Without Consent

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Keep that bench warm for me,’ he said.

  ‘Look, Aunty Helen, when you and that old cadaver of yours get married, you will let me know, won’t you? So I can come along and laugh? I don’t know why the hell you’re so neurotic about it.’

  ‘I’ve told you as much as I can to explain it. And I’ll tell you afterwards. But, frankly, can you see any point in asking you to grace the serious business of middle-aged nuptials with unseemly conduct? No, girl, get stuffed. This was always going to be a private arrangement, very short notice or I’d die of embarrassment, and don’t ask why. Besides, Bailey can’t ask Ryan—’

  ‘I should think not!’ Rose stormed. ‘He’s a fucking rapist!’

  ‘—Overstatement and anyway, it seems to follow I can’t ask my self-appointed, pain-in-the neck of a niece. There’ll be a party, later, so you can offer felicitations and congratulations as appropriate, once the pair of us get used to the idea. If we ever do.’

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ Rose stated.

  Helen beamed at her.

  ‘Good. If I were you, I’d avoid understanding. Tell me, is the man behaving well? Less of the nervous disorders?’

  Rose considered.

  ‘Most of the time, as good as can be expected, thank you, ma’am. Not always better, hardly exquisite in his manners, but not half bad, thanks. His lordship may still get the vapours when I let his botanical specimens die and when I spend joint money on going to an expensive clinic instead of allowing an ordinary doctor to get impertinent with me in the interests of birth control, but otherwise his health is excellent. How kind of you to enquire.’

  ‘Is missy going to persist in this speech on account of watching a video of Pride and Prejudice, or can we get down to work?’

  ‘Oh, did you see Anna?’

  ‘Yes. Yesterday. She’s going to make you window-boxes. You’d better look after them.’

  ‘I’ll use the bedroom one as a place to keep my cap. I’ll plant it, instead of pinging it into the street, and grow little caplets …’

  ‘Work, Rose.’

  ‘OK, OK, but listen. You know I told you about the accident with the sodding cap? Well, it never came back, you know. I had to go to the clinic and get another one, didn’t I? But the good thing was, it made Anna laugh. Laugh? I thought she’d split her sides …’

  ‘Anna?’ Helen queried.

  ‘At the clinic. Where she works. Why else would I go to a place like that?’

  ‘I thought she was a midwife.’

  ‘Naa, not any more. More money in this.’

  Only a little lie, Helen thought; only a small one. The sort of lie she always feared a witness would announce under oath; some little piece of secrecy or vanity which rendered everything else they said faintly suspicious, however true it was. She hefted the file off the floor and onto the desk.

  ‘Work, Rose.’

  ‘Fuck me. I forgot.’

  ‘This one for trial. Read it, see if you agree. I’ve drafted the charge, you annotate the pages; six copies of each. Statements in order, so they tell the story in sequence. Code at the top for stuff which defence and prosecution might agree as purely scientific … away you go.’

  Rose, astride the boxes in Helen’s office, looked up, bullish and sulky.

  ‘Look, I’ve read it. Cover to cover, honest. And I don’t agree.’

  Helen sat back. Examined her nails, thought of Bailey as Mr Darcy and thought, yes, there was quite a resemblance, not least in the fact that each had weaker friends.

  ‘For God’s sake, why?’ she asked innocently.

  Rose took a deep breath, as if about to sing solo and nervous with it. Helen’s mind wandered; she reminded herself to ask some other time about this clinic Rose had mentioned.

  ‘Because if you read her statement, it’s perfect,’ Rose blurted. ‘Too perfect. The defendant’s her ex-boyfriend, right? Can’t stand the thought that she’s left him for someone else, right? He gets lonely one night, comes round and knocks. She says she’s afraid of his violence, which is why she got rid of him in the first place, but she lets him in. All lovely. How are you? Just come round to ask, and how are you too? Have a beer, she says. Sit and watch this video with me, she says. Nice to see you after six months, she says. Where’s that coffee?’

  ‘On your left.’

  Rose grasped the handle of a half-full mug, used it to weight the hand making gestures.

  ‘Then he jumps on her. He says, she likes it; been giving him the come on for the last hour, he says. Wearing a short skirt and not exactly putting a blanket over herself, he says. While she says, look, the whole thing came out of the blue. Why would she ever want to screw this sod when the kid’s asleep and her new man’s expected home any time? Well, I reckon this old boyfriend used to beat her like she said; he comes on strong like she said; she struggled a bit and then decided to keep the peace. What’s once more for old time’s sake, eh? Look, I think she’s telling the absolute truth; she weighed up rape against a broken nose and settled for rape. And I know there’s bruises on her arms, which he says were there before, because the new chap isn’t so gentle either; not a scratch on him, though. But put that in front of a jury?’

  Coffee dribbled onto the floor; Rose ignored it.

  ‘They’re going to say, why didn’t she slam the door as soon as she saw him if he was so bad? Why didn’t she yell for help? By the time the defence has finished, no one’ll remember how that’s actually a difficult thing to do. They won’t think like she would think: once more to stop him hitting me, and I won’t shout because of the kid in the next room. She’d do it, and he’d be able to say either she consented, or he’d every reason to suppose she did.’

  ‘She could have slammed the door.’

  ‘You don’t; she didn’t, but no witnesses. Balance of proof. Reasonable doubt. And you aren’t going to get a six-year-old to testify about mummy’s distress, are you? Not even you. As for the neighbours, they won’t.’

  Helen was out of her swivel chair, examining, through their own dirty windows, the administrative staff of the paint manufacturing company across the road. They had revamped their mottled grey walls to make them greyer still; the people merged with the décor in efficient silence. All busy about some executive decision. Life-threatening colour shades. She waved to no response.

  ‘All right, Rose,’ she said briskly. ‘If that’s what you think, we’ll bin it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The rape.’

  Rose looked horrified. ‘It might work,’ she stuttered. ‘I didn’t mean … It might… work.’

  ‘A phrase not known in legal Latin. D’you want to argue this point past Redwood’s budget? You said it. If you can see a reasonable doubt before you’ve even heard the arguments, what the hell will a jury see?’ Rose was silent. Then she got up, opened the flap of a window, and made to heave the file out. Helen stopped her.

  ‘No good either. You want this woman’s life all over the street?’

  ‘You made me say it,’ Rose raged. ‘You made me act God! You made me say we should turn it down, even when we think it’s true. Sometimes you’re a bitch, Aunty H.’

  ‘Wish I was,’ Helen mourned. ‘I really wish I was. But we can’t run cases we know we’re going to lose. Truth is luxury. And I don’t like playing God, either.’

  The apartment block was a strange building; once a school or institution, Bailey guessed, converted into flats of an unusual size with large modern windows, so that the façade stuck out like a sore thumb in a terrace of smaller, less-gaunt dwellings which had all succumbed to historically conscientious planning regulations while this building had escaped. It sat on the corner of two roads, defiantly marking the boundary between one kind of territory and another. Before it lay the metropolis, behind it the leafier squares of Barnsbury’s genteel streets. You lived here for the view, perhaps for a feeling of power.

  There were benefits to the flexible routine of a rota, Bailey knew. He had always managed to
evade any kind of job which imposed too much of a regime, except that dictated by emergency. His creative evasions were becoming more difficult to achieve in an age where the formulae of accountability took more time than the work itself, but still, he managed. Provided he did excessive hours and obfuscated, he could still function in accordance with his own clock, leaving time for eccentric assignments like these: checking up on Ryan’s theories, following up Sally Smythe’s kindred fantasies about the no-hopers. Beginning with the most recent.

  He had phoned in advance and met with truculence, smoothed by Bailey’s natural diplomacy until Aemon Connor’s rudeness diminished into a grudging growl. Sure, the policeman could come round and waste his time; waste his wife’s time, too, for that matter, but not much of it. Ten minutes. There’s little enough to say. She never did make a great deal of sense, he added.

  There was a hotel-like carpet of more pretension than taste in the lobby and a tiny lift before Bailey reached the Connors’ door. One myth, promulgated by the reports, was immediately exploded, namely that of a twenty-four-hour porter, sober or available at any given time.

  Mr Connor was a man to whom anger was more than second nature; it was a state of being, only absorbed by frenetic activity, a constant position at the top of some heap, and the sense of achievement which came from physical exhaustion. Perhaps he was a cuddly bear when his children were around, but Bailey doubted it. Two teenage girls, he’d read, away for the summer, and, feeling the unnatural heat inside this high apartment, Bailey thought they were well out of it. There was no sign of the wife.

  ‘In the bath,’ Aemon said briefly. He looked at Bailey’s outstretched hand, wondering whether to ignore it, but since the man was smiling, he took it. Bailey wondered if a palm so calloused could actually feel the difference between a firm handshake and a loose one, but refrained from asking. Something about the quality of his own hand seemed to mollify.

  ‘It was you I came to see, sir,’ Bailey said. ‘A chat, before bothering the little woman.’

  ‘She talks rubbish,’ Aemon muttered. ‘Always did.’

  ‘They often do, women, don’t they, sir?’ Bailey sighed in sympathy. ‘Oh, I am sorry. Not the right thing to say, is it? I don’t mean any disrespect.’

  ‘You’ve got it in one, boy.’

  A slight warming of the atmosphere was established by mutual head-shaking sadness, like a couple of men contemplating the keeping of a pair of iguanas acquired by accident and without adequate instruction. Bailey did not feel in the least guilty.

  ‘And I thought the whole thing was closed,’ Connor muttered. He had half a mind to offer the visitor a drink. Not such a bad sort of man, for a copper, and besides, he wanted one himself. Late afternoon, work going downhill, hot as all hell, with scarcely an evening made in heaven stretching away in front of him; a drink seemed a good idea. Just a large one.

  ‘So it is closed,’ Bailey said. ‘But you see, sir, there’s an aspect of the sorry business which might, just might, impinge on another inquiry, quite separate. Now, it seemed like your wife was fantasizing about a caller in the afternoon when you came home to find her in the bath …’

  ‘I often do. She lives in there.’

  ‘Yes, sure, but not usually for so long? That afternoon, when you had to send for the doctor. Look, we know, of course, there’s nothing in this rape allegation against yourself; monstrous, of course, but I’m working on the possibility she did have a caller. One who frightened her maybe. Shocked her, made her hysterical.’

  Aemon was listening.

  ‘I can’t think who she’d let in. Parish women. The priest, she loves the priest, for all he’s a stern fellow to everyone but the undeserving poor.’

  ‘Salesman?’ Bailey suggested. ‘Electrician? Plumber? Delivery man? Doctor?’ he added as an afterthought.

  Aemon shook his head. He was suddenly furiously defensive.

  ‘A doctor? Why the hell would she let in a doctor? There’s nothing wrong with her, is there?’

  ‘Well,’ said Bailey, looking at the clenched fists and wondering why the mention of a doctor tending his wife should touch so raw a nerve, ‘perhaps nothing obvious. Perhaps she was feeling ill?’

  Aemon snorted. ‘Often says so, never is. Like a horse, she is.’

  And, like an award-winning actress, faded, but never beyond a cue, the subject of their discussion wafted into the room. White towelling robe, an overpowering odour of roses, hair wrapped in a turban. Gloria Swanson, Bailey thought; Marlene Dietrich with a softer washed-out face and a bigger bosom. Never a Jamie Lee Curtis.

  ‘Did you call a doctor the other day, Brigid?’ Aemon asked pleasantly, with only a hint of impatience. ‘You know, the day when we all went on our pleasant little outing to the police station,’ he added bitterly.

  She flinched, shook her head and smiled brilliantly.

  ‘We’ve our own doctor,’ Aemon explained. ‘Sound fellow, sixty-four last birthday. Couldn’t scare a cat.’

  ‘Have you ever been to see any other doctor, Mrs Connor?’ Bailey asked her. She shook her head vehemently and spoke quickly in a childish voice.

  ‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that.’ Her face flushed scarlet. Her husband had poured her a large gin.

  ‘Ice?’ he barked.

  ‘Oh, yes. A lot.’

  The ice bucket was divinely old-fashioned, Bailey noticed; almost enough in itself to turn any ordinary drink into a cocktail. Aemon downed his drink in one without, in the end, offering anything to Bailey; it put him into a vastly improved frame of mind.

  ‘Another doctor?’ he chortled, stuck on the doctor theme. ‘You’ll be accusing her of going on the pill next. She’d never do that. Not when we still have time for a son. Another doctor! Perish the thought! She won’t even take her clothes off for me!’

  Bailey, to his own shame, joined in with Aemon’s laughter; let it travel over his face, make his body move while he tried at the same time to catch Mrs Connor’s eye.

  ‘I only ask,’ he explained, ‘because we seem to have a man in this area masquerading as an innocent visitor. Possibly even a delivery man, sometimes, bringing in flowers and chocolates. He’s bothered a couple of other women, that’s all, got them upset.’

  Aemon was thoughtful. ‘You mean she needn’t have been lying? She wasn’t the only one being scared like that?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought lying was in her nature, Mr Connor.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief. I hope you get the bastard.’

  Aemon’s eyes had strayed first to his watch and then to his wife.

  Bailey saw her face, flushed and expressionless, as she passed an ornate mirror on her way to the window. A breeze moved the crystals of the chandelier making small clinking sounds. Mrs Connor leant against the window-frame looking downwards, intently, as if waiting for someone.

  He saw scuffs on the glass, marks and streaks at odds with this daily-cleaned house.

  She must have spent more time at the window today than she had in the bath.

  God forbid he should be so happily married.

  Ryan’s blue folder. Two of them mentioning a doctor. Laughing it off.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘If, with intent to commit an offence … a person does an act which is more than merely preparatory to the commission of the offence, he is guilty of attempting to commit the offence.

  ‘A person may be guilty of attempting to commit an offence (to which this section applies) even though the facts are such that the commission of the offence is impossible.’

  Derek could remember their words, Mum and Dad and all the rest, but most of all he could remember the sharp intakes of breath he could hear when fellow men clapped eyes on Shelley.

  She’s a cow, Derek. Everyone’s told you she’s a cow. Pardon my French, said his sister. Let me tell you something, he would say, she’s a lovely gel, just needs a decent bloke. She’s done well, Shelley. Oh yeah, sure, she likes a good time, but she works hard.

  He had recited
this chapter and verse until it almost rhymed in his head, always singling out from the memory bank those times when Shell was really astoundingly pleased to see him. Times on which his devotion was more rewarded by her ten-minute enthusiasm than a starving pet with late-delivered food and everything forgiven. It was enough to nourish his dogged determination to keep by his side a bird as gorgeous and sometimes wanton as this. She could be a pain to live with, but they’d settled down, and oh, how his mates had envied him at first, whatever they said later. He could feel other men’s envy like balm on the skin, massaging his fragile pride while they reappraised him.

  ‘What you looking at, Shell?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she’d say, from her standpoint by the window, looking like a prisoner who would have knotted her bedsheets together in order to abseil out quicker than she could walk to the big front door. It was not such an imposing front door, either, simply double glazed and ugly, steel-framed, paintwork with condensation stains, and a notice politely requesting that it should be closed quietly. Most of the other residents favoured security. Senior citizens, Derek said politely, content to accede to their requests for errands and the mending of kettles. Past their sell-by date, said Shelley, with contempt.

  And he was slowly, very slowly, discovering that his lady love, his dearest, his chosen partner in life, was a girl to whom kindness was not second nature, a bit of a bitch, in fact. Derek had resisted any such conclusion, squirrelled it away into the realm of non-being, just as he hid from her his ongoing terror of her infidelity. He dampened his exclusive passion for this elegant sulky creature into round-the-clock good-natured solicitude which he couldn’t stop even when he knew it got on her nerves. Nothing was comparable to the fear that she might leave. Not only leave, but go elsewhere.

  ‘You’re always looking out of that window, you,’ he teased. ‘Anyone would think you liked the view.’

  She yawned in reply. ‘Think I’ll go round and see Kath,’ she said.

  ‘I thought you weren’t speaking to Kath.’