False Witness

by Dexter Dias

  “Miss Cavely, I’m the lawyer representing Richard Kingsley. You do know Mr.—”

  “He’s ‘Miss Cavely-ing’ me again, Sonny.”

  “I understand you made a statement.”

  “Want another?”

  “I just want—”

  “Cost you a carburetor. Only last time they promised to fix my car and look at it. So what do you want me to say?”

  Then I realized that Vera Cavely must be a red herring. Some overzealous local policeman had obviously filled out a deposition and got her to sign it—probably so they could object to Kingsley’s bail or ask for a further remand into police custody.

  I was about to leave and asked, “So you know nothing about the death of Molly—”

  “You know what the three little thingees said?”

  “Remind me.”

  “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no—”

  “Yes, I understand,” I said. “I shan’t need to trouble you further.” I had a twenty-minute walk to where I parked Justine’s car on the edge of the woods. “Good luck with the rally,” I said.

  “Luck? Who needs luck when you can drive like a demon, eh, Summers? Do you want some Red-eye?”

  That brought me to a halt. “What did you say—”

  “Red-eye. I’ve got a bucket here.”

  “Miss Cavely… Vera, why did you say Summers?

  She opened the front door of the car and something, a wood pigeon, perhaps, flew out. She did not flinch.

  I said, “Why did you mention—”

  “Oh, Sonny?” She looked at me with complete exasperation. “Well, who on earth did you think I was talking to?”

  I shrugged foolishly.

  She began to pull handfuls of damp moss away from the cracks in the rocky outcrop. “Oh, you do get so dirty. Really.”

  Very soon I could see that the stone I had sat upon was roughly hewn, something like a primitive gravestone. There was a simple inscription: He was Summers.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  THE REST OF MY CONVERSATION WITH VERA CAVELY, although interspersed with talk of pit-stops, double declutching and desert tracks, provided an inkling as to where the truth may have been found about Molly Summers. I would have to visit the church of St. Stephen and the Martyrs. How easy was it, I wondered, to inspect a parish register?

  As I walked back to the car, the woods seemed different to me. Around every other tree trunk I could see that quirky little rally-driver, with her pilot’s goggles and open-toe sandals, itching to scream away from the green light, but not having moved so much as an inch in twenty years.

  By the time I reached the clearing where I thought I had left the car, it was obvious that I had forgotten the way out of the woods. Although I could see the car, I felt that I could more easily find my way to Dakar than to the Wright Estate.

  Then I spotted a man marching through the woods, stick in hand, retriever at his heels. I was debating whether to ask him for directions when I saw someone else walking quickly away from the car. His head was down and the collar of his green cotton jacket was up. He had a purposeful gait.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I wonder whether you could—” He just kept walking. “Could you just slow down a minute?” His pace did not change. “I’m looking for the main road.”

  He glanced in my direction with a curiously sheepish expression.

  I tried to touch his arm gently but he quickened his step. “Sorry, have I offended you in some way?” I got no answer. “What’s the matter?” A suspicious stare. “Do you know the Wrights’ place?”

  He broke into a run. Something was wrong. He seemed vaguely familiar.

  I said, “Just wait, will you?” But he did not listen to me, and went off with little startled strides. I followed him instinctively as he darted in and out of the trees, unconcerned about the sharp branches.

  “Please stop,” I said. Why wouldn’t he reply?

  As I drew alongside him and tried to hold his arm, he pulled up and struck out at me. His swing was pathetic, much as mine would have been, but I ducked and grasped his midriff. We lost our balance and fell to the ground with me on top. I twisted my ankle but continued to lie on him.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?”

  Again, no answer. And I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d seen him.

  “Why did you run?”

  He turned his head sharply to the left, into the mud, and kept his mouth tightly shut.

  “What were you up to at the car?” It was hardly my most inspired cross-examination.

  He tried to shrug me off, but the sheer weight of my body kept him pinned firmly in the mud. I could feel my ankle swelling but tried to ignore the pain.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’ll let you up if you don’t try anything. Agreed?”

  He nodded.

  But as soon as I released his arms he hurled a flurry of punches toward me. Most of them missed. Those that did connect were little more than slaps. I grabbed his throat—and squeezed. It felt good. What a sight we must have been: two frightened men struggling in the undergrowth with hideously contorted faces and bulging eyes.

  With my free hand I reached into his jacket and pulled out his wallet, still holding his throat. His face did not go blue, as I expected, but purplish. I tipped the wallet’s contents into the mud and leaves. The muscles on his snowy neck stood out but I did not let go.

  In the heap of notes and coins were two credit card receipts. One of them was soaked and illegible. I could just make out the name on the other.

  “The ‘P’ stands for Philip, doesn’t it?” I said. It had suddenly become all too obvious. “I can now see how you got past security on the second day of the trial. Tell them you were a defense witness, did you?”

  He lashed his head from side to side, in the way the insane Legat had done in the prison hospital, and I could feel the muscles in his neck rippling as he struggled for air.

  “Philip Templeman,” I said. “I’d given up on Kingsley’s alibi.”

  I levered myself off him. But he continued to lie there, his feeble body caked in mud. He did not even rub his bruised neck.

  “What do you know about the death of Diane Morrow?” I asked. “Why is it that the girls around here keep dying?” When he did not answer, I added, “I suppose you knew it was Justine Wright’s car, did you?”

  He was silent and looked at me fearfully.

  I said, “Did Kingsley tell you to tamper with the brakes or something? Look, why did you deny that your name was Templeman when we met in the corridor at the Old Bailey?”

  There was reddening on his neck as he coughed repeatedly. But still he would not answer.

  “Don’t mess with me,” I said. “Or with Justine. Or… or I’ll kill you.” I knew it sounded trite, but it was all I could think of. Then I added, “Still, can’t talk. Barristers aren’t supposed to speak to alibi witnesses. Not sure if there’s a rule against kicking the shit out of them, though.”

  He closed his eyes and seemed to sink deeper into the mud as I hobbled to the car.

  The museum was situated within the inner circle. As soon as you entered the bleak, dark hall, amongst the collection of plates and pots and axes and arrows, was a skeleton. It was small with a full set of teeth and a distended head. It was a child.

  What struck me immediately as I stood over it was how similar the collection of little ribs and vertebrae was to the smoldering pile of animal bones under Vera Cavely’s old Singer Gazelle.

  “I see you’ve met Freddy.”

  “Freddy?” I said.

  “Well,” said the man, “could be Freda, of course. Bit sad, really. Four thousand years and we can’t tell if the poor bugger is a lad or a lass.” The man pulled the peak of his official cap a little lower. “Mind you, these days youngsters all look the same, don’t they? Long hair, earrings, banging on about free love.”

  “I think you’re thinking of the sixties.”

  “Maybe you’re rig
ht,” he said. He was bluff, burly and not particularly user-friendly. “Still, thousands of the little monsters traipse through here come summer. And as for the festival? Think you were in a gypsy camp.”

  “I put my money on the till.” I said. “Sixty pence, isn’t it?”

  “Very honest of you. You’d be surprised how dishonest some folk are.”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t.”

  “No?”

  “I’m… a lawyer.”

  “Ah,” he said. “You lot wrote the book.”

  It seemed faintly ridiculous talking about contemporary mores over the bones of a neolithic infant.

  “Buried at the bottom of a ditch,” said the man. “Facing the sun. See the position? Meant to be asleep. Quick kip, bit of sunshine and eternal life. Shame it didn’t work. Poor little bugger. Mind, we don’t get much sunshine down this way.”

  I couldn’t help thinking how peaceful the skeleton looked compared to the contorted photographs of Molly Summers.

  “We’d have to close down during the off-season,” said the man, “if it weren’t for that fella.” He pointed his nose across the village.

  “Which fellow?”

  “The writer fella what murdered that lass.”

  “You mean Kingsley?”

  “Him what writes them dirty books.”

  “Can we have a chat about that?” I asked.

  “What? About pornography?”

  “No. About Kingsley.”

  “Sorry, I’m on duty. You know, I don’t understand why he doesn’t write sommat about Stonebury. I mean, this place makes Salem appear a desirable place to live.”

  “Just a quick chat?”

  “You can hire me for a tour if you like.”

  “A tour?”

  “Of the stones,” he said. “I’m the official guide.”

  As the man started to put the lights off in the museum, I asked him, “Don’t you like living in Stonebury?”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “Put it this way, apart from me and this little hugger, have you met anyone in Stonebury who is actually sane?”

  He bent down and whispered to the skeleton, “Daddy’s got to go out, Freddy. But he’ll be back soon.”

  Then the man led me to the stones.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  WHEN YOU GOT UP CLOSE TO THEM, IT WAS THEIR very size, the over-awing bulk of the stones that was surprising. They were once natural boulders which had been chosen by unknown prehistoric visionaries and dragged for miles across the Devon hills. None of the stones was shaped or carved by man in any way. But if you looked at them for long enough, if your thoughts wandered across their shadowy surface, each stone had a face with a pair of eyes, a sardonic grin and a character that was unique.

  “But why?” I asked as he walked and I hobbled past a block called the Holestone. “I mean, what was the point of it all?” The guide had told me that it would have taken five hundred men and oxen to drag just that monstrous rock into position.

  “What’s the point of anything?” he said, looking through a hole in the rock six feet from the ground. “You see this stone? People say that it turns on its axis at midnight, but I’ve never seen it.”

  “Why create a circle?” I insisted.

  “Probably seemed a good idea at the time. Give them something to do. Now if some of our young layabouts were made to—”

  “Who actually owns the stones?” I wanted to cut short his tirade on the maladies of youth.

  “Own ‘em, you say?”

  “Yes. Who do they belong to?”

  “Oh, no one owns them. Mind you,” he said, adjusting the peak of his cap knowingly, “the stones themselves have been known to possess the odd person.”

  The frost had not completely lifted and the stones sparkled. The village slumbered within the circles, and there was not a sound except for the crunch of our footsteps on the crisp grass.

  “And why a circle?” I asked. “I mean, why not a stone square or a stone triangle?”

  “Now, that’s an easy one. Your average circle, right, has no beginning and no end.” He looked at me for confirmation and I nodded, my grasp of geometry extending at least that far. “Well, these stones are like the beginning and the end. Alpha and omega. Birth and death, that sort of thing.”

  All things begin and end in Albion’s rocky shore.

  “And where is Albion?” I asked, for I felt sure he should know.

  “Here,” he said. “Where the children still worship.”

  “Why did you say that?”

  He looked at the circles and said. “‘These hills and valleys are accursed witnesses of sin… I therefore condense them into solid rocks.’”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said, “William Blake.”

  “You a bit of an expert?”

  “No, just an ordinary barrister defending the case from hell. So what’s the official peaked-cap line on Albion?”

  “You what?”

  “Well, is Albion Celtic Britain or Blake’s great Earth Daddy?”

  The man looked at me with a degree of suspicion. “There is another explanation.”

  “Such as?”

  “Albia was the eldest daughter of the King of Syria.”

  “Did you say—”

  “I know it sounds a little far-fetched,” he said.

  “Believe me, compared to the defense I’m running, it sounds positively mundane. So when was all this?”

  “In ancient times.”

  “When else,” I said.

  “All fifty daughters were forced to be married on the same day. They didn’t want it. Who would? I mean, how many crap speeches can you stomach? So on their wedding night, instead of consummating their nuptials, they…”

  “Yes?”

  “Chopped all their husbands’ goolies off.”

  “That seems a tad excessive,” I said.

  “Oh, those were excessive times.”

  “You’re not kidding. Hadn’t these people heard of marriage guidance?”

  The man continued, “Well, as a punishment, he cast them adrift in a ship—”

  “He?”

  “The King.”

  “Of Siam?”

  “Of Syria.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “The King of Syria. I forgot.”

  “Well, finally, they—”

  “The daughters?” I asked.

  “Exactly. You’re getting the hang of this. Finally, the daughters reached this western isle. Albia. Albion. Here.”

  “Fascinating,” I said. “It all started with… well, with them daughters. All the trouble started with the daughters, you see—”

  “Is that why the home is called West Albion?”

  The man did not reply. He was hardly able to contain his excitement as we arrived at a stone which was inclined to an improbable angle. It seemed as if the slightest breath would have been too much and if I had dared to exhale, the rock would have tumbled into the ditch it had overhung for all those millennia. But I did not breathe and it did not move.

  “This is the Surgeon Stone.” The man ran his fingers in one of the crevices. “When they excavated the site in the First World War, they found a man buried at the foot of the stone. From the coins scattered around him they dated him to the Middle Ages.”

  “But why Surgeon?”

  “Buried with his knives, weren’t he?”

  “For operating?”

  “No. Blood-letting.”

  “Blood-what?”

  “In those days blood-letting was quite common. Especially for the monks that used to be round here.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just don’t understand.”

  He moved very close to me, glanced around quickly and whispered, “For libidinous purposes.” He caressed the stone in the way you might a purring cat. “You see, them priests tried to be holy, but had—well, impure thoughts what with the pretty local lasses. They thought it was a madness. So to let the madness out, they had to be cut.”

  “H
ence the surgeon?”

  “And the knives.”

  “But why was he buried here?”

  “They reckons he was killed. By the locals. You see the Church wanted the circles broken up. Pagan religions and all that. And the villagers thought if they could, well, compromise the monks, make them impure, they wouldn’t destroy the stones.” The man looked at me. “Didn’t work, of course. The Church just sent another surgeon.”

  “How many stones were destroyed?”

  “Enough. But the village got its revenge.”

  For a moment, he basked in the undimmed glory of a distant generation. Then he continued, “The two biggest stones were the Male and Female Sarsens. One was very tall and thin, the other smooth and round.”

  “Hardly very subtle imagery.”

  “You can still see the female.” With that he pointed to a mound, rather like a huge upturned saucer by a cluster of leafless trees. “She was on the opposite side of the circle to the male. You see, prior to breeding, males and females were kept separate.”

  I immediately recognized this as one of the founding principles of my secondary school.

  “When the male was broken up,” the man said, “the villagers hid pieces in their barns. Years later when they built the new chapel at St. Stephen’s, they secretly used bits of that.”

  “You don’t mean—”

  “Yes. The whole baptismal font in fact.”

  “Is made from—”

  “A neolithic phallus.”

  We had arrived by the Female Sarsen. A type of brilliant green lichen grew over it, darkened, only slightly, by the shadows of the nearby trees.

  “Isn’t that blasphemous or something?” I asked.

  “Religions come and go, but the stones are always here. Them stones has seen more religions than you or I ‘ave had… I mean, Protestants, Catholics, Romans, Druids, Pagans, Beakers—”

  “Did you say Druids?”

  “At one time this used to be a Druid temple, what with the stones and the oak trees.”

  “Oaks?”

  Another knot untangled.

  The man pointed at the copse of lifeless trunks standing silhouetted against the winter sun. “Reckon that’s where the name is from.”