Exposure Read online

  Karen seemed oddly flattered and puzzled by the emergence of this personal detail. 'Yes,' she said, 'you are.'

  'And am I right in thinking that after dinner, you invariably went on to the casino downstairs at which Mr Giorgiou would gamble?'

  'Well, you don't really need me, do you?'

  There were a few titters from the jury. Sandra noticed how Karen's eyes discreetly checked the arrangement of her breasts in the tight blouse; she also noticed that Alistair was having trouble with his wig. He kept adjusting it at the back of his neck in a rather irritating and visually distracting way. It was slightly mystifying, but he gave the impression of being embarrassed. It was a boyish embarrassment—a genuine, if inexplicable agony. He had the look of a teenage boy enduring the last throes of a TV sex scene on the sofa beside his parents.

  'Please just answer the question, Miss Jennings,' said the judge again.

  'Sorry,' she said. 'Yes.'

  Alistair went on, 'Miss Jennings, would you say that Mr Giorgiou was a reliable man?'

  'Are you kidding?'

  'I'll rephrase that,' he said. 'Would you say that Mr Giorgiou was a punctual man?'

  'Well, depends if there's gambling or sex, doesn't it? Like all men. If there's blackjack or poker or a bit of something he wants, he's there like clockwork.'

  'I see. And would I be correct in stating that on Friday the fifth of January you went, as usual, to Buzzy's Restaurant and Casino, expecting to have dinner with him?'

  'Yes,' she said. 'You would be correct.'

  'You expected to have dinner together and then to go through to the casino, to gamble, as usual?'

  'Yes,' she said. Then she smiled because this evasion seemed absurd to her. She stage-whispered, 'To gamble, then to have sex.'

  'Yes, I see. But on that evening Mr Giorgiou didn't arrive, did he?'

  'No, he didn't.'

  'And you waited for him for several hours? Is that right? Until the restaurant closed?'

  'Yes.'

  'Why did you wait so long?'

  Karen laughed incredulously. 'Do I look like the sort of girl who's used to being stood up? I kept on thinking he'd turn up any minute with a bunch of flowers,' she said.

  Sandra Bachelor glanced at the jury, who seemed to be watching a tennis match. She was beginning to feel concerned that, in the atmosphere of hilarity, they would not appreciate the significance of Alistair's questions. To continue as he was, in a stern voice, might only add to the comic effect of Karen's performance, but she appreciated he had little choice. The depth of his embarrassment now amazed her and she stared at the small figure on the witness stand and wondered what it would be like to have this rather shaming effect on a man.

  'Ah. Yes, I see,' Alistair said sternly. 'So you were extremely surprised that he didn't turn up. Would that be a fair description?'

  'A polite description. Yes.'

  'You were surprised because, as you say, he's punctual if there's gambling involved and because, naturally,' he bowed his head, because he could ham-act for the jury, too, 'you aren't the type of girl who is accustomed to being stood up?

  'You got it,' she said, raising an eyebrow.

  'But eventually you went home.'

  'Well, yes. There are limits, aren't there?'

  Again the jury tittered collectively. It struck Alistair that they were about as intimidating to a potential perjurer as cooing barn owls. In all his years as a barrister, he had rarely seen anyone so unfazed as Karen by the solemnity of the courtroom. He had seen plenty of angry defiance, from etiolated car thieves or swarthy pimps, but all of these had suggested at the very least an acknowledgement, an aggrieved reverence, for the authority of the court. Karen, on the other hand, was simply unable to keep a straight face. She was a genuinely anarchic figure—and he couldn't help finding this acutely exciting. He felt his face going red and wondered if it would be noticed. The thought was appalling.

  He went on, still more severely, 'And the following Thursday, that's Thursday the twelfth of February, again you went back to Buzzy's Restaurant and again you waited for Mr Giorgiou for several hours?'

  'Yes. And I don't mind telling you, I was not a happy bunny,' she said, pouting slightly.

  Alistair felt his face flush redder still and was suddenly afraid that he would actually make a fool of himself in front of a judge and jury if he could not keep better control of his demeanour. This had never happened before. He rested his hand casually on the table in front of him. 'No, I can imagine you weren't,' he said, playing along. 'But, none the less, again you waited, and ...' he made a tumbling motion with his hand and pushed out his lips to imply their easy understanding '...and again, all the while, you imagined that Mr Giorgiou might suddenly turn up because it was unlike him to miss an evening's gambling or to stand up a girl like you.'

  'Exactly,' she said, visibly impatient.

  'I see. And did you receive any kind of explanation from him about why he had not turned up?'

  'Explanation? Well—no.'

  'No?' Now he felt himself regaining control—the first foothold.

  She looked at him as if he was an idiot. 'How could I? He was locked up?'

  'Ah, yes, of course,' Alistair said, all but slapping his forehead. 'I wonder then how you explained this to yourself—I mean, the fact that he didn't call. How did you account for this, Miss Jennings?'

  For a moment, she looked almost starded. Then her eyes seemed to catch sight of something in the far corner of the room and she said, 'Thought he was playing hard to get.'

  'Oh, I see. But he had never behaved in that way before, had he? You described him as—what was it?—"like clockwork" if there was ... gambling involved.'

  'Look, I do it to him all the time. You play hard to get and then they appreciate it when you give them what they want,' she said. 'Does a man no harm at all. He could've been giving me a taste of it. Why not? That's what I thought.'

  'Indeed,' Alistair said. 'You sound, Miss Jennings, like something of an expert on the male ego.'

  She giggled and wrinkled up her nose at him. 'Ooh, is that what barristers call it, then?'

  His only option was to press on, deaf to the laughter (to which even the judge seemed prone) and simply to ignore her asides. Again he consulted the ring binder, in a bid to return the jury's focus to the facts. 'Surely, though, Miss Jennings,' he said, 'in your—well, in your expert opinion, there must be more effective ways of "playing hard to get" than sitting in a restaurant until closing time twice in a row. Aren't there?'

  She raised an eyebrow. 'Yes, but he wasn't to know, was he?'

  'Ah, no—of course. Of course he couldn't have done. Forgive me—I'm simply trying to put it all together. Perhaps you would further assist me, then, by describing what was going through your mind, Miss Jennings.'

  'What? In the restaurant?'

  'Yes—I mean what with waiters coming and going. It's a well-known restaurant, after all. People must have been served mouth-watering food to the left and right of you. You must have been terribly hungry ... and yet it would appear that you didn't order anything.'

  She snorted and tossed back her hair. 'I'm not paying a hundred quid for my dinner, am I? What do you take me for?'

  'No. Quite. But you said you expected Mr Giorgiou to turn up at any moment with a bunch of flowers. Would he have begrudged you a starter?'

  'Look, Lexi's the kind of man who orders for you,' she said. 'That's the kind of man I like.'

  The insolence was astonishing, he thought. He imagined her in red stockings, laughing at him, in a see-through black négligée, not letting him come near. He looked forward to seeing his wife.

  'Ah. Yes, I see. But, as I say, I'm curious about what you were thinking at the time, Miss Jennings. I mean to say, did it perhaps occur to you that your boyfriend might have had an accident?'

  'I don't know. Maybe. It probably crossed my mind.'

  'I can imagine. He might, after all, have had a car crash or broken a leg—who was to know? Cer
tainly not you. And, let's face it, you were waiting, with no occupation, for over three hours. Even the steadiest mind would run riot under such conditions.'

  He glanced up at her, but she made no response. She was plainly not going to speak unless she was asked a question. It astonished Sandra to see that Karen looked intrigued, rather than nervous—as if she viewed her cross-examination as a flirtatious game and was interested to know who might win. Sandra wished she could stop Alistair's constant fiddling with his wig: he was plainly unaware that he was doing it and it gave a dreadful impression of nerves, which surely couldn't be genuine, given his experience, she thought. Perhaps he was feeling unwell, she told herself. The redness of his face might simply have been caused by a fever. That was probably it, she thought, but still she felt somewhat let down by this eminent QC whom she had so longed to work beside.

  He went on, 'Did it perhaps also cross your mind that your boyfriend might be ill?'

  Karen shrugged and sighed. 'Did I think he might be ill? Oh, I guess so. I can't really remember, to be honest, but it probably did, yes.'

  'Of course. You must have been very worried. So there you sat, thinking all these unpleasant things,' he circled his hand to add a falsely reassuring breadth to his point, 'and yet, Miss Jennings, it did not occur to you simply to call his mobile phone and find out where he was.'

  He registered the changed expression on her face. It brought him the usual quietly violent satisfaction. He then consulted a record (which in fact he had mislaid on the large desk and was now representing with a sheet of blank paper visible to none but himself) and continued, 'It seems you made no telephone call either to him, or to any of his friends, or indeed to any member of his family, on either evening or at any point between the fifth and the seventeenth of February, when your boyfriend was discovered by the police.'

  He made eye-contact and removed his glasses.

  'Miss Jennings, can it be true that you made no attempt to visit or to contact Mr Giorgiou, your boyfriend, in any way, for almost two weeks, during which time he stood you up, without explanation, twice? Is that correct?'

  She stared at him. A flicker of pleasure passed over her lips and she smoothed down her clothes as if it might literally have disturbed them.

  Alistair said, 'You see, all of the telephone numbers that attempted to contact his mobile phone during that time have been accounted for.' He turned to the judge. 'I refer, my lord, to exhibit eight, the telephone records. Usher, please hand a copy to the witness.'

  He waited for her to cast her eyes over the first few pages and then he continued, 'As I say, Miss Jennings, none of his close friends recall having heard from you by any means. Nor do any of his family. And it's plain that you did not call him directly, and yet records from the last eighteen months show us that, even under ordinary circumstances, you were in the habit of calling your boyfriend, on his mobile phone, up to two or three times a week.'

  She laughed. 'Oh, you keep saying "your boyfriend" like that. Like my mum. So I called him sometimes. Sometimes I didn't. So what? You don't really seem to get it. I don't have rules. It's not like we're serious or whatever. With me and Lexi it's a casual thing, yeah? You know.' She pouted indifferently and leant very slightly forward as if she was sharing a deep secret with him alone. 'It's sexual,' she said.

  To the rest of the courtroom, Alistair then appeared to make a note on the pad in front of him. It was, in reality, merely a wiggly line. 'Yes,' he said. Then he repeated to himself: 'Yes.'

  And when he raised his face, she said, 'Yes,' in return, and smiled conclusively.

  (This little exchange of yeses was vibrantly parodied by the jury members in the canteen the next day.)

  Alistair straightened his waistcoat. Then he straightened his wig, and his gown, and then he rearranged his feet on the carpet. He frowned for a moment and cleared his throat. 'Am I right in saying that the next time you heard from Alexis Giorgiou was when he called you from the police station on the seventeenth?'

  'You are.'

  'But he was allowed only two telephone calls, Miss Jennings. Were you not extremely surprised that he chose to ring you—given you aren't in a "serious" relationship, given you didn't try to call him once, in two weeks, during which, after all, you had an unlimited number of telephone calls at your disposal?'

  Karen gave him a level stare and he felt a deep thrill at the direct eye-contact. She was certainly not beautiful—she was vulgar-looking, really, but then her effect on him was not exactly sexual. At any rate, it was not sexual in any recognizable sense. There was sweat on his forehead, his cheeks were burning, his clothes felt fundamentally wrong.

  Again, she gave her shrug. 'Well, who knows? Maybe he missed me more than I missed him. Is that possible, Mr Langford?'

  In spite of her mockery, there was no escape from the net he had created. It had been a successful cross-examination. But now that he had reached its crescendo and was able to put it to her directly that she had known all about the kidnap and was merely attempting to provide Giorgiou with a cover, he found that the usual predatory fulfilment was missing. She denied all prior knowledge of the kidnap outright, of course, but the jury was plainly alerted and he put no further questions. As he sat down, he felt a peculiar, almost a devastating sense of anticlimax.

  He had caught the defence witness in a He but, what with his red cheeks and his crazy waistcoat-straightening and the intolerable itchiness of his wig (which he now removed so as to scratch his head all over in luxurious surrender), he was the one who felt shown up.

  He could not blame Karen. She had done her insolent best to devalue his questions, certainly, but he felt sure that she had no more idea of her anarchic power over his body than spring itself. This was a peculiarly sentimental thought and he hurried it away with his papers and highlighter pens.

  ***

  Sandra Bachelor, Ryan and Alistair took the lift back up to the Bar mess and the robing rooms without looking at one another. There was an obvious awkwardness in the air and Sandra said something banal about it being a late sitting, with which Ryan enthusiastically agreed, as he did with everything she said. It was becoming increasingly plain to Alistair that Sandra had noticed how flustered he had been and that she did not know what to say. Her comment on his cross-examination was conspicuously absent. Thankfully, Ryan was robustly oblivious. And, better still, it was the weekend and there would be no need to call Karen again as a witness.

  In the silks' robing room, where his locker was, Alistair was accosted by an old friend, and by the time he came out, carrying his coat and his various bags, the hallway was teeming. As always on a Friday night, the Bar-mess area contained an end-of-term excitement that spilled down the stairs and into the hall. Sandra stood by the stairs, hurriedly reloading files into a bag whose handle had torn. Ryan was waiting beside her. 'Oh, wretched thing,' he heard her say. 'I really must get a new one.' Then she turned and smiled at Alistair—who was now obliged to exchange a few non-professional words with them. He went over to join them.

  Sandra was saying, 'Are you going anywhere nice this weekend, Ryan?'

  Alistair had noted all her attempts to make the boy relax.

  'Well, it's my sister's twenty-first tonight. We're all going clubbing,' Ryan told her.

  'I've always thought,' said Alistair, 'that particular activity sounds like the most awful blood sport.' He grinned at Sandra.

  Ryan looked embarrassed. 'Oh, yeah. God, I suppose it does, doesn't it?'

  'Will there be lots of you?' Sandra persisted—and immediately Alistair regretted his stupid joke.

  'Tonight? About fourteen. Hopefully lots of my sister's pretty friends.' Ryan grinned, his habit of self-effacement giving way for the first time to a youthful ego. His face was beautiful, the eyes were a rich brown and there was a natural flush of health in his cheeks. Alistair studied it longingly, hungrily.

  Sandra giggled.' Goodness me. Sounds like they'd better watch out.'

  'Yeah, maybe. How about you? Are y
ou doing anything fun, Sandra?'

  She folded her gown and laid it on top of the files, looking pleased to have been asked. 'Yes, I am, as it happens. I'm going out for dinner with a very nice young man.'

  'Are you? Maybe he'd better watch out,' Ryan ventured, smiling nervously.

  'Yes. Actually, Ryan, I think he probably had.'

  Was no one going to ask him what he was doing, Alistair thought. Old people's things, it was assumed. Something slightly embarrassing, something poignant. He noted the new camaraderie between the young and fertile as they put on their coats, smiling like conspirators.

  Alistair had never been fooled by the sense, which had threatened to plague his twenties and thirties, that there was a great carnival called 'happiness' going on, just one street away, and that he was the only one not invited. He had always known that this was a message from the false heart to the long-suffering will. It was designed to tempt you away from your purpose. The only solution was to use your will to spite your heart into submission; to shut that damned heart up once and for all. And he had done exactly this, working on in his study when there really was no need, no hurry, listening to the family sounds of Christmas through the floorboards or the tap-tap of croquet on the lawn in the summer. He could relish his imprisonment in his own ambitions, ritualizing it like an act of obedient prayer. There was much to be thankful for, after all: he might have had a very different sort of life.

  And when happiness came, it was nothing like a carnival, of course. It had simply always been there, waiting quietly to be recognized and he would catch it in the corner of his eye. There it had been while he looked through the windscreen at the approaching view of sunny French vineyards and golden hills, his arm resting outside the open window, Rosalind beside him and the two children singing in the back. These had been moments of fulfilled egotism, essentially, when the world had seemed to show them themselves—their youth, their hope, their fertility. It had been enough to make you believe God was a great artist.

  Alistair set down his bags and put on his coat because it was a nuisance to carry. It was too heavy over his suit. He felt encumbered, stifled. He wondered if he had ever appreciated how valuable, how perishable the sensation of approaching those hills really was.