Indictment for Murder

by Peter Rawlinson

  And he rang off.

  * * *

  The Bractons’ house stood in an acre of ground on the outskirts of the city. It was a medium-sized villa, a comfortable, ugly house. In the hall, when George Bracton and Brian Graves were hanging up their coats, they were greeted by the Labrador charging at them and then by the twins. Bracton hugged the children. ‘Isn’t it homework time?’ he said.

  ‘It is.’ Joan was standing in the doorway to the dining-room. ‘Come on, you two. Back to work.’

  ‘We’ll get ourselves tea,’ said Bracton, leading Graves into the kitchen. They brought their cups into the large sitting-room, solidly furnished, well-lived-in, shabby. Joan joined them.

  ‘I’m expecting the DPP to call,’ Bracton said. Then he told her what had happened in court. Both, she saw, were anxious and unsettled. She prayed that when he talked to the DPP her husband would be sensible and not be stubborn. Brian Graves saw her look and smiled at her. She had cut her hair, he noticed, and it made her look much older.

  ‘In justification of Trent, I expect Johnson never told him that Playfair had said that Trelawney had killed himself,’ he said to Bracton.

  ‘Probably not, and Johnson was feeding the press, who were putting pressure on an inexperienced DPP.’

  ‘What’ll you do now?’ Joan asked.

  ‘Just see how the defence develops.’

  ‘You’re going to speak to the DPP?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, but the ultimate responsibility is mine.’

  ‘What about the judge?’

  ‘He can’t interfere with how the prosecution is handled. Some judges have tried, without success. But Harris may not know that.’

  It was not the DPP who telephoned. It was the Attorney General. Richard took the call at the table in the corner of the room; Joan and Brian were in the armchairs by the fire. ‘James Tyson has been telling me what’s been happening at old Jonathan’s trial,’ the Attorney boomed, ‘and I thought I’d have a word. Of course, how you handle it, Richard, is a matter for you,’ the loud voice went on, ‘but we don’t want any embarrassment, do we? I must say,’ he added, ‘that when James Tyson launched this prosecution he said he had the evidence for a conviction. I hope he was right.’ He was not going to admit to Treasury Counsel that he himself had read the police reports. ‘All I wanted to say, Richard, is go ahead and get that verdict and, as I said, avoid anything which could lead to embarrassment. You know what I mean.’ I certainly do, thought Bracton. No awkward Parliamentary Questions about why a prosecution had gone off half-cock or been derailed; or, on the other hand, why one of the Establishment had been given an easy ride. Otherwise the press would be after the hide of the government’s Law Officers.

  ‘So the net of it is,’ concluded the Attorney, ‘leave it to the jury. But you’re experienced enough, Richard. I leave it entirely to you.’

  Of course you do, Bracton thought. So that if there’s any trouble, you can blame Counsel for the Crown.

  As he replaced the receiver, Brian Graves asked, ‘What did he have to say?’

  ‘Go on to the end of the road, no quarter, no favours, and mind my back. The Attorney wants no trouble, no complaint when it’s all over.’ He sounded angry. Please, Joan prayed, be sensible, be careful.

  ‘Well. I’ll do what I think’s right,’ he continued. ‘And to the devil with them.’

  If you don’t do what they want, thought Graves, you can kiss goodbye to that judgeship.

  * * *

  Virginia ran the bath and emptied into it a cupful of aromatic bath-oil. She lay in the steaming water, playing with the froth, gently lathering her breasts. Limeys cock-up over judge prosecution. Perhaps that will now be the headline. But it wasn’t over yet. Either way, she could make a story of it.

  She thought again of Hugo. If the prosecution collapsed after he’d been sacked and Playfair had taken over his own defence, it wouldn’t do Hugo much good. But Hugo, after all, was history, and tonight she was dining again with Leslie Bramley. She liked his crassness, more than she had Hugo’s pretensions. And, she thought as she soaped herself langourously in the steaming-hot water, from Bramley she might get another piece of the jigsaw – the truth about the police and the press.

  16

  ON Tuesday evening the rumour had reached the journalists in the hotels and bars of the city that next day the defence would begin and that, contrary to what the prosecution had expected, the accused himself would go into the witness-box. As a result, on Wednesday morning the court was more crowded than ever before. Barristers in wigs and gowns who had slipped away from other courts to come and listen filled the back row of Counsels’ benches. Solicitors and their clerks stood in every gangway; the press bench was crammed, and every seat in the public galleries taken.

  As soon as the court sat Bracton announced he had no reexamination of the police officer. The technician, Fraser, came and went, his evidence, that he had checked the apparatus on the day following the deceased’s death and found it in perfect working order, unchallenged. The post-mortem evidence proving the cause of death was read; it was agreed that the cross-examination of the lawyer, Symes, would be interposed whenever he arrived. At shortly after eleven-thirty the case for the prosecution was concluded.

  It was the turn of the defence. Jonathan rose from his seat in the dock. ‘I have no opening statement to make,’ he said. ‘What I have to say I shall say from the witness-box, on oath.’

  It took him some time, using his cane and helped by the usher, to descend the steps from the dock and mount those to the witness-box. For this day he was dressed more formally than before, in a dark suit, with a cream-coloured shirt rather loose about the neck and a black knitted tie fastened in a large knot. He stood in the witness-box, a tall, slightly stooping figure, now directly facing the jury. Below them were the reporters, among them Leslie Bramley with the subpoena in his pocket. He tried to catch Virginia’s eye across the court but failed.

  When Jonathan had been in the dock, Bracton had his back to him. Now for the first time he could see Jonathan full-face and was struck by how frail the old man looked, as if a puff of wind could blow him away. He saw that Jonathan was carrying no note, no papers, nothing. In front of counsel, at the solicitors’ table, sat an ashen-faced Trent, beside him Harold Benson, who had moved so as to be able to hand to Jonathan any documents he might need. In her seat in the front row of the jury-box the middle-aged jurywoman couldn’t bring herself to look directly at him, so she kept her eye on the rail of the box, at about the level of his waist. But Virginia, in her usual seat in the front at the side of the court, did. Hitherto she had only been able to see him half-profile, or the back of his white head when he had stood and turned towards a witness. Now she too could see him full-face and she examined him carefully, noting the high cheekbones and the skin lined and crinkled like old parchment. He’ll not live long, she thought, in prison or not.

  While the usher was fetching the Testament, Jonathan once again glanced up at the wall high above the judge’s bench to the wooden, painted wheel depicting King Arthur’s Round Table – as he had when he had been brought into the dock on the first day of the trial. He remembered he had promised himself he would look up the role of Mordred, but he never had. Now he remembered the other names which, in his dream, had taken the places of Lancelot, Galahad and Percival; the names of Hartley, Trelawney, Connor, his own name – and, lastly, Willis. He looked down at the usher and took the oath.

  ‘You may sit if you wish,’ Graham said when Jonathan had been sworn.

  ‘Thank you, my lord, but I prefer to stand.’

  ‘Very well. But if you get tired, you may sit.’

  Then Jonathan began, and the middle-aged jurywoman now raised her eyes. He looks very fine, she thought.

  ‘I’m Jonathan Wentworth Playfair,’ he said in a light but strong voice which belied his frail appearance and carried to every corner of the courtroom. ‘I am nearly seventy-eight years of age and I live in rooms in my cousi
n’s home, Pembroke House in Tildsley. David Trelawney, whom they accuse me of killing, was a few months older than I and we had known each other since childhood. At one time our families became linked because for twenty years my father lived with David Trelawney’s mother.’ He paused. ‘So I knew David Trelawney all his life. I was with him when he died. But I did not kill him.’

  When he said this the middle-aged jurywoman in the front row thought he was looking directly at her and she looked away to stop herself from nodding. Jonathan went on: ‘We were at school together and at the same university, and soldiers together in the Second World War. Some of you may know’ – he stopped and looked straight at the juror in the dark blue blazer with the brass buttons. Then he smiled. (It’s a nice smile, Virginia thought.) – ‘No, I don’t imagine any of you are old enough to have personal experience of what I was going to say, which was that being together in war, in battle, forges a bond which is unique. It was one of the bonds which bound me to David Trelawney.’

  He looked down at his hands gripping the edge of the witness-box – old man’s hands, Virginia saw, mottled with age. Colonel Basildon, who knew about war, although a war later than that of which Jonathan was speaking, war in Korea, shifted in his chair beside the judge.

  ‘I wish I was able to paint for you in words a true picture of how David Trelawney was in his prime, during the war of which I was speaking. He was a very handsome man and in his uniform, with the ribbons of his decorations for gallantry on his left breast, he looked very splendid. He had only to enter a room for every woman to fall in love with him.’ He looked again at the same jurywoman, who again quickly looked away. ‘In battle every man under his command followed him gladly, even into the greatest danger. That I am alive today is due to his heroism.’ He paused. ‘But that I am in this place today is due to his malevolence.’ The court was deathly quiet as the light voice went on. ‘He saved my life in battle at the risk of his own, and I owe to him all the years that have passed since that night on a hillside in North Africa over fifty years ago.’ He paused again. Then added very quietly, ‘And he never, ever, let me forget it.’

  When he said this Bracton thought of what Trelawney had said in the recorded telephone call. About all that Playfair had given him. What had Playfair given?

  ‘When we were boys at school,’ the voice continued, ‘David Trelawney was the captain of everything, Head of everything. I was good only at my books, and my father, Beau Playfair as he was called, so much admired the young David Trelawney that he was unable to disguise his preference for David, the son of the woman with whom he eventually went to live, over me, the son of the wife he abandoned. And both David and I were aware of it. Later in our lives, during the war, David Trelawney fathered a child on a girl with whom I had grown up and whom I loved all my life. But he never married her.’

  There had to be a woman somewhere, Virginia thought. Would he tell what happened to her?

  ‘Because my father lived with David Trelawney’s mother for the last twenty years of his life, David Trelawney at one time referred to us as step-brothers. I did not. During those years I saw little of him or my father. I saw more of my mother.’

  Get on with it, thought the young juryman at the end of the front row, shifting restlessly. What happened in the room on that afternoon is what we want to hear. But the rest of the jury were listening, fascinated.

  ‘When he left the army in which he had won such honours David Trelawney went to live in France – his mother was French. But there he became involved in some very dubious businesses, in what was then called the black market, and he only narrowly avoided prosecution by the French authorities. His business ventures failed and he lost what money he had. My father bailed him out, not once but several times. Then in 1970 my father died. In his will he made generous provision for Trelawney’s mother and, as you heard from the statement of the lawyer, Mr Symes, he also made provision for David, but only if in old age David Trelawney was struck down by serious illness. After my father’s death David Trelawney got money out of his mother. That was the kind of man he had by then become. When she too died in 1979, David Trelawney turned to me.’

  Virginia began to make notes in a small notebook, but not like the court reporters in the press box, who had their heads bent over their pads, scribbling furiously as they took down every word. All Virginia needed for her piece was background, how he spoke, how he looked. Bramley too was taking notes, but by now he had become uneasy. Not only because of the subpoena in his pocket, but because he sensed that ever since Playfair had taken over from Shelbourne something in the atmosphere in the court had changed. He caught Virginia’s eye and smiled, but she looked away.

  ‘I had become a lawyer,’ Jonathan was saying, ‘and had been successful. Then I became a judge. Trelawney thought I was rich. He owed money, he told me; and I, as he also told me, owed him my life.’

  Wasn’t there something more than owing his life, Graham thought, something Trelawney had referred to in his letter to Lightwood? He leafed through his papers and took out the letter, Exhibit 6, and read it again. Yes, there it was. Trelawney had written: ‘I saved his precious skin – and more than that.’ What had Trelawney meant by ‘more than that’?

  ‘David Trelawney’s failure after the war in which he had been such a hero changed our relationship. I, over whom he had lorded it at school, at the university and in the army – I, to whom he had so condescended as a youth and whose life he had saved almost contemptuously – was flourishing, whereas he was penniless, scrounging from friends. Our positions had reversed.’

  Bracton whispered to Brian Graves, ‘What was it Trelawney said on the telephone? Something about Playfair so often giving.’ Graves handed him his note, and Bracton read: ‘I’ve taken a lot from you over the years, Jonathan. Now I want to give you something, for a change.’ Bracton handed back the note to Graves. That ‘something’ must be the letters. What Playfair had given must have been money. He looked up again at Jonathan.

  ‘He demanded I invest in his business in France, which I did, reluctantly. Later he asked a second time, then a third. When the businesses all failed he said he was destitute and began to ask for money to save him from ruin. So I helped him. At this time the sums were not great, for until his mother died she was his main source of funds. He was quite blunt. I owed it to him, he used to say, because I owed him my existence. So I paid up.’

  Why, wondered Bracton. Pay up once or twice for family reasons, yes. But why so often?

  ‘I am telling you this, members of the jury,’ Jonathan said, ‘because it is true that when Trelawney died I had every reason to want him dead. So, yes, I had a motive for killing him.’ He paused, looking intently at the jury. ‘I had a motive,’ he repeated, ‘but I did not kill him.’ He paused again. Then went on briskly, ‘In the early summer of last year I learned he was ill and had applied to the trustees of my father’s will for the funds which my father had provided. I was glad, for now he would get money from them, although I suspected that if he didn’t get all he wanted he’d come back to me for more.’

  He leaned forward and asked the usher for the tape recorder he had produced when he had been cross-examining Nurse Langley. He held it up in his hand. ‘For many years, unknown to him, I had been recording what he said every time he telephoned. The tapes of these conversations I kept in a drawer in my desk and when I came home from his death-bed and I thought the story had ended, I destroyed them and put away the recorder, which I thought I’d never have to use again. I had forgotten that the tape of the last conversation was still in the machine.’ He handed the recorder back to the usher. ‘When I heard he had cancer I was not sorry, not only because I would be relieved of his demands on me, but also because, quite frankly, I hoped he would not have long to live. But I say again – I did not kill him, nor did I help him to die.’

  Jonathan’s voice was now less steady, and the usher brought a glass of water and placed it on the ledge of the witness-box. Jonathan took it and sipp
ed.

  ‘I had not heard from him for several months when he telephoned me on the morning of Saturday June 21st. As soon as I heard his voice on the telephone I reached for the small recorder which I had on my desk.’

  Bracton turned back in his notebook to check again the note he had taken of what had been said on the tape. He kept it before him, following it while Jonathan spoke.

  ‘You may remember he asked me to call him back and said it was urgent. He did that because he wanted to convince the nurse, as he did convince her, that it was I who had insisted on coming to him. This was part of a plan that he had devised, a plan to implicate me in the death he had planned for himself, for, despite what he said to the nurse and doctor, he had decided to end his own life. He was not prepared, he told me when I came to him, and I believed him, to allow himself to be eaten away by his disease. What I did not suspect was that by his death he planned to get his revenge on me, for by this time there had grown in his mind a canker of jealousy and resentment of me as great as the cancer which had grown in his body. Unknown to me, in ending his own life, he planned to pull down the figure which represented to him the success he believed his golden youth and young manhood so much better deserved. He thought of me, whom he despised, as the respectable, wealthy, self-righteous judge, and what could be more appropriate than to have me, the former judge, suspected, better still accused, of his murder.’ Jonathan again sipped from the glass. ‘And because the investigating officer was a police officer who had a bitter grudge against me and who used my enemies in the press’ – here he looked down at Bramley – ‘and partly, I admit, because I left that house when I did, his plan succeeded. But that came later. On June 21st, having prepared the nurse and written his letter to Lightwood, suggesting apparently facetiously that I might put a pillow over his face to get him out of the way, knowing that when Lightwood read it, he, Trelawney, would be dead, he told me on the telephone he wanted to see me urgently because he was so ill and had not much time and wanted to give me some old letters from a person he knew I had always loved. This was the bait he used to get me to come to him. When I agreed he pretended to the nurse that he didn’t want to see me, that I had forced myself on him and that he was scared of me, and he got me to tell the nurse she could go out. All this he did to make her believe that it was I who wanted her out of the way. So the stage was set for his final piece of play-acting, which began when we were alone.