False Witness Read online

  “Alibi,” I repeated. “Philip Templeman. Our alibi.”

  “But you can’t run alibi, Mr. Fawley.”

  “Some… some law against it?” Jamie was rapidly losing both his temper and his power of speech.

  Payne tutted to himself. He held his leather gloves in his left hand and stroked them as if he were holding a small kitten.

  As Payne hovered in front of me, I asked, “What’s wrong with alibi?” I could make out his face and little else now.

  “You got no witness,” he said. “Gone. Flown the nest. Scarpered.” Then he added in a melodic voice, “They seek him here, they seek him there, those bobbies seek Templeman everywhere.”

  He repeated this refrain twice as his voice slowly receded into the bar. Just before he vanished, he turned and said, “You see, no one can find your witness and we’ve suddenly found ours. Strange how things work out. See you in court, sir.”

  Jamie and I again sat in silence.

  I finally said, “I don’t want this case.”

  “What you want,” said Jamie, “is a swift nightcap. Set you up for tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  AS I FOUGHT THROUGH THE CROWDS AT BLACKFRIARS Station on the third day of the trial, I had a bitter taste, like burnt almonds, in my mouth. I hadn’t slept well that night. Nor had I expected to. I dreamt that I was falling and falling, but never reached the ground.

  Throughout the tube journey I had short stabs of pain behind my eyes. Lurking somewhere just below the surface was something I didn’t want to know.

  Once I arrived at the Old Bailey, I barged to the front of the queue patiently waiting to enter. A girl in a faded denim jacket protested. It was the young juror.

  “Get to the back,” shouted one of the security guards.

  “I’m counsel,” I said as arrogantly as I could.

  “’Fraid everyone’s got to be ticked off.” The guard wore his peaked cap at an irritating angle. “Guvnor’s orders.”

  “Listen,” I panted. “I’m late.”

  “More than me job’s worth.”

  “Judge Manly’s waiting and—”

  “Orders is…” He paused and looked at me, digested my words and blushed suddenly. “You had better go through, sir.”

  I didn’t bother to robe but dashed straight to Court 8, slipping on the newly polished stone steps. What excuse would I use? I pushed past a solicitor’s clerk reading a copy of Viz. Suicide at South Kensington. Oh, M’Lord, you wouldn’t believe the chaos. I turned the corner past the lifts and was astonished to see a quiet crowd milling outside Court 8. Davenport had his grubby hands on Justine’s shoulders, and she didn’t seem to mind.

  Emma rushed over to me as I put down my briefcase. I said, “You wouldn’t believe the mess at South Ken. Some idiot only goes and jumps under the—”

  “Shut up, Tom.” There was sadness in her voice.

  “Was Payne lying then?” I asked. “Have they not found the second girl?”

  It didn’t seem as if Emma was listening. The shorthand writer staggered out of court supported by Norman who was buckling under the strain. He had his newspaper tucked under his armpit and his much-chewed biro tucked behind his ear. He hadn’t started the crossword—something was seriously wrong.

  “What’s wrong, Emma?” I asked again.

  She did not reply.

  “What is it, Emma? No witness?”

  Her bottom lip quivered slightly. “No judge,” she said. “No judge.”

  Hilary Hardcastle wore her familiar judicial frown in Court 4 as she muttered something to Leonard. Years before, Leonard had come south at the same time as Hardcastle when she descended from the legal wastelands north of Stockport to dispense justice to us soft southerners. Leonard said that Hardcastle’s greatest regret was that she was elevated to the Bench after the abolition of the death penalty. Naturally, Leonard approved.

  “Has the jury been brought in and discharged?” asked Hardcastle. That was the usual procedure after the death of the trial judge.

  “Yes, M’Lady,” said Davenport. “Mr. Justice Gritt did that when Mr. Fawley finally arrived.”

  “Oh, none of this ‘M’Lady’ palaver, Mr. Davenport.” Hilary Hardcastle prided herself on being the salt of the earth, the people’s judge, a grammar school in Blackburn and Manchester University, straight-talking, full of bluff northern common sense. “No,” she said, making her magnanimous concession to the march of democracy, “just call me ‘Your Honor’—that will do.”

  “Indeed.” Davenport bowed obsequiously.

  “So what remains?” she asked.

  I got to my feet. It was now approaching lunchtime and the trial was in tatters. “There still remains the question of bail, Your Honor.”

  Hardcastle fixed me with her reptilian eyes. If Hieronymous Bosch had turned his talents to gargoyles, Hilary Hardcastle would have been one of his most treasured creations.

  “I wasn’t addressing you,” she lashed. “What about the question of bail, Mr. Davenport? The Crown objects… I assume?”

  Hardcastle’s court was in that ancient part of the Old Bailey. The courtroom was cramped and uncomfortable, full of dark wood and unnerving memories. It was the set you saw in every Agatha Christie court scene; at any moment you expected Charles Laughton to lurch across the room.

  “Mr. Davenport?” repeated Hardcastle. “Where I come from, it is a common courtesy when people are addressing you to—”

  “I suppose things have—altered somewhat,” he said. “And… taking into account the recent developments—”

  “Oh, for goodness sake. Do you oppose bail or not?”

  “Possibly,” said Davenport who was all at sea without Justine to prompt him. She was still outside.

  The judge huffed mightily and moved her wig toward the space where her eyebrows should have been. “What do you say, Mr. Fawley?” She always pronounced my name, Folly. I never really decided whether it was deliberate or not.

  “In my submission, the defendant should be admitted to bail pending the retrial.”

  “And when is the retrial to be?”

  “In two weeks,” I said. “Or so the list office says.”

  Hilary was unimpressed. “Hasn’t Kingsley been convicted of a number of sexual offenses?”

  “He pleaded guilty,” I said.

  “Perpetrated on young girls?”

  “He’s spent a year in custody.”

  “And he still faces murder?”

  “The evidence is weak.”

  “And he’s confessed?”

  “He is presumed innocent, Your Honor.” I tried once more. If Kingsley was granted bail, he might have absconded before the retrial and I would be free of the case. “This prosecution is very dubious.”

  “So is your submission, Mr. Folly.” Hardcastle’s tongue was her sword and she ensured it did not rust. She lacked the art of conversation but, sadly, not the power of speech.

  “My client is a man of good character,” I said.

  “Previous good character,” she snapped back. Her eyes flared, the lids palpitated.

  I was angry at myself for giving her such an easy opportunity to score.

  “Bail is refused,” she said.

  “But I haven’t finished—”

  “Yes, you have,” she said with her wig overhanging her face like a jagged rock.

  I braced myself for a final assault. “One witness disappeared yesterday—”

  “Sit down, Mr. Folly.”

  “The other has lost her—”

  “You have been warned.”

  “The forensics are inconclusive.”

  “Bail is refused,” she said. There was now little forehead between her wig and her eyes.

  Emma got up beside me. “Your Honor, we are all a little upset.”

  “I’m sure we all admired Mr. Justice Manly,” the judge said. But Leonard once told me over a pint of northern bitter that Hardcastle resented a black man, such as Ignatius Manly, being elevated t
o the High Court Bench ahead of her. His death would do nothing but advance her ambitions. “Yes, Miss Sharpe, we all admired Judge Manly,” she continued. “But common decency does not fly out of the window at times such as these.”

  “No, Your Honor,” said Emma, trying to elbow me into my seat.

  “Thank you, Miss Sharpe.” Hardcastle blinked several times. Her wispy eyelashes were almost invisible. “Bail is refused.”

  From the corner of my eye, I could see Justine talking to Inspector Payne by the back door. “I wish to be heard,” I said.

  “But I do not wish to listen.” Hardcastle enjoyed that.

  “This is outrageous,” I said, waving one of Emma’s pens melodramatically.

  “Not another word from you, Mr. Folly.”

  “It is disgraceful.”

  “Sit down.”

  “I haven’t had the opportunity to—”

  “This is your last warning.”

  “I have a right—”

  “You’ll have the right to be represented by counsel before the conduct committee, if you continue.”

  “But I—”

  “And stop pointing that pen at me.”

  “But you,” I said, aiming the nib somewhere between her dilating pupils, “but you haven’t had the courtesy to listen to all my arguments.”

  Hardcastle raised her nose and peered down at me coldly. “You will be reported,” she said.

  “I’ve been in far higher courts than this and my conduct has never been criticized,” I replied.

  “Perhaps you weren’t impertinent there,” Hardcastle said.

  “Perhaps I had no need to be.”

  Justine had by then come back into court with Payne. She conferred with Davenport, her eyes red and puffy. He stumbled to his feet holding something that was obscured by his gown.

  “Your Honor,” he said, “this was found in the defendant’s cell while he was up here in court.” Davenport passed me a scrunched-up piece of paper with uneven, intense handwriting upon it. He said, “The words exactly… duplicate matters that the unfortunate girl was cross-examined upon. Something about the past being a river of many streams.”

  “The past being what?” Hardcastle did not follow.

  But I knew it was the end. Kingsley must have put the typed version of the note in my papers when I had visited him in the cells on the first day.

  Davenport continued. “And this document caused the witness to, as Mr. Fawley put it, to lose her…” His voice trailed off but he had said enough.

  Hardcastle licked her colorless lips with a grainy red tongue. “Bail is refused.”

  I sat down wearily and thought of how the sun shone so gently on the mountains in Ignatius Manly’s painting.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THAT EVENING, FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES GATHERED in the old chambers of Ignatius Manly. Most of the Old Bailey judges were there. Hilary Hardcastle was conspicuously absent.

  Swarms of dark-suited barristers stood around the reception and administrative areas on the ground floor. They told their favorite Ignatius Manly stories, each vying with the other to claim the most humiliating put-down suffered at the hands of the judge.

  I stood at the back, trying to recall a few lines from Tennyson. Finally, I remembered them: “For my purpose holds, to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars until I die.”

  I could not remember the rest of the poem. For in my mind, I saw Mr. Justice Manly sitting in one of the gaily painted fishing boats from his painting. And there was Ignatius, tacking serenely toward his Caribbean isle. Then I realized: no one had explained how the “accident”—as they called it—had really occurred. It was said that he was found at the bottom of the stairs. But how did he get there?

  To me it had sounded a little too much like suicide to let the matter rest. But no one would talk, especially not to me. The problem was that judges never died, they merely passed away to the great Appeal Court in the sky. Plaques were put up, scholarships were founded, but no one would ever discuss what really happened. And to suggest suicide? Just the mention of the “s” word would be sufficient to stamp an indelible blight against your name in some dank cavern within the bowels of the Lord Chancellor’s Department.

  The Liebfraumilch that was served was much the same as it was all those years ago at the party when Manly took silk. But I could barely drink it. I had become a snob.

  I stood alone, thinking a little and sulking a lot. I tried to take in the scene. A set of barristers’ chambers in the Temple. That miracle of legal London. A dozen rooms, two dozen egos, and the constant cry of, When will I get paid for that buggery in Luton? The rooms were full of old briefs, pink ribbon and disintegrating wigs that smelt like badgers. Was this what I had worked for? Was this what I had aspired to? Suddenly, Manly’s Caribbean isle seemed immensely attractive.

  After a couple of embarrassing hours, Emma sidled up to me with a bottle of wine. “Where’s your cup, Tom?”

  “Lost my thirst,” I said.

  “Come on. One for the road and I’ll drive you home.”

  “You know, Emma, I think I’ve had it with this game.”

  “You’re just a bit squiffy,” she said, giving me her plastic cup. The wine was syrupy with warm pieces of cork bobbing in it.

  “No, really. I’m sick of it all. The lies, the deceit. The hypocrisy of it all.”

  “Don’t go all maudlin on me, you old goat.” She put down the suspiciously blue bottle. “You see, Tom. Some people choose to be barristers. And some people are chosen.” She held my forearm gingerly. Her eyes were clear and I knew she was right. “And you’ve been chosen.”

  “Don’t you ever want to do anything else?” I asked.

  We both noticed Hilary Hardcastle making a dramatic late entrance on a pair of dangerously high heels.

  “You may have to,” said Emma. “Unless you apologize to Hilary.”

  “She can screw herself.” This was something upon which I had no intention of compromising.

  Emma tried to change the subject. “We never tracked down Kingsley’s alibi, after all. I suppose we didn’t need him.”

  “We might for the retrial. Look, Emma. I can’t face talking about the case just now.”

  “Then what do you want to talk about?” she asked.

  “Where’s Justine?”

  “I think she went upstairs.”

  I gave the cup back to Emma and headed for the barrister’s rooms on the upper floors.

  Until my seventeenth year I was more interested in cricket and stamp collecting than in those strange creatures called girls. The reason was simple. I went to a Catholic boys’ school and was taught a very strange creed. I now know it was all rubbish. But what was a teenage boy with a bad attack of puberty and the Book of Revelations supposed to do?

  Mary, I was told, was a virgin. Mary Magdalene was a whore. Some women, it was implied, fell from the former state to the latter, leading unsuspecting boys into temptation as they went. God was white, male and had a son called Jesus who was only technically a Jew until he had the sense to become a Christian like the rest of us. Everybody—with the exception of the Pope and, possibly, Mother Teresa—sinned. But Catholics were the only people with sufficient guts to go to confession and admit it.

  Good things in life included incense, celibacy and, if this was impossible, the rhythm method of contraception. Bad things included missing Mass on Sundays, masturbation and the kind of smutty humor practiced by Benny Hill. For years, I tried to work out the link between these last three items.

  Despite this somewhat unpromising start, something finally clicked. It was in my final year before university. I took a walk to the public library. It was a ramshackle building full of pensioners and tramps, and always smelt of Vapo-rub. When I thought that no one was looking, I took out a book. It was called The Interpretation of Dreams.

  I had not the slightest interest in the subject, but secreted at the end of the leather volume with the crumbling spin
e was On Sexuality by Sigmund Freud. I read it again and again. Soon there was nothing I did not know about foot fetishes, castration complexes and a rather confused Greek chap called Oedipus.

  In the school lunch-hours, I held surgeries in the bicycle sheds and diagnosed my friends as perverts and freaks. Some of these youthful predictions have been subsequently borne out by history. Penny would have been amused if she was told all of this. She always claimed that I didn’t find her clitoris for more than a year.

  It was, then, with this background that I knocked on the impressive oak door of Justine’s second-floor room. My palms sweated and I mentally flicked through the pages of Freud’s book, trying to understand my intense feeling of guilt, trying to put out of my mind images of the Madonna, the Magdalene and Benny Hill.

  There was no reply from inside Justine’s room.

  I turned the handle. The door creaked as it opened. The room was in darkness. But sitting on the Regency desk by the French windows, silhouetted by the lights from Temple Hall, was a lonely figure carelessly swinging her feet. She looked so small and vulnerable, I barely dared to speak.

  “Is that you, Aubrey?” she said, still looking out of the window.

  “It’s Tom.”

  “Oh.” Justine seemed disappointed. “Well, thank you for coming.”

  Silently I stepped two paces across the deep pile carpet. “You all right?” By now I was almost at her back. Her blond hair seemed silver and her shoulders alight.

  “He was like a father to me,” she said.

  It was the old lie. She must have forgotten what she had told me all those years ago in that very room. The oak door creaked eerily again and closed itself.

  “Must get the clerks to oil it,” she continued.

  “I don’t know if this is the right time,” I said, “but what really happened to Ignatius? I heard some rubbish about him falling—”

  “Down the stairs?” Justine said.

  “Did you hear that, too? Come on, Justine. You must know what the truth really…”

  Justine put her head in her hands.

  Then I realized how tactless I had been. I said, “I am very—”