Judge Savage

by Tim Parks

  On putting the phone down, Judge Savage felt oppressed and dissatisfied. The sound of these familiar voices, each so miraculously distinct, instantly gave him back a part of himself. Then it died the moment he put the phone down. He was no one. For a moment, going through to the sitting room, he found himself in the black glass of the TV screen. It had become rather frightening sitting here alone. The television is frightening, he thought. How could Martin lie there for hours allowing his mind to be absorbed in the television? Daniel Savage wanted to tear a scab off. But where was the wound? Do I really feel that bad? I do feel bad, he thought, but it doesn’t matter. Mr Whitaker’s face was present to him. What a nondescript face that was! This man who had suffered so much. The world is so irretrievably routine for today’s youth – this was something he had read in a newspaper article – that only the most extreme gestures can pierce its suffocating sameness. I’m in danger, he sensed. He had felt less sorry for Mr Whitaker after his appearance in the witness box than when he first heard about the calamity. When you read about suffering, in a newspaper article or in case papers, you imagine it is your own. How intense it would be! You imagine you are capable of the most intense suffering. You imagine the pathos of Hilary hit by a rock, her face is shattered, torn away by stone and shattered glass. You are sitting on the roadside weeping. Mr Whitaker is not up to the tragedy that has befallen him, Daniel decided. He was a mediocre man who had been heavily and effectively tranquillised. Not even a reliable witness. Those three minutes could save the defendants.

  Christine? he demanded. Christine. He felt belligerent. Yes. Christine, listen, I saw Martin last week and he told me it was you who told Sarah about me and Jane. How clumsy it sounded. Why on earth did you do that? Why? I know it must sound mad calling out of the blue, but I need to know. Why did you do that? You changed my life. There was a long pause. The woman seemed to be in difficulty. Why? he demanded. I just don’t understand it, he shouted. Is it true? Dan. She was upset. Dan, I . . . Abruptly a different voice came on the line. Who is this? Who am I talking to? Daniel Savage. Oh Dan, it was Martin’s father. The voice dropped. Dan, I’m afraid Martin died this afternoon. Christine’s in a state.

  He called his daughter, but no one replied. She even took the dog, he told himself for the twentieth time. I can’t even stroke the bloody dog. The ringing tone sounded for the tenth or twelfth time. Sarah wasn’t answering. If I’d had to feed the dog I might have fed myself too. He wasn’t eating at all except lunchtimes in the judges’ dining room. The fridge was empty. In the one private conversation he had had during the day Crawford had complained that the Government’s new human rights legislation would double their work load. There would be endless complaints. Whole new categories of victims have been created! The potential for litigation is vast. Where will it end? Daniel thought: Perhaps the powers that be don’t want to lose a judge when they’re expecting a flood of new cases. The phone rang on. Minnie is there, he suspected, but not answering. It occurred to him that he didn’t know whether or not the girl was in time to have an abortion. These are not my problems, he told himself.

  He went out and climbed into the car. Nobody replied at Carlton Street. He drove to the country, to the Shields’ house. The place had undergone a transformation. Everything had been cleaned and tidied away. Seriously cleaned, Judge Savage sensed. The once cluttered hallway was spick and span. There were no bottles to recycle. In the sitting room, the air of shabby inertia had been replaced by an equally unsettling show-house look. Coming here so soon after the phone conversation with Frank, Daniel noticed for the first time that all the furniture was antique. All the surfaces were freshly dusted. On a low table, copies of Tatler and Cosmopolitan had been arranged in a fan. He wasn’t a man who usually noticed furniture. Hilary hated DIY and Ikea and she hated antiques too. Though she always dusted. The glossy covers stood out against the dark varnish. People should make beautiful things now, she said. Hilary seemed to hate everything that might be considered the norm of English middle-class life. No wonder she married a man who wasn’t white. Everything classy is black, she used to laugh. Cars. Dinner jackets. Pianos. On the Victorian sideboard stood a huge framed photo of Martin in full black barrister’s regalia. That was new. It was a rather young Martin, but with a Dickensian look to him, his eagerness still intact. You were his closest friend, old Mrs Shields murmured, and she pressed Daniel’s hand between hers.

  They sat in the austerely clean room. Christine kept getting up from her seat and sitting down again. Even the sofa covers had been dry cleaned. Christine drew the curtains, sat down. She went to get glasses, sat down. The floral curtains have been cleaned, he noticed. He remembered making the phone-call to Ben, from that seat. Mr Shields was talking. Christine’s dress had a neat floral pattern. All her dresses, he was aware, had frills at the bosom. She placed various bottles on a low table beside the Tatlers and Cosmopolitans. She sat down. She has nice knees. Then she stood up to pour.

  With all the advances in medical science, Martin’s father was rambling, it seems you can still die of some obscure disease without them even being able to tell you what it is. He had exactly Martin’s long, lean face, his curling, self-confident lip. They can’t tell you. They’ve never even heard of it. The posh old voice was a rehearsal of outrage. He doesn’t really feel outraged, Judge Savage sensed. He feels he should be. Pouring sherry and whisky, Christine’s floral sleeve trembled. The frills on her breasts trembled. But it seemed with repressed energy, not grief. Probably they were fed up with Martin and his disease. The woman is having to hold herself back, Daniel thought. Martin had bored everybody sick. She wants to get going. It seemed it might be Creutzfeldt-Jakob at first, Mrs Shields confided. The mother had exactly Martin’s soft eyes. The early symptoms, she said, were very similar. He’d had the father’s sardonic lip, the mother’s soft eyes. Oh Mother! Christine protested. The older woman had burst into tears. You were his only friend, Dan, she was mumbling. The only one who came to visit him in hospital. Then they said it must be something to do with all those moths he kept playing with, Mr Shields picked up the story. Perhaps more to drown out his wife than anything else. He was pacing the carpet beside the coffee table, glass in hand. These were hours to be got through, Daniel thought. When he tried to exchange a glance with Christine, she looked away. Some oriental thing, Mr Shields was saying, halfheartedly. She went to fetch an ashtray. Could she really have told Sarah, Daniel wondered? It had never occurred to him that Martin might die and they would never speak again. I’m sure I wasn’t the only visitor, he said. Martin had so many friends. Mrs Shields lost control. Our world is over now! It’s gone, Dan. She was sobbing. She sat crumpled on a low stool. Then she put her arms over her face, her hands pressed on her grey hair. There’s nothing left. There are no children. We might as well be dead ourselves. Sometimes I think we are dead! Shut up, woman! Mr Shields lashed back. With hatred, Daniel thought. He put down a cigar. I’ll never have grandchildren, she was weeping, shaking her head beneath her arms. Martin cut off what friends he had, Daniel realised. Christine sat rigidly in her seat, one hand reached out to touch her mother-in-law’s arm. She is waiting for us to be gone. The moment we are gone, she will jump to her feet and live! She can’t wait. Old Mr Shields looked disgusted. Daniel stood up himself. Christine will change her life overnight, no sooner than we are all gone, he thought. She has been waiting for this moment. She knew it was coming. Mrs Shields, he bent down to the woman; she was small and shrunken and shaking: Martin was a wonderful man, he said. You know that, Mrs Shields. The words seemed both true and preposterous. Turning to go, he found himself face to face with the photograph of the younger Martin in his black gown. How persuasive his friend had been! I can find my own way, Judge Savage said. But Christine had sprung up, a haunted smile on her face. In the passageway she squeezed his hand. We must talk, she said. He didn’t know how to respond. Did she mean about Sarah? Dan, I want you to speak at the funeral. It will be Friday probably. Will you? Only you could
do him justice, she was saying. Please, Dan, just a litde speech. Justice. She was pleading and intimate. She reached out to him and did something motherly to a button on his jacket. You do know Hilary has left me, he said. Hilary has left me, he told her. Yes, I know, I know, we must talk. Outside Daniel sat in his car rubbing a finger fiercely at the corner of his lips. His old friend was dead. When he stopped at Carlton Street the windows were still dark and no one answered.

  By the time the prosecution was approaching the end of his case the styles of the various defence counsels had become clear. There were those who objected constantly and chose to cross examine all the Crown’s witnesses, and those who kept silent, sat still. It was also clear that there was a certain friction between one or two of the lawyers. Perhaps, Daniel thought, Sedley had tried to split the defence pre-trial by hinting at his accepting a lesser charge – perhaps section 20, GBH through reckless behaviour, rather than section 18, GBH with intent – for the less important of the group’s members. In return for a plea of guilty of course. Both initial interviews given by the Crawley sisters indicated Sayle and Grier as the culprits. That none of the defendants had accepted the offer was an indication of how tight-knit the group was, how much they feared Sayle perhaps. Unless of course they were indeed all innocent. At the same time the lawyers defending those offered the lesser charge, if such an offer had been made, would have understood that they could perhaps best serve their clients by leaving the spotlight on the two defendants whom the prosecution had now unequivocally indicated as the main targets. Or if he was truly devious, this might have been Sedley’s plan, not to have the less important defendants accept his offer, but to encourage them to believe that it was worth attacking each other from the witness box. But that phase of the trial was yet to come. Meanwhile, another remarkable indication of solidarity among the defendants was that all but one had told the police that they were actually at the bridge. Perhaps they had decided even before they were arrested that it would be too dangerous to deny this, since there might be evidence to prove their presence there. As it was the prosecution had only one witness, the elderly cyclist, who had positively identified only two members of the group, Sasha Singleton and Ryan Riley, as present on the bridge at the time of the crime, more or less. Their accounts, in interview, of those with them on the bridge would not become evidence against their co-accused until they actually gave their versions in court, after the prosecution had presented the case. If all the others had flatly denied being on the bridge, Sedley might well have found himself threatened with having his case dropped at half-time for lack of evidence even before the defendants were called to the witness box. Yet only one had denied it, and as a result of that he was clearly being ostracised in the dock. The others were not speaking to him. No sooner had Sedley closed for the prosecution than Stuart Bateson’s counsel was on her feet. Your honour. She wished to consult with the judge upon a matter of law. The jury were invited to leave the court. Your honour, may I submit that there is no case to answer in respect of Stuart Bateson. No witness, this sensible middle-aged woman pointed out, had identified Bateson as present at the scene of the crime, he himself, unlike the others, has always denied it. Counsel for the prosecution had had nothing to say about him. There was an immediate and angry stir among the defendants. You bastard! In the dock, a police constable moved quickly to get between Bateson and Grier. Daniel withdrew to consider the matter.

  From the case papers Judge Savage knew that the other eight defendants had all named Bateson as one of their number on the bridge at the scene of the crime. But again this could not be considered evidence against Bateson until stated in the witness box. At this point, the prosecution’s case against Bateson rested on his having been engaged in the orgy of mobile phone conversations in the early morning after the event and having been seen to leave the pub with the rest of the group when they set off for the bridge. The law requires that Judge Savage separates in his mind what he knows will be stated in court by the other defendants and what the court has already heard. And what he has heard is really not enough evidence to try the man. Other youngsters were known to be members of the group and were not on trial. They too had made many phone calls on the morning after the crime. One girl in particular, Virginia Keane, had also left the pub with the group, but then not gone to the bridge. Her alibi was solid and none of the rest of the group claimed she had been present. Judge Savage put his head in his hands. Then before returning to court, he quickly wrote the following note on headed paper: Dear Hilary, not having an address for you, what can I do but hope that your parents will forward this, or hand it to you. Despite having written the thing at least a thousand times in his sleepless head, he found himself stuck when committing it to paper. I myself don’t understand the psychology of it, he wrote, or the real nature of the damage that has been done. I just want to say that whatever I did and said, I am still essentially the person you always thought I was. The things we talked about were over ages ago. I want to live with you and Tom and Sarah. Meantime, have you heard that Martin has died? When I found out, I realised how much I longed to have you beside me to talk about it.

  Give my love to Tom. You have all of mine.

  Dan.

  When the jury eventually returned and took their seats again it was to hear Judge Savage explain in careful detail why he must now invite them to return a verdict of Not Guilty on the defendant Stuart Bateson.

  TWENTY-ONE

  IT HAD LONG been impressed on Daniel Savage that you could recognise people by the way they played the piano. But could you then go on to recognise whom they were playing for? Drinking whisky over newspapers while Max practised in the sitting room, Judge Savage found himself puzzled. His wife had a particular kind of virtuosity. It was the virtuosity of precision, of controlled excitement. That is Hilary, Daniel often thought, that energy and its contrasting restraint. Don’t be boring, she always said. Don’t be boring, Sarah mimicked. And she might equally well say it to invite you to express strong emotions, or to ironise when you had launched into them. She wanted those emotions, then ironised them. She found them cloying. The two of them had made love together in the empty house, with great tenderness, but then it had been most unwise to speak of what was most on his mind. When they went for walks, he remembered, she hurried on ahead, straight-backed; she turned round and beckoned you on, Come on! Then she stopped for hours to pick blackberries by the side of the road, stuffing them, if she had nothing else, into a paper bag that immediately fell to pieces. Or she would talk to someone at a bus stop, ignoring you. She was cheerful, patient, charming, then intolerant to a degree. I became addicted, Daniel thought, as he sat listening to Max’s piano playing, to the difficulty of being with Hilary. Though perhaps she is no more difficult than any other woman, or man for that matter. Now I am suffering withdrawal pains. And Max is playing differently too, he thought. You could tell he wasn’t playing for her today.

  Listening, Daniel tried to concentrate on his newspaper. A man dressed as a woman had killed his psychiatrist and the psychiatrist’s wife in a major London shopping street. I am drinking too much again, Daniel thought, pouring himself another drink. Max was playing quite differently. The murderer had no history of cross-dressing. After killing the husband he had chased the wife, whom he had never previously met, into a department store, shot her, then locked himself in the ladies toilet and, after two hours of negotiation with the police, shot himself. It was as if a flood tide of music were slopping over lush banks. Daniel lifted his head. The boy was playing as if no one were listening.

  Murderer’s Wife in the Dark. That was one subheading. This woman had told the police that she didn’t realise her husband had a gun. The murderer was a successful architect, but retired. The wife was a third wife. More remarkably, she wasn’t aware that her husband had been seeing a psychiatrist. Daniel went out to stand in the back garden. The new grass was thin and long now. A horse was grazing in the field beyond the hedge. I won’t mow it, he decided, until th
ey come back. Actually, he didn’t know whether Hilary had bought a mower. I expected scandal and tumult, he thought, and drama, but not this emptiness. All day at the court, then an empty house. You thought work filled your life, then found time hanging heavily. How Tom would thump things out on the piano! Get back Joe! Hilary didn’t control or criticise him the way she did with her students. How excited she got watching him play football. Pass, Tom! Pass! You’re too wooden, she used to tell Sarah. You’re too cautious. Suddenly, Judge Savage was storming back into the drawing room.