A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  “Mr. Feinberg is very busy—”

  “Tell him it’s James Knight.”

  “I’m afraid he’s in a meeting at the moment—”

  “Interrupt the meeting and tell him it’s James Knight, with a case for him.”

  He would not yet have read the evening papers, but his contacts in the police were too good for him not to have known about Daisy’s arrest—probably before she did. I knew he would find the publicity surrounding the case irresistible. Feinberg came on the line in seconds. He spoke in a rapid, impatient staccato.

  “It’s about your girlfriend. Murder charge. You wish to instruct me. I accept. When does Holmes want to question her?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “When?”

  “Sometime in the afternoon.”

  “When exactly?”

  Already Feinberg was furious.

  “Anytime we like to stroll in. Holmes is going to be in Hampstead police station all day.”

  “He said that?”

  “Yes.”

  A short pause. “Weirdest thing I ever heard. Is this a murder trial or an exhibition match at Lords?”

  “He’s being gentlemanly. I don’t know why.”

  “Don’t like it. Bring her to my office tomorrow morning at eight-thirty. I have a meeting at nine-thirty, but I’m free in the afternoon. We’ll do the cop-shop bit then.”

  He put the phone down without waiting for confirmation. The next morning at eight-thirty exactly (Feinberg had been known to refuse to see people who were ten minutes late), I took Daisy to see him. I was glad that she found the spirit to wear her Sunday-morning hat and her best dress, in case the press surprised us again.

  Although he maintained a branch near the Bailey, Feinberg’s main office was in the West End, a piece of slick, tinted-glass modernity carved out of the ground floor of one of Mayfair’s Georgian structures. A caricature receptionist (platinum blond, slim, tight black sweater, long legs in fishnet stockings) showed us into his inner sanctum, where his real secretary sat outside his door like a guard dog. She eschewed glamour to the same extent that her colleague cultivated it: old-fashioned spectacles, a shapeless but expensive suit, a shrewd appraising glance. I had heard that she adored Feinberg with animal loyalty and shrugged at his transient affairs with his front-window receptionists. Without saying a word to either of us, she clicked an intercom switch.

  “Mr. Knight is here.”

  “Mrs. Thirst and Mr. Knight are here,” I said.

  Daisy put a hand on my arm. “It’s all right—I got used to being invisible a long time ago.”

  The secretary showed us in without apologizing. Feinberg stood up from behind a vast desk and walked around to meet us. He was short, not even five feet five, wore black-framed spectacles, and had a shock of curly gray hair. His head was large for his body, and his face and thick lips were a nest of insect twitches that stopped only when he talked, or when he was concentrating. As with many gifted people, when he concentrated he seemed to dwell in a different state of consciousness, from which he emerged angrily into the present. I could sense his attraction to Daisy, which might be useful.

  “I made inquiries,” he said the moment we sat down. “We’ll do the background later. This is what you’ll have to explain. Convincingly. And in detail.”

  He took a photograph out of his drawer and flung it in front of Daisy. It was the one George Holmes had shown me that Sunday. Daisy in earmuffs at a firing range.

  The blood drained from her cheeks. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

  “That’s exactly the reaction that will cost you ten years in Holloway,” Feinberg snapped.

  “Who took it? Where did they get it?” Daisy was shaking.

  Feinberg shrugged. “Who knows? Some Special Branch caper, no doubt.” He looked at me. “Naive, isn’t she?” He slouched back in his chair, stared at Daisy. “This is England, dear. They don’t necessarily stop you breaking the law, but they always know. And they use it against you when it suits them.”

  Daisy clawed slowly at her face. “Special Branch? I thought they caught terrorists.”

  He leered, leaned forward to stab at the photograph. “And what d’you think you look like to them?” He drummed his fingers on his desk. “That’s all I have to say this morning. Except to tell you about my fee structure. Take that picture. Study it. Live with it. Learn to love it. The way you react to it in the box is what this case is going to be about. We’ll sort out the story later.”

  He spent the next few minutes telling us about his fees, when he wanted them paid, and how lazy he would become if they were not. I told him that I wanted Roland Denson as junior counsel.

  “So long as I get to choose the leader,” he said.

  I did not need to guess who he wanted. There was only one Queen’s Counsel at the English bar with enough ferocity to please Feinberg.

  “You want Sir Simon Carlford?”

  “I get Simon Carlford.” His thick lips broke into an ugly smile. “When I want him.”

  —

  “It’s time we talked,” Daisy said in a taxi on the way home.

  Later that day we went together to my study and I unwrapped a new floppy disk that I put into my personal computer. We looked at each other grimly.

  “In law it’s the details that count,” I said.

  34

  To prepare a case properly for trial is a work of art. This is doubly so when the preparation involves the concealment of a fundamental lie. And yet, if you pause to think about it, it must be so. Any human calling higher than bricklaying is about the manipulation of human perception, and if the perception you set out to manipulate is not naive, but canny and expert (that of a judge or prosecutor, say), then the sleight-of-hand must not falter, the magic must be seamless, the will that underlies the act so strong that even the impresario believes, for the instant that counts, that the pantomime horse can win the derby. All of which necessitates an intellectual and emotional discipline to which a lifetime of drugs and slogans had left Daisy unaccustomed.

  “We’re going to make a man of you,” Feinberg told her with a leer.

  In a way, he did. She made the mistake, one day, of saying that doing time in Holloway would be preferable to another day with Feinberg and me, which gave Feinberg the excuse he needed. He arranged a visit to the prison, which left her pale and very frightened. Few people have any idea how low in the mental slum it is possible to sink. When Daisy came back, her mouth was set. Feinberg had finally whipped her awake.

  “I’m not going to gaol, James,” she said. “Believe me.”

  After that she learned her lines so well that we ran up against a new problem.

  “She’s too perfect,” Feinberg said. “There isn’t a convincing hesitation left in her.”

  “Fuck you,” Daisy said.

  Feinberg looked at her curiously. “Listen, dear, there’s one question I’ve never asked and I’m not going to. I couldn’t give a carrot if you did him in or not. What bothers me is that you don’t have an alibi. George Holmes doesn’t like losing—if all you can say is that you were at home all night playing with yourself, you’re going to go down. There’s only one sure way of winning any criminal trial, and that’s to lie so well they couldn’t convict you even if they wanted to. Right?”

  The last word was directed at me. I had spent most of my career avoiding becoming the kind of lawyer Feinberg was. Even now, with Daisy’s freedom at stake, I found it difficult. I looked away without replying, which enraged Feinberg.

  “I want to talk to you,” he said. “You can go,” he told Daisy.

  We sat for a moment in his office, looking at each other across his desk. He seemed to be even more angry than usual. The twitches in his face were at war with each other, and his thick lips were chewed almost to the point of bleeding. Finally he held up two fingers.

  “Two surprises. Two very strange, very interesting surprises. The police statements arrived yesterday. Not exactly crammed with evidence, but e
nough, just enough, to put her away for the last years of her youth. To ensure she’ll be senile in mind if not in body by the time she comes out.”

  “So what’s the first surprise?”

  “This. This pathetic excuse for an eyewitness account.”

  He took a single sheet of paper off the top of a stack of documents on his desk. The stack all bore the insignia of the Metropolitan Police. The sheet of paper he gave me was a witness statement in standard form. At the top it bore the name of the witness, the name of the police officer who had taken the statement, the time and date, place and address, age and occupation of the witness. At the bottom of the paper there was a place for the witness to sign, proof that nothing had been added after the statement was taken. Normally the sheets in a witness statement are carefully numbered, but in this instance there was only one sheet.

  It was, as Feinberg said, a pathetic excuse for an eyewitness account. A ten-year-old boy awakened by his parents’ drunken row had slipped out of his house at about 3:00 A.M.. As he turned a corner, he saw, some three hundred yards away, the silhouette of two people cast by a streetlamp. One seemed to be pleading with the other, who walked in front. The one who was pleading knelt down; the other turned and aimed a gun at him. There was a shot, and the kneeling figure collapsed. The other walked to a car parked about one hundred yards away, which is to say four hundred yards from the boy, and drove off in the opposite direction. To the crucial questions “Was the assailant tall or short, a man or a woman?” the boy could give no answer. He was mildly shortsighted and in that light saw no more than silhouettes—a shadow play against a desolate London street. It was not even possible, at that distance, to have any sense of the height or weight of the two people. They could have been dwarfs or giants. True, the boy had assumed, thanks to the kind of social programming Daisy deplored, that the assailant was a man. Under carefully biased questioning, the boy agreed that this was an assumption based on prejudice rather than perception. I put the statement down. Somehow I knew that the boy would not be called as a witness.

  “Very interesting, don’t you think?”

  I shrugged. “A useless statement; it proves nothing.”

  Feinberg stared at me. I looked away.

  “What was the other surprise? You said there were two.”

  “They’ve retained Nigel Monkson.”

  I examined Feinberg’s face to see if he was engaging in some sadistic joke.

  “Monkson?”

  His lips broke into a grin. “I phoned his clerk this morning. It’s kosher.”

  I smiled back. Nigel Monkson, Q.C., was the buffoon of the English bar, a harmless fool more concerned with male fashion than with legal practice. His connection with backwoods aristocracy and a conservative Lord Chancellor had enabled him, somewhat late in life, to become Queen’s Counsel, but he was not taken seriously by solicitors or judges. Apparently incapable of grasping legal complexities, he had been known to have juries in stitches with his unaffected naïveté. “My Lord, if I’ve understood him aright, my learned friend is accusing my client of telling fibs,” was one of his famously indignant lines. “Oh, I seem to have got that wrong,” was another. To make matters worse, when excited he pronounced the letter r as if it were a w, a comic effect much appreciated by English juries.

  “So maybe you would like to tell me exactly what George Holmes is up to,” Feinberg said, his eyebrows raised and the insects in his face twitching again.

  “I really don’t know, Cyril,” I said. He hated being called Cyril.

  35

  For reasons which he kept to himself, although I was able to guess at them, George Holmes dragged his feet so much that Daisy was seven months pregnant by the first day of her trial.

  The judge treated her with the tenderness of an old man who had spent his life observing some chivalric code, and Nigel Monkson could be heard complaining in the robing room that in his very first murder prosecution the defendant was “pwegnant.”

  No one doubted that the pregnancy was calculated, or that it was a calculation of dramatic cunning, or that George Holmes had badly slipped up on his timing. Number One Court at the Old Bailey, reserved for murders and rapes, is large, intimidating, and austere. Everyone in the business saw the theatrical possibilities of Daisy on the elevated island that is the witness stand—lonely, female, and fecund, a figure of primal innocence in the shadow of all that cruel used oak, of men in gray wigs and black gowns and behind them the infinitely black prospect of prison. It was, people said without thinking, one of Feinberg’s most brilliant ploys.

  George sat behind the solicitor from the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions who was instructing Monkson and his junior for the prosecution. I sat behind Feinberg and stared across at George. Daisy stood in the iron cage reserved for defendants. Every morning I made a point of irritating George by taking out a sheaf of papers, nodding at him, and returning them, carefully folded in three, back in my jacket pocket. I made sure that Daisy kept the disk from which they were printed.

  Nigel Monkson surprised all of us by showing an exemplary grasp of the law and the facts. Neither was difficult, but the effort showed on his face. The many emblems of his vanity (a gold bracelet on his left wrist, a fob watch, a large crimson silk handkerchief to wipe his brow, a crystal wineglass for his drinking water) seemed somehow forsaken in the grim intellectual struggle he was bringing to his first murder trial. Sir Simon Carlford, Daisy’s ruthless Q.C., decided on a policy of seductive sweetness. He called Monkson “Nigel dear” and used phrases like “we silks.” Monkson beamed in gratitude. I overheard him tell Carlford that “one does not weally become a man at the bar until one has pwosecuted a murder at the Bailey,” a confidence Carlford rewarded with a discreet grasp of Monkson’s forearm.

  After the usual preliminaries, the jury were sworn in. The defense has the right to object without cause to a total of two jurors. Roland Denson, Carlford, and I had spent some time discussing whether or not we would make objections. It is generally known that middle-aged housewives are the most lenient jurors, but then, the average defendant tends to be young and male. After much debate, we decided the juror we did not want was the young misogynist—men of the intense angry type who have been hurt or enraged by feminists. The jury we ended with comprised seven women and five men. This pleased Carlford, who thought he would be able to dress up his natural aggression and make it look like a passionate defense of womanhood.

  Monkson opened with a speech that was overlong and emotional. He talked about cold blood and malice aforethought and could not say the word “murder” without investing it with Dickensian melodrama. The jury was not to know that Monkson looked upon his first murder trial the way some men look upon a new car—as a source of pride to be polished and petted now and then. Every time he said “murder,” Daisy shuddered.

  There was the usual progression of forensic experts establishing the approximate time, cause, and place of death. Thirst had died between 3:00 and 5:00 A.M.. in a London street when a small-caliber bullet fired at close range penetrated the frontal lobe of his brain. The bullet came out at the lower back of his head, about a centimeter above the top of the spinal column, tearing away an irregular piece of flesh roughly the size of a marble. The hole drilled in his forehead was as small and neat as the red marriage spot Indian women wear. The assailant, therefore, had been standing above him. Two unsavory-looking business associates—with perfect alibis—were called to tell the court when they last saw him alive. Then Nigel Monkson called the only witness in the trial who did not seem to be a timeless player in the eternal drama of wife-husband-lover.

  She was an inch, or maybe two, under six feet and walked with head lowered, as if about to charge. She wore dungarees in court, which had the effect of concealing what must have been a full figure. In another personality her body might still have been sexy—a suggestion, I felt, which one was likely to pay for with one’s life. She spoke in short, staccato sentences, each of which carried a political
message. Her hair was cut short at the back and sides, and her forehead clenched whenever she talked to men.

  It was clear that she had access to an unlimited reservoir of loathing and had mistaken Nigel Monkson for a self-appointed persecutor of womanhood. In a series of leading questions to which Carlford made no objection, Monkson established that she owned a small area of farming land in Suffolk she had turned into a retreat at which the threatened, the beaten, the paranoid of her sex (whom she referred to as wimmin) could seek refuge and develop self-defense skills. Having herself reached killer level in every martial art from karate to Thai kick-boxing, she proudly told the court of her many successful rescues of damsels in distress from male bullies. The judge said something about a Don Quixotrix: Carlford laughed loudly and Monkson beamed, unsure at that stage whose side the judge was on. Now Monkson came to what he invariably called “the gravamen” of the evidence.

  “And it is right, is it not, that in addition to unarmed combat you teach other martial skills?”

  “The female human body tends to be smaller and weaker than the male body. I always encourage the wimmin to develop physical strengths and skills in unarmed combat.”

  “But some of the wimmin, as you put it—”

  “My friend is cross-examining his own witness,” Carlford put in. He had no real objection. Having lulled Monkson into a false feeling of comradeship, he now proceeded to betray him.

  Monkson gave him a hurt glance. “Sorry. In addition to unarmed combat—”

  “I allow some of the more harassed wimmin to use small arms.”

  “Including firearms?”

  “Leading question,” Carlford said.

  Monkson reddened. He seemed bewildered. Carlford, after all, had allowed a whole succession of similar leading questions without objection, as is the custom with noncontentious evidence.

  “M’Lord, I knew not that this part of the evidence was contentious,” Monkson said.

  “I didn’t say it was contentious,” Carlford said, standing as he spoke. “I simply said it was a leading question. There’s no entitlement to ask leading questions in examination-in-chief, as my friend ought to know. I’ve shown exemplary patience up to now, but I cannot be expected to tolerate such conduct indefinitely. However, if he undertakes not to do it again, I’ll withdraw the objection.”