List of chapters | Fiction
Afterword | Second appendix
The body of Jean-Christophe Goldfisch was found in a refuse bin in September 2008. He died following the infliction of a wound which was clearly intended to cause death or, at best, grievous mutilation. While a number of potential suspects have been investigated by the police and questioned by me, nobody has yet been charged with the murder.
It now falls to me to consider whether certain newly discovered evidence which appears to implicate Claude Legrand in the crime is of sufficient probative value to justify a direction that the accused be put on trial for the murder. If I decide that the evidence is not sufficient, the matter will end there. If I come to the contrary conclusion, I shall then have to decide, as a separate issue, whether to direct that he be tried.
The evidence in question consists of a narrative published on the internet on behalf of the accused, which the prosecution argues amounts to a confession that he ordered certain unknown employees of his to kill the victim. It is clear that the narrative does indeed state that the victim was murdered on the instructions of the accused. It can also be said with certainty that the narrative was written by, and published on behalf of the accused and that both writing and publication were voluntary and unforced.
While the published document consists of a computer file and therefore does not bear a handwritten signature, I have no doubt that the words «C. Legrand» at the foot of the document were intended by the accused as an acknowledgement that the narrative is his utterance. I have been invited by his counsel to treat the issue on the assumption that there will be no dispute that the publication is the work of the accused.
In spite of this, there remain some reasons to question the value of the narrative as evidence against the accused in a criminal investigation. In the first place only the final five paragraphs are in his own voice. These final paragraphs form a kind of epilogue to the main text — in which the alleged admissions occur — which purports to be in the voice of someone other than the accused. The person in question is Andrea Wilson, an Englishwoman who was herself arrested and questioned as a possible suspect in the murder. She alleged that the victim had attempted to rape her a few weeks before he was killed. The accused’s narrative includes an evidently fictionalized description of these events. According to the narrative, Ms Wilson died in a fall from a mountain. It should be noted that her body has not been recovered, nor has she been reported missing.
The lack of evidence of Ms Wilson’s death does not in itself cast doubt on the truth of the relevant parts of the narrative. Inaccessibility and imprecision as to the location could provide a more than adequate explanation of the failure to recover a body. Nor should too much be read into the fact that nobody seems to have missed her. If the narrative is to be relied on, she led a dissolute and rather aimless life which would not have conduced to the formation of close bonds or strong friendships. There remain two powerful reasons to conclude with confidence that the narrative is unreliable in its main points.
First, it is predicated entirely on a clearly fictional device: the accused claims that, through the use of some unprecedented technology that is never properly described or explained, he was able to read Ms Wilson’s mind.
And second, he claims to have seen, through her eyes, a gigantic explosion in which a wooden cabin and a car parked beside it were destroyed. Police investigations have established beyond doubt that no such explosion occurred in the Pyrenées at the time of these alleged events.
The narrative, in short, makes no credible claim to be truthful and is obviously unreliable as a historical document in its main points. The question to be determined, then, is whether a plausible admission, contained in a work of fiction, but incidental to the main thrust of the narrative, and which fits the established facts, is of adequate evidentiary value to ground a criminal trial? I conclude that it is. In principle, a credible admission is not to be excluded from evidence solely because of the nature of the document in which it occurs, though the court of trial would, of course, have to weigh the evidence carefully and sceptically.
I emphasize that, in this case, the admission does indeed fit the established facts very closely. In particular, it is a fact that M. Goldfisch is dead, and he died in a manner which corresponds almost exactly to that described by the accused.
Although the evidence is sufficient, it does not follow as a matter of course that the accused should be arraigned. At the time he completed the narrative, almost three years ago, he had been warned by his health care team that he could expect shortly to succumb to dementia. There is no dispute that this has in fact come to pass, or that his condition has deteriorated with frightening rapidity. I have studied the reports of psychiatric experts commissioned by the defence and requested by my office. There is an unusually high degree of agreement between them despite one major point of dispute which is tangential to the issue which I have to determine. I have no hesitation in concluding that Claude Legrand would not be capable of following the evidence and arguments in any trial that might take place, and could not adequately instruct his counsel. It follows that a trial cannot take place. Further, there is no prospect that M. Legrand’s condition will improve. Nothing, therefore, can be gained by leaving the file open. I direct that the complaint against Claude Legrand be dismissed.