False Witness (14 page)

T
HAT 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 spine 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—”

“Shh.” Her eyes were moist but not particularly so. “I spent my first day in pupilage here at this desk. It was originally
my father’s. But when he… well, Ignatius took it over. I had a chair at the end.”

“You rarely talk about your father.”

“You rarely talk about your wife.”

“True.”

“You see, Tom, there are some things that are better left unsaid.”

I tried to think of something to change the subject. But my imagination had been flooded with cheap German hock. So I merely
asked Justine, “What sort of pupil master was Ignatius?”

She paused to consider. “Interested,” she said and looked up at me childishly, biting her bottom lip. “How’s things with Penny?”

“You mean the wife I rarely talk about?”

“How are things?” Justine insisted.

“The usual,” I said.

“That bad?”

“Worse.”

Through my white cotton court shirt I could feel that Justine’s hands were warm and damp, like mine, but her fingers were
accurate and did not fumble with the buttons.

“Tom, what’s
this
?“ she said teasingly. She sent shivers through my body. “Why, Mr. Fawley, you’ve grown a spine.”

“Justine, you know I’ve always—”

“I loved how you stood up to that old witch, Hardcastle.”

And now I could feel her fingers moving lower, more slowly.

“Do you think Kingsley did it?” she asked.

I was finding it difficult to concentrate. “Possibly,” I said.

Her feet were no longer swinging. “Has he told you what he did… to those other girls?”

By now she had undone my belt. “Yes,” I breathed.

“And do you think about it?”

I stared at the velvet curtains, which were slightly parted. I ached very badly. “Justine, please.”

“Do you dream about it, Tom?” Her fingers moved very slowly and rhythmically over me. “Do you?”

At that moment I couldn’t speak.

“And do you dream of me?” she asked.

I nodded and noticed she had taken off her shirt and wore nothing underneath. Her breasts were hardly developed and she did
look young. And I remembered again what Emma had said about Molly Summers and the Stonebury look.

As she moved her head closer to me, I felt her moist breath on my stomach, and again I imagined I could feel the texture of
a muslin gown, and then the moistness moved lower, and although I looked at the stained-glass windows of the Great Hall in
the Temple, I only saw the ancient circle at Stonebury, and when her lips finally arrived, I only saw one thing, and was sick
to my very soul, for I saw the face of the murdered girl, Molly Summers.

LONDON

T
HERE WERE TO BE TWO WEEKS UNTIL THE RETRIAL
. In the interim, Kingsley had been transferred to the hospital wing of HMP Battersea. This was supposedly due to an unspecified
illness which seemed, to me, to have no physical manifestations whatsoever. Yet I sometimes perceived a kind of sickness,
a disease that buzzed around his head like a swarm of wasps.

I followed a prison officer, his peaked cap low over his eyes, through the corridors with camp bed on both sides. They would
have been called wards, except for the newly painted bars on the windows.

The trial had been aborted two days earlier. Benjamin Goldman, Kingsley’s solicitor, had arranged a conference at Battersea.
The firm of Goldman, Goldman, and Goldman were Kingsley’s libel lawyers, instructed to scrutinize his populist works of sleaze
and sexuality. He kept his lawyers busy. So busy, obviously, that Benjamin Goldman had not managed to attend the prison.

The jailer and I pushed our way through thick sheets of translucent plastic which hung from the ceiling in place of doors.
The dark stone floors had been scrubbed with disinfectant but there was a lingering smell of the sick.

“Why, Mr. Fawley.” The voice to my right was mocking. “How nice of you to spare me your time.”

There was Kingsley. Alone. Wheeling himself through the prison completely unattended.

“Surprised?” he asked. “They allow me a free run of the place—more or less. Doctors say it’s good for me. ‘Get a little exercise,
Mr. Kingsley.’ They call me that, you know.” He began to yawn meekly. “But I do get so tired. No one really worries about
little old me,” said Kingsley. “I can hardly jump over the wall. Can I?”