I was prevented from reaching any conclusions by the doorbell which announced the return of the police. There were two of them, the pouchy-eyed one from last night, and another.
I wanted to know, before they began, whether Igor had been found.
‘No, no sign of him. No one seems to have heard or seen him. Except you, of course. We haven’t been able to trace his movements at all.’
‘But you’re watching the flights to Moscow? Can you get hold of passenger lists?’
He did not reply and I recalled that I did not even know Igor’s surname. And he could take another route, cross the Channel, fly to Cyprus or New York. It was becoming clear that it wasn’t just a question of arresting Igor and letting justice take its course. The police were going to need much more help from me. I would have to tell them about Julian and Anatoli, about the Bank and its activities. And once started, there was no end. Everything needed explaining. I saw resistance in their stolid expressions, a refusal to believe. I did not blame them. It was for that reason I had not wanted to embark on the story. It was hard to know where to begin.
I need not have worried. They did not want to ask about Julian’s past, they concentrated solely on the hours immediately preceding her death. They wanted to hear, again, what we had been doing. Here I made my next serious error: I did not mention Anatoli. My aim had been originally to help him, and that purpose would not be served by involving him in this business, in which, as far as I could see, he had no part. So the story I presented to them was true, but simplified. I said we had been out in the afternoon, to the airport to meet a friend, and had returned about six. Julian had gone across to her own flat while I remained, reading and preparing for my meeting with Dr Horndeane in my own.
‘Had you had any sort of disagreement?’ he asked.
‘We never quarrelled. It was impossible to argue with Julian; she simply withdrew. She never had rows.’
‘What happened next?’
I explained that Igor had arrived, I had let him in, thinking he was Dr Horndeane. He had been with me for less than an hour. No, I had not met him before, but I knew of him as a friend of Julian’s.
‘What did you talk about for so long to a stranger?’
I hesitated. ‘We talked about Julian.’
‘What in particular about her?’
This was my opportunity to explain about the Bank, the three partners, the Mafia. But I did not take it. I did not believe anything Igor had told me; I was not sure I even believed Julian. I did not understand what had been going on. How could I explain what I did not understand? So I left it all out.
‘He came to talk to her about something, I don’t know what exactly. But he was annoyed with her. He spoke of her in an unsympathetic, uncomplimentary way. He didn’t rage or threaten. I had no idea that he was going to do what he did.’
‘When he made his attack, where did he get the knife from?’ This was a good question, one I had not attended to. I shut my eyes and watched the scene replay. I hadn’t seen an attack; I had seen an embrace. My mind had interpreted what I saw according to my preconceptions. Only afterwards I had understood. So where had he kept the knife?
‘It must have been inside his raincoat pocket,’ I said. He had not taken off his mackintosh in my flat. He was still wearing it, open, when we walked over to find Julian.
‘When Dr Horndeane entered she found you holding the knife…’
‘That was because I had just picked it up. I almost fell over it, where it was lying beside her on the floor.’
‘And what sort of knife was it? Can you describe it for me?’
I tried to recall, and succeeded. The brain takes in and records information even at the time of immense emotional pressure. ‘It was about a foot long altogether, including the handle, with a very sharp point and I think it was double-edged. The handle was short in comparison with the blade, maybe only four inches long.’
‘Had you ever seen the weapon before?’
‘No, of course not. He must have had it in his pocket and drawn it out the moment he reached her.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now, I want to ask you about a knife you or rather Miss Bennet acquired in Russia.’
I couldn’t think what he was talking about.
‘We understand that when you were at dinner in Moscow in March, a friend bought Miss Bennet a knife.’
Henrik. How on earth could they know all this? Minna?
‘Yes, you’re right. It was a Dutch art historian called Henrik Gevaert who gave it to her.’ I remembered Henrik’s expression as he looked into the pearly-white breasts of the woman selling roses and souvenirs.
‘And what was that knife like?’
I frowned. ‘I don’t really know. I don’t think I ever studied it closely.’
‘Do you know where it is now?’
‘I’ve no idea. I imagine Julian left it in Moscow. It’s not the sort of thing she would particularly value.’
‘You don’t know its whereabouts now?’
‘No.’
‘Would you permit us to make another search?’
‘Of course, go ahead, if you want to. But I can’t see what that knife has to do with anything that has happened.’
The interview continued for hours, as they nagged on and on about Igor, the knife, the timing of his departure. After about four hours they left. I was to be available for questioning at all times. They would have to come back to check certain points with me.
‘What happens to the body?’ I asked. ‘What about the funeral?’
‘We’re a long way from that, I’m afraid. There’ll be the inquest next week and we’ll take things from there. What about next of kin, sir? Have you notified her relatives of what has happened?’
I shook my head. I had until then done nothing to tell anyone about the catastrophe that had hit me. And who would I tell? I knew Julian was an only child, her parents dead. Who besides me would care?
After this long and wearing session, I came out of my stupefaction sufficiently to ring Prisca’s number. Only the answerphone replied and I could not bring myself to say after the beep, ‘Julian’s been murdered. I’m being questioned by the police.’ I hung up without leaving a message.
They came for me about six in the evening, less than twenty-four hours after Julian’s death. I had not expected it. They should have been pursuing Igor. If they had got him, he could have answered all their questions. But when he spoke, the pouchy-faced officer whose name I never registered, I had a sense of the inevitable. This was what was meant to happen. I could see a pattern: I had met Julian on the night someone had tried to kill her and now he had succeeded. I was set up to be the killer.
40
Thus the whole astonishing process of the trial began, astonishing because I could not believe it was happening. I lived each stage, the police station, the statement, the remand, the committal proceedings, the prison, as if it were happening to someone else. The sense of distance was increased by the sharp demarcation between freedom and captivity.
I was taken from the magistrates’ court to prison in a private security company bus, like no other vehicle I had ever been in before. As it made its way through London, I sat on the hard seat of a cell in the semi-darkness and thought about Julian. Quite soon I must wake up from this nightmare; she would be restored to me, alive; we would be back in the flat together, talking about where to go for dinner, what concert to hear at the weekend. But when the bus came to its final halt it was inside the prison walls and I and my companions were escorted into the Reception Block. Here a series of alienating procedures progressively cut you off from your past. Each stage was another door closing on normality. First we were photographed. Something in the automatic cameras of the police and prison authorities imposes criminality on the face, coarsening the features and brutalising the expression. I was assigned my prison number; then strip-searched and sent to a cell. I was now Ochterlonie SX5860, someone o
ther than the Nicholas Ochterlonie, writer and academic, Julian’s lover, Emily’s husband.
This rupture with my own life did nothing to ease the sense of predestination that came at the arrest; in fact, it enhanced it. More and more I had the feeling that I was on an unstoppable train heading for some unknowable but disastrous end.
Prisca was clear what the catastrophe would be.
‘You’re facing life imprisonment, Nicholas,’ she said as she sat opposite me across one of the formica-topped tables in the Visits Room at the prison.
We met here, in a routine that she imposed to cheer me up and galvanise me into defending myself. She came almost every day, flogging through the south London traffic from her office in the House of Lords. She submitted to the tedious process of waiting to be let into the prison, showing her Visiting Order, indicating my name and number and desire to see her, queuing with the mothers and wives and girlfriends and children to be let in, one by one. The Visits Room had the air of a gloomy cafe with small tables in rows, supervised by video cameras supplemented by several warders watching the exchanges with bored and cynical glances that swept the area like searchlights. Prisca was always already seated at our table when I was led in to meet her.
I had become one of her causes and united her crusading vigour and her family feeling. I was able to give her plenty of material for her prison reform dossier, which had long been one of her interests. Sometimes her research into prison conditions overrode her concerns about my case and she cross-questioned me about life as a remand prisoner, comparing my experience with best practice. I could not complain of ill-treatment, only boredom, discomfort and the misery which derived from my thoughts, not my surroundings. I was celled up with another prisoner, on remand for grievous bodily harm. We were locked up together for about twenty-one hours a day. The three hours out consisted of an hour of free association in the evenings, which I could have done without, half an hour of exercise ambling about the prison yard, occasional trips to the prison library, the visits of my lawyers or Prisca herself. Other diversions from our full-time occupation of lying on our beds were the three expeditions to collect our food from the basement for our meals, which were eaten in our cells at hours I had never previously regarded as times for eating. I told Prisca about what was happening to me as if it were a drama playing on a television switched on in a corner of my room, an episode vivid and self-contained, with no connection to my own life.
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you,’ she said, angrily. ‘You seem incapable of making any effort on your own behalf.’
I tried to explain my sense of doom, the oddity of the pattern, the knifings that had begun and ended my time with Julian.
I had hardly begun before Prisca interrupted. ‘I’ve no time for that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘You always say you hate abstraction, you like particularity, and yet you come out with this rubbish. You’re condemning yourself by your own actions. Your problem is that you’re suffering from shock and some kind of retreat from reality. You’ve got to get over it. You can indulge in all the grief you like once you’re out of prison.’ She waited for a response and, when I said nothing, she sighed. ‘I’m changing your solicitor.’ On my arrest I had rung my family lawyer, the same man who was dealing with my divorce. ‘You need someone who specialises in crime, in cases like this. I took Jamie’s advice and I’ve found the best people to go to and they’ll get us the best barrister. Someone should come to see you tomorrow, once you’ve told the authorities about the change.’
I studied Prisca’s face, determination etched into the lines around her nose and eyes. She was like a piece of sculpture saved from some pagan temple which is still touched as a talisman. Her brow and cheeks and nose were paler, as if polished, than the darker skin around her eyes. I had never really noticed that before.
‘Nicholas,’ she said more gently. ‘You’re not going to get out of this by the operation of abstract justice. You’ve got to tell them everything. Begin at the beginning and tell them all you know.’
‘The problem is,’ I explained, ‘I don’t know what I know. All right, all right, Prisca. I’ll try. Let me explain to you. I know what I observed myself directly, of Julian. I know what she told me about herself and her relationship with the man she used to live with, a Russian banker called Anatoli Vozkresensky and with his partner, the murderer, Igor. What I don’t know is what is the truth. That’s why, to begin with, I just told the police what I knew I knew. Igor came to see her; he stabbed her, he left.’
‘You’d better begin by going through it all with me.’
Once I had been charged, I understood that Igor’s disappearance had left me in a very vulnerable position, for there was no one else to accuse. The police would have to understand the complexity of the situation, so, at length and with great patience, I told them Julian’s story, not everything, not Igor’s version, not Anatoli’s, as part of my statement. By that time they had discovered their own records of the mugging and the break-in, so I explained to them that throughout our time together, she had been at risk from the Russian Mafia.
Initially, I think, my story impressed them sufficiently to stem their scepticism. It was so circumstantial and so detailed that it was unlikely that anyone could improvise such an elaborate tale. But their earlier disbelief returned when they failed to find any corroboration of what I had said.
My lawyers, the new firm organised for me by Prisca, had little more faith in me than the police. They applied themselves to my case with a professional vigour which never quite hid their doubts. We are paid to believe you, they implied, but you might have made life easier for us by coming up with something more convincing. The partner in charge of my case, George Goodson, interviewed me for the first time with the assistance of a beautiful black colleague, called Christina Martens. Solicitors’ visits were held in special interview rooms, not amid the communal hurly-burly which Prisca, as a relative, faced every day. An hour spent with the lawyers was a time of semi-privacy that I enjoyed for itself; the conversation was a secondary benefit.
I had organised my account carefully, bearing in mind Prisca’s insistence on the importance of frankness. I summarised as concisely as possible my relationship with Julian and the danger she had been in. The story that I recounted was partly my own. It was also partly Julian’s story. I was retailing, secondhand, what she had told me of her life with Anatoli. But that account did not altogether tally with what had been revealed at our meeting with Anatoli at Heathrow, still less with what Igor had told me. I had to decide how much I believed. I would have preferred the first version, Julian as victim, but some sense of self-preservation suggested to me that I would only make matters worse for myself by censoring the story and I simply told them everything I knew and let them make what they could of it.
Ms Martens worked silently at her laptop, while Goodson, of an older generation, made notes on an elegant black leather-backed pad. Neither of them displayed surprise at the account I gave with a comparable lack of emotional emphasis.
Goodson leaned back in his chair when I had finished and said, ‘Let me get this perfectly straight. Our story is that Miss Bennet was killed by a Russian banker, a colleague of her former lover, who regarded her as a rival in the illegal operations of their organisation.’
Put like that I could see there were credibility problems.
‘Yes, I suppose so. But I am not sure of the motive, only of the act. The motivation is speculative.’
‘But how does all this fit with the statement you made to the police?’
‘I’ve told you more than I told them. I began by not saying much, just that Igor was there, that he did it. It was so complicated, too difficult to explain, especially, as I’ve told you, I’m not certain of the truth myself. I can see it was a mistake not to have tried to explain everything right from the beginning.’
‘I can’t say that it has added to your credibility. You start with one story; you give them another when you’re arrested, and n
ow you tell us something else.’
‘They’re not different stories,’ I protested. ‘They’re expansions.’
The police are not so subtle. For them one story is one story, and another another. We’ll have to do what we can to find some witnesses who can support what you say, anybody, a taxi driver, someone passing in the street. A bit of corroboration is what we need.’
He asked more questions, made a few more notes in minuscule writing and the two of them left with a list of names: Igor, Francesca, Barnaby, Anatoli, Colin Trevor, Tom Naish.
A week later Ms Martens returned, alone. She was uncomfortable. At first I thought it was empathy that had produced her distress, for the news she had to convey was not good. They had had no success so far in identifying any of the people I had mentioned and I would have to search my memory for more details. I could see her problem, but I could not help. Barnaby and Francesca, for example. I did not know the surname of either of them. If I had ever known which firm Barnaby belonged to, I had forgotten it.
‘They don’t believe me,’ I complained to Prisca when she came next day. ‘Even my own lawyers don’t believe me.’ I had been telling her the story every afternoon, during the twenty or thirty minutes of visiting time, elaborating another episode while she asked questions.
‘Of course they believe you,’ she said. ‘They’re looking at how to present your case in court. They’ve already retained a barrister, Roger Ignatius, no one could be better. They’re aiming at the best outcome for you.’
‘No,’ I said. They think I did it. They think I’m not completely sane and that I’m trying to escape the responsibility of what I’ve done by blaming an alter ego, a creation of my own mind.’
The Art of Deception Page 29