Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

54. The Trial

The Trial

My former lover is on the witness stand, dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, the same one he wore to Jimmy and Nina’s wedding. Opposite him in the dock is my husband, also in his navy wedding suit, the only one he owns. If only we could turn the clock back to that night, to the foolish conversation Gabriel and I had behind our shield of elm trees. Or wind it further, to the day a lurcher tore into our field and slaughtered our lambs.

I have sat opposite Frank at our kitchen table day in, day out for so many years, I know every centimeter of his face, his body. But this man looks almost a stranger viewed from above. I gaze at him until my eyes hurt from looking, until my heart can no longer take it.

It is my first sighting of the jury: The men and women who hold my husband’s fate in their hands. Will they hear how Frank was a parent to Jimmy as much as a brother, his friend, his guide, and realize he would never have hurt him, let alone murdered him?

My sister, Eleanor, has been here in the public gallery every day since the trial first began. She points out the press bench, overflowing with journalists. “Twice as many today, of course,” she whispers, with a quick eye roll.

A man has died. Frank’s brother, Nina’s husband, the boy who once delivered my baby. But you wouldn’t think it to read the endless rash of stories in the press about the “playboy” author Gabriel Wolfe and his love affair with a lowly “farmer’s wife.”

“Mr. Wolfe,” the Crown prosecutor says, “I’d like to begin at the beginning, if I may? Can you tell me how you first met Beth Johnson?”

I feel, oh, inescapably sad when Gabriel starts to recount our initial meeting. Our trespassing story. Our connection over books and writing. Our mutual boredom, a girl and boy looking to fill a whole summer. The passion that started slowly but soon engulfed us until there was room for nothing and no one else.

“It sounds very powerful the way you describe it. You were in love?”

“We loved each other, yes.”

Gabriel stares back at Donald Glossop, QC, never once dropping his gaze. Gabriel has the clear, well-spoken voice of his kind, unfazed by the scrutiny, a sea of faces turned to examine him. He might be on the witness stand, his private life about to be ripped apart, but they are equals, the barrister and him, that’s what his look says.

“But the relationship ended. Why was that?”

I find myself watching Gabriel intently now, holding my breath as I wait for him to speak.

“It ended for no good reason at all. Miscommunication.”

“A false ending, in a sense?”

Gabriel pauses, as if the words have winded him. “Yes,” he says, quieter now. “That’s exactly right, a false ending.”

“And when you met Beth Johnson again all those years later, you still had feelings for each other?”

I see how Gabriel glances at the dock. He doesn’t know of my daily confessions to Frank in the months before he went to prison. If he was to love me again, I said, then he needed to know everything I had done. There were times he didn’t want to listen and begged me to stop, but I would always carry on in the end. No secrets, we said. Nothing hidden, all of it shared. Frank knows all there is to know about Gabriel and me, from our very beginning to our savage end.

Gabriel says: “Deep down, yes. Although neither of us wanted to admit it. Beth was happily married. I knew she loved her husband.”

“And yet, you began an affair with her?”

You can feel it, a new alertness in the gallery—this is what the people came for.

“Yes, I knew it was wrong. And I deeply regret it. But I loved her… I always had.”

I bow my head for a moment, look down at my knees. Oh, Gabriel , I think, as the inevitable sadness rushes through me. There’s no point wishing things had turned out differently, but I do it all the same.

“When did the affair start?”

“Last September. Immediately after Jimmy and Nina Johnson’s wedding.”

Disapproval crackles through the court as this fact sinks in. That we would so callously begin an affair after a joyous family celebration. That the bridegroom would be dead within a week.

“I’d like to move now to September the twenty-eighth of last year. The night of the shooting. Beth Johnson came to your house, I believe, to warn you Jimmy was missing and armed with a shotgun.”

Every minute of this trial matters, it matters so much. Nothing has ever mattered more. So why is it I cannot concentrate on Gabriel’s voice as he begins to tell the court his version of events on that fateful night? I am thinking of all the twenty-eighths of September that had gone before it, days of sunshine, laughter, lovemaking or arguing, milking cows or feeding sheep, cooking, cleaning, changing sheets, days when Bobby was alive and days when he wasn’t, stretches of time that gave no hint of what this date would come to mean. I am thinking of the absurdity of the entire case, that Frank, who loved his brother as much as you could ever love anyone, and then some more, would be accused of killing him. I am thinking the wrong man is in the dock and I should never have allowed it to get this far.

“How did Beth seem when you first saw her?” the prosecutor asks.

“She was worried. Frank had told her Jimmy wanted to punish me for the affair. He was out for blood, she said. I didn’t take it seriously at first. It seemed rather far-fetched. But Beth seemed to think Jimmy might turn up at the house. Within minutes, he did.”

I listen to Gabriel describing his son’s terror when Jimmy fired at the kitchen window. The glass shattering. The three of us screaming in shock. A great gap in the window with my brother-in-law standing just outside it, loading another cartridge into his shotgun.

“Why would you risk going outside? Were you not afraid?” Mr. Glossop asks.

“I wanted to protect my son.” Gabriel lowers his voice. “And Beth. I wanted to keep them safe. I needed Jimmy off the premises. That’s all I was thinking about.”

“I’m skeptical, Mr. Wolfe, as to why Jimmy, who had shot at you through the kitchen window, would happily get into a car with you, meek as a lamb.”

“Hardly meek. I told Jimmy I was going to drive him home and he told me to get lost. He was still brandishing his shotgun, drunk out of his mind. It was terrifying. I had to think of something to persuade him into the car. So I told him it was over between me and Beth. That we had ended the affair.”

“Was that true?”

“Not then, no.”

“You’re saying you lied, Mr. Wolfe?”

“Yes,” Gabriel snaps. “On the spur of the moment. It was a stressful situation. I was thinking on my feet.”

Donald Glossop nods but says nothing, allowing Gabriel’s admission to sink in.

“Why didn’t Beth Johnson come in the car with you? Wouldn’t that have made more sense? I would have thought she would have been more able to calm him down.”

“One of us needed to stay behind with my son. He was traumatized, he believed I was going to be killed.”

“What happened when you arrived at Blakely Farm?”

“Frank was in the yard as we drove in, and he came straight over to the car and helped Jimmy into the farmhouse. That was the last time I saw him.”

“If we could pause there for a moment. This was the first time you had seen Frank Johnson since he had learned of your affair with his wife? Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“He must have been very angry with you…?”

“If he was, he didn’t show it. If anything, Frank seemed grateful I’d brought Jimmy home”—Gabriel falters, then recovers himself—“in one piece. He thanked me.”

“He thanked you.”

When Donald Glossop was announced as Crown counsel my sister spent a day in the British Library reading up on the cases he had won. “He’s a performer,” she told me. “He acts up for the jury and gets them onside. He amuses them, makes them laugh, lulls them into a false sense of security. Then delivers his bombshell. It’s his trademark.”

“I’m not sure I’d be thanking you in the same situation, Mr. Wolfe. If it were my wife, my vocabulary would be rather more colorful.”

There is a ripple of laughter in court, several jurors smile. The woman with gray hair and electric-blue spectacles. I’d already registered the flamboyant glasses, wondered what they were meant to signal. The man in pinstripe, whom I think of as “City Gent,” puts his hand to his mouth, trying to conceal his grin.

“Frank Johnson has never shown me any anger, not once, despite the obvious provocation of me sleeping with his wife,” Gabriel says, evenly. “Jimmy was volatile and prone to bursts of violence. But not Frank, not in my experience.”

The man under discussion looks blankly ahead, as he has all morning. If Frank were a poker player, he’d win every hand. His face is inscrutable, devoid of feeling. I know, better than anyone, how he pines for his brother, how he mourned him, the harrowing sobs that would rise from his chest in the middle of the night, try as he might to disguise them. Frank, who barely cried in all my years of knowing him, has wept a lake of tears for Jimmy. But the jury doesn’t know that.

“You are paying Frank Johnson’s legal costs, are you not?”

Gabriel hesitates, wrong-footed now. None of us expected this to come out in the trial.

“Should I repeat the question?”

Gabriel shakes his head, irritated.

“I can afford it. And the Johnsons can’t.”

“Most generous, I am sure,” Mr. Glossop says in his honey-like tone. He turns once more to the jury. “I hear these legal bills can be cripplingly expensive.”

More laughter, the jury are enjoying themselves. It is a moment’s reprieve from the grim reality of a murder trial.

“I wonder, is there not another motivation for doing so? You have told the court you loved Beth Johnson, the defendant’s wife, and always had. Is it fair to say you have her best interests at heart?”

“Yes. No. Not in the way you mean.”

“I don’t believe you have any idea what kind of man Frank Johnson is, as you barely knew him. Your relationship was with his wife. A very intimate relationship. It seems unlikely Frank Johnson would have wanted to spend a single second in your company.”

The jury is smirking again, ready for more sarcasm, more performance. But Donald Glossop does the volte-face for which he is famous, his voice raised to a pitch just below a shout.

“I suggest it is guilt that has brought you here today, Mr. Wolfe. Guilt your love affair with Beth Johnson was an unfortunate catalyst in Jimmy Johnson’s death.”

“I fail to see how my feelings about my relationship with Beth have any relevance to this case? I was called to testify because I was one of the last people to see Jimmy Johnson alive.”

Gabriel’s voice is terse as he says this. To the courtroom he probably sounds impatient. A man trying to keep his irritation under control. But all I hear is Gabriel’s desolation, the quiet change in his voice when he says my name.

“Quite so. And it is your viability as a witness I now call into question. A few moments ago, you readily admitted to being a liar. I don’t believe we can trust a word you are saying.”

He allows one final, significant pause, before he delivers his dismissal in a bored and weary tone as if Gabriel is nothing but a waste of time. “I have no further questions for this witness, my lord.”