‘I was busy telling my client what a complete fool he’d been,’ I said.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘He shouted at one of the witnesses,’ I said. ‘What an idiot!’
I had indeed spent the last hour giving Steve a roasting in the holding cells beneath the court.
‘I’m sorry,’ Steve had whined at me. ‘I couldn’t help it. I was so mad. That bloody Clemens has been riding all my horses. He’d be delighted if I got convicted. Be laughing all the way to the bloody winner’s circle.’
‘But you still mustn’t do it,’ I had urged him again. ‘It is the very worst thing you could have done and now the judge has to make a decision about whether we carry on with the trial or if he lets you go, and he will not have been impressed by your actions. You showed him your temper. He might just think that your temper has something to do with the murder.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he had said again.
‘And,’ I had said, rubbing salt into his wound, ‘Clemens wasn’t even lying when you shouted at him. You have often said that Barlow was a Judas. I’ve heard you myself in the changing rooms.’
Steve had sat on the bare wooden chair in the cell looking very shamefaced. For a change, he’d seemed quite pleased when the prison officer had unlocked the cell door to say that the transport was ready and he had to go. Perhaps I had been a little hard on him but, if the trial were to continue, I needed him to remain sitting calmly and silently in the dock, no matter what the provocation.
Eleanor now leaned forward and gave me a brief kiss on the lips.
‘Do you want to go for a drink?’ I asked her. ‘It’s nearly six.’
‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘I want to go to bed.’
In the end we did both.
I ordered a bottle of champagne and two glasses from the bar to take up to my room.
‘I’ve never made love in a prison before,’ said Eleanor excitedly as we came out of the lift onto one of the galleried landings of ‘A’ wing. ‘In fact, I’ve never even been in a prison before.’
‘They’re not usually like this,’ I said. ‘For a start, they always smell dreadful. A mixture of disinfectant and stale BO. Never enough showers.’
‘Ugh,’ she said.
All my apprehension about this encounter came flooding back with a vengeance and I was shaking like a leaf by the time we had negotiated the long gallery to my room, so much so that I couldn’t even get the cork out of the champagne bottle.
‘Here,’ said Eleanor taking it from my trembling hands. ‘Let me do that.’ She poured the golden bubbling liquid into the two tall flutes. ‘My, we are a nervous boy,’ she said as I took the glass with a tremor.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty nervous, too.’
I sat on the edge of the bed, kicked off my shoes and lay down, putting my feet up on the bedcovers. I tapped the hard plastic shell beneath my shirt.
‘This damn thing doesn’t help either,’ I said.
‘Let me look after you,’ she said, coming over and lying down beside me.
And she did.
All my apprehension drifted away to nothing and all my fears were unfounded. Maybe it really was like riding a bicycle, I thought. Once you had learned the knack you never forgot it.
Eleanor helped ease my itchy body out of the plastic straightjacket and also out of my clothes. I lay naked on the bed as she washed and cooled me using damp towels from the bathroom, and then she herself stripped off and climbed in beside me, between the sheets.
Making love with a broken back is, by necessity, a gentle and tender process. But we discovered it could also be a sensual and passionate one.
Afterwards, we lay entwined together for a while, drifting in and out of light sleep. I would have been so happy to stay like that all night but I needed to do some reading, ready for the morning.
I rolled over gently to look at the digital clock on the bedside cabinet. Seven forty-five. I tried to ease myself up, although it was against my back surgeon’s rules. Eleanor stirred as I tried to remove my arm from beneath her waist.
‘Hello,’ she said, smiling up at me. ‘Going somewhere already?’
‘Yup,’ I said, smiling back. ‘Got to get back to my wife.’
She suddenly looked alarmed, but relaxed when she saw I was joking.
‘You kidder,’ she said, snuggling into my chest.
‘But I really do need to get back to my work,’ I said. ‘I have to be prepared for tomorrow. And, what’s more, I’m hungry.’
‘I’m hungry for you,’ Eleanor said back to me, seductively fluttering her eyelashes.
‘Later, dear. Later,’ I said. ‘Man cannot live by sex alone.’
‘But we could try,’ she said. Then she sighed and rolled off my arm, releasing me.
She helped me back into my plastic corset and then into a towelling robe.
‘Let’s have some room service,’ I said. ‘Then I can work and eat.’
Eleanor called down for the food while I set about looking through the papers that I would need in the event that the judge did not rule in our favour over the defence submission. To be honest, I didn’t really expect him to. Even though much of it was circumstantial, there was probably enough evidence to convict, and certainly enough to leave the question to the jury.
If it was in the balance, the judge might simply allow the trial to continue because the decision was then taken out of his hands and passed to the jury. And Steve Mitchell’s conduct during the afternoon had almost certainly not endeared him to the judge – not that that should be a consideration, but it probably would be.
Since the Criminal Justice Act 2003 had come into force, the prosecution had the right to appeal rulings by judges over whether there was a case to answer, and, in my experience, judges had since become less inclined to so rule for fear of having their decision overturned on appeal.
All in all, I wasn’t too hopeful, and so I still had to do my homework.
However, over our room-service dinner, eaten in our bathrobes, I told Eleanor about the news I had heard from Nikki at lunchtime.
‘What are you going to do about it?’ she asked.
I explained to her about the defence submission I had made to the court at the end of the prosecution case.
‘If the judge doesn’t rule in our favour in the morning,’ I said, ‘and I don’t think he will, I intend calling a couple of witnesses to explore what Nikki found out.’
‘Can you call anyone you like as a witness?’ she asked.
‘Yes and no,’ I said.
‘Explain,’ she said.
‘I can call whoever I like as long as their evidence is relevant to the case,’ I said. ‘But if I’m going to call the defendant as a witness, I have to call him first. I couldn’t call someone else first and then go back to Steve. But I don’t think I’ll be calling him anyway in this case. He’s a bit too volatile. And our defence is that he’s being framed, so all he could say is that he didn’t do it, and he knew nothing about it, and I can say that to the jury anyway.’
I paused to take a mouthful of my dinner.
‘I did think about calling character witnesses but I’m not sure that would be a good idea. Steve’s character is hardly as pure as the driven snow.’
‘You can say that again,’ she said. And she should know.
‘I asked my solicitor, Bruce Lygon, to contact both my new witnesses this afternoon,’ I said. ‘I am still waiting to hear what he says but I fully expect that at least one of them won’t want to come to court.’
‘But what happens then?’ Eleanor asked.
‘In the end, they don’t get any choice in the matter,’ I said. ‘I can apply to the court for a witness summons which is then served on the potential witnesses and then they have to be there. If they don’t turn up, the judge can issue a warrant for their arrest.’
‘But surely that doesn’t mean they also have to answer your questions.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘But if they don’t, they have to give a reason not to answer, and the only reason here would be that in doing so they might incriminate themselves. And that should, at least, do some good as it ought to put some doubt into the minds of the jury as to Steve’s guilt.’ I took another mouthful. ‘But what I really need is time. Time to get the witnesses I need to court, but mostly time for more investigating.’