The benches groaned as everyone in the crowded room sat down. Owen noticed that the courtroom smelled of the same lemon-scented polish his mother used to use; it made him feel sad.
“The prisoner will stand.”
So this was it. Owen stood.
“Is your name Owen Pierce?” asked the Clerk of the Court.
“It is.”
The clerk then read out the indictment and asked Owen how he pleaded.
“Not guilty,” Owen answered, as firmly and confidently as he could manage with all eyes on him.
He scrutinized the jury as he spoke: seven men and five women, all dressed for a day at the office. A pudgy man with a slack, flabby jaw looked at him with something like awe. A pursed-lipped young woman wouldn’t meet his eyes at all, but looked down at her hands folded in her lap. Most of them at least glanced at him in passing. Some were nervous; others looked as if they had already made up their minds.
It was irrational, he knew, but he decided to pick one of them to be his barometer throughout the trial, one whose expressions he would chart to tell how the case was going-for or against him. Not the frowning woman in the powder-blue suit, nor the balding chap who reminded him of his insurance agent; not the conventionally pretty girl with the pageboy cut, nor the burly wrestler-type with his brick-red neck bulging out of his tight collar. It was difficult to find someone.
At last, he decided on a woman; for some reason, it had to be a woman. She was in her late thirties, he guessed, with a moon-shaped face and short mousy hair. She had a wide red slash of a mouth and large eyes.
But it wasn’t her physical appearance so much as her aura that caused him to pick her out. For some reason, he decided, this woman was good and honest. What was more, she could tell the truth from lies. At the moment, she looked puzzled and confused to find herself in such a frightening role, but she would, he knew, as soon as the trial progressed, listen carefully, weigh, judge and decide. Her decision would be the right one, and he would be able to tell from her expression what it was. Yes, he would keep a close eye on her. He would call her “Minerva.”
Almost before Owen realized it, Jerome Lawrence, QC, had launched into his opening address. Lawrence was a small, dark-complexioned man with beady, restless black eyes and a perpetual five-o’clock shadow, shiny as shoe-polish on his cheeks and chin. Somehow, he seemed to fit perfectly into his robes, looking even more like a bat ready to flap its wings and take off into the night than anyone else in the room. Like Shirley Castle, he spoke with his hands a lot, and his robe swished about in a most distracting way.
“The Crown shall seek to prove,” Lawrence said in his oiliest public-school voice, “that the accused is guilty of the most heinous, the most despicable, brutal, inhuman crime of all-the murder of a child, an innocent, a mere sixteen-year-old girl with her whole life before her.”
And for the rest of the day, Owen could only listen, open-mouthed, to the depiction of himself as a barely human monster.
Though the parade of witnesses began dramatically enough, with Rebecca Charters tearfully recounting how she discovered Deborah Harrison’s body, several things became clear to him in the first days. Probably the first and foremost of these was that you could be bored even at your own murder trial.
Witnesses came and went, people he had never met, people who didn’t know him: vicars, shopkeepers, teachers, schoolgirls, policemen, pub landlords. Some of them seemed to spend hours in the box for no reason Owen could think of. Jerome Lawrence or Shirley Castle questioned most of them, but sometimes their juniors took over.
With unfailing regularity one lawyer or another would raise points of law that meant the jury had to be sent out, sometimes for hours, and all sides seemed to like nothing better than the kind of delay that meant an early adjournment for the day. Also, there were one or two days off due to illness of a jury member and another for a family bereavement. Every night, without fail, Owen was shipped back to his little cell at Armley Jail. He was becoming so used to it by now that he almost thought of it as home. He had forgotten what his real home looked like.
As far as Owen could tell, things seemed to be going quite well over the first few weeks. Shirley Castle made mincemeat of the policeman with the jug-ears for not explaining why he was visiting Owen in the first place. Detective Inspector Stott came out looking like a member of the Gestapo.
By the time Detective Chief Inspector Banks was called, Owen had lost track of the days.
II
“In the same situation, Chief Inspector, do you think you would bother to mention everyone you saw on the streets during a certain period?”
Banks shrugged. It was his second day giving evidence and Shirley Castle was cross-examining him. “I would hope I would do my duty and try to recall everything that happened around the crucial time,” he answered finally.
“But you are a policeman, Chief Inspector. You have special training. Such facts and fine details are part of your job. I’m sure I wouldn’t even remember most of the people I passed in the street. Nor, I imagine, would most members of the jury.” And here, Shirley Castle paused long enough to look over at the jury. Most of them seemed to agree with her, Banks thought. “Yet you expect Mr. Pierce to remember every face, every detail,” she went on. “I ask you again, Chief Inspector, do you really think this is reasonable?”
“Perhaps not on a busy thoroughfare at rush hour,” said Banks, “but this was a foggy night in a quiet suburb. Yes, I think I would remember if I had seen a particular person. And Mr. Pierce remembered as soon as-”
“That’s enough, Chief Inspector. You have answered my question.”
Banks couldn’t help but allow himself a slight feeling of satisfaction when he saw Shirley Castle reel from his answer. She had made a small mistake; she hadn’t already known the answer to the question she asked.
She hurried on. “Now, as Mr. Sung, proprietor of the Peking Moon restaurant, has already testified, and as my learned friend brought out during his examination-in-chief, Mr. Pierce used his credit card to pay for his meal there. If the timing of events is correct-and I stress if-this would have occurred shortly after the murder of Deborah Harrison, would it not?”
“Yes.”
“Now, in your professional experience, Chief Inspector, would you not say that a criminal, someone who has just committed an attack of the most vile and brutal kind, would be a little more careful to cover his tracks?”
“Most criminals aren’t that clever,” said Banks. “That’s why they get caught.”
The members of the gallery laughed.
“But my client is not stupid,” she went on, ignoring the interruption. “It is hardly likely that he would go and eat Chinese food and pay for it with a credit card after murdering someone, now, is it? Not to mention do it all wearing a bright orange anorak. Why would he be so foolish as to draw attention to himself in such an obvious way if he had committed the crime of which he is accused?”
“Perhaps he was distraught,” Banks answered. “Not thinking clearly. Mr. Sung did say he was talking to-”
“‘Not thinking clearly,’” she repeated, with exactly the right tone of disdain. “Is it not a fact, Chief Inspector, that perpetrators of such random crimes are usually, in fact, thinking very clearly indeed? That they rarely get caught, unless by accident? That they take great care to avoid discovery?”
Banks fiddled with his tie. He hated having it fastened up and could only bear it if he kept the top button of his shirt undone. “There are certain schools would say that, yes. But a criminal’s behavior is not easily predictable. If it were, we’d have an easier job on our hands.” He smiled at the jury; one or two of them smiled back.