Sarah awoke at six as usual, and lay for a while thinking. In these first moments after waking her mind was always clear, and she could often solve problems that had been obscure the day before. It was as though a team of civil servants in her subconscious had been working all night, to present her with the main issues of the day neatly typed and sorted for her consideration.
Bob, still dozing beside her, was the exact opposite. He wouldn’t surface for half an hour, and then only with groans and sighs. She had often tried to discuss things with him at this time, but it was hopeless — he was scarcely human until she was already showered, dressed, and ready for work. It was a daily irritation in their marriage.
But family matters were not uppermost in her mind this morning; they seldom were. Today she might have to cross-examine Sharon Gilbert’s little boy by video link. It would not be easy. Then there were the forensic scientist and DI Terry Bateson, both tough nuts too. She replayed the questions she had planned in her mind as the dawn light filled the room.
She sat at her dressing table by the window, looking out. This was the time of day she liked this house best. There were dew-covered spider’s webs on the long grass in the meadow. She saw a heron float on its wide, creaky wings down to the river bank, where it folded its wings and stood, silent and intent, among the reeds on the further shore. There had been nothing like this in Leeds — it belonged in a nature film on the telly, not in real life where you could actually walk about in it if you wanted. Occasionally Sarah did that — put on a coat and wellington boots and trudged along the river bank; but she felt out of place in it then. It was too cold or damp or muddy; there were insects that bit her; it was eerily quiet and hostile.
It was better looking at it through the window. After all the fact of having a detached house with a view like this proved she and Bob had made it; they were a success at last. So she sat for a while longer, as other people did Tai Chi or meditation, and told herself she enjoyed it. Then she crossed the room to have a shower, tickling Bob’s toes wickedly under the end of the duvet just before the alarm went off.
She was putting on her face before the mirror when Bob came back with a cup of tea, his hair still tousled from sleep. He slumped down on the bed and, to her astonishment, spoke.
‘Can you talk to Emily before you go?’
She turned to stare at him. ‘What about?’
‘Her exams. I was up with her for an hour last night. She thinks she’s going to fail.’
‘Of course she’s not going to fail.’ Sarah turned back to the mirror to finish her eye-shadow. ‘She’s a clever girl, she’s done the work. She’ll be fine.’
‘She doesn’t think so. The poor kid’s in a dreadful state.’
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘Talk to her, that’s all. Show some sympathy. You’ve passed enough exams, you know what it’s like.’
‘All right.’ Sarah glanced at her watch. ‘But I’ve got to go in twenty minutes. Is she up?’
‘Probably not.’ Bob sighed, and took a life-saving draught of tea. ‘You don’t have to be first person in every day, surely? Have a heart, Sarah.’
‘It’s a brain she needs, not a heart.’ Sarah walked quickly across to her daughter’s bedroom. ‘Emily, are you up? I want a word.’
‘What? Oh, mum, no.’ Emily was still in bed. She opened one eye, saw who it was, and buried her face in the pillow.
Sarah softened a little. She sat on the edge of the bed and touched her daughter’s shoulder. The shoulder shrank away. ‘Emily, wake up. I just want to talk to you for a bit. Dad says you’re worried about your exams.’
A mumble that might have been ‘so I am’ came from deep in the pillow.
‘Don’t you want to talk about it?’
‘No, not now — I’m asleep.’
Sarah sighed. ‘You’ve got to get up anyway to go to school.’
‘No, I haven’t. Not going today.’
‘Don’t be silly, of course you’re going. You’re not ill, are you?’
‘No. I’m revising at home.’
‘But you can’t just skip school when you feel like it.’
‘’Course I can. Everyone’s doing it. The lessons are finished now — all we do at school is revise or sit around and talk. I can work better here.’
Emily hunched up to a half-sitting position facing her mother. Her face was puffy from sleep, but there were no signs of tears. Sarah felt her forehead. ‘You’re not feverish, are you?’
‘No, mother! For God’s sake, I’m just staying home to revise! It’s only six days to German, you know!’
‘All right.’ Sarah looked around the room. There were books and papers spread on the desk, clothes scattered all over the floor. ‘Have you got all your books here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you can at least pick up these clothes if you’re going to be here all day.’ She regretted the words as soon as she’d said them; predictably, they brought tears to Emily’s eyes.
‘I haven’t got time for that — don’t you understand? I’ve got all this work and almost no time left to do it and you go on about stupid things like clothes! It’s just like that silly concert — why did I have to waste time practising when I could have been revising instead? I don’t know any German and I’ve got an exam in six days and I’m going to fail, I know I am!’
She was crying, and turned her face towards the wall. Sarah groaned inwardly, and surreptitiously checked her watch. She really would have to go soon, to get ready for court. Clumsily, she tried to embrace her daughter, but Emily shoved her away.
‘Don’t! Leave me alone!’
Frustrated, Sarah tried to speak sensibly. ‘Look, you did all right in the German mock, didn’t you? You got an A …’
‘A B! And I only just got that!’
‘All right, a B then. But that’s not too bad …’
‘You never got Bs, did you? You never got a B in anything!’
‘Well, maybe I didn’t, but … I thought I was going to get Bs lots of times, so I did a bit more work and got an A. That’s what you should do, darling. If you sit here and work hard …’
‘It’s not just German, you know! There’s nine other subjects!’
‘I know. But they don’t all happen on the same day, do they? What you should do is set out a plan, a revision timetable, and then …’
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ Furiously, Emily leapt out of bed, scrabbled in the mess of papers on her desk, and waved a coloured chart under Sarah’s nose. ‘See — look at that! That’s what I’m doing! Supposed to be doing, anyway. That’s what my life is now!’
‘Good, well, stick to it then. I do know, Emily, I have done a few exams myself. Do the work, and you’ll be OK.’
‘Yes, but you’re different,’ said Emily, shaking her tousled hair and glaring at her mother bitterly. ‘You’re just superwoman, you can do anything, no one else is like you. I don’t even want to be like you, why should I? I’ll fail and be like Simon — he’s happy!’
A cold panic flooded through Sarah. Simon wasn’t happy, she didn’t believe it. The worst pain of her adult life had been when Simon dropped out of school to become a labourer. It had been a rejection of everything she and Bob had wanted for him. At least Emily had always been diligent, conscientious, found schoolwork easy. And now, at the first big hurdle, to talk of dropping out …
‘Don’t be stupid, Emily! Of course you’ll pass. Just stick at it for another few days, and you’ll do well. I promise!’
‘I can’t, mum! I don’t want to anyway!’
Sarah didn’t know how to deal with this. Nor did she have time. If she carried on talking now it was just going to blossom into a big discussion which would lead nowhere and make her late. She got up from the bed. ‘Of course you can, Emily, and of course you want to. Do your German revision this morning, and I’ll give you a ring at lunchtime, OK?’
‘If you must.’ Emily slumped dejectedly back on her bed as if she might go to sleep.
‘I will.’ Sarah smiled brightly, opened the door, and went out.
The conversation irritated her, filling her mind as she rode into town. Probably she should have been more sympathetic, but … it was irritation rather than sympathy that inflamed her mind. Why did the girl make so much fuss! After all, at her age, Sarah told herself, I had a baby, I had been slung out of school, I was a social pariah in a cold smelly house with damp walls and rotten plastic furniture but I didn’t cry, did I? Not until Kevin left, anyway — I just got on with it.
So why can’t Emily do that? All that panic and emotion — it just gets in the way. Bob’s too soft with her; she’s got to stand on her own two feet. I’ll ring at lunchtime like I said but I’ll keep the talk light; she’ll manage best if no one takes the fuss too seriously.
And with that, she closed the file in her mind on Emily, and opened the ones on Gary Harker and Sharon Gilbert.
These weren’t just mental files, but real piles of paper wrapped in red tape which she carried into court a few hours later. The day began well, with a significant victory for Sarah. Before the jury entered, there was a brief conference between the barristers and the judge, at which Julian Lloyd-Davies conceded that there was no longer any point in presenting the evidence of Sharon’s little boy, Wayne. He had intended to do this via a video link, with the little boy in a separate room chaperoned by a trained police psychologist, but in view of Sharon’s admission yesterday that she had probably called Wayne by name during the assault, and certainly talked to him about Gary afterwards, there was no longer any point.
So the first witness was the forensic scientist from the Rape Crisis Centre. She confirmed that Sharon had suffered extensive bruising to the vaginal area, entirely consistent with her story of forced, unlubricated penetration. There were marks on her wrists and throat consistent with having been bound; and bruising to her cheek and nose, entirely consistent with the right-handed blows to the face which she had described. Julian Lloyd-Davies extracted these facts with careful, polite questions, dwelling on every detail of the injuries to emphasise to the jury the brutality that must have caused them.
But the most important point, for Sarah, was what the scientist did not say. When Lloyd-Davies had finished she stood up confidently.
‘Dr Marson, I would like to take you back to your examination of Ms Gilbert’s vagina. You testified to bruising, did you not? But I heard no mention of semen. Did you not find any?’
The scientist, an intense young woman with short-cropped hair and steel framed glasses, shook her head. ‘No, I’m afraid we didn’t.’
Sarah affected to look puzzled. ‘But you did look, I take it? I mean, evidence from semen is very important in cases of rape, is it not?’
‘Yes, indeed it is. In this case I took a number of swabs from the vaginal area, but I could detect no semen on any of them.’
‘And what conclusion do you draw from that?’
The young woman shrugged. ‘That the rapist withdrew from the victim’s vagina before an ejaculation took place. Either that or she had cleaned herself with a douche, but there was no evidence of that.’
‘Very well. But from your point of view as a forensic scientist this is a pity, isn’t it, because if there had been any semen you would have been able to send it for DNA analysis, which could have established the accused’s guilt or innocence beyond doubt. So no doubt you searched very diligently to find such a sample?’
‘I did my best, yes.’
‘So to summarise your evidence, Dr Marson, your findings confirm the victim’s story that she was forcibly raped, beaten, and bound. Am I right?’
The young woman nodded earnestly. ‘I would say so. Yes.’
‘But nothing in your findings can help us establish the identity of the man who did these terrible things. Is that also right?’
‘Well, no … that’s true, yes.’
The answer was hardly as clear as Sarah wanted. She tried again.
‘Just to make that crystal clear, Dr Marson, what you are saying is that you know that Sharon Gilbert was raped, but that you have no idea at all whether it was Gary Harker who did it, or my learned colleague Julian Lloyd-Davies here beside me, or his lordship up there on the bench, or any man walking around York today. It could have been any one of those people, couldn’t it, as far as you know? All you can tell us for certain is that it was — a man!’
The young scientist flushed. ‘Well … I’m afraid — yes.’
That had woken them up. Sarah smiled, noticing the raised, bushy eyebrows of the judge, the broad grin of a young newspaper reporter, and the wide, astonished eyes of several jurors.
‘Thank you very much, Dr Marson.’ Pleased with her coup de theatre, she sat down.