Felix Francis - Guilty Not Guilty

‘And now you’ve totally destroyed any chance of happiness for my mother during the last few precious months of her life.’

‘What’s that about your mother?’ asked one of the journalists, his notebook at the ready.

‘My elderly mother is dying of cancer and that beastly man...’ he pointed at me, ‘... has made her life hell for years and now he’s robbed her of her daughter at the most vulnerable time of her life. Prison’s too good for him. He should be strung up. Anyone got a rope?’

I wasn’t about to wait and see if he could recruit a lynch mob. I pulled my suitcase through the throng and walked out of the building and off down New Road in the direction of the railway station. A couple of photographers chased me for a bit until they were happy they had enough snaps and then they, too, peeled away.

I was seething.

Once again I felt like it had been me on the defensive when I was the one who had done nothing wrong.

‘That bloody man,’ I said angrily out loud, and received a very strange look from someone walking the other way.

I’d calmed down a bit by the time I reached the station.

Now where to?

I still had the key to Douglas’s Chester Square house in my pocket, so I bought a ticket to London and caught the next train to Paddington.

‘You were right,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have gone.’

‘So when are you going to start taking some notice of your big brother?’

I sensed that Douglas was quite cross with me.

‘Don’t you start,’ I said. ‘I have enough trouble as it is.’

‘Much of it of your own making.’

I was quite taken aback. ‘What do you mean by that?’

We were in Douglas’s kitchen watching the television evening news, which covered the gory details of the inquest opening at Oxford Coroner’s Court together with some unfortunate footage of the fracas outside afterwards. There was also an interview with Joe Bradbury, clearly conducted after I’d left the scene. Needless to say, he was not very complimentary about me, and that was putting it very mildly.

‘I just can’t understand why the police allow this wicked man to roam the streets. None of us are safe with this killer on the loose. I have been accused of being involved but that’s total nonsense. I loved my darling elder sister. I am just the unfortunate individual who found her dead after her husband had done his worst. And now I’m accused by him of lying. It’s an outrage that he’s not locked up.’

It was close to slanderous — maybe even over the line. Perhaps I should sue both him and the television company, but first I had to prove my innocence.

The TV picture dwelt on Joe’s self-righteous face for a fraction too long before returning to the studio.

‘Why on earth did you go?’ Douglas said again with irritation, now for the third time.

‘I don’t know,’ I said miserably. ‘Perhaps I thought it would somehow make me feel closer to Amelia.’

‘And did it?’

‘No. And now I have images in my head of how she died that I would rather not have.’

‘I told you so,’ Douglas said, throwing his hands up in frustration.

‘Okay, okay. I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have listened. Can we now please drop the subject?’

We sat in awkward silence for a few minutes while Douglas emptied the dishwasher.

‘I could do with a G and T,’ he said. ‘Want one?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Make mine a double.’

He clinked ice into two freshly washed glasses and added generous portions of gin with a little tonic and slices of lime. He pushed one of them across the counter to me and we both drank deeply.

‘It could be worse,’ he said finally. ‘You could’ve been charged.’

‘They have no grounds, other than what that damn man says.’

‘In my experience, grounds are sometimes the least of their concerns. If the public demand that someone is put behind bars, they tend to comply and sort out inconveniences like lack of evidence later, at a trial.’

‘Talking about trials, how’s yours going?’

‘Stupid jury,’ he said.

‘Wrong verdict?’

‘No verdict. Not yet anyway. They’ve been out for ten hours now and the judge has sent them home for a second night. God knows what they’re talking about. Open-and-shut case as far as I can see. Defendant is guilty as sin.’

‘What do you do while you’re waiting?’ I asked.

‘Sit in the robing room twiddling my thumbs, mostly. I try to read future case notes but I find it difficult to concentrate in such circumstances, especially when we keep having to go back into court so the jury can ask the judge a question, as they’ve done repeatedly in this case.’

‘What sort of questions?’

‘All kinds of things. Mostly about the evidence or the law, but they even had us all back in court today so they could ask if three of them could go outside for a smoke.’

He rolled his eyes.

‘And did they?’

‘Of course they did. But the judge had to tell the others not to deliberate without those three being present, so they all had to take a break. It just adds to the time. I got so bored this afternoon that I even spent some time on a casino app playing blackjack.’

‘Did you win?’ I asked.

‘Did I hell! I reckon it’s fixed.’

It had clearly not been his day either.

‘What happens if the jury can’t decide?’

‘The judge has already said he’ll take a majority verdict — that’s when at least ten of them agree — but they haven’t even got that far.’

‘How long do they get?’

‘How long’s a piece of string?’ He forced a laugh. ‘The foreman said that he still thinks they might be able to reach a verdict tomorrow, so the judge has given them more time. If they can’t, then there’ll be a retrial with a new jury. I can’t see the CPS giving up on this one. But it would be a complete waste of everyone’s time, not to mention the money. And I’ve got a very full list for the next few months. Fitting it in will be an absolute nightmare.’

No wonder he’d been in an irritable mood.

He refilled our glasses.

‘But enough of my problems,’ he said. ‘What are we going to do about you?’

‘What do you suggest?’

‘Well, first of all, keep out of the way of the press and especially of that brother-in-law of yours. All you do is pour fuel on his fire and give him more ammunition to shoot back at you.’

‘But I surely have to do something,’ I said.

‘I agree,’ Douglas said. ‘And I think that rather than trying to prove who did kill Amelia, you should concentrate on proving who didn’t.

Now he was talking.

‘It’s quite clear to me,’ Douglas went on, ‘that the police are not going to investigate anyone else unless we can show them beyond any doubt that you couldn’t have done it. That will force them to look elsewhere.’

‘Where do we start?’

‘We simply prove that you were in that hotel room in Edgbaston all night and that your car never moved from the car park. If that’s the case, you couldn’t have done it.’

‘I assure you it was the case,’ I said.

‘So let’s prove it?’

‘The police are trying to prove the reverse.’

‘And if they could, they’d have charged you by now. So we will start from the opposite premise and provide absolute proof that it was physically impossible for you to have been in Hanwell at any time between five o’clock on Tuesday afternoon until after Amelia’s body had been discovered. We will provide you with an unbreakable alibi.’

He smiled at me.

‘Do you know what alibi actually means?’ he asked. ‘It’s Latin for “elsewhere”. It is an absolute defence. If you can prove you were elsewhere when the crime was committed, then you have proved your innocence. Only then will we try to show who really did do it.’