Charlie

by Lesley Pearse

  The prosecution’s questions ended with how she escaped, then it was the turn of the defence. Cunningham, the defence barrister, was entirely different to Underwood. A handsome, tall, well-built man, with olive, glowing skin. His voice was cultured but loud and commanding. Although he smiled at her, it didn’t reach his penetrating dark eyes. Right from the very first question Charlie felt uncomfortable. It seemed he was setting out to ridicule her.

  ‘Tell me, Miss Weish,’ he said condescendingly. ‘If your father had last telephoned as you say on the evening of June the 17th, saying he’d be home within a week, why didn’t your mother report him missing when she heard nothing more from him?’

  Her reply explaining he was often delayed sounded feeble.

  ‘You said you had never seen these two men who attacked your mother before, but surely only someone who knew her and her habit of sunbathing well, would come straight into the garden to find her? Can you explain that?’

  ‘No. But I think my mother knew who they were, though she never admitted it,’ she replied.

  He smirked. ‘So they could have been debt collectors, even old lovers?’ he suggested, then before she could deny this, moved straight on to ask if the two men in the dock were the same ones she’d seen that day.

  ‘They could have been,’ Charlie said. ‘They are the right build and age, but I couldn’t see their faces clearly because the sun was in my eyes.’

  ‘A good percentage of men in England must be the right build and age,’ he said to the jury. ‘Please note that there was no positive identification.’

  After many questions about the high standard of living Charlie and her mother had enjoyed at ‘Windways’, he moved on to probe deeply about how they lived in the council flat, asking about her job in the hotel and how she coped with schoolwork and looking after her mother. Charlie wondered why he had to ask all this, she’d already been through all the relevant details with Underwood, but this man continually kept coming back to the subject of her mother’s depression and how difficult it must have been for a schoolgirl to cope. At one point he commiserated with her lack of social life, and when he came to ask about her mother’s suicide his questions were so gentle and sympathetic she began to cry.

  Underwood jumped up then with a protest. The judge ruled that the defence must stick to questions relating only to the charges laid against the accused.

  Yet when he moved on to her meeting up with Rita Tutthill he seemed scornful again. This he described as ‘providential’, giving Charlie the feeling he was trying to insinuate that although it might have been pure chance that she met someone from a similar background to her own mother, she was in fact being manipulated by this older woman for a sinister purpose.

  His line of questioning seemed very odd. It wasn’t until he asked about her first visit to the police regarding Andrew’s disappearance, and got her to admit she felt angry that no one seemed to care about either Andrew or her father, that she suddenly saw his real aim. He was in fact attempting to prove to the jury that she had a persecution complex and maybe was unhinged too.

  ‘Isn’t it true, Miss Weish, that far from coming to London after your mother’s death to start afresh, you came on a crusade? You were bitter that the police hadn’t apprehended your mother’s attackers or found your father, and you were prepared to listen to tales from anyone sympathetic to your grievances.’

  ‘No, that’s not true,’ she retorted. ‘I came to start a new life for myself and although I always intended to try and find out what had happened to my father, I was so happy and busy for the first few months I hardly thought about him.’

  ‘Quite so, Miss Weish,’ he smirked. ‘You put it aside temporarily until you met up with Miss Tutthill, but once she’d fired you up with her story about the accused, you became convinced, without a shred of real evidence to support it, that they were responsible for both the attack on your mother and your father’s disappearance. Isn’t that true?’

  Put like that she had no choice but to agree.

  He was very clever, she had to allow him that. Looking back later she saw he had slanted every single question to portray her as a badly used, grieving innocent, who was punch-drunk from the hard knocks she’d been dealt and in her desire to discover the truth about her father had fallen prey to believing anything she was told, regardless of whether the source was questionable.

  Charlie felt angry that she wasn’t being given any opportunity, even by the prosecution, to show what she was really made of. When she was asked which of the twins had locked her in the basement and she couldn’t tell him, that anger finally boiled over. ‘Does it matter which one it was?’ she shot back at him. ‘You know perfectly well both men were in on it.’

  She received a rebuke for this, but when she was asked how she could be positive that the woman she’d seen only briefly through a small hatch was in fact the same woman as in the dock, she was beyond caring what sort of impression she was making. ‘I’ve got two perfectly good eyes, and a first-class brain,’ she snapped back at him. ‘And Daphne Dexter’s face is unforgettable.’

  All at once it was over and she was asked to step down. For a brief moment she was tempted to stand her ground and shout out to the whole court that these people in the dock robbed her of both her parents. But the realization that would only make her look foolish stopped her in the nick of time.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ Andrew said after he’d hugged Charlie silently for several minutes while she blurted out the gist of her humiliation. Earlier that morning they had planned to go into the public gallery during the afternoon to watch, but that didn’t seem a good idea any longer.

  ‘The defence barrister was a swine to me too,’ Andrew said. ‘He sneered at me and called me a boy scout. He even suggested I was never in that cellar! That was ridiculous. He might be able to cast doubt on some of the crimes the Dexters are supposed to have done, but how can he deny what they did to me?’

  ‘I think it’s just all a game to those lawyers,’ she said weakly. ‘I don’t think they really give a toss about justice, all they want to do is score points and show off to one another.’

  Brian commiserated with them. ‘Don’t take it personally,’ he said. ‘If you were ever to sit through a complete trial you’d understand how the system works. Now go on home and forget about it. Your part in it is over now.’

  They hadn’t anticipated there would be a crowd of reporters waiting for them outside in the street. As they came down the steps, they all lunged towards them, cameras flashing.

  ‘What was it like, Miss Weish, to come face to face with your father’s killers?’ a woman called out.

  Andrew tried to drag her on, urging her to say nothing, but after being portrayed in court as a pathetic character, Charlie was intent on asserting herself.

  ‘I’ve been face to face with them before, remember,’ she said in a loud, clear voice. She blinked as another camera flashed at her.

  ‘Do you think Daphne Dexter will be found guilty of murder?’ another voice called out.

  ‘If she isn’t, there’s something wrong with British justice,’ Charlie retorted. ‘But if by some fluke she does get off, she’ll have me on her back for the rest of her life.’

  Andrew flagged down a passing taxi and bundled her in. ‘Now, that wasn’t the most sensible remark to make,’ he said dryly as he leapt in behind her. ‘Every paper in England will be quoting you tonight.’

  ‘Good,’ she smiled, as she sat back on the seat. ‘I meant it!’

  The trial dragged on for three more weeks. It no longer hogged the headlines, as it had at first, and worse still, what little was reported seemed to suggest the defence were scoring the most points.

  It appeared to Charlie and to Rita that their intention was to build up the idea that the Dexters were the victims of a malicious vendetta. As so many of their alleged crimes had been committed years earlier, against people of dubious character who were often proved to have some sort of grudge against the accused, it
sounded all too possible to anyone who hadn’t suffered at their hands.

  The hit-and-run murder of Ralph Peterson was a case in point. His sister, a spinster in her sixties, staunchly insisted her brother was a man of high moral standards, and claimed he had parted company with Daphne Dexter because he discovered she owned several strip clubs. He had also expressed his fear to her that the woman would retaliate with some kind of violence against him. When asked why, then, Peterson had still left money to Daphne, she said she thought he’d forgotten to change his will after they fell out.

  Under cross-examination she admitted she had always disapproved of her brother’s relationship with Daphne because, as she put it, ‘She was low-class and a gold-digger.’ It also transpired that she had hired a private detective with the sole purpose of discrediting Daphne. Miss Peterson’s testimony to her brother’s ‘high moral standards’ was further shot to pieces by the defence drawing attention to his predilection for young and racy women, listing not only Daphne and Rita but two other club girls he’d also ‘kept company’ with.

  The defence brought on a witness who was the manager of a peep-show club owned by Daphne, and produced a document which showed that Peterson had loaned Daphne money to open a new strip club. He also claimed Peterson regularly came into all her clubs to watch the shows.

  The police had bungled the investigation into Peterson’s death. Although they were given a description of the hit-and-run car, and part of the registration number, by an eye-witness, they didn’t check it out immediately. Barrington Dexter’s car matched the description and the partial number, he had also had a recent repair to it, consistent with driving at someone at high speed, but by the time the police acted, any traces of blood or fibres from Peterson’s clothes which might have been on the car had been washed away.

  Finally, on the Friday of the fourth week of the trial, all the witnesses had given their evidence. On Monday the prosecution and defence would make their closing speeches.

  On Saturday morning Charlie was over at Andrew’s house, busy trying to clean the filthy kitchen, when to her surprise Dave Kent called her there.

  ‘Hello, darlin’,’ he said in his now very familiar crusty voice. ‘Sorry to intrude when yer with yer fella, but I kinda twisted your mate’s arm to give me the number.’

  Charlie had last spoken to him just after she gave her evidence and he had been very low then because he was being pestered by reporters. She knew just what that was like now, she’d had a basin full of it herself. But at the time he had insisted she wasn’t to call on him. As he put it, ‘We don’t want no bloody toe-rags putting two and two together and making a hundred.’

  ‘How are you?’ she asked tentatively, afraid he was going to tell her he was in hospital.

  ‘Never better,’ he said joyfully. ‘But then I’ve got you to thank for that, getting Wendy to come over.’

  ‘She’s there?’ she exclaimed. When his daughter hadn’t turned up when Charlie last phoned she was afraid she wasn’t ever going to.

  ‘Right here by me side,’ he laughed. ‘And bloody lovely she looks an’ all.’

  ‘You aren’t mad with me then for sticking my nose in?’

  ‘Sweetheart!’ he chuckled. ‘When I answered the door last night and saw her standing there, all me principles flew out the bleedin’ window. She showed me the letter you wrote her too. Christ, Charlie, you’ve got one helluva way with words. I’d have been sitting here for a twelve-month before I could put it the way you did.’

  ‘I’m glad something ended happily,’ she said, trying to gesture to Andrew what had happened.

  ‘It’s all gonna end happily,’ he laughed. ‘I’m going with Wendy on Monday to hear the closing speeches, even if I need a wheelchair to get in there. We’ll be knocking back a few celebration bevvies on the way home too. Why don’cha join us?’

  Charlie had already decided she couldn’t bear the strain of attending even though Mrs Haagman had offered both Rita and herself the day off. But hearing Dave’s happiness and his firm belief the Dexters would be found guilty changed her mind.

  ‘Okay, I’ll see you there,’ she said. ‘Now, how are you feeling?’

  ‘On top of the world right now,’ he said. ‘I know I’m right near the end now. Next Friday I’m going into a hospice. I reckon it’s only pure bloody-mindedness which has kept me around this long. But don’t you worry your pretty little head about that. I shall be flying out on a cloud of glory.’

  On Monday morning Charlie, Rita and Andrew joined Dave and Wendy in the front row of the public gallery with only a few short minutes for introductions and a brief chat before the court rose.

  Wendy was prettier and younger-looking in the flesh than she’d appeared in snapshots. Her short fair hair was bleached by the Australian sun, her small uptilted nose was freckled, and it was clear by the expression in her tawny eyes and the way she constantly tucked her arm through her father’s and held his hand that she was savouring every minute of the short time she had left with him. Dave looked so ill, even thinner than the last time Charlie had seen him, the skin on his face hanging like a bloodhound’s. But his smile was bright and he said he felt pretty good.

  The prisoners were brought up and all conversation stopped. The twins looked just the same as they had when Charlie was in court before. They shuffled in, eyes down, faces pale and expressionless. But Daphne almost swaggered in, and it was clear she’d made a special effort with her appearance. She wore the same black suit as before, but with a turquoise blouse beneath which picked up the colour of her eyes. Her dark hair was loose too, falling in a sleek bob to her shoulders. She looked the picture of elegance and confidence.

  The jury came in, and finally the court rose for the judge.

  Brian Underwood’s opening speech was calm and measured. He took up a stance by the jury and addressed everything to them. He started out with a plea for them to look at all the charges separately, to study the evidence and the testimonies of witnesses carefully, weighing them one against the other before they came to their final decision. ‘You may think that on some charges only one person is guilty, that is, the hand that wielded the gun, knife, or other weapon. That isn’t so, the three accused worked together, therefore they share a “Guilty” or a “Not Guilty” verdict.’

  Charlie caught hold of both Andrew and Rita’s hands as Underwood ran through the evidence on each of the charges. With regard to Jin Weish’s murder he said, ‘We don’t know exactly how Jin Weish came to be in the Wapping warehouse on the night of the 20th June 1970, maybe he was taken there by force. But it certainly wasn’t chance. Not when three other people who had no business to be in that building, were there, armed with a gun. Yet we do know for certain that he was bound, then shot several times, at close range in both the head and chest, wrapped in a tarpaulin, weighted down, rowed out into the river and his body dumped. We also know for certain that the goods Jin Weish was awaiting at that time were stolen, to be recovered over two years later in a house belonging to Miss Dexter.

  ’Mr Kent, our witness, owner of the Wapping warehouse, saw the entire murder from a position in the room above. From him we heard that Daphne Dexter, driven by an extreme jealous rage because Weish wouldn’t leave his wife for her, had planned not only to kill him, but also to ruin and bring disgrace to him and his family.

  ‘Should you believe Mr Kent’s testimony about the identity of the murderers and the events he witnessed? I believe you must. Not only were many of the details he gave us verified by experts, but I ask you to bear in mind that a man with a terminal disease has nothing to gain but clearing his own conscience by telling the whole truth. If you had doubts about him because he kept this secret for so long, just ask yourself now, would you have reported this crime if in doing so you put your own child’s life in danger?’

  Charlie looked along the bench at Dave and he smiled encouragingly.

  Underwood then moved on to the charge of grievous bodily harm to Sylvia Weish. He pointed out em
phatically that while there might be a lack of any real proof it was instigated by Daphne Dexter and carried out by her brothers, the jury must bear in mind the words ‘in all probability’. Miss Dexter had stated she intended to decimate Weish’s character and destroy everything he had achieved and loved. Crippling Sylvia Weish at such a time was a perfect way not only to wreak revenge on her personally, but also to create the suspicion that Jin Weish had disappeared because he was involved in serious crime.

  Going on to each of the other charges, he reminded the jury how many of the witnesses for the prosecution were victims who had lived in fear for their own lives and those of their loved ones, yet had bravely put aside that fear, albeit belatedly, to see justice done. When he spoke of Rita Tutthill he was at his most eloquent. ‘A young and pretty woman, whose only crime was to fall for a man Daphne Dexter had set her cap at. Did such an act warrant being tied down naked to a table, to be scored painstakingly with a butcher’s knife, from her shoulders to her knees, like a piece of pork? One could perhaps understand a single thrust of a knife in a moment of jealous rage. But the scars on Miss Tutthill’s body must have taken several hours to achieve. The monstrous cruelty of such an act must prove to you all that the accused are merciless, barbarians, remorseless in their desire to inflict pain on anyone who dared oppose or challenge them.

  ‘Miss Tutthill was too afraid for her child to go to the police, or even to seek medical help. You have seen the photographs of the mutilation to her body, but let me remind you again, these scars were inflicted eight years earlier than the photographs you have seen. I beg you not only to imagine the pain such torture brought, but the terrible mental scars she still bears to this day. Her life since that fateful night has been a sad and lonely one, yet when she met young Charlie Weish and realized that Jin Weish’s one-time mistress was none other than her torturer, she felt compelled to speak out if only to protect her young friend from similar hurt.’