False Witness Read online

  I pushed to the front of the queue. “Where can I buy this?” I asked pointing to the entry in the New Companion.

  “What?” said the assistant.

  “Jerusalem.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not in print.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ask the publishers, mate.”

  “Well, I’m asking you.” My patience was waning. “And don’t call me mate.”

  “Move on,” said the youth. “People are waiting.”

  “Where can I find a copy of it then… to read?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Well, can’t you find out for me… mate?”

  The assistant seemed about to mouth some sort of obscenity when the manager emerged from a trap door, somewhere behind the till. He was tall, thin and aesthetic-looking, wearing John Lennon glasses and a herringbone waistcoat.

  He took off his glasses, cleaned them and then looked at me solemnly. “You want the Tate,” he said.

  On arriving at Pimlico tube station, I passed through a strange hinterland of seedy guest-houses and sophisticated mews before reaching the Tate Gallery. On the cascade of stone steps outside the museum was the usual scattering of the youth of Europe, browsing through Rough Guides and listening to their Walkmans. The gallery’s collection was blessed with an embarrassment of artistic riches. But there was only one thing I wanted to see.

  As I approached the rooms that housed the permanent Blake collection, my steps started to echo in the empty rooms and the light seemed to fade. Surrounding me, strewn across the walls, were images of strange gods, corruption and decay. There was a painting of a man standing before a fiery chariot. He was naked and his head was bowed by the brilliant light emanating from a wrathful figure with a shock of white hair and a fearsome nose.

  “God judging Adam.”

  It was a woman’s voice. I used to hate people speaking to me in public. For me, galleries were little different to churches: places for silence and for some sort of reflection—whatever you could manage. And for those reasons I had long before abandoned going to either.

  “Don’t like it, do you?” she said.

  I still hadn’t taken my eyes from the frightening colors of the painting.

  The voice was small, but hectic, all over the place like a buzzing fly. “I suppose I quite like the horses,” she said. “They are horses, you know—two of them, you can just see the hind legs of the second. See?” A delicate arm covered in brushed denim and smelling somehow of adhesives, hovered near the canvas. “People used to think those lines came from this painting. You know, ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold’—all that chariots of fire stuff. But it’s really nothing to do with it at all; shame really; still, it’s interesting. Well, if you’re interested in that sort of thing—of course, I am. But then I would be… oops. Here I go. Gabbling on. Better dash. Work to do and—”

  “Don’t go,” I said.

  She was small, as fragile as one of the children in the poetry book, but her hair was not flaxen. It was tied behind her small head. She constantly bobbed up and down on the balls of her feet, trying to hide her lack of height, but she was not the sort of person to wear heels. She had thick glasses that reflected the yellow and red streaks from the melting sun in the painting.

  She continued, “Sorry to butt in. We don’t get many people down this end really. Everyone goes to the Turner. You know, tour parties: Blake? Who the—is William Blake? Which way to the Turner, they ask? Still, their loss is… sorry, there I go again.”

  “No, please. I don’t mind.”

  “It’s just… I hardly speak to anyone all day. Then when I see someone: bang. Away I go.”

  “Do you work here?”

  “Sort of. I’m doing some research on old W.B. Oh, it’s too tedious. I won’t bore you with—actually, it’s called: ‘Blake—mystic or madman?’ That’s the trend nowadays. Snappy titles for your thesis. User-friendly.”

  “I need some help.” Before us Adam still cowered.

  “Help? Really?” She tried to hide her excitement, failed, moved her head toward me. The flanks of the horses appeared in her right-hand lens.

  “Yes. Some help with Blake,” I said.

  She threw both denim sleeves toward the ceiling. “Oh, thank you, God. Thank you.” Then she looked at the fearsome visage of judgment. “This way,” she said, leading me into a shadowy corner with all the fanaticism of a train-spotter at Clapham Junction.

  “Should be a doddle.” She seemed pretty confident after I explained what I was looking for. Not everything. Just what was safe, and sane, to relate. “We’ve got color copies of all one hundred plates of the book of Jerusalem. My name’s Anna, by the way. Where do you want to start?”

  As we wandered along rows of dimly lit reproductions, the girl chattered away at a thousand words a minute. She told me about the Romantics and opium and hallucinations; about giant fleas and about God, but not in that order.

  “I think this is what you want.” Before me was a plate with minutely printed writing. Intense writing, the writing of a man with something to say. “Felix culpa, really. Well, Blake’s version.”

  “Felix who?”

  She was obviously tempted to laugh, but flicked a nonexistent speck away from her glasses and bobbed once again. “The felix culpa myth. From Eve to Mary. Women’s guilt and all that. You know, the dark ages, pre-bra burning and Germaine Greer. Lead us not into temptation, unless you happen to be a woman, and then we’ll bite the apple and blame you. Very right on—I don’t think.”

  Eventually we got to Plate Number 61. Her crooked little fingers ran under a passage no different from any other. “Then Mary burst forth…”

  “Rather an ugly image,” she said, as she continued reading. “’She flowed like a river of many streams.’”

  I read it out loud. Then again. Louder. “What does it mean?”

  She looked at me and ran her fingers through her hair. “I could be really snotty and say, Well, what does anything mean? But to tell the truth, I’m not sure. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

  “No, of course—but Mary as in?”

  “Mary as in Mary. You know, Hail Mary full of—the Mother of God.”

  Then I realized and I remembered the charge: Richard Kingsley, you are charged with murder and the particulars of the offense are that you murdered Mary—also known as Molly—Summers.

  The woman said, “I’m sorry I can’t be of more assistance. I’m more of an academic, I suppose. Sorry.”

  “There’s no need to apologize,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because of this.” I pointed to another of the plates. And there, in a heavily slanted Gothic script was a fragment of a sentence that I could barely read.

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

  “Where is Albion?” I asked.

  “Where or what,” she replied.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, Albion was the ancient Celtic name for Britain. But for Blake, Albion was a kind of mythical giant. The source, the seed, the father of all things. I hope that’s not too esoteric?”

  I did not reply.

  “I’m getting more esoteric all the time,” she said. “You see, doing a thesis is like having a pet. You grow more and more like it. At night I have these weird—you know, like Blake did. I suppose I’m very much like old Willy. Except I can’t paint. Mind you, some would say he couldn’t either. Paint, I mean—”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Behind her, rising from her shoulders, was an image of fallen angels and showers of blood and threatening skies and—most vividly of all—circles of stones. I felt a strange sense of déjà vu. It was as though someone had taken a photograph of one of my dreams and colored it with oil paints.

  She put on an academic voice. “Much debated that one. It’s the final plate. A sort of culmination of the book of Jerusalem. It’s thought the figure on the
left is—”

  “What are those?” I pointed to something strange at the foot of the stones. “Are they clouds? Why are they on the ground?”

  “They’re not clouds. They’re trees.”

  “Trees? What sort of trees?”

  “Oh, I don’t know… oh, yes—one school of thought says they’re… oaks.”

  “Did you say oaks?”

  “Yes, oaks. Oaks, you know, as in oak trees. As in, from little acorns do large oaks—”

  Again I remembered what I had imagined on the first night of the trial. Walking over wet grass, scattered with acorns, which must have come from oak trees. But what had oak trees to do with the murder of Molly Summers?

  Finally, I said, “And oaks as in drus?”

  “Ah,” she said. “So you can read Greek?”

  “No, I can’t,” I replied. “But I know a man who can.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I WAS LET INTO THE PRISON IMMEDIATELY, AND NOT long after two o’clock I was walking past the strapped and contorted figure of Legat.

  When I entered Richard Kingsley’s cell, he was not in bed. His wheelchair faced the high barred window in the way that a spring bloom arches toward the sun. All I could see of him was a cruelly hunched back and a tangle of hair as he craned his neck toward the warmth. But you knew that the soil was infertile and this plant could never fully develop.

  He did not turn round. “I was just thinking that there were one or two points of detail I should like your advice upon. Fine-tuning, nothing more—”

  “Who told you?” I snarled.

  His pale head slowly rotated past an immobile shoulder. “I’m sorry?”

  “Who told you, Kingsley?”

  “Forgive me. I thought it was a convention of sorts to be courteous to one’s client.”

  “Who told you?”

  “This is a novel approach. What is this? Method advocacy?” He wheeled himself toward me.

  “Who told you?”

  “You did.”

  “What?” I had not expected that answer.

  “You did, Mr. Fawley. I wonder, could you just?” He pointed toward a pristine white cushion for his back, which I automatically handed him. “They want to keep me strapped up. Rigid. Straighten the spine. But one must pamper oneself—at least, sometimes. Now, where are we? Oh, yes. It was easy really. I do hope you’re not as obvious with the secrets of my defense.”

  “This is all bullshit.” I towered way above him.

  “It’s the way you looked at her.”

  “And how was that?”

  “Hungrily.” He licked his lips. “Also you had made some sort of assignation with her—”

  “You heard that?”

  “—once you thought you’d forced me to plead guilty. The Savoy, wasn’t it?”

  I sat down on the bed.

  He said, “I can’t fault your taste.”

  “Justine Wright?”

  “No, the Savoy. An excellent selection of clarets. Though their older Burgundies are a little overpriced, don’t you think?”

  “What are you after, Kingsley?”

  “After?”

  “What are you up to?”

  “Am I to understand that I’m being cross-examined now? This might be fun.”

  I paced around the bed, and took a deep breath. “We got the forensic report on that handwriting.”

  “Of course, it was mine,” he said nonchalantly.

  “You mean you already—”

  “If someone is trying to set me up, of course they will do a good job.”

  “Or if you’re guilty as sin and desperate to wriggle your way out, then you’ll try anything.”

  “Well, yes.” he said. “That is equally consistent with the facts.” He rolled in the direction of a square table with a small bunch of white orchids, their petals beginning to shrivel at the edges.

  When he came to a halt, I said, “I think you’d better stop messing us around.”

  “And I think we should get the knife tested.”

  “You are joking?”

  “I never joke, Mr. Fawley. Not when my future is at stake. There are, I presume, independent fingerprint experts available to the defense?”

  “It’s a waste of time.”

  “But are there such experts?”

  In fact, I had frequently used Geoffrey Snyde, editor of an excruciatingly tedious journal called Fingerprint Quarterly. Snyde was one of the leaders in the field but I wasn’t about to tell Kingsley that. “They haven’t said it was your fingerprints on the knife.”

  “Nor have they excluded me.”

  “True.”

  “How many of those… ridge characteristics, is it?… do you need?” he asked, meaning the bumps and furrows that make anyone’s fingerprints unique.

  “They have to find sixteen points that are identical,” I said.

  “Well, I want an expert’s opinion, to see if my prints match those on the knife in any way.”

  I told him that I would think about it, but refused to make any promises.

  “There’s something else I want to discuss,” he said.

  At that moment the ominous shadow of the ward sister appeared at the door and seemed to fill the room. Kingsley put a right index finger to his lips and almost magically the room was in silence.

  Having his chamber-pot removed in the presence of a visitor was an indignity Richard Kingsley felt so acutely that it actually made him wince.

  It is a source of constant astonishment to me how nurses in a hospital can brandish a container swirling with human waste with complete indifference. But the sister left in a very matter-of-fact way and told Kingsley that although the pot wasn’t as full as the previous day, she had “better empty it all the same.”

  After that Kingsley did not appear so confident.

  “Mr. Fawley, I was wondering how I should… well, how would you advise me to behave in court?”

  Clients often ask this. It is important. A few stage directions can give a performance a spurious credibility.

  I told him, “Treat it like church. Dress in black, sit in silence—and—pray.”

  “Quite so. But pray to whom?” A half-smile surfaced on his otherwise expressionless face. “Do you think I killed that girl?”

  “If you want to know, the truth is, I don’t know what to think.”

  “And you don’t want to know?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You did before. You see, Mr. Fawley, there is something I should tell you.”

  He stared at me intensely with his head cocked to the left. This is how he would plead to the jury for his freedom. If, that is, I allowed him anywhere near the witness box.

  “Perhaps I’m a little fussy,” he said, “but sixteen is a little too old for my tastes.”

  “Well, that’s a cast-iron defense. I didn’t kill Molly Summers, members of the jury, because I only have sex with under-age girls.”

  “Is that what I said?”

  “It’s what the prosecution will say.” The reptilian features of Hilary Hardcastle flashed through my mind. “Or the judge.”

  “You still don’t understand my sexuality.”

  I remembered the sign above the door in Johnson’s. “Look, I’ll find you an argument in court, but I’m not obliged to find you an understanding out of it.”

  “And what does that mean, Mr. Fawley?”

  “It means that I haven’t really thought about you.”

  “No.” He wheeled a little closer to me as I sat on the bed. “No, you don’t want to understand me. You find my sexuality revolting.”

  “I have no opinion.”

  Kingsley adopted a solemn voice, as though he was reciting a psalm from the Bible. “‘Henceforth,’” he said, seeming to quote from somewhere, “‘I shall do all I can to outrage the laws of both nature and religion.’”

  “Well, Mr. Kingsley. At least you’re consistent,” I said. “Is it a quote from one of your books?”

 
“Not mine.”

  “Then whose?”

  “The Marquis de Sade’s.”

  “You’re quoting a dead Frenchman to me?” I said.

  Kingsley ignored my flippancy and said, “Have you read One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom?”

  “Not recently, Mr. Kingsley.” A smile flickered across my face, I was not sure why. “I’ve read A Hundred Years of Solitude. I suppose it’s the next best thing.”

  “It is a joke to you. You think once somebody has lost the ability to walk, he should lose other… urges as well.”

  “Does it really matter?”

  “There are some things so powerful, Mr. Fawley, that nothing will, nothing can contain them.”

  This was not a conversation I wished to have.

  Kingsley continued, “You look at me and you think, Well I might play around a bit and cheat on my wife, but I’m not like Kingsley. Heaven forbid. Touching little girls. Little girls like my daughter.”

  “You’re a sick man.”

  “But you’ve noticed how she sometimes flirts with you when Mummy’s not home and how she’s beginning to fill her school blouse.”

  I did not answer.

  He looked at the orchids with their falling petals. “We shouldn’t feel guilty,” he said. “There’s too much guilt in the world. I mean, do you blame a wasp for stinging?”

  Kingsley had a rather attractive voice which is something I kept forgetting. And I imagined him whispering with those sophisticated tones into the small ears of a fourteen-year-old girl.

  “Our minds, Mr. Fawley, are like very sensitive receivers. And just because you don’t tune in to a certain frequency, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. It is. It’s all there. Everything you’ve ever wanted. Everything you’ve been denied. All of it. Just waiting.”

  “It that the Marquis de Sade, too?”

  “No, that’s me. They didn’t have radio transmitters in pre-Revolutionary France. Or didn’t anyone tell you?”

  “I just thought—”

  “There’s no need for you to think, Mr. Fawley. No need at all.” Kingsley’s eyes changed from their usual dismal hue to a yellowy white. “You see, Mr. Fawley, like me or loathe me, I’m just a product of our society.”