Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  ‘Well, J’s obviously very disturbed. She’s had some sort of extremely unpleasant experience and she’s been exposed to sexual ideas which are inappropriate for her age group, but that’s common enough in her environment. But as compared with the original interview, the first interview before she was taken into care, well, there’s lots J left out. All the colourful detail about the magician’s wand and the white dress, she didn’t tell me any of that.’

  ‘And those are the colourful parts no one would forget?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And K?’

  ‘Poor little thing. She said exactly the same to me as she had said to Mrs Hunter before she was taken into care, almost word for word.’

  ‘How her stepfather Mr P took her into the shed and so on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There was no change at all in her story? Not after Mr P admitted the offence and was sent to jail?’

  ‘Not really. She was relieved to be out of care of course, but she wished her family hadn’t moved down to our area because she missed her friends. Otherwise she had nothing more to say.’

  ‘Do you deduce from the fact that one child has consistently told the same story and the other hasn’t that K is telling the truth and J isn’t?’

  ‘Yes, I do. J is older, more imaginative, more highly strung. Both children have been damaged, but K is not clever enough to say anything except what happened. J can make up a story out of nothing.’

  ‘Why do you think so many of your colleagues have taken a different view? Why did they attach such importance to J’s testimony and hasten to see to it that other children were taken into care on the strength of her testimony? In some cases, on her testimony alone?’

  ‘I can’t say for sure.’

  ‘Not for sure perhaps, but would you care to hazard a guess?’

  ‘I think they were over-influenced by the conferences they attended. They latched on to anything that sounded like satanic abuse.’

  ‘Even though they were not necessarily Christians themselves?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You think people in a secular age still have a need to believe in such things?’

  ‘Or to believe that other people still believe in them.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Moonman. It was extremely kind of you to come all this way. Your testimony has been most enlightening.’

  ‘Well that’s it, I think I’ve cracked it,’ he said as Patricia brought our ham salads into the headteacher’s room.

  ‘Cracked it?’ said Joan.

  ‘Solved the riddle.’

  ‘I know what “cracked it” means. I just can’t see how you can be so sure, indeed we don’t even know what it is you’re sure of.’

  ‘No, of course you don’t. You haven’t had my advantages, particularly my interview with Mr Stoyt-Smith. And you must forgive me if for the next twenty-four hours I still keep you in the dark. This is partly because I wish to play the great detective, partly because I would value your opinion of my whole scenario when I have tied up the loose ends. Starting from cold as it were, you’ll have a more detached view.’

  ‘So the butler will call us all into the library after breakfast?’

  ‘He will, Gus, I promise you,’ and Francie gave one of his dry frosty smiles which none of us could resist. ‘Meanwhile, Joan will buy a few more jet baubles, and you and I will hack our way round the links.’

  ‘But I thought you were tying up loose ends.’

  ‘Sergeant Thursby and Constable Dykes will be checking out a couple of facts and conducting two brief interviews. They don’t need me.’

  The light was already poor and the rain was coming in off the North Sea as we hit off from the exposed first tee, a midget plateau half-lost in the high grass of the dunes: Francie played with his legs wide-splayed and his torso lowering over the ball before he gave it a slash, leaning out seawards to counteract what would otherwise have been a slice in the general direction of Norway. He stumped over the dimples and hummocks of the darkening fairways – more often the rough – with a blithe ferocity. I felt that if he had been a better player he would have found the game too dull to bother with. He wouldn’t talk shop, said he wanted a break, but then half-way round, when we were playing the short hole at the end of the course, by the lighthouse, he turned to me after chipping out of the tussocks with the rain plastering his grey hair to his scalp, and said: ‘I don’t know why we expect these people to tell the truth. We make them take an oath which doesn’t mean a thing to them. We threaten them with all sorts of hideous punishments if they lie, punishments which we have no intention of carrying out, otherwise the courts would be jammed solid with perjury cases.’

  ‘So you can’t expect them to have any allegiance to the truth?’

  ‘No they don’t, though that sounds like a rather Irish way of putting it.’

  For a long time, I had not thought about Scrannel and his homily on truth. Curious that it should not have occurred to me sooner, but then ever since we had come to Fairness, I had not thought about anything much except what we had come for.

  When we got back to the hotel for the usual tea and fruit-cake, with a drop of whisky in the tea, Dykes and Thursby were already there, and Francie went off to hear their reports.

  ‘On second thoughts,’ he said, when he came bustling back rubbing his hands, ‘I think we might do better to go down to the Pier now, that’ll give us a head-start in the morning. Will you raise Joan?’

  There were four of us in the Jag, the police car following with the two officers.

  Mr G in a long mac with the rain dripping off it was waiting for us beneath the crumpled hardboard clown to open up and turn the lights on. To my surprise, Francie asked him to turn the stage lights on but leave the house in darkness. Francie then led us through the side door on to the tiny stage and sat us down on half a dozen of the folding chairs which were already set out facing the audience. We stared into the dusty darkness, shivering in the unbearable damp chill. The place probably hadn’t been opened up since our initial tour of inspection.

  ‘Let me start by saying,’ Francie began, standing in front of us at the edge of the stage, ‘that I have not the slightest criticism of the police in this particular matter. It was their task to establish whether Mr Iain Stoyt-Smith was or was not mixed up in this whole business, nothing more, nothing less. And what they established beyond peradventure was that he paid one, and only one, visit to Fairness, in his capacity as chairman of the Regional Federation of Boys’ Clubs. Throughout his visit, which lasted some five and a half hours, he was accompanied by the Chief Education Officer and for different overlapping parts of it by the chairman of the Education Committee and the Regional Arts Officer. He was never out of the sight of at least two of them. This corroboration was so strong, unlike most of the evidence that has been presented to us, that the police felt able to eliminate him from their inquiries. There was no further need to interview him or his friends.’

  Francie paused. He was enjoying himself like anyone with a good story to tell, but there was also on his face an expression of relief, and it suddenly came to me that with all his experience he had been as perplexed and distressed as I had been, distressed not only by the horrors he had been forced to listen to but at the seeming impossibility of making any sense of it all. Now he was in full flow.

  ‘But we are not in the position of the police. Our task is to range wider and not least to gain some idea of the atmosphere in which these things are alleged to have occurred and any possible motive for them, to make an informal guess as to why people should do such things or, if the children are inventing some part of it, why they should so invent, and how. Thus it seemed to me that we needed to strive to build up some picture in our mind of the more crucial events in the business. And no event is more crucial to our enquiry than the dance display by the Fairness Primary School on the 7th of May in this place. And not just the dance display. You will recall that it was mentioned in passing, by the Headmaster, I thi
nk, that the display had been preceded by a gymnastic display given by the boys from the secondary school. Now you may wonder how a display of that sort could possibly be given on a stage as tiny as this, barely twelve foot wide. Come to that, even the dance display must have been exceedingly cramped.

  ‘The answer is, of course, that neither display was given on the stage at all. As Mr Stoyt-Smith explained to me, both displays were given in the auditorium – on the floor of the theatre – which, as you will observe, is suitable for the purpose, being dead flat, not raked at all. Indeed, to hold such displays there was anything but a novelty, since the theatre had been used as a temporary gym while the school’s own gym was being refurbished. Thus the distinguished visitors, with Mr Stoyt-Smith as the Louis Quatorze of the afternoon, were seated here on the stage as we are, and they watched the two performances down on the floor.

  ‘Mr Stoyt-Smith told me quite frankly he preferred the gymnastics, he was not much of a one for the ballet. He also told me equally frankly that he was homosexual by inclination, there was no point in hiding the fact, and that this might have originally led him to take an interest in boys’ clubs, but he vehemently denied any wrongdoing in that capacity, and with even greater vehemence he denied having the slightest sexual interest in girls of any age.’

  ‘So if we can forget Stoyt-Smith,’ I said, ‘then J is making it all up, or a lot of it. But why?’

  ‘I would rather ask how. But if you would allow me to continue. What Stoyt-Smith did say, however, and he struck me as a credible witness despite having once been a Conservative Member of Parliament, is that he thought the little girls did look rather sweet sitting round the edge during the gymnastics. The boys left before the dancing, but the girls saw the gymnastics.’

  ‘So –’

  ‘I must admit I can’t quite see the relevance.’ Joan, like me, was beginning to resent this Hercule Poirot monologue.

  ‘Would you be so kind as to turn on the house lights, Mr G?’

  Somewhere behind the stage, there was a click from the invisible Garforth and the lights went on. We blinked into the little auditorium, bare now with the folding seats piled neatly along the sides.

  ‘You will observe that the floor has been swept, as it was not at the time of our earlier visit, and of course it was then obscured by the chairs. But now –’

  Our eyes followed his triumphant index finger. The floor had been marked out in thick white paint for a basketball court. The bank of house lights fell directly on the centre circle.

  ‘And now, if you wouldn’t mind turning your chairs round and facing the back of the stage for a minute.’

  ‘Oh really, this pantomime –’

  But even Joan turned round so that we were all facing the painted backdrop, a country scene in bright colours with a mansion rather like Buckingham Palace in the middle distance and the words of some song on a scroll, all rather faded.

  ‘And now, Mr Garforth, would you mind stepping out for us as we agreed?’

  There was the sound of footsteps trotting down the side-steps leading from backstage.

  On further instructions from Francie, we turned round to look again into the auditorium.

  Mr Garforth had removed his mac and was standing in the centre of the basketball circle. He was wearing a white tracksuit with a large embroidered rose and was pointing to the edge of the circle with a billiard cue.

  ‘Perhaps, Mr Garforth, you would tell my colleagues what you told Sergeant Thursby?’

  ‘Well, sir, nobody thought to ask me at the time, but I qualified as a PE instructor when I was in the army. Then when I came out, I managed the theatre for a time until it closed, but I kept up the PE work at the school, and we like to hold a display every year, gives the kids something to work towards, and Mr Stoyt-Smith said he was most impressed.’

  ‘He was indeed and he remembered the details of the display most accurately down to the tracksuit you are wearing, which is –’

  ‘Regimental rugby squad, sir.’

  ‘And the billiard cue –’

  ‘The principal boy uses it for pointing to the words in the panto song up there when we open up at Christmas. And I use it for commands during the gym. Gives more of a dramatic effect than a whistle.’

  ‘So there you are: the circle, the white dress, the rose, the magic wand. All perfectly innocent. The sources of invention usually lie close at hand. Even for novelists, I dare say.’

  Francie’s smugness was olympian, cosmic, insufferable.

  Joan attacked first. ‘J said a white dress. A tracksuit isn’t a dress.’

  ‘It wasn’t J who first used the word dress. She herself couldn’t immediately think of the word, there is a slight pause on the tape before she says “costume”, then another pause, “like Mum wears”. When the interviewer suggests “dress”, J takes up the word dress, perhaps thinking, quite rightly in my view, that a man in a dress makes a more dramatic and hence more convincing detail. Constable Dykes has checked that J’s mother does wear a tracksuit, in fact she was wearing one when Constable Dykes called, and she does refer to it, I know not why, as a costume, which may have occasioned J’s hesitation because at school such a garment is obviously called a tracksuit and she was caught between the two different words.’

  ‘But why cast Stoyt-Smith as the villain?’ I put in. ‘After all, J can’t have had a clue who he was, she’d only seen him that one time.’

  ‘Very good reasons for making him the villain. She knew he was tremendously important. Bringing him in would grab the grown-ups’ attention, as indeed it has ever since, and as she was never going to see him again, pointing the finger at him didn’t present any danger to her. Or so she thought. Thank you very much indeed, Mr Garforth, I’m sorry to drag you out on such a ghastly night, you can turn the house lights down now.’

  As we were talking, Garforth was holding the cue with hands stretched wide apart and flexing his arms so that his whole body tensed. It was the tensing – and the white suit – that suddenly reminded me of Monsieur’s trim white figure, all sinew, looming out of the beach-mist. Then the lights went out, and we stood up, stretched and shrugged on our coats, with that awkward, deflated feeling that occurs when the curtain comes down.

  That night Francie got pickled. That was his word. He apologised to Joan who said she didn’t mind at all, one needed some kind of release. All of us shared an end-of-term feeling, although there was a mountain of evidence still to be taken before we could even think about writing the report. But the knot had been unravelled. At the heart of the mystery was no mystery, or only a sad little girl with a novelist’s imagination – or perhaps imagination is too grand a description – with a novelist’s knack of seizing on the material that came to hand and remixing it into something fresh.

  ‘It was your friend Helen who woke me up,’ Francie said, slurring his words now. ‘She made me see that J wasn’t making it up out of nothing.’

  ‘But if I remember rightly, that was just what Helen said J did.’

  ‘Exactly. It takes somebody saying something unimaginative to make you think,’ he said heavily. ‘Tell me, does your friend Helen ever make up stories herself?’

  ‘No,’ I said after thinking a bit and remembering her struggling to make up a bedtime story for Beryl, ‘No, I don’t think she can.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said again. ‘She doesn’t know how you do it. None of these people know how you do it, because they never do it themselves. But I know. I hear people do it every day in court.’

  ‘But a child –’ Joan attempted.

  ‘It’s just the same process. In fact it’s a child’s game, making things up. Dangerous game. Your friend’s not a child, though, is she? Helen’s not a child, is she? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss, her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies.’

  ‘No, she’s not a child. She never was,’ I said.

  ‘I think it’s bedtime, we’ve got a long day tomorrow,’ Joan said firmly, rising with a chinking of h
er jet baubles.

  But Francie wasn’t finished. He was relentless when he had had a few, and after Joan had gone upstairs he didn’t hold back on the drink or anything else.

  ‘When I was a young barrister out on circuit, it used to be shagging sheep. Fields behind here used to be full of sheep, they’d graze them on the golf-course in the winter, only place there was no frost. Sheep all gone now, so this. Not so new anyway, I suppose. There was a man came up before me in Lincoln once, had told the police his father had always “broken in” his daughters as he put it so he didn’t see why he shouldn’t carry on the family tradition.’

  ‘But you can’t –’

  ‘Of course I don’t justify it, I’m just telling you what people get up to. You read about that place in New York where respectable couples – lawyers, civil servants, people like you and me – go and roger complete strangers, then go out for a nice dinner in a nice restaurant?’

  ‘Yes, but they’re all adults.’

  ‘So they are adults. It’s only adult entertainment. Quite a different matter.’

  He peered deep into the silly balloon glass as though he was going to try it for size as a helmet, then sat back emitting a long low noise, somewhere between a sigh and a groan.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Never better, apart from being rat-arsed. It gets you down, this stuff, looking at them all trailing in, all of them, and knowing that it’s doing none of them any good, including the innocent ones. Perhaps they’re all innocent, even the social workers. Perhaps they’re all doing their best.’

  ‘Well it may –’

  ‘No, no, don’t listen to me. I don’t mean a thing. The important point is, we are doing our best. That’s the point.’

  ‘I think perhaps –’

  ‘You’re right. It’s bedtime. Dame Joan is right. Everyone is right, and it’s all all right.’

  At nine a.m., Constable Dykes reported a call from Mrs Garforth who said she knew her husband had gone down to meet us at the theatre last night and she hadn’t seen him since.

  ‘Three to one they find him before the week’s out.’