Kit and I were together in the public gallery for the first time, islanded by Jamie’s supporters around us, our hands locked together. The day started with no preamble or recap, but rather recommenced as a play does after the interval. Polglase got to his feet and said, ‘I’d like to call the officer in the case, Detective Sergeant Carol Kent, Devon and Cornwall Police.’
Kent took me by surprise when she swore on the Bible, and I didn’t need to look at Kit to know he was rolling his eyes. I wondered for the first time about the assumptions jurors made about witnesses’ choice of oath. If I worked in court, if it were my boring everyday job instead of a horrible, once-in-a-lifetime ordeal, I’d make a game of guessing who would swear on a holy book and who would not.
Kent’s testimony filled in some of the gaps; we discovered that by the time the patrol car came to pick her up, Beth had recovered enough to give her name and her address, although it would be some hours before the whole story came out. I learned that Beth had met Jamie around a campfire the previous evening, and that she’d given him the brush-off then. We also heard about Jamie’s subsequent arrest. Rather than the police-chase of our conjecture, he had approached a uniformed officer and calmly told him that he had been wrongly accused of sexual assault. That doesn’t look good for Beth, I thought. But these were minor stops on the way to the prosecution’s real concern; the physical evidence.
Much of it was boring information that seemed irrelevant to the case; Polglase spent half an hour mining Kent for details of Pip, the beautiful police dog I’d seen. As this went on, I realised that it is more tiring to be bored than engaged, and unable to see the point of this line of questioning at the time, I wondered if it was a trick to exhaust the jury. Kit’s eyes kept returning to the digital clock on the clerk’s desk, blocky red digits that tore their way through the seconds, their pace at odds with the dragging day.
There was a brief foray into physical theatre when DS Kent put on a pair of Thai fisherman’s trousers. Polglase kept a straight face despite sniggers from the jury. ‘DS Kent, if this were your garment, and you were entering into consensual sex, even partially clothed, enthusiastic, consensual sex, how would you allow yourself to be penetrated?’
‘I’d undo them,’ said DS Kent. ‘There’s physically no other way. You can’t just slide them over your hips. If you wanted to access a woman’s genital area, you’d have to be pretty forceful.’
I had a flashback to Beth’s white leg, smeared with mud. I thought I’d suppressed my shiver but Kit closed his hand tighter on mine, as if to anchor me.
Polglase hooked his thumbs behind the lapel of his gown. (They must teach them to do this in law school.) ‘Thank you, DS Kent.I believe that we are able to share with the jury the actual trousers worn by the complainant on the day of the rape.’
A junior officer produced a plastic evidence bag. Someone on the jury actually said, ‘Oooh,’ and was shushed by a frown from the judge.
‘They’re very muddied as you’d expect,’ said Kent. ‘There’s fraying on the right-hand side where the tie is joined on to the body of the garment, consistent with a sharp tug.’ She’s on Beth’s side, I thought; she wants a guilty verdict as much as I do.
‘Thank you, DS Kent.’
Fiona Price swooped like an eagle. ‘These are incredibly cheap trousers, a few pounds each, sold widely at festivals such as the one on the Lizard. Can you categorically state that this minuscule rip is not simply a result of poor manufacturing? Or that it’s not wear and tear?’
Kent’s pause was deliberate; a drawn-out beat in which the two women eyeballed each other. Kent blinked first. ‘No,’ she said, her voice sagging with resignation.
During the cross-examination, Price rebutted each of the prosecution’s once-convincing arguments. It was like trying to keep track of a dozen shuttlecocks, all volleying back and forth at once. Surely the jurors must be dizzied by it; surely that was her intent. I had to close my eyes and will into my head the image of Jamie’s face above Beth’s, and I had to admit that the only reason I knew was because I knew.
Kit had been looking forward to the doctor’s evidence. No, not looking forward; he still didn’t want to be in court. Perhaps it is better to say that he was giving it a different kind of attention. I knew why; he was finally on firm ground. The trial had so far been little more than a war of words, but now things were to be presented in a way he could trust; observed through a microscope and coded as data. Now it was my turn to warn him not to get his hopes up.
‘This is a consent case, it’s not about identifying him,’ I told him, while we were waiting for the judge to come back from lunch. ‘He admits they had sex. The science is just background noise.’
Kit was about to reply but then the usher intoned ‘All rise’ and we leapt to our feet in anticipation.
‘The prosecution would like to call Doctor Irene Okenedo,’ said Polglase. Irene Okenedo stood about five feet tall, and the top four inches of that were hair, long braids twisted into a bun on top of her head. She looked about twelve years old, and I had the thought – acknowledged as ridiculous even as the mental image formed – that she should have worn her white coat, or a stethoscope around her neck, or something to convince us that she was a real doctor. I willed her to do a good job for Beth, even as I acknowledged with shame how incensed I would have been if she’d been biased towards the defence.
She swore on the Bible (‘I never knew there were so many committed Christians in the professions,’ muttered Kit sarcastically) and introduced herself as a locum A&E registrar, who had trained in treating and examining rape victims with the newly established Metropolitan Police Project Sapphire sexual assault unit. Her voice, low, considered, gave her the authority her stature denied.