I think of Gabriel and his sad eyes, the way he lit up when he thought there was a chance we could be together. I think of those letters, the fact that he liked my sadness because it made him feel less bad about his own. He could have had a happy life, if only he’d been allowed. But then I think about my mother. About my father. How we all have to overcome our childhoods somehow.
‘Right, who fancies a takeaway?’
I look up and see Georgie standing by the door. Jack appears behind her, puts his arm around her waist and smiles.
‘I don’t know about you lot but I’m starving,’ he says. ‘Prawn ramen for you, Lottie?’
‘How did you remember?’ she says, laughing.
‘Well, you always were a creature of habit.’
I smile, allowing myself to sink into the bosom of my family for a few moments, but there’s a feeling of unease that I still can’t shake. I think of Connor running away from the scene, remember his face as he pressed down on me. I look at Georgie as she snuggles up to Jack to order the meal and I realize that the time has come.
I have to tell her what happened.
40. Now
After supper Jack washes the dishes then heads up to bed, leaving me, Georgie and Lottie sitting in the living room.
‘Anyone fancy a top-up?’ says Georgie, holding the bottle of red aloft.
‘Not for me, thanks,’ I say, placing my hand over my glass. I need to have a clear head for what I’m about to say.
Beside me, Lottie lets out a sigh.
‘God, what a day,’ she says, squeezing my arm gently. ‘You must be completely shattered, Ness.’
I nod my head.
‘There’s something I need to tell you both,’ I say, my hands trembling. All these months and this is the first time I will actually articulate what happened to me. It feels surreal.
‘What is it?’ says Georgie, her face all concern. ‘What’s happened?’
I realize I can’t look at them or else I’ll lose my nerve so I stand up and walk over to the Grimshaw painting. Fixing my eyes on that lone figure, I begin to speak.
‘I –’
My voice catches in my throat. I take a deep breath and start again.
‘I – I think Connor raped me.’
There. Out it goes. Out of my head, where it has plagued me these last few months, and into the world. I feel my body crumple with a mixture of terror and relief.
‘What?’
Lottie’s voice rips into the silence. I turn. She is sitting there open-mouthed. Georgie is quiet, but I see that she is clasping her hands so tightly her knuckles have gone white.
‘What happened, Nessa?’ she says, looking up at me. ‘Tell us.’
I turn my head and tell them every little detail, not just of the night in question but everything leading up to it: the mind games, the control, the way he described his ex, Sam, as a psycho, the subtle undermining of everything I said and did. When I’m finished I feel a hand on my shoulder. I turn and fall into my sister’s arms.
‘Oh, my darling girl,’ she says, kissing the top of my head. ‘How could I have let this happen to you?’
‘Georgie, this isn’t your fault,’ I say. ‘You’ve been there for me all my life. When Mum died you were invincible.’
‘It’s these last few years I’m talking about,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘I became selfish, got absorbed in my own life.’
‘Georgie, you’ve never been selfish. I’m a grown woman,’ I say. ‘I chose to be in a relationship with Connor. No one could have foreseen this happening.’
‘The only person at fault here is that bastard,’ says Lottie as we join her on the sofa.
‘He made it seem normal,’ I say, putting my head in my hands. ‘And then he made me feel like I was losing my mind, like I couldn’t function. That’s why it’s taken me so long to realize what actually happened. I couldn’t be sure. All I kept thinking was what if he’s right? What if I am having some sort of breakdown and accusing a man of doing something terrible, something he didn’t do?’
‘Oh, Ness,’ says Lottie, putting her hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s what abusers do. They make you think it’s you. They play the victim.’
I nod my head, recalling his tears the morning after the burlesque.
‘I know. But I just never thought that’s what was happening to me. I couldn’t see clearly. In a weird way, Gabriel made me see sense,’ I say. ‘His life had been destroyed by his father, a man who was adored by millions. His childhood had been stolen from him and put up for public consumption. He’d been violated and he was angry, so angry he ended up killing. I realized that Connor had done something similar to me, he’d violated me when I was at my most vulnerable. But I don’t want to be like Gabriel. I don’t want my life to be destroyed by anger and hate.’
‘It’s not going to be,’ says Georgie, crouching down in front of me. ‘And you know why? Because tomorrow morning, after we’ve all had a good rest, you’re going to call the police. This man has to be stopped before he does this to someone else, darling. You know that, don’t you?’
She takes my hand in hers and looks me straight in the eye.
‘Yes,’ I say, tears blurring my vision. ‘I know that, but I’m scared, Georgie.’
‘I’ll be right here next to you, as will Lottie and Jack, and we’ll be with you every single step of the way.’
‘This is it, Vanessa,’ says Lottie, squeezing my hand. ‘This is the moment you take back control.’
41.
Wimbledon Magistrates Court 5 March 2019
I watch Connor’s face as the jury files back into the courtroom. He doesn’t show any sign of emotion, just stares straight ahead. The dazzling smile and bravado that has carried him through life, has charmed men and women alike, convinced them to do as he asked, to believe his version of events, has deserted him. He looks small, diminished.
The last seven months have brought me to the very limit of what I thought I could endure. Once I made the call to the police I thought the hard part was over, that the weight of the legal system would come down on Connor and relieve some of the anxiety and fear I’d been feeling. Little did I know that the hardest part was still to come.
When Connor was arrested he not only protested his innocence but repeated the lies he had told to Lottie: that I’d got drunk that night then I’d woken up the next day, hung-over and regretful at having blacked out, and decided to accuse him of rape. He pointed out my subsequent decline, leaving my job, my ‘unhinged’ spree of visiting houses under different guises and, of course, Geoffrey Rivers’s death. Even though I was cleared of that entirely, he maintained I wasn’t as innocent as everyone thought.
With Connor refusing to admit what he had done, I was faced with the decision of whether to go ahead and face a trial that could see every aspect of my life dragged out and scrutinized. As nicely as she could, my barrister pointed out that I would be painted as an unreliable witness: a woman in a seemingly stable relationship, with an Instagram page full of loved-up photos of the two of us at the time of the alleged rape, a woman who went on to dupe estate agents in a bizarre game that got me tangled up in a murder case.
The odds were stacked against me, but I decided to proceed. I needed to prove that what Connor did to me that night was wrong, criminally wrong, and to do that I would have to be brave. I thought of my mother, how she hid those headaches from us because she didn’t want to worry us, didn’t want to cause a fuss, and I tried to imagine what she would say if she were here. She would want me to stand up for myself, want me to have the life she never had, a long and healthy one, free of fear. I knew it was going to be daunting, but I knew I had Georgie and Jack and Lottie behind me. I had no choice, I told myself, I had to see this through, had to see justice served.
Still, the odds continued to be stacked against me as the trial began. Connor’s mother had paid for an expensive barrister, an intimidating giant of a man with gold cufflinks and a permanent sneer, who spent the first two
days ripping me to shreds. I spent each night curled up in the foetal position on Georgie’s sofa, my sister rubbing my head and bringing me cups of tea, telling me, just as she had done in the days and weeks following my mother’s death, that everything was going to be fine. ‘The good will out, my darling,’ she told me as we drove back to the court the following day.
I couldn’t see how it possibly would. But when we arrived at court that morning I was met by my barrister, Nicole Jones, a softly spoken but deadly sharp young woman. She told me that, following a tip-off from one of Connor’s ex-colleagues, they had managed to track down Cathy Cooper, a woman who had worked with Connor and accused him of date rape, before he’d intimidated her into leaving the firm. She’d relocated to Brussels, but when my legal team tracked her down and explained what I had gone through, she felt she had to speak out. ‘She’ll be appearing in court, as a witness for the prosecution,’ said Nicole as we stood in the corridor, huddled up against a wall. Neither of us dared say it but we knew that Cathy giving evidence could change everything.
I’ll never forget the look on Connor’s face when Cathy stepped into the witness box. Until then he had been ultra confident, laughing with his legal team, flashing that beaming smile up to his mother in the gallery, answering every question without a flinch. But when he saw Cathy – a tall young woman with blonde hair, pale-blue eyes and a light voice that never wavered, even as Connor’s barrister tried to rip her story to shreds – the colour had drained from his face. He knew, in those moments, that his trail of abuse had come to an end. It was all over.
Like me, Cathy had been a confident, well-balanced, happy woman when she met Connor but after the date rape she had suffered from depression, which was so bad her employers had wondered if she was having a nervous breakdown. When this was revealed in court I thought back to that conversation with Connor where he’d told me about a friend of his who’d had a breakdown. ‘We were all so worried about her,’ he’d said. In reality, he’d stood by and watched as the woman he’d attacked was ground down by the horror of what he’d inflicted on her. And yet, despite her own trauma, Cathy had been brave enough to come forward. I will never forget that and will always be grateful to her.
As the foreman of the jury – a middle-aged man with receding hair and thick, heavy-rimmed spectacles – stands to deliver the verdict, I feel Georgie’s hand clasp mine. This is the moment. This is what I have been waiting for. The man stumbles slightly as he begins to speak, coughs and then says the word we have been hoping for, but never thought would come.
Guilty.
Georgie sweeps me into her arms. Behind me, I hear Connor’s mother hiss some expletive. I feel strangely calm, almost numb.
A couple of minutes pass in a blur and as the verdict sinks in I recall the Victim Impact Statement I had written with my barrister, Nicole.
I’d like to say that before I met Connor Dawkins I was a happy, vivacious person without a care in the world but that would not be true. The fact is that I was a victim before I ever met this man. In 1996, my mum, Penny Adams, suffered a brain haemorrhage while driving home from the shops. She died instantly. And when she died she took a little bit of me, and my sister, and my dad, with her. We would never be the same again. Before that day in July 1996, I had been a happy child with a loving family and a secure home, and I would spend my early adult life looking for a replacement.
It was my search for that feeling of home, for the love and security and warmth that come with it, that put me in the path of Connor Dawkins. When he rushed me into making our relationship official, telling friends, moving in together within a couple of months, I took that as a sign that he loved me and that I had finally found someone to build a life with, a home, a family. I had trusted Connor Dawkins completely but that trust had been misplaced. When he met me for a drink on our first date, he hadn’t seen a potential life partner, a woman he could love and marry and start a family with. He saw another victim. And in my vulnerable state I was an easy target. To the outside world, our relationship looked blissful. But behind his dazzling smile lay a toxic trail of lies, deceit and mind games, which Connor Dawkins hid so skilfully he managed to fool not only me but his family, his friends and his colleagues. ‘A good man,’ was how most of the people who came into his orbit would describe him. ‘A charming man, a team player, one of the lads.’ And I had thought the same of him, even when he was gaslighting me, telling me that I didn’t know my own mind, that I was imagining things, that my suspicions were those of a crazy person, a ‘psycho’ – which is the term he used to describe his exes. And because I was a trusting person, because I desperately wanted to see the good in him and our relationship, I made the mistake of letting Connor Dawkins control my mind to such an extent that I no longer knew what was real and what was just in my head.
I continued to do that right up until the morning of 29th May 2018, when I woke up to find that Connor Dawkins had raped me. Yet, even then, I let him try to tell me that it was all in my head, that I was the bad person for accusing a loving boyfriend of committing such a heinous crime. I knew, instinctively, what had happened, but I tried to block it out by losing myself in other people’s lives. My short-lived coping mechanism was to view expensive houses using various aliases, which the defence has used to paint me as a dangerous fantasist, a mentally unstable woman who doesn’t know her own mind, who lives in a dream world, and who would be quite capable of inventing a story accusing an innocent man of a terrible crime. But during my lost months of trying on other people’s lives, I made a discovery. No one, not your mother, not your father, not your lover, has the right to violate you, to control you, to ‘take’ your life from you and twist it to shape their own ends.
Because what I didn’t know when I fell under the spell of Geoffrey Rivers and his books, as a traumatized ten-year-old, and again when I fell under Connor Dawkins’s spell all these years later, is that for some people, love means power, it means ownership and control. These people would have you believe that you have no voice, no right over your own life. They chip away at your self-esteem, at your judgement, at your very essence, until there is so little left you might as well be a ghost. Yet Connor Dawkins didn’t break me fully. With the support of my family I summoned the courage to go to the police, knowing that he would very likely deny the charges and therefore put me through the ordeal of being cross-examined in court. Most victims would lose their nerve at this point and drop the charges. I very nearly did. To anyone in this position, I would like to say I am with you and I understand your fears, but your silence makes it possible for people like Connor Dawkins to carry on destroying lives. If you can find it in you to come forward then you might help other people like you, like me.
Someone told me recently that the ‘good will out’, that truth and honesty and fairness will always prevail. It will take me a long time to believe that, to trust people again, to let someone else into my heart. But I hope one day to recover from the ordeal this man put me through and to rebuild the life he tried to destroy.
The room remains hushed for a few moments. Up in the public gallery, Connor’s mother gets to her feet and noisily exits, while her son sits with his head in his hands.
Outside the court, Lottie suggests we go and have that celebratory drink before heading home. I smile at her but decline the offer. This is not about celebrating. This is about justice being done. Now it has been, I can sleep peacefully in my bed and I can get on with my life.
Epilogue
Two years later
‘As you can see, Miss Adams, it’s a stunning view.’
I watch as Phil, the estate agent, opens the wooden shutters. A stream of sunlight bathes the living room, giving it a honey glow.
‘The garden needs a little work but if you’re happy to roll your sleeves up you could easily add an extra 50k to the value of the house.’
I nod my head politely as I step towards the window and look out. Phil is right, the garden is in need of some attention, but adding valu
e to this house is the last thing on my mind. If I’ve learned anything these last few years it’s that family and friends are what matters, not fancy houses or picture-perfect lifestyles.
I think back to the woman I was two years ago and I barely recognize myself. In the months after the trial I was a nervous wreck. I was plagued by nightmares where Connor would be on top of me, pinning me down, his face contorted with rage and hate. I’d wake up in a sweat then reassure myself that he was in prison, that he could not hurt me, or any other woman, again. He was sentenced to five years in the end and, though I’ve been told that he will likely only serve half of that, it was enough for me to see him receive punishment for what he did to me and Cathy, however lenient the sentence might be.
Sometimes my thoughts wander to that strange man with the piercing blue eyes, the man who set all this in motion. The police got in touch with me at the end of last year to say there had been possible sightings of Gabriel in Melbourne and Sydney. Part of me was happy for him that he could be having adventures, living the life his father had denied him all those years. Yet another part of me felt uneasy, remembering his hands around my throat, the glee in his eyes as he told me he’d killed his father. The fact that he could be on the other side of the world is reassuring, though when it comes to him, I will never feel truly safe.
Through all of this, my sister has been a tower of strength. ‘I’m so proud of you, Nessa,’ she’d told me, the night after the verdict, as we sat in her kitchen, Radio 2 blaring out of the Roberts radio. She and Jack have had their troubles but they’re still together, still going strong. Of course, they still quarrel but they find a way to work through. As Georgie often reminds me, ‘We’re not perfect, but then, who is?’
The Perfect Life Page 24