In the Absence of Iles

by Bill James

  But Gerald trying to prop her morale at a trial was different. Although he had enough control not to heckle or hiss, after a short while listening to the judge he might become hurt and/or enraged – almost certainly would become hurt and/or enraged – by the cascade of words in public about someone, something, other than himself. He’d regard this as a filthy and calculated affront.

  Naturally, in some of his calmer, saner moments, even Gerald realized that most of the world’s business happened without in the least noticing him. He knew the name G. Davidson did definitely mean something, but not to very many. His complete and obvious irrelevance to what went on in the court would affect him like a sickness. Gerald was not made for spectatordom. And he would fiendishly hate this trial because, although he rated as nothing, Esther could claim to have real involvement here. Clearly. Flagrantly. In fact, he’d spot that what Esther had decided months ago to do with undercover actually caused this summing-up; actually caused the entire fucking trial. This was bound to torment Gerald with envy. He shone at envy. Exclusion brought him vast pain. He was that famous starving kid, nose pressed against the restaurant window, watching the polished clientele gorge. After not very long in court, Gerald would probably become unmanageably restless and start grunting and whispering to Esther, and twitching his body about as if it was worth looking at or giving the kiss of life to. This would insult the court and, much more important in Esther’s opinion, insult Dean and the Martlew family. If Gerald were thrown out by attendants she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know the barmy sod.

  So, she must put him off. Must. But, unless she got the timbre and phrasing right, he’d begin to overheat and start one of his riffs about her only wishing to attend solo because she had, or had had, a wondrously satisfying carnal connection with the dead undercover officer, or some of his family, or with the judge, or Channing, or one or more of the Press reporters, or Ambrose Tutte Turton, or Iles: she’d spoken to Gerald now and then about Iles and his quirks and dandyism, and mentioned that, for his particular reasons, he attended some sessions of the trial. On this key day, she felt it would be bad to appear at court showing sucked wounds. It could seem self-indulgent, and lacking decorum. Nor would she have time, let alone wish, to fuck following a full donnybrook rough-house, as Gerald would undoubtedly demand under established après scrap custom and practice.

  ‘It’s so kind of you to offer to come with me, Gerald, my love!’

  ‘Darling, what else could I do? I mean, if you have trouble don’t I also have trouble – share that trouble?’

  ‘What else could you do? What else!’ She smiled, a lingering, soulmate to soulmate construction. ‘But you see, it’s only because you are you that you ask that question! I can tell you, Gerald – and I probably need to tell you, since, in your kindliness, you’d never suspect this yourself – but I can tell you some men would feel not the least obligation. Zilch obligation.’ She thought this would probably get to him – the word ‘obligation’, and used twice tickled up by the slangy ‘zilch’. He was an artist and didn’t do obligations, despised obligations, would want no truck with obligations, in the usual social-fabric, family sense. Ultimately, his only obligation was to his art, his bassoon, his work, although he didn’t have any just now. He might ask, ‘Did Picasso let “obligations” stop him painting women with eyes where their tits should be?’ Esther said: ‘People there will admire you so much for knowing your duty.’

  ‘People where?’

  ‘At the court. And generally. Television news pictures of you arriving with me – me as recognizable in this context, of course.’

  ‘Duty? I see it as a natural, spousely impulse to be with you at this time, only that,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, and I’m sure it is. But then, I know your character. To them, not knowing it, you would appear to have accepted a mere satellite role – very much a second-string role as compared with mine on this occasion – and they’ll esteem you for that willing and willed self-effacement. This will put you into a lowly, yet not utterly insignificant, position, say like Thatcher’s husband, or footballers’ wives.’

  ‘I’ve played solo in many a fucking concerto, you know, including at the Drapers’ Hall,’ he replied. ‘“Unmatchable”, my Mozart Rondo K.191 was called by a reviewer.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I do know. And perhaps some of them will know also, and feel it truly humble of you to step down from K.191, and recognize that this might be the life-stage when you take on instead – ungrudgingly and devotedly – the sidekick identity, as if subsumed by me. Mind, they will not suppose the bassoon, or the thrill of performance, are completely forgotten, but they’ll assume you have decided these are no longer supreme priorities.’

  ‘They fucking are,’ he replied.

  ‘We realize this, not them.’

  ‘I hate people like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Trite, formula minds.’

  ‘Not many of them would have any real hope of understanding someone of your temperament, Gerald.’

  ‘Always the bassoon will call me, call me, call me, the way a battlefield flag called to troops in old wars.’

  ‘And you are the greater man for that, though it is too much for them to take in. They will see at this point a self-sacrificial, gifted, contentedly bypassed, former celebrity.’

  He didn’t go with her. ‘Have you been messing me about – all that worthy aide-de-camp wool, Esther?’ He said he didn’t know why she had to go to the summing-up again, with him or alone. ‘You can’t affect anything.’

  No, she couldn’t. More zilch. But it was what Gerald would call an impulse. She did have impulses. She got out of the house before he could turn imaginative, dirty and physical. Maybe Iles would show. Dean’s father certainly would: a main reason for Esther to be there. She didn’t want him to think her indifferent. He might in his mind reasonably accuse her of all sorts, but not indifference. Now and then she wished she could manage a spell of indifference, of numbness.

  She’d missed a few hours of the summing-up here and there, including while she was at East Stead on Friday morning, and thought that if necessary she could read the missing bits in transcript sometime. Probably it wasn’t necessary. Things would go as they were going, regardless. Gerald had that right. She might come to the transcript as more or less an historical document, weeks on, months on. But Esther wanted the closing words of the judge’s performance live. They should be heard raw, not read for retrospect. Why? They should, that’s all. On the chief issues that would figure today, Esther needed to savour the seeming reasonableness of the judge’s manner, and the mild, precise way she presented logical options for the jury to think about. The tone would be crucial – not necessarily favourable or comforting but crucial. Tone you couldn’t always get from a transcript.

  Although Esther had considered giving the court another miss and returning to the Dill situation at East Stead, she sensed that people working on the case there found her a persistent, interfering nuisance during her Friday, Saturday and Sunday visits; the Saturday and Sunday ones quite long, as there was no sitting court or office meeting to compete. Actually, she’d realized from the start they would regard her as an interfering nuisance, and decided she could ignore this: Esther felt impelled to be there, and rank saw her all right, entitled her. Rank was beautiful sometimes. This morning, though, the pull of the trial grew strong again. The judge had already been talking for more than a day and a half when she adjourned on Friday lunchtime for the weekend, as judges tended to. She must be near the wrap.

  ‘Members of the jury, I come now to the evidence of the witnesses, Mr Charles Edenbridge Rowan and Mr Frank Claud Bates. Both told the court that they had seen the accused with Detective Sergeant Dean Martlew and another man on 8 June, the day the Prosecution say Dean Martlew was killed. This, of course, is totally at variance with the claim of the accused and others that Martlew had left the Cormax Turton companies and been paid off on 27 May, and that neither he – the accused – nor
, as far as he knew, anybody in the companies, had seen Martlew or been in contact with him since then. The evidence of Mr Rowan and Mr Bates is therefore fundamental to the Prosecution case, and it will be for you to decide how you regard that evidence.’

  As Esther had half expected, Desmond Iles was present for this final session, sitting near the front of the public gallery a few places from Mr Martlew. Just before the judge began, Iles and he shook hands standing, and talked together for a few moments. It seemed amiable. Perhaps Iles had done what he promised and won him and the family over.

  The judge said: ‘There are some resemblances between Mr Rowan’s and Mr Bates’s testimony and some differences. This is to be expected. Let us take the resemblances first. Both say they saw Detective Sergeant Martlew with the accused and another man in the Dunkley Wharf area of the docks on 8 June. As you will recall, the court made a visit to the wharf during the trial so that you could be familiar at first hand with the locale. It is not in dispute that some of Cormax Turton’s waterfront business takes place at Dunkley Wharf, nor that the accused is from time to time involved in that side of Cormax Turton’s work. Both witnesses put their sightings between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. Mr Rowan says about 7.10 p.m., Mr Bates, around 7.35 p.m. Neither of them checked the time on their watches. They had no reason to. They were not witnessing anything exceptional. It would be entirely usual to see the accused and other members of the Cormax Turton companies at the wharf, particularly when a vessel was discharging, as on the evening of 8 June. These are approximate times, then, but in the same general segment of the day. Mr Rowan and Mr Bates work at the docks and knew the accused by sight and his name. They also knew Dean Martlew by sight and name, having several times previously seen him at Dunkley Wharf in connection with Cormax Turton business; though the name by which they knew him was not Dean Martlew but Terence Marshall-Perkins, or, familiarly, The Quiff. They both also thought they recognized the third man, though neither felt totally certain about this, and they had no name for him. “Third Men” do tend to be touched by mystery, don’t they, as we know from Greene’s famous film and novel, The Third Man? Mr Rowan runs a mobile snack bar near Dunkley Wharf, which we saw during our visit. Mr Bates is a member of the Docks Manager’s staff responsible for allocating berths at various wharves, including Dunkley.’

  Esther felt marginally strengthened by Iles’s presence. She realized this could have been otherwise: he’d failed in a comparable case and might have now seemed to her a nomadic jinx. I sympathize, Esther, with your impending disaster because I’ve had one myself. It’s why I come. Let’s mourn dead undercover men together.

  The judge said: ‘It is not disputed by the accused that he and two colleagues were at the wharf between 7 p.m. and 8.30 p.m. on 8 June. The accused told the court they were present to identify and examine certain items in the ship cargo, which had been ordered and imported for several Cormax Turton customers. The accused described this as a routine matter because inspections were always made, in case items had been damaged in transit and, if so, to record that the damage occurred before Cormax Turton became responsible for them. The three men arrived at the wharves in the accused’s silver-coloured Lexus car, which was seen and recognized by Mr Bates and Mr Rowan. None of this is in doubt, but, of course, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what is in doubt is whether one of the three men at the wharf on the evening of 8 June was Terence Marshall-Perkins – Detective Sergeant Dean Martlew. The accused says he at no point knew or suspected that Terence Marshall-Perkins might be a false name and that Marshall-Perkins had left the Cormax Turton in unexceptional circumstances on 27 May.’

  Esther could watch Iles in profile. He stared at the judge, his head utterly still, in that gundog pose once more. But now it was as though, even so late in proceedings, he meant to help her, browbeat her, hypnotize her, towards a right understanding of what had happened to Dean Martlew; this right understanding being based, naturally, on the Prosecution’s and Esther’s version of events, and forget the Ambrose Tutte Turton eyewash and his lawyer’s twists.

  The judge said: ‘Mr Rowan and Mr Bates were in basic agreement about the appearance of the man they took to be Terence Marshall-Perkins. Mr Rowan said the man was dark-haired, between twenty-four and twenty-eight years old, just over six feet in height and about 170 pounds, athletically built. Mr Bates gave the age as twenty-seven, height 185 centimetres, around 175 pounds, “strongly made”, hair dark, with the tuft above his forehead that earned his nickname, “The Quiff”. We heard from Dean Martlew’s official police dossier that he was twenty-six, 187 centimetres, 173 pounds, hair brown.

  ‘The clothes as described by the two witnesses are similar: a dark double-breasted suit, light-coloured shirt, possibly white according to Mr Bates, a tie, dark like the suit but too far away for any decoration or pattern to be seen, no hat. Mr Rowan said that Terence Marshall-Perkins had bought refreshments at his snack bar several times in the past and that they passed the time of day on these occasions. Mr Bates said he had met Terence Marshall-Perkins once some months ago when Ambrose Tutte Turton introduced him on Dunkley Wharf. Both Mr Rowan and Mr Bates said that the man they saw on the evening of 8 June in the company of the accused and another man was, in their opinion, certainly Terence Marshall-Perkins, whom they knew from earlier close contact. It was evening, but the evening of a sunny summer day and the light excellent.’

  Esther wondered if somebody had once called Iles ‘iconic’ in his hearing, and he’d decided this to be so brilliantly correct that he should act up to it. Or he might have read the word somewhere – about, say, Mandela or Castro – and at once seen a clear similarity to himself as deserving homage, though they were damned old and quite unBritish. Always Iles’s clothes looked chosen to excite worship. She recalled that magnificent suit Officer A sported at Fieldfare, and her idea then that the cloth held his shoulders the way a midwife might present a newborn child to its mother. Looking at Iles’s single-breasted grey job now, she felt this still a pretty good comparison, though not quite magnificent enough. This jacket, too, cosseted the shoulders brilliantly, but with the kind of joyous, delicate reverence a member of the Japanese royal family might show the long-awaited male baby heir to media cameras.

  The judge said: ‘The evidence of Mr Rowan and Mr Bates gives the court, and specifically you, members of the jury, two considerable problems. First, have they got things right, and this man was Detective Sergeant Dean Martlew, known to them as Terence Marshall-Perkins? Against the evidence of Mr Rowan and Mr Bates we have to take what we heard from Ian Lysaght Brain, Maurice Cadenne and the accused. Of these, it is, of course, Ian Lysaght Brain who is the most significant. The Defence claim that the man Mr Rowan and Mr Bates took to be Terence Marshall-Perkins was, in fact, Ian Lysaght Brain. You have seen Mr Brain in the witness box and you have seen photographs of Dean Martlew and been given the police dossier account of his height, weight, build, age, hair colour. You have to decide whether there is a likeness and a likeness strong enough to have deceived Mr Rowan and Mr Bates from distances of 100 metres and 140 metres respectively in perfect light.

  ‘You may wish to give some weight to the fact that both Mr Rowan and Mr Bates were used to seeing Terence Marshall-Perkins on the wharf with the accused and that this might have influenced the identifications: sometimes if we are expecting to see something or somebody and we, in fact, see something or somebody approximately the same, we decide we are seeing what we anticipated seeing. The Defence say this was the first time Mr Ian Lysaght Brain had worked at the wharf with the accused, and that an error could easily have been made by Mr Rowan and Mr Bates. Mr Brain in his evidence says that he was with the accused and Mr Maurice Cadenne inspecting cargo from the vessel, Astrolabe III, at Dunkley Wharf on the evening of 8 June. He says Terence Marshall-Perkins was not present, and that in fact he had never met Marshall-Perkins, who left Cormax Turton before Brain joined. In their evidence, Mr Maurice Cadenne and the accused say Marshall-Perkins was not present, and that Mr Ia
n Lysaght Brain was the third member of the party at Dunkley Wharf on 8 June. Having seen Mr Ian Lysaght Brain in court Mr Rowan and Mr Bates agree he could have been the third man.’

  Esther felt it would be short-changing Iles to regard his distinction as only a matter of garments. He could actually sit iconically, as now. Esther fantasized: on a Hollywood set where the chair-backs of some crew members were labelled – ‘Director’, for instance or ‘Continuity’ – Iles’s would carry the simple word, ‘Icon’. It amazed Esther that the judge seemed able to trundle on imperturbably while Iles from no real distance gave her his dogged, stupendously unmatey glare. Anyone coming into this courtroom and knowing nothing about the proceedings would soon feel where dominance lay: not with the methodically gabbing judge but with Iles, although entirely quiet and motionless today.

  The judge said: ‘I come to the second problem associated with this part of the evidence. We are here trying a case in which Ambrose Tutte Turton is accused of the murder of Detective Sergeant Dean Martlew. No evidence has been shown to us as to where, how and exactly when this murder took place. The Prosecution’s case rests on the assertion that Ambrose Tutte Turton was, allegedly, one of the last people to see Martlew alive, and that Turton would have a motive for the murder if he had discovered the supposed member of staff, Terence Marshall-Perkins, to be, in fact, a police undercover detective. This has not been proved, and, as I’ve already mentioned, the accused denies that knowledge.’

  Although Iles maintained such stillness now, at other times, when on his feet and moving about, he had what seemed to Esther amazing lightness, grace and confidence. She’d noticed it even on that memorial visit to the stony beach at Pastel Head. Esther had the feeling Iles could gracefully snake up behind someone he’d lost patience with on some account or another and break their skull open with one blow from a cosh, or garrotte them, in what would seem to anybody observing a single, easy, fluid, textbook sequence. He was only of middle height and slight – not traditional male police build at all – yet he conveyed somehow a sense of brisk physical power, and famously once with a single butt broke the nose of a colleague at an otherwise almost civilized Force function.* Although many said he had driven one of his former Chief Constables into breakdown by open, affectionate contempt and laughing disregard for his orders, he showed almost pathological loyalty to subordinates. This might help explain why he had never got over the death of his Out-loc officer, and why he felt compelled to attend this vaguely similar trial.