Harry Curry: Rats and Mice

by Stuart Littlemore

  ‘Suitable to the defence,’ Harry said, unnecessarily. It was going to happen, whatever position the defence might take.

  The sheriff’s officer looked to the associate, who mouthed ‘Yes’, and did his part by escorting the jury out. Everyone else simply treated the court as having been adjourned and Bruce’s bail continued overnight, although the presiding judge had still not opened his mouth. In the space of perhaps three minutes, everyone withdrew from the courtroom except the judge and his associate, who had remained in their seats, looking straight ahead. Outside in the foyer, with the courtroom doors closed, Harry told Surrey that the associate would look after things. ‘I’ve realised she’s probably his daughter.’

  Having sent the client off with instructions to meet them at nine the next morning, Surrey said, ‘But the DPP bloke said his daughter died in a motor accident.’ They walked together into the barristers’ robing room, where Harry put down his brief and changed out of his wig and gown, and back into his suit jacket.

  ‘He may have more than one daughter, Dave.’

  ‘And no wife.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a train wreck.’ Surrey clicked the lock shut on his battered oxblood briefcase, and they left the building. Harry carried his brief, although he had nothing he needed to work on overnight. Pausing in the heat of the afternoon, looking at the passing traffic, Surrey speculated hopefully. ‘Maybe he’ll be back on the rails in the morning.’

  ‘We can only hope so, Dave, for all our sakes.’

  ‘Well, especially Bruce’s. The last thing he needs is for the trial to be aborted, and to start it all over again at the next sittings.’

  Harry had parked the LandCruiser in the yard at the back of the Queanbeyan police station. As he and Surrey approached it, a uniformed sergeant emerged from the station’s back door, significant displeasure on his face.

  ‘Did you park that vehicle here?’

  ‘Yes.’ Harry put his key in the door and turned it.

  ‘You can’t park here. This is private property.’

  Harry had been waiting for such an opportunity, truth to tell. He opened the car door. ‘Are you quite sure, in front of this witness, an officer of the Supreme Court, that this isn’t a public place?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. This is the property of the New South Wales Police Force.’

  Harry started to climb into his car. ‘That being the case, sergeant, why don’t you fuck off?’

  Surrey opened the other door and joined Harry. The policeman went scarlet.

  ‘I could arrest you for offensive language!’

  ‘You’d better look at section 4 of the Summary Offences Act before you do that, officer. I’d hate to have to sue you for false arrest.’

  Harry started the engine and backed in a semi-circle, forcing the angry policeman to move quickly out of the way. As they drove through the open gate Harry flicked his eyes up at the mirror, checking that the sergeant was still standing there in a state of outrage.

  As the car left Struggletown and headed back to the genteel surrounds of University House in Canberra, where Surrey had left his car that morning, he was chuckling.

  ‘And what’s he going to find when he looks at section 4?’

  ‘Just that offensive language’s not an offence unless the obscenity’s spoken in a public place, or within hearing from a public place. And he’s quite certain that the yard of his police station’s private property, as you heard.’

  ‘Dale Carnegie does it again,’ Surrey laughed.

  ‘Does what?’

  ‘Wins friends and influences people.’

  Harry ate alone in the University House restaurant that night, barely acknowledging the presence of a gaggle of other barristers, part-heard in an insurance appeal in the High Court. They all looked happy, and were speaking too loudly. The wine was flowing freely.

  Back in his room, Harry watched some one-day cricket on TV, but quickly lost interest. He ran through the channel buttons a couple of times, then killed the picture and looked around for something to read. The brief was on the desk, untouched. He opened the balcony door and sat outside for half an hour, looking across the lawn and through the venerable gums at the Law Library. The lights were on. Exams this week and next. On the footpath running along the front of the building a young couple walked slowly by, holding hands and speaking quietly together. Harry went inside and rang Arabella at Elizabeth Bay.

  ‘Busy day?’

  ‘Not in court, if that’s what you mean. After the doctor I had coffee with my clerk. She might be starting to forgive me for ever coming on the floor.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? If you’ll forgive me for speaking in the manner of a character on Neighbours.’

  ‘It means she’s hinting at introducing me to the in-house solicitors at the Commonwealth Bank. They send everything to her and trust her to farm it out.’

  ‘Sounds promising. All those Supreme Court matters enforcing guarantees,’ said Harry. ‘Ruining families, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Not really, Harry. Apparently there’s plenty of work that she thinks would suit me in their banking tribunal. Employment stuff. Sexual harassment, that line of country.’

  ‘Not so bad, then. Not quite so hard-hearted.’

  Harry interrogated Arabella, gently but insistently, about her health and everything the obstetrician had said to her. Then he paused, took a breath and raised the subject of Arabella’s mother coming over from London to help in the final stages of the pregnancy.

  ‘There’s absolutely no prospect of keeping her away,’ said Arabella, ‘and you’d better wear your cricket protector at all material times.’

  ‘I presume she doesn’t take kindly to the idea of an unmarried daughter and a bastard grandchild, least of all when it’s all the doing of a rough and uncultured colonial?’

  ‘How delicately put, my darling. But that’s about right.’

  They both silently thought about that for a while, and Harry prodded carefully at the issue of marriage.

  ‘Harry, you know what I think about that, and — in any event — a sudden wedding might appear to be rushing our fences,’ said Arabella. ‘Though she’d be mollified, at least to some degree, if we were cohabiting.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. She needs to boast about her Australian grandchild, or at the very least to talk about him or her, which is hard to do when the whole arrangement’s unmentionable.’

  ‘I can see that. It does sound as if she’s quite the traditionalist.’

  ‘An uber-conservative, Harry. You have no idea. Just wait till you meet her — she might be small, and she might be skinny, but she can certainly punch above your weight. Feisty Maya.’

  ‘Punch above her weight, do you mean?’

  ‘No, Harry, I meant what I said: she can certainly punch above your weight.’

  ‘Just so long as she punches above my belt.’

  ‘I can’t promise that.’

  ‘You might have told her that I want you to come down to Burragate, and for us all to live there as a family. When I say “all”, I mean the three of us. Not including a de facto mother-in-law.’

  ‘Whatever you might care to call her, Harry, she’s a de jure grandmother. Or she soon will be. Do you realise what this will make your father?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘His title’s going to be Dadaji.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘It’s the respectful title for the paternal grandfather.’

  ‘Wallace Curry QC, aka Dadaji. I hope we strike him on one of his good days when we tell him that.’

  Harry went to bed and thought about having a second woman sitting in judgment of his merits. It took him a long time to get to sleep.

  Day two of the trial began with a pale and apparently unsteady judge taking charge of the proceedings. Skyrne-Jones didn’t speak much, and counsel walked around on eggshells for the morning, but as David Surrey had hoped, the trial was back on the ra
ils and progressing towards the horizon beyond which the jury would be despatched to consider their verdict. If only they could get that far without another judicial tempest.

  The first witness of the day was a very young surgeon. The Crown tendered the report from the emergency operation at Canberra Hospital at which the witness had assisted. Copies were handed to each juror, and the prosecutor resumed his seat. The DPP’s man wasn’t minded to seek any further explanation from his witness.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Surrey, ‘the prosecution can’t just leave the jury to figure all that surgical jargon out for themselves — they won’t understand a word of it.’ Judging by the bemused looks on the faces of several jurors in the front row, he was right. The five women sitting in the back row weren’t even looking at the ten-page document.

  ‘Suits us,’ said Harry as he got to his feet and straightened his wig.

  ‘Dr Leung,’ he began, ‘you’re going to have to forgive me and the jury, but we don’t have medical degrees.’

  The jurors, as Harry had expected, adopted facial expressions indicating that he was speaking for the thirteen of them.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Of course I do, doctor. But you’re also going to have to excuse us if we don’t understand the technical medical language in your report.’

  ‘Well, it’s actually not my report. I countersigned it, but I only assisted at the procedure. I’m a registrar.’

  ‘But you understand all this surgical nomenclature, and we don’t. That’s our problem.’ The Crown grumbled sotto voce to his instructing solicitor that bloody Curry was at it again — pretending to be as dumb as the dumbest juror, with all his ‘we’ and ‘us’, dragging the jury down to the accused’s end of the table. Next thing, he’d be shouting them a beer. Of course Curry knew what it all meant — possibly better than a junior surgical registrar did.

  ‘Nomenclature?’ Now the doctor didn’t understand.

  ‘Mr Curry has his own jargon, doctor,’ Skyrne-Jones grinned. ‘Not even the judges understand all of it, either.’

  Harry bowed deeply toward the bench and returned his attention to the witness. ‘If you’d help me with this for the benefit of all us non-doctors, Dr Leung. In my stumbling and inarticulate way, would I be getting the gist of the report if I said that, to a layman, what it means is that the bullet shown in the X-ray entered Mr Kellaway’s stomach at a level about fifty millimetres below his navel on the left side, and lodged between the bones of his lower spine. The report says it can be seen between the vertebrae at T12 and L1 — which is where the spine goes from what you call its thoracic level to its lumbar level, I believe. The bullet, if my understanding is correct, also tore through the spinal cord, and that’s why Mr Kellaway has lost the use of his legs. How are we doing?’

  ‘Yes, lower limbs. Paraplegia.’

  ‘The really important thing being — important to us, not you — that the trajectory of the bullet was in an upward direction?’

  ‘Yes, slightly.’

  ‘With your Honour’s leave, I’ll just get my client to come out of the dock for a few moments.’

  Harry didn’t wait for any response from the judge, but beckoned den Boer out to stand alongside himself. ‘Now, Bruce,’ he said, ‘just go and stand in front of the jury.’ The accused man did as he was asked, and neither the judge nor the Crown demurred. ‘If your Honour pleases, I’ll have Mr Surrey go and stand facing my client, at least two metres away.’

  ‘Very well.’ The judge came to life to give permission and Surrey left his chair to assume the position assigned to him.

  ‘Now, doctor, I’ll ask you to watch while I get Mr den Boer to raise his right arm to shoulder level, and mime shooting a pistol, or a revolver, at Mr Surrey. Bruce, will you aim your gun just a bit below your solicitor’s navel, please?’

  The accused complied, raising his arm and making a gun with his hand.

  ‘Bang!’ said Harry. ‘Leave your hand there, please, Bruce. Okay, Dr Leung, what the jury has seen is that — assuming the shot was from that height, at that angle, and that the projectile entered about fifty millimetres below Mr Surrey’s navel — the trajectory of the bullet would have been downwards?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not upwards, as you and the surgeon observed it to be from the entry wound and the X-ray.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘For that bullet that we can see on the X-ray, shot from that angle, to have impacted Mr Kellaway’s spine between T12 and L1, it would have to have entered at least a foot — say 300 millimetres — higher than, in fact, it did?’

  ‘Maybe 400 millimetres. Mr Kellaway is a big man. Overweight.’

  ‘Big, but not any taller than Mr Surrey?’ Surrey and den Boer were still positioned in front of the jury. Den Boer let his arm fall. Dr Leung looked at the hospital notes in front of him.

  ‘1.82 metres.’

  ‘And the jury can see, doctor, that Mr Surrey is at least that tall?’

  ‘I’ll take your word for that.’

  ‘If he does, he’s silly,’ said the Crown, perfectly audibly to all in court, a bitter expression on his face.

  Harry turned to him and also spoke loudly enough for the jury to hear. ‘What did you say, Mr Crown? That Dr Leung is a silly man?’

  The Crown got to his feet, blushing. ‘That’s not what I said at all. I merely observed to my instructing solicitor that the witness ought not to take Mr Curry’s word for the height of Mr Surrey.’

  ‘How courteous,’ Harry said. ‘Happily, I came prepared, and I have a tape measure here,’ producing from the side pocket of his Bar jacket a pink dressmaker’s tape he’d bought on his way to court, ‘so I’ll get Mr Surrey to help me establish his height.’

  ‘No, Mr Curry, you won’t,’ said Skyrne-Jones. ‘Mr Surrey, how tall are you?’

  ‘Six feet two-and-a-half, your Honour. One hundred and eighty-five centimetres.’

  ‘I’m directing the jury to take Mr Surrey’s word for that. And it won’t be lost on them that he is at least three centimetres — that’s about an inch — taller than Mr Kellaway.’

  The DPP solicitor was not pleased. ‘You stuffed that up royally,’ he told his counsel. ‘Nice work.’

  Den Boer and Surrey resumed their seats, and the jury exchanged looks. The defence had kicked a good goal. But there was more to come.

  ‘And there’s another thing, isn’t there, Dr Leung? From what you found at operation, Mr Kellaway must have been twisted to one side when the bullet struck him?’

  ‘Well, the wound and the trajectory aren’t consistent with him standing in a position facing the shooter.’

  Morning tea followed, in the legal profession room. Mrs den Boer had brought apricot Danish and flat whites, but had missed the goal-scoring while she was off making the purchases. She noticed that her husband’s deeply lined face had relaxed for the first time, and she asked what had happened while she was out of court.

  ‘I think,’ Mr den Boer said, ‘I think the tide’s turning. Isn’t it, Mr Curry?’

  Harry thought for a moment before answering. ‘You know, Mr den Boer, King Canute was much maligned. He didn’t say he could turn the tide back. What he actually did was demonstrate his helplessness by commanding it to turn back, and showing his admirers that he didn’t have the powers they ascribed to him.’

  ‘I understand,’ said the accused’s mother.

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ said the accused.

  ‘Have faith,’ his mother told him. ‘Mr Curry knows what he’s doing.’

  The judge was slow to come back on the bench — there was not much more than an hour until the luncheon adjournment — but at least he gave every appearance of being stone-cold sober.

  The defence had only one more question for the doctor. Harry, wishing to make absolutely sure that the jury got the point that had been made before the break, put it thus: ‘So the effect of your expert evidence is this, isn’t it, doctor? The bullet that is still l
odged in Mr Kellaway’s spine came from a gun that must — because Mr Kellaway swears he was standing at the time — have been fired from a position well below Mr Kellaway’s belt. Just how far below depends on how far away the gun was from him when it was fired?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s without even considering the twisting of his body?’

  ‘As you say.’

  Harry sat down, and the prosecutor rose to attempt to water down the evidence that had just been given, under the flimsy guise of re-examination. He had, after all, had his turn — Dr Leung was a Crown witness.

  ‘Dr Leung, would your evidence be different if Mr Kellaway had been falling, or jumping, or suddenly changing his position at the time he was shot?’

  Harry’s objection was itself admirably quickfire. Dr Leung had got no further than forming his first word when it came.

  ‘I object. My learned friend can’t claim this is within the scope of re-examination, the purpose of which can only be to clarify an ambiguous answer.’

  Skyrne-Jones tended to agree. ‘It’s all very well for you to put a series of speculations to the witness, Mr Crown, but you adduced no evidence whatever that Mr Kellaway was falling or jumping or anything other than standing at the time he says he was shot. His version, need I remind you, was that he was quite static, and so was the accused. How can you raise this?’

  The Crown gave it his best shot. ‘It arises from cross-examination, your Honour. Mr Curry was asserting that the only possibility is that the shot travelled upwards. There are alternatives — if, for example, Mr Kellaway was falling backwards. Or if they were fighting over the gun.’

  ‘But he didn’t say that, Mr Crown. Nothing remotely like that. You can’t reinvent his evidence.’

  ‘Your Honour —’

  ‘No. The question’s rejected. Have you got anything else? Anything in the nature of valid re-examination?’

  The prosecutor went into a brief huddle with his solicitor, but quickly surrendered to the inevitable.

  ‘Nothing further, your Honour. Might the witness be excused?’

  ‘No objection,’ Harry responded, quickly. After a moment’s hesitation, he added, ‘May I ask, for more abundant caution, that your Honour direct that the transcript should record Mr Crown’s remarks about the possibility of the shot being fired at a time when Mr Kellaway was falling, or even fighting over the gun with my client?’