Wife On Demand Read online

  The witness blinked suddenly and looked down, her upper lip just caught between her teeth. There wasn’t a member of the jury who didn’t understand that Corinne Lamont was suddenly thinking of the cage door that she could not open for Jude Daniels.

  “At any time during your absence did you have cause to believe that Jude Daniels had started seeing another woman?”

  The actress swallowed, glanced at Jude and away. “Someone wrote and told me.”

  “Do you remember who?”

  “No.”

  “It was not Jude Daniels himself?”

  “No.”

  “Did it distress you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? I know I would be deeply distressed if my husband couldn’t remain faithful during a few months’ separation.”

  “But men’s sex drive is less attached to their feelings, isn’t it? I know it’s not politically correct to say so, but men are different. Aren’t they?” She sounded pathetically in need of reassurance.

  “You came back to Toronto—when?”

  “When the cruise was finished. Late September.”

  “What was the situation when you got back, Miss Lamont?”

  “Jude was...under arrest.”

  “In prison?”

  “In the detention centre. When they told me he hadn’t got bail, I was just—”

  “Just answer the question, please. Did you go and visit him there?”

  The actress pressed her lips together. When emotion suffused her, Hope saw, she really was beautiful. Her eyes took on depth that seemed to reach all the way to her soul, her mouth became fuller, swollen with feeling, and the slight trembling of her chin made a dimple in her cheek come and go.

  She lowered her head and nodded.

  “I’m afraid I have to ask you to answer that verbally, Miss Lamont,” said Ms. Holt. “For the record.”

  She cleared her throat, and it was a pathetic sound. “Yes, I went to visit him.”

  “Were you already aware at the time you visited who the other woman in his life was said to be?”

  The pale blue eyes unerringly found Hope in the body of the court. The jury followed her eyes. “Yes, I was aware.”

  “Did Jude Daniels confirm the rumour you had heard?”

  “I think he said her name.”

  “And who was it?”

  “Hope Thompson. The boss’s daughter.” The flick of contempt in the witness’s tone cut her, but Hope didn’t wince.

  “Did Jude Daniels say anything to you at that time about his reasons for getting involved with Hope Thompson?”

  “He had—he has a very strong sex drive,” said the witness.

  “Did he tell you that was his reason?”

  The witness looked suddenly lost, as if she did not know which was the right way to answer this question. “Ummm...” She licked her lips.

  “Please answer the question, Miss Lamont. Did Jude Daniels tell you that sex was his reason for getting involved with Hope Thompson?”

  She made up her mind. “Yes, he did.” It sounded like a lie.

  “Did he give any other reason for having cheated on you?”

  Her eyes fell. “No.”

  “He never suggested to you that he had a very particular reason for his relationship with Ms. Thompson?”

  Corinne Lamont gazed at the Crown Prosecutor in dismay. “No!” she denied hotly. But she was not a good enough actress to cloak the lie. “He just said it wasn’t important and he was sorry.”

  Sondra Holt looked down at a paper on her table. “Did you at any time after visiting Jude Daniels tell one of your friends that Jude Daniels had another very particular reason for this involvement with Hope Thompson?”

  “Objection, Your Honour. What this witness told a friend has no bearing on my client.”

  “Sustained. Try to keep within the limits, Ms. Holt.”

  But the witness decided of her own accord to answer the question. “I told Marsha Goodfellow that he did it so she would testify on his side, but I was lying, and if Marsha told you about it, she’s a liar and a cow!” she said in a hot rush of words.

  Nicholas Harvey erupted in a volcano of indignation, and the defence moved for a mistrial, but the judge cited the jury’s intelligence and the public purse and refused. The Crown was admonished, the witness rebuked, and the jury instructed to ignore her. last remarks. In all this violence, Hope’s heart was the still, small centre of the storm. Like a small animal afraid to move lest it discover that it is bleeding to death, her heart cowered in her.

  Nicholas Harvey rose to his feet and approached the lawyer’s lectern. He looked at the witness for a long appreciative moment and then raised both hands and applauded, the noise his hands made as they slapped together shockingly unexpected in the silence of the court.

  Corinne Lamont stared at him in disbelief that slowly changed to fury.

  “Excellent performance,” said Nicholas Harvey in mocking admiration. “You really took us all with you, Miss Lamont, we were there every step of the way. What an actress!”

  “What are you talking about?” she demanded, in a tight voice. Her eyes narrowed, but she opened them again in wide, innocent incomprehension.

  “You even got my learned friend here, and believe me, she isn’t just anybody’s fool!” The defence lawyer gestured widely towards his opponent with a smile. “You really convinced her that Jude Daniels as good as told you that he was using Hope Thompson, pretending to love her so that she would testify—well, let’s not wrap it up in clean linen!—so that she would lie under oath on his behalf. You might even have got one or two members of the jury to believe it! But you didn’t get me, ’cause I know the truth! He never told you any such thing! Did he!”

  “I didn’t say he did!”

  “No, you didn’t!” he said admiringly. “Instead you said he didn’t tell you that. Nobody’ll ever get you for perjury, will they? Because that is the truth! He didn’t tell you any such thing.” He was grasping the lectern with both hands, leaning over it towards her, pushing his head aggressively towards her as he spoke. Then he stood back and watched her as she very obviously struggled for what to answer.

  “You don’t have an agreement with Jude Daniels, do you? There’s no half engagement and there never was. He was glad when you got that job offer, wasn’t he, though he was polite enough to let you think he wasn’t.”

  “He wasn’t glad! But I really wanted to take it!”

  “Why? A job on a cruise ship?”

  “It was a career opportunity! Anyone might have seen me—producers...”

  “Come on! Producers? On a cruise ship? Was there any passenger on the whole list who wasn’t over sixty-five?”

  “Producers can be over sixty-five,” she said triumphantly.

  “As I’ll bet you know! But not even over-sixty-five producers turn up on a cruise like that, do they? It’s for retired couples taking that trip they’ve saved all their lives for at last, isn’t it?”

  The witness did not answer.

  “So, if it wasn’t for the sake of your career you took such a dead-end job, what was it, Corinne?”

  “I like to keep in work.”

  “You knew it wasn’t going anywhere with my client before you accepted that job, didn’t you? It was a relief when you got that offer because it was your chance to make it look as though you were the one in control.”

  “That is not true! It was a time to think.”

  “And did it make you happy that Jude Daniels was prepared to let you go off for five or six months to think about whether you loved him or not? While he thought about whether he loved you?”

  “We both wanted it. We wanted to get our feelings sorted out.”

  “Let me tell you a secret, Miss Lamont, that you might find useful in future. A man who is willing to let a woman go off on a Mediterranean cruise for six months without nailing her down to a firm commitment beforehand already has his feelings well sorted out.”

  She glared
at him.

  “But you already knew that, didn’t you? As long as you could cover up the fact that he wasn’t seriously interested in you, and make your friends think it was your own choice, you could let him go. So you talked about ‘thinking it over,’ and when you came back you intended to let everybody know you’d just lost interest. But Jude Daniels made a mistake, didn’t he? He fell publicly and deeply in love with another woman while you were away, and everybody thought you’d been jilted. Isn’t that about what happened?”

  “He didn’t fall in love with her!”

  “Didn’t he? Later on, a witness will get up where you are now and testify that Jude Daniels was so besotted with Hope Thompson he nearly fell off a hundred-foot-high scaffolding grabbing at his portable phone when it rang, because he knew it was her! Did your correspondent tell you that Jude Daniels was besotted? Is that what got your pride? The fact that he never felt like that for you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The lawyer walked back to his desk and casually eyed some papers. “Did you sort out your relationship with him during your visit to the detention centre?”

  “No. He refused to discuss it. He said he might not have a future and I should consider myself free.”

  The lawyer grinned.

  “But I told him that I loved him and I’d wait for him however long it was.”

  It went on and on, Nicholas Harvey hammering away at every brick in the edifice of her testimony.

  “Did Jude write you while you were away?”

  “We agreed not to write, to really give ourselves space.”

  “He never wrote you one letter? The truth, Miss Lamont!”

  “I said, we agreed not to write.”

  “Did you strike up any liaisons while you were on this extended tour of all the high spots of the Mediterranean?”

  “Nothing serious.”

  He nodded. “Was there sex involved?”

  “I object, Your Honour. This witness’s sex life is of no relevance to the case.”

  “Oh, I beg to differ! She has testified that she did not feel free to engage with other men, and that she considered herself all but engaged to the defendant. We have a right....”

  For Hope it was slow torture. She was beyond knowing what to believe, almost beyond understanding what she heard. She was tormented alternately by hope and despair. There was nothing to cling to, except her ability to sit there inside her stone envelope, showing nothing.

  “You’re a professional actress.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Ever see that old Marlene Dietrich film, Witness for the Prosecution?” he asked conversationally.

  The witness admitted that she had.

  “The plot hinges, I think,” the defence lawyer said, “on the defendant’s wife pretending to hate her husband in order to make the jury dismiss the damaging testimony she gives, is that right?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Have you ever played the Marlene Dietrich role in that play, Miss Lamont?”

  She blinked. “Only in a high school production.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Five—six years.”

  “When did it occur to you that you could play a reallife reprise of that role today by pretending to this jury that you’re in love with my client when in fact you are furious with him for letting the world know that he prefers another woman to you?”

  The witness gasped. “That’s not true!” she stormed.

  “You would be very pleased if Jude Daniels were convicted of this crime. It would be his punishment for the humiliation you foolishly set yourself up for, wouldn’t it?”

  The witness hotly denied it.

  “And clever and manipulative as you are, you are not really intelligent enough to understand,” Nicholas Harvey went on in a ringing voice, “that to promote a miscarriage of justice of this magnitude for your own personal, vindictive ends is a betrayal not only of what you term love, but of truth itself and of one of our country’s most cherished institutions. From a position of complete self-absorption and ignorance you have set out to pervert the course of this trial and of justice for your own petty ends. Isn’t that so?”

  “No!”

  “Your Honour, I ob—”

  “I have no more questions of this witness, Your Honour,” Nicholas Harvey said in disgusted dismissal.

  Chapter 7

  They broke for lunch.

  After lunch they called Hope’s father’s personal doctor. He detailed the number of years that he had been Hal Thompson’s physician, described the heart attack that he had had two years ago, and said that it was as a direct result of this that, on his advice, Hal Thompson had gone into partnership with Jude Daniels. He described his two more recent heart attacks and said that, given the stimulus, it was no surprise that they had occurred. He agreed that Hal Thompson was now in a persistent vegetative state and unable to testify.

  Thereafter they called a nurse from the hospital where Hal Thompson was currently in an intensive care bed. She had been present on the night following the day of his second heart attack, which had no doubt been caused by reading the newspaper story about Jude Daniels’ arrest that had been unwittingly given him by a hospital volunteer.

  “And from the moment he had the second attack, has he been in a coma?” asked the Crown.

  “Except for that one moment he regained consciousness and spoke. It was after that he sank into the coma.”

  “He spoke? What did he say?”

  Hope blinked with surprise. She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. How could the nurse know? She herself had been alone in the room when her father spoke.

  “I never heard what he said. I was told that he’d spoken just before he slipped into the coma.”

  “Who told you?”

  “His daughter. Hope Thompson. It was to her he spoke.”

  It was in a daze, feeling battered from all directions, that she heard the Crown Prosecutor say, “Your Honour, we expect the next witness to be hostile.”

  The judge nodded. “All right, Ms. Holt Proceed.”

  “Call Hope Thompson,” said Ms. Holt.

  In a maze of fear and confusion, Hope took the stand and was sworn. As if knowing that her brain was reeling, the Crown Prosecutor moved quickly to establish her identity for the jury, while, blinking, Hope looked into the body of the court and at Jude’s face. He was smiling slightly.

  “Now, Ms. Thompson,” said the cool blonde woman before her, and Hope was afraid of her piercing gaze and determined mouth. “You have just heard the testimony of Rachel Clarke, who nursed your father at the time of his heart attack. Will you tell us, if you please, what were the last words your father said to you before going into a coma?”

  Nicholas Harvey was on his feet. “Your Honour,” he said smoothly, “may we know to what this pertains? Is my learned friend expecting to show that Hal Thompson...”

  The Crown Prosecutor turned towards him, and, released from that gaze, Hope began to breathe. Suddenly she realized that that was the purpose of Nicholas Harvey’s interruption—to give her time to collect her scattered thoughts. She tried to call on relaxation techniques, tried to breathe slowly, but her heart did not slow, and no matter how slowly she tried to draw air in, it came in little uncontrollable pants.

  “I think the witness may answer the question,” the judge said finally, and there was that slightly smiling, dangerous face again.

  “Ms. Thompson? Will you tell us what were, effectively, your father’s last words?”

  I swear to tell the truth...

  “I—he said, um...something like, ‘I’m glad I got the new will signed. You’ll be safe now.’ I can’t remember his exact words. And then—”

  Sondra Holt nodded. “Do you know what he was referring to?”

  “Yes, he’d—after his first heart attack, he asked me to call his personal lawyer, Barry Ingelow, to the hospital. I assumed then that he wanted to change his w
ill.”

  “Did Barry Ingelow come to the hospital?”

  “Yes, he did.” Hope began to relax. She had not deliberately omitted anything, but if the Crown’s own questions led her away from it...

  “And to your knowledge, was a new will signed?”

  “I never thought about it again.”

  “But your father’s words indicated that that was what he had done?”

  “That was what I thought he meant.”

  “Do you know what is in the new will?”

  “No.”

  “You say your father said something to the effect that, ‘you’ll be safe now.’ Those words sound as though your father felt he was facing death, would you agree?”

  “Oh, I object, Your Honour. This witness is hardly an expert on deathbed words. How many of us, outside of those in the medical profession, can pretend to know whether another person believes he is facing death when he speaks?”

  Grateful for the momentary break, Hope straightened her spine and breathed more calmly. When the brief battle, which Nicholas Harvey again technically lost, was over, she replied to the Crown’s prompting, “I suppose at the time I thought...he felt he wouldn’t be there to look after me anymore.”

  “And we’ve already heard that your father did indeed immediately slip into a coma from which he is not expected to recover. So anything else your father said at that time would have the effect of a deathbed communication,” Sondra Holt said comfortably, and as quickly as that, Hope was looking into the void.

  “Did your father say anything else?”

  “I—” Unwisely, uncontrollably, she glanced at Jude, and then at Nicholas Harvey. Oh, what a fool she was! Why hadn’t she told that capable man about this?

  “Would you like the question repeated, Ms. Thompson?”

  “No, no, I heard it.” She licked her lips. It could have meant anything. Why should she have to repeat something that would sound so damning but could have meant anything at all? And yet, if she didn’t—did they have another witness who had overheard?

  ...the whole truth...