The Evangeline (6 page)

‘It was torn, some of it.’

‘Some of it? What else made it unusable, Captain Balfour? Don’t think you’re doing Vincent Marlowe a favour by holding anything back. Tell the truth: that’s the best any of us can do.’

‘There was blood on a lot of it.’

Darnell looked at him as if he had expected the answer and, not only that, found it immensely helpful to the defence.

‘There was blood on the clothing, but you have no knowledge about how it got there, do you?’

‘No,’ replied Balfour, watching closely everything Darnell did.

‘The clothing—by the way, you assumed that it did not belong to the six survivors you rescued, isn’t that correct? It’s my recollection that in response to a question put by Mr Roberts, you offered the opinion that the clothing must have belonged to other people—people who, as you phrased it,“didn’t make it”. Because— and again I’m relying on my own memory—the survivors would not have had time to take with them any additional clothing when the
Evangeline
sank? But you have no direct knowledge of what they did, or did not, have time to do when the
Evangeline
sank, do you?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘So it’s possible that some of them might have grabbed anything they could to protect themselves from the elements in what was, by all accounts, a terrible storm?’

The reply was tentative, circumspect.‘It’s possible.’

Darnell shoved both hands into his suit jacket’s pockets. He fixed the witness with a determined look. ‘You hesitate. Is it because you have been told what happened—then and later—by some of the survivors?’

Balfour did not move and did not speak. His eyes were steady, remote.

‘And those survivors, as you reminded us, were all nearly out of their minds when you found them, isn’t that true?’

‘All nearly dead,’ said Balfour, shaking his head at what he had seen. ‘Their bodies were emaciated beyond anything I had seen, like living skeletons they were; except that their feet were swollen up something fierce, like they were ready to burst. Their faces were horrible, with hollow eyes and sunken cheeks; their lips burned black, all cracked and raw—more like scabs than skin; and the skin they had, stretched like dried paper, all blistered and peeling off. It was even more horrible than that; great gaping wounds on their necks and arms, and one of them with a leg all dead flesh and gangrenous.’

‘I read the report you wrote, the one you filed when you first got to port,’ said Darnell. His voice, though not much more than a whisper, could be heard clearly in the deathly stillness of the courtroom. ‘ In addition to everything else, some of them were crippled?’

‘They were forty days out there!’ cried Balfour with a shudder. ‘Forty days. Forget the weather, the hunger, the thirst—forty days shoved up together in that small boat, no room to move. Imagine being forced to sit in a small cage for more than a month. They could not stand up, some of them, after we got them off; some of them could not lie down. None of them could do anything without excruciating pain. Not one of them could walk a step without someone holding him up.’

Darnell had moved across to the jury box. He lay a hand on the railing. ‘There were other injuries as well, weren’t there?’

‘There were indeed.’

‘One of them lost a foot?’

‘Because of how cold it was at night, and the fact he could never get dry, he got frostbite. There was hardly anything left of his foot. It had to come off.’

Darnell began to walk back towards the counsel table.

‘That wasn’t all,’ Balfour added. ‘One of them had a broken ankle; another a broken wrist. Two of them had broken ribs.’

Darnell placed his hands on the back of his empty chair. ‘Yes, and more than what happened to them physically was what happened to them mentally. Let me quote you exactly,’ he said as he searched inside a file folder for Balfour’s report.‘“Two of them were quite out of their minds. Another one would not speak: he would only shake his head and moan. One of the women—the younger one, Ms Grimes—scratched the eyes of the first mate when he tried to lift her out of the lifeboat. The other woman, Mrs Wilcox—”’ Darnell looked up,‘the one who talked about the angels that had come from heaven to help her—“could not stop crying once we had her on board.”’

Darnell stopped reading. The page dangled in his hand.‘They had all been driven crazy, hadn’t they, by what they had been through?’

‘They weren’t human; they had lost all reason—that’s the God’s truth of it. Except for Marlowe, who looked as bad as any of them, maybe worse. He looked me right in the eye and said, “Thank God. It’s over.”’

‘“Thank God. It’s over,”’ repeated Darnell. ‘Thank God you found them, is that what he meant?’

Balfour raised an eyebrow. ‘That, and something more than that, was what he meant.’

Darnell nodded and then pulled out his chair, ready to sit down. ‘One other question, Captain Balfour. The body—what did you do with that?’

The lines in Balfour’s craggy brow deepened and spread further out. ‘We wrapped it in a cloth and gave it a burial at sea. We said a few words over it. That was all we could do.’

‘You know that the defendant, Vincent Marlowe, is on trial for murder. Did you see any evidence that the person whom you buried at sea had died from anything other than natural causes?’

Balfour shook his head. ‘I saw no evidence of murder.’

Chapter Six

W
ILLIAM DARNELL WATCHED FROM THE window. He did not need to check his watch to know that it was four o’clock in the afternoon; he knew it when he heard the car turn into the drive from the road below. Some people—most people, perhaps—were never quite on time; and in most cases a few minutes one way or the other didn’t matter. In a court of law a different rule—a double standard—applied: judges, blaming schedules, were notoriously unconcerned about making others wait; but lawyers had better be there when the judge finally made his way to the bench. Darnell had almost never come to court late; but outside the courtroom, he was often too preoccupied, too lost in thought, to remember where he was supposed to be next.

He had always been at war with time, losing track of it, running out of it, feeling trapped by it. He had once grown irritable and impatient at the way the hours dragged when he wanted them to pass more quickly; now he regretted the way time sped by when he wanted more than anything for it to stop. The days moved faster, as if the days he had left were conspiring to shorten themselves.

Time only slowed down on Saturday afternoons, an hour or so before four. There was a mathematical precision, a strict proportion, between how much he looked forward to her visit and how long it took for that last hour to pass. From the moment he heard the car until the moment she left, he did not think about time at all. He wondered if she ever did. She was always on time, never more than a minute early or a minute late. It was not, as far as he could tell, either a discipline to which she had trained herself or one to which she had been forced to comply. She was the most organised person he had ever known, a woman who had to do dozens of things every day without any way of knowing exactly how long each of them would take, and each of them had to be done in the proper order and without delay. It was, he had decided, a gift she had been born with, a gift that somehow allowed her to make time belong to her.

Summer Blaine parked the ancient Mercedes in front of the garage. She seldom drove it more than a few miles a day, but had it washed every week. She gave it a quick inspection, frowning at the dust, and then threw a mock-evil glance towards the window where Darnell stood watching, to let him know that he really ought to pave the drive. With a bag of groceries in her arms she pushed on the open door with her shoulder and let herself in.

‘Tell me everything about the trial,’ she said as she started to put things away.‘But tell me first about you.’ Her hand was on the cupboard door. She looked at him and smiled.‘How are you, Bill? Is everything all right? Are you taking the medication?’

Darnell tugged at his chin, as if he could not quite remember.

‘That means you are. That’s good.You have to, you know,’ she said with a breezy air, moving from the cupboard to the refrigerator. ‘We’ll eat about six, is that all right?’

‘Wouldn’t you rather go out? I thought we might go up valley, to that place you like. We have to go out anyway, and I thought that after…’

‘You eat out every night in the city—if you remember to eat at all. Tell me the truth … No, don’t tell me that,’ she said, laughing quietly. ‘I know enough already. Did I ever tell you that you’re the worst patient I’ve ever had?’

It made Darnell smile, the way she looked at him when she said it; the girlish, high-spirited sound of her voice that made him think that time had run backward and he was only half his age.‘If I was a better patient, you might stop making house calls.’

A shy smile floated over Summer Blaine’s wide and rather fragile mouth. ‘Then Saturdays would be wasted and I wouldn’t have anything to do.’

They looked at each other with affection, grateful that they still had each other, mourning gently the past they had not shared. They had known each other from the earliest days of their marriages, first through the death of her husband and then, a few years later, the death of his wife.

‘Come into the living room,’ she whispered after she had kissed him on the side of his face and, for a fleeting moment, clung to his neck.

He sat in the easy chair across from the sofa. Unbuttoning his shirt-sleeve he rolled up the faded, threadbare sweater that was as old as her Mercedes.

With a physician’s clean efficiency, Summer Blaine pumped the blood-pressure cuff. ‘Not too bad,’ she said. ‘Bend forward.’

It was a known routine. He pulled the shirt and sweater up over his back and leaned on his knees. The stethoscope felt ice-cold against his skin.

‘Now back.’

He leaned back in the chair, exposing his frail chest.

When she had finished listening, she folded the stethoscope and put it back in her bag. ‘This is your last trial, remember—we agreed.You’ve had two heart attacks already, and the way you’re going I can’t promise there won’t be a third.Your heart may not be strong enough to take that. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’

Darnell got to his feet, tucked in his shirt and adjusted the sweater. He grinned defiantly and bounced up on his toes.‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ he insisted.

‘This case may kill you,’ she insisted with a worried look.

‘This case may keep me alive. I would have been dead years ago if it weren’t for the work. That’s when people die—not when they’re working, but when they don’t have any more work to do. It’s a law of nature.’

It was false bravado, but that was not the reason he immediately regretted the remark. She had lost her husband; he had lost his wife.Work, or the lack of it, had had nothing to do with either death. ‘Sorry,’ he said, touching her arm. ‘But there is some truth to it. I have to stay active; I can’t give up. And if I have a heart attack and die … What of it? Better that way than what happened to Sarah.’

‘And to Adam, too, perhaps. Though I’m not sure how much better it is to go too quickly. At least we were able to say goodbye. The point is, I don’t want to lose you, and your heart isn’t what it used to be. I want you to be careful. And you did agree, remember?’

‘That this would be my last trial.Yes, I suppose…’

‘Suppose? You’re incorrigible. I should know better than to rely on a lawyer’s promise.’

‘A lawyer’s promise?’ said Darnell, a sparkle in his pale grey eyes.‘A lawyer who knows what a promise is, would be more like it. A promise, to be enforceable, has to be supported by a promise in return. I promised this would be my last case, but what promise did I get in return? Are you going to stop the practice of medicine? Give up your blissful sixty-hour week and spend the rest of your days puttering around the garden with me? Remind me, but I don’t remember any promise like that.’

‘Better bring a jacket,’ she told him, shaking her head. ‘It’s November now. I don’t want you catching cold.’

He did not think he needed one, but she worried about him and he liked that she did. If he would not yield to her in the larger questions of his life, he did not mind doing what she asked in the smaller ones. He threw on a corduroy jacket and caught up with her at the car.

‘And how was your week, Dr Blaine?’ he asked as she drove. ‘I envy you a little, able to help people without harming anyone else.’ He watched the houses set far back on the hillside slip by, neighbours he scarcely knew. ‘That would have been a good life, never having to choose. Although I suppose it must happen sometimes,mustn’t it? When you have two people dying and you don’t have time to save them both. That’s what intrigues me so much about this case: the moral ambiguity of everything that happened. I keep wondering what I would have done if I had been in Marlowe’s place.’

She kept her eyes on the twisting road, but her gaze, or so it seemed to Darnell, became more intense. ‘You can’t always help. Sometimes the best thing you can do is not to help at all.’

‘I’ve thought about that, too,’ he replied, staring out the window at the familiar scene, the route they travelled together the first or second Saturday of every month.‘Doctors who let their patients go; the ones who decide that the only life left is pain and suffering, and that to prolong the agony makes medicine a kind of evil. It must happen every day, but no one would ever admit it because life— existence—is the only standard on which anyone can agree. That is what I keep coming back to: that there are certain things that should never be made public. I’m a lawyer, and there are rules. If you start making exceptions, arguing that in certain instances the rules don’t apply, then it isn’t long before everything is an exception and the rules don’t exist. And so we insist that everyone follow the rules even when we know there are times when that might be the worst thing anyone could do. Marlowe should never have been charged with murder, and yet charging him with murder was the only thing the prosecution could have done. What happened out there should have stayed a secret, but there were too many survivors for that. It was not enough that they were alive, they wanted absolution, too. This is both the greatest case I have ever had and the worst. The law wasn’t made for this,’ he said, growing more energetic.‘It’s too far out of the common experience.’