The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [73]
Although I was embarrassed to be talking about such things in front of strangers, I knew that my barrister was doing the right thing. He’d told the police that he had never worked on any case before where he was so determined to get justice for his client and to ensure that the defendant was imprisoned for as long as possible.
I noticed that Richard’s defence lawyer was a striking-looking young black woman. She reminded me of the disco diva Grace Jones. I knew Richard wouldn’t like that, holding the racist views that he did. And the chances were that he would have made his views known to her.
All the time I was giving evidence I kept my hair down, screening out his face, and that also helped to cover my embarrassment a little. I didn’t want to see people pitying me in case I wasn’t able to keep control of my voice. I was determined not to choke up, to ensure that I did the job as well as I possibly could. Every so often Silly Git would let out a rasping warning cough to let me know that even if I couldn’t see him through my veil of hair he was just feet away from me, reminding me of all the threats he had made to me over the years about what would happen if I ever dared to tell anyone about our secrets, trying to bring me back down to the little girl he had pinned against the wall with a carving knife to her throat. He must have been able to see what agony I was in on that stand and he would have known he could have put a stop to it at any second if he had just decided he had done enough to me and had stood up and admitted it all. This was his one last chance to do something decent for the little girl he had taken responsibility for all those years ago, but he said nothing.
All I could see past my hair was the judge and one man sitting at the end of the jury. The juryman looked about forty years old and was wearing a leather jacket. As I told my story, he put his head in his hands several times and wept. I averted my eyes to cut the image out and just kept answering the questions. I felt bad for upsetting him.
I was dreading the time when my barrister would have asked all the questions he wanted to ask and it would be the turn of the opposition. Finally the moment came and Richard’s lawyer stood up to confront me, her aim to prove that I was lying and had made the whole story up.
In all the courtroom dramas I had ever seen the opposing lawyers always managed to twist things to mean something different, making witnesses appear other than they were. But as the case continued, nothing this woman asked me seemed to be difficult to answer. All her questions just required honest replies and when I gave them she seemed to have nothing further to say. Once or twice she actually seemed to make things worse for her client by asking me about events that my own barrister hadn’t thought to mention, all of which made Richard look and sound even more evil.
At one stage she asked me about his racial views, with regard to my status in the family as the ‘Paki slave’, and I had to tell her that he hated everyone of any other race and had tried to teach us to do the same. She asked if I had any racist opinions and I could honestly answer that I didn’t.
When I was finally allowed to leave the witness box I noticed the floor was littered with a confetti of shredded paper from where I had been unknowingly plucking nervously at a ball of tissues.
At the end of my second day in the box, when I thought I had reached the end of my tether and could go no further, the judge apologized to me.
‘I’m sorry, Jane,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid you are going to have to come back again tomorrow.’ My head dropped forward in a mixture