False Witness (18 page)

Livingstone was obviously going through his Oscar Wilde period of fey, disaffected youth. Except Rupert Livingstone was no
longer young, and was not disaffected but faintly disgusting. I tried to decide whether to answer him or to jab my biro under
his fingernails. But instead, as usual, I did nothing.

The jailer closed the huge outer door to the Old Bailey cells behind me. He puffed at an ornamental ebony pipe carved into
the shape of a shrunken head.

“’Fraid we’re absolutely chocka today,” he said. “Peak season, Mr. Fawley. Can’t put you in one of the luxury suites.”

It was his only joke, his whole repertoire. He was at the. reception desk of a luxury hotel on the Costa del Crime, no doubt
somewhere near Torremolinos, the cells were suites, the prisoners were guests, and their lawyers were visitors.

“You’ll have to take suite number six. No sea view, sadly.” A ribbon of black smoke curled toward the ceiling. “Mr. Innocent
will be with you presently.”

I was led to a dark square-shaped room. A loudly buzzing strip light flickered. The room had graffiti daubed on the walls
and there was an enduring smell of stale human sweat.

When the half-glass door opened, Whitey Innocent slid in. The bulb finally went out and the dimness was only relieved by the
yellow light from the corridor.

“Shall I call someone?” I said, pointing at the light.

“Better like this,” said Whitey. “My eyes, Mr. Thomas.” He always called me that. “Worse all the time.”

A lily white hand started to gesture toward the top of his head, but fell limply. His pale face was only interrupted by a
browning set of upper teeth which protruded so completely that you could never see whether he had a lower set to match. Below
the lids were two slits. These were his eyes. He had the overall appearance of an old dog on its last legs. A dog that had
grown so accustomed to sniffing out his way that he no longer needed his sight.

“My eyes are no good,” he said. “but I see many things.”

“Cut the mystic routine, Whitey. I’ve heard it all before.”

“You done good up there, Mr. Thomas.” He finally sat down. “Please,” he said, pointing toward a small table.

“I prefer to stand. You know, it had nothing to do with me.”

“Me Obeah man say it come out right.”

“You’re not still paying that crook?”

Whitey scratched his snowy scalp with a long dirty thumbnail. We had had arguments about this before. Whitey subscribed to
a creed somewhere between voodooism and the Freemasons. He paid his Obeah man, his kind of priest, sums of money. Sometimes
Whitey paid him thousands of pounds to pray for him, to write our magical chants and even to attend court in a crisis.

“You pay insurance?” asked Whitey.

“Yes, but I pay Legal and General, not some old geezer who bets it on the dogs at Walthamstow.”

“It was a result,” he said.

“It was a fix,” I replied. “So, got any plans when you get out? I hope you’re not thinking of going straight?”

Whitey did not smile. “I prefer it inside. You safe there, Mr. Thomas, there’s some bad shit going down.”

It is at such times that alarm bells should ring for any prudent lawyer. It is during such conversations that you can compromise
your next case and hear things you shouldn’t. So I just said, “I don’t want to know.”

“Really bad shit, Mr. Thomas.”

“It’s nothing to do with me, Whitey.”

“Mmm,” he said and scratched the table annoyingly with his dirty thumbnail.

People who are about to be carted off to prison can be desperate for advice, for hope on appeal or simply desperate for a
little human company. They will engage you in all sorts of spurious conversations. They will pretend they know terrible secrets
about the police, the witnesses, even the judge. But what they really crave is a last moment’s attention, someone to take
them seriously before the prison gate finally shuts.

I waited for Whitey to explain himself, but he just muttered
sotto voce
and dropped his eyelids still further. “Now don’t go all mysterious on me,” I said.

Although I tried to laugh it off, I was beginning to be worried, because Emmanuel Innocent did not fit into the above categories.
He had spent more of his adult life behind bars than walking the back streets of Lewisham. Prison was bad for his drugs business
but good for contacts. For a grass, prison was not an occupational hazard, it was part of the occupation.

“Why you think I get pulled?” he finally said.

“Could it be, Whitey because you were dealing heroin which, they tell me, is a little against the laws of the land?”

“Me been dealing heroin some years. Why me get pulled
now
?”

“Because you were caught?” I was getting a little tired of the game.

“You see but you do not see,” he said. “New Babylon in town.” Whitey still used the old slang occasionally. I had never quite
understood why some West Indians called the police “Babylon.” Jamie said it was something to do with slavery.

“This Babylon, he real serious,” said Whitey. “Come from Bradford or Bristol or some West Country shit like that.” Being one
of the London posse, that part of England beyond the M25 was a mystery to Whitey. “But me is Heggarty’s man. He scratch my
back and I—”

“Grass up Yardies?” I said. “Dangerous game, Whitey.”

“Only game me know. So this blood-clot detective come see me with this other man.”

“Who was the other person? Police?”

“Nah,” said Whitey.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Me can smell your Babylon. This other man just there. He was real short, but he was the guv’nor. No doubt.”

“Fascinating as all this is, Whitey, can you get to the point? Your carriage to Battersea nick’s waiting.”

Then Whitey put on a strange accent. “This detective tell me, ‘I need some dirt on that brief o’yours.’ So I says, Mr. Thomas,
I tells him, ‘Get out-a me face,’ and he says, ‘I’ll cause you so much pain, you won’t have a face when I finish with you.’
And I become scared.” Whitey did look up here and his face was even paler. “He get them Drugs Squad to nick me. You see what
me has to deal with, Mr. Thomas?”

“Frankly, I don’t.”

“Mr. Thomas, you’re not listening. This Babylon he want the dirt—”

“So?”

“On me brief—”

“Yes?”

“On
you
. He say, “Just in case…’”

There was a cursory knock on the glass and the jailer, still puffing away, put his face round the door.

“Van for Battersea’s waiting. Let’s be having you,” he said.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I said the Battersea van is leaving and—”

“Not you,” I grabbed Whitey’s hunched shoulder. “
You
.

He turned slowly, stood on tiptoes and whispered in my ear, his eyes narrow but somehow bright. “You in serious shit, Mr.
Thomas.”

“What did that mean ‘Just in case’? Just in case of what?”

Whitey was walking along the corridor and didn’t appear to hear me. “Real serious,” he muttered as he was led to the prison
van. “
Real
serious.”

W
HEN
I
LEFT THE OLD BAILEY
, I
DECIDED TO WALK
along the Embankment to the Temple. I wondered whether Whitey’s thinly veiled warning was a pretext to force me to visit
him in Battersea. To bring him cigarettes or perhaps to run some messages on his behalf. On the other hand, he had practically
served his sentence while remanded in custody. So what motive did he have to lie?

I was daydreaming as I walked and imagined another conference with him, and when it ended Whitey was let out and, to my horror,
I was taken to the prison van.

The Thames sulked under a heavy blanket of fog, the boats on the river were shadows, and the colorless people were little
more than slowly moving apparitions. I could not bear going back to chambers and pretending to be friendly, I couldn’t face
going home and confronting my wife. A flat barge hooted in the distance, the sound echoing again and again under the Waterloo
arches. I traced the river as the banks disappeared westward, and wondered how near to Stonebury it flowed. For an instant,
I felt myself drawn up-river as the tide receded to the west.

When I got to the door of 3 Dickens Court, I saw my name on the board outside, along with the other thirty-odd barristers
who constituted my chambers. Getting your name on the door, that was the thing. It used to seem so important. Every year nearly
one thousand law students, among the best in the land, frantically searched, chased and begged for the, perhaps, two hundred
spaces on the door. And that day, as I saw my nameplate, the black letters fraying away, the background paint yellowing, I
just thought: What was the point?

When I phoned Justine’s chambers and was told she would be going to the Bar dinner that night, I wandered the empty streets
for hours, waiting for darkness, waiting to see Justine, while the fog seemed to seep in through my ears, creating a dark
haze behind my eyes.

The Bar Mess dinner is a sumptuous meal followed by soporific speeches, anodyne debates or mock trials. It is a key event
in the professional calendar. I rarely attended, but that night was different. Driven by a raging desire to see Justine and
a determination to avoid Penny, I found myself in the rococo banqueting hall of the old London Bridge Railway Hotel. There
was no one there apart from sixty barristers and a solitary judge, the special guest speaker, eager to enrich our lives with
firebrand wit.

Hilary Hardcastle was already on her feet, a few minutely scribbled notes in hand, addressing her captive audience. Her strange
head scanned the room in precise jerks.

Justine and Davenport flanked Hardcastle on High Table. Davenport was the Mess Leader and Justine was his guest. When I saw
her sitting there, I wished I had not arrived late, as I desperately wanted to tell her how I felt, to be forward, to articulate
my desires for once. That was the plan. But I had no opportunity. The dubious reward for my tardiness was to be sat on a table
by the door with Mess Junior, Rupert Livingstone.

Now that speeches had begun, it was Livingstone’s solemn task to guard the oak-paneled doors and prevent the entry of “strangers.”
For this dangerous mission, he had been armed with a jeroboam of vintage claret.

Hilary Hardcastle was reaching the heart of her speech. “In my day, the Junior Bar was seen and not heard.” There were a few
port-induced guffaws from the constellation of silks. “We knew our place in those days. Maybe, gentlemen“—she ignored the
scattering of “lady” barristers—“Maybe, gentlemen, it is a sign of the times. Everyone wants his say. I am led to believe
this is what they call democracy.”

At this, laughter. I did not really see why.

Hardcastle took a sip of port; her lips became momentarily ruby. “I see barristers in court talking about the truth. About
justice. They’ll be talking about the American way next.”

Livingstone was sitting behind me. He leant forward and whispered, “She’s a tartar, don’t you think?”

“I can think of other words for it,” I replied. Then I remembered those strange words that Kingsley had called after me in
the prison. I turned to Livingstone. “Rupert, old chap,” I said, speaking the only language he understood. “You appear to
be a chap who knows everything about everything.”

“Well, yes,” he said smugly. “There is that.”

“Does riding the Stang mean anything to you?”

“Don’t be an ignorant pleb all your life, Fawley,” he said.

“So what is it?”

“It’s a form of punishment.”

“What sort?”

“Oh, do shut up, Fawley. Hilary’s reaching her climax.”

This was a phenomenon that even I had a vague interest in seeing. The diminutive judge looked hard at my corner of the room.
“You see, gentlemen, cases are taking too long. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is asking questions.” I could have sworn she stressed
the “Tom.” “Too many of you are fighting hopeless cases, running dishonest defenses.”

Her little eyes didn’t move from my end of the table. Hardcastle was becoming more and more fervent as if she were an evangelical
preacher. Only that with one heretical exception called Fawley, she was preaching to the converted.

“The code of conduct permits you to give strong advice about pleading guilty. My strong advice to you is don’t shirk from
that duty.”

Hardcastle’s voice rose. It cracked, spat, and pestered. “Gentlemen, you are not concerned with real guilt and innocence.
That is the province of the Church—and of God.”

Justine stared up at Hardcastle, her delicate chin cupped in the same delicate hands that had moved so expertly through my
shirt.

“The system of criminal justice is a huge…” Hardcastle frantically searched for the words and after looking down at her plate
she said, “The system is a huge slaughter-house. A right ruddy meat factory. And more meat is being fed in every day. Most
of it fouled, some of it rotting, all sorts of muck.” She took a final sip of port; her tongue, as red as a rhododendron,
lapped the corners of her mouth. “So don’t clog up the system, gentlemen. It will create an awful stink.”