Father Andrew was fond of a saying from a Desert Father:
‘Don’t use wise words falsely’ Perhaps that explained why he was always cautious when he spoke. And why it was disconcerting when you sensed he was preparing to speak.
The day after the funeral, Anselm bumped into Father Andrew crossing the cloister. The Prior paused, eyeing Anselm with an expression somewhere between expectancy and deliberation.
‘Nice day for picking the apples,’ volunteered Anselm.
‘What?’
Anselm repeated what he’d thought was an amiable observation.
‘Eh?’ The Glasgow intonation suggested a coming scuffle.
Oh no, thought Anselm. He’s changing the community work rota. The Prior always lost a screw when he was planning to shift people from one job to another, because everyone complained. Father Andrew waited a moment and then strode off. In a flush of horror, Anselm thought of the new dispensation: he might face exile to the kitchen – a sort of limbo where no one approves of you, except on feast days. But then he settled upon the obvious: that the Prior’s ill temper was related to Elizabeth’s death, the coming of Cartwheel and… an unused key. They were of a piece. And the Prior was waiting for Anselm. He had something to say. But why not call him in? Why the glowering?
Anselm decided that he’d better go to BJM Securities sooner rather than later. First, though, he had to sift through some nagging memories that had gathered around the key Uneasily, Anselm made his way to Saint Leonard’s Field and the sweet ambience of manual labour.
The trees were already peppered with monks. Crates were stacked against a trolley Ladders and forked poles reached into the branches. There was a hum of contentment. Apple picking always did that, even when community nerves were frayed -which they had been since Cyril had started banging on about missing receipts. And Christmas was coming. That always wound the brothers up.
Anselm chose an unattended tree that was heavy with foliage. He found a wide limb, leaned back and rolled himself a cigarette. And he returned to Elizabeth’s remark about ‘not knowing and not being able to care’. It didn’t sit easily with the vociferous defender of the adversarial system whom he’d known at the Bar.
‘Look,’ she had said during one of their little chats, ‘it’s a court of evidence, not truth. We have to forget about the truth, for truth’s sake. The truth is out of reach. And we shouldn’t pretend when we stand up in court that the truth is what we care about. We don’t. We care about what our client says is the truth. I can live with that. It’s the only way to take innocence seriously when all the evidence points the other way. The truth? What’s that? It’s something the jury decided after I sat down.’
No discomfort there, thought Anselm, blowing a perfect ring. At the time, ruminating over a Jaffa cake, Anselm had baited her confidence. ‘But what if someone got off because the trial took a wrong turn and no one noticed?’
‘It can’t happen,’ she said, glancing at her watch. She was due back in court. ‘All the jury hears are competing versions of the relevant facts. Have you eaten the last one?’
‘Sorry.’
What quiet voice had seized her conscience? thought Anselm, picking an apple. And what could it seize upon? Every barrister accepted that justice was determined by winning and losing. If you lost, you swallowed disappointment; if you won, you got a pat on the back. As Elizabeth had said, ‘what really happened’ was whatever the jury decided. And if they convicted an innocent man? Unless you could fault the process or find new evidence, he’d languish in jail. And if a guilty man was freed? No one could bring him back to court. He could chant ‘Nemo debet bis vexari’ (or, to be patristic, ‘God doesn’t judge the same offence twice’). Either way the truth had gone like the dove off the ark.
Anselm was certain that Elizabeth’s crisis had lain in this system, devised over a thousand years to deal with the corollaries of frailty and wickedness. How that was connected with tidying up her life, he hadn’t the faintest idea. Having finished his cigarette, he turned his attention to the apple. Organic principles, incompetently followed, meant that most of Larkwood’s fruit was technically blemished. He examined a wormhole, feeling a small hankering for the old struggle in the corridors of the Bailey.
In one of those glancing thoughts, seemingly irrelevant, Anselm recalled that he’d only ever done one case with Elizabeth. In many respects it had been an allegory for the law’s uneasy accord with the truth. Forensically, it hadn’t been anything special. But the client had been awful… Riley. That was the name. She’d called him ‘a ruined instrument’. Gradually a presence materialised in Anselm’s memory: a shaved head, small ears and sunken wounded eyes.