Indictment for Murder Read online

  Shelbourne made no reply. If Playfair chose not to explain, and if Playfair were convicted, it would be Playfair’s fault, not his.

  ‘Half the time in court this afternoon,’ Harold went on, ‘he wasn’t even listening to what the prosecutor was telling the jury.’

  ‘More fool he,’ Shelbourne replied.

  Harold glanced at him, pained by the other’s bluntness. They were now at the entrance to the hotel. ‘I don’t think he’s conscious of what’s happening,’ he went on stiffly. ‘I used to see much of him before this began, and he always appeared to be perfectly sensible and clear in his mind, meeting people, managing his affairs, and so on.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound as if he’s been managing them very successfully,’ said Shelbourne, ‘for I understand he’s broke. So what about our fees?’

  He shouldered his way through the swing doors. Harold halted for a moment, then followed. Shelbourne flung himself into a chair in a corner of the lounge and ordered tea. ‘Tell them to bring down my case from my room. And hurry,’ he shouted after the waiter. He turned to Harold. ‘Tell me about our fees. They say he’s been ruined at Lloyd’s.’

  ‘I’ve been put in funds,’ Harold said stiffly. ‘From Lady Mary, Mr James’ wife.’

  ‘Good,’ said Shelbourne, drinking his tea. After a time Harold said, ‘I’m glad that at least they’ve extended his bail for the duration of the trial.’

  ‘Yes, I managed that for him. But old Jonathan’s not likely to run away. No, the danger is that he may do himself in. Then bang go our refreshers.’

  He laughed, then, sensing the other’s disapproval, added, ‘We can’t afford to be sentimental, Mr Benson. Our job is to keep cool heads on our shoulders. Lawyers for the defence should never get emotionally involved.’

  Harold Benson glanced at him over the edge of his teacup. This was just another job to him, Harold thought.

  ‘He’s very old,’ was all he said.

  ‘That,’ Shelbourne replied, ‘is no reason not to try someone who’s apparently quite sane.’

  ‘To me he’s an old man at the end of a distinguished career. Which is what makes the spectacle so intolerable.’ Harold put down his cup. ‘Even this afternoon I think they were still hoping there’d be no trial, that he’d be unfit to plead. Did you see the look on the judge’s face?’

  ‘I did. What’s the judge’s name again? Harris?’

  Harold nodded. ‘Yes. Graham Harris.’

  ‘I’d never heard of him,’ Shelbourne said. ‘He seems very young. But perhaps that means I’m growing old. Isn’t it when the policemen begin to look young that you’re really old?’ He laughed his brisk laugh and finished his tea. ‘Nowadays they are appointing judges hardly out of their nappies. But you’re right. Harris did look at me as if to say, “Come on, Mr Shelbourne, get up and say the plea’s Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity – and then we can put the old fellow away without any fuss.” However our client, in the end, has pleaded Not Guilty, and he’s going to say he knows nothing because he remembers nothing – although he insisted on visiting Trelawney, who didn’t want to see him; he was the last person to see Trelawney alive; his fingerprints are on the apparatus that pumped into Trelawney the drug which led to his death; and Trelawney alive was keeping him out of his money. So altogether we’ve no easy task. Still, as he says he’s not guilty, our job is to make it as difficult as possible for the Crown to prove that he is.’

  ‘Will you call him to give evidence?’

  ‘How can I? He remembers nothing.’

  ‘He may insist you do,’ said Harold.

  ‘Then God help us. And God help him. Now I must be off. I’ll see you at Playfair’s house tomorrow, for that glass of sherry he has so graciously promised us. Perhaps it’ll loosen his tongue. Pay for the tea, will you? Put it on client’s account?’ He chuckled and, gathering up his bag in the hall, left the hotel.

  He’s enjoying it, Harold Benson thought. Like the press and the public.

  3

  WELL before Jonathan and his lawyers had left the court the judge had been driven away in the ancient limousine which the local authority provided to transport the judges to and from the Judges’ Lodgings and the court in the castle. The High Court Judges who came from London on circuit to try the most serious criminal cases were known as The Red Judges from the colour of their robes, which distinguished them from the lesser judges, the circuit judges, who wore black or purple. The Red Judges were obliged to live in ‘Lodgings’ provided by the local authority, which in this city was a large Victorian villa a few miles from the court; and it was to there that Mr Justice Harris was now being driven.

  Because it was the first day of the sittings the policemen on duty at the castle were in their high-necked, formal uniform and white gloves. Others, unseen, in helmets and flak-jackets, were high up on the roof and in the top windows of the buildings overlooking the courtyard. While the police in the courtyard saluted at the arrival and departure of the judge, those above eased forward the safety catches of their automatic rifles. For in December two IRA gunmen had been convicted of causing explosions in Southampton docks and sentenced by Mr Justice Templar to twenty years imprisonment. Anonymous letters and telephone calls had been received at the Judges’ Lodgings and at the court. But the High Sheriff, a retired soldier, had insisted that this was no reason why the ceremonial should be abandoned.

  ‘I won’t let the bastards disrupt it,’ he had said. So the police in the forecourt had been put into their full dress and four trumpeters from the nearby depot of the High Sheriff’s regiment played a fanfare as the judge, in his wig and red robe, emerged from the Great Door which was the entrance to the courts and climbed into the ancient Daimler. The step into the old-fashioned car was high, but the young judge sprang in nimbly and sank back against the worn beige covers of the back seat. His clerk, Priestly, top hat in hand, took his place in the jump-seat in front of him facing forward, and the Daimler, preceded and followed by police cars, rolled out of the castle yard through the gate under the archway.

  Mr Justice Graham Harris pushed aside his robe to get at his handkerchief in the pocket of his grey trousers. The upholstery gave off a musty smell; the old car had no heating and it was cold, but the judge was sweating. He mopped his face, pushing his wig back from his forehead. Then, stuffing the handkerchief in his sleeve, he straightened his wig and looked self-consciously ahead as a small knot of onlookers standing at the corner on the pavement stared curiously at the red figure in a wig sitting in the back of the car. The judge – he was just past his forty-third birthday and, as Shelbourne had said, exceptionally young for a High Court judge – had only been a High Court judge for six months and it was his first time out of London on circuit. When he, the most junior and the youngest, had been told that he had been chosen to preside at the trial of Regina v. Jonathan Playfair, he had been appalled. Why me, he had thought? Then he realised that they had to find a judge who was not a friend of the accused and, if possible, had never appeared as counsel when the accused had been sitting on the bench. There weren’t many on the bench who fulfilled those conditions. But he did.

  As the old Daimler lumbered out of the town, Graham Harris for the hundredth time wished the choice had not fallen on him. He had only once in his life been in a criminal court, and that was when as a young barrister he had been briefed to defend in a complicated fraud trial. Since then his experience and practice had been in the Commercial Court and international arbitrations. He knew nothing about handling a jury. All he knew was, as the Lord Chief Justice had said when telling him he was to preside at the trial of Jonathan Playfair, ‘Keep it simple, Harris. Don’t come down either for the defence or the prosecution. Be seen to play it right down the middle. This, of all cases, is a case for the jury to decide. Leave it to them.’

  Keep it simple! Play it down the middle! While every word and gesture would be watched and noted to see if he was leaning towards the defence because the accused had once been a judge or to
o far in favour of the prosecution to show that an English court was no respecter of persons! Throughout the afternoon he had studied Playfair, sitting so impassively, apparently so unconcerned to be in the dock in a courtroom where he had so often sat as a judge. Throughout the two hours during which Richard Bracton had been speaking the prisoner had looked to Graham as though he were somewhere else; as though what was happening was happening to someone else. When he had failed to answer the clerk’s question – Are you Guilty or Not Guilty? – Graham had looked at Shelbourne. For one moment he had thought that, after all, there would be no trial; that the plea would be Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, and he could send the old man to hospital. But Playfair had at last said ‘Not Guilty’ and the trial had begun, with all eyes on the old ex-judge in the dock and on the young new judge on the bench.

  ‘It’s going to snow, sir.’

  Priestly turned and leaned back over the edge of the jump-seat. Graham looked out of the window and up at the lowering, leaden sky, but he said nothing.

  ‘I understand you’re staying in the Lodgings for the weekend. I have to drive all the way back to Mitcham.’ Priestly, who had been with Graham since he had been appointed to the bench, was an ex-policeman and an experienced judge’s clerk and Graham was very glad to have him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve a reserved judgement to write, and I can get on with it better in the Lodgings than I can at home.’

  It wasn’t true. That wasn’t the reason why he was not going home. The reason was that he couldn’t face home. He didn’t want to be at home with Anne, nor she with him, and she would be glad he wasn’t coming. The tension in the house at Christmas had been unbearable.

  They had been married eighteen years; she had been just nineteen and he twenty-five, starting his second year at the Bar, and they were both as poor as church mice when they had married in Chelsea Register Office. Neither family had been present nor been told of it. Graham had only an uncle, a local government officer in Birmingham who had given him some kind of home after his mother had died. He had never known his father, who had disappeared soon after he was born. Scholarships had taken him to grammar school and then to Durham University. Anne’s family lived more grandly in Somerset. She had run away when she was seventeen to live first in a squat and then with slightly more respectable friends in a house in Battersea. She had met Graham at a party. He had been the only one wearing a tie, and she had fallen for him. So much so that she had got a job on a magazine in Brewer Street.

  For a witness to the marriage, Anne had asked an older girl, a journalist, who had arrived rather tight. She said she always was when she went to weddings at Register Offices – they were so grotty. The best man was a young academic from Durham. He had not been tight, although he was by the time the four of them had finished lunch at an Italian restaurant off Fulham Broadway. When they emerged, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the last Graham and Anne had seen of them was the best man pushing the rump of the matron-of-honour into a taxi and falling in on top of her. The bride and groom had gone back to their shabby two rooms in Earls Court. They had not minded. Neither at that time could keep their hands off the other.

  So the babies had come quickly – a boy and a girl, fifteen months between them. But, fortunately, so had the briefs. By the time Anne was twenty-one they had two children. From Earls Court they moved to Wandsworth Common; two years later to a larger house in Bayswater. Ten years after their marriage they had a house in Oxfordshire and a small flat in Pimlico. By then Anne was reconciled to her family, although neither of her parents were ever at ease with Graham. He, buried in work, only came home to the country at weekends, staying during the week in their flat in Pimlico, where in their early days Anne had joined him for one or two nights during the week. Even at weekends he had to work at his papers long into the night. Then there had been the travelling, to Hong Kong or Singapore, or to arbitrations in Geneva or Zurich. He rarely now took her out in the evenings when she came to London, so she had stopped coming, while at weekends he spent hours in his study.

  Quite recently Anne had announced that both children ought to go to boarding school. When he asked why, she said that a boarding school would give the children more of a life – there would be more for them to do in the evenings. So the children had been packed off to Bedales where they could be together.

  At the age of thirty-seven Graham had taken silk, but the pressure of work had not slackened. Then, only six years later, he had, quite unexpectedly, been offered an appointment to the High Court bench. This, he knew, would put an end to the interminable pressure of night and weekend work; rarely now would there be mounds of papers to tackle on Saturdays and Sundays; no more travelling the world. He might even get home to the country some nights during the week. Now, he had thought when he had accepted the appointment, there would be more time with Anne and the family. That had been last summer. But it was too late; Anne was in love with someone else. Francis Keating was a neighbour, a heavily built, amusing man of about fifty, the local divorced ‘spare man’. Anne had told Graham she’d met him out hunting the previous winter. By June, Graham now suspected, they must have become lovers. So, when he told Anne in July that he was to become a judge and that from now on their life would be much easier and they would be able to spend more time together, Anne had been cool and distant. By October, when he had begun his first term as a judge, he began to hear the local gossip, that Anne and Francis Keating were often seen disappearing early from the hunting field and on weekday evenings dining together in local hotels. Christmas had been a nightmare, the parents pretending before the children. By the time the holidays were over and the children had gone back to school, he knew it couldn’t go on.

  An about-to-be divorced judge, he thought, trying a former judge for murder! How that would have shocked their predecessors.

  ‘Don’t forget, sir, the High Sheriff’s coming for a drink this evening.’ Priestly was again turning over the back of the jump-seat. Graham saw through the window of the Daimler that they were approaching the Lodgings.

  ‘What’s his name again?’

  ‘Colonel Basildon. When he heard you were staying down, he told me he was going to ask you if you’d care to hunt tomorrow. He said he’d let you have a horse.’

  ‘No thanks,’ Graham said.

  Priestly turned to face his front and they drove on in silence. Then he leaned back again. ‘Not a very happy afernoon in court,’ he said quietly.

  ‘No, it was not.’

  Graham stared fixedly out of the window. They were turning into the drive of the Victorian villa.

  It was very cold in the large house as Graham laid his wig on the hall table. Priestly helped him out of his robes. ‘I’m going to have a bath,’ he said. When he was on the stair his clerk called up to him: ‘I’ll be off now, sir. I want to get on to the motorway before the snow starts.’

  ‘I hope you have a good run to London,’ said Graham, his hand on the banister. ‘See you Sunday evening. Before you go, remind the servants I’m staying here for the weekend. Tell them I’ll dine at seven-thirty.’

  ‘Don’t forget the High Sheriff,’ Priestly called out.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Graham as he went on up the stairs.

  The servants were not used to a judge staying on over the weekend, and Priestly knew that they wouldn’t like it. And they hadn’t.

  ‘Selfish bastard,’ said the butler to his wife when Priestly had gone. ‘Now we’ll have to work all weekend.’

  ‘I haven’t got any food, and it’s going to snow,’ she replied.

  ‘He doesn’t seem interested. Nor in the wine. He’s brought hardly any with him. Last night he didn’t take port. Not like the old days. They all used to drink port, all the proper judges did. Even Sir Jonathan Playfair liked a glass. The poor old bugger.’

  Colonel Basildon, short and square with a trim figure and a greying military moustache, arrived at six o’clock. He had been uncertain whether the judge’s invitation give
n to him that morning by Priestly had included his wife.

  ‘As I’m not sure of the form, I’d better go on my own,’ he told Susan.

  ‘Not very friendly,’ she replied.

  ‘He’s very young. His clerk said it’s his first time on circuit.’

  The butler showed the High Sheriff into the drawing-room, which, despite the fire, was almost as cold as the hall. Colonel Basildon, in his tweed suit and regimental tie, stood in front of it, warming himself. Graham appeared. He was in pale corduroy trousers with a sweater over an open blue shirt.

  ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t down to greet you. What’ll you have to drink? Whisky-and-soda?’

  ‘Thank you.’ The High Sheriff straightened his tie. He wasn’t used to being entertained by a judge dressed like this. ‘Is it your first time down here?’ he asked as Graham fixed him a drink.

  ‘Yes, first time on any circuit,’ Graham replied.

  ‘You never came when you were at the Bar?’

  ‘No.’ Graham brought the whisky. He took nothing himself. ‘I never did that kind of work. I’m very new, you know; and very ignorant of what goes on, so you’ll have to show me the ropes, guide me through the protocol.’

  ‘Of course. I suppose it depends how long you’re here. There are a few locals whom the judges usually invite. I can give you the names. But I hear you’re staying in the Lodgings for the weekend. Is Lady Harris joining you?’

  ‘No,’ Graham replied, shortly. ‘She’s not.’

  He flung himself into a chair by the fire, putting his leg over the arm. The High Sheriff saw he was wearing slippers, and no socks.

  ‘If it would amuse you to hunt tomorrow,’ Colonel Basildon said as he took the chair opposite Graham, ‘I could lend you a horse.’

  ‘No, I don’t ride – and I’ve a lot of work to do.’

  There was silence for a moment. He’s a prickly young fellow, thought the colonel. Then he said, ‘Nasty case you’ve got, judge – especially if it’s your first on circuit.’