No Comebacks

by Frederick Forsyth

  'A model of lucidity,' said Judge Comyn, staring at O'Connor.

  'The high cards, from ace down to ten, were distinguished from each other by shading, that is, using a chemical preparation to cause slight darkening or lightening of tiny areas of the pattern on the backs of the cards. The areas so affected are extremely small, sometimes no larger than the tip of one whorl in the complex pattern. But enough to be spotted by the card-sharp from across the table, because he knows exactly what he is looking for.'

  'Would it be necessary for the cardsharp to deal dishonestly as well?' asked counsel. He was aware the jury was riveted. It made such a change from stealing horses.

  'A crooked deal might be included,' conceded the detective from the Fraud Squad, 'but it would not be necessary.'

  'Would it be possible to win against such a player?' asked counsel.

  'Quite impossible, sir,' the witness told the bench. 'The cardsharp would simply decline to wager when he knew his opponent had a better hand, and place high bets when he knew his own was better.'

  'No further questions,' said counsel. For the second time O'Connor declined to cross-examine.

  'You have the right to ask the witness any question you may wish, concerning his evidence,' Judge Comyn told the accused.

  'Thank you, my lord,' said O'Connor, but kept his peace.

  Counsel's third, last and star witness was the Tralee grocer, Lurgan Keane, who entered the witness box as a bull to the arena and glared at O'Connor.

  Prompted by the prosecuting counsel, he told his story. He had concluded a business deal in Dublin that day, which accounted for the large amount of cash he had been carrying. In the train, he had been inveigled into a game of poker, at which he thought he was a skilled player, and before Farranfore had been relieved of £62. He had become suspicious because, however promising the hand he held, he had always been bettered by another and had lost money.

  At Farranfore he had descended from the train, convinced he had been cheated, and had asked for the police to be present at Tralee.

  'And I was right,' he roared to the jury, 'your man was playing with marked cards.'

  The twelve good men and true nodded solemnly.

  This time O'Connor rose, looking sadder than ever and as harmless as a calf in the byre, to cross-examine. Mr Keane glowered at him.

  'You say that I produced the pack of cards?' he asked sorrowfully.

  'You did,' said Keane.

  'In what manner?' asked O'Connor.

  Keane looked puzzled. 'From your pocket,' he said.

  'Yes,' agreed O'Connor, 'from my pocket. But what did I do with the cards?'

  Keane thought for a moment. 'You began to play patience,' he said.

  Judge Comyn, who had almost begun to believe in the possibility of the law of remarkable coincidence, got that sinking feeling again.

  'And did I speak first to you,' asked the accused, 'or did you speak first to me?'

  The burly grocer looked crestfallen. 'I spoke to you,' he said, then turning to the jury he added, 'but your man was playing so badly I could not help it. There were blacks on reds and reds on blacks that he couldn't see, so I pointed a couple out to him.'

  'But when it came to the poker,' persisted O'Connor, 'did I suggest a friendly game of poker or did you?'

  'You did,' said Keane heatedly, 'and you suggested we make it interesting with a little wagering. Wagering indeed. Sixty-two pounds is a lot of money,'

  The jury nodded again. It was indeed. Enough to keep a working man for almost a year.

  'I put it to you,' said O'Connor to Keane, 'that it was you who suggested the poker, and you who proposed the wager. Before that we were playing with matchsticks?'

  The grocer thought hard. The honesty shone from his face. Something stirred in his memory. He would not lie.

  'It may have been me,' he conceded, then a new thought came to him. He turned to the jury. 'But isn't that the whole skill of it? Isn't that just what the cardsharp does? He inveigles his victim into a game.'

  He was obviously in love with the word 'inveigle' which the judge thought was new to his vocabulary. The jurymen nodded. Quite obviously they too would hate to be inveigled.

  'One last point,' said O'Connor sadly, 'when we settled up, how much did you pay me?'

  'Sixty-two pounds,' said Keane angrily. 'Hard-earned money.'

  'No,' said O'Connor from the dock, 'how much did you lose to me, personally.'

  The grocer from Tralee thought hard. His face dropped. 'Not to you,' he said. 'Nothing. It was the farmer who won.'

  'And did I win from him?' asked O'Connor, by now looking on the edge of tears.

  'No,' said the witness. 'You lost about eight pounds.'

  'No further questions,' said O'Connor.

  Mr Keane was about to step down when the judge's voice recalled him. 'One moment, Mr Keane. You say "the farmer won"? Who exactly was this farmer?'

  'The other man in the compartment, my lord. He was a farmer from Wexford. Not a good player, but he had the devil's own luck.'

  'Did you manage to get his name?' asked Judge Comyn.

  Mr Keane looked perplexed. 'I did not,' he said. 'It was the accused who had the cards. He was trying to cheat me all right.'

  The prosecution case ended and O'Connor took the stand on his own behalf. He was sworn in. His story was as simple as it was plaintive. He bought and sold horses for a living; there was no crime in that. He enjoyed a friendly game of cards, but was no dab hand at it. A week before the train journey of 13 May he had been having a quiet stout in a Dublin public house when he felt a hard lump on the wooden pew near his thigh.

  It was a pack of cards, apparently abandoned by a previous occupant of the booth, and certainly not new. He thought of handing them in to the barman, but realized such a time-worn pack would have no value anyway. He had kept them, and amused himself with patience on his long journeys seeking a foal or mare to buy for clients.

  If the cards were marked, he was totally ignorant of it. He knew nothing of this shading and trimming the detective had talked about. He would not even know what to look for on the backs of his pack of cards, found on a pub seat.

  As for cheating, didn't cheats win? he asked the jury. He had lost £810s. on that journey, to a complete stranger. He was a fool to himself, for the farmer had had all the run of the good hands. If Mr Keane had wagered and lost more them he, that was perhaps because Mr Keane was a more rash man than he. But as to cheating, he would have no part of it, and certainly he would not have lost so much of his own hard-earned money.

  In cross-examination prosecuting counsel sought to break his story. But the wispy little man stuck to it with apologetic and self-deprecating tenacity. Finally counsel had to sit down.

  O'Connor returned to the dock and awaited the summing up. Judge Comyn gazed at him across the court. You're a poor specimen, O 'Connor, he thought. Either your story is true, in which case you are a truly unlucky card-player. Or it is not, in which case you must be the world's most incompetent card-sharp. Either way, you have twice lost, using your own cards, to strangers in railway trains.

  On the matter of the summing-up, however, he could allow no such choice. He pointed out to the jury that the accused had claimed he had found the cards in a Dublin pub and was completely unaware that they were a marked deck. The jury might privately wish to believe that story or not; the fact was the prosecution had not disproved it, and in Irish law the burden of proof was upon them.

  Secondly, the accused had claimed that it was not he but Mr Keane who had proposed both the poker and the wagering, and Mr Keane had conceded that this might be true.

  But much more importantly, the prosecution case was that the accused had won money by false pretences from the witness Lurgan Keane. Whatever the pretences, true or false, witness Keane had conceded on oath that the accused had won no money from him. Both he, the witness, and the accused had lost money, albeit widely differing sums. On that issue the case must fail. It was his duty to di
rect the jury to acquit the defendant. Knowing his court, he also pointed out that it lacked fifteen minutes to the hour of luncheon.

  It takes a case of weighty jurisprudence to keep a Kerry jury from its lunch, and the twelve good men were back in ten minutes with a verdict of not guilty. O'Connor was discharged and left the dock.

  Judge Comyn disrobed behind the court in the robing room, hung his wig on a peg and left the building to seek his own lunch. Without robes, ruffle or wig, he passed through the throng on the pavement before the court house quite unrecognized.

  He was about to cross the road to the town's principal hotel where, he knew, a fine Shannon salmon awaited his attention, when he saw coming out of the hotel yard a handsome and gleaming limousine of noted marque. At the wheel was O'Connor.

  'Do you see your man?' asked a wondering voice by his side. He glanced to his right and found the Tralee grocer standing beside him.

  'I do,' he said.

  The limousine swept out of the hotel yard. Sitting beside O'Connor was a passenger dressed all in black.

  'Do you see who's sitting beside him?' asked Keane in wonderment.

  The car swished towards them. The cleric with a concern to help the orphans of Dingle bestowed a benign smile and raised two stiff fingers towards the men on the sidewalk. Then the car was heading down the street.

  'Was that an ecclesiastical blessing?' asked the grocer.

  'It might have been,' conceded Judge Comyn, 'though I doubt it.'

  'And what was he dressed in those clothes for?' asked Lurgan Keane.

  'Because he's a priest of the Holy Church,' said the judge.

  'He never is,' said the grocer hotly, 'he's a farmer from Wexford.'