Chapter 39: Three Versions
Damon took the stand at twenty past two with a wrist splint on his left forearm.
I am going to describe the splint before anything else, because of what I saw in the corridor at ten past.
I was on a bench outside courtroom three with Ruth's investigator, a man called Owen Pike, who carries the files.
Damon came up from the lift with his solicitor. The splint was in his hand.
He stopped outside the door, took his jacket half off, put the splint on, tightened the two straps, and put the jacket back.
It took about eleven seconds, and I timed it, because timing things is what I do instead of speaking.
Nobody else on that bench was looking. Pike was reading. The solicitor was talking to a clerk.
A fractured scaphoid is eight to twelve weeks and then a splint as required. He was entitled to wear it. It is not a lie.
It is a decision, made in a corridor, at ten past two.
On the stand he was good. Better than he is at dinner. He sat forward, answered in short sentences, and looked at the judge when he spoke.
What I had not expected was the three versions.
Ruth had them in a folder, side by side, in one column, and this is what she read out.
Version one is the statement he gave an officer at the hospital at twenty past one in the morning on the twenty-sixth.
“I took hold of her dress. She threw me on the floor.”
Version two is the signed witness statement taken on the ninth of January.
“I put my hand on her shoulder to guide her. She threw me on the floor.”
Version three is what he said under oath on the twenty-fourth of February.
“She'd been unsteady all evening. I reached out to steady her, and she turned and threw me on the floor.”
Unsteady. That word arrives in February. It is not there in December.
Ruth read all three and then asked him about the gap.
“In your first account you say you took hold of her dress. In your third you say you reached out to steady her.”
“Yes.”
“Which is it?”
“Both. I took hold of her dress in order to steady her.”
“You did not use the word steady until the ninth of January.”
“I've had time to remember it more clearly.”
That is a sentence you cannot argue with, and it is a sentence a judge hears eleven times a week.
Then he did the other thing, the thing he had come to do, which Grier had not asked for.
“Can I say something about her? Everybody keeps talking about the family.”
The judge allowed it. Judges usually do.
“She had been drinking. Not a lot. Some.”
“She has always been physical. That's who she is. It isn't a criticism. It's a fact about her.”
“She doesn't come from people who talk things out. My mother took her in and taught her a great deal.”
There it is. Took her in. I had been married to his brother for three years.
Then the last piece, which was the actual purpose of the afternoon.
“I run four residential care homes. I'm responsible for two hundred and ten vulnerable adults.”
“It's my job to identify a risk, and I have to say, on the record, that I've been uneasy about her access to those buildings for a while.”
Ruth was on her feet. The judge said he would disregard it.
You cannot disregard it. It is in the transcript. I have read the transcript.
On cross, Ruth asked him four things.
“In three years, has the defendant ever been the subject of a complaint at any of your facilities?”
“No.”
“Has she ever been the subject of a safeguarding referral?”
“No.”
“Has anybody ever reported her for anything at all?”
“Not that I'm aware of.”
“Then when you say uneasy, you mean that you personally felt uneasy.”
“Yes.”
The judge found probable cause in about ninety seconds, which is roughly the length of a national final, and bound the matter over for trial.
The date given was the eleventh of May.
Outside, on the steps, Ruth put the folder under her arm and said, “That went about as well as it could have.”
I said, “He put the splint on in the corridor.”
She stopped walking. “You saw that?”
“Ten past two. Eleven seconds. Two straps.”
She thought about it for a while, and then she gave me the honest answer, which is the only kind she ever gave me.
“You saw it. Nobody else did. It is worth nothing at all until somebody else does.”
Then she said, “Write it down anyway. Date, time, what you saw. No opinion.”
That night at Redmore, on my break at three in the morning, I wrote my first note in a spiral pad that cost one dollar ninety.
By May there were forty pages in it.