Innocent Graves

by Peter Robinson

  At that moment, the full power of his love turned to hate and overwhelmed him, and he knew that everything, her words, her gestures, her lovemaking, her promises, had all been a lie. But he let go; he couldn’t kill her. He stood up, steadied himself and went to collapse on the bed. She was still breathing; there was no blood; he hadn’t raped her.

  In the morning he found her sulking in the spare room, nursing the bump on her head. She tried to make up to him, told him she would do anything he wanted…anything…and started squirming around under the thin sheet. It had always worked before, but this time Owen had had more than enough.

  He knew that if he took her back, if he lived with her for just one more day he would lose his self-respect forever. When he told her to go, she screamed and begged, but he threw her out in the street with only her suitcase. The next thing he knew, he got a letter with a Swiss Cottage address to send on the rest of her things. He did so.

  Shirley Castle let the silence stretch after his explanation. Owen couldn’t read the way she looked at him. He didn’t know whether she believed him or not.

  “Owen,” she said finally. “Whatever the truth is, Michelle’s is a very damning statement. You can imagine the case the Crown is trying to build up. A man obsessed with pornography, especially if it features young girls, capable of sexual violence against women…You see my point?”

  “But it’s not true!” Owen argued. “None of it. I’m not obsessed with pornography.”

  Shirley held up her hand. “I’m not attacking you, Owen. I’m simply trying to demonstrate the spin the prosecution will try and put on the facts, given the chance.”

  Owen laid his hands on the desk and stared at the veins in his wrists. “I don’t know what you must think of me,” he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper, “but I want you to know that I’m not the monster they say I am. It’s a distortion. If I knew only certain facts about your life, or anyone’s, if your fantasies were laid bare for all to see…well, I might form a picture, and it might be the wrong one. Do you know what I mean?”

  He could have sworn there was an amused glint in her eyes, and perhaps a faint flush on her cheeks. “You don’t need to please me, Owen,” she said. “I’m here as a professional. It’s not my place to make judgments about your private life, only to prove reasonable doubt. You don’t need to seek my approval.”

  “But I want it,” Owen said. “Damn it, I want it! You’re not a machine, are you? You must have opinions, feelings.”

  Shirley Castle didn’t answer. Instead, she shuffled the papers back towards her briefcase and said, “There’s one more important question before I go, Owen. Why would Michelle do what she did? Why would she say all those things about you to the police if they’re not true? What reason has she to want you to go to jail?”

  “Don’t you understand? Michelle’s a user. She used me from the start, for her education, her escape from her overbearing parents, for her living-quarters, the good life. I was her passport through college. She threw me a few crumbs and I took them for love. Even now I have a hard time believing that you can live with someone for so long and not really see them for what they are, not know them at all. But it’s true. Maybe I didn’t want to see. All the time she was with me, she was going with other men, and I admit I got jealous and possessive. But she didn’t care. She thought she could get away with everything, just take her clothes off for me and make it all right. At heart she’s a cold, calculating monster. She has no conscience. Do you understand? Sometimes, it’s only when the final piece falls into place that you see there was ever a pattern at all. That was what happened that last night. The final piece. She’d been doing it all along, lying to me, seeing other men, doing exactly what she wanted, using my home-our home-as a squat. I gave her all the freedom she wanted at first, before I started to suspect the truth. She was young after all. How can you keep the love of a younger woman if you try to put her in a cage? As soon as I became more vigilant, the cracks started to appear.”

  Shirley Castle shook her head. “I can accept all that, Owen, but it doesn’t really answer my question. Why does she wish you so much harm?”

  “Why? Because I found her out,” Owen answered, remembering that one calm moment in the final battle, when he had seen her for what she really was. “Because I saw through her. I saw her true face. And because I rejected her. I threw her out. Though she denied me the night before, just after she’d been with her boyfriend, she offered me her body the next morning. But I wouldn’t take it. She begged me to forgive her and let her stay. But I threw her out. She was like a spiteful child if she didn’t get her own way. She can’t forgive me for seeing the truth and having the courage to throw her out before she dumped me.”

  Shirley Castle nodded slowly. “Well, Owen, that’s all very well,” she said. “But we’d just better hope, for your sake, that she doesn’t get anywhere near the witness-box.”

  Chapter 11

  I

  Wood creaked as those present in court got to their feet one rainy April day. Judge Simmonds entered, resplendent in scarlet moire and white linen. He was a wizened old man with reptilian eyes buried deep in wrinkles and folds of flesh. His face was expressionless as he looked around the courtroom before sitting.

  The benches groaned as everyone in the crowded room sat down. Owen noticed that the courtroom smelled of the same lemon-scented polish his mother used to use; it made him feel sad.

  “The prisoner will stand.”

  So this was it. Owen stood.

  “Is your name Owen Pierce?” asked the Clerk of the Court.

  “It is.”

  The clerk then read out the indictment and asked Owen how he pleaded.

  “Not guilty,” Owen answered, as firmly and confidently as he could manage with all eyes on him.

  He scrutinized the jury as he spoke: seven men and five women, all dressed for a day at the office. A pudgy man with a slack, flabby jaw looked at him with something like awe. A pursed-lipped young woman wouldn’t meet his eyes at all, but looked down at her hands folded in her lap. Most of them at least glanced at him in passing. Some were nervous; others looked as if they had already made up their minds.

  It was irrational, he knew, but he decided to pick one of them to be his barometer throughout the trial, one whose expressions he would chart to tell how the case was going-for or against him. Not the frowning woman in the powder-blue suit, nor the balding chap who reminded him of his insurance agent; not the conventionally pretty girl with the pageboy cut, nor the burly wrestler-type with his brick-red neck bulging out of his tight collar. It was difficult to find someone.

  At last, he decided on a woman; for some reason, it had to be a woman. She was in her late thirties, he guessed, with a moon-shaped face and short mousy hair. She had a wide red slash of a mouth and large eyes.

  But it wasn’t her physical appearance so much as her aura that caused him to pick her out. For some reason, he decided, this woman was good and honest. What was more, she could tell the truth from lies. At the moment, she looked puzzled and confused to find herself in such a frightening role, but she would, he knew, as soon as the trial progressed, listen carefully, weigh, judge and decide. Her decision would be the right one, and he would be able to tell from her expression what it was. Yes, he would keep a close eye on her. He would call her “Minerva.”

  Almost before Owen realized it, Jerome Lawrence, QC, had launched into his opening address. Lawrence was a small, dark-complexioned man with beady, restless black eyes and a perpetual five-o’clock shadow, shiny as shoe-polish on his cheeks and chin. Somehow, he seemed to fit perfectly into his robes, looking even more like a bat ready to flap its wings and take off into the night than anyone else in the room. Like Shirley Castle, he spoke with his hands a lot, and his robe swished about in a most distracting way.

  “The Crown shall seek to prove,” Lawrence said in his oiliest public-school voice, “that the accused is guilty of the most heinous, the most despicable, brutal, inhuman
crime of all-the murder of a child, an innocent, a mere sixteen-year-old girl with her whole life before her.”

  And for the rest of the day, Owen could only listen, open-mouthed, to the depiction of himself as a barely human monster.

  Though the parade of witnesses began dramatically enough, with Rebecca Charters tearfully recounting how she discovered Deborah Harrison’s body, several things became clear to him in the first days. Probably the first and foremost of these was that you could be bored even at your own murder trial.

  Witnesses came and went, people he had never met, people who didn’t know him: vicars, shopkeepers, teachers, schoolgirls, policemen, pub landlords. Some of them seemed to spend hours in the box for no reason Owen could think of. Jerome Lawrence or Shirley Castle questioned most of them, but sometimes their juniors took over.

  With unfailing regularity one lawyer or another would raise points of law that meant the jury had to be sent out, sometimes for hours, and all sides seemed to like nothing better than the kind of delay that meant an early adjournment for the day. Also, there were one or two days off due to illness of a jury member and another for a family bereavement. Every night, without fail, Owen was shipped back to his little cell at Armley Jail. He was becoming so used to it by now that he almost thought of it as home. He had forgotten what his real home looked like.

  As far as Owen could tell, things seemed to be going quite well over the first few weeks. Shirley Castle made mincemeat of the policeman with the jug-ears for not explaining why he was visiting Owen in the first place. Detective Inspector Stott came out looking like a member of the Gestapo.

  By the time Detective Chief Inspector Banks was called, Owen had lost track of the days.

  II

  “In the same situation, Chief Inspector, do you think you would bother to mention everyone you saw on the streets during a certain period?”

  Banks shrugged. It was his second day giving evidence and Shirley Castle was cross-examining him. “I would hope I would do my duty and try to recall everything that happened around the crucial time,” he answered finally.

  “But you are a policeman, Chief Inspector. You have special training. Such facts and fine details are part of your job. I’m sure I wouldn’t even remember most of the people I passed in the street. Nor, I imagine, would most members of the jury.” And here, Shirley Castle paused long enough to look over at the jury. Most of them seemed to agree with her, Banks thought. “Yet you expect Mr. Pierce to remember every face, every detail,” she went on. “I ask you again, Chief Inspector, do you really think this is reasonable?”

  “Perhaps not on a busy thoroughfare at rush hour,” said Banks, “but this was a foggy night in a quiet suburb. Yes, I think I would remember if I had seen a particular person. And Mr. Pierce remembered as soon as-”

  “That’s enough, Chief Inspector. You have answered my question.”

  Banks couldn’t help but allow himself a slight feeling of satisfaction when he saw Shirley Castle reel from his answer. She had made a small mistake; she hadn’t already known the answer to the question she asked.

  She hurried on. “Now, as Mr. Sung, proprietor of the Peking Moon restaurant, has already testified, and as my learned friend brought out during his examination-in-chief, Mr. Pierce used his credit card to pay for his meal there. If the timing of events is correct-and I stress if-this would have occurred shortly after the murder of Deborah Harrison, would it not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, in your professional experience, Chief Inspector, would you not say that a criminal, someone who has just committed an attack of the most vile and brutal kind, would be a little more careful to cover his tracks?”

  “Most criminals aren’t that clever,” said Banks. “That’s why they get caught.”

  The members of the gallery laughed.

  “But my client is not stupid,” she went on, ignoring the interruption. “It is hardly likely that he would go and eat Chinese food and pay for it with a credit card after murdering someone, now, is it? Not to mention do it all wearing a bright orange anorak. Why would he be so foolish as to draw attention to himself in such an obvious way if he had committed the crime of which he is accused?”

  “Perhaps he was distraught,” Banks answered. “Not thinking clearly. Mr. Sung did say he was talking to-”

  “‘Not thinking clearly,’” she repeated, with exactly the right tone of disdain. “Is it not a fact, Chief Inspector, that perpetrators of such random crimes are usually, in fact, thinking very clearly indeed? That they rarely get caught, unless by accident? That they take great care to avoid discovery?”

  Banks fiddled with his tie. He hated having it fastened up and could only bear it if he kept the top button of his shirt undone. “There are certain schools would say that, yes. But a criminal’s behavior is not easily predictable. If it were, we’d have an easier job on our hands.” He smiled at the jury; one or two of them smiled back.

  “Come on, Chief Inspector Banks, you can’t have it both ways. Either they’re stupid and easy to catch, as you said earlier, or they’re unpredictable and impossible to catch. Which is it?”

  “Some are stupid; some are not. As I said before, murderers don’t always act rationally. This wasn’t a rational crime. There’s no way of predicting what the killer would do, or why he did things the way he did.”

  “But aren’t you in the business of reconstructing crimes, Chief Inspector?”

  “Nowadays we leave that to ‘Crimewatch.’”

  Laughter rose up from the gallery. Judge Simmonds admonished Banks for his flippancy.

  “My point is,” Shirley Castle went on without cracking a smile, “that you seem to know so very little of what went on in St. Mary’s graveyard, or indeed, of what kind of criminal you’re dealing with. Isn’t that true?”

  “We know that Deborah Harrison was strangled with the strap of her school satchel and that her clothing was rearranged.”

  “But isn’t it true that you simply picked on the first person seen in the area whom you thought fit the bill, that Owen Pierce was unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “I’d say it was Deborah Harrison who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Were there not certain elements of the crime scene that struck you as odd?”

  “What elements?”

  Shirley Castle consulted her notes. “As I understand it,” she said, “the victim’s school satchel was open. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

  “It could have come open during the struggle.”

  “Hardly,” scoffed Shirley Castle. “It was fastened by two good-quality buckles. We’ve tested it, believe me, and it won’t open unless someone deliberately unfastens it.”

  “Perhaps the murderer wanted something from her.”

  “Like what, Chief Inspector? Surely you’re not suggesting robbery? From a schoolgirl’s satchel?”

  “It’s possible. But I-”

  “But what money could a schoolgirl have worth stealing? I understand Deborah Harrison had six pounds in her purse when she was found. If robbery were the motive, why not take that too? And wouldn’t it make more sense to take the entire satchel? Why hang around the crime scene any longer than necessary?”

  “Which question do you want me to answer first?”

  Shirley Castle scowled. “Why would Deborah Harrison’s killer remain at the scene and go through her satchel rather than take it with him?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps he was looking for a trophy of some kind. Something personal to the victim.”

  “But was anything missing?”

  “We don’t know. No-one knew exact-”

  “You don’t know. We have heard a great deal of evidence,” she went on, “placing Mr. Pierce in the vicinity of St. Mary’s at the time of the crime, but let me ask you this, Chief Inspector: did anyone actually see Mr. Pierce enter St. Mary’s graveyard?”

  “He was seen-”

  “A simple yes o
r no will suffice.”

  Banks was silent a moment, then said, “No.”

  “Is it not also possible, Chief Inspector, that Deborah went somewhere else first and returned to the graveyard later, after Mr. Pierce had gone to the Peking Moon?”

  “It’s possible. But-”

  “And that Deborah Harrison was murdered by someone she knew, perhaps because of something she was carrying in her satchel?”

  Exactly what I thought at first, Banks agreed. “I think that’s a rather far-fetched explanation,” he said.

  “More far-fetched than charging Mr. Pierce here with murder?” She pointed at Pierce theatrically. “While you were busy harassing my client, did you pursue the investigation in other directions?”

  “We continued with our inquiries. And we didn’t har-”

  She sniffed. “You continued with your inquiries. What does that mean?”

  “We tried to find out as much about the victim and her movements as possible. We tried to discover, through talking to friends and family, if she had any enemies, anyone who would want to kill her. We collected all the trace evidence we could find and had it analyzed as quickly as possible. We found nothing concrete until we came up with Mr. Pierce.”

  “And after Mr. Pierce’s name came up?”

  Banks knew that most investigations tend to wind down once the police think they’ve got their man. And much as he would have liked to pursue other possibilities, there was other work to do, and there was also Chief Constable Riddle. “I continued other lines of inquiry until it became app-”

  “You continued other lines of inquiry? As soon as you first interviewed him, you decided on Mr. Pierce’s guilt, didn’t you?”

  “Objection!”