False Witness

by Dexter Dias

  “Stonebury?”

  “No,” he said. “Druid. You see them Druids used to worship the oak and drus stands for oak in some fancy foreign lingo… I don’t know, Latin or—”

  “Greek perhaps?” I said.

  “Yea, that might be it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That might well be it.”

  And I thought: Drus, oak, Druid, temple, stones, cult, ritual, death, murder, Molly Summers… Kingsley?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  WHEN I RETURNED FROM THE STONES, JUSTINE WAS still asleep. I sat up late waiting for her, all the time trying to make sense of what I had discovered that day. Again, I had wanted to speak to her about Diane Morrow’s suicide. But when I eventually crawled into bed, Justine did not stir. And yet when I awoke later in the night from a vivid nightmare, I could hear her in the lounge listening to Schubert’s Der Tod und das Mädchen.

  The next morning was my sixth in Stonebury. It was a Saturday. Again I found Justine in bed. So this was the pattern. She would sleep all day, and I would dream all night, and we would barely exchange a word. Initially, I was worried. But soon it seemed natural, as if it were the true rhythm of Stonebury, as natural as the movement of the oak trees above the Sarsens. I had dreamt that I was at the Holestone, near the entrance to the circle. I forced my fingers through the oval-shaped hole as the stone spun around and around. And I was frightened.

  When I awoke, the swelling in my ankle had gone down. I discerned that during the night, Justine had scribbled something on a torn scrap of paper. It merely said, St. Stephen’s. I decided to explore Stonebury further.

  The village church lay about a half mile beyond the outer circle in a southeasterly direction, something like two miles from the estate. It had a solid tower. It was covered in the same slime that infested the ancient Sarsens. And it was called St. Stephen and the Martyrs.

  Surrounding the church, in a perfect circle, were the grounds which included the graveyard. They were lush green. Yet beyond the ramshackle boundary walls were vast fields of mud. Whether these fields had been left fallow deliberately or whether nothing would grow there, I simply could not tell. But to the west, as far as the eye could reach, were huge muddy stretches of brown, like the beaches of a forgotten sea which had been constantly in retreat.

  Graveyards had always been among my favorite places, a place where earthly pretensions were exposed with every grave passed. At St. Stephen’s there was a surprisingly varied collection of headstones. A few were simple crosses. Others were more austere, square tablets of stone, no doubt like those brought down from the Mountain with little odes to the frailty of man.

  In an almost empty corner, there was a roughly cut slab, tilting forward like an old man who had fallen asleep in front of the fire. Opposite it was a newly dug mound of earth. There were two wreaths. One of them had a card which, much to my shame, I read.

  In memory of Diane

  Daughter of Sarah.

  Not even a gravestone, nothing permanent to mark the loss of the young life. These things take time. The grave must settle. The worms must do their work. But I wondered if, by then, anyone would care or remember.

  Near to the wooden porch was a stone seat which protruded awkwardly from the church walls. It had weathered badly and the strange figures carved into the legs had become unrecognizable as anything that had ever lived. There was a plaque above the chair. It said: Sanctuary Seat of Stonebury.

  The slime and the sludge had covered the rest of the writing and the back of my sleeve was thoroughly soiled before the next line became legible.

  Sanctuary is mentioned in the Laws of the Saxons.

  Where had I seen church sanctuary mentioned before? Then I remembered. In Temple library. When I discovered what Kingsley meant by the Stang. I rubbed the plaque and continued to read.

  Sanctuary applied to every church in the country, If a man took the church’s sanctuary, his life was safe. But he remained a prisoner within the precincts of the church condemned to a life of penance until he received the King’s pardon (which was rare).

  The seat itself was uneven and not particularly large. The back of the seat was in fact the church wall, carved with the legend:

  That the slayer might flee hither

  And that he might live.

  Deuteronomy IV, 41–42

  The church bell rang a couple of times and a group of thin crows flew off from the top of the tower and headed toward Nethersmere Woods.

  All at once, the skies parted. It was not so much rain as a heavy sheet of water falling vertically from heaven to earth. Flowers that were propped against gravestones by the bereaved were washed out of their holders, and the trees began to bow with the weight of the deluge. I had no umbrella.

  The church was not as dark inside as you would have expected. At the front, on either side of the altar, were flickering rows of white candles. There was a smell of incense and newly polished wood.

  Then a small woman got up off her knees and approached me.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Did I disturb your praying?”

  “Praying? Ha. Praying that the bloody rain will stop, if that’s what you mean.” She was just under five feet tall and had her dark matted hair tied at the back of her head. “S’pose you’ve come for the Book then?” she said.

  “Well, not really.” Then I thought better of my answer, fearing she would send me out into the rain again. “What time do you close?” I asked.

  “Close? Our church never closes. God doesn’t clock off at the end of the day, you know. The Book’s over here. Come on.”

  She waddled off toward the front of the church, with me in her wake guiltily dripping on the shining floor.

  “I’ll give you twenty minutes. No longer.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Well, don’t ask me, for heaven’s sake.” With that she inspected the dismal trail of muddy puddles, followed it to my soaking boots, tutted, and said, “You’ve even messed up my clean floor.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “Right. You got ten minutes,” she said and stormed off in the general direction of an effigy of St. Stephen, which clearly needed a good dusting.

  The Stonebury Parish Register was a substantial tome, full of elaborately etched Gothic script. It lay open on a rickety wooden reading-stand, lit only by the glimmer of a dozen candle-flames. The last entry was that of a burial.

  Buried. 11th December. Diane Morrow

  During the trial, we were not allowed to know the true identity of the disappearing witness due to the sensitivity of the case. But now I knew. Diane Morrow. A dead daughter of a dead mother. One witness fewer for Richard Kingsley to worry about. What would she have been able to say about the death of Molly Summers? Perhaps only Kingsley would ever really know.

  Thumbing frantically through the large leaves of parchment, I eventually arrived at the entries for one year earlier. I was quite pleased to have found it so quickly.

  Buried. 11th December. Mary (aka Molly) Summers.

  So I was right. It was one year since the burial of the murdered girl. I had only five minutes left. Perhaps there was more to find.

  The register was full of deaths, marriages and baptisms, an inky history of these secret people. The woman knelt by the baptismal font, rubbing it vigorously. Did she know, I wondered, what it was made of? She glowered at me after a few seconds and scrubbed away at my damp stains, all the time muttering to herself.

  Three minutes left.

  I could work out the year of Molly Summer’s birth from Davenport’s speech. As I turned forward, there was no sign of her baptism in the following year. Nor the next. What age are people usually baptized? As babies, perhaps? Supposedly unburdened by anything but original—

  For who amongste us was not borne in a State of Sinne? And which of this Parishe does not but reache the Grave in precisely the same Fashione?

  There were only two minutes left, but I could not help remembering what I had read in the Dyson nov
el in Kingsley’s cell.

  The woman put away her rusting metal pail and wiped her hands. She ran her finger along the top of an effigy and seemed pleased that St. Stephen was not dusty.

  Perhaps, I thought, Molly wasn’t baptized in that church. Perhaps she wasn’t baptized at all. I turned the pages two at a time. The woman’s waddling steps sounded closer and closer up the aisle.

  One minute.

  Of course, Molly Summers went into care. Maybe that explained it? How many children in care were baptized? I didn’t know. Another page, three years on. Burial, burial, marriage, burial.

  The woman tugged at my sleeve. “Time’s up.”

  Baptised. Mary (alias Molly) Summers.

  Daughter of Summers and A Marie Blacke.

  “You’ve got to go,” said the woman. She wiped her nose with the back of her left hand roughly.

  “Just another two minutes.”

  “Not another two seconds.”

  “Please.”

  “You come in here, stamping mud about the place.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Who do you think’s going to clean up after you?”

  The accurate answer was: Well, I thought you’d do it, that seems to be your job. However, I did not relish being anointed by a bucket of dirty water. So I said, “I just need to look up one more thing.”

  I wasn’t sure what that was. It was a device to buy more time. But I had a gut feeling that there was more information between those dusty covers. Perhaps it was the odd coincidence of seeing something to do with my two Stonebury cases. Or perhaps I was remembering something from the dreams. But I sensed that there had to be more.

  “I’ve got to put the Book away now,” she said.

  “Can’t I look while I… wait for confession?”

  “You want to confess?” she said, laughing.

  I had not been to confession in—I couldn’t really say, perhaps more than twenty years. “Yes,” I said. “I haven’t been to confession since October.” That was true, but I didn’t say October of which year. “We’re Church of England,” she said. “We don’t need to confess.”

  “Don’t you sin?”

  “Of course we do. Protestants sin with the best of them. Only we don’t see the point of telling some boozy old priest in a frock. Now what did you want to look up?”

  My mind went blank. But as I gazed at the baptismal font again, it came to me.

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

  “I’m trying to discover when someone was born,” I said, thinking that perhaps everyone had got Molly Summers’s age wrong. “You know, when they began their life.”

  “I do know what birth means.” The woman went up to the rows of candles and between huge gusts of breath said, “But I’m afraid that you simply can’t look up the birth.” Another puff. “Not here, you can’t.”

  “But I thought you said—”

  “All records of birth are kept in London.”

  I closed the church door behind me and began to walk in the rain toward the London Road, all the time trying to remember Emma’s home telephone number. When I thought about it, we had been told very little about Molly Summers. I needed to know more.

  The wind blew through the oak trees along the road. I stopped momentarily to listen to the sound. But it was not the wind but my imagination that I heard. For again I heard the sounds from my recurring dream, the distant strains of a woman weeping. And instead of a blank television screen, I saw the haze of my confusion. And I sensed that it was more important to make a call than to confess.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  EMMA ANSWERED THE TELEPHONE IMMEDIATELY. “I have been going out of my mind,” she said. She was particularly angry as I hadn’t told her I was leaving London with Justine. There was still much preparation for trial to do.

  “Emma, I need a favor.”

  “No, Tom. I’m not going to make the peace with Penny. I have just about had it with—”

  “It’s not that.”

  “What then?”

  “I need you to do some investigating.”

  Her voice expressed her disbelief. “Investigating? There’s a huge bundle of further evidence. Now, Inspector Payne. He’s been doing some investigating. The solicitors are going up the wall, Kingsley wants another conference and all I can tell them is my leader’s disappeared.”

  “Doesn’t sound too good, does it?” I said.

  “I’m trying to hold the fort here and you’ve been… where exactly have you been?”

  “Down the yellow brick road, Emma. Where do you think? I’ve been in Stonebury, of course.”

  “And what have you been doing?”

  “Fox-hunting, going to funerals, poisoning myself with Red-eye. You know, the usual sort of rustic things.”

  “Tom, be serious. Goldman and Goldman say that Philip Templeman has vanished.”

  “No, he hasn’t,” I replied.

  “Then where is he?”

  “I left him in a puddle of mud in Nethersmere Woods.”

  “What?” Emma cried.

  “Well, we had a bit of a… well, fight.”

  “Jesus, Tom. Most barristers value their defense witnesses. You just beat them up.”

  Then the pips went, “I haven’t got much money left,” I said.

  “All right. I know I’m going to regret this, but what do you want me to do?”

  “Find out when and where Molly Summers was born.”

  “What on earth’s the point?”

  “A car came around the sharp bend in the London Road which sheltered the village from most of the noise of the traffic.

  I then said, “It may be that the murdered girl wasn’t who we thought she was.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t Molly Summers who was killed.”

  “Who was it then?”

  I read out the baptism entry from the parish register and Emma conceded that it was slightly, but only slightly, odd.

  “I had to get a new birth certificate for a second passport,” she said. “You have to apply to St. Catherine’s House. I’ll go first thing Monday. And, Tom?”

  “I owe you one, Emma.”

  “Can I suggest you don’t share this information with the… opposition?”

  “You can suggest it.”

  “Perhaps the”—she dropped her voice—“perhaps the other side shouldn’t know what we’re up to.”

  “There are no sides on this one, Emma.”

  “I don’t think Kingsley sees it that way.”

  “Kingsley’s the least of my problems.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “Tell you when I see you.”

  “Which will be?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “But Tom, it’s Saturday now and the trial starts Monday. Can’t you—”

  “Tomorrow’s my last day with Justine. I’ll call you when I get home.”

  The rain had eased and I walked back to the cottage wondering what I should tell Justine.

  * * *

  When I entered the lounge, it was early evening. Justine looked particularly alluring, sitting cross-legged in front of the fire, her hair framing her face like a soft yellow mop, sucking her pen as she considered the papers.

  “I’ve tossed a few things together,” she said. “Some sort of stew. One of old Annie’s specials. Daddy used to love it. Loads of carrots, potatoes… don’t worry, Tom. No turnips.”

  I stared back at her with crossed arms, my wet shoes suddenly feeling particularly uncomfortable. My ankle again began to throb.

  Justine continued writing away. “Fancy a drink, Tom? Gin’s on the sideboard, tonic should be—”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Oh, God. Not again. What more is there to say? I thought I told you everything. Everything.” She paused but my silence provoked her to continue. “What more can I tell you, Tom? What more do you want of me?”


  “It’s nothing to do with—those things.”

  “Then what?”

  “The Sarah Morrow case.”

  “Do we have to? I mean, now?”

  “Yes, now.” Ever since Emma had accosted me in Johnson’s and told me to steer clear of Justine, I had wanted to give Justine a chance. I suppose it was the incorrigible defense advocate in me.

  Justine left the brief on the floor and turned toward the fireplace. “All right,” she said, “you start.”

  I shook a soggy foot. “Why didn’t you tell Sarah Morrow that the judge had offered probation if she—”

  “The fire’s dying,” Justine said. “Can you bring over a couple of logs?”

  When I had done so, I repeated the question.

  “It wasn’t that simple, Tom. Sarah didn’t want to plead guilty to manslaughter. Not after what that so-called husband did to her. Can you imagine what it’s like to be abused?”

  She tried to avoid eye contact with me. “These logs are too big. We’ll have to cut them.” With that she handed me a blunt hand-axe covered in rust. “You do the honors.”

  I had never cut a log, a branch, or anything with growth rings in my life and protested, “Why me?”

  Her eye froze. “You’re supposed to be the man.”

  The first blow bounced off the bark sending vibrations up my arm.

  “You’ve got to make a small groove first,” she said.

  I made a little nick and aimed another blow. “Did you forget? I mean, that case was a political circus,” I said.

  “I didn’t forget. Harder.”

  Another blow. A few splinters flew toward the embers.

  “Then why? She trusted you, Justine and—”

  “Come on. Harder.”

  I raised the axe as far as I could, and Justine held the log with each hand only inches away from the cut. The blow was accurate but the wood was tough. “For God’s sake, Justine. She could have got away with probation and she ended up—”

  “Harder.”

  The cut became a gash. A little pink sap sprayed from the wound. “Well, you know how she ended up.”

  Justine moved her fingers closer together and tightened her grip. “So I screwed up. It happens. It won’t bring her back. Come on, much harder.”