No Birds Sing

by Jo Bannister

  ‘That’s a lot of time to invest in a two-minute rape,’ Liz objected; not because she thought he was wrong, more wanting to hear his argument.

  ‘Yes. But these aren’t casual attacks, they’re planned like a military campaign. Like a legal battle. We know he’s a perfectionist, he takes it personally if things go wrong: well, he commits rape the same way. He picks his target – a woman who’s trodden on his toes anything up to four years previously – follows her round to learn her routine, when she’ll be vulnerable; then he waits for the perfect moment when he can strike with minimal risk to himself.’

  ‘That’s what he did with me.’ It was half a question, half a statement.

  ‘Yes. He identified the half hour in the day when you always do the same thing, and you do it alone. You work some evenings and not others, you get around during the day, you go home different routes at different times. But almost always you get up at seven o’clock to feed the horse. Your fence runs alongside Belvedere Park – all he had to do was climb it and hide in the hayshed for ten minutes. It was the only time in your whole day he could be sure of getting you alone. Yes, to know that he must have watched you.’

  ‘Then in God’s name, Frank, why didn’t I spot him? Why didn’t I know I was being watched? I was trying to draw him out – if I knew I’d succeeded I could have stopped him there and then! He must have been laughing his leg off, watching me ponce up and down the waterfront with Miss Tunstall’s powder-puff, knowing he was going to jump me when I was least expecting it. But I should have expected it! Damn it, it’s my job!’

  ‘Liz, stop this,’ Shapiro said sharply, capturing between his own the hand she was tapping fiercely on his desk. ‘Don’t start looking for ways this could have been your fault. You didn’t see him because he didn’t want you to. This is a town of eighty thousand people and you have a job that takes you out among them: you’re always in the public eye. You think being a police officer makes you psychic? It doesn’t. You have the same faculties as everyone else. No blue lamp flashes in your head when you look at someone who’s planning a crime. Damn it, I’ve had this conversation with Donovan before now but I never expected to have it with you!’

  She gave a ragged sigh. ‘I know that, Frank. Honestly, I’m not blaming myself. It’s just, I can’t help wondering if I’d done something different whether the result would have been the same. If I’d seen him watching me, could we have had him behind bars by now?’

  Shapiro shook his head wearily. ‘You’d just have thought, “Nosy sod” and got on with what you were doing. Same as I would, same as anyone. It doesn’t work that way. We solve crimes; we don’t often manage to prevent them.’

  ‘All right,’ said Liz, swallowing the sudden bile. ‘Well, we knew he didn’t pick his victims out of the phone-book. But there’s more to it than just raping women who’ve annoyed him, isn’t there? There has to be. Why do we all look alike? It can’t be that every woman who ever crossed him looked the same. And why, in heaven’s name, did he wait years to attack the first woman who offended him and then rape three in quick succession?’

  ‘You’ve met his wife. What’s she like?’

  ‘Nice enough woman; bit on the quiet side, at least compared with him. She’s—’ She broke off. ‘Ah.’

  ‘About your age?’ hazarded Shapiro. ‘Fair, tall, well-built?’

  ‘Four of a kind. What’s going on, Frank? What does he think he’s doing?’

  Shapiro considered. ‘Something’s happened, in the last month or so, and I bet it involves her. Somehow she’s both earned his fury and put herself out of reach. She’s – I don’t know, left him, got another man? Anyway, made him feel small. He hates that above all else. The most bitter moments of his life have been when strong women made him feel small. For whatever reason he can’t do much about his wife, but he can start paying back some of the others. Beginning with those who remind him of her’

  There was a long pause before Liz spoke again. Then: ‘Are we serious about this, Frank? It’s not just an idea we’re kicking round any more – we genuinely think Dan Fenton raped me and two other women? We don’t have any proof. We have some circumstantial evidence but nothing’ – she flashed a quick, tight grin – ‘that a good lawyer couldn’t kick out of court.’

  ‘Forensics got a reasonable DNA sample. If it matches Fenton’s, even he might have trouble explaining it away.’

  ‘All right,’ she conceded, ‘it would convince you and it would convince me. But even DNA isn’t the complete answer we used to be told it was. You can’t use it instead of a case, you need a case as well. If we take liberties with Dan Fenton he’ll tear us to shreds. This is a clever, clever man, remember, and this is his field as much as it is ours. He won’t even run. He’ll call in some favours, fix up some alibis, buy an expert witness to question the procedure for taking and analysing the samples, generally fog the issues so much no jury will convict him. We need something specific connecting him to one of the attacks.’

  ‘A fingerprint would be nice,’ Shapiro said wistfully. ‘But you can’t take them off rhododendrons and you can’t take them off hay. The office is about the last chance. I’ll have SOCO go over it with a magnifying glass.’

  Even after a fortnight the Scenes Of Crime Officer found traces of adhesive clinging to the lock plate. ‘Easiest trick in the book, that,’ he said disgustedly. ‘Only takes a few seconds; you could do it with someone a few feet away and they’d never know. You push the tongue back into the lock-case and hold it there with sticky tape – the clear sort, nobody’d notice unless they had their nose up against it. Then you shut the door and rattle it to show that it’s locked. Only it isn’t, it’s just held by the latch. When you come back and turn the knob the door opens, you do what you’ve come for, you strip off the tape and leave, and this time the door locks behind you.’

  He sniffed critically, a man in the pay of the law with the instincts of a criminal. ‘In a perfect world you’d have a meths-impregnated tissue to wipe the lock-case afterwards; then if you smeared a bit of dust over it no one’d ever know. But that’s maybe asking a lot of an amateur.’

  ‘What makes you say he’s an amateur?’ asked Liz.

  SOCO plainly thought she was being dim. ‘He left something for us to find. When he didn’t have to. And he left his bum-print on the windowsill while he was waiting. A professional would have dusted that off before he left. A real professional would have sat on the floor.’

  Another phone-call to Helen Andrews pushed the case over the threshold of reasonable suspicion. ‘Who left the office first? Well, he held the door for me if that’s what you mean, then he shut it behind us. About the first piece of gentlemanly behaviour I ever had from him.’ She wasn’t a stupid woman, she knew this amount of interest in one of the four parties she’d shown round that office meant something. Her voice dropped and hardened. ‘And, I take it, the last.’

  Shapiro put the phone down, carefully, as if afraid it might break. ‘I think,’ he said, weighing his words, ‘we have all we need to ask Mr Daniel Fenton for a blood sample. See if the DNA matches.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’ asked Liz.

  The superintendent looked thoughtfully at the ceiling, then at the backs of his hands. Then he scratched his chin and sniffed. Finally he said, ‘Everybody has to retire sometime.’

  Chapter Twenty-six

  It was the habit of the Crown Court to rise as soon after four in the afternoon as was convenient. That is to say, a witness who was on the point of confessing to the crime himself would not be interrupted and told to come back in the morning, but no new witnesses would be sworn.

  At a few minutes to four, therefore, Shapiro had the choice of intercepting Fenton as he left the court or meeting him as he returned to his office. The discreet thing would have been to go to his office. The slightly less discreet thing would have been to wait in the broad hall which served the four court-rooms as a mustering place, somewhere to give last-minute instructions, an arcade for t
he disbelieved to express their outrage to the agents of their disappointment.

  Shapiro went into the court to wait. He found a seat at the front of the public gallery.

  They knew one another, of course. Shapiro didn’t give evidence as often now as he had a rank or two back, but police officers and lawyers in the same town inevitably know one another. That was almost the hardest thing for Shapiro to deal with: that this man knew Liz Graham, had traded pleasantries with her – outside in the hall, if they met in the street, at the Civic Ball for pity’s sake! – and after that he knocked her down and raped her. It was worse, much worse, than attacking a stranger.

  So was what he did after that. In open court, knowing the answer, knowing the state her emotions must have been in even if she was making a supreme effort to hide it, he’d dared her to confess her own experience of sexual violence. A man swept away by a madness over which he had no control? No doubt that would be his defence; it might even be believed. But to Shapiro, sitting in the gallery watching the busy, self-important man dominate the front of the court even when the prosecuting counsel was on his feet, it looked more calculated than that. They were three uppity women that he wanted to take down a peg or two, and he did it that way because he wanted to and because he thought he could get away with it. Shapiro continued watching him with a dull deep anger, not savage but unforgiving, a sober and abiding enmity.

  At first, Fenton barely registered his presence. From the corner of his eye he saw the slight disturbance as Shapiro took his seat – a bulky man, getting no more agile with the passage of time, he had never been able to slip through a crowd unnoticed; now he left a wake. Knowing the superintendent was not involved in the present case Fenton wondered briefly what his interest was, particularly at this point in the day, before returning his full attention to events outside The Fen Tiger on a Saturday evening last summer.

  It was a critical moment for the defence. If the jury believed the two student nurses who were passing when someone got his face slashed with a broken bottle, Fenton’s client had a new career opening up in the mail-bag industry. So it was vital to find the weakness in their story. Rising to cross-examine the second girl he fed the little inner flame that helped him to think of people who stood in his way as hostiles, wondering how he could trap her into undermining her own credibility.

  So his mind was full of important thoughts, more than enough to eclipse a passing curiosity about a surplus detective superintendent. He had a difficult task, one which would have defeated many of his colleagues. Cometh the hour, he often thought with a certain inner smugness, cometh the Dan. He turned to the girl in the witness box with a smile as sincere as a crocodile’s.

  She was, he had to admit, a good witness, sure but not cocky, not deferential but polite. A lesser man might have despaired of shaking her. Fenton never despaired. But just when he needed his concentration most he began to feel Shapiro’s eyes.

  He tried to ignore them. The policeman had no business with him, was probably just filling time till the court rose. Even if he had something to say it couldn’t be anything important; even if it were it would have to wait till this day’s work was finished. There was no higher duty than that of a barrister to a client facing prison. He tried to put the sense of being watched – no, not that, he was constantly being watched, of being scrutinized – out of his mind while he got on with what he was being paid to do.

  But Shapiro’s gaze was steady – on his cheek as he faced the witness, on the back of his neck as he turned to the judge – its weight unvarying, its significance unavoidable, and Fenton found himself stumbling in his argument and omitting words from his sword-thrust submissions, like a comedian dying on his feet in a working-men’s club.

  He felt his cheek go ashy. He felt his command of the jury – of his audience, that he’d always played like a maestro – crumbling. He felt the judge watching him with puzzlement, then with concern; and the witness waiting tensely for the onslaught she’d been warned about and which had yet to materialize.

  He didn’t shake her story. He got through the cross-examination somehow but without making any dents in the nurse’s account. A dew of sweat beaded his smooth face as he resumed his seat. Everyone had been expecting a rigorous review of the girl’s testimony lasting an hour or more; now suddenly it was over and they could go home. The sense of anticlimax was palpable.

  With a minuscule shrug, Judge Camahan drew a line under his notes. ‘Make a prompt start tomorrow, gentlemen, shall we? Ten-thirty suit?’

  Fenton was looking at Shapiro, and Shapiro at Fenton. With difficulty the defending counsel dragged his eyes back to the bench. He rose slowly, as if smitten by a sudden palsy. He cleared his throat. Even then his voice was barely his own. ‘I think it may be necessary, Your Honour, for the defence to seek an adjournment.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Shapiro.

  It was no longer a question of If; even the blood sample taken by Dr Greaves was no more now than gilt on the gingerbread. Faced with a direct accusation, Fenton had disdained to lie, had admitted – with hardly a flicker of guilt – the rape of Amanda Urquhart, Helen Andrews and Elizabeth Graham in Castlemere on sundry dates in March and April.

  He sat in the interview room, the recording equipment on the table in front of him, a stony-faced constable by the door, Shapiro watching him as he might have watched Dr Jekyll turn into Mr Hyde, and marvelled that he wasn’t afraid. He had no illusions about what this meant. It was the end of everything he’d worked for and enjoyed.

  He felt it odd to be so little moved by the prospect. He’d known it could come to this but never expected it would, so it wasn’t that he was prepared. Rather, he was detached from it – all of it, from what he’d done and from what would happen now. He shrugged negligently. ‘Because I wanted to. Because it made me feel good.’

  ‘Raping women made you feel good? Why?’

  ‘Raping those women did. I don’t really now why.’

  ‘But—’ Shapiro was unsettled by the surrealism of the situation. Not arresting a man he’d respected: he’d done that before, it wasn’t a pleasant duty but he’d learned to step back and let professionalism take over. What he was finding hard to deal with was the lack of any emotional feedback from Dan Fenton.

  It would have been easier if the man had denied it, so that the interview took a shape from the necessary direction of the questioning. But Fenton just sat there, meeting his gaze, answering his questions, making no attempt even to put a gloss on what he’d done; offering nothing that advanced in the least degree an understanding of what had happened.

  Shapiro tried again. ‘What you had, what you were in this town, that was all your own making. For damn near twenty years you put everything you had into building your career: time, energy, skill, commitment. And then – this. Why? Why does a man who’s been a model citizen for twenty years suddenly rape three women? And not just any women: career women, women who’ve climbed the same greasy pole. Not for sex – you can buy that on the corner of Brick Lane any night of the week for less than what you’d charge to enter a plea for a careless driver.’

  Fenton shook his head, once, precisely, the thinning fair hair stroking his brow. ‘No, not sex.’

  ‘Revenge, then. You were punishing them. Why that way, and why them?’

  ‘Because—’ He had to think about it, came up with an answer of a kind. ‘Because they offended me. Because I found them offensive.’

  ‘Offended you?’ exclaimed Shapiro. ‘What – laughed at your wig, made jokes about the Lord Chief Justice – what do you mean, they offended you?’

  For almost the first time Fenton looked straight at him, eyes widening indignantly. ‘Oh, come on, Superintendent, save the political correctness for someone who’ll be impressed by it. It may be politic to pretend otherwise, and maybe you can’t condone what I did, but don’t tell me you like the way the girlies are muscling in any more than I do.’

  ‘Muscling in?’ Shapiro echoed faintly.

  ‘Bus
iness, the professions – dear God, they’re everywhere. The upper echelons of your world and mine are about the last remaining bastions: judges’chambers and the Association of Chief Constables are about the only places you can still walk without too much danger of tripping over a hat-box.’

  ‘And that – bothers you?’

  Fenton regarded him speculatively. Having nothing to hide and nothing to gain freed him to indulge the policeman’s curiosity for just as long as it pleased him. For the moment he was willing to co-operate; when he got bored he would summon his own solicitor. He hadn’t done so yet partly because he wasn’t looking forward to meeting a colleague in these circumstances, and partly because he knew there was a limit to how much help a legal advisor could be. Also, he really didn’t mind talking to Shapiro, as long as they kept it civilized. Shapiro was a civilized man. Shapiro remembered how things used to be.

  ‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ Fenton said quickly, ‘I like women. I enjoy their company, I like having them around. But I don’t consider them my equal intellectually, and I resent being obliged to treat them as if they were. Positive discrimination: having to make room for them. If they were as good as they’re supposed to be they’d make their own room.’

  Shapiro scratched his nose pensively. ‘It’s a point of view. A lot of men share it; but most of them don’t resort to rape. Why did you?’

  Fenton smiled. ‘I thought I could get away with it. Women who’d complain instantly of a smack in the eye hesitate to report rape. I thought Amanda Urquhart would prefer to lick her wounds in private. To start with, it was going to be just her. I owed her – you know that, do you? She treated my client with contempt because he misunderstood a piece of technical jargon. A man wouldn’t have done that. The matter was of no consequence, she didn’t have to make him feel he’d just stepped off a banana boat – whatever the pros and cons of the case, he was the victim, he was entitled to respect. A male defendant taking that attitude to a plaintiff would have been advised to mind his manners; and his pathetic little excuses for cocking up wouldn’t have been accepted as an answer to the action. Against a man I’d have won that case.’