‘They’re all right, OK, thank God, you know what I mean?’
‘Well, that’s good. No more problems at home?’ This seemed to be the right track. I recalled the rows, raised voices, crashing china, slamming doors of Julian’s soap opera. But no one had ever got hurt. I was no longer in a position to regard the violence of Victor’s life from a disdainful distance.
‘No, thank God.’ He looked around at the furniture for something to touch; then rapped his head. He hunched closer across the table. ‘Nothing, nothing at all. I was worried… After, you know…’
He had been worried by the break-in too, I remembered. He was easily upset by violence. Julian had tried to conceal her gashed legs from his view. I could not account for the depth of his concern.
‘A terrible, terrible business.’ He could not bring himself to speak of Julian’s death directly.
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
He sat shaking his head. I had no sense that he was accusing me of responsibility for what had happened.
‘She was a lovely lady. My friend. She used to say, “My friend, Victor,” and we were. Friends.’
Tears were magnifying the milky-coffee coloured whites of his eyes. I had a vision of Julian leaning on her wrists against his desk in the entrance, one leg kicked out behind her in an absurd ’fifties model girl pose; she was laughing. Despair at her loss overwhelmed me again.
‘I’d better be going.’ Victor pushed back his chair. The dandyish side of his personality was in evidence: he was wearing a bright red and gold tie with a Hermes chain pattern, dressed up even for a prison visit. I experienced none of the hostility that had welled up in me at the sight of George Goodson’s bow tie.
‘Very nice of you to have come, Victor.’
‘I just wanted to see you. I’m glad you understand about Rose.’
I didn’t know what he was talking about. I needed Julian to explain it to me. ‘Of course,’ I said.
‘That’s great. Great.’
‘Fine, Victor.’
‘It makes it easier for me. I feel bad about the court case.’
‘Er, yes.’
‘Bye for now. Good luck.’
An explanation of some elements in this unexpected visit came a little later. We were approaching the date of the trial, set for mid-October, and George Goodson had called a meeting with Roger Ignatius, the barrister, to pull together all the threads, as he put it. The interview room was crowded with the leaders and their acolytes. They projected efficiency and optimism. Briefcases and computers snapped open and closed. An air of business prevailed over the passivity and defeatism of the prison atmosphere.
But nothing could conceal the absence in the centre of my case: Igor was not there. Nor, it would seem, had he ever been. Enquiries at the Home Office had at last been answered. No one named I.A. Romanov had either applied for or been granted a visa to Britain in the last five years. The private detectives despatched to Moscow had discovered that the police there had no leads on the murderer of the Uzbek, Muzafarov, and that case was on hold. The Bank had suffered no ill effects as a result of the violent death of one of its founders. I.A. Romanov and A.F. Vozkresensky were still listed as joint presidents of its board, but neither was accessible, or even visible. No approach, direct or through third parties, had elicited any response.
Roger Ignatius was a man of about my own age, jovial, well-fleshed, with soft curly hair and a rubbery baby face. Dismissively, he slapped closed a file that lay on the table.
‘This case depends on impressions, not technicalities. All this stuff on the Mafia is basically unusable. If s hearsay. We haven’t got the witnesses and we’re never going to get them. What we’ve got to do is say to the jury, Look at this guy: a professor, a serious person, never wielded anything more violent than a pencil sharpener in his life. Do you really believe he behaved in a manner so out of character as to stab his girlfriend?’
He looked around the stuffy room. No one spoke. The consensus in expression was, ‘Yes.’
‘And before they say, Yes,’ he went on, ‘we’ve got to undermine the witnesses for the prosecution. The art historian, well, she’s a tough nut, but we can try professional rivalry. If she can be riled, forced to turn nasty in the witness box, she could lose the sympathy of the jury. What do you think?’ He turned to me. ‘Is that a possibility?’
‘Very much so. She’s quick to get angry. Any suggestion that she’s not right will do it. She’s always managed to lose my sympathy very fast.’
‘Good, good.’ He nodded encouragingly, as if the whole thing were put on to keep my spirits up. ‘And what’s your reading of the other witness, the porter?’
‘Victor?’
‘Is that his name? Yes.’
‘What does he say?’
‘Well, nothing. That’s the point.’ He snapped his fingers over one shoulder. ‘Let me have the papers from the committal proceedings. In the prosecution’s statement their two chief witnesses are named as Horndeane, who says she saw you with the knife, and the porter, who says that no one came in or went out at the relevant time, except her.’
So that was why Victor had come.
Ignatius put down the papers and drew one hand forward through his curls.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Let’s be frank. We have to admit you face a very sticky wicket. Your story is virtually unverifiable in legal terms. You were caught…’ He stopped himself. ‘Sorry. You were found with the murder weapon in your hands, so that it’s plastered with your fingerprints and no one else’s. No one else was seen entering the building. I’ve got to say this: it’s a pretty incredible story, yours. And I shall have a job to make the jury believe in it. The prosecution is going to say that it was a lovers’ quarrel. Our chances of getting you off are only fifty-fifty.’ He stopped.
I knew what he wanted to say, but was not allowed to. ‘If you pleaded guilty with a defence of provocation, I would believe you. The jury would believe you. The chances are you’d get off with ten years, out in five with good behaviour…’
They all looked at me with a detached curiosity. They really didn’t mind. They could argue it any way I liked. They’d do their best for me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That’s how it was.’
42
A trial is a play. It has everything necessary for drama: a stage and an audience, a protagonist and a chorus, a troupe of actors, a struggle between good and evil, a denouement. It even conforms to classical rules: unity of time, place and action. But it is even more exciting than a play, for although the parts are fixed and the lines are known, there is an element of improvisation. The ending is unwritten and the punishment is real.
I pleaded not guilty to the murder of Julian Bennet.
I looked round the courtroom briefly and observed Prisca was, as usual, in the front row, with Jamie and Sybil beside her. Roger Ignatius was already there. His ruddy face was not improved by his wig; he looked like an actor pretending to be a barrister. His opponent, Dominic Allwood, QC, prosecuting, with his gloomy horse face, was far more convincing. Best cast of all was the judge, Mr Justice Strowger, who dominated the scene both physically and morally from his position above us all. Elderly, he must have been in his seventies, and looked older. He had a small, wrinkled, hairless face, lacking even eyebrows and eyelashes, balanced on a thin, wattled neck. His mouth was pursed by a shrewd, humourless sphincter and his eyes were bright between heavy lids. He had a leathery, ancient, reptilian look about him, as if he knew of every possible cruelty, every perversion, every crime and nothing could surprise him any more. The jury, who were sworn in once my plea was made, appeared as a row of busts on a shelf. I ran my eye along the line, noting its composition, five women, one Asian, two, a man and a woman, youngish, the rest stolidly middle-aged. I could have worked harder at estimating their varied social status and associated prejudices, but this would have implied a reaction to me and a judgement on my story. I preferred to concentrate on the ritual of the opening, in which the judge,
clerk, barristers all played their parts with the professional ease of actors, ultimately untouched by what was going on.
The prosecution opened with a speech to the jury explaining its task was to prove that the accused, who was assumed to be innocent, had indeed committed the crime, and theirs to be convinced ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. The prosecutor’s voice was matter of fact, without indignation in his tone, and his performance was all the more effective for that. He described Julian’s killing, when, where and how it took place and went on to give the details of the case against the accused. The chief witnesses for the prosecution were to be Minna and Victor, supported by others who would testify to certain details, such as the provenance of the murder weapon, finger prints. Everything centred on the night of the crime and no wider context was admitted. It was not necessary. Was the accused there? Did he do it? were the only questions he wanted to answer. The prosecution case, in its simplicity, was that the accused had a row with his lover and killed her in a jealous rage. The details of the killing were hardly open to debate. The murder weapon was a Russian knife, given to Miss Bennet by a Dutch art historian on a recent visit to Moscow, an event witnessed by Dr Horndeane, who discovered the accused with the knife in his hands only seconds after the murder. The mysterious third person, whom the defence would allege was the murderer, had been seen by no one and had no existence, except in the mind of the accused.
Although I had been able to find no witnesses to my truth, the prosecution had been able to find plenty of evidence for its fiction. The only way to tolerate it was to hear it impersonally, as if it concerned someone else, and to admit that if it had been like that, it might well have ended in the way they said it did. I had to concede it was skilfully done. The art lay not so much in the simple reconstruction of the murder, as in the subtle painting of my character in the darkest tones.
The subtext, never stated directly, but which the jury could easily read was insidiously damning. The accused, Nicholas Ochterlonie, had several counts against him. In the first place, he did not have a proper job. He was temporarily employed by London University, but he had trained as a doctor and psychologist and worked as a writer and philosopher and art historian. In the second place, he had left his wife and was living with his lover. These two facts implied a lack of respectability derived from secure employment and a stable marriage. The accused was, moreover, psychopathically jealous. The impression was of a mad professor, not so mad that he could not be held responsible for his actions, but just mad enough to make a single violent act plausible.
The accused became obsessed with the victim, his neighbour, and made constant enquiries about her. Eventually, after her apartment had been severely damaged in a break-in, he persuaded her to move into his flat As no one was ever charged with the damage and, as no illicit entry was ever discovered, the police concluded that it was an inside job. The accused became irrationally convinced that Miss Bennet was having an affair. He spied on her, sitting in his car outside the house to watch her comings and goings. In the later stages of their relationship he did not permit her to leave his flat, keeping her imprisoned there for weeks at a time, only allowing her out under his escort.
His extravagant concentration on his lover and unreasonable demands for her attention led directly to the tragedy of the killing, which was all but witnessed by Dr Horndeane. As she was there by arrangement and not by chance, the prosecution could not logically call the murder a premeditated act. But the subtext implied that the accused had brooded on it for so long beforehand, that the act combined the cunning of a planned murder with the violent impulse of a crime passionel.
When I remarked to Roger Ignatius about the development of my character, he dismissed my complaints. The prosecution never adduced more than the admissible facts, he insisted. If they had, he would have protested. I said no more, though I had no doubt of the image that the jury would be given. However, I was pleased that, by able cross-questioning, Ignatius succeeded in modifying, if not essentially changing, the picture.
Minna’s performance in the witness box was at first a success. By physique and age, hers was inevitably a character role rather than that of a leading lady, and she played her part with all the authority with which she handed down rulings on art attributions. Allwood led her through the minutes immediately after the murder.
‘When I arrived the porter apologised to me that the lifts were out of order and showed me where the stairs were. I climbed to the fourth floor, and when I arrived I found the doors to both flats open.’
‘Did you meet anyone at all, apart from the porter, between your arrival and reaching the apartment of the accused?’
‘I did not,’ Minna said, solemnly, as if her life depended on it.
‘Please continue.’
‘I rang the bell of Professor Ochterlonie’s flat and, when there was no response, I knocked. As I was standing there, I heard noises from within the flat opposite.’
‘What sort of noises?’
‘Gasping sounds, not loud, but they were distressful. I put my head round the door of Professor Ochterlonie’s flat and called, “Hello?” I could hear nothing, and see nothing unusual inside. So I approached the other door, pushed it open and walked in.’
‘How long were you inside the flat’
‘I wasn’t really inside. I just pushed the door sufficiently to see inside.’
‘Could you still see the landing and the exit to the stairs?’
‘Yes, I could. No one could have passed me without my seeing.’
‘Please tell the jury what you saw when you went into the other apartment.’
‘The accused was standing over the body of a woman with a knife in his hand. I didn’t recognise who it was at first. She was sprawled, face down, on the floor at the foot of the staircase.’
Ignatius did good work here.
“Would you describe exactly, Dr Horndeane, the relative positions of the accused and the body of Miss Bennet when you entered?’ he asked.
Minna was less eager to be precise. ‘She was lying on the ground, face down, as I said, at the foot of the stairs.’
‘Yes, and where was the accused? Facing you, with his back to you? In front or behind the body, from your view point?’
‘Facing me. He was in front of the body.’
‘That is, the body was behind the accused. He had his back to it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you care to estimate the distance between them?’
‘There was some little distance, say six or eight feet.’
‘And how exactly was the accused holding the weapon?’
From Minna’s reluctant replies the picture of the murderer looming over his victim, the weapon in his clenched fist, changed. The body was, in fact, behind the accused, some distance away. The accused could not have stabbed the murdered woman from that position. Moreover, Minna was forced to agree that he was holding the knife by the blade as if he had, as he claimed, just picked it up from the floor. What she had seen was entirely consistent with the story that the accused was not the murderer, but a witness like herself.
‘How would you describe the behaviour of the accused when you came upon him?’ Ignatius asked.
Minna pondered. ‘Calm,’ she replied.
‘Calm,’ Ignatius repeated. ‘Not frightened, not threatening, but calm. Was he co-operative?’
‘He was,’ she conceded. ‘He seemed shocked, a bit slow to react.’
‘You say you asked for a telephone to call the police. Did he make any attempt to leave, to escape?’
‘No. He took me across to his own flat.’
‘In fact, he made the phone call himself.’
‘He was phoning for an ambulance. I called the police.’
‘So he showed no sign of guilt. Only anxiety for the injured woman.’
‘He showed anxiety, yes.’
‘But you did not. You didn’t call an ambulance?’
‘I could see she was already dead.’
‘Did you examine the body?’
‘No, I didn’t touch it.’
‘Was there a lot of blood visible?’
‘There was blood on the knife.’
‘But nowhere else?’
‘I wasn’t looking anywhere else. I saw blood on the knife.’
‘So you just assumed that she was dead.’
‘She was dead.’ Angrily.
‘Now let’s come to the visitor, Igor Romanov, who was with Miss Bennet and Professor Ochterlonie before you arrived.’
‘I saw nothing of him.’
‘But you found the door of the flat open, as if someone had recently and hastily left?’
‘The door was open. I drew no inference of who had left or how recently.’
This was not so good. Ignatius then raised the question of our disagreement on the provenance of the Lady in a Pelisse. It seemed inconceivable that Minna would not have realised that the painting would be mentioned, but she reacted as if taken off guard, with great venom. Ignatius managed to incite her to rage to such a degree that the jurors could see that, although our debate was a mere academic point, she was not an unbiased witness and, even more important, that the subject of our disagreement had been concealment of evidence.
‘Would you tell us, please, the reason for your visit to Professor Ochterlonie on the evening of the murder.’
Minna looked very put out. ‘It was a social call.’
‘I understand it had been arranged a day or so earlier, in order to discuss an academic matter that was in dispute between you and the accused.’
Minna hesitated. ‘We would probably have talked about that question, if we’d had the chance.’
‘So the call was arranged at your request to discuss an academic disagreement?’
‘I suppose you could say that.’
‘It was?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you sum up, in layman’s terms, the nature of the academic dispute between you and the accused.’
‘There was no dispute.’
‘I thought we had just agreed that you had asked for the meeting that evening in order to discuss the matter. Was the issue that Professor Ochterlonie had questioned the attribution of one of the paintings belonging to your Foundation?’
The Art of Deception Page 31
