Arthur spent the next while picking apart and scoffing at Flo’s testimony. The charade that she was infatuated with Cud. “She would have you believe the love carried on even while she sought to nail his hide to the wall of this courtroom. She could have said she saw nothing, that’s what a woman in love might say, but not such an honourable woman as Florenza LeGrand.”
She knew Raffy would be jealous, that he’d be unable to sleep, might wander about in despair, might even spy on his faithless wife-even as the lurking killer waited his chance. And just in case a witness-a neighbour, say-heard something, maybe the slamming of the door to the maid’s bedroom, wouldn’t it be clever to dress the assassin in the gear the stooge usually wore- “Like this,” Arthur said, displaying the cover of Cud’s CD, open-necked shirt, medallion, red suspenders.
Nice spin on troubling eyewitness evidence. Wentworth wished he’d come up with it.
A peroration about the risk of convicting the innocent, a softly worded plea that they deliver a verdict that would not haunt their dreams, an evocation of a sombre scene of clanging prison doors and freedom’s loss, a verse from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”: “The vilest deeds like poison weeds bloom well in prison-air; It is only what is good in man that wastes and withers there.”
Finally, the golden thread again, burden of proof, reasonable doubt. “Ubi dubium ibi libertas!” he concluded. “Where there is doubt, there is freedom.”
Professor Glass, the forewoman, nodded with approval.
35
Under a benign noonday sun, Arthur sat with a pizza slice by the Robson Square waterfall, thankful to be alone for a while, a chance to clear his head, relax his weary lungs, his weary soul. An hour of solace from a trial whose difficulties had accelerated exponentially day by day. Never had he known a case turn so inexorably, so unforgivingly, so quickly, from a walk in the park to a stumble at the edge of a cliff.
He was kicking himself for having got into this with such shallow preparation. Three months wouldn’t have been adequate. He’d been egged into it, seduced into it, tricked into it. To defend whom? Cudworth Brown, to whom he owed nothing, who made a pass at his wife, who played charades with his lawyers. A monkey with a buzz saw, too much to answer for had he taken the stand, he’d have been ripped apart by Abigail. But was Arthur just making excuses for keeping Cud from testifying?
Arthur hadn’t read acquittal on the jurors’ faces. Only uncertainty. They’d been responsive enough, it was clear they liked him, but did they like his client? Arthur shouldn’t have mocked and demeaned him, that was a mistake, he’d let his antipathy show.
Otherwise a good speech, though not worth the nine point six Wentworth awarded. Arthur wished his gushing junior would stop stargazing and come into his own-he had the right stuff deep down. God knows Arthur would have blown this trial ten ways to Sunday had Wentworth not been around to back and fill.
He played with his cellphone but was hesitant to call Margaret. She’d be visiting polling stations, pumping up her scrutineers. Tragically, he saw no chance he’d be at her side when the results came in. Polls close at 8:00 p.m. Kroop will take two hours with his charge. The jury will be deliberating this evening.
Here was Wentworth jogging toward him, breathless. “I won’t bug you, I know you want to be alone, but you got away before I could tell you about Brian. I hadn’t wanted to burden you earlier.”
Arthur listened with concern to the story of Brian’s attempted foray into the afterlife.
“A poorly planned job, you think?”
“Yeah, a custodian was just outside his door.”
“Then maybe it was well planned. How did Brian sound to you?”
“I don’t know. Crazy but sly. Oblique, you know the way he gets. Still talking about the trial as if it’s a book.”
“The view is always the same,” Arthur muttered. “See if you can reach Caroline; it would be useful to hear her observations. And make sure Dr. Epstein knows about this.” Wentworth made a note.
“I don’t want you spacing out when Kroop gives jury directions. We are at the point in this sorry trial where we have to anticipate grounds of appeal.”
Much of the effect that Arthur’s speech had on the jury was buried in the rubble of Kroop’s rambling charge, a mind-deadening recital of seven days of evidence embellished with legal lectures. But not weighted, surprisingly, toward the prosecution. A fair and ample direction on reasonable doubt, a slightly incredulous inflection in his voice when he recounted Florenza’s evidence.
Kroop sent the jury out and asked, “Do counsel have any exceptions?”
Arthur suggested His Lordship might wish to devote a few more words to the cover-up in the high councils of the Conservative government. The latter was for the press, an aid to Margaret’s campaign if it made the supper news.
Kroop demurred with a smile. Nothing was getting to him today. Arthur had wearied from the battle, and he supposed Kroop had too, and they’d settled into a grudging truce that suggested Arthur had been forgiven for the worst of his sins and insults.
Word was sent to the jury to begin deliberations. To satisfy Arthur’s morbid curiosity, he’d asked April to run off a copy of Pomeroy’s manuscript, his true-crime fantasy or whatever he called it. He took it to the barristers’ lounge to kill time until dinner.
“Didn’t happen in my day, these school shootings.”
“There used to be discipline.”
“Too much TV.”
“Kids today, they’re lazy. Manfred, old boy, can you switch to the local news?”
Arthur was hiding behind the codgers, in his little cove, working his way through a chef’s salad, determined to get his strength up for his reception on Garibaldi, a chilly one if he returned ignobly from his quest: the averted eyes, the throat clearings, the commiserative mumbles. “Well, you tried.”
Here was Margaret in high definition, poking her ballot in the slot. Cut to a quickie interview outside the polling place. “I’m exhausted. I’m hopeful. The choice is in the people’s hands.”
The same routine for the other main candidates, followed by an unfunny sidebar, a costumed independent running for the Clown Party. Arthur dialed Margaret’s cell, left a message. “‘The choice is in the people’s hands.’ A splendid example of iambic pentameter. As in, ‘Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain.’ As mine remains for you.”
Disconnecting, he muttered, “How corny, Beauchamp,” then looked up to find himself staring into the penetrating silver eyes of Caroline Pomeroy.
“Corny? Not at all. Lovely, in fact, Arthur. How blessed Margaret is to have a partner who quotes from Venus and Adonis instead of Inspector Grodgins’s Last Case.” She pulled up a chair. “Are women actually allowed in here?” A mocking look about, a sardonic smile-how twinned she was with her ex-husband, her duelling counterpart.
“The bill of rights says so, but you wouldn’t know it. The ladies get frozen out.”
The habitues had checked her out with reproving looks, squirms of discomfort. Even Manfred looked haughty and displeased as he took her order for a whisky sour.
“The last bastion of male hegemony. I’m surprised at you, Arthur.”
“Ah, well, old habitats die hard. They leave you alone here. If it helps, I put eight women on the jury.”
“How magnanimous of you.”
The trial, the by-election, the travails of a divorced mother of three-these topics canvassed, she said, “Shall we move on to the main topic of this evening’s symposium? The headless horseman of Hollyburn. What would cause him to fake a stab at suicide? Lord knows. We talked of the children, of course, and I told him-and I almost grieve to say it-that they deeply miss him.” A moment to muse. “As do I, in an aberrant way. ‘I, the Masochist,’ it’s the title of one of my stories.”