Charlie (69 page)

‘Right here by me side,’ he laughed. ‘And bloody lovely she looks an’ all.’

‘You aren’t mad with me then for sticking my nose in?’

‘Sweetheart!’ he chuckled. ‘When I answered the door last night and saw her standing there, all me principles flew out the bleedin’ window. She showed me the letter you wrote her too. Christ, Charlie, you’ve got one helluva way with words. I’d have been sitting here for a twelve-month before I could put it the way you did.’

‘I’m glad something ended happily,’ she said, trying to gesture to Andrew what had happened.

‘It’s all gonna end happily,’ he laughed. ‘I’m going with Wendy on Monday to hear the closing speeches, even if I need a wheelchair to get in there. We’ll be knocking back a few celebration bevvies on the way home too. Why don’cha join us?’

Charlie had already decided she couldn’t bear the strain of attending even though Mrs Haagman had offered both Rita and herself the day off. But hearing Dave’s happiness and his firm belief the Dexters would be found guilty changed her mind.

‘Okay, I’ll see you there,’ she said. ‘Now, how are you feeling?’

‘On top of the world right now,’ he said. ‘I know I’m right near the end now. Next Friday I’m going into a hospice. I reckon it’s only pure bloody-mindedness which has kept me around this long. But don’t you worry your pretty little head about that. I shall be flying out on a cloud of glory.’

On Monday morning Charlie, Rita and Andrew joined Dave and Wendy in the front row of the public gallery with only a few short minutes for introductions and a brief chat before the court rose.

Wendy was prettier and younger-looking in the flesh than she’d appeared in snapshots. Her short fair hair was bleached by the Australian sun, her small uptilted nose was freckled, and it was clear by the expression in her tawny eyes and the way she constantly tucked her arm through her father’s and held his hand that she was savouring every minute of the short time she had left with him. Dave looked so ill, even thinner than the last time Charlie had seen him, the skin on his face hanging like a bloodhound’s. But his smile was bright and he said he felt pretty good.

The prisoners were brought up and all conversation stopped. The twins looked just the same as they had when Charlie was in court before. They shuffled in, eyes down, faces pale and expressionless. But Daphne almost swaggered in, and it was clear she’d made a special effort with her appearance. She wore the same black suit as before, but with a turquoise blouse beneath which picked up the colour of her eyes. Her dark hair was loose too, falling in a sleek bob to her shoulders. She looked the picture of elegance and confidence.

The jury came in, and finally the court rose for the judge.

Brian Underwood’s opening speech was calm and measured. He took up a stance by the jury and addressed everything to them. He started out with a plea for them to look at all the charges separately, to study the evidence and the testimonies of witnesses carefully, weighing them one against the other before they came to their final decision. ‘You may think that on some charges only one person is guilty, that is, the hand that wielded the gun, knife, or other weapon. That isn’t so, the three accused worked together, therefore they share a “Guilty” or a “Not Guilty” verdict.’

Charlie caught hold of both Andrew and Rita’s hands as Underwood ran through the evidence on each of the charges. With regard to Jin Weish’s murder he said, ‘We don’t know exactly how Jin Weish came to be in the Wapping warehouse on the night of the 20th June 1970, maybe he was taken there by force. But it certainly wasn’t chance. Not when three other people who had no business to be in that building, were there, armed with a gun. Yet we do know for certain that he was bound, then shot several times, at close range in both the head and chest, wrapped in a tarpaulin, weighted down, rowed out into the river and his body dumped. We also know for certain that the goods Jin Weish was awaiting at that time were stolen, to be recovered over two years later in a house belonging to Miss Dexter.

’Mr Kent, our witness, owner of the Wapping warehouse, saw the entire murder from a position in the room above. From him we heard that Daphne Dexter, driven by an extreme jealous rage because Weish wouldn’t leave his wife for her, had planned not only to kill him, but also to ruin and bring disgrace to him and his family.

‘Should you believe Mr Kent’s testimony about the identity of the murderers and the events he witnessed? I believe you must. Not only were many of the details he gave us verified by experts, but I ask you to bear in mind that a man with a terminal disease has nothing to gain but clearing his own conscience by telling the whole truth. If you had doubts about him because he kept this secret for so long, just ask yourself now, would you have reported this crime if in doing so you put your own child’s life in danger?’

Charlie looked along the bench at Dave and he smiled encouragingly.

Underwood then moved on to the charge of grievous bodily harm to Sylvia Weish. He pointed out emphatically that while there might be a lack of any real proof it was instigated by Daphne Dexter and carried out by her brothers, the jury must bear in mind the words ‘in all probability’. Miss Dexter had stated she intended to decimate Weish’s character and destroy everything he had achieved and loved. Crippling Sylvia Weish at such a time was a perfect way not only to wreak revenge on her personally, but also to create the suspicion that Jin Weish had disappeared because he was involved in serious crime.

Going on to each of the other charges, he reminded the jury how many of the witnesses for the prosecution were victims who had lived in fear for their own lives and those of their loved ones, yet had bravely put aside that fear, albeit belatedly, to see justice done. When he spoke of Rita Tutthill he was at his most eloquent. ‘A young and pretty woman, whose only crime was to fall for a man Daphne Dexter had set her cap at. Did such an act warrant being tied down naked to a table, to be scored painstakingly with a butcher’s knife, from her shoulders to her knees, like a piece of pork? One could perhaps understand a single thrust of a knife in a moment of jealous rage. But the scars on Miss Tutthill’s body must have taken several hours to achieve. The monstrous cruelty of such an act must prove to you all that the accused are merciless, barbarians, remorseless in their desire to inflict pain on anyone who dared oppose or challenge them.

‘Miss Tutthill was too afraid for her child to go to the police, or even to seek medical help. You have seen the photographs of the mutilation to her body, but let me remind you again, these scars were inflicted eight years earlier than the photographs you have seen. I beg you not only to imagine the pain such torture brought, but the terrible mental scars she still bears to this day. Her life since that fateful night has been a sad and lonely one, yet when she met young Charlie Weish and realized that Jin Weish’s one-time mistress was none other than her torturer, she felt compelled to speak out if only to protect her young friend from similar hurt.’

Charlie’s eyes filled with tears, and sensing Rita was crying too she caught hold of her hand and squeezed it tightly.

‘Bearing all these atrocities in mind, can any of you now doubt Daphne Dexter chose to dispose of Ralph Peterson too?’ Underwood’s voice rose. Pausing for a moment to allow his words to sink in, he strode up and down in front of the jury, his hands clasped behind his back. ’Peterson had jilted her when she had her heart set on marrying him – almost certainly the attraction was his money. My learned friends for the defence would have us believe this is too weak a reason. I agree that for most of us reasonable people it is. Yet we have already seen and heard that Daphne Dexter is not a reasonable woman, but a vengeful, cunning and jealous woman.

‘The defence went to some pains to discredit Peterson, yet he was a man of sixty-three who had amassed his fortune by building several highly reputable companies, with never the slightest hint of a stain on his character. Wasn’t it far more likely that Miss Dexter engineered the evidence of his trips to peep-show clubs, and indeed lied to him about what she was using his loan for?’ He paused again, looking hard at the jury.

‘Now, the question of the twenty thousand pounds he left Miss Dexter in his will. Proof he still retained some affection for her, as the defence have claimed? I think not. That will was dated nine months prior to his death. Miss Peterson said that her brother didn’t express anxiety about Miss Dexter until seven months later. I ask you all to think when you last updated your will. A year ago, two? It isn’t a high priority to most of us, is it?

‘I believe Miss Dexter always knew the contents of that will, and guessing Peterson wasn’t the type to think of rushing off to change it immediately, ordered her brothers to wait outside his Mayfair club late at night, and knock him down and kill him. At one stroke she rid herself of a humiliating failure and gained a considerable amount of money.’

Charlie looked along to Dave and saw he was grinning. He made a thumbs-up sign to her.

‘Finally we have the abduction of Andrew Blake.’ Underwood looked as if he was enjoying himself now; his face was more animated, his hands, which earlier had been clasped behind his back, were now making involuntary gestures.

’There can be no doubt in any of your minds that when Daphne Dexter drugged him, stripped him of his own clothes and drove him from Shepherd’s Bush to her house in Kent, that she fully intended to murder him. What else was she intending to do with him, if not that? He was the boyfriend of Charlie Weish. She felt that in his investigations into the disappearance of Jin Weish, he was getting too close to the truth for comfort.

‘Our learned council for the defence would have us doubt Blake was ever in that cellar. They produced a witness who said that on the first night of his so-called abduction he stayed at a guest-house in Eastbourne. Yet in a statement made to the police soon after their arrest, Barrington and Michael Dexter admitted they drove the unconscious Blake to The Manse that same Friday evening on instructions from their sister.

‘We also heard from the police that another young man was in fact fraudulently using Blake’s cheque-book and his identity along the south coast, during the entire weekend while Blake was incarcerated. I would suggest this was a ploy to create the impression Blake’s balance of mind was disturbed well before his “faked” suicide. Happily Blake escaped, as did Miss Weish, but I would like you all to think on what might have happened to these two young people if they hadn’t managed it.’

Charlie’s spirits had soared as Underwood summed up the case for the prosecution. She couldn’t see any way that the defence could bring up a stronger argument. But the moment their man stepped forward, her heart sank. Just his height, good looks and bearing made little bespectacled Underwood with his North Country accent look inferior.

He smiled warmly at the jury in the manner of a man who had not a moment’s doubt about his ability to sway the minds of others. He opened up with the standard plea that while the jury made their deliberations they were to bear in mind that if there was any ‘reasonable doubt’ against any of the charges, they must find the accused ‘Not Guilty’ on that count.

Starting with the charge of Jin Weish’s murder, he launched into an assassination of the victim’s character. He suggested that a man who had arrived in England in 1949 with nothing but the clothes on his back, yet leapt from waiter in a Chinese restaurant to owning three Soho night-clubs, and then on to an extremely successful import business, was hardly likely to have achieved all this without skulduggery, cutting corners and making a great many enemies.

‘Are we really supposed to believe that a man as determined and successful as Weish obviously was would really give his most lucrative club to an ex-mistress, just to get her off his back?’ he said with a look of amusement. ‘Ask yourself too, why a woman as dynamic and beautiful as Miss Dexter, who had the world at her feet, would be so riddled with jealousy she’d plot for years to ruin an ex-lover and then execute him herself. It is a ridiculous idea.’

He paused just long enough to allow the jury to ponder on his words. Then, moving away a little and turning again, he raised his voice an octave.

‘Jealousy is an emotion we’ve heard a great deal about in this court for the past few weeks, but I put it to you members of the jury that many of the witnesses whose evidence you have heard were motivated to come forward by just that emotion. How odd too that all these “terrified victims” living in fear of their lives – often it is reputed for years – all found their courage as soon as they heard the Dexters had been arrested! Isn’t it far more likely that these “victims” with their sad little stories, perhaps with some petty grudge against the accused, entered into a feeding frenzy, and relished five minutes of fame, while getting back at those they were jealous of?’

Charlie wished she could see the jury’s faces, but they were hidden from view below the public gallery. She felt that each of them was slowly being turned around, and forgetting everything Underwood had put to them.

‘I don’t for one moment doubt that Mr Kent did see someone shoot Jin Weish, wrap up his body and row it out into the river. But we only have his word for it that it was the Dexters. Can we believe the word of a man who not only keeps quiet about this heinous crime he has observed, but happily sells his warehouse a few months later to the very people he claims committed it?

‘As for the attack on Sylvia Weish, witnessed by her daughter, there isn’t a shred of evidence that this crime was committed by either of the Dexters. It could have been anyone who had a grievance against Jin Weish,’ he said firmly.

As the barrister went on through each separate charge, Charlie was astounded at how the man could discredit every witness with some sort of grudge motive. The bank manager who claimed to have been blackmailed and beaten up in an alley one night when he refused to pay any longer was dismissed as being ‘as crooked as a corkscrew’, later sacked by his bank for misappropriation of funds. The tenants who’d been intimidated were passed off as whining inadequates who were evicted fairly and squarely for nonpayment of rent. As Charlie knew so little about what had passed when these people took the stand, she couldn’t judge whether any of this was true. But she did know for certain that the Dexters had killed her father and maimed Rita, and she wondered how the man could sleep at night knowing that through his clever words the jury might let the Dexters back on to the streets to begin another reign of terror.