Natural Justice

Besides the beer he had been supping at all through the evening,
Andrew partook of the wine served with the duck l'orange and followed
that up with a couple of brandies over his coffee. Jenny looked on
anxiously as he slowly got drunker and drunker, with Robert struggling
to keep up with him. Eventually, Jenny raised the matter of how they
should get home. Full of Dutch courage, Andrew scorned her suggestion
of taking a taxi, instead insisting that they should take a room for
the night. This went down like a lead balloon with Jenny.
"I hate it when you get like this! Come on, Andy, I think you've had
enough now. Why don't you call it a night and we'll get a cab?"

But he was full of bravado in front of Sian Morgan. "Look, you do what
you want to do but I'm staying here."

Jenny rose to her feet. Andrew watched the way she wriggled to
straighten her dress that had ridden well up on her thighs. It was that
little green number which he had once observed; '&;#8230; clung to
her 'like Castrol GTX'.

"Well, if that's your last word, I'll take myself home," she snarled as
she snatched up her handbag. Then after nodding a vague 'good night' to
the others at the table, she slung her bag onto her shoulder and
stormed off.

Emma's eyes blazed at her brother. "Do you have to be so bloody
obnoxious? We've all had a good day. Everything was going fine then you
have to go and do something like that. I really wonder about you at
times, Andy!"

Andrew shot a quick glance at her husband as a desperate appeal for
support. It was no good. Robert was having none of it. He merely gave a
slow shake of his head and gazed briefly at the ceiling.

Jenny had to catch a bus along Hagley Road into the city centre, where
she changed onto a number sixteen. With the intention of taking a short
cut through the gully, which ran close to the river Thame, she got off
at the stop between the Beaufort and the Garden Gate. Although it was
the middle of summer, the night was late enough for it to be extremely
dark, especially along that narrow pathway which relied on the indirect
street lighting for illumination. She was where the Bluebell Woods were
on her right and an area of wasteland on her left, when she was
suddenly grabbed from behind.

Thrashing, kicking and struggling, she was dragged through an opening
in the fence onto the wasteland. All her efforts to free herself were
in vain. Her assailant was much too strong. And while he held her
around the neck with one hand, he repeatedly punched her with the
other. But she was determined not to make it easy for him by squirming
and struggling as much as depleting energy would allow. In the ensuing
melee the contents of her handbag were strewn all around when it flew
from her shoulder as she was hurled backwards onto the hard clay
ground. In a split second he was on top of her, straddling her body
with his knees. While one arm pressed against her throat, she could
feel the roughness of his other hand groping under her dress, wrenching
at her underwear. Although his face was close enough for her to smell
his sweat, body odour and alcohol tainted breath, she could not make
out any defining features.

As she fought to stay conscious by frantically gasping for air, her
hands clawed desperately at the surrounding soil until, quite by
accident, she sensed the hard steel of the hairdressing scissors that
had spilled from her handbag. By inching them gradually bit-by-bit with
the extreme tips of her fingernails, she eventually edged them into the
palm of her hand. Immediately she had them firmly in her grasp she
lashed out with them. She didn't pick a target; anywhere would do so
long as it distracted him from suffocating her. The arc of her swing
came to a violent halt with a dull thud as the blades of the scissors
were dug deep into some part of the assailant's anatomy. Because there
was no immediate reaction from him, she yanked at the loops, with the
intention of freeing them to deliver a follow-up thrust that might have
more effect, but they were jammed solid. In an act of frustration he
landed one last blow to the side of her face before reeling backwards
onto her feet clasping at his head with both hands.

As soon as she had managed to wriggle clear of his writhing body she
watched him clamber to his feet. The last she saw of him was a
grotesque vision of his lurching figure, silhouetted by a distant
street lamp with the scissors protruding from his head. Shuffling
backwards on her bottom, she leaned her aching body against the narrow
trunk of a small tree and sat sobbing while she sucked enough air into
her lungs so that she could gather sufficient composure to drag herself
up onto her trembling, grazed legs.

What Jenny had been through on that patch of wasteland was hard enough
to cope with. But when it was coupled to the trauma of giving a
statement to the police and being subjected to an undignified medical
examination at the hospital, it became unbearable. Besides all the pain
and indignity, her face looked like it had been run over by a bus: She
had grazes down both cheeks; her right eye was almost closed and
blackened; there was a small cut above her left eyebrow. There didn't
seem to be a square centimetre of facial tissue that wasn't affected to
the degree that merely sipping drinks through her battered lips proved
an extremely painful ordeal. And although the X-rays had proved
negative, she found it hard to believe that her badly swollen nose
wasn't actually broken. There were also several scrapes, bruises and
grazes to various other parts of her anatomy but at least she could
keep them covered up. She was dreadfully tired and, being in the
condition she was in, she could have well done without the grilling her
parents were intent on subjected her to the following morning. She
realised it was only their way of expressing their concern but that
didn't help much.

The questioning was fast and furious:
Who did it? Could it have been someone who had followed her from the
hotel? Did she see anyone acting suspiciously on the bus? How come she
didn't get a better look at him? Where was Andrew? Could it have been
him? Why had she been silly enough to come home on her own? Why was she
so reluctant to tell the police the full story? And then, to cap it
all, when she learned the details, Rachael - her own sister - inferred
that she had only herself to blame for not taking Andrew up on his
offer to treat her to a night at 'The Castle'.
"You must be daft. I would have jumped at the opportunity."

"Well you're bloody welcome to him! You'd get on well - two selfish
sods together."

Her father had gone off on a different tack. He had put two and two
together and come up with Andrew. To him it was all so simple: They had
quarrelled. Andrew bent on vengeance and, knowing her regular route
home, had tracked and attacked her.

"Well, we'll soon know for sure," Rachael interjected, "Whoever it is
will be easily spotted with a pair of scissors sticking out of his
head."

As it happened, although Rachael had been talking tongue-in-cheek, her
prophecy was not far off the mark. A man's body was found by early
Sunday lunchtime drinkers, half slumped in bushes at the rear of the
Beaufort's car park. A later post mortem confirmed he had died of blood
loss caused by a severe head wound. Apparently he had managed to remove
the scissors and that was the worst thing he could have done as it
allowed the haemorrhage to flow.