A Matter for the Jury (8 page)

She put a hand on Jess's arm.

‘Jess, I've never told anyone what I've just told you – not even my closest friend. And I'm not sure what it means, if it means anything at all. It's just that, when you asked me to meet you and talk about being a witness for Igg… well, it's not that I don't want to help – I know I owe him that. It's just that… well, I'm not sure I would make a particularly good witness.'

13

Detective Superintendent Arnold
and Detective Inspector Phillips made a deliberately vigorous entry into the small interview room, throwing back the door so that
the knob crashed into the wall, pulling out their chairs from under the table with a clatter, and seating themselves purposefully. Arnold had arranged for Billy Cottage to be brought up from the cells half an hour before commencing the interview. He wanted to give him time to reflect after a night, and a good part of the following day, in the cells. Phillips was poised to resume writing in his notebook. Arnold folded his hands in front of him on the table.

‘I tell you what, Billy,' he said.
‘Let's not waste any more time. I'm going to explain to you what happened on the
Rosemary D
late Saturday night, early Sunday morning. The young lady who owns the cross you found – her name is Jennifer Doyce. She went on board the
Rosemary D
with her boyfriend, Frank Gilliam. This was on Saturday night, some time just before midnight. Someone attacked them. With this…'

Arnold reached down to his left and picked up a thick plastic sack, which had several yellow exhibit labels carefully attached to the tape around its neck. It contained a heavy-looking winch handle with a number of rust-coloured stains.

‘This would have been used for lowering and raising the anchor. But of course, you'd know all about that, wouldn't you? It's been in the water for
a while. Whoever attacked Frank and Jennifer would have thrown it overboard, hoping it might drift downstream with the silt. But, as luck would have it, it caught on the anchor line, and didn't go anywhere. The frogmen we sent down to look for a weapon swam right into it. The blood stains are a bit degraded, but there is still enough to be identified as the same blood groups as the victims'.

Arnold banged the winch handle on the table for emphasis.

‘Jennifer is still alive – just,' he said. ‘She has serious head injuries, and she was raped. She's in a bad way but, unfortunately for whoever did this, she survived, and she may well make a good recovery over time. In fact, DI Phillips and I spoke to her for a few minutes this morning.'

He paused to allow this to sink in.
Billy appeared cowed, but Arnold was not sure whether his expression changed much in response to hearing the news.

‘Frank, on the other hand, is dead. The cause of death was a series of blows to the head with a heavy blunt instrument, resulting in a fractured skull. So we have one charge of murder, one charge of attempted murder, and one charge of rape. And here you are, with her gold cross and chain in your possession, lying to us about where you found it, telling us you found it in the grass, even after we've explained to you that it was taken from her neck by her attacker.'

Billy was staring into the distance at no one and nothing in particular.

‘I think I should caution you again, Billy,' Arnold said,
‘because I must tell you honestly, I suspect that you may be responsible for the attack on Jennifer and Frank.'

‘No…' Billy began to protest, his voice almost plaintive.

‘Just listen to me, Billy. Again, I must remind you that you are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you do say will be taken down and may be given in evidence. Now, do you wish to say anything? Do you wish to explain where you got the cross and chain?'

When I was bound apprentice in famous Lincolnshire
…

Billy seemed lost in thought.

‘It might not have been by the boat. It might have been in the reeds, further along the tow path, closer to town.'

‘
Might
have been?'

‘I don't remember exactly. But it must have been, otherwise the police would have found it before I did, wouldn't they?'

‘So now,' Arnold said, ‘you're saying it wasn't by the lock, on your side of the river, as you originally told us, or by the boat itself, on the other side, as you also suggested. Now, you're saying it was on the bank but closer to town? That's what you're saying now, is it?'

Full well I served my master for nigh on seven years
…

‘I think so.'

Arnold sat back in his chair, pausing, allowing Phillips to catch up.

‘Let's consider that for a moment,' he said. ‘First question: when was this?'

‘I already told you,' Billy replied, with a show of defiance, ‘on Tuesday morning.'

‘Let's accept that for the
moment, even though there would have been police officers walking up and down the river bank all day. What were you doing on the other side of the river, anyway?'

‘I often go over to that side. I have to be aware of possible hazards to river craft, reeds, flotsam and jetsam. You can't see everything from the lock. You have to go and look for yourself. People coming through the lock expect me to tell them about things like that. I
f I didn't, and a craft met with an accident, the River Board would be down on me like a ton of bricks.'

‘Are you sure you didn't cross the river to get a look inside the
Rosemary D
?'

Till I took up to poaching as you shall quickly hear…

‘Why would I do that? I know where she is. She's a hazard, like I said. But there's nothing I can do about it. If the River Board…'

‘I don't think it's got anything to do with the River Board, Billy,' Arnold said. ‘I think it's got more to do with what goes on inside the boat, rather than around her.'

Oh, 'tis my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year.

‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘Yes, you do. All those young courting couples going there and getting up to all kinds of mischief. You know all about that, Billy. You
know what goes on. You like to watch, don't you?'

‘No.'

‘Of course you do. PC Willis nicked you for it before, didn't he? You were standing outside a girl's house watching her undress and playing with yourself. You got a conditional discharge from the magistrates.'

‘That's not how it was
. I can explain that.'

‘No conditional discharge this time, Billy. Not for murder. Not for rape. You went to watch, didn't you? What happened? Did you decide it wasn't enough to watch? Did you want to join in? Wouldn't they let you, is that it?
Did they try to send you on your way?'

‘No.'

‘And you got angry. I understand that. Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't they let you have a bit of fun with them?'

‘No.'

‘So you get angry. You start to leave, but then you think
, sod it, they're not going to treat me like this. So you pick up the winch handle, and you go after them. Who do you attack first? Frank, I would think. Get him out of the way, so he can't interfere. Then you take Jennifer, once you've clobbered her over the head as well, and she can't resist any more. Was she your first, Billy?
Do you want to tell me all about it?'

Billy was rocking back and forth in his chair. He appeared to be having trouble breathing. Phillips looked across at Arnold questioningly, but Arnold raised a hand slightly. There was a long silence. Arnold waited.

‘I've never even been on that boat,' Billy said eventually.

Arnold sat up in his chair.

‘I want you to think very carefully about that answer, Billy,'
he replied quietly. ‘I'm going to give you the chance to change your mind, to tell us the truth. Perhaps you were on board, but nothing happened, at least nothing to do with you? Perhaps you discovered the scene and panicked, didn't know what to do, just ran away?'

Billy shook his head.

‘I never went on board,' he said. ‘I never had the need to.'

‘In that case,' Arnold asked, ‘why did my forensic officer find your fingerprint on a window ledge in the aft cabin – an inside window ledge? The police have your fingerprints from your last arrest, or had you forgotten?
The print has some blood around it, by the way – same group as Jennifer's, as it turns out.'

Billy was staring helplessly up at the ceiling.

Arnold stood up.

‘The other strange thing,' he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘is that when we spoke to Jennifer today, she told us that she remembered the man who attacked her was humming a tune to himself, almost under his breath, but she could hear it. This was while he was raping her, before she lost consciousness.
Care to guess what tune he was humming, Billy?'

Phillips also stood.

‘I'm going to arrange for you to see a solicitor,' Arnold said. ‘I think you need some legal advice. In the meanwhile, I am going to speak to my superiors in Cambridge, and I am going to recommend that you be charged with the murder of Frank Gilliam and with the attempted murder and rape of Jennifer Doyce.'

He turned towards the door.

‘Oh – and also, larceny of the gold cross and chain.
Jennifer recognised it as hers. Mustn't forget that, must we?'

Sergeant Livermore was approaching as Arnold and Phillips left the interview room.

‘You were asking about solicitors earlier, sir. There is actually a solicitor at the station at the moment,' he said. ‘John Singer, local chap, well regarded. He was here on another matter.' He leaned towards the two detectives knowingly, confidentially. ‘Vicar with an unhealthy interest in choir boys. He said he would be happy to have a word with Billy.'

‘Sounds like the perfect man for the job,' Arnold said.

14

3 February

It was a few
minutes after seven in the evening. Barratt and Suzie Davis had just settled down in the living room of their home in Kensington with a bottle of White Burgundy, some olives, and a prized recording of Elgar's
Enigma Variations
– the London Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. When the phone rang, they exchanged frustrated glances. They had both had an extremely busy day. Barratt's clients had been especially challenging. Suzie ran a small fashion boutique with a growing reputation in the Kings Road, Chelsea, and had been run off her feet. This was their time to unwind. For a moment Barratt considered letting the phone ring unanswered, but the habit of a lifetime was not to be broken now. Turning Elgar down a little, he walked slowly across the room, giving whoever was calling ample time to change their mind and hang up. No such luck. He picked up the phone.

‘Barratt Davis.'

The voice on the other end of the line sounded breathless, as if its owner had run some distance to the phone.

‘Barratt, this is John Singer. I'm awfully sorry to disturb your evening. I've been at the police station all afternoon, and I've only just got back to the office.'

‘Hello, John,' Barratt replied. ‘This is a surprise. What's the matter? Has the Reverend Mr Little been on the rampage again?'

Suzie made a face at him. She stood, walked to the record player, gently lifted the needle and replaced it carefully in its cradle. Returning to the coffee table, she picked up Barratt's glass, crossed the room again and handed it to him with a sympathetic kiss on the cheek. He smiled and blew her a kiss in return.

‘No, something far worse, I'm afraid,' Singer was saying. ‘It's right out of my league. I'm hoping you will take it, Barratt, but in any case it will need a London solicitor and counsel. It's a dreadful business.'

There was a silence on the line.

‘Barratt, have you ever defended a capital murder?'

The question hit Barratt like a jug of iced water in the face. For some moments, he stared vacantly ahead of him, as a torrent of memories cascaded unchecked through his mind. Three cases: all convictions; the evidence overwhelming; the defence impossible; the result a certainty from the beginning; the dreadful consequences of conviction seemingly quite inevitable. The former Army lieutenant who caught his wife in bed with a close friend. He had brought his service revolver back home with him after the War. He had probably never fully recovered from the stress of combat, and by the time he managed to bring himself under control, he had shot both of them in the head, twice, at close range. Tried, convicted, sentenced, and executed. The twenty-year-old lad who surprised the owner during a burglary of an electrical store. The store should have been locked and unoccupied at that time of night, but the elderly owner was preparing for his annual audit, and had some late-night paperwork to do in the back office. The lad panicked and hit him once over the head with the solid brass lamp he kept on his desk. It was a blow that would not have killed everyone, but it killed this man. Tried, convicted, sentenced, and executed. The thirty-year-old mother, abandoned by her husband, who smothered her disabled seven-year-old son with a pillow out of sheer desperation, after she had gone for weeks without sleep and did not know where to turn. Tried, convicted, sentenced but, at the very last moment, reprieved by the Home Secretary, sentence commuted to life imprisonment – a victory of a kind. He remembered, indeed he could still feel, and even smell, the atmosphere of those trials: sweaty, tense, nervous, gut-wrenching; the constant and mostly vain efforts to reassure a client who was probably going to be dead at the hands of the public executioner within three months; the sleepless nights; the obsessive going over the facts, time and time again, searching for something – anything – that might offer a way out; the endless analysis of simple points of law, searching for any loophole that might have been overlooked. After conviction, the moment of sentence, the judge's clerk carefully placing the black cap on top of his wig, the ‘Red Judge' in his terrifying red robes, the colour of retribution. After sentence, the hopeless trip to the Court of Criminal Appeal, in which any remaining glimmer of hope was summarily snuffed out by three dismissive appellate judges. Finally, the night before the execution, the Home Secretary's final rejection of the plea for clemency – ‘the law must take its course'; the hours of drinking in a futile bid to release the tension; the sleepless night; the announcement of the execution on the radio the next morning. Then, somehow, back to the office as if it were just another day at work, completely hung over, barely capable of carrying on a normal conversation, trying to summon up the will to deal with a shoplifting prosecution or a routine contractual dispute. Yes, he had defended capital murders, and he never wanted to do it again.

‘The client is a man called Billy Cottage,' Singer was saying. ‘He was charged late this afternoon, he appeared before the magistrates, and he was remanded in custody. He is at Bedford Gaol. It was a brutal attack on a courting couple making love on a houseboat on the river, just outside St Ives. They were both savagely beaten with a winch handle, and the girl was raped. The young man died. The young woman is still on the critical list in Addenbrooke's. They are not sure whether she will pull through.This was not this weekend but the previous one – 25 and 26 of January – late Saturday night or early Sunday morning'

It came back to Barratt immediately.

‘Yes, I read about it in the papers,' he said. He hesitated, conscious that he was about to mortgage yet another chapter of his life. ‘Do we know what evidence they have against him?'

‘I haven't seen any forensic reports yet, but the detective superintendent in charge of the case told me that they found a fingerprint inside the boat, on an inside window ledge, with a blood stain of the same group as the girl. Then there's something I don't understand about witnesses who heard him humming some tune. I'm not sure whether there is anything in that. It won't become clear till the committal proceedings.'

There was a lengthy silence, while Barratt Davis weighed his personal feelings against his sense of responsibility.

‘What counsel would you use for this?' Singer asked eventually.

‘Martin Hardcastle QC,' Barratt replied, without hesitation. ‘I used him in the last two of the three capital cases I've been involved in, and in many other cases also, over the years. Martin is brilliant in court, but he will need a hard-working junior to organise the evidence for him and help with the law. I think I would be inclined to go with Ben Schroeder again.'

‘He's a bit young for a murder, isn't he?' Singer commented. ‘I must say I was very impressed with him in the conference, and he seems to be taking charge of the Reverend Little's case very well. But, still, he…'

‘Young men have to grow up quickly at the Bar these days, John,' Barratt replied. ‘Martin did four capital murders on his own in his first two years of practice as a junior. Ben will never have to do that, thank God. In any case, Martin will do all the work in court. Ben will be there at his beck and call, to make sure he has whatever he needs.'

‘Whatever you think best,' Singer said. ‘I'm just glad you're on board. It's a weight off my mind, I don't mind telling you. I'll make arrangements for an initial conference if you will ask your secretary to phone the office tomorrow. I just want rid of it. I want to get back to being a country solicitor.'

‘That suddenly sounds very appealing,' Barratt said, wishing Singer a good evening. ‘Perhaps I will give it a try myself. You don't happen to need a partner, do you?'

Singer laughed out loud. ‘Come off it, Barratt,' he replied. ‘You would be bored to death. You wouldn't last a month.'

* * *

Martin Hardcastle said very little during the phone call from Barratt Davis. It was better that way, at that time of night. It was, in any case, no more than a courtesy call from a man who was his friend, as well as a professional client. As professional etiquette demanded, Davis would call Vernon, Hardcastle's clerk, in the morning to retain him formally, and Vernon would make all the necessary arrangements. That was when the real business began. All that was needed tonight was an exchange of greetings and familiar expressions of confidence. These days, in the blur his life had become, cases came and went – even capital murders – and Hardcastle had done enough of those by now to have abandoned any pretence that he could wave a magic wand, swoop down from on high to save a life by his forensic brilliance. He also knew that a solicitor of Barratt Davis's experience and competence would not believe for a moment that he could. On the other hand, he had won a few – cases where the evidence was not strong; or where the jury, conscious of the looming penalty and having some sympathy for the defendant, found a reason to convict of manslaughter rather than murder; or occasionally even to acquit altogether because of self-defence. And there was still the reassurance of being instructed in a case, the elusive security of being in work, the feeling of being wanted, that never seemed to go away – forever an integral part of the psyche of the barrister. Just before Davis's call, Hardcastle had, with determination, put the cap back on his bottle of Bell's whisky. He had to be in court the next morning, to make his closing speech to the jury in a fraud case. But a new case called for a reward.

Rewards. Martin Hardcastle had come to the Bar with impressive credentials. He had taken a first in Law at Cambridge, followed by the degree of Bachelor of Civil Law at Oxford. He passed his bar examinations, also with first-class honours, and was invited back to Trinity Hall to give supervisions in criminal law while he did his pupillage. A fellowship was within his grasp if he wanted it. So was a tenancy in excellent Chambers, the Chambers of Miles Overton QC, which offered a range of first-rate work, especially in crime and divorce. Unusually, he had to make the choice between academia and practice, and chose the cut and thrust of practice as more suited to his temperament. Once he gained a place in Chambers his career flourished. His command of the law was obvious, his style in court patient and courteous, yet forceful and precise. Judges liked him; juries ate out of his hand. After fifteen years, he took Silk, and he seemed poised to collect every reward the Bar offered. In addition to those he gave himself.

The rewards Martin Hardcastle gave himself started harmlessly enough, not long after his call to the Bar. They were not his idea. Occasionally, a member of Chambers would celebrate a really good result in court with a bottle or two of champagne in Chambers, to be shared with everyone, or a pint or two in the Devereux with one or two colleagues. Drinking more than that during the week was discouraged in Chambers. At weekends it was a different story. Dinner parties and weekends in the country were part of Chambers life, and the wine flowed freely. But during the week, the expectation was that the drinking would stop – unless there was a good result to celebrate. So Martin was scrupulous in limiting
the rewards he shared with colleagues – there was no point in giving the wrong impression in Chambers. He started smoking cigarettes to take his mind off the rewards while he was working but, on the other hand, he saw no reason to deprive himself of the rewards completely. He had earned them, and he deserved them more than most. He had many good results in court. It was just a question of practicality to reward himself at home, rather than in Chambers or in the Devereux.

Home was a flat on the top floor of a building in Gray's Inn, a respectable distance from his Chambers in Brick Court, in the Middle Temple. At home, he could keep an ample supply of wine for dinner – he was a respectable home cook in those days – and an ample supply of Bell's for after dinner. At home, there was no one to judge him. In any case, if people knew how hard he worked, if they knew how good he was in court, they would understand. Of course, you couldn't guarantee a really good result in court. Sometimes, the other side held all the aces, and it was a matter of damage control rather than victory. Then, any result was a cause for celebration. They all mattered to the client, and damage control took just as much skill as winning. That deserved a reward, too. Sometimes, there was no result at all, nothing particular happening, just a trial dragging interminably on. So then, he celebrated the fact that the next day was Friday; or Thursday. Sometimes, he celebrated something as simple as getting through the day and, sometimes, he celebrated getting through the day without anyone noticing that he was not his usual self; because there were days when he woke up not feeling his usual self, and the symptoms tended to persist throughout the day. Probably just stress, and not getting enough sleep he told himself.
But he managed; he was in control.

Fair enough, there had been the odd day here and there when he was not up to going to court in the morning. He always phoned Vernon early to explain: it was the Indian food consumed at a dodgy restaurant the night before; it was the stomach bug that was doing the rounds: ‘you must have heard about it, Vernon, everybody's going down with it, no need to worry, just a 24-hour job, be as right as rain tomorrow'. Vernon would duly phone the court and pass on Mr Hardcastle's regrets and, after all, he had a junior at court to hold the fort. He would appear at court the next day, apologise profusely to the judge, the jury and his client, he would forego the rewards for a day or two, and he would begin to feel better again.