False Witness Read online

  “Tom,” she said, “this… this thing between you and Justine”—she tugged a little at the duvet and a jet of icy air sped up my back, setting me on edge—“is it just a passing thing? An infatuation?”

  “Penny, I swear… if I knew, I’d—”

  “You see, Alex was—”

  “Alex?” I asked, and then I remembered the earlier part of our conversation. “Oh, Alex.”

  “He was the teacher. Good title for it. I suppose young girls can be tutored in all sorts of things. Alex… oh, was it Chapple?”

  “Is it important?”

  “No,” Penny said.

  “I asked Justine about him but she just told me to mind my own business.”

  “What a surprise,” Penny said. “You see, Alex seemed shy, innocent, supposedly unavailable. Of course, absolutely irresistible to a classful of girls. But it was all hushed up.”

  I was no longer listening very carefully, for I wanted to tell her what I had decided, what was bound to hurt. “I’ll have to go to the West Country for a couple of days,” I said. “For the case.”

  “You’ll miss your daughter’s birthday.”

  “I’ll be back by then.”

  “Yes, it was Chapple,”she said confidently. “That was his name.”

  Outside, the moonlight flickered as a cloud scudded across the garden trees, cloaking their upper branches in purple, then gray.

  “Justine was found in his study,” Penny said in a matter-of-fact way.

  “Is that what you meant? Her old tricks? Leaving—”

  “Leaving things in men’s studies?” Penny paused. “I suppose she left—”

  “Her clothes?”

  “Her cherry.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t be such a prude. Everyone has to lose it sometime. It’s just…”

  “Just what?”

  “Just in those circumstances,” Penny said.

  “The study?”

  “Don’t be silly, Tom. There’s nothing wrong with being bonked on a desktop. We should try it sometime—except your desk is always full of your bloody murder briefs.”

  “Then what was so awful?” I asked.

  “That night,” Penny said, her voice suddenly very distant. “It was…”

  “Yes?”

  “It was the night Justine’s father died.” Before I could say anything at all, Penny continued, “Chapple was sent away, naturally. I’m not sure what happened after that. He disappeared. Some people say he stayed in the area but I never saw him again.”

  I turned round to face her and noticed that the downy hair on her nape was standing on end. “Penny, did you hear me? I might have to go—”

  “If you go,” she said, “we won’t be here when you return.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “YOUR CLIENT,” SAID JUDGE HARDCASTLE, “DEMON strates a refreshing amount of realism.” She fixed me with one of her eyes.

  I was seated in Hilary Hardcastle’s chambers behind Court 4 with my prosecutor for the day, Rupert Livingstone. I was representing Emmanuel “Whitey” Innocent. Whitey was a drugs dealer. He was also a grass. A good grass. A supergrass.

  True informers are born and not made. For some people feel the desire to betray as others feel the need to tend to the sick, or to teach children or to sit in dark confessionals and listen to the sins of others. But unlike doctors and teachers and priests, informers held a special fascination for me, as I was always intrigued to see what would drive a man to betrayal. It was, very often, surprisingly little.

  “Perhaps you might like to read this, Judge,” I said to her as I passed over a sealed envelope.

  “Any objection, Mr. Livingstone?” she asked.

  He grunted reluctantly.

  I did not know the exact contents of the letter. What I did know was that it was from Chief Superintendent William Heggarty of the Flying Squad, and was a curriculum vitae of my client’s informing activities. As the judge slowly read the handwritten note, I gazed around her chambers. They could not have been further removed from those of Ignatius Manly. Hardcastle had prints of the guillotine, the gallows tree at Tyburn with gibbeted highwaymen hanging from chains, and a graphic portrayal of the crushing of the Peterloos Riot with ranks of uniformed troopers attacking an unarmed crowd.

  “These matters are always sensitive,” she finally said. “I suppose we must fight crime by any means necessary.” She looked at the two barristers before her and said, “Do I take it that Mr.… is it Innocent?”

  “It is, I said.

  “Is he pleading guilty?”

  “Yes, Judge,” I said. “I’m afraid he doesn’t live up to his name very often.”

  On that day, even the obvious comment met with the approval of La Hardcastle. “He does have an extraordinary name,” she said.

  “He does,” is all I replied.

  In fact, Whitey was born in Trinidad but had lived most of his adult life in that netherworld between Lewisham and Cat-ford. He never gave the police his correct address. Although ethnically Afro-Caribbean, he was an albino. The tight curls on his head were snowy white and dusty from some skin complaint, his eyes were never more than half open, which is to say that they were invariably half shut, and he was caused terrible pain by sunlight, shingles and telling the truth. Whitey was a pupil of the Judas Iscariot school of trust and loyalty.

  “I suppose,” continued Hardcastle, “I shall have to give him a very substantial reduction in his sentence, for his… assistance.”

  Livingstone groaned again and looked at his impeccably manicured nails. He didn’t want to offer Whitey a deal, but he had it forced upon him by the CPS, who in turn got the word from the Flying Squad.

  “May I ask how important an informant Mr. Innocent is?” asked Hardcastle.

  Rupert Livingstone, former young conservative and now a prematurely old and irritable one, consulted his brief. “I understand he has provided Flying Squad with some intelligence about certain Jamaican armed robbers.”

  Whitey had grassed up the Yardie Blaggers, to use Jamie Armstrong’s parlance. That was a dangerous business and I felt it right that the judge understood the risks involved in such treachery.

  “I understand, Judge,” I said, “that my client has provided more quality information than the next half-dozen informants put together. And”—I paused to try to reinforce the point—“and two of those gentlemen have recently been exposed.”

  “Oh dear,” said Hardcastle.

  “And they were both murdered,” I added.

  “Really?”

  “Quite brutally, I understand.”

  “I see,” said the judge.

  Central Drugs Squad, who had arrested Whitey for dealing heroin, were also unhappy. They had to accept a plea to supply of a little cannabis when the word came down from Flying Squad. Five years’ imprisonment had suddenly become nine months, and with remission and remand time it was practically a walk-out.

  Emmanuel Innocent had to be given his thirty pieces of silver.

  As I put my wig back on, and headed for the corridor leading to the court, Hardcastle stopped me.

  “Good news and bad news, Mr. Fawley,” she said.

  “For whom, Judge?”

  She ignored my comment. “Bad news is that my buggery has been taken out of my list for the next sitting. To give the defendant a chance to think. I hope someone will knock some common sense into his head. I can’t stand sodomites.”

  I looked at Hilary Hardcastle perching on a frugal chair, no cushions, no padding, when a shaft of light momentarily crept through the clouds that had laid siege to St. Paul’s. She looked like a chameleon on a stone.

  “And what is the good news?” I asked.

  She turned her head a little toward the light and licked her lips quickly. “And the good news, Mr. Fawley, is that I’m available to do the Kingsley murder.”

  Rupert Livingstone’s mood improved for the first time that day. As we shut Hardcastle into her lair
, he gave me his most patrician of smiles.

  “Another one for death row,” he said, running a manicured hand through his hair.

  Livingstone was obviously going through his Oscar Wilde period of fey, disaffected youth. Except Rupert Livingstone was no longer young, and was not disaffected but faintly disgusting. I tried to decide whether to answer him or to jab my biro under his fingernails. But instead, as usual, I did nothing.

  The jailer closed the huge outer door to the Old Bailey cells behind me. He puffed at an ornamental ebony pipe carved into the shape of a shrunken head.

  “’Fraid we’re absolutely chocka today,” he said. “Peak season, Mr. Fawley. Can’t put you in one of the luxury suites.”

  It was his only joke, his whole repertoire. He was at the. reception desk of a luxury hotel on the Costa del Crime, no doubt somewhere near Torremolinos, the cells were suites, the prisoners were guests, and their lawyers were visitors.

  “You’ll have to take suite number six. No sea view, sadly.” A ribbon of black smoke curled toward the ceiling. “Mr. Innocent will be with you presently.”

  I was led to a dark square-shaped room. A loudly buzzing strip light flickered. The room had graffiti daubed on the walls and there was an enduring smell of stale human sweat.

  When the half-glass door opened, Whitey Innocent slid in. The bulb finally went out and the dimness was only relieved by the yellow light from the corridor.

  “Shall I call someone?” I said, pointing at the light.

  “Better like this,” said Whitey. “My eyes, Mr. Thomas.” He always called me that. “Worse all the time.”

  A lily white hand started to gesture toward the top of his head, but fell limply. His pale face was only interrupted by a browning set of upper teeth which protruded so completely that you could never see whether he had a lower set to match. Below the lids were two slits. These were his eyes. He had the overall appearance of an old dog on its last legs. A dog that had grown so accustomed to sniffing out his way that he no longer needed his sight.

  “My eyes are no good,” he said. “but I see many things.”

  “Cut the mystic routine, Whitey. I’ve heard it all before.”

  “You done good up there, Mr. Thomas.” He finally sat down. “Please,” he said, pointing toward a small table.

  “I prefer to stand. You know, it had nothing to do with me.”

  “Me Obeah man say it come out right.”

  “You’re not still paying that crook?”

  Whitey scratched his snowy scalp with a long dirty thumbnail. We had had arguments about this before. Whitey subscribed to a creed somewhere between voodooism and the Freemasons. He paid his Obeah man, his kind of priest, sums of money. Sometimes Whitey paid him thousands of pounds to pray for him, to write our magical chants and even to attend court in a crisis.

  “You pay insurance?” asked Whitey.

  “Yes, but I pay Legal and General, not some old geezer who bets it on the dogs at Walthamstow.”

  “It was a result,” he said.

  “It was a fix,” I replied. “So, got any plans when you get out? I hope you’re not thinking of going straight?”

  Whitey did not smile. “I prefer it inside. You safe there, Mr. Thomas, there’s some bad shit going down.”

  It is at such times that alarm bells should ring for any prudent lawyer. It is during such conversations that you can compromise your next case and hear things you shouldn’t. So I just said, “I don’t want to know.”

  “Really bad shit, Mr. Thomas.”

  “It’s nothing to do with me, Whitey.”

  “Mmm,” he said and scratched the table annoyingly with his dirty thumbnail.

  People who are about to be carted off to prison can be desperate for advice, for hope on appeal or simply desperate for a little human company. They will engage you in all sorts of spurious conversations. They will pretend they know terrible secrets about the police, the witnesses, even the judge. But what they really crave is a last moment’s attention, someone to take them seriously before the prison gate finally shuts.

  I waited for Whitey to explain himself, but he just muttered sotto voce and dropped his eyelids still further. “Now don’t go all mysterious on me,” I said.

  Although I tried to laugh it off, I was beginning to be worried, because Emmanuel Innocent did not fit into the above categories. He had spent more of his adult life behind bars than walking the back streets of Lewisham. Prison was bad for his drugs business but good for contacts. For a grass, prison was not an occupational hazard, it was part of the occupation.

  “Why you think I get pulled?” he finally said.

  “Could it be, Whitey because you were dealing heroin which, they tell me, is a little against the laws of the land?”

  “Me been dealing heroin some years. Why me get pulled now?”

  “Because you were caught?” I was getting a little tired of the game.

  “You see but you do not see,” he said. “New Babylon in town.” Whitey still used the old slang occasionally. I had never quite understood why some West Indians called the police “Babylon.” Jamie said it was something to do with slavery.

  “This Babylon, he real serious,” said Whitey. “Come from Bradford or Bristol or some West Country shit like that.” Being one of the London posse, that part of England beyond the M25 was a mystery to Whitey. “But me is Heggarty’s man. He scratch my back and I—”

  “Grass up Yardies?” I said. “Dangerous game, Whitey.”

  “Only game me know. So this blood-clot detective come see me with this other man.”

  “Who was the other person? Police?”

  “Nah,” said Whitey.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Me can smell your Babylon. This other man just there. He was real short, but he was the guv’nor. No doubt.”

  “Fascinating as all this is, Whitey, can you get to the point? Your carriage to Battersea nick’s waiting.”

  Then Whitey put on a strange accent. “This detective tell me, ‘I need some dirt on that brief o’yours.’ So I says, Mr. Thomas, I tells him, ‘Get out-a me face,’ and he says, ‘I’ll cause you so much pain, you won’t have a face when I finish with you.’ And I become scared.” Whitey did look up here and his face was even paler. “He get them Drugs Squad to nick me. You see what me has to deal with, Mr. Thomas?”

  “Frankly, I don’t.”

  “Mr. Thomas, you’re not listening. This Babylon he want the dirt—”

  “So?”

  “On me brief—”

  “Yes?”

  “On you. He say, “Just in case…’”

  There was a cursory knock on the glass and the jailer, still puffing away, put his face round the door.

  “Van for Battersea’s waiting. Let’s be having you,” he said.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I said the Battersea van is leaving and—”

  “Not you,” I grabbed Whitey’s hunched shoulder. “You.

  He turned slowly, stood on tiptoes and whispered in my ear, his eyes narrow but somehow bright. “You in serious shit, Mr. Thomas.”

  “What did that mean ‘Just in case’? Just in case of what?”

  Whitey was walking along the corridor and didn’t appear to hear me. “Real serious,” he muttered as he was led to the prison van. “Real serious.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  WHEN I LEFT THE OLD BAILEY, I DECIDED TO WALK along the Embankment to the Temple. I wondered whether Whitey’s thinly veiled warning was a pretext to force me to visit him in Battersea. To bring him cigarettes or perhaps to run some messages on his behalf. On the other hand, he had practically served his sentence while remanded in custody. So what motive did he have to lie?

  I was daydreaming as I walked and imagined another conference with him, and when it ended Whitey was let out and, to my horror, I was taken to the prison van.

  The Thames sulked under a heavy blanket of fog, the boats on the river were s
hadows, and the colorless people were little more than slowly moving apparitions. I could not bear going back to chambers and pretending to be friendly, I couldn’t face going home and confronting my wife. A flat barge hooted in the distance, the sound echoing again and again under the Waterloo arches. I traced the river as the banks disappeared westward, and wondered how near to Stonebury it flowed. For an instant, I felt myself drawn up-river as the tide receded to the west.

  When I got to the door of 3 Dickens Court, I saw my name on the board outside, along with the other thirty-odd barristers who constituted my chambers. Getting your name on the door, that was the thing. It used to seem so important. Every year nearly one thousand law students, among the best in the land, frantically searched, chased and begged for the, perhaps, two hundred spaces on the door. And that day, as I saw my nameplate, the black letters fraying away, the background paint yellowing, I just thought: What was the point?

  When I phoned Justine’s chambers and was told she would be going to the Bar dinner that night, I wandered the empty streets for hours, waiting for darkness, waiting to see Justine, while the fog seemed to seep in through my ears, creating a dark haze behind my eyes.

  The Bar Mess dinner is a sumptuous meal followed by soporific speeches, anodyne debates or mock trials. It is a key event in the professional calendar. I rarely attended, but that night was different. Driven by a raging desire to see Justine and a determination to avoid Penny, I found myself in the rococo banqueting hall of the old London Bridge Railway Hotel. There was no one there apart from sixty barristers and a solitary judge, the special guest speaker, eager to enrich our lives with firebrand wit.

  Hilary Hardcastle was already on her feet, a few minutely scribbled notes in hand, addressing her captive audience. Her strange head scanned the room in precise jerks.

  Justine and Davenport flanked Hardcastle on High Table. Davenport was the Mess Leader and Justine was his guest. When I saw her sitting there, I wished I had not arrived late, as I desperately wanted to tell her how I felt, to be forward, to articulate my desires for once. That was the plan. But I had no opportunity. The dubious reward for my tardiness was to be sat on a table by the door with Mess Junior, Rupert Livingstone.