Blood Royal (22 page)

He pushed open the door and stopped in his tracks as he saw her with the gun. His face was flushed, not from the stairway, but from booze. He stared at her holding the gun and burst into a laugh.

“You dumb bitch, give me that.”

He stepped forward and she pulled the trigger. The gun jerked in her grasp and she dropped it.

A shotgun blast comes out of the barrel as a tight knot of BB-sized lead pellets, but the wad expands. By the time it reached Barry across the room, the pellets had spread out bigger than a softball. The shot hit him in the groin.

He flew backward with a crazed, violent movement and went down the stairs headfirst.

He mercifully bled to death before an ambulance arrived.

Barry would not have wanted to live as a eunuch.

A
quicksand of deceit.

St. Andrews Hotel

Philip Hall was waiting in the lobby for Marlowe when she stepped out of the elevator. He had come to escort her to the Old Bailey, where her petition to represent the princess would be heard. The press was in full force outside the front doors, with TV cameras ready to beam her image around the globe.

She wondered if people back in Modesto would see it, whether her father would be bragging that that was his daughter. If he was still alive.

She hadn’t heard from him since she won the San Francisco jury trial in which she was accused of murdering her husband Barry. He called her soon after the trial was over and she had listened quietly as he spoke. “This is your father, Marlowe. How are you?”

They hadn’t spoken for nearly a decade, not since she left Modesto, and his tone sounded as if she had been away for the weekend. In her eyes, it was apropos that her father waited to contact her until after she won the murder case against her for shooting Barry.

“Where were you when I needed you?” she asked, and hung up.

The next day, a woman with a weepy voice on the verge of hysteria called to tell her that she was her stepmother and that her father needed her. He had stomach cancer.

Marlowe listened unsympathetically to her appeal and hung up the phone without replying, and then called the telephone company to change her number to an unlisted one.

She knew what her father wanted—he was facing his Maker and wanted forgiveness and closure. She wasn’t willing to give him either. The reason she had been unforgiving was that he had not called for her sake—he had called for his own peace of mind. He could take his guilt and open emotional sores to the grave and toss and turn for eternity.

The sight of the cameras of the Fourth Estate waiting in front of the hotel brought her back to the present.

“Any chance we can sneak out the back rather than face that mob?” she asked Hall.

“’Fraid not. British newspeople can be fair or they can lynch you with printer’s ink. We’re better off facing the pack than antagonizing them. But Anthony has asked that we limit our interaction with the news media to polite smiles. I’ve already told the group outside that there will be a news conference later in the day, so all you have to do is give them a nice smile as we wade through.”

More of Anthony Trent putting a muzzle on her mouth was her impression, but she didn’t have anything she wanted to say to the press. Safely ensconced in the limo, Marlowe said, “I need to ask you something, not specifically about the princess, but the Royals in general. In America, we get cross-signals about the Royals. On the one hand, it appears the British people cherish their royal family, but we hear about people who openly criticize the institution, complain about spending tax money to protect them, and basically want to get rid of the system.”

“I think that’s a fair assessment of the range of feelings, somewhere between adoration and off with their heads. Most people support the queen.”

“Where are you in that equation? And I’m not asking that question of you when you’re wearing your hat—or wig—as a lawyer for the princess, but as a person.”

Hall pursed his lips with a little disapproval, as if she had asked a question about a family secret. “Where do I stand? I believe the Royals are the very heart of Britain, even more so than Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the Church of England, and our other assorted monuments and institutions. You Americans have far fewer traditions than we—”

“We’re a younger country.”

“It’s not just that, that excuse doesn’t work anymore, America’s been around for centuries. I see it differently. Americans don’t honor their traditions the way we have. People in your country pride themselves as being irreverent much more than we do. And I think it’s because you’ve never had a central tradition to focus upon. Your presidents come and go, some in disgrace one step ahead of impeachment, some doing tacky telly commercials soon after leaving office—”

“And some work for world peace and lead very distinguished lives.”

“Rightly so. But the point is, your heads of state are rarely remembered or revered past their term of office unless they get assassinated. Here in Britain, we have had kings and queens as heads of state, sprouting for centuries from the same family tree. I don’t know how the royal genealogical table works, but I would imagine that we’ve had branches of the same tree going back to the Middle Ages. Unlike many other European countries—France, Germany, Italy—we have not had heads of state and forms of government coming and going and leaving chaos in their wake. And the same goes for other European countries with monarchies—the Dutch, Belgians, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians—all of them have cherished their monarchs and have enjoyed long-term stability.”

“What about these Royals, specifically?”

“The only Royals that really matter in terms of the nation are the reigning monarch and heir to the throne. As for the queen, I believe she will go down in our history as one of our most gifted monarchs. She has reigned through the advent of both the atomic age and the computer age, the loss of the colonial empire, the Cold War, the advent of the European Union, and the War Between the Sexes.”

“We call that the Sexual Revolution,” Marlowe said. “What do you think of the princess? Off the record, in complete confidence.” Which was nonsense, of course. How could anything that was said to a lawyer or a reporter be off the record?

“I admire the princess for her courage to stand up for what she believes. She has a good heart, I believe she honestly loves people and has done good with her charities. And she appears to be a caring mother, though one has to wonder how caring it is to kill the boys’ father.”

“But?”

“Some question whether her immaturity and neurosis killed the heir to the throne. What do you think of her?”

“I haven’t reached a conclusion yet. If you had asked me that question before the shooting, I suppose I would have given a response similar to how I imagine many American—and I suppose British—women felt about her. On the one hand, she had married a prince and was to be a queen, that’s a fairy-tale romance to us poor unwashed masses. There are many royal weddings, but this one was particularly special because she has that elusive quality called charisma.”

“She’s quite pretty—”

“No, she’s not
that
attractive, and physical beauty has nothing to do with it. Every year at the Miss America and Miss World beauty pageants, there are women who are far more physically beautiful than most of the female actresses in Hollywood. Julia Roberts, for example, would not be a runner-up at a beauty contest. But she has charisma that makes her stand out from the rest. And the princess has some of that mysterious magnetism.”

They rode in silence for a moment before Marlowe brought up the subject of the procedure at the courthouse whereby she would be granted permission to appear on the princess’s behalf before an English court.

Hall said, “We will meet with the judge and the Crown Prosecutor informally. The right of barristers to act as advocates rests mostly on tradition—theoretically, a judge could allow a solicitor or anyone else to argue a case, but it just isn’t done.”

“I’m not sure that an American court would permit a barrister not licensed in the state to appear before it. Our courts generally operate by the strict rules of statutory law, not traditions. But we do recognize the similarity between the legal systems. If you came to California from a common-law country like Britain or Canada and wanted to be licensed to practice, you could take the bar exam without going to law school. If you came from continental Europe or almost anywhere else in the world, you would have to go to law school before they permitted you to take the exam.”

“Quite so. As Lord Finfall pointed out, both the British and American systems are based upon the same principles, concepts that would be alien to a French, German, Italian, or other continental European attorney. As you well know, the continental system is not based upon attorney adversaries battling before a neutral judge for the favor of a jury, rather it’s an inquisitional system, with the judge conducting an interrogation of witnesses. It’s called civil law, I believe, as opposed to our system of common law. I seem to recall much of it evolved from the Napoleonic era.”

Hall cleaned his glasses with a soft cloth as he went on. “However, don’t make the mistake of assuming that there are no differences between your American system and ours. Your legal system tends to be very dynamic, in constant flux and readily adaptable to change. Ours is much more steeped in tradition, but in many ways less structured.”

“Really? I would have thought it was much more rigid.”

“Not at all. You see, the basic tenet of legal rights under the American criminal justice system is based upon interpretation of a set of written rules.”

“The Constitution.”

“We don’t have a written constitution. More than anything, we have a set of traditions that we honor. The powers of the queen are an example of that. She possesses enormous powers, perhaps even the sort wielded by the proverbial Oriental potentate, but she doesn’t utilize them out of a sense of tradition. I was never a student of the political system, but my understanding is that theoretically she could fire the Prime Minister anytime she liked and appoint a new one. The real limitation on her, of course, is common sense and public opinion. If she attempted to use the old-fashioned powers of a monarch, Parliament would strip them from her.

“By the same token, the Crown, meaning the government at large, has the authority to alter the legal system in ways that your structured system would never be able to. The same goes for the entire legal system. It can be altered to protect the nation.”

“Protect the nation?”

“We’re a small island. America has five times the population, but around thirty or forty times more land area.”

“Plus natural resources.”

“Exactly, vast resources. We have almost no mineral resources, a few buckets of coal, some barrels of oil sucked with difficulty out of the bottom of the North Sea. That makes us a fragile nation. It wouldn’t take much of a natural or military disaster to turn Britain into a third world economy. And everyone knows, we will never completely assimilate into the continental culture or economy. It’s not a question of language, there are many languages in Europe. What really separates us is the
law.
We have a system in which the people look up to the law out of respect. On the continent, the law looks down at them and people fear it. The jury system puts justice in the hands of the people, rather than the way the Europeans conduct their cases with a career judge, literally a paid inquisitor, who socially and economically is far removed from the average person. Judges on the continent are not impartial arbiters. In my view they are an extension of the police.

“The essence of the privilege against self-incrimination and separation of the judiciary from the police are to prevent abuses of police power. The system on the continent, where the judiciary and the police work hand in hand and there is no right to refuse to be interrogated, can lead to usurpation of power by the government.”

He paused and grinned. “Sorry, I didn’t intend to give you a lecture.”

“It’s okay, I appreciate it, I need to understand your system. More than anything else, I need to know the procedures.”

“Then perhaps we should talk about trial procedures. Most of it will be familiar to you, but we don’t permit the sort of jury questioning and challenges, voir dire, used in the States. Basically, other than potential jurors who fall into certain exceptions, such as hardships or personal involvement in the matter that would bar them from serving, the jury will be composed of the first twelve called to the box. And verdicts are different, too. We have the same standard, beyond a reasonable doubt, but unlike your American system, the verdicts don’t have to be unanimous. If all twelve can’t agree upon a verdict, the judge informs them he will accept the will of ten out of twelve.”

“That makes it much harder to get a hung jury.”

“Exactly. And we will also have to deal with a prosecutorial privilege of vetting prospective jurors.”

“What do you mean by vetting?”

“In sensitive cases, prosecutors check the backgrounds of jurors through police, Special Branch, and security services records. They’re looking to see if the person has political or social sympathies that would make them unsuitable in cases that could affect the well-being of the nation. Prosecutors have been secretly vetting since 1974, but the practice was only recently exposed.”

“What happens if they don’t like the person’s beliefs?”

“They ask them to stand by for the prosecution. Meaning they are eliminated as jurors.”

“That amounts to a preemptory challenge by the prosecution, simply eliminating jurors the prosecution doesn’t want, even before they are called to court to be questioned. Do we also have that right?”

“We don’t have the right and the vetting information isn’t always shared with the defense. Basically, the defense only has the right to whatever the prosecution is willing to turn over. It’s a very controversial matter that we barristers are not happy with. In this case, we are making a demand to know if vetting is done, which we know will be done for a certainty. Anthony is planning to make noise if we are not permitted to share information, but there is not a great chance the prosecution will share it with us.”