by Peter Murphy
‘Certainly, Miss Worthington,’ I reply. ‘Coffee break, members of the jury. Fifteen minutes.’
The jurors give me a cheerful nod, but one or two cast rather dark glances in the direction of the dock on the way out of court. I’m finding it hard to resist the temptation to do the same.
Muriel Jones looks small and frail, not quite invisible but hard to see clearly in the witness box. But she has no difficulty in making herself heard. She takes the oath in a strong, clear voice.
‘Mrs Jones,’ Susan begins, having elicited her name and age, ‘do you know the defendant, Laura Catesby?’
Mrs Jones directs a sad look towards the dock. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Would you tell the jury how you first met Ms Catesby?’
‘It was at church.’
‘Is that St Mortimer’s church in Bermondsey?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘How long have you been a member of the congregation at St Mortimer’s?’
Mrs Jones smiles thinly. ‘Oh, goodness, now you’re asking, aren’t you?’
Susan returns the smile. ‘I don’t mean exactly. Roughly how long?’
‘Well, I’ve been going to St Mortimer’s all my life. My parents started taking me there when I was just a little girl; I went to Sunday school, I had my first communion, and I was confirmed there, and I’ve been going ever since.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Jones. Do you remember when you first met Mrs Catesby?’
At which point, for the first time, Mrs Jones seems hesitant. Susan knows that some patience will probably be required this morning. She gives her a moment, and doesn’t press her immediately.
She shakes her head. ‘I couldn’t tell you exactly.’
‘All right, just tell us as far as you remember. We don’t need an exact date.’ Still, the witness hesitates. Susan glances up at me. ‘Would it help you to see your witness statement?’
‘Yes. I think it would.’
Witnesses are always allowed to read their witness statements before giving evidence – after all, evidence is supposed to be a test of accuracy, not memory. But if a witness is having trouble remembering the court may permit her to refresh her memory even while giving evidence, and today judges almost always allow it if asked. Roderick could make a bit of a song and dance about it, but we’re dealing with a witness in her nineties, and he knows that I’m not about to keep her statement from her if she needs it. Wisely, he decides to keep his powder dry. In any case, an early hint of memory problems does his case no harm.
‘No objection, your Honour,’ he replies. Dawn quickly takes the statement from Susan and gives it to the witness. Mrs Jones takes her time reading through it.
‘She and her husband and her two girls used to come to church most Sundays,’ she replies eventually, ‘so I can’t give you an exact date, but it must have been at least four or five years ago. Her husband was one of the churchwardens for a while.’
‘And how did you come to talk to Mrs Catesby?
Another look down at the statement. ‘It was when the vicar gave a sermon one Sunday about helping one another.’ She pauses, and glances up at me. ‘That was the former vicar,’ she adds cautiously, ‘Mr Canning. He had to leave because of a… well… a scandal, so he’s not with us any more. We’ve got a lady vicar now, who’s very nice.’
The jury snigger, and I’m sure they’re curious about the details, as we all are when a minister is involved in a scandal. The Reverend Mr Canning had developed the habit of visiting a dominatrix called Madam Rosita and paying her fees from church funds, in respect of which he was convicted of theft in my court, resulting in a premature end to his clerical career. But that’s not on the agenda today.
‘It was Mr Canning who gave the sermon. And I remember I was standing outside church after the service, and Mrs Catesby was standing there with her husband and the girls, and she asked if she could give me a lift home. So I said yes, that would be very kind, and so they gave me a lift home; and from then on they started taking me to and from church almost every Sunday.’
‘Yes. Did Mrs Catesby offer to help you in any other ways?’
Mrs Jones nods. ‘Yes, after they’d been giving me a lift for some time, she asked if she could do some shopping for me. She told me she worked for a company that had an office not far from my block of flats, so she could run some errands for me during her lunch hour or after work. She said it was no problem.’
‘Did you accept that offer?’
‘Yes, I did. Well, I’m not as strong as I was, you know. I’ve got my shopping cart on wheels and Tesco is only a few minutes’ walk. I’ve been going there for years, but as you get older, you know…’ her voice trails away.
‘Yes, of course,’ Susan says. ‘Sadly, Mrs Jones, you’re a widow, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. My Henry’s been dead ten years and more now. I’ve got the two boys, of course, but they’re too far away.’
‘Your sons?’
‘Yes. Ronnie lives up in Yorkshire, near Scarborough, so he does come down to see me now and then. But Jamie’s in Durban – he works for a big international engineering company – so I’m lucky if I see him once a year. He’s got his own family out there in South Africa.’
‘So they can’t help on a regular basis?’
‘No.’
Susan pauses. ‘Mrs Jones, tell the jury how it worked, Mrs Catesby doing the shopping for you. How did you arrange the money and so on?’
She consults her witness statement again.
‘Well, I would make a list of what I wanted. I would give her the list, whenever she came, at lunchtime or after work, or whenever, and she would go and get it for me. She would bring me the receipt, and I would give her the money in cash. I still had to go out myself sometimes, of course. She wasn’t getting everything for me. I would still go to Tesco and the bank, and so on, at least once a week. But she was a big help. I must admit that. She was very helpful.’
‘Yes, I’m sure. Did there come a time when Mrs Catesby suggested a simpler method of dealing with the money?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was that? Explain to the jury what she suggested, please.’
Back to the witness statement for some seconds.
‘She said it would be easier if I just gave her my debit card when she went out shopping for me. I must admit, there were times when I didn’t have enough cash to pay her for the shopping, if I hadn’t got out to the bank, and then I would have to ask her to wait until the next time. It was only a couple of times, but of course I felt bad about it because she was doing me a favour, so at the time, what she suggested seemed like a good idea.’
‘And did you agree to that arrangement?’
‘Yes. I would give her the debit card. I’d told her the code, you know, the four numbers, so she could use it.’
‘Did she still bring the receipts back for you?’
‘Yes, always.’
‘Did you look at them at the time?’
Mrs Jones shakes her head sadly. ‘At first, I did, you know, when I was giving her the cash. But as time went by, when we’d been doing it all regularly for a while, I suppose I didn’t think I needed to. It all seemed to be going well, and I’d met her at church, you know, and I never thought…’ again, her voice trails away.
‘No, of course. Do you know what happened to the receipts she gave you?’
‘Not really. When the police asked about them I didn’t have them, so I expect she walked off with them.’
Roderick is rising to his feet. Susan holds up a hand.
‘But you don’t know? You didn’t actually see her taking receipts from your flat?’
‘I didn’t see her doing it.’
‘All right. Were you checking your bank accounts regularly?’
‘No,’ the witness replies quietly, embarrassed. ‘Not l
ike I should. I have, what d’you call it, that electronic banking. They don’t send me the bank statements any more, do they? I have to go on the computer, or use that little plastic thing. I don’t… I mean, the manager explained to me how to do it, but I’m not really comfortable with it, and when I try to do it, I seem to make mistakes and it doesn’t seem to work properly.’
Paperless, I think to myself, without Stella to help her.
‘I understand,’ Susan says, but I doubt she does. Susan is one of the new generation of computer-savvy judges-in-waiting, who’s been using such technology all her life and probably can’t imagine the world without it. ‘Did Mrs Catesby ever help you in other ways, in addition to doing some shopping for you?’
‘She would collect my cleaning once in a while, and to be fair to her, she was always ready to tidy up a bit for me when she came round, and she would sometimes make me a sandwich and some soup for lunch. As I say, she was very helpful.’
‘Let me turn to something different,’ Susan says. ‘As well as getting to know Mrs Catesby herself, did you come to know her family at all?’
‘I never really got to know her husband, Larry,’ Mrs Jones replies after some thought. ‘He never came round to the flat. But Laura sometimes brought the girls if they weren’t at school, so I did talk to them from time to time. Very nice girls they are, too. They were always very polite and they seemed very well brought up.’
‘Did Mrs Catesby ever mention money in connection specifically with the girls?’
‘Several times,’ Mrs Jones replies.
‘When was the first time, do you remember?’
She thinks for some time, turning over one or two pages of her statement. ‘It must be about three years ago now, at least. She came to do some shopping one lunchtime, and she seemed very upset, teary and so forth.’
‘Did she tell you why?’
‘Yes. She told me that the younger girl, Emma, had some serious medical condition.’
‘Did she tell you what that condition was?’
‘Not as far as I remember. I assumed it was probably cancer.’
‘Why did you assume that? Did she say anything like that?’
‘No, but that’s always the way, isn’t it? No one wants to say the word “cancer”, do they? I mean, if someone has a heart attack or a stroke, they will tell you. But it’s like bad luck if you actually say “cancer”. So they just say that someone’s seriously ill. I suppose I just assumed it.’
‘And how did the subject of money come up?’
She thinks for some time. ‘As far as I remember, Laura said they couldn’t get Emma in for surgery on the NHS because of the waiting times. They thought it was dangerous to delay it, so they wanted to go private, but they didn’t have the money to hand.’
‘But, as I understand it,’ Susan interjects, ‘both Mr and Mrs Catesby had well-paying jobs, didn’t they?’
‘As far as I knew, yes.’
‘So, why was Mrs Catesby talking to you about money?’
‘It was something to do with their investments. If she told me, I can’t remember the details. But it was something to do with, they’d made some expensive investments and they had to rebuild their savings. She said it would only be a couple of months because they were due to get dividends from their investments, but they were a bit strapped for cash until then, and could I loan them some money to tide them over and make sure that Emma could have her operation?’
‘And did you?’
‘Yes, I loaned her a thousand pounds, which is what she said she needed.’
‘How did you arrange to make that money available to her?’
‘I arranged with the bank to take it out of my savings account, and I gave Laura an authorisation to collect it from the bank.’
‘Has Mrs Catesby ever repaid that loan?’
A look towards the dock. ‘No. She has not.’ Following her eyes, I note that Laura Catesby is still looking faintly bored.
‘Is there any question in your mind that it was a loan? Might it have been that you were making a gift of that thousand pounds to Mrs Catesby?’
‘What, a thousand pounds? No. It was a loan. I’m not made of money.’
‘Did Mrs Catesby ever follow up with you, tell you whether Emma had the surgery, how it went, and so on?’
‘She did thank me, and she told me it had been a success, and Emma was fine. But the odd thing was, I didn’t see Emma at church for a long time, and she never thanked me personally, which I thought was very strange, because she was always such a nice, polite girl.’
‘Before you made that loan to Mrs Catesby, how much money did you have in your savings account?’
‘It was something like twenty thousand pounds that my Henry had left me. That was what I had – in addition to my pension, of course. And I do own my flat that I still live in, where I used to live with Henry before he died. But I didn’t have any other money.’
‘Was that the only occasion when Mrs Catesby raised the subject of money in connection with her daughters?’
‘No.’ She’s turning over pages in her statement again.
‘What other occasions were there?’
‘There were times when she told me she couldn’t afford to pay their school fees.’
‘Did she tell you where they were at school?’
‘She said it was a Christian school for girls, St Somebody’s in Surrey…’
‘St Cecilia’s?’ Susan asks.
‘Something like that.’ She looks down at her statement. ‘Yes: St Cecilia’s, in Surrey. She said it was quite an expensive school, but she and Larry were keen on it because they didn’t want the girls going to the comprehensive, because there was a drug problem and the discipline wasn’t what it should be. She was afraid they would be exposed to bad influences: that’s what she said.’
‘Over what period of time was she complaining about not being able to afford the fees?’
‘Over the last two, two and a half years or thereabouts.’
‘And again, did Mrs Catesby explain why she and her husband couldn’t afford the fees?’
‘It was due to their investments, and the dividends hadn’t been as much as they’d hoped. And then Laura’s mother had been very ill, she said, and she’d had to take care of her. So they still didn’t have the money. But she was still insisting that it was just a temporary loan, and she would be able to repay me before long.’ She looks very sad. ‘But she didn’t.’
‘How much did you loan to Mrs Catesby for school fees?’
‘Five hundred each time. She asked me three times.’
‘So, fifteen hundred pounds in total?’
‘Yes.’
‘Plus one thousand for the surgery?’
‘Yes.’
‘That makes two thousand five hundred pounds, doesn’t it? And after looking at your bank accounts and discussing them with your son and with DC Benson, are you now aware that another eight thousand or so…’
‘I’m sorry, your Honour,’ Roderick intervenes, rising ponderously to his feet, as is his way. His rather-too-light single-breasted jacket has been too tight for him for some time now, but as the acknowledged doyen of the Bermondsey Bar, he is allowed some leeway. ‘I must object to that. This witness has no personal knowledge of that amount, or indeed of what happened to it.’
Roderick is right, technically. I’m not sure there’s much point in his objection in the long run. Susan shouldn’t have any trouble proving it through her police witness and the son, Ronald; but if Roderick really insists, that’s what she’ll have to do. But I don’t think that’s Roderick’s real agenda. I’m pretty sure he’s more interested in taking another early pot shot at Mrs Jones’s memory and her credibility as a witness about what happened to her money. Either way, he’s made a good point. I glance at Susan and she nods.
‘I’
ll deal with that later in another way,’ she replies. ‘So far, then, Mrs Jones, we have a total of two thousand five hundred pounds, is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any of it repaid?’
‘Not a penny.’
Susan pauses for some time. ‘Mrs Jones, the jury may want to know why you parted with so much money to someone you didn’t know all that well, why you trusted Mrs Catesby enough to loan her so much money? What do you say about that?’
I know how Muriel Jones is going to answer that before she opens her mouth, and it’s what’s made me into such an Antonio today.
‘I feel so stupid,’ she replies quietly. ‘I feel like a complete fool. I can imagine what Henry would have to say about it all.’ She bows her head for some seconds before continuing. ‘All I can say is that I met the family in my church, they seemed very respectable, they both had good jobs, they had two well brought up children. They were very nice to me, or so I thought, and I fell for it, hook, line and sinker. I’m sure they’ve been laughing at me, thinking I’m a real mug. It just breaks my heart.’
‘I think there came a time,’ Susan continues after a suitable pause, ‘when you contacted your son Ronald and told him that you were worried about Mrs Catesby. How did that come about?’
‘It was after I’d loaned her so much money, and she hadn’t repaid a penny,’ Mrs Jones replies. ‘I just started to get this feeling that something was wrong. It was always, she needed more time, not long, just a few weeks, and everything would be all right. But it never was. So I went to my vicar and I told her in confidence what was going on, and she advised me to ask someone I knew I could trust to look into it. So I asked Ronnie to come down and tell me what he thought. He has a good head on his shoulders. I just needed to know what was going on.’
‘And did Ronnie come down to London to see you?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He made an appointment to see my bank manager, and got copies of my bank statements going back a few years, my savings account and my ordinary account, and we sat down together and went through them, and he told me…’