Engleby (42 page)

R v Engleby
. Witness Statement. James Stellings, Partner,

Litigation Department, Oswald Payne, 75 Finsbury Pavement,

London EC4 7JB.

Is this thing working? Testing . . . Testing. Right. OK.

I suppose the first er the first word you’d use if you were describing Mike is that you’d say he was a loner. He . . . er . . . at college he was always on his own, he never seemed to be with other people. In the dining hall for instance he’d quite often sit apart. He’d get his tray if it was the self-service thing and go to the end of the table and if it was formal dinner, when it was laid and you sort of had to sit next to someone, then he’d sort of take his place. But he wouldn’t try to engage anyone in conversation.

He . . . he didn’t really seem to have any friends that I was aware of either in college or out. Though I know that he used to go out quite a bit in the evening but I don’t know where he went to.

I first met him I think probably on the very first day we were there. I just happened to find myself sitting next to him at er at dinner and I thought it was friendly to introduce myself and we had a chat and I wouldn’t say it was a very easy conversation, I mean, he wasn’t er . . . the sort of person who was very at ease in company at all. He was awkward, he was physically awkward, and he was er, er . . . ill at ease, it wasn’t, he wasn’t a man who appeared to be well in his own skin as it were.

But . . . er, he was, he had opinions, he had views, and he had extremely strong views in fact [
laughs
] on pretty well everything. I mean, I think if you had to sum up Mike you’d say he was an interesting man but he just wasn’t much fun to be with. I mean, unlike a lot of people where completely the reverse is true. They haven’t got anything interesting or worthwhile to say, but they’re actually quite easy or amusing to be with.

Of course one of the first things you notice about Mike is his appearance. Um . . . you know, he’s incredibly badly dressed and I remember him coming to dinner once at our house in London and turning up in some sort of bootlace cowboy tie and hideous sort of caramel-coloured slacks. I mean, you know, just the whole thing was . . . appalling. And his hair which was sort of wiry and always needed cutting but it wasn’t long in the sort of student style, it just looked as if it hadn’t been cut. And his thick glasses which were defiantly . . . Everyone in those days wore John Lennon-style round glasses but Mike had these er . . . thick sort of I suppose horn-rimmed at the top then rimless at the bottom. And physically he was he was pretty, to be crude, he was pretty unprepossessing. He was . . . Quite short, he wore these horrible clothes, I mean I seem to remember he’d occasionally have on a tee shirt of . . . with something rather inappropriate on the front of it. That was about his only concession to, you know, fashion at all. He grunted quite a lot, he made a lot of noise breathing.

And of course he was also . . . physically very strong. He had heavy shoulders and this big chest. I mean . . . He could have been a fantastic rower. He was a bit short I suppose, but er you know, he was, he gave the impression that, of being a very powerful young man, though as I say I don’t know if he actually took any exercise.

God, what else can you say? I kept in touch with him because I felt that . . . I . . . I saw something in him that I quite liked – but also I suppose out of a sense of kindness. He . . . er, I felt this was a guy who perhaps needed the odd friend. He certainly didn’t have any other friends, so far as I knew.

As far as Jennifer Arkland is concerned, er I think I knew that Mike had met her because he sort of er . . . gatecrashed one summer when they were making a film in Ireland, I remember him telling me about it at the beginning of it must have been our last year I think. Mike just sort of invited himself along and then . . . um, made himself useful. So I knew that he would have met her then and he did mention her to me I think once. He said something about that she was a friend of his. He didn’t say that it was anything more than that and I certainly never saw them together.

I knew almost nothing about his family. I knew that his father had died when he was young and that he’d . . . and that his mother went out to work but I couldn’t tell you, I haven’t the faintest idea what she did. Was there a sister? Did he have a sister or a younger brother? Er . . . I knew also that Mike came from a er . . . pretty er . . . simple background. He, you know, made no bones about that. He had quite a marked accent from wherever it was he came from . . . Reading, I think. Er . . . He didn’t make any attempt to sort of make himself sound more posh or anything like that as I think quite a lot of boys and girls did when they first went to university.

I don’t think he ever mentioned where he’d been to school. I assumed he’d been to the local grammar school. I mean that’s what, that’s where most people had been. There’s a sort of misconception that all the undergraduates are terribly posh and drink champagne, but it wasn’t like that at all. Most of them were from grammar schools. A lot of them were teetotal scientists who just scurried from their rooms to the lecture hall and back again.

What else? The other thing is that he was very clever. But again, so what? So were most of the young men and women there, and I’ve really no idea whether Mike had a higher IQ, more firepower intellectually than anyone else. But he certainly had a phenomenal memory. I mean, if you, if he, if you wanted to, you could test him on dates and lists and you know which record had been in the top ten when, but you know to his credit [
laughs
] he didn’t show off that too much but he certainly had a superior memory.

When I hear this you know, this . . . development, the trouble that Mike’s now in I’m . . . I’m surprised. Because I knew that Mike was a bit of an oddball, as I say – but I am surprised that anything . . . On the other hand, er, you have to say there was kind of concealed violence in a lot of his conversation, in the extreme positions he took on even little things, like music . . . And er politics and all sorts of things . . . He was extremely critical, I mean brutally critical of a lot of political thought and political belief. So there was a kind of maybe undischarged anger in the way that he saw the world.

The truth is I guess now I think about it, that you know that maybe I didn’t really know him at all. People are always mysterious, aren’t they? You know you find out that one of your best friends has been having an affair for years and you never knew anything about it. And I suppose in that way nothing should ever really surprise us because people are like icebergs, you only see the little bit on top.

On the particular questions that you . . . you mentioned in your letter, the particular points. Did Mike appear remote, unengaged, distant from others? Yes, I think I would say that. Next, did he have a ‘loner’ view of life? Yes, I’d definitely say yes to that, in fact it was the first word I used about him. Did he avoid social situations? Yes, I suppose probably he did. Perhaps because he was shy, but also perhaps because he thought he’d be bored, I think. Did he have low sexual desire? I know absolutely nothing about his sexual life at all. What’s the next one? ‘Interpersonal skills’, whatever that means. Yeah, they were poor, I mean really [
laughs
] . . . poor old Mike, I think of him at that dinner party, I mean, it was, it was very funny in a way, in a cruel way, watching him floundering and trying to talk to these people, but yeah he wasn’t able to handle that.

Next. His response to praise and criticism. Was he unresponsive? Yes. Indeed. I would say he was unresponsive to praise. For instance he did very well in the first-year exams and I said, ‘Well done, Mike, that’s fantastic,’ and he then had a very good reason for why anyone could do it, and it wasn’t any sort of achievement at all on his part. And that’s when he acquired the nickname of Groucho as in Groucho Marx who said I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.

Now, ‘difficulty in expressing anger’ . . . That’s also tricky. Yes and no. Um. I suppose it was bottled up, as I said earlier on, I certainly never saw him express anger. So . . . Of those six points I suppose I am answering in the affirmative to pretty well all of them. Sexual desire – except that one. I can’t really say.

What else can I say about Mike? Well of course, he was a terrible pedant. He was always correcting you if you said ‘between you and I’. And what was the other one that used to drive him up the wall? I forget. ‘Internecine’ maybe. Yes, I think I heard him go off on quite a rant about that. You know when people think it’s just a posh word for ‘internal’? I forget what it really does mean now. Better ask Mike.

But of course none of these things made him very popular. People don’t like being ticked off for their grammar especially when they’re just trying to be friendly and thinking maybe Mike could have used a friend.

I did like him, though. Why am I talking in the past, as though he’s dead? I’d like to end by saying that I did like him, though I may have sounded a bit lukewarm in this tape. And I will stick by him even if it turns out for the worst.

So what do I like about him? Mike . . . God. [
laughs
] Not his clothes, that’s for sure. I liked his manner. I think. Although it was awkward, direct, embarrassing . . . It was embarrassing, it was painful to be around sometimes. But there was something deeply er . . . uncompromising about him. He told it exactly how he saw it. It made me laugh. Mike made me laugh a lot, though I often thought he didn’t really get the joke himself. Yes, that’s weird now I come to think of it. He could be very funny, but he hardly ever laughed. He very seldom laughed or showed any emotion at all.

I’ll definitely keep in touch. I’ve certainly never met anyone else quite like him. I’ll send him cards or go and see him. I think that’s all. I’m going to stop this thing now.

I confirm that this is a true and accurate transcript of the tape I made. Signed: James Stellings, 24 July, 1988

Who would have thought old Stellings to have quite such pedestrian thought processes? And to be quite so radically inarticulate? I’d always thought of him with his Montrachet and his Rodgers and Hammerstein as rather debonair. But then as he himself remarked – with such shining originality – perhaps you never really know people.

Oh well.

Yesterday, Dr Exley – deliberately, I think – left some more papers on the table in the room where we do our interviews while he went out to talk to one of the officers. I wasn’t sure whether the scrawly notes were intended to go to the lawyers or to his fellow defence shrink. Or perhaps they were just a memo to himself. Anyway, he was gone for ten minutes, so I read them.

Dr Julian Exley MD, FRCPsych

Preparatory notes for report on patient M. Engleby in case of

R v Engleby.

(Philippa: please leave or fill gaps where indicated. I shall have to redraft in more formal way later. More typing . . . Sorry! J) I recommend a plea of guilty to manslaughter but not guilty to murder on the grounds of diminished responsibility. I expect that expert opinion for the prosecution will agree with the diagnosis and accept the plea. However, in view of the notoriety of the case, it’s possible that the judge will want to put it before a jury, so I have roughed out a report in more detail on the grounds that I may have to give evidence in person.

1.

Michael Engleby is a 35-year-old male of Anglo-Saxon/Caucasiandescent.

He was brought up in a normal working-class family, he is unusually well educated (grammar school, public school, Cambridge University) and has a high IQ (see test results, to be appended). He has managed to retain a well paid and respectable job in journalism. He is financially solvent, has some savings and owns the leasehold (less outstanding mortgage) of a small flat in London.

He has a mild cardiac arrhythmia, and lung function test results (using Youlten peak-flow meter) are slightly below average for his age. This may be caused by excessive smoking. He has a borderline alcohol dependency problem and has been a heavy drug user in the past. Neither condition appears to be acute, however. In prison, he has been prescribed ten mg diazepam twice daily and this seems to be all that is necessary.

Throughout his life, however, he has had difficulty in forming even rudimentary attachments to others. He disliked his father, who, he says, abused him as a child by beating him regularly. His mother appears to have been the dominant figure at home, yet emotionally distant. He had little respect for her and minimal attachment. He claims to have been ‘close’ to a younger sister, but has hardly seen her in the last ten years. He had no close friends at school, university or work. He says that the resulting solitude has not bothered him, that in fact he prefers it.

His preference has been for solitary activities, such as reading or listening to music. In journalism, he made it a condition of his joining the staff of a newspaper that he need not go to the office more than once or twice a week, thus maintaining his solitude. As he put it to me, ‘I’d rather be abandoned than engulfed.’