The Evidence

by Christopher Priest

  Frejah took more of her cryptic calls on the radio headset, leaving me the space to think about my plans for the days ahead. After three nights away I was beginning to miss home comforts, the routines of my ordinary life. And I had work to do: the proofs the publisher had sent me needed to be checked soon, not a difficult or unpleasant chore but still a chore. I had had to set aside writing the first draft of my next novel to make this trip. I wanted to get back to that as soon as possible because a first draft, if left unattended, starts looking unsatisfactory. And I wanted to have some time with Jo, who would be going away in the next few days.

  We passed out of the industrial zone – the road climbed for a while, bringing us to a high, wide plateau. Ice was thick on the road surface once more. The few trees that clung to the soil were wind-carved, their branches reaching out like desperate arms, south to north. After about forty kilometres the road descended again. The distances of Dearth felt interminable, the terrain a constant horror.

  I kept looking at the recessed digital clock display on the dash, wondering what time we would arrive at the airport. The Historical Society had sent me a ticket for the Salay flight taking off in the early evening. That was the plane scheduled for passengers arriving at the airport on the train. I might or might not still be in time for that, but the ticket was an open one so if necessary I could catch an earlier or later flight. I had no idea how many more flights there were.

  I thought of looking at the online airline schedule on my cell, but I was nervous of using it in this place. The coverage would undoubtedly be on the wrong protocol. I did not want to reset to Dearth defaults.

  We stopped for lunch. I was impatient to carry on to Tristcontenta Hub, but Frejah said she wanted a proper meal.

  While we were at the table we worked out how much further there was to drive, and what time we would arrive at the Hub. Frejah was convincingly optimistic. Even if we stayed in the restaurant for another hour, she said, it would still be possible for me to catch the plane on which I was booked. She checked on the internet and said there was another plane two hours later. The one after that took off early the next morning.

  She dawdled over her cup of coffee and began asking me more questions about the books I write. I was thinking ahead about getting to the airport, flying home, and anyway I felt I had said enough about that. She asked me if I wrote any other kind of fiction, or if it was just crime fiction.

  I said nothing to that, trying not to glower, even mentally. Just crime fiction?

  I changed the subject, and told her I had been interested in the story she told me. I asked her if I could check the spelling of some of the names she had mentioned. Even then I was anticipating having to transcribe what she had said. I was guessing that the name of the older cop she had been partnered with was called Jexid or Jeskit, but she put me right on that: Jeksid. I mentally noted it, as I did the name Waller (my guess had been ‘Woller’) Alman. I like to get details right.

  I made a mental note to pass on the correct spellings to Jo, if she was looking through crime reference books for these names.

  We returned to the car. It was still freezing cold but now it was raining, a hard, clamant downpour, a roaring noise against the frozen ground, with flecks of ice or snow bouncing and shattering on the car’s shiny surfaces. Frejah rejoined the traffic, driving swiftly once more. The road was slippery in many places.

  I could not help it: I was in fact brooding with irritation about Frejah’s ‘just crime fiction’ remark. It was like a casually delivered stab.

  I know I am over-sensitive about this. Like all categories of fiction, crime is misunderstood and underrated by those who never read it. Within the reasonable limits of the genre it is possible to take on numerous subjects as well as the crime in question, and narrate them in different ways. There are many tones and moods and approaches possible within the genre, from the slight, repetitive and mechanically plotted, to the well imagined and technically accurate modern mystery, to the deeply researched, well thought out and psychologically plausible. There is almost no such thing as a generic or typical crime novel. Thrillers occupy a literary house with many different rooms.

  Some of the crime writers I was acquainted with made a career out of the repeated activities of a single sleuth, who from one book to the next encountered and eventually solved one seemingly mysterious crime after another. I recognized the attraction of that kind of story, for the writer as well as the reader, but I had tried it in three of my early books until I realized I was becoming dissatisfied with it, and also bored. Since then my novels have been increasingly concerned with the psychological nature of crime, the criminal instinct and the buried motives of the criminal.

  What, beyond a sudden insane impulse of rage or desperation or a misguided sense of grievance, would drive one apparently normal person to kill another? It is such an irreversible step into the dark night of the soul that few people would venture into it. That strikes me as a valid enquiry for a novel. Many of the great classic novels of the past, now accepted as general reading, were in effect crime stories. Few of us can write classics, but they provide a standard of excellence. Some writers excel at the genre, but in truth the plots of many modern thrillers are based on straightforward or banal motives, trivializing this grim psychological territory.

  Although there have been honourable exceptions, most killers in books develop an acute need for money, or they want revenge for some real or imagined grievance, or they wish to receive a legacy that would otherwise go to a sibling or a disliked cousin, or for various reasons they feel they have to get an unwanted spouse or relative out of the way. They try to cheat insurance companies. They think they can elude the police, or the private detective hired to trap them. They remain, on the surface, civilized and articulate, and in some cases see the evasion of justice as a game.

  Several thriller writers have an interest in psychopathy, the motives of a maladjusted serial killer, but as far as my own books were concerned I felt there were only a limited number of ways that could be used as material for a novel.

  I was increasingly interested in the ordinary person, one who is invisible in the context of normal society, who ventures for some reason into that dark world of the soul, who then tries to be released from it, or who rejects it, or who dangerously embraces it.

  My recent books therefore depended less on plot, murderous gimmicks or a twist ending than they did on character, circumstance, background. I wrote about the conflict created when the protagonist (or the person driven to murder – not always the same) sets up boundaries, or a context within which the crime will take place, but overlooks a crucial fact that will ruin everything.

  Sometimes my books ended without the solution the main character was looking for – the crime is unsolved, the murderer gets away with it. A few of the reviewers said they disliked that. I was scolded because crime must not pay. Every puzzle must have a solution, they would sermonize in their reviews, perhaps overlooking the fact that there was a different kind of mystery leading to another sort of outcome, one which I intended to be read as more human, more plausible.

  I found it difficult to describe my recent books to anyone, like Frejah, who was curious about them but was not familiar with the overall genre. I knew I could easily sound difficult, ambitious in the wrong way. I had heard that said about me several times. I never liked it! So I would normally stick to describing my half-dozen first books, the ones which were conventionally plotted and narrated straightforwardly, knowing that what I was saying was no longer true about my current stuff, but it was not important. Readers who had kept up with my later books did not need to be told.

  In any case, it seemed the only book of mine Frejah knew well was my old police procedural. No more questions came from her now. I wondered if she was thinking I was pretentious, or perhaps, because she viewed me through her many years of being a police officer, believing that I had an unhealthy interest in crime, what she called transgression, and was sublimating it into wha
t I wrote.

  We were now closing in on the north of the island. I saw a sign announcing that Tristcontenta Hub was a further 75 kms. The next sign said 42 kms.

  I began wondering what I should say or do when Frejah deposited me at the airport. She had done me a big favour by offering me the car ride, and I did find her company interesting. How often does one get to meet a semi-retired police chief in a souped-up roadster with a military grade semi-automatic stashed in the trunk? Maybe there would be a story in this experience one day?

  I am always curious about motive and outcomes – there was something about Frejah that did not fit. For example, was our first meeting in the hotel bar entirely by chance? That is how it seemed to me, but it turned out she had known who I was, and had found out or already knew where I was staying. It made me think.

  We arrived at the Hub about thirty minutes before my flight was due to take off. Frejah pulled the car, engine growling, into the passenger drop-off area, and for the last time I levered myself into an upright position and swung out of the passenger seat. The bitterly cold air chilled me at once. The walkways had been cleared of snow, but big patches of ice remained.

  Frejah released the lock of the seamless lid of the trunk. It opened with a muted click, a sound of suction. She left the car and walked around to the other side. She had halted the car directly beneath a high lamp shining down on the area, so that the interior of the trunk was brightly illuminated. With swift movements she pulled out my computer holdall, my overnight bag, and the larger case which was holding my padded outer clothes.

  The automatic weapon was in clear sight. The constituent parts were clipped securely into the shaped and customized recesses of a cushioned board. The inner working surfaces were bright – the rest of it was matt black. The barrel was short, the magazine at least a third of a metre long.

  ‘That’s an assault weapon,’ I said. ‘Is that standard police issue?’

  ‘Command and control,’ Frejah said, intoning the form of words. ‘I am licensed to carry it, and my authority is renewed every seven days. I retrain every month.’

  The lid came down swiftly.

  ‘I was just asking,’ I said. ‘You still claim there are no crimes on Dearth?’

  ‘Asking is your right as a citizen serf.’ She held out a hand, and gave me an unforced smile. ‘Well, this is goodbye. It has been most interesting to meet you, Todd.’

  We shook hands, then we kissed lightly on the cheek. We muttered conventional thanks and farewell. We had made no plans to meet again, nor was there ever any expectation that we might. I said something about the fact that I hoped the case she was working on would soon be resolved, and she replied to wish me well with my writing career.

  Then she added something odd: ‘Closing the case might be something you can help with. I told you how it began.’

  She moved quickly to the car door. We were both under the insistent freezing rain, and unprotected against the icy temperature. I gathered up my stuff and dashed towards the terminal building. Before I had passed through the automatic triple doors I heard the now familiar roar of the roadster’s engine.

  I missed the boarding gate closure by three minutes. I walked slowly back to the main part of the terminal, making a swift decision: rather than hang around for another two or three hours in the terminal, waiting for the next plane, which anyway would land me back in Salay in the early hours of the morning, I decided to go to an airport hotel.

  Once I was in my room (whose door was opened with an electronic card, but the room was otherwise free of warnings about mutability), Jo and I exchanged messages on the internet for half an hour. She said she was still looking through the reference books, had found a couple of possible mentions. I confirmed the spelling of the names with her. Then I went to the hotel restaurant for dinner.

  In the morning I caught the first flight out, landing on the island of Salay Ewwel, the first. After a short internal flight to Raba, the fourth, I was home in the early afternoon.

  The house, the beach beyond, the surrounding forest, were bathed in a balmy heat. The sounds of insects and birds, children on the beach, the scent of trees.

  11

  Questions, Questions

  I sprawled on the decking of my patio outside my study, Dearth already a bad and chilling memory. I was born to be a warm climate man.

  It was great to be home again, a place I left as infrequently as possible. The house I lived in with Jo would possibly seem to many people to be too big for only the two of us. It was long and low, single-storeyed, shaped like a capital E, with wings at each end and the kitchen/diner and other rooms sticking out in the middle. The rest of the living and bed rooms were arranged along the central section, which Jo and I always thought of as the useful corridor that joined us. Our work rooms were sufficiently far apart that we did not disturb each other, but sufficiently close together that we could when the mood took us wander along to see each other.

  Roughly aligned east/west, the front of the house became a natural suntrap during the long summers on Raba, and we made constant use of it. When Jo and I first moved in we loved staring out across the sea – the view was one of the main reasons we bought the house. Gradually, though, as the years went by and the house became more intensively a place of work, we neglected the garden. Thick undergrowth grew up to hide the view. We encouraged that: most of the bushes and young saplings that sprang up were natural to the forest, and we planted a couple of other trees as well. We were not alone in doing this: many of our neighbours also encouraged a natural screen. A road ran past the house, between us and the beach. It gave the harmless impression to anyone walking or driving along the road that the beach was fringed with forest greenery. Very few of the houses could be seen from the road, but most of them, like ours, had rough-hewn paths through the trees that were kept open down to the road.

  Jo’s studio was in the wing at the western end. It was a huge room, cluttered with art materials, canvases, sketchbooks, film and video projectors, bottles, huge coils of rope, plastic fishing nets and driftwood salvaged from the sea, dozens of pieces of work, some unfinished, some early efforts. The studio had a specially strengthened concrete floor, overhead in the reinforced roof space was a pulley used for lifting and moving heavier pieces into place, and one of the exterior walls had been entirely replaced by sliding doors. Medium-sized trucks could squeeze alongside the house and reach the studio, bringing in or porting away the largest pieces. Recently, Jo had been spending less time in her studio, and instead was now pursuing a more lucrative career in freelance theatrical design.

  My own study, occupying a large room at the opposite end of the house, was a more austere place, and tidier. Dark stained bookshelves lined two of the walls. The books that stood there, randomly acquired over the years and added to slowly all the time, constituted my primary research source. Apart from my immediate reference shelf, next to my desk, I had accumulated hundreds of books directly or indirectly concerned with true crime. Many of them were transcripts of significant criminal hearings, some were the memoirs of eminent jurists, private detectives, criminal lawyers, journalists, and so on. A few described the political or social ramifications that followed the conviction of certain criminals. But the majority of the books discussed my own area of interest: alleged cases of wrongful conviction, imprisonment or execution, and the loosely connected similar matter: the cases that remained a mystery, where the perpetrator was never identified or arrested, or which had baffled the police and all other investigators.

  Only a few of the books on my shelves were fiction – thrillers or crime novels. Some of them were gifts from friends or colleagues. I kept most of those. Others were sent to me by publishers or the writers themselves, in the hope of a favourable endorsement that might be quoted on publication. I kept only a few. I was always nervous of inadvertently ‘borrowing’ an ingenious idea from other writers’ novels, so I was not an enthusiastic reader of my colleagues’ works. Every year I would hand out a few of
these books to the local library, and pass on the rest to a secondhand shop in Raba City, from which they were quickly sold.

  Copies of my own books were sent by my publishers to other writers, for similar reasons. No doubt these too ended up a year or two later in the same sort of bookstore.

  My desk, with both my laptop and desktop computers, stood in the centre of the room, with a secondary table placed behind for the printer, a box of paper, and so on. When I worked at my desk I faced north towards the sea, but because of the trees in the garden and the steep slope down to the shore there was no distracting view. During the warmest months I worked with the large picture window open, and a sun shade pulled over the decking outside my study. If I sat outside I could hear the breaking of the waves on the shingly beach, and the happy cries of children. When the weather was hottest I would go out to the deck to read or doze, cooled by an electric fan, but the sunshine was too annoyingly bright for me to work for long at a computer monitor.

  Once I was home from my four-day trip to Dearth I relished the return to my normal daily life, seeing Jo again, catching up with news and gossip, sitting at my desk and browsing online at the sites I visited most frequently. I was always surrounded by books, not just the ones on the shelves, but the loose and unstable stacks that stood on the floor near where I worked. Every few weeks I would tidy these up, transferring them to shelves or to another room, but the stacks would soon rebuild themselves with new titles.

  On the evening of my first day back Jo and I drove into Raba City and indulged ourselves in an expensive dinner and a movie. She told me then that she had come across a few possible mentions of the case Frejah had described – she had put the books on the floor next to my desk, with paper markers tucked in. A new, lower stack. I had noticed these, and guessed what they were, but not yet looked at them.