The Juryman's Tale

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The Juryman's Tale Page 10

by Trevor Grove


  Everyone in court, from the judge down, was much too polite to show any overt sign of disdain for the man in the dock, relentlessly going over the same ground again and again. But it was plain from the exasperated raising of eyebrows beneath wigs what was going through their minds. The police witnesses picked this up quickly. From time to time they would turn beseechingly to the judge and say, ‘I am confused, My Lord.’ The subtext was plain: ‘Must I really bother to decipher this impertinent gobbledegook?’

  But the truth was that, in his tiresome way, Korkolis was managing to show up some definite weaknesses in his opponents’ armour. These were not so much in the prosecution case as in the way the police had conducted the operation. Several detectives contradicted each other in minor details. Strange gaps revealed themselves in the timetable of events that led up to the arrests. The detectives had relied on some wild assumptions. Risks had been taken that sounded worryingly unprofessional to laymen’s ears. How did these errors square with Scotland Yard’s world-famous reputation, Korkolis wanted to know? Were they mistakes – or signs of an extraordinary conspiracy between themselves and the Fraghistas family, as he maintained? At one point Korkolis needled DCI Vanner into remarking loftily, ‘I cannot micromanage an operation from a red centre.’ Exactly the sort of shifty-sounding jargon to make a juror freeze – and incidentally arouse some anxiety about what might have become of good old-fashioned policing at the Yard.

  We had now been at it for twenty-four days. On 8 January the judge announced that the trial would be going on at least until St Valentine’s Day. Out of curiosity, I asked the other jurors whether, were the verdict required that very day, we would be likely to agree. No, we would not, it seemed. Several voices were raised indignantly. It was improper even to think about it yet. We must keep open minds. It was too soon to judge. We would have to go back through all the evidence before we could even begin to reach a decision. It would be a hotel job, for sure.

  My liking for the Fraghistas family blossomed into a full-blown crush with the arrival of George’s sister Marily. She was very pretty in a modest, unselfconscious way, answering the prosecution’s questions quietly but with great firmness. It was Jeremy Benson, Miss Korner’s junior, who was conducting the evidence-in-chief on this occasion. Every once in a while she allowed herself a smile which swept the court like a sunbeam – though she took care it never shone on the men in the dock. I suspect quite a few of us were smitten, including some of the lawyers.

  Is there an equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome in a long-running court case? Hostages are known to form attachments to their captors, partly out of self-preservation but chiefly out of the need to keep a hold on their humanity. In Court 9 one could feel something growing between jurors, barristers, witnesses and judge which if not exactly a bond was certainly a sense of being all in this thing together. It extended to Detective Sergeant Hawkins and his sidekick Detective Constable Ian Slade, who were in court nearly every day. It even embraced the defendants, who suffered from the boredom and the hold-ups just as the jury did and were guarded with only slightly more severity. Every morning they nodded to us in a friendly way, which didn’t go unappreciated.

  At any rate, one could sense a determination on the jury’s behalf that this trial should come out well in the eyes of everyone in court, and most particularly the judge’s.

  Most of the time Judge Goldstein was superhumanly long-suffering with Korkolis. Just now and then he allowed himself an impulsive crack of the whip along the lines of, ‘My well-known patience is being sorely tried, Mr Korkolis.’ Once, glancing away from the prisoner and up into a corner of the courtroom ceiling, he let slip, ‘That is an outrageous comment.’ A little light sarcasm might be employed: ‘Mr Korkolis, address the jury later about whatever dreadful significance you see in that.’ How careful did he have to be? I wondered. The bear-traps in the path of a judge trying someone who had chosen to defend himself – particularly a foreign someone, struggling with the language – are obvious even to a layman. The Court of Appeal stood less than a mile away.

  Unlike her oldest brother, Marily tried never to look at Korkolis while he was cross-examining. Her face was set grimly most of the time, staring at the jury on the other side of the courtroom, though she would break into a huge, incredulous grin at some of Korkolis’s suggestions. She thought carefully before answering each question, but not always. ‘If you knew George was in on the plot …’ he began on one occasion, but got no further. Marily gave a snort like a cornered wildcat. ‘I find that outrageous and insulting,’ she spat. Even Korkolis was momentarily silenced.

  WIGS AND CIGS

  Once most of the principal prosecution witnesses were out of the way, things began to speed up. Even Korkolis’s meandering interrogations were noticeably abbreviated. Because jurors’ notebooks may not be removed from the courtroom (we used to wonder whether the cleaners read them overnight), I would write up my own notes from memory and scraps of paper when I got home in the evenings. For the middle two weeks of January they veer between action and aperçu:

  George’s chauffeur, Dennis Banks, gives evidence. Looks like an ambassador: tall, greying, respectable, dressed in double-breasted suit. The best-spoken witness so far. Pity he has nothing interesting to say.

  Today’s batch of prison officers have shaven heads and torturers’ faces. They make Moussaoui the French-Algerian and Mereu the wrestler look like cherubs. It must be hellishly dull for them spending whole days in court with nothing to do but suppress yawns. The clanking of keys heralds their arrival with the prisoners at the side-door which leads directly into the dock. From there, I imagine, there are cobwebby staircases down to the cells. Roy has said he will give us a tour of them one day.

  There are fourteen people in the dock most days, including the jailers. The interpreters lean in towards their clients so they look like pairs of lovers, mouth to ear and ear to mouth.

  Eureka! Our lottery syndicate has won ten pounds. A good omen. If the trial goes on for long enough we are sure to end up rich. It was decided the winnings would be re-invested in another ten lines of numbers. Stuart announced that if we won the big one he would spend his prize money buying a box for life at Ibrox Park, the Rangers’ stadium.

  The defendants have spent sizeable sums of money setting up the hit: hiring cars, renting Hogan Mews, etc. The contemporary kidnap kit includes the following: mobile phones, intercoms, chargers, transformers, transceivers, tape recorders, adaptors, binoculars, camcorder, Polaroid camera, syringes, gun, holster, stungun, wig (£95 from Selfridge’s), masks, latex gloves, sticky tape, handcuffs, earplugs, false passports and false rubber stamps for same. We have examined the bill for a voice distorter, purchased at a West End shop which openly sells such things. By my reckoning, your well-planned kidnap or fake kidnap these days can cost you close on a quarter of a million pounds in capital outlay.

  There were twelve people wearing wigs in Court 9 until Gale and his junior left. During a break, the usher gives an impromptu lecture on the subject. He says the newer, whiter ones are made of nylon, the older, yellower ones of horse hair. Old wigs are chic. If a young barrister is wearing one, it’s sign that he or she has been favoured with it by a retiring silk. Wigs are said to provide the lawyers and judges not merely with an aura of impersonal authority but also a degree of anonymity, which is useful for their own protection. It is true: a QC looks quite different when you run into him outside the Fleet Street branch of Boots, bareheaded and wearing a raincoat.

  Watching Joanna Korner grinding cigarette butts under the heel of her black court shoe, I wonder whether there might not be another explanation for the wig-yellowing phenomenon. The Old Bailey will be the last public building in Britain where smoking is banned, even under New Labour. Barristers, policemen, court officials – everyone puffs away as furiously as actors in rehearsal or squaddies off parade. It is also the last redoubt of the roll-up, much favoured by the older ushers and security men. All that messing about with Rizlas helps to
pass the time, I suppose.

  Several police witnesses get into a muddle when addressing the judge. In your run-of-the-mill Crown Court the correct form is Your Honour. But at the Old Bailey it is My Lord. Ahem. Also, judges dress like barristers when they are sitting in the Bailey and must dispense with their sashes. The top judge here is the Recorder of London, who has a flat in the Old Bailey itself. Novice ushers are schooled not to enter it by mistake, in case they should find Mrs Recorder in her curlers.

  Miss Wendy Nunn, George’s secretary, goes into the box. It was she who took the first call from George after the kidnap. Mr K insists on calling her Mrs Wendy the whole time, committing a double solecism. Miss Nunn is forthright and helpful but her voice has the intonation of someone who spends much of her day saying ‘How can I help you?’ and ‘Would you bear with me?’, typical of a million London Wendys. We miss Marily’s dazzling smile.

  In the Gents’ I ask the interpreter who looks like General Franco why Mr Fraghistas has an ‘s’ on the end of his surname in some of the court documents and Mrs Fraghista (sic) does not. She is in the genitive, he says. Even though she is now a widow, she was once ‘of’ Mr Fraghistas Sr, her husband. Greek feminists have a sitting target there.

  Petros Poulmentis takes the stand. He is George’s partner at World Carrier (London) Ltd. They set up the business together. He is a big, good-looking, crinkly-haired man. He looks like an Englishman’s idea of a Greek playboy: he has enormous white shirt-cuffs of the kind that pre-war dandies used to ‘shoot’ but Mr Poulmentis merely fiddles with. [In fact, I learnt later, he is a family man, who moved to England when he was only 19 and is married to an Englishwoman.] He speaks calmly and confidently and grins a good deal. He swigs mineral water from a bottle out of the left-hand corner of his mouth with the regularity of a chain-smoker trying to kick the habit. He says he disapproves strongly of George’s gambling. Mrs Fraghistas and Marily had both spoken warmly about Petros. ‘He is like a brother to us,’ said Marily. According to Korkolis, the reason he called himself ‘Petros’ during the kidnap was so that anyone listening to his telephone conversations would assume it was Poulmentis talking.

  The jury spent some time this morning calculating what all this is costing the tax-payer. One estimate was £400 an hour. No, no: £25 a minute, more like it. That still sounds to me like an undershoot. Sarah, the clerk of the court, who sits at a desk beneath the judge’s dais, spends much of her time totting up lawyers’ fees: a sort of human taximeter. She is a big cheery young woman with a lovely face who looks like Dawn French and wears a red Aids ribbon under her gown. Maybe after the trial she’ll help me put a price tag on it. Another of Sarah’s jobs is to administer unpunctual jurors with wiggings – an appropriate term, since Old Bailey clerks do wear wigs. A clerk’s reprimand is a good deal more serious than an usher’s.

  There is now a certain house-pride about other cases going on in the Bailey. Court 1 is occupied by the trial of a former Ukrainian prison guard. He is accused of war crimes. Stuart and I agree such retrospective legislation is a mistake, more than half a century later. He’ll probably get off. [He did.] We note days when there are armed police and extra cameramen outside the front entrance. That usually means IRA, we inform nervous new jurors.

  Great excitement this afternoon: Mike Gatting, the former England cricket captain, has been seen in the jury restaurant. Bob went up and got his autograph. Apparently Gatting had been called up three times before and managed to wangle deferrals – all right for some. On this occasion, however, not being wanted on voyage for the New Zealand test series, he had to give in. I telephoned The Times and a nice little story duly appeared in the diary column, to Bob’s wonder and astonishment. Even Roy the usher was impressed. The story prompted him to disclose that Edwina Currie had also been proscribed recently and would have been one of our own jury intake – had she not been an MP and therefore entitled to slip the net. Boo.

  A long morning with the jury out. We discussed the state of civilisation. Stuart had this to say: ‘When I came down from Scotland, if I had an argument with someone I’d put him on the cobbles. Not any more. Now you never see anyone getting a straightener. You don’t want to argue with young blokes for very long. They all carry knives. If a party candidate calls canvassing, I ask him if he’s in favour of hanging. If not I tell him to bugger off.’ Perhaps things aren’t looking so bleak for the Tories after all.

  We have just had two and a half days off because of an ailing juror, Pat. I had offered her some Anadin and the usher spotted me. Not allowed, he said firmly. In keeping with the general nannying, you are not permitted to take medicines from anyone else in court, only those prescribed by your own doctor. Otherwise it’s a visit to the Old Bailey matron. Pat duly went off to see her, but with some trepidation. This was because I had slipped her two Anadins anyway when the usher left the room and she had taken them surreptitiously. Now she was about to be given more pills by matron. Should she risk suspicion by refusing them – or an overdose by taking them?

  I was wondering whether we were about to start asserting that oldest of workplace rights, the right to throw a sickie once a month. Now Kate has come up with a variation on the theme: she has a family funeral to attend. That means another day off for everyone in court.

  Korkolis tried bullying the bench this morning. His outburst began, ‘Don’t ask me to proof…’ but he didn’t get much further. His Lordship intervened sternly, but rather spoilt the effect by producing a stupendous mixed metaphor: ‘If you want to put your horns against me, Mr Korkolis, you will find you’re on a losing wicket.’ Mr K’s upbringing might have helped him cope with the Minotaur image, but he must have been stumped by the cricketing allusion.

  Kate: ‘I’m bored. I’m dying of boredom. I couldn’t bear another day off (she having just requested one).

  The judge, on being invited to re-estimate the trial’s running-time: ‘If I could predict that I would go out and buy the winning lottery ticket.’

  Joanna Korner on her junior, Jeremy Benson, who had made a time-saving suggestion: ‘Mr Benson is full of good ideas on a Friday afternoon.’

  Judge: ‘The best idea would be to stop now.’

  POLICE MATTERS

  I lost count of the number of police witnesses. There must have been at least thirty of them, from DCI Vanner to the humble beat bobbies who were hauled off the street to make up numbers for the raid on Hogan Mews.

  There is no such thing as a typical policeman. They came in all shapes, sizes and colours, from PC Sylvester Hack from Paddington Green, a tiny black man, to more traditional bruisers who looked like they had spent their adult years in a fairground boxing booth. After they had taken the oath they would each launch straight into a soldierly recital of name, rank and station. The only thing they had in common was an Estuary accent, a painful inability to pronounce the names of suspects and victims correctly, and a sort of wooden self-confidence, which I imagine was the product of countless appearances in the witness box.

  There was also a hint of truculence. No doubt this came from long experience of having their evidence challenged and disbelieved. Every notorious mis-trial, from the Guildford Four to the Carl Bridgewater case, blows a huge hole in the credibility of the police force. It did not require Korkolis to remind us of such instances (though he did): there cannot be a jury in the land whose judgement is unaffected by them.

  Watching so many policemen and women go through their paces I noticed a couple of other characteristics which I think jurors must find irritating. One was their obsequiousness towards the judge, tagging ‘My Lord’ on to the end of every answer, when it was us they should have been addressing. The other was their reliance on notebooks and reports, some of them written up hours after the events concerned and often in concert with one or more colleagues. Fair enough, of course. But it had the odd effect of making it look as though they were cheating, bringing their cribs in with them, whereas ordinary mortals giving evidence had only their memories to rely on.


  The upshot was that in some cases I found myself believing the police witnesses despite themselves. There was something not quite wholesome about a few of the detectives. They looked as though they spent too much of their days cooped up in cars smoking and eating Pot Noodles – which I suppose they do, poor things. The puffy eyes suggested long hours of anthropos das nichtas living and late-night report-concocting. Their worldliness was uneasy-making, though also quite glamorous. The blonde whom you’d have taken for the editor of a Sunday tabloid or possibly someone even less salubrious if you’d met her in the street came across as a tough and unflappable detective. She stood her ground admirably against Korkolis, refusing to join in his favourite hypothesising games.

  One worried for these people, all the same. They must live their lives in constant fear of putting a foot wrong. They are obliged to take notes of everything they see or do: number-plates, street names, descriptions of suspects, stopping for a pizza, slipping into McDonald’s to take a leak. Each entry is timed to the minute. The cautious copper probably writes down how many Weetabix he has for breakfast in the police canteen. Think what it would be like in one’s own life, knowing that every few weeks one was liable to be minutely cross-examined by a trained interrogator about one’s work six months earlier – and, to make matters worse, that this viva voce would take place in front of twelve sceptical strangers and a headline-hungry press corps.

 

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