The Dead

36

We’d barely seen the back of one murder trial before we were embroiled in another, but this time I suspected the accused might not be guilty. I didn’t like Golden Boots, not many people did, but I didn’t have any great desire to see him banged up for life for a crime he hadn’t committed; having said that, I far preferred it to be him than me.

His barrister seemed to be struggling to combat the CPS case.

‘The prosecution is big on circumstantial evidence and the accused’s character, or lack of it,’ Susan Fitch had observed, ‘but they are weak on motive. He has to concentrate on that. As far as I can see they have yet to conclusively establish any kind of motive for the killing of Gemma Carlton and if they can show he had no reason to murder the girl then they are halfway there’.

She was right about one thing; when the trial started, the Prosecution tore straight into Golden Boots’ character.

‘Do you watch pornography on the internet?’ asked their barrister.

Golden Boots, wearing a suit and tie for possibly the first time in his life, shrugged, ‘Doesn’t everybody?’

‘But you watch a lot of it, don’t you?’

The footballer sniffed, ‘Not as much as you probably.’

That earned him a ticking off from the judge before the lawyer continued.

‘The police did a check on your internet history. They found a great deal of pornography. In fact I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that was pretty much all they found.’

‘I like to play Angry Birds too,’ he smirked, ‘unless they got confused and thought that was a porn site.’ He laughed at his own weak joke, but nobody else did. The lawyer ignored him.

‘I appreciate that in these more liberal times it is not entirely uncommon for young, adult males to view porn online.’

‘You’re telling me,’ answered the footballer.

‘But not many would view the sites you look at for recreational purposes.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Girls being punished, adolescent girls being punished, schoolgirls being punished,’ the lawyer recited.

‘Oh, well yeah, but that’s bollocks isn’t it, they aren’t real schoolgirls and it’s all an act isn’t it? It’s just a bit of caning and naughty stuff before they get down to the real thing but it’s all basically harmless, you know, fake and that.’

The lawyer continued unabated, dispassionately rhyming off a list of extremely hardcore porn sites, ‘MILFs being punished, ex-girlfriends degraded, embarrassed girls stripped in public, real women groped in the street. Are they all basically harmless too?’

Golden Balls took a while to stammer an answer to that one. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you don’t always know what you are going to get when you land on those sites do you? And if you use porn, which I do, a lot, as you said, you get a bit desensitised to the vanilla stuff.’ I could see at least two members of the jury squinting their incomprehension at that phrase. ‘So, you know, you try a bit more specialist material.’

‘Yes, I see, and your specialist stuff all seems to revolve around the theme of women being tied up, punished and degraded doesn’t it? You don’t like women very much do you?’

‘Course I do. I’ve had loads of them.’ His joke was greeted with a stony silence in the courtroom.

‘Indeed,’ said the lawyer and something about the way he was taking his time made me realise he was saving the best bit till last. He didn’t disappoint. ‘And what about the rape videos?’

‘Eh?’ was all Golden Boots could respond with.

‘The rape videos,’ repeated the lawyer and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop at that point, ‘the ones you used a search engine to find — the nasty videos that aren’t on the more conventional pornographic sites. I have viewed one of those videos, one of the ones you downloaded for your personal pleasure and I have to say it was completely sickening. But I will allow you to answer me, so we can hear your side of things. You can tell us why you downloaded a video which contained fifteen minutes of a woman screaming and sobbing while she was stripped and raped by two men in her own home, while a third man videoed the whole thing.’

‘I saw that by accident,’ protested the Premiership’s finest.

‘You went on that site by accident?’

‘Yes!’

‘Seventeen times?’

‘Look, I don’t think it was real or anything. I reckon she was just acting. I reckon they was all acting in all of them videos.’

‘Really,’ the lawyer went on, ‘so you like to watch video footage of men pretending to rape women? Why ever would you do that?’

When Golden Boots finally answered he did so in a very small voice indeed, ‘It was just a laugh, that’s all. I never meant nothing by it.’

‘It was just a laugh?’ repeated the lawyer, ‘no further questions.’

Susan Fitch told me that Golden Boots had no real motive for killing Gemma Carlton. She’d said it was the big flaw in the Prosecution case, but their barrister never even bothered to counter that. He didn’t just admit there was little motive. The way he portrayed it, motive was meaningless when dealing with someone as disturbed as Golden Boots. ‘We may never reach an understanding of the motive of this spoilt footballer for this violent act,’ he told the jury. ‘Was he slighted in some way by the young girl he had slept with, then discarded, as if she was little more than a piece of meat? Had she flirted with a teammate and made him jealous, did she gossip about his bedroom performance, leaving him open to scorn or ridicule, did she fail to comply with some degraded sexual request? We may never know but it is enough for us to realise that here is a man who has been denied nothing since the day he first signed professional terms as a footballer. He thinks he can have anything he wants, whenever he wants it. It is the Prosecution case that Gemma Carlton, in some way, however slight, managed to annoy, offend or irritate a man with a long history of casual violence, often against women, to such a degree that she became the victim of an assault that led to her death. He even managed to retain the presence of mind to don gloves before carrying out this heinous act of strangulation on his innocent victim, driving her out into the woods and dumping her body as if it were refuse.’

After that little speech, I sensed that Golden Boots was irretrievably fucked.