• • •
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH the Ingrams has suffered a dreadful blow. Not only does Diana think I glower at her with a crazed expression, but the Ingrams have now appointed a media agent called David Thomas. These days, every time I bump into them at Starbucks or in the corridor outside Court 4, Thomas is there, saying “Hello, Jon” in a snarly manner. The rumor is that Thomas is going to handpick one journalist, and the rest of us will get nothing.
“Can I have just five minutes with the Ingrams?” I ask him.
“I’m mentally logging your request,” says Thomas.
“All I want is for them to be able to tell their side of the story,” I say.
“So your pitch is ‘I’m Honest Jon,’” he replies.
“Yes.”
“It’s mentally logged,” says Thomas. “You’ve batted your corner very well.”
I tell him my one question: “What was that thing that happened back in our childhoods with the watch straps and the number plate APOLLO G?”
“Your question is logged up here,” he says, pointing at his head. I spend the next three days sitting in the corridor, waiting for him to come back with an answer.
The jury retire to consider its verdict, and the corridor outside Court 4 becomes a frenzied bazaar. While everyone else crowds around Thomas, telling him how much they love dogs too (Thomas is a dog lover) and explaining that all they want to do is let the Ingrams tell their side of the story (he tells them they batted their corners well), I sidle up to Diana.
“I’ll tell you the one thing I really want to know . . .” I begin breezily.
“Have you met David Thomas?” she replies, looking frantically around for him.
Robert Brydges hears that John Brown Publishing—the company that had once planned to publish Diana and Adrian’s book—is now interested in reading the manuscript of The Third Millionaire.
Suddenly, there is drama. Judge Rivlin calls us all back in. “A very serious matter has arisen that does not concern the defendants,” he says. The jury is temporarily discharged. We file back out into the corridor, bewildered. It turns out that a juror was overheard holding court in a pub, saying how fantastic it was to be on the Millionaire trial jury. For a day and a half, the various parties debate whether to start the trial again with a new jury. In the end, Judge Rivlin decides to allow the eleven remaining jurors to continue.
“Well, that,” Charles mutters to himself, “amounted to the square root of fuck-all.”
So this trial, which was all about entertainment, is almost chucked out because one of the jurors found it too entertaining.
When the guilty verdict comes in, after nearly fourteen hours of deliberations over three days, Diana closes her eyes and looks down. Charles holds her hand and kisses her on the cheek. Tecwen doesn’t respond in any way. The only noises in court are tuts—the kind of tuts that mean “It’s all a bit of a shame.”
Charles and Diana have three daughters, two with special needs.
Judge Rivlin has the reputation of being tough when sentencing, but says, “I’m going to put you out of your misery. There’s no way I’m going to deprive these children of their parents.”
The defense barristers stand up to make their mitigation pleas. In the public gallery the defendants’ family members strain to hear what’s being said. We can just make out, “His career in the army is at an end. . . . Their home was provided by the army, so they’ve lost their home. . . . The children are suffering from panic attacks. . . . All three will have to leave their schools. . . .”
The reason why we can only barely hear this is because three pensioners in the public gallery are coughing uncontrollably.
Judge Rivlin says it was all just a shabby schoolboy trick. He says he doesn’t think this crime was about greed, it was about wanting to look good on a TV quiz show. He says the fact that their reputations have been so publicly ruined is appropriate punishment—and I remember what Charles said about how he hates to be thought of as stupid. Judge Rivlin hands out suspended sentences and fines totaling £60,000. On the courthouse steps, the paparazzi cough theatrically when Tecwen and his quiet son, Rhys, walk out.
The scrum is even more dramatic for Charles and Diana. Cameras and tripods and photographers crash to the floor in the violent scuffle to get pictures. “I’ve seen child murderers get more respect than that,” says one journalist. Other journalists and some nearby builders scream with laughter at Charles and Diana and chant, “Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!”
(An Indian diplomat named Vikas Swarup is at home watching the news reports on TV. Suddenly he has an idea for a novel. He will call it Q & A. The movie adaptation will be called Slumdog Millionaire. Later Swarup will explain his moment of inspiration to the Guardian: “If a British army major can be accused of cheating, then an ignorant tiffin boy [urchin] from the world’s biggest slum can definitely be accused of cheating,” he’ll say.)
I phone David Thomas to ask if Diana can give me the answer to my question. He says, “You’ve not fallen off my mental list.” I never hear from him again.
Instead I phone childhood friends to ask if they can remember anything about it. Most of them can. There were two Pollock brothers, they tell me. Bill and Arthur. They were in a family business together, making leather watch straps. There was a big falling-out in the family, and Arthur left the company. Bill became rich, driving around in a fancy car with the personalized number plate APOLLO G. His family were the ones who lived near me, in a big house in Lisvane. They had a son called Julian. Arthur Pollock never really recovered. He was left penniless and in ill health. His children vowed to pull themselves back up and never suffer the indignity their father endured. They would make something of their lives, they promised themselves. So Adrian and Marcus set up an estate agency together, and Diana married an army major. The estate agency failed. In fact, the whole thing failed.
Who Killed Richard Cullen?
(This story was published in the Guardian on July 16, 2005, two years before the global financial crash that began with the subprime mortgage crisis of July 2007.)
It is a wet February day in a very smoky room in a terraced cottage in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. A portable TV in an alcove plays the news. Everything in here is quite old. No spending spree has taken place in this house. There are wedding and baby and school photographs scattered around. Six children, now all grown up, were raised here. There’s a framed child’s painting in the toilet, a picture of Wendy Cullen. It reads “Supergran.” When I phoned Wendy a week ago she said I was welcome to visit, “Just as long as you don’t mind cigarette smoke. I’m smoking myself to death here.”
The “Congratulations! You have been pre-approved for a loan”–type junk mail is still pouring through their letter box. Wendy has just thrown another batch in the bin.
“You know what the post is like,” she says.
“I don’t get all that much credit-card junk mail,” I say. “I get some, I suppose, but not nearly as much as you do.”
“Really?” says Wendy. “I assumed everyone was constantly bombarded.”
“Not me,” I say.
We both shrug as if to say, “That’s a mystery.”
• • •
IT WAS A MONTH AGO today that Wendy’s husband, Richard, committed suicide. It was the end of what had been an ordinary twenty-five-year marriage. They met when Wendy owned a B and B on the other side of Trowbridge. He turned up one day and rented a room. Richard had trained to be an electrical engineer but he ended up as a mechanic.