Exposure Page 15

  Luke felt Rosalind waiting for him to say something. He took in her anxious face. 'Well, when you think about it, Dad's actually really lucky,' he said. 'They must have been the worst thieves in London.'

  'Yes, they must.'

  Rosalind laughed, in obvious relief. Then she stood up and quickly started moving his clothes from the overnight bag into his empty chest of drawers. He watched her refolding the T-shirts and rolling up a pair of socks that had come undone. It was intensely reassuring to watch.

  He had no idea then that she needed to do this just as much as he needed to watch it being done.

  When she had finished, she said, 'Well, I suppose I should go. I won't stay all that long, but the traffic will be a nightmare. I imagine I'll be back at about six thirty. I'll be quicker if I possibly can.'

  She leant down and kissed him, just as she used to when he was little and he pretended to be ill so as to get off school, so as to be kissed by his mother in just that way.

  The velvet-textured silence of a car had always been a thinking space for Rosalind. She felt solitude wrapped around her, luxurious as a cashmere shawl. In a twenty-year period in which she had done more than her fair share of kissing goodbye at the airport, of loading shopping-bags into the boot of the car, of dropping Alistair off at King's Cross or Sophie at piano or Luke at rugby, she had learnt to value these moments of peace. First came the modern, high-tech thunk as the door closed, and then, suddenly, immunity.

  After the shock of what had happened to Alistair, she wanted nothing more than to sit alone and think for a while, but the builders had been in repairing the conservatory roof and twice when she had been sitting on the steps with her coffee one of them had called out jarringly, 'Cheer up, love. Might never happen.'

  Whether it was her sister or her friends or the builders, somehow there was always someone around wondering what she was thinking about, asking if she was all right, if she had a headache. She did not have a bloody headache!

  Was Luke watching her from his window now? She started the car and moved off. Someone was always ringing the doorbell, selling something, delivering something. The world was not private enough. An image of the desert came into her mind: red sand blown gently into ripples. She had never seen a desert.

  She indicated left and got on to the main road. And, again, she found she was thinking about their friend Julian on the night of the attack. He had insisted on staying with her in the hospital waiting room while Alistair was taken off to have his head X-rayed. Julian had handed her a ribbed plastic cup of scalding coffee. 'Ooops—I think I might have pocketed your change,' he said.

  'What?'

  'For the coffee. Your change.' After a lot of searching, he pulled twenty pence, bright and shining, out of his pocket and handed it to her. She looked at him as if he had handed her a watermelon.

  Julian contracted his eyebrows. 'D'you know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking that it just is a bit strange, isn't it, Roz,' he said, 'that they didn't try to take anything? Not money, not his watch or his wallet or whatever. Nothing.' He was thinking of his daughter's mugging. They had taken her money, cards, earrings, her coat, her shoes.

  Rosalind brought the cup to her lips. She did not drink.

  'The police were very odd about it,' he told her. 'I mean crazy, really. They asked me if there was any reason anyone might be getting revenge on him.'

  'Revenge?'

  'I know. Barmy. They have to rule things out, I suppose.'

  Well, it must be ruled out quickly, she thought. There was no place for this concept in their lives. The word gave off the same neon glare as the miniature envelope of white powder she had once found in Sophie's old winter coat, as the times when Suzannah had turned up drunk on the doorstep and had to be rushed out of sight of the children. Worst of all, it gave off the same glare, the same deafening static, as the shocking magazine she had found in Luke's room when he was about fourteen.

  In fact, Luke's 'livewire' friend, Ben, had bought the magazine for him as a birthday joke. Luke hadn't known what to do with it, how to dispose of the evidence, feeling afraid he would be judged not only by God but also by the dustmen, whom he had often seen looking meditatively into the bin lorry while the rubbish churned. So he hid it. In fact, Rosalind's had been the only eyes to look through it, taking in the spread legs, the clitoral close-ups, the crotchless knickers and peep-hole bras. She put it back carefully in his right ski boot and hurried back to the phone to say, sorry, Luke's boots were a size ten, so they'd be no good for her friend Charlotte's son Rory.

  'Oh, God, Roz, I'm sure it's a standard question, really,' Julian had said, causing her to feel even more worried. 'It's just that it's the middle of the night. Everything feels extraordinary in the middle of the night, doesn't it? We all need to sleep.'

  She nodded at him, with the flat-lipped smile of resignation people use to restore order to the face. 'Exactly,' she said. Then she took a sip of the coffee and felt consoled by the way it burnt her throat—like pouring boiling water on filthy ants in the kitchen.

  'You do look tired, Roz.'

  'Do I? Not surprising, I suppose.'

  'Yes. What a stupid thing to say,' Julian said. 'I'm sorry. Why do people say that?' He was a self-absorbed man, who often picked himself up on tiny points of grammar or found a loose thread in his sweater with an overly dramatic expression of shame. It irritated her. There was something repulsively effeminate about it and she felt grateful for Alistair's occasional brusqueness with her, what she saw as his masculine impatience to get on with important work. She was glad she had never succumbed to the charm of all those love-letters Julian had written her a million years ago. He was certainly a loyal friend now, but it was a mystery to her that Elise put up with his endless puns and his frivolity and his nervous glances in the mirror.

  She gazed at him and felt a wrench of guilt. When had she started finding people she loved so irritating?

  Now she parked the car, feeling deeply confused. Why did she suspect her own husband of—what? What, exactly?—so easily? An educated man, a successful man, an eminent barrister, she told herself. She thought of him quietly reading the biographies or histories he got for Christmas with a cup of coffee beside him. In a dislocated memory he glanced up and smiled as she passed through the room with a plant pot for the conservatory, and she smiled back, appreciating their life together. Children home for Easter, him reading, a lily waiting to be potted. This was trust.

  But part of her had always known that Alistair's excellent legal mind told her the truth and nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth. What was more, she knew she had made way for his dishonesty in the first place. There were places in that mind of his that she watched him go to—as if he was visiting a long-term mistress whom she had come quietly to accept.

  The nurse led her down the corridor to Alistair's room. His head swung round as she came in. He looked up at her—as if he had forgotten to lock the bathroom door, she thought. A book lay unread on the sheets beside him. 'Hello, darling,' he said. He leant forward so she could kiss him.

  She chose the very top of his forehead. 'How's the leg doing?' she said.

  They both looked at the plaster.

  'Not bad at all. Really not bad. The painkillers are fantastic. Everyone's been marvellous.'

  'We must write and thank the nurses,' she said.

  'Yes, darling. You always have the right ideas.'

  She was not really listening to him. He was staring at her sentimentally and it frightened her. Everything was beginning to frighten her. Her son had literally thrown himself on to her in the hallway at his flat—a drowning man.

  What had happened in the air? It was like a curse, she thought—like a curse from ancient times: 'a blight on fathers and sons'. She said, 'The nurse said the police were in again.'

  'Yes, that's true. Yes, they were,' he said. He was using the level voice designed for the less-educated members of the jury. For the first time she was aware that it was entirely inapp
ropriate.

  ' Why, Alistair?'

  'Why? Well, it's complicated.'

  Alistair knew he had about thirty seconds of his former life left. He clung to them, blinking, feeling his heart beating, studying his poised wife.

  Chapter 8

  Just inside the entrance to the newer wing of the Old Bailey there is a line of policemen behind a long window of bulletproof glass. Beside them is an airport-style X-ray machine and a metal-detector security arch. After coming through the rotating doors, jury members, judges, reporters, barristers and solicitors, court clerks and QCs, canteen workers and expert witnesses must all pass through this second gateway under the weary scrutiny of the policemen's eyes.

  No one is exempt from suspicion. Years of IRA trials mean the child with the pink rucksack, the spectacled lady with the embroidered shoulder-bag may very well be carrying the bomb. Each person is checked for guns, or explosives or knives or drugs. In the eyes of the police by the X-ray machine, there is a joyless knowledge, which comes of years of looking into strangers' bags.

  At times it is a delicate procedure and, as the barristers come through, the policemen's faces carefully imply neither judgement nor suspicion. For their part, the barristers appear preoccupied with more ethereal concerns, submitting only their physical selves to this security check, with its faintly absurd implications; the younger ones are vague and intellectual, the older ones place their bags on the conveyor-belt with an air of sympathetic efficiency. These modes of detachment are all that preserve them from the amazing things people do every day. To a barrister, amazement is a professional hazard, a risk to the healthy legal mind, and it must be suppressed, along with fear and hate and despair. The Old Bailey is a building dedicated at every level to the punishment of instinct and the suppression of instinct, in the name of law and order.

  Alistair and the junior barrister who was assisting him, Sandra Bachelor, and her pupil, Ryan Townsend, had been going through these twin entrances every day for two weeks now. The case of Regina v. Giorgiou was the kind of trial barristers hope to get—long and lucrative, genuinely interesting—and there was the not insignificant allure of seeing one's name in the papers. It was a kidnap trial, one that involved the only son of a wealthy Greek shipping family often photographed in Hello! magazine. Alexis Giorgiou was a handsome young man in his early thirties with a devastating gambling habit to feed.

  Throughout the traumatic period of ransom demands, the police sat with Mr and Mrs Giorgiou, both of whom were predictably distraught about their son. Had it not been for the kidnappers' unguarded insistence that, in spite of his protests, Mr Giorgiou certainly could lay his hands on two million pounds in cash, because he need only 'flog that fucking Reardon sketch', there would have been no reason for them to suspect their own son's criminal involvement. But, as Mr Giorgiou said, his face visibly draining of blood while he loosened his cravat and groped like a blind man for his wife's hand, no one knew about this hidden treasure. The sketch was kept in a bank vault in Switzerland and the documents concerning it were in one of the files in a locked compartment in his dressing room, to which only his son and his wife had been given a key. To discover the existence of the sketch would have required a thorough and premeditated search by one or the other of them.

  The police subsequently raided the kidnappers' address, which they had long ago traced, and discovered both the kidnappers and Alexis Giorgiou himself sharing a bottle of claret and playing five-card stud.

  Alistair couldn't help being affected by Ryan Townsend's naive excitement about the case. The boy sent text messages to his mother if there was a chance she might spot him on the London news. It was a different sort of excitement from that with which he had started his career. Ryan seemed modestly thrilled to be included: he watched the court proceedings as if they were a spectacular show to which he had won a ticket. Alistair had always been defensive and vain really; he had always brandished his ticket and focused his attention on the effect his career was having on his personality, his demeanour, his quest for self-improvement. Essentially, Ryan looked outwards while Alistair looked inwards and, like all introverts, Alistair perceived a moral sweetness in the extrovert's cheery smile.

  Sandra Bachelor turned out to be extremely able. She was good and useful to work with and Alistair enjoyed debating points of law with her. But the real pleasure, as always for him, was the immense satisfaction of turning the lead weight of fifteen ring-binder files into the pure gold of an argument. When he was working, and he was almost always working, he thought in these terms: of lead and gold, right and wrong, guilty or not guilty. The expulsion of vagueness left him at peace.

  Alistair loved his life as a barrister. The collegiate feel of the Inner Temple; the camaraderie of the barristers' robing room; the defiant fried eggs and cigarettes in the bar mess before court; the friendly teasing— 'Langford? Good God—you still allowed in?'

  It was a congenial atmosphere. He liked the lunches out with clever solicitors and grateful clients. He liked having drinks at El Vino, where women were still not allowed to order at the bar and men had to wear a tie. He enjoyed a good steak and a glass of claret at a restaurant on Fleet Street, often alone, with his papers spread out on the table in front of him. And it pleased him to use Latin phrases in his everyday work—who else could claim that privilege? Prima facie, sui generis, mutates mutandes: the words themselves carried the scent of old books and churches. They were old and trusted; they authenticated the user. To speak them in an argument was to hit the meeting-point between intellectual and sensual pleasure.

  When dusk fell, Alistair could look out of the window of his room in chambers at the courtyard, which was much like an Oxford quad and still gas-lit at night. From there he could watch the eternal London rain as it fell indifferently both on the barristers' cars and on the barristers themselves, who were hurrying, always hurrying, with their red bags slung over their shoulders. It was good to watch, a familiar dance, and the steps had the dignity of centuries of English law.

  To Alistair, what was old was safe—archaic phrases, traditions, buildings, laws ... Like artefacts in a museum, what was old was protected by a thick cord over which the mob was not allowed to lean in too close.

  But modernity crept in everywhere. Your mobile phone went off in your pocket and threw you off your speech. 'My pacemaker, my lord,' he had once wittily explained when this happened, much to the amusement of the courtroom. But he hadn't got into his stride again and felt he had lost the jury. He never forgave the flashy little machine. Even so, he had learnt how to use his email, when chambers set up work accounts for them all. But he had done it joylessly, with the aggressive thoroughness he had developed early in life to challenge his fear of change. Alistair was never easy on himself: he had always suspected he was prone to disproportionate fears.

  Around his room were bookshelves crammed with mass upon mass of law reports, legal textbooks and piles of briefs tied with ribbon; dark pink was a defence, white was a prosecution. His desk was Victorian mahogany with an inlay of walnut and pieces of ivory. There was a carved lion's head at each corner: big, solid carvings—roaring lions.

  Of course, it was not a working life without frustrations. He had not been made a Queen's Counsel or 'silk' until the relatively late age of fifty-two. Barristers waiting hopefully for silk are known as 'senior juniors', which has a ring of disappointment to it. It had always made Alistair picture trouser legs an inch too short.

  Given his excellent record, he felt sure the delay had been caused by a letter he had written to The Times when he was buoyed up after an argument—or, rather, an extended and euphoric agreement—between himself and two colleagues at El Vino. The letter complained, in precisely the terms that had caused his colleagues to order a fourth bottle of burgundy in his honour, about the prevalence of prosecution-minded judges at the Old Bailey. What were we all to make, the letter asked, of judges repeatedly interrupting defence counsel, judges virtually cross-examining defence witnesses themsel
ves, of judges whose theatrical summing-up to the jury cast lurid doubt over the defence case?

  The issue had come to the front of his mind because he had just appeared in a murder trial before the most notable example of this species of judge. Alistair knew he had been stupid not to see that his words would be taken personally. He would always remember the thud of dismay when his clerk winked at him the next Monday morning and said, 'Susan showed us all your letter, sir. That'll put the wind up old Hanging Judge Simpson, won't it?'

  Simpson was a fiercely insecure man who always smelt faintly of whisky. He was also a great friend of the Home Secretary, who was himself an ex-barrister, and of the newly appointed director of public prosecutions. It turned out that the three of them had been inseparable at Cambridge. The good cases Alistair's clerk had grown used to receiving for him simply dried up. This went on for five years and it took Alistair another three to regain his previous sure footing.

  He regretted writing the letter because it had changed precisely nothing—and he had only sent it because he had been particularly pleased with the way it was phrased. He had liked the thought of colleagues reading it over their toast and marmalade on Sunday morning. And he had thought it would healthily banish any residual shame he felt about his speech at last year's Bar conference. He still suffered this shame because he had forgotten a whole section of what he had meant to say, even though he knew the points he had made were widely thought to be excellent.