A Certain Justice (46 page)

At last she said, getting up: “We won’t hear the post from here. I think I’ll wait by the door.”

He didn’t reply. She went out into the narrow passage, which led to the side door, mug in hand. The minutes passed with infuriating slowness. But away from Dalgliesh she could at least indulge her impatience by a vigorous pacing and by constant glances at her watch. Nine o’clock. Hadn’t Father Presteign said that the post came at nine or shortly after? “Shortly after” could mean anything. They could be waiting for half an hour. Five past nine. Seven minutes past. And then it came. She heard no footsteps outside the heavy door, but the letter-box was thrust open and the post fell through with a thud: two large manila envelopes; a couple of bills; a large, bulky white envelope marked “Private” and addressed to Father Presteign, an educated hand, the hand of someone who wrote with confidence. She had seen envelopes of this size and make in Mrs. Carpenter’s flat. This was surely what they were waiting for. She took it back to Dalgliesh and said: “It’s come, sir.”

He took the letter and laid it on the table, then placed the rest of the post in a neat pile beside it.

“It looks like it, Kate.”

She tried to conceal her impatience. The letter, looking preternaturally white against the dark oak of the table, lay there like a portent.

“How long is it likely to take, sir, the Mass?”

“Low Mass with no sermon or homily, about half an hour.”

She glanced surreptitiously at her watch; just over fifteen minutes to go.

But it was a little before the half-hour that the door opened and Father Presteign and Joe reappeared. Joe disrobed, clambered into his multi-layered biking gear and became metamorphosed into a huge metallic insect.

He said: “I’ll not wait for coffee this morning, Father. Oh, I forgot now, Mary asked me to tell you that she’ll be doing the flowers for Our Lady on Sunday as Miss Pritchard is ill. You did hear that she’d had her op, Father?”

“Yes, I heard, Joe. I’ll be visiting her this afternoon if she’s well enough for visitors. Thank Mary for me, will you?”

They went out together, Joe still talking. The outer door closed with a clang. Kate had a sense that with Joe’s departure the normal world, the world she lived in and understood, had left with him, leaving her mentally isolated and physically ill at ease. The smell of incense had suddenly become oppressive, the vestry itself claustrophobic and oddly threatening. She had an irrational urge to pick up the letter and take it out into the fresh air to be read for what it was — a letter, important, perhaps even vital to their investigations, but still only a letter.

Father Presteign had returned. He took it up and said, “I’ll leave you for a moment, Adam,” and went out again into the church.

“You don’t think he’ll destroy it?” Kate wished the words unsaid as soon as they had left her mouth.

Dalgliesh replied: “No, he won’t destroy it. Whether he gives it to us will depend on what’s in it.”

They waited. It was a long wait. Kate thought: He must give it to us. It’s evidence. He can’t conceal evidence. There must be a way of compelling him to hand it over. You can’t bind a letter under the seal of the confessional. And why is he taking so long? It can’t take him over ten minutes to read a letter. What is he doing out there? Perhaps he’s in front of the altar praying to his God.

There came into her mind for no reason she could imagine snatches of another conversation she had had with Piers about his curious choice of academic subject. She wondered now at his patience under her questioning.

“What does this theology do for you? After all, you spent three years on it. Teach you how to live? Answer some of the questions?”

“What questions?”

“The big questions. The ones there’s no sense in asking. Why are we here? What happens when we die? Have we really free will? Does God exist?”

“No, it doesn’t answer questions. It’s like philosophy, it tells you what questions to ask.”

“I know what questions to ask. It’s the answers I’m after. And what about learning how to live? Isn’t that philosophy too? What’s yours?”

The reply had come easily but, she had thought, with honesty: “To get as much happiness as I can. Not to harm others. Not to whine. In that order.”

It was as reasonable a basis for living as any she’d heard. Effectively it was her own. You didn’t need to go to Oxford to learn that. But what did it say when confronted with a tortured and murdered child, or with that body lying like a butchered animal, the throat cut to the bone? Perhaps Father Presteign thought he had the answer. If so, could it really be found in this dim, incense-laden air? Well, you had to believe in your job whether you were a priest or a policeman. You had at some point to say: This is what I choose to believe. To this I shall give my loyalty. With her it had been the police service. Father Presteign had chosen a more esoteric commitment. It would be difficult for both of them if their loyalties were to conflict.

The door opened and Father Presteign came in. He was very pale. He held out the letter to Dalgliesh. He said: “She has authorized me to give it to you. I’ll leave you to read it in peace. You’ll need to take it, I assume.”

“Yes, we shall need to take it, Father. I will, of course, give you a receipt for it.”

Father Presteign had not replaced it in the envelope.

Dalgliesh said: “It’s longer than I expected. I suppose that’s why she didn’t catch the Monday post. It must have taken her at least a day to write.”

Father Presteign said: “She was an English teacher. Written words were as companionable to her as speech. And I think she needed to write it, to set down the truth, as much for her self as for us. I’ll be back before you go.”

He went again into the church and closed the door.

Dalgliesh spread the letter out on the table. Kate drew up a chair beside him and they read it together.

J
anet Carpenter had wasted no time on preliminaries. This was written out of a need which went beyond any promise to Father Presteign.

Dear Father,
It was almost a relief to me when Rosie killed herself. I know that’s a terrible thing to write; it was a terrible truth to have to confess. But I don’t think I could have gone on living with her grief and stayed sane. She needed me there, I couldn’t have left her. We were shackled together by grief — the grief for my son, the death of her daughter — but it was Emily’s death that killed her. And if she hadn’t hoarded those Distalgesic tablets, washed them down with that bottle of red wine, she would have died in the end, of grief, but more slowly. She moved about the house like the walking dead, dull-eyed, performing small household tasks as if she had been programmed to do them. Her occasional smile was like a twitch of the mouth. Her uncomplaining docile silence was almost more terrible than the outbursts of wild sobbing. When I tried to bring comfort by silently enclosing her in my arms, she didn’t resist or respond. There were no words. Neither of us had any words. Perhaps that was the trouble. I knew only that her heart was broken; and I know now that the phrase isn’t a sentimental exaggeration; everything that made her Rosie was broken. She lived every waking hour in the black horror of Emily’s murder. I’m only surprised that, so drained, so depersonalized, she found the strength and the will to end the torment and to write me that last coherent note.
I grieved with her and for her. Of course I did, I had loved Emily too. I wept for Emily, for the Emily I knew and for all dead, violated children. But for me, grief was subsumed in anger — a terrible, allconsuming anger — and from the start this anger focused on Venetia Aldridge.
If Dermot Beale hadn’t been found guilty I might have planned somehow to make him pay. But Beale was in prison with a recommended minimum sentence of twenty years. I would be dead before he got his freedom. Instead my hatred found its target, its necessary release, in the woman who had defended him at his first trial. She had defended him brilliantly; it had been for her a great forensic triumph, a masterly cross-examination of the Crown witnesses, another personal accolade. And Dermot Beale had gone free to kill again. This time it was Emily who, cycling home from the village less than a mile away with her basket piled with groceries, had heard the sound of his car wheels on that lonely road. And this time Aldridge wasn’t available for the defence. I have heard that she never represents the same client twice. Perhaps even she wouldn’t have the arrogance for that. This time he didn’t get off.
I don’t think that my hatred for Aldridge was naïve. I knew the argument, knew what any of her fellow defence lawyers would say on her behalf. She was doing her job. An accused man, however obvious his guilt may appear to be before the facts are known, however heinous the crime, however unprepossessing his appearance or repellent his character, is entitled to a defence. His lawyer is not required to believe in his innocence, only to test the evidence against him and, if there is a hole in the case for the Crown, to enlarge it so that he can crawl through it to safety. She was playing a lucrative game according to complicated rules designed, or so it seemed to me, to disadvantage her opponents, a game that was sometimes won at the cost of a human life. All I wanted was for her just once to pay the price of victory. Most of us have to live with the results of what we do. Actions have consequences. That’s one of the earliest lessons we have to learn as children, and some of us never learn it. She won her victories and that, for her, was the end; others have had to live with the consequences, others have paid the price. This time I wanted her to pay.
It was only after Rosie’s death that this resentment and anger grew into what I now have to accept was an obsession. Perhaps this was partly because, relieved of the need to try to care and comfort Rosie, my mind and heart were free to brood on the events. It may also have been because after Rosie’s death I lost my faith. I don’t mean my Christian faith, that High Church Tractarian tradition of sacramental worship in which I had been brought up and in which I had always found a natural home. I no longer believed in God. I wasn’t angry with Him, that at least would have been understandable. God must be used to human anger. After all, He invites it. I just woke up one morning to the same grief, the same dull daily tasks, and knew with certainty that God was dead. It was as if all my life I had been hearing the beating of an unseen heart which was now for ever stilled.
I wasn’t aware of regret, only of an immense solitude and a great loneliness. It felt as if the whole living world had died with God. I began to have a recurrent dream from which I would wake up, not terrified and screaming as Rosie would start up from her nightmares of Emily’s death, but weighed down with a profound sadness. In the dream I would be standing on a lonely beach at sunset with a great sea rolling and tumbling over my ankles and sucking the shingle from under my feet. There would be no birds and I knew that the sea was without life, that the whole earth was without life. Then they would begin walking out of the sea, passing me without looking or speaking, a great army of the dead. I saw Ralph and Emily and Rosie walking with them. They didn’t see me or hear me, and when I called out to them and tried to touch them they were cold sea mist in my hands. I would stumble downstairs and switch on the BBC World Service desperate to hear a reassuring human voice. It was out of this emptiness, this loneliness, that my obsession grew.
At first it was as simple as wishing that someone would kill Aldridge’s daughter and then go free, but that was for my private imaginings. It wasn’t something I could arrange, nor was it something that in my heart I really wanted. I hadn’t become a monster. But from that private fantasy there grew a more realistic imagining. Suppose that a young man accused of a serious crime, murder, rape, robbery, was successfully defended by Aldridge and then, after the acquittal, set out to seduce, even perhaps to marry, her daughter? I knew that she had a daughter. There had been a picture of them together after one of her most successful cases, in one of those mother-and-daughter articles which had become popular in the weekend supplements. The photograph, unsentimental but carefully posed, had shown the two of them together, the girl, Octavia, staring at the camera, scarcely troubling to hide her embarrassed reluctance. It told me more than the whole article, carefully written, obviously approved by its main subject. Here, under the pitiless eye of the camera, was the old story, the beautiful successful mother, the plain resentful daughter.
If this was something I might be able to contrive I would need money. The young man would have to be bribed, and bribed with a capital sum in cash that he couldn’t resist. I would need to move to London to get to know Venetia Aldridge’s life, her routine, where she and her daughter lived, in which court she was next to appear. I would have to attend as many of her trials as possible, whenever the crime was serious and the defendant a young male. All of this seemed possible. I had already decided to sell the house I had shared with Rosie and Emily and which I owned. The mortgage had long ago been paid off. The sale would provide enough for me to buy a small convenient flat in London and have more than enough left for the bribery. I would try to find a cleaning job in the Middle Temple in the hope of moving eventually to Aldridge’s Chambers. It would all take time, but I was in no hurry. The girl, Octavia, was still only sixteen. My plan required that she should be of age; I didn’t want her mother making her a ward of court in order to prevent an unsuitable marriage. And I had to choose the right man. On that choice depended the whole success of the enterprise. There was no room for failure here. I had one great advantage: I had been a schoolteacher for more than thirty years, for much of the time teaching adolescents. I thought I would be able to recognize the qualities I was looking for: conceit, acting ability, unscrupulousness, greed. And, once I had a job in her Chambers, I would have access to Venetia Aldridge’s papers. I would know more about his life, his past, than he would ever know of mine.
It all went according to plan. The details don’t matter; the police will know them by now anyway. They have spoken, I know, to Miss Elkington. I ended where I had hoped to end, with a flat in London where I could expect to be private, a job in Aldridge’s Chambers, occasional access to her home. It all went so smoothly that I felt that, were I superstitious, I would be able to believe that my great revenge was pre-ordained, my small craft launched among clouds of propitiatory incense. I didn’t use the word “revenge” then. I saw myself in a less ignoble role, setting out to redress an injustice, to teach a lesson. I know now that what I was planning was revenge and the satisfaction of revenge, that my hatred of Venetia Aldridge was both more personal and more complicated than I was willing to admit. I know now that it was wrong, it was evil. I also know that it kept me sane.
From the beginning I think I accepted that success would be largely a matter of chance. I might never find a suitable young man, or if I did he might not succeed with Octavia. This knowledge that events weren’t entirely under my control seemed paradoxically to make the enterprise more rational and feasible. And I wasn’t changing my whole life for a caprice. I needed to sell the house, to get away, to free myself from the curious glances of strangers and the embarrassed sympathy of friends, that overworked word which can conveniently cover anything from love to the mutual tolerance of neighbours. When I told them, “Don’t write, I need a few months absolutely alone, free of the past,” I could see the relief in their eyes. They had found it hard to cope with an overwhelming grief. Some friends, particularly those with children, made no attempt but, after a single letter or visit, distanced themselves as if I were infectious. There are some horrors, and the murder of a child is one, which probe our deepest fears, fears we hardly dare acknowledge in case a malignant fate senses the depths of our imagined horror and strikes triumphantly to make it real. The egregiously unfortunate have always been the lepers of the earth.
And then I met Mr. Froggett. I still don’t know his first name. He will always be Mr. Froggett to me, and I Mrs. Hamilton to him. I used my maiden name, feeling that its familiarity would at least prevent me from giving myself away. I didn’t confide in him my name, my past, where I lived or where I worked. We first met in the public gallery of Number Two Court at the Old Bailey. There are regulars who go to important or interesting trials, particularly at the Old Bailey, and after that first meeting I saw him every time I went, an unassuming little man of about my own age, always neatly dressed, who, like me, would sit patiently through the longueurs of the trial when the sensation-seekers had departed in search of livelier entertainment and, from time to time, would make notes with his small delicate hands, as if he were monitoring the performance of the chief actors. And what we were seeing was a performance, that was its fascination. It was a play in which some of the characters knew their words and the plot, some were awkward amateurs, making their first appearance on a frightening, unfamiliar stage, but all had their roles assigned in a performance which afforded the ultimate audience satisfaction: no one knew the end.
After we had seen each other about half a dozen times, Mr. Froggett began to greet me with a tentative good-morning, but he didn’t speak until I was overcome with a sudden faintness during the prosecution’s opening speech in a particularly horrible case of child cruelty and abuse. It was the first of such cases I had sat through. I had told myself that there would be times when I would find it hard to go on, but I had never envisaged a case like this: the gowned and bewigged prosecuting counsel, in his quiet educated voice, outlining without embellishment, and apparently without emotion, the torture and degradation of young boys in care. And that case was no use to me. I early realized that most sex cases weren’t. The men concerned were either repellent or more often pathetic creatures whom I could reject as unsuitable for my purpose as soon as they appeared in the dock. Now I put my head between my knees and the worst of the faintness passed. I knew I had to leave and I did so as unobtrusively as I could, but I was in the middle of a tightly packed bench and inevitably I caused a disturbance.
When I reached the concourse I found the little man at my side. He said: “Please forgive the intrusion but I saw that you were ill and that you have no one with you. Could I offer assistance? Perhaps you would permit me to take you for a cup of tea. There is a respectable little café I use which is quite close. It’s really very clean.”
The words, the tone, the careful formality amounting to diffidence were essentially out of date. I remember that I had a ridiculous picture of us standing together on the deck of the Titanic: “Please permit me, madam, to offer you my protection and to assist you into this lifeboat.” Looking into eyes which were genuinely concerned behind the thick glass of his spectacles, I had no distrust of him. My generation knows by instinct — one lost to young women of today — when we can trust a man. So we went together to the respectable little café, one of those innumerable eating places catering for office workers or tourists, where you can get freshly made sandwiches made up from a variety of fillings set out in dishes under the counter — eggs, mashed sardines, tuna fish, ham — together with good coffee and strong tea. He led me to a square table in the corner covered with a checked red-and-white cloth, and then fetched two cups of tea and two chocolate éclairs. Afterwards he walked with me to the underground station and said goodbye. We exchanged names, but nothing more. He didn’t ask whether I had far to travel or where I lived, and I sensed in him a natural reluctance to seem to pry, a concern that I shouldn’t feel that he was intruding, using his act of kindness to force on me an intimacy which I might not want.
And so began our acquaintanceship. It wasn’t friendship — how could it be when I confided so little? — but it had some of the comforts of friendship without its commitment. We got used to having tea together after the court rose at the same café or at one similar. At our first meeting I was worried, not that he would become inquisitive, but that it would increasingly seem odd to him that I was so uncommunicative, and even odder that I should sit there week after week listening to the sad, often predictable recital of human weakness — weakness and wickedness. But that, it appeared, was the last thing to worry him. He was obsessed with the criminal law, nothing seemed more natural to him than that I should share this compelling interest. He confided much about himself and seemed not to notice that I told so little. On our third meeting he told me something which, for a minute, terrified me, until I realized that it posed no real danger, and that it could even be one more auspicious sign that my enterprise would succeed. He had taught at a prep school owned by Venetia Aldridge — s father, had known her well as a child. He claimed — and this was the first time I detected in him evidence of a certain conceit which, once noticed, seemed to be part of his personality — that it was he who had given her the taste for law, had set her on the first steps of her brilliant career. My hand shook as I raised my cup of tea, spilling a little bit in the saucer. I waited a second until the spasm of shaking passed, then calmly poured it back. Not looking at him, I made my voice steady, the question no more than one of casual interest.