Chase Your Shadow by John Carlin Read Free Book Online

answer to that question, and he did not shrink from letting Pistorius know it. Nel’s job was not to feel his pain but to compound it, portraying him before magistrate Nair as a callous, self-engrossed glory-seeker, amply capable of premeditated murder.
    There had been an age of innocence when Pistorius’s idea of a menacing rival was a young Brazilian double amputee who presumed to challenge his status as the planet’s fastest Paralympic runner. Now the foe was Nel, and what was at stake was not the outcome of a 200 meter sprint but whether he would spend the next quarter of a century behind bars. Nel, who would be the prosecutor at the murder trial too, was a man who could have made five times more money had he opted to become a defense lawyer in private practice. Some of his fellow lawyers said he lacked the self-assurance to operate on his own, without the weight of the state behind him; others said that he was driven by a zeal to uphold the rule of law on behalf of the South African state. Whatever the case, he was dogged and he was plucky.In his role as state prosecutor he had faced down threats from powerful people in government and from gangland criminals with contract killers on their payrolls.
    Nel, dressed in the black robes of his profession, stood before the similarly attired Desmond Nair, and proclaimed the state’s certainty that the accused had known exactly whom he was shooting at when he fired his gun. It was common cause, he said, that the victim had died ‘of multiple gunshot wounds’, that he had fired four bullets through a locked bathroom door, three of which had struck Reeva, one in the hip, one in the right arm, one in the head. Where the state differed from the defense was in the contention that it was premeditated murder. Premeditated did not have to mean that he had meticulously planned to kill Reeva Steenkamp; all the state had to do, Nel contended, was to prove that he had resolved to do away with her life prior to pulling the trigger.
    If Nel’s purpose was in part to obtain a reaction from the man in the dock, he succeeded. Battling as he had been to keep his features stonily composed, Pistorius winced at that first mention of the charge that he had knowingly killed Reeva; then he covered his face with his hands and his shoulders heaved.
    Nel seized his chance. ‘It is a possibility,’ he said, casting a wry glance at the gallery, ‘that after shooting someone, one starts to feel sorry for oneself.’ Aimée put her hand to her mouth and shook her head, dismayed by Nel’s pitilessness. But the prosecutor pressed on. It was possible the accused felt sorry, he said, because he was thinking, ‘I am going to jail and my career is gone.’
    There was method in Nel’s heartlessness. He did not want the public, much less the magistrate, to sympathize with the fallen hero. He wanted them to despise him.
    Pistorius had gone into the bail hearing knowing that peoplewould find his version of events difficult to believe. He could see how people might think that in his place they would lie. His lawyers were well aware of how hard it would be to convince the public, never mind a magistrate, that he was telling the truth. The pressure was on him to provide a plausible alternative or, as some chose to see it, to fabricate a good story. The tone and content of the affidavits presented to the magistrate had to be carefully judged. A British media adviser had warned his lawyers not to ‘over-egg’ his case. At the adviser’s prompting, the initial idea of including in the affidavit mention not only of his immense love for Reeva, but of his desire to marry her, was removed. It was true, he insisted to his lawyers – but they had judged the public mood and, by extension, what that of the magistrate was likely to be. The mention of marriage plans might have elicited howls of derision from the courtroom, which was packed with news reporters and members of the public, while adding nothing of material