Execution Dock - Anne Perry [20]
Tremayne turned back to Orme in the witness box. “Mr. Orme, was the case officially reopened? New evidence, perhaps?”
“No, sir. Mr. Monk was just looking through the papers to see if there was anything …”
Rathbone rose to his feet.
“Yes, yes, yes!” Sullivan said quickly “Mr. Orme, please restrict yourself to what you know, what you saw, and what you did.”
Orme flushed. “Yes, my lord.” He looked at Tremayne with reproach. “Mr. Monk told me ‘e'd found papers about a case we'd never closed, and ‘e showed me Mr. Durban's notes on the Figgis case. He said it would be a good thing if we could close it now. I agreed with him. It always bothered me that we ‘adn't finished it.”
“Will you please tell the court what you yourself did then? Since you worked on it with Mr. Durban, presumably Mr. Monk was keen to avail himself of your knowledge?”
“Yes, sir, very keen.”
Tremayne then took Orme through the trail of evidence. He asked about the lightermen, bargees, lumpers, stevedores, ferrymen, chandlers, landlords, pawnbrokers, tobacconists, and quayside news vendors he and Monk had spoken to in the endless pursuit of the connection between the boy, Fig, and the boat in which Jericho Phillips plied his trade. They were always looking for someone who could and would swear to the use of Phillips's boat, and the fact that Fig was there against his will. It was all circumstantial, little threads, second-and thirdhand links.
Rathbone looked at the jury and saw the confusion in their faces, and eventually the boredom. They could not follow it. The disgust was there, the anger and the helplessness, but the certainty of legal proof still eluded them. They were lost in complexity, and because they were still sickeningly aware of the crime, they were frustrated and becoming angry. The day closed with a feeling of hatred in the room, and the police crowded closely around Phillips as he was taken down the stairs to the prison below the court. The mood was ugly with the weight of old, unresolved pain.
Rathbone began cross-examining Orme the next morning. He knew exactly what he needed to draw from him, but he was also aware that he must be extremely careful not to antagonize the jury, whose sympathies were entirely with the victim, and with the police who had tried so very hard to bring him some kind of justice. He stood in the middle of the courtroom floor in the open space between the gallery and the witness stand, deliberately at ease, as if he were a trifle in awe of the occasion, identifying with Orme, not with the machinery of the law.
“I imagine you deal with many harrowing tragedies, Mr. Orme,” he said quietly. He wanted to force the jury to strain to hear him, to make their attention total. The emotion must be grave, subdued, even private with each man, as though he were alone with the horror and the burden of it. Then they would understand Durban, and why Monk, in his turn, had taken the same path. He had not expected to dislike doing this so much. Facing the real man was very different from the intellectual theories of justice, no matter how passionately felt. But there was no way to turn back now without betrayal. When he had to question Hester it would be worse.
“Yes, sir,” Orme agreed.
Rathbone nodded.
“But it has not blunted your sensibilities, or made you any less dedicated to finding justice for the victims of unspeakable torture and death.”
“No, sir.” Orme's face was pale, his hands hidden by his sides, but his shoulders were high and tight.
“Did Mr. Durban feel as deeply?”
“Yes, sir. This case was … was one of the worst. If you'd seen that boy's body, sir, wasted and burned like it was, then ‘is throat cut near through, and dumped in the river as if he were an animal, you'd have felt the same.”
“I imagine I would,” Rathbone said quietly, his head bent a trifle as if he were in the presence of the dead