by C. J. Driver
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I do; you’d be mad to defend him. It might mean the end of your career as a barrister, as a serious, reputable one I mean.”
“In that case I think I’d better leave after all.”
“Don’t be a fool, Tom; I’m not talking about leaving.”
I looked at my watch; it was ten to two.
“I’ve got to go now,” I said. “If I’m late again, I think the judge will report me; and then you’ll probably have to accept my going anyway.” I stood up. “Thanks for the talk, and for the lunch.” I looked down at my plate; I had hardly touched Piero’s delectable moussaka.
“What lunch?” said Matthew, gesturing at my plate. “And what talk? My God, you’re a stubborn man.”
“You’re not exactly sweetness and light yourself.”
“No,” Matthew said, standing up too and waving to the waiter to bring the bill. “I’m a tactless buffoon; but I do mean what I’m saying. Pack this lot in, Tom.”
I went to stand close to him so I could speak quietly.
“You’re not a buffoon, Matthew; and I pray you’ll make the Cabinet next time, and ten years later you’ll be Prime Minister, or Lord Chancellor, or something. But I don’t think I’ll be with you. Thanks for trying anyway,” and I turned and went out of the restaurant as fast as I could.
“You mean, sorry for failing,” he called out after me, but I prentended not to hear.
*
Somehow I lasted the afternoon. By four-fifteen I was back in chambers. I had bought a paper on my way and once I was safely at my desk I opened it and searched the columns. On page six there was one short paragraph saying ‘a number’ of people, some of them members of the Free People, had been remanded in a magistrate’s court that morning on charges of resisting arrest, creating a public disturbance, and the possession of dangerous drugs. No names, no details, nothing about John himself; nothing about the warehouse, about the digging, about Caister. Someone from the P.R. department at the Yard had been doing a great deal of work on the editors of the major newspapers.
I was half-hoping there might have been a call from Peale; but Jamie told me nothing had come through except a call from Tella. Would I phone her back?
Which I did. She had nothing new to tell me. No, John had not been near her, nor had phoned. No, the police hadn’t actually been to her, though they were still sitting in a car outside—at least she thought they were policemen, though they weren’t in uniform. Peale had appeared for the people charged that morning; they had charged only twenty-five of them, and Peale had told her it was simply a holding charge, not a complete one. Her flat was still full of people with nowhere to go. The police wouldn’t allow anyone to go back to the commune, though they had allowed small groups in to collect bedding and belongings. They had found pot on some of the people arrested, but their digging seemed to have got nowhere. Yes, she was coping, though she would like to see me.
But I didn’t want to see Tella, not then. I wanted to see or at least talk to Henderson but though I phoned him six or seven times, the last time from the station while I was waiting for the train, no one was answering his phone except the mechanical voice of an answering service.
So I went home. When I got there, I found Alison waiting anxiously for me, standing outside the garage as I parked the car. I got out of the car and before she could say anything, I put my arms round her and hugged her. I was home, I was safe; the wall was up, the sky was clear, there were no crows to caw and yak here.
“Darling, the police have been here.”
“Oh, damn them; there’s no need for them to get at you too. They were waiting in chambers for me this morning.”
“Did they want to question you about John?”
“Yes, of course.”
“They were looking for him here too.”
“Bloody fools,” I said. Williams hadn’t told me he was going to send his underlings into my home too; next time I saw him I’d have more than an angry word for him about that.
“They had a warrant for John,” Alison said.
“Did they tell you what for?”
“They said it was murder. I don’t believe it; I told them so too.”
“I hope I don’t,” I said gently. “Come inside.” I was weary to the heart; all I wanted was to get inside the house, close the door on London, the law, Buckleson, the Free People, and be with my wife and daughters.
“Were the police nasty to you?” I asked.
“No, they were very nice. They just asked if John was here, and I told them he wasn’t. They showed me the warrant. They looked very tired, so I took them into the kitchen”—the kitchen, mark you, not the drawing-room—“and gave them some tea. That’s when they told me it was for murder.”
“I’ve stopped feeling sorry for policemen,” I said.
“Tom, who is it John is meant to have killed?”
So I told her, though I gave no details.
“Tom, it’s not John, is it?”
“Somebody shot Caister. That’s the one certainty. Honestly I don’t want to talk about it now.” I had thrown myself into an armchair. “I want drink, I want food, I want to go to bed. Where are the girls?”
“They’ve gone to bed early.” There was a strange quality in her voice which made me look up at her. She was standing staring at me.
“Alison,” I said standing up. “What’s wrong? It’s only six-thirty. They’re not ill, are they? Nothing’s happened to them?”
“Tom, John’s here.”
The sky was suddenly dark with the crows again, swollen now till they were almost the size of vultures, claws monstrously hooked, beaks clacking, black wings beating at the windows and against the ceiling.
“You must be out of your mind,” I said to Alison.
“He came this afternoon, after lunch. He’d been hiding down in the woods. He said he got a train to Langford early this morning, and then walked the rest of the way along the ridge.”
“He was here when the police came?”
“Yes.”
“My God, Alison, you are out of your mind. If he’s guilty, you’ll be had for harbouring; even if he’s not, you’ve put yourself bang into trouble—the police want him, and you know they do.” I started to walk away from her; I knew what I had to do.
“Where are you going, Tom?”
“To phone the police.”
“No, Tom.”
“Alison, you don’t understand; if they find out he’s hiding here, even that he has been hiding here, it won’t just be a ticking off you’ll get; it’ll be everything. You’ll go to gaol, I’ll have to give up the law, we’ll lose the house, the girls will be in trouble—the whole bloody lot. You must have been out of your mind.”
She was crying now; she is not tearful usually.
“John didn’t kill anyone,” she cried. “And anyway, I know John and I don’t know the police.”
It was the utter simplicity of what she said which stopped me, rather than her weeping; I was almost laughing when I turned back to her, not because she was funny, but because anyone in my complicated, separated world should be capable of such simplicity. There was a moral system for you: the people whom you knew were more important than people you didn’t know. What could shake that? Not famine, not pestilence, not revolution. You fought for the people you knew because you knew them; it didn’t matter if they were rogues, thieves, murderers even, because you knew them and didn’t know the people they had hurt. I looked at my wife, and saw her suddenly not as my wife at all, but as an entirely separate person, a middle-aged, overweight, square-shouldered woman who saw the world in a way which was her own and no one else’s. Oh, she was struggling now to stop crying, because it was a part of another imposed code that you did not cry even in front of your husband; but it was a code imposed on her and nothing to do with the central simplicity. Through the terror which made me sure I must tell the police John was here, came another feeling, which was both love and desire of
a kind I had never believed possible. When she had sat those long days and nights next to the incubator that housed my poor half-born Penelope, I had thought I loved her better than ever before; but she had been my wife then, for all her thinking that she could keep Nell alive by her will only—now she was separate, and strange, and unexpected, and magnificent.
“Where’s John? Upstairs I expect, in our bed.” Sarcasm is a defence against even passion.
“He’s in the girls’ garden hut.” We have a hut on the second lawn in which I used to store garden tools; the girls expropriated it and keep toys and equipment for summer games like croquet in it.
“Do they know he’s there?”
“No, he came before they got back from school, and I kept them out of the garden and got them to bed early.” She was as completely in control of herself again as she must have been when John and the police came. “Why are you smiling?” she asked.
“Because I think you’re marvellous and totally mad. You still don’t seem to understand what you’ve done—you’re harbouring a wanted man, wanted for murder too, mind you. And you stand there as if you were telling me there was pheasant for dinner.”
She was still very serious. “Are you going to phone the police, Tom?”
“I should.”
“Go and talk to John.”
“And say what? ‘Go away—you’re like a bad dream, Buckleson, and I don’t want to entertain you today.’ Suppose he tells the police he was here; they’re bound to find him sooner or later.”
“Go and talk to him.”
“All right; I will—and then I’ll phone the police. I have to, Alison, for all of us.”
She shook her head.
“But I thought you loathed him.”
“Tom, he came here—to us. Not to anyone else.”
“Because he knows damn well what damage it will do.”
“Oh, that’s unfair. Because he trusts you.”
“Oh, bullshit to trust; I’m a lawyer, not God. Let me phone the police, Alison.”
Still she shook her head. “Go and talk to John,” she said.
*
What else could I do? It was not as if I had any choice, except perhaps to delay choice. What I had said to Alison was true: I had to phone the police sooner or later, because Alison had broken the law, and even in delaying the phone-call I was aiding her. It did not even cross my mind that we might continue to hide John, might try to help him escape the country, might commit ourselves totally to the cause of the Free People, to the cause of the Free People as John had decided it should be interpreted …
I changed my shoes, put on an overcoat, and took a big torch from the jumble cupboard; the girls’ hut is on the second lawn, half-hidden in the drooping boughs of an old fir tree. Down the steep path, on to the lawn, past the rose-beds, and when I was a few yards away from the hut, I stopped and called out quietly,
“John, John Buckleson, it’s me, Tom Grace.” I wasn’t going to risk barging in to the hut without warning him first. As if in answer, there was the sound of someone moving inside the hut, but the beam struck the far wall without showing me John anywhere.
“John,” I said, “it’s me—Tom. It’s all right; I’m alone.” There was a moment’s silence, and then he stepped into the beam; without thinking I shone it straight into his eyes.
“Turn that bloody thing off.”
Which I did, leaving us both blind in the dark.
“Just wait,” John said. “I’ve got a candle in here. I put it out when I heard you coming down the path.”
I could hear him fumbling for his matches, then the small light flared and the candle flickered and was steady. Still I did not move forward; I suppose I was frightened of him.
“Well, aren’t you coming in? Or are you waiting for me to invite you? ‘Do come in to my mansion, Mr. Grace,” he parodied. I went in. “And for God’s sake shut the door,” John said. “It’s cold enough here already.”
“Sorry,” I said. In the small light of the candle I could see he had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders; underneath was an old overcoat of mine, but it was still cold in the hut with its thin wooden walls.
“I’ve actually been thinking about smashing up some of your kids’ wooden toys to make me a little fire to warm my hands,” John said.
I did not answer; absurdly, irrelevantly, I asked instead, “Did you come down from London in your Mexican outfit, you know, the white thing?”
“No,” John grinned in the half-light. “No. I met some half-tight businessman in the back streets after I had got away from the commune; I think he thought I was a prostitute, he must have thought I was a girl with the long hair and white pants—and he tried to pick me up. He was pretty pissed. I didn’t let him feel me up until I had got him into a dark side-street; poor bugger, he was so randy I think he would have had it off with me even if he had discovered I was a man. Then I laid hell into him, got his clothes off, gave him mine, and moved out. I hadn’t taken any money from the commune, and he had a bit, so I took that too.” John was giggling. “Poor bugger, he must have felt a right prick wandering around the back streets dressed like one of the Free People and with no money. It was the second time someone thought I was a girl; I got through the police cordon like that, you know, carrying a baby and pretending to bawl my head off, and two more kids hanging on to my tunic. One of those bastards is going to earn a nice demotion for that.” His sordid little tale seemed to give him great pleasure.
Perhaps he recognised what I felt because his mood changed suddenly. “What am I going to do now, Mr. Lawyer?” It was his old voice back again.
“Did you kill Caister?”
Almost imperceptibly in the half-dark he nodded.
“And you dumped his body outside New Scotland Yard with that … that notice pinned on him?”
Again he nodded.
“You did it yourself—personally? Or someone else?”
Suddenly John was on his feet, and shouting. “For fuck’s sake, yes—I did it, I did it myself, ‘personally’ like you say, with my own hand. I put the pistol at the back of his head, I pulled the trigger, I tied a groundsheet around him, I wrote the notice, I pinned it on the groundsheet, I dragged him to the car Lester had borrowed. I sat with him half-way across my lap until Lester shouted, and I opened the door and shoved him out on to the pavement. I personally, me, John Buckleson.”
“Stop shouting,” I said.
“Why should I? You haven’t got neighbours.” But he spoke quietly now.
“Did you personally beat him up before you executed him?”
“Shot.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t say ‘executed’, say ‘shot’. That’s what I did.”
“Because he was a policeman.”
“Yes.”
“How did you know?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Why?”
“I’m just not telling you.”
“All right. Did you beat him up?”
“We wanted to know how much he’d told them. We had to be sure.”
“How did you know he was a policeman?”
“I said I’m not telling you.”
I knew I had to get an answer to that question. The crows in the circle sat waiting and watching. “What did you kill him with?”
John fumbled underneath the blanket around his shoulders, and suddenly the pistol was in his hand, indistinct, like a black shadow. I hadn’t thought of that at all; and I had not thought he might point it at me, as he was doing now.
“This,” said John gaily. “Little beauty, isn’t it?” And then, conversationally, “By the way, it’s still loaded; and the safety catch is off. I turned it when I heard you coming down the path.” He smiled at me from the other side of the hut. “What’s happened to your voice, Mr. Lawyer of all the questions?”
Then suddenly he began to use his public voice, the dream-voice, hesitating, searching.
“It seems … to me I have
… two choices. I can shoot … you, and then go inside and … shoot your wife … and your daughters, just to keep them from … the orphanage. Or … I could shoot … myself,” and slowly the pistol was brought up until its muzzle pressed against his forehead.
“Neither will help,” I said slowly. The world seemed to have slowed down; every movement, every inflection of voice, every twitch of muscle, was careful, deliberate.
The pistol was back, pointing straight at me across the hut.
“Wouldn’t it? You’re as bad as Caister, Mr. Lawyer. You’d betray us.”
“Did you know the police came here this afternoon looking for you? When you were here?”
“Did they?” It was the private voice again. “You’re not lying?”
“I wasn’t here,” I said carefully.
Silence, then. “So it was her. My God, ‘Middle-Class Housewife Transformed into Revolutionary Heroine’.”
“Don’t sneer.”
“Oh, Tom, I’m not sneering.” He stepped forward across the room; I could not help myself from moving away until my back was against the wooden slats of the wall. “Here,” he said, holding out the pistol to me, “you take this thing. Come on, don’t be afraid.”
I reached out and took its coldness into my hand; I don’t think I’d ever held a gun before, except an air-pistol in a fairground, but automatically my forefinger slipped through the trigger-guard and rested on the trigger and, automatically too, the pistol was pointed at John who had gone back to his side of the hut.
“Now you’ve got two choices,” he said; the gaiety was back in his voice. “You can shoot me, or you can shoot yourself. ‘Middle-Aged Lawyer Shoots Revolutionary Intruder’; that’s a nice headline too.”
“Is this the safety-catch?” I asked unsteadily, gesturing with my left hand to a small lever at the side of the pistol. John nodded. Carefully I clicked the lever upwards, pointed the pistol at the wall, and pressed hard against the trigger; it did not move.
“You do look bloody funny sitting there holding that, Tom. Guns don’t suit you.”
I did not answer; strangely, his handing over of the pistol seemed not to have reduced the tension in the hut but intensified it. I found I was still pointing the thing at John. Carefully I turned it away from him and put it into the pocket of my overcoat.