False Witness Page 17

  The Sierra drew alongside us. One door opened.

  “Run,” shouted Justine.

  But before we could move, the car sped off again, the tyres screeching, and the smell of burnt rubber filled the air. I followed its course and could just make out the two uniforms that had entered the side street.

  Justine grabbed me roughly by the arms. “Tom, just keep quiet,” she said as I giggled childishly. She tightened her grip painfully. “Are you listening? Just shut up. Understand?”

  When the officers arrived, Justine stood in front of me.

  “You the driver, madam?” the first asked. He looked over Justine’s shoulder. “Or is he?”

  “I am,” she replied

  “Break in?”

  “No real harm done,” said Justine. “They didn’t get the stereo. Broken window. Nothing serious.”

  “See anyone?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Better report it… for insurance purposes.”

  “Thanks anyway.” Justine half waved as they continued on their beat.

  I leant on the car bonnet, my legs beginning to give way. “They… they trashed my car.”

  “Shut up, Tom. For God’s sake.”

  “Why should I? You told me not to take it all so seriously.” And I began to laugh. “They trashed my—”

  “Know what that is?” Justine pointed to the transparent package, and held my head in its direction.

  I shrugged inanely as I tried to focus on the granular substance.

  “That’s Brown,” she said.

  “Brown?”

  “Brown.” She opened the passenger door and pushed me in. “Where are your keys?”

  “But you’re not insured,” I feebly protested as I handed over the fob. “Brown?”

  “Jesus, Tom. How many drugs trials have you done? It’s heroin, you idiot. About five years’ worth,” Justine said. “That’s how they package it.”

  “I’ve defended in crack and coke, and speed and grass,” I said. “But I’ve never really seen heroin.”

  “Well, you have now.” Justine turned on the engine and drove toward Chiswick.

  It was 4 A.M. I was soaking in colder sweat and vivid images buzzed around my pillow. I saw myself in a strange room. There was a window that was tall and narrow that gave on to a circle of stones. And there I was rolling in the wet sheets of a four-poster bed. Around me, millimeters from my face, were endless mosquito nets, and although I tore at them, and ripped them with both my hands, they became tighter and tighter. I was increasingly frantic for I knew, and this was all I could be certain of, I knew that the mosquitoes were on the inside.

  Penny had gone. I didn’t know where. She had taken our daughter.

  I got up and looked out into the garden. Every shadow on the lawn appeared to be someone stalking up to the house. I convinced myself that every indistinct shape in the room was another package of heroin.

  I was frightened and I was alone. Justine told me before she got a cab home that the case would not go away. It was a little like the heroin that we had tried to flush down the loo. For a while it would disappear, only to surface again later in a slightly different form.

  Whoever planted the heroin knew where I was. I realized on that night that I could not evade the truth. And rather than let it come and find me in the week or so until the retrial, I made a decision. As I shivered in the moonlight, I remembered a line from the Blake reproductions in the Tate.

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

  I realized at that moment that there was only one place I could go.

  PART III

  STONEBURY

  Your sons and daughters shall prophesize, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.

  Book of Joel 2:28

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THE MOLLY SUMMERS TRIALS EVENTUALLY CAME TO an end about a year ago. But I still return to the village every three months. I do not really understand why. No one likes me here, not after all that has happened. But I feel as though I am sweating out a virus and I must keep returning until the fever finally disappears.

  I always make a point of going to the very center of the circles. And sometimes, when my spirits are low, or when my last wisdom tooth begins to ache, I see myself on another kind of circle. I imagine myself on a type of large wheel, where the past is not behind me nor the future ahead. For when I close my eyes, the faces and events of the Summers case swirl around my head and again I see the first trip I made to Stonebury. I see the village and I see the stones and—most of all—I see Justine.

  Two days after we found the heroin, we went to Justine’s cottage near Stonebury. We drove all the way through Dorset and arrived on the Devon borders on a Sunday night. To me, it seemed like hours from London. It was certainly a strange journey. As the hours advanced, I somehow felt that time was moving in the opposite direction: from present to past, from history to prehistory. And I felt that we were not just driving toward the end of the country, where this island dips its foot into the Atlantic. I felt as though we were driving into the center of things. But if I had been asked, I could not have said what a single one of those things was.

  Of course, being the profound cynic that I then professed to be, I attributed these odd sensations to the carrot and turnip soup that Justine and I had wolfed down in a pub along the way. We got on well. And by the time we had arrived, Justine had persuaded me to stay a whole week before returning to London for the retrial. The case was not scheduled to start until the Monday of the following week. For the first time, we could be together.

  The time flew past. The sex was fantastic.

  Justine and I contrived to spend the best part of two days in bed. We walked around the cottage with only the duvet draped around us. We built log fires and took the phone off the hook. However, Justine did not always manage to come. I explained this by a defect in my technique from too much kneeling in confession and also by the fact that we were in Stonebury. As a result, I tried to postpone my orgasm as long as possible using the well-worn stratagem of thinking alternatively of the greatest goals of Peter Osgood and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  From the windows of the cottage you could just see a part of the main house. It was separated from the somewhat modest cottage grounds by a high fence. There was no entrance that could be seen. Once or twice, in a post-coital glow, I tried to ask Justine about it. But she either pretended to be asleep, massaged my belly button into oblivion or rolled over and sat astride me and then I forgot about everything else.

  Finally, on the third day, we rose from the sheets. I had agreed to join the local hunt. Although I hadn’t ridden for years, I had once been reasonably proficient, motivated largely by an abject fear of falling off, and a desire not to land in the horseshit.

  Justine’s cottage lay three miles outside Stonebury so we left for the hunt early in the morning. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the ravenous yelping of unfed dogs. The smell of warm leather surrounded me and I could faintly detect Justine’s perfume.

  “It’s just not fair,” she said, continuing to trot slightly ahead of me.

  “What isn’t?”

  “What people think of hunting. Simply unfair.”

  “Yes,” I said. “How can they think it’s just the idle rich hunting defenseless animals with a pack of bloodthirsty hounds? What an outrage.”

  At the right moment, the barking grew louder. “You peasant,” she said.

  Since I had been in Stonebury, I had thought of nothing else but Justine. When I awoke in the morning, she was the first thing I saw, all day I was with her and at night I could feel her warmth. It was as though nothing else in Stonebury existed except—and this was the interesting thing—except for those unpredictable hours of sleep.

  I still had the dreams and they must have kept Justine awake most of the night, for each day she was increasingly tired, although she never blamed me. To me, it had almost become a sickness. For it was something I l
onged for. I desired to be there, near to the stones, and I wished to see. Yet I was repulsed by the images that flashed across my imagination.

  Perhaps Kingsley was correct: nothing was forbidden, everything was there, just waiting. Our minds, he had said, were like sensitive receivers. And here I was in Stonebury. In some ways I had tuned into the end of the dial. And beside me was Justine.

  The clatter of our horses’ hooves bounced down the country lane. We were not far from the arranged meeting place.

  “I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” said Justine. “I mean, it’s our land.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But it’s not your fox. I think that might be the point.”

  “You don’t have to do this, Tom.”

  “I want to… I think.” What I really wanted was to be near Justine and I knew I would have to try to understand her world.

  Justine had the full kit: cream-colored breeches, scarlet coat, long leather boots. It was oddly provocative, like a taste of the other side. She had lent me her father’s old tweed jacket, a Ratcatcher she had called it. Her horse was speckled white and had a shaggy mane; sitting on her mount, floating above the frozen winter ground, Justine was completely at home, at ease, in a way she never could have been in London.

  “You know,” she said, “it’s not so bad down here.”

  “Who said it was?”

  “You’re London, Tom. Always will be. Town. There are some things you’ll never understand about the country. You think it’s all cattle rustling and incest down here.” She looked at me and she had a gleam in her eye. “Well, mainly it is. Couple more fences and we’re there.”

  The howling of the dogs became more desperate, and a frightening edge appeared in their barking. But my horse did not flinch. And nor, of course, did Justine.

  When we arrived at the Meet, the field of hunters was everything I expected and worse. Overweight landowners and retired colonels cavorted on uncomplaining horses. They greedily drank their stirrup-cups while below them, standing around their horses like Nubian slaves, were the hunt followers, impoverished local lads, heads bowed, hanging around for orders.

  Justine’s voice rose above the babble of appalling accents. “Good morning, Master,” she said.

  Then a familiar voice. “Ah, Fawley. Glad to see you’re game for some real sport.”

  I recognized the revolting mustache.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” said Justine. “Aubrey is Master of the Hunt.”

  Davenport’s horse was monumentally large, the type you would imagine hauling a brewer’s dray. It waddled toward me as Davenport pointed to the sea of dogs. “Look at my beauties.”

  “If you’re in at the kill, Aubrey can blood you,” Justine told me.

  “Do you actually have to kill it?” I asked. “I mean, can’t you just chase it a bit and then bugger off home for some South African sherry?”

  “We’ve got to keep the hounds in blood,” said Davenport. “Charley won’t mind. Good sport is Charley.”

  “Charley?”

  “The fox,” explained Justine. I said, “What if it escapes?”

  “Gone to ground?” Davenport kicked his nag a couple of times but it refused to move. “Well, he is a wise old bird is Charley. But there’s no chance of that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Stoppers sorted the earths first light.”

  “Can’t you speak English, Davenport?”

  Justine again intervened. “The men blocked the fox-holes with thorns. The fox hasn’t got a prayer.”

  “Call this sport?” I said, hanging off the saddle. “Well, it’s not. It’s murder.”

  “Grow up, Tom.” Justine was clearly annoyed.

  “At least give it an even chance to escape. It’s so unfair.”

  “So’s life, Fawley.” Davenport wrestled his beast around. “Better dash. See you at the death.”

  Suddenly the hounds were off across the meadows and there was undiluted excitement. Someone had picked up a scent.

  We moved past a copse of barren trees which Justine told me they called Nethersmere Woods. There were wilting branches and roots that reached out of the ground like dead men’s hands. Then I heard a cacophony of noise: the beating of drums, the blowing of whistles, and many sirens.

  I was behind Justine and could see nothing when she cried out.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Anti’s.”

  “What?”

  “Hunt sabs.”

  The noise was like a Schoenberg symphony played at the wrong speed, not that I could usually tell the difference. Then there was a chorus of virulent abuse.

  “Bastards… murderers… rich scum.”

  There were forty or fifty saboteurs, wearing the same green wax jackets the huntsmen would sport in town. Their eyes were full of hatred. One of them, a lanky boy with two pony-tails and a CND badge, tried to pull me off.

  “Use your whip,” shouted Justine.

  “Are you mad?” I replied. I managed to free my leg from his grasp, but lost a stirrup.

  Ahead of me was a girl. She had a stereo, like a ghetto-blaster, churning out a tape of the hounds in full cry.

  “What do I do?” I called to Justine who was now riding beside me.

  “Just keep going.”

  Our horses got closer and closer to the girl, but she did not move. I pulled the reins to the left, tugged them to the right, but the wretched horse headed straight for the girl.

  “Get out of the way,” 1 shouted.

  “Killers,” she replied.

  Our horses were virtually on top of her.

  “For God’s sake,” I shouted.

  She turned up her stereo. “Murderers.”

  “Get out—”

  The sound of the baying hounds filled every crevice of my head. The horse bolted to the right and into the woods, where clawlike branches tore through my jacket and pulled at my hair. Further and further the horse charged, leaving the field way behind.

  I had lost Justine and what was more, I thought I recognized the girl.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THERE WERE NO LEAVES ON THE BRANCHES, BUT THE light had nevertheless disappeared, losing its way somewhere up amongst the treetops. Behind me, wafting on the still air, was the sound of the field: the dogs, the horses, no longer menacing, but constantly fading as I went deeper into the wood.

  The glancing shadows of the trees caused me to think back over the previous weeks, much in the way that a hypnotist’s watch conjures up the memory. There I was in Stonebury, where it all had happened, where Molly Summers had been killed. I remembered my conversation with Kingsley in the prison and how he talked quitely about molestation. Why did he go so far with Molly Summers? Was physical gratification, for once, not enough? Did he need something more? Something better? Did he need some blood?

  Soon I came to a clearing in the wood where the tree line curved down toward a brook. As I emerged from the shade the air grew warmer. The frost began to melt and sparkled in the rough pasture. This was a place of calm.

  The horse, however, was on edge.

  Near to the fence that ran from the trees to the water was a stirring, a noise and a movement, almost too delicate to discern with the eye, but there nonetheless. The horse refused to advance, and scuffed a front leg in the long grass. Just then my attention was drawn to the edge of the woods a furlong away.

  “That you, Fawley?” shouted Davenport.

  I did not answer.

  “You’re going the wrong way, man,” he said. “We lost the damn thing. Doubled back on its tracks.”

  My horse started to inch its way toward the place.

  “Hurry up, Fawley. We haven’t got all day.”

  “With you in a second,” I said.

  “You’re going the wrong way, man.”

  Then I saw it. Sitting between the fence and the stream, where the long grass actually smelt green, looking directly at me, tongue panting, was the fox. I wondered whether the disappearin
g witness was a little like that animal. Perhaps she had not really gone to ground? Perhaps she was waiting somewhere, waiting to be found?

  Davenport drew closer. He was only a hundred yards away. “Ground too cold to hold a scent. We’ll never find it,” he said.

  The animal looked at me with vacant yellow eyes. What was I to do? Davenport was very near.

  I said, “I think I’ve seen it, Aubrey.”

  He let out some kind of obnoxious hurrah.

  “Where is it, man?”

  “There,” I said, pointing behind him back into Nethersmere Woods. “Deep in there. You better hurry.”

  Davenport heaved his horse about and the dogs rushed off toward the trees with their tails pointing in the air. Barking filled the air with saliva and hunger, and the fox began to move—almost casually—through the fence. The wiring was razor-sharp, and its hide was ripped. But it did not make a sound. I turned my horse away from the fox and joined Davenport by some bushes.

  “Come on, Aubrey,” I said. “I’ll show you where Charley’s hiding.”

  “Wise old bird is Charley,” he replied.

  Davenport said something else, but I did not hear. I kept wondering whether Molly Summers had screamed, and if she did, why no one had heard. Some nights I imagined the sound, and how it would feel to scream like that, and I would always wake up, never sure whether the screams were the girl’s or mine.

  As we trotted back toward the start, Davenport bored me with his hunting stories much as he used to bore unsuspecting young women in the Old Bailey Mess with his overblown tales of forensic triumph. It was, however, pleasant enough to pass through the gentle Devon hills for twenty minutes.

  By the end of the hunt, the numbers were much depleted. Boys tried to shove reluctant horses into boxes. Everyone was set on a prompt departure before the saboteurs regrouped.

  Justine rushed toward me. “Are you all right, Tom?”

  “Doddle,” I said. “Not so sure about Trigger.” I pointed to the horse who seemed to be flagging. “She looked after me.”

  “It’s a he, didn’t you notice the—”