Sarah Vaughan - Anatomy of a Scandal

To my father, Chris

With love.

He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty.

Though perhaps not guilty as charged.

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

K ATE

2 December 2016

One

My wig slumps on my desk where I have tossed it. A beached jellyfish. Out of court, I am careless with this crucial part of my wardrobe, showing it the opposite of what it should command: respect. Handmade from horsehair and worth nearly six hundred pounds, I want it to accrue the gravitas I sometimes fear I lack. For the hairline to yellow with perspiration, the tight, cream curls to relax. Nineteen years since being called to the Bar, my wig is still that of a conscientious new girl not a barrister who has inherited it from her, or more usually his, father. Thats the sort of wig I want: one dulled with the patina of tradition, entitlement and age.

I kick off my shoes: black patent courts with gold braid on the front, shoes for a Regency fop; for Parliaments Black Rod; or a female barrister who delights in the history, the rigmarole, the sheer ridiculousness of it all. Expensive shoes are important. Chatting with fellow counsel or clients, with ushers and police, we all look down from time to time so as not to appear confrontational. Anyone who glances at my shoes sees someone who understands this quirk of human psychology and who takes herself seriously. They see a woman who dresses as if she believes she will win.

I like to look the part, you see. To do things properly. Female barristers can wear a collarette: a scrap of cotton and lace that acts like a bib a false front that goes just around the neck and that costs around thirty pounds. Or they can dress as I do: a white collarless tunic with a collar attached by collar studs to the front and back. Cuff links. A black wool jacket and skirt or trousers; and depending on their success and seniority a black wool or wool and silk gown.

Im not wearing all of that now. I have shed part of my disguise in the robing room of the Bailey. Robes off. Collar and cuffs undone; my medium-length blonde hair tied back in a ponytail in court released from its bobble; just a little mussed up.

I am more feminine, rid of my garb. With my wig on and my heavy-rimmed glasses, I know I look asexual. Certainly not attractive though you may note my cheekbones: two sharp blades that emerged in my twenties and have hardened and sharpened, as I have hardened and sharpened, over the years.

I am more myself without the wig. More me. The me I am at heart, not the me I present to the court or any previous incarnations of my personality. This is me: Kate Woodcroft, QC; criminal barrister; member of the Inner Temple; a highly experienced specialist in prosecuting sexual crimes. Forty-two years old; divorced, single, childless. I rest my head in my hands for a moment and let a breath ease out of me in one long flow, willing myself just to give up for a minute. Its no good. I cant relax. Ive a small patch of eczema on my wrist and I smear E45 cream there, resisting the desire to scratch it. To scratch at my dissatisfaction with life.

Instead, I look up at the high ceilings of my chambers. A set of rooms in an oasis of calm in the very heart of London. Eighteenth-century, with ornate cornicing, gold leaf around the ceiling rose and a view through the towering sash windows of Inner Temples courtyard and the round twelfth-century Temple Church.

This is my world. Archaic, anachronistic, privileged, exclusive. Everything I should and normally would profess to hate. And yet I love it. I love it because all this this nest of buildings at the edge of the City, tucked off the Strand and flowing down towards the river; the pomp and the hierarchy; the status, history and tradition is something I once never knew existed; and to which I never thought I could aspire. All of this shows how far I have come.

Its the reason that, if Im not with my colleagues, I slip a hot chocolate with extra sachets of sugar to the girl hunched in her sleeping bag in a doorway on the Strand whenever I grab a cappuccino. Most people wont have noticed her. The homeless are good at being invisible or we are good at making them so: averting our eyes from their khaki sleeping bags; their grey faces and matted hair; their bodies bundled in oversized jumpers and their equally skinny wolfhounds as we scurry past on our way to the seductive glitz of Covent Garden or the cultural thrills of the South Bank.

But hang around any court for a while and you will see just how precarious life can be. How your world can come tumbling down all too rapidly if you make the wrong call: if, just for one fatal split second, you behave unlawfully. Or rather, if you are poor and you break the law. For courts, like hospitals, are magnets for those dealt a rough hand from the start of life; who choose the wrong men or the wrong mates and become so mired in bad fortune that they lose their moral compass. The rich arent quite as affected. Look at tax avoidance or fraud, as it might be called if perpetrated by someone without the benefit of a skilled accountant. Bad luck or lack of acumen doesnt seem to dog the rich quite as assiduously as the poor.

Oh, Im in a bad mood. You can tell Im in a bad mood when I start thinking like a student politician. Most of the time I keep my Guardian -reading tendencies to myself. They can sit oddly with the more traditional members of my chambers; make for heated discussions at formal dinners, as we eat the sort of mass-catered food you might get at weddings chicken, or salmon en croute and drink our equally mediocre wine. Far more diplomatic to limit oneself to legal gossip: which QC is receiving so little work theyre applying to be a Crown Court judge; who will next be made silk; who lost their cool with an usher in court. I can rattle through such conversations while thinking of my workload, fretting about my personal life, or even planning what to buy the next day for dinner. After nineteen years, I am adept at fitting in. I am skilled at that.

But in the sanctity of my room I can occasionally let myself go, just a little, and so, for a minute, I put my head in my hands on my mahogany partners desk; squeeze my eyes tight shut; and press my knuckles in hard. I see stars: white pinpricks that break the darkness and shine as bright as the diamonds in the ring I bought for myself for no one else was going to buy it for me. Better to see these than to succumb to tears.

Ive just lost a case. And though I know I will have got over the sense of failure by Monday; will move on for there are other cases to pursue, other clients to represent, still it rankles. Its not something that often happens or which I like to admit to, because I like to win. Well, we all do. Its only natural. We need it to ensure our careers continue to sparkle. And its the way our adversarial judicial system works.

I remember it came as a huge shock when I had this spelled out to me, early in my Bar training. I had gone into the law with high ideals and I have retained some; I havent become overly jaded but I hadnt expected it to be so brutally expressed.

The truth is a tricky issue. Rightly or wrongly, adversarial advocacy is not really an inquiry into the truth, Justin Carew, QC, told us callow twenty-somethings, fresh from Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and Bristol. Advocacy is about being more persuasive than your opponent, he continued. You can win even if the evidence is stacked against you provided that you argue better. And its all about winning, of course.