by Jo Kessel
Thanks very much for your photo. As you can tell from mine, my nose isn’t really crooked. That’s just the Gaelic meaning of my name.
***
Whenever I’ve had a break from seeing Scott Richardson, I think I’m making it all up, but as soon as we’re in the same room together, my defence radar goes into overdrive. No matter how hard I try to ignore it, I can feel his oily presence sliding under my skin, seeping into my nerves. I hadn’t planned to ever come back here, alone or accompanied, but because of the timing, a brief visit with the fresh evidence was essential. I shan’t stay long. ‘Four Finger Freddie’ isn’t here, so it’s just Scott and I, stood in his toilet, standing staring at that old school photo, comparing the image of the soft black and white wannabe film star to the chubby teenager in the front row. Once again, the back of my shirt’s practically kissing the front of my client. His warm breath, laced with more than a hint of alcohol, is blasting in intermittent spurts, tickling my neck. The itch factor’s as heightened as a hundred mosquito bites.
It’s Cameron Matthews, Scott had said, when I showed him the portrait Sahara printed up for me. The Cameron Matthews who’s an Accountant at the same Television Network as my client, the Cameron Matthews who went to school with my client. The Cameron Matthews who went to the police with allegations that my client intended to murder Rupert Simons, which was based on a phone call he overheard Scott having outside the cloakrooms at the Oxo Tower. I personally find it hard to make the connection, seeing as he’s lost so much of his hair in the portrait I’m holding, but Scott assures me it is unequivocally, undeniably, the one and same person. I’d had my suspicions en route here. I’d phoned Anthony from the privacy of my car, straight after leaving Sahara. If I was out and about working on a Saturday, the very least he could do was take my call. Anyway, I’d instructed him to go online to find out if there was a name that meant crooked nose in Gaelic. It transpired that there was. The Google answer came out as Cameron - split in two parts, ‘cam’ in Gaelic means ‘crooked’ and ‘shron’ means ‘nose’. So even before I showed the photo to Scott, I had a sixth sense we’d touched gold. Nevertheless, hearing him say, “yes, this is Cameron Matthews” when I’d asked “do you recognize this man” was more exciting than winning the lottery. Money’s no match for this kind of investigative triumph.
“So, what does this mean?” asks Scott, as we leave the toilet and I follow him into the lounge, hopefully for the last time ever. “Is this good for our case? Does it get me off?”
Should Anthony and I be unsuccessful, should we fail to get an acquittal, the Judge will be forced to give the mandatory sentence for murder, life imprisonment. So, what does this mean? It means Cameron Matthews fancies Sahara. It means Cameron Matthews has it in for my client. By using the phrase ‘top of the class’ in both his mails, it means he probably sent the obscene letter to Scott Richardson too. He may well have penned the anonymous letter I received as well, accusing Scott of bumping off Verity Nichols’ husband. It means he will probably come across as a strange, slightly sordid kind of guy. It does not mean, however, that the case is now signed, sealed, and delivered. Far from it! If he’s good in the stand, his letter writing can be explained away as merely an expression of opinion, freedom of speech and all that. Odd though his letter-writing addiction may be, it isn’t a complete character assassination. This crucial new piece of evidence will only work to our advantage if we can unsettle Cameron Matthews in cross-examination, make him think we’ve got more up our sleeve, make him think we’ve got something to prove he faked his allegation. His allegation was based on a conversation he overheard outside the cloakrooms at a restaurant. ‘It’s going to be you and me very soon, I promise’, he claims were the exact words my client said on his mobile. ‘He won’t be around to interfere much longer. I’ll take care of it’. Both Cameron’s sneaking and subsequent police checks found that Scott had been speaking to Elizabeth Simons at the time, the woman with whom he was having an affair, the wife of the man who is now dead. Rupert Simons RIP.
“Rest assured this is a real help,” I tell Scott, flapping the matinee idol photo in my hand. It’s true. Without it we’d be even worse off. There’s no point admitting that despite this morning’s mini coup we still haven’t got anything truly solid. We’re still heavily relying on sparkling legal repartee.
I’ve no desire to spend a second more than necessary with this Machiavellian character, so I bid him farewell, but when I get to my car and turn on the ignition it won’t start. At first I think I’ve flooded the engine by holding my foot down on the accelerator too long, but even when I rest it for five minutes, nothing happens when I turn the key again, save a slow, short, low battery whine. I’ve a mobile in my pocket that I could quite easily call the AA from, but for some reason professional curiosity gets the better of me. Even though he doesn’t know I know, even though he’s told me he knows nothing about cars other than how to drive one, Scott Richardson has a certificate in car maintenance. Perhaps he might be able to help. I go back to the flat and ring the bell. I announce myself and he buzzes me up.
“Can’t stay away?” asks Scott, with a dirty, evil gleam in his eye.
I ignore the hidden message.
“My car won’t start,” I say. “I wondered if you could help.”
He smiles wide and white, all the better to bite you with.
“Anything to help a damsel in distress,” he struts macho to pick up his coat and keys.
It’s not until we’re out the front door and halfway down the steps to my car that he checks himself, remembering that he’s not meant to know the first thing about motor mechanics.
“On second thoughts,” he says, doing a U-turn, “I don’t want to make a fool of myself. You’d be better off calling the AA.”
***
“This is nice,” I say, lifting a tall glass of Moroccan mint tea to my lips.
I’m referring to the drink, the place we’re sat in, the corner window table in a cute little café overlooking the canal. I’d called Anthony straight after contacting the AA, to inform him both that Cameron Matthews, the Prosecution’s main witness, had indeed been busy sending obscene mails to the Defendant and the Defendant’s ex and also to let him know that I was in for a 90 minutes wait. Seeing as he lived so close by, he refused to leave me in the cold, fearful of Scott Richardson inviting me back in and he came to pick me up, take me out for lunch. I hadn’t wanted to trouble him. “Come on. You’re round the corner and it’s close to lunchtime. We need to go over a few things anyway,” he’d twisted my arm.
So here we are, under the guise of work. Somehow the two of us huddled over drinks and vegetarian lasagne on a Saturday feels naughty. Despite the work papers I’ve strewn across the table, for effect, should anyone I know pass by, I sense how we look. We’ve been here for forty-five minutes and not so much as glanced at the brief, not so much as mentioned the Scott Richardson case, although I did bring up our client’s car mechanics gaffe in the ride over here. I aired my concern once again that perhaps this wasn’t such an innocent man and for the umpteenth time I was told that all this evidence is circumstantial. If a client’s brief can’t even presume him innocent, then there’s no hope. Anyway, more interestingly, Anthony’s been telling me about his brother who’s already got two year old twins and his wife’s just found out she’s pregnant with twins again. What are the chances of that? We reckoned it had to be about one in ten thousand based on no particular theory whatsoever, other than the fact it was bloody unlikely. At least it wasn’t triplets, I’d said, but Anthony thought that was small consolation. He said he hadn’t the vaguest idea what four kids under the age of three would be like, but it wouldn’t be pretty. I should consider myself lucky, apparently, to be carrying just one. From there we’d moved onto maternity wear and my latest polemic that in the whole of Brent Cross, a North London shopping centre with close to a hundred shops, there’s nowhere for a pregnant woman to buy clothes. Bloody outrageous, no logic whatsoever, I’
d opined, seeing as half the shoppers in that place were pushing buggies. So Anthony suggested I’d found a lucrative niche in the market and should open a shop of my own after the baby comes.
“Seriously Ali, well done,” says Anthony. “Strictly speaking, you know you shouldn’t have been playing Detective as you have, but nevertheless, you’ve done great work this morning.”
He makes a point of establishing eye contact, so that I know he means what he’s said.
“Thank you,” I say.
For once I take a compliment graciously. I lower my glass to the table. No sooner than I have, he takes my hand. It’s done in a matter-of-fact, encouraging teammate kind of way, yet still a bolt of electricity shoots into my body, drawing a map of the tube through my veins, flying up to my ear lobes, down to the tips of my toes. I flinch, drawing back my hand, shocked. I start fumbling, shuffle the papers strewn across our table, pretending to put them into some kind of order.
“Right then,” I say, clearing my throat. “Any ideas for how we should open?”
Chapter 36
“My Lord, I’d like to introduce this letter as evidence.”
It’s day six of the Scott Richardson trial. I hold up the computer printout, raise my eyebrows at the Court Associate. “I believe this is exhibit number five?” I say. She nods in concurrence. The courtroom will soon be recited the one and same filthy message posted on Saraha.com by Mr. Crooked Nose, a.k.a. Cameron Matthews. The reading out of the e-mail, full of tits and cocks and sucking and feeding off hairy mud pie, is made all the more embarrassing by Sahara actually being here. Her presence in the public gallery is the only unexpected detail so far. You’d have thought she and Scott would have fallen out over the whole paternity issue, but apparently not. She and Scott must have ironed out their differences. Who knows what really happened? Celebrities seem to live by a different code of practice to the rest of us. Whatever, she nominated herself as the compulsory sexy, ‘I might be your ex but I’m still going to stand-by-you’ totty. She’s been here since day one, walking the pavement towards the Old Bailey with him, their arms defiantly linked. They ignored the flashlights and shoving of microphones under their noses with extreme poise, muttering “no comment” as they were ushered through the main entrance. Adam taped the whole thing for posterity. It was on the news at six. He’s played it back a trillion times on the video. The real stars of the show, says Adam each time, referring to Anthony and I, as he presses pause, freeze-framing us on the screen. There we are, trailing a foot behind Scott and Sahara, a motley crew for counsel if ever there was one. Anthony, pretty alluring and enigmatic himself, would have fitted rather better alongside the protagonists than next to my slow, semi-professional waddle. I rued the fact that this fifteen seconds of fame had me stuck on celluloid as a duck-billed platypus, but Adam assured me this was just the start of my video library. I should use this, he said, as an incentive to get back in shape for the next celebrity case, after the baby’s born.
I’ve been here before, as counsel, back in April, when my client laid down his plea of ‘not guilty’ in a whistle-stop hearing, but in all other respects, I’m an Old Bailey virgin. This is my first time at the most reverential of courts on a trial proper. It’s a murder trial to boot and it’s giving me a real buzz. Despite Anthony’s and my reassurances, Scott Richardson is understandably anxious that he will share the same fate as so many before him and be found guilty. He’ll escape the gallows, that’s for sure, but he might not escape life imprisonment. The court artist’s sketch gives the impression that he’s cool, calm and confident, his hands crossed, resting on the table in front of him, but we, his counsel, know better. It’s all a front. Behind the exterior is a man nervous that he will go down for something he claims he didn’t do. We’d discussed what to wear at length and settled, finally, on navy. It was decided that gray looked too cheap, black too funereal and brown, in Anthony’s opinion, too guilty. So he’s sporting a well-cut navy suit and it’s perfect. Just showy enough to melt the hearts of the female jurors, who shouldn’t see in him what I see, because they won’t get close enough. He comes across as conventional and respectful, without losing his star quality. Scott Richardson is, by and large, a popular personality. This needs to be played on. It has to be said that sat there, presentable and debonair, he doesn’t look like a murderer.
The twelve-strong jury isn’t as HELLO as we’d have liked. There are a couple of women, probably in their late fifties, who look quite prim and closed, like they believe there’s no smoke without fire. There are a couple of blokes who are either tramps or have taken a left-wing, Marxist stance to the extreme. Whichever, they’ve probably never heard of Scott Richardson, never watched him and if they have then they probably wouldn’t like him or what he stands for. It’s the Judge, however, who’s the biggest concern. His name, Mr. Justice Smiley, is somewhat deceptive. This is a man so tight-lipped he looks like he’s either suffering from constipation or the worst case of piles ever. This is not the reason why he’s nicknamed, behind his back, Judge Smelly. It’s because he has the worst halitosis, which I found out first hand this morning. He called counsel for both sides to his chambers for a quiet word, to discuss evidence the Prosecution wanted to admit and he wouldn’t allow. We’d all grouped standing in a tight circle, when horror of all horrors, he coughed, blowing a stinky succession of bad breath rings bang in my direction. Pregnancy has heightened my sense of smell. On reflex my hand flew up to my nose, to guard against the putrid, stale stench. Anthony quickly pulled down my arm, gave me a stern look. I don’t think Judge Smelly saw and if he did, so what? Someone should TELL him. Anyway, in terms of leniency, Mr. Justice Smiley is not a great call. He’s a right-wing hang ‘em and flog ‘em man. You don’t get to pick the judge. If you did, you wouldn’t pick him.
The Prosecution has presented most of their case. This was no car chase that went wrong. Scott Richardson, they claim, intended to murder the now-deceased Rupert Simons, husband of Elizabeth Simons, the woman with whom he was having an affair, and wanted to make it look like an accidental car crash. It was a murder of convenience, to get rid of the cuckold, whose very existence was an obstruction to the Defendant’s happiness. Rupert Simons, states the Prosecution, may he rest in peace, is unable to speak out, to tell us what really happened, but fortunately we’ve a few witnesses who can.
Anthony took charge of proceedings in the beginning. His cross-examination of the Prosecution’s forensic expert was flawless. Whilst my colleague conceded that Rupert Simon’s car had clearly been tampered with, the expert had been forced to agree that without any fingerprints, the man in the Dock could in no way be connected to the deed. “Thank you very much, no further questions,” Anthony had said. It was Elizabeth Simons who had taken the stand next, looking gorgeously demure in black, just as beautiful as Scott Richardson had described, an untouchable, with Jaqueline Bisset’s sexuality, Grace Kelly’s regality. She’d been no real help to the Prosecution’s case, other than stating the facts that yes, on the night in question, her husband had found her in bed with the Defendant and yes, they had both driven off in their cars, her lover first, closely followed by Rupert. Then Anthony had taken over, firing off question after question in quick succession. “Was your husband a bad driver?” “Was he a difficult man to live with?” “Was he hot-tempered?” “Had he himself had affairs?” “Was he a man with a history of alcoholism?” “How did your affair with the Defendant begin?” “Did the Defendant help you through a difficult time?” She’d faced the aerial bombardment with grace and honesty, painting a picture of her deceased husband as a man few would want to live with, a boozer, a chauvinist, a bully who had been known to resort to physical violence. The man in the Dock was a Knight in shining armour by comparison. The jury appeared to be enchanted, bewitched by Elizabeth. Even the hard-nosed Marxist tramp seemed positively captivated by her story. By telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, Elizabeth had been most sympathetic to our cause.
Then Anthony had handed over the baton to me. Thankfully I managed to totally discredit the first of the Prosecution’s most compelling witnesses yesterday, a woman who’d been driving in the other direction at the time of the car chase. She claimed she’d slowed right down, seen Scott Richardson get out his car, deliver a series of volley blows to Rupert Simons. “He absolutely looked like he meant business,” she said. “He was really laying into him.” Anyway, turns out that this woman is blind as a bat, even with her glasses. I’d asked Anthony if he’d mind helping me out with a short demonstration. Mr. Justice Smiley had looked quizzical, as had Anthony, but everyone played along with it. Anyway, I’d sat Anthony down on a chair towards one end of the courtroom.
“How far away from the scene of the accident did you say you were?” I’d asked the eyewitness.
“I’d say about 30 yards,” she’d replied.