by Jon L. Breen
It helped even more that I was a lone father. Lone mothers are, even these days, still subject to a certain moral ambiguity: is she in that position deliberately? Or did she at least bring it on herself? But a father, struggling bravely against both nature and society to raise a child all on his lonesome—why, he’s halfway to being a saint already.
So when Nadine (named for the Chuck Berry song) died in a back street in the West End of London, all I had to do was fight back the tears on live TV and I was instantly canonised.
I made the usual press conference appeal for witnesses, remembering with some guilt as I did so that whenever I’d watched such performances on TV in the past, I’d always assumed that the person making the appeal was the guilty party.
Nadine died one week after her eighteenth birthday, of a rare allergic reaction to the chemicals contained in an anti-rape spray. Normally, so the coroner later declared, this would not have led to a fatality; however, there was evidence at the death scene of a scuffle, during which, it was surmised, her assailant had held the canister close to her face and emptied its entire contents directly into her mouth and nose. Her death, essentially from respiratory failure, had followed rapidly. I was astonished to learn that Nadine carried such a spray—she loathed all weapons—but I supposed that no parent ever knows their children as well as they think they do.
Within seventy-two hours of my daughter’s death, the police made an arrest: a 21-year-old, black, male shop assistant, Horace Jones. The next day’s papers described him variously as Nadine’s “live-in lover” and “steady boyfriend”. I’d never heard of him.
A black, male killer, a white, female victim; a brave but grief-stricken dad. We were news, the three of us.
These events happened in November, so they were still fresh in the public’s mind when a national radio station ran its annual “Man Of The Year” phone-in poll. I won. That made me laugh. I mean, really laugh—laugh with real amusement. I was the Man of the Year for having lost my daughter. If I’d had two daughters, and they’d both been killed, would I have been elected Pope?
Horace Jones denied all charges, both at the time of his arrest, and a few months later, during his trial. His denials were not believed, and he was duly sentenced to life imprisonment.
His trial put me back in the headlines, and my heroic status was confirmed and even enlarged. I really believe that, at that moment, I could have stood for Parliament with some hope of success. Nadine was a victim, Horace Jones was emblematic of all that was wrong with modern Britain, and I was . . . well, I seemed to be, for no reason that was ever clear to me, the symbol of all that was right with modern Britain.
Jones’ lawyer lodged an appeal against the conviction. As it happened, I knew the lawyer, Teddy Edwards; had known him, at least, some years earlier, when we’d served together on a local anti-apartheid committee here in Maidstone. About a week after Jones began his sentence, Teddy phoned and asked to see me. I agreed; I was still in that stage of grief where I wanted more details, more information, more understanding of what had happened.
“He’s not guilty, Jack,” Teddy said as we sat drinking tea in my empty kitchen. “I’m sorry, I know that probably isn’t what you want to hear, but I have to tell you: I have no doubt in my mind at all that Horace Jones did not kill Nadine.”
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, of course, and it wasn’t what I’d expected to hear. “You have to say that, don’t you, Teddy?” I replied. “A lawyer—you’ve got to believe your clients are innocent. That’s how it works, surely?”
He shook his head. “Not at all, Jack. Not like that at all. Ninety-nine per cent of my clients are thieves and liars and worse. I have to accept that they’re innocent if that’s what they choose to tell me, but I’m not required to believe it. I represent them to the best of my ability, because that’s my job—and because,” and here he paused for a self-deprecating chuckle, “and because, now that I’m a middle-aged, middle-class solicitor, I actually do believe in the system. I’m not the radical I once was, Jack. Well, which of us is? I think our system of law is, over all, a good system. And it can only work as long as even the most heinously guilty arsehole gets the best defence the system can provide him with. But no, I don’t usually believe their pathetic fairy stories.”
“So what’s different this time?” I asked.
He sat forward in his seat, and started ticking off items on his fingers. “OK. Right. Basically, I think Horace has been lynched. He’s black, Nadine was white. She was a lovely girl training to be a nurse, he’s just some inner city nobody with a petty criminal record; possession of drugs, some minor thieving. It’s a match made in Hell.”
“Just because ignorant people wanted him to be guilty doesn’t mean he wasn’t guilty,” I said.
“No, sure, good point.” Teddy looked tired and sweaty. He’d aged a lot in the few years since I’d last seen him. Much of his hair had gone, and his suit was irreversibly rumpled. It was a reasonably expensive suit, so I assumed the rumpling came from within. He took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and waved it at me. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“No, of course not.”
“Really,” said Teddy, “say if you do.”
I shook my head, and stood up to find him an ashtray. “Nadine smoked.”
“They all do, don’t they?” he said, lighting up gratefully. “Teenage girls. My wife says the ones you want to worry about are the ones who don’t smoke. You can guarantee they’re doing something much worse.”
Teddy went back to talking about the case, putting forward his arguments concerning Horace Jones’s innocence, but after a while he noticed that I wasn’t hearing him.
“Christ, Jack, are you all right?”
It was the smell of the cigarette. Before Teddy, the last person who’d smoked in that house had been Nadine. For some reason, when everyone came back here for the funeral meats, all the smokers were careful to take their cigarettes out into the garden, even though there were ashtrays on every surface in the kitchen and living-room. A kind of bizarre, turn-of-the-century mark of respect for the dead: don’t let them see you smoking.
When the snake of aromatic grey and white smoke from Teddy’s cigarette coiled across the table between us and up into my brain, I instantly and absolutely broke down. From a man of flesh, holding things together, I turned into a bowl of dry cornflakes: shattered, jagged, formless. And then soggy, as the tears flowed. I wasn’t sobbing: I was just sitting there, staring straight ahead, while the tear-water poured out of my eyes like beer from a tap.
Teddy helped me through to the living-room. He drew the curtains, put the lights on, poured us both a scotch from an almost full bottle on the sideboard. I’d hardly been in the living-room since Nadine died. I felt out of place, almost a visitor in my own home, and I think that helped me regain control of my tear ducts.
After a while, I was ready to resume the conversation. Teddy wasn’t smoking any more.
“I don’t know how much of the trial you took in, Jack. I don’t imagine legal niceties were uppermost in your mind, but let me tell you—and you don’t have to take my word for it, I’ll get you a transcript of the trial—there was basically no evidence against Horace. No serious evidence.”
“Then how did he get convicted?” I asked. “You said just now you believed in our system of law.”
“Yeah, sure, but compared to what—that’s the question.” Teddy rubbed his hands over his scalp, making the little hair he had left stand up in tufts. He looked like a baby that’s just woken up grumpy from an afternoon nap. “To an idealist, a thing is either perfect or terrible. But a realist sees things in context. All I’m saying is, if you were an innocent man, with no money, charged with a terrible crime, where would you rather be tried: Britain or America? Britain or China? Britain or Spain?”
“But this time the system got it wrong. That’s what you’re telling me?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“OK,” I said, the detail
s of the evidence given in court coming back to me. Teddy’s assumption was understandable, but wrong: in fact, I had taken in, and retained, every word of that trial. As long as the trial went on, Nadine still existed. People still spoke of her, and what does being alive mean other than being talked about? “As I recall, there were two main pieces of physical evidence. First of all, the wounds to your client’s face . . .”
“Right,” said Teddy. “The nail scratches. The wounds were the right age, and they came from a woman’s hand, or to be precise from false nails—fun nails, they’re called these days—we didn’t contest that, but remember that the prosecution was unable to say that they came from Nadine’s nails. And that’s not just a technicality, Jack.”
“The wounds were said to be made by a woman of Nadine’s height.”
He shrugged. “She was of average female height. Means nothing.”
“All right. What about the fingerprints?”
“The clincher, as far as the jury was concerned,” Teddy admitted.
“Horace’s prints were on the canister of anti-rape spray. Nobody else’s, not even Nadine’s. He says, as you’ll remember, that he and Nadine had met in a pub in Covent Garden a month before her death, right?”
“And that they’d seen each other ‘as friends only’ several times during that month. Yes, I remember.” So much for the press reports that she’d been killed by her ‘Black Live-In Lover’. “But when your barrister asked him in court if, during that time, he had handled the spray can, he couldn’t say, could he?”
“Not couldn’t say,” said Teddy. “Wouldn’t say. And that’s crucial, Jack. You know that barristers never ask questions they don’t already know the answer to?”
“I’ve heard it said.”
“Well, we thought we knew the answer to that one. We thought Horace was going to reply that Nadine had spilt her handbag once when they were out together, and that he had helped her re-pack it. Hence the single set of his prints on the spray.”
“So why didn’t he?”
Teddy shook his head. “Don’t know. Actually, yes, I think I do—because it was a lie. I don’t think that is how his prints got on there, and he is the kind of bloke—something of an innocent, religious upbringing—that he’s just not willing to tell a lie. Even to save his neck.”
Now I shook my head—the scotch was clouding my mind a little. I hadn’t had a drink since the day of the funeral. “But if even you think he’s lying about the anti-rape spray . . .”
“My guess is that he knows something about what happened, but he’s not willing to say it. So, to avoid lying, he just says nothing. Or else, I don’t know, Sir, which amounts to the same thing.” Teddy stood up. “Look, Jack, I’m sorry. I’ve given you a bad evening. I’ll let you get some kip, now. But can I talk to you again? I really think it’s important.”
“Of course you can,” I said. “I’m always happy to talk.” About Nadine, I didn’t need to add.
Teddy sent me the trial transcript, and I read it, feeling a jet of life squirt up through my body every time I saw the word Nadine in print.
The prosecution’s case was straightforward. Horace and Nadine first met in a pub in Covent Garden. They went out together several times over the next few weeks, to pubs, clubs, ethnic restaurants. They did not sleep together. They chatted about the things they had in common: football (she was a West Ham fanatic, my daughter), exotic food and 1960s rhythm and blues music.
On the night of her death, they had been drinking in a pub off the Charing Cross Road. At closing time, they walked towards Leicester Square Tube station, taking a short cut through an unlit alley. There, Horace demanded sex. Nadine refused. Horace persisted, to the point of attempted rape (her clothes were in disarray when she was found). She tried to use the anti-rape spray on him, but he took it from her and turned it on her, forcing it into her mouth and nose. When he saw the effect this had on her, he panicked and ran. She was found dead by an off-duty ambulance driver about forty minutes later. At around that time, a blood-splashed black youth was seen running in a nearby street.
Horace Jones was a suspect from the start of the investigation, according to the prosecution’s version of events. Detectives learned of his existence from some girls at Nadine’s college, and heard from the same source that he and Nadine had been seen “arguing violently” in a Covent Garden wine bar the night before her death. He was described as “a big, strong man” which caught the detectives’ attention, since it had already been noted that the method of death probably ruled out a female killer, a short man, or a weakling.
When taken in for questioning, Horace denied killing Nadine, or fighting with her, or attempting to rape her, but he declined to give an account of his movements during the crucial hours. He also refused to explain the scratches on his face, and when, on the second day of questioning, he was confronted with the fingerprint evidence, he offered no comment. At the end of the second day, he was charged with murder.
The police did everything by the book: no doubt about that. It’s clear from the interview transcripts that they went to great lengths to persuade Horace that he ought to be represented by a lawyer—“Don’t need a lawyer, man. I got no lies to tell”—and the interviews were interrupted repeatedly for tea breaks, and on three further occasions so that Horace could be seen by the duty surgeon, “as the prisoner appeared to be in a state of considerable emotional shock”.
They’d got their man, and they weren’t going to lose him through a procedural error. Or else maybe they were just good cops, trying to do the job properly. I suppose that’s not impossible, after all.
“Have you read it?” said Teddy on the phone.
“I have.”
“Great. Thanks. Listen, sorry to have to, you know, put you through—”
“That’s OK. Don’t worry.”
“OK, great.” A pause, during which I wondered whether there were any cigarettes in Nadine’s room. I’d never smoked, not even as a kid, but it would be nice to smell that scent again. “Listen, Jack—I’d like you to meet him. Horace: I’d like you to talk to him.”
I almost dropped the phone, as my heart stopped pumping and my limbs froze. Meet him? “Is that . . . would that be allowed?”
“Oh yeah, yeah, listen—yeah.” Teddy was gabbling. In gratitude, I suppose, that I wasn’t screaming at him. “I mean, you know, a prisoner’s allowed visitors. Up to him who they are.”
“And he’s willing?”
Teddy laughed. “About as willing as you are, Jack! But, yes, he’ll see us. If you think you’re up to it.”
How much easier it must have been in the days of capital punishment, I thought. At least back then the ghosts were all dead.
“So you’ve read the evidence, what do you think?” We were in Teddy’s car, driving to the prison. “There’s not much to it, is there?”
“I agree it’s a bit thin,” I said. “But if Horace didn’t do it, and he wasn’t there, then why wasn’t he able to offer a more convincing defence? Some sort of alibi, or something.”
“I’m hoping,” said Teddy, who seemed a lot more nervous than I was, “that we’ll find that out today.” I, by contrast, was not hoping for anything in particular. Why was I there? The usual reason: to prolong the existence of Nadine.
“You won’t get a word out of our Horace,” said the prison officer who checked our papers. “He’s the tall, dark, silent type.” When the guard clocked my name, he gave me a look that only just fell short of naked contempt. That was an omen, if I’d been in a state to notice it. But all such thoughts fled my head the moment I sat down opposite Horace and looked into his eyes for the first time.
I knew straight away that he hadn’t killed my daughter.
It wasn’t anything to do with him. It wasn’t that I looked upon Horace and knew him incapable of murder. It was rather that I looked at Horace and knew Nadine to have been incapable of being murdered by him.
Nonsense, of course. Irrational, meaningless. I underst
ood that then no less than I understand it now, but that understanding didn’t change what I knew. One thing that having your daughter murdered does for you—did for me, at any rate—is it liberates you from the rules of rationality. If you know something, you just know it, and you don’t ask how or why. I had already accepted the utterly impossible fact that my only child had predeceased me; after that, accepting any lesser impossibility was child’s play.
Teddy introduced us—as if we needed it!—and then sat with his chair slightly behind mine, leaving the two of us alone in a room full of chattering, grieving men and women.
“All right, Horace,” I said, without preamble. “You didn’t kill Nadine. So who did?”
Horace said nothing, just stared at me with the eyes of a disinterred corpse. He didn’t blink, and he didn’t look away.
“Do you think your need not to tell is greater than my need to be told? Is that it, Horace? Because if so, then there’s nothing I can—”
He blinked. Once. It was one of the most effective interruptions I have ever been subjected to. I stopped talking, and waited.
At last, he said: “I don’t want to tell you. Being in here is better than telling it. It’s terrible in here, but it’s better than telling it.” But he did tell us his story, even so. Not all of it—not even then—but enough.
A week later, Teddy and I held a press conference. Teddy gave a broad outline of the case for an appeal hearing, while I answered follow-up questions from the reporters—all of which were of the idiotic “How do you feel?” variety. My well-rehearsed answer was simple: I felt it was wrong that a man should be in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed. I felt that those actually responsible for my daughter’s death should be brought to justice. Beyond that, I had no comment to make.
The Campaign For Justice For Horace Jones was formally launched, with Teddy as its Treasurer and me as its Secretary—and thus, within the space of a day, I passed from being yesterday’s hero to being tomorrow’s villain.