Chapter 51: Twenty-Two Witnesses
Ruth had the statements in a lever-arch file three fingers thick and she went through them with me over two hours on a Tuesday.
She read them aloud.
She said it was better than letting me read them alone at night, and she was right, and I did not thank her.
Twenty-two guests.
Nineteen statements.
Three had declined and could be compelled later.
I will tell you what twenty-two people saw.
Simon Petch, a cousin by marriage, saw the defendant take hold of Damon and throw him bodily across the room.
Across the room.
Damon went down within his own footprint. He landed where he had been standing.
But Simon Petch is not lying.
That is the part that took me longest. A man going down fast looks like a man travelling.
Mrs. Deverill from the house on the corner saw Damon say something jokey to Nadia and then he was on the ground and there was blood.
There was no blood.
There was a broken wrist and a lump.
The blood is hers, added afterwards by a mind that needed the picture to make sense.
Four people said it happened without warning.
Six said they had not been looking and turned at the sound.
Two described me as calm. One of those meant it as a compliment. Ruth said the other one was worse for us than anything else in the file.
“Calm is the word that kills you,” she said. “Calm means chose.”
Three of them mentioned Damon's hand.
Mrs. Deverill: he reached out towards her, playfully.
A woman called Corinne, who I had liked, who had once lent me a coat: he had hold of her dress at the front, I think, mucking about.
Simon Petch: I did not see him touch her but he may have.
Playfully.
Mucking about.
May have.
Ruth marked those three with a green tab and said, without any lift in her voice at all, that green tabs were what she had.
There was one more.
An agency waitress. Her statement was seven lines long, taken at the house by an officer at ten past midnight, and the English in it is not her English.
She said: the man put his hand here on the lady's dress and pulled and she went down under it and then he was on the floor.
The officer had written in brackets: witness indicates upper chest.
Her name was Ana Sequeira.
She was twenty-four. She had worked for the caterer for six weeks.
Ruth had written to the caterer twice. Ana Sequeira had left the agency in January and gone home to Portugal, and the agency had a phone number that rang out and an address that was a hostel.
“Can you find her?”
“I can try. It costs money and it may come to nothing, and I have to tell you that a seven-line statement from a witness who will not attend is worth very little.”
Nineteen statements. Sixteen of them say I put a man on the floor. Three of them say he may have touched me first, playfully.
That is what twenty-two people saw at a Christmas dinner where the room was fourteen metres long and the light came from two chandeliers and a hundred and ten candles.
I know the dimensions of that room because I had laid that table eleven times, and because I had knelt on the floor of it eleven times as well.
Ruth closed the file and put her hand flat on the cover of it.
“I need you to understand something and I need you not to argue with me about it.”
I waited.
“There is no version of this trial where you are the person in the room the jury likes. The complainant is a young man with a broken wrist. His mother is sixty-six. Twenty-two people were eating dinner.”
“And you are a woman who used to break people for a living.”
“I never broke anybody.”
“I know that. I am telling you what twelve people will hear when they are told that you took a national silver medal at eighty-one kilos.”
Outside, the drill in the dental practice started and stopped and started again.
I thought about Ana Sequeira, who had been carrying a tray of something and who had turned her head at the right moment and seen the one thing that mattered and put it in seven lines of somebody else's language.
Nobody would ever ask her another question about it.
That is not a scandal.
That is just how the machine runs.
It does not need the eight seconds before. It only needs the eight seconds.
“There is one other thing in the file,” Ruth said.
She took out a single sheet and laid it face down and left her hand on it.
“It's the complainant's personal statement. You don't have to read it today.”
I turned it over.