Brian Freemantle - The Namedropper

‘Arrogance of the rich and spoiled,’ echoed Jordan.

Beckwith shook his head. ‘There’s got to be more than that. So far Appleton doesn’t have a damned defence. ‘

‘On the subject of defence, let’s not forget Pullinger’s lecture about rebuttal of criminal conversation, as far as you two are concerned,’ warned Reid. ‘The law, the way Pullinger interpreted it, comes down pretty heavily against any logical defence.’

‘You can’t be serious!’ argued Beckwith.

‘Logically you looked to be home free at the dismissal hearing. But Pullinger didn’t find for you,’ reminded Reid.

‘We discussed it,’ reminded Beckwith, in turn. ‘Pullinger’s an ornery old bastard. Look how far everything has turned in our favour since then. Harvey can’t possibly be found guilty.’

‘No one ever said the law was fair, any more than life.’

‘Can we take pause here!’ urged Jordan. ‘The jury can’t find against me, not on what they’ve heard.’

‘I don’t think they should, nor am I saying that they will,’ insisted Reid. ‘But Pullinger is an ornery old bastard and he’s still got to sum up and guide the jury. I wouldn’t like to place bets, not yet.’

‘He finds against us I’ll appeal,’ insisted Beckwith.

‘How many more months – and how much more money – could that cost?’ demanded Jordan, genuinely shocked. Confronting Reid’s caution, Jordan acknowledged that although he’d begun raiding Appleton’s firm to build up the necessary insurance against having a financial penalty imposed against him, he had increasingly begun to regard the money as the fitting punishment against Appleton for the inconvenience and upheaval Appleton had caused him; precisely, in fact, the sort of compensation people sought from insurance.

‘Anything up to a year to get a hearing before the North Carolina Supreme Court,’ answered Beckwith, to Reid’s vaguely nodded agreement. ‘Costs would be open-ended. If we won, which we would, minimal; the majority would go against Appleton.’

‘And if we failed, double whatever I’d have to pay now, plus whatever is awarded against me in the first place!’ challenged Jordan.

‘I said we’d win,’ repeated Beckwith. ‘And you wouldn’t have to hang around here, while you waited. You could go back to England and only need to return here when we got a hearing date.’

He wouldn’t come back, was Jordan’s first thought. And then just as quickly realized that he wouldn’t have a choice. There was still the danger of limited publicity and of his identification at the conclusion of this case. That publicity – and identification – would be far greater if he failed to return for an appeal, with the inevitable photographs and the even more inevitable recognition. This would blow open the identity thefts he’d carried out in America in the past, and almost certainly at the New York banks in which he had opened the accounts in Appleton’s name and with whom he would be publicly linked in an appeals procedure. And during Beckwith’s estimated year, the attack he’d mounted against Appleton and his firm would be very actively under investigation. ‘What can we do?’

Beckwith actually laughed at the facile question. ‘Go on expecting to win, of course! That’s why we’re all here. There’s nothing more we can do, unless you’ve got a better idea.’

Jordan didn’t have, although he spent much of a disturbed night trying to think of one: to think of anything. He finally decided, ignoring the pun, that Alyce’s lawyer was playing devil’s advocate to their overconfidence, which he’d admitted to himself the moment Reid had spoken. It would be wrong to regard it as anything more than a cautious touch on the brake. Jordan still wished Reid hadn’t created the doubt and that Beckwith hadn’t been so flippant dismissing it.

Despite trying to dismiss it himself, the doubt remained lodged in Jordan’s mind as he scrolled through his illicit web hideaways. There was nothing more on the Chicago query, nor any additional questions on any of his other raids. Prices remained virtually static on copper and Jordan limited himself entirely to that one metal for the day’s pilfering.

On their way to court Jordan said, ‘I didn’t like Bob’s doom and gloom last night.’

‘Forget it,’ Beckwith continued to dismiss. ‘Bob’s a pessimist. That’s why he always dresses in black, like a funeral director.’

Funeral director to Dodge City cowboy, thought Jordan.

He was surprised that Dr Harding, who knew it was Alyce’s day on the witness stand, wasn’t in court when they entered. She was already at her table, nodding to whatever Reid was saying to her. She looked up, through her thick-rimmed, and now shaded, glasses, as Jordan and Beckwith took their places, but didn’t give any response to Jordan’s nodded smile. She was again in funereal black, matching the pessimistic Reid, without any noticeable make-up, and as she stood to take the oath, her left hand on the rail of the witness stand, Jordan was further surprised to see that for the first time since that initial day in France she was wearing her wedding and engagement rings.

‘Where would you rather be today than here in a divorce court?’ opened Reid, creating an immediate stir throughout the court.

‘Practically anywhere,’ replied Alyce, at once. ‘Most of all in my own home, with a family of my own.’

‘Including children?’

‘Of course including children. A family isn’t a family without children. How can it be?’

‘Children which, until you contracted a sexual disease, you were – according to your gynaecologist who testified yesterday – medically capable of bearing?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you feel now at having less than a ten percent chance of bearing a child full term?’

Alyce didn’t reply at once, bringing to her face a handkerchief Jordan hadn’t been aware of her taking from her purse ‘It might not properly explain how I feel… what I mean… but I feel empty. Inadequate. Not a proper woman.’

‘And now never able to be a proper woman?’

‘He’s pushing it right to the edge of the cliff,’ Beckwith whispered to Jordan, who saw that so far there were no exclamation marks of approval on his lawyer’s legal pad.

‘I’m no longer a proper woman.’

‘How important to you was having children?’

‘It was everything to me, beyond just being a woman. My marriage, as the court has already heard, was the bringing together of two of the oldest families in America. I have no brothers, no sisters. There is no direct bloodline. It will die, with my death. I believe that is important, a loss. Not to other people, I wouldn’t think. But to me it is.’

‘Of course,’ said Reid. ‘Your marriage wasn’t happy before your infection, was it?’

‘No;

‘How – what – did you feel about that?’

Alyce again hesitated. ‘Inadequate, like before. Which again I guess other people, other women, might not understand.’

‘Didn’t you think of divorce then?’

‘Of course I thought about it: how could I not have done? But I never actually considered it as an option. I hoped the separation might help.’

‘Help what?’ seized Reid.

‘My husband.’

‘In what way?’

‘Help my husband to love me.’

Jordan saw Beckwith was at his legal pad at last, although he was assembling question marks, not approving exclamations.

‘If you didn’t believe he loved you, why did you marry him in the first place?’

‘I believed he did, when we got married. It wasn’t until afterwards that I thought differently.’

‘Why?’

‘I very quickly came to believe that what I thought had been love was really pride on his part: pride at me, a Bellamy, being his wife. It was as if I was a trophy. He kept cuttings, in a special book, when we appeared in social columns or magazines. He agreed to a television programme being made about us.’