Chapter 59: Contemporaneous
Ruth listened for twenty-two minutes without writing anything down, which frightened me more than anything else in the room.
Then she picked up her pen and said: “Right. I'm going to be unhelpful for about ten minutes. Let me finish before you argue.”
“I'm not going to argue.”
“You will.”
She drew a line down the middle of a fresh page.
“Two things happened. One is that you found out the truth about the eighth of November. The other is that a woman turned up at your door with a photocopy. Those are not the same size.”
She wrote a word at the top of the left column and turned it so I could read it.
Contemporaneous.
“This is the word that decides most of it. A contemporaneous record is one made at the time by somebody with a duty to make it.”
“The ambulance narrative is contemporaneous. That is real and it is good.”
“It is also four lines long, written at midnight by a paramedic concentrating on a skull, and it names neither of you.”
“Bystander female approx thirty. That is her, and there is nothing that ties that line to a woman called Priya Raman except Priya Raman saying so twelve years later.”
“She can say so.”
“She can. And the Crown will say she is a witness who has been looking for you for over a decade and has an emotional investment the size of a house.”
I said that was not fair.
“It is not fair. It is what I would say if I were them, and I would be doing my job.”
She drew a bracket around the left column.
“Now the conviction.”
“You pleaded guilty at twenty-two.
“You were advised. You were of sound mind.
“You told a court you had thrown a man to the ground and injured him.”
“All of which is true.
“You did throw him. The plea was not false.”
“What was missing was the reason. And the reason is not an element of the offence. It goes to whether it was lawful.”
“Self-defence is a defence. Defence of another is a defence.
“Neither of them was raised.”
“Can it be raised now?”
“Twelve years out of time, against your own plea, on the evidence of a witness who was never formally interviewed.”
She let that sit for a second.
“An application would be made. It would be refused. And I would have to tell the court about it on the twenty-second of April, and the court would think about it what courts think about that.”
“So it does nothing.”
“I did not say that.”
She moved to the right column.
“Here is what it does. Your previous conviction is the single heaviest thing in this case. It is the reason the offer is what it is.”
“At the moment that conviction reads as: a young woman with violence in her hands attacked a stranger in the street for no reason.”
“If Priya Raman gives evidence, it reads as: a young woman intervened in an abduction, used the only skill she had, panicked and ran, and was punished for it because she never told anybody why.”
“That is a different woman. Judges are people.”
“It goes to sentence. It may go to whether they can put the conviction in front of a jury at all, and I would fight that hard.”
“But listen to me now.”
She put the pen down.
“Priya Raman was not at that Christmas dinner.”
“She cannot tell anybody what Damon Ashford did with his hand. She has no idea. She has never met the man.”
“The charge is unaffected. The offer is unaffected. Everything in that basis of plea about the twenty-fifth of December is exactly as true or as untrue as it was three weeks ago.”
I looked at the eleven parking spaces.
“It changes the sentence,” Ruth said. “It might change the way they talk about you. It does not change the charge.”
The radiator ticked twice.
“There is one other route and I am telling you about it because you would find it yourself and come back angry.”
“If you plead guilty but you dispute the facts the Crown says you should be sentenced on, the court can hold a hearing about the facts. Evidence is called. The judge decides.”
“So I could plead guilty and still make them prove that sentence.”
“Yes. And if the judge doesn't believe you, you lose most of your credit for the plea and you are sentenced by a judge who has just heard you lie.”
“Is that likely?”
“Twenty-two witnesses. Three of whom say playfully.”
She squared the pad.
“I need to ask you one question and I want you to think before you answer, and not tonight.”
“Go on.”
“Do you want to be found not guilty, or do you want to be believed?”
“Because they are two different applications, Nadia, and I can only run one of them properly.”