‘What?’ Trout said. ‘He has a kind face, ergo he is innocent?’
‘Can you trust all of the people on both sides who gave evidence?’ Singh asked him. ‘Tell me honestly. You believed and trusted every word?’
Trout shrugged. ‘Maybe not every single word. But pretty much most of it.’
‘Are you sure?’ Meg quizzed.
Trout dug a finger into his ear and twiddled it. His face flushed slightly, showing some emotion for the first time since the trial had started. ‘Well, yes, I suppose so.’
‘You suppose so?’ she pounced. ‘You’d sleep easily knowing he had been put behind bars for maybe fifteen years because you suppose he is guilty? Are you saying you are not one hundred per cent sure?’
‘One hundred per cent certainty on anything is very hard to achieve, Meg,’ he said, defensively.
And now she knew she had him on the ropes. ‘Please correct me if I’m wrong — your job was assessing the risks of everything your company insured?’
‘I had to assess the risks of loss at sea of both ships and their cargoes.’
She nodded. ‘All right, let’s imagine the hypothetical situation in which your company had been asked to insure Terence Gready for ten million pounds against the risk of going to prison. How would you have calculated the premium?’
‘That is pretty much an impossible question,’ he said, affably.
‘You must have had a model on which to calculate your premiums? A ratio of risk to reward?’
‘Ah, I see. You want me to give the percentage chance of a “guilty” or “not guilty” verdict?’
‘Based on the hard facts of the evidence. Without the spin put on it by the prosecution or defence counsels.’
He pouted his lips. ‘With my insurance hat on, I would put it at around eighty per cent probability of guilt on all counts.’
‘So a twenty per cent chance he is innocent?’
After a moment he responded with a reluctant, ‘Yes.’
She looked at him hard. ‘Could you say that a horse in a race, given odds of eight to one, would, for sure, fail to win that race?’
‘Of course not,’ he replied, petulantly. ‘There are too many variables in a horse race.’
‘But you would be prepared to send a man to prison on the same odds?’
His Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down and a few beads of perspiration popped on his brow. ‘I don’t think we can compare the defendant’s guilt or innocence with either a shipping insurance risk assessment or a horse race.’
‘Really? Why not? Are you not admitting you have some doubts — a one in five chance that the defendant might actually be innocent?’
Trout found an itch on his threadbare dome, which he began to attack vigorously. ‘Well,’ he conceded, with clear reluctance. ‘You do have a point, I suppose.’
‘Thank you.’
Meg returned to her notes. ‘We have heard a wide amount of argument about whether the defendant did or did not ever actually meet the man purporting to have been his so-called lieutenant. Michael Starr. This man, who has already pleaded guilty to all of the offences, is clearly, as we have all heard, a highly dubious and untrustworthy character. It is very much his word against the defendant’s. As we have also heard, he has much to gain, in terms of a reduced sentence, by implicating Mr Gready. Can we really trust what he has said? I, for one, am not comfortable with it.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Sophie Eaton exclaimed. ‘We all heard the evidence from that expert witness, the forensic podiatrist Kelly. We saw the video footage which was compelling of Mr Starr entering the premises of TG Law.’
‘We did,’ Mike Roberts said. ‘But to be fair, we heard the evidence of Gready’s employees — and in particular that of his secretary — who I thought was quite convincing. There is nothing any of them said from which we could infer Mr Gready and Mr Starr met on that day — or any other.’
Meg watched the retired police officer with interest. Was he on her side?
‘I agree,’ Maisy Waller suddenly butted in. ‘That mechanic, Arthur Mason-Taylor, at LH Classics, looked a very honest man to me. He said that he had never seen Mr Gready — and had never heard his name. If Mr Gready, as Mr Starr suggested, owned LH Classics, surely it is odd that the chief mechanic there had never seen him?’
‘Well, I’ve worked at the hospital for nine years and I’ve never met the chief executive of it,’ Sophie piped up.
‘But what reason would a man like Arthur Mason-Taylor have for lying?’ Hugo said. ‘That makes no sense to me at all.’
‘It comes back again to the judge’s direction to us,’ Meg said. ‘You must be satisfied of the defendant’s guilt. Can any of us here say that the defendant and Mr Starr ever met — for certain?’
She looked around the table. Only Toby raised his hand.
‘Really, Toby? You are certain, are you?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK. It is very important that we all give our honest opinions. But let’s again remind everyone of the judge’s comments about Michael Starr, which I wrote down. He said we need to bear in mind that Starr had given evidence implicating Terence Gready in the hope of getting a lesser sentence.’ She looked down at her notes. ‘The judge instructed us to — in his words — approach Mr Starr’s evidence with caution. He also went on to say, and I think this is very important for us to consider, you should ask yourselves whether Mr Starr has, or may have, tailored his evidence to implicate Mr Gready falsely.’
She looked up again. ‘To me, that is pretty unequivocal — I think the judge was going as far as he dared to warn us not to trust Starr.’
Trout shook his head. ‘I think you might be reading too much into those words, Meg. My interpretation is that undoubtedly he is doing the right thing in warning us of the possibility that Starr could be lying for his own gain, but I don’t interpret that as a thinly veiled instruction to use from the judge.’
‘I disagree with you,’ she replied and noticed enough nods around the table to indicate she had most of the jury with her on this.
‘Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree on this, won’t we!’ Trout retorted, with irritating smugness.
Meg fleetingly wondered what living with this man must be like. She was sorely tempted to snap back, I was told always to allow other people to be right, it consoles them for not being anything else. But instead she decided it was best to change the subject.
‘Let’s move on to the evidence given by Emily Denyer. I have to say that by the time she had finished, I was almost certain that Mr Gready had to be the mastermind behind all the banking and financial shenanigans. But then we heard from Carolyn Herring. A person with impressive credentials from her former senior role in the Fraud Prevention Department of the Inland Revenue. After she had given her evidence it made me think.’
To Meg’s relief, there were several nods of agreement around the table. ‘Can we,’ she said, ‘be sure, again, that it was Mr Gready behind all the banking and financial transactions? I wouldn’t be comfortable saying it was.’
There were several murmurs of assent. But to her slight consternation, there was no reaction from Rory O’Brien, who had, for the past hour or so of their discussions, been totally focused on the spreadsheets. She wasn’t even sure if he was listening, but then again, he hardly ever spoke. For the moment, though, she didn’t mind, she was on fire, adrenaline coursing through her. She really sensed this was going, with certainty, that her way.
‘Let’s now discuss the evidence given by Michael Starr, which on the surface is highly damaging,’ she said. ‘But as we have just discussed, can we trust this person? We have heard he is a man of extremely dubious character and, having already pleaded guilty, has nothing to lose. I would add that he came across to me as an extremely bitter man.’