by M. R. Hall
Jenny turned to more practical matters. ‘Did you have any personal involvement in arranging the delivery of the Irish Mist?’
‘I dealt with some of the emails, that’s all. The buyer was a businessman from Jersey. He sent a surveyor over before Christmas and I gave him all the paperwork. Gerry said he’d be gone three days. He’d sail down there and catch the plane back via London.’
‘And he sailed alone?’
‘He always did, unless it was a big boat, you know.’ Her voice wavered. ‘He was a fine sailor, right enough. He always got the boat there perfect – in all weathers.’
Jenny attempted to probe further into what Maria Canavan knew of Brogan’s past, but learned nothing new. It seemed he had preferred to say little, rather than construct a tissue of lies as a fantasist might have done. He had been a quiet, hard-working man, the young woman said, studying for his instructor’s licence in the evenings. They had even started talking about their future together. Brogan had had a yearning to build his own house further down the coast.
‘Miss Canavan – did Mr Brogan contact you after he had set sail in the Irish Mist?’
‘No. I heard he called the office – about the rudder – but I wasn’t there at the time.’
‘And you didn’t attempt to contact him?’
She shook her head. ‘He wasn’t the sort of man you’d think to bother that way. A free spirit. Yes, that’s what he was.’ She smiled, pushing her hair away from tear-stained cheeks. ‘You know, it doesn’t bother me that he did those things. He never said an unkind word to me. Never.’
Jenny paused, then nodded to Alison, who from beneath her desk produced an evidence bag containing the holster Brogan had been wearing. As far as she was aware, only she, Dr Kerr and Alison knew of its existence till now.
Alison handed the bag to the witness. The lawyers waited expectantly for an explanation.
Jenny said, ‘You’re looking at a Sidewinder shoulder holster. It’s designed to carry a handgun – in the case of this model, a 9mm Ruger pistol – and to be concealed beneath clothing. Mr Brogan was wearing it under his shirt when he died.’
Maria Canavan began to shake her head.
‘I saw it on his body, Miss Canavan, as did the pathologist—’
It was Crowthorne who hauled himself upright to object. ‘Ma’am, it’s quite extraordinary that such a piece of evidence should not have been disclosed along with the post-mortem report. The Coroner’s Rules clearly state—’
‘That I have discretion. Which I exercised,’ Jenny snapped. ‘Sometimes there’s a value in surprise. As a criminal lawyer, you should understand that.’
‘Was there a gun? Have any ballistics tests been carried out? It’s almost impossible to conceive of evidence that it would be more inappropriate to withhold.’
‘I have no evidence of a gun, Mr Crowthorne, and tests on Mr Brogan’s hands show no signs that he had discharged a weapon, but he had been in the water for some hours. That’s all there is to know.’
Crowthorne’s face reddened with outrage. ‘Were the police told?’
‘The police have shown little interest in communicating with me, and I have returned the favour,’ Jenny said. ‘Can we please continue?’
Crowthorne thumped into his chair and turned to the pair of police solicitors behind him who were already in a tight huddle and reaching for their phones. Jenny switched her attention back to the witness. ‘Did you ever see this holster, Miss Canavan?’
‘No.’
‘A gun?’
‘Never.’
‘Do you have any idea why Mr Brogan would have been carrying one?’
Maria Canavan stared back blankly, the shock in her face as real as Jenny had ever seen in a witness. ‘No.’
‘Thank you, Miss Canavan. Wait there.’
Hartley and Crowthorne were locked in whispered conversation with their teams and declined Jenny’s invitation to cross-examine. Bannerman, who had still to utter a word, merely shook his head and wrote careful notes in his legal pad. Rachel Hemmings, representing Mr and Mrs Patterson, was the only lawyer to rise to her feet.
Jenny could tell at once that she had learned her trade in the family courts. An interested smile instinctively appeared as she turned to Maria Canavan. She addressed her in a relaxed, conversational style.
‘Tell me, Miss Canavan, was Mr Brogan a trustworthy man?’
‘Yes. Yes, he was.’
‘But he didn’t tell you the truth about himself.’
‘Maybe he was afraid I’d judge him.’ A note of defiance entered her voice. ‘I wouldn’t have.’
Hemmings nodded, as if she approved of the answer. ‘You say you met in the restaurant where you were working—?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Was it he who approached you?’
She hesitated. ‘It might have been.’
‘Well, was it or wasn’t it?’
‘I think he might have said hello to me first.’
‘And can you remember – did he seem to know that you worked for Hennessy’s?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t sound altogether sure.’
‘I don’t remember.’
Hemmings paused. Maria Canavan was rattled and she wanted the jury to witness the fact.
‘I appreciate this has all come as something of a shock, but thinking back, do you think that it’s possible Mr Brogan used you as a way of getting an introduction to Hennessy’s?’
The young woman hesitated again.
‘Let’s try and put the pieces together, shall we?’ Hemmings said. ‘Mr Brogan committed various crimes in his teens and twenties and served several years in prison. Thereafter the police suspect him of having been involved with smuggling Republican weapons out of the country. He left Ireland for the Caribbean, where he remained for a number of years before returning to get a job delivering yachts. When he died, he was more than a hundred miles off course and in all probability armed with a gun.’ She looked up from her notes to the witness. ‘Do you have any idea what he was doing so far up the Bristol Channel?’
Maria Canavan shook her head miserably. ‘No.’
Eamon Hennessy was equally puzzled. The fifty-year-old owner of a family business that had been passed on through four generations, he was the closest thing the Irish maritime world had to aristocracy. His secretary, Miss Canavan, had made the introduction, he recalled, but he had been thorough in pursuing Brogan’s references. Brogan’s former employer was a man named Jonathan Budowski, a director of a well-known Wall Street firm of stockbrokers. From the inside pocket of his tweed jacket, Hennessy produced a copy of the emailed reference Budowski had provided, dated 12 September the previous year. It confirmed that Brogan had skippered his yacht for nearly six and half years without incident. He described him as entirely trustworthy and an accomplished seaman. As Hennessy spoke, Jenny saw that Mrs Patterson was noting down his every word.
During his brief period of employment, Hennessy said, Brogan had carried out fifteen deliveries and collections, all single-handed, and all without incident. He couldn’t have performed better. On the morning the Irish Mist went down, he had left a message on the office phone to say that he had a problem with a jamming rudder and that he planned to put in to Swansea for repairs. But by the time he had made the call, he must already have been at least thirty-five miles past the port of Swansea and most of the way to Bristol. Asked why Brogan wasn’t wearing a lifejacket, Hennessy answered that he should have been. He had been issued with a Baltic offshore model designed both to inflate and illuminate on contact with water.
‘Did you have any knowledge of Mr Brogan’s criminal past?’ Rachel Hemmings demanded, when Jenny had finished with the witness.
‘I did not.’
‘Do you know why he might have been carrying a gun?’
‘No.’
‘Have you ever been approached by criminals or terrorists seeking to use your vessels for their activities?’
‘Do you have any political affiliations yourself, Mr Hennessy?’
‘I do not. I am a Protestant, my wife is a Catholic. My employees come from both traditions.’
Rachel Hemmings persisted with a series of questions designed to encourage Hennessy to admit to some degree of suspicion about Brogan, but according to his employer Brogan had distinguished himself only by being exceptionally competent at his job.
With each failed attempt to secure a revelation, Mrs Patterson grew more frustrated. She tugged impatiently at Nick Galbraith’s sleeve and issued whispered instructions which he dutifully wrote down and passed to Rachel Hemmings. When, reluctantly acting on one of these notes, Hemmings put it to Hennessy that his yacht business was being used as a front for terrorists, Jenny stepped in to draw a halt.
‘There are limits, Miss Hemmings, and you’ve reached them. You’ve no evidence for any of these assertions, have you?’
‘No, ma’am,’ Hemmings replied, relieved to have an excuse to resist repeating her client’s outlandish allegations.
‘Then we’ll end it there. Thank you, Mr Hennessy.’
Mrs Patterson glared at him as he stepped away from the witness chair.
Jenny made a note on her legal pad that Hennessy had struck her as a rare commodity: a man with nothing to hide.
Jenny gave Dr Kerr the dubious privilege of being next in the witness chair. It was not a duty he relished. The fearlessness with which he tackled his work in the mortuary abandoned him when confronted with a row of critical lawyers. Reading nervously from the report he had drafted following his post-mortem, he told the jury that Brogan would have succumbed to hypothermia within twenty minutes of entering the chilled waters of the Severn estuary. His body had been washed up on the beach at Aust, a few yards to the east of the Severn Bridge, close to that of ten-year-old Amy Patterson, a victim of the plane crash. The absence of water in his lungs suggested that he had kept his head above water throughout his ordeal, and might in fact have died after reaching dry land. With his body temperature already severely reduced, he could have remained conscious until getting clear of the water, only to die within minutes. The presence of scratches on his arms and neck suggested that he might have had contact with Amy in the water. Beyond that, it was impossible to say what had happened to him between entering the water and his eventual death. Had he been wearing a lifejacket, it was possible that he might have been rescued while still alive, or even have swum to the shore, but without one the mere effort of staying afloat would have quickly drained his energy.
It was an unspoken rule of practice that a coroner would occasionally ask questions with the purpose of painting the deceased in a positive light, especially where there was any hint of suspicion or blame. Jenny asked if it was possible that Brogan might have died attempting to rescue Amy Patterson. Dr Kerr agreed that it certainly couldn’t be ruled out.
Doggedly representing the interests of Ransome Airways, Giles Hartley QC followed on with several questions, seeking to place the blame for Brogan’s death squarely on the sailor himself for failing to wear a lifejacket.
‘You’re surely not seeking to deny that your client’s aircraft hit Mr Brogan’s yacht?’ Jenny interjected.
‘It was struck by lightning, ma’am – an unforeseeable act of God,’ he asserted. ‘Mr Brogan’s negligence was entirely his own.’
‘Thank you, Mr Hartley. You have made your point.’ She looked over the heads of the lawyers to the dead man’s girlfriend. ‘I do apologize for counsel’s insensitivity, Miss Canavan.’
‘For the avoidance of doubt, ma’am,’ Hartley said in his most courtly voice, ‘I make no apology.’ He gave a nod of mock deference and sat down.
Rachel Hemmings was interested in only one thing: the whereabouts of Brogan’s gun.
‘Could the weapon have been removed before you took custody of the body, Dr Kerr?’ she asked.
Jenny willed him to stop and think before answering. He didn’t.
‘It’s possible.’
‘The police constable who was first on the scene gave a statement,’ Jenny interrupted. ‘You have seen it. No weapon was found.’
Undeterred, Hemmings pressed on. ‘There were many opportunities for the body to be searched, weren’t there? It didn’t arrive at your mortuary until nearly three o’clock in the afternoon.’
‘I don’t consider it very likely,’ Dr Kerr said, quickly backtracking.
‘Did you test the hands for evidence of explosive discharge?’
‘I did. None was found, but given the time spent in the water it’s impossible to say whether the results are definitive.’
‘So Mr Brogan may have fired a gun?’
‘He may or may not. I can’t say.’
Mrs Patterson had produced her notebook computer and was typing furiously. She brought something up on the screen which she showed to Galbraith, who in turn passed it forward to Rachel Hemmings.
‘Ma’am, my client has found what she believes to be a picture of a lifejacket matching that which was issued to Mr Brogan. Can Mr Hennessy please be asked to confirm its accuracy?’
‘Certainly.’
The computer was passed back to Hennessy, who confirmed that the picture was indeed a Baltic offshore lifejacket of the kind issued to Brogan. A superior model, it was secured tightly to the body with the aid of a crotch strap and was designed to keep the wearer’s head clear of the water.
Hemmings said, ‘Dr Kerr, please describe the layers of clothing Mr Brogan was wearing.’
‘He had on a T-shirt and underpants, bib-style waterproof trousers, a thick plaid shirt and boots.’
‘You missed something out. Where was the holster?’
‘Over his T-shirt.’
‘So to fetch out a gun he would have had to reach through his shirt and down through the bib of his trousers?’
‘Correct.’
‘Wearing a properly secured lifejacket, that would have been virtually impossible, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes, I suppose it would.’
Mrs Patterson came as close to a smile as her grief would allow. Her husband crossed his hands across his stomach and lowered his eyes to the floor. Whatever theory his wife was formulating, he showed no sign of sharing her enthusiasm for it.
Dick Corton, the investigator from the Marine Accident Investigation Branch, was as inscrutable while giving evidence as he had been on the quayside at Avonmouth, offering not a word more than was strictly required of him. He told the court that the Irish Mist had been struck on the port side of the hull, which, given that the plane had been approaching from the west, indicated that the yacht had been heading upstream towards Bristol at the time. The impact had smashed the port section of the deck and the timber below, fatally holing the hull. It would have sunk in seconds. Weather reports indicated that visibility was as low as three hundred yards. If, as had been suggested, the aircraft was travelling in the region of 180 knots, that would have given the skipper all of three seconds between seeing the plane and the collision. There was no time to take evasive action. The wreck of the yacht was found in fifty feet of water some three hundred yards upstream from the remains of the aircraft.
Jenny next went through the half-dozen photographs Corton had produced, showing what was left of the Irish Mist on the quayside. ‘Picture number four, Mr Corton – please tell us what that shows.’
‘It’s the damaged section of hull near the bow of the boat – the front, if you prefer – just about where the aircraft, assuming that’s what it was, struck.’
‘I think we can safely assume it was the aircraft,’ Jenny said. ‘What I’d like you to comment on is what appears to be evidence of scorching – the insulating foam between the inner and outer hull appears burnt.’
‘I would agree with that.’
‘Caused by what, in your opinion?’
‘The aircraft’s four engines are sited beneath the wings, so I’m prepared to speculate that it was one o
f those which made impact.’
‘What sort of temperatures are required to scorch insulating foam and timber?’
‘The ignition point of timber is around 250 degrees centigrade.’
‘You would agree, then, that whatever hit it was very hot.’
‘That would be a safe assumption.’
Jenny glanced across at Rufus Bannerman QC, counsel for Sir James Kendall, and saw him poised, ready to intervene should her questions start to intrude on the condition of the aircraft. Tempted as she was, she resisted, and moved on.
‘In your inspection of the vessel, Mr Corton, did you examine the rudder mechanism?’
‘I did.’
‘And did you find anything to be wrong with it?’
‘No, ma’am. The rudder was undamaged and the steering couplings were in good order.’
Mrs Patterson was busy whispering to her lawyers again. Her husband looked weary and embarrassed.
‘Picture number six, Mr Corton – what does that show?’
‘It’s a section of the deck by the stern, ma’am. The deck boards have been ripped out, I assume by the naval team that salvaged the vessel.’
‘And why might they have done that?’
‘It would be perfectly routine to check the voids,’ Corton said.
‘For what, precisely?’
‘Anything. It was the only vessel in the area. You would want to examine it closely.’
Jenny turned to the jury and explained as neutrally as she could that while Sir James Kendall, the coroner charged with investigating the deaths in the aircraft, had reserved all members of the salvage crew as witnesses to his inquiry, he had written to confirm that nothing of relevance to her inquest had been found in or around the wreck of the yacht.
Experienced as she was in dealing with the demands of an irrational client, Rachel Hemmings nonetheless coloured with embarrassment as she commenced her cross-examination.