A Messiah of the Last Days

by C. J. Driver

  “Tell me about Caister, John.”

  “Again? Oh, Tom, lay off, please. I’m sick of this; you go on and on. Won’t you go away and leave me alone?”

  “You’ve got to help, John. Did Caister never suggest any action? Political action I mean?”

  “Never, never, never. That line about his being an agent provocateur is just crap; he just watched and listened and looked after things like the lights and kitchen rotas.”

  “Are you certain? It’s important, John.”

  “What are you trying to do? Get me to make up stories about Caister? About some time he came into the commune and said, ‘I’ve got a machine-gun in the car outside. Let’s go and shoot some of those fascist pigs’? You know Caister, Tom; he isn’t like that.”

  “Wasn’t,” I correct him.

  Silence. I stand up and walk around the room. John sits with his chair tilted back against the wall; for someone usually so active, he has become very passive. He waits and watches. I shift my chair to a new place. “All right; forget Caister for a while. Tell me about your parents again.”

  “Again, again. I’ve told you all I’m going to.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “All right.” He takes on the monotonous voice that he has begun to use for these sessions of questioning; I shall have to tell him not to use it in the witness box when I put him there. But I won’t do it yet, because I don’t know whether I shall want to use the public or private voice. Or both even. Not yet, Tom Grace, not yet. “My father is a big shot in one of the big international corporations …”

  “Which one?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Rufus and Wyard, if you must know.” Hooray, Hooray, Hooray; at last a mistake. Before now he has refused to tell me even that. It will be easy enough to find a Buckleson in the senior management of Rufus and Wyard. John smiles at me. “By the way,” he says, “did you know when I was eighteen I changed my name by deed-poll? That’s when I became John Buckleson. I tried to find out my real name, the one I was born with, but I couldn’t.”

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean, your real name?”

  “I’m adopted, Tom; I suppose I must have been illegitimate. My mother, the new one, couldn’t have children of her own, and she wanted someone to bring up—she didn’t have much with my father, because he’s always off somewhere, closing down a factory that isn’t making a profit, buying and selling managers and workers, adding up figures in the portable computer he calls his brain. If you are thinking of looking, you won’t find any Buckleson on the board of Rufus and Wyard.”

  “What is your parents’ name, the adopted parents I mean?”

  “I’m not telling you that. You’ll have to find out.”

  “Why did you change your name?”

  He shrugged, then said, “I suppose I was trying to cut off from everything they were; my mother’s a religious maniac, you know, three times on Sundays, once every other day, prayers morning and night, grace before and after every meal, a cross down the front of her neck, and good works all the time—raising money for missionaries to slaughter blacks with, fixing the church roof, visiting the sick, provided they’re church-people like she is herself. She’s got the total God-thing; you know what they’re like. And my father’s a kind of genius with money; if God were an accountant, my father would be God. When I changed names, I changed everything. I became me, John Buckleson, as close as I could be to what I was when I was born. They’re not even my parents.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  *

  There at least and at last I find some shadows; everywhere else there is so much light it blinds me. Deedpolls are available for inspection; Adoption Societies keep records; and Somerset House keeps birth certificates. I try to hire a private detective, an ex-policeman whom Jamie Macqueen recommends; when he hears the name Buckleson, he hands back the cheque I have given him, and shows me the door. I find another, not an ex-policeman but one whom Jamie recommends as thoroughly disreputable. Judging by his reaction to my orders, he is more used to dealing in dirty photographs and discreet blackmail of potential divorcees than in looking up records. In a week he phones back. John Buckleson’s name had been Richard Henderson; address Johnson’s College, W.C.1. Nothing from Adoption Societies. He hadn’t bothered with Somerset House, because assuming he had been illegitimate, his name would be registered under his mother’s maiden name, not as Henderson. He had checked with Rufus and Wyard; there was a James Henderson on the board who lived in Solihull. Mrs. J.H.Henderson lived at 18 Pleasaunce Road, Solihull. O.K.? O.K.

  *

  Better check with Dr. Bob Henderson, psychiatrist and friend, who now shares a name with John Buckleson. Is there some secret there which Bob has hidden?

  “Hullo, Tom, you’ve been bloody elusive recently.”

  “Sorry, Bob; things have been pretty busy one way and the other.”

  “Buckleson?”

  “Yes. That’s why I’m phoning.”

  “Can I help?” The question is guarded.

  “Did you know he changed his name from Henderson to Buckleson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It didn’t seem material at the time.”

  “Bob, is he some relation of yours? A nephew or something?”

  “Good God, no. It’s pure chance; look at the telephone directory and see how many Hendersons there are in London alone. We are nearly as bad as the Smiths.”

  “What do you know about his parents?”

  “From the consulting room, quite a bit; most of it I can’t tell you.”

  “Did you know he was adopted?”

  “Yes, he told me that.”

  “Did you know his father worked for Rufus and Wyard?”

  “Yes; what’s more, I have some shares in R. and W., old-age insurance and the like.”

  “Be serious. What about his mother?”

  “Tom. I can’t talk about that, I really can’t.”

  “John told me she’s religious.”

  “Did he?”

  “I thought you wanted to help.”

  “Where I can.”

  “Thirty years, Bob; thirty years. Can you. imagine John after thirty years?”

  “One isn’t necessarily dead by the time one’s fifty.”

  “I want to talk about John, not about you. Won’t you help?”

  “Of course I’ll help. You don’t even have to ask. But can’t we meet, rather than talk over a phone? I loathe these disembodied conversations.”

  “I’ll phone you.”

  “When?”

  “When I have time.”

  *

  Buckleson, Lester and Shirley are committed for trial. The whole process takes no longer than half an hour. I hardly open my mouth; Archie and the other barrister try a few tricks. They’ve made it clear to me that they are going to shift as much blame as possible on to John. He’s the ringleader, he’s the bad influence on two fundamentally decent if misguided young people who were fired by idealism until the wicked J.B. corrupted them into action. “Sorry, old chap,” says Archie to me, “but that’s the only line we have; your chap’s had it, I’m afraid. Ours are still in with a hope.”

  Small hope; the prosecution case is solid even without Austell. With him it will be unshakeable.

  *

  There is only one chance: to plead insanity. I sweat for nights over the ludicrous McNaghton Rules, I read case after case in which they have been applied or not applied. I dare not tell anyone, not even Henderson, what I plan; but I think there’s the skeleton of a defence there, if no flesh as yet. I’ve got to find the flesh.

  *

  Time passes. Owl hoots, vixen howls. Thank God for the occasional darkness. The dreams are coming back, though I am not sure I welcome them.

  The main street of the city is long, narrow and straight; on each side of it there are empty buildings. There is a procession coming through the cit
y, a cavalcade of cars, headed by one long open car in the back of which stands the new leader. He is young, cheerful, enjoying the welcome of the people on the pavements; they adore him, he is the popular leader who has come to liberate them. But the people in the cavalcade itself have closed faces and steady eyes; somehow I am aware that they do not like this new leader of theirs—he is too young—the people like him too much, and even those on the pavements become constrained as they realise that the old faces are still in the procession, the head of the Secret Police, the Minister of the Interior, the old oppressors and rulers. Only the young leader does not seem to notice the constraint or the closed faces around him.

  Ahead of the procession a young man and his girl slip from the pavements into one of the empty buildings; it is a hotel, I think, fallen on bad times. The young man is carrying a light suitcase. The corridors are long, most of the rooms are locked. The only person in the building, an old/young woman, appears and is ordered to take them to a room overlooking the street; she is knowingly salacious as she leads them along the corridors and up the stairs. Watching from nowhere, I sense that she would happily join the sexual sport she thinks will follow.

  The three come to a room which the young man wants; the young/old girl unlocks the door, and the young man goes in. It is his dead father’s room, unchanged in any way. He prods the corpse on the floor and turns it over; it collapses into a pile of clothes. The two girls, for age has left the young/old girl now, lead the young man to another room; now the first girl goes away, and the new girl takes off her clothes and climbs under the blanket on the bed in the corner. She lies there with her legs spread, waiting for the young man. But he goes to the window from which he can watch the procession; it is nearer now, and the leader is tired of standing, though he tries to keep his interest in the crowds on the pavement. The young man in the window takes a dismantled rifle from its case. He puts its parts together, sets it on a stand in the window, aims at the leader, and fires. The leader is dead immediately; the people stand watching him for a moment, then furl their flags and put away their handkerchiefs and go back into the houses. They are not angry; they expected this.

  The young man in the window waits; the girl in the bed beckons him to her open thighs, but he sits calmly on the window-sill. Two soldiers and a plain clothes policeman come to the room; they are smiling happily, for the killing of the new leader has saved them doing the job themselves. But the young man must be punished: he is not a policeman and had no right to kill the leader. The young man will not lay down his rifle and surrender to them; they know they could kill him, but they want him to surrender first. So they drag the girl from under the blanket; they stand her naked between them and the plain clothes man beats her with his pistol. Her mouth opens to scream but there is no noise now. They are playing out the final act in dumb show.

  At last, the young man puts down his rifle and is taken into the next room to be shot. The policemen have left the girl standing naked and weeping soundlessly; she expects them back, indeed hopes that they will come, but after a while realises they have left the building. Still naked, she peers into the next room; there are three dead bodies lying there—the collapsed corpse of the young man’s father, the young assassin himself, and the dead leader. She cannot tell which was the leader, which the assassin.

  12

  My week’s leave was due, overdue indeed. I gave Jamie the dates I wanted, and told Alison our holiday together would have to wait a while. I knew I needed more than evenings, train-journeys and the occasional afternoon if I was to turn the little I had into a coherent defence.

  First I wanted to see Mr. and Mrs. Henderson, the couple who had adopted John as a small baby. I wanted to find out from them what had gone wrong, why John had abandoned their name for his own invention, and what they thought might be wrong with his mind. Barristers don’t usually act as private investigators of their clients, and because of Matthew’s warning about the likely effect of my accepting the brief I phoned Peale to get him to set up a meeting with the Hendersons.

  It took some doing; I had overstepped the invisible barriers of what a barrister may do in relation to his client and to the solicitors who brief him.

  Peale wouldn’t give me the Hendersons’ phone number, but in the end I persuaded him to get the Hendersons to phone me.

  “I appreciate your enthusiasm for our client, Mr. Grace,” Peale said; his voice was bitterly sarcastic. There would not be many more jobs coming my way from Messrs. Peale and Randall. But every intuition in me said I had to see John’s parents; though they seemed to have nothing to do with the case, it was the one area of my knowledge where there were any shadows at all. My defence might be lurking in those very shadows.

  Mrs. Henderson phoned me from Solihull the same afternoon. Her son’s solicitor had asked her to phone, she said; she would of course be only too willing to give any help she could—it was her duty as a Christian and a mother, whatever her son had done. She would have done something herself sooner, but she knew what he thought of his parents. Would I come to Solihull? Or should she come to London? She didn’t like London. No, her husband was away on business. Yes, the next day would suit her perfectly.

  “Shall I send the car to meet you at the station?” she asked; she had one of those middle-class voices which are so much under control that they sound desiccated; I suppose I shall sound like that myself one day.

  “Good heavens no,” I answered. “I’ll get a cab.”

  In fact I found out which bus ran near the Hendersons’ house and went that way. I rationalised my action by saying to myself I wanted the bus journey to get the atmosphere of where they lived. Pleasaunce Road is on the far edge of the older suburbs, a row of large Victorian houses set well back from and above the road, with what estate-agents call ‘mature gardens and pleasantly wooded surrounds’. These were the rich among the wealthy, their gardens kept by firms of contract gardeners, their houses painted every year, and Pleasaunce House—No. 18 by default, since I passed No. 16 and had to walk back from No. 20—was the largest and richest of the lot.

  Mrs. Henderson herself met me at the door; she was a plain middle-aged woman, I suppose in her early fifties, with grey hair scraped tightly back over her scalp, no make-up, and a maroon woollen dress which might have been smart ten years before. We shook hands, I was offered tea but refused it, and she led me into a small sitting-room which looked out over the regimental garden. It was all very business-like.

  “Well, what can I do for you, Mr. Grace?” The control seemed absolute.

  “Did Mr. Peale tell you anything over the phone?”

  “He said you would be defending Richard.”

  I looked blank; I had forgotten his old name.

  “I am sorry,” Mrs. Henderson said. “I can’t ever remember to call him John; Richard was our name for him.”

  “Well, I wanted to ask you about that, if I may. I wanted to know about your adoption of him. What you know of his real parents, anything you feel you can tell me, that’s not too private, I mean.” Though of course what I wanted most of all was the private.

  She smiled quietly across the room at me. “There’s nothing I can tell you about that, Mr. Grace, I’m afraid. You see, Richard … John … was our own child. Our only child.”

  “But he told me …”

  “Yes, Mr. Grace, he tells people that. But he’s my own son. I know better than anyone, better even than Richard himself.”

  “But …”

  “He started to tell these stories about being adopted when he was about twelve. I thought at first it was a kind of game—a game to hurt me. And then … well, he seemed to begin to believe it. You know he had a breakdown when he first went to university?”

  “Yes.” She was going too fast for me; if he wasn’t adopted, why then … but he said so. And if he’d say it in public, if he actually believed he was adopted, and I could then show he wasn’t, that he was the child of unhappiness, the only child of a marriage that had gone wrong,
why then … what a line of defence that could be! She was saying something I hadn’t heard. “Sorry,” I said. “I missed that. Would you …?”

  She was pretending patience. “I asked if you knew when he was having that … that breakdown, he went around saying he was God. Did you know that, Mr. Grace?”

  “I’ve been told about it.”

  “I suppose it was a nervous breakdown; but he said it to hurt me. I’m a religious person, Mr. Grace; I’m not ashamed to say that.” It sounded rather as if she was proud to say it, as if it was a badge of honour she wore. “When he said that, he knew it was the one thing, the one thing, I couldn’t take. Anything else I could understand—and forgive, Mr. Grace. Anything: the most vile immorality, disease, anything; but not that …”

  I murmured something under my breath, but she ignored me.

  “He’s very cruel, Mr. Grace, very cruel; if you don’t know that, you’ll find out.” She was looking away from me across the garden in its cold March nakedness.

  “I haven’t seen it myself,” I lied carefully.

  “He is—oh, he is.” Underneath the tight control there was a breaking. I turned my head away from her and kept silent for a moment or two, then stood up from my chair and walked to the window. I could talk to her from there without turning to look at her.

  “Can you tell me where the instability comes from?” I asked.

  Her voice was steady again when she replied. “I don’t know whether any parent can answer that. He’s an only child; I couldn’t have any more after him. I haven’t seen him for nearly four years now, Mr. Grace,” she added irrelevantly. “The police came here before they arrested him; they had a warrant. One of them phoned when they arrested him; he said did I want to see Richard. I told him there wasn’t any point, because Richard hates me. His father is away most of the time.”

  “What does Mr. Henderson do?” It was clear that any approach must be devious.