by Jill McGown
“I just said it.”
“Why?”
“Because … I live in Malworth, don’t I? I wouldn’t be hanging around Stansfield. But I knew the first one had been in Stansfield. So I just said I’d followed her there.”
Whitehouse threw the papers back down onto the desk. “What a remarkable coincidence, then, that she had indeed been in Malworth,” he said. “And did you just ‘say’ that you had threatened to mutilate your victims if they made a sound? Did you just ‘say’ that you had cleaned them up, then cut away and removed the tape? More coincidence, Mr. Drummond?”
“I heard the cops talking,” said Drummond. “I heard them saying that was what he’d done.”
“And it was a coincidence, was it, that you should have about your person adhesive bandages of the type described by the victims as having been used to bind them? Or are you also saying that the police planted them?”
“They were in the first-aid kit—it comes with the bike.”
“And moist tissues of the sort used to wash the victims after the assaults?”
“They come with the first-aid kit.”
“And best of all—that you have the same DNA profile as the rapist,” said Whitehouse. “The odds, Mr. Drummond, are three million to one against that single coincidence alone—one shudders to think what giddy odds your version of events reaches.” He turned to the judge. “No further questions, my lord.”
“Do you wish to re-examine, Mr. Harper?”
Harper shook his head, and the court rose for the day.
Barton Crown Court, Friday 10 July
So far Harper had called a couple of people to confirm that Colin Drummond had always dressed in black since leaving school, and a motorbike salesman to confirm that the bike came with a first-aid box which included moist tissues—evidence which hardly cleared his client of involvement, but which at least confirmed that he was telling the truth. Now, his father was about to go into the box.
Harper had had considerable doubt about including the alibi evidence; the Drummonds had insisted that they knew for a fact that Colin had been at home, stripping down his bike or whatever it was he did with the thing, on the occasion of the first and third rapes, and belatedly attending his mother’s birthday party when the second took place. The party was one thing, but there was no way the Drummonds could remember off-hand what Colin was or was not doing eight months ago on two otherwise unremarkable nights; Harper knew that they had devised the alibi evidence between them, and so would everyone else who heard it.
But in the end he had gone with it, since he had nothing much else to offer. Not even a character witness. Drummond’s total lack of friends made Harper feel almost sorry for him. He had never had a relationship, sexual or otherwise, with any female other than his mother and Rosa. And that wasn’t just sad. It was hampering his defense. Harper had had people scouring the county for sight or sound of Rosa once the police had established that she wasn’t after all a figment of Drummond’s imagination, but she had gone to ground and was staying there. Drummond was now very anxious that she should be found, given the supposed sexual dysfunction of the assailant; Rosa, he said, could tell them that he didn’t have any problem at all in that regard. He hadn’t given anyone much of a chance to look for her; he hadn’t even mentioned her until eight weeks ago. He hadn’t, he had explained to Harper, wanted people knowing that he had had to pay for it on a regular basis.
Rosa had turned up at the Ferrari, worked it for a few weeks, then had left, probably to go somewhere that didn’t have a rapist on the loose. She hadn’t had premises, hadn’t even had a surname that anyone knew. Drummond thought she had had a pimp; he’d seen a man approach her once or twice after he had left her, but he only saw him in the dark, couldn’t describe him, and didn’t know his name.
So the other little prostitute remained his only hope; there were facets to the police version of that drama in the alleyway that Harper had so far merely hinted at, and which didn’t entirely ring true. But they would have to wait for his closing address, because he had no evidence to back up his doubts. He could voice them; he could give the jury something to think about.
For now, iffy alibi evidence, the irate resident who had seen Drummond at the airfield, one of the officers involved in the assault on Drummond, and a psychologist who would say that he was a harmless Peeping Tom comprised, God help him, the remainder of Drummond’s defense.
Judy had watched Drummond’s father lying his head off about how Colin was at home with him and his mother on three of the four occasions in question. Whitehouse had made mincemeat of him, and now he was doing the same to Mrs. Drummond, showing how their answers had been rehearsed, right down to their using the same words as one another.
Retired Major Harold Masterman was called next. He had been arriving home from an evening out when he had seen Drummond drive up to the old airfield, on to which the major’s house backed. He had put up with the screaming of the engine and the squealing of the tires for about an hour, but then he had phoned the police. Much good that had done him, he said. The noise went on for almost another hour, with no sign of the police doing anything about it. Almost half past one before he finally drove off, and never a policeman to be seen.
In the afternoon, Barry Turner was first on. Ex-Police Constable Barry Turner. He and PC Matthew Burbidge had stopped Drummond for reckless driving at thirty-two minutes after nine P.M. on Friday, October twenty-fifth last year. Drummond had been riding his bike at almost eighty miles an hour in thick fog with no lights; they had stopped him, and questioned him about his movements on the nights the rapes had taken place. He had laughed at them, said they would never catch the rapist. PC Burbidge had lost his temper. Turner had at first turned a blind eye, but then had stopped it before it got out of hand.
“Why didn’t you take him in for questioning if he had admitted assaulting these women?” asked Harper.
“Well … that was just it, really. He didn’t say he had. I mean—he wasn’t saying anything, not really. Just hints, and remarks. I thought Matt was just going to … you know, rough him up a bit. But he … well, I stopped it before he did too much damage.”
“Mr. Drummond had previously eluded you in a chase, hadn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And you had been frustrated in your attempts to find evidence of drink or drugs with which you could charge him?”
“Yes.”
“Could that perhaps have been why your colleague assaulted him?”
“It might have been partly why.”
“Not because he believed Mr. Drummond to be the rapist?”
Whitehouse was on his feet, objecting on the grounds that the witness could not know what Mr. Burbidge had or had not believed.
“Did you believe him to be the rapist?” asked Harper.
“No.”
The psychologist was wheeled on next, and was asked for his personal assessment of Drummond.
“Colin Drummond is a young man of surprisingly high IQ,” he started off, “given that the persona he projects most of the time is one of mumbling, inarticulate immaturity.”
Judy’s eyebrows rose in surprise. She couldn’t have given a fairer assessment herself.
“He reads little; he learned little at school. He is not particularly interested in anything except motorcycles, but he has a quick, receptive mind, and a capacity for learning about those things which do interest him.”
Like rape and its detection. Judy sneaked a look at Drummond, who looked appalled. Good. Sometimes even your mummy and daddy can’t buy you out of trouble, you little sod, she thought.
“Colin knows that he is capable of much more than serving in his father’s shop, and he knows that his hang-ups—to use a colloquial term—about relationships with other people resulted in his being turned down by the RAF.”
Better and better. Drummond was a frustrated bomber pilot.
“To avoid the contact with other people which he finds so difficult, he retreats int
o a world where Colin Drummond barely exists; he pulls on the figurative mask of inarticulate stupidity that he almost invariably shows to the rest of the world, and becomes in his mind almost anyone but Colin Drummond. A mask to disguise his very real feelings of resentment toward his father, whom he regards as weak and submissive, and toward his mother, whom he sees as domineering and superior. A mask to hide his own feelings of inadequacy, his own submissiveness to his mother’s rule, his own fear of all women. And he harbored these feelings, these thoughts, under his mask. He dressed in black so that not even his choice of colors and patterns could give him away.”
Judy didn’t usually have much time for psychologists. She could make an exception in this one’s case. Harper didn’t seem worried; he was listening gravely, his face betraying nothing. Perhaps he had just given up. If your own witnesses turn against you, what else could you do?
“Then he read of a man who really did wear a mask, whose dark and undetected presence was inspiring fear in an entire community. In women. Women, whom Colin finds unfathomable, frightening creatures, were being subdued and controlled by this man. A man who dressed as he did, in black. A man who rode a motorbike. And that appealed to him. If he, too, wore a mask—a real mask—he would truly cease to be Colin Drummond; he would become this man, and he could experience by proxy the same control, the same power. He could frighten those who most frightened him.
“And that was what he did. He watched women, followed them, made them run from him. But he made no contact with them; he is a voyeur, and voyeurs are by nature passive. He admits to fantasizing about these women, but his only physical outlet for those fantasies was increasingly frequent use of a prostitute. And that makes sense; that was his safety valve, the bridge between fantasy and reality. In my opinion, Colin Drummond never lost sight of which was which. He knows he is Colin Drummond; he just wishes he wasn’t. And to that end, he play-acted. He pretended to be the rapist, just as he has pretended to be a hundred different things, a hundred different people. Perhaps without even being aware of it, he did cause the police to believe that he was the rapist by his reactions, and his body language, but not, I wouldn’t think, by saying so openly. A mask, real or figurative, does not imply openness of any sort.”
Harper started asking questions then, designed, of course, to make Drummond appear to be nothing more than a sad inadequate whose innocent fantasies had got him into hot water.
When it was over, Whitehouse got to his feet. “Wouldn’t such a man as you describe—one who has a fear of women, one who is dominated by his mother, one who retreats into fantasy—be capable of rape?” he asked.
The psychologist smiled. “There is a school of thought which says that all men are capable of rape,” he said.
There was a muted cheer from the women who sat across from Judy.
“Isn’t one who follows women in the street and watches them make love in parked cars just a touch more likely to put that capability to use?” Whitehouse asked.
“Possibly. But in this case the safety valve was there in Rosa, the prostitute with whom Drummond could find release for these fantasies.”
“But not for long,” said Whitehouse. “The safety valve seems to have left town after people started being raped.”
“I think,” the psychologist said, “that the important part of that sentence is ‘after people started being raped.’ Not before. Two people had been raped before Rosa left. So there is little reason to connect Mr. Drummond to the rapes on those grounds.”
“No further questions,” said Whitehouse.
Harper stood. “That is the case for the defense, my lord,” he said, almost apologetically.
The judge looked at his watch, and disappointed the gallery, who had been hoping for a verdict, and Judy, whose leave was up. “I think this will be a convenient time to adjourn,” he said. “I will hear the closing speeches on Monday.”
“All rise. Let all those having business…”
Barton Crown Court, Monday 13 July
Colin was brought up for the last time. Whitehouse and Harper were going to make their closing addresses to the jury, and the judge would sum up, Harper had told him. They were almost bound to get a verdict today. Harper had said that it was his duty to warn him that he believed it would be a guilty verdict, at least on the first three.
Colin looked around the courtroom, watching it fill up. Those dykes in the gallery would take the roof off the building if he got sent down. Detective Inspector Hill wasn’t there today; she’d been there all last week, sitting with that lot. But she wasn’t a dyke. She was Lloyd’s girlfriend.
Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd had come to see him, come into the garage when he was working on the bike, walked in without so much as asking. The garage was his place, where he could work on the bike, and think. His dad parked his car there, but that was all. Even his mum didn’t come in when Colin was working on the bike. But Lloyd had walked in, calling him “Colin,” as if he owned the place. Next morning, Colin had taken the bike out, had seen Lloyd leave a flat with a woman. Detective Inspector Hill. Lloyd had trespassed on his property, and Colin had made up his mind then to trespass on Lloyd’s. He’d waited for her outside her flat that night, but Lloyd had come home with her, and he’d had to let it go. But he’d get her. One day. He’d get her.
At last, Whitehouse stood up, and faced the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “Colin Drummond was arrested within moments of having sexually assaulted a sixteen-year-old girl in an attack which had begun as three previous attacks had begun; someone had pushed her down to the ground, and subjected her to an anal assault, after having held a knife to her genitals and uttered a specific threat to ‘cut her open’ if she did not do as she was told. On each of the three previous occasions, the victim had then been bound hand and foot and subjected to further horrific abuse, leaving physical and emotional scars, which in one tragic instance led to suicide.
“Colin Drummond’s attire at the time of his arrest—black clothing, and a full face-mask—and his means of transport—a black motorbike—matched that of the assailant in the previous assaults; he carried on him materials of the sort used in each of these previous assaults, and in daylight, a knife was found at the scene of this final assault which matched what description the victim was able to give of it. That same morning Drummond made, as you have heard, a full, boastful, and foul-mouthed confession to all four of these assaults. There cam be little doubt of what Miss Benson’s fate was to have been, had there been no interruption of that final assault.
“But he would have you believe, ladies and gentlemen, that this confession was fabricated by him, pieced together from fragments of information, because he was afraid of being physically harmed. It is true that he had been beaten by a police officer, and you may accept that he was understandably alarmed when he was arrested. But this was just one man losing his temper, and, as a result, his job, and his liberty. Both officers involved were immediately suspended from duty. One was subsequently imprisoned, the other fined, and both were dismissed from the service. In what way could the police be thought to be condoning what they had done, even by a frightened suspect?
“And then there are the coincidences attendant upon his two brushes with Malworth police,” Whitehouse went on.
Colin sat in the dock, watching the jury’s faces as Whitehouse drew attention to the parts of his statement which couldn’t be accounted for by anything he had learned during the interviews, and his responses when questioned about them, then took them through the coincidences, one by one. Then he reminded them again of the DNA evidence, the most damning evidence of all. Harper hadn’t even asked the DNA bloke any questions, useless bastard. And you would have thought he could have found out about Rosa, with all the money that was being thrown at him to do just that.
“No evidence has been offered to back up the veiled suggestion by the defense that the police in some way engineered what went on in Hosier’s Alley that night, or that the statement given by
Miss Benson was anything other than a—possibly misguided—translation into standard English of her spoken word. An emergency call was received which resulted in a police car being on the spot, and two independent witnesses have told you what they saw and heard.
“In light of all the evidence presented, you must find the defendant guilty on all counts,” Whitehouse finished.
Now. Colin held his breath as Harper got up. Earn your money, you lazy sod.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said. “You have heard much over the last three days of the appalling experiences of three young women at the hands of a brutal and methodical assailant. But please don’t allow your very natural revulsion at the disgusting and damaging acts of violence that they endured to cloud the issue, or your judgment of it.
“That these attacks took place is beyond doubt, and not in dispute; what you are judging here is who was responsible for them, and I believe I have demonstrated to you that despite the understandable conviction of the police that they had apprehended the right man, there is in fact very little evidence to support this contention.
“These three young women, the victims, have no personal knowledge of the identity of their assailant. The rapist took great care, as you have heard, to keep his identity well hidden. He covered himself from head to foot, and none of his victims is able to offer anything in the way of a description of the man himself beyond his approximate height and build, and in one instance, the color of his eyes—blue, like my client’s. But no hair color, no skin tone, no distinguishing features.
“There was, however, one way in which his victims might have identified him: they heard a voice. A voice that gave them instructions, that threatened them, that warned them of the consequences of defying him, of making a sound. A voice which told them that their assailant was ‘the Stealth Bomber.’ This voice must have burned itself into the victims’ memories, but not one of them—not one—recognized Mr. Drummond’s voice as the voice of her assailant.