False Witness Read online

  At the front of Court 8, Davenport licked his lips and said, “So to this, the most serious of charges, the defendant has pleaded not guilty. That is his right. But after you’ve heard all the evidence, if you’re sure he killed this sixteen-year-old girl in cold blood, you will convict him of murder. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is your right.”

  Mr. Justice Manly scowled, not at Kingsley but at me, his eyes brooded and I imagined his lips whispering unknown indignities to come. He scribbled something down in his red, leather-bound notebook.

  Earlier, Manly had invited all counsel into his private chambers. It was an invitation that could not be refused. He asked me if I could indicate which issues were likely to arise, which was coded language for: What on earth is your defense? I told him that I didn’t know and then looked around the room, trying to avoid his eyes.

  Manly’s chambers were little different to those of the other Old Bailey judges. The room was full of dark wood, somber leather and the mauled bones of defense counsel who had said the wrong thing. But above his desk, Manly had a rather badly painted watercolor. It was of a Caribbean beach with gaily painted fishing boats and the sun breaking through onto distant mountains. I had always liked it.

  Judges’ chambers are that part of the law the public is not allowed to see. They are half private club, half trading room. The commodities are familiar enough: crime and punishment, probation and prison. But it was the secrecy that used to make me feel guilty, the skulking around behind closed doors. It was as if I had entered into an alliance against my client, as if he was being auctioned and no bid would be too low. And I felt that another kind of judge, who was even more formidable than Ignatius Manly, had entered a mark against my name in a book that was even darker than his.

  After Davenport had been speaking for fifteen minutes, two things had begun to happen. His elephantine frame began to break out in sweat, and the jury started to glaze over. They sat there bemused, somewhat embarrassed to be in the spotlight, trying desperately not to fidget or yawn. No one volunteers for such a job. The electoral roll spins and there they are: dragged, if not kicking and screaming, then with a certain reluctance from their sitting rooms, betting shops, public houses and dole offices.

  When I started at the Bar, I was told to look at the jury carefully. Work out who they were, how they would vote, what made them tick. Get to know your jury. Who were the movers and who were the muppets? I soon discovered that it was a futile exercise. I had little idea about the people I knew well and, at times, even less about myself. So what was the point?

  The more trials I did, the more frightened I became of the jury. They smiled at my jokes, they nodded during my cross-examinations, they took notes during my speeches, and then they convicted my clients. And every time I felt a personal insult, a sense of rejection.

  Davenport stood facing the jury unashamedly adjusting the rolls of flesh that convened around his midriff. He said, “There are a couple of questions you will want answered, members of the jury. Firstly, you may ask, where is Stone-bury? Well, it is set in a valley surrounded by the gentle hills of the Devon and Dorset borders.”

  There seemed to be no hint of recognition on the faces of the jurors. That, at least, was a good sign.

  But Davenport continued, “More importantly, what was so different about Molly Summers? Well, nothing really. For years she’d been in care, moved from foster home to foster home. It’s right to say that she ran away occasionally. That she didn’t settle. And she finally ended up in a residential home in Stonebury. The home is called the West Albion. You might hear a little about it during the course of the trial.”

  A little, I thought. Why only a little? Surely the home was at the center of this? My musings were interrupted by Davenport’s change of tone.

  He paused, looked at the jury and dropped his voice. “West Albion is the type of center that is run by local authorities when there are children with certain… difficulties. Perhaps the defense will make much of this. I don’t know. The problems these girls might have had does not, cannot excuse violence toward them. Keep your eyes on the ball, members of the jury. Why—that is the real question—why would anyone want to murder Molly Summers? This young girl… poor, lonely… and in eyes of the law, innocent… this truly innocent girl—”

  I got to my feet. “M’Lord, I hesitate to object.”

  “Well, hesitate a little longer,” said Manly. There were a few sniggers around the court.

  “But, really. M’friend knows perfectly well that it is highly undesirable for prosecuting counsel to use such emotive language.”

  Davenport turned on me. “Is my friend suggesting that innocence is an emotive word?”

  “The prosecution is not supposed to excite prejudice against a defendant.”

  “I was not.”

  “What were you doing?” I asked.

  “Exciting sympathy for the girl.”

  “The dead girl,” I said, and as soon as I had, I knew it was a mistake. There was no sound in court, but I could feel my heart pounding as all eyes fixed upon me. I felt as though the blood was draining from my legs and I sat down.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Manly, turning to the jury and ignoring us. He folded his hands and closed his eyes as if he were about to pray. At that moment Ignatius Manly made Job himself look like a man who would fly off the handle at the merest slight. It was another of Manly’s ploys. “Members of the jury,” he said, “you will not decide this case on the interventions and histrionics of counsel. No, you will decide this case on the evidence. Are you going to mention the evidence at any stage today, Mr. Davenport?”

  “M’Lord, yes,” he replied. Davenport took a sip of water and brushed a couple of stray droplets from his mustache, which seemed to curl around his top lip and sneak into his mouth. “When you hear the evidence, ladies and gentlemen, you will ask yourselves: What possible defense can Richard Kingsley have?”

  I turned to Emma who was writing all this down. “That’s a question I keep asking myself,” I said. But she ignored me.

  I was hoping that Emma would respond. Few people can realize just how tedious advocates find the speeches of other advocates. Especially if they waffle on like Aubrey Davenport.

  One of the best ways to relieve the monotony is to chat to your colleagues around you. It is surprising how little the jury can hear. And one of the primary arts of defense is the whispered aside. A groan, a cough, a sotto voce mutter can do wonders to put off your opponent. After all, nine-tenths of defense work is an exercise in sabotage. But Davenport, with his mind-numbing oratory, was messing it up all on his own.

  Soon Davenport described the layout of the village. He spoke of Stonebury in almost reverential terms, characterizing it as the epitome of a rural world that was vanishing. The sort of place where you’d half expect the Mayor of Caster-bridge to bump into the cast of the Archers and have a chummy discussion about the price of turnips.

  The ancient part of the village was entirely surrounded by the stones. There were three concentric circles of diminishing sizes—outer, middle and inner—culminating in a group of bluestone blocks known collectively as the Sepulchre. The other stones were made from granite. In local lore, they were called Sarsens.

  The village had approximately three hundred residents. The surrounding farmland, where two thousand or more people lived, also came under the official title of the Parish of Stonebury and extended for about five miles to all points of the compass. I knew that the estate of His Honour Judge Wright, Justine’s deceased father, lay somewhere nearby. He had once been the presiding judge in the area.

  Davenport continued, “Molly Summer’s body was found the next morning. At the place of execution. She still lay within the inner circle at Stonebury. The area is partially paved to make it accessible throughout the year. There were few obvious clues but blood covered the Sepulchre. And, of course, there was the semi-naked body.”

  I noticed a couple of the seedier members of the press take this
down. No doubt it would feature in some tabloid report between the bare breasts and the bingo.

  Davenport was beginning to get into his stride and soon came to a topic that continued to puzzle me. “How then were the police pointed in the direction of Richard Kingsley?” he said. “Shortly before the body was found, there was an anonymous phone call to Stonebury police station. I cannot tell you the content of the call. The informant never came forward, but the police immediately went to the Manor, Mr. Kingsley’s residence in the village.”

  I had seen bundles of photographs of Kingsley’s Stonebury home. It was dimly lit by narrow, Gothic windows and was filled with strange tapestries and statues. In the hallway, where most of us would have coat-hooks, Kingsley had a row of African masks with hollow eyes. Of all the people I had ever met, only Richard Kingsley could have lived in such a place.

  “When the police first searched the Manor, nothing was found,” said Davenport. “No doubt Mr. Kingsley breathed a huge sigh of relief. But the refuse-collectors were late that day, a twist of fate, perhaps? For in the dust bin, something was found. You can see it here.”

  With that Davenport brandished something metallic at the jury and said, “Here, members of the jury, is the murder weapon.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE KNIFE WAS BIGGER THAN THE PHOTOGRAPHS had suggested and I had never seen its like. It was curved, almost crescent-shaped, like a five-day-old moon. It was heavy and sparkling and sharp.

  Davenport waved the knife at the jury as if it were a feather duster and he was brushing some cobwebs away from their eyes. “You will hear from a forensic scientist who will give expert evidence that this knife”—he held it up to the level of his eyes—“matches precisely the dimensions of the instrument that punctured the body of the sixteen-year-old girl.” He looked at the jury with great deliberation. “Punctured her body forty-three times.”

  He thudded the knife on the bench next to him and it made a dull, dead sound. There was complete silence in court, and I had to admit it was a dramatic moment. As counsel for the defense, you never know where to look at such times.

  I looked at the jury and it was a mistake.

  A woman in her thirties, wearing a floral print dress, struggled to fight back the tears. A man in a tweed suit jotted something or other down. A few jurors turned and looked at Kingsley, and this time he did look away.

  But there was a young woman who wore jeans and a baggy blue sweatshirt. She had the same blond hair and gray eyes as Justine. But while Justine ignored me, the juror did not. She just stared and stared at me. I knew that look, I often saw it in my dreams: How could you, it said, how could you defend him?

  And then you feel like an accomplice, as though you took part in the crime, and you want to say, yes, I’m guilty as well, but what can I do? These are the dark moments of the job; such moments are the sowers of doubt, the heralds of failure.

  “God, I wish we could reply to this rubbish right now,” said Emma. She was not intimidated; Emma Sharpe was remarkably resilient.

  “And what would we say?” I replied. What, after all, could we have said? That our client needed to have sex with young girls, but didn’t kill this one? And all the time I knew that Davenport was saving the best part for last.

  “But trials are not about science,” he said. “They are about people. In this case the prosecution will call eye-witnesses to the crime. They will testify that they saw Richard Kingsley at the scene of the murder. They, too, are young girls. Young girls, you may feel, of considerable courage.”

  “Looks like they’ve persuaded the orphans to blab,” said Emma. No doubt she regarded it as an interesting development and would be fascinated to see how I dealt with them, an upward blip on her learning curve. I dreaded it.

  There had been considerable doubt as to whether these eye-witnesses would testify. They had refused to say a word in the magistrates court committal, but if they came up to proof, they would destroy the last vestiges of a defense.

  Davenport continued, “There’s only one person in this court who really knows if Mr. Kingsley is guilty, and that is Richard Kingsley himself. So what does he say? When interviewed with his solicitor he made no comment, as he was entitled to do.”

  “What’s he on about?” asked Emma.

  “So where was Richard Kingsley on the night of the murder?” said Davenport. “Two police officers arrested him when the knife was found.”

  I looked at Justine Wright and she looked away.

  “One will testify,” said Davenport, “that Kingsley confessed to being at the murder.”

  The jury was amazed, there were murmurs in the public gallery, Kingsley shouted, “No, no,” and Manly demanded silence. I turned to Justine.

  “I told you to stop Davenport mentioning the confessions,” I said in a voice that the jury could not hear. The plan was to get the confessions excluded on a legal technicality.

  “I’m sorry, Tom,” she said, all doe-eyed. “I forgot.”

  “Don’t try that ‘I forgot’ stunt with me again, Justine.”

  “What do you mean?” She feigned innocence, but knew I was referring to the last time we were in court together. It was a murder. We were co-defending but our client was convicted.

  “You know what happened,” I said. Our client had committed suicide in prison.

  “Want to rake up the past, Thomas?” She went on the attack. “Of course your hands are spotless.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What are you saying then?”

  “It wasn’t my…”

  Emma watched this bemused as Davenport continued to drone on. One or two jurors watched us but wouldn’t have been able to hear what we were saying.

  “It wasn’t my—”

  “Spit it out, Tom,” Justine said defiantly. “It wasn’t your what? Why don’t you say it, Tom? It wasn’t your what?”

  “I’m not blaming you.”

  “Back off then.”

  “Look, Justine—”

  “I have to say, Mr. Fawley”—she moved very close to me, and I could feel her moist breath on my neck—“you really know how to woo a woman.”

  Justine could always tie me up in knots; it was one of the things, in a perverse way, that attracted me to her. She exposed my sense of uncertainty, hypocrisy even, about my job, my marriage, about myself. She brought it out into the open with her piercing words, and made me face it. She managed to make my longing for infidelity feel—almost honorable. And for her part, she despised and yet enjoyed my weakness. Spineless, she called me once.

  It was years before the trial. There was a party in Justine’s chambers. It was to celebrate Ignatius Manly taking silk. Justine did her pupilage, her apprenticeship, with Manly and Davenport. But her place was guaranteed: the chambers had once belonged to Justine’s father.

  She was very drunk. I had been waiting to make a move on her despite the fact she was my wife’s best friend. I saw the party as an ideal opportunity.

  She allowed me to touch her hair. And when I did, her perfume wafted into my face. She put her hand in the back of my belt and drew me to her body. I could just feel the points of her breasts against my chest as she ran her fingers over my buttocks. I needed to kiss her but as my mouth touched hers, she pulled away. Justine said she was already seeing someone. She said it was Manly. Rather foolishly, prompted by the cheap German wine, I asked what Manly had that I did not.

  “He’s got backbone,” she said. I remember she looked at me with contempt. She put a slender finger to my lips as though she was about to reveal the mysteries of the universe. She added, “I quite like that in a lover.”

  She left me sipping my plastic cup of Liebfraumilch.

  “So what is Richard Kingsley’s defense?” asked Davenport, his voice now thinner and higher with the strain. “Through his lawyers, he has served a notice of alibi. This states that at the time of the murder he was not at the stone circle but was with someone called…” Davenport leaned over toward me and wh
ispered, “I can’t read your writing, Fawley.”

  “It says Templeman,” I said. “Philip—”

  “With someone called Philip Templeman,” Davenport announced in an ominous fashion to the jury. “The defense will say that Mr. Kingsley was with this man. We say this is a lie. For who is this man? Is he flesh and blood? Or is he another of Richard Kingsley’s fictional creations?”

  Davenport glanced at me. And I was grateful that I was not required to give answers to these questions immediately.

  “When you have heard the evidence,” Davenport continued, “you will have no doubt that Richard Kingsley was at the scene in his wheelchair. But that is not the end of the matter. The notice of alibi was only served this morning.”

  Davenport paused and left the words hanging in the air for the jury to consider. I looked at Justine, but she very pointedly turned away.

  “Why?” Davenport asked. “Why the delay in serving a notice that is required by law? Does the alibi represent the truth? Or is it just the latest installment of Mr. Kingsley’s glittering literary career?”

  There was a creak at the back of the court as the defendant wheeled himself a little nearer to the front of the dock.

  Davenport, seeing the opportunity, improvised. “So the defense comes to this,” he said, “mistaken identity. You’ve identified the wrong wheelchair. It’s preposterous, is it not?”

  The Fleet Street hacks enjoyed that but the jury did not smile—they never smile on the first day of a murder.

  Davenport then raised his voice, which trembled slightly. “Whoever is guilty in this case, never forget one thing. Molly Summers is innocent. Innocent in law and innocent in life. Your verdict will not bring her back. But if Richard Kingsley murdered her, he must be convicted by you and punished by law. It is all we can do.”

  When he had finished, there was silence in court. As Davenport sat down, Emma tugged at my gown. “I’ve got to tell you something, Tom.”

  But I wasn’t interested. I stared at the young juror and she stared at me.