The Fortune Men
Page 23
Chief Detective Inspector Harry Powell Sworn:
Q. Will you just tell my Lord, first of all: when you saw the accused, Mattan, on the 12th March, had you in your own mind come to a conclusion as to the propriety of charging him with murder?
A. I had not sufficient evidence at all.
Q. Why did you caution him?
A. In fairness to him. If there was something wrong in what he was going to tell me I wanted him to know he was not obliged to answer questions I was asking him.
Q. It was not because you had made up your mind that you were going to charge him at that stage?
A. I certainly had not.
Q. The fact is, Inspector, that you had sent one of your subordinates, Detective Sergeant Morris, to fetch this man?
A. Yes.
Q. Detective Sergeant Morris himself brought him back to police headquarters?
A. Yes.
Q. And thereafter, at whatever intervals and for whatever time it was, he was continuously in the precincts of the police station for seven hours and thirty-one minutes, or thereabouts?
A. Yes, he was.
Q. Did you at any time during that time tell him he could go home whenever he wanted to?
A. I think he knew that – I did not tell him so specifically, no.
Q. At one stage in these proceedings did Mattan give this answer, ‘If you keep me here twenty years it makes no difference; I tell you what I know, I walk out of here tonight; you get tired’?
A. Yes, he did.
Q. Is it not patently obvious from that answer alone that Mattan was under the impression he was being kept there?
A. I do not think so. He was being kept for the purpose of questioning. There was no question of a charge.
Q. He was being kept?
A. He was not being kept against his will. If he had said at any time that he wished to go, I had no option but to let him go.
Q. You and I and his Lordship know that, but did Mattan know that?
A. He said several times something to me about whether he was going to be charged, and I told him I had no evidence to charge him.
Q. That does not appear in your record of question and answer?
A. Maybe not; but there are other things which do not appear there. It is as accurate as possible.
Q. I am not suggesting that your record is in the least inaccurate. You have put down what you consider to be of relevant importance in this case.
A. Yes.
Q. This man is a Somali, is he not?
A. Yes, he is.
Q. And although he has a fair knowledge of the English language, he does not necessarily make himself easily understood?
A. He makes himself very well understood.
Q. And in spite of the fact that he was a coloured man and obviously a foreigner, at no time did you tell him he was free to leave the police station if he wanted to?
A. I did not tell him that specifically, no.
Q. Chief Detective Inspector, have you ever had your attention drawn to another person similar to Mattan in appearance?
A. I cannot remember that. My attention was drawn to a number of people at this time.
Q. Specifically by a prison officer by the name of Smith, in the presence of a salaried solicitor in the employ of my instructing solicitors?
A. I do not think that was me, sir.
Q. You do not think that was you?
A. I cannot remember the incident.
Q. Do you know anybody who looks like Mattan in Bute Street or Butetown?
A. No, sir, not exactly. He has a very unusual appearance for a Somali. He has some of the regular features of the Somalis and some of the features which are not usually identified with them.
Q. Do you know Mr Hughes, an articled clerk?
A. I think I do. I am not sure of his name. If he is Mr Morgan’s clerk, I know him.
Q. Did you see him in the Main House at Cardiff Prison on Tuesday, the 1st July?
A. Yes, I did, sir.
Q. You remember that?
A. Yes.
Q. And there was a warder present?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you remember anything being said by anybody about someone who closely resembles Mattan standing outside the prison on that occasion?
A. I do not remember that. It might have been, but I cannot recall it at all.
Q. It might have been?
A. Yes.
(The witness withdraws.)
The Prisoner Sworn:
Q. Is your full name Mahmood Hussein Mattan?
A. Yes.
Q. Mr Mattan, keep your voice up so that those twelve ladies and gentlemen may hear what you say. Did you come to England in about 1947?
A. Yes.
Q. And have you made your home in Cardiff since?
A. Yes.
Q. Mattan, you are charged with the wilful murder of Violet Volacki. Did you murder Violet Volacki?
A. No, I never did.
Q. Do you remember the 6th March of this year?
A. Yes.
Q. Where were you in the afternoon?
A. I was in pictures.
Q. About what time did you go there?
A. Half past four.
Q. And what time did you leave?
A. Half past seven.
Q. And where did you go when you left?
A. I go back straight to my lodgings.
Q. What time did you arrive at your lodgings?
A. Twenty to eight.
Q. Did you go down Bute Street that night?
A. No.
Q. Do you remember Mr Harold Cover giving evidence? Mr Cover said he saw you coming from the direction of Miss Volacki’s shop that night. Do you remember him saying that?
A. I do remember he said that, but I was not there; I never been down there.
Q. It was not you whom he saw?
A. It was not me.
Q. Did you see Mrs Gray at all that night?
A. I doesn’t see her.
Q. Did you call at her shop at any time on that day?
A. No.
Q. Later that night did the police officers see you at your lodgings?
A. Yes.
Q. You heard Detective Constable Lavery say that he found a few silver coins and a few copper coins in your trousers pocket on that day. You heard him say that?
A. Yes.
Q. Did you get any money anywhere the next day?
A. On Friday?
Q. The day after the police came to see you?
A. Yes.
Q. Where did you get that from and what was it?
A. It was two pounds three shillings I drew from the Public Assistance.
Q. Now Mattan, when you were seen by the police officers, Sergeant Morris says you were excited after a little time. Is that so?
A. I was not; I was in bed sleeping when he knocked my door.
Q. Were you quite willing for him to come in or not?
A. Well, I was sleeping and I cannot tell you what time it was, but I heard somebody knocking my door and I got out of bed. Before I opened the door I put the light up and I asked him, ‘Who?’ and he told me, ‘Police.’ So I opened the door and the Sergeant Morris and the other detective – I cannot tell his name – come in.
Q. Did Sergeant Morris ask you where you had been that night?
A. The first thing he ask me – he tell me, ‘Something serious happened tonight and we have to see you as soon as possible.’
Q. May the witness have Exhibit 10, please. (Same handed.) Look at that document. Whose signature is there?
A. Well, I cannot read who is there, but it is my signature.
Q. Do you remember signing that document?
A. Well, yes, I did.
Q. Was it read to you before you signed it?
A. He doesn’t read me, and I doesn’t read myself; I doesn’t read or write.
THE JUDGE: Do you say it was not read to you?
A. He doesn’t read me.
Q. Let the pr
isoner see the shoes, please. (Exhibit 9 handed.) Did you use to wear those shoes, Mattan?
A. I did not wear them before; I just bought them a few days before that murder and I never been wearing them since, until the 12th March. I was keeping these shoes for walking purposes; I was not wearing them.
THE JUDGE: Ask him if he was wearing them on the 6th March.
Q. Were you wearing them on the 6th March?
A. No.
Q. Do you know how the bloodstains got on those shoes?
A. No, I cannot tell you, but anyway when he take them off me they were not in this condition.
THE JUDGE: I suppose he is referring to the yellow spots.
Q. I imagine so, my Lord. (To the witness:) You are talking about the yellow spots, are you?
A. No. The shoes were cleaner than that anyhow.
Q. The shoes were cleaner?
A. They were cleaner than that.
Q. Did those bloodstains come from Miss Volacki’s shop?
A. No, nothing to do with it. It got nothing to do with it at all because these shoes I never wear that day and I never been down there, and I don’t know nothing about it.
Q. When were you last in Volacki’s shop before the murder, Mattan?
A. As long as I been in Cardiff only once I been to this shop, and it was in 1949.
Q. Have you been there since?
A. I doesn’t. I pass the way through, but I never been inside the shop.
Q. Now let us see. Miss Brown is wrong in saying that she has seen you in Volacki’s shop since 1949, is she? The assistant of the shop is wrong?
A. I doesn’t know her at all.
Q. Your mother-in-law, Mrs Williams, is wrong when she tells us you went along to her house about eight o’clock and asked her whether she wanted cigarettes?
A. When I been there it was twenty to eight, when I come from the pictures.
Q. Did you speak to Mrs Williams?
A. Yes, but I got no reason to tell you the business about me and my wife; I got no right to tell you, and I got no right to tell the police.
Q. You see, you are going to answer my question. Just tell my Lord and the jury, are you now agreeing you did speak to Mrs Williams on the way back from the cinema?
A. I speak to my wife, but I got no reason to tell you that.
Q. Why did you not tell the police: ‘I spoke to my wife’?
A. I cannot tell police because nothing to do with police; I cannot tell my business between me and my wife.
Q. You are saying you did not tell the police because what happens between you and your wife is not police business. Is that right?
A. I doesn’t tell to the police, and I got no right to tell anyone.
Q. Did you mean the jury to understand a short while ago that you did not read that statement, Exhibit 10, because you cannot read?
A. Yes.
Q. You know the evidence is that your regular practice was to go to Mr Madison’s and have the Echo. What would you have it for – to look at the pictures or to read it?
A. I just used – if I had it, I never used to bother with it; but if I have a look I used to look partly for the racing and the photos. That is what I used to look for; I doesn’t read at all.
Q. Let me ask you about Mrs Gray. Mrs Gray is the lady who gave the evidence, the very deaf lady. Have you been to her shop from time to time to get clothes?
A. No.
Q. You have never been to Mrs Gray’s to buy clothes?
A. No.
Q. That means at any time, does it?
A. Any time, because I got nothing to do with any second-hand clothes at all.
Q. Is it right that on the Friday night at Somerton Park Stadium you were there with between fifteen and twenty £1 notes in your wallet?
A. This wallet I never been with since I came out from the sea. It was always in my suitcase, and the police got it from my suitcase; I never use it at all.
Q. Whichever wallet you used, is it right that on Friday night, the 7th March, you had between fifteen and twenty £1 notes in your possession?
A. No.
Q. At the Somerton Park Stadium?
A. No. When I got there all the money I had was thirty-five shillings.
Q. Is it right you were betting on almost every race?
A. Well, yes, because it is only a two-shilling bet.
Q. On the Saturday is it right that you were playing cards for money?
A. No.
Q. Had you on the 6th March no address to which you could slip to change your clothes?
A. I have no other clothes.
Q. You see, Mr Madison has told my Lord and the jury that on, I think, the 11th March he saw you go out one morning with working clothes on, that he saw you in the city with entirely different clothes on and that later that day you arrived back at number 42 Davis Street once more with your working clothes on. Was Mr Madison right or wrong in his evidence about that?
A. I am not talking about Mr Madison.
Q. But you are going to, you see; you are going to.
A. I am not going to talk about him.
Q. You are going to, Mattan.
A. I got nothing to talk about him.
Q. Was Mr Madison right or wrong in his evidence about you changing your clothing?
A. I am not going to imagine anything about Mr Madison; I was not changing except when I got change in my own place.
Q. Did not Madison say that it was a funny thing that one person should have been able to kill a short fat woman like Miss Volacki?
A. Me and Madison we had a row on Friday and I never talked to him on Saturday at all.
Q. Are you in the habit of carrying a knife or a razor around with you?
A. I doesn’t; I never used to carry one.
Q. Very well; the jury can draw their own deductions from that answer. Harold Cover, you know him, do you not?
A. No.
Q. You are shaking your head again; do you mean ‘No’?
A. I don’t know him.
Q. Do you know him by sight?
A. Who?
Q. Harold Cover, the Jamaican who gave evidence yesterday, Do you know him by sight?
A. I don’t know him at all.
Q. The truth is, is it not, that you went into Miss Volacki’s shop on the night of the 6th March and murdered her? Is not that the truth?
A. It is not true.
Q. By cutting her throat either with a knife or a razor?
A. Not me.
Q. Is it not true that thereafter you robbed her drawer of money exceeding one hundred pounds?
A. No.
Q. Is it not true that thereafter you made your way up to Mrs Gray’s shop running, and that you tried to get some second-hand clothing from her that night?
A. Not me.
Q. Is it not true that you somewhere and somehow effected a change of clothing before you got home that night?
A. Not me.
Q. You were not wearing – those – suede shoes on that night when you went to Miss Volacki’s shop?
A. What?
Q. Let me repeat the question: were you not wearing – those – suede shoes that night when you went to her shop?
A. It’s funny thing, but I never been to Miss Volacki’s shop and I never been wearing those shoes.
(The witness withdraws.)
THE JUDGE: Very well; the witnesses may be released. Members of the jury, may I once again repeat my warning to you. You have now heard the whole of the evidence and tomorrow morning you will have speeches from counsel and then I shall sum up; but you will keep an open mind until you have heard the whole of the case, and whatever you do, of course, do not talk about it to outsiders.
THIRTEEN
Saddex Iyo Toban
The Defence’s Case:
My learned friend, with that customary fairness of his, said that the evidence in this case is wholly circumstantial. With that I, for the Defence, do not seek to quarrel for one moment. It must be apparent, members of
the jury, that it is only circumstantial evidence in this case, and you are invited to draw a certain inference from that circumstantial evidence.
Now you may think, too, that the case for the Prosecution was put in a nutshell by my learned friend just now. I forget whether it is thirty-nine or forty-one witnesses who have been called before you, but in effect the sum, substance and pillar of the Prosecution’s case are two witnesses only. The one, Mr Harold Cover, who saw Mattan in the neighbourhood of the shop in which Miss Volacki was so foully murdered at about the time of the crime, and Mrs Gray, who saw him thereafter with a large sum of money in his possession.
First of all, as my learned friend said, the whole of Mattan’s stories and explanations and statements and evidence is riddled with lies.
Members of the jury, as I comment upon the evidence I will ask you to remember and recall that, in addition to denying the things which my friend suggested to him, he has also denied certain pieces of evidence which are enormously in his favour. Why should he do so? You have to ask yourselves this question when you saw him:
What is he?
Half child of nature?
Half semi-civilized savage?
A man who is caught up in the web of circumstance? Who has come under the suspicion of the police and, because he knows he is suspected, has childishly tried to lie his way out of it – tried to lie his way out of it. That is how he comes before you today.
I am not going to insult your intelligence, members of the jury, by suggesting that anything he has said at any time is true. You can see that for yourselves. But to brand him a liar is very far from branding him a murderer. He has lied, no doubt you may think, purely from the fear of consequences. He thought that if he kept on telling lies he would get out of it eventually.
It is quite clear from the evidence of Detective Sergeant Morris and others that he is not a man who likes the police; he distrusts the police. You remember when they called on him that night he started to call the police liars. You may think that he himself is tarred with the same brush, but, members of the jury, this is the first point which I ask you to accept from the Defence, that the Defence in this case does not rely for one instant on anything which Mattan has said. The Defence in this case is built out of the witnesses for the Prosecution, and for the Prosecution alone, and I ask you to dismiss Mattan’s evidence and the stories of untruth and wrigglings and lies he may have told.
Remember the circumstances in which Cover saw the man he now identifies as Mattan: a casual glance, a passing in the street, at a quarter past eight on a wet night in early March; dark, several people about – in fact, one of the ways he suggests he remembers him is because he stepped back to give him passage. Nothing remarkable about him to draw his particular attention to him. It is only when he hears of the murder later that he thinks back, and says, ‘I remember a man – yes, it was Mattan; he was jolly close to Miss Volacki’s shop that night about that time; I think I ought to tell the police about it,’ and he does, and in so doing he acts as a good citizen and as every one of you no doubt would act in those circumstances.