A Fatal Verdict (The Trials of Sarah Newby)

by Vicary, Tim

  ‘Mr and Mrs Walters, good morning.’ Mark Wrass extended his arms in greeting, his face expressing simultaneous welcome and sympathy. Like a cross between a pub landlord and an undertaker, Sarah thought, watching wryly. ‘Allow me to introduce our counsel, Mrs Sarah Newby.’

  Sarah held out her hand, and smiled. ‘Mr and Mrs Walters? This must be a painful day for you. I hope we can get you justice.’

  ‘I hope so too,’ said Kathryn sharply. ‘That’s what you do here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well yes, of course.’

  ‘I just hope you’re prepared then, that’s all.’

  Sarah frowned, surprised by the aggressive tone. ‘Don’t worry, DI Bateson here and Mr Wrass have done a good job. I’ve got all the statements in this briefcase here, and I read them thoroughly over the weekend.’

  ‘The weekend?’ Kathryn said incredulously. ‘You read them over the weekend?’

  ‘Several times, Mrs Walters,’ Sarah insisted, kicking herself. What she said was true - she’d been busy with two burglaries, an affray, and a car theft the week before - but of course she’d struck the wrong tone. All that trauma with Bob and Emily this morning must have unsettled her more than she’d thought. ‘I read them again, I mean - we’ve had several conferences already. Don’t worry, I’m used to mastering details quickly. It’s part of the job.’

  ‘Nonetheless, it would have been nice if we could have met you too,’ Kathryn persisted, as her husband shook his head slowly. ‘You are representing us, after all.’

  Embarrassed, Mark Wrass sprang to Sarah’s defence. ‘Technically, Mrs Walters, Mrs Newby is instructed by the Crown Prosecution Service, not yourselves. In the eyes of the law you are witnesses in the case, not the principal ...’

  ‘Nevertheless it was your daughter who was murdered.’ Seeing the reaction his words were creating, Sarah put her hand on Kathryn’s arm. ‘I do understand that, Mrs Walters, really. You want this case to be prosecuted properly. Well, it will be. I can assure you of that. I know the system can seem a little ... impersonal, but it doesn’t need to be. Why don’t we meet for lunch? Mr Wrass can arrange it, I’m sure.’

  In the cell block below the court Sarah’s opponent, Savendra Bhose, was about to reacquaint himself with his client. He had met David Kidd before, of course, in the bleak Victorian interview rooms at Armley Gaol, but since then he had defended two burglary cases and taken his fiancee Belinda James on a long weekend in the Lake District on the Honda FireStorm, up and down the hills on what he’d called ‘Wordsworth’s rollercoaster.’ Although the papers from David’s case had come with them, they had received rather less careful scrutiny than his client might have hoped. Several witness statements now exuded a musky Estee Lauder fragrance which reminded Savendra irresistibly of the hotel bedroom in Keswick where they had, unfortunately, been scattered all over the floor with Belinda’s underwear. The touch and scent of these papers evoked clear and beguiling images of Belinda’s looks and behaviour that night; but exactly what his client looked like he found somewhat harder to recall.

  As Kidd was led towards him Savendra greeted him with a professional, encouraging smile. The warder released Kidd’s handcuffs and left them together in the ‘stable block’ - a small room at the end of the cell corridor, furnished with half a dozen wooden stalls in which a lawyer could meet his client. They reminded Savendra of the carrels where junior pupils at his public school, Ampleforth, had done their homework. Each carrel was about four feet square, with a wooden seat at the back where the defendant usually sat, with a stool screwed to the floor in front of it for his lawyer to perch on. It was a primitive, humiliating system, probably dating back to the eighteenth century when the courts were built and men were smaller. If the lawyer and his client were tall, they had to sit carefully to avoid their knees banging together.

  As Kidd sat down Savendra noticed that he looked nervous; but anyone would, in a cell block like this, accused of murder. He was commendably smart, though, his shirt and tie neatly pressed. The snakeskin boots struck a jarring note; but they would be invisible from the dock. He was shorter than Savendra remembered, and there was something rather worrying about the eyes. They seemed not to open fully, as though the man were drunk or half asleep. Savendra found it unnerving. Surely the idiot wasn’t stoned, was he? That would be a fine start to the trial - himself unprepared, his client weaving around in the dock, unable to plead.

  But his voice was clear enough, though slightly lacking in respect. ‘What happens this morning, then? What do you do?’

  ‘Nothing much, at first,’ Savendra smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s the prosecution who kick off. All we do is sit and watch, today.’ And try to remember the details of this case, he thought. ‘All you have to do is create a good impression with the jury. They’ll be watching you while the prosecutor speaks, to see if you look like their idea of a murderer. Just concentrate on looking like a decent, grief-stricken boyfriend, and leave the rest to me.’

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ David Kidd said. ‘You’re not facing life in gaol.’

  ‘Neither are you, I hope,’ Savendra assured him confidently. ‘There’s plenty of room in this case for reasonable doubt and that’s what I intend to create.’

  The young man studied him doubtfully, as though wondering if he’d made the right choice and whether he could do anything about it even at this late stage. Heaven forbid, Savendra thought. I need this case to pay off the loan on the bike. ‘What’s he like, this prosecutor, then? Is he any good?’

  ‘He’s a she, actually,’ Savendra yawned, picking up his wig and getting to his feet. ‘Mrs Sarah Newby. She’s only been qualified for three or four years. Don’t worry, Mr Kidd. We’re in with a chance here. Truly.’

  He called for the warder, who led Kidd back to his cell. Savendra ran up the stairs into the oak-panelled courtroom. He had no great hopes, but there were certainly some holes in the case and he hoped to find others. And since his fiancee’s parents were coming to watch him in court later this week, he strongly hoped he could. That was the surprise she’d sprung on him in their hotel bedroom last night, as he untied the ribbons around the brief he’d brought with him. While Belinda stood beside him, tantalisingly loosening the ribbons on briefs of her own ...

  He dumped those papers now on the ancient leather covered oak table in the courtroom. If only she hadn’t spilt that perfume on these witness statements! Sarah Newby slid into her seat beside him.

  ‘Hi, Savvy, ready for the fray?’ She sniffed the lingering fragrance appreciatively, and smiled. ‘Had a good weekend then, did you?’

  13. Savendra

  THE TWO barristers chatted companionably as they waited for the judge to enter. Sarah and Savendra were friends as well as colleagues; they had shared a room together in their year of pupillage, and supported each other through the tedium, disappointments, occasional triumphs, and frequent sick humour of their first year at the criminal bar. Now she listened, smiling, as he talked of his fiancee’s excitement during their motorbike trip to the Lakes, and their plans for the imminent wedding.

  ‘It’s the ceremony that scares me most,’ Savendra murmured ruefully. ‘I dreamt last night that I dropped the ring and it rolled away down a drain.’

  ‘Very Freudian,’ said Sarah. ‘It means you’re afraid of responsibility. Or riding away from it rather. Like you were this weekend.’

  ‘Over the hills and far away.’ Savendra grinned happily at the memory. ‘It’s tremendous, the FireStorm. I’ll take you for a ride sometime if you like.’

  ‘And scare me rigid? No chance, young man.’ Sarah shook her head, laughing. ‘I’ve seen you leaning into those bends. Your Belinda’s a brave girl.’

  ‘Love me, love my bike. That’s what I told her, that’s what she does.’

  Their banter ended as the accused entered the dock from the cells below, handcuffed to a burly security guard. Sarah turned to look at him, the smile fading from her face. It was the first time she had seen him, this man
who she meant to send to prison for life. He looked smaller than she had expected, his face pale after several months on remand, with a touch of cotton wool under the chin where, perhaps, his hand had shaken while shaving this morning. The sight evoked a pain that was as sharp, as intense as Sarah had feared. The young face, scowling with a mixture of nerves, fear and bravado in a room full of hostile faces pierced her with the memory of her own son, Simon, whose demeanour in court had been surly, truculent and defiant, just as she expected this young man’s to be. It was the natural reaction of the young male, cornered and at bay. Unattractive, and likely to increase the chances of his conviction.

  But the pain only lasted for a moment. As David Kidd answered the clerk, pleading not guilty in a sullen, insolent voice, Sarah looked away, above his head to the watching faces of Kathryn and Andrew Walters in the public gallery. Then, very deliberately, she slid the dead girl’s photograph out of the pile of papers and laid it on the table in front of her. One of the things that had surprised her about Kathryn Walters was how closely the woman’s face had resembled that of her dead daughter. They could have been sisters, almost. Everything, the features, the hair, the shape of the mouth, even the pallor was the same - although the pallor in Kathryn’s face was caused merely by nerves, rather than the loss of four or five litres of blood.

  Concentrate, Sarah told herself firmly as she got to her feet, and remember what that young man did to this poor girl in the photograph. And to her parents, as well. They came here for justice, and now they’re relying on you.

  Certainly no one who listened to Sarah’s opening speech would have accused her of sympathy for the defendant. Her exposition was clear, concise, and cold. This was what she was good at, this was what she had prepared for in all those long years of sacrifice and study. She had hoped this return to prosecution, with the luxury of a trial that would probably last a fortnight, would be a pleasure, and so long as she believed in the case she was presenting it would be. She began to outline the evidence that, she said, would convict David Kidd of murder.

  ‘On the afternoon of Sunday, 21st May this year, David Kidd called an ambulance to his flat in Gillygate, York. When the ambulance crew arrived they found Shelley Walters, his girlfriend, in a bath full of bloody water, with her wrists cut and bleeding and her face under water. They took her to hospital where she died less than an hour later, of heart failure caused by a combination of two factors - extensive haemorrhage from the cuts on her wrists, and partial drowning in the bath water.’

  She paused to contemplate the jurors, like a schoolmistress checking for their attention. There were seven men, five women, three in their early twenties. Of the men, two wore jackets and ties, the others were in open-necked shirts. One man wore a fleece, and a young woman had chosen a tracksuit for the occasion. We prepare with such care, Sarah thought sardonically, then we hand the most vital decision of all to idlers dragged in off the street. The girl in the tracksuit swallowed and nodded nervously as she met Sarah’s eye.

  ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, you may think that this sounds like suicide. A young woman gets into a bath, cuts her wrists, holds them under water to help the blood flow, and then when she faints from this loss of blood her head slips under water and she begins to drown. That is the interpretation, I am sure, that Mr Bhose will present for the defence. It is what David Kidd told the police when they interviewed him. He was the person who found her, and he was alone in the flat with her before she died. So it is clear that only one of two things happened. Either Shelley Walters killed herself, or she was murdered by her boyfriend, David Kidd. There is no other possibility, is there? It is as simple as that.’

  It was not only the jury who watched Sarah attentively as she spoke. Terry Bateson had found a bench to the left of the dock, where he could watch her present his case. It was a rare pleasure for him; he could see her clearly in profile, a slender straightbacked figure in the jet black suit and gown, a delicate finger smoothing an errant wisp of hair under her wig, speaking in a low, clear, persuasive voice that resonated somewhere under his ribs, so that he felt like a teenager again. He was a fool, of course, he knew that: she was a married woman with two grown-up children and a husband to care for; any friendly flirtatious phrase she might occasionally throw him was natural feminine politeness, no more. Her normal manner when they met was pleasant but brusque, sharp, businesslike - the body language of a career woman for whom efficient time management was a function as natural as breathing.

  And yet ... Terry could not help himself. If Mary had been alive it would have been different, but now ... there was an exquisite pleasure in this secret pain of hoping, like pressing a pin into your palm to prove you are alive. And perhaps ... it was always possible things might change, and she feel the same about him. And then how would that be? Where would they meet, what would they do? He watched, entranced, only the surface of his mind attending to her lucid outline of the evidence he knew so well.

  ‘So what is David Kidd’s explanation? Well, he told the police several different stories. You will hear first what he told them on the day of Shelley’s death. Shelley had come to visit him, he said, and while he was preparing a meal for her, she decided to have a bath. Everything was fine between them, he told the police, but she felt under pressure from her tutors and parents because her studies were not going well. They talked about these things for a while, and then she got in the bath while he went out to buy groceries for the meal. When he came back, he found her lying in a bath full of blood, and called an ambulance.’

  Savendra, too, listened to Sarah intently, as the contents of the witness statements, rather than their scent, came back to him at last.

  ‘All very good, you may think. It sounds a reasonable story, doesn’t it? At first the police believed it too. But then they began to investigate further, and found a number of things that did not fit. Much later - two weeks after he was first interviewed by the police - Mr Kidd claimed they didn’t just talk - he had sex with Shelley before she got into the bath. ‘We made love,’ he says. But how much love was there really in what happened to this young girl? You will hear from David Kidd’s neighbour, a priest, who heard the sounds of a quarrel between a man and a woman a short time before Shelley died. The shouting and screaming were so loud that they could be heard through the floor of his flat. Not the sounds of love-making, he says, but of a violent quarrel. Yet this quarrel was completely missing from the story David Kidd told the police.’

  Kathryn Walters listened with cold pleasure. When she and Andrew had first entered the public gallery, they had looked down at the gowned backs and bewigged heads of the two barristers at the table in the centre of the court, engaged in what looked like a light-hearted, friendly conversation. The sight had irritated Kathryn intensely, the more so since clerks, reporters and solicitors wandered in and out, chatting as though nothing important was likely to happen for hours. A journalist told a policeman a joke; the shorthand writer was reading a magazine.

  ‘Look at them!’ she had muttered bitterly to her husband. ‘They don’t bloody care, do they?’ To all these people, she realised with horror, this was just another day at work. Perhaps a mildly interesting one, but that was all.

  But now that Sarah had begun speaking the scene was transformed. Each sentence was clear, straightforward, and damning; the case against her daughter’s murderer was being presented as Kathryn had always hoped it would be. Nothing Sarah said was new to Kathryn, of course; she had worried over each detail endlessly for months, sometimes with Andrew, more often alone, unable to sleep, walking restlessly around the empty house at three in the morning while he was away with his mistress. But here at last was public affirmation. These words were not being muttered darkly in her own mind, but spoken lucidly in open court; nails hammered into David’s coffin one by one. Behind Sarah, a reporter was taking notes busily.

  ‘So what was this quarrel about, you may ask? Well, you will hear from Shelley’s parents, and her friends at university, that t
hings were not fine between David and Shelley, as he claimed. On the contrary - Shelley wanted to end the relationship, because he had been unfaithful to her. The only reason she went to his flat was to collect some clothes and books that she had left there. She was going to see him for the last time.’

  The wigs and gowns, the royal coat of arms, the panelled wood, ornate ceiling and marble pillars all added to the solemnity of the occasion. One hand clasped in her husband’s, Kathryn Walters glared down at David Kidd, the liar she had loathed for so long.

  ‘Then, conclusively, you may think, the police discovered further evidence. A kitchen knife - the knife which caused the fatal injuries to Shelley’s wrists - was found on the floor in the bathroom. And on this knife, you will hear, were not Shelley’s fingerprints, as you might expect if this was suicide, but those of David Kidd. His fingerprints on the knife that killed her!’

  The girl in the tracksuit nodded solemnly. For her, already, the case seemed proved. Other jurors’ faces looked equally serious. A young man glared at David with contempt.

  ‘So, ladies and gentlemen. Other details, small but important, will come to light during the trial. But these are the main points which the prosecution ask you to consider. Firstly, that Shelley did not go to David’s flat for love or sympathy, as he told the police; she went there to collect her belongings, and end their relationship for good. Secondly, that they did not just have a quiet, friendly conversation; they had a noisy, violent quarrel. Thirdly, that she was found dead, in his bath, with her wrists cut by a knife that had his fingerprints on it. That is enough, the prosecution say, to prove that Shelley Walters’ death was not suicide, as David Kidd intended it to appear; it was a cruel, deliberate murder.’