Blood on the Water (33 page)

“Then I’ll see you hang!” Monk snapped. He stood up and went to the door. He turned before he opened it. “If this man who killed Beshara really exists, are you supposing he did it in revenge for the sinking of the
Princess Mary
?”

“ ’Course,” Stockton replied. “Wot else?”

“How about to make sure of his silence?” Monk suggested.

The color bled out of Stockton’s face.

“Watch your back,” Monk said softly, and went out of the door, closing it behind him.

CHAPTER
 

R
ATHBONE SAT BEHIND
B
RANCASTER
at the Old Bailey, as the Central Criminal Court in London was known. Last time he had been here, he himself had been in the dock. Brancaster had defended him, with courage, eloquence, and, now and then, flares of brilliance.

In the past Rathbone had appeared here as a barrister, sometimes prosecuting and at others defending. Now he was merely an observer, an assistant to Brancaster without the right to address the court at all. It was a strange feeling, as if he were not quite real to those who were part of the proceedings.

The jury had been chosen and sworn in. The court had begun proceedings with Lord Justice Antrobus presiding. He was a lean man, ascetic, with a quick mind and a dry sense of humor. He was perceived as a man who relied on his intellect more than his heart. Rathbone, though, had seen the rarely shown side of him that was capable of compassion, and deep anger at those times when the law was unable to
punish cruelty. He had warned Brancaster of Antrobus’s nature, but he wondered now if he had done so with sufficient vehemence.

Brancaster was on his feet addressing the judge and jury. He must be acutely aware of the crowded gallery, the journalists, and the vast mass of men and women beyond the building, who would know only what the newspaper headlines told them.

Rathbone watched with his body clenched, his hands rigid in his lap. Would Brancaster judge well how to press his case? Would he horrify people too much, or just enough? Or might he allow them to become complacent that justice had already been done, and they should not question it now?

“The crime of sinking the
Princess Mary
, and drowning nearly two hundred human beings, is a terrible one,” Brancaster was saying. He spoke quietly, but his voice carried in the silent room. Everyone was looking at him.

“We have lived with this knowledge for several months now,” he continued. “We had been led to believe that the man responsible for it was in prison, ill, and possibly dying, in some degree of pain.”

He waited for the effect of his remark and looked at the faces of the jurors. “Twelve good men, like yourselves, had been presented with evidence and reached that conclusion.” He took a long breath. “I am now here to tell you that they were given only part of the evidence: Some evidence was misguided, some incomplete, some was false, possibly deliberately so. I will ask you to reach a different conclusion.”

At the defense table, Pryor dropped a piece of paper and bent to retrieve it. His movement broke the spell.

Brancaster smiled. “Gentlemen, it seems I have startled my learned friend for the defense to the point where he let his work fall onto the floor.” He looked at Pryor. “I hope you did not get ink on your clothes?”

Everyone, even those in the gallery, turned to look at Pryor again. There was a slight titter of amusement.

Pryor flushed. “Not at all,” he said sharply.

Brancaster resumed his remarks to the jury.

“I shall ask you to reach a different conclusion,” he repeated. “Not necessarily that Habib Beshara was a nice man, or innocent of all wrongdoing, but that he was not guilty of the crime with which he was charged. Indeed, that he could not have been. Whether he was implicated at all in this tragedy is another matter, and not one for us to decide today.”

He became suddenly very grave. “There is also another very serious question that you will inevitably face, and that is, what happened that we were so disastrously wrong in our earlier judgment? How many people lied? Was it simply a series of errors? Or was there corruption?”

Pryor was fuming. He was close to the point where his outrage would erupt into words, inappropriate as that would be.

Brancaster went on, “This is not a legal question for you to address, but these thoughts will come into your mind. It is impossible to avoid them. Is our legal system so totally flawed that this could happen? Do you fear that you yourself, or someone you love, could be falsely accused and convicted of a crime, and no one but you will know their innocence until it is too late?”

“My lord!” Pryor could bear it no longer.

“Mr. Brancaster,” Antrobus said quietly, “I think you are a trifle ahead of yourself. Mr. Pryor may well be going to suggest such things, but you do him an injustice to assume so in advance.”

“Yes, my lord,” Brancaster agreed. It was not difficult to concede; he had already made his point. He resumed his address to the jury.

“We shall show you how this crime was committed using evidence you can see: physical objects rather than people’s recollections from what must have been one of the worst nights of their lives. We will not ask terrified and bereaved people to remember what they saw or heard. We know that they must have been suffering appallingly.”

He inclined his head a little. “No one man did this. It was a conspiracy of, at the very least, two men. Habib Beshara may have been one of them, but he was not the man who took the dynamite on board the
Princess Mary
, or the one who ignited it. Whatever he is guilty of,
he is now facing God’s judgment for it. Gamal Sabri is the one who set off the dynamite that blew the bow off the
Princess Mary
and sank it, and all who were on board, to the bottom of the Thames.”

Brancaster returned to his place.

Pryor rose to his feet, still pink-faced with anger. He paced back and forth as he spoke, recapitulating the leading testimony of the first trial, painting a picture of the devastated survivors and their grief. He mentioned only the points on which the witnesses had agreed.

Rathbone, listening intently to every word, realized that what he was actually doing was reminding them of the horror of the event, moving them gently, step by step, to see themselves, their families, and friends as the victims of the nightmare it had been. It was not reason he was appealing to, it was their terror and grief, and he did it well.

By the time Brancaster stood up again, Rathbone could feel the fear in the courtroom like thunder in the air.

Brancaster called his first witness. No matter how much it played into Pryor’s hands, he was forced to establish the facts of the case, and that included details about the explosion and the sinking itself. He kept it as technical as possible. Rathbone had warned him that if he did that, he might seem cold, even unsympathetic to the victims, as if this were all an exercise in law, not the stories of the awful deaths of nearly two hundred people.

Now he folded a blank piece of paper, and passed it forward.

Pryor saw him. He rose to his feet.

“My lord! I see that we have in court a very distinguished visitor, Sir Oliver Rathbone, who has just passed a note to my learned friend. I regret having to remind the court of the tragic and rather grubby facts, but Sir Oliver is no longer permitted to practice law. I believe Mr. Brancaster defended him at his own trial here, and cannot therefore be ignorant of that fact.”

There was an instant, total silence.

As one man, the jury turned to stare at Rathbone, who felt as if he were a butterfly pinned to a board.

It was Brancaster who spoke, even before Antrobus could intervene.

“My lord, Mr. Pryor is within his rights, of course, but I believe he has exceeded even his own boundaries of good taste. The piece of paper he refers to is blank.” He held it up, turning it over so they could all see both sides of it. Brancaster offered it to the usher. “If you wish to examine it, my lord?”

“No, thank you,” Antrobus declined. “But perhaps you would tell us the purpose of such a note?”

Brancaster smiled self-deprecatingly. “I imagine, my lord, it is to tell me that my remarks have no substance, which I regret is true. Sir Oliver has from time to time warned me about giving the court more technical detail than it requires, and failing to give them the emotional side of things, which my learned friend Mr. Pryor is so skilled in doing.”

“Indeed,” Antrobus said with a slight upward curve of his lips. “It is good advice, Mr. Brancaster.”

“Thank you, my lord. If I may continue?”

“Please do.”

Brancaster resumed, this time being sure to speak of the fear that saturated the night of the sinking and to talk about people’s wonderful eagerness to help catch the perpetrator—which perhaps led some of them to be less than accurate, and understandably so. He was detailed but sympathetic. It was a fine performance.

Nevertheless, Pryor was on his feet after the luncheon adjournment. In covering the evidence yet again, he managed to refer to the note that Rathbone had slipped to Brancaster—not for what was in it, but for the necessity of passing it at all.

“It seems my learned friend has become a pupil of Sir Oliver, or should I say a puppet? Sir Oliver is accepting his banishment from the courts with an ill grace.”

Rathbone felt a chill as if he had been robbed of some necessary garment. There was a cruelty in Pryor he had not foreseen. Was it a taste of how bitter this battle would become?

Antrobus thought for a moment or two, and the look on his face could have been irritation or distaste.

Most of the jurors seemed to be staring at Rathbone as if they expected him to defend himself, not understanding what was going on and seeing him painted as some kind of villain.

Brancaster was obviously taken by surprise.

It was Antrobus who spoke. “Mr. Pryor, as you are well aware, grace of manner or judgment is not a requirement in court. Were it necessary, you would not find yourself here either. Sir Oliver may attend the court, and listen, as may anyone else who does not interrupt the proceedings.”

“Thank you, my lord,” Brancaster said. He hesitated a moment, then took a deep breath, and called his next witness.

This time Pryor did not interrupt him.

Brancaster had a slightly different list of witnesses from those at Beshara’s trial, as he had indicated in his opening address. He did not call Monk regarding his witness of the actual explosion and the long night of work afterward; he chose Orme instead, as Rathbone had suggested. Orme was a quiet man, born and bred on the river. He spoke with a soft voice and with the local accent. His anger and his distress found no words, bringing barely a change in the dignity with which he answered Brancaster’s questions. Rathbone had known that, to the jurors, who were unfamiliar with the working life of the river, this would be more authentic than if the testimony had been expressed in Monk’s more educated accent, or with his confidence and his rank behind it.

It was the following morning before he drew from Orme an account of how the case was taken from them and given to the Metropolitan Police, under Lydiate.

“Do you remember that, Mr. Orme?”

“ ’Course I do.” Orme said it quietly, but there was a darkness in his voice, a strain anyone could hear.

“Do you know why that was?” Brancaster asked.

Pryor rose to his feet. “Objection, my lord. Mr. Orme, for all his worthiness, is not privy to the command decisions of the senior police officers in charge of—”

“I apologize, my lord,” Brancaster said with spurious contrition. “Mr. Orme, may I put that a different way? Were you informed of the reason for this decision?”

“No, sir,” Orme replied. “Didn’t see a reason for it, myself.”

“And then the case was given back to you?” Brancaster asked. “After Habib Beshara had been tried, found guilty, sentenced, and then reprieved, that is?”

Orme’s face was a study of disgust. “ ’Cos by that time it were a first-class mess no one wanted to tangle with,” he said heavily.

There was a murmur of sympathy around the gallery and several jurors clearly felt the same.

Brancaster proceeded to draw from Orme an account of the evidence he and Monk had gained from witnesses that clearly exonerated Beshara from having placed the dynamite on the
Princess Mary
, or having been on board the boat himself.

Pryor appeared to consider questioning Orme, and then decided against it.

Throughout the rest of that day, and the next, Brancaster questioned more witnesses, always careful to stick to material facts. Where an eyewitness observation was unavoidable, he had at least two separate people speak.

Pryor attempted to discredit them, but after the third time he appreciated that he was losing more than he gained. The jury might not remember the detail, but they would not forget that he had lost the point.

By the fourth day a picture had been created of a carefully planned crime involving at least two people, more probably three. It was supported by interlaced facts, details that did not depend upon anyone remembering a face or a walk, exact words or the clothes a person was wearing. Orme had described the boat he and Monk had seen on the
night of the sinking. The ferryman, still with a splint on his broken forearm, described exactly the same boat, and his glimpse of the seahorse emblem. Pryor tried to shake his testimony, but he could not.