The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [69]
The ALF claimed yet another famous victory, and wisely refrained from returning to the fray on behalf of the rats and mice. Eagle and Jude were arrested but released without charge; Keeper Pan was the only real catch among those against whom there was sufficient video evidence to bring charges of assault. Under her birth name, Pamela Hardiston, she was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, but was removed from Warminster Open after seven days on medical grounds. She was credited with five more weeks of theoretical jail time at the Royal United, served under the joint supervision of Group Four and Bristol Cityplex Social Services, before being released on parole.
Lisa had faced at least a hundred perpetrators of serious crimes in various courtrooms before she finally ran up against one, in 2019, who was crazy enough to swear that he would come back and kill her when he was released. She was mildly surprised that it had taken so long, given the extreme reluctance of the vast majority of serious offenders to accept any responsibility for their own deeds. It always seemed to be somebody else’s fault, and police scientists in general were no less unpopular among the criminal classes than detectives, but detectives received far more threats of vengeance—though not, of course, as many as innocent bystanders who happened to be eyewitnesses and therefore seemed to be universally regarded as legitimate targets.
The man who broke precedent by threatening Lisa was a serial rapist named Victor Leverer, who appeared utterly convinced of his innocence of any wrongdoing in spite of his frequent use of a knife. He seemed to regard the fact that none of the slashes he inflicted were mortal—even though some of them were far from trivial—as proof of his loving intent, and he offered an impassioned speech in his own defense in which he claimed that the minority of his accusers with whom he had actually had intercourse had been more than willing, and that the only reason they had subsequently turned against him was that they had been pressured by lesbian radfems convinced that all heterosexual intercourse was rape. Lisa, he claimed, was at the core of a radfem conspiracy, and she had fabricated the evidence linking him to those incidents in which he still denied any involvement at all. Strangely enough, there was no detectable pattern to his loudest denials—they were not the most serious assaults, nor the accusations whose evidential support was weakest.
“Don’t worry about it, Lis,” Mike Grundy said after the judge had delayed sentence so that a psychiatric report could be compiled. “He’s just putting on a mad act before he goes to the shrink. It’s only a ploy.”
“The problem with that kind of ploy,” Lisa told him glumly, “is that the people who try it sometimes fall for their own patter. If he pretends hard enough that I’m the Antichrist who stitched him up on behalf of Lesbians Incorporated, he might end up believing it, and even if the shrinks tell the judge to throw the book at him, he’ll be out in seven—ten at the most. That’s plenty long enough for the grievance to fester, but not so long that I needn’t worry about it till I’m old.”
“These things never come to anything,” Mike told her. “Real life’s not like TV and the movies. He’ll have other things on his mind once he’s sent down. He’ll forget all about you inside of a year.”
“Real life is getting more like TV and the movies every day,” she countered with a sigh. “Where else can people find their role models now that the family’s completely broken down and nobody reads books anymore?”
“The family hasn’t broken down,” he assured her. “And people still read. It’s only TV that says otherwise.”
In Mike Grundy’s view, he and Helen still constituted a family of sorts in 2019, even though he’d accepted Helen’s decision not to have children. On the other hand, while Mike and Helen were alike in hardly ever opening a book for other than strictly functional reasons, Lisa was a committed reader.
“Well,” she said philosophically, “I suppose it goes with the territory.