The Crime of Huey Dunstan (17 page)

Another pause.

How to describe that pause? That frisson of excitement. I waited. The jury waited. Everyone waited.

“I’d go along with that. Yes. It does look a bit like me.”

I heard Lawrence swallow.

“Thank you,” he said.

He went on after a moment: “And this one?

“It’s the photograph No. 13 in the Exhibit, for the benefit of the jury.” Lawrence explained to the judge. “The photograph shows the interior of the cottage where the man died. Would you say, Mr Constable, that it bears any similarity to—I am trying, Your Honour, not to put words into the witness’s mouth. Any similarity—?”

“He means the caravan,” the judge interposed.

O thank you
, I almost shouted.
O wise and temperate judge!

The witness said, “Yes, it does look a bit like the inside of my caravan.”

Lawrence was silent. I bit my lip and willed him to say nothing more. Finally he said in a quiet voice, “No, don’t go. My learned colleague may wish to question you.”

“No questions,” the prosecutor said.

“You may step down,” the judge said. Somebody screamed.

It was reported afterwards that a scream “like a mandrake cry” went through the courtroom. But I don’t remember any scream. There was a swing door behind the witness stand that caused a bump in the room as the witnesses came and went. I had heard a bump when the witness Glen came in, but not when he exited. For some reason, having entered by the swing door, he decided to walk out through the body of the court. I did not know this. The breathing behind me had stopped. All I heard was a low growl. The growl changed to a throttled sound, sharp and grating like a fingernail being drawn across a pane of glass. A noise of feet running past. Then a scuffle.

I heard the judge say, “Come on, Huey. You’re no longer seven years old.”

That was all. It was over in a matter of seconds.

I know now that as the witness left the stand and walked out, passing alongside the dock, Huey looked up at his abuser and suddenly flung himself forward. He tried to vault the rail. He would have succeeded if two guards had not restrained him. The official transcript says, “demonstration & obscenities as witness exited”, but the newspaper headline next day was more suggestive: MURDER ACCUSED LUNGES AT ALLEGED ABUSER.

That night as I lay in bed at the hotel I reflected on the day’s events and tried to fit them into some sort of pattern. Undoubtedly with the witness Glen, Lawrence had scored.
The man had admitted everything, even to the facial resemblance when Lawrence showed him the snapshot. The resemblance was uncanny. I could tell from the gulp in Lawrence’s voice when he said thank you.

Afterwards Lawrence was surprised, I think, that the man had kept his bond. Surprised that such a miserable specimen who was risking a long jail sentence should have been capable of what in retrospect was almost an act of magnanimity. It was as if for Lawrence the sordidness and pathos of it all had not until then reached him.

“But how did you persuade him?” was what I wanted to know from Lawrence. “
How did you get him here?
”

“I saw the police video. It was compelling. So I summonsed him, had him remanded in custody and I put it to him. Don’t know if I did the right thing or if it was the honourable thing but I did it. Got him up from the cells and I put it to him. ‘You’re our witness now,’ I said. Said if he repeated his story in court exactly as he’d told it on the police video, the lot, I would advise Mr Dunstan not to file a victim impact report or press charges when it came to sentencing. That was the deal.”

I didn’t ask Lawrence if he had told the police what he had done. The ethics of it did not concern me. What did concern me was Huey’s reaction—the lunge, instinct with violence and suppressed ferocity. It must have taken everyone by surprise, except the judge.

The judge? “
Come on, Huey. You’re no longer seven years old
.” Clearly he had worked it out for himself.

But the jurors? How would they see it? Try as I might, I could not subdue what kept surfacing as I lay in bed trying to sleep: the echo of another judge’s words. The first trial judge who had described Huey’s suppressed feelings as a power and a force, “
pent up even in the court here
”. His words to the jury at Huey’s first trial seemed to have acquired a prophetic ring.

I was perspiring freely. I fell asleep in the early hours, the matter unresolved in my mind.

IT REMAINED UNRESOLVED for two more days, as did the question of the street lamp. On Thursday, the penultimate day, I buttonholed Lawrence during the morning adjournment and asked him about the lamp. Had he done anything? “Oh yes. It’s broken all right,” he said. He had sent an electrician to climb up and look.

“But how do you know when it was broken?”

“I shouldn’t worry about it,” he said airily.

But I did worry about it. I found Lawrence’s whole attitude in those last days worrying. That Thursday, at the end of the day, the opposition’s medical expert came up to me and introduced himself, saying: “I think you got it right.” Meaning post-traumatic stress disorder, our diagnosis. This man was the Crown’s silent witness, the Australian
psychiatrist Lawrence suspected had been planted to intimidate him. The psychiatrist passed on this titbit to me almost casually. I was delighted. But when I in turn passed it on to Lawrence, he was furious. He said, “Then why in god’s name didn’t he say that before! He should have come over to us.”

That was one thing. I had been badgering Lawrence for days to let me talk to Huey. He himself had been back and forth to the family and down to the holding cell at every opportunity, talking to Huey, encouraging him to keep up his computer course on tree culture so he could make use of it, “when you get out”. I thought this sort of optimism false and potentially harmful. On the one occasion I did persuade him to let me down to the cell (it was also on the penultimate day) I found Huey listless, and in a poor way.

“I still wish I hadn’t told you,” he said to me.

“Don’t be silly,” I said.

“All the trouble I’ve caused.”

I told him to stop talking like that or I would get cross. “Come on, Huey. You should be smiling.”

He was silent, hitting his knuckles together, and I guessed that the tic, the nervous twitch over one eye, had returned. Suddenly he said, “I was brought up to tell the truth. It’s all his fault.” Whose fault? I wondered.

“What’s the loneliest word in the dictionary,” Huey said. “Honesty.”

The Crown’s closing address was on Thursday morning, and I am sorry to say I have mislaid it. “Mislaid” is a euphemism. What happened was that when the prosecutor rose to address the jury, he pointedly spoke of Huey not as “the accused” or “Mr Dunstan”, but “this youth”. I was incensed. From then on I subliminally tuned out. A sort of blankness descended. It was remiss of me. But it is no different (perhaps only a sightless person can understand) to the blankness that descended on me once when my daughter Sarah invited me out to dinner on my birthday, and the waiter would not address me. Everything was said to Sarah and I found myself reduced to a cipher, meekly passing on my requests for service through her. For the entire meal I became strangely remote, and it was like that now in the courtroom. I was listless and utterly careless of what the prosecutor was saying to the jury. Even more surprising, when it was the turn of the defence and Lawrence rose to address the jury after lunch, I found myself still careless of my inability to concentrate. I was so indifferent—I knew the arguments so well—that I almost missed the moment he turned the tables on the prosecutor. Lawrence was talking about the street lamp.

“The Crown [Lawrence said] has made much of what it calls my client’s ‘cover-up’. It claims in support of its contention that the crime was planned, that Mr Dunstan deliberately broke the lamp outside the house to hide his tracks. But where is the evidence? The police have told us that they combed the house and surrounds thoroughly,
with painstaking attention to the smallest detail. Can you imagine, if the lamp was indeed broken, that they would not have noticed? Yet they have presented no evidence to show it was broken.”

Yes,
yes
, I thought. Admiring the surgically-planted lie that was not a lie and could not be rebutted (he knew, Lawrence told me later, the police had overlooked it). Quite forgetting that a jury might not see it that way.

I sat through both closing addresses in a kind of stupor and shall not reproduce them here. Lawrence’s opening, I have to say, made me wonder. He began brightly, saying: “Who is on trial here?” But then without warning he suddenly leaped two and a half thousand years back in history to the trial of Orestes in 458 BC. Orestes is the chap who deliberately murdered his mother in revenge for his mother having murdered his father. I know why Lawrence wanted to do this. The
Oresteia
of Aeschylus is the oldest courtroom drama in human history. Lawrence wanted to draw the parallel between Huey and Orestes who was acquitted not because he was innocent, but because he was
not blameworthy
. I thought Lawrence was taking a big risk, going over the jury’s head like this. But perhaps he wanted to impress the judge. Who knows?

I went to bed that night tel ing myself over and over, tomorrow the judge will sum up. Tomorrow the judge will sum up. Whose side will he take? It is a myth that judges are impartial. Take Lord Denning’s treatment of the high-class
pimp Stephen Ward at the time of his inquiry into the Profumo case in England; or Denning’s departure from the bench due to his racist remarks about juries. As the law professor and poet Christopher Silk, my near-contemporary, has written, most judges carry some emotive baggage when they are elevated to the High Court.

I tried to visualise Huey in his cell and instead found myself remembering a medieval woodcut I had once seen illustrating what a condemned man on the eve of his execution was given for supper: crushed beetles and spiders’ entrails. Clearly my emotions were running away with my reason. But there had to be, I kept telling myself, more to this trial than a mere verdict. As I thought this, there flashed into my mind the words of the priest in Kafka’s novel,
The Trial
:

“You are misinterpreting the facts of the case. The verdict is not so suddenly arrived at, the proceedings only gradually merge into the verdict.”

Well I’ll be damned, I thought, and immediately fell into a deep sleep. I awoke on Friday morning feeling bright as a button.

“Your task on the surface is very simple,” I heard the judge say, after he had been summing-up to the jury for the best part of an hour. “You have to decide if the young man before you is guilty of murder, as the Crown claims, or, as the defence maintains, of the lesser charge of manslaughter. The one thing you cannot do,” the judge said almost
casually, “even if you accept that he was no longer in control of his actions, is to declare the accused innocent of manslaughter. That is not allowed in law.”

Even if—?
It was so casual as to be blatant, as if he wanted to remove at a stroke our defence of traumatic stress disorder.

“On any normal balance sheet,” he went on, “you would have to find the accused guilty of murder. He has deliberately killed a man…”

I was still finding it difficult to read the judge. His impartiality until then had been patent. Except once, when he absently referred to Huey by his first name, the judge had barely uttered a word or intruded during the entire proceedings. This was peculiar. In my eighty-odd years, I have formed a view of criminal judges which is possibly unfair but nonetheless true, and that is that they seem to consider the court of state where they sit as their private chamber. I remember a judge who when trying a man who had surprised an intruder—the accused had bailed up the man and impaled him on a pitchfork—took over the role of prosecutor and more or less conducted the Crown’s case from the bench. Yet this judge of ours was not a bit overbearing. He was the opposite.

There is the law and—to state the obvious—there is justice. They are not the same. Good law doesn’t guarantee justice; equally, good justice may result from bad law. The two are often at odds. But what happens if the law
and
justice are both against you—if you are imperilled by
both? This is what happened at Huey’s first trial. Both the law, as misinterpreted or mis-defined by the judge, and the judge also, were against the defence. Now, a second time round, the defence was still hamstrung. Lawrence’s case had opened up an area not defined in law. However he argued it, trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, flashback, the law on provocation remained undeveloped. Effectively it did not exist. The law—or its absence—was still against him. That left the judge.

I pictured a man in spectacles, close to retirement; he wore his glasses hanging from a cord round his neck and when at home sat about in a cardigan shelling peas for dinner. Then again, for all I could see, he might have had short hair chopped off above the ears and been one of those modern specimens who let witnesses burble on while gazing innocently at their PCs on to which they have downloaded the latest computer game. (Huey’s trial, I should have said, was one of the first to admit PCs to the criminal bar.)

“He has deliberately killed a man and he has admitted to deliberately killing this man,” the judge was saying. “But—” It was the “but” that roused me.

A few minutes later:

“Members of the jury, there has been much talk of a cover-up, of a series of wilful actions by the accused at the scene of the crime. In particular you may recall a street lamp that the Crown maintains was deliberately smashed by Mr Dunstan. But—”

There it was again—the forensic “but”, the greedy
conjunction, the hungry worm of legal peroration. There are probably more worms and qualifications in a summing-up from the bench, more buts ifs howevers notwithstandings probablys ontheotherhands and perhapses, than there are mustard seeds in Canada or hues in a peacock’s tail. However, something was happening inside this judge’s mind. I began to listen carefully. The voice was measured, gnomic (
gnosis
, knowledge). I was listening for a signal, my hair standing up like filaments waiting to be charged. But after another hour, the atmosphere in the courtroom had not changed. I decided that I was mistaken.

According to the record, the judge summed up for three hours and ten minutes. There was no mid-morning break. The jury rose in time for a late lunch. So it must have been about morning-tea time, what would have been morning-tea time had there been a break, that Huey farted and I heard from out of the tangle of judicial phrases coming from the bench the word “sympathy” enunciated. I sat forward again.

“Pardon”, I heard coming from the dock behind me. Huey had a habit of breaking wind and saying “pardon” afterwards. I had been sitting forward in my chair, then sideways at an angle, craning my neck to hear the judge.

“Members of the jury, you may recall an incident earlier in the week when I called the accused by his first name.” A cough. A clearing of the throat. His Honour had paused to drink a glass of water? “I should have referred
to him of course as, ‘the accused’ or ‘Mr Dunstan’. I made a mistake. I called him ‘Huey’. You must ignore this. Put aside any feelings of sympathy or prejudice you might feel I showed towards the accused then or at any other time. It might seem that I was exhibiting a kindly or fatherly attitude, calling him by his first name. Think nothing of it.”

There it was. The moment I had been waiting for.

Or was it? Afterwards, when the judge had dismissed the jury to its deliberations with the usual caution, Lawrence sounded unconvinced. I put it to him: “Well. ‘
Ignore what
I have said. Think nothing of it.’
That was telling them, wasn’t it?”

Lawrence was collecting up his papers. I heard him speak to someone. It was about 12.15 p.m.

“I wouldn’t bank on it, Ches. Do you want to come back to chambers with me for a bite to eat?”

“No.” I said that I might stay in the courtroom and wait it out. Privately I gave the jury no more than twenty minutes before they returned. I wrinkled my nose, sniffing, and said to Lawrence: “Is that liquorice you’re eating?”

“Here. Have some.” He pressed a small square into the palm of my hand. Lawrence sometimes carried a strap of liquorice in the folds of his gown and nibbled at it in moments of need. He seemed of a flutter.

“Excuse me a moment. I have to talk to the family.” I sat down and waited. He departed and returned. He said, “I’ve told them, either we shall have a verdict in half an
hour or it’s going to be a long wait. Drink, Ches?” He finished gathering up his papers and we went across the road for a drink. When we returned, I waited in the lobby while he slipped down to the cells to see if Huey was still there. But Huey had been taken back to prison.

An hour later, back at the hotel, I rang Lisbeth. We talked for a bit and she asked me how I was feeling. I said it was hard, waiting. I told her Lawrence had given me a cell phone so he could call me when the jury was coming back.

“What will you do? If you go to bed you’ll never wake up.” We talked some more, and she said: “I think you should go out. Why not do a Buck House?”

So I did that. I ate a late lunch and took a taxi from the hotel to the far side of town where the streets petered out into roads and open farmland; I asked the driver to drop me by a junction I knew. It was where I had once turned off forty years earlier to meet a man nicknamed Butch, baptised Isaac, on one of my first jobs in New Zealand as a probation officer; then I walked back into town, groping along by streets I had once known but no longer remembered, asking directions in simulation of a walk to Buckingham Palace in a previous life. Lisbeth and I were in London for a family reunion. We had been married for five years but I had been registered blind for barely three and was at a crossroads in my life. I had got beyond the stage of hoping to see again; and beyond the stage of despair when my sleep was broken by terrible dreams, knowing it would never happen; I had
got beyond chimeras and had started to reach inside, searching for a kind of inner strength in order to work out some priorities to make life worth living again. But in practical terms I was lost, stranded somewhere in the second dimension, and terrified to venture outside by myself. I lacked confidence walking along strange streets.