Waiting for the case to be called, I could not feel comfortable for more than a few minutes in any one position: sitting down, standing with hands defiantly in pockets, pacing up and down the corridor, staring blankly out of the window and inwardly contemplating the impending loss of freedom. Even my cast-iron digestion was beginning to weaken. I asked to go to the toilet. When I saw the white pan already besmirched by the day’s nerve-churned stomachs, the call of nature struggled with the urge to turn straight round and get back as quickly as I could.
Before I knew it the case was under way. The first two days flashed by in a blur of formalities and feigned politeness. The charges were read out. I pleaded guilty to POOW. The prosecution constructed their case for AOABH. Witnesses came and went. My defence lawyer, the colonel of the Army legal services, countered at best he could each of the points that were raised. Clint and Buffalo, the only defence witnesses, appeared to give their evidence, but they had some difficulty giving a coherent story. They were constantly interrupted by Harry Reynolds, OC CID, who kept telling them to speak more slowly. He was taking down what they said word for word. Their evidence was going to be minutely compared with their previous written statements. The Hong Kong police, still smarting from the two men’s insistence on appearing for the defence, were all out to trip them up. One slip-up, one discrepancy between the two accounts and they would be up for perjury. When they had finished they took their places in the spectators’ gallery to see if their interventions would make any difference.
The first two days had raised more questions than they had answered. The proceedings had become increasingly bizarre, the story of what had happened increasingly disorientated. I was beginning to feel my freedom slip away.
‘All stand!’
Mid-morning on the third day, and Justice Ferguson was returning to deliver his summing-up and pronounce his judgement. The policeman sitting next to me hurriedly folded his newspaper as the judge came in, bowed stiffly to the court in mock obeisance and took his seat on the dais.
At the beginning of the trial, the first thing I had noticed was that there were no windows in the courtroom. This had emphasized to me the falseness of the proceedings, the separateness from the real life of the city. Now, at the end of the trial, I was aware that somewhere along the line, my view had done a volte-face. Now, the outside world had faded to unreality. The only real and tangible thing was this courtroom, the only thing that mattered to me was this quaintly berobed representative of the legal process sitting before me sipping a glass of water and adjusting the position of several weighty tomes of law on a ledge in front of him.
‘This being a criminal case, the defendant is presumed to be innocent until proved guilty…’
The use of the word ‘until’ had an ominous finality to it. Was this a Freudian slip? Had he given the game away right at the start of his summing-up? If he had said ‘unless’ instead of ‘until’, his pronouncement would have a much less fatalistic ring to it.
I was surprised at how much time the judge spent on seemingly irrelevant or minor details, such as the amount of light in the bar at the time, the sound level of the jukebox, the background noise of the city itself, and the exact distances between the bar, the booths and the jukebox – and here witnesses were asked to select two points in the courtroom to illustrate how far apart they estimated these items to be. I glanced at the clock high up on the wall. Already three-quarters of an hour into his summing-up, the judge didn’t appear yet to have said anything concrete or to have given any indication as to which way the case would swing. My stomach still felt uneasy. I shifted in my seat again and crossed my right leg horizontally over my left knee. The policeman next to me leaned forward with his hand on his forehead and appeared to doze off.
‘Being cross-examined is not a very pleasant experience…’
By now, the judge’s voice had become strangely monotone, his manner remote and detached, and his delivery had lapsed into a seemingly automatic style. A lull seemed to descend on the court. Attention began to wander. The only person who maintained his level of concentration was the court stenographer, inconspicuously sitting a few feet to the judge’s right, furiously tapping away at what looked like a desktop calculator. I found myself staring blankly at the reflected shine of the neon lighting in the varnished wooden rail in front of me. My reverie was interrupted by a noise as someone walked in front of the spectators’ gallery. There was so much ancient-looking wood in the room that the slightest movement anywhere in the court was accompanied by an intrusive creaking sound.
‘Indeed, excessive anxiety against a charge falsely brought can lead to false evidence being given…’
False evidence! There was certainly plenty of false evidence being given, but not through any sense of anxiety or nervousness! Quite the contrary. It was a cold, deliberate attempt to pervert the course of justice, to set me up and to deflect attention away from the truth about what had really been going on in the bar. And the source of this false evidence? Who should appear as star witnesses for the prosecution? None other than the thugs who had started the fight in the first place: Peres and his bottle boys, all smartly turned out and looking distinctly uncomfortable in their Sunday-best suits designed to impress the court and project an aura of probity and integrity. The young Chinese inspector, completely misreading the situation, had tracked down Peres and his gang and brought them in to make out a case against me.
I had been utterly astonished. I wouldn’t have been more surprised if, to make pronouncement on the proceedings, the judge had called in a jury consisting entirely of a vanload of day-tripping psychiatric patients from the local asylum. To add weight to the gang’s story, a Chinese doctor was wheeled in to testify that in his professional and considered opinion the wound on Peres’ head had indeed been caused by Exhibit A – the infamous knuckleduster, which lay all along in the middle of a large table below the judge, tagged with a small white label. It looked faintly ridiculous – like an unwanted sale item – and totally innocuous. You couldn’t fire it, throw it, detonate it, cut with it. If a machine gun or a pistol or a ten-inch bladed knife has been lying there, then the severity of the court proceedings would have been justified. But a knuckleduster, a lump of inert metal! To add insult to injury, the thugs were aided and abetted in their evidence by the meek and mild Soriano sisters, who looked as if they’d been given time out from the nunnery specially to appear in court that day. I daresay they were under some kind of duress to turn up. To me they seemed essentially decent types who somehow had lost their way, who somewhere along the line had naively been caught up in the petty-crime scene.
‘Now to the evidence itself…’
Justice Ferguson picked up a large red notebook, adjusted his spectacles, coughed, flicked through the pages to refresh his memory with some of the handwritten notes he’d taken and proceeded to read out his version of the events. The sight and sound of the learned judge describing in reverent tones the details of a fight that was clearly totally alien to someone of his status bordered on the comic.
‘Kicked the assailant in the groin… struck him a blow to the temple… head-butted the second man… grappled with the broken bottle… split his scalp with a blow to the head… rolled across the floor… a scuffle ensued…’