“Graham, are you seriously suggesting that I can’t get a fair trial because of Jimmy Savile?”
“And Rolf Harris…and Stuart Hall…and that disc jockey…and the other one, with the hair.”
I steer him back on to the subject of his failed marriage just to shut him up until, at last, I hear the toot of a car horn and I lead him out into the rainy night and fold him into the back seat of a taxi. As the cab starts to pull away he leans out of the window and hisses: “Ignore me, I’m a bit pissed.”
And then I sit in the darkness thinking about what he said. Savile was a devious psychopath – an exceptional, obscene monster – he had nothing to do with my case. Only an idiot would lump me in with him. The public weren’t idiots, even if some of them did occasionally confuse me with a fictional character. No, I had to believe in people; I had to believe in the law; I had to remember the ones who had been vindicated – Paul Gambaccini, Jim Davidson. There were others, but I couldn’t remember them. No, the whisky in Graham had made him exaggerate and generalise. Don’t fret over the words of a drunk.
The next time I see Graham no reference is made to our conversation. We are in a meeting with my barrister, who looks like a barrister, rotund, with slicked-back hair. He even wears a waistcoat, for Christ’s sake. His name is Seymour and he has a rich, deep voice which he seems rather proud of.
“Now then, Kevin, I’m afraid I’m about to ask you a lot of questions which may strike you as rather tedious, but they’ll prove very useful for me when I have to paint a picture of you to the jury.”
In the corner of the room, Nina Patel starts tapping notes into her tablet.
“Why do you need to paint a picture of me?”
“Well…” he gives me a smile that drips with condescension, “that’s because, to help their deliberations, I’ll need to give them a sense…a fully rounded sense of what kind of a chap you are.”
“Will they need that? The case is about the facts, isn’t it? The facts speak for themselves.”
A look shoots between Graham and Nina. They think I am being difficult.
“The facts,” Seymour booms, “of course the facts will be our guiding stars, but, in my experience, people also like to understand the people in a case, so part of my task is to give a favourable impression of your character and, if possible, taint the character of your accuser.” He glances at some notes. “Tawdry, I know, but this isn’t tiddlywinks. Now then, you were born in…?”
“Stoke Newington.”
“OK, and your parents are…?”
“Both gone.”
“I see…Father’s occupation?”
“Postal worker.”
“Did your mother work?”
“She was a dinner lady.”
He pauses, as if to picture them.
“So…working-class, then.”
“Yes. Is that good?”
He ignores the edge in my question.
“So how were things for them financially?”
“Tough, I suppose…I think they put pretty much every penny towards me.”
“Only child?”
“Yes.”
“Any childhood illnesses?”
“Are you serious?”
He doesn’t even bother to look up.
“Any childhood illnesses?”
“Yes, I lost an arm in some factory machinery.”
Nina Patel leans across to tell me to stop being a dickhead when people are trying to help.
“I’m looking for an element of heroism, Kevin,” Seymour intones. “I’m looking for a way of presenting you as the little guy who battled through, even though the odds were stacked against him.”
“But they weren’t.”
He lets out a sigh.
“I’m not going to turn you into a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel, I am merely looking for something people can connect with…When did your parents die?”
“Erm…Dad in ’89…Mum six years ago.”
“Natural causes?”
“Dad, liver failure…Mum, cancer.”
“You’ve been married.”
“Yes, Sandra, didn’t work out, but we remain friends.”
“And she is testifying on your behalf.”
“That’s right, yes.”
“She’ll say nice things about you?”
“She’ll say true things.”
He peers at me for a few moments. “I think it would be worth a meeting with her,” he says to Graham and Nina, casually. “Now then, Kevin, we’re going to practise thickening up that skin of yours. Do you think you’re up for that?”
“Is this necessary?”
“First off, I think it’d be really useful if you could unlearn this habit of answering every question with a question. That won’t play well, I’m afraid. Second off, I’m presuming that the beard is going to go soon…?”
“Yes…the beard will come off.”
“Splendid. A plain suit on the day, please. Something you’d wear to your granny’s funeral. Now then, imagine you’re in the witness box and that I’m the prosecuting counsel…are you ready?”
The rehearsal lasted about forty-five minutes. It reminded me a little of being on set as they gave me various playing notes. Part of me wondered whether it was dangerous to prepare an actor in this way. What if the jury started to feel I was giving some kind of performance?
There was only one of these sessions, thank God, so the weeks limped past me in my mud-hole until, at last, the big day arrived. August 21st. My Mum’s birthday.
5
The Trial
My legal team gave me a final pep talk a few minutes before we entered the courtroom. Don’t get angry. Don’t wave your arms around. Do look at the jury, but not too often. I had shaved and was wearing a sober blue suit.
The first morning of the first day is largely procedural. Then, in the afternoon the jury are shown police photographs of Jade’s face the morning after the incident. In lurid close-up, the varnished blue bruises around her cheekbones do make you wince a little, but then she did hit the kerb pretty hard. After that, Jade takes the stand, wearing a dark blue, sombre trouser suit. She starts giving her evidence – all of it totally believable – because she believes it. In her memory, I hit her, pure and simple. As I sit in the dock, listening to her terrifying certainty, I begin to sweat, which I know will look like guilt.
Seymour questions her all afternoon, without leaving a mark on her. Every time I glance up to the gallery, Sandra gives me a brave smile.
Next into the witness box is a young woman called Tracey Martin. Apparently she is an eye-witness and there is a bit of a swagger in her answers. The counsel for the prosecution – a shambolic-looking man with feral eyebrows and a mass of mad-professor hair – guides her gently through her evidence. Then it is Seymour’s turn. He takes her back to the beginning of her account.
“And you were getting out of your car, which was parked in the position marked on the diagram?”
She glances at the diagram. “’S right, yeh.”
“And as you got out of your car, you heard raised voices. And when you looked you saw Mr Carver and Miss Pope having an argument.”
“Yeh.”
“And what happened next?”
“Well, I hear a thump, like, and then she’s lying on the ground, and he’s, like, leaning over her.”
Seymour pauses. He shuffles his notes with a slightly distracted air.
“Did Mr Carver seem concerned?”
“Yeh…sort of.”
Their barrister shifts in his seat as if he is about to object, but then thinks better of it. My barrister ups his volume slightly.
“And what did you do next, Miss Martin?”
“I walked out of the car park…towards the shopping centre.”
“Right. Nothing else?”
“No, no, sorry, no. I did do something else…”
The prosecution team look slightly thrown.
“I, um…I texted my mate Karen that I’d just seen
Lenny and Melanie having a barney in a car park.”
Someone titters quietly near the back of the courtroom. Seymour gives a sly grin and goes in for the kill.
I ought to have gone home feeling confident. He had torn Tracey Martin to shreds, exposing her as silly and unreliable. As we adjourned, my legal team clustered round to tell me we had had a good day. But it did not feel that way to me, I still felt shrouded in dread.
At home, curled in the corner of my sofa, I watched the news. Ludicrously, I was the second item, ahead of an earthquake that had killed several hundred people in Guatemala, two suicide bombs in Kabul, a lethal mudslide in the Philippines, a murder in Guildford and a possible cure for Parkinson’s disease. The report itself contained very little, just some footage of my arrival, the ITN correspondent shouting platitudes down a microphone and an artist’s impression of me standing in the dock looking extremely shifty.
I felt hunted.
Mac rang to tell me that TV News was now run by “limp-dicked wankers” and I wasn’t to let them get to me. Sandra phoned and offered to come round. I wanted to say yes but for some reason I didn’t. Shame, I suppose. She told me that she thought things had gone well for me in court and that I could face tomorrow with confidence.
“And don’t forget to breathe.”
“Don’t forget to breathe?”
“Yuh.”
“Yeh, that’d be a pretty basic error, wouldn’t it?”
“I mean it, Kevin, when you get tense you do that shallow-breathing thing, and then you get anxious.”
“That’s rubbish, I’m an actor, I’m trained, I breathe properly.”
“Only when you’re being someone else.”
6
The Dock
Morning came, eventually, and Graham picked me up in his car. As we arrived at the courthouse, a group of about thirty paparazzi avalanched towards the car. Two policemen muscled in and forced them back so we could scuttle inside.
There is time for a cup of tea and yet one more pep talk before proceedings begin. My first hour in the witness box is nowhere near as bad as I had feared. Their barrister’s line of questioning is not particularly aggressive; he restricts himself to establishing the sequence of events, my relationship with Jade, the dinner, the argument. He barely questions my account of how I had pushed Jade away to protect myself. It has all been very matter-of-fact, business-like.
Then he stops and shakes his head. He seems to have got his notes in a tangle. For a good thirty seconds, he shuffles his papers around in silence before looking up at the ceiling and puffing his cheeks.
“Tell me, Mr Carver, when you first approach the portrayal of a character, where do you start from?”
“I’m sorry, I…”
“Well some actors like to start with the shoes, don’t they?”
What? Where the hell is he going with this?
“Other actors like to nail the way a character walks or—”
Seymour is on his feet. “Your honour, I—”
The judge is ahead of him. “Mr Sims, I trust this is going somewhere pertinent.”
“I think so, m’lud. So, Mr Carver, as an actor, where do you start?”
“I start with the text.”
“Right, and when you’re shaping a character, do you draw on your own personality and experience?”
“Well, to a certain extent…you have to bring it from somewhere.”
“From somewhere, so you draw on your own psyche, as it were.”
The judge steps in. “Perhaps you might like to move beyond theories about acting.”
“I am happy to leave that avenue, m’lud.”
“Thank you.”
“Mr Carver…have you ever struck a woman?”
“No, never,” I reply, quickly, firmly, definitively.
“That’s…um…” he pauses to read some notes. “…that’s not strictly true, is it? You’ve struck many women and what’s more, millions of people have seen you do it. In fact, as Lenny, you’ve hit three women in the last year.”
I concentrate on remaining calm, and breathing. “Lenny isn’t real. That’s what we call pretend.”
“Of course, yes, absolutely, but purely on a practical level, and please excuse my ignorance here, but when you do those violent scenes, do you actually strike the actress, or…”
The judge interrupts loudly, losing his patience. “Once again, Mr Sims, I feel we’re going off on a rather luxurious tangent.”
“I do apologise, m’lud, I’ll move on. If you’ll just bear with me a moment.”
He’s shuffling through his papers again. Is this some kind of tactic? Now some have dropped on to the floor and he’s scrabbling incompetently to pick them up.
“Sorry, sorry. Sorry about that. Mr Carver, do you read reviews about yourself?”
“Only the good ones.”
He laughs. “Well then, perhaps you saw this very complimentary one you got from the TV critic of the Daily Telegraph.”
Seymour looks concerned and gets to his feet. “M’lud, I confess, I’m bewildered by—”
“I’ll allow it for now, Mr Sims,” the judge intones, with the suggestion of a warning.
The prosecution starts to read out the newspaper clipping: “‘In a gallery of otherwise vegetoid characters, one performance stands out. Kevin Carver, who plays ‘sexy bad-boy’ Lenny, convinces the viewer that beneath the character’s wisecracks there is a dark, ever-present suggestion of potentially explosive violence.’ Where do you think you bring that from?”
I hesitate, I can feel ice cracking beneath my feet.
“Earlier, Mr Carver, you said ‘you have to bring it from somewhere’, so that on-screen violence against women, where’s the ‘somewhere’ that you bring that from?”
I can’t marshal an answer. Seymour is on his feet protesting, but their man is shouting over him: “Perhaps from the same somewhere that led you to punch Miss Pope in the car park, is that where it comes from?”
Now my man is protesting more loudly and the judge steps in to instruct the jury that they are to disregard any questions that were to do with the character I play on TV. But the damage is done, I can read it in the jury’s faces. I am him. I play a man who treats women cruelly, often brutally. How can I do that? Where do I bring that stuff from, if not somewhere deep inside?
A bloody good question, as it happens.
The next two hours are a nightmare. Every question is an accusation, sometimes snarled, sometimes slid in, sly, like a stiletto. Every answer I give he labels a lie. My brief is up and down like a jack-in-the-box, but this man keeps coming for me; he has sunk his teeth in and he is going to bring me down.
The judge warns him every now and then but fundamentally, I am on my own. He destroys me. He makes me feel pathetic and stupid and, for the first time in decades, I am working-class again, one step behind, out of place, the boy in the wrong kind of shoes.
“You say she kicked you and she hit you, Mr Carver.”
I must be decisive. “Yes.” Loud and clear.
“Hit you how many times?”
“I can’t remember exactly.”
“Once, more than once, several, many, dozens?”
“Um…several.”
“With her fist? Or just slaps?”
“Bit of both.”
“How many fists, percentage-wise?”
“I can’t remember, it was—”
“More slaps than fists?”
“Not sure, probably, yes, I—”
“So it didn’t really hurt, then?”
“No, not really, it was more disorientating, I—”
“And you pushed her away, you say, in order to defend yourself?”
“Yes.”
“To defend yourself from what? You just said it didn’t hurt.”
Stay calm, Kevin. Think.
“Mr Carver?”
Choose your words.
“You’re a strong man, could you not have just restrained her by holding her by t
he arms?”
Yes, that’s what I should have done, but I must choose my words.
“Possibly, that’s how I should have reacted, but it all happened so fast, I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“You hit her, Mr Carver, didn’t you?”
“No, categorically not.”
“You’re certain?”
“One hundred per cent certain.”
“You’re one hundred per cent certain on that point…and yet so very uncertain about everything else.”
He starts to shuffle his notes, as I hang, turning, silk-wrapped.
Inevitably, I could not sleep that night. I just lay on the bed, hollowed out with mental exhaustion. I took a sleeping pill, but it didn’t work. And I was frightened to take another in case it dulled my mental processes in the morning. How long was this trial going to last? How much could I take?
The following day, probably as a defence, I find my brain has slipped into neutral. Luckily, all I have to do is sit and watch. I have become a member of the audience, watching my story being acted out in front of me. Sandra appears as a character witness. Mr Sims is clinical, but civil.
“And did you ever experience Mr Carver being physically abusive?”
“To me?”
“To anyone?”
“No.”
“And what about verbal abuse? Was he ever verbally abusive to you?”
“We were married. The abuse was mutual.”
My barrister looks pleased. She is holding her own.
“You divorced Mr Carver on the grounds of his unreasonable behaviour, is that correct?”
“Yes…”
“Did that involve other women?”
“To an extent, yes.”
“How would you describe his attitude to women?”
Sandra hesitates, flummoxed by the general nature of the question. He presses on. “Do you think he treats them as people?”
“Yes,” she replies with an upward tilt of her head. “As much as any man does.”
Mr Sims rearranges his notes. “No further questions, m’lud.”
It was a battling performance from Sandra but I knew it would not be enough. The prosecution was skilfully piecing together the argument that I was clearly the kind of man who hits women.
At the end of a gruelling day, while leaving the courthouse, I heard a voice behind me – probably one of the journalists – mutter “dead man walking”.
The Star Witness Page 9