The woman stopped what she was doing and looked up at me. “The director is expecting an overseas call at any moment, and cannot be disturbed,” she replied. “I’m sorry, but …”
I ran straight past her, pulled open the door and rushed into the room, where I came face to face with Jeremy Alexander for the first time since I had left him lying on the floor of my drawing room. He was talking animatedly on the phone, but he looked up and recognized me immediately. When I pulled the gun from my pocket, he dropped the receiver. As I took aim, the blood suddenly drained from his face.
“Are you there, Jeremy?” asked an agitated voice on the other end of the line. Despite the passing of time, I had no difficulty in recognizing Rosemary’s strident tones.
Jeremy was shouting, “No, Richard, no! I can explain! Believe me, I can explain!” as Donald came running in. He came to an abrupt halt by the professor’s desk, but showed no interest in Jeremy.
“Don’t do it, Richard,” he pleaded. “You’ll only spend the rest of your life regretting it.” I remember thinking it was the first time he had ever called me Richard.
“Wrong, for a change, Donald,” I told him. “I won’t regret killing Jeremy Alexander. You see, he’s already been pronounced dead once. I know, because I was sentenced to life imprisonment for his murder. I’m sure you’re aware of the meaning of autrefois acquit, and will therefore know that I can’t be charged a second time with a crime I’ve already been convicted of and sentenced for. Even though this time they will have a body.”
I moved the gun a few inches to the right, and aimed at Jeremy’s heart. I squeezed the trigger just as Jenny came charging into the room. She dived at my legs.
Jeremy and I both hit the ground with a thud.
Well, as I pointed out to you at the beginning of this chronicle, I ought to explain why I’m in jail—or, to be more accurate, why I’m back in jail.
I was tried a second time; on this occasion for attempted murder—despite the fact that I had only grazed the bloody man’s shoulder. I still blame Jenny for that.
Mind you, it was worth it just to hear Matthew’s closing speech, because he certainly understood the meaning of autrefois acquit. He surpassed himself with his description of Rosemary as a calculating, evil Jezebel, and Jeremy as a man motivated by malice and greed, quite willing to cynically pose as a national hero while his victim was rotting his life away in jail, put there by a wife’s perjured testimony of which he had unquestionably been the mastermind. In another four years, a furious Matthew told the jury, they would have been able to pocket several more millions between them. This time the jury looked on me with considerable sympathy.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against any man,” were Sir Matthew’s closing words, his sonorous tones making him sound like an Old Testament prophet.
The tabloids always need a hero and a villain. This time they had got themselves a hero and two villains. They seemed to have forgotten everything they had printed during the previous trial about the oversexed truck driver, and it would be foolish to suggest that the page after page devoted to every sordid detail of Jeremy and Rosemary’s deception didn’t influence the jury.
They found me guilty, of course, but only because they weren’t given any choice. In his summing up, the judge almost ordered them to do so. But the foreman expressed his fellow jurors’ hope that, given the circumstances, the judge might consider a lenient sentence. Mr. Justice Lampton obviously didn’t read the tabloids, because he lectured me for several minutes and then said I would be sent down for five years.
Matthew was on his feet immediately, appealing for clemency on the grounds that I had already served a long sentence. “This man looks out on the world through a window of tears,” he told the judge. “I beseech your lordship not to put bars across that window a second time.” The applause from the gallery was so thunderous that the judge had to instruct the bailiffs to clear the court before he could respond to Sir Matthew’s plea.
“His lordship obviously needs a little time to think,” Matthew explained under his breath as he passed me in the dock. After much deliberation in his chambers, Mr. Justice Lampton settled on three years. Later that day I was sent to Ford Open Prison.
After considerable press comment during the next few weeks, and what Sir Matthew described to the Court of Appeal as “my client’s unparalleled affliction and exemplary behavior,” I ended up only having to serve nine months.
Meanwhile, Jeremy had been arrested at Addenbrookes Hospital by Allan Leeke, deputy chief constable of Cambridgeshire. After three days in a heavily guarded ward, he was charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of public justice and transferred to Armley Prison to await trial. He comes before the Leeds Crown Court next month, and you can be sure I’ll be sitting in the gallery following the proceedings every day. By the way, Fingers and the boys gave him a very handsome welcome. I’m told he’s lost even more weight than he did trooping backward and forward across Europe fixing up his new identity.
Rosemary has also been arrested and charged with perjury. They didn’t grant her bail, and Donald informs me that French prisons, particularly the one in Marseilles, are less comfortable than Armley—one of the few disadvantages of living in the south of France. She’s fighting the extradition order, of course, but I’m assured by Matthew that she has absolutely no chance of succeeding now that we’ve signed the Maastricht Treaty. I knew something good must come out of that.
As for Mrs. Balcescu—I’m sure you worked out where I’d seen her long before I did.
In the case of Regina v. Alexander and Kershaw, I’m told, she will be giving evidence on behalf of the Crown. Jeremy made such a simple mistake for a normally calculating and shrewd man. In order to protect himself from being identified, he put all his worldly goods in his wife’s name. So the striking blond ended up with everything, and I have a feeling that when it comes to her cross-examination, Rosemary won’t turn out to be all that helpful to Jeremy, because it slipped his mind to let her know that in between those weekly phone calls he was living with another woman.
It’s been difficult to find out much more about the real Professor Balcescu, because since Ceausescu’s downfall no one is quite sure what really happened to the distinguished academic. Even the Romanians believed he had escaped to Britain and begun a new life.
Bradford City’s soccer team has gone into the cellar, so Donald has bought a cottage in the West Country and settled down to watch Bath play rugby. Jenny has joined a private detective agency in London, but is already complaining about her salary and conditions. Williams has returned to Bradford and decided on an early retirement. It was he who pointed out the painfully obvious fact that when it’s twelve o’clock in France, it’s only eleven o’clock in Britain.
By the way, I’ve decided to go back to Leeds after all. Cooper’s went into liquidation as I suspected they would, the new management team not proving all that effective when it came to riding out a recession. The official receiver was only too delighted to accept my offer of £250,000 for what remained of the company, because no one else was showing the slightest interest in it. Poor Jeremy will get almost nothing for his shares. Still, you should look up the new stock in the F.T. around the middle of next year, and buy yourself a few, because they’ll be what my father would have called “a risk worth taking.”
By the way, Matthew advises me that I’ve just given you what’s termed as “inside information,” so please don’t pass it on, as I have no desire to go back to jail for a third time.
CHEAP AT HALF THE PRICE
Women are naturally superior to men, and Mrs. Consuela Rosenheim was no exception.
Victor Rosenheim, an American banker, was Consuela’s third husband, and the gossip columns on both sides of the Atlantic were suggesting that, like a chain-smoker, the former Colombian model was already searching for her next spouse before she had extracted the last gasp from the old one. Her first two husbands—one an Arab, the other a Jew (Consuela showed no racial prejudice when it came to signing marriage contracts)—had not quite left her in a position that would guarantee her financial security once her natural beauty had faded. But two more divorce settlements would sort that out. With this in mind, Consuela estimated that she only had another five years before the final vow must be taken.
The Rosenheims flew into London from their home in New York—or, to be more accurate, from their homes in New York. Consuela had traveled to the airport by chauffeur-driven car from their mansion in the Hamptons, while her husband had been taken from his Wall S
treet office in a second chauffeur-driven car. They met up in the Concorde lounge at JFK. When they had landed at Heathrow, another limousine transported them to the Ritz, where they were escorted to their usual suite without any suggestion of having to sign forms or check in.