Judge Walden

by Peter Murphy

  I agree, and at this point, I admit, I’m more than ready to pounce on Susan – but Busby has been staring at her.

  ‘Has something like that happened to someone you know?’ he asks her, kindly and gently.

  ‘It happened to my mother,’ Susan replies. ‘She was diagnosed with cancer and she went to an astrologer, who said…’ she stops abruptly. ‘I’m sorry, your Honour, I shouldn’t have started this line of questioning. I’ll stop.’

  So that’s what’s getting to her, that’s where the personal animus is coming from. I’m about to invite everyone to move on, when Busby pre-empts us all once again.

  ‘That should never have happened to your mother,’ he replies. ‘I’m very sorry that it did.’

  ‘She asked him the question,’ Susan concedes quietly.

  ‘Let’s move on, shall we, Miss Worthington?’ I suggest.

  ‘No astrologer has to answer a question just because a client asks it,’ Busby replies.

  ‘Would you have answered that question?’ I ask, sensing that Susan needs a few moments.

  ‘No, your Honour.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because my role is to help my clients to make positive decisions about their lives using their free will, and I can’t imagine how answering that question would help. And that’s before you take into account that even if I see a ridge of high pressure, the weather doesn’t always play by the rules.’

  ‘I have nothing further, your Honour,’ Susan says.

  I give everyone a twenty-minute break. Susan’s not the only one who needs some recovery time.

  ‘Your Honour, I call Lydia Howell,’ Aubrey says when we resume.

  Lydia Howell is a small, energetic, grey-haired woman wearing bright clothes, with a pair of large, garish spectacles dangling from a silver chain around her neck.

  ‘Mrs Howell, do you live in London?’

  ‘Yes, in Islington.’

  ‘What do you do for a living?’

  ‘I’m a professional astrologer.’

  ‘For how long have you been an astrologer?’

  ‘For many years. I graduated from the College of Astrological Studies of Wales in 1972 and I’ve been in practice ever since.’

  ‘Do you know the defendant, Gerard Busby?’

  ‘I do indeed. I’ve known him since before he qualified. The college asked me if Gerard could do his hours sitting in on consultations with me, after he’d passed his exams. You have to do forty hours of sitting in before you can get your diploma. He didn’t do all forty hours with me. I don’t think it’s good to spend the whole time with the same person; it does you good to see different styles and different approaches, so I arranged for him to spend some time with other astrologers I knew. But he did the bulk of his hours with me.’

  ‘During that time, did you have the opportunity to assess Mr Busby’s ability as an astrologer?’

  ‘Both then and since. Since then we’ve kept in touch, we’ve spoken at conferences together, and we both teach for the college from time to time.’

  ‘And what is your opinion of him as a professional astrologer?’

  ‘Gerard is extremely competent. That was obvious even when he was sitting in with me. I always asked him what he thought of the charts before we saw a client, and he was almost always right on the money. Before long, I was letting him conduct part of the reading – with the client’s approval, of course. He is a very safe pair of hands. I would trust his judgment implicitly.’

  ‘What do you say about his honesty, his professional integrity?’

  ‘They are of the highest order. I’ve never had any cause to question them.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Howell. Now, did my instructing solicitors ask you to assist by looking at some charts and then answering a question based on those charts?’

  ‘Yes, they did. I’ve brought them with me if anyone wants to see them.’

  ‘Thank you. Would you tell the jury what you were asked to do?’

  ‘I was given a chart for the time of a question posed to Gerard by a client, together with the client’s natal chart with progressions, and her solar return for the year.’

  ‘Was that client a Mrs Edith Hunter?’

  ‘So I’ve been told since. I wasn’t given her name at the time – privacy concerns, you understand.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Do you know Mrs Hunter at all?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘What was the question asked?’

  ‘The client had asked whether she would get a new job in Paris, about which she had been approached, although no offer had been made to her, and she wanted to know whether it was going to work out for her.’

  ‘Before we go any further, Mrs Howell, did the solicitors tell you why you were being asked to look at these charts?’

  ‘Yes, they explained that Gerard had been charged with fraud in connection with a judgment he had made for a client, and they wanted an independent opinion about the work he had done.’

  ‘Did they tell you what Mr Busby had concluded about the charts?’

  ‘No. They said they wanted my independent opinion.’

  ‘Did you have any communications with Mr Busby about the question?’

  ‘No, of course not. As I say, they wanted my independent opinion.’

  ‘What, if any, conclusion did you reach?’

  ‘Well, please understand that I didn’t have the advantage of meeting the client, which I would always do if she were my client…’

  ‘I understand…’

  ‘So I was working only with the charts…’

  ‘But with that reservation…?’

  ‘With that reservation, my opinion was that there was a very high probability that she would get the job.’

  ‘Was it certain?’

  ‘That’s a word I don’t use. Certainty doesn’t exist. There was a very high probability.’

  ‘I’m not going to ask for your reasoning, Mrs Howell, but are you ready to explain how you reached your conclusion if anyone wants you to?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Mrs Howell. Wait there please.’

  ‘I have no questions, your Honour,’ Susan says after some thought.

  We have some time left before we have to adjourn for the day; but we’re ready for closing speeches now, Susan has to go first, and I’m not sure she’s in the right frame of mind to do it this afternoon. She looks thoroughly miserable. I tell the jury that for administrative reasons we can’t go any further today, and release them until tomorrow morning.

  * * *

  Wednesday morning

  ‘My Nan used to read people’s palms,’ Elsie says, as she wraps up my ham and cheese bap, following a lengthy discussion of the case while she was assembling it.

  ‘What kind of things did she tell them?’ Jeanie asks, handing me my latte and taking my money.

  ‘Well, the usual things – you know, they were going to meet a tall, dark stranger, or they were going to win the pools. They never did, of course, but they all thought it was very interesting.’

  ‘My auntie Nell did the Tarot cards,’ Jeanie says.

  ‘Oh yes?’ I say, ‘and what kind of things did she predict?’

  ‘The same as Elsie’s Nan, as far as I remember, sir, though in Auntie Nell’s case someone actually did win the pools.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ Elsie protests.

  ‘No, she did. I mean, it wasn’t the whole thing, the million pounds or whatever it was if you got all the results right. But she had five draws on the coupon, so she won a fair bit, didn’t she? Enough to keep her in Guinness for a while, let’s put it that way. Of course, everybody started coming to see auntie Nell after that; but nobody won anything else, so they left her alone eventually.’

  ‘You got it all sorted,
guv, did you?’ George asks as I hand over my change to pay for The Times. ‘It was a bit naughty of the Standard to put all that stuff in there with your trial going on, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was indeed,’ I agree.

  ‘If you ask me, guv, the Standard hasn’t been the same since they started giving it away for free. In the old days, when you had to pay for it, it was all right, wasn’t it? And in those days you could always buy the News if you didn’t fancy the Standard, couldn’t you? But ever since they stopped charging for it – I don’t know, but it’s just not the same, if you know what I mean. Perhaps it’s all the advertising.’

  ‘Perhaps it is,’ I say.

  ‘I tell you what, guv,’ he adds, ‘what you ought to do is have all those astrologers, or whatever they call themselves, hauled up before you for contempt of court. Then, you could ask them to predict what sentence you were going to give them, and you could give them more than they were expecting. You could have a right laugh with them, couldn’t you?’

  Susan still isn’t quite herself, but she makes a brave show of it. She’s brief and to the point and, actually, quite effective. She avoids the mistake of launching a full-scale attack on astrology and concentrates on the case at hand. The moment Gerard Busby accepts two hundred and fifty pounds from Edith Hunter to predict the obvious, she argues, he must take responsibility for the certainty of success he plants in her mind. And it was always a good bet that he’d be proved right, wasn’t it?

  ‘I mean, come on, members of the jury, she’d been head-hunted for goodness sake. It doesn’t take an astrologer to forecast that the job is as good as hers, does it, when an agent has been plying her with offers of more money and better perks and an idyllic new life in Paris? You and I would reach the same conclusion after chatting with her for five minutes, wouldn’t we, using nothing more than our common sense? We wouldn’t need to consult the stars, would we?’

  But once he takes her money and talks to her about the charts, Susan argues, he steps into the shoes of Le Chat Bien Paré’s agent, he takes over where the agent left off. Now Gerard Busby is the one making all the promises, the one seducing her with the prospect of this wonderful change in her fortunes. And once he does that, he has to take responsibility for her reaction to the promises he makes, because in promising her that her fortune is written in the stars, he invests common sense with an aura of scientific method that it doesn’t have. Left to her own devices, left to her own common sense, Edith Hunter would have been more circumspect, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t have counted her chickens before they hatched. But if your fate is written in the stars, you can assume that they’re already hatched and running around the yard, and you can start buying the ingredients for your Chicken Kiev.

  Except, you can’t: because if you do, you risk sabotaging the result in the real world, because if there’s one thing that’s going to kill an interview it’s treating it as a formality and being arrogant enough to assume that the job is already yours. In all probability, that’s what happened to Edith Hunter, just as the defence said. But unlike the defence, we say that the blame falls fairly and squarely on Gerard Busby, not on Edith Hunter. The blame falls on Gerard Busby because he’s the one who took an obviously likely event and placed on it the spurious seal of inevitability offered by this pseudo-science of astrology. He knew what he was doing, and what he was doing was dishonest and fraudulent. Turning Aubrey’s strong point back on him is clever, and effective, and for the first time for a while, the case seems to swing back somewhat towards the prosecution’s side.

  ‘Gerard Busby is not on trial for being an astrologer,’ Aubrey reminds the jury.

  For the moment, that’s as far as he’s going to get. I haven’t paid much attention to the public gallery, which is quite crowded this morning after all the publicity the case has attracted. If I had, I would have recognised a familiar face. As it is, the first thing I’m aware of is her voice, which isn’t familiar, shouting very loudly. Then I see that she’s holding a home-made banner, a huge sheet of paper she must have rolled up and secreted into the building inside her coat. Its message, scrawled untidily in a bright red marker is, ‘Christians have rights too! End discrimination!’

  ‘Christians have a right to serve on juries!’ Deidre Streeter is screaming at the top of her voice. ‘But I’ve been slung off two juries in two days. This is blatant religious discrimination!’

  ‘That will do, Mrs Streeter,’ I say. ‘Either you will leave court at once, or I will hold you in contempt and have you arrested.’

  ‘You can’t do that to me,’ she replies. ‘I know my rights.’

  Dawn is following her training and leading the jury quickly out of court. I see Carol pressing the button under her desk, which will bring security to our aid in a minute or two.

  ‘He should be put away,’ Deidre continues to bellow. ‘What do you need a trial for? Those who practise fortune-telling and devilry shall be cast into eternal darkness!’

  I give it a few seconds, but she’s showing no sign of stopping. It has its funny side, I suppose, if you like that kind of thing – a woman who’s perfectly happy to condemn people without trial, ranting on and on endlessly about discrimination because we won’t let her serve on a jury; while the other occupants of the public gallery remain frozen in their seats, staring straight ahead of them, unsure whether to ignore her, try to intervene somehow, or make a run for it. But I’m afraid, if I ever had any sense of humour about Deidre Streeter, it has long since evaporated.

  ‘Detective Constable Trent,’ I almost shout over the din. ‘I’m holding Mrs Streeter in contempt of court. Will you please assist the court by detaining her until the security staff can take her down to the cells?’

  ‘Yes, your Honour.’

  ‘I will rise for a few moments,’ I say, as DC Trent provokes fresh outbursts by restraining her. ‘I will deal with her after court this afternoon. She will remain in custody until then.’

  ‘I think Emily Phipson is at court, Judge,’ Carol says. ‘Shall I ask whether she would represent Mrs Streeter pro bono?’

  ‘Good idea,’ I agree.

  ‘Gerard Busby is not on trial for being an astrologer’, Aubrey reminds the jury for the second time, order having now been restored thanks to the joint efforts of DC Trent and security. The jury don’t seem fazed by the outburst they were exposed to, but I’ve directed them to ignore it, just in case. ‘He’s not on trial for practising as an astrologer, and he’s not on trial for accepting a fee of two hundred and fifty pounds for rendering an astrological opinion. He’s on trial because the prosecution say he acted dishonestly and fraudulently. But where is the dishonesty? Where is the fraud?

  ‘The practice of astrology is a lawful occupation, in which people have engaged for centuries. We may disagree about whether there is any validity in astrology, but not about the principle that people are free to decide that question for themselves. I’m not asking you to approve of what Mr Busby does, only to remember that there are those who do, and they have the right to consult people like Gerard Busby and Lydia Howell if they wish. Otherwise, how could we allow practitioners of alternative medicine – practitioners of acupuncture, of chiropractic, of homeopathy, to treat patients? For that matter, how could we allow priests, or ministers, or rabbis, or imams to counsel people and offer them spiritual comfort and guidance? Because there are as many people who are sceptical about all of those practices as there are those who are sceptical about astrology. The point is that in a free society, we allow people to believe in things we may not believe in ourselves.’

  There’s not a shred of evidence, Aubrey continues, that Gerard Busby acted in any way dishonestly. If he were taking money from clients, not caring whether what he told them had any basis or not, not caring whether his answers to the questions they asked were right or wrong, is it conceivable that he could have been carrying on his practice for more than twenty years, that he could have g
ot away with it for so long, that he could have built up and maintained such a loyal clientele? Wouldn’t he inevitably have been exposed years ago?

  ‘And what of the prosecution’s claim that Mr Busby told Edith Hunter that it was a certainty that she would get the job? Members of the jury, Mr Busby has answered that more than once in the course of this trial, hasn’t he? He told you that he never gives his clients answers with absolute certainty, because he can’t – and any honest professional, be he a lawyer, a doctor, a priest, or a practitioner in any field will tell you the same: that’s just not how life works. Certainty doesn’t exist in human affairs, members of the jury: all we have are degrees of probability, and that applies in this trial as much as it does in any other area of life. When he sums the case up to you, His Honour will tell you that the law itself makes that very same assumption. The law requires a high standard of proof to be satisfied before anyone can be convicted of a crime; but it doesn’t rise to the level of absolute certainty, because we can’t attain that level.

  ‘My learned friend Miss Worthington told you that Mr Busby took a fee from Edith Hunter for “predicting the obvious”. Well, members of the jury, many things can seem obvious to those who aren’t intimately involved with them, can’t they? But if it’s your life and you have very serious, and perhaps irrevocable decisions to make, things have a way of looking less obvious to you than they might to those around you. So it’s not totally surprising, is it, that Mrs Hunter wasn’t as sure of her ground as Miss Worthington seems to be; it’s not surprising, is it, that she wanted an opinion from someone uninvolved in the emotion of it all, someone who could stand back and look at the situation more objectively? And at the end of the day, members of the jury, let’s not forget that this event that my learned friend says was so “obvious” did not in fact occur.

  ‘During her cross-examination of Mr Busby, my learned friend challenged him to call Mrs Hunter “stupid” for telling her existing employers about her intention to leave, for taking a lease on an expensive flat in Paris before any offer had been made, and for treating her interview as a “formality”. Perhaps out of politeness, Mr Busby was reluctant to apply the word “stupid” to what she did. But it doesn’t matter what you call it. Call it stupidity, call it ill advised, call it whatever you like: Gerard Busby did not advise Edith Hunter to do any of those things. She made those decisions using her own free will, all on her own.