Nursery Crimes Part 16

And now the time of waiting was over and he was sitting here in this great room that looked like a nonconformist chapel. Up in the pulpit was a judge who was to be called M'Lud. His wig looked as if it had been shorn from an ancient Kerry sheep, and under it, his face, long and lean, was as joyless as a Protestant sabbath. "Not a bad bloke," Prester, his defending counsel, had told him, "if you handle him properly ... or rather, if 7 handle him properly, which I will. Catesby, for the Crown, is a bit of a pain. Remember not to lose your cool. Be polite." "Yes, sorr," said Murphy. It seemed to him that he had been exceedingly polite to a lot of people who hadn't deserved it for a long time. The end, however, was in sight. Today they had given him his best serge suit to wear. Respectable for when he went home.

The public has certainly turned out for him - the court was packed. He imagined them in the one and nine-pennies at the local cinema. "Murphy the Murderer" by Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Roar, lion, roar. It was all so daft he couldn't believe it.

He noticed Father Donovan's bald head and was pleased he was there. The old man had visited him frequently in the local gaol and they had talked a lot together. He had told the priest about meeting Bridget on the cliffs and been honest about everything they'd done - well, maybe not quite everything. If the old boy thought making love was a kiss and a cuddle, that was up to him. He didn't know if his hesitancy about personal physical details had been misconstrued by Father Donovan but to his direct: "Did you kill her?" his emphatic "No!" had seemed to be accepted. All the same, at his most recent confession the old man had been like a carpenter with a screwdriver trying to dislodge a rusty nail. "The Lord is compa.s.sionate," he had said, "don't be afraid to tell me the truth."

Murphy wasn't afraid to tell it. But, as he was to discover during the two days of the trial, truth was a peculiar commodity. Pliable and capable of distortion. A lot was made of a little, and important truths ignored. Forensic experts went to a great deal of trouble to prove that he and Bridget had been together on that precise area of headland. Their scientific evidence concerned soil and seeds and fibres from their clothes. All they had to do, Murphy thought, was ask. He had never denied being there. And he wouldn't deny they'd made love - so why employ a scientist to discover that? The way the scientist described it, it didn't sound like love -- more like a clinical operation. Catesby, the prosecuting counsel, even had the cheek to suggest it was "an angry taking of a woman after a violent row". As for Bridget's pa.s.sionate scratches, he called those, "a desperate woman's attempt to get away". While listening to all this rubbish Murphy began to understand why the prison doctor had taken such an interest in the nail marks on his shoulder. The true explanation was simple enough. Embarra.s.sing, perhaps, but necessary.

When he was called to the witness box on the second day he made sure that he swore on the Douai version of the New Testament. It didn't do to take chances. This was important.

He stated his case immediately. He and Bridget had been on the headland making love. The scratches were part of love. "No violence, sorr, at all."

Catesby stopped him abruptly. Murphy was there to answer questions, he told him, and be silent until they were asked. Then, after a brief re-capping of events, he lunged in for the attack. "You have heard the evidence given by the two witnesses who were sitting on the beach as you and Bridget O'Hare pa.s.sed by them on the way up to the promontory. You were, they say, quarrelling with some pa.s.sion. The word b.a.s.t.a.r.d was used with great bitterness. I put it to you that you had discovered her infidelity with another man and that she had told you about the child she was expecting."

"No," said Murphy.

"You didn't know about the child?"

"No."

"Oh, come, come, you're not going to tell me you weren't quarrelling?"

"We were quarrelling, sorr," Murphy said, "about a b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"The young woman's child - you mean?"

"No child is a b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Murphy said, quoting Father Donovan. "Every child is a child of G.o.d."

The sentiment, though commendable, didn't clarify anything, and Murphy's remark was followed by a brief silence.

"Perhaps," Catesby suggested silkily, "you can explain?"

"We were quarrelling," Murphy said, "about Charlie Parnell."

"And Charlie Parnell," ventured Catesby, "is the b.a.s.t.a.r.d who had relations with your girlfriend, Bridget O'Hare? He is, then, the father of her unborn child?"

'"Twould be a miracle," Murphy said, astonished by the notion. "An immaculate conception."

Prester jumped up. "If your Lords.h.i.+p pleases ..." He had warned Murphy not to get on to this. The thick Irishman would do well to keep his politics under lock and key. Only another Irishman could hope to understand them. "The defendant," he explained, "is referring to Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish Nationalist leader. He died in 1891."

There was a t.i.tter around the court.

The judge frowned. His was an ancient and esteemed office, he wasn't presiding over a music hall. He wished Catesby would conduct his case more expertly and avoid this sort of deplorable irrelevance. "You would be wise to behave with more gravity," he warned Murphy. "You are facing a serious charge."

He nodded at Catesby to proceed.

"Are you seriously telling me," Catesby asked, annoyed at having been made to look a fool, "that you and Bridget O'Hare were quarrelling about Irish politics?"

"Yes, sorr."

"You were out together on a nice sunny day - having a picnic -- she was your girlfriend -- your lover -- she was pregnant with another man's child - and you quarrelled about a man who lived in the last century?"

"Yes, sorr."

"I find it," Catesby said, "quite incredible."

He continued to express his scepticism, and to suggest more likely motives for murder, before finally sitting down.

Prester, the defending counsel, took the floor. It was difficult to make the incredible believable, but he tried. "After several conversations with the defendant," he said, "I am now rather more knowledgeable about the Irish troubles - and the Irish temperament - than I was before. It is natural for the Irish to take sides -- especially over their own national heroes. A hero to Bridget. A b.a.s.t.a.r.d to Murphy. An argument of some considerable heat at the time - but short lived. Murphy did not push Bridget over the cliff because she put up an impa.s.sioned defence of Charles Stewart Parnell. He did not push her over the cliff at all."

He then went on to try and prove it. The situation was so negative in many ways that proof either way was very difficult to establish. The pathologist's report about a blow over the back of the head wasn't helpful. She had been found face downwards in the gully. The sea might have rolled stones across the back of her head and rolled them off again, but the nature of the wound was consistent with one hard thump. Had the murder instrument been an old tin of- say, corned beef weighted with pebbles -- the lacerations of the skin would have cried murder in tones loud and clear. As it was, she had probably been hit pretty hard by a stone -- Prester did his best with stones being dislodged as she fell and falling on her. But it was weak and he knew it.

Had Murphy said he had left her alive - which he did say and insisted upon -- and left it at that, he might have been believed. But his insistence that he had later seen her was worse than weak, it was d.a.m.ning. She could have fallen over the cliff - picking flowers perhaps on the slippery gra.s.s. She could have had a knock on the back of the head as she fell. It would have been natural for Murphy to go back and look for her - which he did. It would have been natural for him not to have thought of looking over the edge of the cliff. He hadn't, he said, thought of looking. But it was not natural -- or credible -that he should have gone back to the cliff and then returned to the nuns in a rage and saying that he had seen her getting into a mythical boat with mythical yachtsmen. Why a boat if he didn't know she was dead in the water? Why not a car? A bus?

"Murphy," Catesby said, making the most of it in his final speech, "was a frightened man - not an angry man at this stage - a man terrified by the consequences of what he had done - the consequences of his dastardly crime. And so he pretends he saw Bridget putting out to sea. The sea would carry her into the gully. If he were lucky it would carry her out again and she would disappear for ever more, or else be washed up in several months' time too decomposed for identification. But the sea didn't carry her out. And by the way she fell it couldn't have carried her in. So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. A corpse that refuses to budge from the site where it landed. A corpse of a beautiful young girl - a beautiful young mother-to-be. And there you have Murphy - a pa.s.sionate man - a jealous man - and not only that, a devious man. It took some acting, wouldn't you say, to show anxiety to the nuns when Bridget didn't appear. It took acting to simulate anger when he returned from the search -- it took cunning to state that he had seen her alive. A simple confession - a heartbroken "I pushed her, G.o.d help me" - a change of plea to guilty might have aroused compa.s.sion in you - and indeed in me. We are all fallible. All human. We err. We sin. We transgress. But we do not kill and then try to cover up the crime. Do you see a contrite man standing there? You do not. Earlier he had the audacity to joke. Is the death of a nineteen-year-old girl funny? Ladies and gentlemen, it is appalling. It is tragic. It is unforgivable."

And so he went on. For another ten minutes.

Prester in his final speech couldn't compete.

The judge had little to add at the summing up. Catesby, after a fumbling start, had pressed on the accelerator and revved up to a satisfactory finish. However, it was up to the jury. He instructed them without obvious bias, but the bias was there, sensed and powerfully persuasive.

While they were out Murphy went below and played draughts with one of the prison officers while the other one fetched him tea. To play draughts and drink tea was his way of showing willing. He was part of a charade - a short-lived, amazingly stupid charade - in which everyone behaved like lunatics. It was polite to sit here and jump his white draughts over the black ones. His opponent was letting him win. His opponent looked b.l.o.o.d.y sympathetic. When all this nonsense was over, he told him, he was going back to Ireland. The auld fella, his father, was getting on a bit, he could do with help on the farm.

The jury were out for three hours.

When they came back in they didn't look at Murphy.

Murphy thought he hadn't heard their leader properly when he gave the verdict. It wasn't until' he saw the judge putting the black bit of cloth on his head that he knew what was happening.

The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds were going to hang him!

The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds were going to b.l.o.o.d.y do him in!

For a moment he felt like picking up the two prison officers who were standing beside him and slamming them down over the side of the dock. He had a vision of garotting the judge with the bit of black on his b.l.o.o.d.y wig. Anger like a roaring sea screamed through his head.

But he stood in complete silence.

The judge asked him if he had anything to say.

He was incapable of saying anything. He was incapable of moving. After a few minutes the prison officers led him away.

"I am very much afraid," Clare said, "that I can't eat this tea-cake." It was extraordinary, she thought, how you did ordinary things in times of great disaster -- such as leaving the courtroom and ordering tea in a little cafe adjacent to it. Even the old priest, Father Donovan, was doing it. And he was eating his tea-cake - even putting more b.u.t.ter on it. Shouldn't he be down in the cells holding Murphy's hand - praying over him - doing something? Shouldn't she and Graham have stood up m the court and shouted "Stop!" Couldn't they, even now, waylay the judge and tell him how abominably wrong the jury's verdict was?

Well, of course they could.

But they wouldn't.

They'd sit down at a window table with a red and white checked cloth on it and they would order tea and toasted tea-cakes. Graham would even eat them. She looked at him in disgust.