Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘I … I don’t know what to say,’ I said instead. ‘What … how did you come to …?’

  ‘To shoot him? I’ll tell you,’ he said. He didn’t sound brash or annoyed. He sounded like a politician getting to the question they’d been wanting to answer all night. ‘He was rooting through our stuff. Unplugging cables in the study. Bloody unplugging them. I grabbed him. His mate fled. He reached for me. He was still holding the statue. I reached for the gun and shot. Blindly.’

  ‘Blindly?’ I echoed. I let my mind spin over the facts, like digesting a patient’s symptoms. ‘I thought they threw it at you – the statue?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You just said they threw it at you.’

  ‘There were two.’

  I looked at him for a long time after that.

  ‘I just shot him. Dominic Hull,’ he said after a while. ‘Quickly. I didn’t risk assess like the court said I should have. It was self-defence. The prosecution had to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that I intended to kill, or was wickedly reckless. But once I raised the defence of it being self-defence, there are cases that say the prosecution has to negate that claim. And if there’s any doubt – any possibility of self-defence – the jury has to acquit. It’s the law.’ He said it all so easily; the legal terms and proceedings so familiar to him.

  ‘And it was unlikely. Low risk. I never thought an air rifle would kill anyone. But I just shot, before he did anything to me.’

  ‘And then he …’ I couldn’t stop thinking about that phrase. Wickedly reckless. I couldn’t stop thinking, too, about the target-practice tree. He’d called it a mistake after the Hoppings.

  ‘People always ask that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What happened next? How did he die? How did I know?’

  ‘What people?’ I said, distracted from my original question.

  More questions squeezed into the waiting room, barging past the others. Who knew? Was I the last? And the last question, the most irrelevant one, but the one that said so much: how come the whole family changed their name? Did I have to call him John now?

  ‘The police. The lawyers. Mum. Dad. Others. Newspapers. No comment,’ he said. ‘I just said no comment.’

  ‘Well, did you know?’ I asked. ‘Did you know you’d killed him?’ I would have stepped more carefully had the anger not started simmering then, producing a gentle steam. Later, it would become boiling, roiling and angry, the water bubbles popping on the surface like lava, but it wasn’t there, not yet.

  ‘As I shot him in the temple,’ he said, ‘he reached for me.’

  He wasn’t answering my questions. He never did. I tried to steer him, but he wouldn’t let me, whether consciously or unconsciously. It felt like being pulled out to sea against my will.

  I couldn’t help but think of the boy, and the look he had given me, when my hand was on the door. But it was different, it was different, it was different.

  Jack continued. ‘I called an ambulance. But I could tell. I took his pulse. Felt like I was in a film. It didn’t hit me for ages – how huge it was, what I’d done. And I could tell, even though he was still moving. I could tell. There was a bit of blood, but that wasn’t the problem. It went into his brain. That’s how it killed him.’

  It would, I found myself thinking. It would go right through the temporal lobe. It wouldn’t have to pass through any bone. The softest bit of the skull. The deadliest part.

  ‘They charged me. That night. With murder.’

  He looked me directly in the eye then, for the first time since his confession. He was facing the last of the sun. A narrow slice lit up his brown eyes, so light they turned almost golden, like a watchful lion’s.

  We both understood; a coded message passing from his eyes to mine. I knew exactly what he meant. Even when the observations were all normal, and the blood results fine, death came with a presence of its own: somewhere between an absence of heat and pinkness and a distinctive pallor. Sometimes it marched in, taking life swiftly, but other times it stole in: quiet and slow, like a prowling cat.

  The only difference was, of course, that I was trying to save lives and he had taken one. But the rest was just the same.

  Jack asked me what I thought after five minutes of silence on our boat.

  I said I thought nothing.

  He told me the rest: that his real name was John Michael Douglas, that he’d of course lied about his friend with the assault, that the real atrocity was his act, that he was acquitted because a jury found he had used self-defence. That sometimes his acquittal caused irritation in the press and it reared its head again. That he was, in a way, infamous.

  ‘It was of its time,’ Jack had added, later, once it was so dark and cold we were both shivering and his lips had gone a reddish blue.

  His tone said, somehow, that he’d been told this himself. By a friendly aunt or uncle, maybe. Or even by his lawyer.

  ‘It was just at the time when they were clamping down on that sort of thing. Americans with guns had gone mental.’

  ‘Right, right,’ I said tonelessly.

  ‘Loads of decisions to prosecute are about policy,’ he prattled earnestly.

  It was the most earnest he’d ever been; not in an explanation of his crime but in defence of it. I had expected contrition, and I didn’t get it.

  ‘It was the ultimate in bad luck,’ he added. ‘How unlucky do you have to be to kill someone with an air rifle?’ His tone wasn’t as jaunty as his words: it was imbued with sadness, flat almost.

  But I didn’t exactly sense regret. I looked at him, fiddling with the oar, at his damp shoes, at his legs crossed at the ankles. I could see the socks I’d bought him a few weeks ago. They had ginger cats on. He never wore serious socks.

  ‘Why would they prosecute you, though?’ I said.

  ‘To tick their boxes,’ he said grimly.

  ‘It sounds like – just bad luck?’

  ‘I don’t know. Policy, like I said.’

  ‘But, Jack,’ I said, using his name even though it wasn’t really his name, ‘how do I know you’re not lying this time?’

  His eyes darkened. He rubbed his forehead, looking down at the bottom of the boat. ‘I don’t know what I can say to you, to make you believe that this is it.’ He looked up at me. His whole face seemed shadowed. He spread his hands wide, then left them resting on the oars. ‘I don’t know. I hope that you know I’m not. I hope you know that I love you.’

  I went for a walk on my own as soon as we got back to the shore. It was dark, but I didn’t care. I ended up sitting with my feet dangling down the cliff top and out into the Oban air. Thinking. And then I stopped thinking and I dialled Audrey’s number.

  ‘Jack shot a burglar,’ I said. ‘He was acquitted.’

  Audrey paused, then said, ‘Bloody hell.’ She didn’t ask how I’d come to find out. She just said, ‘Bloody hell,’ again.

  And then we lapsed into silence.

  ‘Did you get the Clare’s Law response?’ she asked eventually. ‘I guess it’ll be clear. It was an acquittal.’

  ‘Yes. But it was clear because he changed his name.’

  ‘Did he kill him? The burglar?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Murder? Or culpable homicide? That’s the Scots’ manslaughter.’

  ‘Murder.’

  We said nothing again.

  ‘But he was acquitted. At least he didn’t hit a woman. Or stalk someone. Or rape someone,’ Audrey added. ‘It’s … I don’t know. Who knows what you would do if someone came into your house uninvited.’

  I loved Audrey’s open-mindedness. And although my heart lifted with hope, and I said, ‘Really?’ I wasn’t ready for all of that. There was something else bothering me. It wasn’t just the crime itself. It was the other stuff: Jack’s telling of it. His reaction to it. His reluctance. His lies. It was always that way. The problem was never the creature caught in the spider’s web, but the web itself, the surrounding gossamer. That’s where the a
nger came from.

  ‘Really,’ she said.

  The clouds in my mind cleared momentarily. Maybe if my best friend – and a lawyer – could understand it, perhaps I could, too. But then, Audrey was very into grey areas herself, had slept with another man at university in the early days of her relationship with Amrit, which he still didn’t know about. I had wanted to tell him during so many night shifts, but never had. Audrey viewed it totally differently to me. She would say they were hardly exclusive – and, anyway, nobody got hurt if they didn’t find out about the past.

  Then I thought again about the man lying lifelessly in Jack’s parents’ study, leaving in a body bag, and I thought I might never get over it, not even if I left him. Never. My baby would be tied to this man forever. Wally would have his genes. For the first time, then, Wally felt like mine, and not ours. I wanted to run away with my baby, and keep him safe.

  More thoughts formed: what if Wally had been the burglar? A misguided youth? I cringed and touched my hand to my stomach. Slayed, murdered, because he broke into a house to steal a PlayStation. Was that fair? How could I ever say it was? In hospital, I’d treat a burglar. I’d treat a murderer. A terrorist. I’d help them.

  I shook my head. ‘There’s something really odd about it,’ I said a few seconds later. ‘It’s … I don’t know. He’s cagey about it.’

  ‘Cagey? He lied to you. Shouldn’t he be begging for forgiveness?’

  I looked at the sky. He should be, I knew. I agreed with her. Maybe there was more to it. Maybe Davey did it? Maybe he did it for Davey? Maybe that was why Davey had said he was in trouble?

  I wished I could know. I wished I knew.

  ‘Rachel,’ Jack’s mum said to me later.

  ‘Yes?’ I replied.

  I was standing in the kitchen, on my own. Everybody else was in the living room. I couldn’t bring myself to make us all leave a day early. Not only because of the embarrassment it would cause, but because of Jack, and because of Wally. Those two people meant I let so many things slide. Because of how much I loved them. Because I wanted Wally to come home from school one day to both of his parents. And because of Jack. Just: because of Jack.

  Jack’s mum had a broom and had begun sweeping the orange-tiled kitchen floor. She was methodically making her way back and forth across the room.

  ‘We don’t like to dig at old skeletons, here,’ she said quietly.

  The mixed metaphor confused me, until I realized: she knew that I knew. He must have told her. I wondered if she went through this with every girlfriend Jack had. Maybe his girlfriends were blissfully happy for a while, and then they found out, and then they did things like this: stood in the kitchen angrily, keeping out of the way; stomped around, looking strange.

  ‘No?’ I said, standing up.

  She took a step towards me, and I saw she wasn’t being frightening: she looked kind.

  ‘Jack did a terrible thing. But we want to move on. Look ahead. Not back.’

  I frowned. ‘Okay,’ I said, too quickly, too compliant, before I really grasped her meaning: there were to be no more questions asked.

  This enormous event was to sit silently at the centre of our relationship, looming so large that neither of us could see around it.

  I was alone in the bedroom. There was another massive portrait of some past Ross – or Douglas – staring down at me as I lay on the bed.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Jack said quietly, sadly, walking softly into the room and shutting the door behind him. He’d let me be for almost an hour, and then he’d come up to find me. ‘I’ve told everyone you’re ill.’

  ‘More lies. I know. I know you told them.’

  ‘Yes. They know. But I’ve said you’re not feeling well. They won’t … they won’t want to discuss it, anyway.’

  ‘I should leave. You,’ I said, flashing a look his way.

  ‘I …’ Jack spread his hands wide, helplessly. ‘I don’t want you to do that,’ he said, sounding small and Scottish.

  ‘What’s his surname?’ I said, gesturing up to the picture. I flung my arm out, wrenching my shoulder. My face felt hot. My voice was too loud.

  ‘Douglas. We all changed it. Afterwards. When all the press got too much.’

  ‘Wow.’

  I couldn’t look at him. I could barely speak. ‘How many lies did you tell me?’ I shouted, looking up at him.

  He was sitting cross-legged on the bed, plucking at the duvet cover. It was oddly childlike.

  ‘Well …’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘One, really,’ he said. ‘Just – a big one.’

  ‘A whopper. You looked at me the other night in the armchair. And you promised.’ My voice cracked.

  That lie didn’t matter more than all of the others. But every time I thought of that locked-gaze moment between us my stomach contracted.

  He looked away at that, biting his lower lip, a shaking hand raking his hair back – like Davey was always doing. ‘I know. I’m so sorry. That was self-preservation, and there’s no excuse.’

  It was a full and frank apology, unlike his criminal confession.

  ‘It’s not okay,’ I said.

  ‘Rach, you don’t know. You don’t know how it was. There were bloody reporters –’ He gestured at the window, at the black Oban night. His Scottish ‘r’s rolled like thunder on reporters. ‘They camped out. They’re still there, sometimes. It comes up, again and again. We’ve moved. We’ve all adopted Mum’s maiden name. It was a witch-hunt.’

  ‘Did you think I’d never know?’

  ‘No, I …’ He stood to his full height, pulling a hand through his hair. ‘I would have …’

  ‘Wally and I – we deserved to know.’

  ‘I know. It all got so serious so quickly …’ He trailed off.

  And even then, when we were arguing, I felt a dart of pleasure as I caught his gaze.

  He smiled at me, tentatively. ‘Not Wally,’ he added. ‘Just you. The way I felt about you. It was always serious. I feel like we’re made for each other. We’re just right, aren’t we? Together?’

  I looked away. ‘You lied to me about your name. Your past. What you’ve gone through. You’ve had a lawyer. You’ve been to trial. Have you been to prison? I don’t even know.’

  ‘No. I promise, Rachel. This is all.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Can you imagine me in prison? How would I survive?’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t plan it. A bad thing happened to me. And I just reacted to it. And my whole life changed in a moment. But I’m still me,’ he said. And then, in a quieter voice, ‘I am still yours.’

  ‘You know that. But you know everything. Your history. What happened. But I don’t,’ I said. ‘I know nothing.’

  I looked at him. He stared back at me. It was true. This was our story, but it was more his than mine. It began for him years and years ago, and for me just recently. Where would it end? Would we go our separate ways today, tomorrow, next year? Would I become the only girlfriend he’d ever told, or the next one in a long list of people who couldn’t come to terms with his past? Whose version was correct? Mine: my boyfriend had a horrible past? Or his: my girlfriend wouldn’t let the past be the past?

  We went downstairs together, after a while. Jack smilingly passed me a herbal tea as we watched a film, but our acting was wooden, like we were performing in a bad play.

  And all the while, as the film flickered in front of us, lighting the living room blue and white, I was thinking: it may have been a witch-hunt, but that doesn’t mean you’re not a witch.

  27

  The main problem was that I couldn’t stop investigating him. Not once I knew about the Wayback Machine, even though it hardly ever threw anything up.

  Not once I knew the victim’s name.

  I did it at night, when I wasn’t sleeping. That didn’t help, the lack of sleep. Amrit had called me twice one night, quite late, but I couldn’t face speaking to him, even though I w
as up. It was easier if I never saw anybody I had worked with ever again. It was better that way.

  A few nights later, at gone ten o’clock, I opened my laptop and started reading.

  I found two more screenshots of two more articles. One had a photo of Jack in it. That was it, after hours of trawling.

  Soon, I came to know all the permutations of the small rotation of fragments of text I could find: the selection of grainy photographs they used. The photo of Dominic from Facebook taken in front of a giant Christmas tree, his hands raised to the sky. The one of Jack at target practice, grinning and holding a gun. Relics, hidden in the Internet. Preserved.

  ITEM 10

  JOHN DOUGLAS: FRIEND OR FOE?

  The Guardian

  9 April 2010

  TWENTY-FIVE-year-old John Douglas was in his Oban home that December night. He had no idea what would befall him. How could he? He heard, he says, the burglars entering for the fourth time in less than two years, and he acted.

  WHO WAS DOMINIC HULL?

  The Daily Mail

  8 April 2010

  THE HULLS live modestly, on a glum estate in east Oban. Dominic’s mother showed me into their two-bedroom flat, past a threadbare brown carpet and a grey sofa and right into Dominic’s room.

  It is preserved, as if he never left. There are song lyrics everywhere. Rap, mostly. Hip hop. He’s stencilled them carefully, framed them.

  The rest is unremarkable. He played PlayStation games. He liked cars, has a few reviews of the latest models torn out and scattered around his room. But it is those words I can’t forget. He wrote his own poems, his own raps, his mother said. He was buried with a notebook. That was who Dominic Hull was. And that’s how he will be remembered.

  http://thenewsinbrief.blogspot.com

  Douglas: Live Blog

  Day Four

  8 April 2010

  09.23: John Douglas just walked past me. He was nothing like I imagined. He was tall and muscular, yes, and had the concentrated stare seen in his byline photograph, his mugshot, on the way to his failed bail hearing. But as he pushed past me, a hand held up in defence, I glimpsed something else in his eyes: a quiet confidence.