Inside, Mr. Greer and all good boys had seen to it that the Turk would be quiet, at least for a while. Two hours a day outside my cell, even under supervision, allowed me more than enough time to discern who it was in my community that had dried blood under their fingernails.
I mean, it’s not that you can’t pass
ten or fifteen years inside
and more—
you can,
as long as the jewel
on the left side of your chest doesn’t lose its luster!
A week to go before the committal hearing and nothing had changed. There was still nothing to breathe that wasn’t tainted, nothing to touch that wasn’t soiled, nothing to hope for that wasn’t hopeless. A week to go and Anna had not come.
Gina explained the purpose of the committal hearing. It would give the magistrate the opportunity to hear the prosecution evidence in respect of each of the charges and, on the basis of that, to form a view as to whether there was a prima facie case against me. The test, put formally, to determine whether I should be committed for trial on any particular charge was whether a reasonable jury, properly instructed, could at law convict on that charge. In the committal, as it’s called for short, there’s no jury, just the magistrate. There was a kind of poetry to much of the technical language Gina used to explain what was going to happen and what we needed to happen. Had I been merely a casual observer I might have enjoyed the rhythm and tortured syntax they use but I was the “defendant,” also the “accused,” except when traveling to or from the court cells to the prison, when I was the “prisoner.”
“They’ll call their witnesses,” Gina said, “and we’ll get a chance to cross-examine them.”
“Who will they call?”
“The cops, Threlfall and Staszic, Angela—”
“Why her?”
“She called it in.”
“What’s she going to say?”
“I don’t know. That’s what we’ll find out. Is there any reason we should be particularly worried about her?”
“No, not if she tells the truth.”
“There are lots of reasons she could stray from the truth, the most likely being some sort of deal with the police.”
“What could the police possibly offer her?”
“Some kind of immunity.”
“Immunity from what?”
“From prosecution.”
“But she hasn’t done anything.”
“Oh, Simon, she doesn’t need to have done anything. It’s your case that you haven’t done anything.”
“Yeah, but in my case Joe Geraghty is motivated by my affair with his wife to claim that I have. Why would anyone want to have Angelique charged?”
“The police could threaten her with it to make her a more compliant witness. She’s the only one they’ve got who is capable of giving evidence as to your actions, and as to what you said, before the police found you with the boy.”
“Sam. His name is Sam. I had his mother’s permission to pick him up from school.”
“His mother will be their main witness, and obviously I’ll be asking her about that.”
“What good will that do? She’s denying I had permission. She’s denying the affair.”
“First, it gives her another chance to tell the truth, and in quite different circumstances. She will never have been asked that question in a courtroom under oath, with all eyes on her. Second, it gives her a glimpse of the dire consequences for you if she sticks to her denial. She’ll see you in the dock with an officer on either side of you. It will give her the shot of reality she needs. I’ll give her a middle way out as well. If she continues to deny the affair, I’ll suggest that perhaps she had resumed a non-sexual, even non-romantic relationship with you and that she hadn’t told her husband about it for fear of arousing suspicion, jealousy, anger, or just so as not to hurt his feelings. If I can give a jury an accurate picture of you, it will be seen as eminently reasonable to suggest that Anna preferred talking to you, confiding in you, rather than her husband.”
“I thought you said there wasn’t a jury at the committal stage?”
“No, there isn’t, but it’s prudent for us to use the committal to set things up for the trial.”
Gina would not let me harbor any illusions that a magistrate would dismiss all the charges after he’d heard the evidence against me. She said I shouldn’t imagine that I’d be going home at the conclusion of the committal hearing. Technically I didn’t have a home to go to. I wasn’t able to pay my rent, and my father couldn’t be talked into paying it. Alex had tried but, having failed, all he could do was to pack my books and music into boxes and store them in his wife’s garage.
“Are you saying you won’t even be trying to get me off?”
“Not at this stage. I’ll try to get the magistrate to throw out some of the charges, but we won’t be putting any case of our own. There’s no point. We’ll save it all for trial.”
“What will you be saying at the trial?”
“You need to remember that the burden of proof is on them. We don’t need to prove anything. We’ll be trying to raise a ‘reasonable doubt’ in the minds of the jury. We don’t have to actually prove that you and Anna were having an illicit relationship or even that you had her permission to pick Sam up from school. They have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you didn’t have permission. If we can cause the jury to have a reasonable doubt, then they have to find you not guilty.”
“But what evidence do we have even to cast doubt on their case?”
“Mainly you.”
“Me?”
“You’re going to have to give evidence of your relationship with Anna and specifically of her instruction to pick Sam up from school.”
“But it’s just my word against theirs.”
“It’s really your word against Anna’s. At the trial, we will try to lead evidence to show how much she stood to lose by acknowledging the affair—the house, the lifestyle, her husband’s income. If she persists in denying the whole relationship, we’ll just have to discredit her. Given that you don’t have any incriminating letters from her—”
“What do you mean ‘incriminating letters’? You make it sound like she’s on trial.”
“That’s what we’re going to have to do—create that impression, the subtext, that she’s on trial. We have to get the jury to understand how reluctant she must be to confess to the affair; the indignity, the guilt, the fear of losing her family. We have the letters she wrote to you in your university days when she was your girlfriend, when she wasn’t ashamed of your relationship, when it wasn’t illicit. We’ll tender them as exhibits so the jury can see them. We’ll do the same thing with photos of the two of you.”
“But she’s not denying that we had a relationship back then, just now.”
“I know, and for that reason we’ll have a fight on our hands trying to get them admitted as evidence. We’ll be arguing that they ought to be admitted to show the improbability of the prosecution’s case. We’ll be asking the jury to consider how unlikely it is that after almost ten years of not seeing her, not being in contact with her at all, you would suddenly get it in your head to pick her six-year-old son up from school one Friday and give him some chocolate milk. We’ll be making them see that she has very good reasons for lying, that the truth will destroy her whole world, her status quo. You, on the other hand, had no reason in the world to pick up Sam from school unless you were asked to.”
14. The protective services officers, the men who were in charge of transporting prisoners, in charge of guarding them on the way to court and back to prison, were not the same men who guarded us at the prison. The shelf company the state paid to employ them was not the same company that owned the prison, and the men were selected from a completely different pool. For all that, there was no qualitative difference between them and the prison officers. They too liked to find out what it was the prisoners they were transporting were charged with. They too, like almost everyone
else I had encountered since it all began, equated being charged with being guilty, the assumption being that the police wouldn’t have charged you if you weren’t. Where these men differed from the prison officers was the alacrity with which they let you know how much they disapproved of what you must have done to be in their care.
The prison officers had you captive every day and so they were in no particular hurry to exercise the power they had over you. They had the luxury of sitting back and letting prisoners take care of one another, intervening only when the de facto justice system within the walls of the prison demanded a little tweaking, a little ad hoc extra-judicial improvement. The officers who were in charge of prisoners only when they were away from prison, on the other hand, had to victimize you expeditiously. They had to take every opportunity to torment you, be it when they cuffed your wrists, when they pushed you into the prison van, when they ate their lunch in front of you after depriving you of yours on some flimsy pretext. They were small things designed to humiliate and intimidate. They were effective.
I sat in the dock, as I had for the bail applications, dressed in a suit and tie with an officer on each side. I stood like everyone else when the magistrate entered the court and sat down like everyone else when instructed. The room was filled with people I had never seen before, print and television journalists, and members of the public who had struck it lucky and gotten into the committal hearing of that guy, the one who took all those children. Alex was there sitting behind Gina and her instructing solicitor.
Gina had advised me to sit up straight and to look attentive, politely engaged, and never indignant no matter what was said. I was to make no sotto voce remarks, but I could take notes with a pen and paper she had provided for me. I was to look neither too confident nor too afraid but rather, if I could manage it, sympathetic, intelligent. Ironically, the effort required to eliminate from my appearance all the extremes she had warned against as each person in the courtroom looked at me—some furtively, some feasting on me, convinced of my guilt, some not fully understanding the charges, some wondering what I had actually done to attract them—made it impossible for me not to grimace from time to time. She had told me earlier not to be afraid of the committal.
“This’ll be a rehearsal. There’s no jury. It’s just an opportunity for us to put the prosecution and their witnesses through their paces,” she had said. I kept trying to remind myself of this. But I was afraid of their witnesses, one of them in particular. Alex was right. There was really no way of avoiding it. Anna was failing.
I looked at the magistrate, a not-unpleasant-looking somewhat colorless man, so very ordinary. Did he like music? Did he read? Was he married and, if so, how had he met his wife? What had made her choose him? Did she consider him a reasonable man? Did he work too hard? Was he the type of man to equate any increase in the funding of state schools with a lamentable stifling of individual responsibility? And would we have been able to enjoy each other’s company, to smile wanly at the sorry state of the world over a drink together, had I not ruined my life and taken an ex-lover’s son home from school?
The prosecutor opened, his matter-of-fact style of presentation revealing to the close observer a studied theatricality that had no doubt assisted him in getting to this point in his career. As at the start of every high-profile case, his mouth was a little drier than usual, his palms a little moister, and his patience a little shorter. He knew, as he stood behind the bar table and addressed the court, that given what the media are pleased to call their commitment to the public’s right to know, he was addressing a far larger audience.
“Your Worship,” he began, “Simon Heywood is charged . . .” and then, after he had formally and quickly recited all the charges, he went on to describe a stranger who, superficially, had much in common with me. This stranger had once been a primary-school teacher but had lost his job. He had lived on his own in an apartment for many years. He was something of a dreamer and was chronically short of money. He had been seeing a psychiatrist for a couple of years. He had been romantically involved with a prostitute and had lived off her earnings. He liked to think of himself as something of an intellectual but, sadly, he had not apparently achieved anything that would warrant this self-assessment. Largely estranged from his family and with few if any friends, he was, in short, a man with some potential, but it was a potential that was entirely unrealized. I listened to the prosecutor describe this man, a man nobody could possibly have any time for, and though I am, I think, more honestly acquainted with myself than most people, I did not recognize him.
Alternately holding her own hand, nervously shifting up and down from toe to heel and back, as if for a ballet exercise, joining a thumb and middle finger around her wrist, or else leaning against the railing of the witness box as if exhausted, she looked like she was more afraid than I was. She was required to give her full name.
“Can you tell the court how long you’ve known the defendant, Simon Heywood?”
“I don’t know exactly . . .”
“Approximately.”
“I’ve known him . . . approximately . . . two years. Something like that.”
“Two years?”
“I think so, is that right?”
“I can’t give you the answers, just the questions.”
“I’m sorry.”
“How long had you known him at the time of his arrest?”
“About . . . I’d known him for about two years at that time.”
“Two years at the time of his arrest, so it’s more than two years now?”
“Yes.”
“In what capacity did you know him?”
“What capacity?”
“What kind of relationship was it?”
“Good.”
“No, what I mean is—”
“Your Worship,” Gina rose to interrupt the prosecutor, “I’m loath to interrupt my learned friend’s examination of this witness but I’m concerned that, in his quite genuine and legitimate attempt to have the witness understand his questions, he might be about to lead her to the very answer he seeks!”
“Well, Ms. Serkin,” the magistrate answered, “Mr. Henshaw hasn’t yet done anything to warrant an objection, so let’s see if he continues that way. Mr. Henshaw, you will not be suggesting the answer in your question, will you?”
“No, Your Worship.”
“There you are, Ms. Serkin. Can we let him continue now?”
“Yes, Your Worship.”
“Thank you, Mr. Henshaw. Continue with your next non-leading question of the witness.”
“Angela, will you tell the court the type of work you’re engaged in.”
“I work in the hospitality industry.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I work as an escort.”
“What does that entail?”
“I work for an agency. They . . . the agency sends me to meet different clients.”
“For what are you paid?”
“For my time.”
“What do you do with your time?”
“When I’m working?”
“Yes.”
“It varies.”
The prosecutor tried to hide his frustration.
“Your Worship, I sense some perhaps understandable reluctance on the part of the witness. I seek my friend’s indulgence to lead on a fact not in dispute.”
“Well, don’t ask me, Mr. Henshaw. It’s Ms. Serkin’s permission you need.”
With a wave of her hand Gina agreed to the prosecutor’s request, adding, “To establish one thing only.” The prosecutor nodded and looked back in the direction of my nervous young friend.
“You’ve been supporting yourself by working as a prostitute, haven’t you?”
Angelique, who must have expected this to come out sooner rather than later, nonetheless went red. She turned to the magistrate.
“Isn’t that a leading question, sir?”
The magistrate waited for the general burst of laughter in the
room to die down.
“It is, but Ms. Serkin has agreed to let him ask it.”
“Is it relevant? I don’t mind talking . . . about the boy.”
“I’m afraid you have to answer it.”
For all that she had done for a living since I had met her, she had never stood up in court, in public anywhere, and announced it. This was the moment when she would confirm what her parents in Adelaide had perhaps tried their best not to suspect. How many people could I hurt in one fell swoop?
“What was the question again?”
“Do you work as a prostitute?”
“An escort.”
“Does that involve an exchange of money for sex?”
“Yes. Yes, it does. I’m the one who gets the money. Happy?”
“I’m sorry, I’m . . . not trying to embarrass you,” the prosecutor explained. She was testing his patience.
“Were you working when you met Simon Heywood?”
“Yes.”
“Was he your client?”
“No.”
“Then what was the nature of your relationship?”
“We . . . we were friends.”
“Friends?”
“Yes.”
“Your Worship, again I seek my learned friend’s indulgence to lead the witness.”
“Ms. Serkin?” the magistrate directed a questioning tone to Gina.
“Sir, the witness has answered the question. She’s said my client and she were friends. I’m not inclined to indulge Mr. Henshaw’s taste for leading questions just because he’s not getting answers that suit him.”
“There’s your answer, Mr. Henshaw. Do you have any non-leading questions for the witness?” the magistrate asked. Henshaw continued.
“Were you always friends with Mr. Heywood, with the defendant?”
“No. I’ve only known him for a few years.”
“Have you ever described your relationship with him in any other way?”
“I don’t know, maybe . . . You know, wishful thinking perhaps.”
“Are you saying that’s how you described your relationship with him to the police the day he was arrested on the charges that bring us here—?”