reports of the previous day’s proceedings from the Telegraph and Guardian websites. I expected to get more detail from the Telegraph, a cooler appraisal from the Guardian. In practice, while it regularly occurred that one publication contained information that was missing from the other, the differences between them weren’t as clear-cut as I expected. To my surprise, I resolved to continue being a regular visitor to the Telegraph site, even after the trial was over.
It may seem to border on the reckless that I’d enter the court building carrying proof that I’d been breaking the rules governing my conduct as a witness, but I guessed that there was no real risk. The screen on the Palm was low resolution and poorly illuminated, so the chance that somebody might read it over my shoulder was negligible. Anybody who was up-to-date with gadgetry would certainly know that the device couldn’t connect directly to the internet and anyone who didn’t know about gadgetry would be unlikely even to consider the possibility. As an additional precaution, I used meaningless filenames and hid them in the middle of a list of irrelevant material. I even went to the trouble of writing a script that randomly “touched” several of the irrelevant files every morning when I synced the pda, so a casual observer wouldn’t even be able to tell which files had been most recently updated. If I should be required to hand over the device for inspection, I’d close the file I was reading first and my interlocutor was likely to be none the wiser. As it happened, no official evinced any hint of suspicion regarding the Palm.
So, I spent four days in the vicinity of a courtroom where a succession of witnesses told a jury, on oath, what they knew about the attack that had left Ben Colleran in a coma, reading at second hand what the same jury had been told by the same or different witnesses the previous day. Much of the evidence was predictable and I was irritated by the probability that several unexpected or surprising little details weren’t making their way into the newspaper reports and by the certainty that I was losing much of the sense of how the case unfolded because I did not hear the troughs and peaks of examination and cross-examination but instead saw reports that flattened these out after the event. The reports had the effect of making the proceedings sound like a linear enquiry rather than the adversarial clash I assumed it to be in reality. I’d never been present at a criminal trial and I briefly entertained the notion of sitting in at a separate trial in the same building while waiting to be called. I suppose the idea was that, if I had a mental picture of what criminal proceedings were actually like, I’d be better able to reconstruct from the news reports something resembling a sense of the shape of Lucie’s trial.
I quickly dismissed that notion because I was afraid of getting details of the other case confused with those of Lucie’s and as a result making myself seem a less reliable witness than I hoped to come across as. I even thought about sneaking in to Lucie’s hearing in some kind of disguise. I’d do so only until the end of the prosecution case, then reappear as myself, ready to give evidence for the defence as soon as required. That possibility merely had to take mental shape for its preposterous impracticability to become obvious even to me. It was an amusing image, though, and I continued to think about how I might overcome the practical difficulties long after I knew that there was no possibility of my actually taking any steps to do so.
One colourful detail, of which the Telegraph made rather more of than was apparently warranted and which was not mentioned by the Guardian at all, was the finding by the investigators of a triangular scrap of black polyamide material next to Colleran’s collapsed form. The scrap wasn’t bloodstained but a much smaller fragment of the same material was found under the nail of the middle finger of Colleran’s right hand. A forensic scientist had testified that the probability was high that the fragments had come from a pair of tights or stockings. The weave of the material corresponded with one used in tights sold by Monoprix in France.
It was here that my inability to hear the cross-examination of the witness was at its most frustrating. I surmised that the expert witness would have been compelled to admit that Monoprix was not the only outlet who sold tights made of this material and that there were in all probability outlets in this country who supplied them. Further, it was presumably put to him, and he doubtless agreed, that the presence of these scraps at the scene of the attack did not necessarily indicate that the attacker had been a woman, let alone a Frenchwoman, still less any particular Frenchwoman. In short, I didn’t think the fragment of her tights was particularly damaging to Lucie’s defence. It had surely been tested for DNA. If any of hers had remained, the fact would have been reported. It would be nice to know this for sure, having heard it directly from the mouths of defence counsel and witness, and seen the effects of their utterances on the jury.
It appeared from both news outlets that evidence had also been given that, as a sculpture student, Lucie had bought and owned a small hammer of a type similar to that used in the attack. No such hammer had been found in her flat, which had been searched on foot of a warrant. When she was questioned under caution, Lucie had said that she had neither seen nor used the hammer for many weeks and had certainly not taken it with her when she had split up with her former boyfriend. The former boyfriend’s flat was also searched, with his consent, and the hammer had not been found there either. I was pleased that the reports did not mention me by name, though I knew that my anonymity would not survive my appearance in the witness box.
Once again, I had to imagine the cross-examination and the awareness that the reality had almost certainly been very different from my mental reconstruction was a source of great frustration to me. Lucie’s counsel would, I felt sure, make it clear to the jury that, though Colleran’s injuries might be “consistent with” a small, light hammer that Lucie had once owned and which could not now be accounted for, they were certainly consistent with many other hypotheses besides, including some that might not have occurred to anybody except the killer. The probative value of this alleged “consistency” was virtually nil.
Though my picture of what was happening inside the courtroom just a few metres away was infuriatingly incomplete, I became increasingly confident that the case against Lucie was a weak one and that competent defence counsel would leave the jury in no doubt of the fact. My own part in her exoneration would be a minor one. The relative unimportance of my role was, curiously, rather a comfort to me than the reverse. I realized that, despite my lack of familiarity with legal proceedings, I had formed the firm opinion (probably fostered by watching television drama) that courtrooms were places where events regularly took unpredictable, catastrophic turns, where the best laid plans unravelled in an unforeseen instant and even the most carefully prepared lawyer suddenly found himself (in my mental image, the lawyer in question was invariably a man in early middle age) eliciting testimony that was disastrously at odds with what he’d been expecting. That my own evidence lacked significance meant, I assumed, that there was less that could go wrong, hence my relief that the part I had to play was small. Small but crucial, I told myself.
As it turned out, my part was cut almost completely. On the third day of the trial, Gunning came up to me and told me that I was now free to leave and that my further attendance would not be required. I must have looked puzzled, because he explained to me that counsel had decided that they wouldn’t need my evidence after all. I didn’t immediately grasp what this meant.
“Shouldn’t I hang around, just in case?”
“I’m quite sure that won’t be necessary. My client is just about to give evidence. That will be the end of our case.”
That meant there was no longer any reason why I shouldn’t sit in the court, didn’t it? I asked Gunning for confirmation.
“You certainly have a right to be present but I wouldn’t recommend it. You wouldn’t want to put my client off her stride, would you? Inhibit her in any way?”
Inhibit in what way? What was she going to say? I decided that I desperately wanted to hear her evidence. I’d try to be as inconspicuous as possible and hope she wouldn’t notice me. Then she’d have no reason to feel inhibited.
Now that it had sunk in that I wasn’t going to be called as a witness, what I really wanted was to argue the issue with Gunning; to try to persuade him that my testimony could make all the difference. I saw at once that there was no point however: it wasn’t Gunning’s call; the decision had been taken by Lucie’s QC, who had no intention of engaging in an argument or, indeed, of exchanging two words with me. Chafing at my powerlessness to influence the result of the trial, I found an empty seat near the back the public seating area. Given that the case featured sex, violence and a beautiful, allegedly vengeful Frenchwoman, I was surprised that there were several such.
I took an immediate dislike to leading defence counsel, whom I now saw for the first time. Jeremy Dunn QC was — or looked — a good decade younger than I’d expected. He seemed to be no older than his early forties, which I thought was very young for a silk. He did not have a prepossessing physical appearance. I’d have put his height at no more than 1.75 metres; his build was thin without appearing athletic. From the little of his hair that was visible beneath his wig, I formed the impression that it was wispy and lank. The biggest disappointments were his voice and his delivery. It seemed to me that they were unexpectedly unactorly for a lawyer who made a substantial part of his living addressing juries. The voice seemed to lack those baritone underpinnings that I’d have thought would be invaluable to someone whose job was persuasion. The delivery appeared to have been calculated to carry his words just as far as the judge and no further (the jury and the witness box both being nearer to him) so that we behind him in the public area had to strain to catch whole sentences. I resolved that, whenever there was a break in the proceedings, I’d try to find an empty seat nearer the front.