To my father, Chris
With love.
He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty.
Though perhaps not guilty as charged.
Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
KATE
2 December 2016
One
My wig slumps on my desk where I have tossed it. A beached jellyfish. Out of court, I am careless with this crucial part of my wardrobe, showing it the opposite of what it should command: respect. Handmade from horsehair and worth nearly six hundred pounds, I want it to accrue the gravitas I sometimes fear I lack. For the hairline to yellow with perspiration, the tight, cream curls to relax. Nineteen years since being called to the Bar, my wig is still that of a conscientious new girl – not a barrister who has inherited it from her, or more usually his, father. That’s the sort of wig I want: one dulled with the patina of tradition, entitlement and age.
I kick off my shoes: black patent courts with gold braid on the front, shoes for a Regency fop; for Parliament’s Black Rod; or a female barrister who delights in the history, the rigmarole, the sheer ridiculousness of it all. Expensive shoes are important. Chatting with fellow counsel or clients, with ushers and police, we all look down from time to time so as not to appear confrontational. Anyone who glances at my shoes sees someone who understands this quirk of human psychology and who takes herself seriously. They see a woman who dresses as if she believes she will win.
I like to look the part, you see. To do things properly. Female barristers can wear a collarette: a scrap of cotton and lace that acts like a bib – a false front that goes just around the neck – and that costs around thirty pounds. Or they can dress as I do: a white collarless tunic with a collar attached by collar studs to the front and back. Cuff links. A black wool jacket and skirt or trousers; and – depending on their success and seniority – a black wool or wool and silk gown.
I’m not wearing all of that now. I have shed part of my disguise in the robing room of the Bailey. Robes off. Collar and cuffs undone; my medium-length blonde hair – tied back in a ponytail in court – released from its bobble; just a little mussed up.
I am more feminine, rid of my garb. With my wig on and my heavy-rimmed glasses, I know I look asexual. Certainly not attractive – though you may note my cheekbones: two sharp blades that emerged in my twenties and have hardened and sharpened, as I have hardened and sharpened, over the years.
I am more myself without the wig. More me. The me I am at heart, not the me I present to the court or any previous incarnations of my personality. This is me: Kate Woodcroft, QC; criminal barrister; member of the Inner Temple; a highly experienced specialist in prosecuting sexual crimes. Forty-two years old; divorced, single, childless. I rest my head in my hands for a moment and let a breath ease out of me in one long flow, willing myself just to give up for a minute. It’s no good. I can’t relax. I’ve a small patch of eczema on my wrist and I smear E45 cream there, resisting the desire to scratch it. To scratch at my dissatisfaction with life.
Instead, I look up at the high ceilings of my chambers. A set of rooms in an oasis of calm in the very heart of London. Eighteenth-century, with ornate cornicing, gold leaf around the ceiling rose and a view – through the towering sash windows – of Inner Temple’s courtyard and the round twelfth-century Temple Church.
This is my world. Archaic, anachronistic, privileged, exclusive. Everything I should – and normally would – profess to hate. And yet I love it. I love it because all this – this nest of buildings at the edge of the City, tucked off the Strand and flowing down towards the river; the pomp and the hierarchy; the status, history and tradition – is something I once never knew existed; and to which I never thought I could aspire. All of this shows how far I have come.
It’s the reason that, if I’m not with my colleagues, I slip a hot chocolate – with extra sachets of sugar – to the girl hunched in her sleeping bag in a doorway on the Strand whenever I grab a cappuccino. Most people won’t have noticed her. The homeless are good at being invisible or we are good at making them so: averting our eyes from their khaki sleeping bags; their grey faces and matted hair; their bodies bundled in oversized jumpers and their equally skinny wolfhounds as we scurry past on our way to the seductive glitz of Covent Garden or the cultural thrills of the South Bank.
But hang around any court for a while and you will see just how precarious life can be. How your world can come tumbling down all too rapidly if you make the wrong call: if, just for one fatal split second, you behave unlawfully. Or rather, if you are poor and you break the law. For courts, like hospitals, are magnets for those dealt a rough hand from the start of life; who choose the wrong men or the wrong mates and become so mired in bad fortune that they lose their moral compass. The rich aren’t quite as affected. Look at tax avoidance – or fraud, as it might be called if perpetrated by someone without the benefit of a skilled accountant. Bad luck – or lack of acumen – doesn’t seem to dog the rich quite as assiduously as the poor.
Oh, I’m in a bad mood. You can tell I’m in a bad mood when I start thinking like a student politician. Most of the time I keep my Guardian-reading tendencies to myself. They can sit oddly with the more traditional members of my chambers; make for heated discussions at formal dinners, as we eat the sort of mass-catered food you might get at weddings – chicken, or salmon en croute – and drink our equally mediocre wine. Far more diplomatic to limit oneself to legal gossip: which QC is receiving so little work they’re applying to be a Crown Court judge; who will next be made silk; who lost their cool with an usher in court. I can rattle through such conversations while thinking of my workload, fretting about my personal life, or even planning what to buy the next day for dinner. After nineteen years, I am adept at fitting in. I am skilled at that.
But in the sanctity of my room I can occasionally let myself go, just a little, and so, for a minute, I put my head in my hands on my mahogany partner’s desk; squeeze my eyes tight shut; and press my knuckles in hard. I see stars: white pinpricks that break the darkness and shine as bright as the diamonds in the ring I bought for myself – for no one else was going to buy it for me. Better to see these than to succumb to tears.
I’ve just lost a case. And though I know I will have got over the sense of failure by Monday; will move on for there are other cases to pursue, other clients to represent, still it rankles. It’s not something that often happens or which I like to admit to, because I like to win. Well, we all do. It’s only natural. We need it to ensure our careers continue to sparkle. And it’s the way our adversarial judicial system works.
I remember it came as a huge shock when I had this spelled out to me, early in my Bar training. I had gone into the law with high ideals – and I have retained some; I haven’t become overly jaded – but I hadn’t expected it to be so brutally expressed.
‘The truth is a tricky issue. Rightly or wrongly, adversarial advocacy is not really an inquiry into the truth,’ Justin Carew, QC, told us callow twenty-somethings, fresh from Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and Bristol. Advocacy is about being more persuasive than your opponent, he continued. You can win even if the evidence is stacked against you provided that you argue better. And it’s all about winning, of course.
But sometimes, despite all your skills of persuasion, you lose; and, with me, that invariably happens if a witness turns out to be flaky; if they didn’t come up to proof with their evidence; if, under cross-examination, their story unravels like a skein of wool tapped by a kitten – a mass of contradictions that becomes ever more knotted when pulled.
That happened today in the case of Butler. It was a rape case clouded by domestic violence: Ted Butler and Stacey Gibbons, who had lived together for four years, for most of w
hich he had knocked her about.
I knew the odds were stacked against us from the start. Juries are keen to convict the predatory rapist, the archetypal bogeyman down a dark alley, yet when it comes to relationship rape, they’d really rather not know, thank you very much.
Though, in general, I think jurors get it right, in this case they didn’t. I sometimes think they are stuck in the Victorian era; she is your wife, or common-law wife, and it’s completely private, what goes on behind closed doors. And, to be fair, there is something rather mucky about delving so intimately into a couple’s lives: about hearing what she wears in bed – an oversized T-shirt from a leading supermarket chain – or how he always likes a cigarette after sex, even though she is an asthmatic and he knows it makes her chest tight. I wonder at those who sit in the public gallery: why do they come to watch this sad, sorry drama? More gripping than a soap opera in that these are real people acting it out and real sobs coming from the witness – who thankfully those in the public gallery cannot see; her identity shielded by a screen so that she doesn’t have to watch her alleged assailant: fat-necked and piggy-eyed; in a cheap suit and black shirt and tie; his menacing take on respectability, glowering behind the reinforced glass in the dock.
So it feels smutty and prurient. Invasive. But still I ask the questions – questions that pry into the most exposing, frightening moments Stacey has ever experienced – because deep down, despite what that eminent QC told me all those years ago, I still want to get at the truth.
And then the defence lawyer brings up the issue of porn. An issue that can only be raised because my opponent has made a successful application in which he argued that there is a parallel between a scene in a DVD on their bedside table and what happened here. ‘Is it not possible,’ my learned friend, Rupert Fletcher, asks in his deep, coercive baritone, ‘that this was a sex game that she now finds a little embarrassing? A fantasy indulged in that she felt went a little too far? The DVD shows a woman being tied up, just as Miss Gibbons was. You may feel that at the point of penetration, Ted Butler believed that Stacey Gibbons was going along with a fantasy they had discussed at some point beforehand. That she was just acting a part she had, in all willingness, already agreed on.’
He relays further details of the DVD; then refers to a text message in which she admits: ‘It made me hot.’ And I can see the shudder of distaste on a couple of juror’s faces – the women in late middle age, dressed smartly for court, who perhaps anticipated sitting in on a trial for a burglary, or a murder; and whose eyes have been well and truly opened by this case – and I know that their sympathy for Stacey is disappearing faster than a tide slithering from the beach.
‘You fantasised about being tied up, didn’t you?’ Rupert says. ‘You texted your lover to let him know you’d like to try such things.’
He waits a beat, allowing Stacey’s sobs to ring around the windowless courtroom. And then: ‘Yes,’ comes her muffled admission – and from then on it does not matter that Ted half-choked her as he carried out the rape; or that there were welts on her wrists from where she struggled to free herself; rope burns she had the foresight to record on her iPhone. From then on, it is all downhill.
I pour myself a shot of whisky from the decanter on the sideboard. It’s not something I often do, drink at work, but it’s been a long day and it’s past five now. Dusk has settled – soft peach and gold illuminating the clouds, making the courtyard excessively pretty – and I always think alcohol is permissible once it’s dark. The single malt hits the back of my throat; warms my gullet. I wonder if Rupert will be celebrating in the wine bar opposite the High Court. He must have known, from the welts, from the choke, from the smirk on his client’s face as he heard the verdict, that his client was as guilty as hell. But a win’s a win. Still, if I were defending a case like that, I would have the decency not to gloat, far less to buy a bottle of Veuve to share with my junior. But then again, I try not to defend in such cases. Though you’re deemed a better barrister if you do both, I don’t want to sully my conscience by representing those I suspect to be guilty. That’s why I prefer to prosecute.
For I am on the side of the truth, you see, not just the side of the winners – and my thinking is that, if I believe a witness, then there is sufficient evidence to bring a case. And that’s why I want to win. Not just for winning’s sake but because I am on the side of the Stacey Gibbonses of this world; and of those whose cases are less muddied and even more brutal: the six-year-old raped by her grandfather; the eleven-year-old repeatedly buggered by his scoutmaster; the student forced to perform oral sex when she makes the mistake, late at night, of walking home alone. Yes, particularly for her. The standard of proof is high in the criminal court: beyond a reasonable doubt, not on the balance of probabilities, the burden of proof applied in the civil court. And that’s why Ted Butler walked free today. There was that seed of doubt: that hypothetical possibility conjured up by Rupert, in his caramel voice, that Stacey, a woman whom the jurors might assume was a bit rough, had consented to violent sex and it was only two weeks later, when she discovered that Ted had a bit on the side, that she thought to go to the police. The possibility that she might be traumatised and shamed; that she might fear she would be mauled by the court and disbelieved, as she has been, does not appear to have occurred to them.
I refill my heavy crystal glass; add a splash of water. Two shots is my limit and I keep to it. I am disciplined. I have to be, for I know my intellect is blunted if I drink any more. Perhaps it is time to go home – but the thought of returning to my ordered two-bedroom flat doesn’t appeal. Normally I enjoy living alone. I am too contrary to be in a relationship, I know that; too possessive of my space; too selfish; too argumentative. I luxuriate in my solitude, or rather the fact that I don’t need to accommodate anyone else’s needs when my brain is churning as I prepare a case, or when I am dog-weary at the end of one. But when I lose, I resent the close, understanding silence. I don’t want to be alone – to dwell on my professional and personal inadequacies – any more. And so I tend to stay late at work, my lamp burning when my colleagues with families have long gone home; searching for the truth in my bundles of papers and working out a way in which to win.
Tonight, I listen as the heels of my colleagues clatter down the eighteenth-century wooden stairs and the burble of laughter drifts up towards me. Early December, the start of the run-up to Christmas, a Friday night and it is palpable: the general relief of reaching the end of a long week. I won’t be joining my colleagues in the pub. I have a face on me, as my mother would say, and I’ve done enough acting for one day. I don’t want my workmates to feel they have to console me; to tell me there are other cases to fight; that if you are dealing with a domestic, you’re on to a losing streak from the start. I don’t want to have to smile thinly while inside I rail; I don’t want my anger to curdle the atmosphere. Richard will be there: my one-time pupil master; my occasional lover – very occasional these days for his wife, Felicity, has learned of us and I don’t want to rock, still less to wrench apart, his marriage. I don’t want him to feel pity for me.
A crisp knock on the door: the brisk rat-a-tat-tat that belongs to the one person I could bear to see at the moment. Brian Taylor, my clerk for the entire nineteen years I have been in 1 Swift Court. Forty years in the profession, and with more nous and a better insight into human psychology than many of the counsel for whom he works. Behind the slick salt-and-pepper hair, the neatly buttoned suit, the perky ‘Miss’ – for he insists on sticking to hierarchy, in the office at least – there is a sharp understanding of human nature and a deep sense of morality. He’s also intensely private. It took me four years to realise that his wife had left him; four more before I realised it was for another woman.
‘Thought you’d still be at it.’ He pops his head round the door. ‘Heard about the Butler case.’ His eyes flit from my empty whisky glass to the bottle and back again. Saying nothing. Just noting.
I make a noncommittal murmur t
hat comes out as a growl in the back of my throat.
He stands in front of my desk, hands behind his back, relaxed in his own skin; just waiting to offer some pearl of wisdom. I find myself playing along with it and lean back in my chair; unfurling just a little from my bleak mood, despite myself.
‘What you need now is something meaty. Something high-profile.’
‘Tell me about it.’ I feel the breath rush from my body: the relief of someone else knowing me so clearly and stating my ambition as a fact.
‘What you need,’ he continues, and he looks at me slyly, his dark eyes alight with the thrill of a juicy case, ‘is something that will take you to the next level. That will completely make your career.’
He is holding something in his hand, as I knew he would. Since October 2015, all cases have been delivered electronically: no longer wrapped in dark pink ribbon like a fat billet doux. But Brian knows that I prefer to read physical documents: to pore over a sheaf of papers that I can scrawl on, underline; cover with fluorescent Post-its until I create a map with which to navigate a trial.
He always prints my papers out and they are the sweetest of letters, presented now with a magician’s flourish.
‘I’ve got just the sort of case you need.’
SOPHIE
21 October 2016
Two
Sophie has never thought of her husband as a liar.
She knows he dissembles, yes. That’s part of his job: a willingness to be economical with the truth. A prerequisite, even, for a government minister.
But she has never imagined he would lie to her. Or rather, that he might have a life she knows nothing about: a secret that could detonate beneath her lovingly maintained world and blow it apart forever.
Watching him that Friday, as he leaves to take the children to school, she feels a stab of love so fierce she pauses on the stairs just to drink in the tableau of the three of them together. They are framed in the doorway, James turning to call goodbye; left arm raised in that politician’s wave she used to mock but which now seems second nature; right hand cradling Finn’s head. Their son, fringe falling in his eyes, socks bagging round his ankles, scuffs at the tiles, reluctant, as ever, to go. His elder sister, Emily, ducks through the doorway: determined, aged nine, not to be late.
Anatomy of a Scandal Page 1