The Evidence

by Christopher Priest

  ‘The man who was murdered was called Harsent?’

  ‘I think so, yes. The thing is, it turned out to be another unsolved crime – in the end the file was closed. We heard from Dearth that they knew or suspected who the killer was, but he had an ironclad alibi and there was no evidence against him. They made the Ewwel force go through everything all over again, but they still found nothing. This information apparently came from one of the senior officers on Dearth, who said she was certain she knew who it was. But it was only a hunch, or perhaps hearsay. You can’t arrest anyone on that basis alone.’

  ‘And this informant – was it the dead man’s wife?’

  ‘Now you mention it, I think it was.’

  ‘Then that would be Frejah, Frejah Harsent. She was a cop then, she’s a cop now.’

  ‘I think so,’ said Spoder, again.

  ‘Did she name the person she thought was the killer?’

  ‘It’s all coming back to me now, sir. I’m sorry – I should have made the connection myself.’

  ‘It was Enver Jeksid, wasn’t it? A serjeant on the Dearth force.’

  ‘The man who is looking for you. Yes.’

  ‘You spoke to him twice,’ I said.

  ‘Three times, sir. He made contact with me again this week. Yesterday, in fact.’

  ‘When you spoke to him, did either of you say anything about this old case?’

  ‘No – and he wouldn’t. If it’s the same man, he couldn’t risk his whereabouts being known. He’d keep quiet about his past. Of course, I might have remembered his name, but in fact I didn’t and he would have had no idea that I was connected with what he did. To most people his name wouldn’t mean anything. That’s why I’m sorry – I slipped up. But he’s in an ambiguous situation anyway.’

  ‘Why is that?’ I said.

  ‘In the first place, he was kicked out of the police in disgrace. I don’t know the reasons, but it was a few months after Harsent was killed in Ewwel Town. Jeksid stayed on in Dearth for a while after he was fired, but eventually he moved to Salay Tielet, the third. Officially he is still a suspect, and when he left Dearth he became technically a fugitive. If the Dearth force knew where he was, they could try to arrest him. But there would be difficulties with that, too.’

  ‘No extradition treaty?’

  ‘None at all. The whole of Tielet is a refuge for deserters and other fugitives.’

  Of course I did know that. Within the Salay Group, and probably elsewhere in the archipelago, Tielet was an island greatly admired for its liberal havenic policy.

  ‘You were going to tell me about these calls with Jeksid,’ I said. ‘I need to know exactly what he said.’

  ‘It’s not easy, sir,’ Spoder said.

  ‘Can’t you just tell me? You don’t have to dress it up.’

  ‘Oh, I do, I do.’ He took a deep breath.

  ‘Is this going to take time, Spoder?’

  ‘There’s a lot to tell, because Jeksid had a reason for contacting me.’ His voice was low. ‘He has found out more about me than I should like him to know. The fact is that I have never been completely honest with you about the life I lead. What I am doing now and the life I led in the past. I am not what you think, sir.’

  ‘Is he blackmailing you?’

  ‘He’s using his knowledge to put pressure on me.’

  ‘Are you now telling me that you were never a detective in the police?’

  ‘No, sir. That is a matter of complete truth.’

  ‘Or that you are no longer connected in any way with the police on this island?’

  ‘Everything I have told you about my work with the police is true. I have never deliberately lied to you. I have simply omitted to tell you certain facts about myself.’

  ‘We have an entirely professional relationship, Spoder,’ I said. ‘I accept you for who you are. You work well with me, and I’m not bothered by what you might have got up to in the past.’

  ‘Well – it affects the present, too. When you know the whole truth about me, you might never be able to trust me again.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘It’s serious.’

  I had never seen him looking so defensive, so troubled. I realized he had manoeuvred himself into a mental position where he saw no alternative but to tell me his story, and that I should therefore have to listen. He was almost wringing his hands in his earnest wish to own up, or confess, or whatever it was he thought he had to do. I was not anxious to hear it: what I said to him about our work together was true. For me it had been fruitful. I intended it to continue.

  I wondered if our experience in the magic museum had unexpectedly opened the doors to this new frankness. I had not seen him since that day.

  I collected up our coffee things and said I would brew a fresh pot. I left Spoder on the patio and retreated into the house. It was the work of only a few moments to prepare the coffee machine and rinse out the mugs. I stood for a few moments in the kitchen while the coffee maker popped and hissed, wondering how much in fact I wanted or even needed to hear Spoder’s story.

  Although I felt sceptical about Frejah Harsent’s warning of a killer seeking me, there appeared none the less to be a link between me, Spoder, Frejah, Jeksid and Frejah’s dead husband. I could not ignore that – I should listen to what he said.

  As the coffee machine went into its familiar sounds of hoarsely gasping finale, I ducked away from the kitchen and went quickly to my study. Spoder was sitting outside with his back to me. I turned on my desktop, then as soon as I could I glanced at the emails that had come in during the interim. There were four: three were routine messages, one was from Jo, confirming she would be in contact as usual that evening.

  Before powering down, I clicked on my bank’s icon and did the final check of the day on my account. I had already been in and out of the website about five times. Although I maintained an aura of indifference to the financial crash, I had become a compulsive checker of the health or otherwise of my own account.

  I immediately wished I had not looked at all: large capital letters informed me that the bank had encountered what it called insurmountable problems. Official administrators had been called in, and all personal and business accounts were frozen. They assured savers and investors that their accounts were safe and guaranteed. There was nothing about current accounts.

  I knew I was broke. Like hundreds of thousands of other citizen serfs on Raba I no longer had access to any of my money, apart from the increasingly worthless cash in my pocket. It was not a surprise after all the warning signs from elsewhere, but it was a substantial shock.

  I went back to Spoder, put down the tray of coffee things. I wondered briefly about whichever bank it was where Spoder kept his own money, if he too had been affected. I did not ask. It was now late afternoon, but the sun, lowering towards the horizon, still gave out a powerful heat. The insects in the trees had not yet started their evening stridulation.

  For a long time Spoder said nothing at all. I waited in the silence, thinking, inevitably, about money. Or the lack of it.

  Then: ‘The problem is, sir, that I don’t know how to start. And I don’t know how to say what I have to. I can only speak plainly: I am a lawbreaker and a fugitive from justice.’

  22

  The Story of DI Spoder (ret’d)

  (I have tried to reproduce exactly what Spoder told me.)

  Spoder said he was not an islander, that everything he had ever said about being born on one of Salay’s islands was untrue. He said he was ashamed of this, that the lie had always been a background blight in his life, but when he was applying to join the Salay Raba police force he had mistakenly believed that advancement or promotion to senior rank, or transfer to the plainclothes detective section, would only be open to him if he was Raba born. Spoder said he wanted to graduate to detective work as soon as possible. He therefore presented himself in the best possible light, as he saw it at the time. He told me he had used identity papers that were copied and modi
fied, and produced two false credentials from minor officials in Raba City. Later, he realized none of this was necessary, but he felt saddled with the lie and had never owned up about it. Over the years it had begun to seem true. Only now, with Jeksid trying to force his hand, was he able to confront it.

  His beginnings were humble.

  He came from Faiandland, the largest and most prosperous of the northern countries, and grew up in a suburb of Jethra, the capital city. He was born Yumi Spoder, a popular given name in the remote country area where his mother was raised, but he grew up hating it. The other children pronounced it ‘yummy’, a constant tease and affliction, as he saw it. As soon as he left school he used it as little as possible, a habit that persisted to this day. His father was a line engineer for an electrical supply company, while his mother was a junior school teacher. Yumi Spoder was therefore brought up by respectable and hard-working but not wealthy people. He had no brothers or sisters. In spite of the constant bullying, young Yumi was good at school and he intended to go to college when he left – but along with a great many young people in the same position he was to be denied that chance.

  Faiandland was a country at war. Although it was a self-proclaimed liberal democracy, with an assembly of elected deputies, an independent judiciary and press, and a tradition of artistic diversity, Faiandland was embroiled in an unrelenting, shameless war with its neighbouring country, the Glaund Republic.

  Glaund was the ideological opposite of Faiandland, a socialistic republic, a command economy, run by a military junta and using extensive techniques of repression and censorship to manipulate the populace. It too had an assembly of elected deputies and a tradition of the performing arts. Socially, Glaund was many years behind Faiandland. It too was fighting a dirty war.

  Theoretically, the quarrel between the two countries was political, but in reality there were numerous areas of dispute over mineral deposits, oil fields, water resources and boundaries. Ancient grudges existed. Reasonableness did not. It was a war, and commonsense was the second casualty of war.

  After years of destructive hostilities against each other the two countries drew up a treaty of disengagement. It was agreed that the fighting would be transferred to where military action could be unfettered without further damage to the infrastructure of either country. The southern continent of Sudmaieure therefore became the battlefield of choice, the war quickly evolving into a military confrontation for which there was no conceivable end.

  Yumi Spoder was conscripted at the age of seventeen. After several weeks of basic training he was taken to the port where one of the many troopships was moored.

  He said to me: ‘All through training it was rammed home to us that life in the Faiandland army was hard but fair. We were trained to obey orders, no matter what, without hesitation or thought. We were trained to march, to dig temporary defences, to fire rifles and missiles and rockets and cannons and mortars, to engage in hand-to-hand combat. All these I saw, reluctantly, as the work of a modern army. I was too young to have shaped my own ideas, except in the most general way. I was not a pacifist, nor was I enthusiastic about having to kill the enemy. I learned during training that the way to survive the army was to turn off all private feelings of identity or individualism. My escouade was my only group of friends, the escouade serjeant was my only god. Time would pass. We were assured that military service would last no longer than two and a half years, at the end of which we would be returned home. All this I accepted. But nothing had prepared me for the conditions aboard the troopship.’

  The first sight of the ship was alarming to Spoder and the hundreds of other conscripts. It was painted matt grey, but over the years many huge streaks and blotches of rust had spread across the hull and around the rivets. One long part of the hull, extending down below the waterline, had been replaced without being painted, so you could still see the streaky brown-red of anti-rust paint. The vessel lay low in the water.

  The escouade serjeant marched the young soldiers to the quayside, then read them their orders: he would not be boarding the ship with them. He added that he was instructed to tell them what they would find once they boarded the ship. He said that it was fully modernized and air conditioned inside, that there were shared cabins with four comfortable bunks apiece, space for relaxation, shower rooms, and so on. There were adequate facilities for recreation: a large gym and exercise hall, a cinema, a library, even a small swimming pool. The food was good and nutritious, better than anything they had been given during training. Each escouade could appoint a spokesperson, who would be able to pass on ideas, requests or complaints to the ship’s crew.

  The serjeant brought them to attention, then marched away. An hour later the squad was still waiting on the quay, with all the other escouades of conscripts. No officers or NCOs were there. It was wintry and cold on the bleak and exposed quay, and the young soldiers became restless to be on the ship. Eventually, they began to drift towards the nearest gangplank and went aboard.

  Thus they discovered the first casualty of war: truth.

  Spoder said that what they found on the ship were conditions so foul it seemed inevitable that disease would be rife. The interior had apparently never been cleaned: there was filth everywhere, and the air was rank and disgusting. There were no cabins, only narrow stretches of bare deck, and nowhere to sleep other than in some hard, cramped space on the deck, shared with others. The food was more or less uneatable. There were no facilities for exercise, there was no escape from the constant heat, noise, stench and crowding. Once the ship set sail it was impossible to move up or down to other decks. Everyone was grouching and complaining and selfishly argumentative – it was not long before the first fights broke out.

  The hell of the boat continued for what Spoder estimated was at least four days. The lights were never dimmed, and there were no routines by which the passage of time could be measured. Spoder said he managed to grab some light sleep about ten times, always in short, disturbed sessions. He was soon hungry, exhausted, nauseated, frightened and angry. Then the ship ran at full speed on to some rocks.

  There was an explosive, grinding roar and the entire vessel jerked violently upwards. Instantly, all the lights went out. Everyone standing was thrown to the deck. In the total darkness there was complete chaos. Spoder suffered a series of violent blows from men behind and around him. He returned them reflexively. Everyone was fighting for survival, scrambling and kicking against each other, forcing themselves upwards, trying to find air and light and freedom. Then the ship rolled to one side, with the tortured racket of the splitting hull against the rocks, amplified by the bare metal plates and bulkheads of the ship’s construction. The screaming and shouting actually intensified. Spoder said he found himself cushioned by many bodies as he fell, so although he was smothered and trapped in the confusion of the heap of struggling men, he suffered no serious injuries.

  Sea water was gushing in through unseen fractures in the hull. The flood quickly reached where Spoder was trapped, pouring with terrifying pressure around his head and over his face, surging around his chest. He struggled to be free of the bodies holding him down, but everyone around him was doing the same. They were trying to lunge upwards in the total darkness, fighting for air. An instinct made Spoder force his way in the opposite direction, down through the flailing limbs and the icy water. He slipped through a thicket of unseen kicking legs. He was swallowing the salty sea water, feeling as if he was inhaling it. Terrified, choking and spluttering, he was suddenly able to work himself free of the others. Still in absolute darkness he dragged himself and waded further away: the sounds of distress behind him were horrendous.

  A glimmer of light ahead! Spoder pulled himself towards it. He was still floundering in freezing cold sea water up to his waist, sometimes deeper, clambering over the bodies of many others. The shouting was less now, as the water continued to flood in. After a long struggle Spoder saw the source of the light: one of the bulkhead hatches, firmly locked throughout the voyag
e, had burst open under the stress of the ship’s crashing halt. When he finally staggered up to it he saw a metal staircase beside it, a ship’s steep ladder, but because of the list it was now almost horizontal. He worked his way along it, emerging unexpectedly into brilliant sunlight. Because of the extreme list the outer deck was vertical, a wall, and when he let go of the final rung he slithered down, crashing against various pieces of deck equipment, and immediately plunged shockingly into the sea.

  The wreck had already attracted a small fleet of rescuers, an ad hoc flotilla of small boats and yachts. After ten minutes trying to stay afloat, every breath feeling as if it was his last, Spoder was hauled from the water by the people in one of the boats. Within half an hour, he and four other young conscripts, also dragged in a wretched state from the sea, were taken ashore.

  Spoder spent five days and nights being cared for by a couple who lived on a farm in the hills, away from the sea. The island against whose rocky shallows the troopship had crashed was called Nelquay, in the temperate zone north of the equator. For the time being the island would be safe from the escouades of military police sent to search for conscripts who had survived the wreck, but they would inevitably arrive in force in the near future. There were ways he could avoid being captured. The people caring for him said he would be given all the help and advice he needed.

  On the evening of the sixth day he was taken to a meeting in Nelquay Port. Apart from fourteen young soldiers still being treated in hospital, all the known survivors were there. It was estimated that more than sixteen hundred young people had died in the disaster, but around one hundred and fifty were still alive. Spoder realized immediately that he had escaped with comparatively little harm to himself – most of the other survivors were in a bad way.

  A spokesperson from the island seigniory addressed the meeting, pointing out that the survivors had three choices. She said they must urgently decide what they wished to do.