He then protested about the police invasion of his cottage and insisted that he be allowed to make several telephone calls, one of which was to his lawyer. The lawyer evidently advised him not to resist arrest and met him at the police station where fingerprint tests were inconclusive because the clump of fern had been watered recently and the fingerprints on the gun were largely obliterated by mud.
This is not a detective story.
Harald has to believe that the mode of events that genre represents is actuality.
This is the sequence of actions by which a charge of murder is arrived. When he recounts to Claudia what he heard from the lawyer she moves her head from side to side at each stage of detail and does not interrupt. He has the impression she is hearing him out; yet when he has finished, she says nothing. He sees, from her silence, he has said nothing; brought back nothing that would explain. Duncan came out of that man’s house and dropped something in the garden on his way back to his cottage. A gun was found. Duncan said he was asleep and did not hear either his friends or the police when they knocked at the door. None of this tells anything more, gives any more explanation than there was in the confrontation across the barrier in court. His brief embrace with head turned away. His reply to any need: nothing. Harald sees, informed by Claudia’s presence, that what he has related, to himself and her, is indeed a crude whodunnit.
Bail application by the good friend cocksure lawyer had been again refused.
But why? Why? All she can call to mind is some unquestioned accepted reasoning that one who is likely to commit another crime cannot be let loose on the mere security of money. Duncan, a danger to society! For god’s sake, why?
The prosecutor’s got wind of some idea that he might disappear — leave.
The country?
Now they are in the category of those who buy themselves out of retribution because they can afford to put up bail and then estreat. He did not know whether she understood this implication of refusal, for their son and themselves.
Where does the idea come from?
The girl’s been called for questioning, apparently she said he’s been threatening to take up a position he’s been offered with a practice in Singapore. I don’t know — to get away from her, it sounds like. Something she let slip, maybe intentionally. Who can fathom what was going on between them.
If Claudia is dissatisfied with what little Harald has learned in explanation, could she have been more successful? Well, let her try, then.
An awaiting-trial prisoner has the right to visits. Her turn: I’d like to talk to that Julian whatever-his-name, before we go.
Harald knows that both have an irrational revulsion against contact with the young man: don’t kill the messenger, the threat is the message.
Claudia is not the only woman with a son in prison. Since this afternoon she has understood that. She is no longer the one who doles out comfort or its placebos for others’ disasters, herself safe, untouchable, in another class. And it’s not the just laws that have brought about this form of equality; something quite other. There’s no sentimentality in this, either, which is why she will not speak of it to anyone, not even to the one who is the father of a son in prison; it might be misinterpreted.
She telephoned the lawyer to obtain the number of the messenger who had presented himself at the townhouse security gate and entered at the hour of after-dinner coffee. She was adamant, Harald could hear as she reached the messenger, that he should come back that evening. Not tomorrow. Now.
This time when he opened the door to the messenger, Harald offered his hand to him: Julian Verster. Claudia had noted down the name.
How did they seem to him? The occasion had no precedent to go by; a social occasion, an inquisition, an appeal — what kind of hospitality is this, what signifying arrangements are appropriate, as the provision of tea or drinks set out, the placing of ashtrays and arrangement of a comfortable chair signify the nature of other occasions. Everything in its customary place in the room; that in itself inappropriate, even bizarre.
Their attitude towards him had changed, overcome by need. They saw in this young man the possibility of some answers, they might read even in his appearance something of the context in which what had happened could happen. Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself. Bulky running shoes with intricate embellishments, high tongues and thick soles, that cabinet ministers as well as clerks and students wear now, and Harald himself, at leisure, wears; pitted skin on the cheeks, the tribal marks of adolescent acne, wide-spaced dog’s-brown eyes darkened by heavy eyebrows authoritatively contradicting the uncertainties of a mouth that moves, shaping and reshaping itself before he speaks. A face that suggests a personality subservient and loyaclass="underline" an ideal component of a coterie. In business, Harald is accustomed to being observant of such things when meeting prospective associates.
— I’m sorry to have interrupted your plans for the evening, like this, but when you came that night we were all … I don’t know … we couldn’t say much. It was difficult to take in anything. As Duncan’s friend, you must have felt something the same — it must have been hard for you to have to come to us. We know that.—
The young man acknowledges with an understanding downturn of the lips that this is, in turn, her way of extending a hand to him.
— I felt awful — that I did it so badly — I couldn’t think of any other way. Awful. And he’d asked me, he left it to me.—
They sat in a close group now. Claudia was turned to him, sharing the sofa, and Harald drew up a chair, to speak.
— Why didn’t he call us himself.—
But it was a judgment rather than a question.
— Oh Harald … that’s obvious.—
— He was terribly shocked, you can’t imagine.—
— That was at the police station?—
— No, the house, he reached me on my cell phone and I just turned round in the middle of the road, where I was … he was still with the police at the house, the cottage.—
Claudia’s knees and hands matched, tight together, hands on knees. — You went to the house.—
— Yes. I saw. I couldn’t believe it.—
To them, what was seen is the man in the mortuary (Claudia knows the post-mortem procedure; the body may be kept for days before the process is performed). But — there in his face — to this Julian Verster what was seen was his friend, as Duncan is his friend. This realization makes it possible to begin to say what it is they want of him. Out of some instinctive agreement, neither has any right above the other, they question him alternately; they’ve found a formula, at least some structure they have put together for themselves in the absence of any precedent.
— Could you give us an idea of how, at all, Duncan could have been mixed up in this, how his — what shall I say? — his position as some sort of tenant, his relationship to the men in the house — these friends — could have led to the circumstantial evidence there seems to be against him? I was at the lawyer’s today. You belong to that group of friends, don’t you? We don’t know any of them, really—