Murderers and Other Friends (2 page)

‘Members of the jury' – his voice is deep and comes softly at first, the half-audible hint of approaching thunder – ‘this is the point in the case at which I am supposed to make a reasoned and persuasive speech on behalf of the accused. That will be followed by an unbiased summing-up from the learned judge, and you will then retire and come to a just decision. But' – here comes a great sigh and then a louder, clearer burst of thunder – ‘as I am far too drunk to make a reasoned and persuasive speech, and as the judge has never given an unbiased summing-up in his entire career, and as you look far too stupid to come to a just verdict, I shall sit down.' He does so and, happy at last, closes his eyes.

That happened but not, thank God, to me. The barrister retired and a retrial was ordered for his client. Beneath all the suave, assured, perhaps pompous, behaviour of advocates in murder cases there is a haunted insecurity, a dread of forgetting to ask a question or, worse still, asking too many and so destroying the future of the client in the dock, who is also giving a more or less convincing performance of quiet confidence and who has become, for the short period of the trial, your dependant and, in some strange way, your friend.

It's not, I suppose, what you would call true friendship. I mean, people on trial for murder are not the sort you'd want to go on holiday with, or ask to be godparents to your children, or confide in when plagued by doubt and insecurity. The friendship only lasts for a short time, a few weeks or however long the trial takes. When the trial is over, you say goodbye to them in the cells and they are still full of the adrenalin which kept them going throughout the case – as actors are still in a high mood after the curtain falls on a play in which they have starred. If you have shared a success, the relationship is also over and they will stare straight through you, even though you meet again in the most respectable circumstances, on the terrace of the House of Commons, for example, or in the Crush Bar at Covent Garden. They no longer depend on you, try to impress or even entertain you. When they are out of danger they want to believe you never existed. Those accused of murder are at the best fair-weather, or rather ill-weather, friends.

What the defending counsel learns – a useful lesson when dealing with all types of friend – is to refrain from judgement. There are plenty of people whose business it is to perform this unpleasant function: judges, juries and, perhaps, God. The defender's task is to listen and suspend disbelief.

Filson Young, writing in the Notable British Trials series about Dr Crippen, a murderer who impressed everyone with his politeness and modesty, said that it was ‘what we have in common with a criminal, rather than the subtle insanity which differentiates him from us, that makes us view with such a lively interest a human being who has wandered into these tragic and fatal fields'. The lively interest almost always falls short of understanding. One of my greatest friends, at Oxford and for many years after, was a pacifist, a Greek scholar, a lover of Mozart and a country doctor. He ended his life, after killing his mistress, by committing suicide. I can only think of him as a friend, as a murderer I cannot understand him at all.

To defend in a murder trial is an unpredictable business; cases can be won or lost because they happen to come on before a certain judge, or because of the random selection of the jury, or because the defendant is likeable or apparently unpleasant. Some trials go well from the start, others seem to attract ill fortune and blunders. Sometimes the luck can change in a most unnerving manner, as it did in the case of a young man whom I'll call Jimmy O'Neill, although that wasn't his name. He was accused not only of murder, but of writing a letter to the devil in his victim's blood.

Jimmy O'Neill was small, Irish and very young. He looked like an office boy in some huge, bureaucratic department where the work was dull and he saw little of the daylight. He lived around Earls Court in a flat which he shared with a male friend. In his spare time Jimmy read the works of Dennis Wheatley who wrote about satanism and black magic. The night he started on his journey to the dock in Number Two Court down the Old Bailey, he came back to the bed in which he slept with his flatmate and his flatmate's girlfriend. He announced that he had killed a man, washed his hands and hidden the Malayan dagger which he often carried. His friend seemed to show no great interest in this revelation. In the morning Jimmy was sitting up in bed smoking and no one referred to what had happened the night before.

Charles Wistey was good-looking, young and well connected. Somewhere or other his family contained a Lord. He had been having dinner with the girl he planned to marry; they had parted in the restaurant and he was on his way home by himself when he was stabbed to death in the portico of a Victorian house in Earls Court. The police made inquiries in the neighbourhood; Jimmy realized they were after him but was too frightened to give himself up. He was eventually found and charged with murder; there was no doubt he had stabbed Charles Wistey with the dagger.

Detective stories ask ‘whodunit?' In most murders that question is quickly answered and the trial attempts to discover ‘whydunit?' Did the customer in the dock intend to kill or do serious harm, did he or she act in self-defence, was there provocation, was it all an accident or the result of a diseased mind? These are questions fingerprints and bloodstains cannot answer; they require the jury to perform the difficult act of getting inside the skull of someone who may or may not be a murderer.

Jimmy's account, I was not particularly delighted to learn, was one well known in criminal courts as ‘the Guardsman's Defence'. I suppose it came from the days when humble guardsmen were sexually assaulted by officers and gentlemen and protected their honour too energetically. Charles Wistey had, it seemed, propositioned the pale, young Jimmy O'Neill in the street and pursued him into the portico of the house and had him cornered. Jimmy's statement described him pulling out the knife he often carried, holding it in front of him and shouting, ‘Get off, you dirty man!' Undeterred, Wistey advanced remorselessly and ran himself on to the dagger in the way an antique Roman fell upon his sword. As a general rule it's unwise to attack the character of the deceased, who cannot, after all, answer back. In Jimmy's case we were alleging that a young man of ‘good' family, engaged to be married, was a homosexual rapist – without the support of any evidence at all. We would be in for a bumpy ride before Carl Aarvold, the gruff but decent Recorder of London, who was chairman of the Wimbledon tennis matches and had a long, and no doubt weary, experience of ‘the Guardsman's Defence'. There was, however, one singular fact. Earls Court, then an area well known for gay pick-ups, was nowhere near the route Wistey would have taken from the West End restaurant to his home.

The day starts with a lonely breakfast in the café opposite the Old Bailey, a site where Londoners once paid a great deal for a window to watch the executions outside Newgate Prison. I am surrounded by anonymous people, talking quietly about the day ahead, they may be jurors, witnesses, villains or police officers. Then I go up to the robing room and put on the fancy costume: the winged collar and the bands, the Tom Jones tailed coat and the silk gown. In this very robing room I once saw an elderly ex-Solicitor-General slip my wallet into his jacket pocket. I go out carrying my wig and my brief. My next stop is the cells, down in the basement.

I pass the old, scratched, kicked oak door, carved with the names of forgotten criminals, the last remnant of Newgate, and the prison officer lets me into the cells. These men always seem to be drinking mugs of tea and eating doorstep sandwiches. They have a prison pallor and are overweight. Then I am let into the interview room where Jimmy is already taking cigarettes off my solicitor, Paul Laity. Paul is short, thickset, plods about looking like a farmer and has a fund of filthy reminiscences about his life in the Navy. He comes from Cornwall and goes beagling, walking vast distances in the company of hunting dogs. He has a great determination to win cases and will not forgive me if I fail to ask a question. He will have one brilliant idea which will be an enormous help to us. I also have a junior barrister named Peter who is consistently entertaining, can mimic all the judges and discuss politics and the theatre with great insight. He will be able to view the case with an amused detachment neither Paul nor I can manage. At the moment he is being entertaining somewhere else. This is the small squad I have to do my best to command, and from whom I must try to hide my doubts and fears.

The visit to the client in the cells is less to gain information than to calm his fears and give him a confidence which you may not feel. Jimmy has to trust me but I have no such duty. I must merely suspend my disbelief about him. I am there to put his case as well as it can be put and never to judge him. I know he won't tell me much more about the facts of the stabbing which, like all traumatic events, have been buried in some dark corner of his mind and he doesn't want to disinter them. I also remember that Sir Patrick Hastings, a great advocate, would never see a client in a murder, in case, overwhelmed by his dominating and Irish charm, they might pour out their hearts to him and confess.

So we watch Jimmy, looking paler and younger than ever, buoyed up by the excitement of the great day which has come at last. We smoke Paul's cigarettes and talk about the weather and conditions on remand in Brixton, both horrible. Then Jimmy tells me that his letter to the devil, which began ‘Hail, Lucifer' and contained the Lord's Prayer in reverse, was written, not in his victim's blood, as the prosecution's expert would testify, but in his own. I know that my job, for the next few days, is not to prove Jimmy innocent but to demonstrate that the prosecution evidence is not entirely convincing.

Now I am in court. The prosecutor is an elegant lawyer who wears a bowler hat with a curly brim, striped shirts with stiff white collars and takes holidays on Greek islands. The jury looks solid and working-class with one Irishman (is this a hopeful sign?) and a shy Kensington lady who seems strangely out of place. The judge is silent, almost motionless. Nobody looks surprised as the prosecutor flourishes the dagger and deciphers the blood-stained letter to the Prince of Darkness. Peter, my junior, has appeared and is looking round the court with quiet amusement. At lunch-time, in the pub, he will give the prosecutor's opening speech a severe mimicking. Two clerks of the court, sitting below the judge, have dropped into a light doze. The pathologist gives evidence and we examine the dagger with detached interest, as though we were passing each other clues from the crossword puzzle. We have met in many such trials and always enjoyed friendly conversations across the court. At least he agrees that the wound is not inconsistent with our story. The judge snorts loudly, like an old boar awakening, and asks some questions. They are very fair. I remember defending an elderly husband who had killed his terminally ill wife. ‘You have undertaken a task,' Judge Aarvold told him, ‘which only the Almighty performs and that with reluctance. Go now and sin no more.' I wonder if there is any chance of him telling Jimmy to go and sin no more, and decide that, even if he doesn't, I like this judge very much.

Jimmy's flatmate gives evidence. He is thin, long-haired, elegant and now married to a Swedish girl. He seems an unlikely friend for the pallid young Irishman. He says he couldn't believe it when Jimmy said he'd killed someone, and didn't remember if he was laughing or crying when he said it. One court clerk, now awake, wakes up the other who can't face the reality of life in court and is soon off again. The judge starts to yawn and clerk number one keeps awake by closely watching everyone's movements. Courts are not the quiet, peaceful places you see in movies: a stream of people are coming in and out, whispering, passing notes and dashing off to other cases. Now, the wakeful clerk concentrates on making telephone calls. As I realize the prosecution wants to prove Jimmy gay and therefore unlikely to resist the deceased person's advances (as though a heterosexual girl would be bound to accept all would-be lovers), I ask his flatmate about a disease he and Jimmy caught from the same woman. He looks at his shoes and admits the truth of this suggestion. Then we go to lunch in the pub where Paul reads a prediction of doom in Jimmy's horoscope and Peter tells me he hates being led.

In the afternoon we get Jimmy's sister, a sensible Irish nurse who seems undisturbed by the proceedings. She says her brother is a perfectly normal young man. A friend from the Lebanon gives evidence and says he had teased Jimmy for being ‘queer'. ‘And was it because he wasn't that you felt it safe to tease him?' I ask a distinctly risky question and am rewarded by an undeserved yes. Paul, who is writing feverishly, mutters, ‘Good question!' Peter is whispering something highly entertaining to the junior counsel for the prosecution. We get a youngish doctor who puts on a bowler hat to take the oath and says that he examined Jimmy in prison and came to the conclusion that he had been ‘buggered frequently'. ‘You are an examiner of the back passage?' The judge is making a note in which he is not inclined to mince words. I remember the book on forensic evidence which says that area of the body can be distended for many reasons. People sometimes put strange things up themselves; for instance, in various recorded cases, a tin of Brasso, a boot brush, or a small bust of Napoleon III. It can also be distended by chronic constipation. The judge takes down the evidence about Napoleon III without a smile and then looks at the doctor in some bewilderment. I feel I have done my best with the medical evidence and sit down sweating and thinking of a hot bath and clean clothes. When the day ends Jimmy is in a mood of exhilaration and thinks things are going ‘brilliantly'. Paul says he's going to see a haemotologist and work on the case most of the night. He hopes to have something for me by lunch-time tomorrow. Peter gives us an imitation of the doctor in the witness-box.