Indictment for Murder

by Peter Rawlinson

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Also by Peter Rawlinson

  Copyright

  To Peter and Avril,

  with much affection

  1

  THEY brought him up a narrow, winding stair to the box surrounded by a rail which was the dock. He was an old man using a cane, a tall, stooped figure with a lined, narrow face and a sharp, aquiline nose beneath a full head of white hair. He stood with his hands gripping the ledge in front of him, as in this place he had seen so many do so many times before. He looked straight ahead of him to where the clerk of the court stood, wigged and robed in black like the barristers seated in two rows immediately below the dock.

  Above the clerk sat the judge, in short, bobbed wig and scarlet robe trimmed with ermine, flanked on one side by the judge’s clerk in morning dress and on the other by the High Sheriff of the county in dark blue military uniform. To his left were the steps leading to the witness-box; to his right, the jury-box, as yet empty; below this, the press bench, already full. In banked tiers behind and to either side of the dock were the seats for the public, filled on this afternoon not by the regulars – those elderly men in shabby raincoats and women in smocks and turbans who came whenever the court was in session – but by a smarter, more lively congregation, many of whom had never before been in a court of law. Long before the appearance of the prisoner the ushers had locked the doors, and even those with official business were forced to push their way through spectators in order to get to the clerk or to the benches of counsel.

  The court itself had been built in Victorian times within a great flint and stone hall, all that remained of the mediaeval castle destroyed by Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century. The furnishings of the courtroom – the benches, the seats and the boxes – were painted battleship grey, relieved only by the bright colours of the royal coat of arms above the judge’s seat. It was a scene the prisoner knew well, for he had often been in this place. But he had never seen it as he saw it now. In the past he had been seated on the judge’s bench looking towards the dock in which he now stood. Then it had been his clerk on one side of him and the High Sheriff attending him on the other. Now he stood, a warder at his elbow, facing the judge who was sitting where he had so often sat. On the flint wall of the ancient castle, high above the coat of arms over the judge’s bench, hung the great, wooden, painted wheel that depicted the table and places of the Knights of the Round Table. It had hung in this hall for hundreds of years, but it had been made not in the time of the legendary King Arthur but in the sixteenth century, when King Henry the Eighth had it borne to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The wheel or circle was divided into wedges or segments, marked on the outer rim with the name, and thus the seat, of each of King Arthur’s knights. At the top was the seat and name of the king; on his left, Galahad. Next to Galahad, Lancelot, the adulterer, the lover of the queen. On the king’s right was the place of Mordred. Who was Mordred? the prisoner wondered. What part had Mordred played in the legend of Camelot? When he was back home he would check the role of Mordred. Then he corrected himself. If they let him go home.

  ‘Prisoner at the bar,’ the clerk called out, and the prisoner lowered his gaze to the black-robed figure below the judge’s bench. ‘Is your name Jonathan Wentworth Playfair?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I am Jonathan Playfair.’

  Then, from the paper he was holding the clerk began to read the formal indictment of the crime of which Jonathan Wentworth Playfair was accused. While the clerk read, the prisoner bent his head, looking down at his hands, which were gripping the rail at the front of the dock.

  Looking up at him among the reporters crowded into the press box was Leslie Bramley, the chief crime reporter of the Globe newspaper. It had been the campaign by the Globe – starting with a few paragraphs introducing the accused’s name, then swelling into columns of description and comment – that, Bramley and his editor claimed, had forced the hand of the Director of Public Prosecutions and obliged him to launch a prosecution. Which was why Bramley studied the figure in the dock with such satisfaction, noting how he now stood with his head bowed, looking down at his hands on the rail. Bowing his head in shame, Bramley thought. That was how he would write it – after the man had been convicted.

  But the prisoner had bent his head because he was not listening to the words the clerk was reading. He was not even in the courtroom. He was in a very different place, in a cave on the summit of a mountain, thinking not of the man whom he was accused of murdering but of another who had fallen fifty years ago with a bullet-hole in his forehead.

  The clerk paused in his reading and raised his head. He looked towards the prisoner in the dock, spoke and waited. When there was no reply, he spoke again, louder. Still the prisoner was silent, and a murmur arose throughout the court as people turned to each other, whispering, muttering, as the clerk repeated the words for a third time even more loudly. ‘How say you? Are you Guilty or Not Guilty?’

  Jonathan raised his hand and rested it for a second on his forehead, in the place where the bullet had entered the head of the man of whom he had been thinking. The noise in the court increased – and he became conscious of the sounds of the place where he was. He looked up and saw the clerk, waiting, expectant. Then he heard another voice, speaking from the side of the dock. A head and shoulders had appeared, leaning over the rail towards him – a sharp, dark face with eyes the colour of raisins under the grey wig, the face of the counsel whom his solicitor, Harold Benson, had briefed to defend him.

  ‘Sir Jonathan. You must reply to the clerk. You must plead to the charge.’

  Jonathan looked at him gravely. Then he nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course. I was not paying attention.’

  He turned and faced the clerk, who asked a fourth time: ‘How say you? Are you Guilty or Not Guilty?

  ‘Not Guilty,’ Jonathan said, with a slight bow. ‘Not Guilty.’

  Again a sound like wind stirring the leaves in the branches of a tree filled the courtroom. The barrister slipped back into his seat, turning as he did so to his junior counsel beside him, shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head. ‘What can you expect?’ his gesture implied. ‘What can you expect of the old man?’

  The clerk began the business of calling the jury to be sworn, but the prisoner did not even cast a glance in the direction of the men and women who, one by one, filed into their places. When they were assembled, they stood, holding the book in their right hands – save for two unbelievers who affirmed. None were challenged by the defence. Five women and seven men. Three of the women were middle-aged, one with blue-rinsed hair; two with grey. They were dressed in sober black or dark blue. The other two women were younger, one in brown and the other, incongruously, in pink. Of the men, three looked as if they were in their mid-forties and two
seemed younger, perhaps in their thirties; all were in open shirts. The other two were older, one in a smart blue blazer with brass buttons; the other in a suit. When the ten were sworn and the two had affirmed, the clerk read to them the charge on which they were to try the accused – that he, in this city, on June 21st of last year, had murdered David Spencer Trelawney.

  The clerk resumed his seat and, after a word from the bench, the uniformed man beside Jonathan tapped his shoulder and pulled up a chair and directed him to sit. The court settled, a short, rather red-faced man rose from his place on counsel’s bench, and the trial began of Jonathan Wentworth Playfair, Knight, sometime Judge of the High Court, accused of murder.

  As he sat on the hard, straight-backed chair which the warder had pulled up for him, Jonathan’s eyes were again on his hands, now clasped in his lap while prosecuting counsel, in an agreeable, gravelly voice with a slight West Country burr, began to tell the jury about the circumstances that had led the prisoner to stand his trial. Jonathan shut his eyes and closed his ears to the words, on every one of which everyone else in that place was hanging. He was no longer now in the cave on the mountain where a man had fallen with a bullet-hole in his forehead. He was in a quiet room in a silent house not far from this court, standing by a bedside while the June sunshine flooded into the room.

  * * *

  It was Midsummer Day, the windows were closed and the room very warm, but Jonathan, in his light jacket over dark trousers, had felt no discomfort as he stood looking down at the dead man lying on the bed. He was used to death and the sight of the dead. He had been broken to it early. In his youth he had been surrounded by it – on the streets and houses of home, when the bombs fell from the enemy aircraft high up in the night sky, and, later, in the mountains where he had fought in battle. But the death which had then been so constant a companion had never been silent like the death he had just witnessed in that quiet room. Then it had been accompanied by the noise of bombs or battle: the scream of the shells through the air and the crash as they threw up rock and dust, blanketing out the sun; or the crack of calibre-88’s mounted in the Tiger tanks, and the whine of the bombs from the six-barrel mortars as they came in flights, like, he had thought at that time, the arrows at Agincourt. And above those sounds, the cries of the wounded and the dying.

  Those had been the sounds of death in the time of his youth. But in this room there had only been the sound of breathing, heavy at first, then growing lighter and lighter, ceasing without even the rattle of death, while the sunshine fell on the white bedclothes and the pattern of flowers on the walls.

  He had stood for a long time looking down at the white hair on the pillow, the white of the moustache and the white stubble on the chin and at the features he had seen pass from childhood to old age; and he had thought of the other companion of their youth who had died in the same battle as the man with the bullet-hole in his forehead. Rory had not died in silence, although at that moment a quiet had fallen over the battlefield as the men of the two armies waited in their holes in the ground a hundred yards apart in the cold night air of an April in northern Africa. He had died to the sound of his own voice as he lay on a hillside, both legs broken by the bullets from the German machine-guns. For suddenly, eerily, the dying man had begun to sing – Irish songs about love and desertion, betrayal and exile and, finally, the song with which, at home, he always ended his singing as he stood, often very drunk, balanced precariously on the edge of the fender around the fireplace before he fell from his perch into the arms of his friends.

  ‘The King he said to the Queen,’ Rory sang, his voice ringing out over the mountainside, ‘Was ever such wonder seen. Take the crown off my head, And give me instead, Flanagan’s Flying Machine.’

  Twenty yards away in his slit-trench on the summit of the hill, Jonathan had listened, his head bowed on his arms. When the dying man finished the song, he had said the Paternoster in Latin – and died. And the flares went up and the firing began again.

  Rory Connor had been the first of the three of them to die. Now, half a century later, in this neat, comfortable room, Jonathan watched over the death of the second. But although the room was quiet and the scene peaceful, in the eyes of David Trelawney when he looked up at Jonathan before he closed them for ever, there had not been the look of one friend to another.

  After a minute or so, Jonathan had walked from the bedside to the window and flung it open, to let in the summer air, to let out the man’s spirit. He stood at the open window, looking across the road to the garden of the cathedral close where children were playing. He could hear their laughter, and the cry of one of them. He saw a woman in yellow dart across the grass and pick up the child, and the noise of the wailing ceased. Beyond was the cathedral and its tower. Abruptly he drew the curtains and, taking his stick, left the room. He went down the stairs, wanting to hurry but forced to move slowly because of his knees, which as always on stairs, made his steps unsteady. In the hall he had stood for a moment, listening. There was no sound now in the whole of the empty house.

  He knew he should not leave. He knew he should summon someone or wait for the nurse to return. But he needed to go – to run, if only his knees would have let him. So he opened the front door and went out into the street and around the gardens where the children were playing, walking as fast as he was able. The woman in the yellow dress with the child in her arms turned and looked at him as he went. She would, he knew, recognise him again.

  * * *

  In his seat in the dock, Jonathan heard the sound of the scrape of a heavy chair on the wooden floor – and he was back in the present. He looked up towards the figure in the red robe on the bench above the clerk, and heard the young voice of the judge saying, ‘If that is a convenient moment, Mr Bracton, I will rise now.’

  ‘Certainly, my lord,’ the prosecutor answered.

  The man in uniform tapped Jonathan lightly on the shoulder.

  ‘I know,’ Jonathan thought, ‘I know,’ and he rose to his feet. Then came the voice of his own counsel, the man with the dark face and dark eyes who had reminded him that he must answer the clerk and plead to the charge. What was to happen now was important, and he listened attentively.

  ‘My lord,’ he heard his counsel say, ‘because of the particular nature of this case and the facts surrounding the death of David Trelawney, and because of the accused’s frailty and advanced age – he is seventy-seven – and the utter improbability that he would fail to attend at his trial, the accused soon after his arrest in July last year was granted bail by Mr Justice Templar, the Presiding Judge of this circuit. Mr Justice Templar made a detailed examination of all the circumstances concerning the alleged crime and the accused, and heard that the police had no objection to bail. As a result, and even though this was a murder charge, Mr Justice Templar granted the application. The accused has, therefore, been on bail awaiting trial until he surrendered this afternoon. I now ask that bail be continued throughout the course of the trial on the same recognisances.’

  ‘Where is he living?’

  ‘He has an apartment in Pembroke House, Tildsley, the home of his cousin, Mr James Playfair, a Deputy Lieutenant of this county. Mr Playfair is a surety and lives at Pembroke House with his wife. And,’ counsel emphasised, for the judge he was addressing was young and new and the judge who had first granted bail senior and experienced, ‘Mr Justice Templar was satisfied that in this case bail was permissible.’

  ‘That was in July?’

  ‘It was.’

  The young judge paused. ‘Have the prosecution or the police, Mr Bracton, any objection to bail being extended during the trial?’

  ‘None, my lord,’ said Richard Bracton.

  Another pause. ‘Very well. Bail will be continued throughout the trial on the same terms and conditions.’

  So I shall get home, Jonathan thought, as the figure in red rose and left the court. How many times, he thought, had not he himself gone through that same door, walked up the same steps to the
judge’s room and then, still robed and preceded by his clerk and High Sheriff, gone to the Great Door to be driven away to the Judges’ Lodgings on the outskirts of the city.

  ‘The court is adjourned until ten-thirty on Monday morning,’ the clerk called out above the hubbub that had broken out as soon as the judge had disappeared.

  Monday, Jonathan thought. Why Monday? But of course. Today was Friday. The trial had been fixed to start on the Thursday, but the previous case had lasted a day longer than expected. The judge trying that case had gone and the new, young judge, a judge who did not know Sir Jonathan Playfair, had only arrived on Friday morning. Other business had delayed the start until the afternoon.

  ‘We’ll wait until the court has cleared a little before letting you out, sir,’ said the warder beside him, ‘if you don’t mind.’

  The warder had been doing this job for many years, indeed from before Jonathan had retired. ‘It gave me a funny feeling having him beside me, I can tell you,’ the warder said that night to his wife. ‘Before I’d only seen him sitting up there on the bench.’

  Jonathan resumed his seat. He saw Hugo Shelbourne, his QC, the man with the dark face, and the junior counsel, Andrew Benjamin, both in their wigs and robes, approaching the dock, followed by his solicitor, Harold Benson. Shelbourne, a tall, thin man of about fifty; Benjamin, younger, short and slight; Benson, awkward, angular, with a pronounced Adam’s apple and a shock of grey hair which fell over his ears and his collar. In his shabby tweed suit and black tie, he looked more like a don than a lawyer.

  ‘We now have some idea how the Crown are putting their case, Sir Jonathan,’ said Hugo Shelbourne briskly. ‘So I suggest we have a talk this evening.’ He was leaning over the side of the dock.

  ‘Do you think it necessary?’ Jonathan asked.

  It had been Benson who had briefed Shelbourne – without consulting Jonathan.

  Shelbourne looked at Benson. ‘Well, there are certain points Bracton has already made which I think we ought to discuss,’ he replied, with a note of irritation in his voice. ‘When the evidence begins on Monday I shall have to cross-examine the nurse and the doctor and—’