Chapter 22
Friday arrived and with it another cloudless sky.
Eve spent the morning on campus and then cycled to Norham Gardens.
She met Joe in the back garden, where he was tending to the flower beds, a mug of tea next to him on the low wall.
He offered her one and she said she would wait for Sarah.
She realised how much she was looking forward to having an independent perspective on all the thoughts about Joe that were still crashing around in her head.
They heard the noise of a car engine outside and the sound of a vehicle pulling up onto the gravel behind the Volvo.
Joe stood up and crossed the path to the gate, and Eve stood up, too.
She waited as he walked out onto the driveway, returning a few moments later with a woman in her late thirties or early forties who had wavy fair hair pulled back into a loose knot.
She was wearing a yellow crocheted vest-style top, three-quarter-length jeans and trainers.
Her casual appearance immediately put Eve at ease.
‘Hello.’ Sarah smiled warmly and held out her hand. Eve took it.
‘Eve is also a lawyer,’ Joe added.
‘Well, I’m an academic,’ Eve said, a little dismissively. ‘I haven’t practised in decades.’ She smiled. ‘You know what they say. Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’
Sarah frowned. ‘You’re training the next generation of lawyers,’ she said earnestly. ‘I wouldn’t be here today without my law professor. She was brilliant.’
The introductions over, they went into the house through the back door. Joe offered Sarah use of the study next to the kitchen, but Sarah said, ‘This is perfect, right here, if that works for you?’
Joe agreed that it did and turned to put the kettle on again while Sarah took a laptop out of her rucksack and Eve slid into her usual seat.
‘I’ve made Joe aware,’ Sarah said, setting herself up at the table to Eve’s left and sitting down, ‘that anything he tells me is confidential, but this doesn’t apply to you.
Obviously you are legally trained,’ she said, fixing her eyes on Eve’s, ‘but you’re not retained as his lawyer, which means that you could – in theory – talk to anyone you like about his case. ’
‘Oh, no,’ Eve said, ‘I wouldn’t—’
‘But you could,’ Sarah argued. ‘And that’s what I need Joe to understand. It might help if you were able to reinforce this.’
‘Sarah’s right,’ Eve said, turning to Joe. ‘I could, in theory, go to a newspaper or to my family or to the police and tell them everything you’ve said here today. But I’m not going to,’ she added. ‘Of course I’m not going to.’
Sarah raised an eyebrow at Joe.
‘I get it,’ he said. ‘But I trust Eve, and I want her here. I want her to trust me.’
‘OK, then,’ Sarah said decisively and turned her eyes towards the screen in front of her.
They both watched as Sarah moved a finger across the trackpad on her laptop and clicked open a document.
‘The first thing I want you to know,’ she said, looking up, ‘is that we’re going to be meeting a lot.
As Joe no doubt realises by now, criminal appeals are notoriously difficult to bring, especially at this stage, post-conviction.
You first have to apply to the CCRC – the Criminal Cases Review Commission – and it’s not their job to decide if you are innocent or guilty.
They have a different test. They have to decide – based on the evidence we present to them – whether the Court of Appeal is likely to come to a different conclusion from the one it came to previously. ’
‘They have to predict what another person might do,’ Eve observed.
‘What three other people might do, but yes,’ Sarah agreed.
‘Many lawyers consider it to be an irrational test, but until someone manages to change it, that’s the law, and so it doesn’t matter how weak, or suspicious, or worrying the evidence is that convicted you, if the Court of Appeal have already heard that evidence and the CCRC thinks it’s unlikely to change its mind, they will refuse to refer it back.
’ She paused, looking at Joe. ‘And that’s the other part of the problem.
The Court of Appeal often won’t reverse a decision it has already made.
It’s very conservative and there is genuinely very little belief that the system gets it wrong.
Also, the available grounds for appeal are very restrictive.
There are only a handful of gateways. The upshot is that in Joe’s case, it is going to boil down to whether we can find any significant new evidence that points to his innocence, something that hasn’t been presented before and is hugely compelling.
And then, as I said, you’ve first got to get past the CCRC – and to put this into perspective, out of every fifteen or sixteen hundred cases they look at each year, only thirty are referred back. ’
‘Only thirty out of every fifteen hundred appeal cases make it into a courtroom?’ Joe said, looking shocked.
‘Beyond the first right to appeal, yes. That’s been the average for many years, and definitely since you last tried in 2012.’
‘So why are they even there?’
‘Well, in theory—’
‘To sort through the slush pile?’ Eve suggested.
‘But in a very restrictive way,’ Sarah said.
‘So they’re really there to block you,’ Joe said.
Sarah exhaled. ‘There were good intentions initially. The CCRC was set up after a series of wrongful convictions in the seventies and early eighties, their mission being to investigate potential miscarriages of justice and refer them back to the Court of Appeal. It started out well with a full complement of full-time staff before suffering the most horrific cuts, and now there’s a skeleton crew of commissioners working only one day a week, so of course there’s a huge backlog.
Over the years, it has become clear that its mission is to act as a gatekeeper for the Court of Appeal, not to support those who potentially have a good case for wrongful conviction – so, yes, Joe, it is more likely to look for reasons not to refer. ’
Joe took this in. Eve wanted to reach out and take his hand, but she knew any physical contact might alert Sarah to there being something between them that went further than friendship. She wasn’t a good actor. She hoped Joe wasn’t either – in fact, she was banking on this.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m not here to tell you that it’s going to be impossible.
We just need to be realistic. Joe has already tried to get the CCRC to refer his case back once before and they refused.
So this time we need to be in that “for sure” territory before we even try, which means that I am going to be reliant on every small nugget of information I can glean from you.
I’m going to need you to tell me anything and everything, whether you think it’s relevant or not, so that I can see if there is anything I can use – something that didn’t come up at the original trial, perhaps, something that your previous legal team didn’t know about, or didn’t spot, or didn’t consider important.
I’m going to need you to tell me the whole story of what happened all over again, starting right at the very beginning, and I’m going to need as much detail as you can give me. ’
‘OK.’ Joe nodded.
‘Good.’ She sat back and looked at him. ‘So, we’ll start in a moment. But first of all – putting aside everything I’ve just said – how are you bearing up, Joe? Are you doing OK?’
Eve glanced at Joe, giving him a half smile of encouragement.
‘I’m OK,’ he said, taking a shaky breath. ‘I know how lucky I am to be living in a house like this, to have this support. I know most ex-prisoners aren’t so lucky.’
‘No,’ Sarah agreed. ‘They’re not. And you’re doing some work for Chas, too, is that right?’
Joe nodded. ‘A loft conversion. It’s the sort of thing I used to do before I went to prison, and when I told him, he saw an opportunity for both of us. He also liked the idea of having someone to look after this place while he was away, and so … well, like I said, I’ve been lucky.’
‘But is there anyone else? What about family?’
Joe shook his head. ‘Just my mum. My dad died in 2008 and my brothers both disowned me pretty much straight away after I got arrested. I haven’t spoken to them in years.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Sarah typed this up. ‘But your mum is supportive?’
‘Yes. But she’s in Woking now. My parents moved there after I went to prison. She’s seventy-five and she doesn’t own a car and she still works part-time, so she can’t visit me easily, and I won’t go to her house. I wouldn’t do that to her. She spent a lot of years being spat at in the street.’
‘Anyone else. Friends? Aunts? Uncles? Cousins?’
Joe shook his head. ‘We weren’t a close family. I got into trouble a bit as a kid. You probably know that. It took me a while to find my place in the world.’ He glanced sideways at Eve. ‘And you probably know that I got a conviction for criminal damage in my mid-twenties.’
‘I saw that,’ Sarah said. ‘I was surprised it was adduced at your trial, though. What happened?’
Joe coloured. ‘I broke my neighbour’s wing mirror. I was angry. He kept parking in my space and I lost it. It was stupid. I was working long hours on building sites, so I was tired by the time I got home, and I had all this equipment to carry, and we got into a row.’
‘And they used that against you in a murder case?’ Sarah frowned.
‘They said it showed a …’
‘A propensity?’ Sarah suggested.
‘Yes. That’s it,’ Joe said. ‘A propensity for violence. It was stupid and I regretted it straight away. I apologised to my neighbour and he didn’t even want it to go to court, but he had already made a statement and I had already admitted it, so they had the evidence they needed.
But I turned my life around after that and I was doing OK,’ he said.
‘I was saving up. I was going to buy a house and start working on my own renovations.’