Quota (21 page)

‘How am I going mate?'

‘I can't tell you,' hissed Charlie. ‘You're still under oath until the cross-examination's finished. I can't discuss your evidence with you.'

‘Yeah, but you can tell me if I'm doing all right or not. That's not evidence,' Charlie looked at the ground. ‘No I can't.'

Patrick took a long drag on the smoke and ashed it by his side.

‘Strange, isn't it? We're back in your world now. Rules, rules, rules.'

Charlie couldn't help himself.

‘You mighta been frank in the first place,' he answered. But as soon as he saw the wounded look cross Patrick's face, he knew he'd been unfair.

‘Just keep your chin up,' he offered feebly.

‘Mm.' Patrick dropped the butt and ground it into the cobbles with his heel. He turned away without another look at Charlie and walked back inside. Charlie was left watching his back, the troubled downward tilt of his neck, as the shadows consumed him.

AT TWO SEVENTEEN pm, Jose Ocas rose to cross-examine. Dark-featured and heavy, his manner finely tuned to suggest the outsider's role, he came as near to exotica as such a room would allow. A fairground boxer, curiously pinned into the ritual garb of old England: the jabot, the wig, the outlandish folds of the great black gown. Nothing about his demeanour sat easily with the pompous attire.

He surveyed the room, his deep-set eyes lingering a moment over the jury, before picking up a document from the scatter of papers before him. He held it at half an arm's length, studying it silently as he stroked at the chin of his beard. Patrick waited, inert and helpless, through this set piece.

‘I was going to ask you questions about your statement, Mr Lanegan,' Ocas began, in a tone that suggested mock offence. ‘But it's not much use to us now, is it?'

He threw the document onto the table and looked to the jury, his face a pained grimace.
This treacherous witness has deceived us
. He plainly didn't care for any answer to the rhetorical query.

‘All lies. You lied to the police, didn't you, Mr Lanegan?'

Weir rose in feeble protest. ‘Perhaps Mr Ocas would like to be more specific?'

The judge nodded slightly and Ocas held a palm out in front of him. ‘I'll get to that, Your Honour. I will.'

Ocas allowed a long silence to grow in the room with himself at its centre. Slumped over his notes, Charlie felt a reluctant admiration for his stagecraft. At the very moment when any further silence might have caused murmuring among those present, Ocas resumed with thunderous rage.

‘You sold abalone on the black market for the Murchisons!' he bellowed.

‘Yes I did.'

‘You received from them, at various times, deliveries of hydroponically grown cannabis for resale to others!'

‘Me and me brother, yes.'

‘You have prior convictions for, among other things, aggravated assault.'

‘I do.'

‘Threats to kill…'

‘Yes.'

‘Burglary, theft from motor vehicle and affray, Mr Lanegan.'

‘Yes. I done those things.' Patrick's voice had fallen to a murmur. He seemed fixated on the timber rail of the witness box in front of him, his fingers absently drawing lines along the grain.

‘You hadn't committed an offence for, oh, nineteen months before all this, had you?' Ocas waved the rap sheet around his head in feigned wonderment.

‘No, I hadn't.' Patrick raised his chin with a glimmer of defiance. ‘I was focused on me family.'

‘On your
family
…' recited Ocas, freighting the first syllable with all the sarcasm it would carry. ‘That's noble. Were you focused on your family when you swore a completely false statement before Detective Sergeant Robertson?'

Patrick glared back at his tormentor but said nothing. Watching his helpless fury, Charlie wondered if the lost soul in the witness box could finally feel the reality of what Charlie had been trying to tell him—that the rules would ultimately prevail, that the law created blind corners like this one where guile and fists and stoicism were impotent. A finely structured, state-sanctioned torture, governed by a complex code that the room couldn't see. Only those in the robes, four barristers and a judge, knew exactly how far this battering could proceed, where the margins were. Charlie knew there was ample room between those margins for total humiliation. Ocas had worked these questions up over weeks, had measured carefully the forensic impact of each. As he lifted each line off the page and into the air, he was applying his own long-tested barometer, sensing the mood in the room, the emotional endurance of the witness, the patience of the listeners. Each question was matured, polished and precision-engineered long before it found voice, for all it might have sounded like spontaneous argument. And for each question, Patrick had seconds to respond.

Ocas pointed to his left. ‘You owe this jury an answer, Mr Lanegan. Your brother had been dead not even a couple of hours and you were already telling outrageous lies to Detective Sergeant Robertson, weren't you.'

‘I don't know if they were outrageous,' sighed Patrick. ‘That's your word. There were lies in there, yes. I would've thought that's pretty obvious.'

Again, Ocas reeled in imaginary offence. ‘Obvious, Mr Lanegan? All right, I'm going to give you your statement and you can tell me which parts are the true parts of the—I take it there are
some
true parts, are there?'

‘There would be, yes.' The room fell silent but for the faint tapping of the stenographer, as the document was handed across the bar table to the associate, then the tipstaff and finally to the witness. Patrick studied it for some time.

‘The first page is true,' he said quietly. He turned the page over the staple at the corner. It hung there as he read. ‘Second page is all true too. Again he turned the page. ‘Third page I made up.'

‘Mmm,' grunted Ocas. ‘Is that your signature at the foot of the document, Mr Lanegan, after the third page that, as you so eloquently put it, you “made up”? I'm referring to the one at the top of the fourth page.'

‘Yes it is.'

‘Just read me the words, Mr Lanegan, that appear directly above your signature, will you please?'

‘“I hereby acknowledge that this statement is true and correct and I make it in the belief that a person making a false statement in the circumstances is liable to the pe– the penalties of perjury…”'

‘So although you swore to tell the truth then, and you've sworn to tell it today, you want us to choose, in effect, to believe
this
version of your story, but not that one. Is that the case?'

‘I'm sorry, can you repeat that?' asked Patrick. It was the one trick Charlie had shown him that, so far, he'd shown any sign of remembering. If you're in a tight spot, Charlie had told him, ask the questioner to repeat what they've asked you. Slows everything down, gives you a chance to compose.

‘You want us to believe that this story, today, is the truth, do you?'

Patrick hesitated a moment as he realised there was no good answer to such a question. ‘Yes, I do.'

‘Well, before I come to the question that all of us are interested in—that's why you lied to police—I want to ask you about something else. Who influenced you to change your story?'

‘No one did.'

‘No one? You simply had a change of heart?'

‘Um, you could put it that way, yes.'

‘I put to you, Mr Lanegan, that something has happened between'—he scanned the statement—‘11 August last year and now, that has caused you to change your evidence.'

‘No.'

‘Either some person, or some circumstance, has borne upon you to cause you to change your account of the night.'

‘No.'

‘You're on oath, Mr Lanegan.'

‘No.'

‘This isn't some Magistrates' Court out in western Victoria, Mr Lanegan. This is the big—'

Weir finally intervened, his words clamouring loudly over the end of Ocas's sentence. ‘I think the jury is unlikely to be assisted by this sort of grandstanding, Your Honour.'

Charlie watched the old lizard as his eyes darted from Weir to the Basque and back again. ‘I'm inclined to agree, Mr Ocas. Try to confine it a bit if you can, please.'

‘Certainly, Your Honour.'

Ocas placed one hairy paw on top of his wig and shifted it forwards. His stout body was now enveloped by the black swathe of the robe and supported on both fists, propped on the shiny surface of the bar table. He leaned forward over the table, resembling a furious pitbull straining to break its leash.

‘Did you speak to Mr Jardim during the break, Mr Lanegan?'

Patrick shot a look at Charlie, his face creased in confusion. ‘What, just now?'

‘Yes. Just now. During the lunch break, in between your evidence in chief and the beginning of this cross-examination. Did you speak to Mr Jardim?'

Charlie knew just enough of Patrick to see that the Basque had tweaked his defiance. ‘Yes, yes I did. So what?'

‘Did you discuss your evidence with Mr Jardim?'

The question hung in the air as Charlie felt ants crawling up over his jaw and a prickly, hot itch bursting across his forehead under the wig. He tried to scribble away idly at his notes as though the question meant nothing to him.

Patrick grinned back at Ocas. ‘I tried to, yes, cos I didn't know the rule about that, but he wouldn't let me talk about it, eh.'

‘You wanted him to coach you through this cross-examination,' Ocas persisted. ‘You wanted to
cheat
, Mr Lanegan.'

‘Nah. I actually wanted to know how I'd gone in the first bit.' The grin disappeared as quickly as it had come. ‘It was a big thing to, you know, to talk about it in front of everyone…' His voice trailed off as his eyes shifted nervously across the room from the media bench on one side to the jury on the other.

‘So Mr Jardim gave you no assistance over the lunch break, you say.'

‘That's right.'

‘However, he
did
pay you a visit in Dauphin, didn't he,' Ocas pressed.

‘Yes.'

‘In the three weeks between the sixth and twenty-fifth of March this year, Mr Jardim was in Dauphin, wasn't he, Mr Lanegan.'

‘I couldn't say what the dates were, exactly, but he was there for a couple of weeks that I knew of, yes.'

‘And he wasn't on holiday, was he?'

‘No, I'd say he probably wasn't, but he didn't seem to be working either.'

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘I don't know. I suppose I'd say if a lawyer was at work, he'd be in a suit and that, and he'd be, um, writing stuff or working at a computer, or talking in court or something. He wasn't doing any of that stuff is what I mean.' Charlie marvelled at his ingenuity. He'd slipped behind the bumpkin mask. The kid was a study in rat cunning.

A faint smile unfurled under the Basque's beard. ‘Lawyers sometimes work in funny ways, Mr Lanegan.' Ocas appeared to reconsider this. ‘I withdraw that, Your Honour.' He leafed through his notebook, the paper made stiff and heavy by the weight of ink expended on each page.

‘Now I don't want to speak ill of Mr Jardim, you understand, but it's fair to say, isn't it, that you struck up a bit of a friendship with him.'

Feel free to disown me right now
, thought Charlie.

‘We got along okay. I mean, he had a job to do and I can respect that.' The instant the words had completed their short echo in the room, it was obvious that Patrick regretted them intensely. He tensed, as though to add something, but Ocas was already upon him.

‘He
did
have a job to do,
didn't
he! He was there, Mr Lanegan, to influence your evidence!'

Weir leapt to his feet again. ‘This witness can't answer that, Your Honour. It's rhetorical…'

Williams puckered his mouth in thought. ‘Tipstaff, send the witness and the jury out, please.' The jury were stood up and marched in their rows through the heavy panelled door that separated them from society. Patrick was ushered through a similar doorway in a corner of the great room that lay adjacent to the witness box. Only once both doors had clunked heavily into place did the judge begin to speak.

‘Mr Ocas, I accept that this is a robust jurisdiction, but you are wandering into some territory here that is…I mean, at best, it's forensically awkward. At worst, you may cause a mistrial. Is that what you're angling at?'

‘Your Honour, I'm only trying to lay the groundwork with this jury that the witness has recanted one version and adopted another, which offers a much'—he searched for the word—‘
cosier
fit with the available evidence. Now that might be pure coincidence, but in my submission I'm entitled to explore how that change of attitude came about.'

‘I don't think there's any mystery as to what you're angling at, Mr Ocas. Jurists differ in the level of insight they ascribe to juries, but you'll be aware that I have maintained for many years that they are sentient organisms, juries, and what you're suggesting here is very obvious. I'm not sure that there's a need for you to go dragging Mr Jardim here into the mire along with the witness. What if we have a situation where Mr Jardim winds up having to give evidence in rebuttal of something you assert, or something this witness tells us? What then?'

‘Well with respect, Your Honour, I didn't ask Mr Jardim to go wandering off to Dauphin and start inveigling himself into the local scene.' He extended an arm towards Weir. ‘Perhaps Mr Weir did. Perhaps Mr Jardim took it upon himself. But the Crown are now presenting this young man as an eyewitness to the killing. If you read the prosecution brief, you'd be forgiven for thinking he was little more than a bereaved relative. So in that context, I say the defence should be able to attack his credit. I don't want, and I adopt Your Honour's term here, I don't want any awkwardness to emerge, but I can't just take a one hundred and eighty degree turnaround from the witness and say, “Oh okay, fair enough, can I ask you a few questions about your new version”.'