Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner (read book txt) 📗

and tables are draped in white sheets like ghosts. I watch the blue light of the TV flicker on Daniel’s face, and wonder what it is that my husband is hiding from me.

GREENWICH PARK

On the high street, car headlights and street lamps flicker on. Shop shutters start to come down, like eyes closing. She watches, and waits.

The man is behind the glass, a window that stretches from the floor to the ceiling. All the other lights in the building are off. His is the only one remaining.

She shifts on her feet. The sky is darkening, the light draining out of it in streaks of pink and orange over the houses. He would normally be home by now. But something is keeping him here this evening. Something stopping him going home to his beautiful wife.

The man stands up, slings a bag over his shoulder, gathers his things. Picks up a magazine on his desk, tries to tear it in half, but it’s too thick. Now, feeling foolish, he glances up, as if he senses he is being watched. Her neck prickles – has he seen her?

But no, the man has not seen her. Of course not, she scolds herself. She is safe here, in the shadows. The man tosses the magazine into the wastepaper bin instead. Then, finally, he picks up the envelope on his desk. Here we are, she thinks. Here we are. The man takes the envelope, rips it open and pulls out the contents onto his desk. She watches, gleefully, this silent film. She feels her fingers twitch, the saliva pool in her mouth, as the bag slips off the man’s shoulder, as he grabs for the side of his desk, as if he has been tossed, untethered, into space. Into a place without air, a place without gravity.

KATIE

As I sit in court, I try hard to focus on the evidence. I take down the defendant’s answers in shorthand, my pen makes a scratching sound against my notebook.

‘Her eyes were open.’ The defendant is tall, blond, with bright blue eyes. His palms are turned up and outwards in the body language of honesty. ‘She pulled me towards her.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘We kissed.’

‘You kissed her?’

‘Yes, and she kissed me back.’

‘And you were in no doubt whatsoever that she consented to this contact?’

He smiles, looks straight at the jury. ‘None whatsoever.’

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

‘And what happened after that?’

The weather is getting cold now; the clerks wear cardigans and scarves inside the courtroom, plug heaters in at the walls. Everything about the room is starting to grate on me; the awful, cheap patterned carpet, the filthy plug sockets, the musty smell, the dust along the windowsills. DCI Carter is here again. He is wearing a diamond-patterned jumper under his suit jacket. I nod at him and he gently nods back.

After we went for coffee that time, I’d kept thinking about the way he’d reacted when I said that thing about rape cases. It made me wonder whether something had happened, in the past. Back at the office, I’d pulled up the digital archive, searched for his name. There were murder cases, kidnapping cases. Not many for rape.

Eventually, I’d found it. The papers had called it the Boathouse Rape. The echoes with the current case had been obvious. The privileged backgrounds of the accused. The vulnerability of the victim. The beauty of the backdrop. The ugliness of the detail.

It had been even worse for the victims back then. They couldn’t report this girl’s name, of course – she’d have anonymity for life under the law. But everything else about her life had been laid out in lurid technicolour. The underwear she’d had on, the number of drinks she’d had at the party. The way she’d been dressed, the way she’d behaved, how much sexual experience she’d had before. It was all in the stories, every last bit. She had been just sixteen years old.

I guessed the conclusion, even before I came to the end of the cuttings. There was a picture of the two smirking defendants on the Cambridge courtroom steps. Quotes from their lawyers complaining that they should have had anonymity too, that their young lives had been shattered. And at the very bottom, a few words from the senior investigating officer, about the bravery of the victim in coming forward, his hope that the verdict would not deter others from doing so. His name was DCI Mark Carter.

I saved the cuttings in a folder on my laptop, clicking and dragging each article one by one. As I did so, I noticed the date of the offence. It had all happened in the summer of 2008. I counted on my fingers. Hadn’t Helen still been at Cambridge University that summer?

The next time I spoke to Helen on the phone, I asked her if she remembered it.

‘There was loads in the national papers,’ I told her. ‘The Boathouse Rape, they called it. A young girl who turned up at one of those May week parties at Cambridge, the summer you left. She said two male students had got her drunk and raped her.’

Helen didn’t respond straight away.

‘Helen, are you still there?’

‘Yes. Sorry. Can’t remember it,’ she said vaguely. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘No reason really. Just researching the detective on this current case. Thought you might remember it, what it was like being at the university when something like that was happening.’

‘Oh, right, I see.’ Her voice was odd. She sounded relieved. ‘Well, I think we’d left by the time all that was really in the news.’ I frowned. I thought she’d said she didn’t remember it being in the news?

‘All rise.’

The case is breaking for a bit. Everyone stands. When I look up, DCI Carter is gone. He must have slipped out the back. I had been hoping to lure him to the pub at lunchtime, try and get a bit more out of him. Ask if he ever passed the victim my letter.

I head to the