Find Them Dead

28 Thursday 9 May

Richard Jupp sat at his desk in his chambers, sipping a strong coffee he’d brewed himself, both his dogs lying at his feet. The coffee was supplied by a criminal law solicitor called Gerry Maye. Maye was smartly — in Jupp’s view — diversifying from his law practice into coffee importing. Due to reductions in legal aid rates, a large number of law firms had gone to the wall during the past couple of years. It made him gladder than ever that he was a judge, on a comfortable salary and with a good pension ahead.

The round clock on the wall read 9.55. Five minutes to the start and the defendant’s QC, Primrose Brown — a clever barrister who he knew and liked — had just informed him via the clerk of the court, Maureen Sapsed, that a new financial report had only just been received by the defence counsel. More evidence linking Gready to offshore accounts.

Maureen, garbed in the traditional black gown and now nervously standing in front of him, was efficient in the extreme, and always did her very best to keep all court business flowing. But, like himself, she was often driven to distraction by the inefficiencies that dogged the entire legal system. Like all major public services, the court system had been affected by the austerity measures brought in over a decade ago.

The under-funded and therefore under-manned Crown Prosecution Service was in a constant state of false economy. The cost of putting together any major trial was immense. Getting all the witnesses, police officers, prosecution advocates and defence counsel together for a specific date was always a nightmare of scheduling. With a never-ending backlog of trials waiting in the wings, adjourning a case was never a simple matter of putting it back a few days. All the players involved had myriad other commitments. An adjournment would often mean months before all the elements could be assembled again. And with it came another problem. If the accused had been remanded in custody, they could be kept there, by law, for a maximum of six months. There had to be good grounds for an extension.

Sometimes, he said, only partly in jest, that he felt like a shepherd trying to herd cats. It was a major headache to hold all the different, diverse and moving pieces of a trial together.

For all these reasons, the decision facing Richard Jupp, just five minutes before the start of Regina v Terence Arthur Gready, was whether to go ahead or adjourn due to the late arrival of this new evidence. He knew that obtaining financial information from overseas was an imprecise science, but that was a problem for later. There were two elements to the trial — the first being whether Gready was involved in the importation of six million pounds’ worth of cocaine and four similar importation charges, as well as a much wider network of county lines drug dealing.

But the second element and the main focus of this trial was whether Terence Gready was actually the mastermind behind a vast drugs empire.

A major factor for any judge was whether any decision he or she made would leave an opening for an appeal. But in his opinion, there would be ample time during the following days for the defence to study the late financial documents. It wasn’t enough to justify an adjournment of probably many months. And the defence counsel, if they were sensible, wouldn’t challenge this. The trial had already taken long enough to come to court, with the defendant locked up on remand. Everyone wanted to get going.

Jupp looked up at the clerk. ‘We start, regardless of this, Maureen. But I want a written explanation from the SIO for the lateness of this evidence.’

‘Yes, Your Honour.’

‘How’s the audience looking?’

He was referring to the public gallery. There was a general rule-of-thumb about the numbers attending court cases out of pure interest. The ‘chart busters’, as he liked to call them, were Death by Dangerous Driving cases, which always attracted the biggest crowds, often filling the courts to capacity. Next came murder trials. And a long way third were sex cases.

‘Pretty full,’ she said. ‘The case has had a lot of local media coverage.’

Jupp didn’t like a full gallery. Dozens of strangers staring at him and, more importantly, at the jurors. Intimidating them. Especially during trials when a large contingent of the public gallery was made up of family and friends of the accused. Which this one almost certainly was.

He glanced at the clock. ‘OK, let’s rock and roll!’