An Eye For Justice

by Mark Young

  And what exactly did his words prove anyway? Nothing. I was still in Helena’s room around the time of the murder. There was cast iron proof of that and I’d never disputed it. But, someone else was as well, but we couldn’t prove it and nothing Fossey had said changed that. Even if we had evidence to suggest tampering with the CCTV, so what? They still had my presence, my DNA and my tie around Helena’s neck. Whichever way I turned, there was a hangman’s noose waiting.

  And now I had to make my closing speech, and frankly, if I was on that jury, I’d be convicting - logic dictated it. But I still had to say something, so I slowly rose to my feet and turned to face the jury.

  I ran my eyes over them. They looked kind of tired of it all, and me, and I am sure they just wanted to get it over with and get on with their lives. It was almost as if my closing argument was a formality that needed to be got through, and then they could convict.

  ‘You know,’ I said, starting off slow, ‘I told you about the claim against K Corp and you’ll be pleased to know I’m not going to go over all that again. But I will just remind you of one part of what I told you. When Helena and I met with K Corp, to try and settle Hannah’s claim, we suggested that if the case did not settle, it was likely some highly damaging allegations against them were likely to come out. What happened? That very same evening, Helena was murdered, and I was framed for it.

  ‘I know, I know. You’ve heard it all before, but it is true. I just can’t prove it,’ I said.

  ‘But one last thing. K Corp own 19% of a company called Protecta who specialize in CCTV and security. Their head of research is a guy called John Fossey. The night of Helena’s murder he was booked into the Marriott Hotel, Manhattan, 5 minutes walk from the murder scene. If anyone could tamper with the CCTV, it would be him, but again, I can’t prove anything. Whispers in the wind,’ I said, pausing to draw breath and shoot a glance at Stahl. I had been expecting him to object like crazy to my last point as it was patently improper, having not featured at all in the evidence. But Stahl seemed oblivious, scribbling away on his yellow legal pad, barely listening to me. I guess he was so confident of a conviction, he’d already moved onto his next case.

  ‘Oh, I said that was the last thing, but its not. In fact there are two more things. Firstly, I don’t actually have to prove anything. That’s for the prosecution. All I have to do is raise a reasonable doubt in your mind as to my guilt. Remember that.

  ‘The final thing, is’ I said, looking full on at the jury: ‘I didn’t kill Helena Palmer.’

  I let that resonate a moment as I held my eyes on the jury.

  ‘I would never kill another human except to defend myself. I had no motive, but someone else certainly did. I was framed. Thank you,’ I said, and sat down..

  Chapter 25

  Southern District Court

  Day 9

  They were all back again, and now there were more watchers in the public gallery as people became increasingly bound up in Hannah’s story, as it became darker and darker.

  ‘You see,’ Hannah said tiredly, looking intently at the jurors, anxious that they should understand. ‘Almost everybody at Westerbork Transit camp believed that the transports that left on Tuesday mornings were taking people to the east for work. It made sense; the war was going badly for the Germans, and surely they needed an endless supply of workers for armaments, guns, tanks, planes, bombs and rifles. So when we assembled for roll call that Tuesday morning with our hand baggage, we were not especially frightened by the thought of the transport; after all, thousands had already gone before us.’

  Hannah paused there, eyes closed now, head bowed, hands crossed in her lap. Her last session in the witness box had gone particularly slowly, with many stops and starts as she had tried to dig back in her memory. It was almost as if she was afraid to draw back the curtain veiling those memories, or couldn’t draw it back, but now something seemed to driving her on, forcing her to confront the past and all its demons. And now she was back there again, and she could smell it, and feel it and see those sights again…….

  ……….the train waited at the platform, smoke rising from its stack. It stood around 20 cattle wagons long, like some sinister mechanical snake waiting to devour them. There was an immediate change in atmosphere as the soldiers lost their smiles and began to harry and push people onto the wagons. When an old man fell trying to climb aboard, a giant soldier mercilessly clubbed the man with his rifle, then lifted him and bodily threw him into the wagon. Then it was just a mad scramble of pushing, shoving, screaming, rifles swinging and dogs barking until all the wagons were stuffed full of heaving, frightened humanity.

  Each cramped wagon contained between 50 to 60 people stood squashed up together with barely room to move. At one end of the wagon there was a single pail of water for drinking, and at the other end an empty bucket for use as a toilet.

  For the first few hours, people moved about as much as they could, trying to find a comfortable position. Embarrassment at using the bucket as a toilet soon abated as people became resigned to their fate. Hannah leant back against the side of the wagon and closed her eyes, the sound of the wheels on the track slowly, hypnotically drawing her into a dream. She was back in Papa’s sunlit studio working on a beautiful painting and she was singing. Then she was walking with Mama across Dam square, and then down by the canals to go shopping, watching the people smiling and talking, moving, walking, living free.

  After the first day as the sun began to go down and the train relentlessly moved across the European hinterland, sometimes crawling, sometimes at full steam, sometimes parked in a siding so a military train could pass, but always moving slowly east, Hannah knew that such a journey could not end well. By then the water had run out and children had begun to cry from thirst, and the other bucket was overflowing with excrement and the smell was indescribable. At around 10 pm they stopped in a siding for the night. To start with there were endless calls for water, food and to be let out onto the platform, but no one came. Just a solitary soldier walking down the side of the wagons, slamming his rifle butt into peoples faces if they dared to show them.

  Eventually the cries subsided as the darkness enveloped the train. Hannah held Helena, gently rocking her as she slept. She looked out through a gap in the roof and could see the vast cloudless sky above, lit by an endless stream of stars stretching away to infinity. She thought of a book she had read the year before, The Time Machine, by H G Wells; her mind flitted into and out of dreams and visions of climbing into such a machine and leaving the world behind, journeying to a place where they could be free again. But then mama was coughing and retching, violently pulling Hannah out of her fantasy world back into the horror of the wagon. Hannah handed Helena to Papa and cradled Mama’s head which was feverish, her brow beaded with sweat. Hannah could feel tremors running through her mothers thin frame.

  In the end Hannah couldn’t sleep so she stayed awake gently stroking mama’s fevered brow as she slept. At 4 am hawkers and pedlars with carts of food and water appeared outside the train. Beseeching hands came out of the side of the wagons, begging for food and water, but the sellers wanted gold, diamonds or a fortune for a cup of water or a crust of bread. They jeered and cajoled, tipping water onto the ground and tossing scraps of bread into the wind. Hannah watched a well dressed woman hand her diamond ring over for a cup of water and a slice of bread.

  When Mama suddenly woke with a start she seemed disoriented and unsure of where she was. Her face was pasty white, almost ethereal, and her huge dark eyes seemed blank and empty, bereft of the will to live. Hannah kissed Mama’s brow and gently stroked her hair. As she did so the wagon gave a juddering lurch and began to move again, slowly edging out of the siding back onto the mainline track to the east.

  People began to die on the third day, mostly the very old or people who were already sick before the journey began. One very old man died, standing up. When he toppled over, his body was already stiff with rigor mortis. Mama became worse during that da
y, calling out to Hannah and not recognizing her when she spoke. Papa couldn’t stop crying which seemed to make Mama worse, but then she drifted into sleep again around midday.

  Hannah and Grandpa took turns to cradle Helena, quietly singing to her and playing with her. Grandpa talked to Hannah as he had never done before, about his youth, about his time fighting in the first world war, and about Mama when she was born and how joyful they had been, he and his long dead wife. He talked to her about Rudi as well, how he had heard that Rudi had died in one of the camps and he hadn’t told Hannah because he knew it would upset her. He told her that he still had the painting Rudi had taken from the museum, rolled up in his rucksack.

  Hannah asked to see it, but at that moment Mama had screamed in her sleep and woken, shaking and crying out for water. Mama died on the morning of the fourth day. Hannah was holding her and it was Grandpa who realized she had gone. Hannah thought she was just sleeping, but then she realized all the warmth had left Mama’s body. Hannah couldn’t seem to cry. Eventually Grandpa managed to pull her away and covered Mama’s face with a cloth.

  Papa died too, around the same time, but by his own hand. They found him later with a large piece of broken blood stained glass held tightly in his palm. He had slashed it across his neck, cutting the main artery and had quickly bled to death, and he wasn’t alone. There were many suicides in the wagon that last day.

  The train stopped mid-morning, but Hannah couldn’t read the station sign. She saw a couple of men walking down the platform. They looked like the engine drivers. Then the train began to shunt slowly forward again, and Hannah idly wondered who was driving it. Grandpa and Hannah held Helena between them gently rocking her. Hannah felt lightheaded. She’d had little water and no food for days, and it was almost as if she were now a ghost. Her mind played tricks, awash with hot coloured dreams of the past, flickering in and out, tripping. Then the train stopped.

  * * * *

  People v Calver - Manhattan Supreme Court

  Day 9

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is a very simple case,’ Stahl said, as he began his closing argument.

  My eyes kept trying to close because I hadn’t slept in a week, but the jury looked keen and alert again. They knew they would be going home soon.

  ‘Thank you for all the time you’ve spent with us,’ Stahl continued, looking at them with cod sincerity. ‘Some of what you have had to see and hear in this trial has been rough, but we’re nearly done. On that night we know the defendant and victim had dinner together in the defendants room. We know she went back to her room to sleep, and we know the time - 1 am - because we’ve seen the CCTV footage with its real-time clock showing on the ticker.

  ‘We know the defendant later went down to the bar for a drink. We see him again on the CCTV in there. He gets a call from Helena Palmer. “Come up and see me”, she says. He does. We watch him on the CCTV as he enters her room at 2.20 am. Then nothing until he leaves 25 minutes later at 2.45 am. No one else enters or leaves that room during that time or afterwards, until we see the busboy knocking at 9.30 am and getting no answer. Ten minutes later Mr. O’Leary arrives with a master key and they enter and find Helena’s dead body.

  ‘Defendant says, “It wasn’t me. It was someone else.” Really? Who?’ Stahl says, mock incredulous, really getting into it. ‘Maybe it was the invisible man, because we know, don’t we, members of the jury. No one else other than the defendant enters or leaves that room during the period when Helena Palmer died.

  ‘So what happened in that room during those twenty five minutes? This defendant likes rough sex. We know that from hearing his wife’s desperate call to emergency services after he tried to strangle her during sex. He’s got form for it. Helena Palmer was anally raped whilst being garroted with the defendants green silk tie. That tie was so deeply embedded in her neck that the first responders didn’t even know it was there until they took a closer look. We don’t know how it started. Perhaps the defendant broached the subject of rough sex. Maybe he suggested some form of role play, and maybe she didn’t like it. See, the thing is, guys with hang-ups like Mr. Calver here, they need the coercive element of the sex to get progressively harder, to satisfy their cravings. They become desensitized, so the sex must get rougher and rougher, harder and harder, in order to get them off. And we say that’s what happened in this case. We say the deviant behaviour of such offenders escalates in form, until, as in this case, it ends in murder.

  ‘You’ve seen the crime scene photographs and yes, they are horrible, but you needed to see them to get some idea of what Helena Palmer went through that night in order to satisfy this defendants sick cravings.

  ‘Most cases are a deal more complicated than this one. This one is simple. Juries are often told to use their common sense in coming to a verdict, but I don’t think you even need to do that. In this case all you need is logic. This defendant was the only other person in the room when Helena Palmer died.

  ‘He can scream all he wants about some big corporate conspiracy, some phantom figure who really carried out the murder, and then had the expertise to tamper with the CCTV to frame the defendant. Really? Well, ask yourself one question: has this defendant, at any time during this trial, produced a single shred of evidence to support those contentions?’

  Stahl paused, slowly running his eye along the jury box, letting that last question sink in and resonate. Then he added, ‘I’ll leave you to answer that yourselves, in your deliberations. Thank you.’

  * * * *

  Pascal and Bob Jeffries sat at their usual table in Starbucks, sipping the same bland ersatz coffee as last time. Pascal had had to bring Cara along. The child was hugging her moth-eaten teddybear closely to her chest and warily eyeing Bob. He had tried smiling at her, but it hadn’t seemed to work, but then another little girl had wandered over, staring at the teddybear with big round eyes and holding her hands out, and Cara had given it to her. And now the two girls were excitedly chattering away in the corner.

  ‘You remember the rogues gallery you left me on the tablet, to have a look at? The London/New York Jihadi’s?’ Pascal said.

  ‘Course I remember. I been waiting on you. I thought you were holding out on me,’ Bob said.

  ‘Not holding out, Bob, just taking my time, bearing in mind my original assessment that the job is bullshit. An ass covering exercise for your back office boys at Homeland Security, so yeah, I didn’t take it too seriously. And anyway, what I’ve got is probably nothing,’ she said turning her tablet around on the table so he could see the screen whilst she scrolled to a picture of the guy called Zaid Hamdani.

  When she had first seen the mug-shot whilst idly panning through the rogues gallery down in the consulate basement, it had taken some time for the image to register, as it was a face from a while ago.

  ‘I knew this guy in London for a very short period, way back in 2008, when I was running de-radicalization workshops for the Met counter terrorism command. His name then was Yusuf Masri, and he was basically just a very bright and engaging seventeen year old refugee from Iraq. I didn’t consider him to be at risk as he was far too bright to be taken in by any of that nihilistic Jihadi bullshit the local mullah’s were peddling at the time. He was around for about six weeks and then he was gone. That was the way it was then, people constantly coming and going and moving on somewhere else, and we never kept tabs on them.’

  Bob watched her, his eyes blank, thinking. She took a sip of the ultimate in homogenous blandness, a Starbucks Americano with whole milk and two sugars. Then as Bob sat quiet, checking out records on his hand-held, she glanced over at Cara and felt good for a beat because the little girl was smiling, and that was something solid and good, the awful past forgotten for a moment. Thank God children were so resilient she thought.

  Then Bob was dragging her back to the world of Jihadi killers. ‘Here’s what we got,’ he said looking at his phone screen. ‘He’s at an address in Brooklyn, a rooming house and he’s single with no k
nown family; seems to do freelance work related to the crypto digital currency world, and that’s about it. Came to our attention because he was picked up by chance on a video surveillance camera at some demonstration against US involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, just standing watching a speech, and that was it. He’s on your list because his country of origin was shown as UK, when he first entered the US.’

  Bob looked hard at the picture. ‘So. I wonder what he’s up to now?’ he said.

  ‘You know, Bob, if you’d asked me, where would Yusuf be in ten years, I would have said a dot-com millionaire. He was that sharp.’

  ‘Well he sure aint no millionaire now, not living at that address. But we’ll check him out, low priority,’ Bob said, then looked pensive. Then he went on. ‘You did good here, Courtney,’ he said. ‘And the US government, and me, are real grateful for the help.’

  It was what she wanted to hear. ‘How grateful, Bob?’ she said, steeling a glance at him.

  He glanced back at her, beginnings of a smile. ‘You’re some operator, Courtney. What d’you want this time? I take it, its not the British Government who want a favour, right?’

  ‘It’s Calver’s trial, Bob,’ she said.

  He looked at her again, surprised at the edge of concern in her voice. ‘Yeah, I been following it,’ he muttered. Then, ‘he doesn’t seem to have a defense, so why doesn’t he just cut a deal with the DA?’

  ‘It’s too late for that. He could have done a deal way back, but he said no and he even called for a quick trial. It was dumb and stupid but he can be like that sometimes. And with the DA now virtually guaranteed a conviction, why’s he going to offer Calver anything?

  ‘Calver always worked on the basis we’d crack the CCTV, and although we now think we know how it was done, we don’t have any usable evidence. I reckon the judge is about to hand it off to the jury and I think Calver’s just about given up. Essentially we’ve run out of time.’