Without Consent (19 page)

There was a polite coughing from the far end of the room, where two of the coroner's officers sat with paperwork and phones, one looking at Ryan quizzically, trying to remember something, something he might have heard, perhaps. It reminded Ryan how much Dr Webb's voice carried; he remembered the waiting relatives, almost within earshot. Remembered also, his first protective chauvinistic impression, that a woman as beautiful as this should not speak so loud.

‘Pleasant, outside,' he suggested. ‘Shall we?'

She was, as always, obliging, and trailed her cigarette smoke into the warm outdoors. She sauntered into the park, stubbed out the fag end on a gravestone, sighed and looked at her watch.

‘Pre-mortuary precaution,' she said, wiping her hands on her skirt. ‘Takes away the smell. What next?'

‘Another method of a man causing the death of a woman, in a sexual encounter, without leaving traces,' he began, pleased that he no longer needed to whisper. Her brow wrinkled.

‘Ah yes. A similar thing. Death by blow-job. Shows there can be more things wrong with oral sex than just the view!' She roared with laughter. Ryan stood woodenly, looking at the grass, pressing down a ring-pull from a can
into the earth. He noticed, with a sudden flush of horror, that he was wearing training shoes beneath his pressed suit trousers. He looked up again. No doubt the pathologist would cut off his feet for him if he asked her nicely.

‘The vagina is full of delicate little blood-vessels. Vulnerable in pregnant ladies. The man doesn't do the normal: he actually blows into it. A bubble of air can enter one of the blood-vessels, travel round the system, get to the heart and poof! An embolism. You need ten cc. I told you. It's a bit like having an airlock in the central-heating system. She dies. No signs for me. Cardiac respiratory arrest.'

‘I remember,' said Ryan, ‘but could he be exact?'

‘You ask for certainty, you can't have it; not in anything. More likely if you practise, but never certain. With a syringe full of air, more so. Oh, and only pregnant ladies, especially with vaginal verrucas.'

‘How long would it take to die?'

‘Oh, rapid. I must go. Is that enough?'

‘Thank you. You've been very kind.'

‘Good luck with your thesis. Don't come back soon.'

Another posse of relatives were huddled outside the entrance in order to smoke. They were a picture of controlled misery; Ryan guessed at the death of a child. He saw the officer who had coughed standing on the doorstep, looking over their heads, staring after him. No, he would not come back soon. Ryan turned and walked purposefully down the hill, wrenching off his tie, cursing his shoes. In this park he felt as if he was treading on skulls, one of them his own, and the shoes were simply a symptom of how far he had sunk and how much further he could go.

There was a man out there he had begun to hate long since. So nebulous a presence, the pursuit of him was similar to chasing a will-o'-the-wisp, a foggy London phantom, the discussion of whom would make him disappear into thin air. Unlike his own wife, who would stand by him until prison walls created the last barrier, and then, for the sake of the survivors, she would go.

T
he old young man slept, turned on his side to get the sun on his back. Ryan shoved his packet of cigarettes into a rancid armpit.

‘Keep that bench warm for me,' he said.

‘L
ook, Aunty Helen, when you and that old cadaver of yours get married, you will let me know, won't you? So I can come along and laugh? I don't know why the hell you're so neurotic about it.'

‘I've told you as much as I can to explain it. And I'll tell you afterwards. But, frankly, can you see any point in asking you to grace the serious business of middle-aged nuptials with unseemly conduct? No, girl, get stuffed. This was always going to be a private arrangement, very short notice or I'd die of embarrassment, and don't ask why. Besides, Bailey can't ask Ryan—'

‘I should think not!' Rose stormed. ‘He's a fucking rapist!'

‘—Overstatement and anyway, it seems to follow I can't ask my self-appointed, pain-in-the neck of a niece. There'll be a party, later, so you can offer felicitations and congratulations as appropriate, once the pair of us get used to the idea. If we ever do.'

‘I don't understand you,' Rose stated.

Helen beamed at her.

‘Good. If I were you, I'd avoid understanding. Tell me, is the man behaving well? Less of the nervous disorders?'

Rose considered.

‘Most of the time, as good as can be expected, thank you, ma'am. Not always better, hardly exquisite in his manners, but not half bad, thanks. His lordship may still get the vapours when I let his botanical specimens die and when I spend joint money on going to an expensive clinic instead of allowing an ordinary doctor to get impertinent with me in the interests of birth control, but otherwise his health is excellent. How kind of you to enquire.'

‘Is missy going to persist in this speech on account of watching a video of
Pride and Prejudice,
or can we get down to work?'

‘Oh, did you see Anna?'

‘Yes. Yesterday. She's going to make you window-boxes. You'd better look after them.'

‘I'll use the bedroom one as a place to keep my cap. I'll plant it, instead of pinging it into the street, and grow little caplets …'

‘Work, Rose.'

‘OK, OK, but listen. You know I told you about the accident with the sodding cap? Well, it never came back, you know. I had to go to the clinic and get another one, didn't I? But the good thing was, it made Anna laugh. Laugh? I thought she'd split her sides …'

‘Anna?' Helen queried.

‘At the clinic. Where she works. Why else would I go to a place like that?'

‘I thought she was a midwife.'

‘Naa, not any more. More money in this.'

Only a little lie, Helen thought; only a small one. The sort of lie she always feared a witness would announce under oath; some little piece of secrecy or vanity which rendered everything else they said faintly suspicious, however true it was. She hefted the file off the floor and onto the desk.

‘Work, Rose.'

‘Fuck me. I forgot.'

‘This one for trial. Read it, see if you agree. I've drafted the charge, you annotate the pages; six copies of each. Statements in order, so they tell the story in sequence. Code at the top for stuff which defence and prosecution might agree as purely scientific … away you go.'

Rose, astride the boxes in Helen's office, looked up, bullish and sulky.

‘Look, I've read it. Cover to cover, honest. And I don't agree.'

Helen sat back. Examined her nails, thought of Bailey as Mr Darcy and thought, yes, there was quite a resemblance, not least in the fact that each had weaker friends.

‘For God's sake, why?' she asked innocently.

Rose took a deep breath, as if about to sing solo and nervous with it. Helen's mind wandered; she reminded herself to ask some other time about this clinic Rose had mentioned.

‘Because if you read her statement, it's perfect,' Rose blurted. ‘Too perfect. The defendant's her ex-boyfriend, right? Can't stand the thought that she's left him for someone else, right? He gets lonely one night, comes round and
knocks. She says she's afraid of his violence, which is why she got rid of him in the first place, but she lets him in. All lovely. How are you? Just come round to ask, and how are you too? Have a beer, she says. Sit and watch this video with me, she says. Nice to see you after six months, she says. Where's that coffee?'

‘On your left.'

Rose grasped the handle of a half-full mug, used it to weight the hand making gestures.

‘Then he jumps on her.
He
says, she likes it; been giving him the come on for the last hour,
he
says. Wearing a short skirt and not exactly putting a blanket over herself, he says. While she says, look, the whole thing came out of the blue. Why would she ever want to screw this sod when the kid's asleep and her new man's expected home any time? Well, I reckon this old boyfriend used to beat her like she said; he comes on strong like she said; she struggled a bit and then decided to keep the peace. What's once more for old time's sake, eh? Look, I think she's telling the absolute truth; she weighed up rape against a broken nose and settled for rape. And I know there's bruises on her arms, which he says were there before, because the new chap isn't so gentle either; not a scratch on him, though. But put that in front of a jury?'

Coffee dribbled onto the floor; Rose ignored it.

‘They're going to say, why didn't she slam the door as soon as she saw him if he was so bad? Why didn't she yell for help? By the time the defence has finished, no one'll remember how that's actually a difficult thing to do. They won't think like she would think: once more to stop him hitting me, and I won't shout because of the kid in the next
room. She'd do it, and he'd be able to say either she consented, or he'd every reason to suppose she did.'

‘She could have slammed the door.'

‘You don't; she didn't, but no witnesses. Balance of proof. Reasonable doubt. And you aren't going to get a six-year-old to testify about mummy's distress, are you? Not even you. As for the neighbours, they won't.'

Helen was out of her swivel chair, examining, through their own dirty windows, the administrative staff of the paint manufacturing company across the road. They had revamped their mottled grey walls to make them greyer still; the people merged with the décor in efficient silence. All busy about some executive decision. Life-threatening colour shades. She waved to no response.

‘All right, Rose,' she said briskly. ‘If that's what you think, we'll bin it.'

‘What?'

‘The rape.'

Rose looked horrified. ‘It might work,' she stuttered. ‘I didn't mean … It might… work.'

‘A phrase not known in legal Latin. D'you want to argue this point past Redwood's budget? You said it. If you can see a reasonable doubt before you've even heard the arguments, what the hell will a jury see?' Rose was silent. Then she got up, opened the flap of a window, and made to heave the file out. Helen stopped her.

‘No good either. You want this woman's life all over the street?'

‘You made me say it,' Rose raged. ‘You made me act God! You made me say we should turn it down, even when we think it's true. Sometimes you're a bitch, Aunty H.'

‘Wish I was,' Helen mourned. ‘I really wish I was. But we can't run cases we know we're going to lose. Truth is luxury. And I don't like playing God, either.'

T
he apartment block was a strange building; once a school or institution, Bailey guessed, converted into flats of an unusual size with large modern windows, so that the façade stuck out like a sore thumb in a terrace of smaller, less-gaunt dwellings which had all succumbed to historically conscientious planning regulations while this building had escaped. It sat on the corner of two roads, defiantly marking the boundary between one kind of territory and another. Before it lay the metropolis, behind it the leafier squares of Barnsbury's genteel streets. You lived here for the view, perhaps for a feeling of power.

There were benefits to the flexible routine of a rota, Bailey knew. He had always managed to evade any kind of job which imposed too much of a regime, except that dictated by emergency. His creative evasions were becoming more difficult to achieve in an age where the formulae of accountability took more time than the work itself, but still, he managed. Provided he did excessive hours and obfuscated, he could still function in accordance with his own clock, leaving time for eccentric assignments like these: checking up on Ryan's theories, following up Sally Smythe's kindred fantasies about the no-hopers. Beginning with the most recent.

He had phoned in advance and met with truculence, smoothed by Bailey's natural diplomacy until Aemon Connor's rudeness diminished into a grudging growl. Sure, the policeman could come round and waste his time;
waste his wife's time, too, for that matter, but not much of it. Ten minutes. There's little enough to say. She never did make a great deal of sense, he added.

There was a hotel-like carpet of more pretension than taste in the lobby and a tiny lift before Bailey reached the Connors' door. One myth, promulgated by the reports, was immediately exploded, namely that of a twenty-four-hour porter, sober or available at any given time.

Mr Connor was a man to whom anger was more than second nature; it was a state of being, only absorbed by frenetic activity, a constant position at the top of some heap, and the sense of achievement which came from physical exhaustion. Perhaps he was a cuddly bear when his children were around, but Bailey doubted it. Two teenage girls, he'd read, away for the summer, and, feeling the unnatural heat inside this high apartment, Bailey thought they were well out of it. There was no sign of the wife.

‘In the bath,' Aemon said briefly. He looked at Bailey's outstretched hand, wondering whether to ignore it, but since the man was smiling, he took it. Bailey wondered if a palm so calloused could actually feel the difference between a firm handshake and a loose one, but refrained from asking. Something about the quality of his own hand seemed to mollify.

‘It was you I came to see, sir,' Bailey said. ‘A chat, before bothering the little woman.'

‘She talks rubbish,' Aemon muttered. ‘Always did.'

‘They often do, women, don't they, sir?' Bailey sighed in sympathy. ‘Oh, I am sorry. Not the right thing to say, is it? I don't mean any disrespect.'

‘You've got it in one, boy.'

A slight warming of the atmosphere was established by mutual head-shaking sadness, like a couple of men contemplating the keeping of a pair of iguanas acquired by accident and without adequate instruction. Bailey did not feel in the least guilty.