preserved.
Forensically, it could all go horribly wrong before it ever got into the courtroom. The collecting and handling of evidence was so important.
There had been no witnesses to the assault that she could remember, and certainly none had come forward at the time. There had been plenty of appeals, of course. Lots of trawling from house to house in the area, hours spent stopping cars that used the nearby roads, and talking to motorists, lots of effort put into leaning on informants who might have heard a murmur on the streets. All to no avail. It was an offence with no witnesses other than the perpetrators and the victim.
Apart from her own statement, the only evidence Fry had of the attack were bruises and abrasions. And those faded with time, leaving only the crime-scene photographer’s prints to pass around a jury. As for the psychological scars…well, they didn’t show up too well in court.
But now they had a credible witness report, as well as an e-fit record that had been kept in the imaging unit, and a copy of the file retained by the FSS. So where had this new witness come from?
According to Blake, this person was on witness protection. They could be putting themselves at serious risk to testify. Someone had done some smooth talking, or exerted the right kind of pressure.
Blake was busy giving her the bad news, touching on the six per cent conviction rate for rape cases.
‘I’m afraid the conviction rate in rape cases is still very low in this country.’
‘Yes, I know that.’
Blake tilted his head in acknowledgement. ‘Of course you do. And I’m sure you’re aware, too, that there’s a lot of pressure to improve conviction rates.’
‘Absolutely. The inference from the poor figures being that the police don’t take rape allegations seriously enough.’
‘Well, that’s a perception the public might take away from the statistics. We know it isn’t true, though, don’t we? Generally speaking. There are lots of other factors that make convictions difficult to achieve, especially in cases where the defendant is known to the victim.’
‘Like the fact that it’s impossible to provide objective evidence on whether consent was given.’
‘Exactly. It always comes down to one person’s word against another’s. And juries don’t like that. They want to be presented with evidence. We’re handicapped by those old-fashioned notions of people being innocent until proven guilty, and having to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt. When it’s just a question of “he says, she says”, there’s always going to be room for reasonable doubt. One person’s truth is someone else’s lie. We all know that. It would take a poor barrister not to ram the point firmly into the heads of a jury.’
‘Or a defendant who’s not very convincing on the stand.’
Blake smiled. ‘Ah, yes. There are some people who just look so guilty that jurors will convict them whatever the evidence. But that’s the chance you take in a jury system, isn’t it?’
He was repeating himself from that meeting in Superintendent Branagh’s office. But something about their relationship had changed since then, a shifting of the dynamics had taken place, and Fry was the one at a disadvantage. She could even remember the moment it had happened.
‘You know, I don’t like to hear you call me “sir”, Diane. It was always “Gareth”, wasn’t it?’
That had been a clear signal that their relationship wasn’t going to be a professional one. They weren’t to be considered a DS and a DI working together, no longer colleagues who could safely share information fully with each other. From that moment, from the second she called him ‘Gareth’, she wouldn’t be a fellow police officer any more. He was the investigator. And she was the victim.
‘But the six per cent figure is based on reported rapes,’ he said.
‘Most of them never get to court. There’s a high attrition rate, as you know.’
‘Attrition rate?’
‘Yes.’ Blake looked embarrassed, then faintly irritated. ‘Diane, you know the jargon. Don’t try to make me feel as if I’m personally responsible for it.’
Gareth Blake might have been uncomfortable. And she had to confess to herself that she hadn’t made it any easier for him, hadn’t wanted to either. She’d taken a small satisfaction in seeing him squirm, in watching that smooth demeanour crumble for a moment. It was petty, she supposed. But gratifying, all the same. Each time, it had given her a little bit of illicit pleasure.
Yes, Blake might have felt uncomfortable. But he couldn’t know what it felt like to be on the other side of the table, to be a woman hearing a man lecturing her about attrition rates in rape cases. No amount of specialist training would give Gareth Blake that insight. He didn’t have the right kind of eyes to see it. He didn’t have the right kind of mind.
Blake shuffled his papers and closed his file.
‘Right. We’ll move on to the next stage. This afternoon, Diane, we’d like to take you back to the scene of the incident. If that wouldn’t be too difficult for you. But we would understand, if — ’
‘No. No, that will be fine.’
Fry had thought a lot about this moment, the time when she would have to see the place again. Memories were one thing. They didn’t have any concrete substance, and you could bury them, if you tried hard enough. But a place was real. You couldn’t deny the existence of a street, the wall of a factory, the hard concrete of a pavement. You couldn’t bury them in that dark hole at the back of your mind. Reality was still there when you closed your eyes.
They went to the Digbeth area in Gareth Blake’s car. He drove a Hyundai. Silver grey, she noticed. Just like almost every other car on the road, except hers. But his air conditioning worked well. On the journey across town, Fry tried to steady her breathing, to clear the buzzing in her head, the faint dizziness she’d experienced when she walked out into the open air.
It was just the unaccustomed heat, she told herself. It felt so much warmer in the middle of a city than out in the wilds of Derbyshire. Concrete absorbed the heat, acres of plate glass reflected the sun on to already humid streets. And hardly a breath of wind reached this far into Birmingham. It was blocked by the miles of suburbs to the south.
She began to dream of standing on the Lickey Hills, way up on Beacon Hill. She could feel the wind up there, whipping through her hair, cooling the sweat on her brow. She could see that view of the city from a distance, its cluster of towers faintly blurred, as if standing in a mist. A first glimpse of the Emerald City. The far-off promised land.
‘Are you all right, Diane?’
She jerked at the sound of Gareth Blake’s voice. She’d almost forgotten where she was. But suddenly she was back in the here and now, sitting in the passenger seat of Blake’s car, pulling up to the traffic lights in Deritend High Street. She saw a Peugeot dealer, the Old Crown, and the brick campanile of Father Lopes’ Chapel, which now seemed to be used as a car wash.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said.
‘I thought you’d fallen asleep there for a minute.’
Fry tried a smile for his benefit.
‘Wide awake,’ she said.
‘We’re here, anyway.’
Well, this part of Birmingham hadn’t altered much. Ironic, when it was the one area that she would have been glad to see transformed. But these factory walls hadn’t changed, or those side streets full of workshops and warehouses. The pub was still there, too. The Connemara. How had that particular pub survived, when so many others had closed?
The arches of the railway viaduct were certainly the same. Black brick, chipped and scrawled with graffiti. It stood exactly as it had been built centuries ago. Well, except for the graffiti, maybe. The messages were pretty modern.
And the scrubby expanse of waste ground — that was still there, of course. Dense with clumps of weed, bounded by a barbed-wire fence. Even from here, she could see the gaps that had been prised in the fence. Someone still used this spot for their own purposes. Drug dealers, crack whores, sexual predators hidden in the shadows…
Fry took a deep breath. She was in danger of losing objectivity, letting her emotions run away with her.
‘We have your statement, of course,’ said Blake. ‘But sometimes more details will come back to you, once
