Pat Barker - Border Crossing

Since it wasn’t safe to drive he had to sit in the hot car till it was over. It lasted about ten minutes. After the last flashing light had faded, he sat with his head in his hands, feeling totally washed up. For some reason, despite the absence of pain and vomiting, and all the more distressing aspects of a migraine, these episodes exhausted him. Yet he felt the world was a new place. He looked round the car park, and his unimpeded vision made every object he saw miraculous.

On the spur of the moment he decided to phone Nigel Lewis, who had been Danny’s solicitor at the time of the trial. Phone pressed to his ear, he leant against the side of the car, fully expecting to be told that Mr Lewis was in court and unavailable for the rest of the day. Instead he came on the line at once.

After exchanging greetings, Tom said, ‘You remember Daniel Miller?’

‘Miller? I don’t think —’.

Tom could hear a conversation going on in the background. ‘Yes, you do,’ he insisted, trying not to sound impatient, as Nigel put a hand over the mouthpiece and made some apologetic remark to the other people in the room. ‘The murder of Lizzie Parks. He was ten, remember?’

‘Miller? Oh God, yes. Of course I remember.’

‘Well, he’s out. He came to see me the other day.’

Another aside to the people in the room.

‘Look, can we talk?’ Tom asked. ‘I mean, can we meet somewhere?’

‘Cooperage? One o’clock?’

‘Fine.’ It was almost that now.

The Quayside never failed to lift Tom’s spirits, no matter how low his mood when he arrived. He leant on the railings for a few minutes, listening to gulls cry and grizzle, watching the tough, brown, sinewy river flow under the bridge and on towards the sea. You could smell the sea on windy days like this, imagine cliffs crumbling, the coast nibbled away, big concrete tank traps, eroded by spring and neap tides, blown as specks of grit into the eye.

Nigel, a great believer in liquid lunches, had arrived first and was already standing at the bar, holding his usual pint of lager. ‘I nearly ordered for you,’ he said, as Tom went up to him.

‘Thanks, I will have one.’

‘So. What’s the matter?’ Nigel said, as they set their pints down on a table at the far end of the bar.

‘Nothing’s the matter, he —’

‘So did he just show up? How long’s he been out?’

‘Nearly a year.’

Nigel lifted the glass to his mouth. ‘Oh well, I suppose they couldn’t keep him in for ever.’

‘You’re not his solicitor any more?’

‘No, thank God. So anyway what happened?’

‘We bumped into each other. And then he decided it might be helpful if he talked to somebody.’

‘Helpful to him, of course. Figures.’

‘I’ve said I’ll see him.’

‘Why?’

‘Curiosity, I suppose. Partly. It’s not often you get the chance to follow up a case like that.’ He smiled. ‘It’s not often you get a case like that.’

‘But he’s not a p0061tient? I mean, you’re —’

‘Oh no, no. He’s made it perfectly plain he doesn’t want treatment. He just wants to talk.’

Nigel smiled his well — oiled smile. ‘I suppose it’d be quite a feather in your cap to write that one up, wouldn’t it?’

No point trying to explain to Nigel the effect of Danny’s hot face against his stomach all those years ago. Nigel focused on the lowest common denominator of human behaviour, and over the years had become totally, devastatingly cynical. Which left him, Tomthought, not merely blind to the more-than-occasional goodness of human beings, but to the evil as well. His was a world where people looked after number one, and kept an eye on the main chance. He seemed unable to grasp that some people act out of a disinterested love of destruction. Evil, be thou my good… That had been left out of his repertoire. He was lucky.

‘No, I don’t think I’ll be doing that. It was something he said, it’s been bothering me a bit. I mean —. briefly, he said it was my evidence that convicted him — and of course I reminded him about the forensic evidence, and all that, but… he didn’t bat an eyelid. He simply said, “No. It was you.”‘

‘Hmm. Sounds as if he’s read a transcript.’

This was not the response Tom had expected. Nigel put down his lager, wiped his mouth discreetly on the back of his hand and sat back on the bench seat, looking grave. Tom ought, perhaps, to have welcomed this evidence that he was being taken seriously, that his anxiety had not automatically been dismissed as groundless, but he didn’t. He wanted his concern taken seriously, and the grounds for it dismissed. Nigel’s response was just exasperating.

‘You sure you bumped into him?’ Nigel asked. ‘He didn’t come looking for you?’

Tom was not going to mention the attempted suicide, the coincidence of their meeting again like that. He knew, anyway, what Nigel would have said. Instead, he reverted to Danny’s remark about Tom’s

evidence having convicted him, recalling details of the case, reminding Nigel of the vast quantity of forensic evidence that had linked Danny to the crime, the fact that he’d been missing from school that day, the eyewitnesses who’d seen him running away from Lizzie Parks’s house. He was beginning to gabble, to make sarcastic remarks, anything to get Nigel to say of course it was ridiculous. He desperately needed Nigel to say that his evidence had merely confirmed what the jury knew already, but Nigel remained ominously silent. ‘You know, I almost get the feeling he thinks he wouldn’t have been convicted if it hadn’t been for me.’

‘Oh, that’s putting it a bit strong.’

‘A bit strong?’

‘I don’t like the sound of this, Tom. You don’t have to see him, surely?’

‘No, it’s —’

‘And if he starts pestering you, all you have to do is to tell the Home Office. He’ll be back inside in no time. That’s one thing you can say about the system. They’re on a very short leash.’ He raised his glass to his lips, pausing to add: ‘Thank God.’

‘I suppose what I want from you is some sort of reassurance that it’s not true. I mean, I’ve always assumed my contribution was… trivial, really, and what actually convicted him was the forensic evidence.’

Nigel didn’t actually squirm on the bench, because he was too bulky for his movements to be interpreted in that way.’ Ye — es, but you know the forensic evidence really only connected him to the scene, and he didn’t deny being there. He didn’t deny touching her, he didn’t deny lifting the cushion off her face. There was nothing really conclusive. It’s not as if she had claw marks all over her face and he had her skin under his fingernails.’

‘But his fingerprints were all over the bedroom.’

‘The kittens were in the bedroom. He’d been to see the kittens twice — or so he said. Lizzie wasn’t around to deny it. The point is, Tom, the jury believed him. You know how long I hesitated about putting him in the box. I wasn’t frightened he was going to crack under the pressure and tell a pack of stupid lies — I knew he wouldn’t. I thought he’d come across as an arrogant little bastard — which he was. But in the event it paid off. He stood up straight, he looked them in the eye, he was well turned out, admitted that, yes, he’d been a naughty boy, he’d nicked off school, yes, he’d gone to the house, but only to see the kittens, and he was utterly devastated when he found the body. And when he saw the naughty man at the top of the stairs, he was frightened, he thought the naughty man was going to kill him, and so he didn’t tell anybody. Mad piece of behaviour in an adult, totally normal in a ten-year-old. I was looking at them all the way through. They believed him, Tom. They looked at that kid, and they didn’t believe he’d done it. I didn’t believe it, and I knew he had.’