Mimi's Ghost (40 page)

Sure enough this stole a little thunder. There were people in the court who must be admiring his frankness and courage. But the defence lawyer was canny. He said: ‘So, Meester Duck-wonth, perhaps you can now explain to the court what you
were
doing that evening after your brother-in-law disappeared.'

For the first time Morris allowed a little alarm to invade his scarred features. He turned abruptly to the judges.
‘Signori giudici,
you have all read the police reports. You know what I said to my analyst. You know that I only said it after being advised to do so by a priest. Do I really need to repeat it in public? Don't I have a right to silence?'

The older man and the two lady judges put their heads together. A blonde curl fell over the childish cheek. Pushing it back an eye flickered up to glance at Morris.

The right to silence,' the presiding judge eventually said, ‘refers above all to information that might incriminate either yourself or a member of the immediate family, which is not the case here. To remain silent would thus be in contempt of court. Certainly the court would appreciate, if only to dispel all doubts in your regard, a statement as to your whereabouts on that evening, if not your exact activities.'

Immediately and very swiftly, as if to get the thing out and over with, Morris said: ‘I was in the cemetery weeping over the coffin of my ex-girlfriend, the coffin having been brought out from the communal family grave to accommodate the burial of the mother the following day.'

Again there was a stir in the court. Morris looked determinedly at the ceiling. Nobody could say he wasn't going through the worst possible humiliation here. He was earning his freedom.

After waiting for the stir to subside, the lawyer asked quietly: ‘And you expect us to believe this?'

‘If you expect me to treat that as a serious question you are clearly the more impertinent,' Morris snapped back most convincingly, but then immediately recovered himself.
‘Mi scusi,
I appreciate that you are only doing your job on behalf of your clients, with whom I have every sympathy' - how Italian encouraged this kind of wonderful pomposity! ‘No, I'm afraid that ever since Massimina's disappearance and death I have been obsessed by the idea that I had lost the one great experience of my life. In a way it's as if I had been left behind, marooned with her. I speak to her every day in my mind, I feel she is close to me, I feel she guides me. Perhaps it was this sensation of already having someone that allowed me to continue with what can only be described as an arid marriage.'

Morris looked straight at the lawyer and reflected that there was nothing like admitting the unpalatable to gain a little credence. Certainly the sincerity in his voice must have been undeniable. At the same time he distinctly heard a voice whisper: ‘
Morrees, grazie, grazie.
Thank you for saying in public that you love only me.'

The lawyer was understandably irritated. ‘Meester Duck-worrth, let me put it to you that, rather than these two young men having killed or abducted Signor Posenato, it would have been perfectly possible for you to have killed him, to have driven his car away some short distance with the body inside, to have returned, called the police, then disposed of both car and body the following evening, inventing this farcical business of weeping over an ex-girlfriend's coffin only after three weeks of racking your brains in a high-security prison.'

Again the: court responded with a ripple of interest, though the two accused seemed to be having extreme difficulty following the whole thing. Azedine was chewing his nails.

Morris said: This, as I suggested before, is Colonnello Fendtsteig's theory. Though how I could have done all this car-shuffling and body-burying without an accomplice is beyond me.'

The defence lawyer had begun another question, but Morris ploughed on: ‘It must be said, however, in favour of Colonnello Fendtsteig, that given the circumstantial nature of the evidence available, whether against the two accused (apart perhaps from the bloody knife) or against myself for that matter, it is quite amazing to me that this case has been brought to court at all. After all, in circumstantial terms third and even fourth solutions are available. That Bobo was killed or abducted by his lover's husband, for example, if only we knew who that was. Or that Bobo staged the scene in the office and ran off with his mistress. What I'm saying is that without the body, or even the missing car, I don't see how anybody can be tried for . . .'

‘Please,' the elderly judge interrupted, but kindly. ‘You are here to be cross-examined by the defence for the two men being tried, not to engage in fantasies and personal reflections.'

‘Mi scusi, Signor Giudke.'
Morris was properly self-abasing. ‘What I was really trying to say is that the fact that I am obliged to defend myself does not mean that I wish the two accused to be found guilty willy-nilly.'

The defence lawyer turned abruptly to the judges. ‘Your honours, let us come to the point. In my summing up later on, I shall be trying to show not only that the evidence against my two clients is pathetically thin, but also that it is far more likely that if a murder were committed it was carried out by Signor Duckworth, who had both motive and opportunity. Of course, as he himself has said, it seems improbable that he could have acted alone. I will thus be suggesting that he was aided by the tall Negro known only as Kwame, who later died together with Paola Trevisan, Signor Duckworth's wife. Signor Duckworth admits that he spoke to the Negro at the so-called Villa Caritas immediately before proceeding to the office. For the next two hours the black's movements are unknown. Then only a few days after Posenato's disappearance, Signor Duckworth allowed this young black immigrant to move out of the hostel and into his own private flat. He also rewarded him with the gift of his Mercedes and gave him administrative control of the company in his absence in prison, a development which inevitably brought the black into close contact with Signor Duckworth's wife, a woman whose marital infidelities appear to have been well known to all members of the family and indeed many people outside it. What I am suggesting is that this circumstantial evidence is considerably greater than that being offered by the prosecution against my clients, who are guilty, I suspect, of nothing worse than not being Caucasian. I will therefore be asking that the case be dropped and that investigations continue into the activities of the present witness.'

If there was immediately an explosion of chatter at the back of the courtroom, the effect on Morris himself was devastating, not unlike that of a great artillery shell missing by a hair's breadth. Or perhaps not missing at all. The livid red of his scars turned with electric quickness to white while his hands trembled visibly on his knees and for the first time in his life he felt an involuntary twitch seize the left corner of his mouth and drag it violently downwards.

There is also the curious fact,' the defence lawyer went on, ‘the curious fact that as his fellow workers have explained to the court, though at the time the fact did not perhaps seem relevant the Negro Kwame actually turned up to his night shift four hours late on the second night after the crime, with the pathetic excuse that he had been outside rearranging stacks of bottles, something nobody did at night, since at night the guard dog was freed from his chain and would attack anybody coming out of the building. Hence the whereabouts of the Negro Kwame must be considered unaccounted for on the very night that Signor Duckworth was allegedly weeping over the remains of his lost beloved. In short, the two of them together had ample time to dispose of a body.'

This certainly was a direct hit. The only miracle was that it had been so long in coming. ‘Mimi,' Morris croaked, though happily his voice was lost in the general hubbub of people finally seeing a whole picture come into focus. ‘Mimi!' All at once Morris felt as though he had not a scrap of energy left. Clearly he was finished. If he wasn't going to confess now it was merely in order to have a few last days of semi-liberty so as to put his papers in order and read the Bible a last time or two with Antonella.

‘Meester Duckworrth,' the lawyer turned to him, I put it to you that you saw the sacking of Azedine and Farouk as a cover for killing your partner when an argument broke out between you as to the future of the company and your shared inheritance.'

Morris opened his mouth. No, wait. He snapped it shut, then shut his eyes too. They were so harrowingly close to the kill now that he simply would not and could not speak for fear of saying the wrong thing. No, he would not answer until Mimi appeared to him, until she actually told him word for word what to say. And what was God's will for him. Even if it meant waiting a thousand years. Thirty seconds passed. A minute. ‘Meester Duckworrth,' the lawyer said, ‘would you please respond to my question.'

Nothing. The court had fallen silent, waiting. Behind his closed eyes Morris was seeing deep red while the silence began to throb with blood draining down and away from consciousness. Another moment and he would faint. Someone shuffled a chair nearby. At the back of the room there was a whisper, the slightest rustle of paper. Until, into this silence pressed full of passion, the sudden sound of a door opening and footsteps running came as a liberating explosion.

‘Signor Giudice! Signor Giudice!'

Opening his eyes, dazed by nausea, Morris barely made out what seemed to be Inspector Marangoni's assistant of old hurrying across the courtroom. He went directly to the judges' bench and began to talk to them in a low voice. Glances were exchanged. The judges looked up and called over the two lawyers. People in the courtroom began to talk. The older judge called them to order. And Morris finally came back to his senses just in time to hear the words:
‘Signore e signori,
due to the discovery of a new and apparently conclusive piece of evidence, this court will be adjourned for an hour while the prosecution decides whether he wishes to continue the case against the accused.'

May had brought the poppies back, a brilliant red dapple in the green patchwork of the countryside. Riding up the Valpantena for his mornings in the office, Morris was reminded of the pointillists and pictures he had seen at the National Gallery as an adolescent. On two occasions he called his father, first to invite him to the funeral, second to point out to him the misfortune they now had in common. Both had lost a young wife. Both in terrible accidents. Though unlike Ron, Morris didn't have the consolation of a child to remind him of his spouse.

Morris was moved by how genuinely upset his father was on his behalf. In the first phone call. In the second, the man seemed more dismissive, more himself. The burden of it was that Morris should pull his socks out of the spilt milk and get on and find somebody else. He'd always tended to be a bit of a crybaby.

‘She was pregnant,' Morris whimpered. ‘It only came out in the autopsy.'

‘I,' his father was already saying, ‘didn't wait long after Alice died, because I couldn't see that anybody had anything to gain out of me being a miserable old bastard. Not your mother, not you and not meself. Or am I right?'

Morris hung up. He resented his father taking his mother's name in vain. At cruising speed, he admired the thick freshness of everything, the vine leaves racing along their wires and poles, the stark verticality of the cypress, the waving silver of the birches (like light on water, his artist's eye told him). ‘How everything grows back and back,' he told Mimi on the phone.

‘Like our love,' she said. For she often answered now. She seemed to have lost the reticence of earlier days. She asked: ‘Where are you going now, Morri?'

‘But you know where I'm going,'' he laughed, ‘you know everything, Mimi.'

‘Yes, but I like to ask, and for you to answer.'

‘Fair enough.' He smiled, taking his hand from the wheel one risky moment to push it through blond hair that was growing back. Though he didn't try to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the sunshade as once he used to. ‘I'm going to see Forbes,' he said.

There was a brief silence. The car purred past the ugly industrial developments outside Grezzana. Morris drove more carefully and sedately these days. Then she said: ‘I still think Forbes is dangerous, Morri.'

Morris couldn't help but agree. There were indeed all kinds of problems.

‘He knows so much,' she said.

‘But he did give me the letters back,' Morris reminded her. ‘And he doesn't so much
know
everything as imagine it. I mean, he doesn't actually know
I
wrote those letters, just that I had them in my pocket, and he doesn't know what I did to Paola and Kwame. By the way, it seems they were never apart while I was in hospital.' Into a brief space he added: ‘Actually, I miss Kwame.'

‘Forbes knows,' Massimina said sombrely, and with something final in her voice.

But Morris was quite relaxed. ‘He doesn't
know
I put the pubic hair and so on in the car, does he? Only that I drove it off into the hills. And in the end it must have been Kwame who brought it back to the villa, not me. Right? Probably planning to spray it and resell it or something. I wondered why the police hadn't found it. So the idea that it was them who killed Bobo must seem quite feasible to him. Even if he suspects otherwise. The logistics of it are a bit tight, but just about possible.'

‘I love your voice,' she said. Her own was soft in the elegant phone. Though when Morris put the receiver down it was intriguing that she kept on talking to him just the same. You only needed the phone to get things started these days.

‘Really, still?' he asked.

‘Still,' she said. Her voice had a way of filling the whole car, as if it were on every side of him, coming out of the four-speaker stereo perhaps.

‘The thing is,' Morris said, ‘that I know he wrote those two ransom letters to try to save Farouk.'