Quota (25 page)

He surveyed the room, tuning out of the sound of Weir's voice as it lumbered into rhythm. Twelve jurors, a judge, an associate and tipstaff. One stenographer, one reporter from commercial TV and two from the print media. One, two, three, nine interested parties in the public gallery. Two accused up the back, with two screws to watch over them. Three solicitors in total on the reverse side of the bar table, and four counsel on this side. In all, thirty-nine souls in the room, twelve of them female. Thirty-nine primates wrapped in fabric. Thirty-nine seated apes, talking, listening, maintaining a careful amount of space between each other so as never to touch. And under the fabric, the hearts of these apes measured out their remaining mortal hours. It made Charlie smile to think that some of the apes were successfully selling their remaining hours to the other apes in exchange for money, an exercise which was ultimately as artificial as the rest of the business. What cue, he wondered, could summon them all to revert to their ancestral ways, jump onto the benches and balustrades, screeching and swinging their arms? He stole a glance at Patrick's Kate, sad and serene in the gallery. She was the finest of these monkeys by quite some distance.

Weir was stretching out, doing the necessary.

‘…In order to establish the guilt of the accused men of the offence of murder it is necessary to understand what makes up the essential elements that constitute that offence.

‘There are a number of legal considerations about which you will need to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt. Firstly, of course, that Matthew Lanegan was killed. Secondly, that his death was caused by an act or actions of the accused men…' Harlan swung an indifferent finger at the dock, not even giving them a glance.

‘For these purposes, if only one of the accused men carried out the act which caused the death, provided the other was his accomplice, they both share the criminal responsibility for that conduct irrespective of which carried out the physical actions. Before each of these accused can be criminally responsible for the killing, you need to be satisfied that, regardless of who administered the fatal gunshot to Matthew Lanegan, the two men were engaged in a joint enterprise.

‘Thirdly…thirdly…that the act or actions which caused the death of Matthew Lanegan were
conscious
,
voluntary
and
deliberate
acts.' Harlan stopped and looked down at something on the table for a long time until even Charlie, so used to his shtick, found himself looking up. The old fox was counting to himself, just audible above his breath.

‘Conscious.'

He swung on them, searching the rows of faces for a conviction that matched his.

‘Voluntary.'

His eyes never left them.

‘
Deliberate
.'

Seemingly content, he settled again.

‘So let's say you are, hm? What next, ladies and gentlemen? Next, you must be satisfied that the accused men, or either of them, did the act or acts which killed Matthew Lanegan with the
intention
of killing him, or,' he pointed again, schoolteacherly, ‘…or, with the intention of inflicting really serious bodily harm on him.'

‘Lastly, ladies and gentlemen, and this may not trouble you too much if you have come this far, lastly you must be satisfied that the killing of Matthew Lanegan was not excused by any lawful justification.'

Again the room grew heavy with silence. Charlie looked over at Kate, felt her pin-bright spark of tiny defiance. Where the fuck does it come from? he asked himself. She's one row in front of the bloody Murchisons.

‘So that's the law, my friends.' Charlie cringed at his familiarity. ‘Now to the evidence…'

Charlie knew what was coming next and, like a paying punter, he couldn't help but watch in admiration. Harlan reached down beside the bar table and emerged with the rifle. He held it aloft, one hand clutched around the woodwork forward of the trigger guard. And there it was, dominating the room. Charlie had thought ever since he saw the evil thing that the telescopic sight on top of it was the key to the whole business. It added a cruel bulk to the weapon, all blackspiderly menace and intent. Harlan cocked an eyebrow towards the tipstaff.

‘Mister Tipstaff, has the weapon been proofed?' Receiving an imperceptible nod in return, he shook the other hand from the sleeve of his robes and grabbed hold of the steel ball on the end of the bolt mechanism.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, there are few acts more conscious, more deliberate, than operating a bolt action rifle.' And with a tight grimace, he threw the bolt.
Chuck chuck
. The gleaming rifle held the room. ‘Can't do
that
accidentally, can you?'

He put the rifle down on the table and Charlie watched its muzzle come to rest at the end of his notepad. The hard clunk of the gun on the woodwork was another of Harlan's gems. Why put it down quietly and waste the theatrical potential? He watched the unseeing eye of the rifle and the lazy blue tracks of his pen on the notepad. He could pick up the rifle and stand on his chair, cuff Harlan over the jowls and watch him tumble backwards in a swirl of black silk, eyeball the jurors down the barrel of the Remington .308, pick a couple out specifically, white faces in the crosshairs, watch them dive for cover, scream and beg for their lives, in the face of an obviously unloaded gun. It'd be like a school shooting where you don't have to take yourself out at the end. They'd give him six, maybe twelve months for it, and the jurors would get a lifetime exemption from jury duty. Harlan would be back at work the following Monday as though it never happened. Charlie would eclipse Harlan's patiently accumulated thirty years of notoriety in a neat three or four minutes.

He wondered if everyone had these thoughts.

‘You know that the two accused were out there on that night, in their vessel, the
Open Quest
. You know this because they used their individual keycard to operate the lock on the commercial wharf that separates the public from the working area. Witnesses have told you they watched the vessel—they called it a trawler, but I suggest this is the understandable ignorance of the tourist—they watched the vessel leave the river mouth, and one witness actually told you she saw a man who resembles Mr McVean pacing about on the deck. Now Mr Murchison didn't go as far as to tell police in his interview that he was out at sea, but you'll recall the officer interviewing him led him all the way up to that point before Mr Murchison got a sudden case of the vapours and asked to end the interview. You're entitled to take into account the point at which he asked to end the interview as evidencing a consciousness of guilt…'

Two days of exhaustive pre-trial argument about consciousness of guilt. All so that Weir could have his casual throwaway line about the interview. What a strange way of doing things. The jurors looked puzzled and Charlie felt a degree of empathy for their bewilderment.

‘Don't worry too much about that concept for the time being. You'll be told more about that by his Honour. But let me assume you're satisfied about the presence of these two men on the water that night. In their boat. With their rifle…'

The rhythm of his delivery was interrupted by a loud sigh from the public gallery. Delvene Murchison, who until now had worn a look of pained endurance throughout the trial, was now openly shaking her head in furious denial as Weir spoke. There was a split-second stand-off as Weir looked at her and she returned his gaze, white-lipped with fury. The judge watched them both, on the brink of intervening. Then her consciousness of the room looking her way was enough to make her drop her head.

Charlie tuned out. Weir would spend several more hours setting out the evidence in painstaking detail, weaving his stories and overripe analogies as he went. Charlie took himself back to the reef, to the massive blue space around him as he hung on the surface watching the fish circle below. With a little mental effort he could imagine himself as they saw him, in the sky, soaring in the light of the surface, floating cruciform. Those creatures, whose business was not his business, who idled and curled and flowed through invisible canyons in the great mass of water. The hypnotic sound of the air bubbles around him. Removed from the fear that had gripped him on the day, now he could hear the notes more truly: tinkling, glassy, nearly metallic sounds that rose and fell with distance. The light had been glorious, bathing everything in a redemptive glow, falling in columns through the depths and illuminating a rock here, a stretch of sand there. A fish would cross the columns now and then, flashing chrome through the shadows.

‘You heard evidence that the
Open Quest
had a very sophisticated GPS unit on it. You heard that the GPS needed replacing, very urgently, the day after Mr Lanegan's body was found. Why is that, ladies and gentlemen? Why the urgency? Why was the old unit discarded by Toby Murchison? You know why. The police officer who searched the Murchison shed told you: the GPS, when it was found in a disposal skip at the shed, had what they call a waypoint on it. A mark. Created on the night of the killing. Now cast your minds back again to Mr Lanegan's evidence. Do you remember him saying the words in reference to his deceased brother, I'm just looking for the words…“I think he fiddled around with the GPS for a sec.” There, ladies and gentlemen. The waypoint was perfectly positioned on the south edge of the feature that Patrick Lanegan called the crayhole, and it was made twenty-two minutes before witnesses say they saw flames out at sea. It is reasonable to conclude—you don't have to be a commercial fisherman to do this—is reasonable for you, ladies and gentlemen, using your ordinary experience of life, to conclude that Matthew Lanegan had an inkling that something was wrong on that boat, and that he left that mark, deliberately…'

Charlie thought back to Dauphin; the day a thunderstorm had blown in, the sky turning a livid purple and the sea answering in brilliant green. The white foam of the surf was suddenly more intense, more perfect than he had ever seen it as the gathering darkness brought it into heightened contrast. The air itself had seemed charged with current and, standing on the dune behind the house, he'd heard a roar coming from the west, as though a wave were about to consume the town. The sound had gathered in volume. It was coming nearer. And then its source became apparent: a hailstorm sweeping in over the tin roofs, not yet upon him as he stood in the electric air.

For a brief instant he was dry as the houses on the west side of town were under siege, hammered by the downpour. Then it was on him as well, painful darts of ice biting at his head and hands, the sound all around him, the undergrowth buckling under the assault. He'd run back into the house, still stunned by the instant when the wave of frozen air was within reach of him, was in front of him, when a cloudburst could be separated from him by a handful of streets. He'd experienced the sensation of the storm front moving past him, even through him, that afternoon, but he'd absorbed it without reflection. It was only now, looking back, that he knew he'd felt a tiny tug of concern for the stoic tin-topped houses, for their humble persistence under the wild sky.

Weir was now in a good rhythm, black robes cascading around him as he spoke. He was looking less and less at his notes as the familiar script came readily to his mind and he filled in gaps with the ease of long experience.

‘There was the spotlight, ladies and gentlemen. A bit like the GPS unit, you may conclude that once Patrick Lanegan got away, once it was clear that these two weren't going to find him and eliminate him as a potential witness, they had to focus on removing the traces of the things that would tie in with Patrick's story. They would have assumed that Patrick would make a better choice than he ultimately made, that he would tell the police everything he saw. So, as with the GPS, the spotlight had to go. As you heard in Patrick Lanegan's evidence, they'd used it to hunt him, literally hunt him, in the water for some extended period after the shooting and before the fire. And there was one witness in the group of witnesses who saw flames,' he leafed quickly through the ring binder in front of him, ‘Pederson. Marjorie Pederson, who says she saw flashing lights in the moments before the flames appeared out at the reef. That, ladies and gentlemen, was either Mr McVean or Mr Murchison
hunting
Patrick Lanegan with the spotlight. Imagine the terror. It's dark, you're in the ocean, it's August, much like now,' he looked up towards the windows. ‘Intensely cold. You've watched two men with a rifle murder your brother, and they're hell-bent on getting you. The only place you have to hide is that inky black water. But there's a spotlight. A spotlight, ladies and gentlemen. It's the stuff of nightmares.

‘So we suggest to you that Mr McVean, having some idea of the way in which that spotlight might be uppermost in the mind of Patrick Lanegan after the event, elected to get rid of it. And again, as with the GPS at the Murchison shed, it turns up close to home, at Mr McVean's elderly mother's house, in the roof cavity. Odd place for a marine spotlight, you might think. Don't hide your light under a bushel, stuff it in the roof. You will take note of that find, and of the assault that Mr McVean perpetrated on the officer conducting the search, as matters that go to Mr McVean's consciousness of guilt. Would an innocent man react the same way to such a search? Would an innocent man put the light where it was found? You know the answers to these questions, ladies and gentlemen.'

Charlie had wandered again, was now at the eastern end of the long beach where Les had told him the longshore drift left its flotsam. As he stumped through the thick detritus of the high tide line, looping down towards the reaching waves every so often, he understood what Les had been trying to convey about the loneliness of the place. It rejected human presence, even while the signs of humanity—the bottles, shreds of rope, floats and plastic bags—were everywhere. On the wet sand, each stone left an arrow of flowing water in the receding wave, tumbled once or twice. On the dry hummocks beyond the line of desiccated kelp, the spiky exoskeleton of a puffer fish, eyes gone. Down again on the wet, an oystercatcher trying to extract worms from the sand, darting between incoming rushes of the sea. On the dry, a plank, rounded and bleached by the ocean and draped in clumps of barnacles, all of them still squirming, eager to abandon their stranded host.