False Witness

by Dexter Dias

  Justine asked, “What do you want to do today?”

  “Well, I haven’t seen any turnips yet.”

  “No, seriously. What do you want to do?”

  “What I most want to do in the whole world,” I replied. “Which is nothing.”

  “I always admired your energy, Tom.”

  “I mean, why do people always have to do something. I’m sick and tired of it. I just want to be left alone,” I said. And then seeing a scowl beginning to contort her face, I added, “Well, with you as well, of course.”

  Justine was wearing an immaculate white blouse made of Italian silk, a neatly fitting skirt and black stockings peppered with little cats. Her blond hair was pulled back from her face and was in a single pony-tail, her makeup was perfect, her fragrance refined. I had forgotten to shave.

  “So you don’t want to see that witness?” she said.

  “Which witness?” I wasn’t really listening. I thought about what I had dreamt the night before. For the first time I dreamt that I was within the circle of stones. The blocks of stone seemed to crowd in on me. Figures were becoming more distinct, like the images on a photograph when the developer is applied.

  “You know the woman I’m talking about,” Justine said.

  “Oh, the hermit. Well, she isn’t a witness. Not really. You just gave me her details.”

  “She lives round here,” Justine said. “Used to come into the pub to buy a bucket of the local brew.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a rough type of the mead wine. They call it Red-eye or something. Poisonous stuff.”

  “Right. I’ll have a double,” I said.

  “We could skip the drinks and try to find that woman.”

  “Why bother? Kingsley’s going down.”

  “You’ve got to put up a fight, Tom.”

  “For him?” I replied.

  “No. Not for Kingsley.” She put her hand on my fingers. “For yourself.” She looked at the empty glasses. “Look, I know it’s none of my business—”

  “How very perceptive of you.”

  “I couldn’t help noticing.” She lowered her voice. “You know, the drink. I’m a little worried. Should I be?”

  “You’re certainly right about one thing.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes,” I said and lowered my voice. “It’s none of your business.” I rather childishly turned the glass upside down to demonstrate its emptiness. “Besides, a man needs a hobby and the only poor defenseless animal it’ll kill is me.”

  “All right. Subject closed.” She took her hand away and folded her arms. “So what are we going to do?”

  “I might just take a wander round,” I said.

  “You won’t find him, the police—”

  “Him? I didn’t mention a him.”

  Justine looked quickly away. She played with the grip that secured her hair. Then she said. “The police have looked everywhere for Templeman. He’s not even on the electoral roll.”

  “Doesn’t that worry you?” I asked.

  “Why should it? He’s supposed to be your witness.”

  “Look, I know you don’t need to be able to vote for the Blood Sports and Monarchy Party to be an alibi witness, but—”

  “Have you finished?” Justine said, looking back at me. When I did not respond, she added, “So what are we going to do, Tom?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I would like to go up to the residential home. You know, West Albion. It’s about time that I saw it.”

  “You’ve already seen it,” Justine replied.

  “No, I mean the place Molly Summers—”

  “You’ve already seen it,” Justine insisted.

  “Where?” I asked, and then I began to understand. “The main house? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why didn’t you ask?”

  “Well, I did try, Justine. But every time I did, you climbed on top and rode me like a wild stallion.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “Anyway, I can’t remember you complaining.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Then what is?”

  “How it comes to pass that the Wright country residence has more destitute children than the orphanage in Oliver. That might be the point, Justine.”

  An uneasy silence followed and we sat a table’s width apart managing not to look at each other. I felt better, safer, back on familiar ground. I had burst the bubble of unreal contentment before—as it must—it burst of its own accord. I knew I had climbed back aboard that old favorite, the well-worn cycle of crisis and calm, the peaks and troughs that propel a relationship and that make domestic bliss almost bearable.

  Finally, Justine said, “It was in his will. Well, the codicil to the will.”

  “What was?”

  “The bequest of the house to the local authority.”

  “But why, Justine?”

  “He always was charitable. He granted them a very generous lease.”

  “I’ve heard of charity beginning at home, but this is ridiculous. You see, some people just give fifty pence to Oxfam and wear a red nose for Comic Relief. I mean, where were you supposed to live?”

  “I had the cottage,” Justine said. “And the rents from the lease went into a trust fund for me.”

  “But why on earth did he do it?”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, Justine. Because it’s not a particularly normal thing to do.”

  “Know your problem, Tom?”

  “Which one in particular?”

  “The one which prevents you seeing the good in what people do. You see, Tom, you defend so many evil people that you just think that goodness is laughable. Somehow weak. Well, it’s not. But that’s not something that people like you and Richard Kingsley will ever understand.”

  I cannot remember how many glasses of the thick mead I drank after that. But it was sufficient to make my vision as cloudy as the liquid. When I was drunk enough, I cursed Hilary Hardcastle and I cursed Richard Kingsley. I tried to forget about Whitey Innocent and the London Bar. For once I was going to do something for myself—and that was nothing.

  After an hour, Justine said that we could walk the few miles back to her cottage. And if we got tired or bored, she said, we could phone for a cab from the village.

  Stonebury was not particularly different to how I imagined it. What really struck me was the silence. You couldn’t hear the sounds a town-dweller immediately associates with a pastoral scene: no bleating of sheep, no tractors, no carts running down cobbled streets. Not even the birds sang. It felt like your were entering a closely confined vacuum, something had been preserved there, but no one—I imagined—could tell you what.

  There was a little parish church on the far side of the village, outside the circle of stones which completely surrounded the houses. When we reached the corner of the graveyard, with its fluttering angels of marble and overgrown tombstones, Justine stopped abruptly.

  “Better get a cab,” she said.

  “I’m all right, really.” I tried to put on a brave face. In truth, I was rather ashamed of my behavior in the pub. “We haven’t far to go, have we?”

  “That’s not the point,” she said.

  A small group of people were coming out of the church. No one was smiling.

  “I just don’t believe it,” said Justine.

  “Who are they?”

  “Just keep your head down and keep walking.” She put her coat collar up and cast down her eyes. “Just keep walking,” Justine ordered.

  From the corner of my eye, I noticed the odd handshake and several sympathetic embraces.

  “Justine,” I said, “do you think it could be—”

  “Shut up, will you?” She tightened her belt.

  Before we got much further, a woman spoke and her voice quivered in the winter’s air. “You have no right,” she said. “How dare you.”

  Justine grabbed my arm and tried to usher me around the group.
/>   The woman was covered in black lace. “You shouldn’t have brought him,” she said, meaning me. “You… whore.”

  “Now hold on,” I said.

  “Leave it, Tom.” Justine kept pushing me on.

  “You have no right,” said the woman.

  “Look, madam.” I straightened my back and probably sounded patronizing. “This is a public right of way. We have every right—”

  “Don’t, Tom,” said Justine. “They all know who you are.”

  The woman shouted again. “How can you be here? Not today. She was so young… and now—”

  The still air was jolted by the ringing of the church bell. Justine put her hand in the small of my back and drove me forward. We virtually ran past the far corner of the graveyard. The mead swilled around my stomach like one of those wave machines in a theme park.

  “You have no right,” cried the woman. “Not today.”

  But we were fifty yards clear. We rushed through winding lanes, with high hedges on both sides, obscuring everything apart from a miserable patch of dark sky above. I developed a stitch. And when it felt as though a black crow was pecking at my abdomen, I had to stop.

  “Tom,” gasped Justine. “Let me explain.”

  My stomach heaved mightily. “I think I know.”

  “You do?”

  “It’s almost exactly a year since the Summers murder, isn’t it?” I said.

  “So?”

  “So this is some sort of memorial.”

  Justine looked at me incredulously. “That was a funeral, you idiot.”

  “A what? Do people usually get buried on a Thursday?”

  “Kingsley’s going to walk,” said Justine. “That was our last real hope.”

  I put my hand to my mouth as the pain from my stitch was overwhelmed by another urge.

  “The disappearing witness was in the coffin,” Justine said. “She’s overdosed.”

  “On what?”

  “Oh, don’t be so obtuse.”

  “On what, Justine?”

  “On heroin, of course.”

  “Who was she?”

  Justine did not reply.

  “What was her name, Justine?”

  “Diane.”

  “Diane what?” When she was silent, I grabbed her sleeve and I repeated, “Diane what?”

  “Diane Morrow.”

  “She’s never the daughter of—”

  “What doe you think, Tom?” Justine said.

  But I did not reply and I did not really think of Sarah Morrow, for then I was mightily sick.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  IT WAS MY FIFTH DAY IN STONEBURY. A FEVER struck Justine in the early hours and moved through her body quietly. She did not complain. It was as if it were something she expected, something she felt she deserved.

  So when I left her after breakfast, she was quite weak, but was too vain to let me see her discomfort. I had obviously wanted to ask her about Diane Morrow, but it would all have to wait until she recovered. So with some reluctance, I agreed to go out on my own. But I also realized that I could use the trip to make some illicit calls home.

  Justine’s Land-Rover was easy to drive and could cope with the terrain better than my car. It towered over the other vehicles on the road, and I felt as if I was seated on an eighteen-hand horse. Why is it, I thought, that the upper class insist on traveling with their rears six feet in the air?

  The phone box was on the London Road, a half-mile outside the village. I called home. There was no reply. Next I tried chambers. After being put on hold once, and being cut off twice, Steve told me that my retrial had definitely been fixed in front of Hilary Hardcastle, that Kingsley wanted another conference, that Jamie Armstrong rang (garbled message and gratuitous abuse), and that yesterday there was a call on behalf of someone called Molly.

  The message was simply, “Ibid.” The insane logic was beginning to bite. Obviously, I had to buy The Times.

  I had spotted the local store when we entered the village from the pub side. It was as far away from the church as any building could be in a smallish hamlet. It had reassuringly vulgar tabloids in the window and was doing a special offer on instant coffee.

  On entering the shop, there was a stack of unwanted Guardians and a few Daily Sports.

  “Can I help you?” the man asked.

  “I must have The Times,” I said. “Nothing else will do.”

  “We don’t have it, sir.” The shopkeeper’s tone was as gentle as his face. He was a little man slightly balding and had what you might call a pot-belly.

  “Do you know where I can buy one?”

  “No, sir.” He smiled apologetically. “But you can have mine.”

  “Yours?”

  “Well, I am doing the crossword. Twelve down was very naughty. But if you don’t mind the scribblings of a shopkeeper, you can have mine.” He had one hand on his stomach and rubbed it as he talked as if he were coaxing the words out.

  “You are a godsend,” I told him.

  “No, sir. Just a poor man trying to make an honest living.” He handed me the paper and I found the place almost immediately. The message was equally obtuse.

  Roses down the mere.

  When he noticed that the paper was open at the Births and Deaths, he said, “If I am not being too presumptuous, do you have good news or—”

  “Can’t say really. What do you make of this?” I asked, showing him the message from Molly in the newspaper.

  “Any more clues?”

  “Clues? There was another message, if that’s what you mean.”

  He nodded slowly. When I opened my wallet and took out the torn scrap of paper from the previous edition of The Times, and placed it next to the more recent message, the man put his finger in his mouth, then scratched his chin, frowned, moved the scraps of paper around, looked at me and smiled. He wrote out the two messages next to each other on the back of a “Historic views of Stonebury” postcard.

  Who’s met or seen red?

  Roses down the mere.

  “Easy,” he said, rubbing his stomach. “Very very easy. Oh, yes. Very easy indeed.”

  She was called Vera Cavely. She was the witness the prosecution tried to bury. For all the obvious reasons, I had thought that she might have lived in some deep mysterious cavern, full of stalagmites and cave paintings. But she did not. She lived in a car.

  The old Singer Gazelle had probably not moved in twenty years. The metallic black had degenerated into an all-pervasive rust. Hanging from the front and rear windscreens were neat little curtains with red checks that even managed to match the vehicle’s rusting chassis. All the side windows had bin-liners sellotaped to the inside. There were three wheels and a tidy pile of bricks where the fourth should have been. Two of the tires were flat, the third had been slashed. Painted on the hood in a childish scrawl were the words: Silence. Someone lives here.

  The car was in the middle of Nethersmere Woods, and as the shopkeeper had reliably told me, Nethersmere Woods was an anagram of both the messages I had been sent.

  When I arrived, there seemed to be no one inside the car, or rather, no one I could hear. So I waited, sitting on a little rocky outcrop a few feet from the exhaust, the seat of my jeans becoming damp due to the abundance of moss. Here was a restful corner of the woods, where you might believe that the totality of man’s endeavors amounted to nothing more than a rusting car.

  I must have momentarily fallen asleep, for I did not fully hear the question the first time it was asked and did not really understand it when it was repeated.

  “Have you come about the carburetor?”

  I rubbed my eyes and tried to focus on the questioner and could not believe what I saw.

  “About time too,” she said. “Still, I suppose you’ll tell me it’s not your fault. No time for excuses. Just pop it in, will you? It’s a long drive to Dakar.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said. However, I was not at all clear what I should have been sorry about.

  “You’r
e sorry?” The woman turned toward one of the rocks. “He’s sorry? Hear that? He’s sorry, thank you very much, and I’ve got a race to win. Huh.”

  If someone had told me that such a creature existed, I should not have believed it. She was about four foot nine, wore toeless leather sandals, had a dark overcoat that was covered with grass and foliage that I swore was alive, and sitting on her head was a Second World War motorcycle helmet with pilot’s goggles. In each of her clawlike hands she carried a plastic bag tied with string and bursting with—something. Vera Cavely walked toward me as though her legs were wooden below the knees, which they very probably were.

  “Where is my carburetor?” she asked with increasing annoyance.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t got it.”

  “Well, you’ll have to jolly well go and jolly well fetch it.”

  “Actually, I just wanted a word with you.”

  She looked at the piece of rock I had been sitting upon. “Did you hear that? He wants to have a word with me. Charming. Well, I jolly well want to have a word with you—and that word is carburetor.”

  With this she kicked the rear bumper of the car and the boot sprang open. Smoke came from the area of the exhaust which confused me as the engine was not running. On closer inspection, I noticed a pile of smoldering bones that had once belonged to a small, indescribable animal. There was also a bucket full of a thick liquid.

  “Miss Cavely,” I began.

  “Don’t you ‘Miss Cavely’ me. Just fetch my…” Suddenly there was a vacant expression and she dropped the plastic bags. “Just fetch my…”

  “Your carburetor?”

  “Oh, you’ve got it? Splendid. Pop it in. Do you know the way to Paris?”

  “Paris?”

  “That’s where the rally begins.”

  “Rally?”

  “Paris–Dakar, of course.” Then she said to the rocky outcrop, “Can’t let them get a head start, can we, Sonny? Oh, no. Paris here we come.”

  Now I knew why the prosecution chose not to use Vera Cavely as a witness against Kingsley. She was two sandwiches short of a picnic. But she did make a statement which they had not disclosed. So what did she know? And why did the messages point to her?