Verdict Unsafe (4 page)

Merrill shook his head. “The interview was conducted in several sessions over seven hours, as you’ve said—the information wasn’t given in one lump and in the correct order, as you’ve just done.”

“But it was given, nonetheless. My client will say that he merely used the information he had gleaned from the newspapers and from your officers,” said Harper. “That after several weeks of what can only be described as hero-worship of this rapist, of reading avidly where and when each assault took place, and a sleepless night during most of which he was told over and over again of what he was supposed to have done, he, afraid of more physical retribution if he did not admit his guilt, simply told you what you wanted to hear. This is entirely possible, isn’t it?”

Amid growing and audible scepticism which the judge did not try to quieten, Merrill shook his head. “No, it is not,” he said firmly. “The defendant’s statement indicates the precise modus operandi, and the increasing violence of the assaults. And while mention was made by the investigating officers of the victims having been bound hand and foot, those were the words that were used, and not ‘taped,’ which is the word the defendant used in his statement.”

Judy nodded vigorously. Merrill had been doing his homework on the interview tapes as well. Not that any of it mattered very much, really. The DNA evidence placed Drummond at the scene of the second assault, and he had been caught in the act of committing the fourth. Hotshot Harper must be on a good retainer to be working this hard for a lost cause.

But he wasn’t giving up. “You had questioned Mr. Drummond very closely as to the contents of the first-aid kit on his motorbike, hadn’t you?” he asked. “About the roll of adhesive bandage in particular?”

“Yes. The victims had described material of that sort being used to bind them.”

“It wouldn’t need too great a leap of imagination to work out to what use you thought this adhesive bandage had been put, would it?”

The muttering had grown into open expression of disbelief, and was at last disapproved of by the judge; the courtroom went quiet again.

“Let us look for a moment at the assault on Miss Rogerson,” said Harper, not allowing a reply to his previous question. “In his statement, Mr. Drummond says ‘I made her … undo her shirt,’ whereas Miss Rogerson says that she was wearing a light summer top designed to go on and off over the head. Doesn’t this suggest that Mr. Drummond might in fact have been inventing the details of this incident?”

The cat-calls were loud enough for the judge to threaten to remove the women who were making them.

“No. It simply means he got confused about what his victims were wearing,” Merrill replied. “There are details in the defendant’s statement that he did not get from any of the interviews, or any newspaper, and which he could neither have invented nor surmised. The specific threats uttered, the cleaning-up of the victims., the cutting away and removal of the tape at the cessation of the assault, the fact that the assailant called himself the ‘Stealth Bomber’—none of that was made known to him by any agency whatever.”

“One of them was, Chief Inspector,” said Harper. “One of the officers at the scene of the alleged assault on Miss Benson said, in Mr. Drummond’s hearing, that the Stealth Bomber had been grounded.”

“I wasn’t aware of that,” said Merrill.

“Evidently not.” Harper turned a sheet of paper over on the desk and looked up. “And we have no way of knowing how
many other remarks were made off the record, so to speak, have we?”

Merrill didn’t feel obliged to give an answer, and Harper didn’t seek one. “But what we do know,” he went on, “is that this statement was made after Mr. Drummond had been held at Malworth police station from one forty-five
A.M
. for over ten hours with no more than refreshment breaks—isn’t that right, Chief Inspector?”

“It was necessary to interview the suspect immediately after the assault complained of, and to question him about the previous assaults.”

“The Police and Criminal Evidence Act provides for eight hours’ uninterrupted rest from questioning, does it not?”

“Eight hours in twenty-four,” said Merrill. “He got that.”

“Isn’t this eight hours intended to be at night?”

“If possible. In this case, it wasn’t. He had several refreshment breaks, and a breakfast break.”

“Where?”

“In a cell.”

“I think the spirit of the Act was being stretched to its limit, Chief Inspector, but let us move on. After the breakfast break, you yourself conducted the resumed interview, I believe. Did you remind Mr. Drummond that he was not obliged to answer your questions, as required by the Act?”

“Not at that time, my lord,” said Merrill. “It was an oversight—he should have been reminded.”

“Was he reminded of his right to free legal advice?”

“No.”

“Another oversight, Chief Inspector?”

“The same oversight, my lord.”

Judy wished that Merrill had had a little more time for what he regarded as new-fangled molly-coddling. Malworth wasn’t exactly coming out of this too well.

“And it was during this interview, conducted with a young man who had had no sleep, and who had spent the breaks from questioning locked in a cell, that you brought up the subject of DNA, wasn’t it? And told Mr. Drummond that you could prove that he had raped these women?”

“I explained how DNA profiling worked,” said Merrill. “And I believe my exact words were that
if he had
raped those women, we could prove it. The tape will bear me out, I think. I certainly meant to say ‘if.’”

“I’m sure you did say it, Chief Inspector,” said Harper. “Perhaps its significance escaped Mr. Drummond. And when you said you could prove it, you meant that you had collected samples for DNA typing from all three assaults, and had already obtained a DNA profile from the first assault which was just waiting for a match, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But it wasn’t a match for my client, was it, Chief Inspector?”

“No.”

There was a puzzled murmur in the courtroom, and Judy sighed. They had known that the defense would have a field day with this.

“So you had misled him?”

“Not deliberately.”

“But the fact is that you got three different profiles from the three different samples, isn’t that correct?”

The murmuring grew; the judge quietened it.

They had thought that they had more physical evidence than they needed, when traces of seminal fluid had been found on the underskirt of the second victim, and the other two vaginal swabs had proved positive, but gradually they had become aware of why Drummond had called himself the Stealth Bomber. Stealth planes, she had been informed by her more knowledgeable colleagues, produced controlled emissions, and could not therefore be easily detected by tracking systems.

“We did.” Merrill turned to the judge. “If I may explain to the court, my lord?” On receiving consent, he faced the jury. “The first victim, Mrs. Jarvis, was unsure whether or not there had been any emission during the assault, but when the vaginal swab taken as a matter of course proved positive, we assumed that there had, and since there was no match, the defendant was charged only with the assault on Miss Benson, and held in custody pending trial for that offense.

“The victim, of the second assault, Mrs. Ashman, had stated that her assailant had ejaculated into a tissue, but seminal fluid was found to be present on her underclothing, and when the DNA profile obtained from this second sample
did
match that of the defendant, he was then charged with that offense.

“In view of these findings, and information given in the defendant’s statement, we questioned Mrs. Jarvis again, and found that she had not, as she had originally stated, been returning from visiting a female friend in Stansfield, but had in fact been with a male friend in Malworth, with whom she had had unprotected sexual relations. Mrs. Jarvis then gave us details of the gentleman concerned, a blood sample was obtained, and he was eliminated from the inquiry.”

The Jarvises were somehow still together, sitting in front of Judy in the gallery, listening to their private lives being discussed in open court. She looked pale, even less well than she had yesterday, her fair coloring making her seem almost transparent; he looked angry, as he had yesterday, as he had since he had been brought home from his tour of duty in Northern Ireland to his wife’s hospital bed. He would listen intently, then his head would drop down, color creeping up the back of his neck to his short, sandy-red hair, and even from where she sat, Judy could see the muscle working in his cheek as he controlled his anger.

“But the third profile didn’t match either, did it?” said Harper.

“In the third case, we knew from the start that Miss Rogerson had had sexual relations immediately prior to the assault,” said Merrill. “Both from her own statement and that of the defendant. We had expected a mixed sample, but we got only one. Miss Rogerson was unwilling to give us the name of her boyfriend, and in the light of medical advice, we felt it both unwise and unnecessary to persist with our inquiries, especially when it was revealed that the assailant had ejaculated into a tissue as with the second assault, and that the vaginal sample was of no further interest to our investigation. The defendant was subsequently charged with all four assaults.”

“Did you ask Miss Rogerson why she hadn’t told you that her assailant had ejaculated in this manner in the first place?” asked Harper.

“It is not at all unusual for such details only to emerge after a considerable time has elapsed,” said Merrill. “It is very difficult for badly hurt and severely traumatized victims of violent assaults—particularly sexual assaults—to recount or even sometimes to recall the details of their ordeal.”

“Yes, I’m sure that is very true,” said Harper. “We can only guess at what these young women went through. No further questions, my lord.”

“Mr. Whitehouse, do you wish to re-examine?”

“No, thank you, my lord.”

And with that, the court adjourned until the following day.

Most cases engendered very little public interest, especially in Barton, a not very well-known county town that had sought and failed to acquire city status almost all century. But Colin Drummond, son of the third generation of one of the county’s oldest established retailers, was being accused of terrorizing two neighboring Bartonshire towns for over two months, and more people wanted a ringside seat at his trial than the court could accommodate.

Now the medical evidence was being presented, and this was where Whitehouse could ram home to the jury—and the judge, come to that—the sheer brutality of the assaults. This judge was anything but soft on sex offenders at the best of times, and Harper was uncomfortably aware of the life sentence at his disposal should Drummond be found guilty.

The forensic medical examiner was in the witness box now, giving details of her more or less immediate postassault medical examinations of the victims. Harper asked no questions; he had to try to divorce his client from the horror of the first three assaults, and concentrate on the fourth.

*   *   *

“And Miss Benson?” Whitehouse was asking, as Judy took her place in the public gallery.

“There was some minor bruising of the anus, and pressure bruising to the buttocks consistent with their having been held apart to facilitate anal penetration,” she said.

“In your medical opinion,” asked Whitehouse, “having examined the other victims after they had been assaulted, was there any similarity with those previous assaults?”

“Similar bruising was found on the other three victims.”

“Did you also examine Mr. Drummond after the alleged assault?”

“I did. There was slight chafing to the penis, and his knees were quite badly grazed.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” said Mr. Whitehouse.

Harper stood up, and looked at the doctor. “Surely minor bruising and ‘slight chafing’ could occur during consenting anal intercourse?” he asked.

“It might.”

“These minor injuries bear no relation to those found on the other victims, do they?”

“To the extent that I mentioned, they do. The anal assault in the first three cases was markedly less violent than the ones which followed, being apparently intended to establish the assailant’s dominance over his victims, and to facilitate the binding of his victims’ hands and feet.”

“Did you find any evidence during your examination of Miss Benson of the tearing injuries that might be expected to result from forcible insertion into an orifice not intended for the purpose?”

“No,” said the doctor. “But despite her years, this victim was, unlike the others, very sexually experienced. Insertion in this instance would have been achieved with comparative ease.”

“May I ask then what led you to the belief that this was an assault?”

“The grazing of the defendant’s knees indicated the level of force used, in my opinion,” said the doctor.

“The grazing on his knees,” repeated Harper. “Did you not consider—given the supposed ease of insertion, and the low level of bruising—that the grazing on the defendant’s knees might have had another cause altogether?”

“I did, but the defendant offered no other explanation,” she said.

“He is now offering an explanation,” said Harper. “Mr. Drummond is a motorcyclist, and you may have seen motorcycle races where the rider bends into the corners with his knee almost touching the ground. My client will state that he was at the disused Malworth airfield, practicing just such a high-speed maneuver, without the usual protection of leathers, a matter of ten minutes or so before this incident. Isn’t such a maneuver, attempted by a non-professional,
more
likely to explain the grazing than the carrying-out of this alleged assault?”

The doctor frowned a little. “Yes,” she said, a little reluctantly.

“I will be producing a witness to the fact that carrying out this and other high-speed maneuvers on his motorbike is indeed how my client spent that evening, my lord,” said Harper.

“Thank you,” muttered the judge.