‘You’re becoming institutionalised,’ Jamie remarked when I told him that, grateful as I was to Prisca for all that she was doing, I still couldn’t believe it would do any good in practical terms. ‘All those years at boarding school was just preparing you for this.’
I laughed at the old joke. ‘There’s one difference,’ I said. ‘At school, awful as it was, you could still choose your friends. Here your companions are forced on you.’
The next time I saw Prisca, I asked her, ‘Why are you doing this?’ We were sitting decorously opposite one another in the Visits Room. Our immediate neighbours were passionately embracing across the table. They had not spoken a word since they met. ‘I mean, why do you pursue this case so unremittingly? You did everything you could before the trial. You could have given up then. Why fight a hopeless cause?’
She swivelled a signet ring on her little finger. ‘I can never give up, you know that,’ she said lightly. That seemed to be the answer. It lay in her character, not in me or events. Then she added, angrily, ‘And I’m doing it because of her. I detested her.’
‘Julian?’ I knew she had not much liked her; I was surprised at the depth of dislike she revealed. ‘How could you detest her? She was always loved. Charm was her thing. What did she do to you?’
‘It’s not what she did, it was what she was.’ She sat still, making up her mind to speak. ‘Well, I might as well say it. It might help you to come to terms with what happened. She was everything I despise.’ Her face had tightened, the lines around her mouth deepened. ‘She reminds me of myself. Not now, but when I began. I was ambitious, like her and, like her, because I was…’ She could not bring herself to say ‘beautiful’. ‘Well, looked as I did, I had choices.’
I remembered Prisca when she was young, when I had first known her. She had been twenty-six; I had been seventeen. She had worn her hair cropped then, exposing the Nefertiti lines of her face, the colour of bronze. She was tall and adored clothes. Montfort loved her to dress up and encouraged her sartorial extravagance for the pleasure of the admiration she aroused in other men. It had only been a brief episode. As soon as she had got rid of him, she grew an enormous Afro and wore the longest, loosest, plainest garments she could contrive, a style, at once ethnic and idiosyncratic, which she maintained to the present.
‘I could have become like her. For a time, I was like her. But thank God, I gave it up. She was a succubus, a woman who defined herself entirely by her relations with men. She was dependent, manipulative, enticing but fundamentally cold. But it’s not a theoretical dislike. One meets plenty of women like that and I don’t waste my time disliking them. It was what she did to you. She found you at a vulnerable moment, when you’d lost your wife, your children, your usual existence and she seized you. She used you and exploited every weakness of your situation and your character.’ She saw me beginning to protest and she went on quickly, to prevent me from interrupting, ‘And even worse, she exploited your goodness, perverted your trust, destroyed you. And I don’t just mean landing you in here. That was the least of it. And it’s that bit I hope to undo.’
45
While time inched forward towards the date set for the appeal, I tried to work on the Lady in a Pelisse. There was no reason for Minna to get away with her faking just because I was locked up. The authorities at my new prison were sympathetic and special arrangements were made for me to work. Instead of being assigned to sew diplomatic bags, I was allowed to study in the prison library and books were sent from London for me. I installed myself at a small table under the barred window, and from eight to ten thirty and two to four most days I was locked in to pass the time as I had always done. However, I did not work with my usual surge of ideas and flow of words. I would sit for hours watching the changeable west country sky through the cell window, the clouds forming and reforming in ranks in their north-eastward flow, until the turning of the key awoke me to the end of my study session. I would often find I had not written a word.
Everything led back to Julian. Even the keys grinding in the locks which divided every segment of my day reminded me of the key to her flat which had begun it all, of Anatoli’s false key which had released us from the dacha, the hypothetical key that had let the wreckers into her flat, the key that Igor must have kept. Each key took me to another point in her story.
Even more evocative was the postcard of the Litvak Lady which I kept with my notes. As a reproduction it was not very good. The colour tones were distorted, but the luminous, innocent gaze and the moist mouth still had enormous power. I used to gaze at it for hours in the prison library, thinking about her alter ego, Julian.
As time passed, events clarified, gradually settling into a thick layer of sediment at the bottom of my mind. Now at some distance from her, I could begin to reach a personal conclusion about Julian’s life. I acknowledged to myself that she had not been what she seemed, or what I had taken her for. I now accepted that she had loved Anatoli and hated him, too. She had wanted revenge for the pain she had suffered and had conspired his downfall with Tom Naish. What she (or he) had expected to come of their plan I could not guess. I wondered whether, in her case, the key was the act of arrest, when she had handed him over, and what happened next was unimportant to her. I knew very well the compulsion to revenge, the urgency to act. She had wanted to see the knife strike and the body fall.
In this view of her, she was exactly what Prisca detested, a woman who lived through and on men, whom she manipulated to counterbalance her lack of power. Was there more to her than this? Had she been a powerful and independent creature, an executive director of the Bank’s operations, motivated by money not emotion? Was this, in any case, more admirable? At this point in my thoughts, I was plunged into the same whirlpool of muddied water that had engulfed me on the evening of her death. I remembered her oddness about money, her extravagance and her meanness, the oblique way she had told me about the Bank’s criminal activities, tempting me to see more, worse, than she said.
I snapped my notebook closed on the painting. I wanted her, like me, to be innocent.
Prisca was full of optimism about the appeal. I did not allow myself to think about it, still less to hope for my release from prison. I did not want to go to court to hear the case and tried to persuade Prisca that it could be done without me. However, George Goodson and Roger Ignatius would not permit this. It was inconceivable, they said, for an appellant not to appear in court, and it would undermine my case. I submitted to these arguments.
I was shipped up to London on the day before the hearing to be delivered to the Law Courts in the Strand early in the morning. I was surprised to see that, in spite of the revolution that had taken place in my own life, everyone remained the same. Roger Ignatius looked as incongruous under his wig as he had last time round, and more ebullient than ever as he briefed me on the characters and histories of the three Lords Justices of Appeal who were to make up the tribunal.
I concentrated for the entire two-day period in court on such extraneous details, refusing to pay attention to the substance of what was happening around me. Roger Ignatius spent long hours on his feet, reading passages from his documents and answering questions from the tribunal. I was struck once again by the element of drama and role-play in pleading. He knew his part and he acted well. He was never at a loss and could improvise as well as learn a script. But all the time there was an edge of overacting in what he said that revealed the boundary between the true and the false, the felt and the acted. By the evening of the first day, when I was taken away to the police cells, I had a sense of how things were going, but, like Cordelia watching a film on television, closing her eyes at the frightening bits, I did not want to look.
I felt nothing but disbelief when the judgement was announced, that after so much horror and bad luck, it should turn out like this. What had it all been for?
The appeal was allowed on the grounds that the conviction was unsatisfactory. The court was adjourned for a fully reasoned judgement to b
e given later. I emerged blinking into the grey drizzling air of the Strand in the late afternoon, a free man again. Prisca, Jamie and Sibyl were there to greet and embrace me. Prisca dealt efficiently with reporters. They were much more eager to talk to and photograph her than me.
‘I didn’t think you would want to go to your mother’s flat, at least for tonight,’ Prisca said. ‘So I booked you a room at the Goring. I picked up a suit for you, though it might not fit too well. You look as if you’ve lost weight. You haven’t been eating properly. Then we’re all going out to dinner together.’
I had been imprisoned since the day after Julian’s death a year ago. I should feel some joy in freedom, I told myself, as I showered and changed that evening. If nothing else I should savour the contrast in my surroundings: the marble beneath my feet, the thick towels that I had wrapped around myself while I shaved. But I felt nothing, neither elation nor even comfort. I was as empty as a spilled glass. No external change seemed to fill the hollow core. I would have to do better this evening, I thought. Prisca and my cousins had been euphoric when we left the Law Courts. They had fought for me and won. The least I could do was to show gratitude, to reward them for what they had achieved.
My hotel room was hot. I opened the window and looked over the garden, a green space jailed by the surrounding buildings. My life was starting again, but I had no idea what direction I wanted it to take. I had felt safer in prison. There, at least, I had no choice in what I should do. It was all Emily’s fault, I thought, bitterly. If she had not chucked me out of my good life as a householder and father of a family, none of this would have happened.
That evening we drank a great deal of champagne. My cousins were triumphant, celebrating a victory for truth and justice. I was simply relieved that the waiting was over and would probably have felt the same if I had been on my way back to my cell. I managed to put on enough of a show that my hollowness did not show. Just as I had experienced no pleasure in the luxury of the hotel, so I found the food difficult to eat. The dull, stodgy prison meals had required no decision. Faced with richness of choice and taste, I took the plainest food available. Even that, whatever its composition, resolved itself in front of my eyes into the colours and textures of flesh and blood, saliva, semen and faeces. In our mood of euphoria, no one noticed my lack of appetite.
‘The mind of a killer is a fascinating study,’ Prisca remarked.
She was eating trout, concentrating on piercing its crisply fried skin, slicing along its back and separating it into fillets, having already removed its head.
‘Can one tell, do you think?’ she went on. ‘Not after the event, but before. Not who did it, that’s an obvious question, but who will do it? Could you? Did you see?’ She did not look at me.
‘No, of course not,’ I said. There was a lot I didn’t see.’
‘Before now I’ve only ever known murderers retrospectively.’ She was lifting out the backbone and removing it fastidiously to the side of her plate. ‘That is, they’d already killed when I met them, when I was a prison visitor. I never knew them before the act. And that’s the interesting bit.’
‘Beforehand I had everything wrong. All the information was there, but I simply didn’t read it properly.’
I had chosen a steak, because I couldn’t be bothered to consider anything else on the menu. I had cut through the encrusted surface and now the reddish edge was gently weeping onto my plate.
‘To do you justice, some of the information was faked.’
‘You know I don’t accept that.’
‘Nicholas, you were duped, tricked all along the line. Either that or you’re fooling us.’
She selected a forkful of flesh, dabbed it with sauce and put it in her mouth.
‘Why aren’t you eating? Isn’t rare enough for you? You ought to write it up. It would be therapy for you, get you started again. You needn’t bother with who did it; we know all that. The view you want is not who, but why. Could you see beforehand? Should you have guessed what was going on? You were the only person who had the information, who knew everybody, or at least knew about everybody.’
‘It’s not just a question of who is going to be the killer. It’s also who is going to be killed.’
‘The victim was always pretty obvious. Asking for it, in my opinion. Not that I dreamt… But I didn’t know the half of it.’ Prisca helped herself to a piece of French bread. She stabbed a curl of butter and pasted it into place.
‘I can’t write any more. I’ve been trying to work on my book on art and perception, but I can’t concentrate. I think I need a holiday.’
The steak was tough. It required some energy to saw through it. Human flesh was equally fibrous, dense, knit together in a durable web of tissue. To puncture the skin and pierce the muscle was the work of force. I put my knife and fork down, wishing I’d chosen something else.
‘Nonsense.’ Prisca never took holidays and did not see why anyone else should. ‘You’ve just got to get the whole thing out of your system. Write it up. Then you can come back to your academic stuff later. Refreshed.’
She ate the last mouthful of her fish and took a sip of wine. All that remained on her plate was a framework of fine bones.
‘I suppose I could try. I’d want to explain how it seemed at the time, the signs that were there, but which I didn’t understand, to do it without hindsight, innocently.’
‘However you want to tackle it,’ Prisca said, ‘the important thing is to cauterise the past. Now, what shall we have for pudding?’ She took the menu from the waiter. ‘I think it’s quite important for you,’ she went on, ‘to come to some kind of understanding of what happened, why it happened, why it happened to you of all people.’
I chose roasted figs, three soft black bulbs which sat in a raspberry sauce, a pink pool in the centre of the white plate. I broke into the first fruit with the side of my fork. It opened up like a wound to reveal its centre, a milder red, fibrillous, speckled with golden seeds. Food had recently taken on an extraordinary power to return itself to raw materials in front of my eyes. And not just the form of its origin, but transubstantiated into flesh, open, throbbing, bloody, female. If writing about what had happened would put an end to this, it would be worth doing.
‘It all began like this,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It began that night two years ago, when you and I, Prisca, had dinner together to talk about Emily. Do you remember? That’s when I met her.’
They talked about the trial and the appeal, recalling the details obsessively, commenting on the skills of the solicitors, barristers, judges involved. Prisca had trained as a lawyer, Jamie still practised, and they analysed the case with professional thoroughness, as if it had been a game. They ordered more coffee; Jamie had a brandy. Julian was not with us, so no one ate the petits fours.
‘I had to be optimistic,’ Jamie said, ‘especially with poor Nick, but I can say now I think we were bloody lucky to get off at the eleventh hour.’
‘It’s terrifying,’ Sibyl said. ‘How close you can get to terrible injustice. Because you can’t prove, and nobody will believe, the truth.’
‘There are different levels of truth.’ Prisca was expounding one of her theories. ‘On the legal level you can only judge by what comes within the rules and nothing else. If the truth, or a truth, can be exposed within that area, fine. The fact that there was a material irregularity and a key witness changed his story is enough to end play.’
‘It’s not like that, Prisca,’ Sibyl replied. ‘It isn’t a game. One story is fake and the other is real. Those events really happened. There’s no choice about that.’
‘Nobody denies they happened. It’s the interpretation that differs. That’s my point. Even when you have established the bare facts, there is the whole level of intention. The interpretation of that subterranean flow of motive and purpose is another level of truth. Julian’s story, Igor’s story. Where was the truth there? Was she killed for love or money, sex o
r power? Your choice of interpretation is more to do with your personality than hers.’
‘I’m sure Minna was lying,’ Sibyl said. ‘She must have seen Igor. Think how often we walked up and down those stairs to work out the timing. She committed perjury. And that was because of the painting. If Nick hadn’t been embroiled with her over the Lady in a Pelisse…’
‘It was revenge,’ said Prisca.
‘The irony is that it won’t make any difference to the truth about the painting,’ Sibyl went on. They’ll rerun the tests and the experts will draw their own conclusions. It’s not as if locking Nick up for life would stop the process.’
‘No, that’s why I said it was revenge. It was a violent, impulsive act which you do because of the past, not the future. I think she made her first denial instinctively and after that she was stuck with it.’
I could hear Julian’s voice: I thought you lot, intellectuals I mean, were dedicated to the service of abstract truth.
‘Prisca’s right,’ I intervened. They turned to look at me with surprise. They had argued this over many dinner tables when I was in prison. They were not used to my being with them. ‘The interpretation of the facts depends on your point of view. You all supported me and worked for me, for which I can never thank you enough. But in the end, you did it because we’re cousins. Not for abstract love of truth.’
There was silence. I had cruelly reminded them that we had won on the rules, not on the evidence. Jamie and Sibyl both studied their plates. Prisca looked at me, startled, with that penetrating expression that always made me feel that she had understood more than I had said.
I poured more champagne. ‘As Jamie was saying, I’ve been very lucky, particularly in you three. I know I wouldn’t be free if it hadn’t been for you. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your loyalty and friendship.’
The Art of Deception Page 34
