My heart had dropped when Arthur told me that Sir James would lead and I would be acting as his junior. Sir James has a reputation of doing very little, or nothing, in preparation for a trial while still expecting everything to be in order and complete on day one. He also had a reputation, richly deserved, for publicly blaming his junior whenever anything went wrong, whether or not they had anything to do with it. He seemed to expect his juniors to have powers of clairvoyance over the facts, yet be unable to stand up in court to question a witness, something he reserved solely for himself.
Needless to say, I still had not yet told anyone of my encounter with the murder victim in the showers at Sandown, even though I had been sorely tempted to do so in order to disqualify myself from acting alongside Sir James. But it had been so long since I should have said something that I couldn’t really do so now without placing myself in a very compromising position. I would be damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t, but, in the latter case, only if anyone else knew about it from Barlow. Was I prepared to take that risk? Perhaps I should simply plead insanity, excuse myself from the case altogether and commit myself to a mental hospital until it was all over. By then Steve Mitchell would have been tried, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for a crime for which I didn’t believe he was responsible. I would then be safe from Julian Trent and life could go back to normal. That is, until the next time someone wanted to manipulate the outcome of a trial, and young Mr Trent and his baseball bat were sent to pass the message.
The news that I was no longer acting as the sole barrister in the case had spread far and wide to ears I didn’t know, but ears of those who most definitely had an interest in the outcome.
Within only a few hours of the appointment of Sir James Horley as defence QC being posted on the courts’ website, I had received a call on my mobile.
‘I told you to take the Mitchell case,’ the quiet well-spoken whisperer had said. ‘Why are you not listed as the defence barrister?’
I had tried to explain that a QC would always have to lead in such a high-profile case and I wasn’t one. I had told him that I would be assisting.
‘You are to ensure Mitchell loses,’ he had said.
‘Why?’ I had asked him.
‘Just do it,’ he had said, and then he’d hung up.
As before, and as expected, he had withheld his number.
Why, indeed, did they, whoever ‘they’ were, want Mitchell to lose? Was it solely to have someone else convicted of their crime or was there something else? Was it anything to do with Mitchell himself? Had Mitchell in fact done the crime and they were just making sure he got his just deserts? But how would they know he was definitely guilty unless they were there with him at the time?
No, I still believed that Steve was being set up. All the disclosed prosecution evidence put together would be very convincing to a jury, although any single part of it on its own could be described as circumstantial. No one questioned that the pitchfork, the murder weapon, had belonged to Steve Mitchell, but, as I had seen myself, his pitchforks had not been kept locked away and anyone could have taken one of them from the open feed store to stick into Barlow’s chest. Blood and hairs from the victim had been found on a pair of Mitchell’s wellington boots as well as in his car, but the boots had been kept in the same feed store as the pitchfork, and Mitchell swore that he had left his car unlocked on his driveway, as he always did, on the day of the murder. The Defence Case Statement stated that Mr Mitchell was being framed for the crime that someone else, unknown, had committed. And that the crime in question had been premeditated and planned meticulously so as to appear to have been perpetrated by our client.
The prosecution had been unable to establish definitively that Mitchell had indeed sent the text message to Barlow threatening to ‘come round and sort you out properly you sneaking little bastard’. In spite of the message being signed with Mitchell’s name, it could only be determined by the police that it had been sent by a free texting service accessible from any computer, by anyone, anywhere in the world.
The betting receipts, however, did indeed belong to Steve Mitchell and he had been stupid enough to have his own name on them. They were, in fact, debit-card receipts from a bookmaker rather than actual betting slips. Steve denied that they were his but even I knew he wasn’t telling the truth. I had explained to him that the time for lying about betting was now over, he had more serious allegations to deal with, but he was so used to denying that he gambled that it came naturally to him to continue to do so.
Add the mass of physical evidence, the well-known and well-documented antagonism between the victim and the accused, the lack of any semblance of an alibi and the defence’s seeming inability to demonstrate who or why anyone would want to frame him, and I could imagine a jury returning a unanimous guilty verdict so quickly that they would hardly have to retire from the courtroom.
I had explained to Steve, during another trip to talk with him in prison, that if he had an alibi he must declare it prior to the trial. To suddenly produce one in court would not assist his case. The jury would be invited by the prosecution to draw whatever inferences they wished from the fact that no previous mention had been made of an alibi. However, he had remained adamant that he had been on his own at home reading all afternoon on that Monday.
‘Steve,’ I had implored. ‘I am afraid I don’t believe you. If you were with someone, perhaps someone you shouldn’t have been with, you must tell me now. At the trial or afterwards will be too late.’
‘I tell you I was on my own,’ he had said. ‘That’s the truth. What do you want me to do? Lie?’
I had thought that it would be counter-productive to say that I knew he had lied to me before, about the ending of his affair with Millie Barlow.
‘Don’t you realize the mess you are in?’ I’d shouted at him while banging on the grey metal table with my fist. ‘You’re facing a long stretch in prison for this. It’s not some game in the park, you know.’
‘I can’t,’ he had said finally.
‘Yes, you can,’ I’d screamed at him. ‘No one would expect you to keep quiet if it meant you would be convicted of a murder you didn’t do.’
‘It’s not that simple,’ he had said, looking down at the table.
‘Is she married?’ I had asked, guessing the reason.
‘Yes,’ he’d said emphatically. ‘And I don’t even think I was with her when that bastard Barlow got himself killed. It was only a last-minute lunchtime bonk, arranged when the racing at Ludlow was called off. I’m certainly not embroiling her in this mess when it wouldn’t even give me an alibi for the right time.’
The prosecution case was that Barlow had died sometime between two and four in the afternoon. His body had been discovered around six by a policeman responding to an anonymous call to Newbury police station’s front desk about an intruder at Honeysuckle Cottage. As the caller had used the local landline and not the emergency 999 service there had been no record of the telephone number or any recording of the conversation.
This fact was one of the few plus points for our side because, as I had pointed out in our Defence Case Statement, Mitchell was hardly likely to call the police if he had, in fact, murdered Barlow, and the prosecution case was that he had acted alone in the killing. It was a minor point in the face of the wealth of prosecution evidence, but one I planned to exploit to the full at the trial.