KATIE
As I sit in court, I try hard to focus on the evidence. I take down the defendant’s answers in shorthand, my pen makes a scratching sound against my notebook.
‘Her eyes were open.’ The defendant is tall, blond, with bright blue eyes. His palms are turned up and outwards in the body language of honesty. ‘She pulled me towards her.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘We kissed.’
‘You kissed her?’
‘Yes, and she kissed me back.’
‘And you were in no doubt whatsoever that she consented to this contact?’
He smiles, looks straight at the jury. ‘None whatsoever.’
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
‘And what happened after that?’
The weather is getting cold now; the clerks wear cardigans and scarves inside the courtroom, plug heaters in at the walls. Everything about the room is starting to grate on me; the awful, cheap patterned carpet, the filthy plug sockets, the musty smell, the dust along the windowsills. DCI Carter is here again. He is wearing a diamond-patterned jumper under his suit jacket. I nod at him and he gently nods back.
After we went for coffee that time, I’d kept thinking about the way he’d reacted when I said that thing about rape cases. It made me wonder whether something had happened, in the past. Back at the office, I’d pulled up the digital archive, searched for his name. There were murder cases, kidnapping cases. Not many for rape.
Eventually, I’d found it. The papers had called it the Boathouse Rape. The echoes with the current case had been obvious. The privileged backgrounds of the accused. The vulnerability of the victim. The beauty of the backdrop. The ugliness of the detail.
It had been even worse for the victims back then. They couldn’t report this girl’s name, of course – she’d have anonymity for life under the law. But everything else about her life had been laid out in lurid technicolour. The underwear she’d had on, the number of drinks she’d had at the party. The way she’d been dressed, the way she’d behaved, how much sexual experience she’d had before. It was all in the stories, every last bit. She had been just sixteen years old.
I guessed the conclusion, even before I came to the end of the cuttings. There was a picture of the two smirking defendants on the Cambridge courtroom steps. Quotes from their lawyers complaining that they should have had anonymity too, that their young lives had been shattered. And at the very bottom, a few words from the senior investigating officer, about the bravery of the victim in coming forward, his hope that the verdict would not deter others from doing so. His name was DCI Mark Carter.
I saved the cuttings in a folder on my laptop, clicking and dragging each article one by one. As I did so, I noticed the date of the offence. It had all happened in the summer of 2008. I counted on my fingers. Hadn’t Helen still been at Cambridge University that summer?
The next time I spoke to Helen on the phone, I asked her if she remembered it.
‘There was loads in the national papers,’ I told her. ‘The Boathouse Rape, they called it. A young girl who turned up at one of those May week parties at Cambridge, the summer you left. She said two male students had got her drunk and raped her.’
Helen didn’t respond straight away.
‘Helen, are you still there?’
‘Yes. Sorry. Can’t remember it,’ she said vaguely. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘No reason really. Just researching the detective on this current case. Thought you might remember it, what it was like being at the university when something like that was happening.’
‘Oh, right, I see.’ Her voice was odd. She sounded relieved. ‘Well, I think we’d left by the time all that was really in the news.’ I frowned. I thought she’d said she didn’t remember it being in the news?
‘All rise.’
The case is breaking for a bit. Everyone stands. When I look up, DCI Carter is gone. He must have slipped out the back. I had been hoping to lure him to the pub at lunchtime, try and get a bit more out of him. Ask if he ever passed the victim my letter.
I head to the toilets. It occurs to me how tired I am. I think about seeing Charlie tonight. He has promised to cook me pasta, and I can stop thinking about the case for a while. Maybe after dinner we can watch The Apprentice and laugh at the contestants. If I can get back in time – the last time I drove from Cambridge to Charlie’s flat in east London, it had taken me two hours. My heart had sunk when I’d seen the long snake of red brake lights cramped together on the motorway. It occurred to me how much I wanted to get back to Charlie, how homesick I felt for him, how much I longed to see the light on at the window of his little top-floor flat.