Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

“I see,” said Hall, pausing for a moment. He was thinking, tapping his spectacles on the brief in front of him. At length he raised his head. “But at least you have admitted I was right about one thing, about the temperature of the passion in Kihara.” He nodded and remained standing for a few moments, so that the whole court could dwell on his last sentence.

Then he looked at the judge. “Thank you, Your Honor, that’s all,” he said softly, and sat down.

Tudor scribbled for a while, his writing once again the only sound in the room. Then he raised his head. “Do you wish to reexamine, Sir Maxwell?”

“Just one question, Your Honor,” said Sandys, getting to his feet.

“Dr. Nelson, you said you didn’t see Ndekei carrying a weapon. Could you see his hands, were they empty?”

“No … I mean no, I couldn’t see his hands. There was so little light that if he had been carrying a machete, for example, there was not enough light for the blade to catch it, nothing to make it shine.”

“Thank you,” said Sandys. “You may stand down now.”

He waited while Natalie left the witness box. The usher led her to the bench where Jack and her father and the others were sitting. Jack mouthed “Well done” and her father gave her the thumbs up. But she looked away. She had felt half naked in the witness box.

Sandys had turned and was watching as she sat down. Then he faced the judge again. “That completes the case for the prosecution, Your Honor.”

Tudor looked at the clock. It was 12:20.

“Mr. Hall?”

Hilary Hall rose and gathered up his gown in his hands. “Your honor, at this stage I would like to enter a plea that in this alleged crime there is no case to answer, all the evidence is circumstantial, and in view of that the charges against my client be dismissed.”

Tudor took off his own glasses. “Can you make your argument by lunchtime?”

“I think I can, yes.”

The judge nodded. “Then proceed.”

Hall drank some water and put on his spectacles. He held some notes but didn’t consult them. “It’s really very simple, Your Honor, and as an experienced trial judge you will be familiar, more than familiar, with the arguments I am going to employ.” He cleared his throat. “All the evidence in this case is circumstantial, there is nothing that directly links my client to this crime. I will go through the planks of the prosecution’s case one by one.”

He leaned on the desk lid in front of him. “Although the piece of Ndekei’s apron that was found on the thorn hedge near the victim’s tent was discovered the morning after the crime had been committed, that does not mean that it was left there during the preceding night. He worked in the camp after all, and had done for months, moving around, driving Land Rovers as well as cooking. It could have been left there well before the crime occurred and no one noticed—it is a small piece of cloth. The same argument applies to the footprint of the Wellington boot found outside Dr. Sutton’s tent. There was no blood on it and it too could have been made at any point in the days before the crime. One might say that this is more likely than not because only one footprint was found, others having been destroyed in the days preceding. Whoever wore that boot was outside Dr. Sutton’s tent, yes, but not necessarily on the night in question. And the imprint, though undoubtedly of Ndekei’s boot, has not been shown incontrovertibly to have been made by him.

“The picture is further confused by the Wellington boot that was found being played with by some monkeys. While it is unorthodox that no one would come to court to say where, exactly, this boot was found, we do accept the prosecution argument that the material fact is that it was Ndekei’s boot and had blood on it of the same group as Professor Sutton’s. But this only confuses matters, because the boot found with blood on it was the same foot as the boot whose print was found outside Professor Sutton’s tent without blood. Is that not more than a little odd?”

Hall shuffled more papers, drank more water.

The judge looked up at the clock.

“I come now to Dr. Nelson’s evidence. As she herself said, more than once, she never saw Mutevu Ndekei’s features that night. She inferred it was him because of what happened later, just as she inferred he was headed for Richard Sutton’s tent because of what happened subsequently, and because of the clothes he was wearing and the way he moved, the characteristic way that he ‘shuffled,’ as she put it. At the time, she thought he was headed for an assignation with a woman, possibly in the empty tent at the end of the row. But of course that figure could have been anyone, it could have been someone looking like Ndekei, or someone pretending to be Ndekei, knowing that it was Dr. Nelson’s habit to sit up late, long after everyone else had gone to sleep, drinking whiskey and smoking a cigarette.

“I would remind the court, Your Honor, that no murder weapon has been found, and that Ndekei’s boots may have been stolen days before the crucial incident and deliberately used to frame him, as the jargon goes, to cast suspicion wrongfully upon him. We know that they had been stolen—by baboons, maybe—before and maybe that gave someone, some human, the idea to steal them again. I would remind Your Honor that though the blood found on the Wellington boot being played with by some monkeys was the same group as Professor Sutton’s, that group—O—is shared by between forty and fifty percent of the population. That narrows things down statistically but it hardly proves anything forensically.”

He turned towards Maxwell Sandys.

“Much has been made of the fact that Professor Sutton, together with Professor North, broke into a local Maasai burial ground and stole some ancestral bones, and that Sutton was killed in an act of revenge. But here again such reasoning is pure speculation, it is all circumstantial. Not a single shred of hard evidence has been produced in this court to support such speculation. There are no witnesses to the crime, there is no confession the prosecution can produce, I repeat that no murder weapon has been found, no Maasai spear, no machete, for example, which might offer some support for these wild allegations.”

He gathered up his gown again. “As Your Honor well knows, my client—as defendant—does not have to produce rival theories about who committed this crime in order to demonstrate his innocence, but I cannot help but remark that the prosecution do not seem to have considered one very plausible alternative to their case against Mutevu Ndekei.”

He looked around the court.

“Which is that the excavation run by Dr. Eleanor Deacon was and is a close-knit group of highly ambitious, very clever people, where rivalries were and are intense, where competition is the order of the day, and, it seems, where personal emotions got mixed up with professional responsibilities. That seems to me a perfect forcing ground for an explanation for this sort of murder.”

He looked about him. “As the court has seen, Dr. Nelson is a very attractive woman, very attractive indeed, and in the close confines of the excavation she was surrounded by several young men.”

He let a silence elapse before turning to the judge and saying, “But that too, Your Honor, is speculation—”

“Yes, yes it is,” interjected the judge. “And forgive me, Mr. Hall, but I wish to be clear about this. Are you suggesting that someone else impersonated Mr. Ndekei, or that Dr. Nelson made up her story to protect a lover who was jealous of Professor Sutton? I am confused.”

What must Richard Sutton Senior make of all this, Natalie wondered.

“I am obliged to Your Honor,” said Hall. “But I respectfully remind the court that we in the defense are not required to make the prosecution’s case for it. I merely point out some avenues of inquiry the prosecution appear to have overlooked or ignored.”