Murderers and Other Friends Read online

  Detective stories ask ‘whodunit?’ In most murders that question is quickly answered and the trial attempts to discover ‘whydunit?’ Did the customer in the dock intend to kill or do serious harm, did he or she act in self-defence, was there provocation, was it all an accident or the result of a diseased mind? These are questions fingerprints and bloodstains cannot answer; they require the jury to perform the difficult act of getting inside the skull of someone who may or may not be a murderer.

  Jimmy’s account, I was not particularly delighted to learn, was one well known in criminal courts as ‘the Guardsman’s Defence’. I suppose it came from the days when humble guardsmen were sexually assaulted by officers and gentlemen and protected their honour too energetically. Charles Wistey had, it seemed, propositioned the pale, young Jimmy O’Neill in the street and pursued him into the portico of the house and had him cornered. Jimmy’s statement described him pulling out the knife he often carried, holding it in front of him and shouting, ‘Get off, you dirty man!’ Undeterred, Wistey advanced remorselessly and ran himself on to the dagger in the way an antique Roman fell upon his sword. As a general rule it’s unwise to attack the character of the deceased, who cannot, after all, answer back. In Jimmy’s case we were alleging that a young man of ‘good’ family, engaged to be married, was a homosexual rapist – without the support of any evidence at all. We would be in for a bumpy ride before Carl Aarvold, the gruff but decent Recorder of London, who was chairman of the Wimbledon tennis matches and had a long, and no doubt weary, experience of ‘the Guardsman’s Defence’. There was, however, one singular fact. Earls Court, then an area well known for gay pick-ups, was nowhere near the route Wistey would have taken from the West End restaurant to his home.

  The day starts with a lonely breakfast in the café opposite the Old Bailey, a site where Londoners once paid a great deal for a window to watch the executions outside Newgate Prison. I am surrounded by anonymous people, talking quietly about the day ahead, they may be jurors, witnesses, villains or police officers. Then I go up to the robing room and put on the fancy costume: the winged collar and the bands, the Tom Jones tailed coat and the silk gown. In this very robing room I once saw an elderly ex-Solicitor-General slip my wallet into his jacket pocket. I go out carrying my wig and my brief. My next stop is the cells, down in the basement.

  I pass the old, scratched, kicked oak door, carved with the names of forgotten criminals, the last remnant of Newgate, and the prison officer lets me into the cells. These men always seem to be drinking mugs of tea and eating doorstep sandwiches. They have a prison pallor and are overweight. Then I am let into the interview room where Jimmy is already taking cigarettes off my solicitor, Paul Laity. Paul is short, thickset, plods about looking like a farmer and has a fund of filthy reminiscences about his life in the Navy. He comes from Cornwall and goes beagling, walking vast distances in the company of hunting dogs. He has a great determination to win cases and will not forgive me if I fail to ask a question. He will have one brilliant idea which will be an enormous help to us. I also have a junior barrister named Peter who is consistently entertaining, can mimic all the judges and discuss politics and the theatre with great insight. He will be able to view the case with an amused detachment neither Paul nor I can manage. At the moment he is being entertaining somewhere else. This is the small squad I have to do my best to command, and from whom I must try to hide my doubts and fears.

  The visit to the client in the cells is less to gain information than to calm his fears and give him a confidence which you may not feel. Jimmy has to trust me but I have no such duty. I must merely suspend my disbelief about him. I am there to put his case as well as it can be put and never to judge him. I know he won’t tell me much more about the facts of the stabbing which, like all traumatic events, have been buried in some dark corner of his mind and he doesn’t want to disinter them. I also remember that Sir Patrick Hastings, a great advocate, would never see a client in a murder, in case, overwhelmed by his dominating and Irish charm, they might pour out their hearts to him and confess.

  So we watch Jimmy, looking paler and younger than ever, buoyed up by the excitement of the great day which has come at last. We smoke Paul’s cigarettes and talk about the weather and conditions on remand in Brixton, both horrible. Then Jimmy tells me that his letter to the devil, which began ‘Hail, Lucifer’ and contained the Lord’s Prayer in reverse, was written, not in his victim’s blood, as the prosecution’s expert would testify, but in his own. I know that my job, for the next few days, is not to prove Jimmy innocent but to demonstrate that the prosecution evidence is not entirely convincing.

  Now I am in court. The prosecutor is an elegant lawyer who wears a bowler hat with a curly brim, striped shirts with stiff white collars and takes holidays on Greek islands. The jury looks solid and working-class with one Irishman (is this a hopeful sign?) and a shy Kensington lady who seems strangely out of place. The judge is silent, almost motionless. Nobody looks surprised as the prosecutor flourishes the dagger and deciphers the blood-stained letter to the Prince of Darkness. Peter, my junior, has appeared and is looking round the court with quiet amusement. At lunch-time, in the pub, he will give the prosecutor’s opening speech a severe mimicking. Two clerks of the court, sitting below the judge, have dropped into a light doze. The pathologist gives evidence and we examine the dagger with detached interest, as though we were passing each other clues from the crossword puzzle. We have met in many such trials and always enjoyed friendly conversations across the court. At least he agrees that the wound is not inconsistent with our story. The judge snorts loudly, like an old boar awakening, and asks some questions. They are very fair. I remember defending an elderly husband who had killed his terminally ill wife. ‘You have undertaken a task,’ Judge Aarvold told him, ‘which only the Almighty performs and that with reluctance. Go now and sin no more.’ I wonder if there is any chance of him telling Jimmy to go and sin no more, and decide that, even if he doesn’t, I like this judge very much.

  Jimmy’s flatmate gives evidence. He is thin, long-haired, elegant and now married to a Swedish girl. He seems an unlikely friend for the pallid young Irishman. He says he couldn’t believe it when Jimmy said he’d killed someone, and didn’t remember if he was laughing or crying when he said it. One court clerk, now awake, wakes up the other who can’t face the reality of life in court and is soon off again. The judge starts to yawn and clerk number one keeps awake by closely watching everyone’s movements. Courts are not the quiet, peaceful places you see in movies: a stream of people are coming in and out, whispering, passing notes and dashing off to other cases. Now, the wakeful clerk concentrates on making telephone calls. As I realize the prosecution wants to prove Jimmy gay and therefore unlikely to resist the deceased person’s advances (as though a heterosexual girl would be bound to accept all would-be lovers), I ask his flatmate about a disease he and Jimmy caught from the same woman. He looks at his shoes and admits the truth of this suggestion. Then we go to lunch in the pub where Paul reads a prediction of doom in Jimmy’s horoscope and Peter tells me he hates being led.

  In the afternoon we get Jimmy’s sister, a sensible Irish nurse who seems undisturbed by the proceedings. She says her brother is a perfectly normal young man. A friend from the Lebanon gives evidence and says he had teased Jimmy for being ‘queer’. ‘And was it because he wasn’t that you felt it safe to tease him?’ I ask a distinctly risky question and am rewarded by an undeserved yes. Paul, who is writing feverishly, mutters, ‘Good question!’ Peter is whispering something highly entertaining to the junior counsel for the prosecution. We get a youngish doctor who puts on a bowler hat to take the oath and says that he examined Jimmy in prison and came to the conclusion that he had been ‘buggered frequently’. ‘You are an examiner of the back passage?’ The judge is making a note in which he is not inclined to mince words. I remember the book on forensic evidence which says that area of the body can be distended for many reasons. People sometimes put strange things
up themselves; for instance, in various recorded cases, a tin of Brasso, a boot brush, or a small bust of Napoleon III. It can also be distended by chronic constipation. The judge takes down the evidence about Napoleon III without a smile and then looks at the doctor in some bewilderment. I feel I have done my best with the medical evidence and sit down sweating and thinking of a hot bath and clean clothes. When the day ends Jimmy is in a mood of exhilaration and thinks things are going ‘brilliantly’. Paul says he’s going to see a haemotologist and work on the case most of the night. He hopes to have something for me by lunch-time tomorrow. Peter gives us an imitation of the doctor in the witness-box.

  The next morning the court is crowded. There is a party of schoolgirls and a contingent from the Women’s Institute. The judge is friendly, the jury look anxious and attentive; the prosecutor winks at me from time to time, remembering our blue movie sessions in Scotland Yard. Nothing has gone seriously wrong and, although I had another nightmare about turning up in court in my pyjamas, I am feeling relaxed. And then a large, jovially upper-class doctor appears in the witness-box and says he is a friend of the Wistey family and had been asked by them to keep an eye on young Charlie in London. He says the dead man had a low IQ, and was emphatically not homosexual. I feel that this medic and the judge are going to get on well together and start a polite, low-key cross-examination. ‘When you say Wistey was sexually immature, does that mean he was at the homosexual stage?’ I ask a question which is politically incorrect but might be forensically effective. The doctor will have none of this and embarks on a long lecture about the nature of homosexuality which is distinctly unhelpful to our case. Hoping to stop his flow I sit down, to be fixed with a glare from Paul, who looks at me as though I were the first sign of blight on the potato crop. ‘Why didn’t you suggest that Master Charlie wouldn’t have admitted to being gay to his upper-crust friends?’ he hissed at me. I smile in a way which I hope indicates I had thought of that question and, after careful consideration, rejected it.

  By lunch-time Paul has forgiven me. We go to an Italian restaurant and, among the breadsticks and beside the plates of spaghetti carbonara, he gives me notes he has made about the blood in which Jimmy wrote his letter to the devil. I absorb a glass or two of Chianti and a crash course in haemotology. I realize with intense gratitude that I have a solicitor who may help win the case.

  The forensic expert looks like an anonymous housewife with glasses and a high, monotonous voice with whistling s sounds. She has formidable qualifications and handles all the exhibits with elaborate care, putting the dagger back into its sheath as though it were a valuable antique. It is to her that I have to put the body of instant learning I have got from Paul in the restaurant not half an hour before. I embark on the subject of the classification of blood: ‘All our red corpuscles are the same. What varies are the agglutinogens which must fit in with the appropriate agglutinin as a lock fits its own key, and causes the red cells to clump together like bunches of grapes. These varying types of lock can divide human blood into four groups, which have been named A, B, O and AB. An advocate must be able to take an instant lesson in any subject and at least sound knowledgeable when cross-examining an expert who has studied it for years. So far, the witness agrees. Then I put Paul’s great thesis. The deceased’s blood was of the common O variety. Jimmy’s is of the slightly more rare A. Now, when the blood on the letter was tested it was classified as O and it was assumed that it had been written after the murder because it was in the victim’s blood. But if, in fact, Jimmy had written it months before in his own blood, the passage of time could have caused the antigens to fade and the blood would have become very hard to classify. So the letter might not have been the devilish work of a murderer performing black magic with his victim’s blood, but the act of a schoolboyish young man who pricked his own finger to do something he had read about in the works of Dennis Wheatley. The judge is wide awake and looming forward as though in the Centre Court at Wimbledon. The expert, for whom I now feel a surge of love and admiration, admits the possibility of what I am suggesting. What may turn out to be a match point has been won by Paul Laity.

  The prosecution case is over and I’m opening the defence to the jury. I want them to perform an act of imagination. What would it be like to be an eighteen-year-old Irish boy who’d had a few drinks and was cornered by a bigger, taller, more athletic, better-nourished and sexually ravenous young man late on a wet night in the Earls Court area? The prosecutor has always called my client O’Neill. I call him Jimmy. I can tell his story for him but the moment comes, all too soon, when he has to tell it for himself. He leaves the safety of the dock for the dangerous witness-box. I take him through his evidence and then sit down. He’s alone now, beyond my help, facing a prosecutor who’s no longer smiling or winking at me but attacking Jimmy in a well-judged simulation of controlled outrage. It’s all lies, isn’t it, the story of an accidental death and a sexual attack? Jimmy turns out, rather to my surprise, to be an intelligent witness, perhaps too intelligent. He can see the rocks ahead. He sticks to his story, although some strange facts emerge. He wrote the letter in blood to frighten a girl he didn’t like, but it seems to have frightened her not at all. He says he’d never heard of buggery until he got to England and then ‘a queer told me’. He appears strangely innocent and prudish and doesn’t know that the word ‘come’ means to have an orgasm. He says he made his statement to the police in a hurry because he wanted his cherry-coloured corduroy trousers back. He told some lies in it in order not to involve the friends he’d told about the killing. ‘You lied to save your friends. Didn’t you also lie to save yourself?’ The prosecutor sits down, well satisfied, without waiting for the answer.

  The defence is always at its highest point at the end of the prosecution case, at its lowest after the accused has given evidence. Jimmy hasn’t made any obvious mistakes, in fact he’s done rather well, but we’ve got no evidence to support the story of violent soliciting by night. There’s plenty of evidence against Jimmy, none at all against Charles Wistey. And then Paul, who’s been outside the court, comes back in a state of high excitement with a piece of paper in his hand. This is what can be said, he tells me, by a surprise witness, a deus ex machina who has arrived from nowhere and wants to give evidence. ‘For God’s sake,’ Paul whispers deafeningly, ‘get him into the witness-box before the bugger changes his mind!’

  Our unlooked-for, unhoped-for witness turns out to be a model of credibility, a medical student about to do his finals and also engaged to be married. He’d read about our case in the Daily Mirror and decided to come and tell the court about his own experience. He’d been walking home late at night in Earls Court when a well-built, upper-class young man solicited him, pursued him into a doorway and urgently demanded sex. He’s able to recognize the photograph of Wistey. No, he has no doubt about it at all. The advocate is frequently taken by surprise in the course of a case and has to hide the fact; it’s particularly unnerving to discover that your client may have been telling nothing but the truth.

  The final speech has always been the part I most enjoyed. You don’t have to flatter the judge or risk unexpected answers from witnesses. You can form a relationship, a very temporary friendship even, with twelve people you hope to persuade to uncertainty. You can choose those members of the jury you feel are sympathetic and build up their confidence, or you can concentrate on those who have sat po-faced and disapproving and hope to convert them, or at least make them smile. It’s also the best part because the end is in sight, the blessed moment when you’ve done all you can and the responsibility is no longer yours. I try to make them remember that Jimmy O’Neill’s life will be changed for ever by what they decide, long after everyone else in court has forgotten what his case was all about.

  And now the deep, growling voice comes from the bench, fair, moderate, still somewhat puzzled. ‘This is a strange, unfamiliar world to us, members of the jury,’ the judge tells them, as though Earls Court were in darkest Africa, t
housands of miles from the tennis at Wimbledon. Jimmy is listening, pale and intense, as the judge dismisses the suggestion that he was buggered and accepts that Wistey pursued him with lecherous intent. ‘That young man was on the prowl in Earls Court,’ he says. It’s twenty to twelve when he finishes, the jury file out in solemn silence and Paul and I go up to the Old Bailey canteen to wait and drink coffee.

  This is the worst part. You can’t concentrate or think of anything else. Peter arrives smiling and asks if the case is all over. The woman behind the tea urns is shouting at a deaf man because he failed to send someone a birthday card. The clerk who spent most of his time asleep in court comes up to our table. ‘Your defence of that young man. Bloody top hole!’ he says. ‘If I were in charge I’d acquit immediately. And I say that from my extremely humble position.’ I decide I don’t like this work, and yet some inherited aptitude, or listening to ancestral voices, has kept me at it far too long.

  We drink coffee until it feels as though it’s running out of our ears and then we go to lunch in the pub. Doing nothing makes it the longest, the suspense makes it the most exhausting, day of the trial. At three o’clock in the afternoon the jury come back. ‘Will your foreman please stand.’ The clerk of the court is now wide awake and quietly excited. I hold my breath and stare at the ceiling, a gambler waiting for the roulette wheel to slow down and the ball to stop rattling. Jimmy, who has learnt chess from one of the screws during the long wait, seems entirely calm as the jury acquit him of murder and find him guilty of manslaughter by a majority of ten to two. I make the sort of mitigation speech, the appeal to mercy, which I have never been particularly good at and Jimmy stands, saying he’s sorry for the family of the deceased gentleman. Judge Aarvold, talking sadly about the dangers of drinking and carrying knives, gives him four years, which like so many things in life is probably worse than he’d hoped for but better than he’d feared. Of course I never see him again.