Beyond Reasonable Doubt

by Gary Bell

  ‘We will make you sure of the defendant’s guilt. We will leave you with absolutely not a single shred of doubt that William Barber is guilty of murder.’

  And then he shuffled his papers, bristling with indignation, and left a heavy silence.

  An opening speech by the defence is rare, especially in a murder trial, so I was neither asked nor did I request to make one. Instead, I poured water from a carafe out into glasses for Zara and myself and slid one towards her, but she barely seemed to notice for staring upwards.

  I followed her wide, brown eyes up to the public gallery and saw Sarah Barber’s face there, white and thin as bone, like a flower dying at the front of the moderate crowd.

  What remained of the Barber clan had turned up in force. Declan and Caine, the younger brothers, now both in their late forties, watched with deadpan expressions, dressed in what were undoubtedly their usual courtroom suits and quite possibly the same ones I’d seen at Aidan’s funeral in ’88. Around them, the same bald, hard, craggy faces were repeated again and again through all the cousins and uncles and extended members of the family.

  There was nobody there for the victim.

  ‘With My Lord’s leave,’ Garrick said, ‘I’ll now call the Crown’s first witness …’

  It was a petite police officer who entered the court in full uniform and walked up to the witness box, bowing her neat blonde bob towards the bench before taking the Bible up in one hand, and speaking with the accent of my home.

  ‘I swear by Almighty God that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Garrick smiled, a reptile with toothache, old charmer that he was. ‘Could you start by introducing yourself to the court?’

  She nodded, rubbing her slight hands across her thighs. ‘I’m Police Constable Louise Shepherd of Rushcliffe South Police, stationed at Cotgrave Station, Nottinghamshire.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Garrick said once more. ‘PC Shepherd, were you on duty on the morning of Saturday 15 April this year?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘And did you receive the call to go to the disused railway that runs from Cotgrave and beyond Radcliffe-on-Trent?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Were you in the company of another officer?’

  ‘Yes. Police Constable Lucas Sharp.’

  Garrick nodded. ‘And, in your own time, can you tell the court what you encountered upon arriving at the scene?’

  ‘Certainly.’ She cleared her throat with a slight cough. ‘Do I have the court’s permission to refer to my own statement?’

  From the bench, Pike turned his weary eyes on me, spreading his hands. ‘Does the defence have any objections?’

  ‘No,’ I said into the microphone, ‘none whatsoever, My Lord. The officer’s evidence is all agreed upon. My learned friend can lead her through every word of it if he so chooses.’

  ‘Very well. You may continue, Miss Shepherd.’

  Another polite nod, another clearing of the throat, and she did.

  ‘PC Sharp and myself responded to a call made by Mr Harold Kennard, a gentleman who had been walking his dog along the old railway tracks from Radcliffe-on-Trent up towards Polser Brook, a small stream north-west of the village, early on Saturday morning. We arrived at the location at seven thirty-seven, but, because the majority of the track cuts through fields that are inaccessible by vehicle, we had no choice but to park our transport at the nearside of Radcliffe Road and proceed northwards on foot.’

  ‘You were assisted by paramedics?’ Garrick asked.

  ‘That’s right. The first responder ambulance arrived almost instantaneously, and its crew of two paramedics – Miss Lisa Langley and Mr Mark Merchant – joined Constable Sharp and myself. It took us a further five or six minutes to reach Mr Kennard, at which point the victim was confirmed as deceased on our arrival.’

  Garrick was intermittently shifting his gaze between the witness, and any impact she might be having on the jury. ‘Have you visited the scenes of many murders in your time with the force, Miss Shepherd?’

  She crossed her hands over her midriff, expression hardening. ‘I’ve seen three in my nine years. I’m thankful to say that these sorts of crimes are few and far between in our community.’

  ‘But this was a particularly gruesome one, wasn’t it?’

  ‘My Lord …’ I climbed wearily to my feet, halting the proceedings. ‘I’ve no objection in principle to evidence being given by my learned friend rather than the actual witness, but if he insists on doing so, shouldn’t he be sworn, too?’

  The judge waggled his bushy white eyebrows disapprovingly at Garrick, whose face coloured slightly, and the witness went on as I returned to my seat.

  ‘It was a very upsetting scene. The victim was only young. Naked, and sprawled out on the tracks like that … The pedestrian, Mr Kennard, he’s in his seventies and was enormously distressed. We cordoned off the area, and the investigation was handed over to DCS DeWitt and crime scene analysis, while Constable Sharp and myself escorted Mr Kennard back to the station.’

  ‘Thank you, Constable Shepherd,’ Garrick said. ‘We appreciate you taking the time to come down here today. If you wait there, the defence may have some questions for you.’

  ‘No questions, My Lord,’ I muttered. ‘No questions.’

  26

  ‘How come we had no questions? Shouldn’t we have cross-examined her? Challenged the evidence?’

  We were in the Bar mess, having hung up our wigs and adjourned for lunch. I’d asked for a strong black coffee, but it was so weak I could see the bottom of the cup staring straight back through it. Zara didn’t fancy any of the food on offer. I simply didn’t fancy eating.

  ‘The nature of cross-examination is to test the evidence of a witness where, on your client’s instructions, you disagree with it,’ I told her. ‘It’s not about passing comment on the evidence nor the effect of it unless it’s relevant. We don’t have any dispute with her findings, so there’s no need to cross-examine.’

  ‘I guess,’ she sighed, polishing the coffee’s condensation from her glasses with one shirtsleeve. ‘Still, seems a long way for her to have come just to read her own statement. They must’ve known we weren’t going to argue with whatever she’d found at the scene, so why bother getting her down here at all?’

  ‘Because Garrick’s going to lay it on thick with a trowel. He knows it’s agreed evidence, but he’s aiming for maximum impact. He wants that jury to put faces to names and expressions to faces. He wants a horror show. For now, we just have to bide our time and let the prosecution present their case.’

  ‘Speak of the knob …’ she muttered into her cup, and then, realising I’d heard her, rolled her eyes. ‘Sorry.’

  Garrick and Bowen had entered the mess, still dressed in full wigs and gowns, and blanked us all the way to the counter. They didn’t even sit together, choosing separate tables on opposite sides of the room.

  ‘He’s loads older than me, isn’t he?’ Zara grumbled. She was watching Bowen, who was guiding an egg sandwich into his open mouth with one hand, sullenly flicking through the mess’s complimentary copy of The Times with the other. ‘Must be, what, twice my age?’

  I nodded. ‘You say that as if it reflects poorly on you.’

  ‘Well, doesn’t it?’

  ‘If anything, I’d say it’s entirely the opposite. You’re half his age and working on the same trial, aren’t you?’

  ‘Hmm …’ She sipped her drink, hardly encouraged, watching him still. ‘He’s from our chambers, isn’t he?’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘Doesn’t it feel strange, going up against somebody from your set?’

  I shrugged. ‘It happens quite often. We’re self-employed, after all. So, you’d already met him in chambers?’

  ‘No. I recognise the name, but I’ve never seen him about. You don’t get on, do you?’

  I could’ve laughed. ‘What gives you that idea?’
/>   Harold Kennard was next to give evidence.

  God only knows how they’d got him down there for the day.

  He was just a few years older than our own head of chambers but looked as brittle as a bundle of matchsticks by comparison. It took a long, and at times excruciating, three hours for him to describe the morning he’d come across the body, intercut by loosely connected anecdotes covering most of his formative decades.

  Whenever Garrick actually managed to steer the distrait ramblings back into focus, it was a miserable, thoroughly depressing picture he painted for the jury.

  While I had no doubt that it had indeed been a terrible, traumatising encounter, Kennard’s being there was a cheap move by the prosecution and provided no more evidence than the preceding officer had already offered. He had been invited there for sheer emotional impact and little else; a stand-in, to fill the void that might ordinarily belong to a tearful victim impact statement by a member of the family.

  For all its skulduggery, it worked wonders.

  Juror Number 4 – a white woman with creased hands, the obvious eldest of the dozen in one of the more expensive, neater blouses – mopped her eyes with a tissue.

  Billy, on the other hand, looked as if he might’ve fallen asleep when I glanced back into the dock, and several of his relatives had actually wandered out of the gallery.

  For me, there was nothing to do but grimace and bear it until the witness was led out of the courtroom.

  ‘Wow,’ Zara whispered while we cleared our row after being adjourned for the evening. ‘That was …’

  ‘Painful?’ I said.

  ‘I would’ve gone for agonising.’

  I rushed for the robing room, wanting to avoid being cornered with Garrick, and then outside for a smoke. I didn’t even bother going down to see Billy before he was returned to his cell for the night, nor did I wait around to speak to his solicitor.

  Zara met me out the front, canvas bag of files over one shoulder, blue monogrammed damask against her chest. She hesitated before descending the steps. The throng of thirty or so people there had almost doubled; some were ranting to reporters while others sat cross-legged on the ground, cardboard placards alongside them.

  ‘So, this is it,’ she said, ‘murder at the Old Bailey.’

  ‘Is it everything you ever dreamed it would be?’ I asked drily.

  ‘You mean, did I spend my nights at Bar school dreaming of defending a cruel, bigoted racist?’ She shook her head. ‘I’d be lying if I said I did.’

  ‘Any regrets?’

  ‘No. Barristers can’t be choosers, can they?’ She remained close beside me, eyes fixed on the scattered crowd. ‘They look like they’re waiting for a gig or something.’

  ‘You’re apprehensive about going through them?’

  ‘No …’ She shrugged. ‘A bit, maybe.’

  I nodded, smoke billowing out through my nostrils, and began to descend the steps. ‘Come on,’ I said softly. ‘You’ve been face-to-face with a deranged, suspected killer. What’re a few dozen demonstrators compared to that?’

  ‘It’s different,’ she mumbled, keeping her face turned down from disapproving eyes.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Because I’ve come to expect hatred from a man like that,’ she said. ‘It’s everybody else’s anger I have a problem with.’

  27

  The River Fleet still runs beneath the Old Bailey. I haven’t seen it myself, but I’ve been told about it by various people around the court who have.

  To get to it, one has to go down through the coal room that heats the courts, an enormous power station with nearly eight-metre-high ceilings hidden entirely below street level. From there, it’s just an open hatch and a rusted ladder down to the cold, black Fleet where Elizabeth Fry, the great prison reformer of the early nineteenth century, used to collect water for the inmates of Newgate. By the 1860s, the water had become so fetid that the city was forced to cover it up, to build and live above it, and concede it to the ever-expanding kingdom of the rats that thrive in all those dark, forgotten places.

  I was thinking about that the next morning, after having the same dream about Aidan, lost in the mine. Going underground to see Billy didn’t help.

  ‘You actually planning on getting up and fucking doing owt today?’

  He was suited up in one of the seventy-four subterranean cells, ready for his second day in court.

  ‘I already told you which evidence we’d be challenging,’ I said, ‘and the witnesses we’d be cross-examining. You didn’t seem interested.’

  He shrugged, shoulders nearing the low, cracked ceiling, and sniffed. ‘Didn’t think you’d spend the whole thing just sitting on your fat arse though.’

  Both Zara and Fraser Hayes had accompanied me down for the quick morning conference but stood mutely by the cell door. I could scarcely blame them. I hardly had anything more to say to him myself.

  ‘Would you have preferred me to start throwing my weight around? To tear the seventy-something-year-old witness a new one in front of the judge and jury?’

  ‘That’d be worth seeing,’ he said with a lopsided grin.

  ‘Look, I don’t have time for this,’ I snapped. ‘So, unless you have some new instructions for us, then we’ll be seeing you up there.’

  ‘Can’t wait, Rumpole,’ he jeered, winking at my wig. ‘Which wanker have we got up there this morning, anyway?’

  ‘Ali Abdul Nazir.’

  ‘Ah, the Paki?’ He glanced to Zara, his eyes burning. ‘No offence, love.’

  ‘None taken,’ she replied coolly. ‘But tell me, Mr Barber, this Aryan, white, super-race that you’re so obsessed with, are you an example of it?’

  For once, he had no reply.

  Nazir was skinnier than I’d been expecting, though I knew from bitter experience that even the lightest man could throw a blinding jab. Boxing had given him a lean, chiselled look, and at twenty-five years old and well over six feet, he was the tall, dark, handsome antithesis of the stooped elderly witness that had come to the stand before him, his physique pressing against his long-sleeved shirt in all the ways and places mine did not.

  ‘Mr Nazir,’ Garrick began, ‘could you please tell the court what happened to you on the afternoon of Friday the fourteenth of April this year?’

  Nazir shifted lightly on his toes, a professional habit, and stroked his trimmed beard as he cast his mind back six months.

  ‘I was on my way to a mate’s, cos we were all off out for bank holiday weekend and that, when I stopped off to use the cashy.’

  ‘That would be the Tesco Express and its cashpoint on Maid Marian Way?’ Garrick asked, doing his public-schooled best to translate the quick-fire response.

  ‘Bang on, yeah,’ Nazir nodded.

  ‘Do you happen to remember what time this was?’

  ‘I know exactly when it was,’ he replied proudly, still bobbing on the spot. ‘Four minutes past five.’

  Garrick lifted his eyebrows in surprise, as if he hadn’t read it in the statement several times already.

  ‘That’s incredibly precise, Mr Nazir. How can you be so certain?’

  ‘The machine gave me a receipt, and then later, when I did my statement, I still had the paper in my wallet.’

  ‘Ideal,’ Garrick said. ‘Now, as you may or may not know, the footage from the cashpoint’s camera couldn’t be obtained …’ That’s ideal, I thought, rolling my eyes. ‘So, perhaps you could tell the court what occurred at that time?’

  Nazir nodded and gazed up into the grey beyond the glass roof.

  ‘I’m standing there, using the hole in the wall, when this bloke comes storming from the corner across the road behind me.’

  ‘Did you recognise this man?’

  ‘Not then, no. Didn’t have a clue who he was. I do now, of course.’

  ‘And, since then, you’ve positively identified him as the defendant,’ Garrick said, pointing up to the dock with one limp hand, ‘William Barber?’

&nb
sp; ‘Oh yeah,’ Nazir said, tilting his head right back so he could glare at Billy. ‘He was absolutely leathered, stumbling from one side of the pavement to the other. St James’s Street was behind me, so sort of …’ He mimed what was presumably the face of a cash machine in the air ahead of him, and then pointed a thumb off behind his right shoulder, ‘there, and that’s where he came out of. I turned round as soon as I heard him.’

  ‘And what did you hear?’

  ‘Just noises, really. Aggressive yelling. Sort of singing, I guess, but not …’ He frowned, trying to find the right word, and buried the tips of his fingers into his beard, pulling at the hair. ‘It was a racket, so I turned round to see what was going on. It’s four lanes of traffic on Maid Marian Way, two lanes each way separated by this strip of trees and bushes fenced off in the middle, and he’s coming straight across the road towards me. He manages to jump the first fence, stamps through all the bushes and that, and then bins it on the nearest fence.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Garrick interrupted, raising a palm, ‘but what exactly do you mean by “bins it”?’

  ‘Falls over, you know? Into the road. One of the cars has to swerve, pounds its horn, and that’s when I realise how drunk he is, and that he’s got his eyes fixed on me.’

  ‘Quite the spectacle,’ Garrick said coldly. ‘What were you doing in the meantime?’

  ‘I was just trying to get my money out fast, but by the time it had given me my card back he was already at the kerb, a couple of metres away.’

  ‘And was he making any more sense, verbally, by then?’

  ‘You could say that,’ he sniffed. ‘He basically started accusing me of stealing money from the machine. Said I’d come over here to rob him and his family. I mean, technically I was born in Newark, but I don’t think that’s what he meant … By that point he was causing a massive scene, and people were slowing down in their cars, watching him through the window of the Bear and Lace, the restaurant next door. He was going ballistic.’