Eden St. Michel

by F. R. Jameson

  The reason I did was Daphne.

  I’d handed myself in wanting to save Eden, but now I’d done that, I couldn’t have my little girl growing up believing that her Daddy was a killer. The thought of her being ashamed of me, embarrassed by the sound of my name, was just too much. No matter what happened, I wasn’t going to confess. Even though I didn’t have any real alibi, I was still going to tell the whole world I was innocent. And if it went wrong, and I had to climb the scaffold, hopefully my little girl would still believe me.

  So I took the taunts and insults of the plod, soaked it up when they took out their frustration with their fists. Even when they came into my cell as I slept and threw a bucket of warm piss over me, I didn’t break. They wanted me to say that I was a murderer, but there was no way those words were ever going to pass my lips. Even if I had been there when Wachtel died, even if he had died at my hand in self-defence, such was my stubbornness, I almost managed to convince myself that I’d had nothing to do with it at all.

  As the plod told me again and again – yelling it at me, sneering it at me – the case they had against me was strong. It was strong, but even I could see that it was flawed.

  They had my name, and Eden’s, as the last names in the appointment book for Wachtel that day. Morty had clearly been thrown by me speaking to him – or someone claiming to be me – rather than his client, and so had given both our names to Wachtel’s people. Told them we were both coming to the meeting. But then they had Eden, who flummoxed them by saying she knew nothing about it.

  I’d have loved to have been an insect crawling on the wall when she gave her witness statement. I imagine her all dolled up and fancy, brightening the grey interview room just by her presence. Seemingly all pleasantness and politeness, but her eyes at their absolute hardest, never yielding anything. There was no way she’d be intimidated by them. And the fact she was a witness rather than a suspect meant they couldn’t clout her. They’d just have to take whatever she gave them. Take her cold stares at the wrong questions, her dismissive tone when they asked something twice. There’d be nothing they could do about it.

  We’d broken up, she told them, and she had no idea what I was up to when I made that phone call. (If indeed I did make that phone call.) That baffled them. Particularly when they realised that she had a solid alibi, even if the “respectable businessman” she could prove she was with turned out to be another Welshman they knew all too well. Since Eden and I were no longer a couple, they couldn’t work out what motive I might possibly have. A jealous lover was one thing, but a man going loopy over his temporary boss was another. Particularly as no one could even say they’d seen Wachtel and me speak to each other, let alone that we’d had some violent argument.

  There was a moment when I nearly confessed to making that phone call. Tired and bruised, I nearly told them that I wanted to follow that Scots bastard Connery’s path and go from stuntman to actor. But I stopped myself before I opened my bruised lips. I knew it would give them a thread to pull, and if they had just one thread they wouldn’t let go.

  Thankfully – and quite incredibly – I didn’t leave any fingerprints at Wachtel’s place. Nothing they could match, anyway. It was all a blur to me now, but looking back, I didn’t think I touched anything.

  However, they did have witnesses saying that they saw a Hillman of my make and colour racing through Richmond. At unsafe speeds, so I was told. But then it was a popular car, there were a lot of them about.

  So all they had was circumstantial.

  As such, all I could legitimately hope was that their case didn’t hold up to scrutiny. That it wasn’t enough to convict me. My barrister, a Mr Doughty, certainly thought that was a possibility. Or maybe he was being polite.

  Eden was safe now. A couple of times I even saw her face in yellowed, old newsprint during my stay at the hellhole that was Brixton Prison. There she was, beaming at opening nights and premieres. It turned my insides a little to see her, to look at her so glamorous and glittering as if nothing that had happened meant anything to her. But I knew it was just an act, that she was playing her part while I did what I had to do. Surely she must be yearning for me, too; her heart had to be broken. I knew that, but seeing her smile hurt me nonetheless.

  She was safe, though. The woman I loved was in the clear.

  I’d done that part of my duty, and now I just had to try and make sure that Daphne didn’t live her life trying to forget her father.

  Lord knows what Sally and Glenda would have told her about where I’d gone. If I got off, it wouldn’t matter. Not guilty and me walking away would make this whole thing be a strange, half-formed memory of childhood, nothing more. A time when Daddy went away for a bit, when there were odd things said about him, but it was over now.

  That’s if I got off. The alternative – the judge slipping that black cloth onto his head – didn’t bear thinking about.

  All I could do was hope. That somehow even without a proper alibi, even with the evidence of the phone call and the car, I could appear an upright and decent person in the dock and a jury would be swayed to my side.

  In those long three months on remand, there were many nights of doubt. I twisted myself in agonies at the predicament I’d got myself into. But I never looked back, I never considered copping to manslaughter. It was all or nothing now and I just had to pray that luck was with me.

  Wachtel was a bastard. He hadn’t deserved to die, but then I hadn’t meant to kill him. There was no way hanging was the right fate for me.

  I’d saved Eden.

  All I could think of now was trying to save Daphne from a lifetime of pain and shame.

  To do that, though, I needed to find a way to save myself.

  Even though I had no idea if I possibly could.

  From the audio recordings of Eden St. Michel

  “Joe was my Sydney Carton.

  “Of course, I actually had a small part in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. Third French wench to the left or whatever it was, but I had lines and have fond memories of that film. Even though I was in it, never once did it occur to me to try and read the book. To me, Dirk Bogarde was Sydney Carton: so handsome and so dashing. I wept buckets at his moment of self-sacrifice. But now I had my own Sydney Carton, a man who’d sacrificed himself for me. I may have called him an idiot, but he was my idiot and I couldn’t believe there was anyone alive who would do something like that for me.

  “It still hurt like hell, though.

  “After his arrest, I did as he asked and tried my best to get on with my life. There were a few embarrassing interviews with the police, a studio-appointed solicitor in tow, but they were always incredibly sympathetic with me. Sometimes I cried real tears for them. Other times I gave them the fake ones, as it made them feel awkward. Professional that I was, I always kept to the script, the agreed story Joe and his friend Luca had worked up. And, actress that I was, I sold it to them, made them believe it.

  “There was a certain amount of pressure from the people in charge of the various studios, wanting to know how innocent I really was. Trying to understand if keeping me around would harm the bottom line. But I convinced them that I was a totally innocent party in this.

  “It probably helped that Joe was a film person, too. There were lots of us who knew him. Actors who’d been his drinking buddies and friends, even other lower-ranking actresses who’d had dalliances with him. Finding that out actually made me smile. No matter how attractive I found Joe, I couldn’t quite picture him as the seasoned ladies’ man.

  “So they looked after me. The scandal was unavoidable for Joe, but they did their best to keep me out of the story. To make me an incidental party. The wronged girl who’d just been that little bit too trusting. I was still box office, they thought. Maybe, after this, even more so. As such, they were happy to keep me around and let me go on with my life.

  “I even made a film, ‘Summertime Blues’, which is a really lovely comedy with me and Roger Moore top-billed that not enough peopl
e saw. God, I was good in that film. And since it’s most likely my swansong on the big screen, I’m glad I went out shining.

  “Of course, Roger being Roger, he suggested an affair, but I turned him down gently. My heart was already broken, and an illicit fling wasn’t going to do anything to make it better. ‘Summertime Blues’ is a good film, and I’m proud of it, but it was hard to make. I went from beautiful and effervescent on set, to alone at home weeping myself to sleep with half a bottle of gin each night. Not that gin really cut it for me any more. The fact was that nothing tasted good to me any more. The life I’d led before was devoid of pleasure now; it felt utterly empty. All I could think about, every waking moment and in most of my dreams as well, was Joe.

  “I didn’t go to see him when he was on remand, and that’s something I regret now. At the time I thought that I’d be too easily recognised and the façade we’d created would come crashing down around us. Most of the time I didn’t really care what happened to me, but I knew that Joe would be horrified if all he’d done turned out to be a waste. I so wanted to see him, but I was too gutless to go. Besides, I knew that I’d get emotional, that I’d hound him with questions that he probably didn’t want to answer. Like, why the hell was he pleading innocent and not manslaughter? Why was he taking that risk? Five years he’d said the sentence might be. I’d have preferred five years to hanging.

  “When the trial started on the twelfth of November, it almost seemed to have slipped the public’s mind that I was part of the case. The story all the papers had was that he was the rogue stuntman with a violent streak who had inveigled his way into an American producer’s house and killed him. Why wasn’t exactly clear, but I saw more than one commentator suggest that he might be a psychopath.

  “I always thought the press had to be careful what they reported while a trial was going on, but clearly their need for a good headline overcame that. I read the newspapers every day and, three days in, I could see how badly things were going for poor Joe. Pretty much every paper had set out its stall against him. They were writing about him practically as if he’d been convicted already. There was no way Joe was going to get a fair trial.

  “In their coverage they made the American sound like he was some kind of saint, a visiting holy man happy to spend his own money on the struggling British film industry and keeping hundreds of people employed. And then this Welsh ne’er-do-well came along and murdered him. It was disgraceful, they said, when the only thing that was really disgraceful was what they were writing.

  “If only they could have had some inkling of the truth.

  “By the second week, it was obvious to me that Joe was going to be hanged. Or that the best possible outcome for him was that he was going to spend the rest of his life in jail. And I couldn’t let that happen, not to my Joe.

  “One morning I looked around my life and wondered how much I actually had to lose. And I asked myself, how much of my career, my livelihood, even my very freedom was I willing to risk? By that point I’d been a film star – a name-above-the-title, proper movie star – for about five years. And I’d loved it – I can confess that now – I’d absolutely loved being a star. But when I looked around, I realised that it was worth nothing. That nothing was worth as much as my Joe. That I couldn’t go on with any of it if he was dead or languishing in prison.

  “He had been so noble in saving me, but now it was my turn to try and save him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  My barrister, Mr Doughty, was a short and round man who had the warmest eyes of anyone I’d ever met. I had no idea whether he had a wife or children, but he seemed – even at the age of forty – to be a man made to be a grandfather. That’s what he reminded me of, a kindly grandpa who thought the absolute best of the world.

  When we first met he’d been positively cheerful. He couldn’t promise anything, obviously, but given how circumstantial the Crown’s case was, he thought we had a more than fair chance. But with each passing day of the trial, he greeted me every morning with a sadder and sadder gaze. One day I thought he was actually going to put his arms around me and whisper that it was all going to be alright, when we both knew it wasn’t.

  Across from Doughty, the man leading the prosecution was a Q.C. named Gilberthorpe. He was the opposite of Doughty in every way. Clearly born to superiority in the manner of a genuine toff, he was tall, lean and spare, with the kind of naturally harsh and dismissive stare that must have frightened the kids at Christmas.

  When Doughty first told me who’d been selected to lead the prosecution, there was an unmistakable nervousness to him. He confessed that he’d never seen Gilberthorpe in action himself, but that his reputation was fearsome.

  After only three days in court I could understand why.

  Gilberthorpe was ruthless. I think he was even younger than Doughty, but he gave the impression of being a much older man. One of those men who are born middle-aged and sneering at everything. He had the perfect voice to echo around the court. Whereas Doughty tried to be friendly and put everyone at ease, Gilberthorpe had an edge of condemnation to every sentence he uttered. Those in the witness box seemed to be constantly worried about upsetting this stern schoolmaster. It was in this stately and unhurried fashion – and with that plummy, brooking-no-nonsense voice – that he went about destroying my defence.

  The case against me rested on the circumstantial evidence of the phone call, the appointment book and a car resembling mine being seen in the area. Gilberthorpe hammered those points home again and again, as if they were all the proof of guilt that was ever needed. My defence, on the other hand, relied heavily on character witnesses, on people saying that as far as they were concerned I was no murderer. That I may have got into the occasional scrap, but I didn’t really have a violent temper. In short, that I was too decent a bloke to do what I was being accused of.

  Doughty could barely land a blow on any of the prosecution’s witnesses: on Morty (who was as friendly as he could be, but was still led into condemning me on voice alone); on the old couple who saw the car (who, if anything, seemed even more certain of what they’d seen after Doughty had finished with them); on bloody Cheesewright (who relished telling the story of our altercation). Gilberthorpe, however, totally destroyed the witnesses for the defence.

  It took me a few times of seeing it in action to understand how his formula worked. Fat lot of good it did me, though. None of the witnesses were allowed in the court before they were called, and so they didn’t know how deadly he was. They didn’t know what they’d let themselves in for by agreeing to speak up for me.

  Gilberthorpe would always start his questioning with gentle courtesy. He’d make sure that the witness was calm and ready and not at all intimidated by the Old Bailey setting. Then he’d ask them to go through the details they’d just given to Doughty, about how I was a decent bloke who would really never hurt a fly. Once they’d done that, he’d pause and then stare around the courtroom, before directly asking the witness if they had really never, ever – in all their years of acquaintance with me – seen a single moment of anger. If it was genuinely the case that they had never, not once, seen me lose my temper.

  The people who came to give evidence were friends and family, most from London but some as far back as Cardiff. If you’ve known someone for years, then they will have seen the best of you and they will have seen the worst of you. There were times when, yes, they would have seen me lose my rag a little.

  So all it required was a hesitation. One pause where they tried to frame their answer in such a way that it didn’t incriminate me – and at that hesitation Gilberthorpe would leap in to attack. Suddenly they’d find themselves under his withering eye. He’d ask, loud and with judgement dripping from every syllable, just why they were taking so long to answer a simple question. And before they could catch themselves, they’d be blathering away about how generally I had a good disposition, but…

  The best of them did try to maintain that I had the same everyday frustra
tions as everybody else, but even then Gilberthorpe made it sound like I was unbalanced. The worst of them, the ones who really wilted under his gaze – well, he twisted their words around to make me sound like a modern-day Jack the Ripper.

  My defence, he openly said, was laughable.

  Of course I’d made that phone call, he told the jury. Why on earth would anyone else pretend to be me? And if I was cunning enough to make that phone call, he said, then I certainly would not have wasted the opportunity and would have gone to Boris Wachtel’s place. And if I went to Boris Wachtel’s place and was now lying about the fact, what could have happened there apart from me being responsible for the poor man’s death? “Solely responsible!” he practically yelled.

  Two weeks into the trial, I had pretty much given up. All my thoughts of saving my name in front of my daughter, of even seeing her again or hearing her laugh, had faded to nothing. I was doomed, I was a dead man. Each day in the dock, I could feel myself getting more shaky and nervous. I was in trouble and it was dripping off me like sweat.

  By the time Eden came to court – a witness for the prosecution, there to explain that she’d broken up with me and had no idea why, if I made that phone call, I would use her name in that way – I wasn’t sure I could even face her.

  I’d done this all for her and it was the right thing to do. But when she stared at me in the dock, she was going to see a man who’d lost every fragment of hope. Who had found out how misplaced his confidence was, who’d had all optimism kicked out of him. And I didn’t want her to look at me and think that she’d made a mistake in agreeing to my scheme. I didn’t want to make her feel guilty.

  Even though, when I thought of Daphne, all I could think of was that somewhere along the line, I’d made a terrible mistake and wished I could go back to stop it.

  That I was going to die with a rope around my neck, and there was nothing I could do – nothing anyone could do – to halt the inevitable.