He looked briefly sideways at me then turned the key in the ignition. “You’ll be ok,” he said tersely. “You’re tough.” He glanced into his mirror and changed into first gear. “But I need to warn you,” he added, “that the public gallery is stuffed full of journalists for your evidence. It was for mine too. I’m the Muslim male who turned on his own community, and you’re the heroic blonde who hounded the gangs down when no-one else was willing to. So give a good account of yourself – because it’s going to be splashed all over the media.”
I thought of Williams and their constant need for good coverage and I groaned inwardly. This was such bad timing, right at the end of my internship. They may decide on the basis of this not to employ me at the end of my six months with them. They may consider me a publicity risk.
Back at the Acharyas’ I retreated to my room and rang Mr. Heskett at home on his mobile.
“The media are going to completely sensationalise the trial I’m involved with,” I warned him in miserable tones. “Starting maybe with tomorrow’s papers, so you’d better warn the department who look after the media coverage to keep their eyes peeled, including the local Lancashire papers and regional news programmes on TV.”
And then I crashed out on my bed for an hour until Chetsi called me and insisted I come out to eat with them. And then I went to bed and slept the sleep of exhaustion for some hours until I started tossing and turning with nightmares towards morning. And then it started all over again.
“So Ms. McGinty,” Mohammed’s defence lawyer launched in. “Show us that large scar on your upper arm.”
I looked stonily at him for a moment. I had an idea where he may be going with this. Then I slowly took off my jacket and pulled up the sleeve so the court could see the long puckered white scar that was slashed across my upper arm. Then I rolled down my sleeve and put my jacket back on.
“Would you like to tell the court how you got that scar?”
“When I was sixteen, Augustino , the bouncer that Hussein used to hang out with, slashed me with a switchblade.”
“Why was that?”
“Because someone told him I’d done something that I hadn’t,” I said carefully.
“From what I hear, you’d stolen drugs from Luke Beck and they were trying to get them back…”
I frowned. “No, that’s not true. I’ve never possessed or taken drugs. But someone told them that I’d stolen their drugs.”
“But you knew these men because you’d already gone out with Luke Beck when you were only sixteen, hadn’t you? Despite him being much older than you.”
“Very briefly, maybe three or four times. I was hoping he’d let me take his GPZ 900 apart,” I explained.
“GPZ 900?” The lawyer repeated vaguely.
“Nice motorbike,” I translated for him. Someone in the courtroom laughed and then tried to hide it with a cough.
“So you slept with him so that you could have a go on his motorbike?” The lawyer said.
“No,” I said patiently. I could also guess where this was going and I was going to nip it in the bud. “I never slept with him, and I didn’t want to ‘have a go on it’ – I was too light to be able to steer it round a steep corner – I merely wanted a chance to take it apart and put it together again.”
There was a short silence from the lawyer while he stared at me like I was an alien from outer space. “Come on, of course you slept with him!” He said at last, as though he could understand that sort of talk better.
“No, I didn’t.” I re-iterated firmly. “He wouldn’t let me take his bike apart, he was a misogynistic git and indulged in such classic lines as, I don’t respect the weaker sex, I just find it awfully convenient that they’re weaker than me, understand?” I put on a Neanderthal sounding thicko voice and a few people tittered in the gallery. “So if you don’t realise that’s a big signal to get out of his orbit, then you’re a bit stupid aren’t you?”
The lawyer gave up on that one as a lost cause.
“So, tell us what you did to Augustino?” The lawyer restarted.
I sighed. “Ok, so when Tino knifed me, I ran away. I hooked up with my neighbour, Adam Quinn,” (I noticed that whenever I mentioned Quinn’s name, a ripple would go around the court. I wondered how many in the gallery were fans of Full Frontal and come along to glean titbits), “and we drove off on Quinn’s bike. But Tino and Sy Davis followed us. Sy Davis in a Lexus and Tino on a bike. Tino caught up with us and attacked us again with his switchblade – so in self-defence I pulled out a penknife and stabbed him.”
“So you too, carried a knife?” The lawyer established.
“It wasn’t my knife, I was wearing Quinn’s jacket, but it was a legal penknife that he used for his work.”
“And then you ran away and left Augustino to die.”
“No, when I saw that he was potentially fatally injured, I rang an ambulance because I didn’t intend to kill him, I was just attempting to prevent him stabbing us, and then I ran away,” I corrected. “And the paramedics arrived in time to save him.”
“And yet you were convicted of Grievous Bodily Harm for this and served a year’s sentence for it…” The lawyer pointed out.
“Yes, I served a year’s Community Supervision Order with one hundred and fifty hours community service,” I agreed calmly. “Which was the best thing that could have happened to me, as the volunteer work with Learning Disabled adults that I was assigned to do, expanded my horizons no end.”
The lawyer turned away and turned back. “So we’ve already established that you had a much older boyfriend when you were sixteen. And after that you had multiple partners?”
I frowned. “No. I’ve only ever had two partners.”
“I didn’t say ‘relationships’ – I meant sexual partners.”
“I’ve only ever had two sexual partners, both of them in the context of a long term relationship.” I insisted firmly.
“And who were they?”
“Pete Satterthwaite and Nathan Tyler.”
“And how much older were they than you?”
“Pete was eight years older and Tyler was seventeen years older,” I reported. Another little ripple went round.
“And so you slept with Satterthwaite in return for him loaning you his…” he glanced dubiously down at his notes and said uncertainly, “Formula Two Stock Car. And slept with Tyler in return for him giving you his Championship winning Formula Two car.”
I was getting the hang of this. “No, that’s incorrect,” I set him right in a deliberately condescending tone. “When Pete broke his leg, he let me use his cars until he got better, long before we were in a relationship. And I paid £4,000 for Tyler’s old car, months before we got into a relationship.”
“Four thousand pounds!” The lawyer made it sound a complete fortune. “How on earth could a young girl afford that sort of money?”
“I was eighteen, I’d been working full time for two years, and I was offered a photo shoot job for a magazine that paid for at least half of it.”
“Ah ha!” He said triumphantly. “Now we get to the nub of it! You were starring in a documentary for ITV at the time and were raking in the money from the associated fame and you missed that when the documentary stopped, didn’t you? So you thought you’d make yourself famous again by making up this farrago of nonsense and getting it on TV.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I only got one associated job out of the documentary. I grew to hate being in the public eye and refused point blank to take part in the follow up programme that they did when Tyler died.”
“In that case, if you hate publicity so much, why did you take part in a series for ITV in the autumn of the year you allege all these crimes? How can we possibly believe that you weren’t still craving the limelight?”
I shrugged. “None of the cowardly local newspapers would help me to investigate the reports of the systematic rapes of local school girls, so I rang up ITV to ask if they had an investigative reporting team who could help me
. Their condition for putting me in touch with one, was that I did that dumb show with Quinn. Up until that point I’d always refused their suggestions that I do a new series with Quinn.”
“A show in which you were happy to take all your clothes off to get attention!”
“I suppose you’re referring to the time I jumped in the harbour?” I said in as dismissive a tone as I could manage. “Quinn dared me to do it, and promised he’d jump in with me. But it turned out he’d just done it to play a trick on me, and he got out and left me there in the water knowing perfectly well I’d rather drown than get out naked in front of the cameras.”
“So it seems to me, that even your own life shows that it is quite natural for young girls to be attracted to older men to see what they can get out of them in return for sex, is that not so?”
“No,” I denied sharply. “All you have established, is that I’m a car mechanic and a racing driver that hangs out with other car mechanics and racing drivers, within which circles it is a normal practice to loan out and sell cars to each other.” And then I added. “Plus I was seventeen when I started going out with Satterthwaite, long after the age of consent.”
“Is it true that when Mohammed asked you what you wanted, you asked to drive his car?”
I smiled slightly. “Yes. He kept asking me what I wanted, and of course I didn’t want anything from him, and then I forgot that I was meant to be fourteen and said I’d like to drive his car. And then when he laughed at me, I remembered that my Ellie character wouldn’t have a driving licence yet, so of course he couldn’t let me. And I had to remember that Ellie didn’t know anything about mechanics so I had to pretend not to notice the glaring fault when he lifted the bonnet to show me the engine.”
“So has Mohammed got a nice car?” The Lawyer asked in one of those oily leading question tones.
“Yes,” I confirmed. “A Porsche Cayman.”
He glanced in a self-satisfied way back down at his notes and I felt an urge to wind him up a bit more.
“Three four three six cc, six cylinder, two hundred and eighty pound per foot at four seven five zero revolutions per minute, four hundred and seventy nine pound per foot at one seven five zero revolutions per minute,” I rattled off relentlessly at him. “Six speed manual, nought to sixty two miles per hour in four point nine seconds, one hundred and seventy seven miles per hour top speed and thirty one point four miles per gallon.”
He stared at me. “Would you care to translate that?”
I smiled slowly at him. “Middle range performance car.” Then I tipped my head deliberately on one side and added in a silly girl’s voice, “green.” Someone in the gallery smothered a snort.
“So actually,” he recovered, after an annoyed look in the direction of the gallery and yet another glance down at his papers, “you went out with Mohammed because you wanted to get your hands on his car, and when he wouldn’t let you drive it, you took your revenge by accusing him of sexual trafficking.”
I smiled at him. “Even you don’t sound awfully convinced by that,” I commented dryly. “You had to look down at your notes to remind yourself of which piece of nonsense you were going to throw at me next!”
He looked coldly at me. “And you were so angry that he wouldn’t let you drive his car that you smashed it up.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t know what you mean…”
“You deliberately drove at his car in another vehicle at high speed and forced him off the road.”
“Ah,” I said, as though suddenly enlightened. “You mean that time after he started texting those threats to me that he knew where I lived, and he knew where I worked, and he knew where my family lived? You mean that time when he arrived at my place of work and started following me and my colleague Jo Satterthwaite in his green middle of the range performance car? And then maybe you are referring to the fact that when I was driving along a dual carriageway quite fast with him following right up my bumper, I slammed on my brakes suddenly to teach him not to crowd me so much?”
The lawyer looked annoyed. “Mohammed claims that you also ran him off the road and drove straight at him from the other way on a fast road in town.”
“I don’t remember it like that,” I said sweetly. “I certainly drove the other way down a fast road that he was travelling along in the opposite direction, but if he’s such a bad driver he can’t stay on his side of the white line, I can’t help that, can I?”
I looked across at Mohammed and met his eyes. We stared at each other for a moment or two and then I saw his lips quivering. He’s trying not to get the giggles, I thought. I blinked hard and bit my lip and glanced away before he set me off.
“You seem to have gone to some lengths to get the attention of Mohammed,” the lawyer suggested. “It seems as though you must have been quite attracted to him?”
“Are you asking me a question or idly speculating?” I asked dryly.
“I am suggesting that you were attracted to Mohammed and wanted his attention. Were you attracted to him?”
I thought about it. “I didn’t really think about it. He was just the one who first picked me up. But when he wasn’t threatening me or forcing me to do things that I didn’t want to, he was quite fun. He has a lively sense of humour.”
“He has a lively sense of humour?” The lawyer echoed as though he didn’t recognise that statement. He glanced at me as though he hadn’t expected that answer.
“Yeah, he was very observant and always teasing me about everything. He seemed to find me highly hilarious.” I looked across at Mohammed again and met his eyes. Mohammed smiled slightly.
“And yet you issued death threats to him?” The lawyer said coldly.
I sighed again. “I suppose you are talking about the occasion when Mohammed turned up at the isolated garage in the middle of the moors where I keep my cars, at eleven at night when I was completely on my own, after threatening me by text message? Yes, I did warn him that if he laid a finger on me, I’d kill him.”
The lawyer raised his eyebrows. “That is quite extreme. Would you have actually carried out your threat?”
I shrugged. “If he’d attacked me, I’d have had a damn good go at it,” I agreed. “But I had a panic alarm and a GPS locator on me, so I figured it was unlikely to get to those extremes as I’d already set the alarm off and the police were already on their way.”
The lawyer paused and looked down at his notes again. Did I win that one? I thought.
“So now you’re onto your next target…” He said as though it was a done and dusted fact. “You’re sticking to the same old pattern. You’ve moved down South, taken up a job with Williams Race Engineering, and started sleeping with Anish Gilbraith, the half Pakistani Formula One driver who has just signed with the Williams race team who owns a Ferrari, and you’re already on his driving licence.”
A big excited ripple went round certain parts of the audience at this titbit.
I pushed my hair behind my ears while I gathered myself to deal with this one. I had to see this off with complete dignity, to prevent his slimy assumptions getting into the papers.
“Nish is British, just like Mohammed is,” I said carefully. “But his mother was born in Pakistan. Yes, he owns a Ferrari Four Eight Eight Gran Turismo Berlinetta – top of the range racing sports car, red,” I added, with a condescending nod towards the lawyer which caused Mohammed’s lips to twitch again which made me like him even more. Maybe if he hadn’t been a vicious paedophile, we might have got along? “But I’m not in a relationship with him, nor am I sleeping with him,” I lied. “He is merely a work colleague that I was asked to chauffeur about at a time when he was very ill with glandular fever. And I was also asked to help him get back into his fitness training in readiness for the coming season.”
The lawyer looked hard at me. “So is he attractive?”
“Yes,” I said truthfully. “The magazines are going to love him…”
“And yet you are not sleeping with him?” The la
wyer sounded cynical.
“That would be very unprofessional,” I pointed out coolly.
“Or is it because you’re actually extremely racist, and you couldn’t bring yourself to sleep with a Pakistani man, which is why you’re keeping your distance from Gilbraith, and making up fantastical lies to ruin the lives of these men standing before you, and holding Sahmir in thrall to you, promising to put out with him if he’ll go along with your stories and pretend to corroborate them?”
I laughed. “You’re the fantasist my friend,” I asserted. “You can believe what you want, but I’ve been telling the truth about everything I’ve seen and heard, and so has Sahmir.”
At the end of the day I sat exhausted in the private witnesses’ room. Ms. Jones had followed me in.
“Did I do ok?” I asked wearily.
She smiled. “You did ok.”
“I couldn’t tell what he was trying to do,” I complained. “He kept twisty turny changing directions, and seemed to have something sly prepared to say whichever way I reacted.”
“He was trying to discredit you. Trying to get you so angry that you’d say something unwise that sounded racist. And trying to throw up a smokescreen about your motivations so that the jury would forget what the actual evidence is.”
“And has he succeeded?” I asked anxiously.
She shrugged. “Obviously I can’t say for sure, but it seemed as though the jurors liked you. You had them rolling in the aisles at times. They didn’t look particularly taken in…”
“So, tomorrow?” I asked tiredly.
“More of the same,” she informed me bluntly. “Until we’ve got through all eleven. But since your main evidence is against Mohammed, and you’ve told the court you can’t identify some of the men for sure, I don’t think it’s going to take much time. Who knows, you might be stood down by the end of tomorrow. At any rate, it’s clearly going to be over from your point of view by the end of Friday.”
The Way Back Page 25