Harry walked over to say hello. Ronald Sou, habitually inscrutable, gave a scarcely perceptible nod, but said nothing. Harry and Jim Crusoe had once speculated on what it would take to prompt Ronald to express surprise. Doubling his salary might do it, they agreed, but so far they had not been able to afford the temptation to put their theory to the test.
Vaulkhard said, ‘So, Harry. A crucial cross-examination for us this morning. Let’s see if we can bait the trap.’
A Liverpudlian born and bred, he had kept close to his roots, and life at the Bar had never rubbed the Scouse edge off his accent. His reputation was that of a crafty and cynical individualist, someone who did not quite fit in. The old men in smoke-filled rooms who made such decisions had never allowed him to take silk and Harry guessed they never would.
‘Here come our clients,’ said Harry, glancing through the glass windows into Derby Square. He could see twenty or more journalists crowding Kevin and Jeannie Walter and throwing questions at them as if feeding fish to dolphins. It was plain that the real focus of their interest was Jeannie. Although her husband might be the plaintiff seeking huge damages, she was the character with reader-appeal. Love her or loathe her, Jeannie Walter had star quality and even the most hardbitten members of the pack were hanging on her every word.
Pushing through the swing doors, she detached herself from the group of journalists and, her husband lumbering two paces behind, headed towards the lawyers. She moved as if on a catwalk, slinky and self-confident. Harry guessed she had been up as early as he had that morning, contriving her platinum curls into that exotic cascade. He had a gloomy feeling that she nurtured ambitions of becoming a new icon for the fashion industry.
‘How’s my favourite pair of briefs?’ She squealed with laughter, as she always did when she cracked that joke, then rushed on without waiting for an answer. ‘Rarin’ to go, Paddy? Great!’
‘Ready to give them bastards hell, I hope.’ Kevin Walter’s years in prison had left him with a carefully preserved sense of martyrdom and a vocal whine that set Harry’s teeth on edge. His skin was pallid, his shoulders hunched; he had suffered at the hands of the legal establishment and, like a cantankerous invalid, was bent upon making the most of his misfortune.
‘The moment of truth!’ said Jeannie, her eyes gleaming.
‘It’ll be a day to remember,’ said Vaulkhard wryly, ‘if we hear the truth in this court of law.’
As he sat in the courtroom, listening to Vaulkhard question the detective sergeant who had taken Kevin Walter’s confession, Harry recalled a conversation from Crime and Punishment. He had read it as a schoolboy and the story of Raskolnikov’s downfall had made a lasting impression. In later life, it had even given him a little understanding of the forces that moved his own clients to their pointless acts of self-betrayal. A few lines about cross-examination stuck in his mind: Porfiry’s explanation of the method of starting an interrogation with trivial irrelevances as a means of putting the witness off his guard before stunning him with the most dangerous question of all. It seemed to him that Patrick Vaulkhard had taken the message to heart.
The early exchanges were low-key, little more than a series of pleasantries. Vaulkhard lingered over the sergeant’s past record, and the commendations he’d received for shrewd detective work. The sergeant, a heavily built man in his forties, was on the alert for traps and for some time his responses were cautious and monosyllabic. But gradually he began to unbend and by the time Vaulkhard moved on to his part in the Walter case, he was in the mood to defend his actions with vigour.
‘I suppose you will say that you were working long hours?’
‘As a matter of fact, I was. We all were. It was an important investigation and we had plenty more on besides.’
‘But you put considerable effort into detecting the man who committed this particular robbery?’
‘You can say that again.’
‘Yet no-one seems to have quizzed the real perpetrator, Denny Gurr, in any detail about the crime.’
The sergeant shrugged. ‘I was only one of the team. I can’t answer for everyone.’
‘So,’ said Vaulkhard. He paused for a moment before continuing and allowed himself the faintest of smiles. ‘The fact that you bullied Kevin Walter into his so-called confession had nothing to do with the fact that Denny Gurr was, at the time, going out with your only daughter, Tracey?’
The silence seemed to last forever. Harry could see spots of sweat shining on the sergeant’s forehead and watched as the man’s hand moved to loosen his tie. It seemed as if his legs were starting to buckle beneath him and he stretched out an arm to steady himself.
Vaulkhard’s face seemed more vulpine than ever. ‘Yes or no will suffice, sergeant.’
The man turned to the judge. His naturally florid complexion seemed to have darkened. ‘My Lord…,’ he began, but his voice was barely a whisper and it trailed away into nothingness.
‘Are you feeling unwell, sergeant?’ asked the judge.
For answer, the man clutched at his chest. He was gasping for breath. Then, as everyone looked on in frozen and fascinated horror, he slowly crumpled to the floor.
The silence was broken by a cry of alarm from someone in the public gallery. Harry was immobile. So Dostoyevsky had it right, he thought. And from the row behind him, he could hear the voice of Jeannie Walter: ‘It’s fantastic, absolutely fantastic! Paddy’s killed the bugger!’
‘I’ve heard of deadly cross-examinations,’ said a voice in Harry’s ear, ‘but this is ridiculous.’
He was standing outside the court cafeteria. The sergeant had been whisked away to intensive care: the paramedics reckoned he had suffered a coronary. Kevin and Jeannie Walter had departed to give their media minders their exclusive reaction to the morning’s sensational development and the staircase and corridors of the courthouse were no longer buzzing with excitement. The rest of the cases on the list today were humdrum by comparison: the usual assortment of broken marriages and shattered lives. The judge had adjourned the case until the following Monday, although over a coffee Patrick Vaulkhard had expressed the view that that was due more to old Seagrave’s fondness for a four-day week than to any serious expectation that the sergeant would soon rise Lazarus-like from his sick bed to explain why he had never drawn his daughter’s brief fling with Denny Gurr to the attention of his superiors.
He looked round and saw a lean woman in white shirt and black jacket and skirt. A Greenpeace badge was pinned to her lapel and an Amnesty International magazine peeped out of the briefcase at her feet. Kim Lawrence, partner in another small city-centre practice and specialist in civil liberties law.
‘So you’ve heard about our little sensation in court?’
‘You know what this place is like for gossip, and any new twist in the Jeannie Walter saga is hot news.’
‘She’s become a legend in her own time, I agree. And after this case, what’s the betting but that she’ll make a career out of it?’
‘Out of campaigning for justice?’
‘No, out of being Jeannie Walter.’
Kim Lawrence’s habitually watchful expression relaxed into a smile. Her blonde hair was brushed off her forehead and held in place by a slide; she shunned make-up and the only jewellery she wore was a pair of CND earrings. A career spent trying to bridge the gulf between truth and evidence had etched frown-lines into her forehead, and she wasn’t someone he had ever socialised with. But looking at her now, his interest was awakened, and not simply because she currently chaired the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation.
‘As it happens, I wanted to have a word with you. I’m interested in a case which is right up MOJO’s street.’
Kim leaned forward. MOJO campaigned on behalf of those who claimed to have been wrongly convicted, whether through mistake or malice, yet whose cases were deemed by the authorities to be closed. It had supported the original fight for Kevin Walter’s release although Jeannie’s bandwagon had soon developed a momentum of its own.