by C F Dunn
“Professor D’Eresby, if you would?”
I blinked; I had missed a question. The counsels were back in position and the jury were looking expectant.
Duffy frowned slightly. “If you would please reply so that the court might hear it.”
Reply? Blast – what had been the question? I opened my mouth but didn’t know what to say.
“Yes.” I heard it quite distinctly – a voice from the very centre of me.
“Yes,” I said firmly. She looked relieved.
She swung around to half-face the jury. “One last question, Professor D’Eresby – did you ever have sex with Kort Staahl?”
“No!” I was half out of the chair before I realized it, and if anyone had been in any doubt about how I felt regarding Staahl, they shouldn’t be now. I sat down again.
She gave me a sideways, satisfied look. “Thank you, professor, that’ll be all now.”
She walked back to our table, leaving me stranded and numb.
The judge took off her glasses and proceeded to clean them on her gown as she peered at me short-sightedly. “You can go back to your seat now, professor.”
I nodded and found my feet somewhere at the end of my legs, and made it back to my chair without collapsing and making a complete idiot of myself.
“The court will take recess and reconvene at fourteen hundred hours,” the judge announced, and then stood up and left through a rear door. The jury filed out next and then the room burst into a hubbub behind us as people shuffled down the long benches and out of the room.
Duffy finished putting her sheaf of papers away in her bulging briefcase and said something to her clerk, who laughed and shook his head. She swivelled in her chair to face me. “Hun, I expect you could do with some R and R, couldn’t you?”
I didn’t look at her. “Has he gone?”
She looked mystified. “Who?”
“Staahl. Has Staahl gone?”
She stood up and pushed her chair back, the metal caps on each leg scraping unpleasantly on the scarred wooden floors. “He’s gone. I think we’d better have a little downtime here. Come with me and we’ll find somewhere quiet to talk.”
The hall was almost empty but Elena and Matias were waiting on the bench opposite the door. At the far end of the hall a man talked on a mobile. His expression took on an alert interest when he saw us.
“Journalist,” Duffy said loudly. “Best friend or vulture, remains to be seen,” she added more quietly.
Matias had one leg crossed over the other and he tapped the toe of his shoe with his thumb like a drumstick on a tambour, tap, tap, tap, repeatedly. He stood up as he saw us, his combed hair already beginning to rebel into its normal unruly mass.
“How’s it going?” he asked both of us at the same time, but Duffy answered.
“Emma’s doing just fine; it’s always a bit of a learning curve the first time. You her friend?”
“Yes – Matias Lidström, and this is Elena Smalova,” he said, bringing Elena forward with his arm from where she hovered behind him.
“Can we take Emma out? Is it allowed?” Elena asked, looking as anxious as I felt.
“Sure you can, but I want to have a quiet few words with her first, so give us half an hour or so, if you would. I’ll show you where my office is so you’ll know.”
Duffy led us down the back stairs and around to her office.
“Half an hour,” Matias said, looking at me with a promise, and the door closed behind me.
Duffy went over to a door at the side of the room and stuck her head around it. “Leon, get us some coffee here and a bagel – the usual.” She pulled back to look at me over her shoulder. “Emma, what will you have?”
I shook my head. “Nothing, thank you.”
She raised her eyebrows and thrust her head back around the door frame. “Make that two, will you, honey? Sit down, Emma, you look as if you might fall down if you don’t.” She sat on the chair behind her desk, tilting it on to its back legs like we used to do at school. “Bet you’re feeling a little raw now,” she observed.
I grimaced. “That was… appalling.”
“Now, don’t you worry, you did OK. It always feels bad when you’re not used to it. That last question took you by surprise, didn’t it?”
“I think that’s an understatement.”
“But it did the trick, and it’s something Staahl’s counsel will want to come back to so don’t let it bother you. We had to get in there first.”
The door opened and the clerk brought in a tray with two small red cups that steamed seductively. The aroma of strong coffee filled the room, and I instantly felt a surge of nausea at the acrid smell.
Distaste must have shown on my face because Duffy slapped her thigh. “Dang, I went and forgot you don’t drink coffee. Leon, can you go get a bottle of water if you would – thanks.” She took a slug of coffee. “I take a double espresso myself during a trial; keeps me alert and frisky and on – their – case. All right, any questions?”
“What happens next? Do I have to go back on the stand after lunch?”
She finished her coffee and the cup rattled unevenly as she replaced it on its saucer. “Sure, you’ll be up again, the prosecution’ll want to ask you some questions in cross-examination. Then, we call our next witness; I expect you know who that is?”
I did, but I managed to sound tentative. “Dr Lynes?”
She eyed me speculatively. “Of course you do. He’d be a bit difficult to forget, I imagine – in the circumstances.”
I was saved from having to say anything by the clerk coming in with a brown paper bag with “Nellie’s Deli” written in red Italianate writing across the front.
The thin paper crackled like Christmas morning as Duffy took out a bagel in a film wrapper, and handed it to me. I wasn’t hungry, but took a tentative bite.
“You know, I think we’ll do something with your hair before you go back in,” she said, wiping her mouth with her napkin. “Loosen it up a little maybe, just around the edges.”
I put a hand to my hair defensively. “Why, what’s wrong with it?”
“Wrong with it? Did I say there was anything wrong with it? Hang, I’d kill for hair like yours. No, at the moment it’s a little tight – like a schoolmistress – and the light can’t get to it. We want to play the jury a bit before the prosecution gets going, get them on your side.”
“I had the impression they’ve already won them over.”
“Hell no, we can do better than that. Horatio might be a hot-dog lawyer but this jury is local and I know these people, I’ve been here long enough.”
“Horatio? His name’s Horatio?” I almost laughed. Almost.
“Quaint, isn’t it? You just keep thinking his name when he starts asking you those questions you won’t like, that’ll help keep it all in perspective.” She reached for the second cup of coffee and raised it to her lips. “You sure you and Dr Lynes are just friends?” I nodded, thankful I could focus on eating the bagel rather than having to look at her directly. “I only ask because he’s so darn good-looking, a girl’d have to be blind or gay – not that I have anything against gays or such – or lying, not to see it and hell, I see it and I’m a happily married woman.”
I glanced at her obliquely and she looked at me over the edge of her cup, her eyes sharply enquiring despite the light tone she adopted. “Of course,” she said slowly, “we wouldn’t want Staahl’s counsel thinking there’s more to your friendship than just being friends, because that might just undermine the testimony and we wouldn’t be wanting that, now, would we?” She tapped her finger on her cup, the pink-tipped nail tinking flatly on the porcelain.
I pretended to be eating, but in reality I frantically reviewed the past few months and whether we had been less discreet than we thought. I felt doubly thankful we hadn’t gone public, but there had still been plenty of speculation. And then there was Sam. If Sam were questioned, would he say anything? I remembered the way he had looked at us at the New
Year party as if puzzled why we were not together that evening. He obviously still bore a grudge; would he be willing to cement it by revealing to the prosecution what he knew of our relationship? I hadn’t seen him in the courtroom, but then I hadn’t looked, and it hadn’t occurred to me until now that he might be there.
She stopped tapping. “You know, you’ll have to answer counsel if he asks you a direct question, and if you seem evasive, he will keep digging until he finds dirt. So just you remember: keep your answers simple and keep them decisive – whatever they may be.” She let the chair drop with a dogmatic thud and put the cup on the saucer. “You better go see your friends. You’ll find this afternoon a little taxing so you might need their support. Come back here at a quarter to two and I’ll fix your hair.”
I stood up gratefully. “Thank you, Duffy, and thanks for the bagel.”
“Sure, hun, and you’re welcome. Go see your friends; I’ll be here.”
I welcomed the cold of the street after the stuffy, overheated air of the courthouse. We found the little café we last visited when Elena and I had come shopping for our evening clothes for the All Saints’ dinner, a lifetime ago.
The bitter, stewed tea made a welcome change from water and it fed life into my veins. I asked for a second cup as Elena and Matias ate their lunch.
“So, how was it – really?” Matias asked between mouthfuls.
“Really? Pretty horrid. I can understand what it must have been like walking to a scaffold in front of a crowd. You have this ball of fear in the pit of your stomach that won’t shift, and when you’re up there, you don’t see individual faces – people are just a blur – and you think they’re all looking at you, and judging you. The worst thing is, when I was asked a question my mind went blank, and I forgot all the things I meant to say and the way I wanted to say them. I felt like such an idiot.”
Elena finished her mouthful. “But you did not look it. You looked nervous, yes, but you should not worry about what people think of you – they are on your side.” She licked her finger. “That man on the prosecution team is very good too.”
I groaned.
“Well, he is,” she said, surprised.
Matias shook his head. “Emma doesn’t need to hear that, Elena, not now.”
“Elena’s right, Matias; the man has presence, we can’t deny that. The jury lapped him up. He’s so convincing.”
Matias put his big hand over mine. “So, you’ll have to convince them he’s wrong, won’t you? See it like a debate, not an interrogation, and that is not a scaffold you’re on, it’s a stage – and you’re the main player – so play them.”
I rotated my mug on the table in front of me gloomily. “That’s what Duffy said, but for me to act the part I have to know my lines, and I keep forgetting them.”
“Look, what did you do the first time you lectured to a room full of students?”
I thought back. “I told them what I knew.”
“Well, then, that’s all you have to do. You know what happened. Tell the truth.”
I studiously ignored the black-coated counsel for the prosecution and his client, whose eyes followed me all the way from the door, down the side aisle to my chair next to Duffy, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling with remembrance.
“That’s better,” Duffy said, inspecting my hair as we sat down. “That makes you look less uptight and a lot more vulnerable.” She sat back satisfied, and emptied the contents of her briefcase onto the table, selecting items from it and decking the papers into a pile. Her clerk handed her a piece of paper and they discussed it in subdued tones that I couldn’t hear properly.
The loosened hair formed a wave around my head, the strands shining pink-copper in the afternoon sunlight, catching my eye when I least expected it. I resisted the temptation to scrape it all behind my ears and out of my line of sight, and concentrated on the voices around me. I could hear them more clearly than this morning, almost as if I had taken cotton wool from my ears. Snippets of comments – shades of meaning behind veiled words. Mostly innocuous, but odd words filtered through: fetish, sadist, masochist. She led him on, I read it somewhere.
I whipped my head around to be met by a dozen pairs of eyes staring back: Elena and Matias – hopeful and supportive, others patently hostile, or curious, suspicious, or indifferent. I found Henry’s steady gaze through the wall of strangers, kind and affirming.
Duffy tapped my arm and I turned to face the front as the judge came in and sat down cumbersomely, balancing half-moon spectacles on her nose.
“Prosecution calls Emma D’Eresby.”
My mouth went dry. I pressed my damp palms together and rose to my feet, willing my knees to stop shaking. I couldn’t read the hazy faces of the jurors as I approached the stand.
“You are still under oath, Ms D’Eresby.”
I wondered why the prosecution counsel didn’t address me using my title, then realized he used it as a ploy to reduce my standing in front of the jurors. Great.
“Yes.”
“I hope that you had a pleasant lunch?”
Pig. As if he cared.
“Yes, thank you.”
“In your testimony, Ms D’Eresby, you said that the injury to your right arm was caused by my client bringing it sharply against the edge of the door. I suggest that this could equally have been caused by an accidental blow, perhaps when Dr Lynes flung himself with such heroism in order to save you.”
“No.”
“No, it wasn’t an accidental blow or no, Dr Lynes didn’t try to save you?”
Horatio Pig.
“Kort Staahl deliberately broke my arm to stop me from struggling and trying to escape.”
“So you say…”
My skin flushed but I stuck my chin out stubbornly. “Yes, I do.”
“Why were you in the atrium, Ms D’Eresby?”
“I had been told that there was a telephone call for me. I thought that it was an urgent call from England.”
“How convenient,” he almost sneered, “and was it?”
“No, there was no one there.”
“That wasn’t much of a surprise though, was it, because you had already arranged to meet my client by the porters’ lodge, hadn’t you?”
“No.”
“Oh, I think you had, but we’ll come back to that later.”
What did he mean?
“You say that you were afraid of my client. What reason did you have to be afraid of him?”
“I thought he was following me.”
“And you reported this to the police?”
“No.”
“Why not, Ms D’Eresby? You thought you were being followed – he frightened you, you say – and yet you didn’t do anything about it. Why not?”
“It would have been difficult to prove.”
“You mean you had no evidence to support your so-called fears, no evidence – like the telephone call. The jury can only make up their minds if there is evidence, Ms D’Eresby. What evidence is there that Kort Staahl planned and carried out an attack on you?”
Duffy cut through his bludgeoning attack. “Objection, Your Honour. Counsel is bullying Professor D’Eresby.”
Two tablets plinked and fizzed in the glass of water in the judge’s hand. “I want you to reword your question, counsel, and refrain from browbeating the defendant.” She drank half the contents in one gulp.
“Ms D’Eresby, tell the court, if you will, about the subject you have chosen to make your particular focus of interest.”
“I – I’m a historian. I study late medieval and early modern English and European social and religious history.”
“Yes, that’s all very interesting, but that doesn’t define your area of special interest, does it? Let me quote some of your more recent works by way of illustration – and this is relevant, before counsel for defense objects.”
He held up a piece of paper in front of him like a herald reading out a proclamation. “‘Demons and Demonology in Medieval Societ
y.’ ‘The Tortured Soul: The Use of Torture in Religious Courts 1300–1500.’ ‘Religion Persecuted: The Use of Torture in Religious Courts in the Counter-Reformation.’ ‘Crossing the Line: From Sect to Sedition’; and this one is my favourite: ‘Myth, Magic, and Monsters’ – very catchy, I love the use of alliteration, Ms D’Eresby. I could go on, members of the jury, but I think you get the picture.” They did; they looked at me in a new light and it wasn’t favourable.
“You enjoy studying topics that involve pain and torture, don’t you, Ms D’Eresby?”
“No.”
“Oh? You were forced to research those areas and write papers on them?”
“No.”
“Then please explain why a young woman of your obvious… talent would wish to focus on such unpleasant, violent subjects?”
A strand of hair strayed over my eyes; I twitched it out of the way. “Because they inform me of human behaviours that shape the history of that period.”
“So you say.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but he moved on.
“You indulge in fantasies about violence.”
“No, I do not.”
“You read and study acts of violence – some quite indescribably despicable acts – carried out on other human beings, is that not so?”
Duffy cut in. “Objection. Counsel cannot refer to acts in such general terms as it can lead to misinterpretation.”
Horatio held up his hand as if accepting judgment. “Thank you, I am much obliged to the counsel for the defense for pointing that out and I will correct my error by being more specific. Ms D’Eresby, let me read from part of your own work, your paper on: ‘The Tortured Soul: 1300 to 1500’.
“‘Although Papal guidelines were in place, authority for the processing of inquisition was not centralized until the Reformation. Responsibility for the organization of inquisition therefore lay with local officials resulting in varying interpretation of the guidelines.’ Blargh, blargh, blargh – ah yes, here we are…” A widespread snigger from around the room.
