Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (19 page)

Ian kept telling me that Auntie Coral had been wrong about me and trying to assure me that things would work out all right in the end because he knew and I knew that I hadn’t done anything inappropriate in a situation in which my own life was very much on the line. I appreciated his efforts to provide solace. But it was very difficult for me to have faith in his words as I waited for my trial date to be announced.

When my case finally came up in Crown Court, it took a week to be heard. One long, stressful, awful week that I never want to have to go through again. The only good thing about the start of that week was that it meant that the waiting was finally over. Whatever was about to happen, at least I would know my fate.

When you are in trouble, you learn who your real friends are. I had a pal called Ray Tame who ran the door at a nightclub called Palms. Ray was getting on a bit in years by then, but even then I still wouldn’t have wanted to fight him – and I was prepared to take on almost anybody. He is a big, tough guy who does not ask questions or take any prisoners. Ray came to court for me every day and gave evidence in my defence.

‘I’ve worked with Paul on many occasions,’ Ray said. ‘I’ve seen him being spat at and provoked and he’s never reacted with anything but professionalism. Paul is not a violent character. Paul wouldn’t have taken them out if he didn’t have to. It was a question of defending himself from attack.’

But the prosecuting barrister kept harping on about how I should have walked away: ‘Why didn’t you just go? Why didn’t you just put the aggressors outside and leave them there? You didn’t have to fight them. You didn’t have to get involved. You could have been the bigger man, and just left them there…’

Ray, who had run security courses for the government and was a court bailiff, explained on my behalf, ‘There was a queue of customers outside the door. Anybody who knows anything about security work realises that Mr Connolly had a primary responsibility to the people in the queue at the front of the premises. He couldn’t walk back in; he had to stay outside to protect the people in the queue, because, in a situation like that, any one of them could have been hurt. And that would have meant that Mr Connolly had failed to do his job properly.’

As Ray spoke, I could see the jury nodding and an understanding beginning to dawn on their faces, and I began to have some hope that maybe, just maybe, things would go my way. I did feel confident that I had not done the wrong thing. It was true that I had hurt two men very badly. It was also true that the encounter had started with them and their three friends jumping on my head.

Ray didn’t just know about security work; he was also very knowledgeable about the law, thanks to his work as a court bailiff. He was able to use all this information; he was able to make the jury see the situation from the viewpoint of a doorman. He was able to make them understand that the people who had attacked me were bullies who could have lashed out at anyone and that, if I had not defended myself, I might very well have been killed by them, while any of the customers waiting in the queue outside the club could have been badly hurt. While my actions might not have been nice and while they might not have been gentle, they were very necessary.

Further support came from strange places. I have already mentioned the various policewomen I had been involved with over the years. Anthea, the woman I had been going out with at the time of the assault, came to give evidence at the court case. Anthea and I had since split up, but she was a good friend for me during the trial, and she wasn’t afraid to put herself on the line on my behalf. Speaking as a police officer, Anthea gave a long statement saying that, in her view, I had not been dealt with in the correct way by her colleagues in uniform. I had been straight with the police about what had happened and what my role in it had been.

I owe Anthea a lot for turning up on my behalf and telling the truth to the jury and the rest of the court, not least because our relationship had ended some time before, and I was already seeing someone else. I will always be grateful to Anthea for coming through for me.

Because of the type of people I had come to know, I was able to call on friends who worked in blue-chip organisations who were able to come and give character references for me. As well as Anthea, several friends with upstanding reputations and sterling CVs came and testified that I was a good bloke, and I think that the judge was surprised by the calibre of my friends.

As the trial drew near to an end, I was taken out from the cells and placed in front of the court and jury to hear my fate. I had been dreaming – mostly nightmares, of course – about this moment for the last eighteen months. Now that it was actually happening, it didn’t quite seem real. I thought that I had reason to hope a little bit, but how much? It was very hard for me to tell how things would go. I didn’t want to give in to hope, only for hope to be dashed to the ground when I was sent away.

Every time defendants come into the court, they are frisked to make sure that they are not carrying anything that could serve as a missile to throw at the judge. On this particular day, they forgot to search me and, as I stood there while the judge was deliberating, just before summing up the case and making his final statement, my phone went off in my pocket: ‘Pump up the volume, pump up the volume.’

As I fumbled to turn it off, the jury started to laugh. My hands were trembling too much to turn it off and it kept on ringing. It seemed to get louder and louder.

‘Pump up the volume, pump up the volume.’

‘Why has that man got a phone on him?’ the judge asked severely. ‘He could have thrown it at me. There are rules against such things for a reason, you know.’

‘Pump up the volume, pump up the volume.’

The police took the phone from me as quickly as they could reach me, but they couldn’t figure out how to turn it off, so they brought it into a nearby cell and left it there. The ringtone echoed inside, magnifying it until the sound completely dominated the courtroom.

‘Pump up the volume, pump up the volume.’

Still the police couldn’t turn it off and by now the jury and even the lawyers were almost in hysterics.

Shit, I thought, this isn’t helping my case at all. The judge was looking thunderous.

Eventually, the phone got turned off and the judge continued, but he did not look happy. He summed up efficiently and sent the jury out to do their deliberations.

The case had lasted from Monday to Friday, and the jury went out at lunchtime on Friday to discuss my case and decide my fate. Earlier, my barrister had been giving me some plain talking. It seemed that he was less impressed with the hope that Ray had injected into the proceedings than I had been.

He went on to advise me of alternative strategies in the light of the proceedings. He explained that if I admitted to Section 20 – Grievous Bodily Harm – I would receive a lesser prison sentence. If I accepted this charge, I could avoid a Section 18 – GBH with Intent, a much more serious crime. I was stubborn, though; I had done nothing wrong and didn’t see why I should admit to something of which I was not guilty.

‘No fucking way,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong and I’m not going to stand here and say that I did.’

I looked down at my hands, which held tightly on to the edge of the desk. My knuckles were white with tension. I could see that my hands were trembling, but I could do nothing to control them. Still, there was no way on earth I was going to plead guilty. I had spent my whole life trying to stand up for myself whenever I found myself facing a bully, and I was not about to stop doing that now that I was facing this new challenge and the devastating prospect of several years behind bars and the loss of all the things I had worked so hard to achieve.

The jury stayed out for an hour, which is a very short period for deliberation. It didn’t feel short to me, though; that was the longest hour of my life. But, when they filed back in, they were all smiling and looking quite relaxed. I remembered that I had been told that a smiling jury never convicts. I felt another glimmer of hope.

We all rose to listen to the verdict. The foreman of the jury stood.

‘Have you reached a unanimous verdict on both charges?’

‘Yes, your honour, we have.’

By now I was cacking myself big time.

‘In the case of the charge of Mr Connolly, Section 20, Grievous Bodily Harm, how do you find?’

‘Not guilty.’

You could have heard a pin drop in the court. I had been found not guilty for GBH, but that made it more likely that I would be found guilty of the more serious charge, which would mean a minimum of five years in prison.

‘In the case of the charge of Mr Connolly, Section 18, Grievous Bodily Harm with Intent to commit Grievous Bodily Harm, how do you find?’

‘Not guilty.’

Not guilty!

I had been so convinced that I was going to be found guilty and sent away to serve the prison sentence that Auntie Coral had convinced me was hanging over my head, I didn’t hear the word ‘not’ and for an awful moment my heart sank and I began to look around for the coppers who were going to take me away.

But then a great cheer broke out in the gallery as my friends and supporters rose to their feet, clapping and cheering.

Well, they can’t be cheering if I am going to prison, I thought. Perhaps everything is OK after all …

The judge said, ‘You are free to go, Mr Connolly,’ and added, ‘This case has been a waste of taxpayers’ money. If you had been walking in the street rather than working on the door when five men attacked you, it would never have come to trial at all.’

I was so relieved that it didn’t occur to me to thank the jury or the judge for the outcome of my trial. I ran out of the courtroom as quickly as possible. The men I had beaten up outside the club had not been able to take me out, but the waves of emotion that crashed over me now certainly did. Suddenly unable to bear my own weight, I collapsed on to the floor in the corridor outside, and one of my friends had to pick me up off the floor and help me to stand straight as I gathered my emotions. The sudden relief of the stress that had been weighing me down for a full year and a half was almost more than I could bear, and I felt overcome with exhaustion of a sort that I had never experienced before.

The jury had found that when I beat those men I had been acting in self-defence, and I used reasonable force. In the circumstances, my violence had to exceed theirs because, if it hadn’t, there would have been a real, serious risk that I could have been killed. I should never have been arrested in the first place and fifty thousand pounds of taxpayers’ money had gone down the drain.

Being found not guilty of committing Grievous Bodily Harm and Grievous Bodily Harm with Intent was a real turning point in my life because not only had I come up against the genuine risk of spending an extended period in prison with all the associated losses and damages to my career, but I had had to confront my deepest fear – that everything Auntie Coral and Starling had said about me during the course of all those years was actually true.

I told myself that I would no longer put myself in the sort of situations in which such things were likely to happen. I resolved that, from then on, I would be the sort of person of whom I could be proud.

After that, I stopped doing door work, concentrated wholly on my career as a personal trainer and I turned my back on anything that was seedy and underhand, or flirted with illegality or with violence. I promised myself that things would be different from now on and that I would keep my temper in check.

Perhaps it was because of the turning over of a new leaf and my decision to stay away from sticky situations, but, shortly after the trial, I got back in contact with Mary for the first time in almost twenty years. I think that I wanted to show her that I had turned out all right, despite everything. I had often thought about Mary in the intervening years, but I had never contacted her because I had a feeling that she would not have been particularly proud of the sort of person I had become since she had last seen me at the age of twelve or thirteen. I also suspected that she would not have approved of the type of people with whom I had mixed. Once I had decided to definitively draw a line under that way of life, I started to wonder how Mary was and to remember how she had been a beacon of hope for me in an otherwise desolate childhood. I wrote a letter to an address that I found on a letter I had received from her many years earlier. Mary had moved to another house in the meantime, but the letter was duly forwarded and contact was renewed.

I learned that Mary had been through some tough times of her own. She had broken her back in a car accident, and wasn’t able to ride her horses any more. But she was making the best of things and getting on with life.

‘So what are you doing, Paul?’ Mary asked.

‘I’m the head personal trainer for the David Lloyd clubs in Essex and the South East.’

Mary was silent.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s just that Spencer’s a personal trainer too and he’s the head personal trainer for the David Lloyd clubs on the south coast.’

Perhaps all those games of tennis I had played with Mary as a child had more of an influence on the choices I made than I thought.

Mary and I talked for a long time, and I was very happy to realise that our old bond had not been broken. After all, she had been the closest thing to a real mother figure that I had ever had, and that sort of affection runs deep. I told Mary about my successes in boxing, and the accident that had cut my boxing career short. Spencer had a boxing background too. The parallels between our lives were almost eerie. I had often wondered how my life would have turned out if I had really become Mary’s adopted son. If Spencer is anything to go by, some parts of mine are likely to have been very similar, although, of course, Spencer had never done some of the nastier things that I did, or worked in the shadows as I had done for so many years.

It was wonderful to know that I had escaped the prison sentence that seemed to have been hanging over me not just since the incident at the nightclub, but since birth. It was wonderful to have renewed contact with the one woman who had shown me throughout my childhood that women could be kind and nurturing, generous and gracious. Finally, I could sense a sort of calming of the disturbed waters of my soul. Now in my mid-thirties, it seemed that I was entering a new, happier period of my life and that I might be able to continue moving onwards and upwards.