Before we parted, Charlie gave us all our tasks: Kelly and I were to deal with disclosure, track down witnesses, especially Gary Dickinson’s ex-girlfriends, draft a bad character application, and deal with the interviews.
I reacted like a tail-wagging Labrador each time Charlie gave me something new to do.
The next day I eagerly started to deal with the issue of disclosure.
If you get the chance, look up the poster for the 1994 Demi Moore and Michael Douglas ‘gripping courtroom drama’ Disclosure – tag line: ‘Sex Is Power’. It shows Demi Moore, skirt hitched up to her waist, in mid-clinch with Michael Douglas. Well, I can tell you that this does not in any shape or form reflect the reality that is disclosure.
Disclosure is not sexy, but, in every legal case, it is crucial.
Let me tell you how it works in criminal cases.
The police investigate a crime and in the course of their investigation they take statements and accumulate evidence. They then send their file to the Crown Prosecution Service who decide whether or not to prosecute. The test for the CPS is whether it is in the public interest to prosecute and whether, on the evidence, there is a realistic chance of a conviction. They are therefore not allowed to prosecute hopeless or pointless cases.
Once they’ve made their decision to charge, they carry out what is known as primary disclosure. This is when they serve on the defence all the statements and exhibits that they are relying on to prove the charge.
After primary disclosure, if the defendant is contesting the charge, he must serve something called the defence statement, which says why he is not guilty.
The prosecution then respond by serving the items of evidence that they haven’t yet disclosed, which will either assist the defence or undermine the prosecution. And that is an important test, because it relies on the integrity and intelligence of a disclosure officer.
They also serve upon the defence a list of all the statements and documents that they have which they are not relying upon, this is called the schedule of unused material, which the defence must go through carefully to see if there is anything else that, in their opinion, assists them, or undermines the prosecution’s case.
See I told you – nothing to do with sex or power or Demi Moore in a short skirt.
Now, I’ll be honest, in most of the minor cases that I do, the issue of disclosure is fairly straightforward. Most of the material is disclosed and anything that is held back is usually completely uncontroversial (for example, a statement from a police officer describing how they disposed of their protective gloves after they’d seized some drugs from the anus of a drug mule doesn’t really assist the defence or undermine the prosecution). But there have been cases when a failure to disclose has been potentially catastrophic for my clients.
Take the case of Abdul Ramzi. Abdul was the owner of a curry house in the East End. He was a family man and well-respected member of his community. Alas for Abdul, he also had a penchant for young men, particularly rough young white men, preferably with tattoos.
And after one liaison with a nineteen-year-old man from Dagenham, he was accused of rape. The complainant claimed that he had met Abdul in a gay bar. They had chatted and then shared a taxi because they were going in the same direction, before Abdul ordered the taxi to stop by some waste ground where he was alleged to have raped the young man in some bushes.
At first, Abdul denied any knowledge of the Dagenham boy – ‘This is ridiculous,’ he told me, ‘I am a married man. I am 100 per cent straight. I have never met this man.’
The one flaw in Abdul’s assertion that he had never met the man was that his DNA and sperm was all over the complainant’s underwear and body.
I met him in chambers for a conference. He was shaking as he told me how this was all a total set-up and how he was not gay.
‘That’s fine,’ I told him, ‘no one is suggesting that you are gay. But, if you want me to help you, then you are going to have to tell me everything, because the evidence in the case shows, overwhelmingly, that you have had some kind of contact with the complainant.’
After a couple of months of total denial, just before the trial, a very contrite Abdul finally made the decision to tell me everything. He told me that he had met the man in a pub, they had kissed in the pub, had some jiggy-jiggy in the pub toilets and left together in a taxi, going on to have consensual sex in a disused bus station.
This was massively important. As soon as I heard Abdul’s proper account, I knew that there was potentially evidence to corroborate his story. You see, you can’t cop off with anyone in a pub and expect it to remain a secret: CCTV is everywhere.
I scoured the schedule of unused material for reference to the CCTV footage of the pub. It was inconceivable that the police wouldn’t have seized it in a case like this. But, amazingly, there was no mention of it. Nothing, not a sausage.
I asked my solicitor to get in touch with the police and the CPS and ask them to have a look for it, and the answer came back that it didn’t exist.
I didn’t believe them.
I asked again, and got the same message back: ‘There is no further material that either undermines the prosecution case or assists the defence.’
I went before a Judge and made a big fuss. The Judge agreed that there must be something and suggested that a failure to seize the CCTV footage was a serious flaw in the investigation.
Lo and behold, a few days later I received a brown envelope containing a CCTV disc. On it, clear as day, was Abdul and a young blonde man sitting at a table in Flumes Club in Basildon, then Abdul and the young blonde man kissing in Flumes Club, then Abdul and the man disappearing to the toilets, then Abdul and the, seemingly very happy, content young man walking out of the club, hand in hand, towards a taxi.
The Crown dropped the case against him a short while later. After this, they knew that there was no longer a reasonable prospect of a conviction.
Now, in the case of Tasha Roux, the schedule of unused material ran to many pages. I scoured it. There was very little that was of interest: a few things about Gary Dickinson’s previous convictions (which were not insubstantial, but, alas, nothing for violence against women), lots of unhelpful briefings and some statements from other people in the flats who said that they hadn’t seen very much. Not surprisingly, there was nothing about any of Dickinson’s other girlfriends.
I reached the end of the schedule and sighed. I was desperate to establish something that showed that Gary Dickinson was capable of hitting women in the way that Tasha described. I knew that there must, somewhere, be an ex-girlfriend who could give evidence about Dickinson and what he was capable of. I needed at least one other girl, especially one who had never met Tasha and had no reason to just back her up. It might make the difference between a jury believing or disbelieving her account.
Tasha had been certain that there was a girl from a club in Deptford called the Purple Velvet Club, who Dickinson had been seeing behind her back. Lilly, Tasha had said.
It was time for me to find Lilly.
Goodbye to Johnny Richardson and hello to Lilly Spencer
Johnny Richardson’s leaving party was in an upstairs room in a pub in Shoreditch.
Bless ’em, some of the people from his chambers had tried to create a bit of a Middle Eastern theme by getting hold of a couple of blow-up camels and building a rather elaborate pyramid. There was a banner that read ‘Good Luck Johnny!’ with some pictures of playing cards on it to symbolise his new career as a croupier in a Dubai hotel.
I looked at the banner and the camels and the pyramids and felt like weeping. It all seemed so unfair, such a waste.
I got myself a pint and found my old university and flatmate, Ed Douglas, who was talking with a group of his Chancery pals. Predictably, they were talking about a case. One of them, who had thick glasses and acne that any thirteen-year-old boy would be proud of, was chastising another for trying to obtain an injunction in relation to some assets which were being hidden. ‘But
if you don’t even know what country the assets are in,’ he was saying, ‘how can you make such an application?’
‘Easy,’ I said, butting in.
They all looked at me. ‘Well it’s all there, isn’t it, in the case of,’ I paused, ‘Bradley versus Tompkinson.’
‘What?’ They stared at me, as Ed Douglas’ face broke out into a big grin. ‘Is that the case about the ship that went down killing the cargo of puppies?’ he asked, playing along with my joke.
‘They were kittens,’ I answered. Still none of the Chancery boys realised we were taking the piss.
‘Ah, yes,’ responded Ed, ‘the case where Mr Justice Foreskin ruled that no knowledge of the unknowable assets accrued by the benefactors of the third party could be injuncted, if the rule in Stoppard, Stoppard and Pintglass was invoked before 10 o’clock on a Thursday?’
I burst out laughing. Ed burst out laughing. The Chancery boys said nothing and carried on with their conversation.
I ushered Ed to the bar where Johnny Richardson was holding court wearing an Arab headdress.
‘Is that what you’re going to be wearing in Dubai?’ I asked. ‘You’re going all that way to swap one ridiculous costume for another?’
‘Ah,’ said Johnny, suddenly becoming wistful, ‘the costume is about the only thing I’m going to miss.’
We drank some beer and reminisced about girls we had known at university and the things we’d got up to when we first came down to London.
Then we drank some more beer, and a small Scottish barrister called Harvey Johnstone joined us and started to talk about the barristers who were no longer working. He reeled off a list of names. ‘Pete Ashton,’ he said, ‘went to become a teacher. Ernie Haselhurst, you know, with the lisp, he left to become an antiques dealer or something. Andy Renshaw has become a golfing instructor. Graham Lloyd-Smith joined the army. And little Tommy Conrad, well, who knows what happened to him, he just disappeared: he made a bail application in a burglary case, left court, and no one saw him again.’
It was a list of the fallen: barristers who had worked at the Criminal and Family Bar who could no longer work because of the cuts to legal aid and the changes to the way we get our work. Now our mate Johnny was about to join their ranks, leaving the profession he had spent five years studying to join, to go and work in a hotel. I felt sad as I remembered the pride on the faces of his parents and his little sister when they came to his graduation.
‘Will you come back to the Bar?’ I asked him.
He shrugged. ‘Not unless things change. I’m sick of the debt. It’s not a profession for the likes of us any more. It’s a job for the sons and daughters of the rich.’
It was difficult to stand and listen to the negativity, to have another conversation about how defeated we were, how we were all doomed, how the promise of a lovely secure professional way of life we had assumed was ours, was going to crash around our heads. They may be right, but I wasn’t giving up. Not yet.
We drank more, toasted Johnny, drank some more, then hugged him and wished him well.
Eventually, just after Harvey Johnstone had completed his third toast in the style of Rab Burns, I looked at the time, it was just after midnight. I turned to Ed Douglas. ‘Look Ed, will you do me a favour?’
‘Sure.’
‘I need to go to a club in Deptford. Will you come with me?’
‘A club in Deptford?’
‘Yes.’
‘Christ, Russ, haven’t you suffered enough listening to the voices of doom in here?’
‘I need to find a girl,’ I told him, adding quickly, ‘Not like that. It’s for a case I’m doing – for my murder. It’s the club where the deceased used to work.’
‘What, you want us to go to a nightclub in Deptford, where the person your client is accused of murdering used to work, to find a girl?’
‘Yes.’
Ed smiled. ‘You’re completely mad.’
Ten minutes later we were in a taxi rushing through the twinkling London night towards the Purple Velvet Club, Deptford.
It is an old-fashioned nightclub, the Purple Velvet, one that probably saw its heyday in the 1980s. Now, though, it looked very quiet. I was nervous. The beer was starting to wear off and I was seriously questioning whether this was the right thing to do. It was the first time I had ever chased a witness, in fact it was the first time I had ever taken one of my cases into the real world. Normally my cases existed in the form of statements and photographs and the odd bit of CCTV. They would only come alive for me in my room and in my head, where they would be properly penned in by the confines of the law and my position as a barrister – the two things that protect me.
I had now entered the world of Tasha Roux and Gary Dickinson and I was an imposter, I wasn’t meant to be there.
My pupil-master had told me that I should never get too close to a case, yet here I was in the club where the deceased had worked, trying to find one of his girlfriends. It was utter madness. If I had been sober I’m pretty sure that I would have turned around, got back into the taxi and got as far away from the Purple Velvet Club as I could.
Ed looked at me, sensing my reticence. ‘Look, we’re here now, we might as well have a drink.’
I nodded, and we entered without any problem.
The club was quiet. There was a bar on the right-hand side and a deserted dance floor that was pulsing with disco lights.
I followed Ed to the bar. ‘Right,’ he said, shouting above the music, ‘what does this girl look like?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said.
‘Well, what’s her name then?’
‘Lilly.’
‘Okay, watch this,’ said Ed and turned towards the bar where a barmaid came to serve him. What happened next left me stunned. The ordinarily bookish and shy Ed Douglas suddenly started to flirt outrageously with the barmaid. The barmaid was a rather portly girl with dyed jet-black hair and a nose ring. I knew straight away that she would have never been involved with Gary Dickinson, this girl wasn’t his type. Ed ordered us both a drink, then bought one for the barmaid before declaring with incredible and unexpected confidence, ‘You must be Lilly then?’
The barmaid looked confused. ‘Er, no.’
‘Oh,’ said Ed, ‘I’m really sorry, I thought you were. Is Lilly working tonight?’
‘Lilly Spencer?’ asked the goth girl.
‘Yes,’ said Ed.
The girl looked at her watch. ‘She’s in the upstairs bar. You’d better hurry though, she’s about to finish her shift.’
Ed winked at me, and I rushed upstairs, ignoring the voice in my head that told me I was being a complete idiot.
At the top of the stairs was a set of double doors. As I reached them they opened and there stood two women wearing coats and looking as though they were ready to get off home. One of the girls was Hispanic-looking and the other, who was slightly older, had fair hair.
‘Hi,’ I said, panting. They looked at me, alarmed, instantly dismissing me as a pissed-up bloke on the pull. ‘Sorry,’ I continued, ‘but I’m trying to find Lilly. Are either of you Lilly?’
The Hispanic girl glanced towards the fair-haired girl. Bingo.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘I’m a barrister,’ I continued, as though this made being drunk, sweaty, out of breath and a bit embarrassing, somehow more acceptable.
‘I need to speak to her in relation to a case I’m doing.’
The blonde girl immediately looked down, as the Hispanic girl came to her defence. ‘If it’s about Gary then she doesn’t want anything to do with you,’ she said.
‘Please,’ I said, ‘I just want five minutes. That’s all.’
The two of them started to push past me on the way down the stairs. I turned and followed them.
‘Please,’ I repeated, sounding desperate now, ‘a young girl is in danger of spending the next twenty years of her life in prison.’
‘Well she shouldn’t have done it then,’ hissed the Hispanic girl
.
‘But, that’s just it, she didn’t do it.’
By now the two girls were moving away from me, and one of the bouncers was making his way up the stairs in my direction.
‘Lilly,’ I shouted, ‘Lilly, please.’
But it was too late. With an incredible deftness of touch, the bouncer grabbed my arm, and effortlessly placed me in a shoulder lock. A few seconds later, I was dispatched through a back door and into a back alley, ending up on my arse.
I sat there in the dark and deserted alley, the walls were damp and slimy with dubious history. This was a place where crimes were committed. This was a place where men had brandished knives and used their feet to kick, this was a place where women had been raped and drugs had been exchanged for money.
This was real.
I felt stupid. I shouldn’t have done this.
Bad character
I woke up the next morning with a tongue as dry as a camel-herder’s sandal and a massive grey cloud of guilt and self-loathing sitting uncomfortably above me.
What was I thinking? Going to the Purple Velvet Club in search of a witness, after having a skinful of beer was possibly the stupidest thing that I had ever done.
And then getting myself chucked out. I groaned to myself as the awful reality of what had happened came back to me.
It got worse. I checked my phone and saw that at some point I had sent a series of text messages to Kelly Backworth. The first, cockily proclaiming my decision to go to the Purple Velvet Club in search of Lilly, to which she had replied, with incisive prescience, ‘Do you really think that’s a good idea Russ?’
Then twenty minutes later, a rather pathetic drunken message that read ‘bin checked out of the Purple Club.’
To which she replied with a single word – ‘Tit’.
I limped into chambers, drinking Lucozade and eating bananas and extra strong mints (my age-old, tried and trusted hangover cure), and decided to carry out the next task on the list of things that Charlie Parkman wanted me to do: draft the application to adduce the bad character of Gary Dickinson.
Confessions of a Lawyer Page 21