Felix Francis - Guilty Not Guilty

And, oh, yes, well, Mr James Fairbrother, MA (Oxon), TEP, had lived up to his billing as a trust and estate practitioner. He had proved to be a great help, first seeing off Joe Bradbury’s fatuous challenge to his mother’s will, and then applying on my behalf for a grant of probate from the Chancery Division of the High Court, in order that I could distribute the estate funds to the beneficiaries of the will, plus, of course, a sizable share to the taxman.

As a result, I wasn’t too concerned yet at my lack of paid employment, not with a seven-figure bank balance suddenly to my name. And, at the very least, that had silenced the bank’s threats to foreclose on my property.

At four-thirty on Thursday afternoon, the court rose after the fourth day of the trial, and I still hadn’t been called.

No one apologised that I had spent two whole days sitting on a hard seat facing a blank wall. But at least the Crown Prosecution Service would pay expenses towards my unnecessary taxi journeys both ways from the far side of Banbury. Shame I couldn’t also claim for loss of earnings.

‘Be back tomorrow,’ the witness service instructed. ‘Court reconvenes at ten o’clock sharp.’

My trusty taxi picked me up from outside the court building and we worked our way through the Oxford rush-hour traffic congestion and on towards Banbury.

I had finally been cleared by the medics as fit enough to drive, but only for short distances and Oxford was too far, plus the problem of parking near to the court made a taxi the only sensible option.

‘How’s it going?’ the driver asked cheerfully.

‘No idea,’ I said. ‘All I’ve done so far is wait in a room. But I should be called tomorrow. I’ll need to be there by ten.’

‘I’ll pick you up at half past eight,’ he said. ‘Same as today. Just to be on the safe side.’

‘Fine.’

He drove on in silence. He knew I didn’t really want to talk.

In spite of my loneliness, no amount of conversation with anyone other than Amelia seemed to make me feel any better. After eight months, I was trying to get my life back onto some sort of track, where I could look forward to a future rather than always backwards at the past.

But it wasn’t easy.

Everyone else had done their grieving. They spoke to me about Amelia as if she had somehow once been a character in a film, and one that had now been relegated to DVD, or some old-movie channel on satellite TV. But, for me, her role had been worthy of an Oscar and deserved to be forever in lights above the title for everyone to see.

The taxi dropped me outside the house and I hobbled up the path to the front door.

The trial had put everything in my life on hold and I had been advised by the police that it would go on for several weeks at least, and maybe for a month or more. Long gone were the days when even high-profile murder trials lasted less than a week.

In October 1910, the infamous dentist Dr Crippen was tried, convicted and sentenced to death within the space of just five days, with the jury taking as little as twenty-seven minutes of deliberation to unanimously find him guilty. Within a month he was dead, hanged at nine in the morning at Pentonville Prison in London.

Even forty-three years later in 1953, the trial of John Christie, of 10 Rillington Place fame, was over quicker still, in only four days, and a mere three weeks was to pass between the start of his trial and his execution on the same gallows as Crippen.

And John Haigh, the ‘acid bath murderer’, was amazingly convicted of six murders in just two days, the 18th and 19th of July 1949, with the jury taking no more than seventeen minutes to find him guilty. He was hanged on 10th August.

‘Evidence tends to be far more complicated these days,’ DS Dowdeswell had told me. ‘What with forensics, DNA profiles, phone records and such. And modern juries are also much more sceptical than in the past. They need greater convincing. No one believes the police without question any more.’

He had made it sound like a major failing on the part of the public, but there had been too many examples where police evidence at a trial was later found to have been fabricated in the misplaced desire to guarantee a conviction.

I let myself in through the front door and wished for the millionth time that Amelia were here to greet me. The trial might provide me with some sense of justice, provided Joe was convicted, but it could never bring back what I’d lost.

I popped one of my replenished supply of ready meals into the microwave.

Four minutes at full power.

While I waited for the timer to count down to zero, I again looked at the broken back-door lock and decided that I’d fix it after the trial was over, whatever the outcome.

Life had to go on.

‘William Gordon-Russell.’

‘Here,’ I said, struggling to stand up while not dropping the crutches.

The court usher held open the doors for me as I made my way into the courtroom.

It was eerily quiet as I went slowly past the massed rows of court reporters to the witness box, the only sound being the clink-clink of the crutches on the hard blue-carpeted floor.

‘Do you need a chair?’ asked the usher.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not to start with.’

I was determined to stand, if only to demonstrate to Joe Bradbury that I was not the invalid he had tried to make me. I leaned the crutches up against the front of the wooden witness box.

‘Take the testament in your right hand and read from the card,’ said the usher.

I did as he asked. ‘I swear by Almighty God that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

The usher took back the card and Bible, and I looked around the court.

Slightly to my right and in front was the imposing red-robed and bewigged judge sitting alone behind his raised bench. On the rear wall, above the judge’s head, was a painted moulding of the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom — a reminder that all criminal cases are tried in British Crown Courts in the name of the reigning monarch.

Beyond the judge, on the far side of the court, was the jury and I was facing them directly as they were me. Five men and seven women in two rows of six.

I turned to my left and there he was — the defendant, Joseph Reginald Bradbury, sitting behind vertically slatted glass panels in the dock at the back of the court, opposite the judge, flanked by two uniformed security officers.

The very sight of Joe staring at me with his cold eyes sent a shiver down my damaged spine.

There was a slight pause and then the prosecuting barrister stood up from his place and turned to me.

‘Please state your full name,’ he said.

‘William Herbert Millgate Gordon-Russell.’

‘And are you the widower of Amelia Jane Gordon-Russell, the victim of the murder in this case.’

‘I am.’

So it was now official, I was a widower.

And there was no point in asking to be referred to as just plain Bill Russell. Even I could see that. The whole court atmosphere was extremely formal, from the judge in his red robes and horsehair wig, the barristers in their black gowns, also with wigs, and then the court officials in dark suits, some also with black gowns over. I was in my Sunday best, as was Joe Bradbury in the dock, both, no doubt, trying to make a good impression as honest and respectable citizens.

Only the jury appeared to have been dragged in off the street in their leisure attire, which of course they effectively had. And they had clearly not received any memo concerning an expected dress code. Most of them appeared to be completely out of place in slogan-printed T-shirts and skimpy blouses. But perhaps their choice of apparel was more in keeping with the hot June weather than the heavy garb of the lawyers. One of the young men in the back row, I noticed later, was even sporting Bermuda shorts and flip-flops.