A Certain Justice (7 page)

Well, she had won, and there came, as there so often did after the momentary exhilaration of triumph, a draining tiredness which was as much physical as emotional. It never lasted long but sometimes, after a case which had dragged on for months, the reaction of triumph and then exhaustion would come close to overpowering her and it would take an effort of will to collect her papers together, get to her feet and respond to the murmured congratulations of her junior and the solicitors. Today it seemed to her that the congratulations were muted. Her junior was still young and found it difficult to rejoice in a verdict which he thought wrong. Yet for once the tiredness was only momentary; she could feel the surge of energy and strength returning to muscles and veins. But never before had she felt such repugnance for a client. She hoped never to have to see him again, but this last encounter was unavoidable.

And now he came forward with his solicitor, Neville Saunders, in attendance, the latter wearing his usual schoolmaster’s expression of disapproval, as if about to warn his client against a recurrence of the events which had brought them together. Smiling his wintry half-smile, he held out his hand and said: “Congratulations.” Then, turning to Ashe: “You’re a very fortunate young man. You owe Miss Aldridge a great deal.”

The dark eyes looked into hers and she thought she detected for the first time a glint of humour. The unspoken message was clear: We understand each other. I know what got me off, and so do you.

But all he said was: “She’ll get what she’s owed. I’m on legal aid. That’s what it’s for, remember.”

Saunders, his face flushed, opened his mouth to expostulate, but before he could speak Venetia said, “Good afternoon to you both,” and turned away.

She had less than four weeks left of life. And she did not ask him then or later how he had known what spectacles Mrs. Scully had been wearing on the night of the murder.

O
n the same evening Hubert Langton left his Chambers at six o’clock. It was his usual time, and in recent years he had become obsessional about the small comforting rituals of life. But this evening there seemed no possible reason to return home, to the long lonely hours which stretched ahead. Almost without conscious thought he turned right, crossed Middle Temple Lane and passed under the arch by Pump Court and through the Cloisters to the Temple Church. It was open, and he entered through the great Norman doorway to the sound of the organ. Someone was practising. The music was modern, abrasive to his ears, but he sat himself in the stall on the cantoris side in which he had sat Sunday after Sunday for nearly forty years, and let the weariness and ennui which had threatened him all day take undisputed possession.

“Seventy-two is not old.” He spoke the words aloud but they fell on the unencumbered air less as a small defiant affirmation than as a thin wail of desperation. Was it really possible that that appalling moment over the road in Court Twelve only three weeks earlier could have robbed him of so much in one moment? The memory of it, the agony of it, was with him almost every waking minute. Now his body became stiff with remembered terror.

He had been in the middle of his closing arguments in a case which had been more forensically interesting than difficult, a lucrative brief from an international company, and a case concerned as much with establishing a point of law as with any dramatic conflict of interests. In one second, with no warning, language deserted him. The words he next wanted to speak were not there, neither in his mind nor on his tongue. The familiar court in which he had appeared for over forty years became an alien cockpit of terror. He could remember nothing, not the name of the judge or of the parties, not the name of his junior or of opposing counsel. There was a half-minute when it seemed that every breath was stilled, every eye in the court was bent on him with surprise, contempt or curiosity. He managed somehow to finish his sentence and sit down. At least he could still read. The written words still conveyed a meaning. He took up his brief with hands which were shaking so violently that they must have signalled his distress to the whole court. But no one spoke, nothing was said. After a little pause and a glance at him, the opposing counsel got to his feet.

But it mustn’t happen again. He couldn’t live again through that embarrassment, that panic. He had been to his general practitioner, had spoken in general terms of lapses of short-term memory, of a fear that this could be a symptom of something worse. He had forced himself to speak the dreaded word, Alzheimer’s. The subsequent physical examination revealed nothing abnormal. The doctor spoke reassuringly about overwork, the need to take things more gently, the advisability of a holiday. The connectors of his brain were getting less efficient with age; that was to be expected. He was reminded of the words of Dr. Johnson: “If a young man mislays his hat he says he has mislaid his hat. The old man says, ‘I have lost my hat. I must be getting old.’ ” He suspected that this anecdote was offered as reassurance to all elderly patients. He had received no reassurance; he had expected none.

Yes, it was time to retire. He hadn’t intended to commit himself to Drysdale Laud, had regretted the words as soon as they were spoken. He had been precipitate. But he had been wiser than he knew. It was right to give way to a younger man as Head of Chambers. Or a younger woman. Drysdale or Venetia, it hardly mattered to him which of them succeeded him. And how much did he himself want to go on? Even Chambers had changed. It was now less a band of brothers than the convenient, if over-crowded, set of rooms in which men and women lived their separate professional lives, sometimes not meeting for weeks. He lamented the old days, when he was first a member and there was less specialization, when colleagues would saunter into each other’s rooms to discuss a brief or the nicer points of law, to seek advice and rehearse arguments. A gentler world. Now the systems men had taken over with their calculators, their technology, their managerial obsession with results. Wouldn’t he be better out of it? But where was he to go? For him there was no world elsewhere, no place except that quadrilateral of narrow streets and courts where the ghost of a small boy, with his romantic dreams, his naïve ambitions, walked through the Middle Temple.

His grandfather, Matthew Langton, had from his birth intended him to be a lawyer. Despite the name, with its overtones of ecclesiastical eminence, the family had been poor; his great-grandfather had kept a small hardware shop in Sudbury in Suffolk, his great-grandmother had been in service with an aristocratic Suffolk family. They managed, but there was never money to spare. But their only child had been highly intelligent, ambitious and determined to be a lawyer. Scholarships had been won, sacrifices made, the family at the great house where his mother had worked had given their patronage. At the age of twenty-four Matthew Langton had been admitted to the Middle Temple.

And now memory, like a searchlight, moved with seemingly deliberate intent over the wasteland of Hubert’s life, paused to illumine with shadow-less clarity a moment in time which for a second was fixed and motionless and then, as if activated by some click of recollection, moved on again. Himself at the age of ten, walking through Middle Temple Gardens with his grandfather, trying to match his steps to the old man’s longer stride, hearing the roll call of famous names, men who had been members of their ancient society: Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Burke, the American patriot John Dickinson, the Lord Chancellors, the Lord Chief Justices, the writers — John Evelyn, Henry Fielding, William Cowper, De Quincey, Thackeray. He and his grandfather would pause at every building to identify it by the badge assigned to the Templars: the Paschal Lamb carrying the banner of innocence set in a red cross on a white nimbus ground. He remembered his triumph when he discovered it above a door or on a water pipe. He was told the history, the legends. Together they counted the goldfish in the pool in Fountain Court and stood hand in hand under the four-hundred-year-old double hammer-beamed roof of Middle Temple Hall. And here, in those childhood years, he had imbibed the history, the romance, the proud traditions of this ancient society, and had known that one day he would be part of it.

He must have been aged eight, perhaps even younger, when his grandfather first showed him the Temple Church. They had walked together between the thirteenth-century effigies of the knights, and he had learned their names by heart as if they were friends: William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, and his sons William and Gilbert. William the Marshall had been adviser to King John before Magna Carta. Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, with his cylindrical helmet. Hubert would recite the names in his high childish voice, pleasing his grandfather by this act of memory and, greatly daring, laying small hands on the cold stone as if these flat impassive faces held some secret to which he was heir. The church had outlived them and their turbulent lives as it would outlive him. It would survive the ceaseless battering of the millennium against its walls as it had survived that night of 10 May 1941, when the flames had roared with the tongues of an advancing army, the chapel had become a furnace, the marble pillars had cracked and the roof had exploded in a burst of fire to fall in blazing shards over the effigies. Then it had seemed that seven hundred years of history were falling in flames. But the pillars had been replaced, the effigies repaired, new stalls were ranked in collegiate order where once there had been Victorian woodwork, and Lord Glentanar had given his splendid Harrison organ to replace the one destroyed.

Now in his own old age, Hubert suspected that his grandfather had tried to discipline his passionate pride in the career he had achieved, his veneration for the ancient society of which he was part, and that only with the child had he felt free to express emotions, of the strength of which he was half ashamed. He had told his stories with little embellishment, but as the fervid imagination of adolescence had replaced the simple acceptance of childhood, Hubert had clothed history with romance. He had felt his jacket brushed by the gorgeous robes of Henry III and his nobles as they processed into the Round Church on Ascension Day in 1240 for the consecration of the magnificent new choir; had heard the weakening moans as a condemned knight starved to death in the five-foot-long Penitential Chamber. The eight-year-old had found the story more interesting than horrific.

“What had he done, Grandfather?”

“Broken one of the rules of the Order. Disobeyed the Master.”

“Are people put in the cell today?” He had stared at the two window slits, imagining that he could see desperate eyes peering down.

“Not today. The Templars Order was dissolved in 1312.”

“But what about the lawyers?”

“I’m happy to say that the Lord Chancellor is satisfied with less draconian measures.”

Hubert smiled, remembering, sitting still and silent as if he, too, were carved in stone. The organ music had ceased, he couldn’t remember when any more than he could remember how long he had been sitting there. What had happened to those years? Where had they gone, the decades since he had walked between the stone knights with his grandfather, had sat with him Sunday after Sunday for matins? The simplicity and ordered beauty of the service, the splendour of the music had seemed to him to represent the profession into which he had been born. He still attended every Sunday. It was as much a part of his routine as buying the same two Sunday newspapers at the same stall on his way home, the luncheon taken from the fridge and heated up in obedience to Erik’s written instructions, the short afternoon walk through the park, then the hour of sleep and the evening of television. The practice of his religion, which, it seemed to him now, had never been more than a formal affirmation of a received set of values, was now little more than a pointless exercise designed to give shape to the week. The wonder, the mystery, the sense of history — all had gone. Time, which took so much away, had taken that as it was taking his strength and even his mind. But not, please God, his mind. Anything but that. He felt himself praying with Lear: “O! let me not be mad, not mad, sweet Heaven! Keep me in temper. I would not be mad!”

And then there came into his mind a more accepting, more submissive prayer. “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and with thine ears consider my calling. For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence, and be no more seen.”

I
t was four o’clock on Tuesday, 8 October, when Venetia hitched her gown more firmly on her shoulders, shuffled her papers together and left a court in the Old Bailey for what was to be the last time. The 1972 extension with its rows of leather-covered benches was empty. The air held the expectant calm of a normally busy concourse now cleansed of discordant humanity and settling into its evening peace.

The trial had made few demands on her, but she felt unexpectedly weary and wanted nothing more than to get to the lady barristers’ robing-room and to put aside her working clothes for yet another day. She hadn’t expected this case to come on at the Bailey. The trial of Brian Cartwright on the charge of grievous bodily harm had originally been scheduled for Winchester Crown Court but had been transferred to London because of local prejudice against the defendant. He had been more chagrined than gratified by the change, complaining bitterly throughout the two weeks’ trial of the inconvenience of the venue and the time lost in travelling from his factory to London. She had won and, for him, all inconveniences were forgotten. Volatile and indiscreet in victory, he had no intention of hurrying away. But for Venetia, anxious to see the last of him, it had been an unsatisfactory case, ill-prepared by the prosecution, presided over by a judge who she suspected disliked her — and who had made his disapproval of the majority verdict only too apparent — and made tedious by a prosecuting counsel who could never believe that a jury could take in any fact that hadn’t been explained to them three times.