Trial of Passion

by William Deverell

  Augustina studies it. “Not blood. It’s lipstick. Shameless.”

  What to make of this? Anything? Clearly, this script was roughly handled during the amateur theatrics of November twenty-eighth. But Kimberley knew her lines — why would her lipstick be in this book?

  “Seize the evidence,” I tell her softly. “Don’t mention it to Jonathan just yet.”

  “Why?”

  “In case it . . . compromises his defence.” Although I’m not sure why it would.

  Wordlessly, she puts both copies of the play in her briefcase, then continues showing me about.

  “This is the chair where she passed out, quote unquote,” Augustina says.

  An overstuffed armchair, a matching couch by it. Over here, a large built-in desk, with a Selectric typewriter. Beside it, a review copy of some heavy tome about law in the Middle Ages. Framed on the wall, a photograph of a smiling, confident-looking older man in hunting gear, holding a dead pheasant by the neck, a bottle of champagne in the other hand.

  “Viscount Caraway,” says Augustina. “Jonathan says the picture tells it all; he thinks it’s funny. He says he only recently brought the photo out from hiding. He and his father have had some kind of a rapprochement.”

  “How has his father reacted to all of this?”

  “With pride, I think.”

  The viscount was in the news again, I recall, shovelling coals of hell and damnation upon Whitehall for selling Ulster out to Irish popery. It strikes me as cynically apropos that Kimberley Martin is Roman Catholic.

  My tour takes me to the fireplace: a spent condom and a few linen sheets met their doom here on November twenty-seventh. Jonathan’s panicky incineration of evidence may yet serve him poorly at this trial.

  Augustina leads me through the living room — original art on the walls: modern, confusing to my eye — then down to the billiard room: the table covered, cues stacked neatly. A shiny varnished bar — the cocaine chopping block.

  Our tour then takes us to the upper level, to a spacious master bedroom with a queen-sized brass bed. Here is where Kimberley did it with Jonathan, as the girls of Mop’n’Chop might put it.

  French doors lead to a sundeck at the back. A large window looks out upon a mature weeping willow, obscuring Dr. Hawthorne’s house, about forty feet away.

  “This is the closet where her clothes were all neatly hanging. That’s the suit she put on.” Hidden in the back. “The ensuite. Nice big bath, a Jacuzzi. Over here, the dresser drawers she snooped in, where she found the famous tie.”

  Augustina gets up onto the bed, lies face down, her legs splayed, her feet touching the second-to-the-end bedposts, raising a comely blue-jeaned rump. “Try it, Arthur. Oh, I forgot, you’re in love with someone else. Actually, it would be really hard if she were resisting. On her back, yeah, no problem. So why would he have tied her facedown? Obvious. So he could spank her. I didn’t say that.” But she abruptly becomes solemn. “Arthur, do you believe he’s innocent?”

  I hedge: “Innocence is irrelevant. We defend, juries judge.”

  “Yeah, I know all that, but what’s your gut reaction — is he innocent?”

  “I want to believe he is.” But I sense that is not enough for her, too vacillating and weak. “Beyond a moral certainty, I cannot say, but I am determined to give him the benefit of doubt.”

  That seems not to satisfy her at all. Her face clouds. “He’s been terribly wronged, Arthur.”

  I dare not suggest to her that her judgement might be impaired by the tenderness she obviously feels for the haunted soul we defend. Yet, I, too, have grown in my regard for this brother in pain — almost more than I dare to admit.

  What did George Rimbold say? You believe or you don’t believe, there’s no goddamn in-between. I cannot be agnostic as to Jonathan’s innocence; I must believe.

  The food is excellent, the conversation intense, and it continues over compote and coffee. We discuss strategies: how to pry Wally Sprogue from Kimberley’s bosom; how to cross-examine her — unrelenting politeness or the dentist’s drills and needles? Were inhibitions so enfeebled through the cocktail mix of cocaine and alcohol that she succumbed to repressed desires? Augustina has talked to experts, one of whom is under subpoena, but it’s an area of risky forensics that we may wish not to touch.

  Have we missed anything? Are there clues floating about like gossamer too indistinct to see? Or are we looking in the wrong direction? I say nothing about the Shameless blotch on the text of Shaw’s play. I’m still unsure what to make of it.

  Jonathan tells me his psychiatrist, Dr. Jane Dix, will be attending tomorrow, and I am advised to spend some quality time with her. But he continues to be reluctant to say how she may be of use. She will not know the court’s rules of engagement and may urge some inappropriate mental defence.

  Jonathan can’t seem to stop ruminating the mystery of Kimberley Martin. “She’s a complex puzzle. Amazing woman. Bloody awesome, in fact. Too vibrant. Too damn real. Why can’t I hate her? I can’t find my anger; maybe I’ve buried it too deep.”

  I am perplexed by his forbearance. The wrongly accused usually tend to flare in indignation at their tormentors, but Jonathan seems to flounder in a swamp of . . . what? Not self-pity. Self-reproach, maybe, or shame.

  “Actually, I feel a sort of sick admiration for the skilful way she’s managed to trash my life.” A wry smile. “I’m like a rat worried into a corner, trapped in a dead-end maze. A blameless rat, for what that’s worth. I can’t prove my innocence.” He seems to be working up one of his heads of steam.

  “The law does not require you to do so, Jonathan,” I say softly.

  “The law is an ass.” His fist thuds the table; coffee slops; forks and spoons bounce. Augustina looks alarmed. “The law. The law! I’m trapped in the bloody clutches of the law. Presumption of innocence, reasonable doubt, grand precepts, aren’t they? It’s a system of beautifully constructed bullshit. The rule of law that I shove down innocent throats, that I teach and preach, and supposedly celebrate, has reared back at me like some monstrous, rabid animal. It won’t allow me to clear my name! If I continue to play dead like this I’ll be chewed alive. Jesus bloody Christ, at least if I fight, I may have a ten-per-cent survival chance.”

  I down a last draught of decaffeinated coffee, wait until he cools down. “What are you saying, Jonathan?”

  “I’m saying that this gag order is choking me. Even in the unlikely event I’m not proved guilty, I’ll still be subjected for the rest of my life to a kind of universal smirking disbelief. But I can’t defend myself, can I? Somebody give me the reasons one more time.”

  Augustina takes his hand, gently unballs his fisted fingers. “Jonathan, don’t be so damn pessimistic. You’re not going to hang unless you provide the rope.”

  I explain again to him. There are a dozen reasons for not putting him on the stand: He must admit to a guilty mind — his frantic efforts to destroy or alter crucial evidence, the sheets, the condoms, the dry-cleaned suit. None of this could they prove without his generous help. He could be trapped within the coils of his many lies. But, most perilous, the dangerous Dominique Lander would be unleashed against us in rebuttal.

  “Miss Lander may find pleasure under the whip, but the lash of rejection bites deeper. She abominates you with the kind of venom that only a disorganized mind can concoct. She is determined to destroy you and will enjoy an immense sadistic thrill in doing so. No, Jonathan, you are to be acquitted by your silence.”

  He calms himself, sadly shakes his head. “There’s no other way of keeping her off the stand?”

  “That’s the ultimate effect of our arrangement with the Crown. If you don’t testify, neither does she.”

  “And nobody hears that you played master-and-slave games with that weirdo,” Augustina says. “Wouldn’t you rather have people smirking than laughing out loud?”

  He smiles ruefully. “I’ve really done it to myself. What a pathetic jerk I’ve been.” He sighs. “God s
ave me.”

  “He will,” says Augustina. “Won’t you, Arthur?”

  Our after-dinner conversation has not only enervated me but inculcated an almost morbid fear that I may fail in the godlike trust imposed on me. And now I have returned to my hotel too late to try Margaret once again, and this causes me to descend into a yawning chasm of emptiness and loneliness. Love and pain are twin emotions.

  I crawl into bed and fall into a fretful sleep.

  And then she calls.

  “Arthur? Is it too late?”

  I look at the bedside clock: a few minutes after midnight. “Not at all.” I am suddenly wide awake, my body pulsing.

  “Were you sleeping? Don’t lie to make me feel good. Fall Fair Committee, two nights in a row. They were still going at it when I left. People were at each other’s throats. That ridiculous Leanna Sawyer started it all. You know her. Bossy Jesus freak? Wanted no beer on the grounds. No beer at the fall fair? I told her she was nuts.”

  She needs to vent steam, and I insist she does so on my dime, so I disconnect and call her back. She talks non-stop for twenty minutes, an exuberant rhapsody: I am on her side, cheering her on, clucking with displeasure at the chicanery of her enemies.

  “How’s the trial coming?”

  I talk until I am almost hoarse, reciting the entire encyclopedia of the last two days, my gaffes, my triumphs, my hopes and fears.

  At the end of this, I ask her if she could find the time to visit Rimbold. “He needs cheering up.”

  “You’re an awfully kind man, Arthur. For a lawyer.”

  “I think of you a great deal, Margaret. I’m afraid I’ve been drifting off in court a bit.”

  “I think of you a lot, too. I do.”

  I nestle the phone onto its hook and crawl under the covers with a silly smile on my face….

  I am strolling with Margaret across the fairgrounds: She applauds at the sight of a blue-ribboned entry in the organic category. I have won for best zucchini.

  The Commander is seated at the counsel table doodling two tiny words on a pad of paper: “I do, I do.” I think of you a lot, too. I do.

  But my mind must wander no longer down Potter’s Road. The star performer has retaken the witness box and all other main players are present, sans Remy, who has apparently rushed off to his Guyana gold fields. As we commence, the activist judge beams down at her, a full moon lighting her way so she doesn’t trip over any roots.

  Recommencing her evidence, Kimberley is pensive, brief with her answers. But intermittently a different personality seems to take over, and she brightens, and when she does so, rambles incautiously, as is her wont. She is resolute enough considering that her fiancé has abandoned her in a time of need for business others could do.

  The jury, too, must be seeing stress fractures in their relationship. They are quiet, attentive, and, I sense, neutral; they are waiting to hear the other side, the unflinching denials by O’Donnell of her atrocious slanders. Hearing no rebuttal, will they conclude Jonathan’s silence means assent? Will Wally Sprogue then throw the book in vigorous affirmation of his belief in class and gender equity? As her professor, you were in a position of unique trust. I sentence you to fourteen years.

  Patricia escorts Kimberley from the dance to the West End party to the scene of the crime. The witness goes there without prodding, running unleashed like a frisky dog as she describes the bantering over cognac and Benedictine, then the parlour-game production of Saint Joan. I am reminded of that smudge of lipstick in the rumpled paperback. Perhaps, for some obscure reason, she put the page to her face.

  “And that went on for about twenty minutes, and then we took a break. Professor O’Donnell was going through his CD’s, looking for some suitable music, baroque or medieval, or whatever, and I think Charles had to go to the bathroom, and . . . well, I followed Egan and Paula downstairs to a kind of billiards room.”

  “And what happened there?” Patricia asks. She has clearly decided to bite the bullet, to blunt my own fire during cross-examination.

  “We had some cocaine.”

  I interrupt; I want the jury’s full attention. “Since this junket to the rumpus room was omitted from her evidence at the preliminary, we will want to take careful notes.”

  “Take your time, Ms. Martin,” Wally says.

  “Who produced this cocaine?” Patricia asks.

  “Egan Chornicky. He had a little envelope of it.”

  “How much did you consume?”

  “A line. I’m sure that’s all. I guess I had just a little too much to drink, because normally, unless …” Her voice falters. “I’m not a user. I mean, I’ve done it a few times. It’s around a fair bit, you know, among some people in the theatre crowd.”

  There is an earnest pathos to this apology, and it rings true. I do not remotely see Kimberley as a drug-dependent personality — and I am all too familiar with the type.

  “It’s not something you do,” Wally repeats for the jury’s benefit, anxious to rehabilitate her.

  “No. I normally don’t like drugs.”

  Wally nods sagely. He is anxious to shelve this awkward incident; the innocent are prone to error. He asks Kimberley if she might enjoy a little break.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  After judge and jury leave, Jonathan draws me aside and introduces me to Dr. Jane Dix, who has been sitting behind him in the gallery. She is in her mid-thirties: petite and perky, deep-set blue eyes, extremely close-cropped, straw-coloured hair.

  “I cancelled my patients today,” she says. “I thought this might be more gripping.”

  “She’s here to analyse the judge’s masturbation fantasies,” Jonathan says.

  “Poor Jonathan,” she says. “I think you’re jealous.” She gives him a friendly poke, then turns to me. “We’ll have a chance to talk?”

  “Certainly.”

  As court reassembles, Kimberley’s handlers huddle with her at the prosecution table; they want the complainant to strut her stuff, to come out swinging. She takes a deep breath as court is called to order, then mounts the stand and sits with chin uplifted. She looks resolute now, much fortified by Wally’s kindly ministering.

  We now follow her from rumpus room to second-floor bedroom to ensuite washroom: “to answer nature’s call” is her euphemism. While upstairs, she struck upon the “not-so-brilliant idea” of dressing in male clothing for the next scene of Saint Joan. Wally edges closer to the witness, hunching forward as she describes looking through Jonathan’s clothes, stripping to her underwear, changing into his suit.

  Her reasoning for playing this game of dress-up seems lost on some of the jurors. Kimberley’s cheeks glow slightly, an innocent blush, as she recounts her impertinent impersonation of Jonathan.

  The play proceeds. The fire awaits in the marketplace outside the castle of Rouen, wherein stands the heretic saint, chained at her inquisition — a trial within this trial. Just before she recants her confession, she falls asleep. Why then? Why does this boisterous actress suddenly spark out at the play’s dramatic apogee? The jury must surely suspect, as I believe, there is an element of stagecraft here.

  Jeanne d’Arc awakes to find on fire not herself but her law professor, in full bloom of lust, seeking to lance his trussed love slave from behind, successfully locating the generally preferred aperture, then trying in vain a less elegant route. Kimberley’s account of her rude awakening is brisk if not eager, and we are subjected to no histrionics about how utterly degraded she feels to speak of such matters. This story of erotic abuse is so blunt in its telling that it jerks no tears, though Wally is frowning and has stopped taking notes. Here is the accused in flagrante delicto. Here is a woman cruelly abused by an agent of the patriarchy.

  But do I pick up a faint aroma of skepticism wafting from some members of my jury? There is shuffling, a cough or two. Miss Jackson-Blyth is looking down at her hands and seems unhappy — the complainant has let the side down.

  O’Donnell visits the washroom, and a
s he fills the tub Kimberley frees herself and flees. Her testimony becomes more spirited now; the major obstacle on her course has been cleared and she is racing for the finish line. A brief stop at the neighbour’s house, then her lover arrives and whisks her away.

  She showered, she bathed, and — heard here for the first time — she douched. She is not defensive about any of this. “All I could think of was winning back my body from him; it felt stained — it was stained. The lipstick looked like blood. And I just had to clean his smell from me. “This last note is harsh, unexpected. She is returning Jonathan’s stare now, bellicose. “I mean, I really felt I had something sickening done to me. By a man I’d respected.”

  I should rise to complain about these ex gratia calumnies, but content myself with a loud grunt of displeasure.

  “Is that an objection, Mr. Beauchamp?” Wally asks.

  “Merely a petty critique, m’lord, of an otherwise bravura performance.”

  Patricia scrambles to her feet needlessly; her witness proves able to protect herself. “I am speaking what I know is the truth, Mr. Beauchamp.”

  “Truth is known only to God, Miss Martin.”

  “I think your client needs help.”

  I am taken aback by her tartness and can summon up no quick rejoinder. Wally’s hearty intervention makes matters worse: “She got you right back, Mr. Beauchamp.”

  Odd how such a reasonably competent lawyer can turn into such a toad of a judge. My nose has been bloodied, but I must keep my temper.

  Patricia wraps up with a brief excursus to the production of Switch. Did the witness ever see the accused in the audience?

  “At least four times. He kept staring at me. Like he’s doing right now.”

  “Your witness,” Patricia says.

  A nice touch upon which to conclude. Miss Martin’s combat-iveness is restored and fully functional. It is nearly twelve-thirty, lunch break. I rise.