The Namedropper (42 page)

T
he Jack Daniels bottle was on the table again, although this celebration was more muted than its first appearance. The judge had upheld David Bartle's protest at the inadmissibility of the fatal accident, refused any further reference to it and rejected Reid's application to call DDK investigator Jack Doyle to give supporting evidence, at the same time as instructing the jury to disregard any inference when considering their final verdict.

‘They won't be able to disregard it,' Beckwith told the other lawyer. ‘It's in their minds and you put it there. Where it will stay when they get around to reaching a decision.'

‘I could have done so much more,' complained Reid. ‘We even had proof of the $500,000 payoff Appleton's family gave Anthea's parents to avoid charges being pressed; the mom and dad broke up because of the accident and mom changed her mind about it being hushed up. She actually wanted to be called to give evidence that Appleton made her daughter pregnant and that he'd started out only offering $100,000.'

‘How did the kid die?' asked Jordan.

‘He was drunk, after some yachting event,' said Reid. ‘Missed a turning and drove instead into a lake. Managed to get himself out and swim ashore. The driver of a following car called emergency and got Appleton to hospital. Appleton didn't say anything about the kid in the car until the following day. By then it was obviously too late but a medical examiner said if she'd been gotten out she and the baby would have survived. Chapman swore Appleton was too concussed to have remembered anything – that he couldn't even remember the accident – so no prosecution was brought.

‘And there was Chapman again with all the necessary qualifications willing to help out with venereal disease and pressure another specialist to go along with it,' completed Beckwith. ‘How the hell did Appleton think he was going to get away with it!'

‘Arrogance of the rich and spoiled, I guess,' said Reid. ‘It worked once, with the same guy. And let's be honest, Appleton was within a whisker of getting away with it again now.' The lawyer raised his whisky glass in silent acknowledgement to Jordan's contribution.

‘Alyce didn't do so well today,' said Jordan. After Chapman's release from the witness stand Reid had cleverly ignored the attentive Dr Harding but called Alyce's gynaecologist, Brenda Stirling, to testify to what Jordan had already read in the intercepted email correspondence, that Alyce now only had a ten percent possibility (‘and that's being extremely optimistic') of conceiving a full term birth because of the fallopian tube scarring caused by the chlamydia infection. Alyce had wept openly throughout the testimony and Reid hadn't bothered to invite her to that evening's conference.

‘I've got to call her to give evidence tomorrow,' said Reid, unapologetically. ‘And Leanne, directly after, for the jury to compare the two of them literally side by side. And Alyce can cry as much as she wants.'

‘That's cynical,' protested Jordan.

‘That's practical,' dismissed Reid. ‘Don't worry about Alyce. Worry about yourself and the hook you're still on.'

‘It's because I'm still worried about myself that I'm worried about Alyce and wondering how she'll stand up to a full examination and cross-examination. Bartle's got to destroy her to give Appleton any sort of a chance, hasn't he?'

‘I don't see how he can damage her,' said Beckwith. ‘I actually don't see how Appleton and Bartle could have believed they had any chance of pursuing the case they're attempting.'

‘Arrogance of the rich and spoiled,' echoed Jordan.

Beckwith shook his head. ‘There's got to be more than that. So far Appleton doesn't have a damned defence. ‘

‘On the subject of defence, let's not forget Pullinger's lecture about rebuttal of criminal conversation, as far as you two are concerned,' warned Reid. ‘The law, the way Pullinger interpreted it, comes down pretty heavily against any logical defence.'

‘You can't be serious!' argued Beckwith.

‘Logically you looked to be home free at the dismissal hearing. But Pullinger didn't find for you,' reminded Reid.

‘We discussed it,' reminded Beckwith, in turn. ‘Pullinger's an ornery old bastard. Look how far everything has turned in our favour since then. Harvey can't possibly be found guilty.'

‘No one ever said the law was fair, any more than life.'

‘Can we take pause here!' urged Jordan. ‘The jury can't find against me, not on what they've heard.'

‘I don't think they should, nor am I saying that they will,' insisted Reid. ‘But Pullinger
is
an ornery old bastard and he's still got to sum up and guide the jury. I wouldn't like to place bets, not yet.'

‘He finds against us I'll appeal,' insisted Beckwith.

‘How many more months – and how much more money – could that cost?' demanded Jordan, genuinely shocked. Confronting Reid's caution, Jordan acknowledged that although he'd begun raiding Appleton's firm to build up the necessary insurance against having a financial penalty imposed against him, he had increasingly begun to regard the money as the fitting punishment against Appleton for the inconvenience and upheaval Appleton had caused him; precisely, in fact, the sort of compensation people sought from insurance.

‘Anything up to a year to get a hearing before the North Carolina Supreme Court,' answered Beckwith, to Reid's vaguely nodded agreement. ‘Costs would be open-ended. If we won, which we would, minimal; the majority would go against Appleton.'

‘And if we failed, double whatever I'd have to pay now, plus whatever is awarded against me in the first place!' challenged Jordan.

‘I said we'd win,' repeated Beckwith. ‘And you wouldn't have to hang around here, while you waited. You could go back to England and only need to return here when we got a hearing date.'

He wouldn't come back, was Jordan's first thought. And then just as quickly realized that he wouldn't have a choice. There was still the danger of limited publicity and of his identification at the conclusion of this case. That publicity – and identification – would be far greater if he failed to return for an appeal, with the inevitable photographs and the even more inevitable recognition. This would blow open the identity thefts he'd carried out in America in the past, and almost certainly at the New York banks in which he had opened the accounts in Appleton's name and with whom he would be publicly linked in an appeals procedure. And during Beckwith's estimated year, the attack he'd mounted against Appleton and his firm would be very actively under investigation. ‘What can we do?'

Beckwith actually laughed at the facile question. ‘Go on expecting to win, of course! That's why we're all here. There's nothing more we can do, unless you've got a better idea.'

Jordan didn't have, although he spent much of a disturbed night trying to think of one: to think of anything. He finally decided, ignoring the pun, that Alyce's lawyer was playing devil's advocate to their overconfidence, which he'd admitted to himself the moment Reid had spoken. It would be wrong to regard it as anything more than a cautious touch on the brake. Jordan still wished Reid hadn't created the doubt and that Beckwith hadn't been so flippant dismissing it.

Despite trying to dismiss it himself, the doubt remained lodged in Jordan's mind as he scrolled through his illicit web hideaways. There was nothing more on the Chicago query, nor any additional questions on any of his other raids. Prices remained virtually static on copper and Jordan limited himself entirely to that one metal for the day's pilfering.

On their way to court Jordan said, ‘I didn't like Bob's doom and gloom last night.'

‘Forget it,' Beckwith continued to dismiss. ‘Bob's a pessimist. That's why he always dresses in black, like a funeral director.'

Funeral director to Dodge City cowboy, thought Jordan.

He was surprised that Dr Harding, who knew it was Alyce's day on the witness stand, wasn't in court when they entered. She was already at her table, nodding to whatever Reid was saying to her. She looked up, through her thick-rimmed, and now shaded, glasses, as Jordan and Beckwith took their places, but didn't give any response to Jordan's nodded smile. She was again in funereal black, matching the pessimistic Reid, without any noticeable make-up, and as she stood to take the oath, her left hand on the rail of the witness stand, Jordan was further surprised to see that for the first time since that initial day in France she was wearing her wedding and engagement rings.

‘Where would you rather be today than here in a divorce court?' opened Reid, creating an immediate stir throughout the court.

‘Practically anywhere,' replied Alyce, at once. ‘Most of all in my own home, with a family of my own.'

‘Including children?'

‘Of course including children. A family isn't a family without children. How can it be?'

‘Children which, until you contracted a sexual disease, you were – according to your gynaecologist who testified yesterday – medically capable of bearing?'

‘Yes.'

‘How do you feel now at having less than a ten percent chance of bearing a child full term?'

Alyce didn't reply at once, bringing to her face a handkerchief Jordan hadn't been aware of her taking from her purse ‘It might not properly explain how I feel … what I mean … but I feel empty. Inadequate. Not a proper woman.'

‘And now never able to
be
a proper woman?'

‘He's pushing it right to the edge of the cliff,' Beckwith whispered to Jordan, who saw that so far there were no exclamation marks of approval on his lawyer's legal pad.

‘I'm no longer a proper woman.'

‘How important to you was having children?'

‘It was everything to me, beyond just being a woman. My marriage, as the court has already heard, was the bringing together of two of the oldest families in America. I have no brothers, no sisters. There is no direct bloodline. It will die, with my death. I believe that is important, a loss. Not to other people, I wouldn't think. But to me it is.'

‘Of course,' said Reid. ‘Your marriage wasn't happy before your infection, was it?'

‘No;

‘How – what – did you feel about that?'

Alyce again hesitated. ‘Inadequate, like before. Which again I guess other people, other women, might not understand.'

‘Didn't you think of divorce then?'

‘Of course I
thought
about it: how could I not have done? But I never actually considered it as an option. I hoped the separation might help.'

‘Help what?' seized Reid.

‘My husband.'

‘In what way?'

‘Help my husband to love me.'

Jordan saw Beckwith was at his legal pad at last, although he was assembling question marks, not approving exclamations.

‘If you didn't believe he loved you, why did you marry him in the first place?'

‘I believed he did, when we got married. It wasn't until afterwards that I thought differently.'

‘Why?'

‘I very quickly came to believe that what I thought had been love was really pride on his part: pride at me, a Bellamy, being his wife. It was as if I was a trophy. He kept cuttings, in a special book, when we appeared in social columns or magazines. He agreed to a television programme being made about us.'

‘Didn't you like that?'

‘I hated it! I knew who I was: who my family were. I didn't believe we had to prove it. It seemed …' She paused, seeking the word. ‘Arrogant, I suppose.'

‘Did you talk to him about it?'

‘I tried to … told him I didn't want any more television programmes because after the first there were other approaches … but he told me I was being stupid. That it would bring clients to the business; prestige by association, he called it. He told me I was being unreasonable.'

‘Did he want to accept some of the other TV approaches?'

‘Yes. I refused to take part, so they never happened.'

‘Was he upset?'

‘Very. He said it didn't reflect well on our marriage.'

‘But you didn't talk of divorce?'

‘Not over something as stupid as a television show. Divorce is a failure, isn't it? A lot of people stay together unhappily, for the sake of the family. I thought that if I had a child it would be all right: that he might change but that if he didn't it wouldn't matter … I'd have a child, hopefully more than one child, and that would be enough for me.'

‘Would it have been?'

‘I never found out. Now I never will.'

‘Did you ever suspect he was being unfaithful?'

‘Not in the beginning, although after the first few months he invariably came home late. He said it was how it had to be in his business. I thought there might be other women when I went up to Long Island and he stayed in Manhattan. He was rarely in the apartment when I called.'

‘Did you ever challenge him?'

‘No.'

‘And you didn't have any proof?'

‘He was disinterested in me when he did come home.'

‘Sexually, you mean?'

‘Yes.'

‘Your husband engaged a private enquiry agent to watch you. Did it ever occur to you to do the same, to watch him?'

‘No. When we finally did, appointing DDK, it was at your suggestion. I didn't have to, before then. He'd admitted it, hadn't he?'

‘I'm not sure I understand that remark. Or that the jury will,' complained Reid.

‘When I told him he had given me chlamydia there was the big argument – he'd been drinking. When I said he'd obviously been sleeping with someone else he said not one. Two. And laughed. He later tried to deny it, when he sobered up and realized the mistake he'd made.'

Jordan saw Reid's frown. ‘Do you think that's why he admitted it, in his statement?'