Murderers and Other Friends Read Online Free Page A

lies, isn’t it, the story of an accidental death and a sexual attack? Jimmy turns out, rather to my surprise, to be an intelligent witness, perhaps too intelligent. He can see the rocks ahead. He sticks to his story, although some strange facts emerge. He wrote the letter in blood to frighten a girl he didn’t like, but it seems to have frightened her not at all. He says he’d never heard of buggery until he got to England and then ‘a queer told me’. He appears strangely innocent and prudish and doesn’t know that the word ‘come’ means to have an orgasm. He says he made his statement to the police in a hurry because he wanted his cherry-coloured corduroy trousers back. He told some lies in it in order not to involve the friends he’d told about the killing. ‘You lied to save your friends. Didn’t you also lie to save yourself?’ The prosecutor sits down, well satisfied, without waiting for the answer.
    The defence is always at its highest point at the end of the prosecution case, at its lowest after the accused has given evidence. Jimmy hasn’t made any obvious mistakes, in fact he’s done rather well, but we’ve got no evidence to support the story of violent soliciting by night. There’s plenty of evidence against Jimmy, none at all against Charles Wistey. And then Paul, who’s been outside the court, comes back in a state of high excitement with a piece of paper in his hand. This is what can be said, he tells me, by a surprise witness, a deus ex machina who has arrived from nowhere and wants to give evidence. ‘For God’s sake,’ Paul whispers deafeningly, ‘get him into the witness-box before the bugger changes his mind!’
    Our unlooked-for, unhoped-for witness turns out to be a model of credibility, a medical student about to do his finals and also engaged to be married. He’d read about our case in the Daily Mirror and decided to come and tell the court about his own experience. He’d been walking home late at night in Earls Court when a well-built, upper-class young man solicited him, pursued him into a doorway and urgently demanded sex. He’s able to recognize the photograph of Wistey. No, he has no doubt about it at all. The advocate is frequently taken by surprise in the course of a case and has to hide the fact; it’s particularly unnerving to discover that your client may have been telling nothing but the truth.
    The final speech has always been the part I most enjoyed. You don’t have to flatter the judge or risk unexpected answers from witnesses. You can form a relationship, a very temporary friendship even, with twelve people you hope to persuade to uncertainty. You can choose those members of the jury you feel are sympathetic and build up their confidence, or you can concentrate on those who have sat po-faced and disapproving and hope to convert them, or at least make them smile. It’s also the best part because the end is in sight, the blessed moment when you’ve done all you can and the responsibility is no longer yours. I try to make them remember that Jimmy O’Neill’s life will be changed for ever by what they decide, long after everyone else in court has forgotten what his case was all about.
    And now the deep, growling voice comes from the bench, fair, moderate, still somewhat puzzled. ‘This is a strange, unfamiliar world to us, members of the jury,’ the judge tells them, as though Earls Court were in darkest Africa, thousands of miles from the tennis at Wimbledon. Jimmy is listening, pale and intense, as the judge dismisses the suggestion that he was buggered and accepts that Wistey pursued him with lecherous intent. ‘That young man was on the prowl in Earls Court,’ he says. It’s twenty to twelve when he finishes, the jury file out in solemn silence and Paul and I go up to the Old Bailey canteen to wait and drink coffee.
    This is the worst part. You