Chapter 114: The Verdict
Closing speeches took the fourth morning.
Farrow said the demonstration proved his point, not mine.
He said the jury had watched a woman explain, with total precision, exactly how to put a man on the ground.
It was a good argument and for about ninety seconds I thought it had worked.
Achterberg spoke for fifty minutes without notes.
She said one thing that I have kept.
She said the Crown had put before them a woman who, when a man took hold of her, produced a movement so controlled that she could account for every part of it eleven months later.
And that the Crown called this dangerous.
She said the word for that is not dangerous. She said the word is trained.
Rampton summed up for two hours on the Friday morning.
He was scrupulous.
He told them twice that the burden was on the Crown, that I did not have to prove I acted in self-defence, and that the question was whether the Crown had made them sure I had not.
He gave them the direction on my previous conviction and he gave it slowly.
He said the fact that a person behaved in a certain way twelve years ago does not mean she has behaved that way now.
If they were tempted to think it did, they should resist it.
Then he sent them out at eleven minutes past twelve.
The concourse at Hallowfield has eleven rows of blue seats. I have described them before.
I sat in the same one.
Priya came. Tobias came, in a jacket, which I had never seen.
Nobody talks. You think there will be talking and there is none.
At two o'clock Ruth went and bought four cups of tea and only three of us drank them.
At half past three there was a jury note. We were called in for it.
They wanted two things: the photograph of the dress, and to be reminded of the definition of reasonable force.
Rampton gave them both, in eight minutes, and sent them back.
Achterberg said, in the corridor, “That is a jury working.”
“Is it good?”
“It is neither. Anybody who tells you they can read a note is lying to you.”
At twenty past four the usher came out and said they were coming back.
My legs went, which they had not done at any point in eleven months.
I stood in the dock and held the rail because holding a rail is permitted.
The clerk asked the foreman to stand. The foreman was the youngest of them, the one I had thought was under twenty-five.
She asked whether they had reached a verdict upon which they were all agreed.
He said yes.
She asked whether they found the defendant guilty or not guilty of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
He said not guilty.
I want to describe what that was like, and the truthful description is nothing.
There was no rush. There was no sound in my ears. I did not cry and I have never once cried about it since.
What I felt was my own weight come back onto my heels, which is where it had not been since the twenty-fifth of December the year before.
Rampton thanked the jury for their attention. He told them they were excused from jury service for ten years.
Then he said, “Mrs Ashford, you are discharged. You may leave the dock.”
The dock has a door. An officer opens it from the outside. That is the whole of it.
I walked four metres across a courtroom floor and out through the door at the back, and Priya was standing in the corridor with both hands over her mouth.
Tobias shook my hand. He is fifty-five years old and he shook my hand like a referee.
“Correct decision,” he said, which is the most emotional sentence he has ever addressed to me.
Ruth had two forms for me to sign and she made me sign them in the corridor before anything else happened.
Outside it was dark at twenty to five, because it was October.
Damon was not there. He had not been in court since the second day.
Julian was not there. He had not been in court at all, on advice, because his statement had been read.
Achterberg came out unrobed, in a coat, with the trolley case, and she shook my hand and said she was catching the 17:14.
“What happens now?” I said.
“Nothing happens now. That is what an acquittal is.”
She said one more thing, from about four metres away, with her back half turned, in the manner of a woman who has said it before.
“Don't expect it to fix anything that isn't the charge.”
I said I would try not to.
Then she went for her train and I stood on the steps of a Crown Court in the dark with two forms in my coat pocket and no idea at all what to do with the evening.