Judge Savage Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Parks

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Promoted young to the position of Crown Court Judge – because of his ability, because of the political convenience of promoting a man with coloured skin – it’s time for Daniel Savage to settle down. Perhaps his marriage is happy enough after all. Teenage children require a father’s attention. His career demands the most responsible behaviour. Day by day Judge Savage presides over those whose double lives have been exposed. He must be above suspicion.

  But why does his daughter refuse to move to their spacious new house? Why does a young Korean woman keep phoning him to beg for help? As the most tangled lives are ironed out in court, Daniel Savage’s own existence descends into a mess of violence and confusion. English society has fragmented into an incomprehensible public gallery where every face conceals a different culture. And those with whom we have the greatest intimacy are suddenly the most frighteningly mysterious.

  About the Author

  Tim Parks studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He lives near Verona with his wife and three children. His novel Europa was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

  ALSO BY TIM PARKS

  Fiction

  Home Thoughts

  Loving Roger

  Family Planning

  Goodness

  Cara Massimina

  Tongues of Flame

  Shear

  Mimi’s Ghost

  Europa

  Destiny

  Non-Fiction

  Italian Neighbours

  An Italian Education

  Adultery & Other Diversions

  Translating Style

  Hell and Back

  A Season with Verona

  Judge Savage

  Tim Parks

  ONE

  THERE IS NO life without a double life. And yet one grows weary. On March 22nd, 1999, having at last resolved the conflict that had dogged their marriage for many years, and with the financial confidence arising from his recent appointment to the position of crown court judge, Daniel Savage and his wife Hilary settled on the purchase of a house then under construction on the hills to the north of their town. It was, as Daniel would later recall, a clear day; there was a sharp light on a windswept, still wintry landscape; and indeed his overriding impression on taking this major decision was one of unprecedented and empowered clarity. He and his wife embraced in the shell of what promised to be a sensible four-bedroom, free-standing structure with spacious garden. I should like them to put in a fireplace, Hilary said. To be together by. Daniel agreed. They had fought each other too long. The spring will be marvellous here, he laughed, and that evening he made the unusual gesture of jotting down a few words in his diary: I feel I have at last taken, he wrote, and taken for the best, all the major decisions of my life, which is to say, all the decisions that are most difficult and self-determining. From now on, I shall be free to concentrate on the job I am so fortunate to have, to love the woman beside me to the best of my ability, to help my children as and how I can. Finally everything is clear. The time of metamorphoses is over. I have become myself.

  After speaking briefly to the builder’s agent, the couple enjoyed a quiet drink in the pub that seemed set to be their local and on arrival back home announced the decision to their adolescent children. Predictably, Sarah was unimpressed, while the younger Tom was delighted. Gently and earnestly, Daniel encouraged his daughter to think how much better off she would be out of town. In a bigger house she would have more privacy. The girl pulled a thin face and slammed the door. We can get a dog! Tom shouted. Hilary hugged the boy. We shall have a fireplace to sit beside, she announced. I’m seeing the builder about it tomorrow. The spring will be marvellous, Daniel repeated, up there on the hill.

  Shortly after Daniel and Hilary had gone to their bedroom, the phone rang. Hilary raised then replaced the receiver. Whoever it was hung up again, she said, and when she looked over at him, Daniel knew at once what she was wondering. Lightly, he remarked: Perhaps now I’m a judge we’ll get more of those. They turned out the lights. In the new house we’ll make sure we’re ex-directory, she said. Hilary, he whispered. They held hands in the shadowy room. This flat had been too small for them for some years now. Perhaps I could get you a better piano, he promised, for our twentieth. The date was looming. I am so thrilled, Daniel, she said. She was reassured.

  The following week Daniel tried a case of indecent assault. He was still quite new to his role and savouring it. A man with many years’ service in the council’s child-care division was accused of having molested a sixteen-year-old. What Daniel was savouring was the freedom of not being embattled on one side or the other, whether for the prosecution or defence. The girl was retarded. The defendant had been driving her home in the council’s mini-bus. In the past, Daniel thought, impassive and bewigged behind his darkly polished table, I would have had to do everything I sensibly could to find a flaw in the prosecution’s case and to get this man off, while perhaps believing he was guilty. The alleged victim was not present in court. Or alternatively I would have had to do everything in my power to get a conviction and hence inevitable prison sentence, while perhaps convinced that prison was entirely inappropriate to a man in his early forties who just once had embraced and fondled a girl in the front seat of a mini-bus. If he had. There was no suggestion of violence.

  Questioned on video, the girl looked physically adult and undeniably attractive, but her speech was slurred and babyish. Inappropriately, she wore a tight, low-cut blouse. Now you can just observe it all, Daniel told himself, orchestrate the whole contest, without sweating. The breasts were prominent and full. You are under no pressure, he thought, overruling some half-hearted objection from the defence, to perform or to win, only to react to the performance of others in the proper way. Propriety was the key. He had always feared the possibility of burnout as an adversarial lawyer.

  At the back of the court in the public gallery, the defendant’s wife made faces of scorn and disdain while evidence was given. She was seriously overweight, a bulky and bullying presence. Her husband was without charisma. His voice trembled. On the second day, the girl’s mother was questioned about her claim that there had been a sperm stain on the child’s clothes. Counsel for the defence wanted to know why it had been put in the wash, why it hadn’t been made available to the police. But Daniel could see that the jury were entirely convinced by the girl’s mother. Particularly the young Indian man. They found her reaction of disgust, her desire to be rid of that stain without delay entirely credible. It was a mista
ke, Daniel felt, on defence counsel’s part, to keep referring to the girl as a child. She was sixteen after all. What he might have brought to the jury’s attention, perhaps, was the dangerous combination of her mature sensuality and lack of those defence mechanisms that would normally scare off an insecure man long before he touched her. Consent might have been the best defence. But it isn’t a judge’s duty to instruct defendants and their lawyers what line to take. Freed from the fray, the judge is entirely alone. He keeps his own counsel. Both lawyers were older than himself, Daniel knew. Perhaps jealous.

  On the video, ably questioned by police experts, the girl was detailed and convincing when describing what had happened. The jury were grim, the defendant’s wife shifted and frowned, the mother wept. Only toward the end of forty minutes of testimony did it occur to Daniel what was so curious about it all: the girl, as she spoke to camera, was strikingly calm, even absent-minded, as though actually thinking of something else! This the defence might have drawn attention to. He might have pointed out that it was the mother who was upset, not the victim. As it was the mother most probably – an alert and articulate woman – who had chosen this low-cut, fashionable blouse and bought the girl her expensive cosmetics, eager perhaps – and for a moment Daniel couldn’t help thinking of his own difficult daughter – to take pride in her physical charms precisely because she was a lost case in other departments. But defence counsel was not after mitigating circumstances. Possibly more afraid of his wife than of the court, the defendant had not only pleaded not guilty, but insisted he hadn’t so much as touched the child. He too used the word child. Unwisely. And throughout the proceedings, bald and bowed, he examined his offending hands, unable to look the jury in the eye. There was no mention of the girl’s father.

  In his closing speech on the Wednesday, counsel for the prosecution used the word monster. This exaggeration – so predictable – made Daniel acutely aware, if only because he had wielded it himself and fought it himself many times in the past, of the great shift in perspective that had occurred when they made him a judge. Rather than participating, rather than seeking to colour events one way or another with colourful words, to sow doubt on the one hand, or reap conviction on the other, he was now seeing the whole thing with a clarity that was both an intellectual pleasure and an emotional strain. It was quite probable, he had thought, as he sat listening to the proceedings, and in particular to the irritating hesitations of the defendant as he admitted that he could, yes, have rearranged his rounds so as not to be alone with the girl in the mini-bus – quite probable that this man and this girl had engaged in all kinds of petting before the mother discovered that damning stain. He had been driving her home every day for months. He had had every opportunity. And perhaps it was precisely because the stain wasn’t actually available as evidence that the defendant had hoped he could convince his terrifying wife that he had never touched the girl at all, while for her part the girl had been so shocked by her mother’s reaction to the merest dampness on her skirt that she hadn’t wanted to say that this business happened most days without her minding at all.

  So your only promising line of defence was tossed away for fear of standing naked before the person closest to you, Daniel thought. Your fear of being left alone. Or at least that was one possible scenario. Convicted and sent to gaol, you can still insist on your innocence. You might even be considered a martyr. Your wife loves you all the more perhaps. She starts a campaign for your release. The important thing is not to confess. But it was merest speculation.

  Summing up to the jury, Daniel invited them as ever to reflect on the words ‘satisfied so that you are sure’, or in the old formula satisfied ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. A new judge, his appointment controversial perhaps, he was very much aware of the need to follow the conventional pattern. You must be satisfied so that you are sure, he repeated, if you are to convict. But he was in little doubt himself that very soon he would be giving the man a severe sentence. The jury would deliver a guilty verdict and at that point a judge must respond appropriately. If you are free from the tussle, he reminded himself, of prosecution and defence, you are not free from public opinion. The newspapers demand exemplary treatment for offenders of this kind, not nuanced reflection. It is a wicked thing and a terrible breach of trust to take advantage of a retarded girl in your care. So only the following morning, when the jury reached their verdict, he would stand up in court and give the defendant three years. For just a second their eyes met. He will lose his job, Daniel thought. Rightly so. He is a ruined man. Somebody led the obese wife sobbing from the court.

  Lady phoned for you, Mr Savage. Twice. She wouldn’t leave a name. I said you were normally in chambers late afternoonish.

  It was Thursday. Daniel wasn’t concerned. He knew Jane would not call again. He had grown used to that. There was even a complicity in the mutual silence that lent it a lingering sweetness. Daniel was at ease. I don’t even want her to call, he discovered, placing his wig in its box. It would be an anti-climax, another breach of trust. Aesthetically wrong, he told himself vaguely, using an expression he knew was his wife’s. There was a way in which he and Hilary were indeed two parts of the same entity. He felt safe.

  Actually, I shall be out this afternoon, he told the young clerk. She too was a charming girl. Whoever it is, she’d better try tomorrow. Tomorrow’s first case, he remembered, was a simple burglary. A fourth- or fifth-time offender pleading not guilty. But how is it, Daniel asked himself, slipping the relevant papers in his briefcase, how is it that you can form a single entity with a woman who is so musical, whose life has to do with music and aesthetics, with her sensitivity to the slightest falseness of pitch, when you yourself have no musical sense whatsoever, and no knowledge at all of aesthetics beyond the merest instinct for what you like and what you don’t? The Bach more than the Brahms. The retarded girl more than the obese wife. Daniel smiled. Dear Jane. Yet it had made sense when Hilary said: What you are doing is ugly. Of the few expressions that remained engraved in the mind, that marked turning points, or suddenly illuminated whole landscapes of consciousness, this was the one that had cut deepest, shone brightest. What you are doing is ugly; the moral and the aesthetic met convincingly in that word.

  In town he was concerned to see that the price of a Steinway grand would significantly raise the level of their mortgage payments. Not all the decisions were behind him, it seemed. But this was a detail. He smiled. He knew his mind. His wife had always wanted a serious piano. They would get a good price for their flat, which was central and not without its attractions. As the dealer played a few arpeggios to make the instrument sing, Daniel was aware of being eager – childishly eager – to show Hilary that he cared, to show her, as he had been doing more or less every day for a year now, that all was well. And it was! He would stand beside her while she played Chopin in the flickering light of the fireplace. Her small square hands were rapid and incisive on the keyboard. Life was taking on a wonderful obviousness. He was not married to a fat, bullying mastiff of a woman. He was not an insipid fellow trapped in a mundane job that constantly exposed him to the charms of his helpless charges. Leaving a pretty clerk alone is not beyond a crown court judge.

  Signing the cheque for the deposit, Daniel experienced again what had become a familiar emotion ever since the terrible conflict with his wife had been – they were both agreed on this – definitively resolved: a wave of exhilaration accompanied by the thought, clearly and gratefully articulated: How lucky you’ve been! How lucky you are! Got away with it! An image that sometimes sprung to mind in this regard was that of his close friend Martin Shields who before Christmas had spun off the motorway at high speed, bounced off crash barriers to one side and another, rolled over and over while other vehicles braked and scattered, finally to emerge from his ruined Audi entirely unscathed. He hadn’t even been prosecuted for dangerous driving! How can you be such a depressive, Daniel laughed, after an escape like that! Martin, a colleague from his old chambers, had serious
problems that were all inside his head, and thus unforgivable in a way. His wife was very attractive. They had no children to obstruct their pleasures. Climbing into his own car, it occurred to Daniel that his daughter might start playing again when the new piano was installed in the new house with the fireplace and the dog. What kind of dog? He decided to take the unusual step of picking up Sarah and Tom from their school.

  It is always interesting to see your children with their friends, especially when they don’t know that they are being watched. Parked just beyond their bus-stop, Daniel was poignantly struck by a certain separateness that marked out his daughter, even in this group of lively seventeen-year-olds. There was something narrow and tense about the shoulders. Her head was bowed. It would be a phase she was going through, he imagined.

  What are you doing here? Sarah demanded, leaning into the side window. Where’s Tom? he asked. Crowds of children were pushing by. Sarah chose to sit in the back. Daniel couldn’t see her face. They waited. Can you keep a secret? he asked. What on earth have you come here for? she repeated. I thought it would be nice, he said warmly, to pick you up. I’m perfectly happy on the bus, she said.

  They waited. A secret from whom? she asked. Daniel was searching in the wing mirror for his son. How correctly Sarah spoke! From whom! Young people were supposed to be slovenly. Mum, he said. You see . . . No, she objected. The fact is I’ve just gone and . . . No! she insisted. No, what? Daniel hadn’t been concentrating. Tom does get out at the same time as you, doesn’t he? he asked. I don’t want to hear any secret I have to keep from Mum, his daughter said. People shouldn’t have secrets from each other. Not in the family. But it’s something nice! Daniel protested. No, I said no!

  Getting out of the car, Daniel waved to Tom who came running from his friends. Dad! The boy was a charming, chubby figure, out of breath, cluttered with backpack and gym bag. Slipping back into his seat again, Judge Savage suddenly felt a soft slim arm round his neck and a mouth by his ear. Thanks for coming, Dad, she whispered warmly right against the lobe. Her breath was moist and her hair perfumed. It’s so sweet of you. That’s my girl! he immediately responded. Lovebirds! Tom cried. The door slammed. Where are we off to then? I thought we might drive out to the new house, Daniel suggested, to see how they’re getting on, choose our rooms. No! Again his daughter’s veto was brutal. I’ve got too much homework, she said. Then she had to go out. I have to go to Chapel. Early. It was a voice that passed from seductive intimacy to extreme authority. Daniel didn’t think of opposing it. He bought his son a large ice-cream. And one for himself. I’m perfectly happy to use the bus, Sarah said, if you two want to have a drive.