by Tim Parks
He sat back. Suddenly the energy seemed to leave him. Still, he said vaguely, I’m enjoying my moths at the moment. You know? He trailed a finger in some spilt beer. I love the way they’re such a blatant example of mindlessly animated material, bits of fluff and silicon fizzing and flitting about. He laughed nervously. Then the farce of those extravagant patterns on their wings. It’s fantastic.
Unasked, Daniel stood up to get in another round. On the television behind the bar they were showing a Hollywood shootout in the customary abandoned warehouse. Hispanic policemen, Chinese traffickers. Or was it vice versa? To date Daniel had never had to try a case involving actual use of firearms. On returning to his seat he could see no other way of proceeding than with complete frankness. Pint in hand, he said: Two things, Mart: to be brief: first, Christine is frantic, I mean about you. I’ve had her weeping on the phone. Second, Hilary and I are concerned that if you’re not working, it may change your plans for purchasing our flat. We’re pledged to a schedule of payments that depend on you honouring yours. We don’t have a lot of cash in reserve.
Martin had rested his chin on his hands. The beard has overgrown his personality, Daniel thought, obscured it. There was dirt in his nails. Have you told Hilary about the anonymous letter? his friend asked. Judge Savage said he hadn’t. Why not? It’s obvious, isn’t it: because she might imagine there was something behind it. And you maintain there isn’t? No! So actually, you’re just protecting your wife from a dangerous idea. You’re patronising her really, the only reason for not telling her is if there’s something behind it. Oh for Christ’s sake, Martin, I just don’t want her to get the wrong end of the stick.
There was a pause, then Daniel asked, So do you tell Christine everything? Actually, yes, Martin said. He stared straight across the table. Yes. You have no secrets at all? None. He was oddly belligerent. Really? None; it always seemed to me that that was the only way to give marriage any sense at all, no secrets. Well, I don’t see, Daniel objected, how that’s actually possible; I don’t know how you can tell another person everything. I mean everything that’s in your head as well. Martin smiled. He is horribly smug, Daniel thought. And she has no secrets from you? Daniel insisted. No, why should she have? So you know that she phoned me on Monday, desperate to get me to talk to you because she feels you’re going crazy? Of course I know, Martin said evenly. I thought it was rather funny when you called and said you had a problem you wanted to discuss.
And the kiss? Daniel wondered.
Martin said: I know Christine is worried, but I’ve told her not to be. You know she’s a bit of a drama queen. As for cash, you know our family’s not poor. I’ve never not met a commitment. I can work or not work as I choose. Suddenly he stood up. And now I think I’ll be off. Daniel was taken aback. Without another word, Martin Shields walked briskly to the door. On the table a pint of shandy was left untouched, as the snooker table too had been abandoned mid game, and likewise in a sense, Daniel thought, his friend’s career.
Daniel Savage sat on for a few minutes alone, a handsome man of obscurely mixed origin wearing a sober suit and tie in this mostly white and very English suburban pub. He drank up his beer, then sat alone in the front seat of his car. What did Martin mean, So your sentencing is just like all the others’? Why shouldn’t it be? The Colombian woman had been found guilty. Martin is ill, Daniel thought. The Savages, he remembered, had been bled dry paying for Frank’s various addictions. One way or another, his brother had drained the Savage family resources with his endless requests for money. Trafficking is a serious matter. Matter in general, Daniel thought, whether carbon or whatever, is serious. But all at once he was aware that what was troubling him lay elsewhere: What if Minnie were brought before my court? Minnie had always said, Dad is the boss, Dad would kill me. What if the girl were forced to commit some crime, to carry drugs? Minnie stands in the dock and says, my father made me do this. I phoned my old boyfriend His Honour Judge Savage to ask for help, but . . .
The fireplace for their new house was being prepared on the trading estate to the south of the town. Daniel and Hilary had driven out there on the Friday to decide on some final details: lacquered or natural finish, the kind of scrolling beneath the mantelpiece. And so you drove right past Minnie’s factory, Daniel remembered, without even thinking of her! You parked within a hundred yards of Minnie’s factory, Minnie’s father’s factory rather. You walked along the ugly, amorphous trade-estate street, hand in hand with your wife of twenty years, discussing the sort of shapes and colours your new sitting room will have – Shiny surfaces clean easier, Hilary had said – all within sight of Kwan’s Asian Fabrics, and you never thought of Minnie at all!
Daniel started the car and pulled out into the road. I didn’t even think – he took the ring road with its fast stretches and busy lay-bys – didn’t recall, that is, any visual image of the three or four times we made love at Kwan’s Fabrics, lying on heaps of oriental rugs. But why should I have? That part of his life was over now. Twenty minutes later he stopped the car beside one of a series of low prefabs behind railings and barbed wire. An amorphous gritty street. There had been five or six keys as he recalled, a rather nasty dog who used to recognise her at once. Dad’d kill me, she giggled. He remembered her turning the keys, speaking Korean to the dog. After a few weeks of the water torture, she added.
The place was dark now as it had been then. No, she hadn’t been good in bed, perhaps not even really interested sexually. What she wanted was contact with an older and, as she presumably saw it, intelligent man. She wanted knowledge from outside her closed community. The Korean community’s so tight, she told him. He’d beat me to death, she said. Her accent was comical. You have no idea. And what Daniel had enjoyed, as with other younger women for that matter, was the opportunity to reverse the sort of role he seemed obliged to play with Martin, the endless deference he had learned to deploy as a non-white performing on sufferance among powerful whites. Unless that was just part of his character anyway, something he would have done, whatever his race. How could you know such things? Or to do with being adopted, with being invited into a family, rather than bred there. He had learned deference, he had learned to be a good boy, to hide his misdemeanours. Perhaps adoption was far more important than race. Other blacks showed no deference at all. Quite the contrary. Many were assertive, even belligerent. It was Daniel’s adoption his brother Frank had resented, not his colour. Daniel had always sensed that. Frank was not racist. With Minnie on the other hand Daniel Savage could play mentor. Now he gave the wise advice. He became authoritative. In that sense his affairs had been a rehearsal for promotion. There was an odd thought! For finally having the whip hand.
Minnie’s body was pretty rather than seductive, he remembered, better fantasised beforehand than when actually lying naked on the high platform of rugs in the gloom of smeared windows. They couldn’t risk the light. And she never stopped talking, never stopped pouring out her problems, her future, her father’s plans for her future, the claustrophobic life laid out for her. With Ben. Ben! She laughed. She despaired. Ben! He’s so thick! She giggled. So hopeless! The only thing holding you back, Minnie, Daniel said, is what’s inside your head. Fuck off, she told him. And then she said: Maybe, could be. People say they’ll kill you, Daniel told her, but they never would, would they? A father is not going to kill his daughter. Still sitting in his car, out in the street, the crown court judge at last formulated the question in its most appropriate form: What if I were the only person in the world who knew that Minnie had been killed?
FOUR
BEFORE WE GO any further, your honour, a matter of Public Interest Immunity needs to be considered. Judge Savage had not been expecting this application. Can I address your honour in chambers? In his pocket was a scrap of paper that said, The eye of the adulterer waits for the twilight, saying, No eye shall see me, and disguises his face. Judge Carter, who ought to have been sitting, was ill. To avoid emptying a surprisingly packed court, Daniel decided to h
ear the matter in his own chambers, his office. Judge Carter is always ill, he thought. Counsel for the prosecution and his CPS solicitor, a woman Daniel had never seen before, followed him along the corridor together with a police officer. Inspector Mattheson, your honour. Of course. They took seats. Then as counsel began to put the prosecution’s application in tediously circumlocutory fashion, Daniel was suddenly struck by a photograph of Hilary on the filing cabinet to the left of his desk. Taken a dozen years ago it showed her in a pretty dress leaning back against a farmyard gate in the golden light of early evening. The eye of the adulterer waits for twilight! Mr Nicholson, he interrupted. The young man was obsequious and complacent. Mr Nicholson, despite the short notice I have read through the papers in question and I’m not sure that I am entirely convinced. Actually I’m not convinced at all. Soberly dressed, a determined set to her lips, the solicitor immediately leaned over to whisper to the police inspector. He nodded and half stood: Your honour, if I might be allowed . . . But now there came a knock on the door. The court usher appeared and hurried across the room to pass the judge a note. Your wife asks you to call home as soon as possible. Daniel was perplexed. Hilary never contacted him at work. It was a rule. Superintendent, ladies and gentlemen, he apologised, if you would bear with me for just five minutes. The three of them filed out.
Sarah won’t come out of the bathroom, Hilary told him. Her tone was grim and somehow demanding. Daniel’s attention began to fragment. He didn’t like PII’s, particularly when it was a question of protecting informers. Then what purpose does it serve, he had been asking himself, to send a man vaguely threatening notes obliquely accusing him of something he had done ages ago but did no longer? She’s been there since you left, Hilary said. It’s driving me crazy. But why? Don’t ask me. She won’t speak. She’s just sitting in there crying. The only thing she said was that we were incredibly cruel to go out like that last night. Daniel couldn’t understand. To the concert? Yes. But why shouldn’t we go out? We haven’t been out together in ages. Don’t ask me, Hilary repeated. Ask your daughter. Tom certainly didn’t mind.
Then Daniel remembered that Sarah was to start her A levels this afternoon. I don’t understand what she wants from us, Hilary was saying, or why she’s doing this. I was supposed to be up at the house this morning showing them what we want done with the bathroom. I’ve a lesson at eleven. Then I have to see Charles about the organ recital. Why is it, Daniel wondered, that Hilary is so generous with Tom, so hard on Sarah? As last night she had been so hard on the Russian’s performance of Froberger. Froberger is bad enough on a piano at all, Hilary had said in the interval in a voice that turned heads all along the bar. But to add the pedal, as if we were at the height of Romanticism, as if the whole philological movement had never been! For heaven’s sake! Just tell her, Judge Savage said, that you’ve got me on the phone, and that I’d like to have a word with her. Right away.
Waiting, he stood by his desk, playing with a paper knife. A light flashed beside the number pad, indicating that someone else was trying to get through. He ignored it. He had had the impression, speaking to his daughter at the school gate a year ago, telling her, I want you to look after your Mum, that the girl had suddenly matured; she had flowered in that brief month he was away. There had been something composed and adult about the way she’d said: Don’t worry Dad. I can handle it. Mum’ll be fine. One Saturday he had spied on them when they went to do the morning shop as he knew they would. They had been chatting, very cheerfully he thought, pushing their trolley through the car park. He had felt a pang of jealousy.
Now he heard the clatter of the receiver. She says she won’t speak to you, Hilary announced, unless you come home. But I’m in court, for Christ’s sake! Basil’s ill again and I’ve got to do his list. There was a silence. She says she’s not going to do her exam. What? She’s not going to go to school. She bloody well is! Daniel said. She says that since she doesn’t want to go to university it doesn’t matter. God doesn’t want her to go. But I thought, Judge Savage said, that we’d agreed to postpone the university decision till after Italy. Apparently not. Hilary’s voice was dry to the point of sarcasm. God has decided, she said.
Oddly, Daniel now had the impression that he and his wife were arguing. Though presumably they were united over Sarah. Christ knows, he protested, we let her choose the subjects she wanted, didn’t we? Now she can bloody-well go and do the exam. Some parents don’t even let their kids choose their own subjects. I don’t understand, Hilary said coolly. I mean, he explained, that some parents wouldn’t let their kids study Theology and Classics, would they? They make them do what’ll get them a job and that’s that. Do they? His wife didn’t seem to have grasped what he was talking about. Who? she asked. Then Daniel realised that he could only have been referring to Minnie’s father. He was thinking of Minnie again. The girl’s studies had been entirely geared to her father’s miserable business. She’ll damn well go if I have to drag her there, Daniel was saying, when Adrian, the court usher, put his head round the door. Court Three also waiting, your honour, he whispered; he raised his eyebrows in a smile of shared sufferance. Adrian was comically gay. We minorities, his smile said, holding the fort! Look, Daniel told his wife, I’ll try to get back before one and take her to school myself for two. It’s at two, right? Two-thirty? Tell her I’ll come back and have lunch with her. I promise.
No sooner were they back in the room than it was clear that the threesome had decided to change tactics. The point is, Inspector Mattheson was saying – and doubtless he was right to go over the head of the dithering prosecution counsel – that young Harville is being most helpful to us in all sorts of ways. He has all sorts of contacts in all sorts of fields. The epithet young is palliative, Daniel told himself, resuming his thoughtful judicial face over the relevant papers. That may be so, Superintendent, but in this particular case I can’t help noticing that he is also the defendant’s brother-in-law. That’s right, your honour. In fact it’s significant, that the young fellow’s wife, the defendant’s sister, is Irish, they are very much involved in the Irish community in all sorts of ways. Mattheson likes the expression all sorts of, Daniel noted. To reveal his name in court, your honour, as the source of our information would be to lose a – er – potential national security advantage, the policeman was insisting. From all sorts of points of view, Daniel suggested. Exactly, Mattheson agreed. Quite apart, I imagine Superintendent, from putting the man’s life at risk, perhaps. I’m afraid so, your honour.
Daniel caught the eyes of the CPS woman for a moment. She was staring at him most intently, as if this might somehow convince him of their case. Clearly she would have liked to speak, but that would be a breach of the normal procedures. He turned back to the thickly built Mattheson. Where had they crossed paths before? The man had aged. Superintendent, let us go over the story, can we, just to make quite sure that I have got the facts right. Of course, your honour. Mr Colin Rigby, Daniel glanced down at the papers before him, or young Rigby as I might say if I felt so inclined, is stopped in his car and searched in response to information supplied by Mr Harville, who is Rigby’s brother-in-law. A kilo and more of cocaine is found in the glove compartment of the car. Rigby swears he knows nothing about it, never saw it, doesn’t know how it got there. To complicate matters, Harville himself was tried some nine months ago for ABH. He was accused of beating up another young man who had a record of drug related offences. In that case the victim stated that the attack was in response to his inability to pay for the drugs that he had been using and that, so he claimed, Harville was supplying to him. Am I right so far? Your honour, Mattheson saw at once where this was leading, Harville always denied that the fight had anything to do with drugs. He claimed both men were drunk and arguing over a woman.
But his victim was a cocaine addict.
He was, your honour.
Daniel paused. Superintendent, Mr Nicholson, and er – Mrs Connolly, the woman said quickly. Thank you, Mrs Connolly. Superintendent, natu
rally when I consider an application for Public Interest Immunity I must bear in mind the importance of the information in question to the defence position, were it to be disclosed. Of course, your honour, prosecution counsel said too eagerly. Now, correct me if I am wrong but I believe that as far as regards the previous trial, in which Mr Harville was the defendant, an initial charge of GBH, section i8, a most serious crime, was altered to ABH, upon which he, Harville altered his plea to guilty and was given a non-custodial sentence. Two weeks after that he was entered in the registry of police informers.
Daniel waited a moment. Nobody corrected him. Being a judge, he was aware, meant not being party to the undeclared agendas of those who petition you. He must only consider the fairness of the trial. There are inferences, he said at last, that the defence counsel might draw from this state of affairs, are there not? He might question the informer’s motives. The man has been accused of involvement in the drugs world. Could he perhaps be setting up a rival? Does he have a score to settle with Rigby? Is there some quarrel in this family which might prompt Harville, now he has access to the police, to have his brother-in-law sent down for a few years? These are all areas that the defence might wish to explore with Harville in the witness box. In fact, this is a situation where the moment the defendant knows the name of the person who has informed against him, he might supply an entirely convincing explanation of how the cocaine came to be in the car.
