One Law For the Rest of Us E-Book

Peter Murphy

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: A Ben Schroeder legal thriller
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 501

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Two generations of abuse... one shocking conspiracy... a woman determined to expose it all When Audrey Marshall sends her daughter Emily to the religious boarding school where she herself was educated a generation before, memories return - memories of a culture of child sexual abuse presided over by a highly-regarded priest. Audrey turns to barrister Ben Schroeder in search of justice for Emily and herself. But there are powerful men involved, men determined to protect themselves at all costs. . .

Leseprobe

ONE LAW FOR THE REST OF US

When Audrey Marshall sends her daughter Emily to the religious boarding school where she herself was educated a generation before, memories return – memories of a culture of child sexual abuse presided over by a highly-regarded priest. Audrey turns to barrister Ben Schroeder in search of justice for Emily and herself. But there are powerful men involved, men determined to protect themselves at all costs. Will they succeed? Is there indeed one law for the rich and powerful, and one law for…?

About the author

Peter Murphy graduated from Cambridge University and spent a career in the law, as an advocate, teacher, and judge. He has worked both in England and the United States, and served for several years as counsel at the Yugoslavian War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. He has written seven novels: two political thrillers about the US presidency, Removal and Test of Resolve; five historical/legal thrillers featuring Ben Schroeder, A Higher Duty, A Matter for the Jury, And isthere Honey Still for Tea?, The Heirs of Owain Glyndwr and Calling Downthe Storm. He is also the author of two collections of short stories Walden ofBermondsey and Judge Walden – Back in session. He lives in Cambridgeshire.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR PETER MURPHY

‘Racy legal thrillers lift the lid on sex and racial prejudice at the bar’ – Guardian

‘Murphy’s clever legal thriller revels in the chicanery of the English law courts of the period’ – Independent

‘An intelligent amalgam of spy story and legal drama’ – Times

‘[The Heirs of Owain Glyndwr] illustrates and discusses effectively questions of nationalism and national identity. It is to the author’s credit that this fiction sometimes reads and feels like a dramatic re-telling of a real event’ – Crime Review

‘A gripping, enjoyable and informative read’ – Promoting Crime Fiction

‘If anyone’s looking for the next big courtroom drama… look no further. Murphy is your man’ – ICLR

‘A gripping page-turner. A compelling and disturbing tale of English law courts, lawyers, and their clients, told with the authenticity that only an insider like Murphy can deliver. The best read I’ve come across in a long time’ – David Ambrose

There is no scandal so serious that trying to cover it up won’t make it worse.

Anon

PART ONE

1

Audrey Marshall

If it hasn’t happened to you, I can’t adequately explain what it feels like. You feel like you’ve been struck down without warning: like having a heart attack when you’re young and in the prime of life, and going about your day of work and play and love, as young living people do; like a partner you trusted telling you he’s leaving you for someone else, just when you’ve started to tell him about your day, and the plans you’ve made for dinner or the weekend or the summer, as lovers do. Everything stops. You can’t comprehend it.

Nothing in your range of vision looks the way it did a few seconds before; nothing you hear sounds the same as it did. Your mind and your emotions have frozen, like drops of water on the tip of a stalactite in some sub-zero cavern that solidify before they can fall to ground. For a moment you’re not sure who you are, or where you are: and when your mind and emotions slowly begin to thaw and you start to regain your bearings, you realise that your body has frozen too, and you’re not breathing. You force yourself to breathe, and your body slowly begins to react to your commands; but then you feel like you’re going to faint, so you find something or someone to hold on to; and when the fainting feeling subsides, you feel an urge to throw up; and when the urge to throw up subsides, you scream until you can’t scream any more, a deafening primal scream that seems to last for ever. Then, if you’re one of the lucky ones, you find that you can still cry.

The few experts who claim to understand it call it recovered memory. And this is what I’ve learned about recovered memory: you feel it’s ambushed you and taken you completely by surprise; but in fact, that’s not true. Once you make the connection, you realise that you knew all along. You feel that the memories have sprung from nowhere and have no origins or antecedents in your life. But at the same time you also have the contradictory sense that they have always been with you: like fragments of a dream hovering in the back of your mind as you’re waking up, fragments that you can’t define or identify, but that you somehow know are something more than a dream. That’s when you put two and two together to make four. Four is the revelation that all those elusive grainy images flitting through your mind, images you could never quite hold on to, images so vague that you couldn’t place them in time and space, but that somehow seemed real, were indeed real. And it all starts to make sense.

That sudden feeling of dread when you walked up some curved section of staircase, or entered a small room in someone’s home, when there was nothing to fear.

That momentary panic when a male voice called to you unexpectedly when you were in your bedroom in your nightdress, even though the voice was one you knew and trusted.

That overwhelming urge to reject an approach from a man – even a man you fancied and who might have been just the kind of man you wanted to be with – because of the tone of his voice, or a phrase he used, or the colour of his tie, or a whiff of his cologne.

That feeling of bewilderment, embarrassment, and humiliation when you’d finally found a man you cared about: when you’d undressed each other, and you were lying on the bed together, and you were kissing him with closed eyes, and your hand was working on his cock, and you were feeling and hearing his passion increasing; and he gently slid his fingers inside you to reciprocate, which was what you were hoping he would do, which was what you wanted, because you were hot and wet for him; but when he actually did it, you found yourself closing your legs over his fingers; and then, without any warning, you felt your cunt tighten and slam shut against him, like the door of a bank vault.

You made any excuse you could: it felt painful, you were nervous, you were feeling ticklish that day. You’d even developed a silly giggle to represent feeling ticklish. ‘It’s not your fault,’ you would say, ‘it’s just not working today. Let me…’ And then, to compensate him for rejecting his attempt at intimacy, and to divert his attention, you would desperately transfer his cock from your hand to your mouth; or whisper a saucy invitation, as you licked an ear lobe, to put it in and fuck your brains out. And while you were fucking and while you were lying in his arms afterwards, you were hoping he wouldn’t ask you: why, if you found his fingers so painful or ticklish, didn’t that apply to his cock? Because you didn’t have any answer to that question that made sense.

Later, when he was asleep, you would furtively masturbate, trying desperately to ignore your undeserved feelings of shame and guilt, and you would be faced with the inexplicable fact that there was nothing painful or ticklish about your own fingers touching you. And perhaps once or twice, when you’d had a few drinks and, to your surprise, fell nervously into bed with a woman friend, you found that you could accept the pleasure of her deliciously hesitant, exploring fingers without any contrary feelings at all: for which, when you reflected on the experience after the effects of the drink had worn off, you could also find no explanation.

When you eventually married a man you loved and trusted, you were finally able to allow him to do what no other male lover had been able to do for you. But even with your husband, there were nights when you couldn’t – nights when you had to kick the old defence mechanisms into gear; nights when, yet again, you gave way to the silly giggle, and acted like a skittish teenager with an unpredictable phobia about being touched. And it was only his love and understanding that saved you from the misery that had haunted your love-making for as long in your life as you had been making love.

When I recovered my memories, any sense of mystery about all those experiences instantly vanished into thin air. I saw immediately, and with perfect clarity, that there was the most rational explanation in the world for every feeling of fear or dread I’d ever had in so many situations during my life. It was as if the floodgates had suddenly opened, and I was deluged by wave after wave of high-definition images from my past, images so clear and precise that the events I now remembered might have occurred the day before. They were all so clear that it was incomprehensible to me that I had not remembered at some much earlier time – indeed, it was incomprehensible to me that I had could ever have forgotten them.

But then, of course, I realised that my condition was not one of a simple loss of memory, or the result of any conscious effort on my part to suppress the images. It was a condition of the most profound amnesia, imposed on me subconsciously by my own mind for my protection, to save me from having to relive again and again the pain and humiliation I had endured at such an early age. It was an act of mercy, not a deprivation. But that thought brought little relief.

Worst of all, I felt a crushing, overwhelming guilt that my failure to remember had caused me to expose my daughter to the same horrors to which I myself had been exposed. Ironically, she was the same age then as I’d been when it happened to me. All it took for me to recover my memories was for Emily to speak two sentences, and for those two sentences to swirl around like acid in my mind for a few hours. The experience devastated me, and for hours afterwards I was incapable of rational thought. But, as soon as I recovered some semblance of composure, I swore by all I held sacred that I would protect her from that moment onward, and that I would bring those who had abused us both to justice, if it cost me everything I had.

2

Monday 4 February 1974

‘I asked the clients to come at four thirty,’ Julia Cathermole said, glancing at her watch. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I wanted to make sure that we had time to talk among ourselves first. We have forty-five minutes. I think that should give us long enough.’

‘I’m sure it will,’ Ben Schroeder replied.

They had gathered for the conference in Ben’s chambers at Two Wessex Buildings, housed in the magnificent archway at the foot of Middle Temple Lane, from which the few remaining yards of the Lane lead down to the Embankment. Ben’s junior clerk, Alan, had arranged the room so that they could sit as a group in chairs in front of Ben’s desk, around a working table.

Ben was a handsome, dark-haired man, now in his mid-thirties, a rising star at the London criminal bar. His still thin, bony facial features had a way of forcing the observer to focus on his deep-set, piercing, dark brown eyes, eyes which had a discomfiting habit of seeming to bore into the witnesses and judges on whom he trained them in court. He wore an immaculate dark grey three-piece suit, with a light grey and white tie, over a pristine white shirt. The bar was a notoriously snobbish profession, and Ben’s East End origins had been an obstacle earlier in his career; but they also offered intimate access to the best Jewish tailoring available anywhere in London, and he was known for taking full advantage of that craftsmanship. Now, after one or two turbulent years, he enjoyed the best of both worlds. The tailoring remained one of his trademarks, but his roots had long since become irrelevant to his professional success: he had more than proved himself in a series of high-profile cases, and his reputation was continuing to grow.

Julia had brought with her another barrister: Virginia Castle, Ginny to friends and colleagues, with Chambers in King’s Bench Walk in the Inner Temple, who made up for a slight, will-o’-the-wisp figure with a forceful courtroom technique every bit the equal of Ben’s, a sharp wit, and great personal charm, all used to good effect. She, too, favoured the barrister’s dark suit, in her case, a two-piece suit worn over a well-starched white blouse; the effect, with her jet-black hair, tied neatly up at the back, was a striking one.

It was left to Julia to make up for the lack of colour with a light green suit and yellow scarf with matching shoes. The small firm of solicitors she had helped to found had had the confidence to forsake the City in favour of the West End, and her personal style reflected that same confidence. Her vivid outfits were becoming as familiar on the London legal scene as her sophisticated and occasionally outrageous dinner parties, invitations to which were eagerly sought, not only by lawyers and judges, but also by many of the capital’s political and artistic names.

‘It should be more than enough,’ Ginny agreed. ‘Has her husband come down to London with her?’

‘He goes everywhere with her. With all she’s been through, I don’t think she could cope without him at the moment. He was the one who got in touch and asked me – well, my firm, Cathermole and Bridger – to represent them.’

‘He’s a solicitor himself, isn’t he, up where they live, in Ely?’

‘Yes. We had some dealings a year or two ago. He referred us a banking dispute his firm didn’t have the firepower to handle, and we settled it for him. That’s how he knew about us.’

‘Julia, before we get started, do you mind if I ask why you’ve come to me?’ Ben asked.

She laughed. ‘Well, that’s a new one, I must say. Most barristers want to know why it’s taken me so long. It’s rather refreshing.’

Ben smiled. ‘I’m wondering whether you’d thought about a Silk? This is going to be a heavy case, and we’re probably going to offend some powerful people. The only time our paths have crossed before, you’d instructed Ginny and I was on the other side – and you won.’

‘I find that’s the best vantage point from which to observe a barrister,’ Julia replied, returning his smile. ‘The fact that a barrister may lose a case doesn’t interest me. Every barrister wins and loses cases: that’s the nature of the game. It’s how they do it that interests me.’

‘What interested you about me?’

‘The fact that you were determined to get to the truth, and you weren’t going to let anything stand in your way. It can’t have been easy in the case we had against each other.’

Ben laughed. ‘It’s not every day you start out with what you think is a cast-iron case, and then have to stand there and watch as it falls apart overnight.’

‘You didn’t know your client was another Kim Philby: how could you? Neither did the good Professor Hollander, if the truth be known. He suspected that Digby was up to no good, but he didn’t know – and in the end he blew the whistle on Digby without a shred of real evidence.’

‘We more or less begged Hollander to throw his hand in and publish a retraction,’ Ginny smiled.

‘We did everything except go down on bended knee,’ Julia agreed. ‘But, lo and behold, come the first morning of trial, Sir James Digby QC had been unmasked and was nowhere to be found. What happened?’

‘Viktor Stepanov happened,’ Ben replied.

Julia nodded. ‘Exactly: but Stepanov happened because you and Ginny made him happen. But for that, Sir James Digby might still be one of the country’s leading Silks, and Francis Hollander might have crawled back to America with his tail between his legs, with a huge bill for damages and costs in his pocket.’ She paused. ‘Not many junior counsel would have done what you two did, swanning off at short notice with a member of the Secret Intelligence Service to meet a Soviet defector in a foreign safe house, a couple of days before trial.’

‘Stepanov turned the whole case on its head in a couple of hours,’ Ginny recalled. ‘He regaled us with the whole story: how he’d recruited Digby through their common interest in chess, and how they’d used chess symbols to swap secret messages.’ She turned to Ben. ‘I didn’t tell you at the time, but I really admired the calm way you reacted. It must have been a hell of a shock, but you didn’t give anything away.’

‘There was nothing left to give away, was there?’ Ben replied with a wry smile. ‘The game was up – time to knock your king over and resign – and we told him so as soon as I got back to London; and the next day he took the Burgess and Maclean route to Moscow.’

‘Here’s the point I’m making,’ Julia said. ‘When you two went to The Hague with Baxter, neither of you knew what you would find. The stakes were sky-high, and you had no way of knowing what evidence Baxter had, or whose case that evidence would support. But you wanted the truth, and you weren’t afraid to do whatever it took to get it. That’s what we’re going to need in this case too. Not to mention,’ she continued, more quietly, after some moments, ‘that you took quite a risk, professionally speaking – counsel aren’t allowed to run around gathering evidence, are they? Strictly verboten, as I understand the rules. That’s our job, as solicitors.’

‘Baxter didn’t give us much choice,’ Ben observed.

‘No, I know. He insisted that the two of you should be the ones to go.’ She smiled. ‘I was a bit miffed, I must say. I know it was Baxter’s decision to leave me at home. I’m not sure I’ve forgiven him yet.’

‘With your connections inside MI6?’ Ginny said, smiling. ‘I’m not surprised. You must have been furious.’

‘I would have gone over his head, except that there wasn’t time – we were on the verge of trial. But, looking back on it now, and much though it hurts my wounded professional pride to admit it, Baxter was right. You two were the right choice, and you’re the right choice for this case.’

‘Does that mean we’ll have to go digging for evidence again?’ Ginny asked.

‘Quite possibly: and we’re certainly going to be ruffling some influential feathers, accusing some people in high places of some very nasty things – people who won’t go down without a very hard fight. Audrey Marshall doesn’t need a Silk, Ben. She needs counsel who are not afraid of a fight: and based on everything I’ve seen, the two of you fit that description to a T.’

3

Audrey Marshall

I was born Audrey Patterson in October 1933. I had a sister, Joan, who was almost exactly five years older. My dad, Jack, was a clerk in an insurance company in the City. My mum, Dorothy, had been a secretary before she got married, and she made a bit of extra money by taking in typing and editing. So, although we weren’t exactly rich, we were pretty comfortably off. We lived in our own house in Stepney Way in the East End of London, and as far as I remember from so long ago, we were very happy together there. I remember going to the local primary school and playing in the street in front of our house with Joan; and I remember my seventh birthday party. Although the war had started by then, and some things we’d taken for granted before the war were in short supply, my mother somehow managed to bake me a cake and put seven white candles on it, and found balloons and ribbons to decorate the living room, and my friends from the street and school were all there. We played pass the parcel and hide-and-seek.

One reason I remember that birthday party so well is that it’s the last real memory I have of my life in our house. The Blitz had been underway for about a month. The Luftwaffe was dropping its bombs on London by night and by day, inflicting as much damage as it could, and the East End bore the brunt of it because a lot of the bombing was aimed at crippling the docks. Then again, a lot of it was aimed simply at terrorising the city’s population; and a good deal of it was probably random – bombs ditched to lose weight before attempting the flight home with damage inflicted by our anti-aircraft guns; or when short of fuel; or when the navigator had lost his way.

I was too young to understand the full extent of the danger. But at night, I remember hearing explosions and the wailing of sirens, and the rapid bursts of fire from anti-aircraft batteries; and, if I dared to peek out around the blackout curtains we had on the windows, seeing the red and orange glow of fires on the ground in the distance, and the white beams of searchlights in the sky. I remember my parents talking in whispered tones about people they knew who had been killed or lost their homes in the bombing, and about people sleeping on the platforms of the underground stations. For some reason, we never resorted to these obvious places of sanctuary from the nightly violence, even though Stepney Green and Whitechapel stations were close at hand. I’ve often wondered why. My parents never explained. Looking back on that time now with my adult understanding, I can only suppose that it was a case of denial. In common with many other Londoners, they couldn’t bring themselves to accept that the assumptions of peace and security on which they had built their lives had been swept away so comprehensively and so suddenly: that in just a month, a hostile air force could have reduced their city to a state of such terror that people would abandon their homes and everything they had worked for, that they would leave everything they had defenceless in the dead of night. Perhaps, also in common with many other Londoners, they were clinging desperately to the delusion that it would never happen to them.

Whatever the truth, some sense of reality must have penetrated, because three days after my party, my parents packed suitcases for Joan and me. With no forewarning, they explained to us that we were being evacuated. That wasn’t how they put it: what they said was that we were going for a short holiday in the country until the war was over, which would be any day now, so we wouldn’t be away for long. What I’d seen, even through the eyes of a child, didn’t suggest to me that the war would be over any time soon; and my mother was crying as she and my father tied our name-tags around our necks with white ribbon, and bundled us out of the house in the bleak hours of the morning, just before dawn. They walked us quickly to the corner of the street, where we boarded a dark, cold bus with a handful of other children. Our consignment would grow to twenty: one or two we knew, but most of them strangers; a few, from Bow and Whitechapel and Stepney, already on board or boarding with Joan and me; others picked up on our way, as we meandered through unfamiliar streets towards the north-eastern outskirts of London. Our parents kissed us as we left, and promised that they would see us soon.

I know they meant it. But on the third night after we left, the Luftwaffe scored a direct hit on our house, with my parents inside it.

The drive from East London to the country seemed to take forever. But, to a child who had never been out of the city, it was fascinating to see the change of scenery as the bus left London behind and emerged into a dawning world of green fields and trees: a world in which you could travel for miles without seeing more than one or two houses; and in which I saw, for the first time in my life, sheep and cows, and horses roaming free instead of pulling carts through the streets of Whitechapel for some wizened old rag-and-bone man. I gazed out of the window with my nose pressed hard against the glass for miles on end, and Joan had to remind me to eat the sandwich and biscuits we’d been given as a packed meal, before some greedy child could snatch it away from me.

Eventually we arrived at a huge mansion, which seemed to spring at us from nowhere as we were driving along a narrow country lane bordered by tall trees and hedges. It hasn’t changed at all over the years. Today Lancelot Andrewes House looks exactly the same as it did when I first set eyes on it: an imposing six-storey construction of red brick, with austere bay windows formed of thin black panes and old wavy glass, set back from the road a hundred yards or so, with extensive grounds at the rear. It is a place I have come to know intimately, and which has played a huge role in my life, for good and for ill: and even now that I’m forty years of age and have seen it so often as an adult, I still remember how it looked for the first time through the eyes of a child; I still remember the sense of being overawed by its size and its unexpected presence, its ability somehow to spring at you suddenly from its hiding place behind the trees and hedgerows, the sense of its being unconnected to the world, certainly the world of my seven-year-old experience.

Lancelot Andrewes House is a Church of England boarding school situated in the Cambridgeshire countryside, about five miles from Ely. It is actually two separate schools, one for boys and one for girls; but the two are accommodated in the same building, with strict separation, girls on the left, boys on the right, as you see the building from the road. As a contribution to the war effort, the school had offered to take a limited number of children evacuated from the East End, and had agreed to waive its usual fees. The offer was a generous one, although it was meant to last only until it became safe for us to return to London; and most of the children who had arrived on the bus with me left to go home to Bow and Whitechapel and Stepney and Bethnal Green once our Spitfires had all but banished the Luftwaffe’s bombers from our skies. But Joan and I were orphaned within three days of arriving, and out of sympathy, were immediately told that we could stay and complete our education at Lancelot Andrewes, come what may; and despite everything that happened subsequently, I am still deeply touched by that act of extraordinary kindness.

That same sympathy probably saved Joan and me from the worst of the nastiness many of the East End evacuees experienced at the hands of snobbish school mates, girls who came from richer homes and whose parents could afford the fees. Joan and I seemed to get off relatively lightly. But the richer girls found it fun to laugh at our lack of sophistication, at our Cockney accents and poor diction, at our ignorance of life outside the East End, and at our more shabby clothes: until Matron – a lovely, plump, forty-something, caring but no-nonsense woman called Molly – supplied us with second-hand school uniforms, red blazers and grey skirts, grey stockings and black shoes that looked exactly the same as everyone else’s. That wasn’t Matron’s only kindness, by any means. Somehow – looking back on it, I’m pretty sure she must have had a whip-round among the staff – she found us some weekly pocket money: not as much as the richer girls had, of course, but enough to allow us to patronise the school tuck shop; and to hold our own when we were allowed to go for tea and cakes in the High Street after our monthly school service in Ely cathedral. As we all got used to each other, and as most of the London children returned home, the worst of the childish prejudices faded away. Joan and I made friends, some of whom I’m still in contact with today, and we were sometimes even invited to their homes for school holidays.

I’m grateful, too, despite everything, for the education I received at Lancelot Andrewes. I settled without too much restlessness into the daily routine of prayers, classes and games, and the discipline did me good. I think it did Joan good, too. It structured our grieving for our parents, and it gave form to our new life without them, without the only home we had ever known; it enabled us to avoid the temptation of clinging exclusively to each other, of erecting barriers against the rest of the world to defend ourselves from the pain. The staff were dedicated teachers, who, unusually for the time, expected the same high academic standards of the girls as they did of the boys, with the result that the school was continually breaking national records for the number of girls gaining university places.

Joan left Lancelot Andrewes at the age of eighteen to study History at Edinburgh, and I followed in her footsteps five years later, to read English. After graduation, as a twenty-one-year-old woman with no other plans for her life, I decided to stay with Joan in Edinburgh. By then, she already held a responsible administrative position with the Royal Bank of Scotland, where she was highly thought of; so much so that at her request, her manager offered me a job too, on a similar career path. We shared an upstairs flat in a lovely old Georgian town house in the New Town district.

We lived and worked together, happily as far as I could tell, for almost four years: until one Saturday afternoon, when I got back from the shops and the library, I found her lifeless body hanging from the staircase on the attic floor above our flat. I’d had no idea, not the slightest indication, that she’d had any thoughts about taking her own life. She was always quiet, and could be rather reserved, even with me. But she was doing well at work and there was a young man she seemed to like who was paying attention to her. I hadn’t detected any change in her mood. But there she was, hanging there. Dead.

She’d left me a note. It said: ‘I’m sorry, Audrey. I wanted to stop it, but I couldn’t.’ At the time, I didn’t understand what she meant. If I had, I might perhaps have saved her: and, in a sense, and to some extent, myself.

4

‘I suppose the first question I have,’ Ginny said, after Julia had introduced Audrey and Ken Marshall, and they were comfortably settled around the table with cups of tea, ‘is why you haven’t been to the police? What you’re saying is that this Father Gerrard has been enabling a network of paedophiles to molest young girls at Lancelot Andrewes School for two generations, and that you and Emily are both victims. Why haven’t you been to the police? For that matter, why hasn’t anyone been to the police before now?’

Audrey nodded. ‘We’ve been trying to decide what to do ever since Emily told us what happened to her, and my memory came back. I know it’s the right thing to do, to tell the police. But… well, we’re not sure we’d be taken seriously if we reported it in Ely.’

‘The school has a lot of influence locally, Miss Castle,’ Ken added. ‘You’d be surprised. And with Audrey having worked for the diocese of Ely for so long, we just don’t feel confident about going to the police at home.’

‘Is the school under the control of the diocese?’ Ben asked.

‘Not now,’ Audrey replied. ‘It was originally, but the Church suddenly cut all ties to the school in the early 1950s. No one seems to know exactly why, but it was quite abrupt. Since then, Lancelot Andrewes has been an independent school with its own charitable status. It still describes itself as a Church of England school, and the headmaster’s a priest, but there’s no formal connection with the Church. Obviously, with the school being so close, there are still contacts with the diocese; they still hold regular services in the cathedral, and so on.’

‘Why should that affect the police?’ Ben asked.

‘Because of Father Gerrard,’ Ken replied.

‘Desmond Gerrard has a national reputation, Mr Schroeder,’ Audrey added. ‘Lancelot Andrewes is one of the most respected schools in the country. He’s been headmaster since before my time – and I started there in 1940. The Queen gave him the CBE for services to education. The Church gave him a special title, the Most Reverend Father Desmond Gerrard. Desmond Gerrard is a legend in Ely. He’s untouchable.’

‘Nobody’s untouchable,’ Ginny said.

‘No, I know,’ Audrey said. ‘But… I’m the deputy administrator for the diocese. I’ve been in my job for the best part of fifteen years, so I’ve had ample time to see how these things work…’

‘Go on,’ Ginny said encouragingly.

‘The diocese is represented by the same solicitor as Lancelot Andrewes, a man called John Singer. Singer is ruthless when it comes to protecting the Church. I report to the administrator, and he reports to John Singer. Believe me, I know.’

‘That’s why we asked Julia for advice,’ Ken added. ‘We needed an outsider, someone with some contacts, someone who won’t be intimidated by the Ely mafia.’

Ginny laughed. ‘Julia’s taken on more sinister characters than the Ely mafia in her time, Audrey. She won’t be intimidated, I can promise you that.’

‘Amen to that,’ Julia smiled.

‘I know John Singer,’ Ben said, ‘or, at least, I worked with him for some time on a case, not long after I’d started out in practice.’

‘What? In Ely?’ Ken asked.

‘No. St Ives. The defendant was a vicar there. He had a very unusual name, Ignatius something. This would be ten years ago, 1964.’

‘Ignatius Little,’ Audrey said immediately.

‘That’s the man.’

Audrey scoffed. ‘I remember Ignatius Little. Don’t I just? He was bad news from the day we ordained him: couldn’t keep his hands off his choir boys. But he wasn’t one of the obvious ones – he looked the part, you know. He was a real blighter to pin down. Finally, he was arrested and charged.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘But then you went and got him off, didn’t you?’

Ben nodded. ‘Sorry. I’m afraid I did. We went for trial at Quarter Sessions in Huntingdon, and we got the right jury. And he had a really nice fiancée, who made a good witness. But some time later…’

‘Some time later, we shipped him off to the diocese of Chester,’ Audrey interrupted, ‘where he distinguished himself by getting himself arrested for importuning in a public place; following which he hanged himself in a police cell. But that was typical Singer: anything to protect the diocese. We should never have sent Ignatius to Chester – not without telling them what we knew about him. I argued against it, but I was overruled. By the time it all finally came out, it was Chester’s problem, not ours. Singer was happy with that, needless to say. I wasn’t happy, and neither was my boss. But we had no say in it.’

‘It sounds to me,’ Julia suggested, ‘that you may have been right not to go the police in Ely – not as a first step, anyway.’

‘But she must go to the police, Julia,’ Ginny insisted. ‘There’s been a long history of child sexual abuse at Lancelot Andrewes, and it has to be investigated.’

‘There’s something else, too,’ Audrey said after a silence.

‘Go on,’ Ginny said. ‘Don’t be afraid. We’re on your side.’

‘She’s worried no one will believe her,’ Ken said quietly.

‘Why?’

‘I sent Emily to Lancelot Andrewes after I’d been molested there myself, didn’t I? The school still gives employees of the diocese a special rate on the fees. When she reached the age to start school, I’d been working for the diocese long enough to qualify, and it was a huge, huge reduction. To be honest, we couldn’t have afforded it otherwise. At the time, it was too good to turn down. But now I’m afraid they will use it against me.’

‘You had no memory of being molested then,’ Ginny pointed out. ‘You had no way of knowing.’

‘No, but…’

‘And they can’t hold that against Emily. There’s no question of recovered memory in her case. Her memory is as fresh as a daisy.’

‘Yes, Ginny,’ Ben agreed. ‘But she’s a child, claiming to be the victim of sexual assault. Any evidence she gives would need corroboration from an independent source.’

‘So they could say that Audrey’s trying to provide Emily with corroboration,’ Julia asked, ‘by pretending to have memories of being molested herself?’

‘Exactly,’ Ben replied.

‘That’s what scares me,’ Audrey said quietly.

‘Other witnesses will come forward,’ Ginny insisted. ‘They’re bound to, once word of this gets out. Emily will have all the corroboration she needs. So will you, Audrey.’

‘Perhaps,’ Ben said, ‘but it’s a problem we can’t just ignore. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be believed, Audrey, and it’s no reason not to go forward. But the first step is to find a way to report to the police, in such a way that John Singer can’t obstruct us.’

‘The question is: how to do it?’ Julia mused.

‘I dealt with a capital murder committed in St Ives,’ Ben said, ‘at about the same time as Ignatius Little’s case. There were two senior officers from Cambridge dealing with it, a Detective Superintendent Arnold and a Detective Inspector Phillips.’

‘I know Ted Phillips from Rotary Club,’ Ken said. ‘Arnold has retired, and there’s a Detective Superintendent Walker who’s taken over now. Ted’s still there, though. I’ve always thought of him as somebody you could trust.’

Ben nodded. ‘He struck me as a good man. We have to start with the Cambridgeshire police. There’s no way around that. It’s their jurisdiction.’

‘Let’s contact Phillips, then,’ Ginny said. ‘Singer may have the ear of the police at Ely or St Ives, but I find it hard to believe that he’s going to have much clout in Cambridge – certainly not in a case like this.’

‘One would hope not,’ Ben replied. ‘But just in case, let’s get Scotland Yard involved too, just to make sure that we can snuff out any local interference before it even starts.’

‘How will you do that?’ Julia asked.

‘I’ll talk to Andrew Pilkington,’ Ben replied. ‘Andrew is senior Treasury counsel, one of the prosecutors at the Old Bailey. Andrew can talk to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the Director can make sure that the Yard gets involved.’

He took a deep breath.

‘There’s a way to do this, Audrey. It’s not going to be easy, and none of us is going to pretend otherwise. But if you want justice for yourself and Emily, it’s something you’re going to have to face up to. What you and Ken have to decide is whether you can live with what you know if you don’t come forward. Remember, this is for Emily too, not just yourself.’

‘And for many, many others,’ Ginny added, ‘including those Father Gerrard is allowing to be abused even now, as we speak.’

Audrey and Ken looked at each other for some time.

‘We’ve come too far to go back now,’ Ken said.

‘Yes, I know,’ Audrey replied. ‘I just want to make sure Emily is all right.’

5

‘So: what about names?’ Ben asked.

Julia opened her briefcase and took out a number of documents. She laid them out in front of her on the table.

‘Do you want to start with the girls, or the men?’

‘Let’s start with the girls.’

‘Girls, it is. Obviously, Emily’s case is easier, because it’s so recent and she remembers everything. Emily told Audrey that it had happened to four or five girls she knew, but we haven’t spoken to anyone as yet. We didn’t want to throw the cat in among the pigeons until we had our strategy in place. Once we approach her school friends or their parents, there’s likely to be pandemonium, and we need to be prepared.’

‘We shouldn’t approach them,’ Ben said. ‘We should leave that to the police.’

Julia nodded. ‘All right. Here’s Emily’s list of names.’ She handed a sheet of paper to Ginny. ‘And this,’ handing her another sheet, ‘is Audrey’s list, going back to her time at school. And, of course, this is where we enter the world of recovered memory.’

‘Father Gerrard was always very careful,’ Audrey said. ‘He would leave it until about eight thirty to nine o’clock, when there would only be one member of staff on night duty. What I remember is: he never came for more than one girl at any given time, so I was taken on my own, or another girl was taken on her own, and we only ever knew for sure if she spoke about it later. Often, we didn’t talk about it. Most of the time, we just went straight back to bed and cried our eyes out. That’s a general impression. I can’t remember specifically everyone I talked to. I know I would have told Joan and my best friend, Mary Forbes.’

‘Where were you taken to?’ Ben asked. ‘And where from?’

‘Father Gerrard would come to our dorm. It started not long after I got to the school, so I was seven. All the sleeping accommodation was upstairs, on the fifth and sixth floors. At that age, we slept in dorms of twelve girls. When you got older, fourteen or fifteen, you shared a bedroom and study with one other girl, but until then it was always dorms of twelve. Father Gerrard would take you downstairs to a room next to his study, and that’s where the men would be waiting for you.’

‘What kind of room was it?’ Ginny asked.

‘As I understand it now, from having seen plans of the school we keep at work, it’s his private library. It’s a room you would never normally see as a pupil. You might go into his study, but there’d be no reason to go into his library. It was like something from a gentleman’s club in Pall Mall, you know, with book cases all around the walls, filled with old books and busts of God knows what Greek philosophers and what-have-you, and a long cherry-wood table in the middle of the room and heavy red leather armchairs. I remember, there was always a smell of tobacco, cigars or a pipe.’

‘So, you do remember some of the other girls who were taken?’ Ginny asked.

‘I gave Julia that list you have, with five names.’

‘These are girls who told you they’d been taken?’

‘That’s what I remember now. The girls I knew from the East End went back to London once the Blitz died down. There were two girls from that group I know it happened to, but they got out pretty quickly. I’ve included their names, but even if they remember, I’m not sure they would want to talk about it.’

Ben scanned the list. ‘So, Betty Friedman and Sylvia Marks were the two from the East End?’

‘Yes. They’re both in London still. Betty’s married to a furniture importer and she’s still living in the East End. Sylvia married a stockbroker and they live in Islington, or they did when I last heard from her.’

‘And the other three?’

‘Jenny Hamilton, I added to the list because I have a memory of her. But she died a year or two ago, from cancer of some kind. Mary Forbes was a good friend to me. Her parents were well off, from the Guildford area, but they weren’t snobbish at all. Joan and I spent several school holidays with them. Mary became a solicitor, and married an international lawyer, a Canadian. They live in Toronto. Then lastly, there’s Alice Hargreaves. I’m not sure where she is now. I heard she’d gone travelling after she left university. There was talk three or four years ago that she’d come back and settled in some remote corner of Ireland. But…’

‘We will find her if we need her,’ Julia said in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Those are the only girls you have specific memories of?’

‘Yes. Of course, the school would have a complete record of all the girls who were there in my time, and they will have contact information for most of them. The school relies heavily on old girls and boys, and their families, to fund its endowments and scholarships, so they’re pretty keen on keeping in touch with us. They pester us to update our contact details all the time.’

‘That would be one strategy,’ Ginny said. ‘To approach all of them and ask them point blank whether they were ever taken to the private library. I bet we’d get a good response.’

‘Again,’ Ben replied, ‘I think we have to let the police do all that. This has to be an official investigation, with the police in charge, not us. I don’t want it to look as though we’re trawling for victims. With any luck these women will find us, or the police, without our having to approach them.’ He replaced the list on the table. ‘What about the men?’

Julia delved into her briefcase again. ‘You’re going to love this.’

She took out a number of newspaper clippings, and handed them to Ben, who perused them in silence, with Ginny looking on over his shoulder. It was some time before anyone spoke.

‘You took these clippings after your memory returned?’ Ginny asked.

‘Yes. As soon as I saw their pictures in The Times, I recognised them as men I’d seen in his library – men Father Gerrard invited there to molest me.’

‘Thirty or more years ago,’ Ben observed quietly.

‘I remember them as they were, Mr Schroeder,’ Audrey insisted. ‘They haven’t changed that much. I’d know them again anywhere.’

‘She reacted instantly, Mr Schroeder,’ Ken confirmed, ‘as soon as she turned to the page and saw them. She must have seen these men hundreds of times – they’re in the papers and on TV all the time, aren’t they? You see them every day. But she’d never reacted to them like that before her memory returned: never. But she did once the memories came back, believe you me. She screamed and jumped right out of her chair. She looked like she’d seen a ghost.’

Ben nodded. ‘That’s exactly what will worry a judge or jury,’ he replied.

‘These men are public figures, Ben,’ Julia pointed out. ‘Why pick on these three? If Audrey intended to pick names out of a hat, or out of The Times, what guarantee would she have that they don’t have cast-iron alibis?’

‘I’m not suggesting that you’re making anything up, Audrey,’ Ben said. ‘Please understand that. I’m playing devil’s advocate.’

‘I know,’ Audrey replied.

‘And as devil’s advocate, I would point out that it’s difficult to produce an alibi if all you’re told is that you’re accused of having done something some time in 1940, by someone who saw your face in a newspaper more than thirty years later – an image she’d seen many times in the intervening years, and said nothing.’

‘That’s not fair…’ Ken began.

‘Yes, it is,’ Audrey replied, cutting him off. ‘That’s what they’re going to say, and we may as well face up to it now.’

There was a long silence.

‘So now you know what I was referring to when I said we would be ruffling some influential feathers,’ Julia said, at length.

‘One member of the House of Lords; one former cabinet minister, still an MP; and one…?’ Ben concluded inquiringly.

‘Retired bishop, currently serving as Master of an Oxford college,’ Julia replied.

‘I don’t suppose any of them were still getting up to their tricks with Emily?’ Ginny asked. ‘We couldn’t be that lucky, could we?’

‘Emily says the men wear masks now,’ Julia replied. ‘Apparently, they’ve got more self-conscious over the years.’

‘It wouldn’t help anyway, would it, if they were the same men?’ Audrey said. ‘That would just give me more motive for identifying them, wouldn’t it?’

Ben smiled grimly. ‘You’re developing a good instinct for how this works.’

‘I’m developing a bad case of paranoia – and a bad case of cynicism,’ she replied.

6

Audrey Marshall

Finding my sister hanging there from the staircase of the house in which I thought we were happy was a moment of utter devastation. I never saw the scene of my parents’ death, the bombed-out ruins of the other house in which I’d been happy. I found out about their death in a detached setting, when Father Gerrard called Joan and me into his study, with Matron in attendance weeping into her handkerchief, and told us that we were now orphans, in much the same tone he used to read out the daily notices in morning assembly. It was a moment of fear and bewilderment and wondering what would become of us in the world. But at least I didn’t have to see the results of the Luftwaffe’s work up close, and I still had Joan.

Now I had to see the results of her desperation for myself, and I no longer had anyone. She had asphyxiated, the procurator fiscal explained, in the course of reporting that Joan had committed suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed. No further enquiry into her death was necessary, he concluded. It would have taken her some time to die, because she’d positioned the knot to the right of her jaw, causing it to move down to her throat and effectively strangle her; instead of to the left, from where the knot would have turned up behind the back of her neck, causing an immediately fatal fracture of the second and third vertebrae and severance of the spinal cord – a technical nicety, the procurator fiscal added thoughtfully, well known to public executioners. As it was, the effects of her death struggle were obvious. I have often wondered whether, once she knew she had passed the point of no return, she regretted what she was doing; and would have given everything she had for a second chance; and whether she would have liked to talk to me once more, to tell me why she thought she had to leave me, to give me the chance of talking her out of it. ‘I’m sorry, Audrey. I wanted to stop it, but I couldn’t.’ Stop what? Was the balance of her mind disturbed, or had she finally found the balance of her mind again? She couldn’t tell me now.

I remember that, on discovering her body and the note she had left, I sat down on the top stair, staring helplessly at her and at the note in turn, finding it all completely inexplicable. It was almost an hour before I stood up again, strangely calm by then, in the way that only people devoid of all consciousness of hope are calm, and made my way downstairs, almost as an afterthought, to tell anyone who might for any reason be interested in the information that my sister was hanging from the staircase on the attic floor upstairs.

I remember very little about the ensuing weeks. I think they kept me sedated for at least three or four days, the first two in hospital, the second two back at home with a nurse at my bedside day and night. After that, with the procurator fiscal’s investigation pending, they allowed me, still under supervision and medicated, to go through her things and decide what I wanted to keep and what could be donated to some charitable cause. Eventually the supervision stopped and I was left with a supply of a tranquilising drug, my discretion whether to take it or not. After the procurator fiscal had presented his report, I returned in my mind – a police officer had seized it as evidence and had to retain it for some period of time – to her note. ‘I’m sorry, Audrey. I wanted to stop it, but I couldn’t.’ Stop what, Joan, for God’s sake, stop what? Was there some scandal at work I didn’t know about? Had you got yourself involved with drugs? Surely I would have noticed? Your boyfriend didn’t impregnate you or pass on some terrible disease – the procurator fiscal would have explained that as helpfully as he had explained the mechanics of an efficient hanging. What in God’s name brought you to this? What in God’s name was too terrible for you to confide in me: in your sister who had shared the experience of being orphaned and exiled from the home we had loved; in your sister who, after we had survived those irreversible losses, had chosen to make a home and a new life with you in Edinburgh? In God’s name, Joan, what is it you couldn’t tell me?

Two weeks after the inquiry was complete, I returned to work. The staff at the bank were incredibly kind to me. They never once hurried me, or even hinted that my job depended on my coming back by a given date. They were genuinely sad to lose Joan, and within a month of my return I was asked to move up to her job as a senior administrator. Out of gratitude and loyalty I would have liked to accept: but everything about the place, everything about Edinburgh, reminded me of Joan; there was no respite, and I knew I couldn’t move on while I stayed there.

Matron, from school, to whom I had reported Joan’s death and who must have been reading my mind, sent me by post, special delivery, an advertisement taken from the Cambridge News. The diocese of Ely urgently needed to fill a vacancy for a deputy to work alongside the diocesan administrator: experience of administrative responsibility highly desirable, but willingness to learn and the ability to work efficiently without supervision more important; prior knowledge of church affairs not essential; salary commensurate with experience. I applied at once, enclosing an embarrassingly effusive reference from my manager at RBS. The diocese paid for my travel south for an interview with the administrator, Bill Hollis, who became my boss, and the diocesan solicitor, John Singer. They offered me the job without even asking me to leave the room, and I accepted similarly.

Two weeks after that, I said a tearful goodbye to Edinburgh and to my friends at the bank, and to my friends from university who were still in the city; and for the second time in my life, made a life-changing journey to Cambridgeshire. It was 1958. I was approaching the age of twenty-five.

7

I met Ken at a reception given by the bishop after a service in the cathedral. Like me, he was a university graduate who had fallen in love with the setting and atmosphere of his university, and so had never wanted to leave the Cambridge area. After graduating with a law degree he qualified as a solicitor, and set up on his own in practice in Ely. He was doing well by the time I met him in 1960, and was a generous benefactor of the diocese; and after our first meeting, we ran into each other on a regular basis.

There had been an immediate attraction between us, but it was some time before I agreed to go out with him on our own for an evening. It was an area of my life that wasn’t working, and I was scared. There had been no opportunity for dating while I was still at Lancelot Andrewes. There were known instances of boys and girls defying the rigidly enforced apartheid between the boys’ school and girls’ school: romances happened, and one or two girls even managed to get pregnant during the years I was there. But to say that fraternisation was frowned on would be an understatement: as often as not it resulted in, at least an extended suspension, and in some cases expulsion from school; and I had nowhere else to go. In any case, I never had sufficient interest in any of the boys to consider battling against such overwhelming odds to pursue him.

That changed when I became a student at Edinburgh. I wasn’t exactly making up for lost time, but like my contemporaries I began to go out with boys I met in class or at social gatherings, and everything seemed to be going normally: until Alistair. Alistair was a year ahead of me, reading medicine. He was handsome and sporty, and I really fancied him. One evening when we knew each other pretty well, I went back to his place with him after a few drinks. We started kissing, and one thing led to another, and suddenly there I was: naked on a bed with a naked man. Oddly enough, perhaps because of the drink, I didn’t feel unduly nervous. We lay down together and kissed using tongues, and I took his cock in my hand as if I’d been doing it all my life, and stroked him until he started to get hard. Then – and it was really the most natural thing in the world – he put his hand on my knee and very gradually moved it up my leg and thigh until he was ruffling my pubic hairs. At which point my legs, in fact my entire body below my waist, seemed to freeze. I started to say something, but before I could, two of his fingers ventured very gently just inside me. I felt a moment of intense excitement, but then, without any conscious decision on my part, I remember my cunt snapping shut as if someone had slammed the door of a vault, and I remember pulling his hand away quite roughly, and saying no.

I don’t know which of us was more surprised. I was flabbergasted. I very much wanted him to do what he was about to do, and I had no way of explaining my body’s reaction to his touch. He began to ask me something, but I had no answer to offer. In desperation, or out of sheer embarrassment, I quickly laid him on his back, moved down, and took his cock in my mouth, which served to distract him. I think he had a good time, but something had happened that neither of us understood, and as a result of whatever it was, I wasn’t ready to take our relationship any further. We broke up a week or two later.