Covet by Tara Moss Page A

had concerns about the presence of the accused in the courtroom.’
    ‘Well, I…yes.’ Ed Brown. In the very same room. Tomorrow. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she managed.
    ‘That is not an unusual issue in cases in which the crime is of an intimate nature.’
    Tied naked to a bed and sprayed down with some kind of weird disinfectant is pretty bloody intimate , Mak thought.
    ‘It can be an intimidating experience for many. However, Makedde, my feeling is that the trial would be better served by your physical presence in the courtroom in front of the jurors.’
    She had considered this. ‘I thought you might say that.’
    ‘So unless you feel very strongly about it and you wish to press for that request, I would prefer that we have you in the witness box throughout your testimony.’
    ‘Okay,’ Mak agreed, without giving it any more thought. ‘I’ll do whatever it takes to nail him.’
    ‘I appreciate your attitude. Frankly, I feel the same way. This individual is an aggressive fetishist and a sexual sadist. Very dangerous indeed. Fortunately, we don’t come across guys like this all that often. Not of his calibre.’
    How fortunate.
    Makedde reflected on just how colossally bad her luck seemed to have been in recent years. Then again, she was still alive. She had all her limbs and digits—barely. Things could have been much worse for her.
    As if on cue, the big toe of her right foot began to tingle, exactly where the micro-surgeon had sewn it back on eighteen months earlier. At first, after the surgery, it had been numb and there was some doubt as to whether she would ever regain feeling in it. But now there was a worse problem, this irritating itch that drove her to distraction. It only ever seemed to itch when she thought about how the wound had been inflicted. Ed Brown had severed her toe with a scalpel during his bizarre ritualistic assault. He had no doubt planned to keep her toes—together with those of his other victims—in the formaldehyde jar that had been found in his bedroom. She wondered how Ed’s defence would try to talk their way around that piece of evidence.
    ‘You might not have been aware in Canada that there is considerable interest in the trial both here and in the UK,’ Bartel continued.
    ‘The UK?’
    ‘Because of Rebecca Ross, one of the last victims. She was in a soap opera. Neighbours , I believe. It’s quite popular over there.’
    Great.
    The responsibility of justice in this case was not just for Catherine, or for what Mak had endured herself, but for eight other women who had lost theirlives to Ed’s sadistic obsession. That responsibility weighed heavily on Mak.
    ‘We will do our best to protect you as you come in and out of the courts. Remember you are not required to speak to the media. In fact I would prefer it if you did not, at least until the trial is over.’
    ‘I understand.’ She wanted to get back to the issue of the trial itself. ‘Can I ask, did the defence push to have the cases tried separately?’
    ‘Yes they did. But they didn’t succeed.’
    Good , Makedde thought. A defence team sometimes tries to obtain separate trials for each individual crime, making it harder for the prosecution to prove its case. The accused might win a couple of the trials because of lack of evidence or due to an unshakeable alibi, and in subsequent trials the defence team can then say, ‘But your Honour, the same man must have committed all these crimes and our defendant has already proved that he did not commit a number of them, so he could not possibly have committed this one.’ It had been done before. It was highly unlikely that any defence team could pull off a stunt like that with the wealth of evidence stacked up against Ed Brown, but still, they would try anything. With the cases tried together, a great deal of damning evidence would be seen by the one jury, and if the prosecution could not prove beyond reasonable doubt that Ed had murdered one or more of the victims,