Chapter 23
The House
I went to see him on the Saturday, which was a mistake, because on Saturdays he was at home.
I had spent two days not going. It is a thing I am good at. I went to the office on the Thursday and sat through a call about demurrage. I had lunch with Gil, who talked for an hour about the twentieth floor and did not once ask me why I looked as I did. I went to a late meeting with Julian, in his small office with the view of the car park, and listened to him describe a currency hedge with a calm, dry, flawless precision, and watched his left hand move across a spreadsheet, and said I see at the appropriate places. He was gracious. He asked whether I was sleeping. I said yes.
I had not slept. I had the video on a drive in my breast pocket, and on a second drive in the lining of my briefcase, and on a third, in an envelope, in a safe deposit box at a bank on Harbor Street that I visited at lunchtime on Friday, in a gray suit, with the elaborate, absurd, self-conscious secrecy of a man in a film. I did not tell Priya. I did not tell Hollis, who had phoned twice, and left two messages in his flat dry voice, saying only Call me. I did not tell Walt. I sat in the glass room above the harbor and watched the container ships go out, one by one, into the haze, and thought: I am not a man who does this.
Then on Saturday morning I got in my car and drove up the hill.
It was a brilliant day. The rain had finally broken, and the whole city lay under a high, hard, blue sky, with the harbor glittering like a sheet of tin. The roads were full of families. Cranmoor Lane was quiet and bright, the hedges clipped and shining. I drove up past the green cottage with its front window, and saw, behind the glass, a white head, bent over a crossword. He did not look up.
The gate at the Hale house stood open. I parked on the gravel. The air was warm and smelled of cut grass.
It was Victor himself who answered the door. He was in a faded blue shirt and old gray trousers, with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and there was a smear of earth on his forearm. He had been in the garden. He looked, in the strong daylight, much as he had on the night of the fire: loosened, tanned, ten years younger than the man in the dock. He held a pair of secateurs in his left hand. I saw it, and looked away.
"Adrian. You should have telephoned."
"I know."
"I'd have had Mrs. Park make something. She's gone to her sister's." He stood aside. "Come in. I was only killing roses. It's a thing I've been meaning to do for years."
"I wanted to speak with you privately."
"Of course." If he noticed anything in my voice he gave no sign. He put down the secateurs on the hall table, with their blades closed, and wiped his hands on a handkerchief. "The study, then. It's the only room that doesn't echo."
I did not move.
He had begun to turn away. He stopped. He looked at me, mildly, with the handkerchief in his fingers. "Is there a difficulty?"
"No," I said. "No. Of course not."
I had not been in it since October.
They had cleaned it. Of course they had. A firm had come in the last week of April, a crew of three, in white overalls, with a van and a steam cleaner, and had taken up the Persian rug and the underlay and the planking beneath. Victor told me about it later, in the same mild voice he used for the weather. The blood had not stopped at the carpet. It had gone through the wool and the felt and into the cracks between the boards, and down, and the men had found it on the joists underneath, a black glaze like tar, with a rust-colored crust at the edges. It had run in a long tongue along a beam and dripped onto the stone of the cellar floor. They had cut the whole section out and carried it away in sacks. It took two days, he had said. The smell, I'm told, was rather difficult. They had laid new boards, pale and unstained, across the whole of the central floor. A new rug lay over them, a blue one, the color of the sea in a children's book. The walls had been repainted. The scarred baseboard had been replaced. The leather chairs stood in their old places. On the desk, under the green lamp, lay a blotter, a pen tray, a closed laptop, and a framed photograph.
I did not look at the photograph at once. I looked at the shelf.
It was the third from the top, above the desk. The row of books ran along it, straight and upright. There were no gaps. Someone had filled the place where the bird had stood with a pair of heavy gray volumes, a set of nautical tables, and straightened the rest. The wood was clean. I could not see the scuffs from where I stood, and I did not go close.
"They gave the heron back," said Victor. He had come in behind me and was standing by the window with his hands in his pockets. "After the verdict. A policeman brought it in a box. I couldn't touch it. I had Barnaby take it away." He smiled very faintly. "I believe it's in a vault. It's not the sort of thing one puts on a mantelpiece."
"No."
"Sit down, Adrian. Please. You look unwell."
I sat. It was one of the armchairs, the one by the fire, which was empty and swept. He took the chair behind the desk, the swivel, and turned it a little toward me, and rested his forearms on the walnut, and looked at me over his clasped hands with the grave, kindly, attentive face I had known for ten months. It was the face of a man who has all the time in the world.
On the desk between us, in a silver frame, Eleanor Hale looked at the camera with her chin lifted. It was a photograph of a woman in her thirties, in a green linen dress, in a garden, laughing at something outside the frame. She had a smear of white paint on her cheekbone. She looked straight at me with those wide level eyes, and I looked away.
"I'd like to ask you about the call at 9:44," I said.
"We've been through it."
"I'd like to go through it again."
"As you wish." He settled back. "A man's voice. A rushing noise. I said hello, twice."
"Was it a man you knew?"
"I've said no."
"Victor." I put my hands on my knees. "I'm going to say something. You can answer it, or not. I'd like you to hear all of it first."
He waited. The window was open and a warm wind moved the curtain. From somewhere in the garden came the bright mechanical chatter of a sprinkler, going round.
"I'm your lawyer. I've been your lawyer since the fifteenth of October. I'm your company's lawyer now. Everything you say to me is privileged, and I will not repeat it to anyone without your consent. That's the first thing." I drew a breath. "The second is that I'm an officer of the court. There are things that I'm not permitted to do, whatever you say to me. I'm not permitted to put forward evidence I know to be false. I'm not permitted to let a court go on believing it, if I learn, after the fact, that it was."
"The rules," said Victor, gently.
"Yes."
"I'm familiar with them. I've paid a number of men a great deal of money to read them to me."
"I'd like you to tell me, now, honestly." My voice sounded thin in my own ears. "Where were you at nine forty-one on the night of the fourteenth?"
"In my office."
"You're certain."
"Entirely."
"Did you leave the building at any time between nine o'clock and ten-thirty?"
"No."
"Did anyone answer your telephone for you?"
"Adrian—"
"Did you give it to someone?"
"I did not." His face did not change. "I answered it myself. I've told you. I've told the jury. I've told Whitlock. It seems to me that I have told everyone in the country except, apparently, you."
I put my hand into my breast pocket, slowly, and took out the phone.
I had decided in the car. It was a thing I could not have defended. A lawyer does not show a client the evidence that might incriminate him; he is supposed to keep it close, to weigh it, to tell the client what it means and ask what he would like to do. But I had sat for two nights with the idea of what I would see in his face, and I had come to feel that no other piece of information in the world could be as useful, or as terrible, as that.
I set the phone on the blotter, beside the silver frame. I opened the file. I turned the volume up, and I pressed play, and I turned the screen so that he could see.
He looked down.
I have since tried to remember what his face did. It is the hardest thing. I watched it from three feet away, in a clear, cold, unsparing daylight, with the curtain moving and the sprinkler going round. And what I remember is that it did nothing. The first six seconds, the lamp, the shelf, the dark sleeve, the white cuff, and the cufflink, passed over it like the shadow of a bird.
Then the hand came into the frame, and the bronze heron.
And a woman said, Please.
I saw his eyes close.
It was a very small movement, hardly a blink. A lowering of the lids, slow, deliberate, final, like a man shutting a book that he has read a great many times. His jaw tightened. A muscle jumped in his cheek and was still. His hands, which had been loosely clasped on the walnut, came apart, and one of them, the right, moved a few inches across the blotter and stopped. It lay flat, an inch from the photograph.
Ellie.
The screen went black. In the quiet room I could hear the clock on the shelf. I could hear the wind. I could hear my own blood, a dull far-off pounding, like surf in a cave.
For a long time, he did not open his eyes.
"Where did you get this?" said Victor Hale.
"It came to me. On Wednesday night. From her email account."
"From her account."
"Scheduled. It had been waiting."
"I see." He opened his eyes. They were dark and very clear, and perfectly dry. "She always did like to be sure."
"Victor, is that you?"
He looked at me.
"Is that you in the video?" I said. "I'm not asking whether you killed her. I'm not going to. I'm asking whether it's your hand on the heron. Your voice."
"The voice says Ellie."
"Yes."
"I used to call her that."
"You called her that to the police. In the 911 call."
"I did." He nodded slowly. "And I called her that in front of everyone for fourteen years. At dinner. In company. In front of my brother, who thought it was the most sentimental thing he had ever heard." A very faint, dry flicker crossed his mouth. "He used to do it to tease me. Ellie, Ellie, Ellie. In my voice. He's a very fine mimic. He did our father at the funeral and made the minister laugh."
"Are you telling me that's Julian."
"I am telling you," said Victor, quite softly, "that it is a seventeen-second recording with no face in it, and that a good lawyer could find a hundred ways to question it. I believe you know that better than I do."
"I know it."
"Then why have you come?"
"Because you closed your eyes."
It was out before I had meant it. He did not move. In the open window, the curtain lifted and fell. A far-off lawn mower started up, and coughed, and stopped.
"When she said please," I said. "You closed your eyes. As if you'd heard it before."
"I have. In my head. Every night for ten months." His voice was perfectly even. "It is not so very strange, Adrian, to close one's eyes."
"No."
"It is not evidence of anything."
"No."
"Then I wonder," said Victor Hale, "whether you've considered what you propose to do."
He leaned back in the swivel chair. It creaked. He laced his fingers across his stomach and looked at me, with the large, quiet, rather sorrowful face of a man who has been asked to settle an argument between children.
"I was acquitted," he said. "Of the murder of my wife. By twelve people, on the evidence. You know the law of double jeopardy better than I do. It's the oldest principle in the system. A man cannot be tried twice for the same offense."
"Not ordinarily."
"Not at all."
"Section 417 of the Calder Code."
"Ah." He smiled. "The Tainted Acquittal Act. You've read it. Good. Then you'll know that it requires a finding that the acquittal was procured by interference with the administration of justice. By perjury. By fabricated evidence. By a bribed juror." The smile deepened. "By a lawyer who knowingly misled the court."
I did not speak.
"I was acquitted on the basis of an expert's testimony about a clock, and a witness who gave an honest opinion about a car, and a closing argument in which my lawyer said that something was impossible." He said it gently. "If there is a clock that was tampered with, Adrian, and I say if, it was a clock that you put in front of the jury. If there is an expert whose evidence is unsound, he was your expert. If there is a statement that was false, it was made, in my presence, by a lawyer of unquestionable skill, whose name is in every newspaper in the country." A pause. "I wonder, in the circumstances, whom the Act would be most interested to examine."
The sprinkler went round. Someone, far down the garden, was whistling.
I understood then that I was not sitting across from a client. I was sitting across from a man who had read the statute on the way to the courthouse, and the rules of professional conduct on the day of the verdict, and who had come, in the course of ten months, to know me rather better than I knew myself. He was not threatening me. He would never have been so crude. He was explaining the terms of a lease.
"You knew about the clocks," I said.
"I know a great many things about my own company."
"Did you order them stopped?"
"I'm a very busy man. I order a great many things."
"Victor—"
"I'm going to tell you what I think." He sat forward, and his voice took on a different note, low and clear, almost tender. "I think that you're a good man. I told you so in the courtroom, and I meant it. I think you want to be able to sleep. I think that somewhere inside you there's a boy who stood in a corridor and watched his father be given a number, and that boy has been telling you, in a very small voice, for twenty years, that the world is a place where innocent men are punished and guilty men go free and nobody can tell which is which." The brown eyes were warm and level. "I think it's been the making of you. And I think it is going to be the end."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that you will never know. Whatever you do. If you take that video to Whitlock, you'll start a process that cannot be stopped. And at the end of it, perhaps ten years from now, a jury will say a word. And you will not know whether it was the right one." He spread his hands. "You'll have given up your career, your client, your name, for a seventeen-second clip with no face. I'd like you to consider that, as a lawyer. Whether it's wise."
"And if it's true?"
"If it's true?"
"If it's you." I could hardly hear my own voice. "If that's you in the study. Then I got you off a murder, and I did it with a lie."
"Then I should think," said Victor Hale, "that you'd rather not find out."
I stared at him.
It was said so lightly, so quietly, with such a depth of calm, that for an instant I thought I had misheard. His face was perfectly composed. His hands lay folded on his stomach. A little of the sun lay on his right sleeve, bright and warm, on the blue cotton, and on the cuff there was nothing at all, no gold, no crest, nothing but a plain mother-of-pearl button.
"Or perhaps," he said, after a moment, "that is exactly what you would like to find out. And that is the thing that I'd ask you to be careful of." He smiled again, and this time it was tired, and almost kind. "Are you quite certain, Adrian, which of us you're trying to protect?"
I do not remember leaving the study. I remember the light in the hall, and the smell of cut roses, and Barnaby Lowe standing at the far end of the passage in his pencil-gray suit with his leather folio held to his chest like a hymnal, smiling, saying Mr. Cole, in his gentle voice. I do not remember what I answered. I remember the long slope of the lawn, and the tall hedge, and a gap in it where the road went through, and the green cottage across the lane with the white head still bent in the window.
I got into the car. I sat with both hands on the wheel. I could feel the phone in my breast pocket against my ribs, and the plain white envelope, and the folded note about the call, and the knowledge, which I had not had at nine that morning and which I could not now put down, that a man who has been acquitted of murder had sat in the room where it happened, and had listened to the sound of his own wife saying please, and had not asked me to turn it off.
He had not asked who sent it. He had not asked what I would do.
He had asked which of us I was trying to protect.
I started the engine. In the mirror, as I turned out of the gate, I saw the house standing long and gray against the hill, with the sun on its forty windows, and a tall figure in a blue shirt standing at the door of the study, a very small, quiet, upright shape, with one hand raised against the light. It might have been a wave. It might have been a man shading his eyes.
I did not wave back.