False Witness Page 8

  I didn’t know whether to get to my feet. Emma decided the issue by holding me down firmly by the wrist.

  “It’s so cold,” said the girl, reaching for the shawl that was no longer there. She wrapped her frail arms desperately around her chest. “The grass was so wet. There was twigs and acorns. On the ground, like. But Molly says, I will if you will.” She looked at the judge and her eyes bulged with fear. “It was her idea. I swears it. She told me to do it.”

  I could contain myself no longer. “She told you to do what?” Emma still held my sleeve so my shoulders sloped ludicrously.

  “She told me to take—”

  “Yes?”

  “To take off our—well, you knows.”

  I thought I did, and at that moment I imagined that I could actually feel the strange texture of muslin. “Was it just the two of you?” I asked.

  “At first it was.”

  “And then?”

  “Then there was more.”

  And now I knew I must press on. “Who else was there?”

  “Jesus, Tom,” called up Emma.

  The girl looked at the public gallery.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “I’m a good girl. I never meant no harm to no one.” She wiped her nose violently. “They said they’d pay us if we did it.”

  “Who else was there?” I asked.

  “When I met Molly, we went to the woods and—”

  “Who else?”

  “They didn’t give us no money. They’s just took Molly.”

  The strip light above her flickered and one bulb fizzled out.

  I said, “We must know—who else was there?” I blinked hard and wondered whether what I saw was a trick of the light.

  The noise the girl made started as a word and ended in the type of howl you hear when you want to wake up but cannot. “No… No-ooh,” she screamed again and again.

  There was now blood seeping from one of her nostrils.

  “Lies,” shouted Kingsley from the bowels of the court. “Lies, it’s all lies.”

  The girl was convulsing and that momentarily checked the sound. As Jenny Stone approached her, she lashed out again and again as though a bird of prey were swooping from the ceiling and tearing at her face.

  “No, Molly,” screamed the girl. “Don’t do it to me, Moll.”

  The lights were flickering more violently now.

  “Please, Molly. Leave me alone.” She tried to shield her face and then she imagined she was attacked from another direction.

  The faltering light in court was in perfect contrast to the steady darkness that emanated from the wretched girl.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MANLY SUMMONED US ALL TO HIS ROOM. IT WAS now approaching the end of the afternoon. When we finally settled down, there was an awkward silence. Emma sat next to me, Justine was behind Davenport, and the judge rocked back and forth in his red leather chair.

  “What news of the girl, Mr. Davenport?” he asked, rummaging around in his desk, trying not to seem overly concerned.

  The shorthand writer began to type away.

  Davenport replied, “It’s too early to say, Judge. The bleeding has stopped. The prognosis is good.”

  I gazed at the well-worn carpet which was deep scarlet and only reminded me of one thing. I waited to be blamed.

  “Please feel free to smoke, gentlemen,” said Manly. “That includes you, Miss Wright,” he said to Justine.

  Davenport vainly searched for a packet in his amorphous rolls of flab and accepted a suspiciously small cigar from Justine.

  “Ashtray?” Manly slid a foil dish across the desk in Davenport’s direction. “You’re ready to go ahead with the other girl, I suppose?”

  “Well, now you mention it, Judge—”

  “Problem?”

  “Not exactly what I would call a problem,” said Davenport.

  “Then what would you call it? She is willing to testify?”

  Davenport took a little time, scratched one of his chins and chose his words with care. “I have not been told any different.”

  “Good,” said Manly. “We’ll crack on then.”

  “I wonder if—” Davenport said. “You see, she seems to have… well, sort of disappeared.”

  Manly stopped rocking. “Well, you’ll just have to sort of find her.”

  Manly watched Davenport’s head wobble, and turned to the stenographer who was still trying to catch up. “Perhaps you’d like to leave us,” he said.

  Without an official record. I knew there would be some straight talking. It was by no means unusual for reluctant witnesses to remove themselves from court and go to ground for the duration of a trial. The real question was, why had it happened here? But before I could think it through, Manly had begun to speak. He had already started to slip into his drawl.

  “What sort of case have you got here, Aubrey? One witness disappears and little Miss Muffet starts talking in tongues?”

  “I admit, Judge, there have been some… problems. But we—”

  “Cut the bull, Aubrey. We’re in the bloody twilight zone.”

  Davenport stubbed out his cigarette, spreading cakes of ash all over the judge’s desktop. He blushed as he frantically tried to scoop it up.

  “Forget about that,” said Manly. “Tell me, where is your case?”

  Davenport’s left eye sneaked toward Justine. She whispered something to him which I could not hear.

  “We’ve still got the confession,” he said. “And then—”

  “It’s in breach of virtually every provision of the interview rules. No doubt Mr. Fawley specifically went to the library to arm himself with a wealth of authorities to demonstrate that. Is that right, Tom?”

  I peered at Manly and thought that perhaps my flight to the library was not in vain.

  “If,” continued Manly, “the defense applies to exclude the confession, I shall find such an argument hard to resist.”

  Davenport was always a little slow under pressure. “You’ll throw it out?”

  “No, Aubrey. I’ll toss off my wig and gown and do a tapdance routine on the Bench. Of course I’ll throw it out,” Manly said, rapping his knuckles on the desk.

  Justine prodded Davenport, her svelte fingers disappearing into his mounds of flesh.

  He said, “We’ve also got… er… the knife.”

  “No,” replied Manly, clearly irritable now, “you’ve got a knife. And it’s probably the wrong knife. I understand it’s got no forensic link to the defendant. Correct, Tom?”

  I kept gazing at Manly and tried to effect a smile.

  He said, “I want all you learned people here half an hour early tomorrow.”

  We dutifully agreed and began shuffling out of the door. Manly again began to rock in his chair.

  “Oh, Aubrey,” he said in a sing-song voice, “no witness, no case.”

  “I’m sorry, Judge?”

  “Now don’t go dumb on me, Aubrey.” Ignatius Manly gazed longingly at the fishing boats in the painting above his head. And I thought I noticed a certain sadness in his eyes, as though that was the place he really longed to be. But he continued, “No witness, no case. Savvy?”

  Probably for the first time in his obtuse legal career, Aubrey Davenport savvied.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THAT EVENING, I SAT ALONE IN A WINDOW SEAT IN Johnson’s near to the quote of the old doctor. I thought about the girl who had disappeared but did not understand. What could she be afraid of? I stared out of the window and into the darkness and imagined I heard a wailing in the distance. Then with flashing lights an ambulance swept past.

  The voice that intruded upon these thoughts was like a clenched fist. “What you need is a dram of malt. And gimme none of that Irish muck.”

  Jamie Armstrong delighted in exaggerating his gentle Borders brogue when he was drunk. He used then to pretend that he was Glaswegian, but he could never do the accent. He raised his voice and moved very close to my face. Jamie had a habit of doing that, esp
ecially when he was inebriated. I could smell the whisky on his breath, which was sweet.

  “Listen, Jamie. I’ve got to go.”

  “You still got half a bottle.”

  “Like a glass?” I asked. It was a silly question. In his day, Jamie was the best advocate I had seen. A natural. But it all went wrong. Too much whisky, too little work, and before any of us knew it, Jamie was an outcast. He was an object of ridicule, untouchable, unclean, screaming his head off in the legal wilderness outside the Temple like a lost prophet.

  “You know, you shouldn’t drink on your own, Tommie,” he said mockingly.

  After the Sarah Morrow suicide, I affected an interest in wines and started to go to tastings in the City. Usually I went alone. I would have gone with Justine, but by then she was ill. I never spat out the wine. I never knew how and, anyway, I didn’t want to learn. Soon I quite enjoyed drinking alone. I deceived myself into thinking that it showed character, proved my independence, and all the time I knew I needed it more and more.

  Jamie didn’t bother to get a clean glass from the bar. He picked up an abandoned champagne flute from the next table and poured the dregs onto the floor. After he had vaguely attempted to wipe off the lipstick around the rim, he helped himself to my white Burgundy.

  “Cheers,” I said.

  “Up yours.” He didn’t even bother to look at me. He gulped down the wine, wincing all the while, coughing once and said, “Right. Now for some real booze.”

  “I can’t,” I told him. “I was late for Manly’s court this morning. So I can’t get drunk again.”

  “You’re already drunk, Tommie. Pass the bottle.” He again wolfed down the wine in one mouthful. “You’ve forgotten Armstrong’s First Law,” he said.

  In fact, I hadn’t forgotten it. Every alcohol-induced piece of philosophizing that emerged from Jamie’s lips became Armstrong’s First Law. There were hundreds of them.

  “Remind me,” I said.

  “To cross-examine is to examine crossly.”

  “Crossly?”

  “With a hangover.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Makes you aggressive. Short. To the point. And you can’t have dinky little butterflies when your head’s splitting apart.”

  That was the winning argument. Pretty soon, we stood in the entrance and tried to hail a cab.

  I looked up at the sign above the door. “What do you think old Samuel Johnson meant?” I asked Jamie, pointing at the quote.

  “It’s obvious,” he replied.

  “Not to me. I’ll find you an argument but not an understanding? What was he trying to—”

  “Look, some bugger gets in trouble. We defend him. But we don’t need to like the bugger.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “Get them out of the dock, Tommie. But don’t jump into bed with ‘em after.”

  I tried to hail another taxi to take us to Soho, but Jamie pulled my arm down. We both fell into a lamppost. Jamie was a big man, much taller than me. So when he grabbed me by my lapels, he practically lifted me off my feet.

  “I’ve got a wee place for you t’see,” he said as he led me back through the night toward the Old Bailey.

  We headed toward the river, which flowed silently and was little more than a dark cord through the center of the city. Then after we had walked through the back streets of Blackfriars, we entered a cobbled alley.

  “There she is,” said Jamie. “You beauty.” He smiled as if he was intensely proud of what he saw.

  There was a building with empty warehouses on each side. Above the door was a neon sign which didn’t work. Through the gloom I could just make out the words, II Paradiso.

  “Has the best malt whisky south of Berwick,” boasted Jamie.

  It was extremely odd. I had lived almost forty years in London, had worked for fifteen years in that small part of the city and I had never been down that road. In fact, it was somewhere between Back Bridge Street and Butter Lane, but you would never have known it existed.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Jamie looked up and down the alley suspiciously. “Beyond your wildest dreams,” he said.

  “Used to be a wine bar during the eighties,” said Jamie as he led me down some spiral steps made of cast iron. “Full of obnoxious yuppies. Served fancy Italian wines.”

  Probably designer-label Super-Tuscans, I thought. I had come to learn a little about wines.

  “Went bust, thank Christ,” he said.

  “Why are we here?” I asked.

  “Best malt—”

  “Yes, I know. South of Berwick.”

  “And I regard it as my sacred duty to complete your education, young Thomas.”

  “Bit late tonight, Jamie?” said the barman. He was red-faced, had a shock of ginger hair and rejoiced in the name of Donald. A couple of his front teeth were missing, which made it sound as if he were whistling the words without a tune.

  “Damn work,” said Jamie, at which the barman laughed.

  “Two fingers or three?” asked Donald. He held up a dark green bottle of malt whisky.

  “Better make it four,” said Jamie.

  “Bad day?” asked Donald.

  “Bloody awful,” Jamie replied.

  I had been standing rather foolishly at Jamie’s side, but when he had ordered the drinks, he led me to a table in the corner of the dark room.

  Jamie put his hand on my arm and I could see the dirt under his nails. He said, “This, my dear Thomas, is to the Bailey what Sodom was to Gomorrah.”

  I tried to gauge the atmosphere of the place. But there was none. It was a void: dark emptiness and incessant heat. The tables wobbled, the jukebox was broken, and the glasses were dirty.

  “Of course, this place doesn’t exist,” he said.

  “I need your help, Jamie.” I was worried about what to do if the second girl reappeared overnight.

  “Doesn’t exist officially.” Jamie ignored me and continued sipping his malt while staring straight ahead. “Got raided last year. Some hot-shot young broom in the City of London police. Donald just laughed when he saw the warrant—ex-Drugs Squad is Donald—and pointed downstairs. Flying Squad boys were furious. Ruined their poker game. Sent the City plods packing, shiny uniforms and all.”

  “Will you help me?” I asked.

  “On this dog’s-dinner of a murder you’re doing?”

  “I don’t know what to do if they drag the key witness to court. I’m a bit lost.”

  “First principles, Tommy.”

  “The alibi?”

  He made an enormous, disapproving grunt. “No, first principles,” he said and looked at me with profound disappointment and his eyes seemed to say, Did I teach you nothing? After another sip, he asked, “Who really knows if Kingsley did it?”

  “Local police?”

  “Yokels and sheep-shaggers. They know bugger all.”

  “The Crown Prosecution Service?”

  “Jesus,” he said, waiting for the whisky to bite. “You, Tommy. You’re the one. You tell me. Did he do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bull.”

  “I really don’t.”

  “But what do you think?”

  It was the first time I had really faced up to it. “I think… I think he did it.” When 1 glanced at Jamie, his eyes were red and his hands shook. “But I’m not sure.”

  “There you are,” he said. “There’s your doubt. The only man who knows—really knows—if the punter is guilty, is his lawyer. And you don’t know. Armstrong’s First Law: If you can’t be sure, how can the jury? Hammer away at the standard of proof.”

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  “It is easy. It’s the drinking that’s the hard part.”

  I paused. As Jamie cleaned his fingernails with the end of a beermat, I swallowed a large mouthful of whisky.

  “Look,” said Jamie. “The prosecution case is white and the defense case is black, all right? And the truth, Tommy, th
e truth—thank Christ—gets lost in the gray fog between. I know, it’s a crap system. But it’s the only one we’ve got.”

  After that neither of us much wanted to talk. I tried not to look at him as he guzzled his whisky. For I feared that I was becoming more like Jamie Armstrong. And I wondered whether in years to come I would bring a younger man to that place and would tell him how it was with a bottle of malt.

  Then I heard a clipped voice, bristling with irony. “Well, if it isn’t Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” it said.

  When I screwed up my eyes, I could just make out the features of Inspector Stanley Payne. He was the officer charged with putting Kingsley behind bars for life.

  “I never thought you had it in you, Mr. Fawley,” he said. I nodded in his direction, feeling terribly embarrassed, like a child caught red-handed pinching the custard creams. “Of course,” said Payne, “it’s nice to see you in here again, Mr. Armstrong.”

  Jamie looked up at him with contempt. “Why don’t you crawl off and catch some real criminals?”

  “Oh, but we’ve got one already, Mr. Armstrong. Haven’t you heard? Oh, yes. We got ourselves a real bad ‘un this time, haven’t we, Mr. Fawley?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Things look a little grim for poor old Kingsley,” Payne said, “now that we’ve found the second girl.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Payne carefully took off his long leather gloves, pulling at one finger at a time. He was a very pale man, viperous almost. The veins stuck out on his neck as he spoke and his skin had a strangely luminous quality.

  “What’s the defense then, Mr. Fawley? Wheelchair was punctured, was it?”

  “Don’t speak to him,” said Jamie.

  By then, however, I was lost somewhere between inebriation and unconsciousness. “Alibi,” I said.

  Payne was delighted. “Come, come, sir,” he said. “A man of your”—he looked me up and down and smiled when he saw the wet yellow stain on my shirt and the drunkenness in my eyes—“a man of your caliber can do better than that.”

  “I’m warning you, Payne,” said Jamie. I was frightened of Jamie when he was like that.