Courting Trouble (25 page)

‘Yeah . . . I’m well respected an’ that. I know how to handle meself,’ he preened.

‘Wouldn’t it be fair to say that people are scared of you?’

‘I don’t take no crap, if that’s what you mean.’ His huge chest puffed outwards until I thought the buttons might ping off his shirt and hit jury members in the eye.

‘And you wouldn’t take any rubbish, especially from an old lady, would you? I mean, how would that look on the estate? So, anyone coming around to see you is going to be scared and probably armed, isn’t that fair to say? Because of your fierce reputation.’

‘P’robly. Yeah.’ The thug’s mind was clearly wandering – and it really was too small to be allowed out on its own – which meant that now was my moment.

‘But isn’t it true that this frightened, frail old grandma just came around to tell you not to trash her granddaughter’s reputation? That it would be unacceptable to belittle the girl by calling her a slut or a slag?’

It was then that Jack tried his best to distract me. He gave me a mischievously gloating wink before devouring most of my purloined chocolate bar in one great gulp. I felt an overwhelming urge to teach the man a lesson. What I was about to do wasn’t fair. But then, neither is life. As Roxy said, if life was fair, then Elvis would still be alive and all the impersonators would be dead. Vacillating for a moment, I glanced quickly at the jury.

On the one hand, I totally believe in the jury system and the ability of ordinary men and women to discern the truth . . . On the other hand, it’s also true that a significant proportion of the population believe that the moon landing was faked. Which is why I next heard myself say—

‘Wasn’t your favourite weapon close at hand?’

‘What weapon?’

‘You are a man who carries a knife, aren’t you, Mr Simmons?’

I hadn’t intended to take the Roxy route but, when the odds are against you, a female barrister’s just gotta get even.

‘Knife? What fuckin’ knife. I never pulled no knife!’

‘Why are you mentioning pulling a knife, Mr Simmons? I made no mention of you pulling a knife? . . . Did you pull a knife?’

‘Fuck, no!’

‘My client saw you reach for your pocket and in her terror cannot recall the next seconds. Was it your knife that frightened the poor old lady?’

‘Objection, My Lord.’ Jack uncoiled to his feet with languorous disdain. ‘A suggestion is being made that there was a knife. There is no evidence of a knife.’ Gone were his velvet vowels. The prosecutor’s words were crisp, clipped and precise. Jack is a master of insouciant understatement, but when roused, you’d rather be pinned down by mortar fire in the middle of a war zone than endure one of his verbal volleys.

‘My Lord, I was asking the witness whether he’s a habitual carrier of a knife.’ I sent out my own salvo. ‘It was the witness who then insisted he had not used any knife – rather precipitously, the jury might think. His own answers raise the question. It is my case that he reached for his pocket and, in terror of what he was about to produce, my client shot him.’

The judge harrumphed, as if to belittle my defence, but allowed me to continue.

‘After the shot was fired, there were – what? – thirty or so people crowded around you, correct? Friends. Allies. Gangland compatriots . . . Any knife would disappear very quickly, wouldn’t it?’

Jack took the moral high ground with his eyebrows then leapt up. ‘It’s mere conjecture, My Lord.’

Prompted by Jack, the judge disdainfully dismissed my line of questioning. But the doubt had been sown in the minds of the jury. I felt a bit squeamish – but I hadn’t
lied.
Lying in court would get me struck off. This was just a little bit of gamesmanship, and, after all, life is full of games – games which women usually lose.

Jack shot me a withering look before bringing in his second witness, the more sinister thug nicknamed, appropriately, ‘Bash’. His wild hair was now perfectly smooth, like plastic. His shoes were shined, jaw cleanshaven, his suit expensive and immaculate, except for a tie that looked too tight. It wasn’t the only noose I’d like to see around his neck, I thought, as he spun an identical story to the court.

During my cross-examination, despite Bash’s polished appearance, I soon sensed that the jury disliked his monosyllabic hard-man attitude, especially the way he looked at me with the slow lizard blink of a top-order predator. The man had all the charm of a drug baron’s hitman – possibly because he was one. I asked in a very loaded way whether he had seen a knife that night. His shifty look and diffident ‘Nope’ was greeted with scepticism by the jury.

I knew he had prior convictions – basically, the piece of pond scum had been in so many police line-ups he could just wave at the witnesses and say ‘Remember me?!’ So when he foolishly denied that he had any ‘previous’, I pressed him. ‘Are you absolutely clear on that point?’ When he gave a haughty nod, I continued, ‘Well, let me make it clear that the point I’m suggesting is that you have invented your account because you are a complete stranger to the truth.’ I put his previous-convictions sheet under his nose and got him to read it out to the jury, making him repeat his GBH and sexual assault offences. Mistrust rippled through the jury box.

After the officer in charge of the case confirmed that these were indeed Bash’s previous convictions, Jack concluded with a standard ‘My Lord, this is the case for the prosecution.’ His conclusion may have been standard, but the gravitas and charm he oozed was definitely not. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the female jurors committed a joint crime right then and there, just on the off chance that he might represent them, preferably after a strip search.

The judge announced an adjournment, and Phyllis, looking bewildered and terrified, was handcuffed to a police officer then led down to the cells. I spent the nail-gnawing recess going over my choices. I had thought about opening with a speech to the jury outlining the defence case. But sometimes it’s more powerful and authentic to let the defendant go into the witness box straight away to tell their side of the story. But I wasn’t confident that Phyllis wouldn’t wobble on the detail; so I decided to woo the jury first.

When court resumed, I utilized every sympathetic adjective in my linguistic armoury to paint Phyllis as a doting, docile grandma. I conjured up so many cosy, nostalgic images of the jurors’ own grannies that the aroma of home-baked biscuits was practically wafting through the air. By the time I concluded my opening address the jury were so sweet on my dear old gran, I worried I’d given them all diabetes.

I now turned to Phyllis, who sat rigid on her stiff-backed chair in the dock, still flanked by uniformed prison officers. In a loud, clear voice, I said, ‘I now call Phyllis O’Carroll.’ The trembling gran was escorted to the witness box, where she took an oath. She was holding on to the railing in front of her as if trying to squeeze blood from it. I took Phyllis through her evidence, as carefully as a trainee in a minefield, guiding her to the safety of the right answers without setting off any unexpected explosions. But when asked to explain to the jury what had happened on the night in question, Phyllis suddenly employed a weird Reading Aloud to a Classroom Full of Children voice. Her delivery was so wooden, she was practically a fire hazard. Overawed by the surroundings, the poor woman was trying hard to enunciate, which strangled her natural oratorical flow and struck a false note with the jury, who shifted uncomfortably, instinctively dubious of her sincerity. When I asked if she had heard rumours that Bash always carried a knife, Jack objected, saying that I was inviting hearsay evidence. I insisted that if my client knew Bash was a local knife wielder as well as a rapist, it would explain her frame of mind as she courageously set off to see him.

Phyllis’s head was swivelling so fast from one side of the court room to the other that she resembled a meerkat watching tennis. Jack objected once more, but this time Judge Jaggers reluctantly, almost apologetically, allowed my point. ‘Well, Mr Cassidy, it may be speculation but Miss’ – he made a theatrical scramble to find my name on the court papers, thus signalling to the jury that I was so insignificant as a barrister that judges had never heard of me, even though Jaggers knew my name so well he’d once got me sacked – ‘Miss . . . Miss . . . Devine’s defendant is entitled to put her case to the court.’

I then asked Phyllis if she saw a knife. She hesitated. My toes were plaited in dread, as I waited for her answer. Then she replied hesitantly that she wasn’t certain . . . but she did see him put his hand to his pocket.

‘Yer Majesty, I was quakin’. I reckoned that I was about to be ripped from me gullet to me fanny. An’ that’s when the gun went off.’

When it was Jack’s turn to cross-examine the defendant, he smirked condescendingly at me before turning a sympathetic smile in my client’s direction. Jack Cassidy’s great skill as a cross-examiner is never to examine crossly. He treated Phyllis with the utmost care and kindness. He was respectful and gracious as he led her towards the suggestion that, driven mad by grief, she’d picked up a gun, a gun she just happened to have in her cupboard, and gone around there to teach those boys a lesson they wouldn’t forget. Lulled by his lovely, deep, lilting voice, it was hard not to agree with all of his utterances, just to keep him talking. ‘You went around there to kill them,’ Jack insisted. ‘Because you were full of outrage about what you thought they’d done, isn’t that right?’

Behind me, Roxy gave a derisive snort which, to her mind, was probably quiet but, to normal people in the stillness of a court room, sounded a lot like a hippo in the final stages of labour.

The judge glowered in my mother’s direction, while respectfully apologizing to Jack for the interruption. ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Cassidy. Please continue.’

‘Thank you, m’Lord . . . You’ve been a mother to that grandchild of yours. Your own child is in prison for drugs-related crimes, yes?’ Phyllis nodded and hung her head. ‘You felt you’d failed one child and then, oh, what torture, to feel you’d failed another. You went around there to kill them for what you thought they’d done to your granddaughter. And I ask you to tell the truth to this court. You went around there to shoot the men who you thought had attacked your beloved grandchild. That was your intention, yes?’

There was a pause. All eyes were now on the wilted grandmother. ‘Yes,’ said Phyllis softly.

There was a theatrical gasp in the court room as people mumbled their surprise. Judge Jaggers scowled once more, ensuring silence immediately swooped down and tightened its grip on the court. Jack sneaked another tiny victorious smile in my direction and licked his chocolatey fingertips. A sweat patch the size of Devon had appeared under each of my armpits. What was she thinking? How could I interrupt Phyllis’s journey into the centre of self-annihilation?

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Roxy’s leopardskin wedge jacking up and down, as if she were working an invisible bicycle pump. Stretch and Bash were now sitting beside Jack. They wore cocksure grins that flickered on and off like faulty lightbulbs.

‘Please continue,’ Jack coaxed Phyllis kindly. ‘I know it’s hard for you, my good woman.’

I looked at Phyllis, willing her not to give in to Jack’s persuasive charms. Fat chance, I thought bitterly. The female jurors could toast marshmallows on their faces, they were so hot and bothered by the debonair presence of prosecutor Jack Cassidy.

‘My first instinct, when I saw that child of mine, all beaten up and bruised an’ that, was to kill ’em . . .’ The regions beneath my armpits now expanded to include all of mainland Britain. A tense hush fell over the court room like a fog. ‘But, well, I ain’t no fool. You don’t get to be seventy-odd and have lived the life I’ve lived . . . and not know the consequences of doing somethin’ as feckin’ crazy as that.’

I felt myself unclench. I tried to devise a facial expression to cover up my glee. I furrowed my brow in a learned, weighty way, as though calculating mc
²
. But I couldn’t help sending a surreptitiously smug smile of my own back in Jack’s sanctimonious direction.

‘. . . But I also know what bastards those blokes are. I went round there with a gun so those animals would listen to me. Then he’ – she pointed at Stretch – ‘pulled a knife on me. Or so I thought. An old granny. I was that terrified that I don’t even remember pullin’ the trigger.’

Phyllis swayed as though she were being buffeted by the fiercest winds, despite the fact we were safely indoors. An Oscar nomination could not be far off for the wily old woman. As the day’s proceedings came to a close, I felt the jury lean ever so slightly in Phyllis’s direction.

On day two, I was feeling much more confident. Put it this way, I’d only had about four heart attacks during breakfast, down from ten per minute during the previous day’s trial. But I also hadn’t forgotten that the rapist thugs did have a powerful secret weapon – Jack Cassidy. And the judge. As the morning wore on and Judge Jaggers denied all my objections and indulged Jack’s every line of questioning, I wondered if it would be inappropriate to ask him if he only enjoyed being a judge so he could wear a wig to hide the horrible alien life form sprouting from his head, otherwise known as the world’s worst comb-over?

For Jack’s closing argument, my nemesis utilized every ounce of his captivating magnetism. He was more disarming than a UN peacekeeping force. Jack’s arguments sneaked up on the jury so stealthily they might as well have been dressed in camouflage combat fatigues. By the time Jack delivered his passionate, damning closing speech, in which he accused the septuagenarian grandma of the premeditated attempted murder of two innocent men who were attacked, in cold blood, in their own home, Phyllis had crumpled in the dock, hiding her face in her hands, and every one of the women on the jury had not just fallen for his act but seemed totally ready to leave their husbands, run off with him and live orgasmically ever after.

After Jack had sat back down, flicking his robes back with toreador flamboyance, the judge called on me to address the jury. I took a sip of water so that I could be doing something else with my lips besides trembling. It was tepid and stale. I swallowed hard, reminding myself that the closing speech is the part of the trial I most relish. I like knitting all the threads of the case together: drawing the jury in, until they’re in the palm of my metaphorical hand. I steeled my nerves, then stood to face the jury.