Chapter 113: The Demonstration
Priya gave evidence at ten past ten on the third morning.
She was allowed to because the Crown had put my conviction in.
Rampton had ruled, with the jury out, that where the Crown relies on a conviction the defendant may explain the circumstances.
She held the rail of the witness box with both hands and did not let go for nineteen minutes.
The eleventh of April, twelve years ago. Ackland Road, twenty past eleven.
A man she did not know had her right wrist and was walking her towards a car with the engine running.
She had gone four metres. She knows the number because she has counted them since.
A woman crossed the road.
The woman said one word, which Priya cannot recall, and took hold of the man's sleeve and collar.
Then the man was on the ground, and then the woman was running.
Priya went to the police the next afternoon and gave a statement.
She could not name the woman or describe her beyond height, hair and a dark jacket. By then a woman had been arrested off a doorway camera, advised to plead guilty, and had.
Her statement went into a file and was never read to any court, because there was no trial.
That is how a thing like that disappears. Nobody hides it. It is simply never asked for.
Farrow cross-examined for four minutes. He asked whether she had spent twelve years looking for me, and whether she wanted to help me, and she said yes to both.
I gave evidence after lunch. Two hours and forty minutes, and most of it was ordinary.
The dress. The room. The twenty-two guests. The eleven dates.
Then, at ten past three, Farrow came to the technique.
He read the phrase out of the guideline: the use of a specialist skill against an untrained person.
“You threw him.”
“Yes.”
“Using a movement you have performed how many times?”
“Tens of thousands.”
“Describe it to the jury, please.”
“May I stand up?”
Rampton took off his glasses.
Then he told the jury they would be shown a movement, that nobody would touch anybody, and that a demonstration is not worth more than words.
“Slowly, please, Mrs Ashford. And stay where you are.”
I stood in the dock with a metre of floor either side.
“He has my collar in his right hand and he is pulling down,” I said.
“So his weight is already forward, onto his front foot. I do not break his balance. He has.”
“My left hand takes his sleeve above the elbow. That is the hand that matters.”
“My right arm goes under his arm and round his back, palm flat, here.” I put my hand on my own back at the bottom rib.
“Not the neck. You never take the neck. You are told that at twelve years old.”
“Then I turn. Both feet, one step, until my back is against him and my hips are below his.”
“That is the whole of it. A difference in the height of two sets of hips.”
I turned then, at quarter speed, with nobody in front of me. It takes half a step.
“I straighten my legs. He comes over the hip. He is not lifted. He is rotated.”
“Now the sleeve.”
I held my left hand out in front of the jury, closed, and kept it there.
“I do not let go. Not when he goes over, not when he lands, not until he has stopped moving.”
“If I let go, he falls the way a dropped thing falls. Shoulders first. Head last and fastest.”
“Holding the sleeve turns him, so he lands flat across both shoulder blades, and takes a third of the speed out of the landing.”
“Flat is the whole point. It spreads the landing over the back, and the arm I hold keeps his head off the floor.”
“That is why he has a wrist and a coccyx.”
The room was quiet enough that I could hear the shorthand writer.
“Twelve years ago,” I said, “I let go.”
Nobody stopped me. Not Farrow, not the judge.
“The shoulder had no strength there. His sleeve came out of my hand at the top of the turn, and he landed on the back of his head.”
“He was unconscious for eleven days. I have thought about the difference between those two landings every day since.”
“You are asking about a specialist skill. The skill is not the throwing. Anybody can put a man on a floor.”
“The skill is the sleeve.”
Then I sat down, because I had finished.
Farrow asked whether I accepted I could have stepped back instead.
I said that stepping back with a hand in your collar takes the collar and your balance with it.
Achterberg did not re-examine. She told me later that re-examining would have been vandalism.
I put both hands flat on the ledge in front of me. They shook for about four minutes, and I let them.