‘I’ve come to say that I’m sorry for what I did to you. Now I know what it feels like, eh?’
Jo watched Jeanie walk away in the pouring rain then looked back at Harry, who was still smiling at her cherubically from his playpen.
Pulling off the single shoe on her foot, she dropped it on the ground and, letting the other one fall from her hand, she closed the door and slid the bolt across. Padding down the hall, she took the backs off her jangling costume earrings and was placing them on the hall table when the phone started ringing. Ignoring the tears running down her cheeks, she answered it.
‘I know it’s Saturday evening and you’re probably on your way to meet a hot date,’ Gerry in Justice said, ‘so I’ll cut to the chase, shall I? Your proposal for SLR for rape victims has been approved. It’s in the pipeline.’ He paused. ‘Are you crying, Birmingham?’
‘Of course not.’ Jo wiped her eyes on the back of her sleeve. ‘I’ve just got everything I wanted, haven’t I?’
A NOTE ON SEPARATE LEGAL REPRESENTATION
Victims don’t take priority in court. If they’re lucky enough to have survived their ordeal, their role in court is as a witness to a crime against the state. If they’ve passed on, their memory tends to be assassinated by the trial process, because that’s what is required when proving the defence of provocation. Their loved ones sit in the back of the court and weep. They have endured the tragedy of violent loss, and now they must hear harrowing evidence such as the post-mortem findings. The weight of the deceased’s brain, heart and liver is information that is par for the course, as are descriptions of how, for example, the skull was incised across the scalp from behind one ear to the other, with the front half peeled forwards and the back half peeled back so the tissue underneath could be examined for bruising, when head injuries are a factor.
Regularly, it all becomes too much, but a family member who shouts out in distress or protests in any way can be held in contempt and be transferred to a holding cell until they purge the contempt by apologizing to the court. All they generally want to say is ‘who’ they have lost and how the person being depicted in court by the barrister of the accused is a stranger to them. Some will make a Victim Impact Statement. Since the trial process has concluded anyway by this point, for most families, it’s cold comfort.
Rape Crisis campaigners argue that one way of empowering victims in court is to provide them with Separate Legal Representation, so as to help put an end to a system which puts the victim on trial. However, the powers that be have reacted to the campaign for SLR as if it would cause the pillars of the temple to fall.
Like Jo Birmingham, I too feel that the scales of justice are too heavily weighted in favour of the accused and need to be rebalanced back towards the victims of crime. This novel is our opening salvo.
Niamh O’Connor
April 2010
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Niamh O’Connor is one of Ireland’s best-known crime authors. She is the true crime editor of the Sunday World, Ireland’s biggest-selling Sunday newspaper, for whom she has written six true-crime books which were given away with the newspaper. Her job, in which she interviews both high-profile criminals and their victims, means she knows the world she is writing about.
Also by Niamh O’Connor
Non-fiction
Blood Ties
Fiction
Taken
Too Close for Comfort
Blink
Acknowledgements
Heartfelt thanks to Selina Walker, Sheila Crowley, Lisanne Radice, Colm MacGinty, Neil Leslie, Cathy Kelly, Sarah Hamilton, Eoin McHugh, Madeline Toy, Lauren Hadden, Vanessa O’Loughlin, Professor Marie Cassidy, Stephen Mulcahy, Declan Heeney, Helen Gleed O’Connor, Siobhan Carmody Collins, the garda contacts I can’t name – you know who you are – and all my pals in the Sunday World.
As for my family – especially my husband, Brian, and parents, Eamonn and Sheila – there’d have been no book without all the support and encouragement.
TRANSWORLD IRELAND
an imprint of The Random House Group Limited
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First published in 2010 by Transworld Ireland, a division of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Niamh O’Connor 2010
Niamh O’Connor has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781407084015
ISBN 9781848270916
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