Charlie (68 page)

Her voice shook as she took the oath – she was only too well aware of Daphne Dexter studying her insolently from the dock to her left. Despite what Rita had said about Daphne’s appearance, from Charlie’s swift glance at her she thought the woman looked pretty good. She was wearing a black jacket and a white blouse, her dark hair pinned up in a bun.

It was difficult to tell which of the brothers was the one who had caught her in the garden, as they were so staggeringly alike, both dressed in dark suits and white shirts, with short-cropped dark hair, an identical burly build and square jaws. But neither of them looked at her; they were both studying their laps.

The prosecution barrister was a short, stocky man with glasses and traces of a North Country accent. Charlie had been told by Brian that his name was Underwood, and he took her straight into the events of the day Sylvia was attacked. Charlie described where she was when she first heard the car draw up, and how she was getting dressed when she heard her mother scream, and what she saw from the window before running to call the police.

Underwood then led her onto the aftermath, her mother’s loss of mobility, her depression and misery through losing their former home. It was clear to Charlie by his penetrating questions about how they lived in Mayflower Close until the day Sylvia took her life, that he wished to establish in the jury’s minds the full picture of the havoc that had been wreaked on both women through the vicious attack and Jin’s disappearance. There were no interruptions throughout these questions, yet when Underwood asked Charlie when she first heard about Daphne Dexter from her mother and what was said, the defence leapt up to say this was hearsay. The prosecution claimed what she had said was vital evidence and the judge ruled Charlie could go on.

‘My mother only ever called her by her nickname DeeDee,’ Charlie said, going on to repeat the rest of what she’d been told.

‘What was your mother’s attitude to this other woman in your father’s life?’ Underwood asked.

‘Bewilderment that her old friend had done such a thing. Anger, jealousy too of course, but she seemed to be very frightened of the woman as well.’

Charlie found she was regaining her confidence as his questions seemed so sympathetic. She found she wasn’t even thrown by the many times the defence interrupted with claims that his opposite part was leading the witness.

There were no further interruptions from the defence as she was asked how she met Rita, and how it came about that Andrew set out to try and solve the mystery of her missing father. Finally just the part about her ordeal in The Manse remained. Underwood asked her first if the man who locked her up was in the court today. She agreed he was one of the two men in the dock, but could only guess which one because they were so alike. Then Underwood asked if the woman she saw through the dining-hatch was in the court. Charlie said she was and pointed to Daphne.

The look Daphne gave her was one of pure loathing. Her lips curled back and her vivid blue eyes flashed with menace. Even in the safety of the court Charlie felt shaken and it brought it home to her how terrible it must have been for Rita to face her again.

The prosecution’s questions ended with how she escaped, then it was the turn of the defence. Cunningham, the defence barrister, was entirely different to Underwood. A handsome, tall, well-built man, with olive, glowing skin. His voice was cultured but loud and commanding. Although he smiled at her, it didn’t reach his penetrating dark eyes. Right from the very first question Charlie felt uncomfortable. It seemed he was setting out to ridicule her.

‘Tell me, Miss Weish,’ he said condescendingly. ‘If your father had last telephoned as you say on the evening of June the 17th, saying he’d be home within a week, why didn’t your mother report him missing when she heard nothing more from him?’

Her reply explaining he was often delayed sounded feeble.

‘You said you had never seen these two men who attacked your mother before, but surely only someone who knew her and her habit of sunbathing well, would come straight into the garden to find her? Can you explain that?’

‘No. But I think my mother knew who they were, though she never admitted it,’ she replied.

He smirked. ‘So they could have been debt collectors, even old lovers?’ he suggested, then before she could deny this, moved straight on to ask if the two men in the dock were the same ones she’d seen that day.

‘They could have been,’ Charlie said. ‘They are the right build and age, but I couldn’t see their faces clearly because the sun was in my eyes.’

‘A good percentage of men in England must be the right build and age,’ he said to the jury. ‘Please note that there was no positive identification.’

After many questions about the high standard of living Charlie and her mother had enjoyed at ‘Windways’, he moved on to probe deeply about how they lived in the council flat, asking about her job in the hotel and how she coped with schoolwork and looking after her mother. Charlie wondered why he had to ask all this, she’d already been through all the relevant details with Underwood, but this man continually kept coming back to the subject of her mother’s depression and how difficult it must have been for a schoolgirl to cope. At one point he commiserated with her lack of social life, and when he came to ask about her mother’s suicide his questions were so gentle and sympathetic she began to cry.

Underwood jumped up then with a protest. The judge ruled that the defence must stick to questions relating only to the charges laid against the accused.

Yet when he moved on to her meeting up with Rita Tutthill he seemed scornful again. This he described as ‘providential’, giving Charlie the feeling he was trying to insinuate that although it might have been pure chance that she met someone from a similar background to her own mother, she was in fact being manipulated by this older woman for a sinister purpose.

His line of questioning seemed very odd. It wasn’t until he asked about her first visit to the police regarding Andrew’s disappearance, and got her to admit she felt angry that no one seemed to care about either Andrew or her father, that she suddenly saw his real aim. He was in fact attempting to prove to the jury that she had a persecution complex and maybe was unhinged too.

‘Isn’t it true, Miss Weish, that far from coming to London after your mother’s death to start afresh, you came on a crusade? You were bitter that the police hadn’t apprehended your mother’s attackers or found your father, and you were prepared to listen to tales from anyone sympathetic to your grievances.’

‘No, that’s not true,’ she retorted. ‘I came to start a new life for myself and although I always intended to try and find out what had happened to my father, I was so happy and busy for the first few months I hardly thought about him.’

‘Quite so, Miss Weish,’ he smirked. ‘You put it aside temporarily until you met up with Miss Tutthill, but once she’d fired you up with her story about the accused, you became convinced, without a shred of real evidence to support it, that they were responsible for both the attack on your mother and your father’s disappearance. Isn’t that true?’

Put like that she had no choice but to agree.

He was very clever, she had to allow him that. Looking back later she saw he had slanted every single question to portray her as a badly used, grieving innocent, who was punch-drunk from the hard knocks she’d been dealt and in her desire to discover the truth about her father had fallen prey to believing anything she was told, regardless of whether the source was questionable.

Charlie felt angry that she wasn’t being given any opportunity, even by the prosecution, to show what she was really made of. When she was asked which of the twins had locked her in the basement and she couldn’t tell him, that anger finally boiled over. ‘Does it matter which one it was?’ she shot back at him. ‘You know perfectly well both men were in on it.’

She received a rebuke for this, but when she was asked how she could be positive that the woman she’d seen only briefly through a small hatch was in fact the same woman as in the dock, she was beyond caring what sort of impression she was making. ‘I’ve got two perfectly good eyes, and a first-class brain,’ she snapped back at him. ‘And Daphne Dexter’s face is unforgettable.’

All at once it was over and she was asked to step down. For a brief moment she was tempted to stand her ground and shout out to the whole court that these people in the dock robbed her of both her parents. But the realization that would only make her look foolish stopped her in the nick of time.

‘Let’s go home,’ Andrew said after he’d hugged Charlie silently for several minutes while she blurted out the gist of her humiliation. Earlier that morning they had planned to go into the public gallery during the afternoon to watch, but that didn’t seem a good idea any longer.

‘The defence barrister was a swine to me too,’ Andrew said. ‘He sneered at me and called me a boy scout. He even suggested I was never in that cellar! That was ridiculous. He might be able to cast doubt on some of the crimes the Dexters are supposed to have done, but how can he deny what they did to me?’

‘I think it’s just all a game to those lawyers,’ she said weakly. ‘I don’t think they really give a toss about justice, all they want to do is score points and show off to one another.’

Brian commiserated with them. ‘Don’t take it personally,’ he said. ‘If you were ever to sit through a complete trial you’d understand how the system works. Now go on home and forget about it. Your part in it is over now.’

They hadn’t anticipated there would be a crowd of reporters waiting for them outside in the street. As they came down the steps, they all lunged towards them, cameras flashing.

‘What was it like, Miss Weish, to come face to face with your father’s killers?’ a woman called out.

Andrew tried to drag her on, urging her to say nothing, but after being portrayed in court as a pathetic character, Charlie was intent on asserting herself.

‘I’ve been face to face with them before, remember,’ she said in a loud, clear voice. She blinked as another camera flashed at her.

‘Do you think Daphne Dexter will be found guilty of murder?’ another voice called out.

‘If she isn’t, there’s something wrong with British justice,’ Charlie retorted. ‘But if by some fluke she does get off, she’ll have me on her back for the rest of her life.’

Andrew flagged down a passing taxi and bundled her in. ‘Now, that wasn’t the most sensible remark to make,’ he said dryly as he leapt in behind her. ‘Every paper in England will be quoting you tonight.’

‘Good,’ she smiled, as she sat back on the seat. ‘I meant it!’

The trial dragged on for three more weeks. It no longer hogged the headlines, as it had at first, and worse still, what little was reported seemed to suggest the defence were scoring the most points.

It appeared to Charlie and to Rita that their intention was to build up the idea that the Dexters were the victims of a malicious vendetta. As so many of their alleged crimes had been committed years earlier, against people of dubious character who were often proved to have some sort of grudge against the accused, it sounded all too possible to anyone who hadn’t suffered at their hands.

The hit-and-run murder of Ralph Peterson was a case in point. His sister, a spinster in her sixties, staunchly insisted her brother was a man of high moral standards, and claimed he had parted company with Daphne Dexter because he discovered she owned several strip clubs. He had also expressed his fear to her that the woman would retaliate with some kind of violence against him. When asked why, then, Peterson had still left money to Daphne, she said she thought he’d forgotten to change his will after they fell out.

Under cross-examination she admitted she had always disapproved of her brother’s relationship with Daphne because, as she put it, ‘She was low-class and a gold-digger.’ It also transpired that she had hired a private detective with the sole purpose of discrediting Daphne. Miss Peterson’s testimony to her brother’s ‘high moral standards’ was further shot to pieces by the defence drawing attention to his predilection for young and racy women, listing not only Daphne and Rita but two other club girls he’d also ‘kept company’ with.

The defence brought on a witness who was the manager of a peep-show club owned by Daphne, and produced a document which showed that Peterson had loaned Daphne money to open a new strip club. He also claimed Peterson regularly came into all her clubs to watch the shows.

The police had bungled the investigation into Peterson’s death. Although they were given a description of the hit-and-run car, and part of the registration number, by an eye-witness, they didn’t check it out immediately. Barrington Dexter’s car matched the description and the partial number, he had also had a recent repair to it, consistent with driving at someone at high speed, but by the time the police acted, any traces of blood or fibres from Peterson’s clothes which might have been on the car had been washed away.

Finally, on the Friday of the fourth week of the trial, all the witnesses had given their evidence. On Monday the prosecution and defence would make their closing speeches.

On Saturday morning Charlie was over at Andrew’s house, busy trying to clean the filthy kitchen, when to her surprise Dave Kent called her there.

‘Hello, darlin’,’ he said in his now very familiar crusty voice. ‘Sorry to intrude when yer with yer fella, but I kinda twisted your mate’s arm to give me the number.’

Charlie had last spoken to him just after she gave her evidence and he had been very low then because he was being pestered by reporters. She knew just what that was like now, she’d had a basin full of it herself. But at the time he had insisted she wasn’t to call on him. As he put it, ‘We don’t want no bloody toe-rags putting two and two together and making a hundred.’

‘How are you?’ she asked tentatively, afraid he was going to tell her he was in hospital.

‘Never better,’ he said joyfully. ‘But then I’ve got you to thank for that, getting Wendy to come over.’

‘She’s there?’ she exclaimed. When his daughter hadn’t turned up when Charlie last phoned she was afraid she wasn’t ever going to.