The Art of Deception

by The Art of Deception (retail) (epub)

  Minna appeared more and more annoyed. She no longer answered the questions fully and with the enjoyment that she had responded to Dominic Allwood.

  ‘It was,’ she said reluctantly. ‘But the points he raised were trivial ones.’

  ‘Is it true, too, that at his Coulounieix lectures last year and at the Moscow Conference on Art and Perception in March, Professor Ochterlonie adduced as evidence scientific data which he claimed was known to you and which had been suppressed?’

  Minna exploded. ‘There was no suppression of evidence. It had evidently been mislaid. Or scholars had simply not found the material. The accusations were mischievous.’

  The Judge’s style was one of non-intervention. He sat above the fray, his tortoise eyes blinking under the overhang of his wig. Up to this point he had spoken little. In this interchange he several times ordered Minna to answer the question and she did not receive the direction well. However, a bad-tempered, unsympathetic witness is not necessarily an untruthful one. The jury probably didn’t like her, but they would believe her, nonetheless.

  Victor was an even more telling witness against me. He had dressed in his very best for the part, in a camel blazer, a light blue shirt with a dark blue silk tie. He looked nervous and kept glancing at the public gallery where, following his eyes, I saw a grey-haired white woman with a coloured child, her hair plaited and beaded, on her knee. At first, Victor’s voice was low and faltering and the judge had to instruct him to speak up, as he acknowledged who he was, what he did, how long he had been employed, that he had been on duty on the night in question. He had known Miss Bennet for more than four years, he said. She was a wonderful lady. Professor Ochterlonie he had know for a long time because he used to come to visit his mum. He had only moved in to live permanently less than a year before, before the murder. He was a very nice gentleman, always polite.

  Victor was transparently easy to read. When he was happy answering a question, he responded at once and looked directly at the barrister addressing him. When he was reluctant to reply, he spoke more slowly, lowering his eyelids and looking obliquely away from the questioner. So he vividly conveyed his admiration of Julian and his dislike of incriminating me, which were even more damaging than Minna’s hostility.

  ‘Who,’ Allwood asked when they reached the night of the murder, ‘Who entered the building that evening after you came on duty?’

  ‘It was a quiet night,’ Victor replied, casting his eyes down. ‘Many of the residents were away for the weekend. Dr Horndeane came. She was the first.’

  ‘No one came before her?’

  A pause. ‘No.’

  ‘And what time did she arrive?’

  ‘Just after eight, I’d say. I didn’t notice the time exactly.’

  ‘But, let’s be clear, no one else came to see Miss Bennet or Professor Ochterlonie earlier, at any time?’

  A long pause. ‘No.’

  ‘Quite specifically, a tall fair Russian man in his early thirties?’ Victor turned his head away. ‘No, sir, no.’ He sounded grieved, as if he would have seen him if he could, but he was bound, in honesty, to admit he had not.

  ‘And what happened next, as far as you were concerned?’

  ‘The police arrived.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘I didn’t look. About eight thirty.’

  ‘Describe what happened.’

  ‘They came in and asked for Flat 8. Two uniformed officers. I told them the fourth floor and they went up. Then, quite soon, all hell broke loose. People were arriving, asking for Flat 8, all going up there. I knew something was up.’

  ‘Once again, this is crucially important, did anyone, anyone at all, even a resident known to you, leave the building between Dr Horndeane’s arrival and that of the police?’

  ‘I didn’t see no one.’

  Listening to Minna and Victor, it was easy to understand why Roger Ignatius wanted me to admit to the lovers’ quarrel, claiming provocation. It was the obvious interpretation, the easiest one to match to the facts, the most believable story. I could see how easily he could have made Julian into an infuriating woman who could enflame jealousy. But I did not want her portrayed in such terms. However, doing what he could with the brief he had been given, Roger Ignatius skilfully chipped away at the prosecution evidence and for a period I thought that he had sown sufficient doubt for me to escape. It would not be a vindication of my story, an honourable acquittal, but it would be freedom nonetheless.

  One prosecution witness, a scene-of-crime officer, turned out to be particularly useful to us. He had been a member of the team called out on the night of the murder and had been detailed to search the flat while his colleague was occupied with the body. He had only found one interesting cache: in the main bedroom of the apartment of the accused, stored inside an unlocked tortoiseshell box he had found a Russian pistol and two hundred thousand dollars in hundred- dollar bills. When questioned by Roger Ignatius, he agreed when he found them the possibility of a Russian Mafia connexion had come into his mind.

  Why so?

  Because such a large sum in dollars suggested unlaundered black money, for which the source was either Latin America where narco- dollars circulated, or Russia where large sums of cash needed recycling into the white economy. The presence of a Russian pistol was not conclusive; such weapons were found the world over, but the conjunction of the two, cash and gun, was at the very least suggestive of a Russian origin.

  Why had this lead never been followed up?

  The scene-of-crime officer could not answer this. It was not his job. The police opinion had been that they had found the obvious suspect to arrest. There was no need to confuse matters by introducing unnecessary questions about Russian or any other kind of international criminals.

  Another prosecution witness who helped my cause was the fingerprint expert. He testified that my prints had been found on the murder weapon and this evidence was the crux of the case against me. However, under Roger Ignatius’s cross-examination, he admitted that mine were not the only ones there. Two residual, smudgy and unidentifiable prints were also recovered from the handle. He could not say whether they were the same as those found on one of the glasses and the bottle of whisky in the drawing room of my flat.

  All the good work that Ignatius had done evaporated when I took the stand. The accused is the first defence witness to testify. Ignatius wanted to make my account as straightforward as he could, to get over the credibility problem, he said, and I was to help him by making my replies direct and unconditional. This seemed a good policy and I intended to co-operate fully. But as soon as the questioning started I could feel that the atmosphere was unsympathetic, as an actor must sense the rejection of a play by the audience. The jury did not like me. One after the other, their lips tightened with doubt, as it occurred to them that I was too clever, quite clever enough to have made up the whole story. All I could do was trudge on with my set lines. I looked too cerebral and the story that I told, of Russian bankers and their rivalry, was too complicated. It lacked the comprehensible story line of the prosecution’s case. Oddly, only under cross-examination by Allwood did I perform well. I was a match for his nitpicking and could not be shaken in my story. Whatever else, I had the conviction of consistency.

  Barnaby was called as a witness to testify to Anatoli’s existence, his job, his relationship with Julian. He also confirmed another director of the Russian bank was a certain I.A. Romanov. Victor had already been cross-examined by Ignatius about Anatoli’s cohabitation with Julian. He was vague in his reply, almost closing his eyes. There had been a gentleman, he agreed, Russian he couldn’t say, foreign, yes. He was never there on a permanent basis. He came and went. Ignatius asked him about Igor’s visits. The question produced the troubled frown, the sideways look, the reluctant admission that he could recall no such person.

  The account of the attacks on Julian was more persuasive. Ignatius demonstrated that they had begun some time after she had separated from her p
revious partner, the Russian banker, Anatoli Vozkresensky. These incidents, with which the accused had no connexion, had threatened her life and culminated in her murder. They had been reported to the police, at least the first two had been. Police and medical witnesses were called to describe what had happened.

  Prisca’s private detectives had traced the Rolls-Royce whose driver described to the court the accident that had occurred one night in early February. It was just before midnight and he was driving down the ramp into the underground parking to put the Rolls into its reserved place on the first floor for the night. A motorbike had been coming the wrong way, out of the in-coming ramp, and had driven headlong into his car. The rider had been thrown over the Rolls and hit the ground behind. Astonishingly, he had jumped up and run away, leaving his bike blocking the road. The chauffeur had examined the damage to his car, which was slight, dragged the motorbike clear of his path and parked the Rolls. He had seen two people, a tall thin man and a girl in a fur coat, running out of the exit and had assumed that there had been some kind of ‘trouble’. He had not reported the incident. He had not wanted to get involved, he explained.

  The chauffeur, the policemen, the bulldog and the terrier who had investigated the break-in, all dealt with reality. There was no fantasy in these practical men as they answered questions about the mugging or the break-in. The ‘dent to the front bumper and slight scratching of the paint work on the roof and boot’, the ‘heavy damage to furniture, fixtures and fittings made with a sharp instrument such as a knife or razor’, the ‘narrow knife wound in the right side…’ all carried conviction. These events really happened and there were credible witnesses to their results.

  A pattern emerged from Ignatius’s questioning: the final attack that had killed Julian Bennet was one of a series. Was it reasonable to believe that these episodes were simply random coincidences: a woman who is mugged by a nameless jogger, has her flat burgled, is attacked in an underground car park, is merely unlucky, and these things had nothing to do with her ultimate fate?

  This argument had its effect. The jury could believe in the existence of Anatoli Vozkresensky, but Igor it could not cope with at all. He was invisible. I struggled to make him real, but he was a man without substance. And no wonder. I had only seen him once myself. In his final statement, Roger Ignatius argued that life is more complicated than fiction, and that the untidiness of his story was evidence of its truth.

  Allwood, however, saw neatness rather than disorder as the mark of reality. In cross-examining me, he undermined my story with an alternative scenario. The attacks on Julian were not chance affairs, nor had they been orchestrated by some anonymous Russian criminal; they had been the work of the accused, as part of his attempt to dominate the victim. It was not the old lover, but the new one who was responsible. Finally, the Russian pistol and the bundles of dollars? The professor himself had visited Moscow recently. Why look for an unseen culprit when an explanation was at hand?

  I joked to Roger Ignatius, during one of our last periods of consultation, ‘The prosecution’s case is so convincing, I believe in it myself. I think I must have done it.’

  I could imagine the quarrel that we did not have that evening. I was accusing her of deceit, reproaching her for her ruthless trapping of Anatoli, her betrayal of us both with Igor. I could imagine her leaving me to my rage, walking across the landing to her own apartment. I was following her. I opened the drawer in the hall table to find my key, and saw the knife, left there on our return from Moscow. But I couldn’t get any further. I knew that if she had defended herself, I would have believed her, as I always did. Any justification would have been good enough. The next image was Igor’s foot, in its grey Russian shoe, which I saw as I bent over her. Then the sound of the blade on the wooden floor.

  Ignatius did not laugh, though he maintained his bonhomie and optimism to the end. I accepted the verdict as inevitable.

  43

  When you become a convicted rather than a remand prisoner, life changes. You pass from Purgatory to Hades; you are no longer waiting, you are a permanent inmate. I was only allowed one visit a fortnight and, as I had been moved to another prison, out of London, reaching me was much more of an effort. I wouldn’t have blamed Prisca if she had skipped a few, but she never did. I had shut down links to other people since Julian died, as the only way to survive their proximity. I was celled up with a middle-aged, ex-employee of British Rail who had cracked open his wife’s skull like a breakfast egg in a quarrel over where to go on holiday. He was a fussy, routine-bound man, with whom I had nothing in common. I depended on Prisca.

  ‘We must get you out,’ she told me. ‘You’ll go mad here. What do you do all day?’

  ‘It’s not so bad. I’m getting used to it. As a murderer I have a certain status. I read.’

  ‘You don’t work?’

  ‘Ah, work is a privilege. Sex offenders do the laundry. Some of the murderers work in the kitchen, perhaps because they’re thought to be skilful with knives. I know that one or two of the men in for assault and battery are cleaners. I’m on the waiting list to sew diplomatic bags, I’m told. In the meantime, the prison library is working on a book list for me. I’m category B, which means I’m not thought to be violent. I’m quiet and co-operative; I expect to be on the enhanced regime for good behaviour soon. Prisoners who just want to read are no trouble at all. The authorities encourage it. So I thought it was an ideal opportunity to write up the case of the Lady in a Pelisse.’

  ‘You’re not to accept the verdict. We’re going to appeal.’

  Her determination filled me with awe. ‘Prisca, you’re a lawyer. You know, better than me, that you can’t appeal just because you think I’m innocent. You have to have some reason to do so.’

  ‘That’s not a problem.’ She brushed aside my ignorance of the ways of the law. ‘I saw Roger Ignatius, straightaway and he had already called for a transcript of the judge’s speech.’

  ‘Why? Was there something wrong with it?’

  ‘He was certain, as was I, that there was an error in the summing up, sufficient for an appeal.’

  The immediate grounds of appeal were technical: the judge had failed to give an adequate direction on the burden of proof. What this meant in practice, Prisca explained, was that Roger Ignatius was going to argue that the element of doubt in the case, particularly the origin of the previous attacks on Julian, had been inadequately explained in the judge’s summing up. The judge had also not set aside as irrelevant the suggestion, made by Allwood in his final statement, that I might well have been responsible for those attacks.

  I recalled the hope I had felt during several days of the trial and allowed it to re-emerge. ‘Is there any chance?’ I asked. ‘Are you doing this because you think I have a real possibility of getting out or because you can’t bear to be defeated and you need to do something?’

  ‘Ah, you know me too well. I won’t let go any chance, even the slightest, but I can’t pretend it’s very hopeful. The bind is this: even if the Lords of Appeal find that Strowger misdirected the jury, and I’m sure he did, if they think that in practice there hasn’t been a miscarriage of justice, the appeal will fail. Basically, that means you can’t get off on a technicality.’

  ‘So we’re no better off than we were.’

  ‘No, we’ve bought time. I always thought if we’d had a bit more time before the trial I would have turned up something.’

  ‘It’s all there,’ I said. ‘But it’s in Russia, and it’s not going to be made available to us here.’

  ‘I’m not thinking about Anatoli or Igor in Russia. I’ve accepted we can’t get anything out of them. But there’s the question of Igor’s presence in the building on that night. If he was there, he must have been seen. I’m going to interview everyone in the block myself. Then there’s Colin Trevor and the pressure that was put on him. I’m going to get a statement out of him. I’m going to pull some strings to make Tom Naish dance.’

  ‘It’s been done,
Prisca. We’ve tried all that.’

  ‘I’m going to get my private investigators to find someone who was around in the square that night. Even if he wasn’t seen in the building, it would help if someone would swear to seeing him in the area.’

  When she came back a fortnight later, she was more downcast than I had ever seen her.

  ‘I can’t understand it. Not a single person will admit to seeing Igor. In fact, if you believe all your neighbours, hardly any of them was there.’

  ‘It was a Friday evening; they were all away for the weekend. I told you it wouldn’t be any good. In any case, you never see anyone in that building. I visited my mother there innumerable times when Julian was living opposite her and we never met. The only person who saw everybody was Victor. There is only one way in and one way out and that’s past his desk.’ My lack of surprise renewed her combative spirit.

  ‘Then Victor must have seen Igor and I must see Victor.’

  ‘He’s stated on oath that no one came or left except Minna. It’s no good, Prisca.’

  ‘There has to be an explanation. It’s probably very simple, if we could only see it. The question that wasn’t asked. Did he go to the bathroom, for example? Could Igor have hidden in the building, say on an upper floor, and got out later, the next day even?’

  ‘I talked to Roger Ignatius about that sort of thing. You know he was desperate to find something. I’m sure the police searched the building, visited every apartment, before they left that night. But go ahead. Why not?’

  ‘It’s hopeless being so pessimistic,’ Prisca said severely. ‘You’ve got to take some responsibility yourself. You’ve got to think. That’s what you’re supposed to be good at.’

  I had plenty of time for that. We were locked in our cells by eight o’clock every night and I spent the evenings lying on my bed, remembering. However, I preferred to think about Julian than to search for an explanation for the inexplicable. I would recall the first time I saw her, the first time she invited me for a drink, the first time we had dinner together, the first time we made love. I listed the dates, the places, the times of day, what she wore, what she said. The past was the land I lived in, a refugee from the present. Only occasionally did I turn my mind to how I had arrived in my present position and whether I could escape from it.