A Fatal Verdict (9 page)

11. Counsel’s opinion

Sarah Newby had thought long and hard about taking this case, when her clerk proposed it to her. Over the past year she had appeared mostly as defence counsel in minor cases, the staple diet of a junior criminal barrister - burglaries, muggings, drugs - the usual round of petty crime. She had hoped that the publicity she gained for the successful defence of her son Simon on a murder charge would have raised her image with commissioning solicitors, but this had not happened. A few solicitors, like her friend Lucy Parsons, sent their harder cases to her, but many others fought shy. Mostly, she found herself scrabbling around for work as before, in the mire of petty crime, no nearer the prestige of a silk Queen’s Counsel gown that, despite her late entry to the bar, she craved.

So this approach from the Crown Prosecution Service to undertake a murder trial was a compliment, a step up. The CPS, after all, had its own barristers - juniors employed on a salary to prosecute the mound of cases that clogged up the courts every day of the year. Sarah saw these people in court all the time, clutching heaps of files which they had only received the night before; it was because of their enforced lack of preparation that she was so often able to run rings round them. Any of them would have given their eye teeth for a case like this; but their very lack of experience in prosecuting major cases made them less likely to be entrusted with one, and more likely for the CPS management to go outside to a self-employed barrister like Sarah.

And Sarah, being only two rungs up the slippery ladder of success, was equally eager to take it. Even if it meant prosecuting for a change, instead of defending, as she was used to.

‘As I see it,’ she said now, ‘our first problem is with the forensic evidence. It’s not clear exactly what this poor girl died of. According to your pathologist it was “heart failure caused either by major haemorrhage or partial drowning, or a combination of both”. Hardly a model of clarity that, is it?’

For half an hour they went through the details – the pathologist’s report, the forensic evidence that showed three of David Kidd’s fingerprints – and none of Shelley’s – on the knife, and the background to the fatal relationship. Terry explained it clearly, with occasional interruptions from his boss.

‘What we know for certain is that this young couple, David Kidd and Shelley Walters, were having an affair of some kind - well, the obvious kind, really. She was a first year student at the uni and her parents didn’t like him - thought he was a conman and a cradlesnatcher - you’ve all read their statements. It’s also clear that the affair wasn’t going well - we’ve got statements from her student friends saying that she meant to dump him, in fact they thought she
had
dumped him the week before ...’

‘Why was that, exactly?’ Churchill asked, unable to resist filling the silence left by Terry’s pause.
Does he think I don’t know?
Terry wondered. Churchill, to Terry’s annoyance, had stepped in to supervise the investigation for ten days while Esther was ill in hospital, which was the reason for his presence now.

‘Because she found him in bed with another girl,’ Sarah answered smoothly.

‘Yes, that’s right.’ Terry nodded, approvingly. At least
she
had done her homework. ‘A girl called Lindsay. She’s the mother of his three year old kid - though he’s no loving father. Takes her to bed every now and then and bungs her a few quid to keep her quiet, that seems to be his style. Anyway, when the dead girl, Shelley, found this girl in his bed it was the last straw, according to her friend Sandy. Shelley saw the light, and brought it to an end.’

‘So why did she got back to his flat?’ Sarah asked thoughtfully. ‘The defence are bound to ask that. Did she want to see him again?’

‘According to him, yes, according to her friend Sandy, no. She’d left a few clothes and books in the flat and wanted them back, that’s all. But David now claims she’d forgiven him: she came in, they talked for a while, then made love, he says. That’s the big change to his story. He didn’t mention it in the first interview.’

‘Why not?’

‘He was shy, he says. He was respecting her privacy.’ Terry shrugged dismissively.

‘No sign of rape, though?’

‘Not according to the pathologist, no.’

‘So that, presumably, is an avenue the defence will want to explore. Who is representing him, by the way?’

Mark Wrass’s large hands blundered earnestly through his papers. ‘Savendra Bhose.’

‘There you are then.’ Sarah smiled. ‘Savvy knows his job all right. He’ll claim the girl thought up an excuse to see her lover one last time, hoping he’d forgive her. I know it was really a question of
her
forgiving
him
, but that’s how a young girl’s mind might work, especially if she was as naive and lacking in self-confidence as these statements from her mother and her tutors imply. She’d dumped him, but somehow he’d made her feel guilty, and part of her wanted forgiveness, so she went there hoping that something like that might happen. And it did, didn’t it? They made love, then she got in the bath. Then while he was out of the flat she was overcome by remorse and killed herself. That’s what he’ll say. Trust me, I can see Savendra inventing it now.’

Inventing it.
This was what unsettled him about lawyers, Terry thought. He liked Sarah, but she was still in love with her own cleverness, all of them were. She hadn’t had to see the girl’s dismembered body on the mortuary table as he had, or confront her hysterical mother in the hospital, wrapping his arms around hers to prevent her scratching the eyes out of the boyfriend who stood there brazenly claiming that Shelley had killed herself because of the incessant pressure from her parents to succeed. Sarah hadn’t witnessed that, nor had she sat in the interview room for hours as he had, carefully restraining his temper while the cocky young bastard faked his grief and changed his story by the day.

And yet it was her job to face him in court. If she could be persuaded to take up the case at all, that is.

‘He may say all that, but her student friends disagree,’ he responded sourly. ‘The affair was over as far as she was concerned, they say. She just went back to collect her possessions.’

‘What possessions?’ Sarah said. ‘A bag, some underwear and jeans, a couple of novels, a magazine? Couldn’t she have bought new ones?’

‘They were her things. Students are poor.’

‘Granted. And I’ll make that point of course. But we have to accept the possibility that this girl Shelley went back to her boyfriend’s flat at a time that made it virtually certain she would meet him.’

‘Her friend Sandy might corroborate that,’ said DS Tracy Litherland, speaking for the first time. ‘She’d offered to go back with Shelley several times to collect these things, but Shelley always put her off. And then she went alone.’

‘There you are then.’ Sarah sat back in her chair, smiling. ‘First break of serve to the defence.
And,
it seems, she’d been seeing a psychiatrist. What’s that all about?’

‘Bi-polar disorder,’ said Tracy warily. ‘She’d had treatment for a couple of years, her mother said. She took lithium to keep it under control.’

‘Any suicidal tendencies?’

‘Not according to her mother, no. None at all.’

‘The defence aren’t going to believe that, are they? Given that Kidd is claiming suicide. Savendra’s going to call that psychiatrist, for sure. This could get nasty, for the parents. Especially if Kidd claims they put pressure on her, as ...’ she leafed through the papers in front
of her ‘.
.. it seems he does. Not looking so easy now, is it?’

Terry felt a little tic throbbing in his throat as it often did when he was angry.
The case his team had spent a month knitting together was unravelling in front of him.

‘It’s your job to counter those arguments,’ he said sourly. ‘If they put them at all.’

‘I’ll do my best, of course,’ said Sarah. ‘If I advise the CPS to go ahead, that is. It’s my duty today to evaluate whether we have a chance of winning. What I’m pointing out is that the evidence to support your story is hardly conclusive. Not yet anyway.’

‘All right,’ said Terry angrily. ‘Okay, she had a psychiatric disorder and she was a first year undergraduate, I’ll grant you that. But most undergraduates don’t kill themselves. Maybe she did go back to the flat to meet him again, I don’t know. But look at his response when I asked him about these things in her bag. He said she’d come to stay and brought them with her. It was only when we’d spoken to her friend Sandy that he admitted he’d lied. You can hit him with that surely?’

‘Certainly,’ Sarah nodded coolly.

‘Just as he lied about their happy reunion. He persisted with that until we told him his neighbour - a priest - had heard a quarrel. A violent quarrel, he said. Then Kidd admitted they’d had an argument.’

Sarah made a note.

‘Then in the flat we found a meal half-prepared - onions, potatoes and carrots chopped up in a pan, steak in the fridge. And Shelley’s clothes strewn all over the floor where she’d taken them off before she got in the bath.’

‘Or made love?’ Sarah asked.

‘Or made love, yes,’ Terry agreed. ‘That’s what he admitted they did, later.’

‘And after that you think he killed her?

‘That’s what I think happened, yes,’ Terry confirmed grimly. ‘Whether this love-making was consensual or not is impossible to say; there’s no evidence of rape, so perhaps it was. Maybe, as you say, she was in two minds about whether to break up with him; perhaps it was a fond farewell, I don’t know. But he was never going to let her go, he’s not that type. You haven’t met him, I have. He’s a psycho, a control freak. So when she’s in the bath he goes in and says something that scares her - I don’t know what. Maybe he has a kitchen knife in his hand - that would freak her out. Anyway she tries to get out of the bath and there’s a struggle. He thrusts her head under water - that’s how she gets the bruises round her neck and her throat - and she starts to drown. She nearly did drown, remember - the pathologist found water in her lungs and the ambulance crew say she coughed up pink frothy fluid - classic drowning symptoms. But of course, from David’s point of view this is no good - how can he explain away a drowned girl in his bath? He thinks he’s killed her but he’s got to disguise how she died, make it look like suicide. So he cuts her wrists, sees the blood seeping out in the bath, and thinks what do I do now? That’s when he decides to go to the shop. If he’s out of the flat long enough he can claim an alibi, say she committed suicide while he wasn’t there. So he goes out, and has a conversation with the shopkeeper who knows him. He even buys flowers, remember - a bunch of flowers for his girlfriend who’s come back to him. He tells the shopkeeper all about this, then he meets his neighbour, a priest, on the stairs and tells him about it too. Then when he thinks she’s had enough time to die he comes home, leaves a knife by her hand to make it look like suicide, and phones 999.’

‘Only the ambulance crew find she’s still alive,’ murmured Sarah softly.

‘Exactly. Not only that but they find a young man who seems more shocked than relieved that she’s still breathing.’

‘Do they say that?’

‘Something like that. It’s in their statements somewhere.’

‘I see.’ Sarah studied Terry thoughtfully. ‘And is this the story you want me to put before the jury?’

‘Yes.’

There was a silence. Will Churchill broke in, his Essex accent harsh and intrusive. ‘Before you start questioning it in your clever lawyer’s way, Mrs Newby, there’s something else you should know.’ He passed two slim files across the table. ‘Those are the trial and probation reports on David Kidd. Three years ago he was charged with the rape and kidnap of a sixteen year old schoolgirl in Nottingham. The trial collapsed when the girl changed her story in the witness box, so all they could get him for was possession of cocaine. He got six months and probation for two years. But look at the witness statements and probation reports. He’s a nasty piece of work, this lad.’

Sarah put her fingertips on the files as if to push them away. ‘I can’t use these. You know I can’t. His previous record’s irrelevant.’

‘I’m asking you to read them all the same,’ Churchill insisted. ‘You need to know what this boy is like, and why we’re so keen to bang him up. Offender profiling, if you know what that means.’

Always the snide remark. Sarah hesitated, her hand still on the files. ‘All right, I may look at them if we decide to go ahead, but they shouldn’t influence my decision now. What we have to decide is whether with the evidence you’ve got
on this case
there’s a reasonable chance of conviction. So let’s review it, shall we?’

She thought for a moment, then continued, counting out points on her fingers.

‘First, and most important, we’ve got conflicting causes of death. Heart failure caused either by haemorrhage from the cut wrists, or from partial drowning, or both. Not very satisfactory, especially since the defence will say she cut her wrists first and then began to drown when she lost consciousness, which contradicts your story. On our side, however, we have the suspicious nature of the cuts - I take it the girl was right-handed, was she?’

‘She was,’ Terry nodded. ‘And David was, too.’

‘Good. So I can use that, and the bruises round her neck - they’ll have a hard time explaining those away. And then there are the fingerprints on the knife; another good point for us. Then, thirdly, we have all the inconsistencies in his story. Whatever version he comes up with in the witness box I can cast doubt on it.’