The Evidence

by Christopher Priest

  To respect sensibilities, each set of illustrations was screened off by a covering page, which carried a warning as well as captions describing each picture concealed behind. This page had to be turned before the photographs became visible, which made seeing the illustrations optional, but at the same time introduced an unmistakable feeling of curiosity. Early on I succumbed to temptation, but after that I opted to leave curiosity unsatisfied. The captions alone were enough to make the stomach churn.

  I would never have use for this degree of detail, now or in any future novel, but I saw it as interesting background intelligence. When writing about technical details I always wanted to be in possession of more information than I actually needed.

  The car’s engine continued to rumble in the sea road at the end of my garden. The familiarity of the sound made me want to retreat into the house, stay out of sight. A certainty was growing in me that it was not a casual visitor, someone who happened to have pulled up and was still waiting on the side of the road. I was sure it was Frejah. I had not been able to take in a single word of the new book from the moment I became aware of the car. I kept waiting for the driver to switch off the engine or drive away, or at least do something other than sit there with the engine running. The constant note was more distracting than a series of louder noises – it was like an unfinished sentence, music without a climactic tonic chord.

  I put down the book. I had quickly become tense, curious, nervy. I crossed the garden, the comfort of our private space, then walked along the rough path Jo and I had made to the short flight of steps that led down to the road.

  As soon as I reached the top of the steps I could see the car. It was either Frejah Harsent’s roadster or one exactly like it. The black bodywork glittered in the sunlight, shards of reflection shimmering as the engine turned over. The car I had once seen as beautiful and desirable now looked menacing, intrusive, frightening. I did not go down to meet her.

  Since our brief meeting on Dearth Island I had often thought about Frejah Harsent, what she had said, the story she told me. I knew she had lied to me, but I still did not know why. Lying is something you inflict on people you know, the ones already around you, or people you intend to cheat or deceive. Why pick out a stranger then feed him a series of untruths?

  There were still unexplained details I had not yet untangled. Why, for instance, had she given the name of the murdered man as Waller Alman? The Waller part of the name I understood, perhaps. But Alman? I was now certain the dead man was called Lew Waller Antterland.

  That murder had led to another. She had not mentioned the death of Dever Willer Antterland, so presumably she had not been involved with it as a police officer. Or as anything else? But how could she not know about it? He was almost certainly the killer of Lew, the thief who removed Lew’s money. So did she deliberately omit it from the story she told me? If so, why?

  Over the past couple of weeks I had spent most of my time concentrating on the novel I was writing, and observing with a sense of combined fascination and dread the falling apart of the financial substructure of my home island. Yet the small mysteries Frejah Harsent created for me had never really gone away.

  Because of the elevation of my garden I was above the low-slung car. From where I was standing at the top of the steps I could see down to Frejah, or more exactly her grey-haired head, glimpsed through the upper window of the gull-wing door. She was leaning forward, adjusting something on the dash. Did she know I was there? She gave no sign of it. Was I expected to walk down to the car, expressing my surprise that she had come to my house?

  She moved her hands back to the steering wheel. The engine continued to rumble.

  Stupidly, I felt immobilized by indecision, but it was not my own indecision. She had arrived unannounced at my house. It would not be a social call. She wanted something of me, something related to those old murders. I could turn around, step back into the covering shade of the trees, return across my lawn, pretend I was unaware of the car and had not seen her. Or I could walk casually down the stone steps, greet her in some way, speak to her, perhaps invite her in.

  It was still less than two months since I had seen her last. I remembered the arrival at the airport in the freezing air of Tristcontenta Hub, chilled by a gusting wind and insistent rain, hastily retrieving my overnight bags and computer case from the trunk of the car. Horribly aware of the large, snub-nosed automatic weapon mounted in the trunk. Then a quick but conventional farewell: a slight and formal kiss on the cheek, a shake of hands.

  She could have been any old acquaintance, dropping me off at an airport. In a supercharged roadster bristling with police instruments. With an automatic weapon close at hand.

  In the end she made up my mind for me. While I was standing there wondering what to do I realized that Frejah had become aware of my presence. There was a movement of her hand on the steering column, then the gull-wing door on her side of the car smoothly raised itself. I went down the steps and stood beside her.

  I said: ‘Hello again, Commissioner.’ A casual greeting, an attempt to try and counteract the negative feelings that her arrival had suddenly induced in me.

  Looking up at me she waved a hand towards me. I saw that she was swivelling her body around, the manoeuvre I had had to master to get in and out of the car. Her legs were already outside the car, but she was having difficulty raising the rest of her body. She was pressing down awkwardly with her elbows, attempting to slide forward. She was holding her head at an odd angle. It made her look stiff, much older. When I had been with her on Dearth, just that short time ago, she had entered and left the car with smooth, almost agile movements.

  I held out a hand to help her lift herself away from the low seat, but she waved it away impatiently, not looking at me. She levered herself into an upright sitting position, then managed to stand. She was unsteady, holding on to the car door for a few seconds. Once she was on her feet she stepped back a couple of paces. She looked hunched, reduced. There was no hint of familiarity between us.

  ‘Fremde, you’ve been looking into matters that don’t concern you,’ she said. She was avoiding my eyes, looking somewhere behind me, not at me. Her voice was not strong – she spoke indistinctly, partly muffled by the constant loud rumbling of the car’s engine.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve been checking up on my story.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have done that if what you said was true. That’s what made me interested in the murder – the fact that you lied.’

  ‘What happened was more than fifteen years ago,’ she said. ‘It was one of the first cases I was involved with. I have forgotten some details. I wasn’t lying. We were talking about your books, your writing. I thought you’d be interested in a real case, a real story. And you said you didn’t understand mutability. When I went to Salay Hames for that case it was the first time I had ever experienced an extreme form of it. You and I were just talking in a car. It was a long journey.’

  ‘No – I recorded it when we stopped in a restaurant. That was your idea. You wanted me to hear it, wanted me to react. I checked the names with you afterwards. It was more than just a casual conversation.’

  ‘I should have said less. But you involved yourself.’

  ‘Not directly.’

  ‘Your associate – the retired detective, Spoder. He found the files. Then you went with him to Salay Sekonda.’

  ‘Because the two killings were linked. The victims were brothers. Did you know that?’

  ‘That’s none of your business, Fremde.’

  ‘You made it my business.’

  We were both glaring at each other. She was certainly looking angrily at me, and without of course being able to see myself I felt I was facing her down.

  I had prepared for none of this: five minutes before, I was peacefully contemplating punctured lungs and bullet exit wounds – a quiet pleasure, if inexplicable to many. I still did not know why she had come to my house, but the sight of her, the memory of th
at two-day drive across the grim landscape of Dearth, invoked by seeing the car again, brought rising to the surface thoughts of all the intrigue she had created afterwards. Until I saw her I had not appreciated how far under my defences she had penetrated.

  I wished Jo were with me. She would at least have calmed me.

  I turned away from Frejah in an effort to stop the argument from escalating into a full-on row. We were standing in the direct heat of the sun, while the fumes from the car’s engine spread around us. I wanted to move to the side, circling her car, into the shade of the nearest trees, but it would mean stepping more directly away from her, around the obstacle of the halted car. I did not want to look or feel as if I was retreating from her, but she had parked at a sharp angle, making it impossible to step back into the shade without appearing to be doing exactly that. Everything had been disrupted by her arrival at the house.

  ‘Frejah, what have you come here for?’ I said.

  ‘I’m here to warn you. Someone is looking for you, and if he finds you he’s intending to kill you.’

  ‘Are you serious? Someone hunting me?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘What the hell! You sound like someone from one of my novels.’

  (I did not enlarge on this, but in reality she was sounding like someone from abandoned drafts of some of my early novels. That was a period of my writing signified by sudden declarations, sardonic laughs, threats uttered, features grimacing. Not now, not any more. Even back then there was not much of it. I was never good at writing violence, and verbal violence always felt false to me.)

  ‘He is out for revenge against you.’

  ‘Revenge? Who is he, and what does he think I have done to him?’

  ‘My old partner on the Dearth force, Enver Jeksid.’

  ‘Oh, not him again. He said much the same to my colleague Spoder. What interest could he possibly have in me?’

  ‘He’s dangerous. He has already killed at least once.’

  ‘He’s a cop. That’s what cops do.’

  ‘Enver is no longer with the force. He’s disgraced, he has been put down to citizen serfdom. I haven’t seen him in years. He was dishonourably discharged, which lost him his vassalage. He lives on Salay Tielet.’

  ‘The third,’ I said, by habit adding the suffix. Tielet was a long way from Raba, on the opposite side of the central lagoon of the Salay Group, a mountainous island dominated by a long-extinct volcano. It was the wine-growing island. Large herds of cattle were reared on the coastal plains. Salay Tielet was famous for its liberal havenic laws, making itself a destination for many fugitives. I had never had reason to go there. ‘So what does Jeksid claim I’ve done to him?’

  ‘He’ll almost certainly tell you when he finds you.’

  ‘If you know, tell me now.’

  I felt I was teetering on the edge of a dangerous world I did not understand, a place of murder, revenge and threats. But was it real? I was outside my home, standing on the side of the road I crossed almost every day when I walked down to the beach. Traffic was driving past at normal speeds, although having to slow slightly to go around Frejah’s roadster, angularly halted. Two young women in light clothes rode past on bicycles. They wobbled as they went around the car. Beyond us: the silver-blue sea looked glassy and still, as if becalmed by the hot sunshine. The familiar distant prospect of small islets. Yachts with multicoloured sails tacked in the light breeze. People were walking their dogs along the green sward that separated the beach from the road. On the beach, many were lazing in the sun, others were walking or staring at the sea, or running down to plunge in. All this I knew and understood.

  ‘He believes it was you who hacked the computer systems in Raba City,’ Frejah said.

  ‘And that affects him how?’

  ‘He lost all his money as a result.’

  ‘So has everyone else with savings on this island. Why should he blame me?’

  ‘You took the mutability software from the hotel. He still has a police tracking device, and it identified you, your hotel room in Dearth. He’s currently trying to find out where you live through your associate, Spoder.’

  ‘This is ridiculous!’ I said. ‘I haven’t the least idea how to hack software. I have trouble enough with my own desktop.’

  ‘He knows you had the means and he believes you did it. He’s serious about killing. He murdered my husband, he’s going to kill you, and he’s going to try to kill me too.’

  ‘Kill you?’ I said. The conversation had become surreal. I couldn’t bring myself to believe a word of it.

  ‘He will if he gets the chance. I’m planning to get to him first.’

  ‘And that’s why you carry a weapon in the trunk of this car?’

  ‘One of the reasons.’

  ‘You know where he is, then?’

  ‘I know he’s on this island now but I don’t know where. He has a taste for cheap hotels, but there are many of those on the other side of town.’

  I said again: ‘Frejah – is this serious? Are you being serious?’

  ‘Never more so.’

  The engine of the roadster continued to throb noisily. It was a constant distraction and annoyance to me, worsened by the smell of particulate-heavy fumes. Raba has strict antipollution laws, and Frejah’s ludicrously powerful car was in direct conflict with them.

  ‘Can’t you turn off the engine?’ I said.

  ‘I never turn it off – in case I need to make a quick exit.’

  That made me smile: I imagined her slowly and painfully re-inserting herself into the sculpted low-angle driving seat, elbows and neck and legs stiff. She saw the smile.

  ‘You really don’t understand, do you?’ she said.

  ‘Why don’t you just tell me straight what it is you know? Is that impossible? When we were driving to the airport we were speaking frankly—’

  ‘That was then.’ She held up a hand, and for the first time I noticed two of her fingers had splints, with bandaging around them. ‘Things have changed.’

  ‘Has someone beaten you up?’

  ‘People don’t get beaten up on Dearth. There’s no crime on Dearth – remember? This was a transgression, one night just before I left to come here to Raba. We call it a bodily impairment intrusion.’

  ‘Was it Jeksid?’

  ‘Not Enver himself. Three of them. They were masked. I assumed he had sent them.’

  ‘Were you hurt badly?’

  ‘These two fingers were broken. I lost a tooth. Bruising all over my back and chest. My neck was wrenched. One eye was blackened. I suppose it could have been worse. I’ll survive.’

  Neither of us had moved away, but I felt that something had changed. A mutual connection we both rejected, but which bound us. Or that was what Frejah seemed to want me to feel, a mutuality with her. Standing there in the heat and sunlight, I still felt the tendrils of commonsense denial, the impossibility of it all. This plotting, these moves against each other.

  ‘You said he murdered your husband. Are you certain of that?’

  ‘It was a few years ago. Hari, my husband, was a police officer too, working undercover on Salay Ewwel, the first. We were separated, but still married. It was impossible to live a normal married life because of the work he was doing. My work sometimes was in the way too, but we were still fond of each other. We’d had a lot of good years together. He was a lifetime professional officer, committed to what he was doing, and I respected that. He was infiltrating a gang of drug smugglers, based on Ewwel but trafficking drugs to Dearth. He had a front, a drinks joint he ran in Ewwel Town. I was out of contact with him and had no idea where he was, but Jeksid traced him. He went to Ewwel and killed Hari. I’m sure of that, but Jeksid covered his tracks. He had no apparent motive, left no clues, no witnesses, no evidence, nothing that could link him to the murder. He had a clear alibi. He was still a cop at the time, and he got away with it. A perfect crime.’

  ‘You said he was dishonourably discharged.’

  �
��The police couldn’t pin it on him – Jeksid was clever. He had done a brilliant job of covering it up. But I knew beyond doubt that no one else would have done it. Then some of the other commissioners started having their doubts. I said nothing to discourage them. About a year after Hari was killed they found a way to get rid of Enver. He was furious: he lost his vassal status, his pension, his good service record, everything. He blamed me – he knew I had worked out what he had done. I was the only one who could. He swore then he would get me. That’s why I pack a weapon, yes. But mostly I’ve stayed out of his way. When he moved to Tielet, the third, I eased up a little.’

  A perfect murder? I remembered Spoder’s claim that the murder of Dever Antterland had taken place inside a locked room. Spoder had been right, in a way. Now this – the dream of every thriller writer, to think up a crime that was perfect, unsolvable, but at the same time possible, or at least made to seem realistic within the bounds of a novel.

  But not so perfect if it led to Jeksid being given a dishonourable discharge?

  ‘I’m going to leave now,’ Frejah said. ‘I don’t like being in one place too long. Jeksid is somewhere near – he might still be using the tracker. He can pick out this car whenever it’s running.’

  ‘So why not turn off the engine?’

  She waved at me with irritation. ‘I told you.’

  ‘If Jeksid doesn’t know where I am, how did you find me?’

  ‘I have a tracker too.’ She indicated the car’s bunch of antennae. ‘Mine’s better than his. Command and control, remember? But best not to take risks.’

  She went around to the open door on the driver’s side, then began the awkward and obviously painful procedure of easing herself stiffly back into the seat. I stepped forward to offer help, but she jerked her arm away from me. She half rolled into position. As soon as she was seated she touched the control on the steering column and the gull wing door began descending smoothly. She revved up the engine, which gave out a terrible roar and a cloud of dark smoke.