Chapter 43: Were Aware
Discovery came in a cardboard box on the third of March. Three hundred and forty pages. It weighed about two kilos. I know, because I carried it.
I read it in Ruth's office on two Tuesdays after my supervision appointment, ten until one, at a table by the window.
You are not allowed to take it away. I made notes in the spiral pad.
Police report. Supplementary report. Two officers' notebooks, photocopied at an angle so that the left margin is missing.
Damon's medical records from that night. A wrist. A concussion assessment. A discharge sheet timed twenty past six in the morning.
Eleven photographs of the back of a man's head, none of which show anything, which Ruth says is normal and does not matter.
Twenty-two canvass sheets. Nineteen of them have four words in the summary box, and it is the same four words on all nineteen.
She threw him down.
And, at page two hundred and six, the transcript of the emergency call.
I had not thought about the call. In ten weeks it had never once occurred to me that there would be a recording.
There is always a recording.
The call is timed twenty-one forty-seven. It runs one minute fifty-one seconds.
The caller is Margot Ellis Ashford, and she is calling from the dining room, seated, with twenty-two people in front of her.
You can hear cutlery in the first ten seconds. I would like that noted. Somebody was still eating.
I am going to set down four lines of it exactly as they appear on page two hundred and six.
DISPATCHER: What's the address of the emergency?
CALLER: Fenwold, Fenwold Lane. My son has been assaulted in my dining room.
DISPATCHER: Is the person who assaulted him still there?
CALLER: She is. It is my daughter-in-law. She has a conviction for this. She has done it before.
Nine seconds. That is where that line falls in the call. Nine seconds after the address.
Ruth read it, and read it again, and then put her pen down, which is what she does.
“How long has your mother-in-law known about your record?”
“Julian told her.”
“When?”
“The second year. Something came up on the news and he told her afterwards. He said he had to.”
“He told you that.”
“Yes.”
“So the account you have is his account.”
I said yes, and I heard how it sounded.
Then Ruth asked the question that caused everything else, and she asked it without any weight on it at all.
“When you are frightened, and a stranger asks you for an address, do you produce a legal term?”
I thought about it. “No.”
“She said conviction. Not trouble. Not history. Not she's been in trouble before.”
“Conviction is a word you have read.”
She turned to Margot's own witness statement, taken on the sixth of January, found a line near the top, and turned it round to face me.
We were of course aware of her history.
“Were aware,” Ruth said. “Not became aware. Not were told. Were aware. That is the tense of somebody describing a settled state.”
“That might only be how she talks.”
“It might. It very often is. But there is a way to find out. It is boring, and it is the only reason anybody ever wins anything.”
Then she said the sentence I have since repeated to myself perhaps a hundred times.
“People do not have facts. They have documents. And documents get paid for.”
Then she explained what she was going to do, which took eleven minutes and was mostly about rules.
She would serve a subpoena on Margot Ashford for all documents in her possession, custody or control relating to me.
The family's solicitors would refuse most of it and produce a privilege log, which is a list of the documents they are refusing you and the reason.
A privilege log is the most useful object in law, because in order to refuse you a document they have to describe it.
Legal advice is privileged. A letter from your solicitor is privileged.
An invoice from a company that is not a firm of solicitors is not privileged. It is a receipt.
“What are we looking for?”
“I don't know,” she said. “That is what a subpoena is for.”
She drafted it on the screen while I sat there, and at the end there is a field where you specify the period covered.
She typed the date of my wedding, and then stopped with her hands on the keys.
Then she deleted it and typed: any date, without limitation.
I asked her why.
“Because I have been doing this eleven years, and the only cases I win are the ones where I asked for a wider period than I could justify.”
It went out on the twentieth of March, by process server, to the house.
Renwick and Voss had twenty-one days to respond, and they used twenty of them.