Verdict Unsafe (8 page)

Better and better. Drummond was a frustrated bomber pilot.

“To avoid the contact with other people which he finds so difficult, he retreats into a world where Colin Drummond barely exists; he pulls on the figurative mask of inarticulate stupidity that he almost invariably shows to the rest of the world, and becomes in his mind almost anyone
but
Colin Drummond. A mask to disguise his very real feelings of resentment toward his father, whom he regards as weak and submissive, and toward his mother, whom he sees as domineering and superior. A mask to hide his own feelings of inadequacy, his own submissiveness to his mother’s rule, his own fear of all women. And he harbored these feelings, these thoughts, under his mask. He dressed in black so that not even his choice of colors and patterns could give him away.”

Judy didn’t usually have much time for psychologists. She could make an exception in this one’s case. Harper didn’t seem worried; he was listening gravely, his face betraying nothing. Perhaps he had just given up. If your own witnesses turn against you, what else could you do?

“Then he read of a man who really did wear a mask, whose dark and undetected presence was inspiring fear in an entire community. In women. Women, whom Colin finds unfathomable, frightening creatures, were being subdued and controlled by this man. A man who dressed as he did, in black. A man who rode a motorbike. And that appealed to him. If he, too, wore a mask—a real mask—he would truly cease to be Colin Drummond; he would become this man, and he could experience by proxy the same control, the same power. He could frighten those who most frightened him.

“And that was what he did. He watched women, followed them, made them run from him. But he made no contact with them; he is a voyeur, and voyeurs are by nature passive. He admits to fantasizing about these women, but his only physical outlet for those fantasies was increasingly frequent use of a prostitute. And that makes sense; that was his safety valve, the
bridge between fantasy and reality. In my opinion, Colin Drummond never lost sight of which was which. He knows he is Colin Drummond; he just wishes he wasn’t. And to that end, he play-acted. He pretended to be the rapist, just as he has pretended to be a hundred different things, a hundred different people. Perhaps without even being aware of it, he did cause the police to believe that he was the rapist by his reactions, and his body language, but not, I wouldn’t think, by saying so openly. A mask, real or figurative, does not imply openness of any sort.”

Harper started asking questions then, designed, of course, to make Drummond appear to be nothing more than a sad inadequate whose innocent fantasies had got him into hot water.

When it was over, Whitehouse got to his feet. “Wouldn’t such a man as you describe—one who has a fear of women, one who is dominated by his mother, one who retreats into fantasy—be capable of rape?” he asked.

The psychologist smiled. “There is a school of thought which says that all men are capable of rape,” he said.

There was a muted cheer from the women who sat across from Judy.

“Isn’t one who follows women in the street and watches them make love in parked cars just a touch more likely to put that capability to use?” Whitehouse asked.

“Possibly. But in this case the safety valve was there in Rosa, the prostitute with whom Drummond could find release for these fantasies.”

“But not for long,” said Whitehouse. “The safety valve seems to have left town after people started being raped.”

“I think,” the psychologist said, “that the important part of that sentence is
‘after
people started being raped.’ Not before. Two people had been raped before Rosa left. So there is little reason to connect Mr. Drummond to the rapes on those grounds.”

“No further questions,” said Whitehouse.

Harper stood. “That is the case for the defense, my lord,” he said, almost apologetically.

The judge looked at his watch, and disappointed the gallery, who had been hoping for a verdict, and Judy, whose leave was up. “I think this will be a convenient time to adjourn,” he said. “I will hear the closing speeches on Monday.”

“All rise. Let all those having business…”

Colin was brought up for the last time. Whitehouse and Harper were going to make their closing addresses to the jury, and the judge would sum up, Harper had told him. They were almost bound to get a verdict today. Harper had said that it was his duty to warn him that he believed it would be a guilty verdict, at least on the first three.

Colin looked around the courtroom, watching it fill up. Those dykes in the gallery would take the roof off the building if he got sent down. Detective Inspector Hill wasn’t there today; she’d been there all last week, sitting with that lot. But she wasn’t a dyke. She was Lloyd’s girlfriend.

Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd had come to see him, come into the garage when he was working on the bike, walked in without so much as asking. The garage was his place, where he could work on the bike, and think. His dad parked his car there, but that was all. Even his mum didn’t come in when Colin was working on the bike. But Lloyd had walked in, calling him “Colin,” as if he owned the place. Next morning, Colin had taken the bike out, had seen Lloyd leave a flat with a woman. Detective Inspector Hill. Lloyd had trespassed on his property, and Colin had made up his mind then to trespass on Lloyd’s. He’d waited for her outside her flat that night, but Lloyd had come home with her, and he’d had to let it go. But he’d get her. One day. He’d get her.

At last, Whitehouse stood up, and faced the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “Colin Drummond was arrested within moments of having sexually assaulted a sixteen-year-old girl in an attack which had begun as three previous attacks had begun; someone had pushed her down to the ground, and
subjected her to an anal assault, after having held a knife to her genitals and uttered a specific threat to ‘cut her open’ if she did not do as she was told. On each of the three previous occasions, the victim had then been bound hand and foot and subjected to further horrific abuse, leaving physical and emotional scars, which in one tragic instance led to suicide.

“Colin Drummond’s attire at the time of his arrest—black clothing, and a full face-mask—and his means of transport—a black motorbike—matched that of the assailant in the previous assaults; he carried on him materials of the sort used in each of these previous assaults, and in daylight, a knife was found at the scene of this final assault which matched what description the victim was able to give of it. That same morning Drummond made, as you have heard, a full, boastful, and foul-mouthed confession to all four of these assaults. There cam be little doubt of what Miss Benson’s fate was to have been, had there been no interruption of that final assault.

“But he would have you believe, ladies and gentlemen, that this confession was fabricated by him, pieced together from fragments of information, because he was afraid of being physically harmed. It is true that he had been beaten by a police officer, and you may accept that he was understandably alarmed when he was arrested. But this was just one man losing his temper, and, as a result, his job, and his liberty. Both officers involved were immediately suspended from duty. One was subsequently imprisoned, the other fined, and both were dismissed from the service. In what way could the police be thought to be condoning what they had done, even by a frightened suspect?

“And then there are the coincidences attendant upon his two brushes with Malworth police,” Whitehouse went on.

Colin sat in the dock, watching the jury’s faces as Whitehouse drew attention to the parts of his statement which couldn’t be accounted for by anything he had learned during the interviews, and his responses when questioned about them, then took them through the coincidences, one by one. Then he reminded them again of the DNA evidence, the most damning evidence of all.
Harper hadn’t even asked the DNA bloke any questions, useless bastard. And you would have thought he could have found out about Rosa, with all the money that was being thrown at him to do just that.

“No evidence has been offered to back up the veiled suggestion by the defense that the police in some way engineered what went on in Hosier’s Alley that night, or that the statement given by Miss Benson was anything other than a—possibly misguided—translation into standard English of her spoken word. An emergency call was received which resulted in a police car being on the spot, and two independent witnesses have told you what they saw and heard.

“In light of all the evidence presented, you must find the defendant guilty on all counts,” Whitehouse finished.

Now. Colin held his breath as Harper got up. Earn your money, you lazy sod.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said. “You have heard much over the last three days of the appalling experiences of three young women at the hands of a brutal and methodical assailant. But please don’t allow your very natural revulsion at the disgusting and damaging acts of violence that they endured to cloud the issue, or your judgment of it.

“That these attacks took place is beyond doubt, and not in dispute; what you are judging here is who was responsible for them, and I believe I have demonstrated to you that despite the understandable conviction of the police that they had apprehended the right man, there is in fact very little evidence to support this contention.

“These three young women, the victims, have no personal knowledge of the identity of their assailant. The rapist took great care, as you have heard, to keep his identity well hidden. He covered himself from head to foot, and none of his victims is able to offer anything in the way of a description of the man himself beyond his approximate height and build, and in one instance, the color of his eyes—blue, like my client’s. But no hair color, no skin tone, no distinguishing features.

“There was, however, one way in which his victims might have identified him: they heard a voice. A voice that gave them
instructions, that threatened them, that warned them of the consequences of defying him, of making a sound. A voice which told them that their assailant was ‘the Stealth Bomber.’ This voice must have burned itself into the victims’ memories, but not one of them—not one—recognized Mr. Drummond’s voice as the voice of her assailant.

“No real, tangible connection has been made between my client and these crimes. No one has been brought before this court who witnessed Mr. Drummond anywhere near the locations of the first three assaults, and indeed his parents have sworn on oath that he was at home with them on all three occasions.”

Colin listened, shaking his head slightly. His mother and father’s evidence had done more harm than good. Why hadn’t his father just said he was out raping women? He might as well have done. She would have told him to perjure himself, of course; Colin didn’t suppose he had wanted to, but her word was law. His father was a spineless prick. He turned his attention back to Harper. He was another prick. And that doctor. They were all pricks.

“No one has given evidence that he or she has ever sold Mr. Drummond a flick-knife, or even seen him
with
a flick-knife. No one has been brought before you to say that he or she sold Mr. Drummond a ski-mask prior to the first of these rapes, or a replacement mask after he is alleged to have thrown away the first one. In short, nothing has been put before you to identify my client as the perpetrator of these crimes except one piece of evidence. The DNA profile.”

There was a murmur then, and Colin glanced up at the gallery as it grew louder, and Harper had to raise his voice slightly as he continued to address the jury.

“Yes, my client’s DNA profile is a match for the one found, but you have heard that there
is
a possibility of an accidental match, and this possibility must not be cast aside. And yes, he admired this rapist, something that you and I might find incomprehensible, but which the psychologist who spent many hours with Mr. Drummond has told you is quite in keeping with his admitted actions. Because yes, he occasionally wore a
mask, and yes, he occasionally followed solitary females in the hope that he might induce fear in those who induced fear in him. But you have heard that he, to quote the psychologist, lives ‘in a Walter Mitty world,’ and was entirely capable of fantasizing about being this rapist without ever doing anything other than that, because inducing fear was an end in itself.

“You have heard from a prosecution witness that Mr. Drummond was in the habit of visiting a prostitute, and indeed had visited her less than two hours before one of these assaults with which he is charged. Why would he be moved to rape, when his needs had so recently been met?”

More cat-calls. A warning from the judge. Silence.

“And yes, he made a statement confessing to these crimes, but only after having been beaten up by one police officer while another stood by and did nothing, only after being taken in for questioning to another police station altogether, on another matter altogether, from which no charges arose. Only after being visited at home by the police, then arrested again and taken to Malworth police station where he was questioned for many hours with no sleep, all in the space of a weekend.

“It is entirely possible that the investigating officers, in the belief that they had got ‘their man,’ and in their understandable eagerness to rid the streets of a very real menace, prompted some of the assertions made in that statement, either inadvertently or otherwise. And—mistakenly or otherwise—Colin Drummond, so recently a victim of brutality at the hands of the police, believed that he would put himself in further physical peril if he did not do as they wished, and made a confession which was retracted as soon as he was beyond the walls of Malworth police station.

“He maintained then, and has ever since, that he has no knowledge whatever of the first three assaults with which he is charged, and that the fourth charge is malicious. We must therefore look at the night of his arrest, and ask ourselves what really happened in that alleyway.

“The medical evidence of the grazing of my client’s knees, intended to support the prosecution’s case, has been shown to be no more than a jumped-to conclusion, and the very minor
bruising caused to the alleged victim no more than she would expect from an evening’s work.”