A Capital Crime (23 page)

‘I see,’ said Ronstadt. ‘So that is your defence, that you confessed to the murder of your wife and child because you were upset … And therefore you make an allegation through your counsel against a perfectly innocent man that he caused the murder.’

Again, Shillingworth got to his feet. Save your breath, chum, thought Stratton. You’re on a hiding to nothing with this one. ‘Is that the proper way of asking the question, with the greatest respect? “You make an allegation against a perfectly innocent man” can only be a statement based on the assumption that his witness is innocent and mine is not. My friend has no right to make a statement describing Mr Backhouse as “a perfectly innocent man”.’

The judge looked perplexed. ‘Why not?’

‘Well, it can only be done for the purpose of prejudice.’

‘I crave leave,’ said Ronstadt, in a voice that dripped with irony, ‘not to have to believe that everything the accused says is true.’

‘Bloody hell,’ muttered Ballard.

There followed some to-ing and fro-ing over statements, during which Davies appeared to get into a complete muddle about which one was being discussed. By the end of it, the picture of a man whose past was rapidly and remorselessly catching up with him was clearer than ever. ‘So,’ concluded Ronstadt, ‘you are saying that, out of the four statements you made, three of them were lies, and only the second statement from Wales – the one in which you accuse Mr Backhouse – is true?’

‘Yes.’ Davies sounded surer now.

‘So, would it not be right to say that you are a person who is prepared to lie or tell the truth at your convenience?’

‘Why should I tell lies?’ Davies burst out angrily. His eyes were bright with panic, and for a moment Stratton had the impression of some tiny, furtive animal, flushed into the open and then cornered, twisting frantically this way and that to escape its captors. Stratton glanced at Ballard, and guessed from the flinty, set expression on his face that the sergeant was thinking exactly what he was: Shame you didn’t consider that before you murdered a woman and a helpless baby. He felt no sympathy now, just the excited anticipation of watching a fellow hunter using all his skills and training to go smoothly for the kill. The rest of the court felt it too; where there had been disbelief, there was now a different undercurrent – almost a thrill, as, necks craning and mouths agape, people leaned forward as if straining to catch Ronstadt’s next words.

‘After you made the first statement at the police station in London – that’s Exhibit Eight, which is the short statement of confession – you told the police, “It is a great relief to get it off my chest.” That’s correct, isn’t it?’

Stratton raised a questioning eyebrow at Ballard, who tapped his notebook by way of confirmation.

‘Yes.’

‘So it was a relief to you to tell the truth at last to the police, which was a confession of murder?’

Davies looked puzzled. ‘It wasn’t the truth,’ he said at last. ‘It was a lot of lies.’

‘You are telling us that it was a relief to tell a lot of lies?’

‘I was upset,’ said Davies, doggedly.

‘Do answer the question,’ said the judge, testily. ‘Was it a relief to you to tell a lot more lies?’

‘I …’ Davies paused, mouth agape. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t a relief.’

‘Now,’ said Ronstadt, ‘you’ve told us that the second of your statements, in which you accuse Mr Backhouse, is true. Is that right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’ve said that Mr Backhouse commits an abortion on your wife so that she dies of it, and that knowing that he is responsible for her death, he organises the disposition of her body and the removal of your child to some other place? Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then he comes along here and commits perjury against you? Is that what you are saying?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I see. Let’s look a little further at what I suggest is your habit of lying to suit your convenience. You lied to the Backhouses, didn’t you, about your wife being away?’

‘I lied to Mrs Backhouse, yes.’

‘You lied to Mrs Backhouse. And you lied to your aunt down in Wales, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You then told half a dozen separate, distinct and deliberate lies to the police, inventing any story that came into your head, didn’t you?’

‘Not any story, sir,’ said Davies, desperately. It didn’t really matter now, thought Stratton, what he said. Ronstadt’s hammering home of the words ‘lied’ and ‘lies’ were so effective and so final that they might as well have been nails in the little man’s coffin.

‘Well, you began by lying about putting your wife’s body down the drain. That wasn’t true, was it?’

‘No, it wasn’t true.’

‘You lied about helping Mr Backhouse carry your wife’s body downstairs, didn’t you?’

‘No, I didn’t. That was true.’

‘Do you not realise from what you have heard today,’ said Ronstadt, with the air of patient, even compassionate, explanation, ‘that he was physically incapable of doing that, or even of carrying the baby?’

‘I still say I helped him carry my wife’s body,’ said Davies stubbornly.

Ronstadt sighed audibly. The sound managed to convey a dozen things unspoken – regret, sorrow, dismay at such a blatant show of mendacity … Despite his antipathy to the man, Stratton was impressed. There was no coughing now, no stirring or rustling, just a taut silence.

‘I suggest,’ said Ronstadt, ‘that that is another lie. You lied to your employer, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Another lie. You lied to Mrs Backhouse, your aunt, the police, and your boss.’

‘Yes. I did it because Mr Backhouse told me to.’

‘Mr
Backhouse
told you to lie to all these people?’

‘He said that if anyone asked about my wife and daughter I should say they’d gone on holiday.’

‘I see.’ Ronstadt half-turned from Davies and then, swivelling back on the balls of his feet with the dexterity of a matador about to administer the
coup de grâce
in a bull ring, said, ‘And now you are alleging that Mr Backhouse is the murderer in this case? Perhaps you can suggest why he should have strangled your wife?’

Davies opened his mouth, then closed it again. Unblinking, Ronstadt stared at him, waiting, a predator about to spring.

‘Well,’ he said uncertainly, ‘he was home all day.’

‘I asked you,’ said Ronstadt, ‘if you can suggest
why
he should have strangled her?’

Davies looked dazed, and appeared to shrink a little more, as if squashed by the air itself. The silence seemed to be quivering with electricity, and Stratton felt the blood pounding in his ears. As if in slow motion, Davies bent, then raised, his head, then looked around the court as if he might find an answer there. When he finally answered, it was in the thick voice of a man waking from a dream. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t.’

‘Well,’ said Ronstadt, in tones of the utmost reasonableness, ‘perhaps you can suggest why he should have strangled your daughter.’

Davies shook his head, defeated. ‘No,’ he said.

With elaborate courtesy, Ronstadt said, ‘Thank you, Mr Davies,’ and, striding across the courtroom, resumed his seat. As he did so an audible exhalation, like a sigh, went round the court, and, the tension evaporating, people began to shift about and murmur to one another.

Shillingworth rose. ‘My lord,’ he said, wearily, ‘that is the case for the defence.’

‘I think that must be the shortest closing speech from a prosecuting council I’ve ever heard,’ said Stratton, when they emerged at the end of the day.

‘Caught Shillingworth on the hop, didn’t it?’ said Ballard. ‘He looked as if he wasn’t expecting to have to do anything till tomorrow.’

‘Yes, he did. Mind you, it’s not going to make any difference – not unless the judge changes his mind overnight. I’ve got to get back to the station – DCI Lamb’ll be waiting with bated breath, I shouldn’t wonder, but why don’t you cut off home?’

‘I’d like to, sir, if it’s all right. See the nipper before she goes to sleep.’

‘Don’t blame you.’ For want of a more intimate gesture, Stratton clapped Ballard on the back. ‘Off you go, then. Give my best to your missus, won’t you?’

‘Course, sir. And … you know …’ Ballard’s grin became lopsided in the effort to hide his embarrassment, ‘thanks.’

Chapter Thirty-One

Listening to the judge’s summing-up the following day, Davies, dead-eyed, looked more like some sort of grotesque, outsized man-doll than a human being. Stratton wondered how much of the arcane language he understood. Behind him, the warder had stopped doodling and was alert, head on one side, rather in the manner of an attentive dog. Looking about him, Stratton thought that he was the only one whose focus had sharpened – compared to the previous afternoon the atmosphere in the court was calm, the silence no longer twanging with anticipation. No cut and thrust here – this was a formality, and it was going pretty much as they’d expected – Mr Justice Spencer, bless his ermine socks, was restating the case for the prosecution with as much, if not more, righteous ire, than Ronstadt. After insisting to the jury in no uncertain terms that Davies had ‘lied and lied and lied’, he told them, almost as an afterthought, that of course they had to make up their own minds about whether he was telling the truth. Stratton, scanning their twelve faces, decided that they’d done that already.

‘It’s in the bag,’ he said, as the jury, armed with copies of Davies’s statements, filed out of the court.

‘Seems so, sir,’ said Ballard.

‘I almost felt sorry for him …’ Stratton said. Now it was almost over, it was much easier to dismiss the nagging, unfocused worries
that had been bedevilling him. They were, he told himself, a consequence of trying to do a good job, and nothing worse than anything he’d experienced with other cases. ‘Talk about a poisoned chalice,’ he added.

‘We didn’t need to worry about the stuff we never got straight, after all.’

‘Can’t dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s every time,’ said Stratton, easily. ‘Always one or two little mysteries. Still,’ he added, ‘the judge did everything but tell them to convict him.’

‘He convicted himself, sir. The jury won’t have believed him any more than we did.’

When, after only forty more minutes, they were told that the jury were about to return, Stratton knew they’d been right about the conviction. As he followed Ballard into the courtroom, he tried to stabilise himself, mentally, against the conflicting rush of emotions that he remembered all too clearly from the handful of capital cases he’d worked on. There was something horribly primitive about the soaring sense of triumph that overcame him, but it was, at least, undermined by his shame for feeling it and blunted by his pity and sorrow for Davies’s victims – who were, after all, going to be given some form of revenge. Not of course, that it would do them any good, but all the same … Still, Stratton supposed, feeling those things was better than being indifferent, because that would mean one didn’t care.

‘Members of the jury,’ intoned Mr Justice Spencer, ‘are you agreed upon your verdict?’

The foreman, a dapper individual who looked as if he might work in a gents’ outfitters, stood up. ‘We are.’

‘Do you find the prisoner, John Wilfred Davies, guilty or not guilty of the murder of Judy Davies?’

There was a second’s silence and Stratton felt a tightness grip his chest, as if a collective intake of breath had robbed the air of oxygen, and then the foreman said, ‘Guilty.’

A hastily stifled cry came from the gallery. Davies’s mother, thought Stratton. In the dock, Davies who’d been standing with his head bowed, jerked like a marionette being twitched into life on invisible strings, his face as taut as a mask.

‘You find him guilty and that is the verdict of you all?’

‘It is.’`

‘John Wilfred Davies, you stand convicted of murder. Have you anything to say why the court shall not give you judgement of death according to the law?’

Davies’s expression did not change, but his voice quavered as he said, ‘No, sir.’

An usher, as sombre and reverent as if he were serving at an altar, laid the black square on Mr Justice Spencer’s head and, backing slowly away, returned to his seat. Get on with it, for God’s sake, thought Stratton. He’d seen this before, a couple of times, and it never got any better. There was something terrible about the way that the ceremony of it all, the pauses, the sheer theatricality, cloaked desire for retribution and the sheer barbarism of putting a man to death, no matter how much he deserved it. Turning it into a spectacle like this was sickening, and the repulsed fascination he felt about it disgusted him.

Straightening his back, the judge turned to the dock and spoke. ‘John Wilfred Davies, the jury have found you guilty of wilful murder and the sentence of the court upon you is that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison, and thence to a place of execution, and there you suffer death by hanging, and that your body be buried within the precincts of the prison in which you shall have been last confined before your execution, and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul.’

Stratton saw Davies take a deep breath, as though preparing for a dive, and close his eyes. Startled by a sudden, harsh sob from the other side of the court, he turned to look and saw that Backhouse, head in hands, was weeping.