Brian Freemantle - The Namedropper

‘Perhaps your client would share the joke with the court, Mr Beckwith?’ said Pullinger, who wasn’t smiling either.

‘There’s an open air market on the Place des Lices in St Tropez on two days of the week, Tuesdays and Saturdays,’ explained Jordan, patiently. ‘It caters for tourists as well as local residents, selling all sorts of things: cheap clothing and a lot of local produce, cheeses and meats. And there are bric-a-brac stalls. From one of them, at a Tuesday market, I bought a plastic ring, in imitation marble. It was a joke between us. Play-acting, the way people do.’

‘Play-acting the way people do when they feel they are falling in love?’ said Bartle.

‘ No! ’ refused Jordan. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘Like what, Mr Jordan?’

‘A serious declaration of love: a declaration of anything of the sort you are trying to make it into.’

‘Why didn’t you mention it, in your written statement?’

Hold your temper, Jordan told himself. ‘Because it was so inconsequential: so meaningless. I had totally forgotten the incident: didn’t even remember it when I first saw the photographs.’

‘You claim it was a joke?’

‘It was a joke: a silly, harmless joke.’

‘People laugh at jokes,’ said Bartle. ‘You and Alyce Appleton look very serious at your restaurant table, with your celebratory champagne.’

‘This is a ridiculous attempt to create a situation where no situation existed,’ insisted Jordan.

‘Did Alyce Appleton continue to wear your meaningless plastic joke ring after that day in St Tropez?’

There’d be more photographs, Jordan guessed. ‘She might have done. I don’t remember her doing so. As I have tried to make clear, it was totally inconsequential, something over in a moment and forgotten.’

‘Alyce Appleton doesn’t appear to have forgotten it,’ said Bartle, summoning the usher to distribute another selection of photographs.

The second batch was thicker than the first and Jordan was surprised that his initial reaction at flicking through them was not apprehension at the questioning they were going to prompt but the briefest moment of nostalgia.

‘Do you recognize – remember – these photographs?’

‘Of course I do!’ replied Jordan, unthinkingly.

‘Of course you do,’ again mocked Bartle, as he looked up to the bench. ‘I would particularly invite your honour to look at the ring upon Alyce Appleton’s finger as I go through the numbered sequence. Here – dated as they all are – is Mrs Appleton boarding a yacht to another sailing excursion, this time to the lies de Porquerolles. And print five shows Mrs Appleton and Mr Jordan at Cagnes. Print six has them at the Hermitage Hotel in Monte Carlo and this,’ declared Bartle with the enthusiasm of a conjuror groping into his top hat for the rabbit, ‘is the photograph of Alyce Appleton passing through Nice airport for her return to America…’ Bartle paused, to create his moment. ‘Each of the photographs before you, your honour, very clearly show Alyce Appleton wearing the joke, inconsequential plastic ring so seriously slipped upon her finger by the defendant, the gesture celebrated with champagne.’

And he hadn’t once been aware of it being on Alyce’s finger after that one fun lunch at the Mouscardins restaurant, thought Jordan.

Alyce walked unaided but with her lawyer attentively close at hand to the witness stand, her doctor tensed forward from his chair behind, took the oath in a controlled voice and settled herself demurely in her seat, knees discreetly covered by her mid-calf skirt, hands crossed in her lap. Despite the lack of make-up, there was a tinge of natural colour to her cheeks. In a steady, controlled voice she went through the identifying formalities before looking expectantly to Daniel Beckwith. On her trip to France, she agreed, she had had an affair – the first in which she had engaged after her marriage to Alfred Appleton – with Harvey Jordan. She could not recall a time in her life when she had felt so lost, so abandoned. Having initiated the divorce proceedings after discovering she had a sexual disease and undergone successful treatment, she had tried to distance herself as far away as she could from a husband she despised and for whom she no longer had any feeling other than contempt. When she’d got to France she’d realized it was not the good idea she had imagined it would be. She was lonely, her confidence gone: there’d been days – specifically two, she admitted, under Beckwith’s questioning – when she hadn’t bothered to bathe or even get out of her hotel bed. Harvey Jordan had been kind. At no time had his attitude towards her been that of a predatory seducer. She’d been intrigued by his invitation to what emerged to be the prison in which the man in the iron mask had been held, never for a moment considering the possibility of his making a sexual advance. Which he didn’t. Feeling as she did because of her personal circumstances – the circumstances of being betrayed and abandoned – she had been deeply moved at seeing the cell in which someone had been shut off from the world, as she at that moment felt herself to have been.

‘What happened after you disembarked from the catamaran back in Cannes, to return to the hotel at which you were both staying?’ asked Beckwith.

Looking directly at the man, her voice even and clear, Alyce said, ‘Harvey asked if I wanted to have dinner. I told him no, that I was tired after being at sea all day and that I wanted to go to bed. But not alone.’

‘Had Harvey Jordan made any sort of sexual approach, any sexual advances, prior to your telling him that?’

‘No, none whatsoever.’

‘So the approach came from you, without any encouragement or pressure from him?’

‘Yes. Although when I said it I didn’t think of it – imagine it – as a sexual approach. I’d been too long alone, like the poor man who’d spent his life in jail for an offence that has never been positively known. I just didn’t want to be alone that night.’

‘But that night you and Harvey Jordan made love?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you a willing partner to the lovemaking?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did Harvey Jordan force himself upon you?’

‘Absolutely not! I had only ever known one man, sexually, before Harvey, who was the most gentle, considerate man I could ever have imagined. Sex with my husband had been close to rape. Sex with Harvey was what I’d always imagined love to be, but never known.’

The reactions stirred through the court. From the Appleton table there was anger from the man himself, but a smile of satisfaction from Bartle. Beckwith irritably tapped his finger against his leg.

Quickly Beckwith said, ‘Did you imagine yourself – believe yourself – falling in love with Harvey Jordan?’

‘Of course not! Neither of us, from that night until I left to return here, to this divorce, had any illusions or fantasies about what was happening. We were having an affair, for my part a wonderful affair. But it ended with my flight taking off from Nice.’

‘You did not intend – plan – ever to see him again?’

‘Never.’

‘What was your reaction at learning that Harvey Jordan had been cited as a co- respondent in this divorce? And that a damages claim for criminal conversations had been filed against him?’

‘Great distress. I do not deny the affair in France. But according to my understanding of the damages accusation Harvey Jordan is not in any way responsible for me divorcing my husband. By the time I met Harvey Jordan there was not the slightest affection remaining to alienate me from my husband. There hadn’t been, for a very long time.’

As he sat, Beckwith leaned close to Jordan and said, ‘Better than I’d hoped.’