Find Them Dead

by James, Peter

  Throughout the weekend she had repeatedly tried to contact Laura and Cassie. With no response. A late glass of wine on Saturday night had helped her fall asleep, but only to wake at 2 a.m. with a dull stomach ache, pins and needles in her fingers, and her scalp feeling like a rat was clawing its way over it.

  Meg had felt briefly better after a long run along the seafront on Monday morning, but the endorphin high had long worn off by the afternoon. She had planned to do a very early run this morning, too, but she’d felt too tired when the alarm went off. Now she was having to go into battle to save her daughter’s life after another totally sleepless night. And it seemed, from the talk in the jury room just now, that most of the jurors had already made up their minds to convict.

  Addressing the jury, the judge went straight into his summing-up, walking them through detail by detail of the evidence they had heard from both sides. He took particular care to refer back to his earlier caveat about Michael Starr’s motives when recounting all the points that Starr had made against Gready, and reminded the jury again that he had already pleaded guilty to all of the counts that Gready faced.

  Meg made copious notes, underlining all the points that would be most helpful to her, glad for the seeming impartiality of the judge. But then, to her dismay, his tone suddenly changed.

  ‘You have heard from the defence QC about the respectability of her client. That Mr Gready is a school governor, a tireless supporter of local charities, a good and well-respected employer, a modest man who lives a modest life, one unencumbered by the trappings of vast wealth. In every respect he appears a thoroughly decent man, worthy of every citizen’s respect. One could indeed say he is a model citizen! All these qualities are to be admired.’

  He went on. ‘Members of the jury, I’m sure you have indeed been impressed by all the fine work the defendant and his wife have done. And you have been made aware of the relatively modest lives they have lived. But before I send you to your deliberations, there are a couple of thoughts I would like to leave you with, which I feel are relevant.’

  Meg’s heart was sinking.

  ‘You need to consider your own life experience and that things are not always as they appear. It is up to you to decide whether the defendant’s good character makes it less likely that he committed the offence. My point is, very simply, that not all crime overlords, in real life or in fiction, fit the stereotype picture that has been painted to you by the defence. This is not to cast aspersions on the defendant, in any way, but you should in your deliberations consider only the facts of the evidence presented to you, rather than be influenced by the fact that Mr Gready appears to be a jolly good guy.’

  Shortly after 1 p.m. Jupp finished his summing-up. ‘Members of the jury, you have heard the evidence of both sides. It is now your job to retire to the jury room and debate all the facts that you have heard during the course of this trial and to reach a verdict. Is the defendant guilty or not guilty on the matters for which he is accused? It is my view, from all that we have heard over the past weeks, that there is sufficient evidence for you to make an informed decision. I will now leave it to your sound judgement.’

  98

  Tuesday 28 May

  There had been speculation in the jury room earlier this morning that the judge’s summing-up might take several days. The reality was, according to Meg’s watch, just under three hours.

  It left her in panic, she wasn’t prepared for this. She had hoped for at least a night clear to study her notes and get her arguments ready for the jurors.

  Bleakly, thinking hard, she followed her colleagues back into the jury room and took her place at the head of the table. As she sat, she decided her best chance was to be assertive and take immediate control. She also needed to buy herself more thinking time.

  ‘As it is now lunchtime,’ she announced, ‘may I suggest we take a short break? Some sandwiches and drinks have been provided for us. Let’s resume with clear heads in half an hour’s time.’

  Her suggestion was greeted by universal assent and to her relief everyone found their own space around the room. She got straight on with her plan, scanning through all of her notes and numbering them in a sequence she felt might work best for her – just her hunch. Her tiredness was long forgotten. She felt alert and increasingly optimistic the further she read through her notes.

  She could do this, she realized, it was no longer an impossible task – she actually could pull this off.

  99

  Tuesday 28 May

  It was half an hour later, after everyone was ready in the jury room, had made themselves drinks and sat back at the table, when Meg put the first part of her plan into place.

  ‘Right, I’d like each of you to write down on a piece of paper your initial verdict on each or all of the counts. It would be useful to see where everyone stands before we begin our discussions. Do please write down, also, if you are undecided.’

  They all dutifully complied, passing the various-sized folded scraps of paper into the middle of the table, which were then pushed up to her. They arrived in too much of a jumble for Meg to figure out who had written which.

  The handwriting gave her few further clues, although she knew for sure that Harold Trout would have been a ‘guilty’, and one of those ‘guilty’ votes had shaky, old-person handwriting. His?

  Nine of her ten fellow jurors were looking at her, expectantly. One, the geeky Rory O’Brien at the far end of the table, was poring through a stack of spreadsheets in front of him and scribbling notes.

  ‘OK,’ Meg said. ‘We have five “guilty”, three “undecided” and two “not guilty”.’

  ‘Meg,’ Toby said in his pained voice, ‘are you going to tell us what you think?’

  She decided on a tactical bluff. ‘Well, from all I’ve heard, I think he’s guilty.’

  ‘But can you really say that for sure, Meg?’ asked Hugo Pink, coming to her rescue.

  She sat, pretending to weigh this up for some moments, thinking hard. Maybe the way she could win this would be by appearing to lose, she thought. ‘Fair point, Hugo. I understand why you say that, and I’m struggling to process it all myself. To be sure is the essence, the most important factor. Are we satisfied on the evidence to be sure of the defendant’s guilt?’

  She looked around at her fellow jurors. ‘What I suggest we do now, in the interests of being fair to the defendant, and complying with the judge’s directions, is to review all the evidence from both sides.’

  ‘Do we really need to?’ asked Trout. ‘The man is so obviously guilty. In my view the prosecution has made it an open-and-shut case.’

  ‘Actually, Harold,’ Hugo rounded on him, ‘we do. Of course the prosecution wants him to be guilty, they’ve invested a large amount of time and money in bringing this case – they would have very red faces if Terence Gready walked free. Which is precisely why we need a proper discussion.’

  ‘I don’t believe he is guilty,’ Hari Singh said. ‘He has a kind face.’

  ‘What?’ Trout said. ‘He has a kind face, ergo he is innocent?’

  ‘Can you trust all of the people on both sides who gave evidence?’ Singh asked him. ‘Tell me honestly. You believed and trusted every word?’

  Trout shrugged. ‘Maybe not every single word. But pretty much most of it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Meg quizzed.

  Trout dug a finger into his ear and twiddled it. His face flushed slightly, showing some emotion for the first time since the trial had started. ‘Well, yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘You suppose so?’ she pounced. ‘You’d sleep easily knowing he had been put behind bars for maybe fifteen years because you suppose he is guilty? Are you saying you are not one hundred per cent sure?’

  ‘One hundred per cent certainty on anything is very hard to achieve, Meg,’ he said, defensively.

  And now she knew she had him on the ropes. ‘Please correct me if I’m wrong – your job was assessing the risks of everything your company insured?’

>   ‘I had to assess the risks of loss at sea of both ships and their cargoes.’

  She nodded. ‘All right, let’s imagine the hypothetical situation in which your company had been asked to insure Terence Gready for ten million pounds against the risk of going to prison. How would you have calculated the premium?’

  ‘That is pretty much an impossible question,’ he said, affably.

  ‘You must have had a model on which to calculate your premiums? A ratio of risk to reward?’

  ‘Ah, I see. You want me to give the percentage chance of a “guilty” or “not guilty” verdict?’

  ‘Based on the hard facts of the evidence. Without the spin put on it by the prosecution or defence counsels.’

  He pouted his lips. ‘With my insurance hat on, I would put it at around eighty per cent probability of guilt on all counts.’

  ‘So a twenty per cent chance he is innocent?’

  After a moment he responded with a reluctant, ‘Yes.’

  She looked at him hard. ‘Could you say that a horse in a race, given odds of eight to one, would, for sure, fail to win that race?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he replied, petulantly. ‘There are too many variables in a horse race.’

  ‘But you would be prepared to send a man to prison on the same odds?’

  His Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down and a few beads of perspiration popped on his brow. ‘I don’t think we can compare the defendant’s guilt or innocence with either a shipping insurance risk assessment or a horse race.’

  ‘Really? Why not? Are you not admitting you have some doubts – a one in five chance that the defendant might actually be innocent?’

  Trout found an itch on his threadbare dome, which he began to attack vigorously. ‘Well,’ he conceded, with clear reluctance. ‘You do have a point, I suppose.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Meg returned to her notes. ‘We have heard a wide amount of argument about whether the defendant did or did not ever actually meet the man purporting to have been his so-called lieutenant. Michael Starr. This man, who has already pleaded guilty to all of the offences, is clearly, as we have all heard, a highly dubious and untrustworthy character. It is very much his word against the defendant’s. As we have also heard, he has much to gain, in terms of a reduced sentence, by implicating Mr Gready. Can we really trust what he has said? I, for one, am not comfortable with it.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Sophie Eaton exclaimed. ‘We all heard the evidence from that expert witness, the forensic podiatrist Kelly. We saw the video footage which was compelling of Mr Starr entering the premises of TG Law.’

  ‘We did,’ Mike Roberts said. ‘But to be fair, we heard the evidence of Gready’s employees – and in particular that of his secretary – who I thought was quite convincing. There is nothing any of them said from which we could infer Mr Gready and Mr Starr met on that day – or any other.’

  Meg watched the retired police officer with interest. Was he on her side?

  ‘I agree,’ Maisy Waller suddenly butted in. ‘That mechanic, Arthur Mason-Taylor, at LH Classics, looked a very honest man to me. He said that he had never seen Mr Gready – and had never heard his name. If Mr Gready, as Mr Starr suggested, owned LH Classics, surely it is odd that the chief mechanic there had never seen him?’

  ‘Well, I’ve worked at the hospital for nine years and I’ve never met the chief executive of it,’ Sophie piped up.

  ‘But what reason would a man like Arthur Mason-Taylor have for lying?’ Hugo said. ‘That makes no sense to me at all.’

  ‘It comes back again to the judge’s direction to us,’ Meg said. ‘You must be satisfied of the defendant’s guilt. Can any of us here say that the defendant and Mr Starr ever met – for certain?’

  She looked around the table. Only Toby raised his hand.

  ‘Really, Toby? You are certain, are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK. It is very important that we all give our honest opinions. But let’s again remind everyone of the judge’s comments about Michael Starr, which I wrote down. He said we need to bear in mind that Starr had given evidence implicating Terence Gready in the hope of getting a lesser sentence.’ She looked down at her notes. ‘The judge instructed us to – in his words – approach Mr Starr’s evidence with caution. He also went on to say, and I think this is very important for us to consider, you should ask yourselves whether Mr Starr has, or may have, tailored his evidence to implicate Mr Gready falsely.’

  She looked up again. ‘To me, that is pretty unequivocal – I think the judge was going as far as he dared to warn us not to trust Starr.’

  Trout shook his head. ‘I think you might be reading too much into those words, Meg. My interpretation is that undoubtedly he is doing the right thing in warning us of the possibility that Starr could be lying for his own gain, but I don’t interpret that as a thinly veiled instruction to use from the judge.’

  ‘I disagree with you,’ she replied and noticed enough nods around the table to indicate she had most of the jury with her on this.

  ‘Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree on this, won’t we!’ Trout retorted, with irritating smugness.

  Meg fleetingly wondered what living with this man must be like. She was sorely tempted to snap back, I was told always to allow other people to be right, it consoles them for not being anything else. But instead she decided it was best to change the subject.

  ‘Let’s move on to the evidence given by Emily Denyer. I have to say that by the time she had finished, I was almost certain that Mr Gready had to be the mastermind behind all the banking and financial shenanigans. But then we heard from Carolyn Herring. A person with impressive credentials from her former senior role in the Fraud Prevention Department of the Inland Revenue. After she had given her evidence it made me think.’

  To Meg’s relief, there were several nods of agreement around the table. ‘Can we,’ she said, ‘be sure, again, that it was Mr Gready behind all the banking and financial transactions? I wouldn’t be comfortable saying it was.’

  There were several murmurs of assent. But to her slight consternation, there was no reaction from Rory O’Brien, who had, for the past hour or so of their discussions, been totally focused on the spreadsheets. She wasn’t even sure if he was listening, but then again, he hardly ever spoke. For the moment, though, she didn’t mind, she was on fire, adrenaline coursing through her. She really sensed this was going, with certainty, that her way.

  ‘Let’s now discuss the evidence given by Michael Starr, which on the surface is highly damaging,’ she said. ‘But as we have just discussed, can we trust this person? We have heard he is a man of extremely dubious character and, having already pleaded guilty, has nothing to lose. I would add that he came across to me as an extremely bitter man.’

  Sophie Eaton, Hari Singh and Maisy Waller all nodded. She went on.

  ‘Starr told the court he believes Mr Gready was responsible for his brother’s murder. But it is hard to see how he could have been involved, since he was in prison at the time of the very sad murder of Mr Starr’s brother,’ Meg added.

  ‘I would have to disagree with you there,’ Roberts said. ‘In my experience as a police officer, prisoners with influence have plenty of access to the outside world – much of it through smuggled phones, as well as corrupt prison officers. An inmate with Gready’s alleged credentials and criminal contacts would have no problem arranging a hit on someone, anywhere.’

  ‘Point taken,’ Meg replied. ‘But can any of us around this table say, again, with complete certainty, that the evidence given against the defendant by Mr Starr is the truth? Please raise your hands if you believe this.’

  No one did.

  Meg’s heart was thumping, she really was on a roll. ‘Let’s finally consider the evidence given by the defendant himself. As we have all heard, Terence Gready believes he is a victim of a perfect storm of events and that he has been framed by a bitter would-be client whom he refused to take on, on mo
ral grounds. And he believes Starr has been assisted by a police officer – perhaps more than one – who bears a grudge against Gready for the mere fact that he defends criminals the police have arrested, and often gets them off.’ She paused and took a sip of water. Her mouth was dry.

  ‘We know Starr to be a highly untrustworthy person, who has already admitted that he is both a smuggler of Class-A drugs and a major player in a substantial county lines drugs distribution network. Do any of us believe, with certainty, that the evidence from this person, implicating the defendant, Mr Gready, is the truth? Please, again, give me a show of hands.’ She hammered home the message, remembering from her sales training days that a sales message needed to be seen or heard three times before it would start to be effective.

  No one raised a hand.

  She was beginning to feel elated. She had them eating out of her palm! ‘Can I now ask you all, please, to write down on a piece of paper your verdicts? Guilty, not guilty, or don’t know.’

  A couple of minutes later she scooped up the scraps and then looked at each. She moved the ‘not guilty’ votes to the right, ‘guilty’ to the left.

  Two ‘guilty’. Seven ‘not guilty’ – eight, including herself. If she could get just one more ‘not guilty’, she would be home free, if the judge allowed a majority verdict.

  The missing vote and unknown quantity was O’Brien, still preoccupied with his spreadsheets.

  ‘Rory,’ she prompted. ‘Could you let me have your decision?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘not yet, no. I’m going to need more time.’

  ‘How much more?’ she asked, politely, not wanting to put him under pressure.

  ‘Several hours at least,’ he replied.

  ‘What!’ Mark Adams exclaimed, furious. ‘This is ridiculous! Surely we’ve all heard enough to make a decision about the defendant’s guilt. Do we have to drag this out for yet another day?’