A Game of Proof by Tim Vicary Page B

flooded through Sarah. Simon wasn’t happy, she didn’t believe it. The worst pain of her adult life had been when Simon dropped out of school to become a labourer. It had been a rejection of everything she and Bob had wanted for him. At least Emily had always been diligent, conscientious, found schoolwork easy. And now, at the first big hurdle, to talk of dropping out ...
    ‘Don’t be stupid, Emily! Of course you’ll pass. Just stick at it for another few days, and you’ll do well. I promise!’
    ‘I can’t, mum! I don’t want to anyway!’
    Sarah didn’t know how to deal with this. Nor did she have time. If she carried on talking now it was just going to blossom into a big discussion which would lead nowhere and make her late. She got up from the bed. ‘Of course you can, Emily, and of course you want to. Do your German revision this morning, and I’ll give you a ring at lunchtime, OK?’
    ‘If you must.’ Emily slumped dejectedly back on her bed as if she might go to sleep.
    ‘I will.’ Sarah smiled brightly, opened the door, and went out.
    The conversation irritated her, filling her mind as she rode into town. Probably she should have been more sympathetic, but ... it was irritation rather than sympathy that inflamed her mind. Why did the girl make so much fuss! After all, at her age, Sarah told herself, I had a baby, I had been slung out of school, I was a social pariah in a cold smelly house with damp walls and rotten plastic furniture but I didn’t cry, did I? Not until Kevin left, anyway - I just got on with it.
    So why can’t Emily do that? All that panic and emotion - it just gets in the way. Bob’s too soft with her; she’s got to stand on her own two feet. I’ll ring at lunchtime like I said but I’ll keep the talk light; she’ll manage best if no one takes the fuss too seriously.
    And with that, she closed the file in her mind on Emily, and opened the ones on Gary Harker and Sharon Gilbert.
    These weren’t just mental files, but real piles of paper wrapped in red tape which she carried into court a few hours later. The day began well, with a significant victory for Sarah. Before the jury entered, there was a brief conference between the barristers and the judge, at which Julian Lloyd-Davies conceded that there was no longer any point in presenting the evidence of Sharon’s little boy, Wayne. He had intended to do this via a video link, with the little boy in a separate room chaperoned by a trained police psychologist, but in view of Sharon’s admission yesterday that she had probably called Wayne by name during the assault, and certainly talked to him about Gary afterwards, there was no longer any point.
    So the first witness was the forensic scientist from the Rape Crisis Centre. She confirmed that Sharon had suffered extensive bruising to the vaginal area, entirely consistent with her story of forced, unlubricated penetration. There were marks on her wrists and throat consistent with having been bound; and bruising to her cheek and nose, entirely consistent with the right-handed blows to the face which she had described. Julian Lloyd-Davies extracted these facts with careful, polite questions, dwelling on every detail of the injuries to emphasise to the jury the brutality that must have caused them.
    But the most important point, for Sarah, was what the scientist did not say. When Lloyd-Davies had finished she stood up confidently.
    ‘Dr Marson, I would like to take you back to your examination of Ms Gilbert’s vagina. You testified to bruising, did you not? But I heard no mention of semen. Did you not find any?’
    The scientist, an intense young woman with short-cropped hair and steel framed glasses, shook her head. ‘No, I’m afraid we didn’t.’
    Sarah affected to look puzzled. ‘But you did look, I take it? I mean, evidence from semen is very important in cases of rape, is it not?’
    ‘Yes, indeed it is. In this case I took a number of swabs from the vaginal area, but I