Chapter 4
Sarah Kellerman pulled her laptop towards her and clicked the link on the secure file she’d been sent by her contact at Truth for Justice.
She could hear her boyfriend, Will, in the kitchen, rattling mugs and teaspoons.
He wasn’t in court today. They both had trial preparation or other paperwork to do, which often meant working from home together.
Separately but together. She liked it when they did that.
It was almost exactly three years since she’d left the job she’d hated at the high-street law firm on Highbury Corner, and when she woke in the mornings, she still wanted to pinch herself.
Going freelance had been scary financially at times, but it was the best move she’d ever made.
She had parked her duty solicitor slots with a firm in Warren Street and acted as a consultant for them, covering her own slots on the rotas and doing whatever else she could to help out when they needed an extra pair of hands.
But she was now in the enviable position of being able to take on the work that interested her most.
She looked up as Will entered the living room. He was wearing his ‘suit’, as he called it: grey joggers and a white T-shirt. His feet were bare and his chin was covered in a light stubble. He placed a mug of coffee on the table in front of her.
‘What have you got?’ he asked.
‘A new case. It’s from Sam at TFJ.’
‘The appeal charity?’
Sarah nodded.
‘Anything interesting?’
‘You remember Christy Nicholls? The woman found by her seven-year-old daughter after she’d been raped and killed in her own home?’
Will looked at her, surprised. ‘South London. Streatham, if I remember rightly?’
‘You do.’
‘That was a while back.’
‘Twenty years ago – 2003.’
‘They convicted the boyfriend, didn’t they?’
‘Yes. He’s just been released on life licence. Stuck in more than one appeal in the last two decades. Wants another shot to clear his name.’
Will sat down on the sofa beside her and studied her expression more closely, watching her eyes as they moved across her laptop screen. ‘You OK?’
‘Yeah.’ Sarah sighed. ‘It’s just … pretty horrible stuff.
If he did it, he must have really hated her.
Or hated women,’ she corrected herself. ‘He beat her up pretty badly – choked her and gave her a fractured cheekbone and three dislocated fingers. Pushed a rag into her mouth to gag her, then used duct tape for good measure. The primary cause of death was suffocation.’
‘What was the evidence?’
‘DNA found on her bra and in two other “crime-specific” locations. And he was positively identified by three witnesses who all said they saw him that night.’
‘What did he say?’
‘That he was her boyfriend. The prosecution case was that he wasn’t but wanted to be, that he was stalking her. Either way, she knew him. There was no forced entry. He’d been inside her house more than once, he said, and they’d touched and kissed.’
‘Explaining the DNA.’
‘Yes.’ Sarah paused, still reading from her laptop screen. ‘Although the vaginal swabs were “inconclusive”.’
Will considered this. ‘That could mean a few things – that there was no profile found at all, due to poor quality of the test material, or that there was a mixed one …’
‘The prosecution case was that he’d used a condom.
He denied it. Said they hadn’t had actual sex.
Other than that, the case was reliant on ID evidence, most crucially from the daughter.
She’d seen him at the house before and told the jury she was one hundred per cent certain it was him. The case pretty much turned on this.’
‘She gave live evidence?’
Sarah looked down again, perusing the case summary. ‘No. It looks as though her ABE video evidence was admitted under the hearsay provisions.’
Will shrugged. ‘It happens. It would take a judge with cojones to kick it out.’
Sarah nodded, her eyes moving back to the page. ‘His first appeal challenged the daughter’s reliability and also that of the two key witnesses.’
‘On what basis?’
‘They all knew who he was. They’d seen him before, so were bound to pick him out during the ID procedure, which had a bolstering effect on an otherwise weak case.
That’s what his lawyers argued. The Court of Appeal threw it out.
Said there was no reason to believe the witnesses were mistaken, that the police had followed Code D and that the forensic evidence against the boyfriend was strong. ’
Will nodded thoughtfully.
‘And then in 2012, he applied to the CCRC to have the case sent back again. He asked for the victim’s clothing to be retested on the basis that the vaginal swab had been inconclusive at the time, but that advances had since been made in forensic science. His request was refused.’
‘What reason did they give?’
‘Same again. There was already sufficient forensic evidence that he’d had sexual contact with her before she died.’
‘Hmm,’ Will said. ‘Might be worth looking at that again. Maybe get your own testing done.’
Sarah eyed him. ‘It does raise some questions, doesn’t it?’
He smiled. ‘If you’re asking me if I mind you taking on a pro bono case, the answer is that I think you should do what you feel is right.’ He leaned over, kissed her and stood up, then picked up his laptop and walked over to the table beside the window where he usually worked.
Sarah looked across at him, feeling grateful, once again, that she had both the freedom and the support to follow her instincts.
Gareth, her old boss, would have been dead against her pursuing a case like this, one where there was no money.
But Will didn’t need to ask if Sarah was going to get paid.
He knew it would fall on him to support them all – himself, Sarah and Ben, her nine-year-old son – for the time it took while she wandered down this particular rabbit hole, and yet he hadn’t batted an eyelid.
Because she cared, he cared, which meant the world to her.
Gareth should care, too, Sarah mused as she scrolled through the crime scene photographs, feeling sick as she always did.
The prosecution should care. The Criminal Cases Review Commission should care.
The Court of Appeal should care. Because if there was even the slightest chance that the person who’d been convicted was not the person who had committed this terrible crime, then not only had a man’s entire life been ruined, but the person who had killed Christy Nicholls could still be out there, preying on vulnerable women.
He could, at this very moment, have found his next victim.