The Hunt (27 page)

“
My God,” gasped Madeleine, “was that really the kind of shit he said to you?”

“
Almost verbatim,” replied Mara, adding, “Thank you so much for this. I don't know what I'd have done without you.”

“
You'd have found another lawyer who was equally good. Anyway, we women have to look out for each other. Because nobody else will.”

Mara nodded, then said,
“Though I was impressed by that Judge. Sometimes I think there might be men who are on our side. I feel almost hopeful about the future.”

Madeleine smiled sweetly and said,
“Speaking of which, I'm going to be meeting with Aaron Rosenbaum on Monday. I'll let you know what he says.”

Madeleine returned to her office, and Mara, her step lighter than it had been for weeks, caught the tube,
first texting a message to Yuke, “Appeal granted. No caning. At least for me. I'll tell you everything tonight.” As she took her seat on the train, she remembered the middle-aged woman in the punishment centre. Only now did she realise there was something distinctly odd about this encounter. She'd been struck by the woman's resemblance to Mary Green. But Mara had never seen Mary Green, had never even read a description of her, had absolutely no way of knowing what she looked like. What on Earth could have been going through her mind?

When
Yuke arrived at the apartment that evening, she listened open-mouthed as Mara recounted the story of Tyner's grilling by the Judge. They decided to send out a group email inviting their friends, Madeleine included, to meet them for a celebration at the Benugo Bar on Saturday. Mara reserved The Drawing Room, a small cocktail bar concealed behind the lounge area, and spent several hours surrounded by people she loved. She even felt confident enough to kiss Yuke on the lips, they were in a semi-public area, but the only stranger was a female bartender, who winked at them.

Before departing, Madeleine embraced
Yuke and said, “Take good care of Mara. She's a very special person.” Any doubts the lawyer might still have had about the nature of Mara's relationship with Yuke did not survive the evening.

Chapter 21

The investigation into Julie
Weisz's death proceeded with remarkable speed. At the family's request, a second postmortem was carried out on April 20th by an independent coroner, who concluded Julie had died of exhaustion, shock, and cardiac arrest following several days of sustained torture. Soon after this, Madeleine set up a meeting between Mara and Aaron Rosenbaum. It was Aaron who informed Mara that Julie's boyfriend, himself a talented musician and songwriter, had committed suicide. So two young lives full of potential had been cut short because of Price's sadistic urges. Mara told Aaron everything she knew about Julie's death, and he took the responsibility of passing this information on to the girl's parents.

When Mara was officially introduced to the
Weiszs, they literally got down on their knees and begged her to forgive them for their behaviour outside the stadium. After that, they treated her as if she were Julie reincarnated. But the more affection they lavished on Mara, the worse she felt. She knew enough about psychoanalysis to be familiar with the concept of survivor's guilt, but realising she was exhibiting the classic symptoms of a widely recognised condition didn't help.

She kept going over the many things she could have done differently, things that might have changed the fatal outcome. If only she'd taken Price up on his offer, or chosen a different hiding place, or stopped Julie from going out to use the vending machine, or not told Tyner that Julie was her friend. That last mistake particularly haunted her, because it was so pointless. How could she have been stupid enough to think somebody as detached from normal emotions as Tyner would fail to exploit something so pathetically sentimental as one human being's concern for another?

A very un-Melissa Valance-like private detective named Ray Walcott was hired by the family, though with nobody except Mara willing to talk to him, his investigation ran into a wall. But both Aaron and Madeleine believed Mara's testimony and the results of the second postmortem were enough to justify a trial. They presented their evidence to the Director of Public Prosecutions, making it clear that if Robert Price was not prosecuted, they would take the case to the European court. The DPP had little choice, but to schedule a trial for late June. During the weeks that followed, Walcott discovered that pathologist Dr. Frederick Letap was a notorious incompetent who tended to be called in whenever somebody wanted to muddy the waters. He'd recently conducted a postmortem on a woman who'd been beaten to death by two police officers for the crime of talking back to them. Letap claimed the victim had died of a drug-related illness, and insisted he could find no signs of violence, even though she was covered in bruises, her left arm broken, and her skull fractured. Letap subsequently mislaid the only sample he'd taken of the victim's blood, and despite two subsequent postmortems which concluded the woman had died due to a sustained assault, the accused officers were found not guilty. The authorities clearly expected the same thing to happen if Price ever came to trial, but Aaron hoped to expose Letap in front of the jury.

The trial began on June 27th. Newspaper editors had made an unspoken pact not to publicise the
Weiszs' quest for justice, but they could hardly ignore a prominent murder trial. Their approach, predictably, was to present Price as an innocent victim of circumstance persecuted by a couple whose grief had driven them insane. When Price took the stand on June 29th, the sympathy for him emanating from the public gallery was almost palpable.

Mara
, who attended every day of the trial, barely recognised him. He'd obviously spent quality time with a good drama coach. His stooped posture evoked memories of Charles Laughton in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, and his eyes were constantly directed upward, as if begging a merciful God to take pity on him in his time of need. His voice was gentle, and his hands frequently clasped, as if in prayer. He'd even taken to using a walking stick. Aaron was intensely aware of how negatively the jury responded whenever he subjected Price to tough questioning.

As he told the
Weiszs, “The best we can hope for is to expose the sadistic cruelty of the Hunt, because the jury will never send this man to prison.” As part of this strategy, Aaron asked Price to read the section of the Hunt pamphlet outlining how Hunters were permitted to treat their victims. Although several members of the all-male jury were plainly unsettled by this account of state-sanctioned torture, they refused to accept that a man like Price, a man any girl would be happy to take home to mother, could do such things.

But Aaron believed he had an ace up his sleeve. The country's leading pathologist had conducted a third
postmortem on May 7th, and prepared a detailed report describing exactly how the wounds on Julie's body had been caused. Aaron expected Price to deny having done anything to Julie. His plan was to bring out the undeniable forensic evidence and break Price down, forcing him to admit how he'd made his victim suffer. But Price had access to some expensive legal talent, and they'd prepared an almost perfect defence. When Aaron asked how he'd treated Julie, Price had his story well rehearsed, and wouldn't budge from it. He claimed to have entered the Hunt because he approved of the way it deterred terrorists, and wanted to show his support, but he hadn't planned on actually doing anything except a little light spanking, and not even that if the person he caught wasn't willing. But, to his horror, Julie turned out to be an extreme masochist. Yes, he'd pierced her nipples several times, attached a clamp to her clitoris, used electricity on her genitalia, flogged her until she was covered in blood and her skin raw, raped her repeatedly, both vaginally and anally. But she'd begged him to do all these things. She hadn't even wanted to sleep in a bed, instead demanding he strap her to the wooden horse, or lock her in the cage, or suspend her from the ceiling by her breasts, and leave her in these positions overnight. He'd pleaded with her to let him rest, but she'd merely laughed, called him names, and insisted he continue.

With Price admitting to having done everything the pathologist's report irrefutably proved he'd done, evidence became of secondary importance. All that remained was to demonstrate the sheer implausibility of Price's narrative. Why, asked Aaron, had Julie's parents and friends never noticed these masochistic tendencies? Perhaps she was ashamed of them, suggested Price in a reasonable tone, and tried to keep them secret. Or perhaps participating in the Hunt had unleashed desires Julie never knew she had.

Aaron's response was to put Mara on the stand and have her tell the jury what she'd observed. Mara calmly recounted how Price had approached her during the initial meeting and offered to go easy on her if she surrendered to him. And she described, detail by detail, what happened when Price brought Julie to Tyner's playroom. At least three of the jurymen gasped when Mara quoted Price as saying, “I intend to make sure this vile cunt remembers tonight for the rest of her life.” Even Price expressed shock and disbelief. When he once again took the stand, he was willing to admit that much of what Mara said was true. He had brought Julie to Tyner's apartment and coerced Mara into torturing her. But, he insisted, it was all Julie's idea. She'd wanted to play a practical joke on her friend. Julie had indeed appeared to be terrified, but that was all part of the act. She'd planned to let Mara in on the joke when they were released the following day. But Price denied having said anything to Mara at the meeting, except that he hoped she'd enjoy the Hunt. “She looked a bit nervous,” he recalled, “and I wanted to cheer her up.” And he'd certainly not said that terrible thing in the playroom. Shaking his head in sadness, he reluctantly admitted that Mara seemed to be a bit of a fantasist. “Mr. Tyner told me she spent an entire evening ranting about one of her pet conspiracy theories. Apparently, she believes the 2059 bombings were carried out by the government.” The jury chuckled at this, and Price smiled, like a nightclub comedian whose latest joke has been well received.

And that was pretty much the end of the case for the prosecution. Aaron wanted to introduce evidence of Dr.
Letap's incompetence, but the Judge ruled it inadmissible. Tyner had been subpoenaed, but was no longer resident in the U.K. When Mara last saw him, he'd been running from the Camden Punishment Centre, and it seemed he hadn't stopped until reaching France. The opportunity to test his pain threshold apparently held little appeal.

The defence focused on the fact that Price had done nothing illegal during the Hunt. The only thing he could be accused of was using excessive force, and hadn't he explained that Miss
Weisz nagged away at him until, in order to satisfy her perverse desires, he'd been coerced into acting against his better judgement?

Dr. Roberts was then brought to the stand. He'd examined Miss
Weisz every day, he insisted, and seen nothing to suggest her health was being endangered. She died, he pointed out, after his final examination, so what happened during her final hours was beyond his control. He did recall her begging him to put an end to her agony, but his psychiatric training enabled him to perceive that these pleas were actually Miss Weisz's way of furthering her masochistic agenda, allowing her to view herself as the helpless victim she so longed to be.

When Mara returned to the stand, all the defence lawyer wanted to discuss was her theory concerning the 2059 bombings. Madeleine had suggested she keep quiet about her discovery, but she'd forgotten having already mentioned it to Tyner. The cat was now out of the bag, and Mara decided that truth would be the best weapon to use against Price's lies. She told of how she'd come across Mary Green's letter, which revealed that, after leaving Kilburn's homeless alone for over a decade, the police had started clearing them out of the area one week before the supposed terrorist attack took place. Turning to the jury, Mara said,
“Decide for yourselves if this was nothing more than a coincidence.” Price's lawyer looked at the jury, twisting his face and shaking his head in a manner which suggested they should all pretend to believe Mara, as she might become violent if contradicted. Mara wasn't so sure the jurymen saw things this way, some of them were visibly disturbed.

But in the end, it made no difference. The defence pointed out that although certain individuals disagreed with Dr.
Letap, he was nonetheless the first person to examine the corpse, and his opinions thus carried more weight than those of subsequent pathologists. As had been intended all along, Letap so confused the issue that there was no way for the jury to definitively conclude Julie hadn't died of natural causes. They declared Price not guilty.

The press response was unanimously favourable.
“Justice Prevails” read the
Daily Male'
s headline, pages two and three being entirely dedicated to coverage of the trial. Needless to say, these 'objective' news reports were slanted to make the prosecution's claims seem absurd. Mara, who was depicted as a mad conspiracy theorist, wept when she read the articles. She'd desperately wanted Price to face justice, yet he'd ended up being exonerated, while Julie, who should have been known as a talented singer and songwriter, would be remembered as a masochist responsible for her own death.

Yet once she'd gone through all the reports in detail, she began to see a positive side. For there, on the state-approved Internet and in the cold light of print, were full details about what took place during a Hunt. Perhaps this would open people's eyes and make them acknowledge what was going on. When Germany's post-Nazi youth asked how their parents could have stood by while millions of Jews were murdered, the older generation claimed not to have known what was happening. The people of Great Britain could no longer make such a claim, for all the information they needed could be found in the newspapers. Even Mara's theory about the 2059 bombings was there: ridiculed, yes - talk show hosts had even started telling Mara Gorki jokes - but openly expressed in a way that would surely make at least some people have second thoughts about the Brave New World in which they lived. Right now, all this didn't seem like much. But what was it Mary Green had written?
“I feel confident that this small flame can be fanned into a blaze which will sweep away the misogyny and injustice being foisted on this country's citizens.”