City of Spades - By Colin MacInnes Page 0,82

Crown counsel said, ‘your man’s English will be comprehensible. I take it you’ll be putting him in the box?’

‘Time alone will show, Archie. But if you want any evidence taken in the vernacular, we can always put in for an interpreter and prolong matters to your heart’s content.’

‘No, thank you,’ said Mr Gillespie. ‘Crown counsel don’t draw your huge refreshers.’ He dried his hands. ‘Who’s the judge?’

‘Old Haemorrhoids.’

‘My God. It would be.’

The lawyers looked at each other resignedly. There was a distant shout, and they adjusted their wigs like actors who’ve heard the call-boy summon them to the stage.

Johnny Fortune had been brought up from Brixton to the court in one of those police vans where the prisoners half sit in metal boxes, hardly larger than themselves. They’d arrived more than an hour before the case began, and the court jailer, after searching him yet again, said, ‘Well, we won’t put you in the cells unless you really want to go there. If I leave you in the room here, will you behave yourself?’

‘Of course.’

‘You want some cigarettes?’

‘They not let me take any of my money.’

‘Oh, pay me when you’re acquitted!’ said the jailer with a hearty laugh, and gave Johnny Fortune a half-filled pack of Woodbines and a cup of purple tea. ‘I see you’ve got Vial,’ he went on. ‘That’ll cost you a bit, won’t it? Or should I say’ – the jailer laughed roguishly – ‘cost your little lady and her customers?’

Johnny stood up. ‘Mister, put me in your cells. I do not wish your tea or want your Woodbine.’

‘No offence, lad, don’t be so touchy. I know you all have to say you’re innocent – I get used to it here. Come on, keep them – you’ve got an hour to wait.’ The jailer patted his prisoner on the shoulder, and went over to gossip with a lean, powdered female constable in civilian dress, who, as they talked, looked over the jailer’s shoulder at the folds in Johnny Fortune’s trousers.

Everyone stood, and the judge came in wearing a wig not of the Gilbert and Sullivan variety, but a short one, slightly askew, that made him look like Dr Johnson’s younger brother. The jury was new, and the case their first, so they had to be sworn in by the usher. Two of them were women: a WVS housewifely person, and the other with a beret and a tailored suit whose nature it was impossible to guess at. A male juror turned out, when he swore, to be called ‘Ramsay Macdonald’, on hearing which Mr Vial made a slight histrionic gesture of impressed surprise to Mr Gillespie, who ignored him.

One of the two policemen in the dock nudged Johnny, and he stood. The clerk, a quite young man with a pink, pale face, read out the charge in a voice like an Old Vic juvenile’s; and when he asked Johnny how he pleaded, looked up at him, across the court, with a pleading expression on his own wan face.

‘I plead not guilty.’

Mr Zuss-Amor, flanking his advocate, twitched his shoulders slightly. You never could tell with defendants: he’d even known them get the plea wrong at the outset.

Mr Archie Gillespie’s opening statement of the case for the Queen against the prisoner was as methodical as one would expect from a Scottish lawyer of vast experience and entire integrity. He had the great psychological advantages of believing the facts in the brief that he’d been given, or most of them, and of being quite dispassionate in his advocacy. He had no feeling of animosity towards the prisoner whatever, and this made him all the more deadly.

He began by explaining to the jury what living on the immoral earnings of a common prostitute consisted of. It was a distasteful subject, and a painful duty for the members of the jury to have to hear about it. But they were, he did not doubt, men and women of ripe experience, to whom he could speak quite frankly. Very well, then. As everyone knew, there were, unfortunately, such women as common prostitutes – selling their bodies for gain (Mr Gillespie paused, and gazed at a female juror, who licked her lips) – in our society; women whose odious commerce was – subject to certain important restrictions – not actually illegal, however reprehensible on moral grounds. But what was illegal – and highly so, and he would say more, revolting and abhorrent – was the practice of certain men – if one could