William Deverell - Kill All the Judges

He wondered whether the jury was stuck on something. Some point he might have made clearer. Some argument inadequately put. They weren’t buying Arthur’s bold assurances about driving a tank through the holes of the Crown’s case.

His fingers curled around his phone. Don’t call her. Too early.

“Blake 2,558, O’Malley 2,549,” the obliging reporter announced.

“Splendid! Hurrah!”

But by nine o’clock, she’d slipped behind. Conservatives 7,518, Green 7,498. Everyone else had fallen from the race.

Before long, Kroop called the jurors in, explained with yawning unction that he didn’t want to overwork them after an already long day, and sent them off to a comfortable downtown hostelry.

“What now?” Wentworth asked in the gowning room.

“You go home and get a good night’s sleep.”

Outside, he waited until Wentworth pedalled off, then hailed a cab.

“West Vancouver, please. Hollyburn Hall.”

They crawled, only one lane open to the bridge, Arthur restive, fidgety, finally digging out his phone. Margaret wasn’t picking up, and there seemed no hope of reaching campaign headquarters. He could imagine them, all wired on caffeine, Margaret trying to keep calm amid the tempest around her.

On his tenth try, he finally connected, to a background of whoops and groans, cheers and lamentations. Margaret could barely be heard. “Vocal chords gone. Fingernails too.” He didn’t realize she’d passed the phone on until his undying expressions of love were interrupted by a male voice. “Oh, you’re just saying that.”

Arthur asked the voice for the results of poll eighty-nine, Tumwat First Nations reserve. Green forty-one, Tories nine; Arthur had pulled it in. The amiable young volunteer stayed on the phone until the taxi pulled into the driveway of Hollyburn Hall. With three polls uncounted, at a quarter to ten, Margaret had a sixteen-vote edge.

In the main hall, some kind of break-into-groups session was underway, four clusters of patients nodding and murmuring. In one of the circles, a man was sobbing. Elsewhere, a wail. “Everyone hates me!”

Not partaking was Brian Pomeroy, who was in the well of the conversation pit, in repartee with Dr. Schlegg. Arthur made his way toward them, around the crackling fireplace, past a vocalizing groupie: “Don’t give me that bullshit.”

Brian was lecturing the balding, bearded Facilitator. “Damn right I was trying to send out a message. I was at the end of my rope. Save me, I was screaming, save me from group therapy. I did one, no more. Everyone had a story that would drive you to suicide. Stop ragging me, doc, I ain’t facilitatable. Bring me an exorcist.”

Brian did a double take as he looked up and saw Arthur, on his haunches at the rim of the pit. “Jesus. Don’t scare me like that.”

Schlegg rose. “No more smoking in the room, my friend, or the privilege may be denied altogether.”

“Fank you, please delete yourself, I have an important guest.”

“Always a pleasure, Mr. Beauchamp. Please remember the time, we rise early here.” He departed, clapped his hands, and the four circles broke up, though one of the group leaders remained clinched in a hug with a tearful male patient.

“Crybaby,” Brian said. “If he was a man, he’d kill himself.”

Arthur descended into the snake pit. “Everyone but me seems to dismiss your aborted suicide as a rather empty gesture. Given that you have spurned all medical aid around here, one could hardly call it an attention-seeking device. I see it as a scream of despair.”

Reflections from the fire played on Brian’s face as he twisted away to listen to Schlegg, on a dais. “Good, excellent. So let’s have the group leaders up here for final feedback.”

“Let’s have our own session, Brian.” He took Brian’s elbow, helped him up.

“Right.” He shook himself vigorously, like a wet dog, as if to shed unwelcome feelings. “How’s your version of the trial working out, Arthur? Has it ended yet?”

“The jury is out. How has yours ended?”

They paused at the stoop of the stairs. “Widgeon shot Inspector Grodgins and Constable Marchmont, then he hanged himself out of guilt over having made a fool of me. The literary allusion is subtly entertaining-the death of Widgeon symbolizes the death of this novel. Even my disordered mind could tell, in the course of editing it, that no sane man could have written this. I have failed. Thus, the scream of despair.”

Crazy but sly, said Wentworth. Cleverly oblique.

His room was neat, the bed made, the only disarray a dirty ashtray and a spilled carton of Craven A on the desk. Brian slid open the sliding balcony door, took the ashtray outside. His trash can was full of manuscript. The DSM-V of the American Psychiatric Association was open beside the computer, a line in boldface, “Psychotic Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.”

Arthur joined him outside, drew out his Peterson bent. “‘I know too much.’” Arthur repeated the phrase, it was playful, had a double edge. “That’s not my line; it’s yours, as quoted to me by Dr. Alison Epstein. You told her you knew who did it. You said the clues were all in your manuscript. What I find interesting about that manuscript, other than its lack of such clues, is that however flawed, with all its jumps and starts, it seems not the output of an insane mind. You were able to express insanity more effectively off the page.”

Brian made no response, pulled on a sweater. It was a cool night, but the rain was holding off. Arthur itched to turn on Brian’s radio, suppressed his election-result anxiety.

“I have read enough mysteries to know that an implied contract exists between the writer and his reader. The writer provides clues as his part of the bargain; they may be clever but must be sufficient. What’s the point of a whodunit if even the cleverest puzzle-solver gives up because the author has broken the contract?”

He thrust an index finger at Brian’s forehead. “The clues were in here, not in the book. You couldn’t avoid it, could you? The scattering of clues.”

Brian chain-lit a second cigarette. “What clues?”

Arthur gestured at the psychiatric texts, the thick pile of Reginav. Gilbert transcripts. “The bulk of those dozen volumes consist of eight shrinks testifying for Crown and defence. Research material for your book, I first thought. But then I realized the transcripts might be an excellent aid to constructing an airtight insanity defence. Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“A glitch, a witness. Anything that might lead them to you.” Arthur blew two perfect smoke rings. “The twist that comes out of nowhere.”

Brian’s face was undergoing a metamorphosis, caving in, the crooked smile fading, the spark of combat dulling in his eyes. Arthur set down his pipe. “You showed Caroline some photos from Cuba. May I see your photo library?”

Brian took a deep drag, looked up in sad contemplation at the black slopes of Hollyburn, the black sky. Then he butted out and led Arthur to his computer.

The photos were grouped four to a frame. A street salsa band in Havana, old-timers playing dominoes, Hemingway’s hotel room. “Let’s go back to the start,” Arthur said.

Brian slid a bar to the top of the screen. Summertime. The three adopted children, raven-haired and beautiful, playing on a beach. “Pre-divorce,” Brian said. “I used to get them weekends.”

There were three dozen more such shots, all date-marked July 21, 2007. Brian was showing emotion as the photos rolled up the screen, phlegm in his throat. “I forgot about these. God. Look at Amelia. She’ll be a ballet dancer.”

The next grouping showed several lawyers in a Karaoke bar, a Friday night near the end of the marathon Morgan trial. Brian’s defence cronies, a duet miming on a stage, Brovak with an air guitar. Then nothing until a series of shots from an open car window, out of focus, possibly of Brian’s former house. Yes, there was Caroline sitting on the steps with one of the girls.