Blood Royal (31 page)

“Inspector Archer is very interested in talking to you. Why don’t you give yourself up? I think he’s going to take you dead or dead.”

“He’s a nutcase, isn’t he?”

“He’s
a nutcase? He wasn’t the one who burglarized my room and attacked me.”

“I didn’t attack you, luv, it was all self-defense. I got the worse of it, didn’t I?”

“You didn’t get half of what you deserve. If there’s anything I plan on accomplishing in my stay in this country, it will be to see you in jail.”

“Been there, done that, but you’re not going to do that, anyway. I’m the best friend you have.”

“You are a sneaky, slimy, repulsive—”

“Self-defense, it was.”

“What was?”

“That’s why she shot him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about your husband-killing client, the one who put a bullet in the heart of the heir apparent before an audience of millions. It was self-defense. I can give you the goods on it, and in return, you give me the inside line on every major development that comes up. Tic for tac.

“What kind of tabloid bullshit are you trying to sell me?”

“Have a drink with me and I’ll tell you why it was self-defense.”

“Sure, we’ll make it a threesome: you, me, and Inspector Archer.”

“Tsk-tsk, don’t be catty, luv, not to your knight in shining armor. You heard what Sergeant Kramer told you: I’m a great reporter hiding in tabloid clothing—and I hold my ejaculations.”

She stared at the receiver. “You have my room bugged!”

“Not at all, luv.” The adjoining-room door opened and Dutton stepped in with a portable phone to his ear. The adjoining room door was near the door to the hallway. He grinned at her.

She gaped. “How—”

He shrugged and tried to look modest. “There are few limits to my abilities. Now that we’re old friends, let’s have a drink together and I’ll tell you my theory of your case and you can give me a headline.”

Someone knocked on her room door.

She grinned at Dutton. “We’ll need a table for four if your police friends are coming.” She spoke to his retreating back.

Dutton quickly stepped back into his room, closing and locking the door behind him.

She opened her door to find the hotel manager and the head of hotel security, not Archer and Kramer.

She listened to two minutes of apologies before she cut him off. “The person who broke into my room had the adjoining room, but my side was locked when I left. Someone had to unlock it. That makes it an inside job with your employees.”

A quick look into the adjoining room by the security officer revealed Lord and Lady Grey had gone on the lam.

She got rid of the hotel management, letting them know that she was leaning toward a lawsuit but could be diverted from legal action if her hotel bill went away.

After they were gone, she sat on her bed and stared at the now-locked door to the adjoining room. She thought about what Dutton had said about self-defense being the motive behind the shooting. She shook her head. No way, it was the man’s tabloid-rotted brain searching for a headline. She was glad she hadn’t discussed the charge with him. She didn’t need a lamebrained defense like that to appear in the papers with her seal of approval.

There was a fundamental problem with the reporter’s self-defense theory: The princess shot an unarmed man.

D
EFEND
THE
C
HILDREN OF THE
P
OOR
& P
UNISH THE
W
RONGDOER

Marlowe read the inscription carved in Old Bailey’s stone. Noble words, a noble goal.
They usually don’t put inspirational inscriptions on buildings anymore,
she thought.
But they don’t build them intending to last centuries, either.
The building appeared old and hallowed even though it was a mere babe in a country that still had vestiges of Roman walls.

High above, standing on a globe atop a great dome, stood golden Justice, a set of scales in one hand, a sword in the other. She liked the representation of Justice as a fighter. She didn’t care for the statues of the goddess that showed the goddess blind. If she had had her way, she’d show Justice with a sword in one hand and an Uzi in another—she knew from her own experience and that of the people she defended that you couldn’t rely upon justice to be blindly handed down, it was something that had to be fought for. Courts are places of law, not fairness—sometimes the Children of the Poor are screwed and Wrongdoers are rewarded.

She recalled that in one of her early trials she had told a judge the case against her client was “not fair.” The judge went volcanic and nearly blew her out of the courtroom, yelling that Marlowe was required to cite legal authority, not value judgments.

*   *   *

M
ARLOWE WALKED DOWN A
corridor in the courthouse. It was early—the bewigged barristers, suited solicitors, and nervous clients had not yet made their appearance. She had come early to “acclimatize” herself to the hallowed environment in the heart of the English criminal justice system. As she walked down the deserted corridor, she imagined she could hear the murmurings of the great cases that had been decided in the courtrooms—Oscar Wilde, huge beast that he was, pompous, contemptuous, brilliant, and utterly without street smarts, flaunting his homosexuality in an era when it was a hangable offense; Lord Haw-Haw, Nazi, traitor, affecting a proper British accent as he haughtily informed the court it had no authority over him—even as the gallows were being prepared.

Her heels on the hard floor made a hollow sound that bounced off the walls. A numbness gripped her. There were no complex thoughts about the case flying around her head. The numbness froze them.

It was always the same for her on the first day of trial—no obvious nervousness showed, but it wasn’t because she had steel nerves. Her state of icy calm was a defense mechanism that kicked in so she wouldn’t expose her raw nerves. For days, her nerves had been on fire, she thought of nothing other than the case, reading, worrying, thinking, working each piece of evidence, each witness over and over in her mind, seeing if it all added up to a victory for her client—the law was not about what one knew, but what could be proven.

She had played the case over and over in her mind as a movie, imagining it scene by scene. In an out-of-body view, she saw herself giving an opening statement, looking at herself standing at a podium, moving over to talk face-to-face with jurors, questioning witnesses, watching a movie of them responding to her questions. It was how she always prepared, running the movie in her mind, seeing the trial before she faced it in court.

She built the movie from scenes but left some of it on her mind’s cutting room floor when she realized that she would not be able to move around the courtroom as she commonly did in the States. There were three rows of wooden bench seats for attorneys in the courtroom: the first row for senior counsel, behind them the juniors, while the instructing solicitor occupied the third row. Besides the bench to sit on, in front of the seated attorney was a flat area to use as a writing desk. Because the senior counsels and senior prosecutor would rise to address the court, jurors, and witnesses, they had a small wooden podium to place their papers on. The podium sat atop the flat desk area.

The seniors had to rise from the bench where they sat and speak with the podium immediately in front of them. Marlowe had already discovered that the desktop podium blocked her view and made her claustrophobic. She’d had it removed, but she still was permitted only to stand up and talk without moving away from her bench seat. She hated the lack of mobility. She thought better on her feet, feet that were in motion, not cemented to the floor. But she planned for the lack of movement, the mental movie she used for prep had her addressing the judge and jury with her feet planted. It also had her seated closest to the jury. As a California defense attorney, she was used to the prosecutor being seated closest to the jury, but the English courtroom had a different rule.

Her frozen nerves would thaw the first time she rose to challenge the prosecutor in a verbal debate over a point of law or spoke directly to the jury with her opening statement. Her voice would be shaky—for a moment. Then adrenaline would kick in. Her frozen nerves and shaky voice would melt in the baptism of fire in the courtroom.

She had never met a good trial attorney who wasn’t nervous before a trial. An actor once told her that most actors were nervous when they had to speak their lines. And the dividing line between actors and trial attorneys was often vague.

She entered the courtroom and paused. The only person in the room was the bailiff. He nodded at her and continued reading a newspaper.

She went to her bench seat behind the rail and looked around at the courtroom. She loved the dramatic soul, the aura of old-fashioned justice, of the Old Bailey courtroom. It was unlike any courtroom she had been in, more dramatic theater than legal forum, a place that reeked with the intense conflicts and powerful emotions that had exploded against its aged walls. Conflict was the basis of great fiction—and great courtroom drama. It was a courtroom where attorneys Abe Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, and Gary Spence (not to mention screen lawyers Charles Laughton, Paul Newman, and barrister Rumpole) would have felt comfortable speaking their lines.

American courtrooms were built like auditoriums, with only the moderator—the judge—facing the audience. But the Old Bailey courtroom was built like a theater, with a viewing gallery, “box seats,” above the dramatic action on the courtroom floor, permitting the audience to watch the dramatic tension on the floor below with a bird’s-eye view.

There were even theatrical costumes for the judge and attorneys, wigs out of fashion for centuries and gowns that separated the “classes” of lawyers by rank and distinction.

Adding to the dramatic tension, the sense of tragedy and impending conflict, was “the prisoner in the dock.” The defendant did not sit next to her attorneys, but was in the “dock,” a square, elevated box that displayed the prisoner dramatically as the center of attention. The dock in the courtroom was a large box-shaped compartment that the defendant shared with two bailiffs. At the top was an ornamental iron trim of spearheads, the original purpose of which was to keep the prisoner from climbing over and lunging for the judge.

In an American courtroom the defendants sat at the counsel table with their lawyers and usually had to be pointed out for the jury to realize which person sitting at the table was on trial. Putting prisoners in a display box with guards nearby made the defendant the focus of attention—there was no question of who the accused was and little possibility of the prisoner hiding emotions except behind a dull stare that itself bespoke guilt.

As in any hallowed theater, there was said to be a house ghost in Old Bailey, an innocent person who had been unfairly condemned and was hanged.

Marlowe hoped that the ghost was on her side.

She thought about the wheels of justice that were to begin spinning. It would play out almost exactly like a boxing match—a judge would act as a referee between competing combatants, with the jury deciding who won the fight.

Throughout the trial, the judge would constantly be making ruling on “quiddities” and “quillets,” those esoteric points of law that Prince Hamlet complained were a lawyer’s weapons. “Rules of evidence” were lawyers’ swords and pikes, which they used to jab each other as they fought to get their evidence in and their opponent’s excluded. In the European system, where judges decided guilt or innocence, there was no need for elaborate rules for admitting evidence because the judge was presumed to be a professional who could separate the wheat from the chaff. But under the Anglo-American system, jurors walked into a courtroom and had months and even years of complex trial preparation by experts thrown at them in hours. Untrained and unprepared to know the difference between reliable and unreliable evidence, the jury had to have the evidence strained for them by the judge.

The net result was that the jurors didn’t necessarily hear all evidence, nor all the truth—the cases were decided upon only on the facts the judge let them hear.

One of the most common questions asked of an attorney during a social gathering is, “How can you defend someone you know is guilty?” The answer isn’t that a defendant is presumed innocent—the truth is that the adversarial system of justice the British invented requires that even the known guilty be defended because prosecutors are not neutral parties, but combatants whose duty it is to champion only the police view.

She knew that she had a fault, one that made her a good attorney but also sometimes blindsided her—she had too much empathy for her clients. You couldn’t be a good doctor unless you could stand the sight of blood—and it was inevitable that patients would die. If you weren’t able to accept those deaths, you had to find another profession. The same was true of attorneys who defended people in courtrooms—sometimes blood was spilled, the innocent went to prison, the guilty went free. If you couldn’t keep your professional life in a box separated from your emotions, if you had too much feeling, trials became an emotional roller coaster. And she couldn’t separate her personal emotions—she felt fear and pain for the client, often even more than the clients themselves appeared to feel.

Marlowe didn’t have a connection with organized religion in the sense of being a churchgoer, but at these moments when there was an uncanny silence in the courtroom before the bloody battle began, she was always reminded of the old soldier’s truth: There are no atheists in the foxhole.

She was wondering if there was a prayer for lawyers on the day a trial began when the other players started entering the theater.