The Northern Clemency (69 page)

But soon an officer of the court stepped in and asked her to follow him. The corridors were plain, not the wood panelling she had expected, and when he opened the door and led her into the courtroom, that was a surprise, too. It was a smaller room than she had thought, and full of people; it seemed strangely smoky, its dust rising up in the light from the high windows. Nobody looked at her. She
allowed herself to be led to the witness stand, and took the vow on the Bible. Then, before the barrister started to ask questions, she managed to glance around, and there, suddenly, were a few people she knew; in the public gallery, Malcolm and Daniel and, unexpectedly, Helen too; and her eyes fell on Nick, looking exactly as he always had, his gaze anywhere but on her. He only looked bored, that was all.

One of the barristers rose; he was fat, broad-faced, and his wide mouth seemed almost to cut his face in two, like a toad’s. His gown swelled out before him; he rested his two hands on either side of his pile of papers, crouching there like malignant amphibians about to leap. The questions started, and they were much the same as the questions the police had asked her the first time, and the more recent occasion when they had gone through the whole business again.

“When did you begin work at Mr. Reynolds’s shop?”

“Did you know Mr. Reynolds before starting work there?”

“What drew you to apply for a job there?”

“What experience did you have working in a shop before then?”

“Why did you want to take a job at all?”

“How would you describe your family finances?”

“How many days a week did you work there?”

“How would you describe Mr. Reynolds’s methods of running the business?”

“Did you see the accounts of the shop at any point?”

“Did anything ever strike you as peculiar about the amounts of money coming into the shop?”

“What banking arrangements did Mr. Reynolds have?”

“Is that the only bank account you are aware of?”

“Did Mr. Reynolds ever ask you to pay any money into the bank?”

“Did you ever question Mr. Reynolds about the accounts?”

“Did you ever see the bank statements pertaining to the shop?”

“Did you ever go to Mr. Reynolds’s house in Sheffield?”

She paused then.

“Just answer the question, please, Mrs. Glover,” the judge said gently.

“Yes,” Katherine said. “I went once to Mr. Reynolds’s house in Ranmoor, just after he had bought it.”

She could almost feel the stiffening from the public gallery, a willingness not to hear what was about to be said.

“How would you describe Mr. Reynolds’s house?”

“It was a very nice house.”

“Would it surprise you to learn that it cost seventy-eight thousand pounds to buy?”

“No, I would guess that that was about what a house like that in Ranmoor would cost. I live quite nearby. It’s a very good neighbourhood.”

“How did Mr. Reynolds find the money to buy a house like that?”

“I have no idea.”

“Did he never mention how he was buying the house?”

“No, I don’t believe he did.”

“Would it surprise you to know that Mr. Reynolds bought the house outright, without needing to take out a mortgage?”

“If I had known that, I would have thought that he had bought it with his own money.”

“Did it not strike you as strange—”

There was an objection here, for some reason, the defence barrister popping up like a black jack-in-the-box, and the judge asked the barrister to move on with his questions. Katherine felt released from something; she would not have to answer at least one question, though it was a question she hardly cared about or worried over, and with the release she found herself trembling.

“How would you describe your relationship with Mr. Reynolds?”

“We had a good working relationship,” Katherine said carefully. “I liked him.”

“How close was that?”

“Well, I invited him to come to a party my husband and I were holding once,” Katherine said. “We were good enough friends for that.”

“So you socialized together.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Katherine said. “He didn’t come to my party, and I only went once to his house.”

“Did he take you into his confidence on any subjects?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, seeing that there were too many ways to answer this question.

“Did you believe, from anything Mr. Reynolds said, that there was anything improper about the way he was running his business?”

Another objection, again sustained. The courtroom—she was able to look around her properly, now—was modern, but wood-panelled, the panelling brought from some older and more august building. For the first time, she saw to one side of the room a box of people in two short lines, inspecting her with frowning disapproval, boredom, concentration. It was the jury. She wouldn’t turn to the other side and look at Nick again.

“What were Mr. Reynolds’s suppliers?”

“I can’t remember their names,” Katherine said.

“Was he supplied, for instance, with flowers, by Gracechurch’s?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Katherine said. “Those were his suppliers.”

“What other suppliers did he have?”

“Later, he found a different supplier, I think—yes, they were called Bradstone. He got fed up with the others, he said they never had much of a range.”

“So he dropped Gracechurch’s?”

“Yes.”

“When would that be?”

“I think it was in the very early spring one year.”

“Would it have been in 1977?”

“Yes, it could have been. In fact, yes, it definitely was, because I remember Nick saying that he was worried Gracechurch’s might let us down in some way when it came to the Silver Jubilee if there was a high demand for flowers, so we ought to change a few months in advance.”

“Did Mr. Reynolds ever, to your knowledge, use more than one supplier at the same time?”

“No, definitely not.”

“How much of a mark-up did Mr. Reynolds generally make?”

“Could you explain, please?”

“Mrs. Glover, there’s no need to dissimulate.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You must be aware of what the shop’s mark-up was. What did Mr. Reynolds pay for flowers from the wholesalers, and what did he charge for them?”

“I’m sorry,” Katherine said. “We always used a different word. I think if he paid five pounds, he would try to charge enough so he’d make between eight and ten pounds if he sold all of them. Lilies, that would have been. I think that’s about right.”

“So between sixty and a hundred per cent mark-up, is that right?”

“I don’t know,” Katherine said. “I really don’t know.”

“That would follow from what you’ve just said.”

“Yes, but,” Katherine said, hoping to help Nick in some way here, “I don’t think he ever really made a hundred per cent profit at the end of the week. There were all sorts of other things he had to pay for, like the van, and rent, and then, of course, there were lots of flowers which had to be thrown away at the end of the week because they hadn’t sold—”

“Mrs. Glover, the court is quite familiar with these concepts of business,” the judge said. “Could we move on?”

“If your lordship pleases,” the barrister said. “Now, Mrs. Glover, I wonder if you could take a look at Exhibit G.” It was passed up to her by one of the clerks, sitting in the well of the courtroom. “As you see, these are three pages from the accounts for September 1976. These are sample pages, m’lud. And with it, the business’s bank statement for the same month. You will see that recorded sales and the amount paid in on successive Friday afternoons by, I presume, you, amount to £1,223, £1,076, and £1,150. Is that correct?”

“I don’t remember ever seeing any of this,” Katherine said. “I don’t remember those weeks in particular.”

“Does that seem like the sort of amount that you were being asked to pay into the bank around that time?”

“It sounds about right,” Katherine said. “But I didn’t really pay very much attention.”

“Now, please look at Exhibit H.” Again, three sheets of paper in a folder, passed up in an unfamiliar hand. “These are the relevant pages from the order book of Mr. Reynolds’s supplier at the time, which you have testified was his only supplier, is that correct?”

“Yes, that’s right, as far as I know.”

“You will see that for the corresponding weeks, Mr. Reynolds paid £220, £240 and £215 to the supplier for flowers. You have testified that Mr. Reynolds’s usual mark-up was somewhere between sixty and a hundred per cent, a usual commercial rate. These rates suggest, however, something more like five hundred per cent or a little more. Can you offer any explanation?”

“We sold vases too, sometimes,” Katherine said hopelessly. “And stationery, as well.”

“Did you ever sell as much as six or seven hundred pounds’ worth of those goods in a week?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Try to remember, Mrs. Glover.”

“I don’t think we could ever have done,” Katherine eventually said.

“Did nothing about any of this strike you as being remotely strange at the time?”

No, it didn’t.”

“What other business associates did Mr. Reynolds have, apart from the suppliers?”

“I don’t know of any.”

“Come, now, Mrs. Glover. You must have been aware of the sources of this extra income in the shop. Who brought the extra money to Mr. Reynolds?”

“I never saw anyone.”

“We know they came very regularly, these sums of money.”

“I don’t know that.”

“We also know that they were most likely brought in person.”

I don’t know that, either.”

“Were there never any regular visitors to Mr. Reynolds’s shop whom you became familiar with?”

Katherine paused, looking to the public gallery as if for assistance. She could see her family, Daniel leaning forward in concern; behind him, there was a girl in a beautiful cream jacket and perfect hair. She stood out; and though she was not looking at Katherine, or at anything in particular, there was something about her forced stillness that had a significance. Katherine had no idea what that significance might be. “I only knew the regular customers,” she said. “There was nobody apart from that, as far as I know.”

“Let us move on,” the barrister said.

By the time Katherine was dismissed, she was exhausted. Under her warm green tweed suit, her blouse was wringing wet. She looked up, helplessly, at the public gallery. There was not only Daniel and Helen and Malcolm, but, unexpectedly, Alice Sellers, too. Alice was the only one looking directly at her, and on her face was an expression of relief. Katherine was surprised; and then she realized that, horrible as it had been, they had come near to the horrible story of her real relation with Nick but had failed to discover it. The whole thing was over. There seemed no hope for Nick, but there was no reason now to think that anyone would ever discover any of it. She could, if she liked, go home.

The court broke for lunch, and in a moment, Malcolm and the others were there outside the courtroom.

“Thank God that’s over,” Malcolm said. “It makes me so angry, your being dragged into all of that.”

“It was horrible,” Katherine admitted. She couldn’t say anything else.

“You can listen to the evidence, now, can’t you?” Helen said. “Now that you’ve done what you had to do.”

“I suppose I can, love,” Katherine said, surprised. She had thought of going home now; but of course they would want to stay to hear what
Nick had to say. His evidence would be that afternoon, the lawyers had told her.

There was a canteen and, depositing Katherine at a table with Alice, they bought a range of dried-up sandwiches, children’s fizzy drinks and bags of crisps—a lunch for a school outing. Katherine ate it all, gratefully, shrinking into herself, not saying anything much. She kept her head down to the table. There was no risk of seeing Nick. He would be shuttled in vans between the dock and prison each day; he would be taken down to the cells between the morning and the afternoon sessions. She had no real doubt that, at the end of this, he would be sent to prison and never appear in their lives again. She was safe from him now. But she still kept her head down to the table. She felt that the barristers, with their wigs and their robes off, but still with their white bands, the instructing solicitors in their neat suits, all had listened to what she had had to say and had interpreted it lewdly, had heard the obscene innuendo in the barrister’s questions. If she raised her head, they would stare at her.

There was no conversation to be had, or made, surely: but steadily she found herself being drawn out of her inturned concern, and found herself listening to a conversation, which seemed all but natural, about Helen’s parents, and particularly her father. Katherine knew that he was a miner, and she knew that he must be on strike, but hadn’t enquired any further. It was out of a combination of good taste and self-absorption.

“Why doesn’t he go back to work if he feels like that?” Malcolm asked. He seemed genuinely puzzled.

“It’s not as simple as that,” Helen said. “He could, of course he could, but they live in a small place. Everyone knows everyone in Tinstone, and there’s a bit of—I don’t know how to explain it.”

“They call them scabs,” Malcolm said. “I know that much.”

“And not only calling names,” Helen said. “It’s not a playground thing. They’d paint it on your house, and throw bricks through your window. The police, they can bus you in every morning but they can’t mount a guard outside your house night and day. And it would go on after the strike was over. They never forget that sort of thing in a place like Tinstone. There was a lad I were at school with, some of the other kids weren’t allowed to associate wi’ im because he were the son of a scab. That’d be during 1972, his dad were a scab, but people in Tinstone, they went on crossing the road when they saw any of them coming for years after. They probably still would, but they upped sticks and moved to Nottingham.”

“How terrible,” Katherine said. “It’s like bullying in the playground.”

“Well, my dad,” Helen said, “he doesn’t feel that strongly about keeping the mine going, anything like that. But he hates Scargill and he hates the union men.” It was apparent that, even here at the table in the noisy canteen, she had lowered her voice.