False Witness (24 page)

H
AVING FINISHED EARLY, WE WENT TO THE PRE-THE
ater sitting at II Gallo Nero. Justine wanted to celebrate my salvation from what to her was the unimaginable horror of having
to earn an honest crust without a tatty pile of horsehair on one’s head. And whilst I could not help but be touched by Justine’s
gaiety, I sat there among the piles of lightly oiled
fettucine
realizing it was merely a stay of execution. There was little more than a week until the retrial. And that was to be presided
over by Hilary Hardcastle.

My car was parked in a side street off Long Acre. In general, I frowned upon drink-driving. But that night the old boundaries
began to disappear. I felt a strange sense of release, a certain light-headedness, in the way your head spins when you give
blood. It was as if I had been mysteriously transported to the margin of things. I saw myself and I was on the outside, like
someone half watching a down-market soap opera, when you want to know what happens next—but not very much.

We walked out of the restaurant, past an abandoned cinema with tattered posters of Visconti’s
Ossessione
, past old bookshops and modern boutiques. When Justine thrust me against a wall.

“Let’s fool around,” she said.

“What, here?”

“Why not?”

I objected to kissing in public. I could not imagine that the unedifying spectacle of my tongue wriggling in another person’s
throat could be of the slightest interest to the man on the Clapham omnibus. However, that night I kissed Justine.

We walked up toward Covent Garden passing droves of painted young people in leather and chains. In the distance was a high-pitched
wailing.

“Will you come with me?” asked Justine.

“Where?”

“You know.”

And, of course, I did. “Penny has sort of thrown down the gauntlet,” I said.

“So you told her?”

I was far too inebriated to articulate the niceties, if that is the word, of our impending breakup. So, as the wailing grew
louder, I merely said, “Something like that. She said she would leave me. If I… you know, with you.”

Justine looked at me desperately. “It’s your call, Tom. There’s still over a week till the retrial.”

“Look, don’t tempt me,” I said.

“Why not? That’s what I’m here for.”

“I’d love to get away from London and the Bar and… well, everything—”

“You don’t need to explain,” she said. “I understand. These things happen. Penny’s a big girl.”

“But Ginny isn’t,” I said. I had hoped that the last vestiges of my former loyalties would have vanished with my disappearing
sobriety. But it was not as easy as that. I suppose it was something that I had always known. “There was a time, Justine,
when I knew what I wanted. But nothing seems that simple anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Well, we hear so many lies in our job. I sometimes wonder if they’re… well, sort of contagious. I know this sounds stupid,
but I sometimes wonder whether I’ll ever hear the truth again.”

Justine burst out laughing as we neared the side street. “Just relax, Tom,” she said. “Don’t take everything
so
seriously.”

“All right then,” I replied. “Are you telling me that you know what you want?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what?”

“You want me to tell you now?”

“Right now, Justine.”

“Well, right now, Mr. Fawley,” she whispered, all the time drawing me closer, “right now I—”

“Yes?”

“I want to fuck your brains out.”

We finally entered the side street. There was complete chaos. Lights were flashing on my car, the side window was smashed,
the alarm was screaming. Justine and I ran to the passenger door, but the radio had not been stolen and nothing was missing.

“Someone must have caught him in the act,” she said.

In the alcoholic haze that had descended around me, it all seemed rather amusing. When Justine suggested we should find a
policeman, I found the prospect irresistibly funny and couldn’t stop laughing.

Suddenly a car came round the corner and accelerated toward us. It was a Sierra and in the half-light was just a blur. I noticed
a bag of powder on the front seat of my car. It was wrapped in see-through cellophane and the granular contents were clearly
visible.

“Don’t touch it,” shouted Justine.

The Sierra got closer. It was fifty yards away and started to brake loudly. I reached, or rather fumbled, toward the package,
the contents of which were rather like a couple of pounds of refined brown sugar.

“Leave it, Tom,” Justine again shouted.

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.

STONEBURY

T
HE
M
OLLY
S
UMMERS 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.”