A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  The judge nodded. Monkson turned scarlet, stranded in a crisis of embarrassment. To make matters worse, from now on he would struggle with the discipline of asking neutral questions to elicit the evidence he needed.

  “Those wimmin who are especially vulnerable may bring firearms to practice on my firing range,” the witness said, in response to Monkson’s last question.

  “And with regard to those women who bring guns—we’re talking about handguns, are we not?—are they or are they not legally entitled to own such weapons?”

  “Less than one percent of gun licenses in this country are owned by wimmin. Men dominate the right to violence, just as they dominate the right to wealth. Wimmin are only attempting to defend themselves. Wimmin do not start wars. Men do—”

  “We appear to have strayed from the point—not for the first time, Mr. Monkson,” the judge said.

  Embattled, Monkson stared at the judge. Then he nodded, bowed his head, read from his notes. “And do you see in this courtroom any wimmin, as you put it, whom you allowed to bring a handgun onto your property to practice on your firing range?”

  The Don Quixotrix gazed at Daisy and nodded.

  “Whom do you indicate?”

  “The defendant, Ms. Thirst.” Her voice had softened.

  “And do you recognize the person in this photograph?” Monkson held out the photograph for a clerk to pass to the witness.

  “Yes. It’s the defendant practicing on my firing range.”

  Monkson explained to the judge and jury, with Carlford nodding his consent, that it was an agreed fact that the photograph had been taken by Special Branch during a routine investigation of all activities involving firearms as part of an ongoing antiterrorism exercise. Of course there was no suggestion that Daisy was a terrorist; it was her bad luck to have been caught by the concealed camera. Special Branch had not closed down the illegal firing range because they hoped it would attract and lead to the identification of real terrorists. Daisy blinked every time Monkson used the word “terrorist.”

  The photograph was passed to the jury. I could see each of them—seven women and five men, solid, good-natured Londoners who had never seen bloodshed or handled guns—look at Daisy in a new light. This was the worst point of the trial for her, the moment that Monkson, for all his foolishness, had quite skillfully arranged. It was close to lunchtime, but Carlford wanted, at all costs, for something else to be in the jury’s mind over lunch. For the jury to know that Daisy practiced at a firing range was one thing. The damage done by the visual impact of her grimly holding a gun and shooting it was quite another. He had already rattled Monkson; now was the time to create a diversion by thoroughly unnerving him.

  Sir Simon Carlford was tall, stooped, and beaked, with a large bald patch on his crown where the hair had been worn away by his wig, leaving the rest to fly wildly around his ears. He generally waited like an impatient vulture to cross-examine, then went at it with a horrible and remorseless pecking. But when he stood up that day, he asked perhaps the most extravagantly irrelevant question of his career.

  “Madam, is it correct to say that you are a homosexual—or a bull dyke, as I believe it is known in the vernacular?”

  The public gallery tittered, the jury gasped, the judge looked perplexed, and Monkson jumped up. Carlford sat down to permit Monkson’s objection. There was a puzzling moment of silence while Monkson turned purple as he wrestled with this blatant provocation from Carlford.

  “You have an objection to make, Mr. Monkson?” the judge asked helpfully.

  Still Monkson seemed capable only of jaw movements unaccompanied by sound. Finally his anger exploded in a cataract.

  “Never in all my caweer at the bar—”

  “Does my friend wish to give evidence about his career?” Carlford asked. “I’m sure it’s been fascinating and illustrious.”

  Monkson pressed his upper arms to his sides and moved his fists up and down in a mime of intense frustration. “I know not what twick, what demonically cunning subterfuge, my fwend thinks he’s pursuing—”

  “If my friend is accusing me of professional misconduct, this is neither the time nor the place,” Carlford said, standing again.

  The judge turned to Carlford and began to discuss Monkson as if he were in another room. “I agree, Sir Simon Carlford. I thought at first he wanted to object to your last cross-examination question.”

  “I do,” Monkson pleaded, “want to object, most vigorously, most vigorously, My Lord. When I was a pupil at the bar of England and Wales, it was instilled into us that we are guardians of the English language—”

  Monkson stopped when the judge hit the bench in exasperation. Carlford, who had sat down again, was busying himself with his papers. In the intervening moment of silence there was a loud cough from the witness stand.

  “I’m very proud to be a lesbian,” the witness began. “I—”

  The judge silenced her with a strained smile. “Your evidence is most valuable to us, madam. Unfortunately, just at the moment prosecuting counsel seems to have—”

  “Got his knickers in a twist,” she interrupted.

  There was a guffaw, immediately stifled, from the gallery. Anger flashed across the judge’s face as he turned from the witness to Monkson. “Mr. Monkson, I do not propose to allow this trial to degenerate into a circus—”

  “Iwelevant,” Monkson said, subdued. “The question was iwelevant.”

  “Ah!” the judge said. “Sir Simon Carlford?”

  Carlford nodded as if he were considering a difficult forensic point. “In what manner, exactly? It would be most helpful if my friend would specify which category of irrelevance he has in mind.”

  The judge gave Carlford a stern look. “I think that will do, Sir Simon Carlford. Do you acknowledge the irrelevance of the question, now that you have had time to consider it, or not?”

  Carlford looked at the ceiling for a long moment, then down at his watch. “Possibly. In any event, in the interests of expedition I withdraw the question. Would Your Lordship consider this a suitable moment to break for lunch?”

  36

  Carlford’s ploy could not have been more successful. When they had done with giggling at the comic diversion provided by Monkson’s distress, the jury would spend the lunch break pondering the mysteries of lesbianism and discussing the outrageous choice of words by the very eminent Sir Simon Carlford. The first shock of seeing that photograph of Daisy would have been softened, perhaps even eclipsed. The effect would be reinforced when they saw the headlines of the evening newspaper they were not supposed to see but always did: EMINENT Q.C. ACCUSES WITNESS OF BEING BULL DYKE. The evidence of this witness would be forever tainted in their minds not because of her homosexuality but because she had been laughed at. Still more important, their faith in the competence of the prosecution was now permanently damaged.

  As people filed out of the court, I signaled to someone in the public gallery who had caught my eye. He waited for me by the exit to the Old Bailey.

  James Hogg’s face and figure had collapsed into middle age. His smooth, heavy jowls were androgynous in their obesity, his once powerful body now enormous and walrus-like in the folds that filled his shirt. He was wearing a Roman collar.

  “I half expected you,” I told him.

  “I was undecided whether to come or not. What decisions can a court of law make about matters of the soul?”

  “So you’ve found God again?”

  “Not again. Before, I had a religious posture merely. Oliver Thirst was one of God’s instruments who made me see how wretched I was. In the end my lusts destroyed my pride, such are the mysterious ways of the spirit.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m a fat and sexless spectator, as you see. But on my good days I walk with my God.”

  The streets were so crowded with people searching for lunch that our discussion was sometimes conducted over the heads of men and women who pushed between us. A woman turned and searched Hogg’s f
ace on overhearing him pronounce the word “God,” then shrugged and turned away when she saw it was a clergyman.

  He walked heavily, as if the gravitational pull on his immense bulk was almost beyond his powers to resist.

  “I decided to come because I had a dream last night,” he said. “Oliver was in it. In the dream he possessed exceptional beauty, like an angel. He was with a group of people like himself, who all seemed to be enjoying themselves. Then he turned from the group to speak to me. There was a small red hole in his forehead. He started to say something about Daisy, but I woke up.”

  We walked to a crowded sandwich bar. The urgency of people clamoring for lunch made a sharp contrast to the sedate progress of Daisy’s trial. In the courtroom I had loathed every minute of the slow march of law, but now I found a passing nostalgia for it. The truth was that my nerves were jangled and I was in that state of mind in which one perpetually wishes to be elsewhere. In court I had felt hungry and in need of replenishing the nervous energy I was expending; now I could hardly bring myself to take two bites out of a small ham roll. Hogg, on the other hand, ordered a “super sandwich” with the confidence of a connoisseur. It consisted of two large slices of whole-meal bread that captured between them an inch and a half of ham, shredded chicken, avocado, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. He had to open his mouth to the point of unhinging his jaw in order to take a bite. After each mouthful he pulled a fresh paper napkin from a holder to wipe the folds of his face. Even so, a tear-shaped blob of mayonnaise suddenly appeared on his black vestment.

  “I envy Daisy for being on trial,” he told me. “We all participated in his destruction in one form or another. I would have been honored if God had chosen me as the scapegoat.”

  “Leaving God aside, the law requires that you actually pull the trigger.” My words were hard little bullets. “Participation—you need to participate in order to be honored by a trial for murder.”

  “Ah yes, your anger—I remember it now. You’ve always despised me; that was a help. But what about you? Have you still not come to doubt the basis of your righteousness? You must be nearly forty, after all.”

  He spoke between huge mouthfuls, so that his shrewd words formed a curious juxtaposition to the impression of stupefying gluttony. But where had he found the power to unlock in me all that cold anger?

  We pushed our way out onto the busy street. The effort had made him pale.

  “I shan’t come back to court,” he said. “I cannot be of any help there.”

  So it was to me alone that he had come to deliver his message. As we parted, he said, “By the way, in the dream it was clear, somehow, that Daisy was innocent.”

  37

  After lunch, Carlford found that he had no questions at all for the Don Quixotrix. Since it was the end of the prosecution case, Carlford called his first witness.

  It was the first time in my life that I had ever given evidence in a criminal trial, the first time I experienced firsthand the unutterable loneliness of standing in the witness box under the examining eye of a skeptical judge and a packed courtroom. The costumes, the heraldry, the swearing on the Bible, all these symbols have a magical affect on a psyche made vulnerable through isolation. The effect is a thousand times stronger when the story one has to tell is a fabrication from beginning to end.

  I understood the importance of Feinberg’s relentless drilling when I found that my response to Carlford’s questions was automatic. The lie had become more real than the truth. I said that Daisy and I had been together all night on the night Thirst died. We had, of course, added details to make the whole thing credible (we had resumed our relationship a few months before, met secretly once a week, had spent a couple of weekends together in the country).

  I could see Monkson conferring hurriedly with George Holmes just before he stood up. I felt an inexpressible relief that it was Monkson and not someone more competent who would cross-examine me.

  “Mr. Knight, you are aware, are you not, that your conversation with Commander Holmes at your house that day was recorded by police technicians waiting in an unmarked van near your house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will it be necessary to recall Commander Holmes to produce the tape and testify as to its accuracy?”

  “No.”

  “But, Mr. Knight, the account you gave to Commander Holmes, and which we find recorded for posterity, differs to a radical degree from the account you have only minutes ago given to this honorable court.”

  “I know.”

  “And out of these two conflicting accounts, which one do you select?”

  “The one I’ve just given to the court.”

  “In other words, you claim to have lied to Commander Holmes?”

  “Yes.”

  The obvious next question, the one old-fashioned schoolmasters always used to ask, was “If you lied then, why should we believe you now?” A more sophisticated barrister would have avoided it.

  “But, Mr. Knight, if you, a member of the bar, admit to telling lies to Commander Holmes, why should this honorable court accord cwedence to your evidence now?”

  The judge half closed his eyes as if in pain, but the jury were on the edge of their seats. It is not often that a barrister is cross-examined in a murder trial by another barrister.

  I paused, as Feinberg had recommended, as if the question were difficult to answer. I began in a voice so quiet that the judge (wearily) asked me to speak up. I said it again, still fairly quietly but loud enough for the jury to hear.

  “I didn’t catch the answer to that question,” Carlford complained on cue.

  “Would you repeat the answer, please,” the judge said. Unlike his exchanges with the other witnesses, he never used any polite form of address with me. In his eyes I had betrayed the glorious club of the bar, I was a traitor to the mess. In my case the war was no longer elsewhere. I suppose it never really had been.

  “When Commander Holmes came to see me that day, I didn’t know that Mrs. Thirst’s freedom was at stake. Now I know it is.”

  Monkson saw the tempting cheese in the trap Feinberg and Carlford had set months before.

  “Therefore, do you tell the court that at first you told untruths in order to protect your career and to hide the fact that you had recently been associated with the wife of a notorious criminal?”

  “Yes.”

  I caught the gleam in Monkson’s eye. “And now you say that your conscience has got the better of you and like Sir Galahad you have come forward to save Mrs. Thirst?”

  “I’ve come forward to tell the truth.”

  “But you are in love with Mrs. Thirst, are you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have been for over a decade?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And you will do anything to save her—anything at all?”

  “No.”

  “Even lie in order to give her an alibi.”

  “No.”

  “Throw away your career, your integrity, your very character, to save her skin, so infatuated are you with her.”

  “No.”

  When I came down from the witness box I felt sick, but Feinberg sent a note to congratulate me. The first part of his plan had operated perfectly. Probably there was not a member of the jury who actually believed the alibi that I had given Daisy. But I had given the very best reason twelve goodhearted people could ever have for pretending to believe it. I was the lovesick saint, the archetypal good guy who is always around when the lady really needs him. The unexotic, unphallic, solid yeoman. Not a lot of fun but a good man to have children with. Now it was up to Daisy.

  Feinberg made sure that before she mounted the witness stand she paraded her pregnancy in front of the jury. We had done what we could to ensure that the jury members were fathers and mothers themselves.

  She was able to walk and stand with some, at least, of her former elegance. Pregnancy, too, had had a wonderful effect on her skin. She glowed like a young virgin. She had also reached the stag
e where her energy and attention were all on the baby, the world of men a matter of serene indifference. Everything about her bespoke a faith that providence could not possibly be so cruel as to send her to jail and separate her from her newborn child. Some of the jury were dewy-eyed before she spoke.

  The judge, naturally, was anxious that she sit down. Carlford immediately pointed out that the stool in the witness stand did not have a back. The purpose of his stratagem arose from the curious fact that unlike any other court in the country, the witness at Number One Court at the Old Bailey stands or sits with her back to the jury, facing the judge. By persuading the judge to let Daisy come down from the witness stand as soon as she was sworn in—and sit in a chair in the well of the court at an angle so that both judge and jury could see her face—Carlford ensured that the glow of motherhood was never out of the jury’s sight.

  Anxious ushers brought her water. The subtleties of Carlford’s maneuvers were all lost on Monkson, who was working furiously on his notes for cross-examination. He was the kind of barrister who would scribble, “If witness says (a) below then ask question (i); if witness says (b) then ask question (ii).”

  Carlford took her quickly through her early relationship with me, the first meetings with Thirst, the death of her mother, our estrangement, which led to her marriage to Thirst. As Feinberg had coached her to tell it, this was not so much a marriage on the rebound as a giving in to the relentless pressure from the lovesick Thirst. She had known, of course, of his criminal record, but one had to remember that he presented—Carlford’s word—at that stage as a reformed character. Thirst’s image from those days floated in front of my mind as she spoke: confused, book-haunted, and frighteningly earnest.

  “Those of us who spend their careers in the field of criminal law come to look, let us say, skeptically upon claims by hardened criminals that they have reformed,” Carlford said. “Was there any particular reason for you to suppose that Oliver Thirst, whom you knew to have been a criminal since childhood, had genuinely changed his ways?”