Anyway, I’d started seeing a woman called Karen, who was one of Anne’s best friends. That was mistake number one. Karen was the mother of two children and she was married to a sports lawyer who had cancer. At first it was just me being nice to her, taking her out for the odd lunch to cheer her up, and then it got out of hand. I am not proud of that. But there it is. All I can say in my defence is that I was young and stupid. And, yes, lonely. I wasn’t interested in the kind of girls who throw themselves at footballers in nightclubs. Never have been. I don’t even like nightclubs. My idea of a nightmare is an evening out with the lads. I much prefer dinner at The Ivy or The Wolseley. Even when I was at Arsenal the club still had a reputation for some hard drinking — it wasn’t just silverware that the likes of Tony Adams and Paul Merson helped earn for the Gunners — but me, I was always in bed before midnight.
Karen’s house in St Albans was conveniently close to the Arsenal training ground at Shenley, so I’d got into the habit of dropping in to see her on my way home to Hampstead; and sometimes I was seeing a lot more of her than was proper. I suppose I was in love with her. And perhaps she was in love with me. I don’t know what we thought was going to happen. Certainly we could never have imagined what actually did happen.
I remember everything about the day it happened as if it has been etched onto my brain with acid. It was after one post-Shenley visit, a beautiful day near the end of the season. I came out of Karen’s house after a couple of hours to find that my car had been nicked. It was a brand new Porsche Cayenne Turbo that I’d only just taken delivery of, so I was pretty gutted. At the same time I was reluctant to report the car stolen for the simple reason that I guessed my wife, Anne, would recognise Karen’s address if the story got into the newspapers. So I jumped on a train back to my house in Hampstead, thinking I might as well report the car stolen from somewhere in the village. Mistake number two. However, no sooner had I got back home than Karen rang me and said the car was now standing outside her house again. At first I didn’t believe it, but she read out the registration number and it was indeed my car. More than a little puzzled as to what was happening, I got in a taxi and went straight back to St Albans to collect it.
When I arrived there I couldn’t believe my luck. The car wasn’t locked but it didn’t have a scratch on it and, anxious to be away from Karen’s house before her husband came home, I drove off telling myself that perhaps some kids had taken it for a joy-ride and then returned it, having had second thoughts about what they’d done. Oddly enough I’d done something like that as a kid: I stole a scooter and then returned it after a couple of hours. It was naïve of me to think that something similar had happened here, I admit, but I was just happy to be reunited with a car I loved. Mistake number three.
Driving home I noticed a knife on the floor of the car and, not thinking straight, I picked it up. Mistake number four. I should have tossed the knife out of the window; instead I put it in the compartment underneath the armrest. I was so pleased to recover a car I thought had been stolen that perhaps I did exceed the speed limit here and there; then again I wasn’t driving dangerously or under the influence of drink or drugs.
Somewhere near Edgware I noticed a car in my mirror flashing me and ignored it, as you do; London is full of half-wit drivers. I had no idea it was actually an unmarked police car. The next time I looked, near Brent Cross, the same car was still in my mirror only now it had a cherry on top. And still not suspecting that anything very bad had happened, I pulled over. You can imagine my surprise when two police officers accused me of speeding and failing to stop; I was handcuffed, arrested and taken to Willesden Green where to my greater horror I found myself being interviewed about a rape. A man ‘answering my description’ and driving my car — the victim remembered the marque and half the registration number — had picked a woman up at a service station on the A414 and then raped her at knifepoint in nearby Greenwood Park.
There was no doubt my car had been involved; some of the victim’s hairs were found on the headrest, her knickers were in the glove box, and there was other circumstantial evidence, too. Her blood and my fingerprints were on the knife, of course; and in the same glove box as the victim’s knickers the police found a packet of condoms I’d bought at a garage in Shenley. The receipt was still in the ashtray. The sales assistant at the garage remembered me buying them because he’d seen me on MOTD mouthing off about some stupid incident in a match against Tottenham. More of that in a moment. Anyway, there were two condoms missing from the packet. The rapist had used one on his victim; I’d put another in my wallet when I’d gone to visit Karen, but I wasn’t about to tell the police this because I was still hoping to spare her and, more importantly, her husband. I figured the last thing he needed was his wife providing me with an adulterous alibi while the poor bastard was having chemo. Mistake number five.
The victim — Helen Fehmiu, who was Turkish — wasn’t at all sure that it was me who’d raped her, however. Her attacker had punched her several times in the face, so hard she had a detached retina, but she thought he was perhaps black or ‘a bit foreign-looking’ which was good coming from her, quite frankly. She was darker than I am. Helpfully the police arranged for Mrs Fehmiu to see my picture on the back pages of the newspapers, where I’d been apologising for my conduct after the Tottenham match. One of their players took a dive when I tackled him and the ref awarded a very dubious penalty that resulted in me shouting in his face, which earned me a well-deserved red card. Arsenal versus Tottenham is always a highly emotional fixture, to put it mildly.
Anyway, Mrs Fehmiu thought it might have been me who’d raped her, and what with that and the forensics in my car the cops then interviewed me for sixteen hours, at the end of which they typed up a transcript that bore absolutely no relation to what I had said on the tape. In the typewritten transcript I admitted more or less everything; I even admitted ‘doing an O.J.’ and trying to shake off a police car that was in pursuit of my vehicle. In short they verballed me, confident that the quality of the recording made of the interview was so poor that the jury wouldn’t be able to make out what was said, which proved to be the case. Indeed, the jury was so persuaded by the police transcript that it managed to hear me saying things on the tape that were never even there to hear. Weird but true.
Meanwhile it transpired that the police had managed to ‘lose’ the only piece of evidence that was vital to my defence: a used condom that was found in Greenwood Park on the day of the rape and in the spot where the victim said she’d been attacked. That condom would easily have cleared me.
The newspapers were involved, of course, and before I came to trial the tabloids did their bit for English justice; having already concluded that I was ‘a monster’, and ‘revealing’ that my nickname at Highbury was Norman Bates on account of my psycho-like personality on the park (which was a blatant lie), they managed to rake up the fact that I was already technically a rapist. As usual it wasn’t what they said, it was what they didn’t say. They managed to find an ex-girlfriend in Northampton with whom I’d had sex a few days before her sixteenth birthday. They neglected to mention that I was just eighteen at the time and that she and I had been going out for more than a year; her father — who was none too keen on someone he described as having ‘more than a touch of the tar-brush’ about him, i.e. me — had found out that we’d slept together and even though he wasn’t living at home with his daughter at the time, he threatened to have me charged with statutory rape. It hardly seemed to matter that this same girl volunteered to be a character witness in my defence.