Pewe stood up, opening his hands in a gesture of friendship, and walked round his desk. He put an arm round Roy’s shoulder and steered him over to the L-shaped sofa. ‘Sit down — can I get you any tea or coffee?’
As he sat, Grace shook his head. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’
Pewe sat a short distance away. ‘OK, let’s start again. Bury the hatchet?’
‘How deep? Beneath sonar range?’ Grace said it with a smile like dry ice.
Pewe winced, visibly stung by the reference to his previous time in Sussex, when he had been on equal rank to Roy Grace. Prompted by the parents of Roy’s missing wife, Sandy, who had long suspected Roy of murdering her, Pewe had taken it upon himself to have a sonar scan done of the back garden of the house where he and Sandy had lived.
Grace had never forgiven Sandy’s toxic parents, nor Pewe for this outrage, although he had been marginally more forgiving of Pewe for acting on information, albeit unsubstantiated, given by her parents.
‘I didn’t have any choice, Roy,’ Pewe said. ‘You know that, you’d have had to do exactly the same if the roles had been reversed.’
Grace resisted the urge to say he would have had the courtesy to let Pewe know first, and not done it behind his back. But if the ACC was genuinely offering him an olive branch, he didn’t want to throw it back in his face. Not yet. ‘Sure,’ he replied, flatly.
‘So,’ Cassian Pewe sat up, brightly. ‘You’ll have my support for your application for the Chief Superintendents boards. And we start afresh from next Monday, maybe not as bosom buddies but as colleagues who respect each other?’
‘Sounds good,’ Grace said, guardedly.
Pewe beamed. ‘Right then, get out there and move the needle on Sussex’s crime statistics. Know a negative feedback loop when you see one.’
Grace looked at him, wondering as he always did where the hell Cassian Pewe got all this corporate gobbledygook from. ‘Absolutely,’ he replied.
Pewe patted him on the shoulder and jumped up again. ‘Are we done?’
‘We’re done.’
‘Good man! Good to have you back.’
25
Thursday 9 May
When people encountered Richard Jupp for the first time, away from his work environment, most of them assumed the tall, thick-set, teddy bear of a man in his late sixties, with thinning grey hair and a beard verging on the straggly, was a teacher or perhaps an environmentalist, or maybe even some kind of local politician. No one would have put him down as the country’s longest-serving Crown Court judge.
But beneath his cuddly exterior was a man who could, when needed, be as hard as nails or as kind and humane as your favourite uncle. He was one of three judges in Sussex who were ‘ticketed’ — as it was called in legal parlance — to sit on murder trials.
He liked to be in very early on the morning of a major new trial, to review the key documentation and be fully prepped. At 7.45 a.m. he sat in his chambers adjoining Court 3 of Lewes Crown Court. He loved this Victorian building — the four law courts it housed had a grandeur and sense of occasion that he felt was missing in most modern courts. And compared to modern judge’s chambers, this room was wonderfully old-fashioned and spacious, with more the feel of a suite in a grand but tired hotel, rather than an office.
Its ochre walls were relieved by uninspired framed prints of Lewes landscapes; there was a patterned lavender carpet and imposing drapes hung from an elaborate pelmet atop an almost impossibly tall window. The furniture was just old, rather than antique. A spacious L-shaped desk was cluttered with a photocopier, conferencing laptop, box of tissues and a row of legal tomes, with a short meeting table attached. There was a wardrobe, a pastel armchair, a handful of purple-upholstered conference chairs and some desultory potted plants. On a shelf sat a black-and-gold tin with a brass handle, containing his wig. He had forgotten it on a couple of occasions when he had been distracted by something on a case and had sent his clerk scuttling out of court to fetch it. But in all other respects, he was sharp as a tack.
Jupp stroked his black-and-white spaniel, Biscuit, comfortably seated on his lap, whilst his other dog, Charlie, snored in his basket on the floor. ‘Lock-’em-up Jupp’ was the moniker that His Honour Judge Richard Jupp had long been given by his colleagues and by all the barristers, local and from afar, who had ever come before him, whether prosecuting or defending. He liked it, well aware his reputation was as a judge to be feared, but one who was fair.
In the courts over which he presided, the accused, their briefs and the jury would always know where they stood when they were in front of him. If clearly guilty, in his view, from all the evidence presented, he’d always done his best to get that message across to even the most dim-witted of juries in his summings-up and directions. And, boy, while many were good, he’d had more than his share of seriously dim-witted ones! And if there was proper doubt about the person in the dock’s culpability, he would try equally hard to direct the jury towards that coveted two-word verdict:
Not guilty.
The problem was, in his long experience, that whilst many juries were highly competent, the jury system itself had flaws. It was a lottery what jury you got.
Frustratingly, on a few occasions juries got it very wrong. So much could sway a bunch of inexperienced people, of mixed backgrounds and views, to go either way. And occasionally they made a totally incomprehensible decision. All it took was a group of malleable jurors and a passionate — but misguided — one to sway them.
In Richard Jupp’s view, formed after forty years of appearing in court, on both sides of the bench, juries often convicted or acquitted on emotions rather than on facts. He likened juries to a lucky dip — you never knew quite what you were going to get.
The system wasn’t as bad as portrayed in a television show many years ago, with the late comedy genius Tony Hancock, whom he had loved. One episode featured an unemployed Hancock doing jury service. Hancock had discovered that jurors got paid a daily rate equal to an entire week’s dole money, so every time the rest of the jury reached a verdict, one way or the other, he would convince them to reverse it in order to prolong the trial and increase the meagre amount of his earnings.
Although a fiction, there had been genuine instances of bizarre behaviour in jury rooms which made it seem not so far-fetched. For example, after the trial of a double murderer, here in Sussex, had ended, it was revealed that drunk members of the jury had resorted to consulting a Ouija board in the hotel where they were sequestered, to communicate with the spirits of the murder victims, to help them with their verdict.
It was not surprising there were occasional instances of odd behaviour when a group of total strangers, generally lay people, were put into a daunting environment and had to reach decisions that would make or destroy many people’s lives — the lives of both the accused and of the victims or their loved ones.
And despite what some tabloids screamed on their front-page splashes, prisons were not holiday camps. In Jupp’s view, most UK prisons were brick shithouses, filled with bullies. Nasty, scary places where you were confined with total strangers, a percentage of whom were likely to be violent. A place where you were not simply deprived of all the liberties and luxuries you’d previously taken for granted, but a horror hotel, where there was no pillow menu, no breakfast list to hang on your door, no privacy — frequently an open toilet where you had to perform your functions behind a plastic curtain, inches from your cellmate’s face — and scant relief from the relentless tedium and the constant threat of being brutalized by other inmates. One wrong look or ill-chosen word and your face could be slashed open, boiling porridge poured on your genitals, or worse.