Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby) Read online

Sarah’s success in persuading the judges to consider Amanda Carr’s evidence began to fade almost as soon as she left the stand. The next hour was taken up with argument about how much significance should be attached to that evidence. And here, Sarah frequently found herself worsted by her opponent. Gareth Jones was not a QC for nothing, and he was determined to run rings round her if he could.

  Amanda’s evidence, Gareth Jones argued, was worth very little. As experienced High Court judges, their Lordships could not fail to know how notoriously unreliable identification evidence was. Witnesses frequently picked out the wrong people in identification parades, even when they had seen their assailant face to face, which Mrs Carr had not done. Given all these doubts, it was hard to see what difference her evidence could have made to the jury. Even if the girl on the road had been Brenda, it was still possible that Jason had killed her after Amanda saw her.

  Sarah opposed this point vigorously, using a map to illustrate the distance from the point where Amanda had seen the girl, to the point where Jason said she had left him by the river on Landing Lane. ‘My Lords, there is no dispute about the time when Amanda Carr got home. It was after four a.m. – her mother berated her for it. So if the girl she saw was Brenda Stokes, she was still alive at four in the morning. Which means that my client would simply not have had time to murder Brenda, dispose of her body, and then drive to Leeds and torch the car so that it was completely burnt out before 5.20 a.m. It’s not practicable. In any case it conflicts with the version presented in court, which is that my client murdered Brenda Stokes soon after 2 a.m., and dumped her body in the river.

  ‘But what if my client’s story is true? They had a violent quarrel at Landing Lane, after which she fled into the night. She ran off, bleeding and terrified, to hide from him in the undergrowth. He searched for her with the torch, but eventually gave up and drove back to Leeds. Then, when it was quiet, she may have ventured out, and made her way south along the footpath by the river, to a field opposite Naburn Lane, where the old Maternity Hospital used to be. Which is exactly where Amanda Carr saw a young woman, dressed as a schoolgirl, wandering along the road at 4 a.m. that morning.’

  Sarah looked up, at the three learned faces watching her thoughtfully. ‘My Lords, I do not say this definitely happened; I cannot be sure. But I do say that it is a version entirely consistent with the evidence. It fits my client’s story; it also explains the evidence of Amanda Carr. The only evidence it conflicts with is Jason Barnes’s alleged confession to Brian Winnick, which Mr Crosse has told us is a lie.

  ‘And that, My Lords, explains quite clearly why Amanda’s statement was such an embarrassment to the police, and why they failed to follow it up, or disclose it to the prosecution. It ruins their version of events. It gives my client a watertight alibi, which was never presented to the jury. Quite simply, it proves his innocence.’

  Gareth Jones rose to his feet beside her. ‘My Lords, I am reminded of games I used to play as a child. We balanced one playing card on top of another, to build a castle as high as we could. But sadly, it always collapsed in the end. The foundations were simply not there.’

  Sarah turned on him coldly. ‘That, it seems to me, is more apt as a description of the prosecution case than the defence. My client has spent 18 years in prison for a conviction in which there was no body, no real forensic evidence, and a fake confession.’

  ‘My Lords,’ Gareth Jones persisted, ‘as I have already stated, the evidence of Amanda Carr is flimsy in the extreme. She has no idea who she saw, she was drunk, it was dark - need I go on?’

  The senior judge raised his hand. ‘No, Mr Jones, you need not. We take a short recess, and hear further arguments later.’

  ‘Keep it up, eh, darlin’,’ Jason muttered grimly. ‘Grab that Welsh bastard by the nuts and squeeze. They sing lovely, I’ve heard.’

  Sarah grinned. ‘Not allowed under judge’s rules, I’m afraid. I’d get a red card.’

  ‘Worth it, though, eh?’ His face clouded with anxiety. ‘Are we going to win?’

  ‘We have a chance,’ Sarah said. ‘No more.’ She left the dock and returned to her place as the judges returned. The senior judge looked down.

  ‘We have considered counsel’s submissions and agree that the evidence of Amanda Carr can be considered together with the statement of Brian Winnick. How heavy these weigh in the scales of justice, however, has yet to be decided. Now, are counsel prepared to submit final arguments?’

  ‘My Lords, yes.’ Sarah drew a deep breath, and drew a fresh sheet of notes from the bundles in front of her. Several of these were handwritten on hotel notepaper - how well had her mind been functioning at four a.m. this morning? The terrible vision flashed into her mind, of Bob making love to the faceless Sonya, and her heart lurched wildly. She almost forgot where she was, then saw the judges watching patiently. Forget Bob, she thought. Come on, girl, concentrate, now!

  Sarah had three further points to add to the evidence of Mr Crosse and Amanda Carr. First, she emphasized the absence of a body. There were very few cases in which someone had been convicted of murder when the body had not been found. In the original trial, Jason’s defence had suggested that Brenda might be still alive. Sarah accepted that she was probably dead, but that did not mean Jason had killed her. If Amanda’s evidence, suppressed in the original trial, was accepted, then someone else might have done it.

  ‘She may have been murdered by a malevolent stranger; she may have been kidnapped and imprisoned by a sexual sadist; or she may simply have met with a terrible accident which was covered up. My client does not know, and neither - in the absence of her body - do the police.

  ‘What we can say, however, is that if she did try to walk home, she presented the perfect target for whatever evil-minded man she happened to meet. A nineteen year old girl, provocatively attired in school uniform, including a miniskirt and tightfitting blouse, wandering alone down a country lane in the middle of the night. This girl was in danger, my Lords, from anyone who met her.’

  Sarah’s second point was the bloodstained torch. Yes, it had blood on it which recent DNA testing had proved to be similar to that of Brenda’s mother. No one could be certain it was Brenda’s, because her body had not been found to take samples from. But even if it was Brenda’s blood, with Jason’s fingerprint in it, that did not prove he had killed her. He admitted he had assaulted her, and she had had a nose bleed. That was how her blood got on his hands. And from his hands, it got onto the torch – not the other way round. In the original trial, the torch had been presented to the jury as the murder weapon. But there was no dent on the torch, and even though it had been minutely re-examined with the most modern forensic techniques, not even the most microscopic trace of Brenda’s hair or skin had been found anywhere on it.

  ‘Surely this only proves one thing, my Lords,’ she said earnestly. ‘That torch did not kill her. It was not the murder weapon, as the jury were told in the original trial. Neither the blood nor the fingerprint are sufficient to establish that. The evidence of the torch supports my client’s story, not that of the prosecution.’

  She searched their faces for sympathy, but found none. Only solemn, thoughtful attention. Grimly, she ploughed on.

  ‘I would like to make one further point. My client has been in prison for eighteen years, far longer than the normal tariff for such a crime. He could have been released long ago, if he had agreed to admit his guilt. Yet he has consistently maintained his innocence. “I did not kill Brenda Stokes,” he says. That is what he said when he was arrested, that is what he said at his original trial, and that is what he says to your Lordships today. This consistency, I suggest, is a further point in his favour.

  ‘I therefore respectfully submit that the right course for your Lordships is to overturn this verdict, and set this man free.’

  Sarah bowed, and sat down. That’s it, she thought. Unless they have any questions, or Gareth Jones says something totally outrageous. I’m done. She watched her opponent rise and s
mooth his gown. He looks a nice man, she thought. Maybe I’ll meet him later in the Middle Temple. We could have a drink together. It’s very attractive, that Welsh accent. Pleasant manners too.

  Gareth Jones dealt first with the absence of the body. It had been a difficult feature of the case, he agreed, from the beginning. The original defence had claimed that Brenda Stokes was still alive. Now it seemed Mrs Newby wished to change this story. A hint of derision entered his voice.

  ‘Brenda Stokes is dead, she says, but it was not her client who killed her. Well, my Lords, what are we to say to this? Here we have Jason Barnes, a man with several prior convictions for violence, who was the last person to see Brenda alive. This man drives her to a remote riverside car park with the intention of having sex with her. He admits that when she refused, they had a violent quarrel, which left her blood on his hands. After which she vanished without trace.

  ‘And what do we have on the other hand, my Lords? Nothing at all. Just ghosts, my Lords - shadowy figures with no substance and no name, brought forward by Mrs Newby to confuse the issue. Sexual sadists, kidnappers, malevolent strangers - people of whose existence there is no evidence whatsoever. Need I say more? The police conducted an extensive investigation and came up with only one credible suspect - Jason Barnes, the man who was convicted eighteen years ago, after a thorough examination of the evidence.

  The evidence of Amanda Carr, he said, had been rejected at an earlier appeal. ‘And having seen Mrs Carr, your lordships may well understand why. Her evidence is unreliable. She admits she had been drinking. She caught a brief, fleeting glimpse of a girl in her headlights - no more. And it was only months afterwards - when photos of Brenda Stokes had been all over the media - that she belatedly decided that the person she had seen matched Brenda’s description.

  He then turned to something Sarah had tried to avoid - the evidence of Jason’s unlovely character, and his dishonest, criminal behaviour.

  ‘Mr Barnes, we must remember, lied when he was first interviewed. He did not steal a car, he claimed, he drove one belonging to a friend. This proved to be a lie. He now admits he stole a car, which he torched before he went home. Why did he do that, my Lords, except to conceal evidence? Burnt clothes were found inside the car - were they his clothes, perhaps? Burned with the car because they too, like the torch, had Brenda’s blood on?

  ‘And so to the torch, which Mrs Newby claims cannot be regarded as the murder weapon. Well, my Lords, I submit that any jury, confronted by a bloodstained torch, with the defendant’s fingerprint on it, would find it very hard to acquit. Particularly when it is found hidden in bushes by the river, where, by his own admission, Jason Barnes attempted to rape the young girl he had brought there. A young girl who has not been seen alive since that day. Were the jury misled about this torch? My Lords, I submit that they were not.’

  Finally, he turned to Sarah’s last point. Jason Barnes had always protested his innocence, he said. Was that a good reason for mercy? No, not in his case. There was another way to look at it entirely.

  ‘For 18 long years, my Lords, this man has refused to admit his guilt. And for all those years, Brenda’s mother - now in her seventies, my lords, and too frail to come here today - has had no body to bury. Jason Barnes knows of her grief. She has sent him letters begging him to tell her where her daughter is hidden, so that she may bury her in peace. And what has been his response? Laughter, my Lords. Mockery of the lowest kind. Allow me to read you one letter which Jason Barnes sent to Brenda’s mother, in reply to her appeal. It is very short.

  Why don’t you jump in a slurry pit yourself, you old cow? Might make you smell better.

  Gareth Jones sat down in the shocked silence. He turned to Sarah with a grim smile.

  ‘That’s your client for you,’ he said. ‘Enjoy.’

  10. A Helping Hand

  ‘HE JUST brought it into your classroom?’

  ‘Yes. Said he found it on holiday - somewhere near Filey. Not that I necessarily believe it. The story sounds fantastic to me.’

  ‘But then, so is this hand.’ Detective Sergeant Wilson favoured the flustered young schoolteacher with a gentle smile. ‘I don’t suppose you get many of them in your classroom, do you, Ms - er ...’

  ‘Sheranski. Do you think ... it is real, isn’t it?’

  ‘Looks real enough to me, certainly. But the pathologist will know.’

  DS Wilson contemplated the hand in its plastic evidence bag. There were some greenish strands between the bones which might be dried seaweed. If so, they would support the Filey story. But the first thing, clearly, was to interview the boy who had brought the hand to school.

  The school in which Julie Sheranski was battling through her probationary year was well known to the police, and Sean Tory proved to be a typical nine-year-old delinquent in the making. His mother had a printout two pages long on the police computer, and seemed to have worn out as many social workers as boyfriends. Gary James, her latest choice, was currently resting from paid employment but had a string of offences including theft, handling and GBH.

  So when DS Wilson interviewed the lad in the presence of Ms Sheranski, he was not surprised to get less than willing co-operation. Sean’s sole concern was to get back his hand. ‘It’s mine,’ he insisted truculently. ‘I found it, and she nicked it. What about my rights? You’re the filth - you want to arrest her, not me!’

  ‘What I want to know, Sean,’ the detective insisted patiently. ‘Is exactly where you found it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, it could be evidence, son, couldn’t it? I mean, people don’t just go leaving their hands around the countryside when they get tired of them, do they? There could be a crime committed here.’

  ‘And you could help solve it, Sean,’ Julie Sheranski put it in optimistically. ‘Help the police catch a criminal.’

  ‘Get real, miss. I ain’t gonna grass no-one. You’re the criminal here! Nicking my hand!’

  ‘Tell us the story, Sean,’ DS Wilson prodded patiently. ‘It’s got to be a good one.’

  Reluctantly, Sean consented to elaborate on the story he had told Ms Sheranski earlier that morning. The three boys were left alone in their rented caravan one night while Sharon and Gary went to the pub. Around midnight, they heard a scratching outside, which terrified the two-year-old, Wayne. While Sean’s brother Declan comforted the boy, Sean took a breadknife and bravely crept outside. In the darkness he saw a large animal, about the size of a small wolf. It was trying to get into the caravan. Naturally, Sean admitted, he’d been scared, particularly since he remembered a terrible film from the telly where a dingo ran away with a baby in Australia. This holiday place, Filey, DS Wilson should realise, was nothing like Leeds - it was all quiet and lonely and dark - much darker and wilder than anywhere in Australia, for certain. So there was a real threat to young Wayne and himself. But bravely, he challenged the fox, and it ran away. He chased it into the sand dunes for quite a distance - four or five miles, he estimated - until it ran into a hole in the ground. Just outside this hole he found the hand.

  ‘So you picked it up and brought it back to the caravan?’

  ‘Well yeah, course. Otherwise no-one would have believed me.’

  ‘Oh, you showed it to other people, then?’

  ‘Well, yeah. Declan and me mum and him.’

  ‘So they’ll confirm this story, will they?’

  Sean’s steady gaze never wavered. ‘Declan will, yeah, ‘course. I’ll fetch him now, shall I? He’s in Mr Purdy’s class.’

  He was halfway to the door before the detective stopped him. ‘No, no, Sean, that’s all right. You stay here with Ms Sheranski. I’ll find Declan myself, if you don’t mind.’

  By the end of the afternoon, having interviewed first Declan, then Sharon and finally her boyfriend Gary, DS Wilson had managed to uncover a different and rather more credible version of the story - that the boys had found the hand in the mouth of a dead fox on a slip road near York. After careful questioning
of Gary, aided by the discovery that the Orion’s road tax disc related to a completely different car altogether, he managed to establish a location for this slip road. Having done that, and had a pathologist confirm that the bones were genuinely human - not plastic from a medical exhibit - he decided reluctantly to pass the investigation over to the police in York.

  So he drove east. It was a pleasant drive, but DS Wilson, like most of his colleagues, had a poor opinion of police forces outside Leeds. It was only a year since a much-resented team from York had screwed up a serious joint drugs investigation, causing stress to all concerned. So when DS Wilson learned that the DI he was to meet had been involved in this same investigation, he saw a childish opportunity for revenge. Carefully, he folded the forefinger and two outside fingers inside the evidence bag back against the palm, leaving the middle finger pointing rigidly upwards. He presented it in York like this, an ingratiating smile on his face.

  ‘Always willing to give our country colleagues a hand,’ he said.

  A tale that was worth a few pints, when he got home.

  11. Judgement Day

  COURT ADJOURNED at three, with judgement promised for tomorrow. That gave Sarah and Lucy two hasty hours to explore the West End shops. It was welcome therapy for Sarah. She bought a pair of spike heeled leather boots for herself, and a cashmere sweater for Emily. She was hunting for a Christmas present for her son when the blues returned. It was the corduroy shirts that did it; they were too like those she had bought for Bob last year. He had worn them every weekend until summer. She had been so pleased with the success of her choice, she’d even enjoyed ironing them.

  No more. Now another woman would rest her head against those shirts, another woman buy his presents at Christmas. Not me. Well, I wish him joy of her, the swine. Eyes misting with rage, she hurried Lucy to the lingerie section, where she bought a soft silken camisole which the assistant promised would cherish her skin every day that she wore it.