False Witness Read online

  PRAISE FOR FALSE WITNESS

  “FOUR STARS!… Gripping… harrowing…. Dias brings the same professional expertise to his fiction as Scott Turow. Its vivid characters and startling plot twists, combined with Dias’s crisp style, make it a masterful debut.”

  –West Coast Review of Book

  “Lively… an enjoyable read, and it’s such a pleasure to unearth a lawyer who can write in real-life language.”

  –Marcel Berlins, Guardian

  “Fascinating.”

  –Manchester Evening news

  “The pace is breathtaking… Dias is very good on the sinister and disturbing, the dark sides of the human psyche. His is a name to watch.”

  –City Life

  “The writing has a disturbing edge that lifts it above the conventional.”

  –Bookseller

  “An extremely promising debut…. Dias may soon be a crown prince among all the acknowledged Queens of Crime. He shows style and flair and his plot weaves its way through society’s high life and dregs in a way that brooks no argument.”

  –Yorkshire Post

  “The courtroom gives Dias—a barrister himself—his best moments, revelling in the slippery games that pass for British justice.”

  –nick Kimberley, Guardian

  “More raw and raunchy than anything in American courtroom drama.”

  –Kirkus Reviews

  “Recommended.”

  –Library Journal

  DEXTER DIAS is a high-profile civil libertarian attorney in Great Britain, a crusading lawyer who defends the clients no one else will touch. Many of his cases have made international headlines.

  Copyright

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING EDITION

  Copyright © 1995 by Dexter Dias

  All rights reserved.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo are registered trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover by Mysterious Press

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56673-5

  Contents

  PRAISE FOR FALSE WITNESS

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  PART I: TRIAL

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PART II: LONDON

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  PART III: STONEBURY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  PART IV: RETRIAL

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  For my parents

  And for Katie

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks are due to many people. To Mike for opening my eyes to the possibility of writing fiction. To Teresa for spotting, supporting and advising me. To Carolyn and Kate at Hodders for their editorial and administrative input. And finally to Ruth Rendell, for taking the time to speak to a case-weary barrister and convince him that he might be able to do it.

  The author also wishes to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright materials:

  Chatto & Windus for extracts from “The Panther” from Selected Poems by Rilke, translated by J.B. Leisham; Curtis Brown Ltd. on behalf of Joanna Richardson for the translation of Baudelaire’s poem “The Vampire. “© Joanna Richardson.

  PART I

  TRIAL

  Then the young man asked Him, “What good thing must I do, that I may have eternal life?”

  To this He replied, “Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness.”

  Matthew 19:16–18

  CHAPTER ONE

  “AND TO THE FIRST COUNT, HOW DO YOU PLEAD? Guilty or not guilty?”

  There was silence.

  Then again the question. “On the first count, you are charged with outraging public decency. How do you plead?”

  A breath. A pause. And then an answer. “Guilty.”

  I suddenly remembered why I was sitting in the front row of Court 8 at the Old Bailey. I adjusted my horsehair wig and told myself that I had to stop daydreaming while the court was in session.

  But I was puzzled by the previous night’s dream. For I had again dreamt of Stonebury, where the murder was committed. I had dreamt of the village and of the rain and of a young girl being led quietly to the circle of stones. And I was puzzled by a voice. For I had been asked a single question. It was this: Is a dream something you possess, or is it something that possesses you?

  I didn’t know the answer back then. If I did, perhaps I would not have sat and listened to the charges being read out, but would have taken off my wig, neatly folded my gown, and would have then disappeared from the court with the minimum of fuss.

  The furor caused by the death of Molly Summers has died down. The case came to court over a year ago and I suspect that no one but me really thinks about that trial anymore. Yet when I am alone, and especially when I am tired, the memories begin to well. Usually it is the scent of perfume or the texture of muslin that first comes to mind, and then, like an old movie with shadowy figures moving in silence, the story unfolds.

  What I do find strange when I look back at it all, is that I could have become so involved. I still return to Stonebury every few months, which must be an admission of some kind. There are certain things that I cannot explain and other things I do not wish to. And when I return and walk around the ancient circle, the place where the broken body was found, I realize that I was partly to blame. I realize that I bore some of the guilt. But I was too weak and the desire was too strong and then, I suppose, there was Justine.

  At one time a barrister’s life had seemed so straightforward: you’re born, you’re called to the Bar,
you take silk, you die. I imagined that nothing would interrupt my procession from Bar to oblivion except, perhaps, hair-loss, the odd affair, and a couple of hard-earned ulcers. It was safe, if predictable, progress. And then I started dreaming about the stones.

  To the press, the case was a sensation. To the law, it was a scandal. But to me, it was simply a journey. It was a journey to the center of the circle. But this was a circle of my own creation, a place from which even now I find it hard to escape. Even now.

  “You plead guilty?” asked Leonard, clerk to Court 8.

  He was in a bad mood. But then Leonard, the oldest of the Old Bailey clerks, had been in a bad mood since the 1960s when they abolished capital punishment. He missed the black caps, he once told me. Then there was the “You will be hung by the neck until you are dead” line. Leonard never understood that, he said. After all, where else could they hang you from? When I once made a suggestion, Leonard didn’t speak to me for a year.

  The public gallery was full by the time that proceedings began at 10:30 A.M. There was even a long queue outside stretching a fair distance along Old Bailey toward St. Paul’s Everybody wanted to see him.

  And there he was: my client, Richard Kingsley, sitting quietly in the dock oblivious to everything. There was Richard Kingsley, pulp novelist, celebrity and guilty as any one of us can be. He sat hunched up in his wheelchair with a slightly shriveled arm and waited to be punished.

  At least they could not hang him.

  “And on the first count,” repeated Leonard, more irritably, flaring his nostrils, “you plead guilty?”

  “Yes,” said Kingsley. “Guilty.”

  Leonard waited for the murmuring in the public gallery to die down. Then he said, “And on the second count, Richard Kingsley, you are also charged with outraging public decency.”

  My tatty wig pricked me when I heard that. My winged collar cut into my throat for I had always thought it a ludicrous charge. Didn’t it assume that there was something called the public? And that it had a sense of decency? And that despite all the obscenities that had become part of our lives, it could still be outraged?

  Leonard read on. “And the particulars of the offense are that you committed acts of a lewd and disgusting nature, tending to corrupt the mind of a fourteen-year-old girl in Stonebury?” He clearly enjoyed reading that, and looked around the court at the open mouths in the galleries and the bored faces of the court staff. Then he asked the question. “Are you guilty or not guilty?”

  Kingsley looked at me with his unnaturally white face. I nodded.

  “Guilty,” Kingsley said.

  It was 10:41 A.M. I had already secured two guilty pleas. It was excellent progress. Because that was the deal. Plead guilty to some of this, not guilty to some of that, and it was all going to be over by lunchtime. The defendant would get a lighter sentence, the police could say they solved some crimes, the court could wheel in the next case and, of course, I would collect the money. Everybody would win.

  That first day was, I recall, a bright Monday in December. First thing, at nine o’clock, I had seen Kingsley in the cells below the Old Bailey. He sat in the artificial light and talked about his crimes. He was a phenomenon. Richard Kingsley could discuss the corruption of the young and the abuse of the innocent as though it were a lesson in algebra with certain given axioms and inexorable conclusions.

  “You have studied the brief, I suppose?” he said to me, stretching his tiny frame.

  “Of course,” I replied.

  “So you know what I did to those other girls?”

  “What they say you did.”

  “Ah, yes. I’m presumed innocent, aren’t I? I keep forgetting that.” He moved his wheelchair a little closer to me so that he could whisper. “But what if… I was not quite innocent? What then? I just wondered, would your morals be outraged by my—little games?”

  “Isn’t that my business?”

  “Surely I’m entitled to know the type of man who is defending me? You see, I suspect you aren’t sure if I did it?”

  “So?”

  “So you wonder. Yes, you wonder, don’t you, Mr. Fawley?”

  I considered very carefully how I should answer him and finally decided that I should begin as I intended to carry on. I lied.

  “Let me tell you something, Mr. Kingsley,” I said. “I wonder about a great many things. I wonder about the size of my overdraft. I even wonder about the meaning of life. But I can sleep well enough at night without knowing the answer to either.”

  It was all lies.

  Even before I had been sent the case papers, the dreams had begun. At night, I could not sleep without dreaming about the stones. I used to dread sleeping by myself, because I feared there would be no one to wake me up and then the dream would go on and on.

  At first there were just flashes, the hint of a color, the ghost of a shape, which never lasted more than a few seconds. In fact, I only started to worry when the figures began to emerge. They were wild, truncated: the top of a slim leg, the back of a head, a hand clasping something. And through it all, I never saw a face. There were never any faces.

  Initially, I tried to ignore the dreams. There is, after all, a lot of nonsense spoken about them. And then I read an article. I found it in a dog-eared color supplement while I was waiting for my dentist to bore into my gums. I learnt that Aristotle classified dreams and that Alexander the Great never went into battle without his dream-interpreter. It said that the waking world does not own us completely, that we retreat from it for one-third of our lives, deliberately seeking a place that is quiet and still and dark, and that is the province of dreams.

  The worst dream of all, the one I seemed to carry with me, had no images. There was just a dull grayness, like a television screen after the programs have finished, and emerging from it, almost imperceptibly, was the weeping, a pitiful weeping. Who was it who was crying so inconsolably? Was it someone else? Or was it me?

  At 9:32, Kingsley again wheeled himself close to me in the cells.

  “Shall I tell you what I’m really guilty of?” he asked.

  “Look,” I said, wincing at a loose filling. “If you want to confess, get yourself a priest. Or do yourself a favor, and sell your story to the tabloids. At least make some money from it. But don’t tell me.”

  “But you’re my lawyer. Don’t you need to know the truth?”

  “Save it for your memoirs. We’re on a tight schedule. The curtain goes up at ten thirty.”

  Kingsley became silent and neither of us spoke for a while. I paced around the small room and Kingsley looked through my papers.

  “Listen to me for a moment,” I finally said. “You just don’t understand, do you? We’re playing a game and you don’t know the rules. That’s all it is. I know you haven’t done anything like this before.”

  “You mean, I haven’t been caught before.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “Is it?”

  “Well, legally… look, I better explain.” The light flickered slightly but did not go out. “When you go through the doors of the court, you go through—well, you sort of go through the looking-glass. And the truth doesn’t count. You see, us lawyers need the truth as much as doctors need vaccines. A little is fine. Too much and we go out of business.”

  “So what do you want to know?” Kingsley asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Or as near to nothing as your conscience will allow.”

  “Not a particularly moral stance, Mr.—”

  “You should read your Bible.”

  “My what?”

  “Your Bible, Mr. Kingsley. You know, that all-time bestseller.”

  “That nobody reads. Except, of course,” Kingsley said, somewhat enigmatically, “in prison.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, the Bible’s the one thing more widely available in prison than drugs. Everyone’s offered a free copy.”

  “I didn’t know the Gideons did prison visits,” I said.


  “Not the Gideons, the government. A particularly cruel form of mental torture. No doubt devised by some junior minister whilst being whipped into a lather by his rent-boy.”

  “No doubt,” I replied.

  “The perks of high office, I suppose,” Kingsley said, sighing. “Still, most people take up the offer.”

  “Why?”

  “Comes in handy when the loo-roll runs out.”

  “Well, did you ever take a peek at the Book of Ecclesiastes?” I asked. “I mean, before you ran out of Andrex?”

  “Ecclesiastes?”

  “You know, ‘The more we know, the more we suffer,’ and all that. You must be familiar with the quote. ‘The more we know, the more—’”

  “A cynics’ charter?”

  “In the finest traditions of the Bar. You see, the less you tell me, Mr. Kingsley, the better it gets.”

  Richard Kingsley seemed delighted with my answer, but I wasn’t sure why. Did he think he had found a kindred spirit? Or did he sense my apprehension? Did he smell it and conclude instantly that I was weak and was someone to be used?

  “I’m very glad I instructed you, Mr. Fawley,” he said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because unlike those hypocrites who pretend to have morals, you’re proud to have none. Call me old-fashioned, but I like that in a man.”

  “Was that a compliment?” I asked.

  “More of a diagnosis,” he said. “Besides, there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “I know you won’t judge me.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Because you’re too busy judging yourself,” Kingsley said. “You know, I think we shall get along famously.”

  And we did. By 10:03, the crumpled little man had decided not to contest any of the sex offenses. Guilt and innocence? They simply did not come into it.

  In those days, I think I could claim to be the most indifferent, cynical and lazy excuse of a man who ever dared to toss on a barrister’s wig. I suppose I could spout all that Rumpole of the Bailey stuff about how brilliant a barrister I was. But I wasn’t.