Without Consent (10 page)

He gave a brief snort of laughter, which echoed loudly in the quiet of the library. There was often something comical in the most pedantic of texts. He turned the laugh into a cough and rubbed his head, in order to look as if the cough troubled him. Then he examined his neatly trimmed nails and wiped his hands down the synthetic fibre of his trousers. Silence prevailed. In the late afternoon, the heat had become stultifying, even in here. He thought of the hungry little leeches and he thought of ice in a long glass, a mild form of anaesthetic to the skin, a deceptive ameliorator of heat. Ice and leeches; they might have done for him as well as anything else. No one should despise
primitive medicine in favour of the supposedly more sophisticated.

A leech could be useful. Provided it remained detached about its business. Common salt will detach a leech. Air will dispatch, and detach, the woman or the girl.

I want to be loved, he admitted.

I want, even more, to be in control of passion.

T
hey called it the Rape House. It stood two streets distant from the police station, conveniently placed for Sainsbury's and the market. Inside were five small rooms of miniature, late-Victorian terraced building, similar in size to the home nurtured by Anna Stirland, less than a mile distant. The area was roughly boundaried, tapering away into the complicated wilderness of King's Cross on one side, some of the streets gentrified, some defiantly refusing. The Rape House – for use of vulnerable persons only – lacked the polish of its neighbours and the key tended to stick in the lock, making DS Ryan repeat one of his familiar ribald comments,
ad nauseam. ‘
Can't get it in,' he would mutter. ‘Story of my life.' Ryan's remarks did not always stop on the right side of downright offensive. Personally, Sally Smythe did not think it mattered as long as his actions showed respect and he didn't wisecrack in front of the punters. Sex remained the stuff of rude humour, whatever anyone did for a living, she thought. Police officers were allowed bad taste, same as doctors.

The local authority had given the house to the police, for indefinite use, as an alternative to the rape suite inside the police station, which had been comfortable enough, but only reached via the front desk and a mile of corridor,
which was enough to make any nervous victim back out quickly. No paperwork was done in the Rape House; no computer terminal was visible. The décor reminded Bailey of a dentist's waiting-room: three prints on the wall showing landscapes, each aligned with the other in remarkable precision; a chintzy sofa; glass coffee-table and venetian blinds to block out the light. There was a slight smell of disuse in the kitchen, drifting into the surgery, and another room designated for use as a nursery; enough residual stuffiness to indicate that no one lived in the house. Nightmares might find themselves embedded in the clean walls, but no one slept here.

Bailey felt slightly out of date and ashamed of it. He and Ryan's colleague were padding around one another like cats, with her muttering, I'll make you a cup of tea, shall I, treating him with condescension because this was her territory not his, adding in a touch of sarcasm with the sugar. For Lord's sake, the man could read; he'd read the files; why did he want to chat again, and why here? Lucky for him there was no ongoing investigation, no late-night allegation, no current attack which would demand that she sat here with the complainant for one day, two, three, as long as it took to piece together a statement which said it all with minimal need for revision. The Rape House was redundant for a few blessed hours and, even in the heat, felt chilly.

‘What was it you wanted to know, sir?'

‘How many of these cases get as far as the Crown Prosecution Service?' he asked mildly. The easy questions came first.

‘About half. There's no point them seeing the complete
non-starters, is there? A DCI has to mark them off, though. No point sending them the false allegations either.'

‘Many of those?'

She fiddled with her hands in her lap, feeling faintly treacherous.

‘Yes.'

‘Any particular reason why, do you think?'

Sally Smythe warmed to a theme. Perhaps this austere man, whom Ryan had mentioned so often, really wanted to know.

‘There's always been a lot, but it's hardly political correctness to say so. Sexual attack and women's rights get a high profile. Probably more complaints now because it's common knowledge we take them seriously, so the rotten complaints increase in proportion. Girls know they risk nothing in coming to us. They get kid-glove treatment, no recriminations, no lectures. Don't get me wrong, I'm not over-cynical, nor was Ryan, but a lot of the time we're a free counselling service. Victims they may be, but not always victims of rape.'

Bailey frowned. Sally did not scent disapproval; she didn't scent anything; his lack of reaction disorientated her.

‘Was Ryan tolerant about that?'

‘Very. Although he did less of the interviewing than we did. Obviously, some of them don't want a man in the room. There's always two of us. When he was here, there was always a woman officer as well.'

He stirred his tea and smiled at her. The effect on his gaunt face was almost shocking, making her respond with a grin before she knew it had happened.

‘Give me a typical outline for a false claim. If there is such a thing as typical.'

She thought quickly and shrugged.

‘A woman or a girl says she's been raped, attacked, say, three days earlier. She's thought about it, wants to complain, but she'll give three different versions of how it happened. The description of the attacker will vary too, but she won't know his name, even if she says she's seen him around. We don't try and trip her up; she does it herself, trying to tell us things which can't be proved or disproved, not clever enough to get it right. Sometimes it's sheer fantasy, sometimes a real event from some time past, or a real event distorted, sometimes it's straight off the telly. Troubled ladies. Then there's the semi-false, like, oh, I dunno, someone having it off with a family friend, relative, something; wanting to tell themselves it was rape when what worries them is the fact they consented, or were outmanoeuvred. Then there's those getting revenge on boyfriends. Or hiding an illicit encounter.'

‘Do you always know the liars?'

She hesitated, outraged. Liars was a harsh description for the desperate.

‘Yes, I think so. After several dozen, yes. I didn't to start with, nor did Ryan. You learn from the ones who tell the truth. There's a difference; it hits you in the eyes.'

She was becoming a touch impatient, slightly self-conscious, felt as if she was giving evidence which could be used against her. She was not fond of the sound of her own voice. Bailey had uncurled himself, begun pacing. You would never hold down my kind of job, sir, she wanted to yell at him: the person asking questions is supposed to ask
in a manner which will put the person answering at ease, and then keep them there; it says so in the training manual. Her mind ran on to other things to fill the silence. Pathos and bathos, such as how to get back from the lab the patchwork quilt on which a brave and honest victim had been raped and buggered by two burglars. The quilt had been made out of cut-offs from her children's clothes, pieces of it torn in the process of analysis for stains, but she still wanted it back, if only to prove that the one set of memories it invoked were far more important than the other.

That's what I deal with too, she wanted to tell Bailey: bravery. And that's what Ryan was good at. Finding the truth.

‘What I really want to know,' Bailey said carelessly, as if all previous conversation was irrelevant, ‘is why Ryan kept this file?' He was flourishing a slim folder, using it to fan himself before he handed it across.

‘Which file?' she asked stupidly, blushing as if Bailey had unearthed something incriminatory. There was no such thing, after all, as a totally clean record. If he were to delve around in anyone's career, even if their daily progress was far less documented than that of any police officer, this spy could always find some embarrassing piece of shit. Even furry little rabbits leave turds. It must have been Ryan who said that.

Bailey sat and the room grew smaller. Putting on his glasses failed to make him human. He rose again and pulled open the fussy venetian blinds, letting in light through the small window-panes. The blinds had always stuck before, even when new – Ryan had comments for
them, too – but these long fingers of his older mentor commanded obedience out of inanimate things and, suddenly, there was light. Sally was afraid of Bailey, the way, as a child, she had been afraid of the old woman in the story who lived in the forest in a cottage made of cake.

T
he computer print in the file blurred in front of her eyes. She sat bolt upright, reading the faint lettering, resentful, ready to come up with any old answer. The print was made for daylight. She was half aware that Bailey had left the room; there was a distant flush of the lavatory cistern and the sound of the kettle boiling again. Then he was back. Sounds echoed in an unoccupied house. More tea, as if to prove he could make it better. She hated tea, the drink of comfort and a swollen bladder.

The windows needed cleaning, she noticed; he made her aware of such details. They were smudged rather than filthy, but enough to deserve attention.

‘I know what it looks like,' she said. ‘He's got the names and addresses and descriptions of several no-hopers. Girls who've been in here. Cases which'll go no further. And their witnesses, few that there are. He's got that disco girl and Shelley Pelmore, the one he's supposed to have raped. And I suppose you're thinking it may be his version of a little black book, aren't you?'

‘They have one thing in common,' Bailey said evenly. ‘All those names. All those girls, women, I mean; he's quite specific about that, they're all unmarried. Perhaps one or two of them would appreciate a visit from a good-looking sympathetic policeman. Liars maybe, vulnerable maybe, but so far, incapable of completing their accusations and
maybe needing a nice broad shoulder, or something of the kind.'

She would have flared at him like a rocket hitting the ceiling in that confined space; she could, after all, see exactly the way it looked. To the naked eye this small compendium of names and addresses was horrifying. We do not rely on photos of victims, she wanted to say, but surely he knew, even in his old-fashioned way, how that would make them feel. We make pictorial histories; we write notes as if computers did not exist. Here was Ryan's inventory of the victims who had never got beyond the DCI's no-action dictate. Not all of them; only some: five, or was it six? Bailey seemed drunk on tea. It was an added insult that he had the kind of long lean frame which need never resort to saccharin in order to keep it in that awkward state of angular thinness. Skeleton on legs, Ms Smythe thought, despising him with a clarity of thought which took in the file, too. Her face was red and chubby. It was her turn to get up and pace the room.

‘It wasn't a file for Ryan's personal use. It was
ours.
Ours; the product of 'ours and 'ours; oh, he did like a pun. If you'd read further, you'd see.'

‘What would I see?' he asked gently.

She sat, but moved again.

‘Oh, I can't expect you to understand his code. Or to see why there was any sense in him recording these particular women, I mean, or the kinds of places they lived in, what jobs they did. Even Shelley Pelmore's friend; you see they all had jobs.'

‘Jobs, I presume, they wouldn't want to lose? By doing silly things like shouting rape for the second time, for
instance? Unlikely, also to report a smiling police officer at the door with a bottle of vino?'

Sally forced herself to stay calm.

‘Look, you were the one who talked about gut reactions, I didn't, and he didn't much. Oh, for Christ's sake, the gut digests, doesn't it? Look. What we've got on this patch is a serial sexual pervert. He's been around for a while. He doesn't have an established way of doing anything, sir, but he rapes without trace, and he may have killed without trace. All the ladies in this file are those who would not, or could not, complete a statement, however long we gave them. They could not, would not, name an assailant. They were blurred in their accounts, they described fantastical things … There was never any forensic evidence …'

‘They were dead ringers for the false allegations you describe. No names, no precision, change of story. Vulnerable ladies. Fantasists maybe; unhappy, maybe. Ideal for a man with his prick out at every traffic light.'

It was at that point she twisted her left hand into the cord of the awkward venetian blinds of the doll's house which was the Rape House; regretting politics, regretting everything apart from the fact that if Ryan was going to be done to death on evidence such as this, she had better put the record straight.

‘Look, you sanctimonious, dirty-minded bastard. They weren't even the prettiest. Can't you read?'

‘Sometimes,' Bailey said humbly. She continued at the same speed, well beyond listening, her voice stronger and stronger.

‘This was Ryan's collection. It has a system, you see. A small collection, you will note, not quite the stuff of a little
black book. A few witnesses, maybe working alongside, giving evidence of victims' habits, maybe a link. What we think these girls had in common was one single perpetrator of whom they were ashamed. Some nameless shitface. And Ryan's got the pathologist he's spoken to on the file as well. No one would dare seduce her.'

‘I know the pathologist,' Bailey said. ‘She's very attractive. And I don't understand,' he added, sounding obtuse, a man without visible gut and all too apparent guile. ‘Don't understand.'

She took a deep breath, spoke carefully.