An unruly night [15]

In this episode, my family and I try to focus on Christmas rather than crime. But that's made difficult by continuing contradictory communications from the police. Constant rain brings down everyone's spirits - and then a phone call from an unidentified number really spooks me. Is Ms X, out on bail, up to her old tricks? Finally, the verdict in the US trial of Ghislaine Maxwell brings some hope for Bea's case - but is it misplaced?

Trigger warnings: this podcast deals with rape, sexual assault, anxiety, depression and eating disorders.
 
 Most mothers will never have to find out what happens when their child becomes the victim of a horrendous crime. I, Lisa Lennox, never imagined that it would happen to my family, to my 17-year-old daughter. But one benign, ordinary summer's day, it did. And so began my family's immersion in the horror unleashed by such a crime, the trauma, the fear, the on-going nightmare of dealing with a police and criminal justice system which, if not completely broken, is certainly fatally fractured and struggling to cope. 
 
 Everyone is Talking About This is the true story of an ordinary family forced to face an extraordinary circumstance. I’ve tried to be honest and forthright about my desperate struggle to help my child get justice - and, on many occasions, to see the reason to go on living.

Please be aware that this podcast mentions sexual assault, rape, eating disorders and mental health issues. There is occasional strong language and some graphic detail. 

If you have been affected by any of the issues in this podcast, here are some organisations you can contact in the UK:
Rape Crisis
0808 500 2222 - calls are free.
Or you can visit their website - https://247sexualabusesupport.org.uk/

Beat, the UK's eating disorder charity
08088010677 - calls are free.
Or visit their website - https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/

You can also speak to your GP or, if you are still at school, someone from your safeguarding team. 


To my listeners - please do tell your friends about this audiobook podcast and encourage them to listen so that as many people as possible are aware of the reality victims of rape are up against on a daily basis here in the UK and across the world. 

Help me to spread the word!

And contact me on: everyoneistalkingaboutthis@gmail.com 
or via Twitter: @63136_survivors to tell me what you like about the podcast and what I could improve. 

Thank you! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

The feeble light of a dull, grey Christmas morning leaks through a chink in the curtains. Through the balcony door that I left open overnight as the weather is so mild, I can hear the distant sound of voices, walkers and joggers, and the clink of howl yards against masts. Boat moorings lie at the bottom of the garden, the other side of the seagrass marsh. My head is pounding. I've barely slept yet again, spending the night going over and over David's latest emails. The info about the pub name ricochets around my head, and I worry and worry at it like a dog with a particularly addictive and rancid bone. In the early hours it dawns on me with a crushing realization that I had mentioned the pub in my statement, written about having to support B across the road, said what a short distance it is from there to our house. It is my fault they found our home, Mr. Y and Miss X, our street. I gave the necessary details for that to happen. And yet still, even as I mentally chastise myself for my idiocy, I know that not even that, on its own, puts you right outside our front door. David's email said Miss X waited around for a prolonged period. I give a hollow, silent laugh. Yeah, we know that. We saw her. Our neighbour Spencer said hello to her. We told the police that, even whilst they were spouting her lies to us about having searched the entire area before serendipitously arriving bang slap beside our property. Eventually, riven with guilt about staying in bed so late, I haul myself up. At this very moment, Iris appears at the bedroom door with a mug of steaming coffee. Happy Christmas, mummy, she says. I put the coffee on the bedside table and hug her. Happy Christmas, sweetheart. As I get dressed, I listen to the radio. My favourite Christmas song comes on, O holy night. A thrill of hope. The weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn. The music is so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes. The day jogs through all the rituals, pre-lunch champagne, roast dinner, presents under the tree, Christmas movie viewing, smoked salmon for supper, and finally at nine PM I flop back into bed. I'm dog tired, exhausted, my head pounding. It is only as I turn the light off and turn on to my side to try to sleep that I remember. I didn't provide my statement to the police until October, long after Miss X's visit. It can't have been what I wrote, my mention of the Duke's Head pub, that is responsible for this mess up. It wasn't my fault. It rains almost the entire Christmas period. In a brief window on Boxing Day afternoon, we go for a walk along the shingly beach at the end of my sister's garden. It's so mild we all shed our coats within ten minutes of leaving the house. By the time we get home the rain has begun again. It rains and rains and rains. The drive back to London on the twenty seventh takes three and a half hours with traffic, road work, speed limits, and yet more rain. We collapse into our house like seafarers who finally made it home after a voyage of many years. Over the next few days the ongoing torrent of news about incidents of rape and violence against women continues. In school we say that the children will behave as badly as they think they can get away with. And the truth is that this applies to the whole of society. Whilst men know that they can get away with rape, they will carry on raping. When the day comes that they know their actions will have consequences, they will stop. Or most of them will anyway. It's that simple. In response to my email to the DCI about the mishandling of so many aspects of the case, I receive a message back suggesting that I make an official complaint. Well, it's honest, if nothing else. But I get the feeling that complaining would be a tick box exercise. I'm sure the police would exonerate themselves, at the same time as hoping that going through the motions would get me off their back. I appreciate that I'm probably the mother from hell in their eyes, but I don't care. They'd do the same for their child, I'm sure, and if it's the only way to get things done, then I'll do it. Another email pings into my inbox. It's from D.S. Gallagher and carries his familiar, passive aggressive tone. He whines on about me feeling aggrieved. I read it with blah blah blah sounding in my head. They just don't get it, do they? Calling me aggrieved makes me sound pathetic and needy, making a fuss over nothing, rather than a mother whose daughter and home has been violated in a terrible way. I don't bother to reply. I'm tired of it. Tired and worn out. Iris is off to meet her friends to go ice skating and then for a sleepover, but she's left her coat in the car, which Phil has gone out for the day in, and so has neither a coat nor her zip card, which was in the pocket. I walk her to the overground station, give her a spare oyster card we've got lying around, which will charge her twice as much per journey, kiss her goodbye. I'm glad she's going out and having fun, but I wish I could relax about either of the girls being apart from me. These days the big wide world seems threatening, ominous, and dangerous in a way I've never felt it to be before. B tells me she's going to visit her friend Tabby at her foster family's house, if she can summon the energy. She's really low today and I'm worried. She did so well over Christmas, even seeming to enjoy seeing her cousins, her grandparents. She didn't come to me once with tears and pleased to go home. Of course it's catching up with her now. I hug her, reassure her. It will all be okay, I soothe. I hope I sound more convinced than I feel. How many times can I say these same words? Which are the ones a child most needs to hear when I no longer believe them. In the late afternoon, Bee decides that she's definitely going to go. She's in my bedroom, where I'm sitting at my desk browsing fabric sales on my laptop. My phone rings. It's a no-caller ID. My heart flips as it always does when I see this on the screen, but Bee is right here, next to me. She's okay. It can't be another catastrophe involving her. I answer. A woman's voice asks if I'm Beatrice Canning. She has an Afro Caribbean accent and sounds fraught, rushed, as if she's in a real hurry to speak to B. No, it's her mother, I reply, trying to remain calm even whilst my heart is beating at double speed. There's something I don't like about this call already. The urgency, the haste. Can I ask who's calling? No, I can't tell you that, the woman snaps. Then she speaks again even more quickly than before, as if afraid she won't get to say her piece in time. I can only speak to Beatrice Canning. If you don't pass me over to her, I will have to cut this call. I'm aware of B listening. I'm sorry, I need to know your name and the organization you are representing, I say. If you can't tell me that, I can't ask B to speak to you. I'm so flustered I'm not sure if it's me who hangs up or her, but in either case the call ends. Who is that? asks B. I don't know, I say. She wouldn't say. Who would refuse to give their name? B questions. I shrug. I'm not sure. I try to play it down to prevent B from becoming worried. It's probably nothing. Or maybe you've won the premium bonds. Not that you've got any. This leads to a long explanation of what premium bonds are, at the end of which B asks, but why would they have your number? The only response I can give is I've no idea. It's pitch dark outside. I walk B to the tube station, the more distant one she has to use these days, as she can no longer go to the nearest. Tabby will meet her at the other end. The call has unsettled me. Before we go I send an email to everyone I can think of, the eating disorders counsellor, the police, the beacon, asking if anyone knows who might have called me, asking for B and refusing to give their name or company. A host of out of office notifications floods into my inbox. We are still in that dead zone between Christmas and New Year when half the world is off work. This year we can also add all those who have COVID too. On the way to the tube he asks me again about the call. It's really unsettled me, and though I've tried to mask it, she's unsettled too. This is our life now, constantly on edge, questioning, unsure. I leave Bee at the tube with a feeling of foreboding. My walk home is strange for all the wrong reasons. I smell perfume on the air when there's no one near me, and see shadows even though there's no moonlight. Macbeth comes to mind, the part before the discovery that King Duncan is dead, when Lennox talks of lamentings heard in the air, strange screams of death. Later, the natural order so thoroughly disrupted by regicide, the king's horses eat each other. Striding out, I refuse to look cowed, refuse to show my fear. I might be the wrong side of fifty, but nobody need think I wouldn't put up a fight. I will fight and fight and fight. But not for myself, for B and for Iris, and for all the women in our world who walk the streets in fear. On the twenty ninth of December, the verdict comes in from the Ghlaine Maxwell trial Guilty. So the attempts by the defence to discredit the witnesses and complainants, to use the length of time that has passed as a reason for memories to be false, to paint the complainants as troubled women with grudges, all failed. Does this give hope for Beatrice's case? I don't dare to hope so. David contacts me to tell me that the no caller ID was from victim support. Cue hollow laugh from me. If this is an organisation that is supposed to support victims, I'd hate to get a call from the opposite one. There is no explanation for why the woman wouldn't talk to me or tell me who she was. Anyway, they want to set up a court visit before B special measures cross-examination, but I'm not sure how that will be possible because it's only about three working days away. She also needs to go to the police station for the memory refresh to watch back her video recorded interview so that she remembers what she said on that occasion. I'm trying to juggle all this work, Iris' deteriorating mental health. On New Year's Eve, Luke sends an email. Almost all the information in it contradicts David's previous emails of Christmas Eve. There's a kind of hideous symmetry here, a seesaw with David on one end and Luke on the other, their seats going up and down depending on who is sending us information at the time. He tells me that a contraband mobile was found in Mr. Y's cell when it was searched in relation to the conspiracy charge. Luke also informs me that Miss X has visited Mr. Y in prison. The actual handing over of the address is not on any of the phone calls that the police have accessed, but he could have passed it on by either of the above methods, the illicit phone, or during a visit. Luke continues to say that Mr. Y would easily have been able to find our address by searching for both mine and Phil's surnames, which are listed on the police report from the night, as is the name of the pub, the Duke's head, that the police first attended. I'm flabbergasted. Again. It hadn't occurred to me for one minute that Mr. Y would get our names, not just B's. Why? For what possible reason does he need to know not only his victim's name, but also that of her parents? This is ridiculous, scandalous. Of course, with our two names together, he could easily narrow down the possible addresses he might find by searching online. Now I know this, I see that all my previous niggling away at this issue has been a complete waste of time. Finding us was easy. Mr Y was given everything he needed to do it. A two-minute online search from his contraband mobile phone was all that was required. Thank God Mr. Y was stupid enough to use the prison phone as well as the illegal one. Otherwise we would never have got the evidence against them that led to the conspiracy to pervert the course of justice charge and their guilty plea. I reply to Luke, telling him that all this confusion, lack of clarity, incomplete information is making things even worse for us. He replies, telling me he has no time for me because he has other, more important things to deal with. Live operations, as he puts it, as opposed to ours, which is what, dead? Of course, what he's actually saying is, go away and stop bothering me. I read this email on New Year's Day. I went to bed at 10 pm the night before, having watched the entire four episodes of a very British scandal about the 1960s divorce of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll. The prejudice against women, the sheer bareface discrimination, was the overriding theme of the drama. It was encapsulated by the judge at the Edinburgh Court of Session, allowing the Duke a chair to sit on whilst in the dock, whilst disallowing the same to the Duchess, forcing her to stand for the duration of her evidence which lasted over three hours. We all want to think things have changed over the last half a century. But have they? It is a new year, twenty twenty two, and for our family it could well be the worst year ever, with the trial kicking off in a few weeks' time, and with every possibility that Bees rapist will get away with it. The worry, stress, anxiety, and fear suddenly seem unbearable. There's no one in the house right now, so I could cry without worrying about upsetting anyone. But I find I can't, though I know I am incalculably weary, bereft, lonely, and so very, very frightened. The tears are all gone, to be replaced by a searing sense of dread, and even more than that, by an emptiness, a huge vacuum where feeling and emotion should be. And to top it all off, I've lost my hairbrush. This minor inconvenience has taken on the proportions of a major catastrophe. I know I didn't leave it at my sister's house, but I can't find it anywhere. I turn my makeup bag inside out, search through the bin in the bathroom in case it fell. Nowhere. Does Iris have it? No, she hasn't borrowed it. She offers to lend me her tangled tees, but I only like my brush. I want my brush. As I search the house for the tratted thing, all I can think is what will we do if Mr Y gets off? How will we cope? What would our future hold in that event? Mina Smallman, mother of murdered sisters, Biber and Nicole, is the guest editor on Radio 4's Today programme. If she can do it, you can do it, I hiss at myself, my fists clenched, fingernails biting into the flesh of my palms. And I'm trying, I really am. But I'm simply not sure that I'm up to the task.