by Trevor Grove
No one stumbled. At least we were all literate. If we sounded nervous it would not have been surprising. The only other occasions on which such solemn undertakings are pronounced in public are weddings and christenings. We spend most of our lives blithely committing good and bad deeds careless of the eye of Heaven upon us. Yet here we were positively calling God’s attention to ourselves and doing so in the presence of scores of stern-faced witnesses, many of them togged up like members of the Spanish Inquisition.
From this moment on, no member of the jury would be required or allowed to speak in court again. We would be a silent tribunal, giving away nothing except what could be read on our faces. In Britain, jury vetting is not a customary procedure, although it is allowed for the prosecution in certain cases, such as those involving official secrets. Since 1973, the court no longer even has the right to know our occupations. So until the day when the foreman delivered his or her verdict, neither the prisoners nor their counsel nor the press nor even the judge himself, however wise in the ways of juries, would know what to make of us. But that was not going to stop them trying.
The scrutiny had already begun. If I turned left, towards the dock, I found at least one of the defendants staring at me intently. Down in the well of the court, my gaze would meet that of a barrister and our eyes would lock. From his eyrie to our right the judge also looked down at one or other of us from time to time, with the unblinking curiosity of an owl. Presumably they felt that our muteness, the blurry anonymity conferred on us by being a body known as a jury, gave them some sort of licence to weigh us up in this unembarrassed fashion. Should any of them try it on the London Underground they would get thumped. But here it was OK.
Actually, it was better than OK: it was flattering and rather thrilling. For the true reason for their hunger to know us better was this: it was we twelve who had ultimate power in this court. They could boss us about like schoolchildren, but unless the judge stopped the trial prematurely it was we who held the scales of justice in our inexperienced hands. The lawyers might know each other and would be able to play on each other’s strengths and weaknesses. They would know which of them, in their own terms, was getting the better of it. But we dozen un-case-hardened strangers would have no such knowledge, any more than an American would know which team was ahead in a test match after a couple of days’ play. We were as stony-faced as sphinxes – and how they longed to have the answers to the riddles we posed.
Naturally, we felt the same curiosity about each other. Who were we? How would we get on together? What teams did we support? What were our politics? For the time being, I could only form a very general impression. We seemed to be a fair representation of the crowd up in the jury restaurant, except for the fact that we were all white, which was unusual. We were six men and six women, ranging in age from early twenties to mid-sixties. The women were nicely turned out; the men were in casual clothes but for two of us in ties and jackets. Socio-economic classes? I guessed there were five who would qualify as ABC1s and seven pretty definite C2s. None of us was on the dole, none was a student and there were just two pensioners, which rather blew a hole in Auberon Waugh’s assertion that ‘any jury nowadays is largely filled by the unemployed’. Nor did we have anyone who could not read or write. The judge had particularly asked those members of the original panel with reading difficulties to excuse themselves. No one did.
But these were early days, when it was enough simply to exchange first names and share our apprehensions about what lay ahead. We were a bunch of disparate people thrown together in unusual circumstances. We were like a group of holiday-makers setting off on a coach tour of the Rhine. But in our case, we had even less in common. We had not even chosen the same holiday from the brochure. What is more, we were all travelling alone. It might turn out to be an uplifting adventure for all of us. But at this stage it felt more like a mystery tour for mismatched singles.
THE CROWN’S CASE
Joanna Korner QC opened for the Crown. She outlined the case for the prosecution crisply. In the late afternoon of Sunday 24 March 1996 George Fraghistas drove his car into the NCP car-park at Lanark Road, Maida Vale, using a plastic card to open the garage doors. As he got out of the car he heard running feet and looked up to see a masked man coming towards him. There were three men altogether, he thought. Mr Fraghistas was hurled to the ground and bundled into the boot of a car at pistol-point, kicking and shouting for help. Someone got into the boot beside him. The man with the gun spoke in English with a Greek accent. Neither of the others uttered a word.
After a short journey, Mr Fraghistas was hauled out of the boot, a blanket was thrown over his head and he was thrust into the utility cupboard at 5 Hogan Mews. He was blindfolded, handcuffed, his ankles were bound, wax plugs were stuffed in his ears and taped into place. The next day he was forced to begin the ransom calls. Scotland Yard was alerted. Nine days after he was seized the police arrested two of the kidnappers in Golders Green in the middle of a ransom call to the Fraghistas household. Two hours later they found the kidnap victim, released him and his four captors were charged.
That, baldly, was what the Crown would now try to prove had happened.
It was hard to take in, chiefly because of its strangeness. Kidnapping for ransom is one of the most serious crimes on the English statute book, second only to murder. In this country, thank heavens, it is also one of the rarest, although there has been a little-publicised increase in recent years, mainly among immigrant communities. Of the nearly fifteen hundred crimes logged as kidnaps in England and Wales in 1996, most concerned gangland feuds, siege situations or domestic squabbles, and lasted no more than a few hours.
In the public imagination kidnapping for ransom is mostly the preserve of pitiless Sicilians and Colombians, the world leaders in the field. Terrorist kidnaps we are more familiar with: over the past thirty years British hostages have been held in the Middle East, Far East, South America and even Canada, though over here the IRA has generally eschewed this tactic.
Sure enough, the alleged kidnappers in our case were all foreigners, as was the kidnapped man. But still, it all sounded quite outlandish. Did such a nasty, un-British crime really happen among the law-abiding mansion-blocks of Maida Vale?
In front of each juror was a plastic water-cup, a yellow highlighter, an array of pencils and a cheap school exercise book. About a third of us began taking notes immediately. As a general rule, those first-day scribblers kept at it throughout the trial, filling a notebook every four weeks or so. Whether it was because they had greater confidence in their memories or were simply lazy, the rest scarcely ever wrote down a thing. One of the detectives on the case told me afterwards that this worried him greatly, since he knew how complicated things would become. As a journalist with an atrocious memory I realised that without a record of what we were hearing I would have nothing but confused impressions to go on even after a week, never mind the months we had been told to expect. Some of our notes did indeed turn out to be crucially important when the time came: the difficulty was in trying to convince some of the others that they were accurate. I suppose those who do not much use the written word in their daily lives are also mistrustful of it. Had we had a video they might have been less dubious.
Joanna Korner was the first barrister most of us had ever seen in action other than on the TV screen. My own courtroom experience was limited to a couple of libel trials and my previous stint as a juror in Southwark. Only one of my new colleagues had also done jury service before.
Miss Korner made a striking impression. She was exceptionally tall and elegant, with an attractive, angular face and short grey hair which blended becomingly into her wig. If she might not, at 46, be everyone’s idea of Portia, she would certainly be right for one of those strong-willed women in the Roman plays. Her manner was head-girlish: drawlingly self-assured for the most part, but prone now and then to break into a self-deprecating, Joyce Grenfellish guffaw. I had her down for Roedean and Girton. I was wrong on both coun
ts. That night when I got home I looked in Who’s Who and learnt that she did not go to university; that in her time off she collected books and porcelain, went to the cinema and played tennis.
Slightly to my surprise the other jurors rather warmed to Joanna Korner as the trial got into its stride. They thought her clever and intelligible (as did the policemen in charge of the case, who had recommended her to the Crown Prosecution Service). I had imagined they would have been put off by her accent, such is the general disdain for talking posh in 1990s Britain. But if so, they would have had to show the same scorn for every other lawyer who opened his mouth in Court 9, including Judge Simon Goldstein who, despite being the son of an East End market trader, alumnus of East Ham Grammar and a supporter of West Ham football club, spoke with the refinement of a Trollopian bishop. Maybe, I concluded, people actually expect a court of law to be a bastion of poshness and so are undismayed by it. Perhaps they even find it reassuring.
It was time for the prosecution to produce its first witness and the jury to get their first look at George Fraghistas, the alleged kidnap victim. He cut an unremarkable figure, standing uncertainly in the witness box. He looked like the sort of businessman you find in Club Class on any scheduled flight to southern Europe: dark suit, dazzling white shirt, striped tie; middle-aged, middling height, middling build, a touch on the flabby side. His cheeks had a muddy Mediterranean pallor. He wore large wire-framed spectacles which he swapped for another pair to read the oath. There was nothing about him to indicate the trauma which the Crown said he had undergone eight months earlier.
If he seemed bewildered and apprehensive, it was a look the jury would come to recognise on the face of every new witness other than court-calloused characters such as the police and forensic experts. For some reason as I watched George standing there, blinking at the ranks of faces around him, I thought of the early Christians, thrust into the glare of the Roman arena, wildly uncertain of their fate.
The witness cuts a very lonely figure in a courtroom. He or she has not been allowed to follow the trial, knows none of the leading players except possibly the defendant, and is usually unfamiliar with court procedure. Barristers are not allowed to rehearse with them, as they are in the United States. These days there is a witness support set-up at the Old Bailey should help be needed. But nothing can alter the fact that while the ordeal lasts, it is the witness who is the centre of attention in this drama and on whom umpteen pairs of eyes are riveted.
To begin with, it was relatively easy for George Fraghistas. Name, address, age, occupation, status (bachelor), family (widowed mother, older brother, two sisters: well-off Athenians with a successful business, mainly in shipping). This was friendly fire. All Mr Fraghistas had to do was give his account, gently prompted by Miss Korner. Bit by bit, he shaded in the outline she had already sketched for us.
His story was both shocking and mundane. The first thought that flashed through his mind on seeing a hooded man running towards him in the car-park was that it was a friend of his, a man notorious for gruesome practical jokes. (Some friend, we thought.) When his assailants had wrestled him to the concrete floor and a gun was levelled at him, all he could think about, he said, was how gigantically tall the man with the gun looked (three of the four defendants were notably short). They tried to force a leather mask over his head but he begged them not to, saying he was terrified of suffocating: surprisingly, they desisted. He struggled so hard to avoid being put in the boot of the kidnappers’ car that one of them jumped in beside him, forcing him to the floor, allegedly the burly French wrestler. The two men, victim and attacker, lay pressed together in the darkness like lovers for the journey to Hogan Mews.
Once installed in the cupboard, Fraghistas’s sense of disorientation was compounded. He could not see where he was because he had been blindfolded. Someone spoke to him in a strange squeaky voice, like a child who has sucked the helium from a party balloon. His ears were plugged, his wrists hurt from the handcuffs and he was losing the circulation in his ankles, which had been tightly bound with adhesive tape. His wristwatch and glasses had been taken from him. Only the dim sounds of traffic, he said, gave him any idea what time of day it was. Gradually the regime was relaxed a little, along with his bonds. He was told to call his chief captor ‘Petros’. He was fed quite well on chicken, prosciutto, even steak and ice-cream. He was brought cigarettes, fruit and tranquilliser pills. At first he was given a bucket to pee in; then an empty plastic mineral water bottle. Once a day he was led blindfolded to the lavatory.
Miss Korner spent long hours taking the court through the transcripts of the ransom calls. These were made by George, she said, under duress. The initial demands were dictated by ‘Petros’ and pre-recorded, then played down the line to the family, who had gathered at Mrs Fraghistas’s flat. When they responded, it was George who had to talk to them. He said that one of the kidnappers was always standing behind his blindfolded head threatening to break his neck if he spoke out of turn. The conversations were being taped both by the kidnappers at Hogan Mews and by the police, who had speedily set up camp in Mrs Fraghistas’s small living room.
These transcribed calls, page after page of them, had an unreal, almost bland quality when read out in studiedly neutral tones by Joanna Korner. Yet one could sense the tension with which each phrase was loaded, a desperate anxiety concealed behind even the most banal-seeming exchanges between George and his sister Marily, or George and Nicos, his fiery older brother. It was Nicos who became the chief negotiator.
The odd thing was that, as the days went by and the man in the witness box told the tale of his terror, it gradually began to sound quite matter of fact. Perhaps we were becoming case-hardened. It was partly the effect of the antiseptic courtroom. Had George Fraghistas been spotlit on a stage with the house-lights dimmed, his narrative would have sustained its dramatic drive. But a boxy modern courtroom with strip lighting overhead is no aid to the imagination. It is, however, a compelling setting when the drama is in the present tense and takes place before one’s very eyes.
This was what occurred one day early on in the trial when Miss Korner asked the usher for one of the exhibits. He took it over to the witness box and held it up. It was a hood, made of heavy black leather. It was designed to cover the entire head, down to the neck, with a horizontal zip across the mouth. It was an almost comically gruesome thing, straight out of the sado-masochist’s mail-order catalogue. Did Mr Fraghistas recognise it? Was this the mask they had tried to force over his head in the garage?
Mr Fraghistas stammered, blenched, bowed his head and hid his face in his hands. He began to sob. The whole court tensed, then looked away, embarrassed. It was one of those moments, for sure, that would stick in the jury’s mind. This was the kind of first-hand evidence we really could judge for ourselves. George breaks down in the box: a man under unbearable stress, suddenly reminded by this horrible object of those first frightening seconds in the car-park. His emotional collapse had allowed us a glimpse of the unvarnished truth.
Or had it?
The trial was still in its infancy, yet already second thoughts were becoming second nature. Antennae we didn’t even know we possessed were erect and twitching. One found oneself asking questions which in other circumstances would have seemed absurdly suspicious. Was it possible, just possible, that George was play-acting? Could it be that he had planned something like this to win the jury’s sympathy?
We were to see and handle a great many other exhibits during the succeeding months – more than a hundred of them. There was a scuffed leather jacket, a pair of handcuffs, a voice distorter, a set of hypodermic syringes still in their wrappers. The firearms expert demonstrated a stungun, made in Korea. It was called a Thundershot. He held it up and a crackling blue arc flared between its crab-like claws, a charge capable of paralysing Arnold Schwarzenegger. The other gun, a heavy black automatic, looked and felt like the real thing although it fired supposedly non-lethal ammunition. We passed it silently from one to an
other along the two rows of the jury box.
Each of these things was charged with its own capacity to shock, like the stungun itself. We were touching the texture of violence, feeling its hard edges, holding its dead weight in our hands. Yet none of these exhibits quite matched the sick-making menace of that mask. A while later, when the court had risen for lunch, some of us saw George huddled in a corner outside, with his face pressed to the wall, weeping.
THE JURORS
We had only been together as a sitting jury for a few days, but already we were showing signs of developing a group sense of responsibility. This became apparent when those of us who had seen George crying told some of the others about it. Poor George, they said. And then a couple of jurors pointed out earnestly that it would surely be wrong for us to let ourselves be influenced by something that had happened outside the courtroom. Shouldn’t we wipe the scene from our minds? And the rest of us nodded gravely.
This was rather remarkable. We had had no guidance whatsoever about such matters. What was happening was that the jury was evolving its own code of behaviour, according to what it dimly understood to be proper and fair. The glue of shared experience was binding us into a group, as any amateur psychologist would have predicted. By now we had progressed from first names to surnames, ages, jobs. In the unhurried British fashion, we learned a little more about each other every day, joining up the dots as we went along.
Bob was the extrovert. That was clear before one had even met him. Right from the start I had seen this grinning, broad-shouldered young man swaggering about the jury restaurant, chatting to all and sundry. He seemed thoroughly at ease. He had an Irish surname but was born and brought up in Woolwich and went to the local Catholic schools. He might have been a bus conductor or a soldier. Actually he was a postman. Yeah. He could have got off, like the other posties, seeing Christmas was coming up. But he wanted to be on a jury, right, especially a good long one. He reckoned the court would compensate for his lost overtime. He was 25, worked out in the gym and played league football for a south London team (‘semi-professionally’ he insisted: £25 a match plus small bonuses). He was a cheery, cocky sort of bloke who let everyone know that he’d be volunteering to be jury foreman when the time came. He quite fancied the idea of standing up in court and delivering the verdict. He had eight GCSEs and knew a lot about cars, something which we would find useful later on. The detectives assigned to the case, who sat across court from us every day, sussed Bob as a weight-trainer straight away, just by the way he moved. They nicknamed him The Body-Builder and thought they saw him looking with special absorption at one of the defendants, Mereu the wrestler. From day one, Bob made a beeline for Kate.
