‘It could be worse,’ he said finally. ‘You could’ve been charged.’
‘They have no grounds, other than what that damn man says.’
‘In my experience, grounds are sometimes the least of their concerns. If the public demand that someone is put behind bars, they tend to comply and sort out inconveniences like lack of evidence later, at a trial.’
‘Talking about trials, how’s yours going?’
‘Stupid jury,’ he said.
‘Wrong verdict?’
‘No verdict. Not yet anyway. They’ve been out for ten hours now and the judge has sent them home for a second night. God knows what they’re talking about. Open-and-shut case as far as I can see. Defendant is guilty as sin.’
‘What do you do while you’re waiting?’ I asked.
‘Sit in the robing room twiddling my thumbs, mostly. I try to read future case notes but I find it difficult to concentrate in such circumstances, especially when we keep having to go back into court so the jury can ask the judge a question, as they’ve done repeatedly in this case.’
‘What sort of questions?’
‘All kinds of things. Mostly about the evidence or the law, but they even had us all back in court today so they could ask if three of them could go outside for a smoke.’
He rolled his eyes.
‘And did they?’
‘Of course they did. But the judge had to tell the others not to deliberate without those three being present, so they all had to take a break. It just adds to the time. I got so bored this afternoon that I even spent some time on a casino app playing blackjack.’
‘Did you win?’ I asked.
‘Did I hell! I reckon it’s fixed.’
It had clearly not been his day either.
‘What happens if the jury can’t decide?’
‘The judge has already said he’ll take a majority verdict — that’s when at least ten of them agree — but they haven’t even got that far.’
‘How long do they get?’
‘How long’s a piece of string?’ He forced a laugh. ‘The foreman said that he still thinks they might be able to reach a verdict tomorrow, so the judge has given them more time. If they can’t, then there’ll be a retrial with a new jury. I can’t see the CPS giving up on this one. But it would be a complete waste of everyone’s time, not to mention the money. And I’ve got a very full list for the next few months. Fitting it in will be an absolute nightmare.’
No wonder he’d been in an irritable mood.
He refilled our glasses.
‘But enough of my problems,’ he said. ‘What are we going to do about you?’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘Well, first of all, keep out of the way of the press and especially of that brother-in-law of yours. All you do is pour fuel on his fire and give him more ammunition to shoot back at you.’
‘But I surely have to do something,’ I said.
‘I agree,’ Douglas said. ‘And I think that rather than trying to prove who did kill Amelia, you should concentrate on proving who didn’t.
Now he was talking.
‘It’s quite clear to me,’ Douglas went on, ‘that the police are not going to investigate anyone else unless we can show them beyond any doubt that you couldn’t have done it. That will force them to look elsewhere.’
‘Where do we start?’
‘We simply prove that you were in that hotel room in Edgbaston all night and that your car never moved from the car park. If that’s the case, you couldn’t have done it.’
‘I assure you it was the case,’ I said.
‘So let’s prove it?’
‘The police are trying to prove the reverse.’
‘And if they could, they’d have charged you by now. So we will start from the opposite premise and provide absolute proof that it was physically impossible for you to have been in Hanwell at any time between five o’clock on Tuesday afternoon until after Amelia’s body had been discovered. We will provide you with an unbreakable alibi.’
He smiled at me.
‘Do you know what alibi actually means?’ he asked. ‘It’s Latin for “elsewhere”. It is an absolute defence. If you can prove you were elsewhere when the crime was committed, then you have proved your innocence. Only then will we try to show who really did do it.’
I loved his enthusiasm. It was almost catching.
‘So we start with the hotel,’ he said. ‘Get a copy of their CCTV film and other electronic data, such as from their door locks.’
‘Door locks?’
‘Yes, door locks. Did you use a metal key or a card?’
I thought back.
‘It was a plastic card, like a credit card.’
‘Then there will be an electronic record of when you used it to enter your room. I prosecuted a theft case last year in Luton where the defence was able to show conclusively that three different cards were used to enter a particular hotel room around the time the valuables went missing. It was enough to put sufficient doubt in the minds of the jury to acquit the accused.’
‘But won’t the police already have that information?’
‘Maybe, or maybe not. I’d not heard of it before. But, either way, they’re looking for proof of a different scenario. If they find something that doesn’t match their theory, they disregard it. They’ll go digging for something else instead. And they won’t tell us something that will help us prove your innocence, certainly not at this early stage in the game. That’s up to us.’
It was good to hear him being so positive, and inclusive.
‘And if the hotel key system or CCTV doesn’t prove it, we’ll find other footage from shops, houses and even dashcams in other cars, anything that shows that your car was in the hotel car park all night. There must also be an ANPR camera somewhere between the hotel and your house.’
‘ANPR?’
‘Automatic Number Plate Recognition. There are thousands of cameras, on all the motorways and main roads, recording the number plate of every car that passes them. Thirty million or so hits every day. They will show if your car moved, unless you used only very minor roads. I assume the police have checked your mobile phone but just because your phone didn’t move doesn’t mean that you didn’t. You could have left it in your hotel room for that very reason.’
He knew all the arguments.
‘Tracking my phone was how they knew I was in Wales.’
Douglas nodded. ‘People don’t realise how easy that is. And mobile phones and computers are the very first things to be seized on arrest. Everyone thinks of their electronic devices as their faithful friends but they have no sense of loyalty. They will grass up their owner’s secrets to anyone who has access to them.’
‘How about passwords?’
‘Forensic extraction technology has a way around those. I see it all the time in organised-crime cases, but it applies to everyone.’
‘That’s scary,’ I said.
‘It certainly is. And smartphones contain the record of our whole lives these days — photos, emails, calendar, contacts, texts, calls, social media, the lot. Nothing is safe from Big Brother if they have your phone.’
I could imagine DS Dowdeswell trawling through all the mundane things on my phone, such as texts from my dentist about an upcoming appointment or to my local dry cleaners about mending a coat. At least he would also see the lovey-dovey messages between Amelia and myself, and find no evidence that I had a bit-on-the-side. Indeed, I had nothing to hide on either my phone or my computer, just as long as Joe Bradbury hadn’t hacked in and stored something I hadn’t seen.
‘I just hope the police read Joe’s foul emails. It will show them what he’s really like. Getting hold of his phone is what they ought to do. He claims that Amelia called and asked him to come over on that Wednesday morning, but he’s lying, and the phone records will prove it. She’d have never done that. She wanted absolutely nothing to do with him.’