Sleek and polished, he gave her a disarming smile. 'You didn't tell the police about this night together at the time?'
She shook her head.
'Because?'
'It didn't seem relevant.' She let out a breath, her face twisted in a frown. 'And I suppose I felt guilty somehow . . . There was no reason to, but I didn't know what was going on in his mind.'
Havilland glanced down at his notes. 'You said he seemed 'demob happy'?'
'Yes.'
'Demobbed from what?'
'I don't know. It was just his mood.'
'He wasn't wearing traditional dress at the bar, I take it?'
'No. He'd stopped that. I'd noticed a few weeks before.'
Havilland drummed his fingertips thoughtfully on the table as he searched for a suitable form of words. 'Did it occur to you that this
'Not at the time. Later, when I heard what was being said — '
'Thank you, Miss James,' Havilland said, cutting her off, and sat down with the look of a man satisfied that he'd made a powerful point.
Martha Denton rose. 'Do you not think it dishonest of you not to have told the police this at the time?'
Dani looked to Jenny. 'Can I please finish what I was going to say?'
'Go ahead,' Jenny said.
Martha Denton rolled her eyes impatiently.
'I've thought about it a lot, again and again ... I don't believe Nazim was going off somewhere. It felt exactly the opposite - it was as if he was coming back.'
'It certainly seems dishonest of you not to have told the police that,' Denton fired back.
'It's not easy to talk about those things, especially when you're that young.'
'It doesn't sound as if you were particularly inhibited.'
Stung, Dani said, 'Believe me, it's easier to go to bed with someone than to talk to the police.'
'Miss James, whether or not you slept with Nazim Jamal, you have no idea whatsoever where he went, do you?'
'No, I just have an instinct. I don't believe he was ever a religious fanatic, not truly.'
'You're in the legal profession, you know an instinct's not evidence.'
Dani's face hardened. 'Devout Muslims don't sleep around. I caught chlamydia from Nazim. I suffered severe inflammation and ended up in hospital a month later. I suffered permanent damage and may not be able to carry a child.' She turned to Jenny. 'You can check my medical records.'
Rattled, Martha Denton said, 'Perhaps you just don't like the idea that he used you.'
Dani didn't answer; Jenny didn't press her to.
'Or perhaps we can't trust your evidence at all. Keeping quiet on such a matter for eight years, then coming forward with a story which you know full well would kick up all sorts of dust—'
'It's the truth.' She looked at Mrs Jamal. 'I'm only sorry I didn't say this before.'
Martha Denton glanced sceptically at the jury. 'I'm sure we all are.'
Yusuf Khan, who had appeared embarrassed at the turn Dani's evidence had taken, offered no cross- examination, and requested only that she give permission for her medical records to be made available to the court. She consented.
Before releasing her, Jenny asked Dani if she'd had other sexual partners before Nazim. She admitted to one, a boy she had slept with during the first term, but insisted they had used condoms. With Nazim she'd taken a chance. There was no doubt in her mind that it was he who had infected her.
Jenny asked Alison in open court to make copies of both Nazim and Rafi's medical records available to the lawyers and told the jury that from what she'd seen there was nothing to suggest Nazim had an STD or any health problems at all. According to his GP's notes he hadn't visited the doctor in three years.
Dani James left the witness chair and walked out of the hall, drawing a mixture of admiring and suspicious looks. Jenny was impressed with her. She was a successful lawyer with a reputation to uphold. It had taken a lot of courage to give the evidence she had.
There was time for one more witness before breaking for lunch. She decided to call Simon Donovan and use the recess to plan her questions for McAvoy. She had a long list accumulating.
Donovan was a fifty-three-year-old managing accountant for a Ford dealership. He was married and lived in the suburb of Stoke Bishop. A man remarkable only for his overwhelming blandness, he told the court that several weeks after Nazim and Rafi's disappearance he had seen their photographs in the Bristol Evening Post. He immediately recognized them as the two young Asian men who had been sitting across the aisle from him on the ten a.m. train from Bristol Parkway to London Paddington on Saturday, 29 June. He had been en route to a football match, as had many of his fellow travellers, and had noticed them mainly because they seemed not to approve of the sometimes boisterous fans. As far as he could recall they were both dressed in smart casual clothes and had only small items of luggage with them.
Jenny said, 'You remembered the faces of two strangers that clearly after three weeks?'
'They were different, I suppose,' Donovan said. 'Maybe it was because they were young lads with beards. And we were all pretty jumpy about terrorists at the time, weren't we? You notice these things on a train.'
'Is this a polite way of saying their presence made you anxious?'
'I'm not a racist,' Donovan said. 'I haven't got a racist bone in my body. But you just can't help wondering, can you? Especially when they're looking so serious.'
Jenny said, 'I see. Thank you, Mr Donovan.'
Havilland asked only a few soft questions designed to shore up Donovan's credibility as a reliable and concerned member of the public with no axe to grind. Martha Denton delved a little further and managed to prompt him into saying that both young men seemed worried or apprehensive. Jenny pointed out that this detail was missing from his statement made three weeks after the event. Donovan replied that the police officer who took his statement had been in a hurry and seemed only to want the bare facts. Jenny wasn't convinced by his explanation.
Yusuf Khan looked at Donovan for a long moment, his head cocked thoughtfully to one side, before asking how many bearded young Asian men he came across in his daily life at that time. Very few, Donovan had to admit.
'But the newspapers at the time were full of them, weren't they? We all remember the hysteria. Every time you caught a train or a plane, the media would have had you believe, you took your life in your hands.'
'What's your question for the witness, Mr Khan?' Jenny said.
'My question, Mr Donovan, is whether you think you could have told one bearded young man with Asian features from another? That's all you recognized, wasn't it - their beards and the colour of their skin?'
'I wouldn't have called the police if I wasn't sure it was them.'
'What was your motivation?'
'I thought it the right thing to do.'
'Do you make a habit of calling the police?'
'No.'
'Were you under the impression they might be terrorist suspects?'
'Well, I ... I suppose it might have crossed my mind.'
Khan nodded calmly. 'When you first called the police, did you say to them, 'I definitely saw the two missing men', or did you say, 'I saw two young Asian men who might have been them'?'
Donovan moved uncomfortably in his seat, his thick neck reddening. 'I said I'd seen these two lads . . . They came round to my house with photographs. When I'd seen a few, I was sure it was them. Why would I have made it up?'
Jenny heard a sudden sharp derisive laugh from the back of the hall. She looked up, angry, and saw that it had come from McAvoy.
