The Evangeline (33 page)

Roberts looked back across the courtroom to where Marlowe sat, staring straight ahead, giving no sign that he had heard a word, or that it would have mattered if he had.

‘It is impossible not to feel a profound sympathy for Vincent Marlowe—I know that—and not to feel that, at times, the law may be too harsh. But what Marlowe did was murder, and unless we are prepared to say that everyone is free to decide for themselves when someone else should die, there is only one verdict you can bring back, and that verdict is guilty.’

Roberts had spoken for an hour and a half; Darnell spoke for nearly three. He took the jury from the beginning of Marlowe’s life to the day the
Evangeline
set sail on its ill-fated voyage around Africa. He quoted from memory and at great length the testimony of Benjamin Whitfield, reminding the jury of the lies he had told and how, on every crucial point, his testimony had been contradicted by the man who had designed and built the
Evangeline
and by the woman he had betrayed and abandoned, the woman who only because Marlowe had saved her life could now have Whitfield’s child.

‘I’ve gone back through all of this, started at the very beginning, because it is important to see that it is only a long series of random chances that we look back on and call fate. Things take on a meaning at the end that they did not have at the beginning.What do we know of the future? How much can we really know about anything? What did Marlowe know in the middle of the south Atlantic, except that they were thousands of miles from shore with no food or water, and that if he did not do something Trevelyn, and others like him, would start to take matters into their own hands. Wait until someone died of natural causes? That is what the prosecution, in the comfort of a courtroom, tells us should have been done.What the prosecution forgets is that it was already too late for that! What the prosecution forgets is that Trevelyn, and not just Trevelyn, was demanding that someone had to be killed, and that they should choose the boy. They said it was because the boy was the closest one to death; it seems more likely that it was because he was a boy and less able to resist.What the prosecution does not want you to think too hard about was that Marlowe brought a kind of civilisation to what would otherwise have become the law of the jungle, a battle for survival in which, eventually, no one would have been left.

‘The prosecution says that there was no necessity for what Marlowe did, because Marlowe did not believe that there was any chance of rescue; that the most he could hope to achieve was to keep the ones he did not kill alive a few days or perhaps a few weeks longer. But even if that were true, it is not clear how that would make what Marlowe did any less necessary. Does the prosecution really wish to insist that the value of a life is measured by how long someone expects it to last? Is it not just as much a murder to kill someone lying in a hospital bed with only a few days or a few weeks left to live?

‘You saw Vincent Marlowe, you heard what he had to say. He put his own nephew to death to save him from seeing what he knew he had to do. He did not think there was any chance that any of them would leave the sea alive.You saw the look in his eyes, that awful anguish, when he cried out that he never would have killed the boy if he had thought there was any chance that any of them might come through this alive.You must have believed him when he said it; and you can’t possibly have any doubt about it now that we know what we did not know before—that the boy was his sister’s child, the closest thing to a son Vincent Marlowe will ever have. That was what he believed—that there would be no rescue. But he believed something else as well. He believed that human beings endure, that we go on for as long as we can; and that, more than our own survival, we have within us an impulse to do something higher and nobler, to sacrifice ourselves so that others can live. Because as long as any of us are still alive there is always, against all odds, the hope that someone will be left to remember what we did.

‘You listened to the prosecution’s summation, and you have listened to mine. Sometime during your deliberations you might remember that there was another summation, one more eloquent than anything either Mr Roberts or I could say. It was the simple admission of Vincent Marlowe when he looked you straight in the eye and told you that he does not believe that what he did was right, but that, even now, looking back on it, he would have to do it again. Vincent Marlowe saved six lives, and there isn’t anyone in this courtroom who believes that he would not give anything not to have been one of them.’

Chapter Thirty

H
OMER MAITLAND GAVE HIS INSTRUCTIONS ON the law, leaving until the very end the instruction on the law of necessity. A few minutes after four in the afternoon the jury began their deliberations. A few minutes after six, the bailiff knocked on the jury-room door to ask if they wanted to break for dinner. They asked if, instead of going out, they could have something sent in. At midnight they told the bailiff that they would start again at eight o’clock the next morning.

Darnell knew nothing of this until the jury had already begun its second day of deliberations. He had had an early dinner with Summer Blaine and, mounting only a mild protest, followed her orders and gone straight to bed. He would not admit how tired he was and how much that three-hour summation had taken out of him, but Summer knew. She had been there watching, proud of every word, more certain than she had ever been that nothing could have stopped him, and glad she had not tried. But now it was over, and he was going to do exactly what she told him until, like any normal patient, he was on his way to a full recovery.

‘They worked until late last night, and they are already back at it this morning,’ said Darnell, as he hung up the bedside phone.

‘Is that good?’ asked Summer, sitting down next to him.‘Eat,’ she said, pointing to a piece of unbuttered toast that had not been touched.

‘I used to think that the longer a jury stayed out, the more uncertain they were; and the more uncertain, the greater the doubt—which should be good for the defence. But I’ve seen juries stay out for days and come back with a verdict that found the defendant guilty on all counts. Who knows what this jury is going to do? I don’t know what I would decide. Marlowe isn’t guilty, and neither is he innocent. If he had killed one person, then maybe—but six? But then if he had not killed them all; if he had stopped at two, or three, or four—no one would be alive. It’s what I said at the beginning: there are some situations for which the rules were never made.’

Darnell bent his head, a baffled expression in his eyes. He tried to make sense of it all, or at least explain that part of it he thought he understood.

‘What happened out there was, in a way, almost biblical. It was the way things must have happened in the beginning, before there was any law, when everyone did whatever they had to do to stay alive—until someone had the wisdom to establish a rule and the strength to make everyone follow it. Someone had to use violence to stop the violence. How do you then go back and charge them with a crime? That was the real necessity out there—that Marlowe, or someone like him, impose the law on all the others— but he could not have done that if he had not also given them a reason to believe in it. If it had not been for him, those people would have become half-mad barbarians, killing each other to stay alive. He made them—do I dare say this?—more civilised than they had been before, willing to let chance decide their fate, willing to die so that the others could live. It was remarkable what he did, but how many of us are willing to admit it? And perhaps it is better if we do not; better to preserve our own decent illusion that murder and cannibalism can never be right.’

Darnell looked at Summer to see if he had made his meaning clear, wondering as he did how much of what he had said was true, so much of it still vague and confusing in his mind. In a way, it did not matter: Marlowe’s fate was in the hands of the jury now. Still, it nagged at him, that after all this time, after all the things he had said and heard at trial, there was this terrible doubt about what it meant. With a helpless shrug, he started to get up. The only thing he could do now was get dressed, go the office, and wait.

Summer Blaine would not hear of it.‘You need to stay in bed. They’ll call you when the jury has a verdict.You can get to court just as quickly from here. Quicker, actually; I’ll drive you.’

Darnell waited all day, but the call never came. The following morning, Homer Maitland telephoned to tell him what he would also tell Roberts—that the jury had again worked until close to midnight and again come back at eight.

The jury worked all that day and all the next. Finally, on the fourth morning, Darnell could not take it anymore. ‘I’m getting dressed,’ he grumbled when Summer asked him what he thought he was doing. ‘I need to get down to the office.’

‘Do you think that will help the jury decide?’

‘No, but it may help to stop me from going crazy,’ he replied as he grabbed a shirt from the closet.

He was pulling on his shoes when the telephone rang. Summer took it in the other room.‘They want you back in court at ten-thirty.’

Darnell looked up. ‘They have a verdict?’ he asked, just to be sure.

‘No. The jury sent a message to the judge saying they haven’t been able to reach one.’

‘That means Maitland is going to give the dynamite instruction. I have to call Marlowe.’

Homer Maitland did exactly what Darnell had said he would. The jury was brought back into the courtroom and, with the defendant and the lawyers sitting at their places, the judge asked the jury foreman, a balding middle-aged man with gentle eyes, if it were true that they had not yet been able to reach a verdict.

‘That’s true, your Honour; we have not,’ he said in a voice that seemed to hint at exhaustion.

Maitland bent forward, a look of quiet confidence in his eye. ‘You are not to feel bad about this; it shows that you have taken your responsibilities as seriously as you should. Now, it often happens that a jury decides that it cannot decide, and when it does, the law—in all its wisdom—has a remedy.’

A smile ran across Maitland’s jagged mouth. The jurors seemed to relax when they saw it. They took it as a sign that they were not delinquent and that he was not displeased.

‘The remedy is that you try again; and that, if possible, you try harder. I am therefore instructing you to return to the jury room and resume deliberations. Each of you, without sacrificing your own independent judgment, should listen carefully to the opinions of all the other jurors and try to see things from their perspective. I am also instructing you to consider the fact that if you do not reach a verdict, this case will have to be tried again, to a different jury, and there is no reason to assume that that jury will be any more capable than you.’

With a doubtful look, the foreman said they would do their best.

As the jury headed back to the jury room,Darnell,with a lawyer’s instinct, started to offer Marlowe a few words of encouragement. One look in his eyes told him it was useless, that Marlowe was beyond the reach of human sympathy or help. Darnell patted him on the arm and they went their separate ways in silence.

The jury was out another day, and another one after that. Darnell began to feel hopeless and alone, as if the trial was over and the jury, like the
Evangeline
, had just disappeared. And then, finally, three days after they had been told to try again, the jury sent word they were finished. They had done what Maitland asked and reached a verdict after all.

It was always the quietest time of all, the hush that fell when the jury filed back into the courtroom with a verdict in the foreman’s hand. Darnell tried to read some meaning into their averted eyes. They did not look at the crowd of spectators and reporters; they did not look at Roberts and they did not look at him. They did not look at Marlowe; they did not look at anyone. They did not even look at Maitland; they sat with lowered eyes, listening to the silence that echoed like a final judgment through the room.

‘Has the jury reached a verdict?’ asked Homer Maitland in a formal, distant voice.

The foreman stood up, looked across at Judge Maitland and, without a word, held up the verdict form.

‘Would the clerk please hand me the verdict?’

The foreman clasped his hands together and waited while Maitland read it over.

The lines in Maitland’s forehead deepened; his eyes became intense. He looked at the foreman as if he had a question, but then he nodded slowly as if he understood, and not only understood, but approved.

‘Give this back to the foreman,’ he said to the clerk. ‘Would the foreman please read the verdict?’

The foreman stood as straight as he could. He cleared his throat and began to read: ‘It is the unanimous verdict of the jury that we cannot decide. We are not a hung jury; we are not split between those who believe the defendant is guilty and those who would vote to acquit. In that sense, we are not divided at all: we all agree that the question of guilt or innocence in the case of the defendant, Vincent Marlowe, is impossible to decide.’

The foreman stopped reading. He looked first at Roberts and then at the courtroom crowd.

‘We go further still,’ he said, reading again from the lengthy handwritten note that had been scrawled on the verdict form.‘We understand that this is no legal verdict, and that the case may be tried again. For whatever weight it may carry, we are unanimous in our feeling that it should not. Having listened to all the evidence, having heard the lawyers’ arguments, having deliberated among ourselves for the better part of a week, we are each and every one of us convinced that in this matter there is no justice in anything anyone can now do.’

Homer Maitland rubbed his chin and then leaned forward on his folded arms. He asked if all the members of the jury agreed with the statement the foreman had read.

‘Though this is the opinion of all of you, and though I cannot say the decision you have reached is wrong, the court, as you have rightly anticipated, has now the duty to declare a mistrial. The case is dismissed,’ he said as he banged his gavel.‘The defendant is free to go.’