The Evangeline (32 page)

‘Why didn’t you explain that to the others? Why didn’t you at least tell Ms Grimes?’

Marlowe rubbed his fingers back and forth across his lower jaw. His eyes narrowed as he turned his head to the side. ‘There weren’t that many who might have agreed with me.’ The glance he gave Darnell spoke the hope that he would not have to go any further to make his meaning clear.

‘One other question about the method that was used.You heard Mr Roberts ask why you did not ask for volunteers instead of leaving things to chance.Was it because this whole arrangement was actually based on voluntary consent? Because everyone agreed to do what the majority decided, and the majority decided that the fairest method was to have everyone draw lots?’ asked Darnell, so certain of the answer that he was thinking ahead to the next question.

‘No.’

Darnell was sure he had not heard him right. He swung his head from the jury box to the witness stand. ‘No? I don’t think I understand. Are you saying that the lottery was not based on the consent of all the others?’

‘No, I’m not saying that either,’ said Marlowe as he looked away from Darnell’s inquiring gaze.

‘Then what are you saying?’ insisted Darnell, certain that Marlowe was hiding something. ‘You have to answer: you’re under oath.’

‘You asked why I did not ask for volunteers.’

‘Yes, it’s the same question Mr Roberts put to Ms Grimes. I don’t quite see…?’

‘Ms Grimes doesn’t remember. She may not even have known. I did not ask any of the women.’

‘You mean…?’

‘I asked for volunteers. I asked if anyone was willing to die.’

‘And no one would?’

‘One only—Mr Offenbach. But I could not let him do it. I could not let Mr Offenbach—you know the reasons already. So I asked again. I asked Trevelyn if he would do it, if he would volunteer, but Trevelyn refused.’

‘It was only then—after no one else would volunteer—that the other method was chosen?’ asked Darnell as he paced slowly in front of the counsel table, staring intently at the floor.

‘Yes.’

Darnell stood still. He twisted his head just far enough to catch Marlowe’s eye.‘But you made sure that the first person to die was not chosen by chance at all.You made certain that a fourteen-year-old boy would be the first one you had to kill. And you did that because you wanted to spare him from having to live through the awful things you knew were going to happen—is that correct?’

Marlowe’s eyes became bleak, remote.

Darnell did not press him.‘Yes, that was your testimony, as I’m sure the jury will remember. There are only a few more points I want to clarify. You said, if I remember correctly, that you first went to sea when you were only twelve—is that right?’

Marlowe seemed, if not to relax, to become less rigid. He looked at Darnell and nodded.‘Yes, I was twelve when I first went to sea.’

‘On a ship from Singapore, the captain someone who knew your father?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

Grasping the edge of the counsel table behind him, Darnell stared down at the floor, wrestling with an inner dilemma. Finally, he looked up. ‘Your father died in an explosion, on a ship he was working on in Seattle. Your mother was left with only a small widow’s pension and there was your sister—a younger sister, if I remember right—still to raise. You went off to sea, willing and, I dare say, eager, to help in anyway you could!’

Darnell’s grey eyebrows arched high above his eyes, a gesture of admiration for what the boy had done to become a man. He stood straight up.‘Your mother passed away some years ago, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, she’s been gone almost ten years now.’

‘Which left your sister; but of course she’s all grown up now with a family of her own. No, I’m sorry—how thoughtless of me. Her husband died a year or so after they were married, didn’t he?’

With a baffled look on his face, Roberts rose slowly from his chair.‘Your Honour, I’m not at all clear what relevance any of this has and—’

‘Which made it almost as difficult for her as it had been for your mother, didn’t it?’ asked Darnell in a voice that made Roberts turn.‘Your mother was left with a daughter to raise while you went off to sea; your sister was left with a son to raise and, once again, you did everything you could to help. Isn’t that right, Mr Marlowe? To all intents and purposes, you became a second father to the boy, didn’t you?’

All the life had gone from Marlowe’s eyes. He was staring into the abyss, greeted by his own reflection.

‘You did everything you could for the boy, even promising that one day you would take him on one of those voyages he used to love to hear you talk about. And you kept that promise, didn’t you, Mr Marlowe? You kept your promise because you loved him more than life itself, didn’t you? And that is the great tragedy of the
Evangeline
, isn’t it? The boy you killed to save from suffering, the boy who—had you only known there was still a chance of rescue—would be at home today, safe with his mother, was your mother’s only grandson, your sister’s only child!’

Chapter Twenty-Nine

H
OMER MAITLAND DID NOT TRY TO HIDE HIS ignorance.With a casual shrug, he informed the two attorneys that he had looked everywhere and there was simply no law—at least none that was, as the lawyers like to say, directly on point.

‘It isn’t all that surprising, when you think about it. Why would you expect to find any law to cover a situation that no one has ever faced? Yes, I know,’ he added before Darnell could interrupt. ‘There were a few cases, but those were in the nineteenth century, and no matter how far back you go, you won’t find a single case in this jurisdiction where the defence of necessity has been raised against a charge of murder. This is the first, and that means it’s up to me to fashion an instruction on that defence for the jury.’

Maitland glanced at a yellow legal pad on which he had written out a draft. ‘After I give the standard instruction on murder, I will instruct them that, “It is a defence to the crime of murder if a reasonable person would have believed that both the death of the person killed and the death of others would have taken place if that person had not been killed, and if the method by which that person was chosen did not unfairly single him out.”’

‘That leaves out the important question of time,’ objected Roberts.‘It is one thing if you have to act within hours or minutes to save the lives of others—the situation of the mountain climber hanging on the rope, which will bring down all the others if it is not cut right away—it is something else again to decide that you should kill someone because you might face that situation at some indeterminate point in the future.’

‘I thought of that. I agree with the importance of the distinction. The difficulty is to know exactly where to draw the line. It seemed to me better to leave it to the jury to decide on the particular facts how long it would be reasonable to wait. It is, after all, part of what defining necessity is all about.

‘After the jury retires, you can both put whatever objections you have, to this or any of the other instructions, on the record.’

‘I wonder what instruction would make it clear to Marlowe what he did,’ said Darnell, his eyes opened wide and not a speck of hope within them.

‘His own nephew, his sister’s only child,’ said Roberts, repeating the phrase that kept echoing in his mind. He looked at Darnell, sitting next to him, and acknowledged the truth of what Darnell had told him at the beginning. ‘This trial has ruined a lot of lives, hasn’t it?’

Roberts paused. He was aware of the irony in the fact that he had prosecuted Marlowe for murder because, sworn to uphold the law, he thought he did not have a choice.‘Or were their lives ruined already, and the trial has given at least a few of them a kind of release which, if not redemption, is something still worth having?’

‘I think that may be true; though, curiously, not for the men involved, only for the women,’ said Darnell.‘I’m too old to believe that women were ever equal to men; they’re better, far better, than men could ever be. They have a strength, an endurance, men can seldom match. Samantha Wilcox and Cynthia Grimes: those are two people anyone would be proud to know. But Trevelyn? DeSantos? A couple of snivelling cowards!’

‘You say the trial might be good, but “only for the women”,’ said Homer Maitland, sitting back, his ankle on his knee. ‘Leave aside Marlowe—I can understand that he’s a special case—but what about Hugo Offenbach? Did he get nothing out of this? You wouldn’t put him in the same category as those other two?’

‘He and Marlowe are both outside the common run. They care nothing, or next to nothing, about the judgments of the world. They both, I think, thought this trial was part of the punishment each of them deserved, the price they had to pay because they lived. Offenbach at least had the satisfaction of letting everyone know the truth of what happened and what Marlowe did; all that Marlowe got was the chance to add another measure of punishment to what must already be unendurable.’

No one said a word. The silence deepened. Finally, and as quietly as he could, Maitland reached for the court file and the instructions he had prepared for the jury.‘If this had been tried to the court without a jury, if I had to decide what to do—if things were what they were years ago, when the sentence was entirely within my own discretion—shall I tell you what I think I would do, the way I would try to cut this Gordian knot?’

Maitland searched their eyes, telling them with a piercing glance that despite his placid, affable demeanour, the trial had taken a toll on his emotions as well as theirs. ‘Just between the three of us, and just within these walls, I would find him guilty of murder and then, as a sentence, set him free—on the ground that living with what he had done, what in his own honest good judgment he had been forced to do, was all the punishment anyone should have to suffer.’

Darnell pushed himself up from the chair. ‘And how would you decide it now, when, if you found him guilty, you would have no choice but to send him away for life?’

Maitland held his hand over his mouth, pondering the harsh stupidities of the law, the absence of all intelligence and understanding, the drive for retribution and revenge that had removed all proportion between the sentence and the crime. ‘All I can do is give the coward’s answer and tell you I’m glad the case is going to a jury.’ He looked at his watch.‘We’d better get started if we’re going to be finished by this afternoon.’

When the jury was brought back into the courtroom, Homer Maitland greeted them with a solemn instruction on the limits of what they were about to hear. ‘At the beginning of the trial each of the attorneys—Mr Roberts for the prosecution and Mr Darnell for the defence—made an opening statement in which they gave you a preview of what they expected the evidence to show. Now, after you have heard all the evidence that is going to be offered in this case, after you have listened to the witnesses called by each side, the attorneys are going to give their closing arguments. These summations, as they are sometimes called, give the prosecution and the defence an opportunity to argue what the evidence means. I cannot emphasise too strongly that, while you should listen and consider carefully what the two attorneys say, the judgment as to whether the evidence you have heard is sufficient to support a conviction is yours and yours alone. Mr Roberts, if you’re ready.’

Roberts was on his feet, moving directly to the jury box. He wasted no time.‘Everyone who has listened to the evidence in this case must have asked themselves what they would have done had they had the misfortune to find themselves in Vincent Marlowe’s position—alive, but barely, out there in the middle of the ocean with a dozen other people in a lifeboat that was not made for anything like that number, with no more food or water. Everyone must have wondered at the courage, the bravery, with which the people who were Marlowe’s victims—the people he killed— faced their deaths without resistance. Some of us—and let me admit that I include myself in this—must have marvelled at the almost unnatural determination with which Marlowe forced himself to plunge that knife of his into each victim, and the way he then set about the grim business of first sharing out their blood and then turning the bodies of the people he murdered into food for those still left alive. But the question, the only question, you are here to decide is whether he had to do this—not
did
he kill six people, for you have his own sworn testimony that he did, but did he have to? Was that the only choice he had? Was there really no other way?’

For nearly an hour, Roberts reviewed the testimony of the witnesses for both the prosecution and the defence. He seemed to go out of his way to balance what one said against the other. There was a point to this, but it was not fairness.

‘Trevelyn seems to have been the first to talk about it, the need to kill someone, and Trevelyn did not hesitate to insist that it should be someone else. Trevelyn wanted to live. Whatever else you might think about him, he was brutally honest—no matter how much he might lie about it now. Someone has to die so that I can live, that is what Trevelyn wanted, and I have no doubt that he would have killed someone if Marlowe had not stopped him. Yes, I mean that. Marlowe stopped him; he would not allow Trevelyn to choose his own victim. But what did Marlowe do instead? Did he stop any murder from being committed? Did he insist that, if they were going to try to stay alive a little longer— and remember he said that he did not think there was any chance of rescue; remember that he killed his own nephew so that the boy would not have to suffer!—did he insist that, if they were going to live like cannibals, devouring human flesh, they really leave it in the hands of chance or God and wait until the first among them died of natural causes? They could not do that, he tells us, because when the body is dead the blood becomes unusable! They could not do that because, if they had, those deaths would not have been so heroic!

‘Whatever merit there might have been in a defence of necessity, it falls apart on this one irrefutable fact: Marlowe, by his own admission, as well as by the testimony of Hugo Offenbach, did not believe that there was any chance of rescue. He did not believe that anyone would survive. Then why was it necessary that anyone be killed? So that others could live? For what? So that, as Samantha Wilcox put it, they could keep killing each other until there was no one left? No, it was necessary, according to Vincent Marlowe, so that their deaths would have some meaning, so that they could each die with the
illusion
—an illusion Marlowe did not share—that they were sacrificing themselves so that others could live!’