Pat Barker - Border Crossing

‘And I convinced them he had?’

‘You convinced them he was capable of it. By the time Smithers was through with you, you’d told them that Danny was capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality…’ Nigel was counting points off on his fingers. ‘Fully understood that killing somebody was seriously wrong, not just naughty. Fully understood that death was a permanent, irreversible state. Now I’m not saying you were wrong, but none of that helped Danny. By the time you’d finished what they had in their minds was not a nice little boy, but a precocious little killer.’

‘You didn’t say anything at the time.’

‘What was the point? You did the best you could for the kid, under very nasty hostile cross-examination. Smithers went right over the top that day. A lot of people more experienced than you would’ve been wilting by the end. I thought it was disgraceful. You’re not supposed to treat an expert witness as hostile, and he came very, very close. I remember Duncan sitting back in his chair at one point, and saying, “Well, that’s it, then. We can all go home.” And he threw his pencil down on the pad.’

Duncan had been the defence counsel. ‘As bad as that?’

‘I don’t know about bad. The fact is the little bugger ended up inside. Which was the right outcome.’

‘I didn’t see it like that. I didn’t think my evidence had any particular impact.’

‘Oh, it did. But there’s always a moment in a long trial when the thing swings. Juries aren’t rational, the seats are too hard, the room’s too hot, it goes on for days and days and bloody days. Weeks. Do you know the average person’s attention span is twenty minutes? And they’d listened to Danny for hours. I think they rather admired him in a funny sort of way. I know I did. But you could see them thinking, I don’t know, he seems all right… And then you came along, and you supplied them with another perspective.’

‘I didn’t change a single fact.’

‘No, but you changed the way they saw him. You scuppered him. And I can tell you the exact moment it happened. Smithers was asking you whether Danny understood that death was a permanent state. Do you remember? And you quoted Danny’s exact words. “If you wring a chicken’s neck, you don’t expect to see it running round the yard next morning.”‘

‘But he was talking about chickens. He lived on a chicken farm, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Doesn’t matter. And everybody went…’ He mimicked the intake of breath, exactly as Danny had done.

‘Danny remembers that.’

‘Does he?’ Nigel said. ‘That’s interesting.’

Tom was thinking. ‘I suppose I’ve never been easy about it, because Smithers got me on the ropes. I know he did. There was no hope of qualifying anything — he just swept it aside.’

Nigel grunted. ‘I wouldn’t blame yourself too much. All you did was quote his own words.’

‘He wasn’t referring to Lizzie.’

‘It was the attitude. All that about it didn’t really matter because she was old, she’d had her life. You ripped the mask off, and okay, you lost me the case.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m glad somebody did, because if he hadn’t been caught he’d have done it again.’

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘Of course. He was on to a good thing, wasn’t he? Befriending old ladies, robbing them, and if they got in the way — splat! I think you should pat yourself on the back. And if you have any bother at all with him, tell the police.’

Tom sat lost; in thought, until a discreet movement from Nigel drew his attention to their empty glasses. He roused himself to go to the bar, where he ordered another pint for Nigel and a half for himself.

He got back to the table to find Nigel chatting to two barristers, and the conversation necessarily changed to other topics.

Half an hour later, as they were leaving the pub, Nigel fell deliberately behind and drew Tom aside. ‘Look, don’t let him get to you. You told the truth. And as far as I’m concerned the only mistake’s the Home Office letting the little bugger out.’

He nodded, and hurried to catch up with his colleagues, a shoal of dark fish weaving in amongst the brightly dressed crowd.

Danny replaced the burnt matchstick carefully in the box.

Tom said, I’ve been thinking about that English teacher of yours. What was his name again?’

Danny looked wary. ‘Angus MacDonald.’

‘You were close?’

‘Yes, I suppose. Ish.’ He tapped ash offhis cigarette. ‘It was a long time ago.’

Silence, except for the pop-pop of the gas fire, and the wind slamming against the windows.

‘You know,’ Danny said suddenly, ‘all day I’ve been thinking I can’t go through with this, and now I think I can.’ He glanced at the red-shaded lamp on Tom’s desk. ‘I don’t know where to start.’

‘You said with Angus you started with little things. About the farm.’

‘Yes…’

‘Worked, then.’

‘Yeah, all right. The first thing I ever wrote for him started with me in bed on a winter’s night watching reflections on the wall, hearing people outside in the yard, shouting, calling. Feeling, you know, exiled — the way kids do when they’re in bed and everything’s still going on downstairs.’

‘Whose voices are they?’

‘My mother’s. Fiona’s — that’s the girl who used to work for us. Sometimes my father’s — not often. He was generally in the pub by then.’

‘And what are they doing?’

‘Putting the hens away for the night. We had some free-range hens. It wasn’t free, exactly, but it was better than the batteries. I used to go into the batteries with my mother, and there were all these heads poking out, bright eyes, these jerky little movements, coxcombs jiggling. I’d be walking along the aisle like this.’ He hunched his arms together across his chest. ‘I was afraid of being pecked. I don’t know why, because I’d been pecked dozens of times. They didn’t live long. When they got past the point of no return, Dad used to wring their necks. Sometimes he’d swing them so they hit me in the face.’

‘Why do you think he did that?’

‘Oh, I’d be pulling faces. I didn’t like it. We used to have pullets in runs in one of the fields, and there was this little skinny white pullet and the others started pecking it. All the feathers had come out, its skin was red raw, and Dad said he’d have to kill it. I didn’t want him to. I said, “Can’t we put it in another run by itself until it gets bigger?”‘ A deep breath. ‘So he made me do it.’

‘How?’

‘How did he make me? I don’t know. I knew I had to. You know, you just pull and twist and Small, foetal movements of the hands. ‘The eyes cloud over.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Six.’ He caught Tom’s expression. ‘Yeah, well, he was on this great toughen-up-the~lad campaign. Perhaps he was right, perhaps I needed it.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Until I was five, there was Mum and me and her parents. Dad was in the army.’

‘Why didn’t you live on the base?’

‘We did, to begin with. I was born in Germany, but Mum got depressed after the birth. Apparently he used to come home, and I’d be screaming in one room and she’d be slumped in a chair. More or less in the same position she’d been in when he left. I think she just about fed me and kept me clean, but that was it. And then he had to go to Northern Ireland, and of course the families can’t go with them there. So she came home to her parents. I think it was meant to be temporary, but once she got away from the base there was no way she was going back.’

‘So you didn’t see very much of him?’