by D. W. Buffa
‘Question: It was capable of sailing—of sailing safely— anywhere in the world?’
‘Yes, it was. I just testified that it had all the newest, best equipment, the—’
‘Question: You had dreamed about making this voyage, planned it for years, isn’t that correct?’
‘Yes—but not just this voyage.We were going to go everywhere, see everything. There was no limit to what we could do with her.’
Darnell had taken another step forward and was now close enough to touch Whitfield. At this last answer, he stood straight up and looked back at the jury. Then, with a puzzled expression, he moved across to the counsel table. Both hands on the back of his empty chair, he fell into a long, thoughtful silence.
‘She was that good, the Evangeline? There were no limits to what she could do?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Whitfield eagerly. ‘She was perfect. She could … No, I see what you mean. There was a limit, wasn’t there? She sank, so there must have been a limit—even for her.’
Darnell motioned to the clerk, a plump young woman with a pleasant face. ‘Would you please hand the witness what has been marked Defence exhibit 17? Would the witness be kind enough to identify the document he has just been handed?’
Whitfield glanced at the cover sheet of a thirty-page document. ‘ This is the report of the sea trials of the Evangeline.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Darnell, flapping his hand as he turned to face the jury.‘Would you please turn to page six? Now, would you read the second paragraph from the top? Just the highlighted portion, if you would.’
‘“During the sea trials, after one day of heavy weather, water began to leak through the aluminium hull. A crack was discovered below the waterline.’”
‘Yes, thank you, Mr Whitfield. That’s enough. Now, let me confess to you,’ he said as he wheeled around and looked at him directly,‘I have seldom ventured out in a sailboat anywhere except here on the San Francisco bay. I know very little about them and nothing at all about their construction. I have, however, been told by people whose business it is to know these things, that if that happens—if there is a crack in the aluminium hull, and if the aluminium plates begin to pull apart—and especially if it happens in the kind of dreadful storm in which the Evangeline suddenly found herself—the only question is how quickly she is going to sink. In your considered opinion, is that a fair statement of the case?’
‘Yes, but that problem was dealt with.’
‘Dealt with? Yes, I remember; the shipyard investigated. One of the welding rods was used improperly. Isn’t that what they found? Something about a welding rod that should have been used to weld a stainless-steel fitting on the rudder was used instead on the aluminium plates of the hull?’
‘The problem was identified and fixed. It was just one worker, just one weld. The crack was fixed,’ replied Whitfield.
‘Yes, the crack was fixed—the one you knew about—but did anyone bother to check if there were other, similar failures? Wouldn’t the safest thing have been to X-ray all the seams, make sure that all of them had been properly welded?’
‘There was no need for that,’ insisted Whitfield.
‘No need?’ Darnell’s eyes narrowed into a penetrating stare. ‘You can say that now, after she went down like that, after all those lives were lost?’
‘They found the crack; they determined the cause! The people who built her were convinced that everything was perfect!’
‘But the question, Mr Whitfield—the question that I have been asking myself ever since I first read that report—is why, if they thought it was “perfect”, did they also offer to check every weld and every seam?’ He looked at Whitfield almost apologetically. ‘The only point I wish to make is that the shipyard was prepared to conduct a thorough investigation into the safety of every part of that aluminium hull, but the decision was made not to do so. Isn’t that correct?
‘Yes, I have to admit that it is.’
‘We are still left with the question, though: why, when you found out that your father was ill, when you found out that you had to fly back home, you didn’t simply put off the maiden voyage of the Evangeline?’
Perhaps not even William Darnell himself could have said whether he had deliberately begun his cross-examination as if he were an enemy, calling the witness a liar, so he could convince Whitfield now, when it counted, that he was—if not a friend, at least sympathetic—willing and able to understand that none of the things that had happened later were his fault.‘The reason you did not postpone the date of departure for the Evangeline is because none of your guests could have waited. Isn’t that the reason, Mr Whitfield? The people you invited to go with you on this voyage were not the kind who could be asked to wait a week or even a few days. Isn’t that true, Mr Whitfield?’
‘I didn’t know how long I was going to be away. I couldn’t ask them to wait.’
‘Because there was a date by which everyone expected to be back in Nice, and they had other commitments, calendars full of places they had to be.’
‘Yes, they all had other things to do.’
‘Indeed. The invitations to your guests had gone out nearly six months in advance. I assume that is the kind of notice people who move in these circles require, because of all the other demands on their time?’
‘It had been planned well in advance, yes.’
Darnell nodded and for a moment stared down at the floor.
‘That was the reason, then,’ he said, slowly raising his eyes,‘that you could not afford the time it would have taken to have all the welding seams examined—because you had to have everything ready by the date the voyage was scheduled to begin—correct?’
‘No, it was because the only repair that was needed had been made! The last thing I would have done is jeopardise the safety of my boat and crew and the passengers on it!’
Darnell listened intently. The Evangeline had been doomed the day she left port and everyone knew it. ‘You testified that these people you invited knew their way around a sailboat.’ Darnell turned his back to the witness and stared at his own empty chair. ‘Would it not be more accurate to say that they knew their way around a yacht?’
‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’
Darnell’s gaze lingered on the empty chair, and then on Marlowe, who wore a strange, impassive expression that had become a kind of permanent mask. Darnell looked back over his shoulder. ‘They were used to being taken care of; they were not people who had to do much for themselves.’
‘I don’t think I would go that far,’ replied Whitfield with a slightly disconcerted look. ‘They were all successful; they all had money, but—’
‘When they showed up that morning, the day the voyage was to begin, how many of them drove their own cars?’ asked Darnell as he turned with a jaundiced look to the witness.
‘I don’t imagine any of them did, but I don’t see—’
‘How much food and drink was put on board? How many cases of champagne?’
‘I don’t know, I—’
‘And cases of caviar? There was a chef on board—correct? The chef of a five-star restaurant, hired at a cost of … Well, we can get into that later, perhaps. But no one on that boat was going to have anything to complain about in terms of comfort, were they?’
‘I wanted everyone to have a good time.’
‘No one on board was going to have to lift a finger; but that was only what they would have expected. That is the life they were used to, wasn’t it, Mr Whitfield? A life of luxury—and what some might call self-indulgence.’
Roberts was rising from his chair.
‘Yes, I have a question,’ said Darnell, smiling, ‘if you’d just be good enough to let me ask it.’
Roberts’s hands were still on the arms of his chair. Bracing himself, he sat back down.
‘Tell us this, Mr Whitfield: of those people you invited on this sailboat cruise around Africa, how many do you think had ever pulled an oar?’
Whit
field shifted his weight from one side to the other of the witness chair. ‘I don’t know. I assume some of them must at some point have rowed a boat somewhere.’
‘“Rowed a boat somewhere,”’ repeated Darnell with a dark look. ‘Let me then ask you the question this way: if you were going to be marooned in a lifeboat, Mr Whitfield—if your survival and the survival of everyone else were at stake—which of those guests of yours would you have chosen to be there with you? Which of them do you think could have helped you to survive?’
Whitfield tensed; the colour drained from his face.
‘These people you invited, these close friends of yours, they were all independently wealthy, weren’t they? And, as it turns out, the least independent people on the planet. They were useless, most of them, weren’t they? When it came right down to it, when everyone’s lives were at stake…?’
‘I wasn’t there! I don’t know what any of them did!’Whitfield protested.
Darnell took a step forward. ‘But Marlowe was different, wasn’t he? He knew how to do everything, didn’t he? You would not have trusted any of your rich and famous friends if you had been one of the survivors—abandoned in a small boat in the high seas, where no one was likely to find you—would you? But you trusted Marlowe, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I trusted him.’
Darnell searched Whitfield’s eyes, determined to get at the one thing the jury had to know.
‘And after everything that has happened, after everything you know, you would still do it, wouldn’t you—hire Marlowe to be in charge?’
‘Yes, I would.’
Chapter Three
ITWAS PERHAPS THE LEAST-EXPECTED INVITATION Michael Roberts had ever received. Prosecutors and defence attorneys might be civil to one another in court, but they seldom spent time together. It was difficult to be friends with someone you were trying to beat. But there was more to it than that. There was almost an element of distrust, a belief that what they did on the other side was not quite right. Roberts could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had had a cup of coffee with a lawyer defending someone he was prosecuting for a crime; he had certainly never agreed to drive forty miles on a Sunday afternoon to see a defence attorney at his home.
The directions were meticulous, precise; given over the telephone with the casual ease of someone who knew every turn by heart.
When he arrived, the gate at the bottom of the vineyard stood open. At the end of a long dirt driveway lined with gnarled grey olive trees, William Darnell, an old straw hat pulled low over his eyes, greeted him with a pensive smile.‘You’re right on time. Have any trouble finding it?’
‘No, your directions were perfect.’ Roberts took a deep breath of the country air and looked out over the narrow vine-covered valley.
‘This is the valley inside the valley,’ explained the older man as he pointed towards the low-lying hills half a mile away. ‘If you keep going along the road, follow it around a few miles, you come out into what the world knows as the Napa Valley. Not many tourists come back here.’
They stood on a patio in front of the house, a comfortable contemporary with wooden beams across the ceiling and glass everywhere. A stone chimney towered above the roof.
‘Have you had it long?’ asked Roberts as he followed Darnell inside. The wooden floors, polished to a hard finish, glimmered in the yellow October light.
‘A little more than thirty years. My wife designed it; built it, really. She was an architect, one of the best.’
He removed the straw hat and wiped his brow with the back of his wrist. The threadbare polo shirt he wore was damp with sweat. ‘A few things needed pruning back,’ he explained. He gestured towards the blue sofa in front of the bookcase in the living room. ‘Let me get you something to drink. I could use something cold, myself. Soft drink all right, or would you rather have a beer? I have wine, too, of course.’
‘Do you make any of your own?’
‘No, too much work. But we have ten acres, and that used to qualify us as a grower, which meant we could buy from all the wineries in the valley at cost. That was before it became big business. Have you ever noticed that the more money people make, the less generous they become? But we still have a lot of what we bought years ago.’ Darnell’s eyes lit up.‘Yes, that’s a good idea. Let me open one of the bottles we got back then. Sarah would approve. I’ll just be a minute.’
A photograph on the wall across the room caught Robert’s eye.‘You were on a carrier?’ he asked, when Darnell returned and handed him a glass three-quarters full.
Darnell turned to look at the large black-and-white photograph and moved closer. ‘Everyone I knew was on a ship.’
‘The war?’
‘Yes, the war,’ said Darnell, his eyes coming back around. ‘Death was everywhere then. I think we all assumed we would not come back, that we would end up dead. Perhaps that’s the reason I never felt more alive.’
He looked across at Roberts, sitting on the sofa on the other side of the brightly lit room. He raised his glass. ‘To your health. And thank you for humouring an old man and coming all this way on a Sunday afternoon. But I thought we ought to talk, and I thought you might prefer we kept it private.’
Roberts began a half-hearted objection.
‘No, I understand,’ Darnell assured him. ‘We tend to look on each other as the enemy. But perhaps in this case we have more in common than opposing lawyers usually have.Your father was in the navy, too, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes. How did you know…?’
‘I read it somewhere. I like to know something about the people I’m going to trial against.Your father was in the navy. He was lost at sea. My ship was sunk, and I was saved.’
‘That’s why you said what you did the other day—that the only sailing you did was around the bay.’
‘For a very long time I would not do even that. I’m sorry about your father. A lot of brave men died in the war.’
‘I didn’t know him. I never had the chance. I was just a baby when he died.’
Darnell sank back in his chair. ‘He died in the service of his country; a decent, honourable death. Most people now think that there is nothing worse than death, but that isn’t true, is it? How you die is rather more important than how long you live. But I’m sorry that you didn’t have the chance to know him. It must have been difficult growing up without a father.’
‘My mother was a remarkable woman,’ Roberts replied, and then quickly changed the subject.‘You were rescued at sea. Is that why you took the case? Because of what happened to you?’
Darnell shook his head. ‘Not because my ship was sunk and I spent a few hours floating in the ocean. There were ships and planes all around; it was one of the great battles of the Pacific. I might get killed, I might get picked up—but whatever was going to happen, it was going to happen before that day was over. I had the certainty of that, which is more than Marlowe ever had. No, it was not what happened to me then; it was what happened to my wife.’
Darnell got up from the chair and opened the sliding glass door next to the stone fireplace. A warm breeze brought in the rich, earthy smell of the vineyards below.
‘We started coming up here in the late sixties.We bought the land and planted the vineyard before we built the house.You live in the city and you notice the weather and the way it changes; you live out here and you watch the seasons and the way life moves through an endless cycle of birth and death and birth again. My wife, Sarah, died after a long illness. She kept reminding me that it was the natural order of things, that everything that comes into being goes out of being, and that you ought to understand that as a gift and not a curse—but it still broke my heart when she died. I watched my wife die and I know I’m not that far from my own death. It isn’t at all remarkable if, at my age, I find that many of my thoughts are a kind of meditation on death and dying. That’s one of the reasons I took this case: if it is about anything, it is about death and what it means and under what circumstanc
es it is to be preferred.’
‘And who has the right to make that decision,’ added Michael Roberts in a solemn voice.
‘Yes, precisely,’ Darnell agreed, moving back to his chair. ‘The right—and perhaps the obligation. There’s no precedent for what we’re doing. Did you think of that when you decided to charge him? There has never been a trial like it—not in an American courtroom, anyway.’
It was not an accusation, and Roberts knew it, but he still did not like the question. There had not been any choice, not after the details of what had happened began to come out.
‘That’s not quite true,’ he replied, a slight trace of irritation in his voice. ‘There was one.’
‘The Holmes case is more than a hundred and fifty years old,’ replied Darnell.‘What does that tell us? That things like this never happened after that? That no one did what Marlowe was forced to do between then and now?’
‘Forced to do?’ asked Roberts with a troubled look.‘Isn’t that what we have to decide?’
‘What difference will it make what we—what a jury decides? There are some things that decide themselves. I understand that people want him punished, as if he hasn’t suffered enough—as if anything could be worse than what he has to live with every day. But how can anyone, sitting in the safe comfort of a courtroom, knowing that they are only a few minutes from the safe comfort of their homes, know what it was like out there? Can any of us say we would have done better? Can any of us say we would have done as well?’
‘There is nothing I can do,’ replied Roberts with a plaintive glance. ‘Even if I agreed with you, it’s too late—unless you want to talk about a plea. We offered before. Are you saying he’s changed his mind?’
Darnell shook his head.‘No, he hasn’t changed his mind. From the first day I met him, he wanted to go to trial. As near as I can tell, that’s the only thing he wants.’ Lifting his eyebrows, Darnell stared into the middle distance. ‘To go to trial and be convicted.’
‘What?’ Roberts sat forward. ‘He wants to be convicted?’
‘I don’t think there is any question. I think it would come as a relief, a kind of redemption, if you will; a penance paid for his sins. Not the sin of what he did, but the sin he was born with, that we were all born with, the original sin that meant we all had to die. He did what he thought he had to do, but that was not any choice at all.Yes, I think he wants to be convicted. It’s the only way he can rescue himself.
