34

Friday 9 January

For the second time in just over a week, the Sexual Offences Liaison Officer, DC Claire Westmore, was back at the Saturn Centre, the Sexual Assault Referral Centre attached to Crawley Hospital.

She knew from experience that no two victims ever reacted the same way, and nor did their conditions remain static. One of the difficult tasks facing her right now was to keep abreast of the changing state of mind of the woman she was with. But while treating her sensitively and sympathetically, and trying to make her feel as safe as possible, she could not lose sight of the cruel fact that Roxy Pearce, like it or not, was a crime scene from whom every possible scrap of forensic evidence needed to be obtained.

When that was completed, she would let the woman rest – safe here in this suite – and with the help of medication get some sleep. Tomorrow, when hopefully the woman would be in a better state, the interview process could start. For Roxy Pearce, as with most victims, that was likely to mean three gruelling days of reliving what had happened, with Westmore extracting from her a harrowing narrative that would eventually fill thirty pages of her A4 notebook.

At this moment she was going through the most distressing part of all for the victim – and for herself. They were alone with a female Forensic Medical Examiner, or FME, as Police Surgeons were now called, in the sterile Forensic Room. Roxy Pearce was wearing only the white towelling dressing gown and pink slippers in which she had travelled here. She’d had a blanket wrapped around her for warmth in the police car, but now that had been removed. She sat, hunched and silent and forlorn, on the blue examining couch, her head bowed, eyes staring blankly at nothing, her long black hair matted and partially obscuring her face. From being hyper-talkative when the police had first arrived at her house, she had now become almost catatonic.

Claire Westmore had heard victims say that being raped was like having their souls murdered. Just as with murder, there was no going back. No amount of therapy would restore Roxy Pearce to the person she had previously been. Yes, in time she would recover a little, enough to function, to live a seemingly normal life. But it would be a life constantly stalked by the shadow of fear. A life in which she would find it hard ever to trust anyone or any situation.

‘You’re safe here, Roxy,’ Claire said to her with a bright smile. ‘You’re in the safest possible place. He can’t get to you here.’

She smiled again. But there was no response. It was like talking to a waxwork.

‘Your friend Amanda is here,’ she went on. ‘She just went out for a ciggie. She’s going to stay with you all day.’ Again she smiled.

Again the blank expression. The dead eyes. Blank. As blank as everything in here around her. As blank and numb as her insides.

Roxy Pearce’s eyes registered the magnolia-coloured walls of the small room. Recently painted. The round, institutional clock showing the time as 12.35. A rack of boxes containing blue latex gloves. Another rack of blue and red crates containing syringes, swabs and vials, all sealed in sterile wrappers. A pink chair. Weighing scales. A basin with a moisturizer dispenser on one side and sterile handwash on the other. A telephone sitting on a bare white work-surface like some unused lifeline in a television quiz game. A foldaway screen on castors.

Tears welled in her eyes. She wished Dermot was here. She wished, in her addled mind, that she hadn’t been unfaithful to him, hadn’t had this crazy thing with Iannis.

Then suddenly she blurted out, ‘It’s all my fault, isn’t it?’

‘Why do you think that, Roxy?’ the SOLO asked, jotting down her words in the log she was keeping in her notepad. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself at all. That’s not right.’

But the woman lapsed back into silence.

‘OK, my love. Don’t worry. You don’t have to say anything to me. We don’t have to talk today if you don’t want to, but what I do need to do is obtain forensic evidence from you, to help us try to catch the man who did this to you. Is that all right with you?’

After some moments, Roxy said, ‘I feel dirty. I want to take a shower. Can I do that?’

‘Of course, Roxy,’ the Forensic Medical Examiner said. ‘But not just yet. We don’t want to wash away any evidence, do we?’ She had a slightly bossy tone, Claire Westmore thought, a little too officious for the victim’s fragile state.

Silence again. Roxy’s mind went off on a tangent. She had taken out two of Dermot’s best bottles. Left them somewhere. One open on the kitchen table, the other in the fridge. She would have to buy a bottle somewhere to replace the opened one, and go to the house before Dermot came back and replace them in the cellar. He’d go loopy otherwise.

The FME snapped on a pair of latex gloves, walked over to the plastic crates and removed the first item from its sterile wrapping. A small, sharp implement for taking scrapings from underneath fingernails. It was possible the woman had scratched her attacker and that crucial skin cells containing his DNA might be trapped beneath her nails.

This was just the start of a long ordeal for Roxy Pearce in this room. Before she would be permitted to take a shower, the FME would have to take swabs from every part of her body where contact with her assailant might have occurred, looking for saliva, semen and skin cells. She would comb her pubic hair, take her blood alcohol and a urine sample for toxicology tests, and sketch in the Medical Examination Book any damage to the genital area.

As the FME worked her way through each of the woman’s nails, bagging the scrapings separately, the SOLO tried to reassure Roxy.

‘We’re going to get this man, Roxy. That’s why we’re doing this. With your cooperation, we’ll be able to stop him from doing this to anyone else. I know it must be hard for you, but try to hold on to that.’

‘I don’t know why you’re bothering,’ Roxy suddenly said. ‘Only 4 per cent of rapists ever get convicted. Right?’

Claire Westmore hesitated. She’d heard that nationwide it was actually only 2 per cent, because just 6 per cent of rapes were ever reported. But she didn’t want to make things worse for the poor woman.

‘Well, that’s not entirely true,’ she answered. ‘But the figures are low, yes. That’s because so few victims have your guts, Roxy. They don’t have the courage to come forward like you are doing.’

‘Guts?’ she retorted bitterly. ‘I don’t have guts.’

‘Yes, you do. You really do have guts.’

Roxy Pearce shook her head bleakly. ‘It’s my fault. If I’d had guts, I’d have stopped him. Everyone’ll think I must have wanted him to do this, that I must have encouraged him somehow. Anyone else might have managed to stop him, knee him in the nuts or something, but I didn’t, did I? I just lay there.’