‘Mr Curry told me not to.’
‘That’s because you don’t actually have a reason, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s not. I’ve got a good reason.’
‘You have a reason, you say, but your highly experienced counsel didn’t want you to tell it to the jury?’
‘That’s right.’
The prosecutor gave him a long last look and sat down, congratulating himself on not swallowing the tempting lure. The judge paused, then asked Harry if he had any re-examination.
Harry stood. ‘Just one question: what’s the reason?’
The Crown was on his feet before den Boer began to answer. ‘I object! I deliberately didn’t open up this issue. This doesn’t arise.’
Harry, still standing, was about to argue, but Skyrne-Jones QC, DCJ, when on form, was nothing if not a master of the rules of criminal practice and procedure. He waved Harry back down.
‘No, Mr Crown, that’s precisely what you did, whether you intended to or not: you cross-examined to the effect that the accused cannot, in truth, offer any explanation for Mr Kellaway’s motive. What you’ve done is open the issue up to such an extent that the defence is now entitled to adduce evidence that would otherwise be inadmissible hearsay.’
‘But, your Honour —’
‘Don’t even attempt to canvass my ruling, Mr Crown. You know better than that.’ The judge turned to the man in the witness box. ‘Mr den Boer, do you need the question again?’
‘No, your Honour.’
‘You can answer it.’
‘Thanks. He did it as a practical joke, that’s my opinion. There’s a story that everyone at Safansecure knows, about a retirement village development in Canberra, where the developer went bust a few years ago, before my time, and the company had a permanent security post there at night to prevent vandalism of the buildings, which were nearly finished. One of the patrolmen and his mate, a policeman, sneaked up on the guard in the pillbox one night, and threw stones on the roof and yelled out they were coming to get him, and terrified the bloke. He had to go off on stress leave. They all thought it was a big laugh.’
‘And you believe,’ asked the judge, ‘that that’s what Mr Kellaway was trying to do on the night he was shot?’
‘I do, yes. Pull the same sort of practical joke.’
‘And — don’t answer this question until Mr Curry has had a chance to object — do you also have any belief as to why Mr Kellaway didn’t own up to his own foolishness, and even went so far as to make what you claim are totally false allegations to the police — and, here, in front of the jury?’
Harry didn’t object. He didn’t know what was coming, but he didn’t object.
Den Boer looked at Harry, who nodded. Go ahead, answer the judge.
‘Yes. Compo.’
‘Workers compensation, I take it you mean?’
‘No. He’s already getting that, they say. What he’s after is criminal injury compo, or that’s what I reckon, at least. It’s $50,000, the police told me, but he only gets that if I’m convicted.’
Harry looked across at the jury, whose faces were worth studying. The judge sent them out for a cup of tea, and the hubbub of talk started well before they’d passed through the door to the jury room. When they had gone, Skyrne-Jones spoke to Harry.
‘You don’t need to re-call Mr Kellaway, do you, Mr Curry?’
Harry thought about it, and checked with Surrey. ‘No, may it please you.’
‘Jury addresses start in twenty-five minutes, counsel.’ The court was adjourned. A handful of onlookers left their seats in the public gallery in search of refreshment, but Harry remained at the Bar table, drafting notes for his closing. Surrey went outside to stretch his legs, and came back smiling. Time passed quickly. The public drifted back in.
Surrey listened carefully to the prosecutor’s submissions, and was impressed. He kept his speech short, and closed by asking the jury to base their verdict on one simple and obvious issue: not, as he explained, whether the accused pulled the trigger voluntarily or involuntarily but, as he put it: ‘Has the evidence satisfied you and each and every one of you individually, beyond reasonable doubt, that there is no realistic possibility that the account given by the accused — that it was an accident — is true? Because if you are not so satisfied, it is your duty to acquit.’ Ten minutes, and very fairly put.
Harry’s turn. Listening to his opponent, he abandoned his planned systematic demolition of the Crown case as totally unnecessary. He even dispensed with his de rigueur coat of arms speech — the emotional appeal of ‘it could be you’.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I won’t keep you long. His Honour’s going to sum up the evidence for you in a moment, and he’ll give you directions of law, which you’re bound to follow. One important thing he’s going to say, I respectfully anticipate, is that sympathy may play no part in your decision-making. You can be sympathetic to Mr Kellaway for his catastrophic injury, we all can, notwithstanding that he was the architect of his own fate, but that natural sympathy doesn’t and cannot affect your verdict. You may well hope that he’s given workers comp so that he can live as close to a normal life as is humanly possible, but this court is not the Workers Compensation Commission. They’ll look after that. Your decision isn’t about Troy Kellaway and his monumental foolishness. It’s about Bruce den Boer. What you are not going to do, and I don’t ask this of you — your own sense of justice demands it — you’re not going to convict an innocent man.’ He paused. ‘Never forget: the rest of my client’s life is in your hands.’ That was the entirety of the speech.
He sat, and Surrey leaned over to ask what he thought Arabella would make of a jury address by Harry Curry that took seventy seconds. ‘Length isn’t everything, Dave,’ he said. ‘More would have been less.’ When Surrey made a face at that, Harry turned around to look for Mr and Mrs den Boer in the public seats and saw Arabella. She sketched a little wave.
His Honour Judge George Skyrne-Jones wished he could have been as brief as counsel, but the Bench Book foisted upon him by the administrative head of the District Court prescribed an interminable number of judicial hoops through which he was required to jump. Aware that one of his colleagues had done no more than fall asleep for a short period during a particularly boring and poorly prosecuted drug trial a year earlier, and that the three Court of Criminal Appeal justices (two of whom had never in their careers at the Bar set foot in a magistrate’s court, much less appeared on either side in a District Court jury trial) had ripped him to shreds, sending the matter off for a rehearing but more crucially causing his humiliation in the opinion columns of the Daily Telegraph, Skyrne-Jones carefully negotiated all the mindless orthodoxy expected of him. Imagine what the yellow press would do in the case of a judge against whose conduct the first ground of appeal was that he presided while drunk? As Harry said to Surrey and Arabella during the brief lull while the jury had a cup of tea and agreed on their verdict, old Skyrne knew that only a jury acquittal could save him — there being no appeal against a Not Guilty verdict — and he’d be less than human if his summing-up didn’t (and none too subtly) favour the defence case.
The jury sent a message to the judge after fifteen minutes of deliberation, letting him know that they had agreed on a verdict. The court was reconvened, and the anticlimactic formality of acquittal was duly recorded, the jury smiling at den Boer as he was released from the dock and crossed to embrace his parents, who were both weeping. Hands were shaken, lawyers were thanked and hugged, and Arabella watched it all from a safe distance.
Harry rolled up his gown and jacket and put them in his blue bag embroidered with the letters ‘HMC’. Henry Mould Curry. His wig went into its much-abused Arnott’s Biscuits tin with his stiff collar, studs and white bands. The brief he handed back to Surrey, with the backsheet crossed through. (‘It’s a crucifix, Harry,’ Wallace Curry QC had told him all those years ago. ‘The monks did it when they completed their manuscripts. It means God’s work is done.’) His Criminal Law Practice
, evidence monograph, notebooks and pens were shut in the battered Globite.
Arabella was telling Surrey, as they walked to his car, that she’d been on an early plane down that morning to Canberra, and had taken a taxi across to the Queanbeyan court. Her complaint that she’d had no breakfast produced an offer from Harry to take them all to a late lunch in Canberra, but Surrey begged off and Arabella said she had something better in mind. ‘And not a hectic trip to Burragate, either.’
As it turned out, what Ms Engineer had planned was a leisurely afternoon with room service in a suite of rooms at the grand old Canberra Hyatt, and, later, dinner at the hotel. Harry’s protests at the cost were rebuffed with an assurance that Arabella had just received a cancellation fee from her favourite insurance company defendant, and that would more than cover it. The suite was splendidly decadent. ‘In the morning, we can take a slow drive down to the farm and eat those broad beans you’ve been boasting about.’
‘I’ll kill a fatted guinea fowl.’
‘You couldn’t.’ Arabella laughed gently as she took off her shoes and prepared to take a shower.
‘Could you?’
‘Of course. Leave it to me.’
‘Is that shower big enough for two people?’ Harry asked.
‘Even for three.’ She disappeared into the bathroom as Harry untied his rugby club tie.
‘You didn’t tell me your mother was already here.’
The bathroom door was flung open and a cake of fancy soap flew out, still in its wrapper, narrowly missing Harry’s head.
A reasonable hypothesis consistent with innocence
Absently smoothing a fold of her sari between her thumb and forefinger, Maya Engineer sat transfixed on the balcony of her daughter’s Elizabeth Bay apartment as the last of the fireworks display faded and dropped from a starry sky into the black-velvet harbour. In the foreground, coloured lights jostled as hundreds of small boats moved about in the chop, and the people on board shouted to each other, their words meaningless in the skein of tangled music spilling out of the boats and the waterfront buildings.
‘And they do it all again at midnight?’ she asked Arabella, who was standing behind her with a cup of tea in her hand.
Harry joined them, carrying a glass and a fresh bottle of the Veuve. ‘That’s if the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t get an injunction to restrain the Lord Mayor — noise pollution, light pollution, all that smoke …’
‘He’s only saying that because he’s after a brief to defend her,’ said Arabella. She pointed to the champagne. ‘Curry’s a famous killjoy.’
Her mother dismissed the bottle. ‘No, Pooh. I’ll ring your father and wish him a happy New Year, and then I’ll be away to my bed.’
Harry raised his eyebrows and looked at Arabella. ‘Pooh?’
‘A nickname in a former life. Mother’s not going to use it again.’
‘Am I not, Pooh? I may not be able to help myself.’ Maya stood and went back into the living room, where she sat disapprovingly on a Barcelona chair. Her London home was furnished in Liberty fabrics. ‘Would you be so kind as to fetch me my iPad from the bedroom? I’m going to Skype Gurgit.’
Harry and Arabella exchanged looks on the balcony. ‘I’d offer to get it,’ he said in a low voice, ‘but your mother wouldn’t want me going into her room.’ He put down his glass on the handrail and deftly opened the bottle, shooting the cork out towards the darkness.
‘God, Harry, if that dragon downstairs saw you do that, it’s me she’ll upbraid. There was a memo to all tenants before Christmas in anticipation of what she was pleased to list as unacceptable festive season conduct — loud music, shouting from the balconies, decorations, visitors’ parking contraventions, taxis blowing their horns, overburdened recycling bins … I shudder to think what she might yet say about you firing corks onto the lawn.’
‘I’m pretty sure it reached the harbour.’ Harry looked chastened. ‘But I’ll go down in the morning and clean up the lawn. Promise.’
Arabella did her mother’s bidding and returned to sit on Harry’s lap, having shut the balcony door behind her. She gave his nose a twist. ‘Binge drinking, littering, bare feet at the dinner table. All a mischievous bid on your part to corroborate Maya’s English view of Australians as uncultured yobbos.’
‘I took her to the Messiah, didn’t I? How anyone could fall asleep during that performance, I cannot understand. Who’s the philistine now?’
‘Jet lag. And keep your voice down.’
Harry looked over his shoulder into the living room. ‘It’s all right. She can’t hear us. She’s absorbed in her iPad manipulations, anyway.’ He put down his glass and wrapped both arms around Arabella. ‘All quiet inside there?’
‘Since this afternoon, yes. I shouldn’t wonder — that was a huge burst of activity.’
‘Poor little bloke’s worn out.’
‘Or blokette.’ She twisted around and kissed him. ‘Exciting, isn’t it?’
At Mosman, there were no fireworks. In a suburban street lined with blocks of home units, parties were getting under way and parking was hard to find. Young men carried slabs of beer from double-parked cars into the tall buildings, and girls tripped in their wake, phones to their ears. From the front seat of a battered Mitsubishi van, white and therefore invisible, two surveillance officers sat to attention as their radio gave them a terse report. ‘The BMW’s just turned in. Got visual?’
The older of the two pointed through the windscreen and activated his send button. ‘Got ’im.’
‘Wait for the command.’ The radio reverted to silence.
The BMW turned half a block in front of them on the opposite side of the street and paused at the ramped entrance to a building’s underground carpark. An arm came out of the driver’s window and a card was held up to a reader. The arm was withdrawn, and the car moved slowly downwards, out of sight of the van.
The younger policeman made a note on a pad. ‘I only saw one person in the car. Asian appearance.’
‘It was Cracker.’
‘Cracker?’
‘Mr Phat.’ The senior policeman obviously thought that hilarious. ‘Geddit? Crack a fat?’
‘It’s not his surname, anyway.’ The younger man made another note. ‘That’s Lee. Chinese people’s names are back to front, aren’t they?’
‘Ask someone who cares,’ said his workmate, adjusting his gun, which was in a holster on his belt, and rolling up his open window.
‘I was just saying —’
But the radio interrupted. ‘Surveillance three, go.’ They reached for the door handles. ‘Go. Go. Go.’
Mrs Engineer ended her call to her husband by turning the iPad’s camera towards the balcony, to capture a view of their daughter sitting on Harry’s lap, in darkness. ‘There they are, Gurjit. Wave, please.’ Then she closed the device before any more could be said. To save the electricity.
Arabella stood and went back inside. ‘Will you have a cup of tea in bed, Ammaji?’ She used the respectful form.
‘Thank you, yes.’
Harry volunteered to make it.
‘From the tea I brought, if you please, Harry.’ And she went down the hall, straightening her sari where it draped over her shoulder. Her gold slippers slapped on the parquet floor and the bedroom door clicked closed behind her.
Arabella grinned. ‘You know what that’s about, don’t you?’
Harry headed for the kitchen. ‘She told me practically as soon as she arrived. Any tea you could buy here would be stale.’
Arabella joined him. ‘No spiders yet, and no kangaroos, but she knows that it’s all forest and desert and sharks out there.’ She jerked her thumb in the general direction of Kings Cross and, beyond it, the Blue Mountains. ‘She just knows. Elizabeth Bay’s an illusion.’
Harry tended to agree with Maya, but said nothing. The kettle whistled and he poured some water into a small black teapot to warm it, as his mother always had. ‘Which one?’
Arabella
opened a cupboard over the sink and took out a black packet labelled Prestige Darjeeling Risheehat. She handed it to him. Harry made the tea and looked at his watch. Two hours to midnight.
‘Would she notice the difference if I used an Earl Grey tea bag?’
‘Listen, Harry,’ Arabella put her hands on her hips and pointed their unborn baby at him, ‘you’ve impregnated me, you haven’t married me, and you don’t even live with me. How much worse do you want to make it for my mother?’
The commander of Operation Sirius looked at his watch: 22.07, and it had all gone according to plan at Mosman, except that the Chinese man in handcuffs was angry, and shouting about search warrants in a New Zealand accent. The word ‘shut’ featured frequently, but the gate to the cyclone-wire-enclosed storage area stood open, and the police team — all nine of them — was standing around immediately outside it in a show of impatience, straining at the leash to begin the task of emptying out the filing cabinets, cardboard cartons, sports bags and battered luggage that filled the space. They looked at their boss.
‘Nobody’s going anywhere,’ he said, taking a hand-held tape recorder out of his pocket but not switching it on. He tapped its base firmly on the bonnet of the BMW to emphasise his next words. ‘If you insist on us getting a warrant before we turn this joint over, Mr Lee, we’ll do just that. We’ve got a JP on call at Manly, and you’re only going to irritate him. But that’s your legal right — to be an uncooperative prick, and interrupt his barbecue. Not that it’s going to make any difference — you know and we know this place is full of ice, and all you’re going to do is delay things for half an hour or so. The video team’ll be here shortly, and I’ll wait until then to caution you. Understand that?’
‘Fuck you.’
‘He understands, all right,’ said the senior man from surveillance team three.
There was the noise of the building’s lift doors opening, and three young people emerged, laughing. They stopped in their tracks and their eyes widened as they saw the small Asian man in handcuffs surrounded by nine big men, only two of whom were in uniform.
Harry Curry: Rats and Mice Page 23