Carl Corunna refused to answer. It was he, he said, who was asking the questions.
The session lasted forty-five minutes.
‘They won’t want to use that deposition in court,’ David T. Vynn said with satisfaction afterwards. ‘You sounded much too genuine.’
‘I spoke the truth.’
‘It’s not always the truth that’s believed.’
The wheels of the justice system revolved with the speed of tortoises. It was well over two years from the day that Jules Harlow had bought the filly that he received a phone call from David T. Vynn saying that the grievance committee of the South Carolina Bar was ready to hear his plea for probable cause.
‘My what?’ Jules Harlow asked blankly. His mind at the time resonated with visions of storing personality and memory on microchips that could be implanted to restore order in confused brains. His loving wife, happy with her horses, held his elbow on kerbsides so that he wouldn’t absent-mindedly step off in front of buses.
David Vynn said, ‘Three weeks next Tuesday, in the evening, eight o’clock, in the hotel where we meet for breakfast.’
‘I thought we were going to court.’
‘No, no,’ his attorney told him patiently. ‘If you remember, I told you at the beginning there were two ways to go. One is to file suit and make the depositions and wind the way slowly into court, and the other is to file a grievance with the South Carolina Bar Association. That grievance — your grievance against Patrick Green — has now reached the top of the pile.’
‘Double helix,’ Jules Harlow murmured.
‘What? Yes, I suppose so. You will turn up for the Bar hearing, won’t you?’
Sandy Nutbridge, during the same two years, had been in and out of jail. Patrick Green, his one-time friend, had again invented information against him and delivered him to arrest with an approximation of a Judas kiss, but this time Sandy, with his family safe in England, had made no attempt to raise bail money, choosing instead to wait resignedly behind bars for the date of his trial.
He chose also to be defended not by Green but by an attorney appointed pro bono by the court, and although he lost his case and was found guilty of minor money irregularities through horse sales, the worse charge of selling cocaine didn’t stick. He was sentenced only to time served, which meant he was freed immediately. Ray Wichelsea gladly put sales his way as before — but paid him commission with regular cheques, not cash.
As Sandy Nutbridge, on behalf of his mother, had also made a complaint to the South Carolina Bar along the same lines as David T. Vynn, the committee had decided to hear both complaints together. Mrs Nutbridge, as sturdily determined in her way as Jules Harlow in his, emptied the last few pounds from her piggy bank back home and on coupons for free-flier miles from her local supermarket, made her way again across the Atlantic.
She met Jules Harlow for the first time in the waiting-room of the extensive business suite in the hotel chosen by the South Carolina Bar Association for their enquiry. No one formally introduced them, but tentatively they approached each other until Jules Harlow (as ever in a grey suit) said to the grey-haired grandmother in her best print wool dress, ‘Are you... er...?’ and she replied self-consciously ‘Mr Harlow, is it?’
Without heat, they exchanged sorrows. Sandy Nutbridge was faithfully sending small amounts to help repay her borrowings, though to do it he had had to abandon his expensive lakeside home. She thought Patrick Green an unspeakable villain. Jules Reginald Harlow looked back to the day when he’d succumbed to her sobs and supposed he would do it again if he had to.
Jules Harlow’s vivacious wife, who said she wouldn’t have missed the Bar Association gathering for all the thoroughbreds in Kentucky, immediately offered sympathy and lighthearted jokes to Mrs Nutbridge, the two women surprising and dissipating the general run of long faces. Mrs Nutbridge visibly strengthened from jitters to determination. Jules Harlow’s wife said, ‘Attagirl!’
Jules Harlow gradually understood that the grievance committee was already in session in the large boardroom across the suite’s lobby and, when David T. Vynn arrived, he confirmed it. The fourteen lawyers at present forming the grievance committee had been listening to Patrick Green’s lies and twisted version of things for almost an hour.
‘They’ll believe him!’ Jules Harlow exclaimed, depressed.
David T. Vynn looked from him to Mrs Nutbridge. ‘It’s up to you two to convince them there’s probable cause.’
Jules Harlow asked again, ‘What is probable cause?’
‘Basically if the committee finds there is probable cause, they may try a colleague among themselves at a later date and disbar him or her from practising as a lawyer if he or she has, say, disgraced his or her profession.’
‘Like doctors?’ Mrs Nutbridge asked.
David Vynn nodded. ‘Like that.’
The committee called Mrs Nutbridge first, alone. Jules Harlow’s summons came half an hour later. Each of them in turn walked into a big brightly-lit room where the fourteen unsmiling lawyers sat round a long boardroom-like table. The committee chairman, at one end of the table, invited Mrs Nutbridge and later Jules Harlow to sit on one of the few empty chairs and answer questions.
Mrs Nutbridge was seated halfway down the table, but the chairman waved Jules Harlow to the only remaining empty seat at the far end which, to his alarm, was next to Patrick Green. Beyond Green sat Carl Corunna. Worse and worse. Expressionlessly, Jules Harlow took his allotted place and, rather woodenly, because of Green’s physical nearness, began to answer the chairman’s questions, most of which assumed Green’s lies to be the faces.
Jules Harlow knew he was doing badly. The assembled lawyers looked disbelieving at his answers and Green, beside him, relaxed. Carl Corunna sniffed.
Jules Harlow, in his memory, heard David Vynn’s voice. ‘It’s not always the truth that’s believed.’ If I’m not believed, he thought, it’s my own fault.
The chairman, consulting notes spread on the table in front of him, asked Jules Harlow on which day he had promised Patrick Green, on the telephone, that he could keep the ten thousand dollars on its return from the court.
The chairman, overweight and suffering from chronic indigestion, was finding the proceedings tedious. Half of the rest of the committee were fighting cat-naps. Patrick Green was smiling.
Jules Harlow took a deep breath and said loudly, ‘I would never have agreed to pay any fees whatsoever for Sandy Nutbridge.’
One of the dozing lawyers opened his eyes wide and said, ‘Why not?’
‘Because I didn’t know him.’
‘But—’
‘When I advanced the money for his bail, I had met him only once. That was on the day I bought a horse from him. Quite a good horse, as it turned out. A mare. You might like a bet on her tomorrow in the fourth race.’
A ripple of amusement finished off the cat-naps.
‘If you didn’t know Nutbridge...’ the chairman frowned ‘...why did you put up money for his bail?’
‘Because of his mother’s distress. I did it for her.’ Jules gestured towards her. ‘I did it because she was crying. I did it because she’s English, and so am I. You yourselves might have come to the aid of a fellow American if one begged you for help in a foreign country. I did it simply because I wanted to.’
There was a short moment of open-mouthed silence, then a lady among the committee cleared her throat and said with humour, ‘If you don’t mind me asking you, Mr Harlow, is ten thousand dollars a great deal of money to you?’