‘First, you’ve got to tell the truth, just like you’ve always told me and Kelly – okay? No one can ask any more of you than that.’
She nodded and tried a little smile.
‘Second,’ I continued, ‘don’t forget that we’re here to protect you. If the questioning becomes too personal or inadmissible, Charlie will get to his feet to stop it.’
She smiled painfully as Charlie looked on like an uncle.
‘And, finally Tasha, you’ve got to remember that this is your chance to tell your side of the story. So go up there and do your best, okay? We’re all behind you rooting for you.’
I wasn’t sure if I was expecting whooping and high fives at the end of my talk, but I didn’t get it. Instead Tasha looked nervously towards the floor then up at me, wiped her eyes and gave me a thin-lipped nod.
Her evidence was difficult.
I can put it no better than that. She struggled with some of the questions, particularly when we asked her about her childhood and her teenage years, when she was taking drugs and living a rather crazy existence.
She became emotional when she described how she had had a baby taken away from her and how, because of that, she had vowed never to have another child, until she met Gary.
‘Did you love him?’ asked Charlie.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Then we got to the night itself. She told us how she had been out and how she was supposed to have been meeting one of Gary Dickinson’s friends, a man called Rio.
‘For what reason?’ asked Charlie, and Tasha did this sly smile before she answered, which I knew was a mixture of nerves and embarrassment, but came across as a bit suspicious. I worried about that. I worried how a jury would interpret her smile, how a little thing like that could give them a particular impression, an unfair impression, which would be her downfall.
‘He wanted me to go with them,’ she answered.
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Charlie. And Tasha paused, then looked upwards with the shame, then answered, ‘He wanted me to have sex with them.’
‘How did you feel about that?’
‘I felt dirty.’
Charlie paused. He knew that the rhythm of her evidence was important, he knew that he had to allow some of her answers to make their way into the minds of the jury.
He asked her about taking cocaine, and she admitted that she had – it was better that that particular detail came from his friendly questioning than the hostile cross-examination that would be coming via Roger Fish. Then he moved on to the actual incident.
‘How did you feel?’
‘Upset.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of what he had wanted me to do with his friends.’
‘How was he with you?’
‘He was angry with me – because I hadn’t met up with them.’
He then asked her about the way in which he would hurt her – and the jury watched, enraptured, as she described what he used to do to her, the way he would form both his hands into fists and bring them down on both sides of her head. She showed the jury the way he did it, bashing her own fists against her temples.
‘How did that feel?’
‘It made me want to pass out with the pain.’
‘Why did you rush towards him?’
‘I wanted to hug him, I thought that he wanted me to hug him, I thought everything was going to be alright, that I was going to be safe.’
‘When you rushed towards him what did he do?’
‘He formed his hands into fists.’
‘What did you think was about to happen?’
‘He was going to hit me instead. He’d conned me.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I pushed him hard on the chest with both my hands.’
‘And what happened to him?’
Tasha started to sob as she answered this question.
‘He fell,’ she managed, ‘he fell backwards over the banister.’
Roger Fish got up slowly to cross-examine her. He knew that this was a tricky exercise. He knew that if he went too hard on her, bullied her, shouted at her, then she would cry and the jury might feel some sympathy for her and antipathy towards him. He started carefully.
‘It’s an awful thing that he was making you do,’ he said, his voice gentle and friendly.
Tasha nodded in response.
‘You must have hated him?’
She nodded again. ‘Sometimes I did, but mostly I loved him, he could be kind and generous when he wanted.’
‘But not on that night.’
‘Well …’
‘Well, he wasn’t, was he?’ continued Fish. ‘He was horrible to you that night, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, he was.’
‘You must have been angry.’
‘I was upset more than angry.’
‘Come now, you were angry – you screamed at him, didn’t you?’
Tasha shrugged. ‘Yes, I did scream at him, because I was so upset.’
‘Okay,’ said the Fishmeister, his voice never changing from its soft tone. ‘You were upset. In fact you were so upset that you wanted to kill him.’
‘No,’ said Tasha. I knew what was coming next.
‘Well,’ said Fish, ‘let’s have a look at that text message you sent him that night.’
I groaned. Here it came.
‘A couple of hours before you killed him, you sent Gary Dickinson a text message saying, “I don’t ever wanna C U again, U come near me and I’ll kill U”.’
Tasha’s lips thinned. The jury stared at her. They knew the importance of this, they stared at Tasha and Roger Fish, standing no more than ten metres from each other, locked in an intense exchange. Two people who would never ever converse again as long as they both lived but at that moment engaged in a deep, deep intimacy.
Fish repeated, ‘You come near me and I’ll kill you And that is exactly what you did, didn’t you, Miss Roux? You killed him, just as you’d threatened.’
Tasha emitted a sound as though her soul was leaving her body, her eyes were red and tears started to roll down her cheeks.
The rest of Tasha’s cross-examination was just as painful. She struggled with questions about drugs and drink and anger. At times she seemed evasive and at times she came over as rock-hard, streetwise, capable of violence. By the end Fish was mocking her for the fact that she had never mentioned to anyone the way in which she was now saying that Gary Dickinson hit her.
‘So you’re now saying that Gary Dickinson used to hit you like this?’ he said, putting his two fists against his own head in a rather limp and unthreatening way.
‘Yes, but it wasn’t like that, it was much harder, he would pound me,’ responded Tasha.
‘Why didn’t you say this to the police?’ His voice less gentle now.
‘Because I was just trying to blot it out of my mind. He did it all the time. I hated it. I thought that one day, he would kill me by doing that.’
‘That’s a lie isn’t it, Miss Roux?’
‘No,’ she wailed. ‘No.’
‘You wanted him dead and as he stood there, vulnerable, by the side of that banister, you saw your chance. That’s right isn’t it?’
Tasha shook her head, sobbing uncontrollably now. Roger Fish sat down. As far as he was concerned his work was done, the witness was defeated.
The Judge looked at Charlie. ‘Is that your case, Mr Parkman, or will you be calling any further evidence?’
Charlie sighed. ‘Can I have five minutes, My Lord, before I formally close the case for the defence?’
‘Very well.’
We traipsed out of the court. Dejected. I felt helpless, our grasp on the case weakened and tentative, everything slipping away from us. It was almost over.
And that’s when I saw her. Striding purposefully down the corridor, past the courtrooms, past the busy barristers and lawyers, past the court attendants, witnesses, criminals, families and victims and all the people who come to the Crown Court: Sh
andra Whithurst, large and confident and looking straight at us. She smiled a massive sunny summer’s day of a smile at Charlie.
‘I’ve found them,’ she said, her voice booming along the ancient stone and brickwork. And with that she motioned to two women who were walking a few yards behind her – the first I recognised immediately as Lilly Spencer, the second, I didn’t know.
‘This is Lilly and this is Taylor,’ said Shandra.
And I felt my own face break out into a massive grin. I knew immediately that Shandra had tracked down not just one, but two of Gary’s former girlfriends, and both were now here in court willing to give evidence.
By the time Lilly Spencer and Taylor Lumsden had finished giving their evidence, the case against Tasha Roux was very different.
Charlie examined both of them perfectly.
‘Do you know Tasha Roux?’ he asked them.
‘No.’
‘Have you ever met her?’
‘No.’
This was vital. They were independent witnesses, they had no axe to grind, no cause to further, no wool to pull over anyone’s eyes. They were here to simply tell the jury what they knew and both of them told the jury that they had been in relationships with Gary Dickinson. Both of them were able to describe how initially he had been loving and then had become controlling and aggressive.
Crucially though – bloody, bloody crucially – both Lilly Spencer and Taylor Lumsden described being assaulted by him, and both of them described the way he had done it: two fists, one knuckle extended, pounding against both sides of their heads. Taylor said it happened twice to her before she moved house to get away from him; but, for Lilly, it happened a lot – she cried as she described it. ‘I felt like he might kill me,’ she told the court, and the court shook with the resonance of that.
I listened, my whole body quivering with the joy that we had presented evidence to the jury to prove that Tasha Roux wasn’t lying.
Later I would ask Shandra how she had found them and she told me she, like me, had gone to the Purple Velvet Club to try to speak to Lilly Spencer.
‘But how did you manage to persuade her?’ I asked.
‘Well I was sober for one thing, Mr Winnock,’ she told me, then added, ‘I’m not a fancy lawyer, you see, so I was able to tell Lilly that I was normal and that giving evidence to help another girl wasn’t a bad or crazy thing to do, but a normal thing to do.’
I nodded. I got that.
‘And how did you find the other girl, Taylor?’ I asked.
‘Facebook.’
I should have guessed. Bloody marvellous Facebook.
Charlie’s speech
The next morning the jury heard speeches from Roger Fish and Charlie Parkman. The two Silks now in direct confrontation as they duelled for the affection of the jury.
Roger’s was, as you would expect, polished and clever. He carefully built up his case, layer by layer. ‘Tasha Roux had a motive to kill,’ he said, ‘she had the correct amount of anger to kill,’ he said, ‘and she had the opportunity to kill.’
I watched the jury to see if any of them nodded and occasionally one or two of them did as the Fishmeister’s points struck home. I cursed them.
Then Charlie Parkman got to his feet.
He started slowly, holding on to the lectern, his body arched and small as though he was coiled, and then, as he unfurled his arguments, he unfurled his body. It was as though as his presence was growing, his arguments were growing, and the idea of reasonable doubt was growing, becoming something tangible that was moving about the jury and touching them gently, making them think again.
‘Gary Dickinson did not deserve to die that night,’ he told them. ‘No one is saying that. Tasha Roux is not saying that, I’m not saying that. Gary Dickinson had a right to life – of course he did. It is a right we all have, each and every one of us. It means everything. But …’ He continued emphatically, uncoiling himself, ‘But. Each and every one of us also has the right to defend ourselves from attack from another person who intends to cause us pain. Tasha Roux had that right. And, whether we like it or not, Gary Dickinson was a man who caused her pain.’
Charlie expertly described the law of self-defence to the jury. He expertly dismissed the telephone text evidence, emphatically telling them that no one who was seriously planning to kill someone would actually be so stupid as to text them about it beforehand. And that pushing someone over a banister would not be the way that someone with a clear and settled intention to kill would do it. Then he reminded them of the two girls, Lilly and Taylor, who had come to court not to bat for a particular side, not to hoodwink them, the jury, into acquitting a friend or loved one, but to tell them what they knew, to help them reach the right verdict. ‘And what they knew,’ he said, ‘was that Gary Dickinson was a man with a propensity for using violence in a particularly nasty and brutal way against women.’ He then formed his fists and looked at the jury – ‘Like this.’
The jury watched. Twelve pairs of eyes unable to move away from this man as he spoke to them.
‘You promised to reach a true verdict according to the evidence,’ he concluded, ‘you made that promise to the court, to society, and to this young woman. Now I’m going to hold you to that promise, I’m going to ask you to find her not guilty.’
I wanted to stand up and cheer. I wanted to clap and whoop and hug my leader as he finished his speech, but of course I couldn’t, I didn’t. Instead I reached my hand out towards Kelly and gave her hand a little squeeze under the bench. She squeezed it back.
Tasha Roux was acquitted of murder.
She broke down in floods of tears as the foreman of the jury read out the verdict – then she mouthed, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ to them as they looked at her and no doubt shared her joy, but at the same time pondered whether they had done the right thing.
We waited for Tasha to be released. It took about twenty minutes. She arrived through a door by the cell area – free. There were hugs and smiles and tears as she thanked me and Kelly, then we let her disappear to her family and friends. Free. Free again.
I found Charlie sitting quietly in the robing room. Roger Fish was congratulating him on a job well done. Charlie smiled and said that it was nice to be back, but he’d forgotten how tiring it could be waiting for a jury.
And he did look tired. He looked as if every ounce of emotion had wrapped itself tightly around him, squeezing the life out of him.
‘Well done,’ I said.
‘Ah Russell, thanks,’ he replied wearily, adding, ‘I’ve got something for you.’
And with that he pulled out a red bag with the initials RW embroidered on it in gold lettering. I held it. My red bag.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said, ‘this means an awful lot to me.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘this was my last case and I’m glad we won it.’
‘Your last case?’
‘Yes,’ he told me, ‘I’ve got a little part-time job doing some offshore work in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Trust law, boring stuff, but the climate will be nice. Semi-retirement for me and a long-suffering wife. That’s why I wanted to do one last case in front of a jury before I slip away.’
I understood now what it had meant to him.
I watched as he packed his wig in his tin, and put his tin in his own red bag, given to him, no doubt, when he was a young, ambitious and enthusiastic junior barrister. I watched him tie the pink ribbon one last time around his last brief, put it all away in his case and walk slowly out of the robing room. The barrister who had his career scarred because he had been instructed to advocate in favour of the death of a young boy, and because he had followed his instructions to the letter. Done his job properly. A proper barrister.
Then I put my own wig tin in my new red bag, slung that over my shoulder and walked out and back to chambers.
Clem Wilson was waiting for me.
‘Well done, sir,’ he said, beaming proudly, ‘a brilliant result.’
‘Than
ks,’ I said coyly.
‘Enjoy it,’ he said, ‘but don’t celebrate too hard tonight.’
‘Why?’ I asked him.
‘Because tomorrow you’ve got to go to Ipswich.’
‘Ipswich?’
‘Yes. Two sentences and a mention in a burglary. The papers are in your pigeonhole.’
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all those at Friday Project for their help and perseverance, in particular Scott Pack for giving me the idea and Cicely Aspinall for making sense out of my tortured ramblings.
I’d also like to thank my agent, who knows who he is but can’t be named, and my wife and children who put up with my long sessions behind my computer screen with a great deal of patience.
Finally, I’d like to acknowledge all of the lawyers, Judges, clients and court staff who make the job of being a barrister uniquely interesting and always challenging.
About the Author
RUSSELL WINNOCK is a pseudonym, but the author is a real criminal barrister, called in 1999 and trying his best ever since.
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Confessions of a Lawyer Page 25