This was also the reason why, for five years, two guards had been on a round-the-clock watch of the scenedow which held the evidence in the Raddall case. There was always the chance that one of Raddall’s relatives, or some publicity-seeking screwball, would sneak in and wipe the slate clean before its time came to resolve all doubts.
There had been moments during the ten years when Harpur had been too ill and tired to care very much, times when it would have been a relief to have the perfect witness silenced forever. But usually the existence of the slow glass did not bother him.
He had made his ruling in the Raddall case, and it had been a decision he would have expected any other judge to make. The subsequent controversy, the enmity of sections of the press, the public, and even some of his colleagues had hurt at first, but he had got over that.
The Law, Harpur had said in his summing up, existed solely because people believed in it. Let that belief be shaken—even once—and the Law would suffer irreparable harm.
As near as could be determined, the killings had taken place about an hour before midnight.
Keeping that in mind, Harpur ate dinner early then showered and shaved for the second time that day. The effort represented a sizeable proportion of his daily energy quota, but it had been hot and sticky in the courtroom. His current case was involved and at the same time, boring. More and more cases were like that lately, he realized. It was a sign he was ready to retire but there was one more duty to perform—he owed that much to the profession.
Harpur put on a lightweight jacket and stood with his back to the valet-mirror which his wife had bought a few months earlier. It was faced with a sheet of fifteen-second retardite which allowed him after a slight pause to turn around and check his appearance from the back. He surveyed his frail but unright figure dispassionately then walked away before the stranger in the glass could turn to look out.
He disliked valet-mirrors almost as much as the equally popular truviewers, which were merely pieces of short-term retardite pivotal on a vertical axis. They served roughly the same function as ordinary mirrors, except that there was no reversal effect. For the first time ever, the makers boasted, you could really see yourself as others saw you. Harpur objected to the idea on grounds he hoped were vaguely philosophical, but which he could not really explain, even to himself.
“You don’t look well, Kenneth,” Eva said as he adjusted his tie minutely. “You haven’t got to go down there, have you?”
“No, I haven’t got to go—that’s why I’ve got to go. That’s the whole point.”
“Then I’ll drive you.”
“You won’t. You’re going to bed. I’m not going to let you drive around the city in the middle of the night.” He put an arm round her shoulders. At fifty-eight, Eva Harpur was on a seemingly endless plateau of indomitable good health, but they maintained a fiction that it was he who looked after her.
He drove himself into the city, but progress through the traffic was unusually slow and, on impulse, he stopped several blocks from the police headquarters and began to walk. Live dangerously, he thought, but walk slowly—just in case. It was a bright warm evening and, with the long daylight hours of June, only the sixteen-hour panels slung above the thoroughfare were black. The alternating eight-hour panels were needlessly blazing with light they had absorbed in the afternoon. The system was a compromise with seasonal variations in daylight hours, but it worked reasonably well and, above all, the light was practically free.
An additional advantage was that it provided the law enforcement authorities with perfect evidence about events like road accidents and traffic violations. In fact, it had been the then brand-new slow glass lighting panels in Fifty-third Avenue which had provided a large part of the evidence in the case against Ewan Raddall.
Evidence on which Harpur had sent Raddall to the electric chair.
The salient facts of the case had not been exactly as in the classic situation proposed by the tabloids, but they had been near enough to arouse public interest. There had been no other known suspect apart from Raddall, but the evidence against him had been largely circumstantial. The bodies had not been found until the next morning, by which time Raddall had been able to get home, clean himself up and have a night’s sleep. When he was picked up he was fresh, composed and plausible—and the forensic teams had been able to prove almost nothing.
The case against Raddall was that he had been seen going towards the public playground at the right time, leaving it at the right time, and that he had bruises and scratches consistent with the crime. Also, between midnight and 9.30 in the morning, when he was taken in for questioning, he had “lost” the plasticord jacket he had worn on the previous evening, and it was never found.
At the end of Raddall’s trial the jury had taken less than an hour to arrive at a verdict of guilty—but during a subsequent appeal his defence claimed the jury was influenced by the knowledge that the crime was recorded in Emile Bennett’s rear window. The defence attorney, demanding a retrial, put forward the view that the jury had dismissed their “reasonable doubt” in the expectation that Harpur would, at the most, impose a life sentence.
But, in Harpur’s eyes, the revised legal code drafted in 1977, mainly to give judges greater power in their own courts, made no provision for wait-and-see legislation, especially in cases of first-degree murder. In January 1987, Raddall was duly sentenced to be executed.
Harpur’s straightforward contention, which had earned him the name “Iron Judge“, was that a decision reached in a court of law always had been, and still was, sacrosanct. The superhuman entity which was the Law must not be humbled before a fragment of glass. Reduced to its crudest terms, his argument was that if wait-and-see legislation were introduced, criminals would carry pieces of fifty-year retardite with them as standard equipment.
Within two years the slow-grinding mills of the Supreme Court had ratified Harpur’s decision and the sentence carried out. The same thing on a microscopic scale, had occurred many times before in the world of sport; and the only possible, the only workable solution, was that the umpire was always right—no matter what cameras or slow glass might say afterwards.
In spite of his vindication, or perhaps because of it, the tabloids never warmed to Harpur. He began making a point of being indifferent to all that anybody wrote or said. All he had needed during the five years was the knowledge that he had made a good decision, as distinct from a wrong one— now he was to discover if he had made a good decision as distinct from a bad one.
Although this night had been looming on his horizon for half a decade, Harpur found it difficult to realize that, in a matter of minutes, they would know if Raddall was guilty. The thought caused a crescendo of uncomfortable jolts in his chest and he stopped for a moment to snatch air. After all, what difference did it really make? He had not made the law, so why feel personally involved?
The answer came quickly.
He was involved because he was part of the law. The reason he had gone on working against medical advice, was that it was he, not some abstract embodiment of Webster’s “great interest of man on earth“, who had passed sentence on Ewan Raddall. And he was going to be there, personally, to face the music if he had made a mistake.