John Marsden - Circle of fight

I posted that on the way to court, but I didn’t know then that we’d be able to go home the same day. Turning up for the last day of the trial was Gavin’s idea. I wouldn’t have come back for any money, now we were no longer needed. When we’d been waiting to be called as witnesses we weren’t allowed to watch any of the case. I think that’s because they don’t want you to hear what the other witnesses are saying in case you change your story. Bit like Mrs Gilchrist when she’s interrogating students to find out who really did assassinate the lollipop lady or rock the roof or get a preview of the questions for the science test.

It was better as a spectator though. The pressure was off us. I soon realised that things were moving faster than I’d expected and the jury was going to be sent on their way pretty soon to decide the result. Mr Manning hadn’t been charged with murder, the murder of Gavin’s mum, because the police said there wasn’t enough evidence. Well, the police said there was enough but the prosecutor apparently disagreed and told the cops they couldn’t run that one, so it was only knifing us that put him in the dock.

I thought that was outrageous, but of course the only evidence about the murder was from Gavin. They’d found a couple of old neighbours who said Mr Manning was violent and a liar, and no-one had seen Gavin’s mum once the war started, but there was nothing else that could pin the actual murder on him. They never found her body. And I could see that Gavin in a witness box wouldn’t necessarily be enough to persuade a court to lock up an adult and throw away the key.

Anyway, this being the last day of the case there were no more witnesses. It was just the lawyers trying to convince the jury. We got there late and it turned out that the prosecutor, whose name was Mr Lucas, had already had his turn and Mr Manning’s lawyer was on the job. He looked like a really nice man, like anyone’s grandfather, kind face, glasses, friendly voice, but I didn’t trust him after the questions he’d asked us. The stuff he told the jury was outrageous, about how Gavin and I had pestered and harassed ‘the defendant’, how we’d exaggerated the whole thing; but as he went on, something told me that his heart wasn’t really in it, and I started to see him differently. Gradually the mask slipped and I saw him as an old guy who had this nasty client who he probably knew was guilty, but he’d been given the job of going through the motions and making sure he seemed to be getting a fair trial. At the end of the day it was pretty hard to argue with the fact that Gavin and I had both been taken to hospital in an ambulance, and it was because we’d been knifed by Mr Manning.

The judge made a speech to the jury, mostly about how in murder you can be convicted if you set out to give someone a severe bashing and they die of it even if you didn’t want that to happen. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you can be convicted of attempted murder if you set out to give someone a severe bashing and they don’t die of it. Or in our case a severe knifing. She said the jury had to be sure that Mr Manning meant to inflict grievous bodily harm on us, and she added, ‘You may well be of the opinion on the evidence you have heard that he did,’ which seemed to me like she was telling them what to think. But even if they agreed with her on that one, by itself it still wasn’t enough. They also had to be sure that he was reckless. ‘You can make up your own minds as to that,’ she said, but it seemed pretty obvious that she’d come to her own conclusion on that as well.

Then she went into a bit of a spiel about ‘present facts’ and ‘future facts’. ‘If someone in a country town batters another person with an axe handle and a bystander calls the town’s only ambulance and the ambulance is involved in an accident on the way to the scene and never arrives, and the victim subsequently dies, then the attacker is guilty of murder. But if the same circumstances occur, and the victim does not die, the attacker is not guilty of attempted murder. He is not expected to know future facts, only present ones. If a person points a gun at the head of another, knowing the gun probably has rounds in one or two of its chambers, and he pulls the trigger and the gun goes off, wounding the victim but not killing him, then the person is guilty of attempted murder, because he had present knowledge and failed to act appropriately in relation to it.’

So apparently if Mr Manning knew that plunging a knife into us was very dangerous, the jury could convict him of attempted murder. I thought the judge was making the whole thing a lot more complicated than it needed to be. But what would I know? And maybe I didn’t understand it properly anyway. I actually thought it was quite interesting and I did listen more attentively than I do at school.

The jury shuffled out, looking a bit embarrassed at all the attention, and I talked to the police prosecutor for a while, who was a really nice guy, and then Gavin and I went for a hot drink. Chocolate in his case, flat white in mine. Mr Lucas said to hang around as he didn’t think the jury would take long, although then he added, ‘I’m usually wrong.’

After an hour nothing had happened so he put us in an office where Gavin could play on a computer and I could read my book, which was called Sing, and Don’t Cry, and which I liked because it took me far away from Stratton and Wirrawee into the exotic world of Mexico, where guys sit in the back of a ute and serenade their women at midnight, playing guitars and singing achingly and lovingly and warmly and mournfully… it made Jeremy look pretty boring.

Then suddenly Mr Lucas put his head in the door and said, ‘They’re coming back’, and Gavin and I joined the little rush of people heading into courtroom number 4.

After that it was pretty much like on TV. The jury came in, and none of them looked at Mr Manning, except one woman who gave him a quick nervous glance, and I knew then that they’d gone for guilty.

They handed a bit of paper to the judge and she read it and said, ‘Is this the verdict of you all?’ and they all nodded, and she then announced that they’d found him guilty of attempted murder and that she agreed with them. She leant forwards and said to him, ‘Mr Manning, you are basically a complete asshole,’ perhaps not quite in those words, but she did let him have a pretty good blast. She said he was a coward and a person of no conscience and no integrity, who was quite prepared to kill children if they got in the way, and who showed absolutely no remorse. She then hit him with ten years on the hard rock pile and they took him away, Gavin and I waiting till he was out of sight before we highfived each other. I hoped they put him in a cell with Sideshow Bob, or with a couple of six foot four, two hundred kilo bikies who found him irresistibly attractive. I hoped they left him there to rot.

For us, it was back to the farm, back to school, and back, I thought, to life as normal.

There are no prizes for guessing what I did when I realised Gavin was missing. Went a little crazy, ran around in circles for a few moments with my hands to my head like I was trying to keep my brains from exploding with all the different thoughts rioting in there, then headed for the phone. I called Homer’s place first and when Homer answered I screeched, ‘Someone’s taken Gavin,’ then hung up. I rang Lee and got Pang, so I asked her to find Lee and have him call me straightaway. I didn’t want to upset Pang. I wasn’t very rational, because I then rang Fi’s boarding house at her school and went through that whole annoying thing of having the phone ring for ages and then a girl answers but she’s kind of lazy and she says, ‘I don’t know where she is,’ and when you say, ‘Oh will you please find her, please, please, it’s really important,’ she says, ‘Oh all right, she might be in the TV Room, I’ll go and have a look there.’ And you wait and wait and you can hear people laughing and talking as they pass the phone and you think you’ve been forgotten until the girl comes back and says, ‘Sorry, can’t find her,’ and you say, ‘Well can you please tell her Ellie rang, and it’s totally important and urgent,’ and you hang up wondering if the message will ever get through.