by D. W. Buffa
The silence in the courtroom became eerie, profound. This was why they had all come, why there was such intense interest in the trial—to find out if the rumours were true, the rumours that had begun to circulate almost from the day the survivors had been found.
‘As I said before, they were delirious, out of their minds. They said a lot of things; none of it made sense,’ insisted Balfour with a wrathful look. ‘What would you have me say?’
‘The truth, Captain Balfour; what you’re sworn to say—just that!’
‘The truth is what you want? The truth of what they said? Well, one of them—that woman, Mrs Wilcox—kept talking about the two angels that swept down from heaven, one of them with a crystal glass filled with the finest thing she ever drank; while the other one hung in the air above her, beating his wings, waiting until she was finished drinking so he could give her food.’ Balfour glared across the courtroom at Roberts. ‘That, sir, is the truth— the true account of what I heard her say. I’m a God-fearing man, myself. Why shouldn’t I believe her? But you, I take it, would rather believe what someone else might have said, though they were not any more in their right mind than she may have been?’
‘You’re under oath, sir!’
‘I know that, sir!’
‘Then answer my questions. When you saw what was left of that body, when you say that they had no other food—you knew what that body had been used for, didn’t you?’
Balfour looked at him with scarcely concealed contempt.
‘Never mind. Tell us this instead: what did the defendant, Vincent Marlowe, tell you about what had happened?’
Thomas Balfour looked from Roberts to Marlowe, and only then turned to the jury. ‘He said he did what he had to do, that he had not had any choice.’
Chapter Five
‘MR DARNELL, DO YOU WISH TO CROSSexamine the witness?’
Reclining in his chair,William Darnell watched the ceiling as if he were outside, tracing the movements of the stars.
‘Mr Darnell…?’
‘Forty days, you say? That in itself is an extraordinary achievement, wouldn’t you say, Captain Balfour? To stay out in a lifeboat that long, and at the end of it still have five other people alive?’
Darnell had not moved, had not looked at the witness. His eyes were still fixed on the ceiling. With sudden energy, he lurched forward and, with his elbow bent beneath him, studied Balfour as if he, the witness, was the only one who could really know what the question meant, what it was like to be out there, all alone, lost at sea.
‘In all your years as a seaman, have you ever known of anything more extraordinary than that?’
The answer of Thomas Balfour was immediate, exact.‘No, sir. I have not.’
Nodding emphatically, Darnell swept his legs out from under the table and got to his feet.
‘A thousand miles, you say; a thousand miles from where they started to where you found them. A rate of twenty-five miles or so per day, east to west—isn’t that what you said?’ he asked, his eyebrows raised as he waited.
The reserve, bordering at times on barely suppressed hostility, by which Balfour had attempted to keep the prosecution at a distance, had all but vanished. It was clear that all his sympathies were with Marlowe, a man he had never met until the morning he plucked him out of the ocean; but there was more than that to the way he responded to Marlowe’s attorney. He liked Darnell, liked everything about him, and had known it the moment he first saw his eyes: honest, open, determined and fair, the eyes of a man who could see past the shifting illusions of the world into the heart of things. Balfour did not meet many men with eyes like that among those who lived their lives on land.
‘Yes, that would have been the rate: twenty-five miles on average, though some days faster, and some days none at all.’
Darnell caught at the last phrase as if it hid a depth of meaning. ‘When there was no wind, no current; when they were “becalmed”?’
‘Yes, right that is. And they had days like that, I know.’
Darnell nodded his agreement, as if they were two old friends remembering things they had done together.
‘A thousand miles like that, twenty-five miles a day … But they didn’t just drift, did they?’
‘No, that’s right; they did not. They had a sail.’
‘Had a sail?’
‘Marlowe rigged it up. Used an oar—two of them, lashed together.’
‘I understand. But what about the sail? What did he use for that? The canvas covering, the one that was used to keep the lifeboat dry—he used that, did he not?’
‘Yes, sir, he did. It was fairly ripped to pieces by the time we found him, but it had got them as far as they had come.’
Darnell’s fingers grazed the edge of the counsel table. His other hand clung to his lapel. ‘What was the point of doing that, of going to all the trouble to rig a mast and sail? They were in the middle of the Atlantic, what difference did it make what part of the ocean they were on?’
‘That might have been what other men would have thought,’ said Balfour with an earnest look.‘Give up all trying and just wait for whatever might happen. Marlowe put up a sail so he could head for land.’
Darnell feigned surprise. ‘They were a thousand miles from where they started and, when you picked them up, a thousand miles east of Rio de Janeiro. Are you saying that he was heading for South America, two thousand miles from where the Evangeline went down?’
‘That’s exactly what he was doing.’
‘But they could not have been more than a few hundred miles from the west coast of Africa when they started. Why didn’t he simply head there?’
‘That time of year, the winds all run southwesterly, and run with force. The only chance he had was to run with them, and that meant sailing west.’
‘But why sail at all? Why not wait where they were, closer to where the Evangeline went down, close to where anyone looking for them would look first?’
Balfour hunched forward, his thick neck sunk on his shoulders. His eyes, narrowed tight, nearly shut, seemed to calculate the odds. ‘From what I gather, there had been a failure of the equipment, and the navigation system had gone out. And then the storm, the storm that sank her, had driven them God knows how far off course.Who knew how long it might be before anyone would discover they were missing? And there was not much chance that anyone would find them by accident in that part of the south Atlantic. They had a good—no, a better chance being picked up if they tried to make land on their own. And if no one did, then at least they were doing everything they could to save themselves.’
‘Among the things you found in the lifeboat, I don’t recall any mention of a sextant or any other navigational devices?’
‘They had nothing. Marlowe used the stars.’
‘The route you sailed, Captain Balfour—was that within the normal sea lanes?’
‘Yes.’
‘So the course Marlowe navigated brought him into the path where a ship crossing the Atlantic might be encountered?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So whether or not he reached South America, he would, by taking the route he did, improve the chance that some ship would find them?’
‘And it worked, too, didn’t it? If he had not done what he did, none of them would have survived,’said Balfour with great emphasis.
A pensive expression on his face, Darnell lowered his eyes and stared down at the floor. ‘And he knew how far they had to go, and how long it would likely take?’ he asked as he slowly raised his eyes to Balfour’s waiting gaze.
‘He would have known that, yes; within an approximation, because, as I say, the storm—the one that sank her—had blown her off course and all the navigation was by the stars. But yes, sir, in response to your question, he would have known that he had as much as two thousand miles of open sea between him and any hope of land.’
‘Two thousand miles across the south Atlantic; and, as you explained, it was winter down there,isn’t that correct,Captain
Balfour?’
‘Winter, and bitter cold.’
‘And the weather generally, that time of year—pretty bad?’
‘The seas can be terrible rough.’
‘And yet you said a few minutes ago that the sea could be as smooth as glass—no wind, no current?’
‘It’s what happens sometimes between storms. There are times it’s so bad you can’t see three feet in any direction: the sea is all around you. Other times, when it’s still, every way you look you see the sky, close enough to touch.’
‘And they were out there forty days in an open boat with a makeshift sail, sometimes in weather so bad they did not know where they were going; other times not knowing if they were going to go anywhere at all.Would that be a fair statement of what it must have been like for them?’
Roberts was on his feet, lodging an objection, but without heat or animosity. ‘The witness was not in the lifeboat. He can’t know what they did or did not encounter,’ he said in a civil voice.
Homer Maitland stroked his chin. ‘No, I’ll allow it,’ he said after a short pause. ‘The witness has direct knowledge of the weather conditions. He can testify to that.’ Maitland looked down at the witness. ‘Go ahead, Mr Balfour: answer the question.’
‘Yes, that’s true. The weather is changeable, and just when you think it’s bad, it gets worse.’
Darnell twisted his head to the side as if the next question had an especially important significance. ‘In those conditions, Captain Balfour, would you imagine that they had to think that each day was likely to be their last?’
Roberts was on his feet with another objection, but this time there was passion in his voice, and this time Maitland, without hesitation, sustained it.
Darnell moved immediately to another question.‘Mr Roberts gave you a document that listed the contents found in the lifeboat.You drew up that list from memory, didn’t you?’
Balfour gave him a puzzled glance.
‘What you remember having seen in the lifeboat.You didn’t keep any of those objects—the empty tins, the plastic water containers … the extra clothing—did you?’
‘I see what you mean. Well, the answer isn’t either yes or no. I didn’t make the list after the fact, but while I had it all in front of my eyes. Then we cut the lifeboat loose. I didn’t see the need to keep any of it, and we were hard-pressed for room with six new people on board—in their condition.’
‘You kept none of the clothing?’
Balfour’s massive head seemed to draw back. His eyes—those narrow slits wedged into his skull—became forbidding.
‘No.’
Darnell had begun to pace. He stopped and, with an intense look, began to study Balfour. That one-word answer concealed a secret the captain did not want to share. All Darnell’s experience, everything he had learned about what it took to win at trial, told him to take the answer and move on to something else, that what Balfour did not want to reveal would only help the prosecution. But there was something else at work, an instinct that this case was so different that the old rules did not apply, and that to do what he had done before was to guarantee defeat.
‘No won’t quite do it, Captain Balfour. The question is why? The empty containers might have no further use, but what about the clothing—why get rid of that?’
‘It was not usable,’ said Balfour after a pause.
‘Why was it not usable?’
‘It was torn, some of it.’
‘Some of it? What else made it unusable, Captain Balfour? Don’t think you’re doing Vincent Marlowe a favour by holding anything back. Tell the truth: that’s the best any of us can do.’
‘There was blood on a lot of it.’
Darnell looked at him as if he had expected the answer and, not only that, found it immensely helpful to the defence.
‘There was blood on the clothing, but you have no knowledge about how it got there, do you?’
‘No,’ replied Balfour, watching closely everything Darnell did.
‘The clothing—by the way, you assumed that it did not belong to the six survivors you rescued, isn’t that correct? It’s my recollection that in response to a question put by Mr Roberts, you offered the opinion that the clothing must have belonged to other people—people who, as you phrased it,“didn’t make it”. Because— and again I’m relying on my own memory—the survivors would not have had time to take with them any additional clothing when the Evangeline sank? But you have no direct knowledge of what they did, or did not, have time to do when the Evangeline sank, do you?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘So it’s possible that some of them might have grabbed anything they could to protect themselves from the elements in what was, by all accounts, a terrible storm?’
The reply was tentative, circumspect.‘It’s possible.’
Darnell shoved both hands into his suit jacket’s pockets. He fixed the witness with a determined look. ‘You hesitate. Is it because you have been told what happened—then and later—by some of the survivors?’
Balfour did not move and did not speak. His eyes were steady, remote.
‘And those survivors, as you reminded us, were all nearly out of their minds when you found them, isn’t that true?’
‘All nearly dead,’ said Balfour, shaking his head at what he had seen. ‘Their bodies were emaciated beyond anything I had seen, like living skeletons they were; except that their feet were swollen up something fierce, like they were ready to burst. Their faces were horrible, with hollow eyes and sunken cheeks; their lips burned black, all cracked and raw—more like scabs than skin; and the skin they had, stretched like dried paper, all blistered and peeling off. It was even more horrible than that; great gaping wounds on their necks and arms, and one of them with a leg all dead flesh and gangrenous.’
‘I read the report you wrote, the one you filed when you first got to port,’ said Darnell. His voice, though not much more than a whisper, could be heard clearly in the deathly stillness of the courtroom. ‘ In addition to everything else, some of them were crippled?’
‘They were forty days out there!’ cried Balfour with a shudder. ‘Forty days. Forget the weather, the hunger, the thirst—forty days shoved up together in that small boat, no room to move. Imagine being forced to sit in a small cage for more than a month. They could not stand up, some of them, after we got them off; some of them could not lie down. None of them could do anything without excruciating pain. Not one of them could walk a step without someone holding him up.’
Darnell had moved across to the jury box. He lay a hand on the railing. ‘There were other injuries as well, weren’t there?’
‘There were indeed.’
‘One of them lost a foot?’
‘Because of how cold it was at night, and the fact he could never get dry, he got frostbite. There was hardly anything left of his foot. It had to come off.’
Darnell began to walk back towards the counsel table.
‘That wasn’t all,’ Balfour added. ‘One of them had a broken ankle; another a broken wrist. Two of them had broken ribs.’
Darnell placed his hands on the back of his empty chair. ‘Yes, and more than what happened to them physically was what happened to them mentally. Let me quote you exactly,’ he said as he searched inside a file folder for Balfour’s report.‘“Two of them were quite out of their minds. Another one would not speak: he would only shake his head and moan. One of the women—the younger one, Ms Grimes—scratched the eyes of the first mate when he tried to lift her out of the lifeboat. The other woman, Mrs Wilcox—”’ Darnell looked up,‘the one who talked about the angels that had come from heaven to help her—“could not stop crying once we had her on board.”’
Darnell stopped reading. The page dangled in his hand.‘They had all been driven crazy, hadn’t they, by what they had been through?’
‘They weren’t human; they had lost all reason—that’s the God’s truth of it. Except for Marlowe, who looked as bad as any of them, maybe wo
rse. He looked me right in the eye and said, “Thank God. It’s over.”’
‘“Thank God. It’s over,”’ repeated Darnell. ‘Thank God you found them, is that what he meant?’
Balfour raised an eyebrow. ‘That, and something more than that, was what he meant.’
Darnell nodded and then pulled out his chair, ready to sit down. ‘One other question, Captain Balfour. The body—what did you do with that?’
The lines in Balfour’s craggy brow deepened and spread further out. ‘We wrapped it in a cloth and gave it a burial at sea. We said a few words over it. That was all we could do.’
‘You know that the defendant, Vincent Marlowe, is on trial for murder. Did you see any evidence that the person whom you buried at sea had died from anything other than natural causes?’
Balfour shook his head. ‘I saw no evidence of murder.’
Chapter Six
WILLIAM DARNELL WATCHED FROM THE window. He did not need to check his watch to know that it was four o’clock in the afternoon; he knew it when he heard the car turn into the drive from the road below. Some people—most people, perhaps—were never quite on time; and in most cases a few minutes one way or the other didn’t matter. In a court of law a different rule—a double standard—applied: judges, blaming schedules, were notoriously unconcerned about making others wait; but lawyers had better be there when the judge finally made his way to the bench. Darnell had almost never come to court late; but outside the courtroom, he was often too preoccupied, too lost in thought, to remember where he was supposed to be next.
He had always been at war with time, losing track of it, running out of it, feeling trapped by it. He had once grown irritable and impatient at the way the hours dragged when he wanted them to pass more quickly; now he regretted the way time sped by when he wanted more than anything for it to stop. The days moved faster, as if the days he had left were conspiring to shorten themselves.