‘Look,’ she had said during one of their little chats, ‘it’s a court of evidence, not truth. We have to forget about the truth, for truth’s sake. The truth is out of reach. And we shouldn’t pretend when we stand up in court that the truth is what we care about. We don’t. We care about what our client says is the truth. I can live with that. It’s the only way to take innocence seriously when all the evidence points the other way. The truth? What’s that? It’s something the jury decided after I sat down.’
No discomfort there, thought Anselm, blowing a perfect ring. At the time, ruminating over a Jaffa cake, Anselm had baited her confidence. ‘But what if someone got off because the trial took a wrong turn and no one noticed?’
‘It can’t happen,’ she said, glancing at her watch. She was due back in court. ‘All the jury hears are competing versions of the relevant facts. Have you eaten the last one?’
‘Sorry.’
What quiet voice had seized her conscience? thought Anselm, picking an apple. And what could it seize upon? Every barrister accepted that justice was determined by winning and losing. If you lost, you swallowed disappointment; if you won, you got a pat on the back. As Elizabeth had said, ‘what really happened’ was whatever the jury decided. And if they convicted an innocent man? Unless you could fault the process or find new evidence, he’d languish in jail. And if a guilty man was freed? No one could bring him back to court. He could chant ‘Nemo debet bis vexari’ (or, to be patristic, ‘God doesn’t judge the same offence twice’). Either way the truth had gone like the dove off the ark.
Anselm was certain that Elizabeth’s crisis had lain in this system, devised over a thousand years to deal with the corollaries of frailty and wickedness. How that was connected with tidying up her life, he hadn’t the faintest idea. Having finished his cigarette, he turned his attention to the apple. Organic principles, incompetently followed, meant that most of Larkwood’s fruit was technically blemished. He examined a wormhole, feeling a small hankering for the old struggle in the corridors of the Bailey.
In one of those glancing thoughts, seemingly irrelevant, Anselm recalled that he’d only ever done one case with Elizabeth. In many respects it had been an allegory for the law’s uneasy accord with the truth. Forensically, it hadn’t been anything special. But the client had been awful … Riley. That was the name. She’d called him ‘a ruined instrument’. Gradually a presence materialised in Anselm’s memory: a shaved head, small ears and sunken wounded eyes.
6
Nick went to the Green Room and rang BJM Securities. While waiting, he studied an open trial brief on the desk. A big man had been murdered in Bristol. ‘The cranial vault comprises eight bones that surround and protect the brain.’ Autopsy photographs reduced him to a one-inch bundle of close-ups.
A Mrs Tippins answered the phone. Nick explained that his mother had passed away and that he wished to collect what had been stored at the premises. She, in turn, described which documents would be required for access to the deposit box.
‘Without the probate certificate,’ she said, ‘you can only look.’
‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘Where are you?’
‘Sudbury.’ She gave the Suffolk address. After a pause, she said, ‘At first I thought you were the monk.’
‘A monk?’
‘Yes. He’s the other keyholder.’
Nick made another call to check train times and then he wrote a note for his father, saying he’d be back late. On rising he looked at the red and blue photographs. His mother had often quizzed him on the building regulations of the body — how it was put together, what would happen if you did this or that to an organ, a tissue. It was an incredibly fragile structure, despite the bones; a staggering, miraculous unity.
‘The design is perfect,’ he’d once said.
‘Not quite.’ She’d sounded disappointed.
To Elizabeth, in this chair, the body had been an exhibit, something numbered and sewn up with stitches. Her wonder had been reserved for worms that glowed.
Nick waited in a small room without windows. The only furnishings were a table and one chair. The door opened, and Mrs Tippins entered, pushing a large aluminium box on wheels. She said, ‘People bring things here when their houses are full up.
Her skirt seemed to have been made from abandoned hotel tablecloths and the blouse from net curtains. ‘It’s hard to get rid of things, isn’t it? Stay as long as you like. Here’s a list of attendances.’ He glanced at the single entry, made about three weeks earlier.
Left alone, Nick opened the box. Inside was a single item: a battered red case — a dainty valise for a weekend trip. A seam was split and the gold had flaked from the clasp. He put the case on the table and lifted the lid. Inside it was a ring binder, an envelope and a newspaper cutting.
Nick began with the first. It was wrapped in the characteristic red tape that he’d seen for years on his mother’s desk. Typed in the centre was the case name: Regina v Riley The left-hand corner bore an endorsement:
Coram: HHJ Venning
Prosecution: Pagett
Defence: Glendinning QC
Junior: Duffy
Not Guilty on all counts.
‘Duffy’ had come to his attention a few moments ago from Mrs Tippins. It was the surname of the monk who’d been entrusted with the second key Nick had met him, long ago. ‘Larkwood Priory isn’t that far off, but he’s never been here. I’ve heard that once you’re in, you can’t get out.’ She’d grimaced like a seasoned potholer. Nick considered the name of the instructing solicitor at the bottom of the page. He’d met him at St John’s Wood, chomping nuts and thinking twice: Frank Wyecliffe Esq.
Nick untied the tape and opened the binder. The front page was entitled ‘Instructions to Counsel’ and contained a single paragraph:
Mr Riley maintains that the witnesses, his former tenants, have fabricated a case against him following their eviction for rent arrears. No doubt counsel will be able to advise the client upon the complexion of the evidence.
Nick turned the page and skimmed the typed witness statements. Three young women had said Riley was a pimp. Scattered here and there was another name: the Pieman. The last deposition was that of David George Bradshaw, the manager of a homeless people’s night shelter to whom, it seemed, the girls had turned for help. The final page was the defendant’s police interview. There was only one reply, ‘I’m clean. ‘Something in Nick’s concentration failed and he tied up the brief. It was difficult this: doing what she had done, in the same way.
He picked up the cutting. It was taken from a south London daily newspaper. The paper was dirty and the ink smudged. A coroner’s court had returned a verdict of accidental death regarding John Bradshaw, seventeen, whose body had been recovered from the Thames. The report quoted the anger and grief of his father, George — evidently the witness in the earlier trial, even though he went by his middle name. Nick cross-checked the date of the inquest with that of the triaclass="underline" an interval of five years had elapsed.
Nick turned to the envelope. It was addressed to both his mother and Anselm Duffy The letter inside was from Emily Bradshaw, the mother of John and the wife of George. It condemned Riley’s defenders and blamed them for the destruction of her family Again Nick checked the date, and then he quickly put everything back in the red case. After a moment’s calm he pencilled a chronology to make clear the sequence of events:
End of trial.
Death of J Bradshaw (as per cutting): 5 years after the trial.
Letter from Mrs Bradshaw: 8 years after trial.
Opening of account with BJM: 10 years after trial.
Nick wheeled the aluminium box back to Mrs Tippins. Her look of permanent curiosity prompted him to remark, ‘Just some old papers.’