Gareth Dawson Series Box Set

by Nathan Burrows

  “Yes, I agree. Court adjourned until half past one.” The courtroom audience started to get to their feet as Judge Watling made his way through the door behind him.

  I was a lot more comfortable in the witness box after lunch. Maybe it was not having the fear of the unknown anymore, maybe it was just having a full stomach even if was full of lukewarm lasagne and soggy garlic bread with only a hint of garlic. Either way, it didn’t matter. I knew the next bit would be hard, but at the same time, it would be crucial. This was my chance to get under the jury’s skin. To make them see me not as a convicted murderer, but as a wronged man.

  There was a delay getting started after lunch, and I took the time to examine in more detail the two individuals sitting at a desk toward the back of the courtroom. When Paul and Laura had visited me at the weekend, I’d probed them to find out who they were. The most that Paul could tell me was that they were ‘court officials of some sort’. Laura had added that she’d seen a similar thing at an appeal trial she’d attended as a law student. At that trial, there’d been a man sitting in a similar position who was there to record everything for the court. I’d asked Laura why, if that was the case, there was a court reporter? Surely that was what they were for? Laura had been non-committal, shrugging her shoulders in response. Paul had been keen to get on with the main discussion, so the conversation was soon forgotten.

  I looked at the two court officials, or whoever they were, while we waited for the court to resume. They were similar in terms of age, both in their mid-thirties at a guess. Obviously at home in a courtroom, dressed for the occasion, and not bothered by the files they had with them. I’d been keeping half an eye on them since the appeal began and had noticed that they didn’t speak to anyone at all. Not even the usher. The only people they spoke to were each other. I didn’t think they were just there to record the appeal, but at the same time, I had no idea who they were.

  “Gareth, please tell us in your own words about the night Jennifer died,” Paul said a few minutes later when Judge Watling had restarted the trial. Paul cut right to the heart of the topic with no preamble as he often did. I took a deep breath, blew the air out of my cheeks, and looked at Rose, the twelfth juror and the foreman, before replying. This wasn’t at Laura’s bidding, and I wasn’t sure why I’d singled out Rose other than perhaps I thought she might be sympathetic.

  “We’d had a bit of an argument, to be honest,” I said. “Jennifer was going out with some friends, and either she’d not told me or I’d forgotten. I’d been planning on cooking something for us both, maybe spending the evening on the sofa watching a boxset or something, but instead, she went out for a few drinks with a friend.” I paused and reached out to pick up the glass of water on the witness stand in front of me. My hand was shaking, but it wasn’t on purpose. “She’d asked me if she looked okay before she left, and all I could say was ‘yeah, you look fine’ or something like that.” I paused again, looking down at my feet. “Next thing I know, I was on my way to the hospital to see her before she went into the operating theatre. But when I got to the hospital, she was already unconscious. I kissed her, promised her everything would be okay. But I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t know I would never see her again.”

  I stopped there, not for dramatic effect, but because I couldn’t go on. The only image in my head was of Jennifer at that moment when I’d promised her something I couldn’t deliver and had no right to promise her anything. I stared at my feet, unable to look up, unable to talk. Tears streamed down my face. Fuck me this was hard, I’d not been expecting this.

  “Your Honour,” I heard Paul say. “Could we take a short recess?” The next thing I knew Laura was at my side, her hand on my elbow.

  “Gareth,” I heard her whisper. “That was a fantastic performance. You did really well.” I looked at her, wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand. For a second, I hated her. That was no performance.

  That was me, laid bare in front of everyone.

  35

  I sat on the witness stand after the break, trying to stay composed while Paul rearranged his papers yet again. I looked across at the jury while I waited for him to restart. Ella was still dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, and Minnie looked just as upset. The young man I’d named Mark was staring at me, and as I caught his eye, he shook his head from side to side. I looked away from him and at Laura, who had four fingers extended on her thigh. The man I’d just been looking at, Mark, would be the focus for the next stage of Paul’s questioning.

  “Gareth, are you ready for me to continue?” Paul asked.

  “Yes,” I replied. The word came out almost as a croak. I cleared my throat and repeated myself. “Yes.”

  “Thank you,” Paul said. “What I want to explore now is your state of mind following Jennifer’s death. Could you tell us about that, in your own words?” Paul and I had argued about this last week. He was convinced that it was vital to the appeal, but it was easy for him to say. It wasn’t him up here on the witness stand.

  “I was in bits,” I said. “Just torn to pieces. Jennifer was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I used to wake up next to her in the morning and wonder why she was in bed next to me. Not just in bed with me, but married to me.” I paused, considering what to say next. With a glance at Mark, I continued. “In my experience, things like Jennifer didn’t happen to people like me.” Over the course of the next hour, Paul led me through those dark days just after Jennifer had died. We left nothing out. I told the jury about my drinking, and about how low I had sunk. Paul was careful to keep the questions specific in terms of how I felt, what I thought, and the effect on me of what had happened. Eventually, we reached the point of Robert’s trial, and Paul wove in additional information for the jury.

  He explained the legal loophole that Robert’s legal team had used to ensure that the only thing that Robert was charged with was drink driving. At this point, Paul turned to the jury and addressed them directly.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, it is vital at this stage you try to put yourself in Gareth’s shoes. He has lost his wife, his soulmate, and regardless of the vagaries of the law, the man who took Jennifer from him was on charge.” He turned back to address me. “Now I know this is in the transcript, but when the verdict was read out Gareth, can you recall your reaction?”

  I looked at my hands, trying to look ashamed.

  “Yes,” I said. “I shouted at Robert.”

  “Do you remember what you shouted?” Paul asked. I remembered what I’d said word for word, but wasn’t going to repeat it in the courtroom. Paul would do that for me.

  “I shouted that I would kill him,” I said. Paul shuffled through his paperwork until he found the piece of paper he was looking for. He looked down and then back up at me.

  “For the record, and I apologise for the language I am about to use, you said ‘You’re dead, Wainwright. You’re fucking dead. I’ll fucking kill you myself’. Is that correct?” I nodded my head, still keeping my eyes downcast and away from the jury. “Gareth, please answer the question for the court transcript,” Paul said.

  “Yes, that’s correct,” I replied in a small voice. When we’d discussed this part of the questioning before the trial, Paul and Laura had explained how the prosecutor might try to use those words against me at some point. Paul wanted to get them in front of the jury, but in a way in which they would be sympathetic. It was better that they were brought out now.

  “Why did you shout those words, Gareth?” Paul asked. The prosecutor shuffled in her chair, and I looked across at her to see if she was going to object. When she remained silent, I continued.

  “I shouted those words because I had just watched the man who murdered my wife get away with it.”

  “Please, Your Honour.” The prosecutor rose to her feet. “Robert Wainwright was not convicted of murder. The only convicted murderer—”

  “Miss Revell,” the judge warned.

  “—in this courtroom is the man on the witness stand,”
she concluded, almost shouting over the judge as she did so.

  “Miss Revell, that’s quite enough.” Judge Watling had what Jennifer would have described as ‘a right face on’. He frowned at the prosecutor as she sat back down. “I will sustain your objection, but with a warning. The jury is to disregard the witness’s last statement, and that of Miss Revell as well.” Paul had said that something along those lines would happen. The prosecutor could object until she was blue in the face, but I’d still said what Paul wanted me to say. The jury might have been told to disregard it, but they couldn’t un-hear it.

  Paul continued through my story, and every low point in my life at that time was highlighted in painful detail. The gradual slide toward rock-bottom was laid out for the entire court. The only part of it that I’d not told anyone about was the night I’d thrown up on the carpet watching our wedding video. That was just between me and Jennifer, and I wasn’t going to tell a soul about it. My half-hearted attempts to get help for my drinking were described, and Paul deftly brought me to the next key stage of my testimony. The decision to attack Robert Wainwright.

  “Now at this point in time, Gareth, you had already started making steps towards your own recovery. Am I correct?” Paul asked, sounding like a psychiatrist. I’d never seen a shrink in real life, but I imagined that this is what they would sound like.

  “Yes, that’s correct. I’d cut back on my drinking and had started running again to try to give me a different focus.”

  “But yet you decided to attack Robert Wainwright. What prompted this decision?

  “I had gone out for a run one evening, and I saw Robert driving his car. The same car that he had used to kill Jennifer.” I looked across at the prosecutor who was stirring into life. “Sorry, the car that was in the accident.” She looked at me through half open eyes as if she was daring me to continue. “I knew he was still banned, but he was driving anyway.” I took a deep breath, remembering that evening. “Seeing him just driving around like nothing had happened just tipped me over the edge.” I locked eyes with juror number four. “So, I decided to do something about it.”

  Over the course of the next hour, I described how I had planned to attack Robert even though the prosecutor had been through all this already. Everything from finding out where he lived, establishing his pattern of life, to buying the baseball bat at a car boot sale so it couldn’t be traced. Paul walked me through the plans I’d put into place to avoid getting caught, and I hoped that if there was a God up there, He wasn’t listening. It wasn’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but an amended version of it. I knew I had to protect Tommy, David and Big Joe, so I told the jury that I’d threatened them all. With Paul’s help, I tried to paint a picture of me as a desperate man, so desperate he would even threaten his closest friends to get the revenge he so badly wanted. The few times I looked up at the jury, they were all listening, so I thought I’d got away with it. I didn’t dare look up at the public gallery in case I caught Big Joe’s eye if he was sitting up there. I knew he wasn’t happy about having to ‘confess’ to being threatened by someone like me, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that.

  Paul got to where I’d laid in wait for Robert for the first time.

  “What was your intention at this point?” Paul asked.

  “I wanted to hurt him.”

  “To kill him?”

  “No, that was never my plan. I just wanted to hurt him, to make him suffer for what he’d done,” I said. “I never wanted to kill him. Only to pay him back.”

  “So, Robert Wainwright left The Griffin public house, and you followed him along Yarmouth Road?”

  “Yes, I did. I was just plucking up the courage to go after him when someone else beat me to it.” Paul slowed things right down and we went through what happened in the wasteland in excruciating detail. I told the jury about Robert getting to his feet and walking off after being beaten up by the two strangers.

  “So you don't know who the two men who attacked Robert were?” Paul asked.

  “No, I don’t think I’d ever seen them before. I didn’t get a good look at them, anyway. It was dark, and I didn’t want them to see me, so I couldn’t get too close.”

  “Would you recognise them again if you saw them?”

  “No,” I replied. “I don’t think I would.”

  Paul paused for a moment, scribbling something on his notes. I knew that this was a deliberate ploy to let the unexplained attack on Robert sink into the jurors' minds, so I waited for him to continue. Paul lingered until he saw the judge shuffle on his chair.

  “Your Honour, I now intend to go through the attack on Mr Wainwright in some detail.” He stopped for a few seconds and looked up at the public gallery. I followed Paul's gaze and saw the elderly couple I’d seen earlier getting to their feet and making their way towards the door to the gallery. I wondered who the couple were as we waited for them to leave the court. Paul had obviously arranged this with them in advance, and my best guess was that they were Robert’s parents. Seeing as I was just about to describe how I’d attacked Robert, it made sense for them to leave. I remembered the look on Andy’s face when he had listened to Jennifer’s post-mortem reports during Robert’s trial and how that had affected him. No matter how much I hated Robert, if they were his parents, I couldn’t blame them one bit for not wanting to hear the next part of my testimony.

  Once the door had closed behind the couple and they were out of the courtroom, Paul returned to his questions.

  “Gareth, please describe what happened next?”

  “I saw Robert leave the pub and make a telephone call. I figured he was phoning for a taxi. He then went down the alleyway to the side of The Griffin pub, so I crossed the road and followed him down the alleyway.”

  “On the CCTV footage of you crossing the road, you can be seen pulling the baseball bat out of your pocket at this point,” Paul said. I paused, unsure whether that was a question. “Which hand did you use to pull out the bat?”

  “My right hand.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m right handed.”

  “Thank you. So, you pulled the bat out with your right hand and followed Robert Wainwright into the alleyway.” I nodded in reply. “What was he doing in the alleyway?” Paul asked.

  “He was having a…” I stopped and paused. “He was urinating. I had the baseball bat in my hand, so I waited for him to finish and turn around.”

  “You waited for him to finish urinating?” Paul said.

  “Yes. I couldn’t hit him while he was, er, urinating. That didn’t seem right and besides, I wanted to look him in the eye.” I glanced at juror number four, who was leaning forward and listening. “When he turned around, I hit him on the side of the head with the baseball bat.”

  Paul paused, letting my comment echo around the courtroom for a few seconds.

  “What happened then?” he asked me.

  “He dropped like a stone.”

  “How many times did you hit him?”

  “Once.”

  “Once? You only hit him once?”

  “Yes,” I said firmly. “I only hit him once.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Well, I looked at Robert lying on the floor. To tell the truth, I was horrified. Absolutely horrified by what I had done.” I took a deep breath before continuing. “I dropped the bat and knelt down by his side.”

  “Can you describe any injuries you could see?” Paul asked me.

  “I couldn’t really see any injuries as such. He had a few drops of blood coming from his nose, and a red mark on the side of his face where I’d smacked him, but there was nothing else.”

  “A nosebleed and a red mark? Those were the only injuries you could see, is that right?” Paul asked.

  “Yes, that’s correct,” I replied.

  “What did you do next?”

  “I rolled him onto his side, so he wouldn’t swallow his tongue or choke.” I looked down at Laura, but she was
busy scribbling something on a pad. I wanted her to look up at me, to acknowledge that even though I’d hit Robert with the baseball bat, it wasn’t as bad as it had been made out. “He’d dropped his phone when I hit him, but it was still working, so I figured he could call for someone when he woke up.”

  “How did you know his phone was still working?”

  “I could see the photo on the home screen. There was a crack in the glass, but it wasn’t shattered,” I said. “There was a photograph of him and Jennifer on the screen. From back when they were together.”

  “And then?” Paul asked after stopping for a few seconds to let that sink in with the jury. I knew he was going to use the phone later on, somehow, so went with it.

  “I got up and left, back down the alleyway and toward the road.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Paul turned to the jury, “there is CCTV evidence that clearly shows my client entering the alleyway after Mr Wainwright and leaving again a short time later. The defence does not contest this evidence as it is obviously my client and is consistent with his version of events.” Paul turned back to me. “What time was it when you attacked Mr Wainwright?”

  “I’m not sure,” I replied. “Ten o’clock maybe? Sometime around then, anyway.”

  “Your Honour, may I introduce Exhibit A, which is a map of the immediate area.” Judge Watling nodded his head in response. Laura got to her feet holding a large rolled-up sheet of paper that had been resting against the defence table. She walked to the middle of the courtroom and was met by the usher who was carrying an easel. Laura unrolled the paper and pinned it to the easel before stepping back and adjusting it so that the jury and the rest of the court could see the map. The only person who couldn’t see it was Judge Watling. Paul and Laura exchanged places and Paul put a large round red sticker on the map.

  “This marker, ladies and gentlemen, is The Griffin pub where the attack took place. Could you describe the route you took from the pub, Gareth?”