Guilty Not Guilty

by Felix Francis

  The coroner laid the piece of paper down on his desk and looked out at the courtroom.

  ‘There will be an opportunity to ask questions of Dr Brewster at the full hearing, but does anyone have any comments to make at this time?’

  Nobody did.

  I was trying to come to terms with the knowledge that it had taken ‘a minute or two’ for Amelia to become unconscious and how she had been so desperate that she had dug her own fingernails into her neck while fighting for her life.

  How awful that must have been for her.

  ‘At this point,’ said the coroner, ‘I will adjourn these proceedings until the full inquest, to be heard at a date after the conclusion of any criminal proceedings.’

  As he spoke the last part, he looked directly at me.

  ‘All rise,’ shouted the usher.

  17

  I tried to slip away from the inquest as quietly as I’d arrived by employing the pull-my-cap-down-over-my-eyes-and-keep-walking-regardless game, but it didn’t work, and the assembled media weren’t playing by the same rules.

  ‘Did you kill your wife?’ shouted one particularly belligerent journalist who stepped straight into my path.

  It was a stupid question. I was hardly going to say ‘yes’ even if I had.

  I ignored him, remembering what Simon Bassett had said about having one’s words distorted by the press, but the man had caused me to stop and now all the others gathered around me like a cackle of hyenas at a zebra carcass.

  They all shouted questions at the same time.

  I didn’t answer any of them but took tight hold of my suitcase and pushed my way through the rabble, only to come face to face with Joe Bradbury, which was certainly not on my planned agenda.

  ‘You’re a fucking disgrace,’ he shouted at me from a distance of about twelve inches, ensuring that all the media could hear. ‘You killed my sister and I can’t believe it that you’re not locked up.’

  ‘You’re the one they should lock up,’ I replied rather more quietly. ‘You killed her and you know it.’

  ‘Look in the mirror, loser. It was you that was arrested.’

  He looked around to ensure the waiting press were all listening before pressing on with his vitriol.

  ‘You’re a hateful, hateful man that’s like a plague in our family. You made my sister mentally ill and now you’re driving me crazy too.’

  ‘What nonsense,’ I said, although I was quite hoping that I was indeed driving him crazy. It was no more than he deserved after the horrendous way he had treated his sister.

  ‘And now you’ve totally destroyed any chance of happiness for my mother during the last few precious months of her life.’

  ‘What’s that about your mother?’ asked one of the journalists, his notebook at the ready.

  ‘My elderly mother is dying of cancer and that beastly man . . .’ he pointed at me, ‘ . . . has made her life hell for years and now he’s robbed her of her daughter at the most vulnerable time of her life. Prison’s too good for him. He should be strung up. Anyone got a rope?’

  I wasn’t about to wait and see if he could recruit a lynch mob. I pulled my suitcase through the throng and walked out of the building and off down New Road in the direction of the railway station. A couple of photographers chased me for a bit until they were happy they had enough snaps and then they, too, peeled away.

  I was seething.

  Once again I felt like it had been me on the defensive when I was the one who had done nothing wrong.

  ‘That bloody man,’ I said angrily out loud, and received a very strange look from someone walking the other way.

  I’d calmed down a bit by the time I reached the station.

  Now where to?

  I still had the key to Douglas’s Chester Square house in my pocket, so I bought a ticket to London and caught the next train to Paddington.

  *

  ‘You were right,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have gone.’

  ‘So when are you going to start taking some notice of your big brother?’

  I sensed that Douglas was quite cross with me.

  ‘Don’t you start,’ I said. ‘I have enough trouble as it is.’

  ‘Much of it of your own making.’

  I was quite taken aback. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  We were in Douglas’s kitchen watching the television evening news, which covered the gory details of the inquest opening at Oxford Coroner’s Court together with some unfortunate footage of the fracas outside afterwards. There was also an interview with Joe Bradbury, clearly conducted after I’d left the scene. Needless to say, he was not very complimentary about me, and that was putting it very mildly.

  ‘I just can’t understand why the police allow this wicked man to roam the streets. None of us are safe with this killer on the loose. I have been accused of being involved but that’s total nonsense. I loved my darling elder sister. I am just the unfortunate individual who found her dead after her husband had done his worst. And now I’m accused by him of lying. It’s an outrage that he’s not locked up.’

  It was close to slanderous – maybe even over the line. Perhaps I should sue both him and the television company, but first I had to prove my innocence.

  The TV picture dwelt on Joe’s self-righteous face for a fraction too long before returning to the studio.

  ‘Why on earth did you go?’ Douglas said again with irritation, now for the third time.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said miserably. ‘Perhaps I thought it would somehow make me feel closer to Amelia.’

  ‘And did it?’

  ‘No. And now I have images in my head of how she died that I would rather not have.’

  ‘I told you so,’ Douglas said, throwing his hands up in frustration.

  ‘Okay, okay. I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have listened. Can we now please drop the subject?’

  We sat in awkward silence for a few minutes while Douglas emptied the dishwasher.

  ‘I could do with a G and T,’ he said. ‘Want one?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Make mine a double.’

  He clinked ice into two freshly washed glasses and added generous portions of gin with a little tonic and slices of lime. He pushed one of them across the counter to me and we both drank deeply.

  ‘It could be worse,’ he said finally. ‘You could’ve been charged.’

  ‘They have no grounds, other than what that damn man says.’

  ‘In my experience, grounds are sometimes the least of their concerns. If the public demand that someone is put behind bars, they tend to comply and sort out inconveniences like lack of evidence later, at a trial.’

  ‘Talking about trials, how’s yours going?’

  ‘Stupid jury,’ he said.

  ‘Wrong verdict?’

  ‘No verdict. Not yet anyway. They’ve been out for ten hours now and the judge has sent them home for a second night. God knows what they’re talking about. Open-and-shut case as far as I can see. Defendant is guilty as sin.’

  ‘What do you do while you’re waiting?’ I asked.

  ‘Sit in the robing room twiddling my thumbs, mostly. I try to read future case notes but I find it difficult to concentrate in such circumstances, especially when we keep having to go back into court so the jury can ask the judge a question, as they’ve done repeatedly in this case.’

  ‘What sort of questions?’

  ‘All kinds of things. Mostly about the evidence or the law, but they even had us all back in court today so they could ask if three of them could go outside for a smoke.’

  He rolled his eyes.

  ‘And did they?’

  ‘Of course they did. But the judge had to tell the others not to deliberate without those three being present, so they all had to take a break. It just adds to the time. I got so bored this afternoon that I even spent some time on a casino app playing blackjack.’

  ‘Did you win?’ I asked.

  ‘Did I hell! I reckon it’s fixed.’

/>   It had clearly not been his day either.

  ‘What happens if the jury can’t decide?’

  ‘The judge has already said he’ll take a majority verdict – that’s when at least ten of them agree – but they haven’t even got that far.’

  ‘How long do they get?’

  ‘How long’s a piece of string?’ He forced a laugh. ‘The foreman said that he still thinks they might be able to reach a verdict tomorrow, so the judge has given them more time. If they can’t, then there’ll be a retrial with a new jury. I can’t see the CPS giving up on this one. But it would be a complete waste of everyone’s time, not to mention the money. And I’ve got a very full list for the next few months. Fitting it in will be an absolute nightmare.’

  No wonder he’d been in an irritable mood.

  He refilled our glasses.

  ‘But enough of my problems,’ he said. ‘What are we going to do about you?’

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘Well, first of all, keep out of the way of the press and especially of that brother-in-law of yours. All you do is pour fuel on his fire and give him more ammunition to shoot back at you.’

  ‘But I surely have to do something,’ I said.

  ‘I agree,’ Douglas said. ‘And I think that rather than trying to prove who did kill Amelia, you should concentrate on proving who didn’t.

  Now he was talking.

  ‘It’s quite clear to me,’ Douglas went on, ‘that the police are not going to investigate anyone else unless we can show them beyond any doubt that you couldn’t have done it. That will force them to look elsewhere.’

  ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘We simply prove that you were in that hotel room in Edgbaston all night and that your car never moved from the car park. If that’s the case, you couldn’t have done it.’

  ‘I assure you it was the case,’ I said.

  ‘So let’s prove it?’

  ‘The police are trying to prove the reverse.’

  ‘And if they could, they’d have charged you by now. So we will start from the opposite premise and provide absolute proof that it was physically impossible for you to have been in Hanwell at any time between five o’clock on Tuesday afternoon until after Amelia’s body had been discovered. We will provide you with an unbreakable alibi.’

  He smiled at me.

  ‘Do you know what alibi actually means?’ he asked. ‘It’s Latin for “elsewhere”. It is an absolute defence. If you can prove you were elsewhere when the crime was committed, then you have proved your innocence. Only then will we try to show who really did do it.’

  I loved his enthusiasm. It was almost catching.

  ‘So we start with the hotel,’ he said. ‘Get a copy of their CCTV film and other electronic data, such as from their door locks.’

  ‘Door locks?’

  ‘Yes, door locks. Did you use a metal key or a card?’

  I thought back.

  ‘It was a plastic card, like a credit card.’

  ‘Then there will be an electronic record of when you used it to enter your room. I prosecuted a theft case last year in Luton where the defence was able to show conclusively that three different cards were used to enter a particular hotel room around the time the valuables went missing. It was enough to put sufficient doubt in the minds of the jury to acquit the accused.’

  ‘But won’t the police already have that information?’

  ‘Maybe, or maybe not. I’d not heard of it before. But, either way, they’re looking for proof of a different scenario. If they find something that doesn’t match their theory, they disregard it. They’ll go digging for something else instead. And they won’t tell us something that will help us prove your innocence, certainly not at this early stage in the game. That’s up to us.’

  It was good to hear him being so positive, and inclusive.

  ‘And if the hotel key system or CCTV doesn’t prove it, we’ll find other footage from shops, houses and even dashcams in other cars, anything that shows that your car was in the hotel car park all night. There must also be an ANPR camera somewhere between the hotel and your house.’

  ‘ANPR?’

  ‘Automatic Number Plate Recognition. There are thousands of cameras, on all the motorways and main roads, recording the number plate of every car that passes them. Thirty million or so hits every day. They will show if your car moved, unless you used only very minor roads. I assume the police have checked your mobile phone but just because your phone didn’t move doesn’t mean that you didn’t. You could have left it in your hotel room for that very reason.’

  He knew all the arguments.

  ‘Tracking my phone was how they knew I was in Wales.’

  Douglas nodded. ‘People don’t realise how easy that is. And mobile phones and computers are the very first things to be seized on arrest. Everyone thinks of their electronic devices as their faithful friends but they have no sense of loyalty. They will grass up their owner’s secrets to anyone who has access to them.’

  ‘How about passwords?’

  ‘Forensic extraction technology has a way around those. I see it all the time in organised-crime cases, but it applies to everyone.’

  ‘That’s scary,’ I said.

  ‘It certainly is. And smartphones contain the record of our whole lives these days – photos, emails, calendar, contacts, texts, calls, social media, the lot. Nothing is safe from Big Brother if they have your phone.’

  I could imagine DS Dowdeswell trawling through all the mundane things on my phone, such as texts from my dentist about an upcoming appointment or to my local dry cleaners about mending a coat. At least he would also see the lovey-dovey messages between Amelia and myself, and find no evidence that I had a bit-on-the-side. Indeed, I had nothing to hide on either my phone or my computer, just as long as Joe Bradbury hadn’t hacked in and stored something I hadn’t seen.

  ‘I just hope the police read Joe’s foul emails. It will show them what he’s really like. Getting hold of his phone is what they ought to do. He claims that Amelia called and asked him to come over on that Wednesday morning, but he’s lying, and the phone records will prove it. She’d have never done that. She wanted absolutely nothing to do with him.’

  ‘Let’s not jump the gun,’ Douglas said. ‘First, we prove it couldn’t have been you that killed Amelia. Only then will we set about finding out who did.’

  18

  ‘I’d like to see the manager, please,’ I said.

  I was back at the Edgbaston Manor Hotel on Thursday morning, having caught a train from London to Birmingham.

  ‘What about?’ asked the female receptionist defensively.

  ‘That’s between him and me,’ I replied. ‘It’s not a complaint.’

  ‘It’s a her actually,’ she said. ‘The manager is a woman.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, giving her a smile.

  The receptionist disappeared into an office behind the desk but soon returned with another woman dressed in a three-piece pinstriped suit, white shirt and dark tie. The manager may have been a woman but she was dressed like a man.

  ‘I’m Karen Wentworth, the manager,’ she said. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘I stayed here last week . . .’

  ‘I know, Mr Gordon-Russell,’ she interrupted icily. ‘The police came here about you on Monday.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, slightly taken aback that she recognised me so readily. ‘What did they want?’

  ‘To search the room you stayed in.’

  ‘Did they find anything?’

  She shook her head. ‘I told them it was a waste of time. Two other guests had been in that room in the interim so it had been cleaned three times since you were there.’ She smiled. ‘Our cleaners are very good.’

  ‘But the police searched it nevertheless.’

  ‘They did,’ she agreed. ‘Took the drains apart beneath the shower and the wash basin too. They made quite a mess.’

  DS Dowdeswell was nothing if not thorough.r />
  ‘Did they want anything else?’

  ‘Copies of all our CCTV recordings.’

  ‘That’s what I was hoping you might give me.’

  ‘But why should I help you?’ she asked. ‘The papers claim you’re a wife killer who should be in jail.’

  She started to turn away.

  ‘But the papers are wrong,’ I said quickly. ‘I haven’t killed anyone. I was asleep in my room at this hotel for the whole night while someone else was murdering my wife and I need your CCTV footage to prove it.’

  ‘So why were you arrested when the police already have a copy of our recordings?’

  It was a very good question and one that I’d been asking myself as well.

  Karen Wentworth turned away again.

  ‘Please,’ I cried in desperation, my voice cracking with emotion. ‘It’s bad enough that the woman I adored has been taken from me without also being accused of killing her. You are my only hope.’

  She slowly turned back.

  ‘Come with me.’

  I followed her past the reception desk and into the office behind.

  ‘I’m afraid our CCTV system is quite old,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘It is due to be upgraded next month.’

  Old will do, I thought, as long as it shows what I need.

  But it didn’t.

  The image of the car park only showed the exit and, at night with car headlights on, the image was so grainy it was impossible to tell even the make of the vehicles that went in and out, let alone their number plates.

  ‘We’ve recently decided to install a barrier at the exit,’ Karen said. ‘To stop people parking in there who are not hotel guests. It gets particularly bad when there’s a big match at the cricket ground.’ She paused as if in apology for even mentioning it. ‘But we haven’t done it yet.’

  Shame.

  ‘What else have you got?’

  She pulled up the images from the hotel lobby but they were equally useless. There was only one black-and-white camera in the reception area and that concentrated on the desk itself rather than the front door. It had clearly been designed to catch staff stealing from the till, rather than the hotel comings and goings.