by P. D. James
I don’t think that my hatred for Aldridge was naïve. I knew the argument, knew what any of her fellow defence lawyers would say on her behalf. She was doing her job. An accused man, however obvious his guilt may appear to be before the facts are known, however heinous the crime, however unprepossessing his appearance or repellent his character, is entitled to a defence. His lawyer is not required to believe in his innocence, only to test the evidence against him and, if there is a hole in the case for the Crown, to enlarge it so that he can crawl through it to safety. She was playing a lucrative game according to complicated rules designed, or so it seemed to me, to disadvantage her opponents, a game that was sometimes won at the cost of a human life. All I wanted was for her just once to pay the price of victory. Most of us have to live with the results of what we do. Actions have consequences. That’s one of the earliest lessons we have to learn as children, and some of us never learn it. She won her victories and that, for her, was the end; others have had to live with the consequences, others have paid the price. This time I wanted her to pay.
It was only after Rosie’s death that this resentment and anger grew into what I now have to accept was an obsession. Perhaps this was partly because, relieved of the need to try to care and comfort Rosie, my mind and heart were free to brood on the events. It may also have been because after Rosie’s death I lost my faith. I don’t mean my Christian faith, that High Church Tractarian tradition of sacramental worship in which I had been brought up and in which I had always found a natural home. I no longer believed in God. I wasn’t angry with Him, that at least would have been understandable. God must be used to human anger. After all, He invites it. I just woke up one morning to the same grief, the same dull daily tasks, and knew with certainty that God was dead. It was as if all my life I had been hearing the beating of an unseen heart which was now for ever stilled.
I wasn’t aware of regret, only of an immense solitude and a great loneliness. It felt as if the whole living world had died with God. I began to have a recurrent dream from which I would wake up, not terrified and screaming as Rosie would start up from her nightmares of Emily’s death, but weighed down with a profound sadness. In the dream I would be standing on a lonely beach at sunset with a great sea rolling and tumbling over my ankles and sucking the shingle from under my feet. There would be no birds and I knew that the sea was without life, that the whole earth was without life. Then they would begin walking out of the sea, passing me without looking or speaking, a great army of the dead. I saw Ralph and Emily and Rosie walking with them. They didn’t see me or hear me, and when I called out to them and tried to touch them they were cold sea mist in my hands. I would stumble downstairs and switch on the BBC World Service desperate to hear a reassuring human voice. It was out of this emptiness, this loneliness, that my obsession grew.
At first it was as simple as wishing that someone would kill Aldridge’s daughter and then go free, but that was for my private imaginings. It wasn’t something I could arrange, nor was it something that in my heart I really wanted. I hadn’t become a monster. But from that private fantasy there grew a more realistic imagining. Suppose that a young man accused of a serious crime, murder, rape, robbery, was successfully defended by Aldridge and then, after the acquittal, set out to seduce, even perhaps to marry, her daughter? I knew that she had a daughter. There had been a picture of them together after one of her most successful cases, in one of those mother-and-daughter articles which had become popular in the weekend supplements. The photograph, unsentimental but carefully posed, had shown the two of them together, the girl, Octavia, staring at the camera, scarcely troubling to hide her embarrassed reluctance. It told me more than the whole article, carefully written, obviously approved by its main subject. Here, under the pitiless eye of the camera, was the old story, the beautiful successful mother, the plain resentful daughter.
If this was something I might be able to contrive I would need money. The young man would have to be bribed, and bribed with a capital sum in cash that he couldn’t resist. I would need to move to London to get to know Venetia Aldridge’s life, her routine, where she and her daughter lived, in which court she was next to appear. I would have to attend as many of her trials as possible, whenever the crime was serious and the defendant a young male. All of this seemed possible. I had already decided to sell the house I had shared with Rosie and Emily and which I owned. The mortgage had long ago been paid off. The sale would provide enough for me to buy a small convenient flat in London and have more than enough left for the bribery. I would try to find a cleaning job in the Middle Temple in the hope of moving eventually to Aldridge’s Chambers. It would all take time, but I was in no hurry. The girl, Octavia, was still only sixteen. My plan required that she should be of age; I didn’t want her mother making her a ward of court in order to prevent an unsuitable marriage. And I had to choose the right man. On that choice depended the whole success of the enterprise. There was no room for failure here. I had one great advantage: I had been a schoolteacher for more than thirty years, for much of the time teaching adolescents. I thought I would be able to recognize the qualities I was looking for: conceit, acting ability, unscrupulousness, greed. And, once I had a job in her Chambers, I would have access to Venetia Aldridge’s papers. I would know more about his life, his past, than he would ever know of mine.
It all went according to plan. The details don’t matter; the police will know them by now anyway. They have spoken, I know, to Miss Elkington. I ended where I had hoped to end, with a flat in London where I could expect to be private, a job in Aldridge’s Chambers, occasional access to her home. It all went so smoothly that I felt that, were I superstitious, I would be able to believe that my great revenge was pre-ordained, my small craft launched among clouds of propitiatory incense. I didn’t use the word “revenge” then. I saw myself in a less ignoble role, setting out to redress an injustice, to teach a lesson. I know now that what I was planning was revenge and the satisfaction of revenge, that my hatred of Venetia Aldridge was both more personal and more complicated than I was willing to admit. I know now that it was wrong, it was evil. I also know that it kept me sane.
From the beginning I think I accepted that success would be largely a matter of chance. I might never find a suitable young man, or if I did he might not succeed with Octavia. This knowledge that events weren’t entirely under my control seemed paradoxically to make the enterprise more rational and feasible. And I wasn’t changing my whole life for a caprice. I needed to sell the house, to get away, to free myself from the curious glances of strangers and the embarrassed sympathy of friends, that overworked word which can conveniently cover anything from love to the mutual tolerance of neighbours. When I told them, “Don’t write, I need a few months absolutely alone, free of the past,” I could see the relief in their eyes. They had found it hard to cope with an overwhelming grief. Some friends, particularly those with children, made no attempt but, after a single letter or visit, distanced themselves as if I were infectious. There are some horrors, and the murder of a child is one, which probe our deepest fears, fears we hardly dare acknowledge in case a malignant fate senses the depths of our imagined horror and strikes triumphantly to make it real. The egregiously unfortunate have always been the lepers of the earth.
And then I met Mr. Froggett. I still don’t know his first name. He will always be Mr. Froggett to me, and I Mrs. Hamilton to him. I used my maiden name, feeling that its familiarity would at least prevent me from giving myself away. I didn’t confide in him my name, my past, where I lived or where I worked. We first met in the public gallery of Number Two Court at the Old Bailey. There are regulars who go to important or interesting trials, particularly at the Old Bailey, and after that first meeting I saw him every time I went, an unassuming little man of about my own age, always neatly dressed, who, like me, would sit patiently through the longueurs of the trial when the sensation-seekers had departed in search of livelier entertainment and, from time to time, would make notes wit
h his small delicate hands, as if he were monitoring the performance of the chief actors. And what we were seeing was a performance, that was its fascination. It was a play in which some of the characters knew their words and the plot, some were awkward amateurs, making their first appearance on a frightening, unfamiliar stage, but all had their roles assigned in a performance which afforded the ultimate audience satisfaction: no one knew the end.
After we had seen each other about half a dozen times, Mr. Froggett began to greet me with a tentative good-morning, but he didn’t speak until I was overcome with a sudden faintness during the prosecution’s opening speech in a particularly horrible case of child cruelty and abuse. It was the first of such cases I had sat through. I had told myself that there would be times when I would find it hard to go on, but I had never envisaged a case like this: the gowned and bewigged prosecuting counsel, in his quiet educated voice, outlining without embellishment, and apparently without emotion, the torture and degradation of young boys in care. And that case was no use to me. I early realized that most sex cases weren’t. The men concerned were either repellent or more often pathetic creatures whom I could reject as unsuitable for my purpose as soon as they appeared in the dock. Now I put my head between my knees and the worst of the faintness passed. I knew I had to leave and I did so as unobtrusively as I could, but I was in the middle of a tightly packed bench and inevitably I caused a disturbance.
When I reached the concourse I found the little man at my side. He said: “Please forgive the intrusion but I saw that you were ill and that you have no one with you. Could I offer assistance? Perhaps you would permit me to take you for a cup of tea. There is a respectable little café I use which is quite close. It’s really very clean.”
The words, the tone, the careful formality amounting to diffidence were essentially out of date. I remember that I had a ridiculous picture of us standing together on the deck of the Titanic: “Please permit me, madam, to offer you my protection and to assist you into this lifeboat.” Looking into eyes which were genuinely concerned behind the thick glass of his spectacles, I had no distrust of him. My generation knows by instinct—one lost to young women of today—when we can trust a man. So we went together to the respectable little café, one of those innumerable eating places catering for office workers or tourists, where you can get freshly made sandwiches made up from a variety of fillings set out in dishes under the counter—eggs, mashed sardines, tuna fish, ham—together with good coffee and strong tea. He led me to a square table in the corner covered with a checked red-and-white cloth, and then fetched two cups of tea and two chocolate éclairs. Afterwards he walked with me to the underground station and said goodbye. We exchanged names, but nothing more. He didn’t ask whether I had far to travel or where I lived, and I sensed in him a natural reluctance to seem to pry, a concern that I shouldn’t feel that he was intruding, using his act of kindness to force on me an intimacy which I might not want.
And so began our acquaintanceship. It wasn’t friendship—how could it be when I confided so little?—but it had some of the comforts of friendship without its commitment. We got used to having tea together after the court rose at the same café or at one similar. At our first meeting I was worried, not that he would become inquisitive, but that it would increasingly seem odd to him that I was so uncommunicative, and even odder that I should sit there week after week listening to the sad, often predictable recital of human weakness—weakness and wickedness. But that, it appeared, was the last thing to worry him. He was obsessed with the criminal law, nothing seemed more natural to him than that I should share this compelling interest. He confided much about himself and seemed not to notice that I told so little. On our third meeting he told me something which, for a minute, terrified me, until I realized that it posed no real danger, and that it could even be one more auspicious sign that my enterprise would succeed. He had taught at a prep school owned by Venetia Aldridge’s father, had known her well as a child. He claimed—and this was the first time I detected in him evidence of a certain conceit which, once noticed, seemed to be part of his personality—that it was he who had given her the taste for law, had set her on the first steps of her brilliant career. My hand shook as I raised my cup of tea, spilling a little bit in the saucer. I waited a second until the spasm of shaking passed, then calmly poured it back. Not looking at him, I made my voice steady, the question no more than one of casual interest.
“Do you see her now? I expect she’d be grateful to know you’re still interested in her career. She’d probably arrange for you to have a seat in the court.”
“No, I don’t see her. I’m careful not to place myself where I might catch her eye—not that there’s much danger of that. But it might seem like pushing myself forward. It was a long time ago, she may have forgotten me. But I try not to miss any of her cases. It’s my hobby now, watching her career, but of course it isn’t always easy finding out where she’s appearing.”
I said on impulse: “I could probably help. I have a friend who works in her Chambers. Of course, she wouldn’t ask directly, she’s in quite a humble capacity, but there must be court lists. I could probably find out for you when Miss Aldridge is next due to appear and at what court.”
Mr. Froggett was genuinely, almost pathetically, grateful. He said, “You’ll need my address,” and, taking out his notebook, wrote it down, keeping his small hands close together like paws. Then he carefully tore out the page and handed it to me. If he thought it odd that I didn’t, in a reciprocal gesture of confidence, give him my address, he made no sign. I saw that he lived—I expect he still lives—in a flat in Goodmayes, Essex, I imagine in one of those modern blocks of small identical characterless apartments. After that I would send him a postcard from time to time, just with a date and a place on it—Winchester Crown Court, 3 October—and sign it with my initials, J.H. I didn’t always see him in court, of course. If the defendant was a woman, or was obviously unsuitable for my purpose, I didn’t bother to turn up.
But those shared half-hours or so of undemanding companionship became some of the happiest interludes of my obsessed life. Perhaps “happiest” is too positive a word. Happiness is not an emotion I feel now, nor ever expect to feel. But there was a kind of contentment, a restfulness and a sense of belonging again to the real world, which I found comforting. We must have looked a strange couple to anyone interested, but, of course, no one was interested. This was London, the city workers chatting together before they began their journeys home, the tourists with their cameras, their maps, their foreign jabber, the occasional solitary drinker of tea, they came in without a glance in our direction. It is all so recent, and yet it already seems a distant memory: the rhythmic groan of the city breaking against the windows like the roar of a distant sea, the hiss of the coffee machine, the smell of toasted sandwiches and the clatter of cups and beakers. Against this background we would talk over the details of the day, comparing our views of the witnesses, assessing their veracity, discussing the conduct of counsel, the possible verdict, whether the judge was hostile.
Only once did I get close, perhaps dangerously close, to my own obsession. The day had been given up to the prosecution evidence. I said: “But she must know that he’s guilty.”
“It isn’t important. It’s her job to defend him whether she thinks he’s guilty or not.”
“I know that. But surely it helps if you believe your client is innocent.”
“It may help, but it can’t be a necessary qualification to take on the job.” Then he said: “Look at me. Suppose I were accused—wrongly accused—of some criminal offence, perhaps an act of indecency against a young girl. I live alone, I’m solitary, I’m not very prepossessing. Suppose my solicitor had to go begging from one set of Chambers to another, desperately seeking a barrister who believed me innocent before I could mount a defence. Our law rests on the presumption of innocence. There are countries where an arrest by the police is taken as a sign of guilt and the subsequent court procedures
are little more than a recital of the case for the prosecution. We should be grateful not to live in such a country.”
He spoke with extraordinary force. For the first time I sensed in him a personal belief, emotional and deeply felt. Up till then I had seen his obsession with the law as no more than an overwhelming intellectual interest. Now, for the first time, I saw signs of a passionate moral commitment to an ideal.
Although Mr. Froggett travelled to any Crown court where Venetia Aldridge was due to appear, he liked it best when she prosecuted or defended at the Old Bailey. No other place, for him, had the romance of Court Number One at the Bailey. “Romance” seems an odd word to use of a place whose origins go back to Newgate, to the horrors of those early prisons, the public executions, the pressing yard where prisoners endured the torture of being pressed to death by weights to safeguard the inheritance of their families. Mr. Froggett knew about these things, the history of criminal law fascinated but never seemed to oppress him. His obsession may have had its element of morbidity—it was, after all, the criminal law which enthralled him—but I never detected ghoulishness and would have found his company disagreeable if I had. His was essentially an intellectual obsession. Mine was very different and yet, as the months passed, I began to understand his passion, began even to share it.
Occasionally, when there was a case of particular interest in Number One Court, I would join him there even if Venetia Aldridge wasn’t the defending counsel. It was important that I did; he must never suspect that I was interested only in the defence. So, time after time, I joined the queue at the public entrance, went through the security screen, climbed the seemingly never-ending bare stairs to the hall outside the public gallery, took my seat and waited for the appearance of Mr. Froggett. Often he was there before me. He liked to sit in the second row and thought it odd of me not to share this preference until I realized that there was little chance of Miss Aldridge looking up, let alone of her recognizing me. I always wore a hat with a brim and my smartest coat; she had seen me only in my working overalls. There was no real risk, yet it was several weeks before I first felt happy sitting so close to the front.