Deadlock

by Graham Ison

  Lydia laughed. ‘There must be a word to describe a combination of philosophy and cynicism, which is what you seem to possess.’

  ‘There is,’ I said. ‘It’s called honesty.’

  ‘Anyway, enough of your so-called honesty, darling. D’you fancy trying out my swimming pool before we have dinner?’

  ‘I didn’t bring my swimming trunks with me,’ I said.

  ‘So?’ said Lydia.

  The trial of Max Roper opened at the Old Bailey on Monday the twenty-ninth of July. We were now in the hands of the lawyers and the aforementioned fickle jury.

  It came as no surprise that Roper should have pleaded guilty to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, his counsel presumably having explained that it would improve his chances of a lesser sentence. He was duty-bound to mention that if the plea failed, Roper would be sent down for four life sentences. But I doubt that that prospect would have made any difference to Roper’s mindset.

  The plea regarding ‘diminished responsibility’ is, to say the least, confused and stacked full of case law. I don’t even begin to understand it, but I don’t have to. That’s why we have lawyers.

  As the case progressed, prosecuting and defence counsel each called their own psychiatric expert witnesses, managing to elicit from them views about the state of Roper’s mental health that suited their particular intention with regard to the hoped-for verdict.

  The defence’s psychiatrist’s theory was that the simplest incident can push an otherwise sane man to sudden and inexplicable psychotic behaviour. He went on to develop this argument by suggesting that in this case, when a woman who Roper thought loved him reneged on their wedding at the last minute, it constituted such an incident. Particularly when he learned that the woman had been unfaithful to him for the entire period of their betrothal.

  After days of esoteric argument between opposing counsel, the judge delivered a long but amazingly lucid summing up, leaving the jury in no doubt about the decisions facing them.

  It took the six men and six women of the jury a total of about ten hours to reach a verdict. To my surprise, and to the obvious surprise of a few others in the courtroom, they returned a verdict of guilty of manslaughter by virtue of diminished responsibility. The jury had clearly opted to believe the argument put forward by Roper’s psychiatrist.

  The judge made a hospital order subject to periodic psychiatric review.

  Although that statement was greeted with a maniacal laugh from Max Roper, I think he was as sane as the rest of us, but the case demonstrated just how an expert witness, spouting psychiatric gobbledegook, coupled with a silver-tongued barrister, can convince a jury that the argument they put forward is the only tenable one.

  On the other hand, one could argue that a sane man was unlikely to murder four women in the space of three weeks just to take revenge on a woman who’d left his self-perceived macho image in tatters.

  But the job of police officers is to put the accused person, together with the evidence, before the court. The rest is up to them.

  A couple of months after the case against Roper was over, Detective Sergeant Tom Challis appeared in the incident room with Heather Douglas. Those officers who had been in on the disguise plan to catch Roper were surprised that she had kept her hair blonde. But in view of what Challis said next, it was apparent that she had done so to please him.

  ‘I thought you all ought to know,’ he announced, ‘that Heather and I are getting married next week, and you’re all invited to the wedding.’

  This announcement was greeted by a barrage of comments which generally took the form of advice for Heather, such as suggesting she shouldn’t do it. For the most part, it consisted of warnings against marrying a copper. Challis and Heather not only took the badinage in good part but seemed to enjoy it. Which just went to show that she was probably suited to take on that most difficult of roles, that of a copper’s wife, full of cancelled social engagements, and the dread of opening the door one day to find a senior officer and the force chaplain on the doorstep with sombre expressions on their faces.