The art of drowning, p.9
The Art of Drowning, page 9
‘Where were we?’ Grace asked, after the guests departed in a chorus of thanks. ‘Oh, that’s where we were.’
She settled herself.
‘In all fairness,’ Grace said, ‘Ivy wasn’t fit to look after Sam after Cassie drowned. She was sedated with legal drugs and sedated herself with the other kind. Carl wouldn’t let me take the boy, even for a while. Who could blame her? She blamed herself for not being there, for encouraging Cassie to fight with her father. And I think she blamed Sam for not going to the rescue. We all expect too much of men, even little ones. Carl had already brought him home.’
Grace snorted into her tea.
‘Carl exaggerated, of course. He’s such a convincing liar, believes his own lies. Said the boy was terrified of her, but really he was terrified of seeing his mother being beaten up. Better keep them apart, he said. She ricocheted between London and here. To begin with, she was delusional. She convinced herself that Cassie wasn’t really dead. She kept saying Cassie had been turned into a swan, not dead, simply transformed. It was the drugs talking, but she believed it. I let her. Anything for comfort. Then … something else happened. She went back home to London, but he locked her out, and then she disappeared.’
‘Didn’t he try to find her?’
‘Not for long. He sent me money to do that. And divorce papers. All she had to do was sign.’
‘But, rights of access, alimony, all that kind of thing. Grandparents’ rights. There’s law, isn’t there? You’ve got rights.’
‘You’ve got rights if you want to pursue them,’ Grace said bitterly. ‘You’ve got rights if you’ve got money to pursue them. You’ve got rights if you’re not in the middle of nowhere with no idea of what to do. You’ve got rights if you’ve got qualifications, know someone who has. We didn’t, we don’t. We had to keep a farm going. We didn’t have a bean, still don’t. Not much sophistication, either. I wouldn’t have a clue where to start exerting rights. Pay a detective? With what? What chance, anyway, against a lawyer? All he ever had to do was stay still, and hide. Tear up letters and send them back. He knows we’re helpless. Ivy knows it too. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to find him. Nor would she.’
‘She could, couldn’t she? She could look him up if she wanted.’
‘Sweetheart, don’t you realise Ivy can scarcely read the small print? She sees shapes rather than letters. Our fault, undiagnosed dyslexia. Carl despised her for that too, she told me. She hides it; she learns everything by practice, off by heart. He was ashamed of her. Doesn’t do, does it, lawyer with semi-literate wife? How could she defend herself?’
Grace was crying again. Rachel wanted to cry too, out of shared frustration and rage, pity for what she had not known.
‘And you know the worst thing about him? The one thing I do know, because I saw it in a newspaper someone left. You know what that bastard does for a living now? Why he would never want to know us? He’s a judge. A fucking judge. Therefore untouchable.’
‘Does Ivy know that?’
‘Yes. That’s all I told her.’
‘Oh.’
There was so much Ivy omitted. Ivy despised pity, and therefore deserved it.
You might not be able to find him, Rachel thought. But I could.
CHAPTER SIX
Donald Cousins waited at the back of the court of His Honour Judge Schneider on Tuesday morning, watching and only half listening while a witness blundered through evidence. It had been difficult to force himself inside, out of the sun, but in here the cool was welcome. Middlesex Crown Court, facing the Houses of Parliament, was once poetry in carved oak and Donald mourned it. Now, Court Five, where the judge sat, was a white-walled box full of power points and laptop screens, as anonymous as any other, although an incongruous throne-like chair had been preserved for the use of the judge. The shield and coat of arms above it, bearing the old legend Honi soit qui mal y pense: Evil to him who evil thinks, was painted in bright blues, reds and golds, and looked like a garish warning sign. The insecurities of the English, Donald thought. The language of the law was Latin, the courtroom mottos were ancient French, and in this case the judge had a Teutonic name. Schneider. Next door’s court was presided over by a diminutive Goan, whose brown skin was peculiarly suited to his white wig. The witness in this court was a resident Scandinavian, who had seen a man savagely attacked by a group of other men, one of whom was in the dock. She was being cross-examined by African counsel. Donald Cousins felt his chest swell with pride in being English. Nowhere else was the law quite so colourful. He attempted to concentrate.
The trial in progress was rehearsing the story of an outdoor fight on a dark night, witnessed by strangers, six months before. A man had been disfigured for the simple crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The witness currently on the stand was distressed by the reliving of it. He said something, yes; then he hit him, then the other one went to hit him back, and then they were fighting, then one went to the ground. Three of them kicked him.
Can you identify the man in the dock as one of those men?
Yes. He was the one who went on longest. The others stopped.
Yes, but can you identify my client?
To Donald Cousins, it was all no more than proof that fists, feet and knives still prevailed as the favourite inner-city weapons. On Saturday nights, high days and holidays, post-football, the west end of central London reverted to historic type. Strong drink was the recreation of choice long before Victoria ruled and gin was a penny a pint; brawling followed and still did. In the same central areas, on Saturday nights, a drunken swathe, lured by bright lights, music, cheap drink and each other, were left marooned with no means of getting home and no sense of direction either. Donald blamed the 1960s, for the kick-starting of a new wave of no inhibitions. Carnaby Street, all that. Silly clothes and drugs, new money. Protest marches sponsoring the right to violence. He had first really lost his nerve much later, in the vicious poll tax riots, buried it for good on future demos, and kissed it goodbye on a New Year’s Eve celebration policing gig in Trafalgar Square. Honi soit … The love of life which went with New Year’s Eve rapidly turned rancid in the early hours of the new year itself. There were endless opportunities for casual murder. Currently the action was in the environs of Leicester Square, haven of bars, cheap eats, cinemas, where pubs and clubs disgorged their fun-loving thousands after the night buses became scarce, leaving them to wander aimlessly, fight indiscriminately and abandon one another. Even a prime minister’s son. And nothing united a celebratory or protesting mob better than the presence of the police, who rapidly became the common enemy. It was on these battle lines, these unpredictable Saturday nights, that a man in uniform, surrounded by historic monuments, learned to hate, fear and hold in contempt the pitiful, pitiless public. Sometimes that particular iron never left the soul.
He listened. The witness stuttered. Of course it was him. He was wearing a baseball cap. He had stripes on his shoes. He was kicking the man on the ground, long after he was still. It made me feel sick. He was the worst, he aimed for his head. It was as if he never wanted to stop.
How blind are you, Miss Gunstrom? Were you wearing your spectacles that night? I note you wear them now. You couldn’t really see, could you?
Donald groaned. Cheap tricks from defence counsel, questioning the witness like that.
‘Many of us wear spectacles, Mr Peal,’ the judge said, adjusting his own. ‘They don’t nullify sight, and can, indeed, enhance it. That’s what they’re for. And you must not bully the witness. I think we should adjourn here. Back at two thirty.’
Judge Schneider wasn’t bad at this, Donald conceded. He kept his interruptions minimal and took care of the witness. Cold and careful and surprisingly sensitive. He had recently begun to suppose that the same iron which entered a policeman’s soul might also infect that of a judge, only later, rather than sooner, since the judge was better rewarded, never had to handle the bodies or touch the blood, regarded the evidence of carnage from a distance, at third hand. But the verbal and visual repetition of man’s inhumanity to man would always be wearing in the end, however sanitised it became in the telling, especially when it was as pointless and stupidly wicked as this. As for punishment, the judge could never deliver an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. He had no such privilege. He would sentence by formula, while the hungry eyes in the public gallery lusted for revenge.
It was an apposite case for this particular Tuesday morning, when the Evening Standard headlined a variation on Saturday-night brutality. A stabbed man had been left alone in an ambulance in Leicester Square, safe at last, until someone joined him there and finished off what wasn’t even half done. Throttled him, like a chicken, with a wire garrotte, while a phalanx of preoccupied police officers stood yards away. Someone with plenty of malice aforethought, getting into an ambulance and killing an injured man. Donald did not know which shocked him more, the cruelty, or the nerve.
On the Monday he had spent hours with the judge’s clerk, going through records, and realised during the process that Carl couldn’t be all bad, because his twelve-stone, bigbosomed, no-nonsense Jamaican clerk, shared with three others, actually seemed to like him. She was very helpful with the facts, had a memory like Methuselah, and was interesting. He gets racial abuse all the time, she said, ’cos of his name. Only from thick whites, I ask you. I keep telling him to change it to Smith. If he calls himself Dolores Smith, I tell him, and puts on some jewels, then he’ll get promoted. He’s a nice warm man.
What about his personal life? Donald asked. She shook her head, and said if she knew she wouldn’t tell him.
Nice? Warm?
He was like an iceberg when he came into the tiny retiring room, smiled so briefly it was like watching a light bulb turned on and then off, in the same second. He nodded towards Donald, acknowledging the appointment.
‘Can we go out?’ he said. ‘If that’s all right with you. I prefer to go out.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘You’re the only one round here calls him sir,’ the clerk chipped in. ‘The rest of us call him God. Don’t we, Carly baby?’
He smiled at her then, and the real smile was a revelation. He led the way down the labyrinth of corridors which led from the back rooms of the courts, and out of a side entrance. Once out in the street he took the lead, walking away from the building with what seemed to Cousins to be unnecessary speed.
‘We can walk down the river to my chambers,’ he said. ‘Or sit in Parliament Square with Winston Churchill. That’s what I tend to do on a day like this. Anything to avoid other lawyers.’
His yellow-grey hair was flattened by wearing the wig for a morning. It was a mystery to Donald why courtroom lawyers failed to rebel against that bizarre and unflattering piece of uniform. Anyone sane would resent wearing horsehair on their head on a day like this, but perhaps it made them concentrate and forget what they looked like. Wig, gown and white wing collar made all equally anonymous. Carl simply looked smaller without them.
To reach the square from the court, they had to sprint across the road, avoiding three lanes of traffic. The judge seemed used to it. The square was not the ideal place for conversation, because of the pigeons and the noise, but the traffic isolated it into an island which few people chose to risk, even for a better view of the Mother of Parliaments and the smiling face of Big Ben. Carl sat on the stone surround of a flowerbed facing the massive back of the statue of Winston Churchill, who was dressed in his old overcoat and glowering at the world. Donald had no option but to sit alongside. The stone was nicely cool. Donald could imagine the judge sitting here even when it was covered in ice. He did not seem a man who revelled in creature comforts. Carl patted the stone with a large, capable hand.
‘Winston was my father’s hero,’ he said, as if explaining his choice. ‘Since my father was a German prisoner of war, I never quite understood why. He said we needed to be vanquished.’
It was a remark which did not seem to demand a reply. Carl sat, expectantly, with his hands in his lap. Donald, who had looked up the judge’s history for the scant detail available, simply nodded to indicate he knew about that, and then asked a question, because he wanted to know. They sat close together, the better to hear above the traffic which circled around them and became a neutral hum of sound.
‘You were born in the late fifties, weren’t you? Not so long after the war. How did your father being German affect you?’
‘I’m honestly not sure. Maybe simply that I had a different childhood from other people, although it didn’t seem so. If he was discriminated against, he didn’t say. He was simply very pro-British. I was brought up to be grateful for being alive and to venerate all things British, with a certain Germanic discipline, of course. The difference was later.’ He smiled apologetically. ‘By the time I was a teenager, and my mother had died, it was puzzling to see my English contemporaries pouring scorn on tradition and hating the establishments I was taught to revere, as I still do, although perhaps a bit more selectively. I was always slightly at odds, I suppose. Ultra-conservative, with a small c. Nothing more than that. Do you have any news for me? Again, I’m so sorry to be such a nuisance.’
Donald cleared his throat. He was yearning for a nice warm pint. ‘I’ve isolated a few possibles,’ he said. ‘The good news is that the list isn’t long; the bad news is that they’re difficult to trace. And I have no means of making any one of them answer questions when and if I do find them.’
‘How on earth do you select?’
‘By using a few basic principles, which even in themselves take a lot for granted. First, I’ve been looking for any person who has expressed a grievance against you, i.e, the widest category. There are plenty of those. Angry young men, mainly, customers who shout out threats as they go down to the cells en route to prison … Those who were free before.’
‘I told you …’ Carl interrupted.
‘That they’re usually prepared and resigned, yes,’ Donald said impatiently. ‘As people are, theoretically, for deaths and smaller tragedies which have been looming for a time. We may have been warned, but nothing prepares us for what we feel when it actually happens. We’re still angered and insulted by it. As I said, the widest category of threateners are those who publicly blamed you for them going to prison. Hatred is so often the displacement of blame, especially blame of oneself.’
Carl was silent.
‘So,’ Donald continued. ‘the widest category is the I’ll see you dead, you bastard brigade. Those who actually shouted, because they were humiliated by the sentence. Especially those within that category who already had a propensity for violence. I mean, those you sentenced for violent crimes, as opposed to any other kind.’
‘That’s very scientific,’ Carl said. ‘But those people aren’t the most cunning. Fraudsters are worse. They ruin lives without a shred of violence. They almost make thugs look admirable.’
This felt like an attempt to change the subject.
Donald went on. ‘I’ve also ignored the other category you mentioned. Those who may loathe you for what, in their eyes, you failed to do. Such as not imposing a sufficiently vengeful sentence on someone who hurt their child. Or overseeing an acquittal which seemed unfair. Those deprived of a fitting revenge – the old miasma-ridden we were talking about – because of a technicality which got someone off. I can’t possibly track down those, unless they expressed themselves publicly. I have to stick with the obvious, which is the violent, verbal ones who shouted, and I’ve broken down this little grouping into those with the necessary skills. And endurance.’
Carl leaned forward to rest his hands on his knees. He looked up towards the sky, enjoying the warmth on his face, like a cat reacting to the sun, stretching his neck. His profile was harmless, with a stubby nose, broad forehead and round, non-aggressive chin above a thick neck, but his hands were enormous, as if meant for toil. The hands of a surgeon were like that. Donald had the uncomfortable feeling that for all that the judge was older than himself, he would not like to be on the wrong side of him in a dark alley at night. His was a solid body.
‘What exactly do you mean by endurance? Is this new police jargon?’
Donald had the feeling that the man was laughing at him; that he knew in advance that the investigation was useless and all this was playing with words. He raised his voice and slowed down.
‘I mean the capability, and the willpower, to carry through. To go on wanting to do something. To harbour revenge, to plan it and hone the plan, to have an aim and sustain it, over months, years if necessary. I’m only looking at the last two years. I’m also only looking at men. Women don’t do this stuff, and anyway, you’ve only ever sent a handful of the fairer sex to jail.’
‘The jury convict,’ Carl began. ‘I don’t.’ He was being obtuse.
‘Or fail to convict,’ Donald said, suddenly furious. ‘The stupid jury may convict, they carry the can, but it’s you who actually send the bastards to jail, and it’s you they’ll remember, not the twelve grey people.’
‘I never think the jury stupid,’ Carl said. He was trying to change the subject. ‘They’ve been bullied for centuries, first as hired witnesses, then dummies, ordered to do nothing but convict. No heat, food or water until they did. Then they rebelled with the trial of William Penn, the Quaker: 1670, wasn’t it? Trumped-up charges about a prayer meeting. Not a million miles from here. The jury wouldn’t convict. They were starved and imprisoned, and still they wouldn’t. They resent it when the state creates bogeymen and expects them to hang them. The jury won, in the end. Penn took the jury trial system to America. Now look what they’ve done with it. What was it William Blackstone said? The judgement of twelve men, indifferently chosen and superior to all suspicion …’
‘… is the sacred bulwark of the nation’s liberties,’ Donald finished.
