The End Of Solomon Grundy (20 page)

Jack Jellifer found his relationship with Arlene quite distinctly changed by his performance in the witness box. One evening, for instance, he began to tell her about his activities and achievements during the day, as he always did when he came home, but she cut him short in a ruthless manner, with a remark to the effect that she had heard it all before. They passed most of the evening in watching television. Jack wore a martyr’s cloak of sullenness, for after all he had done no more and no less than what he regarded as his duty.

All organisations are more or less bureaucratic, all engender in their chief executives a desire not so much for personal glory as for the assurance that their skill, intelligence and dexterity shall not be spoiled by the clumsiness of all those other fellows. Chief-Inspector Whiteface of the Narcotics Squad felt that he had gone as far as could possibly be expected when he warned Manners about the idiot Ryan, who for some bad reason or for no reason at all, had cultivated Kabanga’s acquaintance. He did not, however, think it necessary or advisable to tell Manners about the raid on Kabanga’s clubs. Suspicion that these clubs were being used as drug pushing outlets and that Kabanga himself was receiving and distributing the drugs in a big way had hardened into certainty, and it was certain too, or so Whiteface’s man inside the Windswept said, that Kabanga had just received a consignment. He might have been made suspicious by Ryan’s visits, and he would get the wind up properly when he realised that the visits had stopped. It was necessary to raid Kabanga, and to do it quickly. If Whiteface told Manners about it he would be certain to ask that the raid should be delayed until the trial was over, a request which Whiteface did not want to grant and would have found it awkward to deny, even though the result of the trial couldn’t, as he saw it, possibly be affected. It was as a result of this reasoning that Whiteface left Manners in ignorance.

The raids were carried out on Kabanga’s six clubs simultaneously, just after midnight. In four of the clubs drugs were found in considerable quantities. Kabanga himself was in the tiny flat that he kept at the Windswept. He was very high on heroin. With him was a woman who was also high on heroin. They made quite a fuss, Kabanga shouting obscenities about the inspector who had come to him as a friend and then shopped him, the woman shrieking and fighting, saying things and making threats that were incomprehensible to the officers arresting her. It was not until they got to the station that they discovered the woman’s identity. She was Olivia Stenson.

Trial, Last Day

Trial Transcript – 8

MR NEWTON “My lord, I wish to ask for the recall of one of the prosecution witnesses for further cross-examination, as a result of information that has become known both to my learned friend and to myself since yesterday.”

THE JUDGE “This is an unusual request, Mr Newton. What is the name of the witness?”

MR NEWTON “Mrs Stenson.”

THE JUDGE “I take it you have had an opportunity of consulting with Mr Hardy. What do you say, Mr Hardy?”

MR.HARDY “My lord, in the circumstances, I do not resist the application.”

(Mrs Stenson was recalled to the witness box.)

MR NEWTON “Mrs Stenson, you gave evidence in this Court yesterday upon oath to the effect that you saw the accused on the night of September 23rd, in Cridge Mews. Was that evidence true?”

“No”

“Was it in fact wholly fictitious?”

“Yes.”

“Let me put the truth to you, so that the jury may have it clearly. You said that on the night of September 23rd you were in Cridge Mews. That was a lie?”

“Yes.”

“The truth is that you never saw the accused in your life before yesterday.”

“Yes.”

“You said that you went to Paris on the following day. That was a lie?”

“Yes.”

“The truth is that you went three weeks later, so that you had every opportunity of knowing about the case in the papers?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell the Court your reason for perjuring yourself.”
(The witness did not reply.)
“Perhaps it will be easier if I put certain matters to you. Are you a drug addict?”

“Yes.”

THE JUDGE “Please speak up.”

MR NEWTON “Who is your supplier?”

“Mr Kabanga.”

“Now, will you tell the Court if an approach was made to you the day before yesterday.”

“Yes. He told me—”

“‘He,’ that is, Mr Kabanga.”

“Yes. He told me that the trial didn’t seem to be going well, that the man, Grundy, might get off, and that he was going to fix him.”

“That was his expression, ‘To fix him’?”

“Yes. He said I was to come forward as – as a last minute witness, and to corroborate another witness.”

“That was Mr Leighton.”

“Yes. He told me what to say, and said it would be all right, I should be believed.”

“That is because you are, what shall I say, a woman of good social position.”

“I suppose so.”

“Whereas Leighton is a convicted felon?”

“Yes. I believe that is true.”

“It is true. Now, you knew the serious nature of what you were doing, Mrs Stenson. Why did you do it?”

THE JUDGE “You must answer the question.”
(The
witness appeared distressed.)
“You may sit, if you wish.”

MR NEWTON “I will repeat the question. Why did you do it?”

“He – Kabanga – threatened me.”

“How did he threaten you?”

“He said he would cut off—”

“Cut off your supplies?”

“Yes.”

“And it was because of this threat that you came here yesterday and perjured yourself?”

“Yes.”

“And this perjury might not have been discovered but for the fact that you were arrested with Kabanga last night, in a raid on his club—”
(end of transcript)

It is rarely, in truth, that cases are won and lost in a few minutes of so-called “deadly cross-examination”. The process is generally much more a relentless piling up of facts which lead inexorably to only one possible conclusion. But Newton’s treatment of the pathetic figure in the witness box, hardly recognisable as the poised, elegant Mrs Stenson of yesterday, was felt by those who saw it to be devastatingly effective. The other side were on a hiding to nothing, as Toby Bander said afterwards, but the old thing really rubbed their noses hard in the dirt, and did so in such a manner that he did not seem to be attacking the wretched Mrs Stenson so much as making clear that the villain of the piece was the sinister Kabanga. It was a situation of which nobody could have failed to take advantage but Newton really used it, as Toby Bander handsomely conceded, to the full.

Hardy, on his side, made no attempt to do the impossible, and resuscitate Mrs Stenson as a witness of truth. His face retained its customary impassivity. There is no armour against fate, he may have thought, and there is no redress when you have been saddled with a thorough-paced liar as a witness. He did not re-examine, nor attempt in any way to minimise what had happened. His cold had come back in full stream, and whether or not it was of psychosomatic origin, it was plain that, to put the thing simply, he should have been in bed. He made little attempt, even, to resuscitate Kabanga, who was called back when Mrs Stenson had left the box. The African did not conceal that he had told her what to say, and did not seem to understand at all the seriousness of his offence. Newton made full play with this and, without making any positive accusation, succeeded in leaving the impression that Kabanga had probably introduced Sylvia Gresham to the drug habit. Hardy’s re-examination was brief.

“Mr Kabanga, I believe that in your country it is not unusual for false evidence to be given, even in a case of such seriousness as this?”

Kabanga was not the wreck that Mrs Stenson had been. He answered readily. “Of course. It is a matter of how much you pay to the witnesses.”

“And your sole motive was that you believed the accused to be guilty, and wished justice to be done?”

“Of course, yes.”

“You realise now that what you did was extremely wrong?”

Kabanga pointed dramatically to the man in the dock and shouted: “He did it. Will your justice say so? If it does not, I spit on British justice.”

Hardy was barely able to repress his irritation. Didn’t the man
know
what he should say? He ended his re-examination with a couple of perfunctory questions, sat down and blew heavily into his handkerchief. Stevenage might have felt sorry for him, except that he was almost sure that when the time for cross-examination of Grundy arrived, his senior would miraculously have recovered.

The crucial interview in the case, seen in retrospect, took place before these cross-examinations, before even the day’s proceedings in Court, when Newton and Toby Bander, already apprised of the raids and arrests, went to see their client in his cell and told him what had happened. Grundy said nothing.

“Now,” Newton said pontifically – he could not prevent his manner from being pontifical, and really did not try very hard. “Now, I shall recall this Mrs Stenson and Kabanga too, and I don’t think there is any doubt that the questions I put will be extremely damaging to the other side, very damaging indeed. Isn’t that so, Toby?” Toby Bander agreed, as forcibly and directly as possible, that it was so. “The question is whether, in these circumstances, you should go into the box yourself to give evidence.”

Grundy raised his thick eyebrows and said that he was in their hands. He might have been talking about somebody else.

“No, that’s not the way it is at all.
We
are in
your
hands.” Newton could not resist putting his thumbs in his buttonholes. “On a similar occasion to this, where a vital witness might or might not be called, Marshall Hall left with his client two slips of paper, one saying that he wanted the witness called, the other saying that he didn’t. He asked his client to return one of the slips. The man chose to call the witness, but wouldn’t go into the box himself.”

“What happened to him?”

Newton coughed. Toby Bander said. “He was hanged.” He added after a moment’s hesitation, “But under the 1957 Homicide Act that wouldn’t be possible in this case.”

“It’s only life imprisonment now for strangling someone.” Grundy seemed almost to be enjoying himself.

“I want you to understand clearly what the choices are, and what the effect may be,” Newton said. “A man who is accused almost always goes into the witness box to explain his actions. If he doesn’t, prosecuting counsel conveys to the jury that the reason he didn’t do so was obviously that he was afraid—” here Newton paused, for Grundy had grinned at him in a very disconcerting manner. “—to face cross-examination and the judge also is likely to comment adversely in his summing up. Speaking generally, then, there are only two kinds of occasion when a defending counsel is likely to advise his client not to enter the box. The first is when the prosecution case is so weak that it doesn’t require an answer. That doesn’t apply here, although I don’t think the case is a very strong one.”

“And it will be weaker by the time we’ve done with Mrs Stenson,” Toby Bander said cheerfully.

“The second sort of occasion,” Newton said deliberately, “is when counsel’s client is likely to make such an unfavourable impression if he goes into the box that it is better to keep him out of it.”

Grundy smiled broadly. “And I come into that class?”

Silence. Toby Bander said, “You have a hot temper. Eustace Hardy knows how to stick in needles so that they really get under the skin. If you lost your temper under cross-examination it would be a pity.”

“So what do you advise?”

The note of detached irony was so strong that Newton could not trust himself to speak. Toby Bander replied.

“What we would have said before today was that the case against you demanded that you should go into the box and answer it. Now there is the possibility that Mrs Stenson’s perjury and the way Kabanga arranged it may leave such an unpleasant flavour in the jury’s minds, and cause so much doubt, that we can obtain an acquittal anyway.”

“The possibility,” Newton said. “It can’t be put higher than that. If you could guarantee to control yourself in the box—”

Grundy intervened, grinning. “Which of us can
guarantee
to control himself anywhere?”

Now Newton fairly shouted at his client. “Damn it, man, it’s your skin we’re worrying about.”

“Very good of you. You gentlemen are the experts. What do you advise?”

“It must be your own decision.”

“I see.” Grundy pondered, but only for a moment.

“Let’s toss for it, shall we? Heads I go in the box, tails I don’t.”

And toss for it, to the open fury of Magnus Newton and the secret amusement of Toby Bander, was what they did. A half-crown, produced by Toby Bander from his pocket, was spun by him and dropped to the floor. It came down tails.

So it was that Magnus Newton rose, after Kabanga left the box, and said solemnly that he proposed to call no further witnesses and that the case for the defence was closed. Red-faced, puffing irregularly like a car starting up from cold on a winter morning, he made a vigorous final speech. The half-crown incident had made him so angry that he would have preferred, for once, to find himself upon the prosecution side. It was not in his nature to be half-hearted, however, and he warmed to his words as he went on talking, telling the jury that the prosecution case was such a tissue of quarter-truths, terminological inexactitudes and confessed perjury that, after the most careful consideration, he and his learned junior had decided that it was not necessary for their client to go into the witness box. This, Newton said gravely, was his right and privilege, and it should not be thought that he was afraid to enter the box. Making the best of Grundy’s appearance, he asked, “Do you think he would be afraid of anything?” Grundy scowled at them with obliging ferocity.

Then Newton listed some of the prosecution witnesses, the girl Paget who had been asked to leave one school and who had sworn to things that were almost self-evidently ridiculous, Jellifer the wine and food expert who sampled only too well the subject matter of his talks and articles, Clements who identified a car in a glimpse lasting two or three seconds but could not remember a girl he had seen every day for a fortnight, Leighton the convicted felon, and last and worst of all Mrs Stenson, the model of respectability who had turned out to be a drug addict and peddler. Was there a conspiracy, Newton could not help wondering, was there a conspiracy of some sort on the part of a sinister figure or figures behind Mrs Stenson, to victimise his client? He left the jury with this slightly improbable thought.

Perhaps the most important effect of the decision not to call Grundy was that it disconcerted Eustace Hardy, so far as that model of intelligent legal decorum could be disconcerted. Hardy’s closing speech, like his opening one, was not one of the most notable in his career. There were many things which he would have liked to ask the accused, he said. What were the circumstances in which Sylvia Gresham’s dress had been torn, and his face raked by her nails? It was, however, the accused man’s right, as his learned friend had said, not to enter the witness box, but it did mean that the jury must try to find their answers to these and other questions without the help of the accused man. He referred to Grundy’s “ungovernable temper,” and then proceeded to answer all the rhetorical questions he had asked about the party, about Grundy’s general behaviour, and about his attempted departure for Belgrade without a word to his wife or his partner. He skirted as delicately as possible the unfortunate incident of Mrs Stenson, and suggested that the total volume of evidence was overwhelming…

If Hardy was well below his best, Mr Justice Crumble’s summing up was a model of the judge’s art. A judge may be likened – well, to many things no doubt, but among others he may be likened to an apothecary who, holding those scales above the Old Bailey in his hands, delicately tips them this way and that, dropping in an inch of perjury on this side and an incontrovertible fact on the other, finally balancing them triumphantly with the aid of the necessary precious blobs of judge’s opinion placed unobtrusively on one side or the other. On which side should the balance finally tilt? It was for the jury to say.

But Mr Justice Crumble came back again and again, as it would have been impermissible for Hardy to do, to the fact of Grundy’s absence from the witness box. What of the party incident and of “what the prosecution has called his panic flight” to Belgrade? Well, they must try to explain these as best they could, because the person able to tell them had chosen not to do so. What of this, what of that, what of the other? They must make up their minds without the assistance of the accused man. At the same time, he was careful to add, no obligation rested on the accused to enter the witness box…