Verdict Unsafe by Jill McGown Page A

this end, you purchased a mask. So—tell me, where do you buy a face-mask?”
    “I got it in a sports-goods place in Malworth. It’s for protecting your skin, really. Mountaineers and skiers and people use them.”
    “You’ll have a receipt then, won’t you? A receipt for this item, dated after the date of the newspaper report on the first assault.”
    “No, sir. I didn’t keep it.”
    “I don’t imagine you did. You got this mask long before the first rape, didn’t you?”
    “No, sir. I got it because I’d read about the rape in the paper.”
    “Very well. That brings us to the first coincidence. And it
was
a coincidence, was it, that just such a mask, together with a flick-knife, was found on the very road where you had been stopped by the police the evening before?”
    “Yes.”
    “Did the newspaper report describe the sort of mask the rapist wore?”
    “No, sir.”
    “No. It could have been a balaclava, or a stocking, or a Halloween mask, couldn’t it? But it wasn’t. It was a ski-mask. And so was the one you purchased. A coincidence?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And yet you didn’t have
your
mask with you when they stopped you, did you? Sounds horribly like another coincidence to me, Mr. Drummond.”
    “No,” said Drummond. “I didn’t
always
have it with me.”
    “Only if you were going to ‘put the wind up’ women?”
    “Yes.”
    “You led these officers to believe that you were the rapist, didn’t you?”
    “No, sir. They never said anything about the rapes, and neither did 1.1 was just standing there while they went over the bike, and checked me for drugs and all that. I didn’t say anything. One of them just started hitting me.”
    “Very well. Let’s turn to the night of your arrest. You took your bike to the airfield in order to do stunts in the dark, and that was how you grazed your knees. My learned friend said that this was because you were doing this stunt driving ‘without the protection of leathers.’ Do you have leathers?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Motorcycle leathers are a sort of all-in-one with reinforcement at the knees for just such a maneuver as high-speed cornering, aren’t they?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Then why weren’t you wearing them, if that was your sole reason for going out that night?”
    Drummond shrugged.
    “I’ll tell you, shall I? Because it would be less than easy to rape someone while you were wearing them, wouldn’t it?” Drummond shook his head.
    “Oh,” said Whitehouse. “You mean it
is
easy to rape someone while you’re wearing them?”
    “Mr. Whitehouse,” said the judge, sounding like an infant school teacher at the end of a long morning.
    “I withdraw the question, my lord,” said Whitehouse, and turned back to Drummond. “Let’s put it another way, Mr. Drummond. I don’t really want to know why you weren’t wearing your leathers so much as why you
were
wearing your rapist’s outfit, complete with mask. Why was that?”
    Drummond shrugged again.
    “Because you went out looking for someone to ‘put the wind up’?”
    “No, sir.”
    “But you’ve just told the court that that was the only reason you would have had the mask with you.”
    “Yes, well,” said Drummond. “I did think about that, but there was no one around. It was Sunday evening—the town was dead. I got bored just riding around, so I went up to the airfield.”
    “But on your way home you found someone, didn’t you? And you sexually assaulted her, as you had sexually assaulted and raped three others before her.”
    “No, sir. I was in the alley, and she came up to me and said did I want to … you know. So I said OK.”
    Whitehouse drew in a long, slow breath and released it. “You had just relieved yourself,” he said. “Did you keep your gloves on while you were doing that?”
    Drummond frowned a little. “No,” he said suspiciously.
    “Where were they?”
    “In my helmet, on the bike.”
    “Oh—you had removed your helmet, too?”
    “Yeah, well