by Wilbur Smith
There followed a long silence broken only by the crackle of static.
‘Hello! Hello! Are you still there, Henry?’
‘Yeah, I’m still here. I’m thinking.’ Henry’s voice was bleak. ‘Give me a second or two, Ronnie.’ Then he asked, ‘Who do they accuse him of raping?’
‘Sorry, Henry! This is the worst part of it. He is accused of raping both Sacha and Bryoni.’
‘No!’ Henry said softly. ‘It’s a mistake. It can’t be true. I don’t believe it. Bryoni is my baby.’
Ronald wanted to say, ‘Sacha is also your baby,’ but he bit back the words. He didn’t want to add to his old friend’s suffering.
‘We are going to fight this, Ronnie. We are going to fight this with all we’ve got, do you hear me?’
‘I hear you, Henry. But just consider this for a moment. They have the testimony of both your daughters, they have the testimony of two reliable eye witnesses, they have samples of Carl Peter’s sperm taken from Bryoni’s vagina and mingled with her blood. They have photographs of the bruises he inflicted on her.’
‘Christ!’ said Henry Bannock. ‘Jesus Christ and Mary!’
Ronald could almost hear the pillars and rooftops of Henry’s universe crashing down upon him. He thought he heard him sob, but that was not possible. Not sobbing. Not Henry.
‘Do you think he did it, Ronald?’
‘I am a lawyer, I don’t sit in judgement.’
‘But you think he’s guilty, don’t you? Don’t talk to me like my lawyer. Talk to me like my best friend.’
‘As your lawyer I don’t know and I don’t care. As your friend I care very much, and I think your son is guilty as hell.’
‘He’s not my son!’ Henry said. ‘He never was my son. I have been fooling myself all these years. He is the get and spawn of some rotten Nazi bastard I picked up along the way.’
‘You better come home, Henry. We need you here. Your two little girls need you here very much.’
‘I am on my way!’ Henry said.
*
‘Look here, Ronnie.’ Henry leaned over the desk and pointed his finger at Ronald Bunter. ‘I want that dirty Nazi rapist struck off the list of the beneficiaries of my Family Trust, and I don’t want my Trust to have to pay for the legal fees of defending him from the crime of raping both my daughters. I have spoken to Bryoni and he’s as guilty as all sin and I want to see him swing on the gallows.’
Ronald swivelled back in his chair, placed his fingertips together and looked at the ceiling, as though he was seeking higher help and guidance.
‘You know we have been over this numerous times, Henry. However, I will address your three separate wishes in the order you expressed them.’ He sat straight upright in his chair, placed his elbows on the desk and looked Henry directly in the eye.
‘Firstly, you placed Carl Bannock on the list of beneficiaries and you made damned sure that nobody can ever remove him; not me, or you, or the Supreme Court in Washington. My hands are tied and you tied them. Secondly, you do not want the Trust to pay for his legal defence. The trustees, me among them, have no option in the matter. You made it abundantly clear in the deed of trust that you signed that we are duty bound to pay for all the expenses of protecting him from any legal action brought against him by any person or any government, be it the Department of Justice or the Department of Internal Revenue. It is out of our hands. Carl chooses his own defence team and the Trust must pay for it.’
‘But he raped my daughters,’ Henry protested.
‘You never made an exception for that eventuality,’ Ronald pointed out, and then he continued, ‘Lastly you have just expressed a wish to see Carl swing from the gallows. This can never happen. The State of Texas abolished execution by hanging in 1924. The best I can offer you is a lethal injection.’
‘I realize now that setting up that trust was the biggest mistake of my sweet life.’
‘Again I have to disagree, Henry. Your trust is a fine instrument. The sentiment behind it is a noble one. It ensures that Marlene, Sacha and little Bryoni, together with all their own children and your future wives and their offspring, will never want or lack anything that money can buy. You are a good and great man, Henry Bannock.’
‘I bet you say that to all your clients.’
*
The trial of Carl Peter Bannock lasted twenty-six court days.
The preliminary deliberations of the Grand Jury covered four of those days before they returned a ‘True Bill’, which was the equivalent of a felony indictment. The case was assigned to a court and the process of law was set in motion.
The judge was Joshua Chamberlain. He was a man in his sixties. He was a committed Democrat. He had the reputation of being pedantic and meticulous. During almost twenty years on the bench none of his judgements had ever been overturned on appeal; which was in itself a remarkable achievement.
In line with his liberal beliefs, he had meted out the death sentence in less than three per cent of the capital cases that had come before him.
The prosecutor was a woman. Her name was Melody Strauss. Although she was a little under forty years of age, she had handled many extremely difficult cases, and had built up a solid reputation for herself. She was assigned two legal assistants.
The defence team comprised five of the most expensive lawyers in the state of Texas. They had been carefully selected by counsel for the defendant. Their combined fees cost the Henry Bannock Family Trust a figure somewhat north of two hundred thousand dollars a day.
The first order of business was choosing and swearing in the twelve members of the jury from the fifty possibilities that had been put forward. This took more than a week, as the defence strove to exclude as many women as was possible. They used up all their ten peremptory challenges to strike out prospective female jurors, and then they grilled the remaining women on their attitude to the death sentence and their stance on female enticement and instigation to rape.
Melody Strauss met the defence head on and slogged it out with them. She strove to retain as many women as possible on the final list of jurors. Melody was quick-witted and persuasive. She questioned all the male candidates rigorously to detect any tendency towards male chauvinism. She reserved all her peremptory challenges to dismiss only male candidates who revealed traces of this defect. In the final count she managed to square the odds with an equal number of men and women on the jury.
On the tenth day of the trial Melody Strauss rose to present the case for the prosecution and was met by a barrage of objections from the defence. From the outset they challenged the competence of Sacha Jean Bannock to give evidence, on the grounds of her mental condition.
Both sides called expert witnesses. Melody Strauss called two members of the staff of the Nine Elms psychiatric clinic who had dealt with Sacha over many years. They both testified that Sacha had recently shown marked and sustained improvement in her memory and recall. They attributed this to the influence of her younger sister, Bryoni Lee, and to the catharsis she had experienced after she had recalled a traumatic event or series of events from her early childhood.
Under questioning they gave further evidence that Sacha’s symptoms and mental condition were a textbook example of the effects of repeated and aggravated sexual abuse in early childhood.
The expert called by the defence was a professor emeritus of UCLA Department of Psychology who testified that he had examined Sacha and he gave his opinion that Sacha was not capable of giving evidence under oath because she did not understand the significance of doing so. He further gave his opinion that any evidence she was able to impart would be completely unreliable and that the process would be so traumatic to Sacha that there was a high probability that she would suffer significant and permanent mental damage from the experience.
Melody asked the judge to give special permission to allow Sacha to give evidence in his chambers with the defence and the jury in the next room watching and listening over CCTV without Sacha being aware of their prese
nce. After learned debate Judge Chamberlain denied the request.
Melody then petitioned the judge for leave to play Bryoni’s tape recording of Sacha speaking about her relationship with her brother Carl to the jury.
Again this raised a storm of objection from the defence, and again Judge Chamberlain denied the request of the prosecution.
Melody was left with a fateful choice. She could defy the odds and call Sacha Jean to the stand, or she could drop the charge of ‘repeated aggravated sexual assault on a person or persons under the age of fourteen years’. And go to trial with only testimony from Bryoni Lee as to her rape.
Melody Strauss turned to Bryoni Lee Bannock for final advice. The two of them had developed a special relationship in the short time since they had first met. Bryoni had swiftly come to like and trust Melody, and Melody had been impressed by Bryoni’s maturity, courage and good sense. More especially she had been deeply moved by her loyalty and devotion to Sacha and her intuitive understanding of the troubled girl’s condition.
‘What will Sacha do if I question her in front of all those people about what Carl did to her?’ she asked Bryoni, who answered without hesitation, ‘She will fall down and curl up like an anchovy; then she will suck her thumb and bump her head on the ground and go away into her own special dreamland.’
The next day, to protect and shield Sacha, Melody Strauss formally withdrew the capital charge of repeated aggravated sexual assault on a minor.
Spurred on by this partial failure, Melody threw herself with freshly rekindled vigour into pressing the other charges against Carl Bannock to their utmost.
She called Bryoni Bannock to the stand. The defence raised another storm of protest. Bryoni was an immature child. She did not understand the questions put to her. She was incapable of giving plausible and meaningful evidence.
Judge Chamberlain called a two-hour recess to consider the objection. He spoke to Bryoni alone in his chambers and returned to tell the jury, ‘This young lady has demonstrated to me more intelligence and maturity than many of the thirty-and forty-year-old persons who have stood before me in this court. The objection of the defence is denied. Miss Bryoni Lee Bannock may take her place in the witness box.’
In the witness box was where John Martius, the leading defence counsel, strove to destroy her credibility.
Melody Strauss had groomed Bryoni for the ordeal and instructed her as to how she should comport herself while she was on the stand, and the kind of questions she might be asked.
‘Keep your answers short and to the point,’ she said. ‘Don’t allow yourself to be side-tracked.’
In the event Bryoni conducted herself like a veteran. She answered every question firmly and politely.
‘When did you first suspect that your sister had been sexually molested?’ Melody asked her.
‘When she warned me not to let anybody touch my private parts or else they would hurt me. I was sure that somebody had done that to her.’
‘Objection! Supposition!’ John Martius was on his feet in a flash.
‘Objection denied,’ said Judge Chamberlain.
‘Did she say who it was that had done it to her?’
‘Not at first, but the longer she spoke the more she remembered. I think she had tried to forget the ugly things that had happened to her.’
‘In the end did she remember the name?’
‘Yes, ma’am. I can remember her exact words. She said, “Now I remember it was my brother Carl who came to my room that night and climbed into my bed. It was Carl who pulled my legs open and put his big hard thing deep into me and made it squirt. I screamed but nobody heard me. I was bleeding and it was so sore, but I never told anybody because Carl had told me not to.’”
‘Objection!’ howled John Martius. ‘Hearsay!’
‘Objection denied,’ said the judge. ‘The witness is describing a conversation to which she was a party. The jury will take cognizance of that reply.’
Melody Strauss moved on to cover the events after Bryoni had confronted Carl Bannock with the tape recordings she had made of Sacha describing the series of assaults upon her.
‘Objection! The alleged tape recordings have no provenance and have been excluded from evidence,’ cried John Martius.
‘Miss Strauss?’ The judge invited her to refute.
‘Your Honour, I am not seeking to introduce the recordings as evidence, I am using them merely as a time reference to the events of that evening.’
‘Objection is denied. You may continue, Miss Bannock.’
Bryoni described Carl’s assault upon her.
‘He demanded to know what I had done with my copy of the recording of what Sacha had told me. I refused to tell him. Then he struck me in the face and knocked me onto my bed.’
‘Did he cause you any injury?’
‘My left eye was swollen and bruised. My nose was bleeding and my lip was cut so that my mouth was filled with blood.’
The female members of the jury gasped and murmured and exchanged horrified glances.
In the front row of the visitor’s gallery Henry Bannock scowled and glared at his stepson in the dock. He had been there every hour of every day of the trial, hoping with his presence to bolster and encourage Bryoni in her ordeal.
‘After he had struck you and knocked you down on the bed, what happened next, Bryoni?’ Melody Strauss asked her.
‘Carl told me he was going to teach me respect, just as he had done to my sister, Sacha.’
‘When you say Carl, do you refer to your brother, Carl Bannock, the accused?’
‘That is correct, ma’am.’
John Martius intervened swiftly. ‘Objection! Carl Bannock is not the brother of the witness.’
‘I stand corrected.’ Melody Strauss was just as quick. ‘I should have said, half-brother. That relationship is also covered in the definition of incest in the felony code of the State of Texas.’
‘Objection!’
‘I withdraw that remark, and reserve it for my summation.’ She turned back to Bryoni. ‘Then what did the accused do?’
‘He climbed on top of me and opened my clothing.’
‘Did you try to resist him?’
‘I tried my best, but he is much bigger and stronger than I am, ma’am, and I was dizzy from the blow he had given me.’
‘After he had opened your clothing what happened?’
‘He took out his penis…’
Seated at the defence table Carl Bannock covered his face with both hands and started to sob loudly. John Martius sprang to his feet.
‘Your Honour, my client is overcome by these accusations. I ask for your indulgence, and request a recess for him to recover.’
‘Mr Martius, by all the evidence your client is a powerful and determined individual. I am sure that he can endure a little longer. The witness may reply to the question.’
‘He took out his penis and forced it inside me, into my vagina.’ Bryoni gulped, and wiped at her eyes. ‘It was so sore. The worst pain ever I had. I screamed and struggled but he wouldn’t stop pushing it into me. Then Bonzo came and pulled him away, but the pain did not stop and I saw I was bleeding down there. Cookie came and held me close and told me that it was over and Carl would never be able to hurt me again. She said she wouldn’t let anybody hurt me again.’ Bryoni folded up in her chair and buried her face in her arms, sobbing brokenly.
‘No more questions, Your Honour,’ Melody Strauss said softly.
John Martius jumped to his feet.
‘Cross, Your Honour.’
‘The court will recess until ten o’clock tomorrow morning. You must reserve your cross-examination until then, Mr Martius.’
*
Henry Bannock, Ronnie Bunter and Bonzo Barnes were waiting outside the courtroom to meet Bryoni when she was released and they shepherded her through the mob of reporters and journalists that crowded the sidewalk and shouted questions at her. Bryoni held her head up high and looked straight ahead but her face was ashen
and her lips trembled. She clung to her father’s arm. Bonzo Barnes broke trail for them, and his bulk and his scowl cleared a lane for them to the waiting limousine.
That evening Cookie brought Bryoni’s dinner to her bedroom on a tray and Henry sat beside her bed and talked to her while she ate. He told her how much he loved her, and how he wished he had been able to protect her and Sacha from the terrible things that Carl had done to them. He promised her that he would never let harm come to either of his daughters again.
Then he stayed with her and stroked her hair until she fell asleep.
At ten o’clock the next morning Bryoni was on the witness stand again. The courtroom was packed and in the press section there was standing room only. Bryoni had been briefed by both Melody Strauss and Ronnie Bunter so she ignored them completely and looked at her father in the front row of the public gallery, and at Bonzo and Cookie sitting three rows further back.
John Martius stood up from his seat at the defence table and came to stand in front of her.
‘You understand that I am going to ask you some questions, Bryoni?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You don’t mind if I call you Bryoni?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Do you love your brother, Carl?’
‘Objection! The accused is not the witness’s brother.’ Melody paid him in his own coin.
‘I will rephrase,’ Martius conceded. ‘Do you love your half-brother, Carl?’
‘Perhaps I did once, but not since he raped me and Sacha, I don’t, sir.’ A buzz of approbation swept the courtroom at this and Judge Chamberlain rapped his gavel and said sternly, ‘Silence in court, if you please.’
‘Did you ever ask him to kiss you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Are you saying you never kissed Carl?’
‘I said I never asked him to kiss me, sir.’
‘Did you ever kiss him?’
‘Carl and I just naturally kissed cheeks to say hello or goodbye, like everybody does, sir.’
‘Did you ever ask Carl to kiss you on the mouth, Bryoni?’