Mackenzie Ford

by The Clouds Beneath the Sun (v5)

  And Jack.

  And now he had made her sound disobedient and therefore dishonest.

  But Hall wasn’t finished. “Dr. Nelson, I want you to answer this next question very carefully. Take your time and think about your answer before giving it. Remember your affirmation at the beginning of your testimony, the equal of an oath.”

  He paused.

  The people in the front row of the public gallery were leaning forward, their heads and their elbows showing against the shiny polish of the dark wood.

  Hall rocked from one foot to the other. He put his spectacles back on and looked over the lenses at Natalie. “Apart from Russell North, is there anyone else you have had physical contact with in the Kihara camp?”

  She didn’t reply but she colored. And, as before, in Eleanor Deacon’s tent, the night she had slept there, she knew she had colored. This time, however, there was full daylight in the court, there was surely enough light for others—for her father, for Jack, for Christopher, for Eleanor Deacon herself, for the whole court—to see her reaction.

  The skin on her throat was damp. She felt a bead of sweat trickle down between her breasts. Would anyone else notice?

  She couldn’t look at her father, she couldn’t look at Jack, she couldn’t look at the judge. But she remembered how she’d coped with Richard Sutton Junior, all those weeks ago, when he’d accused her of being inexperienced, and how she’d faced down his father when he had expressed a wish to see the Maasai burial ground.

  She looked hard at Hilary Hall, she looked hard, without blinking. Sans clignant, as her mother would have said, without blinking.

  “I will put the question more bluntly, Dr. Nelson,” he was now saying, “so there can be no misunderstanding.” He lifted his chin, taunting her. “Apart from Russell North, is there anyone else in the Kihara camp you have had sex with?”

  She gasped but tried hard to swallow it. Hall’s questioning made it sound as though she had had sex with Russell North, and even made it sound as though she had had sex with more than one man in the camp. How could Hilary Hall suggest such a—. He had seen her in the deposition room; he knew she was not like that.

  Sandys was looking at her and rubbing his cheek with his spectacles. Reminding her that it was all a game to defense counsel. He was telling her to relax.

  She couldn’t relax. Her father was here. He had come to support her, to put things right after all the … unpleasantness and misunderstandings. He mustn’t think that while she’d been in Africa she’d changed, grown promiscuous, loose, that her lack of faith had so transformed her that she had become a … a diminished woman.

  Another bead of sweat ran down her neck and between her breasts. She fought the urge to wipe it away. She didn’t want anyone in court to know how uncomfortable she was feeling.

  Then, carefully not looking at Jack, she took a deep breath.

  “No,” she lied.

  Another long silence, in which only the scratching of the judge’s pen could be heard.

  “I see,” said Hall eventually, letting an equally long silence follow, to emphasize his doubt, a doubt he wanted the court to share. “I see.”

  Then his spectacles went on again. “One more question, Dr. Nelson.” He stood up straighter. “I put it to you that you were drinking with Dr. North on the night in question. I put it to you that you saw nothing and that this story you have told was concocted the following day, after you had found what you had found, that Professor Sutton had been murdered. Your fairy tale was invented to cover up the fact that the most likely culprit in this murder was another scientist on the excavation, a rival who was jealous either of Richard Sutton’s success in finding fossils or because you were having an affair—sex—with him. In your small, tightly knit, highly competitive community in Kihara, passions run high. And in this case passions overflowed, tragically.”

  Natalie couldn’t look at Hall as he said this. It was so … so far from the truth, it made her out to be so different from what she really was …

  Her glance raked around the rest of the courtroom—Tudor, Richard Sutton Senior, Eleanor, her father …

  As she looked at her father, her lovely father, now here with her, her mind suddenly cleared, as it had done that night in camp, when she had stood naked in the rain, being reminded of him on the beach in Lincolnshire and, in the darkness, in a flash, had seen her way forward, that she must give evidence.

  And there was Eleanor, next to him, sitting upright, concentrating hard, almost glowing with attention. Her chignon looked as French as ever. Natalie straightened her own stance. “You are right about one thing, Mr. Hall.”

  That got his attention. That got everyone’s attention. The judge stopped writing and looked over at her.

  “Yes, there was—is—plenty of passion in Kihara, but not the kind you are wasting so much energy on. We are having a spectacular season there—we have excavated so many important discoveries that we debate what it all means endlessly. Normally, I live and work in Cambridge, at the university, one of the best universities in the world, a famous center of science.” Now she met Hall’s eye directly. “But I have never known intellectual passion like there is in Kihara, mental hard work, total involvement, complete engagement, utter dedication.” She smiled. “If your questions are anything to go by, being a lawyer doesn’t come close to being a paleontologist.” She shook her head. “So far as those passions are concerned, that determined involvement, you are profoundly mistaken, or have been misled. Richard Sutton was an excellent scientist. So is Russell North. But so far as I am concerned, that’s all. Sex doesn’t come into it.”

  “I see,” said Hall, pausing for a moment. He was thinking, tapping his spectacles on the brief in front of him. At length he raised his head. “But at least you have admitted I was right about one thing, about the temperature of the passion in Kihara.” He nodded and remained standing for a few moments, so that the whole court could dwell on his last sentence.

  Then he looked at the judge. “Thank you, Your Honor, that’s all,” he said softly, and sat down.

  Tudor scribbled for a while, his writing once again the only sound in the room. Then he raised his head. “Do you wish to reexamine, Sir Maxwell?”

  “Just one question, Your Honor,” said Sandys, getting to his feet.

  “Dr. Nelson, you said you didn’t see Ndekei carrying a weapon. Could you see his hands, were they empty?”

  “No … I mean no, I couldn’t see his hands. There was so little light that if he had been carrying a machete, for example, there was not enough light for the blade to catch it, nothing to make it shine.”

  “Thank you,” said Sandys. “You may stand down now.”

  He waited while Natalie left the witness box. The usher led her to the bench where Jack and her father and the others were sitting. Jack mouthed “Well done” and her father gave her the thumbs up. But she looked away. She had felt half naked in the witness box.

  Sandys had turned and was watching as she sat down. Then he faced the judge again. “That completes the case for the prosecution, Your Honor.”

  Tudor looked at the clock. It was 12:20.

  “Mr. Hall?”

  Hilary Hall rose and gathered up his gown in his hands. “Your honor, at this stage I would like to enter a plea that in this alleged crime there is no case to answer, all the evidence is circumstantial, and in view of that the charges against my client be dismissed.”

  Tudor took off his own glasses. “Can you make your argument by lunchtime?”

  “I think I can, yes.”

  The judge nodded. “Then proceed.”

  Hall drank some water and put on his spectacles. He held some notes but didn’t consult them. “It’s really very simple, Your Honor, and as an experienced trial judge you will be familiar, more than familiar, with the arguments I am going to employ.” He cleared his throat. “All the evidence in this case is circumstantial, there is nothing that directly links my client to this crime. I will go through the pl
anks of the prosecution’s case one by one.”

  He leaned on the desk lid in front of him. “Although the piece of Ndekei’s apron that was found on the thorn hedge near the victim’s tent was discovered the morning after the crime had been committed, that does not mean that it was left there during the preceding night. He worked in the camp after all, and had done for months, moving around, driving Land Rovers as well as cooking. It could have been left there well before the crime occurred and no one noticed—it is a small piece of cloth. The same argument applies to the footprint of the Wellington boot found outside Dr. Sutton’s tent. There was no blood on it and it too could have been made at any point in the days before the crime. One might say that this is more likely than not because only one footprint was found, others having been destroyed in the days preceding. Whoever wore that boot was outside Dr. Sutton’s tent, yes, but not necessarily on the night in question. And the imprint, though undoubtedly of Ndekei’s boot, has not been shown incontrovertibly to have been made by him.

  “The picture is further confused by the Wellington boot that was found being played with by some monkeys. While it is unorthodox that no one would come to court to say where, exactly, this boot was found, we do accept the prosecution argument that the material fact is that it was Ndekei’s boot and had blood on it of the same group as Professor Sutton’s. But this only confuses matters, because the boot found with blood on it was the same foot as the boot whose print was found outside Professor Sutton’s tent without blood. Is that not more than a little odd?”

  Hall shuffled more papers, drank more water.

  The judge looked up at the clock.

  “I come now to Dr. Nelson’s evidence. As she herself said, more than once, she never saw Mutevu Ndekei’s features that night. She inferred it was him because of what happened later, just as she inferred he was headed for Richard Sutton’s tent because of what happened subsequently, and because of the clothes he was wearing and the way he moved, the characteristic way that he ‘shuffled,’ as she put it. At the time, she thought he was headed for an assignation with a woman, possibly in the empty tent at the end of the row. But of course that figure could have been anyone, it could have been someone looking like Ndekei, or someone pretending to be Ndekei, knowing that it was Dr. Nelson’s habit to sit up late, long after everyone else had gone to sleep, drinking whiskey and smoking a cigarette.

  “I would remind the court, Your Honor, that no murder weapon has been found, and that Ndekei’s boots may have been stolen days before the crucial incident and deliberately used to frame him, as the jargon goes, to cast suspicion wrongfully upon him. We know that they had been stolen—by baboons, maybe—before and maybe that gave someone, some human, the idea to steal them again. I would remind Your Honor that though the blood found on the Wellington boot being played with by some monkeys was the same group as Professor Sutton’s, that group—O—is shared by between forty and fifty percent of the population. That narrows things down statistically but it hardly proves anything forensically.”

  He turned towards Maxwell Sandys.

  “Much has been made of the fact that Professor Sutton, together with Professor North, broke into a local Maasai burial ground and stole some ancestral bones, and that Sutton was killed in an act of revenge. But here again such reasoning is pure speculation, it is all circumstantial. Not a single shred of hard evidence has been produced in this court to support such speculation. There are no witnesses to the crime, there is no confession the prosecution can produce, I repeat that no murder weapon has been found, no Maasai spear, no machete, for example, which might offer some support for these wild allegations.”

  He gathered up his gown again. “As Your Honor well knows, my client—as defendant—does not have to produce rival theories about who committed this crime in order to demonstrate his innocence, but I cannot help but remark that the prosecution do not seem to have considered one very plausible alternative to their case against Mutevu Ndekei.”

  He looked around the court.

  “Which is that the excavation run by Dr. Eleanor Deacon was and is a close-knit group of highly ambitious, very clever people, where rivalries were and are intense, where competition is the order of the day, and, it seems, where personal emotions got mixed up with professional responsibilities. That seems to me a perfect forcing ground for an explanation for this sort of murder.”

  He looked about him. “As the court has seen, Dr. Nelson is a very attractive woman, very attractive indeed, and in the close confines of the excavation she was surrounded by several young men.”

  He let a silence elapse before turning to the judge and saying, “But that too, Your Honor, is speculation—”

  “Yes, yes it is,” interjected the judge. “And forgive me, Mr. Hall, but I wish to be clear about this. Are you suggesting that someone else impersonated Mr. Ndekei, or that Dr. Nelson made up her story to protect a lover who was jealous of Professor Sutton? I am confused.”

  What must Richard Sutton Senior make of all this, Natalie wondered.

  “I am obliged to Your Honor,” said Hall. “But I respectfully remind the court that we in the defense are not required to make the prosecution’s case for it. I merely point out some avenues of inquiry the prosecution appear to have overlooked or ignored.”

  The judge nodded.

  Hall continued. “As you say, Your Honor, that is all speculation on my part, and I will go no further. I simply repeat my central point: that there is no direct physical evidence to link my client to this crime, that everything presented in this court has been circumstantial, and that, so far as motivation is concerned, no evidence at all has been presented, only conjecture.”

  He paused. “In those circumstances, Your Honor, I respectfully submit that any conviction based on such evidence would be unsafe, very unsafe indeed, and I refer you to Regina v. Salter, 1954, and Regina v. McWhirter and others, 1957. It is my submission that, in the case of Regina v. Mutevu Ndekei, my client has no case to answer and that therefore the charges against him should be dismissed, and dismissed immediately, now, this very day.”

  He sat down.

  For a moment once again, the only sound in court was the judge scribbling in his notebook with his pen.

  He finished, carefully screwed the top of his pen back on, put it in his inside pocket, and looked up. “Thank you, Mr. Hall.”

  He looked around the court. “Very well. I see it is now time for luncheon. I will consider your arguments over the indifferent cold meats that the court service usually provides, and will give you my decision this afternoon.”

  “All rise!” barked the court usher and the judge stood up.

  Everyone else did too, the attorneys nodded to Tudor, he nodded back, and then he retired through a polished wooden door behind his chair.

  • • •

  “Now the fireworks start,” said Maxwell Sandys.

  “How do you mean?” said Jack.

  “Hilary Hall was given a respectful hearing, very respectful by Tudor’s standards, when he tried to argue there’s no case to answer, but if he now attempts to mount a defense based on Maasai law, and in the process Ndekei admits killing Sutton, watch the judge go for him.”

  Sandys was standing in the well of the court, surrounded by Eleanor, Natalie, Natalie’s father, Jack, Christopher, and Daniel. Everyone else had gone for lunch.

  “But there’s something different about Tudor today, don’t you think?” said Jack. “That quip about ‘indifferent cold meats’ for lunch … very unlike him. If someone else made that sort of remark, he’d see it as bringing the bench into disrepute.”

  Sandys shrugged. “That’s just Tudor warming up to get nasty. He’s showing his human side before his monstrous side takes over. He knows this case is high profile, and he knows what his reputation is, so he wants to appear reasonable, leave no room for an appeal on procedural grounds.” He turned to Natalie. “Now, my dear, I don’t think you should stay this afternoon. It could get very stormy in the pu
blic galley up above and outside, in the street. Ndekei might even be sentenced to hang today. Who knows when they might choose to take it out on you?”

  “Oh, I don’t think—” Natalie began but her father interrupted her.

  “He’s right, Tally.”

  “In fact, unless Jack wants to stay, to see the storm, he could even fly you back to the gorge this afternoon—that would be safest of all.”

  Everyone looked at Jack.

  He glanced at his watch. “Let’s see. There’s something I have to do this afternoon, a special, informal meeting of this committee I’m on, to review the news that is coming out of the London independence conference, which started yesterday. That kicks off at 2:30 and shouldn’t take more than an hour. So yes, I can pick Natalie up at the hotel at, say, four. That will give us time to get to the gorge before dark. What about the rest of you?”

  Eleanor spoke first. “I want to stay to the end, so does Owen, and so does Daniel, just in case it turns ugly, when having a black African with us may help. Christopher is staying on anyway, to have some flying lessons, now that he is well again.” She turned to Sandys. “You think the trial will end today?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t say. It all depends on how Tudor reacts to the defense Ndekei is going to run.” He paused. “But to answer your question, Eleanor, I don’t see how the trial can last beyond tomorrow morning.”

  Jack nodded. “I agree I should get Natalie out of harm’s way this afternoon. I’ll fly back tomorrow and collect everyone else.” He addressed his mother. “If there’s any change, you can always radio-telephone me at the camp.”

  Eleanor nodded and moved towards Natalie. “Well done, my dear, well done in the witness box, I mean. All that sex talk was quite unnecessary but you managed to remain strong and dignified and put that beastly barrister in his place. What would he know about intellectual passion? Incidentally, sitting with your father in court yesterday and today, we’ve talked a lot and he’s had an interesting idea. He is, as you know, a great admirer of Teilhard de Chardin, the theologian who wanted the church to adapt to developments in paleontology. Chardin is dead, of course, but your father’s given me the idea to invite some religious leaders out to the gorge, people who might feel they are embarrassed by our discoveries, but who might relish the chance to see at first hand what we are doing. People like Paul Tillich and Albert Schweitzer. Having the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize visit the gorge would be a major coup, don’t you think?”