by Jane Elliott
Once I was inside the courtroom I bent my head to let my hair fall forward across my eyes, curtaining out everything except what was directly in front of me. I didn’t want to see Silly Git’s face if I could help it. I didn’t want to imprint it afresh on my mind. I’d managed to put my memories into places where I could cope with them most of the time, I didn’t want any fresh images to haunt me in the small hours of the morning. To my relief I realized that as long as I kept the hair falling forward, he was going to be sitting outside my line of vision. I knew two of my friends were in the gallery, but I couldn’t see them either.
My first day in the witness box was hard, as my barrister went over my childhood in every embarrassing detail. Everything had to be spelled out graphically, so that there could be no danger of any misunderstanding on the part of the judge or the jury and so that it could all be put down on the record. It was no good me referring coyly to ‘his thing’ if I meant ‘his penis’. Every sex act had to be described without any modesty. There was nowhere for me to hide.
Although I was embarrassed to be talking about such things in front of strangers, I knew that my barrister was doing the right thing. He’d told the police that he had never worked on any case before where he was so determined to get justice for his client and to ensure that the defendant was imprisoned for as long as possible.
I noticed that Richard’s defence lawyer was a striking-looking young black woman. She reminded me of the disco diva Grace Jones. I knew Richard wouldn’t like that, holding the racist views that he did. And the chances were that he would have made his views known to her.
All the time I was giving evidence I kept my hair down, screening out his face, and that also helped to cover my embarrassment a little. I didn’t want to see people pitying me in case I wasn’t able to keep control of my voice. I was determined not to choke up, to ensure that I did the job as well as I possibly could. Every so often Silly Git would let out a rasping warning cough to let me know that even if I couldn’t see him through my veil of hair he was just feet away from me, reminding me of all the threats he had made to me over the years about what would happen if I ever dared to tell anyone about our secrets, trying to bring me back down to the little girl he had pinned against the wall with a carving knife to her throat. He must have been able to see what agony I was in on that stand and he would have known he could have put a stop to it at any second if he had just decided he had done enough to me and had stood up and admitted it all. This was his one last chance to do something decent for the little girl he had taken responsibility for all those years ago, but he said nothing.
All I could see past my hair was the judge and one man sitting at the end of the jury. The juryman looked about forty years old and was wearing a leather jacket. As I told my story, he put his head in his hands several times and wept. I averted my eyes to cut the image out and just kept answering the questions. I felt bad for upsetting him.
I was dreading the time when my barrister would have asked all the questions he wanted to ask and it would be the turn of the opposition. Finally the moment came and Richard’s lawyer stood up to confront me, her aim to prove that I was lying and had made the whole story up.
In all the courtroom dramas I had ever seen the opposing lawyers always managed to twist things to mean something different, making witnesses appear other than they were. But as the case continued, nothing this woman asked me seemed to be difficult to answer. All her questions just required honest replies and when I gave them she seemed to have nothing further to say. Once or twice she actually seemed to make things worse for her client by asking me about events that my own barrister hadn’t thought to mention, all of which made Richard look and sound even more evil.
At one stage she asked me about his racial views, with regard to my status in the family as the ‘Paki slave’, and I had to tell her that he hated everyone of any other race and had tried to teach us to do the same. She asked if I had any racist opinions and I could honestly answer that I didn’t.
When I was finally allowed to leave the witness box I noticed the floor was littered with a confetti of shredded paper from where I had been unknowingly plucking nervously at a ball of tissues.
At the end of my second day in the box, when I thought I had reached the end of my tether and could go no further, the judge apologized to me.
‘I’m sorry, Jane,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid you are going to have to come back again tomorrow.’ My head dropped forward in a mixture of exhaustion and despair. ‘I know, I know,’ he went on as soothingly as he could. ‘I’m sorry, but we do want this all cleared up, don’t we?’
Having got this far I wasn’t going to back out now.
My dad still hadn’t made an appearance. I guess he thought it would be too hard to hear everything that had happened to his daughter being spelled out in detail.
The next day the judge stopped the proceedings and spoke to my barrister. ‘I think we need to stop and change the direction of this case,’ he said.
My heart sank. What did he mean?
‘I don’t think this is actually a case about child abuse,’ he went on.
Not about child abuse? Then what were we all doing there? Hadn’t he been listening to a single word of what I had been saying?
‘I think,’ he continued, ‘it’s about control and fear.’
‘Yes!’ I thought, my spirits soaring. At last the authorities understood what had been going on. That was what it had been about from the first day I came back from the foster home. It wasn’t that Richard was just a paedophile, because he had continued his abuse long after I had turned into a woman; it was about something even more premeditated and cold-blooded than that. He had tried to steal my whole life, and had succeeded in getting away with seventeen years of it before I managed to stop him, although it could have been argued that he had stolen the following years as well by leaving me in such a vulnerable and unhappy state.
After a break in the proceedings I was being led back into the courtroom by a victim liaison officer, an elderly lady. Up till then they had been careful to take me in and out of a different door from Silly Git, or if they hadn’t then they had made sure we didn’t meet, which was making me feel more confident. Hiding behind my hair, I had still been able to avoid seeing him and remembering his face too clearly. As I came back in through the door with my head down I saw a pair of shoes directly ahead of me, blocking my way. I looked up, straight into a face that made me feel sick with fear. The pale snakelike eyes and the ginger hair were the same, although he looked a little stockier than I remembered him.
‘Get me out of here,’ I hissed through gritted teeth, feeling his eyes boring into mine and his thoughts getting back inside my head. ‘Get me out, get me out.’
‘Calm down, for heaven’s sake,’ the lady said, irritated by such a show of emotion. ‘Come through here.’
She led me into a room off the court, which had a glass door. He followed us, but didn’t come in, standing outside the glass, just staring at me with no expression.
‘Get the police!’ I screamed. ‘Get the police!’
‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ she was losing patience now. ‘Who is it you’re worried about? Is it him?’ She gestured towards the immobile figure on the other side of the glass with the dead, staring eyes.
‘Get someone!’ I screamed and she realized there was no way she could calm me down. She walked towards the door. ‘Don’t leave me!’ I screamed, suddenly envisaging him and me in the room alone. The woman was panicking now, aware that she didn’t know how to handle the situation.
At that moment Marie and another police officer arrived. Finding me standing in the corner of the room, hiding my face against the wall like a child in trouble, they came to the rescue, furious with everyone and getting me to safety.
‘He’s going to kill me,’ I moaned as Marie put her arm round me. ‘I’m dead.’
‘No, he won’t, Jane,’ she soothed me. ‘He can’t do anything now. You’re doing
fine. It’s nearly over.’
I wanted to be in the courtroom to hear Richard’s testimony once I had said all I had to say. He had been willing to sit there and listen to me as I squirmed with embarrassment relating every detail of my humiliation through the years, so it seemed only fair that I should witness his humiliation.
‘We can’t stop you coming in,’ Marie said, ‘but we really don’t think it would be a good idea. They’re going to tell all sorts of lies to try to make you look bad and to make out that you are a liar and a fantasist. You’ll find it very hard to listen to.’
I took her advice. I’d already had a taste of the sort of things my stepfather’s barrister had been briefed to try to pin on me. She had tried to imply that I was a regular drug user and that my flats were always full of men, both of which were accusations I could easily dismiss. I might have had the odd puff of pot in my time, but the thought of experimenting with anything harder when you already have a head full of demons like mine would be too terrifying to contemplate.
They had also tried to claim that my welfare had been monitored by social services, but my barrister had made that claim look foolish. They had suggested that I was paranoid, believing that everyone and everything was against me, and that I was an attention-seeker, but the judge and jury didn’t seem impressed by any of that either. The worst thing they said was that if I had been interfered with, then it would have been my granddad who had done it, not my stepdad.
Over the next few days I heard odd snippets about what was happening in the courtroom. Steve, Paul, Uncle John and Hayley all did their bits, while everyone else in the family came forward to swear blind that Richard had never hit them and that he was a sweet, gentle man, just an ordinary bloke.
Apparently at one point in the proceedings my brother Pete took exception to something my barrister said and jumped over the barrier to try to take a swing at him. Years of training in the boxing ring, coupled with the philosophy that violence was always the answer to everything, were now working against my family. The more they postured and threatened and swaggered, the more they confirmed the way they were.
Finally it was over. We had said all that we had to say and it was up to the jury to decide whether or not I was telling the truth. If they thought that I was, then the judge would have to decide what to do about it.
I couldn’t even guess what the outcome might be. By now I’d lost track of whether what had happened to me was extraordinary or not. The reaction of everyone who heard my story suggested that it was unusual and shocking, but then my family made it appear that such behaviour was normal, that nothing that had happened to me merited anyone being punished. I no longer knew what to think about anything.
One of the things I was saddest about was that my family now knew about Sophie. I had managed to keep her existence secret from them, but now they knew I had two daughters when I didn’t want them to know anything about my new life.
The jury stayed out for a long time and Marie and my barrister told me that was good, but I really wanted to get it all over with and to know what would be happening next. Everyone told me that they had good vibes and that they were sure we were going to win, but I kept thinking, ‘What if we don’t? What if they find him not guilty on any of the charges and he’s free to leave the court? What would I feel like then? And once he was free, what would he do to exact his revenge on me for telling the world the truth about him?’
Steve and I went to a pub close to the courthouse to wait. We wanted to be with the people who had stood up for me in the court. I wanted to share the result with them because they were the ones who had stuck by me through the whole thing, refusing to be intimidated into silence or lies like all the others. My dad turned up for the last day as well. It was one of those big pubs where you can sit around all day on sofas ordering coffees and drinks and snacks. We got there early in the morning, not wanting to miss the announcement, and the hours ticked slowly by.
Every so often my mobile would ring, making my heart miss a beat, but it would just be Marie, telling us that there was no news but not to worry, that they had all gone to lunch or that they were all back from lunch. Hour after hour we talked over everything that had happened in the courtroom and debated every facial expression that the jury or the judge had shown.
‘I caught that judge’s eye, you know,’ Steve’s dad kept saying, ‘and he gave me a look which just said, “I know, mate. I know.”’
All the signs seemed good, but how often do you read about cases where the verdict is completely the opposite to what everyone expects? How was I to know what influence Richard had exerted on the jury? Could he have intimidated them like he did everyone else? I forced all the negative thoughts from my mind.
At about three o’clock the phone went again, making me jump.
‘It’s Marie. The result is in.’
‘Yeah?’ I hardly dared breathe.
‘He’s been found guilty of all the charges except one, which he got off on a technicality.’
‘Guilty? So how long will be get?’
‘They won’t do the sentencing for a few weeks,’ she said. ‘But the judge did warn him that he would be going away for a very long time.’
‘Does that mean they’ll be letting him out until the sentencing?’ I felt a lurch of panic in my stomach.
‘No,’ Marie laughed. ‘He’ll be on remand. He won’t be going anywhere for a very long time.’
Chapter Twelve
When Marie rang a few weeks later to tell me that Richard had been given fifteen years, the maximum sentence that a judge could give for the crimes he had been found guilty of, I felt a little pang of disappointment.
‘But that’s really good, Jane,’ Marie assured me.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘it’s just that he took seventeen years of my life, and well, you know… ‘
Once I had got used to the idea, however, I was pleased, and very grateful to everyone who had helped me do it.
‘Just think, Mummy,’ Emma said to me the evening after the sentencing, ‘we’re going up to our own beds now and that horrible man has got to go to sleep in a cold cell. Serves him right for what he did to you.’
The girls know that I had a cruel stepfather who did things to me that you shouldn’t do to children, but they don’t yet know the extent of it. Emma can remember the occasional time when Silly Git had me pinned against the wall by the throat, but I don’t think it worries her because she knows that my story has a happy ending.
The outcome of the case wasn’t happy for everyone. My brothers went after the people who had stood up for me. One of them chased Hayley in her car, eventually forcing her to stop. He ran over to her, kicking at the car to try to get her out so he could get at her and shouting how he was going to kill her. She went to the police but the rest of the family gave him an alibi, saying he was with them at the time she alleged the incident happened. Her family started getting threatening phone calls all night long as well.
My Uncle John also started receiving threatening calls. He was attacked beside the grave at a family funeral as punishment for ‘betraying the family’ and his car was sprayed with obscenities. It was his brother’s funeral, the uncle who had tried to intimidate me as I went into court, who had died soon afterwards from the family complaint of kidney failure. The fight at the graveside escalated when Uncle John’s wife tried to help and got her face slapped for her trouble.
Paul had the windows of his house and his car smashed and Steve’s mum and dad started receiving threats on their lives, notes through the door and phone calls telling them what was going to happen to them, and people sitting outside their house in cars, with the headlights shining through the windows, beeping incessantly on the horns. The police gave us, Steve’s parents and Hayley’s family all alarms in our houses as well as mobile ones to carry around, which we can keep for the rest of our lives. Paul has now joined the police force and had a second son. I’m very proud of him for making something good of his life.
&nb
sp; I kept hoping that once Richard had been inside for a while and they had all had a chance to think about things, they would realize that I had done them an enormous favour in rescuing them from a man who had been bullying them all for more than twenty years. I couldn’t understand why it was taking them so long to realize. I presumed they must all still be frightened of him, even though he was inside.
A month or two before the sentencing Steve’s parents had received a call from my brother Tom. ‘Please don’t put the phone down,’ he said. ‘I don’t have anything to do with that lot and I desperately need to speak to Janey because I can’t believe all this stuff has been happening.’
‘Give us your number,’ they said. ‘We’ll pass it on to Janey and she can call you if she wants.’
I had been wanting to get in touch with Tom for years, fearing that he might be the one Richard would pick on once he didn’t have me to kick around. He and Dan had always been my favourites. When he was a baby and I was trying to get him to sleep, I used to suck on his ear lobes so much that I ended up stretching them and making them floppy. He was the one I’d thought about rescuing when we first escaped from the area. I’d heard through friends of Steve’s that he had been beaten up badly and chased out of the house and had been living on the streets and getting into drugs.
I had an old pay-as-you-go mobile which wouldn’t be traceable, so I passed that number to him.
‘Don’t you live with them, then?’ I asked when he called.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve only just found out about the court case because I bumped into Dan up the market.’
‘Yeah?’
‘But I ended up with two black eyes.’
‘How come?’
‘Well, Dan told me you weren’t our real sister, but you are, aren’t you?’