by Mark Lawson
Emma will surely be hoping that her prof has changed his tune!
Legal Advice (2)
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Dear Ned. I appreciate that this will seem astonishing to you but it is difficult to see what action we can sensibly take at this time with regard to the item in ‘The Mole’ diary which references your selections on Desert Island Discs.
If court proceedings were under way, the newspaper would assuredly be in contempt of them. But it is a consequence of the rot-in-limbo tactics being used by the Met in such cases that there is an indefinite period before you would receive the protections of a defendant and, paradoxically, it is our hope that you will never have to.
The only other route available is to take action for defamation. But, as is often the case, the phrasing is sly. The piece does not suggest that you have killed a lover but that, from your musical tastes, your partner could be nervous that you might kill her in a crime of passion if she were guilty of infidelity. It is mightily hard to disprove a hypothetical. If the piece had suggested, for instance, Emma had reason to fear that Toby might be at physical risk from you, then the accusation is so specific and malicious that it could only be an attempt to damage your reputation. However, in this case, they would almost certainly attempt to defend the sentence as humorous and I would be reluctant for you to spend days being taken through the lyrics of ‘Delilah’ by the newspaper’s QC.
The second suggestion – that you are a sinner who may end up in hell – is ultimately a point of contention for theology rather than law and would likely be defended by the newspaper as ‘fair comment’. As the paper’s duty lawyers doubtless told them, we would struggle to bring a libel case over something sung in Italian at Covent Garden. It is also probable that the publication would rebut any approach over these issues until your position in the other matter becomes clear.
Ned, I know how difficult this is and how disappointing my response will be. But clients such as you occupy this curious middle ground between innocence and potential guilt and, in this territory, can be kicked almost at will.
You have been very strong so far and, I’m afraid, must continue to be so.
Claire xx
Home Truths (2)
Age makes the mind stall and skid in reverse and Emma had a saving moment of confusing 2005 with 1995, which would have been before they met, until she placed not just the year but the month, four before Toby was born.
‘When I was pregnant?’
His silence and refusal to meet her eye were enough confirmation. The story no amount of social equality could rewrite: a man who has to fuck someone else the minute the woman he’s with can’t or won’t.
‘Adultery as well as rape! Great!’ she yelled.
He shushed her, lifting his eyes to Toby’s room above, but one benefit of a generation that wore headphones at most times was that their parents could express fury with impunity.
‘It wasn’t – whatever you think of me – it wasn’t … rape. And …’
It was the sort of pause that occurs not when someone finds nothing to say but when they abandon an intended sentence.
‘Go on!’
‘No. It wasn’t …’
‘Just say it. Ned, it couldn’t be anything worse.’
He looked away. She wondered if he had been going to say that it wasn’t strictly adultery because they weren’t married. She had rejected the next question as a demeaning cliché but found herself compelled to ask it anyway: ‘How many times with this … this … Jess?’
‘Oh, look … once.’ It was the damage-limitation answer: could she believe him? ‘Not even that, really …’
‘What? Then how …’
‘Em, I know it doesn’t make much difference but it wasn’t even actual sex as such.’
‘For crying out … Oh, eating ain’t cheating. Is that from Tom Pimm’s Clinton seminar?’
Did it make any difference? The mental image, she found, was no better.
‘Okay. You on her or her on you?’
‘Em, do we have to … ?’
‘Yes.’
‘Her on … I … think. I know it’s no excuse but I was so hammered I don’t really know what happened …’
She had warned him about his drinking on location, fearing that it sometimes showed on screen. Though she obviously watched him with more attention than average viewers, she could sometimes see red-wine tongue when the camera went in close on a link.
He was offering her a version in which what happened had not been very much. And, even though he might be lying to keep her on side, she could take consolation in that being his aim. The forgiving part of her heart argued that she would never have known about this Jess thing except for a sudden British madness of mass accusation; the suspicious side that she might be living with a serial cheat and / or rapist.
‘Has there been anyone since her?’
‘No. No. It was … at that time … too much drink and maybe not enough …’ The unspoken word lay between them like a thrown grenade. ‘Em, I’m not making excuses for it …’
She saw an image, as crisp as an advert, of the champagne chilling in the fridge for tonight’s planned celebration of his being cleared of the charge, the first charge.
‘They just sprung this one on you, did they?’
She was pleased with the question; relationships make everyone a detective.
‘What?’
‘Well, you told me that you and Claire were going there today to blow apart the charge … the first charge?’
As he worked out the best answer to give, she saw the cunning defendant he had become. ‘So, yeah … they’d warned Claire they might have something else to ask but she didn’t think it was going to come to anything.’
‘And what does she think?’
‘Look. She … obviously her criteria are different but she doesn’t think there’s anything criminal here …’
A month before, what Emma was hearing might have destroyed her. But, though she could only speak by gulping down breath and forcing back tears, shock, like alcohol, prepares the body for the absorption of more. She took the lawyer’s narrow definition of Ned’s guilt almost as an exoneration of him. Except that, with both drink and distress, there comes a tipping point.
‘Ned, are there going to be more?’
‘No. No. Well, I didn’t think there were going to be these. But. Em, I know you must hate me …’
‘I don’t hate you,’ she said, but in the manner of an actress testing a line to see if it rang true.
‘But … look … these allegations … it’s one thing I didn’t even know had happened and one where something – not what she says but – something may have happened but I’m not proud of it and I, I … cleaned up my act afterwards. I swear I can’t think of anything in the last ten years that anyone could … unless they just made it up … what I’m saying is, there has to be a … a …’
‘Statute of limitations?’
‘What? No. Because there wasn’t anything legal, I mean illegal obviously … but there has to come a point when you judge people on how they are now not then …’
He tried to pull her to him but she shrugged him away. Not yet. When? Possibly never, but probably not. The atavistic instinct to keep her family together was less strong than it had been on the morning the police came – because this allegation affected her more directly – but she still felt an instinct to, as the newspapers always put it, ‘stand by’ him.
Why did the betrayed stay? The thought of starting again became more alarming the older you were, and with no guarantee of avoiding the same problem; she knew too many women who had taken refuge from one faithless fucker in the arms of another. And because the judgemental – a group that seemed to encompass whole countries these days – tended always to assume that the innocent party had somehow been at fault.
And because Ned’s plea chimed with an instinct of her own. How far – and how fa
r back – could the sins of the past be redeemed?
Whore Trawl
Because Wilhelmina Hessendon Castle was – the electoral register revealed – fifty-eight, opposition research was unlikely to throw up the defendant’s holy grail of her fellating alternate Ibizan waiters while a clearly female head is scarcely covered by her micro-skirt. If such scenes had been as common in the past as they seemed to be now, the early participants had the protection of not being shown from phone to phone moments afterwards.
Usefully, the first accuser’s unusual name made her a Googlewhack, meaning that Claire did not have to waste time reading about numerous irrelevant soundalikes around the world. The woman now lived in South-West London in what appeared to be a flat – there was a B beside the street number – with another occupant, in the 18–25 age category, called William Alexander Castle. A divorced or separated single mother, with – cf. her status as a friend on the Facebook page of Gemma Alexandra Castle, who seemed to be studying late-night drinking with a bit of light Psychology thrown in – a daughter at University.
Claire noted that WHC (her abbreviation in their case documentation) had become a mother relatively late. As a single woman of thirty-seven, this pleased her; as a lawyer, it raised the worry of the prosecution dramatizing a plaintiff who struggled to form relationships because of an early sexual trauma.
The alleged victim had been, either side of the Millennium, a director of two companies – Castle Technology Ltd and Castle Technical Solutions – in which the other director was Alexander Peter Castle. A 192.com for him revealed that he [60–65] lived in Holland Park with Sally Jane Castle [30–35] and Alexandra Jane Castle. Who’s Who confirmed that his m 1st, 1989 to Wilhelmina Dawson (née Hessendon) had produced 1s, 1d before, after (marr. diss. 2008), his m 2nd, 2009 to Sally (née Botting), with its resulting 1d.
To Claire’s surprise, the Facebook page for the first Mrs Castle still had a public profile, suggesting that her solicitor was either old-fashioned or naive about opposition tactics. The lines for relationship status and birth-date were both blank, the second omission possibly a response to the first. The friends with column lacked what would have been the jackpot – Jessamy Pothick – and contained no other overlaps that obviously spoke to motivation or collusion.
The photos were mainly of a boy, in poses graduating from tricycle to motorbike, and a girl whose journey took her from pony to polo pony to VW Polo. There were only three snaps of the page-holder herself, of which the most recent showed her smiling shyly, alone with a glass of white wine at a table with sparkling sea and Med-like light behind. Claire would have given a lot – and, in a crime novel, would have handed that amount over to a private detective – to know who took the photo.
Claire mentally transferred this person, minus the wine and sun glasses, to the witness box. On the English class-by-glance test, WHC looked like a doctor or magistrate and from her listed interests – theatre, gardening, reading – probably sounded like one as well. She was the sort of rape complainant whom the defence rather than the prosecution wanted to give evidence from behind a screen.
It would fall to an intern or work-experiencer to read through the Facebook conversations pages, in the small hope of finding a succession of postings praising the historical documentaries of her old friend Prof. Ned, but Claire’s skim-inspection found nothing. The most frequent exchanges involved one friend who shared photos of rescue dogs and cats and another who seemed to spend much of her time as a volunteer taking the sick and disabled to Lourdes. Neither of these was what you were hoping for on a whore-trawl. And Google threw up only local newspaper reports of fruit and vegetable prizes at gardening fairs and some book reviews (Mantel, Waters, Barnes, Rendell, Kingsolver, Haddon) on the website of a Notting Hill reading group. Claire thought of the old-school QCs who would have seized on a liking for Tipping the Velvet to suggest to the jury that the witness was a closet lesbian, but such tactics were thankfully over.
After two hours, she had found nothing destructive. She was professionally disappointed, personally relieved.
The Literature of False Accusation (3)
Summary: In a ‘certain city’ in early 1974, twenty-seven-year-old Katharina Blum – who works as a housekeeper for an elderly couple and as an occasional freelance caterer – turns up at the doorstep of the Crime Commissioner, who is dressed as a sheik for a fancy-dress party, and confesses to having shot dead that day, in her apartment, Werner Totges, a reporter for the sensational local daily, the News.
Four days previously, Katharina, a young divorcee, attended a party where she seduced / was seduced by – asked by police if he ‘fucked’ her, she replies, ambiguously, ‘I wouldn’t call it that’ – a young man called Ludwig Gotten, who, it turns out, is a political radical on the run from cops who consider him a suspect in murders and a bank robbery. Reporting the story of Gotten’s liaison and escape, the News accuses Katharina of being red (politically), scarlet (sexually) and destined (theologically) for the white-hot flames of hell.
These Werner Totges exclusives draw on interviews with Katharina’s elderly and unwell mother and her splenetic exhusband to create a portrait of a Marxist – her late father, his pastor confides, was a notorious Communist – whore, who, apart from the one-night stand with a left-wing criminal, was also conducting an affair with Straubleder, a married man.
Reader Review: At 140 pages, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum occupied Ned for only part of a sleepless night. Heinrich Böll was obviously influenced by Kafka – an alternative opening might easily have been: ‘Somebody must have been telling lies about Katharina Blum’ – but with the twist that this protagonist willingly offers herself for trial on an irrefutable charge of murder, although Böll clearly directs the reader to indict her only of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished reputation.
While some of the nuances of German politics of the period must elude an English reader – such as Böll’s repeated ironic refrain about living ‘in a free country’ – there was an obvious suggestion that the tabloid press were the new Nazis or a West German Stasi. One incidental pleasure for Ned was the conviction that he had spotted the inspiration for a favourite film, the East German surveillance movie The Lives of Others, in the passage where the narrator wonders: ‘What goes on in the “psyche” of the wiretapper? … Does he find himself in a state of moral or sexual excitement, or both? Does he become indignant, feel pity or even derive some weird pleasure?’ But he was also startled by the novella’s contemporary English relevance: phone-hacking is used by both the state and newspapers and one reason for suspicion of the young woman is that her apartment is considered improbably luxurious for someone of her means, a standard journalistic innuendo still.
What most impressed Ned, though, was the narrative arc. Most readers would suspect – and most writers decide – that the logic of the destruction of Katharina’s reputation must be suicide, but Böll, perhaps aware that this outcome simply gives the journalists another front page, subjects Katharina’s destroyer to homicide. Ned saw himself handcuffed outside the house of Billy Hessendon or Jess Pothick, holding out, like the guy who shot John Lennon, a battered paperback as explanation.
Whore Trawl (2)
There were four Jess Pothicks in the online world, one a junior minister in the New Zealand government, another a student in Hawaii and a third teaching high school in Idaho. So, from location alone, Jess Pothick, 34, London, was obviously the one and her professional status line – freelance researcher-writer-producer, TV – confirmed it. Her dating data read in a relationship with Jeremy Milligan, whom search engines revealed to be a freelance director-producer with a list of credits including Ned’s history of Britain and the Elizabeths film.
Emma made a note of his name with a query beside it. Ned had intermittently reported rows during shoots – usually over the director wanting him to wear, say or do something stupid – and, if Milligan felt wronged or his career blocked, then it was possible that a nerve had been touched wh
en his girlfriend mentioned a connection with the presenter. The next thought – which she tried to ignore – was that Ned and this Jeremy had competed for women when they worked together and that the director was horrified by the retrospective discovery that they had both fucked his new beloved.
Ned had refused to tell her the surname of the second complainant but there was no password protection on the new cheap laptop in his workroom (the police refused to say how long their Macs would be held), which might be taken as confirmation of his claim to be faithful now. When he was out at an appointment with Dr Rafi, she had found the details she needed in a Strictly Private and Confidential e-mail from the solicitor.
Even allowing for the fact that a person’s cover photo on Facebook will be carefully posed and chosen, Jess Pothick was dismayingly attractive: shoulder-length blonde (not obviously bottle) hair, tanned (not obviously spray) skin, wide, kind-eyed smile and, out of shot, that infuriatingly tight, childless vagina. And, when she had done it (whatever it was) with Ned, she had been a decade younger, unless this picture was from then (a minor perjury by online standards) but would that be better or worse? Emma stared at the picture and tried to see in it a twenty-four-year-old woman who had cunningly seduced a pissed fifty-year-old man.
Most of Jess Pothick’s friends on Facebook were men and women of about her age, huddled over wine bottles lined up like skittles, pulling silly drunken faces made demonic by flash red eye. A more unexpected find in the friend line was Dominic Ogg, who identified himself as an award-winning TV producer above a cover photo in which he beamed in a tuxedo while making an X with two BAFTA trophies. Emma added Ogg? to her notes.