Without Consent (3 page)

Oh, surely this was a storm in a nightclub cocktail? He knew in his bones it was not. Ryan, you bloody fool. What now? You always had a weakness for women and they for you. Bailey found he was thinking of the girl with something akin to dislike, already formulating disbelief in what she would say. He shook his head. This would not do.

The back of the station yard was lit with orange light as if to reduce the white paint of the cars to a sickly cream. Bailey went to the back door. Better than going to the front and possibly running the phalanx of waiting relatives, supposing there were any. The interior corridor was a similar warm and oppressive yellow. He was met with the distant courtesy his role demanded. Everyone knew Ryan, a convivial and popular character, while several more knew Bailey, who could not be thus described. No chance, Bailey thought, of an incident like this failing to enter the history books.

The duty inspector was embarrassed, a symptom rarely apparent on ruddy red features such as his, unless he was talking about his daughters with the boastful and nervous pride he reserved for their achievements. The existence of a family made wild men tame, gave them different perspectives; it had done that for Ryan, albeit slowly. However many years he had taken to fall into respectful love with his own wife, he had still done so, although only after he had led her a merry dance, and she him. Boys will be boys, and girls retaliate. The rape story was told, dispassionately, the voice avoiding judgement.

‘Decent enough girl. No record, works in a shop. She knows Ryan on account of being a witness in one of his cases. Seems like she went to a disco with a girl who got into some kind of trouble on the way home, and she's giving evidence about what time they got there, what time the girl left, that kind of thing. Anyway, Ryan takes the statement and they get along fine, and he goes back to tidy it up, and they still get along fine. Then, according to her, he meets her for a third time, purely social. He starts to
pester her. She lives with a bloke. She and Ryan – Shelley Pelmore she's called, sir – go out for a drink. On the way home, he suggests a walk in the park and he rapes her. Or, at least, he tries. Penetration, but no ejaculation.' The inspector coughed apologetically. Another source of ridicule for Ryan. Didn't even make it, poor bastard; couldn't keep it up.

‘Obvious signs of resistance. Sir.'

The police service was an army with a self-appointed officer class, so Bailey understood. Respect had to be earned and in the eyes of this man, he had not earned it yet.

‘Now why on earth would he do that?' Bailey wondered out loud, making light of it. The inspector caught his drift, laughed briefly.

‘See what you mean, sir. Usually he only has to ask nicely, although everyone says he's quietened down. But then why do politicians go with tarts, even when they've got groupies and their fragrant wives at home, sir? Dicing with death, someone's idea of fun.'

‘Do you believe her?' Bailey tried to get the plea out of his voice. The cough was repeated.

‘Can't say, sir, can I? I haven't met her, wouldn't know if I did. They were seen together in the pub. He says they met by accident, chatted, that was all, gave her a lift, went separate ways.'

‘Who reported it?'

‘The boyfriend. Found her on the doorstep. Brought her in. She's in the rape suite up at Holloway. We can't deal with her here for obvious reasons. Ryan's in the detention room.'

‘Well, come with me, will you? I can't see him alone.'

Another long hesitation.

‘Oh, one more thing, sir. When she came in, she was wearing Ryan's jacket…'

H
e would need a witness to ensure fair play – no hidden intimacies between himself and an old pal – and also because he needed someone to stiffen his own backbone when he saw Ryan. Bailey might as well have been looking at the victim of a car smash, one who was resigned to being told that apart from being blind for life, the legs would have to be removed as well. Ryan's handsome face was puffed; he had not avoided the disgrace of weeping, which had made his eyes red and his skin blotched as if it was bruised. There was a smell of drink, not overpowering but noticeable, and the different, overlying smell of perspiration and soap. He sat on the bench in his shirtsleeves above creased cotton trousers. On their entrance, he placed his hands behind his back, guiltily. Bailey had the distinct impression that he had been biting his nails. He swung round on the other officer, almost falling into him.

‘Has he had a shower?'

‘Sir, yes. At home, before we collected him.'

Ryan's face had opened into the beginnings of a smile before Bailey spoke. Then it closed into sullen lines and he turned his eyes to a long examination of his hands. Nails bitten to the quick, Bailey noticed. In as long as he had known the man, Ryan had never bitten his nails. Not even in the long reaches of the night, when nerves turned men into anxious boys.

‘Has he been examined?'

‘Not yet, sir …'

‘For Christ's sake, that should have been first.'

Bailey swung on Ryan with the anger of a parent trying to prevent himself from slapping a child out of sheer disappointment.

‘What have you got to say?' Bailey barked at him.

Ryan shifted. His voice was surprisingly firm.

‘Nothing, sir. Nothing at all.'

And he turned his head to the wall.

‘… if at a trial for a rape offence, the jury has to consider whether a man believed that a woman was consenting to sexual intercourse, the presence or absence of reasonable grounds for such a belief is a matter to which the jury is to have regard, in conjunction with other relevant matters, in considering whether he so believed…'

R
ose Darvey measured the distance, sprinted up to the empty cardboard box and kicked it. It sailed upward and hit the casing of the neon light with a satisfying crack, bounced off the wall and landed. Inspired by the length of the corridor and its dull grey paint, she repeated the kick from the other side, watching as the box hit the casing for a second time. That should do.

‘Yeah!' Rose shouted, waving her fist. Who said football training was no use to a girl? ‘Punch their lights out,' she muttered. Dribbling the box before her, she made for the swing doors. She had to do something – anything, as long as it was overtly physical – before a day in court; frustration was the price of dedication to a career which involved so much enforced immobility. Perhaps she should have
gone in for politics. That, at least, allowed a person to shout. In the life of Rose Darvey, Helen West had much to answer for.

Redwood, self-important yet timid Branch Crown Prosecutor, master of this flagship, came out of his office with the speed of a startled guinea pig. Rose beamed at him with the usual unnerving effect. Rose Darvey and Helen West were clones of each other, he thought fearfully, the pair of them separated only by a decade and a half in which Helen had learnt alternative methods of insubordination. Helen could smile just as sweetly as Rose, but relied on guile, abuse of dignity and dumb insolence, while this one, who could have been her daughter, played her games with more palpable falsehood. She shimmered with energy, like a fighter hanging on the ropes, impervious to the strictures of a referee, waiting for the chance to punch a kidney.

‘Lovely day,' said Rose.

‘Isn't it,' he said faintly, noting the crack in the neon light which everyone hated, wanting to say something about it, but not daring.

‘You're in early, sir,' Rose chirped with a terrible display of politeness, her smile reminiscent of a small animal baring its teeth. She could make ‘sir' sound like an exquisite insult, no offence intended.

‘Yes.' He felt himself beaming in response; fat old cat. Redwood was always in limbo; once he started a conversation, he did not know how to stop, but stood there, hovering. Rose knew that one sure way to make him move was to pick her nose, an action which, understandably, sent him running for cover. At the moment, she had other things in mind.

‘Why are we turning down so many rape cases, sir?'

He rocked on his heels, felt for the wall to give him support. The suddenness of the question jolted him into an untypically truthful response.

‘Because they don't work.'

‘Pardon? Don't work? That ain't no legal phrase I ever heard of.'

‘They don't work,' he repeated.

‘Don't work for who? The fucking Treasury?'

Redwood fled. The corridor fell into silence.

From the distant end, Helen West hoved into view, coming closer beneath the subterranean lights, three of which Rose had managed to damage. She looked good today, Rose remarked to herself: loose jacket; nice skirt, fitting like a dream; good legs. No wonder that dour old scroat Bailey liked her. She wasn't bad for an old lady.

The cardboard box landed at Helen's feet. Lacking the benefit of football training, she picked it up without a second glance and put it over her head. Rose whistled and prayed for Redwood to come back out of his office. Two demented women would keep him demoralized for a week.

It was cool in here, air-conditioned freezing. Helen continued up the corridor, blind as a bat, and turned left into her room without breaking step. Some day, Rose thought, without wistfulness, all this will never be mine.

She was one third of the way through legal training, and so far she had found the exams a breeze. She could count on her fingers a fistful of achievements, namely, the beginnings of an impressive qualification, a borrowed family and a man she was going to marry in a matter of weeks. The career posed several questions and many more
doubts; the marriage did not. Rose scurried down the corridor, looking out for signs of her own vandalism. Now they really would have to replace the fucking lights which drove everyone mad, but then, if the establishment refused to listen to intelligent requests, they had to be otherwise persuaded.

T
he office of the Crown Prosecution Service, north central, lay at the apex of several insignificant streets and was not itself a landmark. Facing Helen West's small room over a narrow stretch of road, there was another set of offices, with remarkably better equipment and a plethora of underworked employees. Helen had suggested rigging up a pulley over the road so that they could send over photocopying, or receive, in recycled carrier bags secured with clothes pegs, the day's faxes. Over the road, the people were engaged in the long-distance management of a paint production company; their office was light, bright and far from grey. Over here, the office fixtures bore signs of wear, redolent of a surly atmosphere and an environment devoted to the creation of nothing but hierarchies. The pursuit of justice was an unprofitable sideline.

Each occupant of each office was supposed to operate on a ‘clear desk policy', translated by Rose to mean, put your mess in a filing cabinet and close the door. Policy directives such as these reached the in-trays on a weekly basis (word processed, single spaced), three-page essays on how to use the new expense claim forms, operate the front door, apply for stationery and photocopying or retrieve a file from the distant limbo of storage, where it could only be accepted for final oblivion if subdivided into
bundles no thicker than three inches. Helen had asked if anyone could keep a clear desk when the bureaucracy spat forth such volumes of forms, statements and exhortations which had nothing to do with the practice of law. Redwood said rules were rules.

Helen kept her room in accordance with the keep-the-desk-tidy policy by storing most of the paperwork which she was not actively hiding on the floor. There lay white files, bound with tape, bulging with paper in varying thicknesses and states of order, festooned with yellow post-its, reminding her of the next thing to be done, and when. She stepped in between the serried rows each morning, read her own messages to herself and hauled forth the ones where some kind of action was imperative. An immaculate system, she thought. The files were slab-like stepping-stones on a grey carpet patterned with coffee stains.

Rose piled one file on top of another and sat astride them. Helen had removed the box, once used for copying paper and invaluable for other purposes, from her head, improving her appearance dramatically. Her hair was not even ruffled and remained tied back neatly in a black scrunchie. Very lawyerly, Rose thought. You could almost believe she was the real thing. Rose adored Helen with a fierce devotion which was not always devoid of criticism.

‘Are we really going back to the Crown Court today, Aunty H? Are we really?' she asked in a passable mimicry of Redwood's whine.

‘Only if you're good.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘You should know by now. Don't taunt Redwood so early in the morning. It's bad for his digestion.'

‘Is it OK in the afternoon?'

‘Yes, especially in the afternoons. Especially during policy meetings.'

Helen was passing down the first line of files, kicking them into symmetry before she pounced, hauled the burden to the clearish desk and struggled with the tape. Rose pointed at it.

‘Is this one going to work? I mean, to coin a legal phrase not yet found in the Latin, will it work?'

‘Doubt it.'

‘Why? That poor cow was raped, good and proper.'

‘Nothing proper about it. Date rape. He says she consented; she says she didn't. It all depends on which of them makes the more impressive witness. She wasn't very good at giving evidence in chief yesterday, was she?'

Rose shrugged. ‘I believed her, but then I s'pose I'm nearer her age. There's a couple of girls on the jury listening hard, but then there's a couple of mothers who've probably got sons just like him. Testosterone tits.' Rose clasped her hands between her knees, an automatic reaction which was nothing to do with the subject matter of the trial. It was all in the air they breathed: the pollen of rape.