I turned round. “Jo!” I exclaimed delightedly. Then, “haven’t you two ever met?”
Jo shook her head. She took a couple of steps inside and made a brusque nod in Taib’s direction. She seemed out of place here in the elegant flat with a pair of doctors. Sort of stocky with excruciatingly short hair, a nose piercing that her previous girlfriend had persuaded her into against her better judgement, and her hands covered with oil.
“You need to come back with me and talk to Mum,” she announced without preamble. “I walked in and found her sobbing her heart out at the kitchen table saying you wouldn’t talk to her.”
“She asked me in for a cup of tea, and I said I needed to go,” I defended. “I can’t see how that constitutes refusing to talk to her!”
“Well, come back with me now and let’s get all this sorted out,” Jo said abruptly.
“No,” I refused sharply.
“Yes,” she insisted fiercely.
“What the hell good will it do?” I attacked.
“She wants to apologise to you!” Jo exclaimed impatiently.
“That’s not going to bring the horse back! That’s not going to put the clock back! That’s not going to give me my life back!” I turned away sharply.
Chetsi was still standing patiently holding the door open. Now she closed it. “How about I make us all a drink and you two explain to me what’s been happening, and we have a go at solving it?”
Jo looked uncomfortable, but perched herself awkwardly on the extreme edge of the sofa in that body language that implies I’m not stopping long.
I slumped back into the far corner of it and pulled my knees up defensively.
“Thing is, Eve,” Jo plunged on, ignoring Chetsi. “Mum can’t forgive herself. She knows she was in the wrong.”
I sniffed, and said nothing.
“Listen, Eve,” she leant forward intently. “She said that when you ran out of the barn that night, she guessed you were going back for Baby and she somehow believed that you’d manage it, and when you didn’t, she absolutely hated you for it and felt like you’d deliberately let Baby die to spite her.”
I listened without meeting Jo’s eye.
“And she was saying this to me in front of Pete and Dad, and Pete went ballistic and said he’d caught you plunging into a wall of flame and had to rugby tackle you to stop you because you’d never have survived, and he’d had to hold you down until Baby stopped screaming-” Even pragmatic Jo had to stop to swallow hard at that point. “And then Dad told Mum that you were so gutted about Baby that you kept saying you wished you’d died with her, that you deserved to die, and that Pete should have let you go into the flames to make the attempt. And then Mum just cried and cried, and finally admitted that the reason she left Baby there was because she was so ruddy jealous of you that even to save Baby’s life she couldn’t bring herself to ask you to lead her out at the very beginning when we could have saved her. Even though she knew that Baby would have followed you anywhere! And she knows that Baby would still be alive if she’d let you take her, and she can’t forgive herself for it.”
“Help me out here,” Chetsi said, handing us a mug each and sitting down in the armchair opposite us, “who’s Baby?”
Jo stared blankly at her as though she didn’t see why Chetsi had any right to get involved. There was a short, prickly pause. “Babbington Sentinel,” she informed her at last. “Mum’s absolutely favourite and most valuable horse.”
“Thank goodness!” Chetsi smiled at her. “I was beginning to imagine infanticide!”
Jo’s expression conveyed her supreme indifference to Chetsi’s social advances.
“Mohammed’s lot,” I intervened, “firebombed the stables up at the Satterthwaites after he was arrested. We got all of the livery horses out safely, but not Sue’s own one.” It helped me to put it coldly like that. It kept it at arms’ length.
Chetsi looked aghast. “I had absolutely no idea!”
“And then Paul banned me from the premises and sent me as far away as he possibly could,” I reported resentfully.
“For your own safety!” Jo eyes flashed momentary fire in defence on her father. “And as a career development thing. Admit it! You’re doing great now! I bet you wouldn’t come back to Entwistle’s now even if he got on bended knee and promised you a proper living wage for once!”
I said nothing. She was annoyingly right. Paul had implemented a vision for my life that I couldn’t, with my limited experience of what had been on offer so far, have ever even dreamed of. And I was loving it.
“I don’t think it’s the right time for Eve to be facing a lot of emotional upset, just before the trial,” Chetsi said kindly to Jo. “Just tell your mother that you’ve spoken to her and that she’ll come back some time at a later date when things aren’t so fraught…”
Jo looked swiftly at me. “Oh,” she said. “It hadn’t occurred to me why you’d suddenly come home. Now I understand…”
After Jo left, I found myself apologising to Chetsi. “I’m sorry, she doesn’t ‘do’ smiley. Her hackles instantly go up.” And then I inwardly laughed at myself. Me? Care about social conventions? Living down South was getting to me. I’d be developing a taste for avocados next.
Chetsi took me to the Crown Court. She said I had a right to have someone supporting me through the initial interview and came in with me. We went in by way of a special Victims and Witnesses door to kept us away from the accused and their families, and were taken to a waiting area that was also kept especially separate. The prosecution co-ordinator took us to a private room and asked me to re-read the statements I’d made to the police. Chetsi kicked up a fuss about them not having prepared me properly. For not having given me a chance to be shown round the court and so forth. The woman seemed uninterested. “She didn’t keep us informed of her changes of address. The last known address we had for her was in somewhere in Italy. By the time we’d tracked her down it was too late.”
“But she’ll be behind a screen, right?” Chetsi established.
The woman just stared at her. “Those sort of special measures have to be applied for in advance, it’s too late now.”
“That’s unacceptable!” Chetsi said angrily.
The woman shrugged. “She’s an adult and she wasn’t abused by the men. She’s not considered vulnerable so it wasn’t considered necessary.”
“She’s been threatened,” Chetsi insisted.
“A screen won’t make any difference to that,” the woman said dismissively. “They all know who’s testifying. She can use the separate entrances and exits. Police are in attendance every day outside the Courthouse due to the daily protests and disturbances. And she can apply to the police for protection to and from the courtroom if she needs to.”
I glanced at Chetsi at the mention of daily protests and disturbances. I’d had no idea. Sahmir was right – I’d set off a hornets nest and then just buggered off to leave everyone else to deal with the resulting mess. I hadn’t even bothered to check up online, or get the local newspapers sent to me. I hadn’t even known the trials had started until Sahmir turned up.
“So which of the accused will be in court?” Chetsi asked.
“Mohammed Noorzai, Hussein Malik,” the woman said and then went on to name several names that I didn’t recognise before mentioning Faraz Iqbal, the town councillor, who I knew was Zahoor Umrani’s Uncle and Abid Qureshi, a name which I vaguely remembered had been mentioned in connection with the other middle-aged geezer I’d been made to watch getting his rocks off. At such a long list of names I just froze.
“I thought I was here to just testify against Mohammed!” I protested, suddenly panic stricken.
The woman raised her eyebrows. “Your evidence impacts on eleven cases and they can’t use your camera and audio recordings in court. The police were able to watch and listen to them and analyse them in order to construct the cases against the men that you captured on your recordings, but now you need to go in and affirm to th
e jury in person, all the events you witnessed.”
Eleven cases? Eleven hostile glaring men across the court from me and maybe some of their families in the public galleries?
She saw my dismayed expression and continued in more kindly tones. “You’ll need to prepare yourself for some very aggressive questioning from their eleven defending barristers. You need to concentrate on not getting riled or upset and stay calm and in control of your evidence at all times. Don’t get tricked into any wild statements or things that aren’t precisely true. All the defence teams have copies of your original statements to the police and will swiftly spot any discrepancy. That’s why you are being given the opportunity to re-read your own statements to remind yourself of what you originally said. Your first day in court will be the easiest as it will be the prosecution interviewing you in a sympathetic way to enable you to lay out everything you have witnessed in a clear and detailed way without someone else trying to interrupt or twist it.”
“So I’m not going into court today?” I latched on to. “I thought I was…”
She glanced significantly at the statements lying in front of me in a huge pile, the length of a small novel. “You’ll need the rest of today to re-read those… You’ll probably be called tomorrow. Although I need to warn you,” she added, “that courts can be subject to sudden last minute changes and hold ups. So you’ll just have to arrive here tomorrow at nine and wait, and you may or may not get called in, and it may or may not be at the beginning of the day. Once you start it will go on for however many days it takes, unless there is some objection made by one of the barristers, and then there may be a break while whatever it is gets sorted out. If that happens you may be sent away until it’s sorted, which depending on what it is, could be a matter of hours, days or weeks. You are not allowed into the court sessions in the public gallery, until after you have given every piece of evidence and have been officially stood down as a witness by the Judge. Then you can join the public gallery to watch the rest of the case if you wish.”
I shuddered. Why on earth would I want to do that? “How long do you estimate I will be needed for?” I asked anxiously, thinking of Heskett’s annoyed expression and Alan’s compressed lips.
She shrugged. “I’d say at least a week. But it depends how much questioning the defence makes, and how many objections to procedures they raise. All the defendants are pleading ‘not guilty’, so the full court process has to be engaged. Every tiny piece of evidence one way or the other has to be chewed over at length, so it’ll go on for as long as it goes on for. That’s what court cases are like…”
She left me and Chetsi alone in the room with the documents.
I looked at Chetsi. “Is this what happened to Sahmir?” I asked in a small voice. “Did he have to face the whole lot of them at once?”
She nodded soberly. “And a lot of them were men with whom he’d been previously acquainted. Who lived locally to him, or who went to the same mosque.”
That made sense, I supposed. The various branches would group themselves according to locality and prior friendship networks. Poor, poor, Sahmir, I thought. And I’d been so dismissive and unsupportive of him when he came down to see me! He’d been in deep distress and I’d shrugged it off as attention seeking. What a cow I was!
Chetsi left me reading the statements and went back into work. I’d finished by three and was then at a loose end. So I rang for a taxi and told the driver to take me to Entwistle’s Garage.
The men were touchingly pleased to see me. Steve Bolton, Tony, and even crusty old Dewhurst, the head mechanic, all rushed up and gave me a hug. Entwistle came out of his office and shook my hand. Jo stood back and smiled.
“Oh, no!” I suddenly realised as they wrapped their oily arms around me and clapped me on the shoulder with greased up hands, “I’m in my court clothes, guys, please back off!”
“She does rather look like a headmistress,” Steve grinned.
I was wearing the only set of ‘professional’ clothes that I possessed, that Chetsi had helped me buy a couple of years ago for Paul to trail me round Motorsport Constructor stands at the Birmingham Autosport International Show, to which end I know understood – he was pimping me out for an internship somewhere.
They found a chair inside the workshop and lay a nearly clean cloth over it, and I sat there like the Queen holding court, with my knees kept primly together and my hands folded in my lap.
“Brew break!” Dewhurst had announced and glanced at Entwistle who nodded, and even hung around himself to join in the interrogation about every detail of life inside the Williams factory and all the latest upgrades on the cars.
“It doesn’t seem quite right to see Eve sitting there looking like a librarian while talking in mathematical detail about KERS and DRS,” Tony laughed.
They got on to my Championship attempt.
“We were gutted we weren’t there!” Steve told me.
“Jo claimed you had the proverbial snowball’s chance, driving from the back,” Dewhurst explained reproachfully, “and told us not to bother to come. And then when she came back saying you’d made it to the podium, we were kicking ourselves!”
A number of accusing pairs of eyes turned on Jo. She spread her hands apologetically. “You’re right, I should have known she’d put on a good show…”
The talk turned to court. “You make sure you get those complete bastards put away,” they instructed me robustly. “We can’t believe all this crap has been going on in this town! Someone needs to clean it up and keep our kids safe!”
It suddenly felt good to feel I had some generalised support from the ordinary town folk. I’d been so used to feeling like the boo hiss racist baddie, and feeling under pressure to couch any discussion of the abuse in conciliating language, that I’d almost lost sight of the fact that these were a bunch of vicious, misogynistic, violent, unrepentant paedophiles that needed putting away.
Just as I got up to go and was making my good-byes, a car drew up on the forecourt and Quinn got out. My heart gave a sudden uneven beat at the shock of suddenly seeing him, and he stopped short and stared at me.
“She’s up for the trial,” Jo explained to him.
“I’m staying with Chetsi,” I added to let him know where to find me.
He nodded abruptly then looked at Entwistle. “I just dropped by to sort out what shifts I can do for you next week.”
“Come to the office then,” Entwistle said to him, and they walked off across the forecourt without Quinn even giving me a second glance. I stared after him. What was that about? Had I upset him in some way? He hadn’t texted me since leaving for America and I’d just assumed he was busy, but come to think of it, Nish always seemed to have ‘just heard’ from him if he ever cropped up in conversation. I racked my brains to see how I might have offended him, but I just couldn’t come up with anything.
I asked Chetsi what ‘riled’ meant.
“Irritable and angry,” she explained.
She dropped me off at the witness and victims’ door. “Just stick to the truth. Don’t let them draw you into any opinions. Don’t use any swear words.”
I wished she could come in with me but she had important meetings today. She waved encouragingly at me as I stood forlornly on the steps watching her drive away. Then I looked around me and was shocked to see all the police lined up in a semi-circle guarding the steps. If it hadn’t borne on me yesterday what I was letting myself in for, it was definitely beginning to sink in now.
Inside I was swept up by the woman who’d spoken to me yesterday, “You ready for this?” She asked briskly.
I shook my head, my stomach suddenly cramping up. She looked measuringly at me. “Deep breaths,” she advised. “She’s good. She really is. She’ll ask you all the right questions to bring out the simple baseline story.”
It had been explained to me that this was the first time these particular eleven had been in court at the same time, as each girl’s evidence impacted on a different se
t of men. So it took some time of shuffling and re-arranging for all eleven to get seated with their barristers in front of them. This all went on behind me and I kept my eyes fixed firmly downwards, feeling sick and my heart pounding in my chest so hard I wondered if I was going to faint. I wasn’t even sure who some of them were going to turn out to be as I hadn’t recognised their names. I hadn’t slept at all well last night, but I wasn’t in any danger of dropping off now with all this adrenaline coursing through me. I was aware of people up in the public gallery coming in and sitting down, fidgeting about and whispering. As if it weren’t bad enough to be facing the court and the men, there’d be an audience of journalists and possibly family members of the men looking down on me.
A bit like being in a strange church service, there was standing and sitting and standing again. The judge had one of those white wigs on, just like on TV. It didn’t feel real. Ok, I thought, I’ll pretend I’m an actor in a film. After all, it wasn’t me it happened to, it was my alter-ego, Ellie. I’d distance myself from all this, separate out. My best bet of staying safe, I reminded myself, was to get every one of these men put away for a long time, which meant staying calm and being a convincing, trustworthy witness. I tried to think how I dealt with anxiety before a race. I wasn’t sure how I did it. I just seemed to throw my mind ahead to the finish line and vividly imagine passing under the chequered flag in first place. So I sat there momentarily imagining the judge putting on a black cap and intoning guilty eleven times – until I remembered that that was from some Victorian melodrama and the black cap meant the death sentence. But perhaps it didn’t do me any disservice, as I momentarily verged on getting the giggles, which helped me lighten up no end.
The moment came when I was asked to come and stand in the witness box. I kept my head high and my shoulders back, but inside I was shitting myself. How had I got myself into this position for goodness sake? I’d been lulled into a false sense of security by the year long wait for the trial. I’d got to the point of imagining that I’d never be called because they wouldn’t need me, there’d be so many other witnesses, and they had all my recorded evidence. But that was dumb of me. Of course I was one of the most important witnesses – an adult who hadn’t been abused by them, who had witnessed abuse taking place – I was independent.
The Way Back Page 23