by D. W. Buffa
‘So we go on with it, then,’ said Maitland with a sigh, ‘and let the jury decide.’ He looked at Darnell closely. ‘I’m sure you’ve explained to him that in a case like this the court has no discretion. If he is convicted, it will be either death or life in prison.’
‘Marlowe is quite aware of that.’
‘Unless they should find him guilty of manslaughter as a lesser included charge. We would not oppose that instruction,’ offered Roberts.
‘Yes, I’ve thought of that; but even that carries time in prison.’
Darnell tapped his fingers on his knee. ‘The jury may not be looking for a way to be lenient. After what Marlowe tells them, I wouldn’t be too surprised if they want to hang him.’
‘Who would ever believe it?’ said Maitland after a brief and troubled silence. ‘A case in which the prosecution wants leniency and the defence rejects it!’
Maitland got back to business. He asked again whether the prosecution had called its last witness. Roberts said he had.
‘In that case, the defence can begin its case in the morning. Other than the defendant,’ he asked Darnell,‘how many witnesses do you plan to call?’
‘All the survivors; or rather, the ones Michael did not call.’
Maitland had his pencil. ‘And those would be?’
‘Other than Marlowe—Hugo Offenbach … And perhaps the other woman, Cynthia Grimes, if I can talk her into it.’
Roberts raised his eyebrows. ‘You found her? You’ve talked to her?’
Darnell responded with a playful frown. ‘Yes and no.’
‘Yes and no?’ asked Roberts, laughing.
‘Yes, I talked to her; no, she did not talk to me, at least not at first. Our first conversation went as follows: “Hello, Mrs Grimes? This is William Darnell, the attorney for Vincent Marlowe.” Then I heard a click.’ Darnell paused for a moment before he added, ‘No, I don’t think I’ve left anything out.’
‘And you’re calling her anyway?’
Darnell was on his feet.
‘I will if I can. But I can’t force her to come, and, so far at least, she has made it quite plain that she does not want to.’
Maitland made a check mark next to each of the three names on the witness list in the court file. ‘Anyone else?’
An impish smile crawled across Darnell’s mouth. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s half an answer,’ replied Maitland drolly. ‘Give me the names and you’ve got it all.’
‘I’m going to call the naval architect who designed the Evangeline. I’ve forgotten his name at the moment, but Mr Roberts has it—the one who signed the report, already introduced into evidence, about the sea trials and the repairs that were done.’
‘Anyone else?’ asked Maitland when Darnell appeared to hesitate.
‘There is a chance that I may call one of the witnesses already called by the prosecution.’
‘Which one?’ asked Roberts, intensely interested.
‘The first one: Benjamin Whitfield.’
‘But why? What more can he add to what he has already testified?’
‘I could not tell you that, even if I knew. I have a feeling, that’s all—let’s just leave it at that.’
A feeling was all it really was, and perhaps even less than that: an unsupported hope. He confessed that night at dinner that he did not think he had any choice, that he had to take a chance, throw away all the rules, all the tried and tested principles on which experienced courtroom lawyers depend for their success.
‘It started to crystallise itself in my mind while I was listening to the testimony of Samantha Wilcox, something she said about everything being in the hands of God.’
Summer Blaine put down the menu, wondering at the useless habit that made her glance at the list of dishes she had long since learned by heart. They had been coming to this same Filmore Street restaurant from almost the first time she had come into the city to spend an evening or a long weekend at the apartment in Pacific Heights. It was odd the way a habit could become a custom, a part of your practice, something that gave shape to your life. There was a strange fear that to give it up was to risk the unknown, that even the smallest change might, like the first crack in a foundation, lead to the destruction of everything else. The menu was a totem of her own invention, and she knew it, but that did not make it any easier to risk her luck.When she scrubbed for surgery, she always washed her right hand first.
‘There has to be some cause, some reason for the things that happen,’ Darnell went on, growing more animated as he spoke. ‘Especially when it is something truly awful. It was fascinating, what she said about why they drew lots to choose who would die: that it had to be left to chance to make sure it was God’s decision.What a powerful belief that is—that nothing happens by chance, that everything has a meaning, that everything is part of some larger design!’
With a last, almost surreptitious glance at the menu, Summer Blaine ordered what she usually did; and then, because he was too wrapped up in what he was saying to pay attention to what he wanted, she ordered, as she often did, for Darnell as well.
The small restaurant was quiet, nearly empty, the way it often was at the late hour they came. It had become a private joke, the familiar greeting repeated each time they walked in, that it must be almost time to close. That was part of the habit, too—the custom by which Darnell held himself to the rigour of the schedule in which he worked through the evening, took an hour or two for dinner, and then, while nearly everyone else was asleep, worked into the early hours of the morning. It might have killed a younger man, but he insisted, as he did about most of the things to which Summer Blaine objected, that it kept him alive.
‘Do you believe in God?’ he asked, bending his head to the side the way he did when he was particularly interested in the answer.
‘Yes, but it doesn’t mean I believe in heaven.’
Her answer did not surprise him. Nor did it seem to confuse him.‘The God who creates the world and then leaves it to its own devices?’
‘Yes, I suppose—something like that. I’ve been a doctor too long to believe that something as intricately organised as the human body is just the chance result of simple cells organising themselves. I’ve helped bring too many children into the world—delivered too many babies—to believe that higher things just happen to evolve out of lower ones. If you know a building is made from bricks, and that the bricks are all the same weight and size, that still doesn’t really tell you much about how Chartres or Mont-Saint-Michel were built. There has to be some intelligence, something that makes us what we are.’
‘But nothing after death?’
‘Just the memory we leave behind.’
‘Death is final, absolute?’
Summer Blaine picked at a green lettuce salad. She was not quite certain what she believed and was too honest not to say so.
‘Isn’t that the real mystery of existence—that we’re here at all? So many people worry about what will happen to them after they die. I don’t hear many of them worrying about what happened to them before they were born. We accept the fact that we did not exist. But then, how could there be anything like life eternal? Eternity does not just mean that there is no ending: it also means that there is no beginning.’
She pushed the salad plate aside. In a teasing parallel, she bent her head the same way he bent his.
‘Now that I’ve solved the problem of the universe, why don’t you tell me what you were going to tell me about the trial? What was it about what Samantha Wilcox said that made you think you had to throw out all the rules? Which rules do you mean?’
Darnell’s grey eyebrows became expressive half-circles. ‘In the vast majority of murder trials, the defence is really quite simple: either the evidence is not sufficient to prove the guilt of the defendant, or the evidence, no matter how powerful, could just as easily be used to prove the guilt of someone else. If the defendant had a motive to kill the victim, there were others who had an even stronger reason to w
ant him dead. It is all perfectly straightforward; it only gets complicated when there is no serious dispute about the facts. Let’s take you as the killer.’
She laughed when she saw the mockery of melodrama in his eyes. ‘Me? I’m the villain? Who am I supposed to have killed?’
‘Not supposed to have killed—you did it. And there isn’t any doubt about it: you confessed.’
‘And was my confession voluntary or was it beaten out of me?’
Darnell waited while the waiter cleared away the salad plates and served the main course.
‘You confessed to killing several patients, each of them in terrible pain, none of them with any chance of survival.You killed them because it was the only way to end their suffering. The prosecution says that doesn’t matter; whatever reason you claim to have had, it’s murder. The defence says that it not only matters, it is the only thing that does.You had it in your power to ease their suffering. A law that says you should not do that is barbaric and should not be obeyed.’
‘Can you say that? Can you make that argument in court? Tell the jury that in some cases the law should not be obeyed?’
‘No, I can’t. But that doesn’t mean a jury can’t decide on its own to ignore the narrow requirements of the law. But there isn’t much chance they’ll do that unless they think there is someone else who is more to blame for what happened.’
Darnell paused to sample the food in front of him.With the fork dangling in his hand, he leaned towards her, his eyes filled with cheerful malice as he told her how she might be saved.‘You killed these people because you could not stand to see them suffer. But why were they under your care in the first place? Why were they in the hospital, going through such torment? Suppose that it was not because of some normal, terminal disease; suppose they were there because of an accident.A building collapsed and they were all buried beneath the rubble. Who, then, is responsible for their deaths?’ he asked with a shrewd glint in his eye. ‘The contractor who, to save money, did not build it right? The inspector who was bribed to look the other way? Or the gifted physician who eased the suffering of people who would not have been in that position—dying in agony —had it not been for their criminal negligence? That’s what the testimony of Samantha Wilcox taught me: the question about creation, the question about the beginning. How did this terrible thing begin? Who created the situation in which Marlowe and the others found themselves? Why were they out there, forced to do what they did? None of this would have happened if the Evangeline had not sunk. And why did the Evangeline sink? Who is responsible for that?’
‘But the Evangeline went down in a storm! You’re not going to try to blame it on God?’
Darnell stroked his chin. He looked at her from under lowered eyelids.
‘No. That was something else Samantha Wilcox taught me. She doesn’t believe that God controls everything; she believes in free will. It was not God’s decision that they start sacrificing one another so that some of them could survive. God came into it only when they drew lots. In that sense, it doesn’t matter who or what created the situation in which they found themselves: it was their decision—a decision Marlowe carried out—to take the lives of those whose names were drawn.’
‘Just as it would not matter who was responsible for sending those people to the hospital; I did not have to kill them.’
‘Which gets us back to what makes this trial different, what sets it apart from all the so-called mercy killings we read about: if Marlowe had not done what he did, none of them would be alive.’
A question had been building in her mind almost from the day Darnell had told her that he had taken the case. She asked it now because of a feeling that it went to the heart of what was really at issue, and what he had been struggling with all along.
‘Do you think it’s better that he did? Do you think it’s better that he killed those people so the others could live?’
‘No, I don’t; but then, neither does he. Nor do any of them, I suspect; except perhaps Trevelyn, and I’m not absolutely sure about him. The only thing worse than what they did—what they had to do—is that Marlowe should now be punished because of it. That’s why I have to give the jury a reason to believe that Marlowe had no choice, that he was put in a situation where it was the only thing he could do. But I have to do more than that: I have to give them a reason to believe that someone did something wrong, that the Evangeline went down because of something someone did or didn’t do, and not because of the storm or any other act of God. I have to give them someone else they can blame.’
Chapter Seventeen
‘THE DEFENCE CALLS THE DEFENDANT,VINCENT Marlowe.’
This was unorthodox, a break with convention. The defendant, if he was called to testify at all, was usually called last. The other witnesses called by the defence would give evidence that should, in one way or another, help demonstrate his innocence. Only then would the defendant take the stand. With no one to follow him, no one to contradict what he said, he could give his own account of what happened and swear by whatever he held sacred that whoever had committed the murder, it had not been him.
Roberts darted a glance at Darnell. He could read nothing in the older man’s eyes. Reaching for his ballpoint pen, he wrote Marlowe’s name on the top line of a blank sheet of paper in a small hand. Then he waited, ready to take what could sometimes be verbatim notes as he listened to a witness called by the other side.
Though the jury had seen Marlowe every day, sitting there with that same stern expression on his face, they watched him now as he took the oath with intense curiosity. Their eyes were all over him, trying to find in the way he looked the difference, the thing that set him apart, that made him peculiar, unique—the thing that made him a man capable of things they themselves could never do. There was a kind of shock, a sense of puzzlement and almost disappointment, when he settled into the witness chair and began to answer questions in a manner and a voice that, to all appearances, seemed quite normal.
For those who had never seen him outside this courtroom, who had never known him before this trial, he was what you might expect of a man who had lived his life among the other strangers who spend their days and nights at sea. There was the quiet confidence, the unhurried look, and the sense of inevitability that seemed to accompany even the smallest thing he did. If the eyes of other men were in constant motion—measuring, comparing, appraising; taking their bearings by the customs, the habits, the expectations they saw all around them—Marlowe looked straight ahead, oblivious, or indifferent, to what other people thought they wanted.
‘I want to begin at the beginning, Mr Marlowe.’
Darnell paused and, with his hand resting on the front corner of the counsel table, briefly lowered his eyes and smiled. ‘You understand that the reason I don’t call you by your first name— Vincent—is because the rules require a certain formality?’ he asked, raising his eyes, not to the witness, but to the jury.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Marlowe in a voice that could be heard as clearly at the back of the courtroom as at the front. He was used to making himself heard in the open air; he had none of the lifeless whisper of an indoor voice.
‘Where were you raised, Mr Marlowe?’
‘Seattle.We did not always live there, in the city, but always somewhere on the Sound: Everett for a few years, Port Townsend for a year or so after that.’
‘And was it because of your father’s work that you always lived in the Seattle area?’
‘My father worked on ships. He was a boilermaker by trade.’
‘How long did you live there—in Seattle?’
Marlowe spread his knees apart and hunched forward. He held his large hands together and squinted into the dull glare of the courtroom light.
‘Until my father died. Then I left.’
Darnell waited, expecting more, but Marlowe had the habit of economy in speech as well as in other things.
‘Would you explain for the jury,’ said Darnell in a gentle, soothing voice,�
�what happened—how your father died and what, because of his death, you had to do?’
‘He died when I was twelve. It was an accident; happened while he was working on a freighter come in for repairs. There was not any money—all my mother had was a small widow’s pension—and there was my sister to raise.’
This time Darnell did not wait quite so long. ‘Your sister— how old was she?’
‘Just a baby—a year … a year and a half.With my father gone, I had to do my part. I didn’t mind; I had grown up with ships and I was waiting for the chance. I wanted to go to sea. I wasn’t all that good in school.’
‘You had grown up with ships? You mean, listening to your father?’
‘That, and going with him when he had one to work on. It was great fun for me—a boy of eight or nine—having the run of a ship, free to explore every nook and cranny. The men who worked in them, holed up in port with nothing pressing they had to do, would tell you stories of things they had seen from all the different places in the world. My head was always filled with thoughts of adventures, of mysterious places I would one day explore, a seaman on one of those freighters taking cargo from one side of the ocean to the other.’
‘You went to work with your father? You mean on those days you weren’t in school?’
‘Saturdays, mainly; and most days in the summer—including the one when it happened.’
Darnell had begun to move from the counsel table across the front of the courtroom to the jury box. He stopped in mid-stride and abruptly turned his head. He had not known.
‘You were there?You were on the ship the day your father died?’
Marlowe sat back in the chair and slowly nodded.‘I was out on deck, near the stern, watching a couple of hands mending rope. The explosion almost tore the ship in two. I knew my father was gone the moment it happened. He knew the risk. He always had me in another part of the ship, away from where he did the work.’
The fretted lines on Darnell’s forehead spread and deepened as he studied Marlowe a moment longer.Was it, he wondered, as a witness of his father’s death that Marlowe had learned the double lesson that every life was settled in advance and that every fate was unknowable? A wave of fatigue came over Darnell. He rested his hand on the jury box railing, staring down at the floor as if he were watching in his mind what young Marlowe had been through. When he raised his eyes to the witness, the sense of weakness had passed.
