Free In the Absence of Iles by Bill James Page A

inquiries.’
    ‘“Infiltrated”, Superintendent,’ Longmuir QC said. ‘Would you explain what that means here?’
    Esther found she could not keep away from the trial, but didn’t get there for every session. That would have signalled nervousness about the case. In fact, she was awash with nervousness about the case – the possibility of blame on Channing and therefore on her, the foul possibility, too, of an acquittal and the unpredictable aftermath this might bring. She must not show her anxiety, though. Juries had to be helped into wisdom and cooperation, i.e. into thinking the police considered the case open and shut and that, therefore, it might
be
open and shut and possibly worth a conviction. ‘Truth is what the jury believes,’ as Iles would say – unless, of course, it believed something he didn’t.
    Instead of continuous attendance at court, Esther turned up for a morning or afternoon now and then, with no real system, and sat in the public gallery. She wore civilian clothes, and tried not to look jinxed by fret. So far today, she felt reasonably at ease. But it was only the prosecution case and the lawyer a wonderfully committed ally, his wonderful commitment costing an arm and a leg, with refreshers. He simply led Channing into describing the spy game, as far as Channing knew it. To date, the judge seemed tolerable, her interventions egomaniac, wet, but undestructive. Esther feared the cross-examination to come from the Defence, perhaps tomorrow. In a crazy but obsessive way she found herself thinking that if this murderous, torturing sod in the dock somehow got off – and trials had a lot of damn somehows – if this unholy sod got off, the blame torrent for Dean Martlew’s death would, and should, drop on her.
    After almost endless, picky, and possibly biased, deliberations, she had put him where he was and then failed to get him out from where he was when it was so necessary to get him out from where he was if he wasn’t to turn up corpsed on a beach with his face and neck much carved possibly for hours before death. Nominally, Channing ran things, but she’d wilfully chosen Channing above his boss and oversaw Channing – meaning she directed him, told him policy. And she’d chosen him because he hated the risks of undercover which, in her view, then, would keep him super-careful and vigilant, and therefore make Dean Martlew safer. Such reasoning she’d found fell pathetically short – smart-arse perversity. Maybe she understood the brutal tales about Desmond Iles in his terrain more fully now. Had he felt such shame at what happened to his Out-loc man that he decided the swiftest way to redemption and renewed peace of mind was to slaughter the pair of villains himself; the lunatic jury there having, in fact, come up with a different truth from his, despite rigorously assisted evidence? Yes, perhaps. Only perhaps. Nothing had been proved.
    This simplistic, abattoir solution would not be available to Esther, though. She knew she’d never have the spirit and/or wrist strength to garrotte. To her, garrotting looked a sinister, damnable skill; in fact a kind of art, a kind of
filthy
art, and Iles had about him much of the good third/fourth-rate artist: arrogance, contempt for usual social and possibly legal standards, some flair, some posturing, some taste, some vision, and the irresistible impulse to create, or its complementary and sometimes necessary opposite, to wipe out.
    ‘“Infiltrated”, Superintendent,’ Longmuir QC said. ‘Would you explain what that means here?’
    ‘He had been able to get himself accepted as a genuine, participating member of the companies.’
    ‘Nobody in the companies suspected he was a police officer?’
    ‘Not for several months, while he was providing us with information. I don’t know about later.’
    Iles had said he might do another long drive and look in on the trial when he could. He had no strictly professional interest here, though. The trip