False Witness

by Dexter Dias

  “Oh, yes. He’s hung like a donkey.”

  “Anyway,” said Justine, “he’s not called Trigger.”

  “What’s his name, then?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What’s his name, Justine?”

  “Nigel,” she said. “But officially, he’s—”

  “Well, that’s just brilliant.”

  “Tom, what’s the matter?”

  “Oh, nothing. I mean, I’ve been attacked by hippies, I galloped over a girl and for the last twenty minutes I’ve been trotting behind Davenport’s bottom on a horse called Nigel. Apart from that, Justine, everything’s hunky dory.”

  Justine did not answer.

  “Still,” I added, “shame about Charley.”

  We both walked into the middle of a group of riders who were again drinking.

  “That depends on your point of view,” said Justine.

  “Well, there’s always another day.”

  “Do shut up,” she said and kissed me roughly in front of the amused crowd, holding my face between her hands.

  “Better luck next time,” I said.

  “There won’t be a next time.” Her fingers came slowly away from my face and I could feel the warm stickiness of quickly drying blood. “There isn’t a next time,” she repeated. “Not for Charley.”

  I had saved the wrong fox.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  THE COTTAGE WAS EVERYTHING YOU WOULD EXPECT: coarse stone walls, thick rugs, brass ornaments and a raging open fire. In fact, the only thing I did not anticipate was that I would still be there, and would be happy, and would be with Justine.

  When I turned to look at Justine, intensely studying her murder brief in front of the fire, I couldn’t help thinking of my wife. Penny was not at home when I had secretly rung that afternoon. I wasn’t sure how Justine would react, so I sneaked a call when she had a nap after the hunt. Nor had Penny left any message on the answerphone. I was being punished. I suspected that Penny had gone to her parents, but I didn’t dare ring her there. I would just have to wait.

  “You were very close to your father?” I asked Justine. I decided to put away my papers. It was nothing particularly important, just another long memorandum from Kingsley drawing up battle plans.

  “I never looked at it like that,” Justine said. “I never knew anything else.” At this, she walked to the back window which was bowed with the weight of years. She looked toward the fence and the main house. “I could never have lived up there after he… passed on. Still I had no choice. It would have been just too expensive to keep up for a teenager with a couple of trust funds.”

  I tried to understand yet could not help but see the house as a sort of shrine to her father. It towered over the cottage and dominated the horizon.

  “I was just wondering,” I said. “Was it that… you know, maybe he hadn’t quite kept up the mortgage repayments?”

  “Maybe it’s none of your business,” she snapped, “and maybe you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”

  “So it’s not been repossessed?”

  “No, Tom. It’s not repossessed.”

  “So why don’t you live there?”

  “Because I don’t.”

  I could sense that things were becoming decidedly frosty. So I attempted to change the subject. “What about your mother?”

  “She died.”

  As usual, I had just made matters worse.

  “But I never knew her,” Justine continued.

  “When did it happen?”

  “When I was born.” Justine was wearing a baggy Argyle sweater and hugged herself tightly. “I suppose I should feel guilty about it in some sort of way. But I don’t. How can I? Never knew her, you see.”

  “I guess it made the bond between you and your father all the stronger?”

  “Poor Daddy. People say he was devastated. Apparently his hair lost all its color, turned white. I used to tease him about it something rotten.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, I used to tell him, All you need to do is grow a beard and you’d look like God. Of course, he never remarried. Lived alone except for Annie, who looked after the house. But even she left. His only companion was his work. I suppose he was married to that.”

  “And you never married?”

  “What’s the point? I always lose them in the end.”

  “Them?”

  “My men. You’ll be no different.” Justine turned and gazed at me over her left shoulder, pleading with me to disagree. “I’m right, aren’t I, Tom?”

  “Let’s not get into this.”

  “How was Penny, by the way?”

  “Penny?”

  “Don’t treat me like an idiot.”

  I tried to bluff it out. “What do you mean?”

  “I wasn’t asleep this afternoon, you know. I can’t seem to sleep,” she said. “You wouldn’t sneak around unless you were calling Penny.”

  “She wasn’t there. I don’t know where she is. Quite frankly, I don’t care.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Penny’s a wonderful person. Better than you deserve,” said Justine. She walked to the hearth and tossed on two logs. The sap sizzled as the flames lapped the bark. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “In what way?”

  “In a couple of kilos of heroin sort of way,” she said. “You said we’d discuss it later.” She looked at her watch pointedly. “Well, it’s later.”

  “I hardly know where to begin. Really I—”

  “He used to say that. Daddy, I mean. Whenever I asked him about the cases he was trying, ‘I hardly know where to begin, Angel.’ He used to call me that. He was a fair judge. Old school, but fair. He cared—well, about his work, anyway.”

  “Justine, I was told by a source—a most unreliable one, admittedly—that I was in some kind of danger.”

  “Who told you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “And are you?”

  “What?”

  “In danger.”

  “What does it look like?”

  She paused and breathed in deeply as she prodded the fire. “But why, Tom?”

  “If I knew, I’d—”

  “We could, I suppose, go to the police.” Justine said this only half-heartedly as she knew my views.

  “And betray the habit of a legal lifetime? Besides, I think they’re behind it somehow.”

  “Then that leaves—”

  “You and me. That’s all there’s left.”

  Justine said, “You make it sound quite an adventure.”

  “Not really. But are you sure you want to be part of it?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “Beyond doubt?”

  “Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Besides—”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I think we were made for each other.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because, Tom, there are two types of people in this world. Those who are fucked up and those who don’t yet know they’re fucked up. And between us—”

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve got the complete set.”

  As she knelt facing the fire, I moved quickly behind her and held on to the warmth of her jumper and smelt the back of her neck. In such moments you feel strong. For a while you lose your fear, but the magic is tempered because, above all, you know that such moments cannot last.

  We had made love. For the first time with Justine it was a gentle experience and I felt very close to her. We lay on our backs, with our pulses still racing, and I ran my fingers over her body. I tried to feel all the contours, to see what I was contending with. Her frame had that Stonebury frailness, like Sarah Morrow, like Molly Summers. But I sensed that Justine had a vulnerability that was more than purely physical.

  Then she began to speak. “Did you enjoy the hunt, Tom? Only you haven’t said.”

  “It’s one way to spend a wet Wednesday…”

  “There’s no ne
ed to lie, Tom. Not tonight. Just for tonight, let’s tell the truth.”

  I rolled over and looked at her. “All right then, I thought it was barbaric.”

  “I just knew it.”

  “How could you, Justine?”

  “It’s a question of what you’re used to. It’s just part of life.”

  Although I disagreed, I didn’t want to argue. “I saw someone,” I said. “Well, I thought I saw someone I might have known.”

  “What? Down here?”

  I moved closer to her and she covered me with the duvet. “Yes. One of the… protesters.”

  “Oh, the crusties. They all look the same. Generations of inbreeding deep in the forest.”

  “You are a frightful snob, Justine.”

  “They hate us, you know. Well, they hate me. Hated Daddy before. There’s probably not a family in the forest we haven’t prosecuted or tried. I cut my teeth down here. Before I got a London practice. That’s why I joined Ignatius’s chambers. Good links with the western circuit.”

  “Rubbish,” I said. “You joined because your father used to be head of chambers.”

  “Well, there was that too.”

  “Let’s tell the truth, shall we? Just for tonight.”

  Justine did not seem to relish being reminded of her own words. She rolled over abruptly and clung to the edge of the bed.

  That was my moment. “You still haven’t told me how Ignatius died.”

  “What do you know?”

  “That he was found at the bottom of the stair.”

  “They presumed it was a heart attack.”

  “But the front door was open,” I said. “And his neck was broken.”

  “He was working too hard.”

  “I was told nothing was stolen and there was no struggle.” I had obtained these details from Jamie. Armstrong’s First Law, he told me. Always find out how a High Court judge snuffs it.

  “Ignatius was always very good to me. I suppose because of my father.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, Daddy gave him a chance. In those days, if a black man walked into chambers, they’d call him the defendant or call the police. But Daddy saw his potential and gave him a chance.” Her voice softened. “I remember when I first met Ignatius.”

  “Justine, there’s something I should tell you.”

  “He was very dashing, you know.”

  I could easily have led her by the nose into yet more deceit, but I didn’t want any secrets to stand between us. So I said, “You told me about Ignatius.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “When you were very drunk at that party. When he was made silk. All those years ago.”

  She was silent.

  I said, “I know just how close you were.”

  “Then you should know how painful it is for me to talk about it.” There was acid in her breath and she tugged the duvet angrily.

  “Sorry. Just thought I’d tell you.”

  There was a little pause as we both reassessed the situation and calculated how far we could go.

  “Ignatius wasn’t the first, you know,” Justine told me.

  “Look. You don’t have to—”

  “No. I want to. The truth? Just for tonight.”

  “Let’s go to sleep.”

  “No, Tom. You’re going to listen and then you’ll know everything.” Justine sat up against the pine headboard and tucked the edge of the quilt under her chin. “I wasn’t interested at first. I mean, a trainee teacher, what could be a bigger turn-off? But he cared about the things that mattered, poetry and stuff. I always thought he fancied Penny. Funny that. Did she ever tell you what really happened?”

  The painful scene from our Chiswick bedroom flickered before me. Penny and I talking for hours, trying to talk it through, baring everything, trying to salvage something from our marriage—and failing. So when Justine asked me again whether Penny had mentioned the scandal about the teacher, I took the only option I knew, the only option I had ever taken.

  “Penny never told me much,” I said. “What happened?”

  From that moment I suppose I must have known, deep down, though I would never have dared to admit it at the time, I knew that my relationship with Justine was equally fated, as would be any relationships after that, until I exhausted the very limited supply of females foolish enough to put up with me.

  Then Justine said, “He used to give me books to read. Anthologies of poetry, that sort of thing. Dryden, Auden, Sylvia Plath. My mind was a whirl.”

  “How long was he at the school?” I asked. I could vaguely see the outline of Justine’s face but not the expression. Her voice, however, was far from doleful.

  “He wasn’t there long. That was the point. By the middle of the summer term I realized that he would leave at the end of the year—and that I’d never see him again.”

  “You could have written.”

  “I couldn’t bear to think that far ahead. You know what teenage crushes are like.”

  I agreed. But in reality I had little idea about young love. I had discovered sex before romance and it was the type of sex found in the moth-eaten pages of a psychology book about fetishes and phobias.

  Justine was not really listening to me and continued. “One day Alex—that was his name. Did I ever say?”

  “No, but Penny might have mentioned it. Wasn’t his surname Chapple or something?”

  “It’s not important, Tom. The point is… well, one morning, it was beautiful and sunny, I remember, Alex asked me into his study. He said he had a poem he wanted me to read. I forget what it was called.”

  “Who was it by?”

  “William Blake, I think.”

  “Jesus,” I said, “don’t you lot know of any other creative artists?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Haven’t you heard of Johnny Keats or Percy Shelley?”

  “Pardon?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Justine.” I was not in the mood to try to explain my visit to the Tate.

  “Well, Alex,” Justine continued, “read a couple of verses. I can’t really remember how it went.”

  This did not ring true, for Justine spoke with a vividness as though she had relived that scene once a day, every day in the intervening twenty years.

  “It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard,” she said. “But there was one line, something about youth and maiden bright, naked in the sunny beams’ delight. Or something like that. It just seemed to match the weather and… everything.”

  She paused as if the words clicked into place and I remembered the painting in the Tate Gallery, with Adam standing before his father in heaven. And God sat in a fiery chariot with a shock of white hair and the naked man bowed in repentance before it.

  When Justine began to speak, her voice seemed to have a distant echo. “ ‘Children of the future age, Reading this indignant page, Know that in a former time, Love! sweet love! was thought a crime.’ At first it made me… well, almost cry. Stupid, isn’t it? Blubbing over a poem. But I realized that Alex would leave me and then I’d be alone.”

  Alone, I wondered whether this was an indirect reference to her father’s death. I wanted to give her a chance to tell the whole truth. So I asked her, “What about your father?”

  “He was always busy with his rapes. I couldn’t bear it. And the poem, I know it sounds dumb now, but I felt Alex had written it—for me.”

  “There’s nothing dumb about that.”

  “Actually,” she said, “it was called ‘A Little Girl Lost.’ It was how I felt, Tom.”

  At that moment there was a rush through the trees, a moaning among the upper branches that fell gently into the bedroom.

  “Alex kept reading the poem to me. Something about the maiden losing her fear. I giggled the first time he got to that bit. By the second or third time I was in a sort of daze. ‘There in rising day, On the grass they play. Parents were afar, Strangers came not near, And the maiden soon lost her fear.’ It wa
s all a bit much—well, for a lonely teenage girl. I was very flattered and hardly noticed… him.” She paused and tried to control her breathing. “He had soft hands, you see. Hardly touching me. It just seemed right. Natural. Like it was part of the poem. And before I knew it, I was…”

  “Yes?”

  She giggled uneasily. “Well, starkers. I looked into his eyes, but they had changed. They were different, somehow frightening. And I screamed. Someone, I forget who, came rushing in—”

  “Penny?”

  “Possibly,” Justine said. “Well, that was it.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “No one wanted a scandal. So nothing really happened. He was sent away. Life went on. I hardly ever think about it now.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about it before?” I asked.

  “It just never came up. What was I supposed to have said? Oh, Tom, did I tell you? I was bonked by my teacher over the Oxford Book of English Verse, Quiller-Couch edition. Who’s your next witness, by the way? You see, it’s just never come up, Tom.”

  “Justine,” I replied, “why are you telling me all this now?” When she did not answer, I added, “Justine, what has this to do… well, with me?”

  “It’s just that I’m—” She appeared to struggle to find the right word. “Well, I’m just bad luck.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said.

  Justine kissed me as a child kisses its father and I could taste little salty droplets running slowly down her cheeks. And I began to see that her thin, scarcely developed body was just a reflection of a childhood that had been starved of proper affection.

  Then I heard the wind rising and falling outside. Soon the bedstead was creaking. And then I was both ashamed and unaccountably excited to be making love to this lost creature, and I thought of Richard Kingsley and his crimes, and I wondered whether I was really very different to him after all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  AT THE HUNT, WE HAD ARRANGED TO MEET DAVENport for a lunchtime drink the next day. We waited in a pub on the outskirts of Stonebury near to the Devon county border. But Davenport did not appear. Justine entered one of her darker moods as she contemplated a suitable punishment. I sat next to her at a table in the corner of the bar drinking both the gin and tonics that we had ordered. The room was dark even though it was barely past midday. An open fire provided some flickering light.