Authors: Michael Dibdin
There was one more role I had to play, however, namely the distraught widower who having barely recovered from the shock of his wife’s tragic death now learns that she was murdered by a family friend with whom she had been carrying on a clandestine love affair and by whom she was pregnant at the time of her death. I think we can dispense with a blow-by-blow account of this, the predictable emotions (disbelief turning to indignation and disgust), the predictable lines (‘Do you mean to tell me, Inspector …’). It was a lousy part and I did it justice with a lousy performance. It didn’t matter. Now Clive had confessed his guilt, my act of innocence could be as amateurish as I liked. The critics had gone home, the reviews were in. I was a smash. Clive had bombed.
It was very satisfying to learn that all the clues I’d left had been painstakingly uncovered. Karen’s suitcase and handbag had been recovered from the reservoir, revealing both the victim’s identity and the fact that she had a single ticket to Banbury rather than a return to Liverpool. Forensic analysis revealed traces of fibres from her clothing in the boot of Clive’s car. Paint scrapings from the Lotus confirmed that it had been on the bridge from which the body had been dumped and also at the quarry from which the concrete post had been taken, and where the spare wheel had been abandoned in order to make room for the body of Clive’s murdered mistress.
‘But why did he kill her, Inspector? In God’s name, why?’
‘Apparently they’d planned to go away together for the weekend. That much he admitted right from the start. He didn’t know about her being in the family way, he says. She was only a couple of months pregnant, so most likely she’d been saving the news up till they were alone together. But somehow she blurted it out right away, and he took it badly. Words turned to blows, and …’
I shook my head.
‘I suppose I should hate him, but I just can’t. All I feel is this tremendous pity for both of them. Do you think that very wrong of me?’
Harry smiled a long, wan, lingering smile, expressive of his familiarity with every freak and foible of human nature. He waggled his glass from side to side.
‘You wouldn’t ever have another of these, would you?’
The mills of British justice grind so slowly that the trial did not take place until almost a year later, but since it represented the conclusion to the events I have just described it seems appropriate to include it here. The digression will be a brief one. When Regina v. Clive Phillips finally reached the courts, it was no contest. Regina cleaned up in straight sets. She hardly dropped a point. Clive was totally outclassed.
Considered as a spectator sport, the trial actually had more in common with cricket than with tennis: long stretches of appalling tedium which so numb the mind that you miss the occasional rare moments of interest. The proceedings invariably started late and were continually being adjourned on some pretext or other. I spent much of my time with Karen’s brother Jim, a car salesman from Southampton, who was representing the family. Jim’s line on his sister’s death was that it was ‘a shocking thing, quite shocking’. He reiterated this with the forceful delivery of a public bar philosopher delivering his considered opinion on the topic of the day. I gradually gathered that the most shocking thing about it from Jim’s point of view was all the commission he was losing. The reason I cultivated him was that he turned out to be very handy at seeing off the various journalists who pestered me.
Following the news of Clive’s arrest, I had been approached by several tabloids offering considerable sums of money for my ‘story’. To be honest, I was tempted. I mean if we’re talking enterprise culture then dumping Karen, framing Clive and selling the rights for £50,000 is definitely the way to go. Unfortunately I had to decline, as this would have put paid for ever to my chances with Alison. During the trial the reporters took their revenge by continually yapping at my heels, trying to provoke me to some riposte they could quote for free. My strategy was to repeat dully that I had no statement to make, but this was very taxing, and I was grateful for Jim’s intervention. He took a more direct line. ‘Look, piss off! All right? Just piss off!’ This may not sound very clever, but it worked. If I’d said it, they wouldn’t have taken a blind bit of notice, but Jim’s manner carried conviction. The hacks worked for the house journal of British vulgarity; Jim was a majority shareholder. When he told them to piss off, they pissed.
The reason the trial dragged on so long was that at the last minute Clive decided to repudiate his confession and plead not guilty. I had expected the proceedings to be a mere formality in which Clive’s confession would be rubber-stamped and converted into a life sentence, but I now faced the prospect of a Perry Mason courtroom drama in which my appearance in the witness box would be exploited by the defence to highlight my own ambiguous position. A succession of surprise witnesses would then be produced, while clever cross-examination left me impaled on my own contradictions. Clive’s counsel would deftly and authoritatively demonstrate the reversability of every shred of evidence against his client, revealing that warp was in fact woof and vice versa. I would end up breaking down in tears, confessing to everything and begging to be locked up for my own good, while Clive walked free without a stain on his character.
It wasn’t anything like that, of course. True, when I was cross-examined after giving evidence for the prosecution, counsel did touch on the question of what I had done that Saturday after seeing Karen off on the train, but this was the merest professional habit, the result of a lifetime spent sowing doubt in jurors’ minds, for which he was peremptorily called to order after an objection by the prosecution.
Judging by the looks of coherent hatred he lasered across the courtroom at me, Clive must have worked out the truth by now, but it didn’t do him any good. Rather the opposite, in fact. You could tell that prison life didn’t really suit Clive. He looked not just older but also weaker, internally damaged, structurally unsound, as though some vital load-bearing element had collapsed. Not the least part of his torment must have been the discovery that the truth was not a marketable commodity in his current situation. His legal representatives were prepared to reverse the plea, if he insisted, but not on the basis of his having been kidnapped by myself and A. N. Other. The jury would never buy anything as far-fetched as that.
Instead, his counsel opted for damage limitation. He accepted that his client had met Karen off the train at Banbury, that they had set off together in his car, and that Clive had subsequently attempted to dispose of her body in the reservoir. Where he begged to differ from the prosecution was over the question of how she had met her death. To bring in a verdict of murder, he reminded the jury, they would have to be convinced that the evidence proved beyond all reasonable doubt that Clive had assaulted his victim with deadly intent. A pathologist for the defence would testify that the injury from which she died was consistent with those which might be sustained in the course of a road accident, while evidence before the court would show that the near-side wing of the Lotus had been badly damaged, indicating that it had been involved in a serious collision.
In his summing-up, prosecuting counsel treated this argument with the contempt it deserved.
‘It would no doubt be possible to construct an almost infinite number of ingenious scenarios which more or less fit the facts. But if you look at the situation not in the abstract but in the flesh, not as a theoretical problem but as a human reality, taking into account the cold-blooded and methodical manner in which the defendant acted after the victim’s death, then you may well conclude that his original account of the circumstances surrounding that event, as contained in the signed confession which he made to the police, is considerably more plausible than this belated and ignoble attempt to evade responsibility for his loathesome crime.’
They did. Clive got fifteen years and a stern rebuke from the judge for wasting everyone’s time. The police were complimented on their speedy and efficient handling of the case.
Life is polyphonic, narrative monodic, as I had occasion to remark one evening at Alison’s. There were eight of us to dinner, including a local purveyor of up-market crime fiction who monopolized both the wine and the conversation, to say nothing of ogling our hostess in a way I found extremely distasteful. My response was the donnish strategy of rubbishing by implication. To suggest that he was a second-rate writer, although true, would have been unacceptable. To argue that writing fiction is a trivial pursuit of interest only to second-rate minds, precisely because this is evident nonsense, was perfectly legitimate.
To confound the fellow further I illustrated my argument with a musical analogy, asserting that a horizontal medium such as narrative could offer only a faint and passing allusion to, or rather illusion of (appreciative laughter), life’s vertical complexities, like the implied harmonies in Bach’s works for solo violin. Human experience, however, was not a matter of one or two voices but a veritable
Spem in alium
(ripple of recognition, real or feigned) of whose contrapuntal complexities fiction could never be more than a hollow travesty.
It never occurred to me that the boot would so soon be on the other foot and that I myself would be struggling with the intractable limitations of narrative. For in my attempt to describe fully and clearly the events which followed my discovery of Karen’s body that Friday night I have necessarily omitted everything which did not directly bear on these developments, in particular their effect on my relationship with Alison. Each new detail which emerged – Karen’s violent death, her illicit pregnancy, Clive’s involvement in both – amounted to another brick in the wall which the affair was erecting between us. When such a garish light was being cast on the activities of people close to me, I myself was inevitably lit up in an undesirable way. PLOs (‘persons like ourselves’, known as ‘people like us’ to those who aren’t, quite) instinctively shun anything and anyone which attracts general attention, from star tenors to vogue foods, let alone the subject of lurid articles appearing in the popular press under such headlines as SEX KILLING HUSBAND STERILE, POLICE TOLD.
But once both Karen and Clive had, in their different ways, been buried, the situation changed dramatically. The very factors which had made Alison take her distance from me earlier became a source of allurement once the whole affair was safely relegated to the past. Old scandals are as much a credit to a good family as new ones are an embarrassment. To the public, the dramatic termination of my marriage was a nine days’ wonder, soon forgotten for fresh sensations, but for Alison and me it was a secret we shared, an ordeal we had come through and which brought us closer together, while making it proper for us to be close.
Even so, we were circumspect about it. The public might have forgotten, but our friends hadn’t, and it was their judgement which would ultimately make or break us as a couple. This was not some reckless and torrid romance in which we would live for and through each other, letting the world go wag. We were both too old and wise to have any wish to run off to a desert island together. On the contrary, the basis of our mutual attraction was a feeling that the other was a suitable partner to share the lives we already led. I didn’t want Alison in the abstract, divorced from the rich and varied habitat which sustained her. Nor would she have wished to be wanted in that way. She would have found such adoration meaningless, and slightly disturbing. Our relationship not only had to be blameless, it had to be pronounced such by a jury of our peers. We had to be seen to have behaved
correctly
.
Our initial encounters were thus fairly furtive affairs, usually taking the form of trips to concerts and plays in London, where we could be reasonably sure of not being seen together by anyone we knew. Occasionally we risked going out to eat locally, and it was in the course of one such evening that our secret was finally revealed when we found ourselves sitting two tables away from a group including Thomas and Lynn Carter.
It was all rather awkward at first, with a good deal of pretending not to pretend not to be looking at each other. Finally Thomas came over and sat down with us. He pointed to Alison’s untouched portion of
zuppa inglese
.
‘Aren’t you going to eat that?’
‘Well no, actually.’
He seized a spoon and tucked in.
‘Call me Autolycus.’
‘I don’t get it,’ I said.
‘I do,’ sighed Alison. ‘And it’s terrible.’
Thomas fixed me with a merry eye.
‘ “A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles”. I didn’t know you two were seeing each other.’
‘We’re not,’ said Alison. ‘At least, we
are
, but …’
‘Well we are,’ I said. ‘Aren’t we?’
‘Well it depends what you mean.’
Realizing that he’d put his foot into wet cement, Thomas adroitly changed the subject to some problem involving the next meeting of the madrigal group.
A few days later Alison and I received invitations to dinner at the Carters’ the following weekend. The invitations were separate, but from the moment we arrived it was clear that we’d been invited as a couple. The other guests were a historian from Balliol whose wife sang with the group, and a senior editor at the University Press whose Dutch husband worked at the European nuclear research project near Abingdon. I was flattered by the quality of the company, and still more by the fact that Thomas had not invited any of the folk I’d met through Dennis and Karen. It was as if he wanted to make clear that that phase of my life was now over.
In return for his thoughtfulness I made a special effort to charm the other guests. The Dutch physicist, though a man of few words, was perfectly pleasant, and his wife was warm and witty, with a fund of anecdotes about a dictionary project she was supervising. The problem was the other couple. The wife was the classic North Oxford matriarch, that formidable combination of nag and nanny, like an intellectual Margaret Thatcher. She was undoubtedly the power behind the Chair her husband held, but he was an even thornier proposition. Eccentric as the comparison may appear, Oxford dons always used to remind me of
gauchos
, proud and touchy, wary and taciturn, their emotions concealed beneath the rigid code of etiquette demanded by a society where everyone carries a knife and is ready to use it at the least provocation. In such company the simplest and most casual remark is apt to draw a challenging glare and a demand to know your sources. It’s wiser not to say how nice the weather’s been, unless you work for the Meteorological Office. Despite your interlocutor’s fame and erudition, you mustn’t expect him to say anything remotely interesting. He has nothing to prove, above all to the likes of you. Don’t make the mistake of asking about his work, either. There are only four people in the world capable of understanding what he does, and he’s no longer speaking to three of them. And don’t for Christ’s sake mention yours, unless you want to be shown to the tradesmen’s entrance.