The Crime of Huey Dunstan

by James Mcneish

  I came to a small chapel. There was a man in a vestment standing at the entrance holding a censer. “Have you come to confess?” he said. “Come along. Huey’s waiting.”

  I took off my shoes and followed hesitantly, treading on flagstones that felt cold and slimy. I was overcome with a sense of foreboding, my nostrils dilating at the acrid fumes, sharp and volatile, that rose from the censer he was swinging.

  I said to him, “What’s it about?”

  “Search me…Here he is, Huey. The prof ’s come.”

  There was a chair and a small light burning, like in a confessional. I peered into the flickering gloom.

  “I can’t see anything,” I said.

  “I’m here.” Huey was behind a screen, with something dark like a cowl pulled over his head.

  I said, “What’s that smell?”

  “Ammonia. Don’t you remember? In the hospital. You said it reminded you of your mother’s room when she died. You told me a story.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Yes, you do. You said you’d stolen your mother’s bible that she bought with the tea coupons. Tea coupons! I’d never heard of tea coupons. You said you threw the book in the canal and let your brother take the rap. You never owned up.”

  “I wanted to. I was only a boy, Huey.”

  “That’s no excuse. You threw away the book but kept the guilt.”

  “That’s true. Tom never split.”

  “But you’ve still got the guilt, I reckon. That’s only half the story.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s something you didn’t tell me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about the funeral, your mother’s funeral. You told me you got there too late. When you arrived she was already put in the ground and everyone was weeping but not you.”

  “I swear. I stood beside her grave and tried to weep but I couldn’t.”

  “Bollocks. The reason you didn’t weep was you weren’t there.”

  “Who says that?”

  “Your brother. You abandoned her, he says. You never came to the funeral. You couldn’t face it so you stayed away. He’s out there. Why don’t you go and ask him?”

  “It’s a lie,” I said. “That’s not true!”

  I got up from the chair and walked round behind the partition and tore the screen away. There was nobody there.

  I woke from the dream sweating. I was sitting on the edge of the bed sweating profusely and trembling. I sat there for some moments before I got back into bed and fell asleep again. As I drifted off I heard a voice say, “It’s OK. You don’t have to suffer a lifetime for what you did as a child.”

  But was that Huey speaking? Or my mother?

  Lisbeth woke me at five. I had a sense of disquiet that was probably a hangover from my dream and the realisation that I had barely an hour before the bus left for Cornford. Lisbeth had prepared sandwiches the night before. She filled a thermos with tea while I dressed, and drove me to the station. The bus left at 6.05 a.m. We just made it.

  The bus was due in Cornford shortly after ten. It stopped twice before I fell asleep. All that remained of my dream of the night before was a vague outline of a cowled figure sitting in the dark asking me questions. On the journey I tried to work out how many witnesses remained to be called, and got to six or seven, seven maximum, not counting the man Glen, assuming he showed up to answer the subpoena. That left only the two closing addresses and the judge’s summation. It seemed unlikely the jury would go out before Friday.

  The bus was a few minutes ahead of schedule. We arrived in a rainstorm. I took a taxi to the hotel, left my things at the desk and went straight to the court. Somebody told me the time. It was 10.20 a.m. I sat in the lobby downstairs and waited for Lawrence’s junior or his clerk to come and get me in the break, as arranged. The man Glen was not expected to arrive before eleven, Lawrence had said. I assumed he would arrive under escort. I sat down on one of the benches inside the door, then rose and walked about flexing my shoulders to undo the stiffness from the bus ride, sweeping my cane to and fro over the floor of the foyer. The lobby seemed deserted. After a few turns I felt for one of the benches near the foot of the stairs where I had sat on previous occasions, and realised I had miscalculated. There was no contact. I remembered the wooden benches were grouped in pairs and clamped to the floor. I moved left, then right, sweeping with the cane. Again nothing. Then out of nowhere a hand appeared and guided me forward.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I can manage now on my own.” I felt the edge of the bench with the fingers of my hand, swivelled round and sat down. The person who had helped me sat down beside me. We sat for some minutes in silence. A voice said:

  “Terrible thing being blind. Terrible.”

  I gave a start. With the voice came an odour that was far from pleasant. Alcohol. I resisted an urge to stand up and move away and instead, as it dawned on me who the man was, who the voice belonged to, shifted my body along the bench as far away as I could. He’s here, I thought. Dimly I heard voices coming from upstairs, then a rush of footsteps descending to the lobby. As the foyer filled with sound I got to my feet, thinking, I must find Lawrence. Someone cannoned into me. One minute I was standing up, the next my cane was knocked from my hand and I was spreadeagled on the floor.

  I heard a cry: “It’s him! It’s him!”

  “Calm down, calm down.”

  “Don’t let Christina see him. She’ll kill the fucking bastard!”

  “Get him out of here!”

  In the mêlee that followed, I managed to roll over on to my knees. Somebody helped me up.

  “Are you OK, Ches?” It was Lawrence.

  “Of course I am. Where’s my stick?”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “Stop fussing.” Lawrence was standing beside me dabbing my jaw with something soft. “It’s only a graze. Where’s my stick?”

  “It’s here.”

  “Thanks.” I felt my jaw and collapsed the cane and opened it again to make sure it wasn’t broken. The shouting had subsided. I said, “Don’t tell me. That was Glen, wasn’t it? And the father! Huey’s father went berserk.”

  “It’s all right. He’s gone now.”

  I said, “You blew it, Lawrence. You should have been here.”

  “Ches, I was in court!”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have been. I told you there’d be trouble if you didn’t keep them apart. Don’t you remember?”

  *

  When the hearing resumed, there was another witness on the stand, a woman. She was being shown a photograph. Lawrence was saying to her:

  “I want you to look at the photograph, Mrs Manger, and tell me if you can see Mr Dunstan in the class. It was taken in 1980 when he was seven.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Look closely. Take your time.”

  “No. Oh yes. There he is in the second row.”

  “How do you know it’s him?”

  “The smile.”

  “Was he a smily child?”

  “Mischievous, I’d say. Bubbly little boy, big toothy grin. I’d forgotten about that.” The word “bubbly” registered. I recognised the voice of the teacher who had turned up the report card for me.

  “Thank you, Mrs Manger.”

  “No questions,” the prosecutor said.

  There was a pause. I heard Lawrence talking to the bench or the registrar. Then a bump. A door bumped. Another witness was led in, the witness sworn. I heard the judge issue an order prohibiting publication of the witness’s name and a further interim order suppressing publication of “any acts performed upon the accused, Hugh Thomas Dunstan”.

  It was my first intimation of what Lawrence had been up to behind the scenes, of plans laid, deals done in the shadowlands of legal dodgems. I had a portent of what was to come. My blood was racing. Portent? Huey, I realised, like me, had been told nothing. The court had become unnaturally still. As I
sat back in my chair, I caught Huey’s breath coming in gusts. Throughout the trial, trying to “observe” what was happening, I had had two screens before my eyes, two maps: a map of the witness stand in the opposite corner below the bench, and another of Huey sitting straight up behind me facing away at ninety degrees towards the witness in the stand. But now he wasn’t doing that, his body had shifted somehow.

  “…And all this happened in your caravan on the outskirts of town,” Lawrence was saying to the witness, “when Mr Dunstan was seven or eight?”

  “I would say so.” I recognised the voice. It was the man in the foyer.

  “And did these acts occur without the knowledge of Mr Dunstan’s parents?”

  “I would say so, yes.”

  I remembered Huey’s description of his attacker. Tall and skinny, with a beard. The voice was insipid, yet audible. The more audible for its curious distinctions, as the answers were spooned out.

  “You held him down on the bed?”

  “More or less.”

  “Tied him up and forced him to give you oral sex?”

  “If he said so.”

  “He has said so, Mr Constable. He has told the court what he suffered at your hands and he has also said that you threatened him with worse, if he said anything to anyone afterwards. Did you threaten him?”

  “I have to say that I did.”

  Small gusts of wind were parting the hairs on my scalp. Huey was breathing rapidly, like an animal hungry for air with its head lowered, as if he couldn’t bear to face his tormentor. My own breathing was accelerating. At the back of the court I heard a chair scrape; my attention was diverted. I imagined the father had started up, had started to his feet. He couldn’t bear it either?

  “…What was the first thing you did? Here’s a small boy, you’re alone with him. Did you get him down on the bed? What did you do?”

  “I think I put my hand on his leg.”

  “Top of his leg? Yes. And you smiled at him? Thank you. How tall are you, Mr Constable?”

  “I’m six foot.”

  “And you have a beard. Is that the same beard you had then?”

  “Bit scruffier then.”

  “Yes. You’ve tidied yourself up to come to court this morning, no doubt. Take off your glasses, please. No, keep them on for the moment. Would you look at this snapshot…Have you seen it before?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a snapshot of the victim, the dead man. It was taken before he died. Would you say it bears a resemblance to what you yourself might have looked like fourteen years ago?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What does ‘maybe’ mean?”

  Silence. There was a long pause.

  “Please take off your glasses.”

  Another pause.

  How to describe that pause? That frisson of excitement. I waited. The jury waited. Everyone waited.

  “I’d go along with that. Yes. It does look a bit like me.”

  I heard Lawrence swallow.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  He went on after a moment: “And this one?

  “It’s the photograph No. 13 in the Exhibit, for the benefit of the jury.” Lawrence explained to the judge. “The photograph shows the interior of the cottage where the man died. Would you say, Mr Constable, that it bears any similarity to—I am trying, Your Honour, not to put words into the witness’s mouth. Any similarity—?”

  “He means the caravan,” the judge interposed.

  O thank you, I almost shouted. O wise and temperate judge!

  The witness said, “Yes, it does look a bit like the inside of my caravan.”

  Lawrence was silent. I bit my lip and willed him to say nothing more. Finally he said in a quiet voice, “No, don’t go. My learned colleague may wish to question you.”

  “No questions,” the prosecutor said.

  “You may step down,” the judge said. Somebody screamed.

  *

  It was reported afterwards that a scream “like a mandrake cry” went through the courtroom. But I don’t remember any scream. There was a swing door behind the witness stand that caused a bump in the room as the witnesses came and went. I had heard a bump when the witness Glen came in, but not when he exited. For some reason, having entered by the swing door, he decided to walk out through the body of the court. I did not know this. The breathing behind me had stopped. All I heard was a low growl. The growl changed to a throttled sound, sharp and grating like a fingernail being drawn across a pane of glass. A noise of feet running past. Then a scuffle.

  I heard the judge say, “Come on, Huey. You’re no longer seven years old.”

  That was all. It was over in a matter of seconds.

  I know now that as the witness left the stand and walked out, passing alongside the dock, Huey looked up at his abuser and suddenly flung himself forward. He tried to vault the rail. He would have succeeded if two guards had not restrained him. The official transcript says, “demonstration & obscenities as witness exited”, but the newspaper headline next day was more suggestive: MURDER ACCUSED LUNGES AT ALLEGED ABUSER.

  That night as I lay in bed at the hotel I reflected on the day’s events and tried to fit them into some sort of pattern. Undoubtedly with the witness Glen, Lawrence had scored. The man had admitted everything, even to the facial resemblance when Lawrence showed him the snapshot. The resemblance was uncanny. I could tell from the gulp in Lawrence’s voice when he said thank you.

  Afterwards Lawrence was surprised, I think, that the man had kept his bond. Surprised that such a miserable specimen who was risking a long jail sentence should have been capable of what in retrospect was almost an act of magnanimity. It was as if for Lawrence the sordidness and pathos of it all had not until then reached him.

  “But how did you persuade him?” was what I wanted to know from Lawrence. “How did you get him here? ”

  “I saw the police video. It was compelling. So I summonsed him, had him remanded in custody and I put it to him. Don’t know if I did the right thing or if it was the honourable thing but I did it. Got him up from the cells and I put it to him. ‘You’re our witness now,’ I said. Said if he repeated his story in court exactly as he’d told it on the police video, the lot, I would advise Mr Dunstan not to file a victim impact report or press charges when it came to sentencing. That was the deal.”

  I didn’t ask Lawrence if he had told the police what he had done. The ethics of it did not concern me. What did concern me was Huey’s reaction—the lunge, instinct with violence and suppressed ferocity. It must have taken everyone by surprise, except the judge.

  The judge? “Come on, Huey. You’re no longer seven years old.” Clearly he had worked it out for himself.

  But the jurors? How would they see it? Try as I might, I could not subdue what kept surfacing as I lay in bed trying to sleep: the echo of another judge’s words. The first trial judge who had described Huey’s suppressed feelings as a power and a force, “pent up even in the court here”. His words to the jury at Huey’s first trial seemed to have acquired a prophetic ring.

  I was perspiring freely. I fell asleep in the early hours, the matter unresolved in my mind.

  TWENTY-TWO

  IT REMAINED UNRESOLVED for two more days, as did the question of the street lamp. On Thursday, the penultimate day, I buttonholed Lawrence during the morning adjournment and asked him about the lamp. Had he done anything? “Oh yes. It’s broken all right,” he said. He had sent an electrician to climb up and look.

  “But how do you know when it was broken?”

  “I shouldn’t worry about it,” he said airily.

  But I did worry about it. I found Lawrence’s whole attitude in those last days worrying. That Thursday, at the end of the day, the opposition’s medical expert came up to me and introduced himself, saying: “I think you got it right.” Meaning post-traumatic stress disorder, our diagnosis. This man was the Crown’s silent witness, the Australian psychiatrist Lawrence suspected had been planted to
intimidate him. The psychiatrist passed on this titbit to me almost casually. I was delighted. But when I in turn passed it on to Lawrence, he was furious. He said, “Then why in god’s name didn’t he say that before! He should have come over to us.”

  That was one thing. I had been badgering Lawrence for days to let me talk to Huey. He himself had been back and forth to the family and down to the holding cell at every opportunity, talking to Huey, encouraging him to keep up his computer course on tree culture so he could make use of it, “when you get out”. I thought this sort of optimism false and potentially harmful. On the one occasion I did persuade him to let me down to the cell (it was also on the penultimate day) I found Huey listless, and in a poor way.

  “I still wish I hadn’t told you,” he said to me.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said.

  “All the trouble I’ve caused.”

  I told him to stop talking like that or I would get cross. “Come on, Huey. You should be smiling.”

  He was silent, hitting his knuckles together, and I guessed that the tic, the nervous twitch over one eye, had returned. Suddenly he said, “I was brought up to tell the truth. It’s all his fault.” Whose fault? I wondered.

  “What’s the loneliest word in the dictionary,” Huey said. “Honesty.”

  *