Murderers and Other Friends (3 page)

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, thousands 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.

And that, so far as I can recall, is how it was living through a murder trial. Years later I put some element of Jimmy O'Neill's trial into a Rumpole story, so fact became fiction. On another strange occasion a fictional murder ended up as fact. I wanted Rumpole to appear at a court martial and, as I had never been engaged in such a proceeding, I went off to the British Army in Germany to see how it worked. I was shown great hospitality by the Judge Advocate's office and taken to see the trial of a young guardsman accused of smoking a cannabis cigarette. An interesting point of law arose because the only evidence of what was in the cigarette was what he said at the time, and he might have been boasting or lying or just having everyone on. I learnt the procedure of a court martial and then I came home to write my Rumpole story.

It was called ‘The Bright Seraphim' and it concerned a court martial for murder in a guards regiment. I started the story with what I thought was a dramatic image: a British sergeant-major is lying, stabbed through the heart, outside a disco in a small German town. The bloodstains were not immediately visible as, instead of his uniform, the sergeant was wearing a long, bright-red evening-gown. The story was written and, in due course, televised.

Years later I was invited to dinner with the Queen's Guard in Germany. It was an extremely pleasant occasion organized by an assistant adjutant whose name was Delia. Before dinner she suggested I might like to have a drink in the Sergeants Mess. One of the sergeants looked over his pint and said, ‘Were you ever out with the army in Germany before?' ‘Oh, yes,' I told them, ‘I came out to see a court martial. It was quite an interesting case, actually. A young guardsman was accused of smoking cannabis and the only evidence against him was that he said it was a joint.' ‘That wasn't the case!' An older, no doubt more important, sergeant corrected me. ‘You came over here because of that murder we had. You know, the one where a sergeant-major was found stabbed outside a disco? And him wearing some tart's red evening-dress.'

I'm giving a talk at lunch-time. It's not especially well attended, but a man has come to interview me for a radio programme. He sits in the front row, an elderly, untidy person with a haversack full of documents. After the talk he takes me up in a creaking, coffin-like lift to an empty office. He produces an old tape-recorder which is about the size of a portable wireless in the days when they were substantial instruments. He strikes it with his fist and its red light flickers find then glows sullenly. By way of warm-up he tells me the following story. His grandfather used to act in melodrama at the old Lyric, Hammersmith, and played star roles. At the end of one of these performances he was holding an actress playing his wife, recently dead. ‘My wife is dead in my arms', was the line this old actor had to sob out to the front of the house. ‘What shall I doo – oo?' A voice from the gallery answered, ‘Screw her while she's still warm!' For some reason this story endeared my interviewer to me but he managed to chill our relationship by delving into the haversack and bringing out a battered typescript. ‘And this' – he flourished it proudly – ‘is what they're going to say about you on the radio on the day you die. I thought it would be great fun if you read it out during our interview. It starts: “John Mortimer was I stopped him there. Why? Because I might be in danger of believing it? Or because I prefer not to dwell on thoughts of death?

Another part of life started for me with Penny, more than twenty-three years younger but considerably more sensible than I. We met at a New Year's Eve party. Our wedding might be considered unromantic by some. I was in the middle of a trial when a member of the jury asked if he might have a day off because his mother-in-law had died and he wanted to attend the funeral. I then rang Penny and said we were having a free day because of the juryman's mother-in-law. Might it be possible to book the Harrow Road register office on the date of the funeral, which also happened to be my birthday and we were having a party? It was free and we were married.

It was the start of the seventies, the vanished age of flower power and headbands, Nehru jackets and Afghan waistcoats, protests against the Vietnam War and posters in bed-sitting rooms advising their occupants, who had no intention of fighting anyone, to Make Love Not War. It was a time when no one young thought they would have the least difficulty finding a job, and that society would inevitably become more tolerant, liberal and humane.