A Certain Justice (3 page)

On the next day, Thursday, 12 September, Venetia stood up to open the case for the defence. She had already effectively made that case in her cross-examination. Now, by the early afternoon, she had only one witness left to call: the accused.

She knew that she had to put Ashe in the box. He would have insisted. She had recognized early in their professional relationship the vanity, the mixture of conceit and bravado, which might even now undo all the good achieved by her cross-examination of the Crown witnesses. He wasn’t going to be cheated out of this final public performance. All those hours of sitting patiently in the dock were for him a prelude to the moment when at last he could answer for himself and the case would be won or lost. She knew him well enough to be sure that what he had most hated was the knowledge that he had to sit while others spoke, others argued their case. He was the most important person in that courtroom. It was for him that a High Court judge in his scarlet robe sat to the right of the carved royal arms, for him that twelve men and women sat there listening patiently for hour after hour, for him that the distinguished members of the Bar in their wigs and gowns questioned, cross-questioned and argued. Venetia knew that it was easy for the accused to feel that he was merely the ineffectual object of others’ concerns, that the system had taken him over, was using him, that he was on display so that others could demonstrate their cleverness, their expertise. Now he would have his chance. She knew that it was a risk; if the conceit, the bravado proved stronger than his control then they were in trouble.

Within minutes of her examination-in-chief she knew that she needn’t have worried. His performance — and she had no doubt that it was that — was beautifully judged. He was, of course, prepared for her first question, but she had not been prepared for his answer.

“Garry, did you love your aunt?”

A short pause, and then: “I was very fond of her, and I was sorry for her. I don’t think I know what people mean by love.”

They were the first words he had spoken in court except for that plea of not guilty spoken in a firm low voice. The court was absolutely silent. The words fell on the quiet expectant air. Venetia could sense the reaction of the jury. Of course he didn’t know, how could he? A boy who had never known his father, had been thrown out by his mother before he was eight, been taken into care, shunted from foster parent to foster parent, transferred from one children’s home to another, seen as a nuisance from the moment he was born. He had never known tenderness, security or disinterested affection. How could he know the meaning of love?

She had an extraordinary sense during his examination of their working together like two actors who had played opposite each other for years, recognizing each other’s signals, judging each pause for its effectiveness, being careful not to spoil the other’s most powerful moment, not because of affection or even mutual respect, but because this was a double act and its success depended on that instinctive understanding in which each contributed to the desired end. His story had the merit of consistency and simplicity. What he had first said to the police he now told the court without alteration or embellishment.

Yes, his aunt and he had had a disagreement while they were at the Duke of Clarence. It had been a resurgence of the old argument: she wanted him to go on taking photographs of her when she and her customers were having sex, he wanted to stop. It had been a disagreement rather than a violent quarrel, but she had been drunk and he had thought it wise to get away, to walk alone through the night to think out whether it was time for him to move on.

“And is that what you wanted, to leave your aunt?”

“Part of me wanted that, part of me wanted to stay. I was fond of her. I think she did need me, and it was home.”

So he had walked through the streets behind Westway as far as Shepherd’s Bush before returning. There were people passing, but not many. He had noticed no one in particular. He wasn’t even sure which streets he had walked. He had arrived home just after midnight to find his aunt’s body lying on the single divan in the sitting-room and had at once telephoned the police. No, he had not touched the body. He could see as soon as he entered the room that she was dead.

He was unshaken in cross-examination, ready to say in reply to questions that he could not remember or was not sure. He never once looked at the jury, but they in their box to the right of him kept their eyes on him. When he finally left the witness box she wondered why she had ever doubted him.

Her final speech for the defence took each of the prosecution’s points one by one and persuasively demolished them. She spoke to the jury as if she were confiding to them the truth of a matter which, with good reason, had caused both them and her concern, but which could now be seen in its true, its reasonable, its essentially innocent light. Where was his motive? It had been suggested that he hoped to be his aunt’s heir, but all Mrs. O’Keefe had in prospect was the money for the compulsory sale of her house, when it came through, and that was insufficient to cover her debts. Her nephew knew that she spent lavishly, particularly on drink, that her creditors were pressing, that debt-collectors called at the house. What could he expect to receive? By her death he had gained nothing and lost a home. Then there was that single small splash of Mrs. O’Keefe’s blood on the head of the shower and the two spots on the stairs. It had been suggested that Ashe had killed his aunt naked and had showered before leaving the house to take a walk designed to provide an alibi. But a visitor, particularly if he were a regular client, would have known the house, known that the tap of the bathroom washbasin was stiff and gave an uncertain flow of water. What more natural than that he should wash his bloody hands under the shower?

The prosecution had relied largely on one witness, the neighbour, Mrs. Scully, who said in her examination-in-chief that she had seen Garry leaving the house by the front door at quarter past eleven. The jury had seen Mrs. Scully in the witness box. She may have struck them, as surely she did everyone who had heard her, as an honest witness trying to tell the truth. But what she had briefly seen was a male figure at night under the high sodium lights designed to shine brightly on the busy road, but apt to throw confusing shadows over the fronts of the houses. At the time she was wearing spectacles through which she couldn’t even clearly see the faces on her television screen at less than ten feet. In cross-examination she had told the jury: “I suppose it could have been someone like him. But I thought at the time it was Garry.” The jury might feel that Mrs. Scully’s identification of Garry Ashe, central to the prosecution’s case, could not be relied upon.

She ended: “Garry Ashe has told you that he went for that night walk because he couldn’t face his aunt when she returned home from the Duke of Clarence pub, drunk, as he knew she would be. He needed time to think about their life together, about his future, whether it was time to leave. In his own words in the witness box: ‘I had to decide what I was going to make of my life.’ Remembering those obscene photographs, which I am sorry you had to see, you may wonder why he didn’t leave before. He has told you why. She was his only living relation. The home she provided was the only home he had ever known. He thought that she needed him. Members of the jury, it is hard to walk out on someone who needs you, however inconvenient, however perverse that need.

“So he walked unseeing and unseen through the night and returned to the horror of that blood-splattered sitting-room. There is no forensic evidence to link him with the crime. The police found no blood on his clothes or his person, his fingerprints were not on that knife. Any one of her numerous clients could have called that night.

“Members of the jury, no one deserves to be murdered. A human life is a human life whether the victim is a prostitute or a saint. In death as in life we are all equal before the law. Mrs. O’Keefe did not deserve to die. But Mrs. O’Keefe, like all prostitutes — and that, members of the jury, is what she was — put herself peculiarly at risk because of her lifestyle. You have heard what that lifestyle was. You have seen the photographs which her nephew was induced or compelled to take. She was a sexually rapacious woman who could be affectionate and generous but who, in drink, was abusive and violent. We do not know who it was she let in that night or what happened between them. The medical evidence is that no sexual act took place immediately before death. But is it not overwhelmingly likely, members of the jury, that she was murdered by one of her clients, killed out of jealousy, rage, frustration, hatred or the lust to kill? It was a murder of great brutality. Half drunk, she opened her door to her murderer. That was her tragedy. It is also a tragedy for the young man who is in the dock in this court today.

“My learned friend, in his opening address, put the matter to you quite clearly. If you are convinced beyond reasonable doubt that my client murdered his aunt, then your verdict must be one of guilty. But if, after considering all the evidence, you have a reasonable doubt that it was indeed his hand that struck down Mrs. O’Keefe, then it will be your duty to return a verdict of not guilty.”

All judges are actors. Mr. Justice Moorcroft’s forte, a part which he had played for so many years that it had become instinctive, was a courteous reasonableness occasionally enlivened with shafts of mordant wit. During his summing up it was his habit to lean well forward towards the jury, a pencil delicately spanning the first finger of each hand, and address them as equals who had kindly agreed to give up their valuable time to assist him with a problem which had its difficulties, but, as with all human concerns, was susceptible to reason. The summing up, as always with this judge, was exemplary in its comprehensiveness and fairness. There could be no appeal in a court of law on the grounds of misdirection; with this judge there never had been.

The jury listened with impassive faces. Watching them, Venetia thought, as she often did, that it was a curious system but one which worked remarkably well provided that your first priority was the protection of the innocent rather than the conviction of the guilty. It wasn’t designed — how could it be? — to elicit the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Even the Continental inquisitorial system couldn’t do that. It would have gone hard with her client if it had.

There was nothing more that she could do for him now. The jury were given their charge and filed out. The judge rose, the court bowed and waited, standing, until he had left. Venetia heard above her the murmuring and shuffling as the public gallery emptied. She had nothing to do now but to await the verdict.

I
n Pawlet Court, on the western boundary of the Middle Temple, the gas lamps were glowing into light. Hubert St John Langton, Head of Chambers, watched from his window as he had on every evening when he had been working in Chambers, for the last forty years. It was the time of the year, the time of day, that he loved best. Now the small court, one of the loveliest in the Middle Temple, took on the soft refulgent glow of an early-autumn evening, the boughs of the great horse chestnut seeming to solidify as he watched, the rectangles of light in the Georgian windows enhancing the atmosphere of ordered, almost domestic, eighteenth-century calm. Beneath him the cobbles between the pavements of York stone glistened as if they had been polished. Drysdale Laud moved up beside him. For a moment they stood in silence, then Langton turned away.

He said: “That’s what I’m going to miss most, the lighting of the lamps. But it’s not quite the same now they’re automatic. I used to like watching for the lamplighter to come into the court. When that stopped, it seemed as if a whole era had gone for ever.”

So he was going, he’d actually made up his mind at last. Laud carefully kept from his voice either surprise or regret. He said: “This place is going to miss you.”

There could hardly, he thought, have been a more banal exchange over a decision he had been awaiting with increasing impatience for over a year. It was time for the old man to go. He wasn’t very old, not yet seventy-three, but in the last year Laud’s critical anticipatory eyes had seen the gradual but inexorable draining of powers physical and mental. Now he watched as Langton seated himself heavily at his desk, the desk that had been his grandfather’s and which he had hoped one day might be his son’s. That hope, like so many others, had been swept away in that avalanche above Klosters.

He said: “I suppose the tree will have to go eventually. People complain that it shuts out too much light in summer. I’ll be glad not to be here when they take the axe to it.”

Laud felt a small surge of irritation. Sentimentality was something new for Langton. He said: “It won’t be an axe, it will be a heavy-duty chainsaw, and I don’t suppose they’ll do it. The tree is protected.” He waited for a moment, then asked with studied unconcern: “When were you thinking of leaving?”

“At the end of the year. Once these decisions are made there’s no point in dragging things out. I’m telling you now because we need to give thought to my successor. There’s the Chambers meeting coming up in October. I thought we might discuss it then.”

Discuss? What was there to discuss? He and Langton had run Chambers between them for the last ten years. The two archbishops — wasn’t that how Chambers spoke of them? Colleagues might use the words with an undertone of slight resentment, even of derision, but they expressed a reality. He decided to be frank. Langton had become increasingly vague and indecisive, but surely not about this. He had to know where he stood. If there was going to be a fight it was better to be prepared.

He said: “I’d rather thought that you wanted me to succeed you. We work together well. I thought that Chambers had come to take it for granted.”

“That you were crown prince? I expect they have. But it might not be as straightforward as I expected. Venetia is interested.”

“Venetia? This is the first I’ve heard of it. She’s never shown the slightest interest in becoming Head of Chambers.”