The Gardens of the Dead (4 page)

Nick woke in the middle of
the night. He went to the bathroom for a glass of water. The mirror was too low
because he was too big … that’s what his mother had said … so he stooped to
look. Despite the sun, he hadn’t gone especially brown. But his skin was
speckled and his eyebrows had turned to straw As if that bewildered face ought
to know, he asked himself why a solicitor had quizzed him about the East End,
rather than dingos; why an inspector had gone after a widower; and why a key
his mother’s secret, had been kept not only from her husband, but also from
him.

5

Father Andrew was fond of
a saying from a Desert Father:

‘Don’t
use wise words falsely’ Perhaps that explained why he was always cautious when
he spoke. And why it was disconcerting when you sensed he was preparing to
speak.

The day
after the funeral, Anselm bumped into Father Andrew crossing the cloister. The
Prior paused, eyeing Anselm with an expression somewhere between expectancy and
deliberation.

‘Nice
day for picking the apples,’ volunteered Anselm.

‘What?’

Anselm
repeated what he’d thought was an amiable observation.

‘Eh?’
The Glasgow intonation suggested a coming scuffle.

Oh no,
thought Anselm. He’s changing the community work rota. The Prior always lost a
screw when he was planning to shift people from one job to another, because
everyone complained. Father Andrew waited a moment and then strode off. In a
flush of horror, Anselm thought of the new dispensation: he might face exile to
the kitchen — a sort of limbo where no one approves of you, except on feast
days. But then he settled upon the obvious: that the Prior’s ill temper was
related to Elizabeth’s death, the coming of Cartwheel and … an unused key.
They were of a piece. And the Prior was waiting for Anselm. He had something to
say. But why not call him in? Why the glowering?

Anselm
decided that he’d better go to BJM Securities sooner rather than later. First,
though, he had to sift through some nagging memories that had gathered around
the key Uneasily, Anselm made his way to Saint Leonard’s Field and the sweet
ambience of manual labour.

The trees were already
peppered with monks. Crates were stacked against a trolley Ladders and forked
poles reached into the branches. There was a hum of contentment. Apple picking
always did that, even when community nerves were frayed —which they had been
since Cyril had started banging on about missing receipts. And Christmas was
coming. That always wound the brothers up.

Anselm
chose an unattended tree that was heavy with foliage. He found a wide limb,
leaned back and rolled himself a cigarette. And he returned to Elizabeth’s
remark about ‘not knowing and not being able to care’. It didn’t sit easily
with the vociferous defender of the adversarial system whom he’d known at the
Bar.

‘Look,’
she had said during one of their little chats, ‘it’s a court of evidence, not
truth. We have to forget about the truth, for truth’s sake. The truth is out of
reach. And we shouldn’t pretend when we stand up in court that the truth is
what we care about. We don’t. We care about what our client
says
is the
truth. I can live with that. It’s the only way to take innocence seriously when
all the evidence points the other way. The truth? What’s that? It’s something
the jury decided after I sat down.’

No
discomfort there, thought Anselm, blowing a perfect ring. At the time,
ruminating over a Jaffa cake, Anselm had baited her confidence. ‘But what if
someone got off because the trial took a wrong turn and no one noticed?’

‘It can’t
happen,’ she said, glancing at her watch. She was due back in court. ‘All the
jury hears are competing versions of the relevant facts. Have you eaten the
last one?’

‘Sorry.’

What
quiet voice had seized her conscience? thought Anselm, picking an apple. And
what could it seize upon? Every barrister accepted that justice was determined
by winning and losing. If you lost, you swallowed disappointment; if you won,
you got a pat on the back. As Elizabeth had said, ‘what really happened’ was
whatever the jury decided. And if they convicted an innocent man? Unless you
could fault the process or find new evidence, he’d languish in jail. And if a
guilty man was freed? No one could bring him back to court. He could chant
‘Nemo
debet bis vexari’
(or, to be patristic, ‘God doesn’t judge the same offence
twice’). Either way the truth had gone like the dove off the ark.

Anselm
was certain that Elizabeth’s crisis had lain in this system, devised over a
thousand years to deal with the corollaries of frailty and wickedness. How
that was connected with tidying up her life, he hadn’t the faintest idea.
Having finished his cigarette, he turned his attention to the apple. Organic
principles, incompetently followed, meant that most of Larkwood’s fruit was
technically blemished. He examined a wormhole, feeling a small hankering for
the old struggle in the corridors of the Bailey.

In one
of those glancing thoughts, seemingly irrelevant, Anselm recalled that he’d
only ever done one case with Elizabeth. In many respects it had been an
allegory for the law’s uneasy accord with the truth. Forensically, it hadn’t
been anything special. But the client had been awful … Riley. That was the
name. She’d called him ‘a ruined instrument’. Gradually a presence materialised
in Anselm’s memory: a shaved head, small ears and sunken wounded eyes.

6

Nick went to the Green
Room and rang BJM Securities. While waiting, he studied an open trial brief on
the desk. A big man had been murdered in Bristol. ‘The cranial vault comprises
eight bones that surround and protect the brain.’ Autopsy photographs reduced
him to a one-inch bundle of close-ups.

A Mrs
Tippins answered the phone. Nick explained that his mother had passed away and
that he wished to collect what had been stored at the premises. She, in turn,
described which documents would be required for access to the deposit box.

‘Without
the probate certificate,’ she said, ‘you can only look.’

‘Fine,’
he replied. ‘Where are you?’

‘Sudbury.’
She gave the Suffolk address. After a pause, she said, ‘At first I thought you
were the monk.’

‘A
monk?’

‘Yes.
He’s the other keyholder.’

Nick
made another call to check train times and then he wrote a note for his father,
saying he’d be back late. On rising he looked at the red and blue photographs.
His mother had often quizzed him on the building regulations of the body — how
it was put together, what would happen if you did this or that to an organ, a
tissue. It was an incredibly fragile structure, despite the bones; a
staggering, miraculous unity.

‘The
design is perfect,’ he’d once said.

‘Not
quite.’ She’d sounded disappointed.

To
Elizabeth, in this chair, the body had been an exhibit, something numbered and
sewn up with stitches. Her wonder had been reserved for worms that glowed.

Nick waited in a small
room without windows. The only furnishings were a table and one chair. The
door opened, and Mrs Tippins entered, pushing a large aluminium box on wheels.
She said, ‘People bring things here when their houses are full up.

Her
skirt seemed to have been made from abandoned hotel tablecloths and the blouse
from net curtains. ‘It’s hard to get rid of things, isn’t it? Stay as long as
you like. Here’s a list of attendances.’ He glanced at the single entry, made
about three weeks earlier.

Left
alone, Nick opened the box. Inside was a single item: a battered red case — a
dainty valise for a weekend trip. A seam was split and the gold had flaked from
the clasp. He put the case on the table and lifted the lid. Inside it was a
ring binder, an envelope and a newspaper cutting.

Nick
began with the first. It was wrapped in the characteristic red tape that he’d
seen for years on his mother’s desk. Typed in the centre was the case name:
Regina v Riley The left-hand corner bore an endorsement:

Coram: HHJ
Venning

Prosecution:
Pagett

Defence:
Glendinning QC

Junior:
Duffy

Not
Guilty on all counts.

‘Duffy’ had come to his
attention a few moments ago from Mrs Tippins. It was the surname of the monk
who’d been entrusted with the second key Nick had met him, long ago. ‘Larkwood
Priory isn’t that far off, but he’s never been here. I’ve heard that once you’re
in, you can’t get out.’ She’d grimaced like a seasoned potholer. Nick
considered the name of the instructing solicitor at the bottom of the page. He’d
met him at St John’s Wood, chomping nuts and thinking twice: Frank Wyecliffe
Esq.

Nick
untied the tape and opened the binder. The front page was entitled ‘Instructions
to Counsel’ and contained a single paragraph:

Mr Riley
maintains that the witnesses, his former tenants, have fabricated a case
against him following their eviction for rent arrears. No doubt counsel will be
able to advise the client upon the complexion of the evidence.

Nick turned the page and
skimmed the typed witness statements. Three young women had said Riley was a
pimp. Scattered here and there was another name: the Pieman. The last
deposition was that of David George Bradshaw, the manager of a homeless people’s
night shelter to whom, it seemed, the girls had turned for help. The final page
was the defendant’s police interview. There was only one reply, ‘I’m clean. ‘Something
in Nick’s concentration failed and he tied up the brief. It was difficult this:
doing what she had done, in the same way.

He
picked up the cutting. It was taken from a south London daily newspaper. The
paper was dirty and the ink smudged. A coroner’s court had returned a verdict
of accidental death regarding John Bradshaw, seventeen, whose body had been
recovered from the Thames. The report quoted the anger and grief of his father,
George — evidently the witness in the earlier trial, even though he went by his
middle name. Nick cross-checked the date of the inquest with that of the trial:
an interval of five years had elapsed.

Nick
turned to the envelope. It was addressed to both his mother and Anselm Duffy
The letter inside was from Emily Bradshaw, the mother of John and the wife of
George. It condemned Riley’s defenders and blamed them for the destruction of
her family Again Nick checked the date, and then he quickly put everything back
in the red case. After a moment’s calm he pencilled a chronology to make clear
the sequence of events:

End of trial.

Death of J Bradshaw (as per cutting): 5 years after the trial.

Letter from Mrs Bradshaw: 8 years after trial.

Opening of account with BJM: 10 years after trial.

Nick
wheeled the aluminium box back to Mrs Tippins. Her look of permanent curiosity
prompted him to remark, ‘Just some old papers.’

‘It’s
funny what people hang on to, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

She
opened a desk register for his signature and then changed her mind. ‘Oh,
probate’s on the way … go on, take them. The monk won’t be coming, will he? I
mean, he’s all but locked up, I shouldn’t wonder.’

On the train back to
London Nick gazed at the evening fields, his mind focused on a small puzzle:
how did Elizabeth obtain a cutting from a local newspaper far from where she
lived and worked? She was a woman of meticulously clean habits, and yet the
paper was dirty and ragged. The only sensible conclusion was that someone had
given it to her; and the most likely candidate was either Mr or Mrs Bradshaw It
was unlikely to have been the latter because the cutting didn’t fit the
envelope, and in any event, the letter itself was in pristine condition, so
that left David George Bradshaw But how could Elizabeth have met him? She had
been defence counsel, representing Riley They’d been on opposing sides. How
could they meet without one or the other, in effect, crossing over? And given
that Elizabeth was the one with the suitcase, she was the likely traveller, so
to speak. That being so, there was a further curiosity: why would Mr Bradshaw
give such a cutting to Elizabeth? Not only did that imply a binding of his
mother to the tragic event, it revealed an intimacy that could not have
prevailed at the time of the trial: for if Elizabeth had already known Mr
Bradshaw, she would have had to withdraw from the case. And, since she didn’t,
the implication was that Elizabeth had sought him out afterwards, perhaps
prompted by the letter from his wife.

So,
thought Nick, watching homely lights spread across the fields, you made a
friend of your opponent, you stored what you found in secret, and you gave the
key to a monk. He felt acutely awake, though tired. He forced his mind to plod
on one or two steps and, like a reward, he came to the real mystery. He gazed
ahead, as if he’d stumbled on the source of the Nile: Elizabeth had started
this collection at the conclusion of the trial, when she could not have
anticipated the death of John Bradshaw, or the letter from his mother. Why
then, had she kept the trial papers in the first place?