Chapter 80: What a Defendant Cannot Do
I wanted to walk into a police station.
I want that on the record, because of everything that came after, and because people have since been generous to me about my patience.
I was not patient. I was told.
I telephoned my solicitor at ten past nine on the Friday and talked for nine minutes without stopping.
She let me finish. Then there was a pause on the line long enough that I checked the screen.
“Right,” she said. “I am going to ask you questions, and I want you to answer them exactly, and if the answer is I do not know, say I do not know.”
“All right.”
“Did you ever hold one of those folders in your hands?”
“No.”
“Did you ever see a complete page?”
“I saw pages open on the trolley.”
“For how long?”
“Seconds. While I was standing behind a chair.”
“Do you have a photograph of anything?”
“No.”
“Do you have the full names of K.H., A.J. or T.D.?”
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
“No,” I said. “I knew their faces. Two of their faces. I called one of them by a first name for three years and I cannot get it.”
“Do you know, as a fact, that any resident was harmed?”
“No.”
“Do you know, as a fact, that any drug was not given?”
“Doreen told me nobody had been round.”
“Which is a woman of eighty-eight telling you something at three in the afternoon.”
“Yes.”
“I am not being cruel,” she said. “I am doing to you what a lawyer on the other side will do, and I would rather it happened in your bedroom than in a room with a stenographer.”
“I understand.”
“Good. Now the hard part.”
She said it in the same flat voice she used for dates.
“You cannot go to the police.”
I stood up again. The room was two strides across and it was not enough.
“Twenty-seven people.”
“Listen to the sentence I am about to say, and then argue with me. You are a defendant on bail. The complainant in your case is Damon Ashford. You are, this week, in written negotiations with his solicitor.”
“Yes.”
“If you walk into a station on Monday and make an allegation against him, there is no version of that which does not look like leverage.”
“It is not leverage.”
“I believe you. That is not the point. The point is what it can be made to look like, and it can be made to look like a woman with an assault conviction inventing a scandal to get a charge dropped.”
I put my forehead against the window frame, which was cold, and which helped.
“And there is a worse thing,” she said, “and I am going to say it once.”
“Say it.”
“If they can characterise it as a threat made to influence a witness, you are looking at a second set of allegations. That is not a theoretical risk. That is the first thing a defence-minded solicitor would reach for if the positions were reversed.”
Outside a woman was strapping a child into a car seat and losing.
“So I do nothing.”
“No. I said you cannot go to the police. I did not say do nothing.”
“Then what?”
“First, understand what I am and what I am not. I am your criminal solicitor. I act for you on a charge under section 47. I am not a regulatory lawyer, I am not an employment lawyer, and I cannot advise you on a care home.”
“Then who does?”
“That is the question we spend next week on.”
“Twenty-seven people,” I said again, because it was the only card I had and I kept putting it down.
“Nadia. If those records are false, they have been false for at least eighteen months, and probably longer. That is horrifying. It also means that the difference between Monday and a fortnight on Monday is very unlikely to be the difference for anybody in that building.”
“You don't know that.”
“No,” she said. “I don't. And if I am wrong, I will carry it. But my advice is the same, and I am giving it to you in writing this afternoon so that you have it.”
“Why in writing?”
“Because one day somebody is going to ask you why you waited,” she said, “and I want you to be able to hand them a letter.”
I stood in the middle of that room for a long time after she rang off.
There is a word for what she had spent nine minutes protecting me from and she had not used it once.
She was too careful to use it. She let me arrive at it on my own, the way she let me arrive at everything.
The word was motive.
I had one now. And the moment I opened my mouth, it would be the first thing they gave to the jury.