Blood Royal (6 page)

It was strange that she was hired by the princess when the woman already had attorneys working for her—but that was just one card in a crazy deck. The fact that the princess reached across the Atlantic to hire an American lawyer when Britain had outstanding attorneys, and had chosen one who had some notoriety in her own right, were also wild cards.

“Our office is taking care of the arrangements to have you appear
ad hoc
in the matter,” Hall said.

Ad hoc
was a legal principle that gave judges the right to permit attorneys not licensed in their jurisdiction to appear before their courts. Thus a California judge could permit a New York attorney to practice before a California court for the limited purpose of representing a particular client. Usually, the out-of-state lawyer had to associate a local attorney in the matter. In this case, an attorney licensed in one country was requesting the right to appear as trial counsel in an entirely different country.

“It’s a bit unusual,” Hall said, “but since you are an attorney from a common-law country with similar procedures and rules of evidence, we believe no serious obstacle will be raised. The fact that Anthony Trent will be lead counsel will clinch it, of course.”

Marlowe let the “lead counsel” remark pass. She intended to cooperate fully with Trent and the princess’s other British lawyers, but she had made it clear in her brief conversation with the princess that she would only come aboard if she had the last say on the defense. Marlowe was not a team player. Teams were committees and her feeling about committees was summed up by someone’s observation that a giraffe was a horse designed by a committee—or was it a camel?

She would cooperate with Hall, Trent, and whoever, that was a necessity, but when it came down to making a major decision on defense strategy, she would follow her own lead.

A newspaper from a stack that sat on the bottom shelf of a liquor cabinet wiggled out enough from the motion of the car so she could read the screaming headline:
NEW GUNFIGHTER IN TOWN.

The subheading was
Slow Trigger James Rides In.

“Slow Trigger” referred to the fact that she had convinced juries that the reasonable provocation needed for a heat-of-passion defense could be abuse stretched out over a period of years rather than a sudden incident.

Hall shoved the paper back inside. “Sorry, but we really need to keep up on all the news, don’t we?”

“I was just thinking of the way trial lawyers in California would harangue the other side’s expert witnesses. They call them hired gunfighters who have come to town just to viciously destroy the poor victim’s case. Then there would be snide inferences that the expert was a member of the world’s oldest profession.”

Hall raised his eyebrows. “Very undignified, isn’t it?”

“Very effective. If you want to leave a negative impression in the mind of jurors, branding someone as a hired killer is rather a good way to do it.”

*   *   *

M
ARLOWE
J
AMES SURPRISED
H
ALL
—her appearance, voice, and body language were not what he had been expecting. He had had very definite ideas about what the American lawyer would look like. Around Trent’s chambers it was assumed that she would be a “ball-breaker,” a woman who “castrates the men around her to make sure that they pay for ten thousand years of feminine servitude,” Norton, a junior clerk, had hypothesized.

Hall didn’t think in those terms, but the TV shows and movies cranked out by Hollywood featuring women lawyers had made him expect her to be excessively aggressive and assertive. At the least, he thought she would be so brisk and efficient, one would have the inclination to stand up and salute when she walked into the room, her stride quick and sure, the steel of her spiked heels ricocheting off marble walls. One had to consider who she was, after all. You wouldn’t expect a woman who had been tried for murdering her own husband to act like an ordinary person.

It was an erroneous assumption, he knew, because the husband-killer Marlowe came to represent was not anything like that—the princess was known to be charming rather than assertive.

Still, Marlowe James was a lawyer in the tough big-city American arenas and one would expect her to be, well, different from the refined princess.

For certain, she wasn’t the proverbial ball-breaker, he thought. Not that there was anything soft about her. She left no doubt that she was a woman who knew her own mind, but she hadn’t displayed a tendency to flex her muscles with him. Rather, she came across as very professional, very businesslike, though perhaps a bit more of a mover and shaker than he personally felt comfortable with. She had a bit of that annoying bluntness Americans tend to display, but none of her dynamic traits made him feel any less that she was
woman.
He had become overly sensitive about female lawyers after he had been verbally chastised by one, a dynamic London barrister who offended his sense of dignity by referring to his private body parts, calling him a “prick” outside the courtroom during an argument over a case.

Another factor in the good impression Marlowe made upon him was the fact she was appropriately dressed for a flight. He hated men and women who flew across oceans and continents in jogging outfits. He never boarded a plane dressed less formally than how he would show up at the office, and that meant a proper suit and tie. Marlowe was wearing a pants suit with comfortable shoes. Rather wisely she had a very small purse because she also carried a briefcase. He had seen female lawyers whose purses were almost as big as their briefcases and he wondered what they carried in them. He was not married and there were parts of womanhood that were as inexplicable as Stonehenge to him.

Good tone to her body, he thought, not buffed like a telly star Trent represented, but a woman who kept her body in decent shape. He personally hated all forms of exercise, especially anything that would require him to go outdoors, and he kept his body trim by pushing away from the dinner table, grateful that his mother had raised him to stop eating before he got that full feeling.

There was a tiny scar on her lip, on the right side, giving her lip a little bit of an unbalanced look, and he couldn’t keep his eyes off of it. He wondered if she had gotten it from her husband—ex-husband, that is, very
ex
indeed, Hall thought.

It puzzled him and everyone else in the office as to why the princess had gone “outside,”
far outside,
to hire an American woman to help defend her.

What was in the princess’s mind?

For that matter, what could have driven her to kill the Prince of Wales in front of millions of home viewers?

Perhaps the royal lady was as bonkers as many people claimed.

The limo carrying Marlowe and Philip Hall took them to Legal London, the area between the Thames and Holborn where the main courthouses and most attorney offices were located. Hall explained on the way that Trent’s “chambers” were in the oldest and most famous of the “inns of court,” those privileged old establishments where barristers gathered to share office space. The limo negotiated its way through a throng of reporters and into a private driveway. During the short walk from the car to the office building, bewigged, robed barristers going to and from court stared at her. She realized that she was on her way to being one of the most famous women on the planet.

She exchanged a smile with a female barrister. “They wear wigs and robes, too,” she told Hall.

“Really?” he said.

The hardly audible, dry reply was the closest thing she’d experienced so far in terms of him having a sense of humor.

Anthony Trent’s offices were mahogany and brass from another era, a time when Britannia had half the world under the Union Jack, and the cream from its colonies found its way to the table of the “Establishment,” that small core of wealthy British who owned just about everything in the country.

The office furniture was aged, heavy hardwood, cut in colonial jungles during the time Britannica ruled the sea and the sun never set on the British Empire. The bookcases were filled with elderly volumes that conveyed a sense that they were both old and authoritative. It was hard for Marlowe to imagine any modern judge overturning the precedents in legal texts as venerable as those she saw in Trent’s office.

Passing by furnishings that took her to a grander age, she was disappointed to see through an open door a modern computer bay with a data-entry clerk fast at work. Scribes with quills and ink pots would have fit the ambience more.

Hall led her to a conference room. Several things struck her the moment she walked in—the scent of fine cigar smoke, a fainter wisp of brandy, a mahogany conference table solid enough to be used as the bowsprit on a battleship … and six people who were careful to keep their disapproval behind fragile masks of civility.

Five men and a woman were seated at the table. The men stood as she entered the room. Hall started the introductions.

“Marlowe James, may I present Anthony Trent.”

Trent had thick, combed-back black hair that came almost to a point at the front of his head, heavy eyebrows, and a patrician nose. His suit was as conservative as Philip Hall’s, but the wool was of the finest, a smooth, almost slick midnight blue with a barely visible black stripe. His shirt was starched white, French-cuffed with gold links, and his tie was blue-and-gold-striped, displaying the colors of one of the snooty British public schools.

Marlowe had expected a Type A personality, the character trait almost universally expected of trial attorneys, but her first impression was of a man who commanded by force of personality rather than snapping jaws. Her second impression was that subtle arrogance that sometimes comes along with wealth and success. Trent was commander in chief in his chambers—his countenance was appraising, his smile and handshake were professional but lacked warmth.

“May I present Lord Finfall.”

Lord Finfall was a white-haired elder statesman in a medium-gray heavy worsted suit that was woven to last the ages.

Trent said, “His Lordship is the Honorable Lord Chief Justice, retired. He brings to our team a half a century of judicial experience and leadership.”

Lord Finfall shook hands, giving a rough heavy paw that Marlowe guessed from the calluses she felt had seen some gardening recently. He appeared to be in his seventies. His jowls had begun to droop and liver spots blotted the delicate pale skin on his hands and face. She assumed that a Lord Chief Justice was something akin to Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. And that the “Lord” part made him a peer of the realm. She wondered if he had been brought out of retirement to throw his great prestige behind the defense. He was definitely Yesterday, while Trent was Today.

“Helen Catters. Helen is a barrister by profession and is on the Board of the London Family Council. She brings to us her experience and reputation in handling family matters in court, a very important skill, since our client, the princess, is well known for her concern for the two princes.”

“A pleasure,” Helen Catters said. Catters did not stand up, nor offer to shake hands.

A divorce lawyer with a social worker background, Marlowe guessed, or something akin to it. Catters looked to be in her early fifties, Marlowe thought, a rather plain, large-busted, thick-waisted woman with dark brown hair who probably tended to blend into the background at social events except when her opinion was solicited on family matters.

Dr. Duncan McMann introduced himself with a Scottish growl. McMann was a big man, bull-necked, with a flat, broad face and sandy hair that was already turning gray even though Marlowe guessed his age at around the same as hers.

“Dr. McMann is a psychiatrist and teaches at the University of Edinburgh,” Trent said. “He is one of the most distinguished forensic psychiatrists in Britain. He is also able to give us the northern view on the matter.”

Marlowe nodded, trying to look suitably impressed. She instantly evaluated him in terms of his jury appeal as an expert witness and didn’t like his demeanor—he had that casual arrogance of doctors who let you know that someday you’ll be dying and will need them. “Northern view,” she guessed, was the Scottish view, a not-too-difficult presumption since Scotland was to the north.

Lawrence Dewey introduced himself and shook hands.

“Larry is with Bartlett’s, the best public relations firm in Britain,” Trent said. “He’s also a solicitor, and has taken leave to join our team.”

Dewey appeared to be in his fifties, a slender man with narrow, pinched features, creating the impression of an inquisitive bird.

“And this distinguished gentleman is Sir Fredic Nelson. Sir Fredic is the princess’s solicitor and he is the instructing solicitor in this matter.”

Sir Fredic looked very much the wealthy, successful corporate attorney Marlowe took him to be. Corporate attorneys worked on the business side of law, representing major entities, battles of titans against each other and battles of titans against little people. It was not an area of law practice she, as a street lawyer, could relate to.

Anthony Trent said, “And of course you have already met Philip, who will be assisting me in the trial. Won’t you have a seat, Miss James?”

Trent showed her to a seat at the opposite head of the table from where he had been seated.

“Please call me Marlowe.”

“Of course. We are all on a first-name basis here,” Trent said. “And with Lord Finfall and Sir Fredic, we use
both
their first names.”

There was a polite laugh around the table. Trent took his seat at the end of the table opposite Marlowe and Philip took a seat at his right side.

There was a silence as the seven people stared at her.

She smiled and raised her eyebrows. “I take it I have the hot seat.”

There were polite chuckles from Dewey and McMann. Helen Catters coughed with what was probably a bit of a laugh.