THE LAW FIRM for which Steve Clark works bears all the hallmarks of a venerable institution — vaulted reception hall, plush carpets, swishy lifts. But as we make our way to one of the discreet, windowless meeting rooms, I have the niggling feeling that something is not quite right. On the walls are not the usual expensive abstracts but photographs of people who are victims of life’s cruel chance: the boxer Michael Watson, the parents of savagely abused Victoria Climbi é, the wife of beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl. They look out of place in this corporate citadel and yet, bearing in mind the conversation we are about to have, they are also strangely apt.
The last time Steve Clark emerged in public he looked as unexceptional as he does now in pinstripe suit and subdued silk tie: it is the image of his wife clutching his hand on the steps of the Court of Appeal that is printed indelibly upon the nation’s consciousness. Hollow-eyed and painfully thin, Sally Clark appeared to have etched upon her gaunt face every lost minute of the three years and 81 days she had spent in prison wrongfully convicted of the murder of her two baby sons. “We are not victorious. There are no winners here. We have all lost out,” she told the crowds amassed outside the Law Courts in the Strand in a speech remarkable not only for its dignity but also for its absence of rancour.
The story of Sally Clark — the solicitor who endured the death of her first son Christopher at 11 weeks and, a year later, the loss of two-month-old Harry; whose third son was then taken from her in infancy as she awaited trial; who was vilified after being pronounced a child killer; and who finally, after two intensely fought, long-drawn-out appeals, was found to be innocent — is, without doubt, one of the most hideous and hellish miscarriages of justice of our times.
Her exoneration had a direct bearing on the subsequent clearing of two other women also accused of killing their babies — Angela Cannings and Trupti Patel — and led to the Attorney-General ordering a review of almost 300 similar cases in which the paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow had given evidence (of 100 reviewed so far, five should go to the Court of Appeal, legal advisers have decided).
Inevitably, when Sally was freed, everyone wanted to know how she felt, what she had been through and what she was going to do next. Eighteen months on, we are about to find out, although not in the way you might expect. Stolen Innocence: A Mother’s Fight for Justice does tell, in unsparing detail, the story of the Clark case. Much of the narrative is in Sally’s own words — some passages written from her prison cell, some of her most reflective thoughts composed afterwards. But the author name on the spine is not Sally’s — it is that of John Batt, a lawyer and family friend. Despite her own substantial contribution, she has not read the final draft. “Sally still isn’t well, and she never will be well again,” her 42-year-old husband says flatly. “She has written all this stuff, but she doesn’t want to see it. It upsets her. She would really rather this wasn’t happening.”
An interview with Sally herself, is, he has told us, out of the question. We are here in his office rather than at home, because that is where Sally is, with their five-year-old son “Tom” (the child’s real name is protected by court order). “She doesn’t know I am doing this,” he says. “I’m speaking because there are some points to be made. She knows there is going to be some publicity but she won’t be reading the piece and I am not going to tell her when it is coming out. We are all trying to protect her.”
Is it possible to keep a highly intelligent and once “fantastically competent” professional in the dark as her name and face is emblazoned across front pages? I don’t know. But the more Steve talks, the more I understand why he is so anxious to keep his wife in her cocoon.
According to the psychiatrist who has assessed Sally, she is suffering from an “enduring personality change” caused by a “catastrophic experience”. Essentially, Steve says, it means “that she is not the happy, confident person she was before this happened to her. She is vulnerable, she has panic attacks, she gets flustered by things that most of us just deal with. She constantly feels that people are judging her and it is a vicious circle. She is the one who passed her driving test first time — I failed mine twice — but she hasn’t driven on her own since she came out; she hasn’t got the confidence.”
Her fragility is such that, although she is not working, she needs the support of a full-time nanny to help care for Tom. “The nanny does the school run, and sometimes Sally goes with her, but sometimes she can’t face that. Initially she was frightened of being in the school playground in case someone pointed at her and said, ‘That’s Sally Clark, who murdered her two children’. Actually the other mums have been wonderful and have tried to include her in all their activities, but she can’t face crowds either. Some days she is the old Sally, but a lot of the time she is just exhausted. She was strong for all those years in prison — she held it together, and now she doesn’t have to fight the system, all her defences are down.”
When Sally, now 39, and Steve met some 16 years ago, they epitomised, in every sense, a meritocratic couple ready to embrace a modern marriage of two wholes, rather than two halves. Each had come from relatively ordinary beginnings, and yet there was nothing mundane about the way their lives meshed together. He is the elder son of a sales manager father and teacher mother, the only pupil from the sixth form of his Derbyshire comprehensive to make it through Oxbridge. He was 27, single, sharing a flat with two old university friends from Cambridge and working for the City firm Clifford Chance when, in the spring of 1988, a “vibrant, pretty, outgoing” management trainee from Citibank walked into his office. Sally Lockyer, as she then was, had had an equally successful, if perhaps not quite so assured, start to her working life. The only daughter of a police chief superintendent father and hairdresser mother, she had been told by teachers at her girls ’ grammar in Salisbury, Wiltshire, that she was not bright enough to study law, but had then stunned them by achieving results so good that she could have sat for Oxbridge. Unlike Steve, however, she did not have parents who had been to university — Oxbridge was a leap too far. Instead, her path into merchant banking had been via an industrial geography degree at Southampton, where she narrowly missed a first.
In the book Sally draws several candid comparisons between herself — the “stomper and flouncer” — and her “calm, easy-going, even-tempered” husband. “Steve was the first man who stood up to me,” she writes. “Previous boyfriends let me control the relationship. Steve never does that. Until I met Steve, I would not back down. My love for him has taught me to compromise.”
The only tinge of regret at their wedding in 1990 was that Sally’s mother Jean was not there with them — she had died the year before, of breast cancer. Shortly afterwards Sally decided to quit her £30,000-a-year job at Citibank to pursue the law career she had always wanted.
It is not hard to picture them, three years later, making the move to Manchester, where Steve had secured his first equity partnership; within a year Sally was working in the corporate finance department of the same firm. Her professional switch meant that they were a bit later than many of their friends in starting a family, but in 1996, at the age of 32, Sally gave birth to Christopher. The book details their first, tentative attempts at parenting: the nursery with the Noah’ s Ark curtains, the feeding, the bathing and the chilling moment, on the evening of Friday, December 13, when Sally — alone in the house because Steve was at an office dinner — went to the Moses basket and found that the face of her baby had turned dusky grey.
