Then he played the video, which showed the courtroom they would be in and pointed out the places where everyone would be seated and who they all would be. When it ended, anxious to get away from the body odour of the man beside her as soon as she could, Meg grabbed a form, then went through to the rear and got herself a coffee from a machine. Then she took a seat and read through the form, which was titled WELCOME TO NEW JURORS, and began to fill in the details it required.
When she had finished, she handed it in to Whyte, then sat down on her own and looked again at a new WhatsApp that had just pinged in from Laura. It was a photograph of her and Cassie, both in shorts, T-shirts, sunglasses and baseball caps, standing with legs straddling either side of a narrow, paved path behind a red-and-yellow sign which read:
Laura was leaning sharply to the right, Cassie to the left.
The message read:
Mum, we are actually standing on the Equator! One foot in the Northern Hemisphere, one in the Southern. And the water really does go down the plughole clockwise in the Northern and anti-clockwise in the Southern, we just tried it! And I got an egg to stand upright on a point, but Cassie couldn’t do it!
Meg smiled, wistfully. She was glad for her daughter, glad to see the genuine happiness in her face, and that she seemed finally to be over all the horror of the loss of her father and brother. But she was sad, at the same time, that they were currently so far apart.
She checked her emails, just in case there was any communication from the recruitment agency — there wasn’t. She took the novel she had brought with her and began to read.
But she only got a few pages in before she suddenly heard her name called out.
28
Thursday 9 May
Richard Jupp sat at his desk in his chambers, sipping a strong coffee he’d brewed himself, both his dogs lying at his feet. The coffee was supplied by a criminal law solicitor called Gerry Maye. Maye was smartly — in Jupp’s view — diversifying from his law practice into coffee importing. Due to reductions in legal aid rates, a large number of law firms had gone to the wall during the past couple of years. It made him gladder than ever that he was a judge, on a comfortable salary and with a good pension ahead.
The round clock on the wall read 9.55. Five minutes to the start and the defendant’s QC, Primrose Brown — a clever barrister who he knew and liked — had just informed him via the clerk of the court, Maureen Sapsed, that a new financial report had only just been received by the defence counsel. More evidence linking Gready to offshore accounts.
Maureen, garbed in the traditional black gown and now nervously standing in front of him, was efficient in the extreme, and always did her very best to keep all court business flowing. But, like himself, she was often driven to distraction by the inefficiencies that dogged the entire legal system. Like all major public services, the court system had been affected by the austerity measures brought in over a decade ago.
The under-funded and therefore under-manned Crown Prosecution Service was in a constant state of false economy. The cost of putting together any major trial was immense. Getting all the witnesses, police officers, prosecution advocates and defence counsel together for a specific date was always a nightmare of scheduling. With a never-ending backlog of trials waiting in the wings, adjourning a case was never a simple matter of putting it back a few days. All the players involved had myriad other commitments. An adjournment would often mean months before all the elements could be assembled again. And with it came another problem. If the accused had been remanded in custody, they could be kept there, by law, for a maximum of six months. There had to be good grounds for an extension.
Sometimes, he said, only partly in jest, that he felt like a shepherd trying to herd cats. It was a major headache to hold all the different, diverse and moving pieces of a trial together.
For all these reasons, the decision facing Richard Jupp, just five minutes before the start of Regina v Terence Arthur Gready, was whether to go ahead or adjourn due to the late arrival of this new evidence. He knew that obtaining financial information from overseas was an imprecise science, but that was a problem for later. There were two elements to the trial — the first being whether Gready was involved in the importation of six million pounds’ worth of cocaine and four similar importation charges, as well as a much wider network of county lines drug dealing.
But the second element and the main focus of this trial was whether Terence Gready was actually the mastermind behind a vast drugs empire.
A major factor for any judge was whether any decision he or she made would leave an opening for an appeal. But in his opinion, there would be ample time during the following days for the defence to study the late financial documents. It wasn’t enough to justify an adjournment of probably many months. And the defence counsel, if they were sensible, wouldn’t challenge this. The trial had already taken long enough to come to court, with the defendant locked up on remand. Everyone wanted to get going.
Jupp looked up at the clerk. ‘We start, regardless of this, Maureen. But I want a written explanation from the SIO for the lateness of this evidence.’
‘Yes, Your Honour.’
‘How’s the audience looking?’
He was referring to the public gallery. There was a general rule-of-thumb about the numbers attending court cases out of pure interest. The ‘chart busters’, as he liked to call them, were Death by Dangerous Driving cases, which always attracted the biggest crowds, often filling the courts to capacity. Next came murder trials. And a long way third were sex cases.
‘Pretty full,’ she said. ‘The case has had a lot of local media coverage.’
Jupp didn’t like a full gallery. Dozens of strangers staring at him and, more importantly, at the jurors. Intimidating them. Especially during trials when a large contingent of the public gallery was made up of family and friends of the accused. Which this one almost certainly was.
He glanced at the clock. ‘OK, let’s rock and roll!’
29
Thursday 9 May
Moments after the clerk left Richard Jupp’s chambers, an usher knocked and entered. Thirty-year-old Matt Croucher, neatly turned out in a grey suit beneath a black cloak, his ID card hung on a lanyard around his neck, said, ‘Ready, Your Honour? Don’t forget your wig!’
Jupp grinned a thank-you, removed the short, grey wig from the tin and, checking in the mirror, aligned it on his head, then followed him out of the room and up the short flight of carpeted stairs to his entrance door to the court.
Croucher knocked loudly, twice, as was the tradition, then opened it with a bold sweep, announcing, ‘All rise!’
As everyone stood, silent, Jupp walked past the screened-off area for vulnerable witnesses, revelling in the expectant atmosphere, the same as at the start of every major case. It often felt to him similar to the moment the curtain rose at the start of a play, and indeed in his view, to some considerable extent, court cases were theatre. Both in the antiquated costumes worn by some of the players, and the fact that many barristers were, in secret, frustrated actors.
But courts were theatres where, unlike make-believe tragedies such as Hamlet, the bodies on the stage were often all too real. A theatre where, when the final curtain descended, there were no bows. Just the grim reality of the sometimes-crushing verdict. Theatre in which a legally innocent person — at the time of the trial — might be fighting for their reputation, career and liberty.