Dead at First Sight

87 Thursday 11 October

Roy Grace had once been backstage at Brighton’s Theatre Royal, some years ago when he was a young DS, and had never forgotten the experience. A stressed stage-door manager named Setch had called the police after the mysterious disappearance of an actress in a touring play who had failed to turn up for a performance and had subsequently been reported missing from her lodgings.

There had been reports of a creepily obsessive fan repeatedly hanging around outside the stage door — ‘Stage Door Johnny’, the staff had called him. Fortunately there had been a good outcome: it turned out she’d had a breakdown unrelated to this stalker, and had gone home to the north of England without bothering to inform any of the play’s company.

What struck Roy, interviewing the stagehands, was the contrast between the opulence of the front-of-house, with its chandeliers, ornate decor and plush red velour seats, as well as the stage set of a Victorian drawing room, and the whole different world of darkness, shabbiness and seeming chaos of the cavernous dark spaces behind, with tangles of cables, ropes and pulleys, and props all over the place.

It was the same with barristers’ chambers, he thought, as he left the tube station following his meeting with Alison Vosper and walked along busy Fleet Street, past the imposing Gothic facade of the Royal Courts of Justice, then turned right, away from the hubbub, down through an archway into the sanctuary of Inner Temple, one of London’s four Inns of Court, which housed barristers and their clerks. He was in a vast courtyard surrounded by tall, handsome red-brick terraced buildings, in front of which were gardens and a pond, as well as a car park containing a fair amount of expensive metal. Successful barristers, who acted as both prosecutors and defending counsel in the nation’s antiquated legal system, were among the highest paid professionals in their field. Their clerks did pretty well, too. And yet he knew, as he stood on the doorstep of No. 82 and rang the bell marked G. Carrington QC, that just like front-of-house at the Theatre Royal, compared to the grandeur of the courts in which they performed, barristers’ chambers tended to be in the main unimpressive and often quite cramped.

As the clerk on the third floor led him through into the small, legal-tome-lined office, it was little different from many he had been in before. George Carrington sat behind a desk, in front of which, in studded leather chairs, sat Financial Investigator Emily Denyer and Crown Prosecution solicitor Rodney Higgs.

Carrington, a Queen’s Counsel who had a formidable reputation on both sides of the Bar, was in his early sixties, with a rubicund, well-lunched face. Dressed in a three-piece chalk-striped suit and looking out imperiously through half-frame glasses, he instantly reminded Grace of a television character, many years back, called Rumpole of the Bailey, played by the late Leo McKern.

As the barrister rose to greet him, Grace clocked the uncomfortable expressions on both Emily Denyer’s and Rodney Higgs’s faces, and apologized for being late.

‘Detective Superintendent Grace,’ Carrington greeted him in a deep, bass voice. ‘Very good to meet you. Please take a seat.’

He pointed Grace to the third chair in front of him.

As he sat down, Roy Grace had the gut feeling this was not going to go well. He was right.

Carrington looked down for some moments at one of a pile of documents on his desk that were bound in coloured ribbon. ‘So, Detective Superintendent, this very charming young lady, Miss Jodie Bentley — at least that’s the name we are currently calling her, among many of her aliases — I believe you have given her the moniker of “Black Widow”?’ He gave Grace a long, hard look. ‘She’s a tricky character, I think you might agree?’

‘I’d say more than tricky, Mr Carrington,’ Grace replied. ‘Extremely well informed and cunning. She’s been operating under a string of aliases, with bank accounts set up in different names around the world. I believe she was responsible for the deaths of at least three previous lovers, as well as, very nearly, the murder of one of my finest detectives, DS Norman Potting. She’s a menace, a danger to society, and if there is any justice in the world, you’ll see to it that she’s locked behind bars for the rest of her life.’

Grace noted, uncomfortably, that both Denyer and Higgs were avoiding meeting his eye.

The QC steepled his hands. ‘I can well understand your sentiments, and there is no doubt in my mind, from your extremely well-prepared trial documents, that she is very probably guilty of all you say. The problem we are faced with is the gap between what you are certain to be the case and what we would be able to get a jury to believe. I’ve been looking at the evidence you and your team have put together and playing devil’s advocate with it.’

He tapped a pile of documents. ‘There is no certainty that we would be able to use similar facts in the evidence to connect the deaths of her first husband and of Walt Klein. She has only been charged with the murder of her second husband, Rowley Carmichael. The defence had indicated this was to be a not-guilty plea, but in the last couple of days new evidence has been submitted which puts a different complexion on matters. The psychiatric reports obtained by the experts working for both the defence and the prosecution agree that at the time of killing him, her mind was adversely affected to the extent of amounting to diminished responsibility.’

‘What?’ Roy Grace had to restrain himself from shouting at the pompous man. He looked at his two colleagues and again they avoided meeting his eye.

The barrister continued. ‘I’ve reviewed every salient detail of the evidence with the contents of the psychiatric reports and I have a number of concerns. But I also have a solution.’

‘Good to hear,’ Roy Grace said, barely masking his growing misgivings.

‘As you know, Detective Superintendent,’ Carrington continued, ‘Jodie Bentley is due to appear at Lewes Crown Court tomorrow morning for a plea and direction hearing. My proposal is that she will plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and be sectioned under Section 37 of the Mental Health Act. That means she can only ever be released under the orders of the Minister of Justice.’

Roy stared back at him in disbelief. ‘You can’t be serious?’

‘I am very serious. I appreciate this may not be the day-in-court result you would like to see, but trust me, this is the best outcome. With the findings from the psychiatric reports and the experts’ agreements on her mental state, there is no way the trial judge would proceed in any other way.’

‘She’s had everybody over, she’s a serial killer, for God’s sake!’ Grace was almost shouting with frustration.

Carrington gave him a patronizing look that merely served to make Roy Grace even more angry. ‘I appreciate all the work you and your team put into this case, and I’ve studied it long and hard. But I’ve been in front of juries for the best part of forty years and I know only too well just how unpredictable they can be. Too often it’s not about right and wrong, justice and injustice.’ He looked hard at the Detective Superintendent. ‘This really is the right course of action, in the circumstances.’

Grace looked hard back at him. The QC carried on.

‘To sum up, having reviewed all the evidence, Detective Superintendent, both from a prosecuting counsel point of view and from a defence counsel’s, manslaughter is appropriate in this case.’

‘And released in a few months by a well-meaning health worker?’ Grace retorted.

Carrington shook his head. ‘No, that’s not going to happen.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I can assure you,’ the barrister said. ‘This is a good result. Trust me.’

Roy Grace stared back at him, thinking, but not saying, Really? Trust you? Get real. Since when did letting a serial killer go free become a good result?