Chapter Fifty-Eight
ADRIAN
The letter came to Gideon’s office, because there is nowhere else on earth to send anything to me, and he did not send it on in a brown envelope with a compliment slip in it.
He got on an aeroplane.
He is sixty three years old and he has been a solicitor for thirty eight years and he came to Milan on a Tuesday in October on a flight he paid for himself and he stood in a courtyard in his good shoes while a man in overalls washed his hands at an outside tap, and he had it in his inside pocket, and he did not take it out until I had dried them.
“You will want to sit down,” he said.
“I do not.”
“Adrian.”
“Gideon, I have been sitting down for two years,” I said. “Give it to me.”
Twenty seven months. That is what it was, from the morning I walked into a building in Stratford with a box on a trolley to the afternoon I read three pages standing up in a yard in Milan with lime under my fingernails.
I am going to set out what it says, and I am going to do it without any assistance, because a man who softens this has learned nothing.
The Director has decided to take no further action against me in relation to the six sets of accounts.
The evidential test is not met. That is the phrase.
It is not met because the accounts were signed on advice, and because the advice is in writing, and because the man who gave it is dead, and because the only person on this earth who ever told the Serious Fraud Office in terms that Adrian Kastellanos knew what he was signing when he signed it is Adrian Kastellanos, and a case cannot be built on a defendant’s own account of his own state of mind and nothing else.
There is a paragraph about it. It is very well written.
Then there is the sentence.
The decision not to prosecute is not a finding that no offence was committed.
I have read that sentence more times than I have read anything in my life except a method statement in a site book, and I want to be extremely clear about what it is, because there is a version of this in which I telephone somebody and say the words no further action and put my hand out.
It is not an acquittal. There was never going to be an acquittal, because there was never going to be a trial, because a trial requires two sides and I did not give them one.
I went into a room in Stratford and I put the rope in a young man’s hands and I told him where the beam was, and it turns out that a man who does that cannot be hanged with it, because the law is not interested in what a man says about himself.
It wants a witness. It wants a document he tried to hide.
I did not hide anything, and so there is nothing to find, and so I walk.
That is what it cost me. I want that written down in the right order. I did not go to prison because I told the truth, and the truth was worth nothing in a court, and it was worth everything in every other room in my life, and there is no justice in the arrangement whatsoever.
The second page is the Insolvency Service.
I signed an undertaking in a room in Bloomsbury on the ninth of November, which is a date that has been used for other things in my life and which I did not choose and which I noticed.
It is twelve years. It is the top of the band.
Gideon fought me about it for a fortnight and told me, correctly, that I could have had eight, and that eight is what a man in my position takes, and that twelve is a man writing a sentence about himself in a public register for other people to read.
I took twelve.
I cannot be a director of a company for twelve years.
I cannot be a trustee of a charity. I cannot form one, or manage one, or take part in the promotion of one, directly or indirectly, and if I do it I go to prison for it, and that is the only route to a prison cell I have left and I would have to walk to it on purpose.
Avvocato Pavone came to see me in January.
He is seventy one and he came out to the loggia and stood with his hat in his hands while I finished a gutter, and he told me that the trustees had discussed, informally, at some length, and with a good deal of feeling, whether the constitution would permit them to co-opt the custode.
And I told him no, and I told him why, and I told him what I had signed and on what date and for how long, and I watched a seventy one year old man work out that the reason he could not have me is that I had asked for the longest one they had.
He stood in that loggia for a while.
“For twelve years,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And after.”
“I do not want it after,” I said. “I want the gutters.”
Then there is the telephone call, and I am going to put it last because it is the only part of this that I have not been able to put down.
He rang me on the Thursday.
He has rung me every nine days for twenty seven months and he has always been polite, and he has always said good afternoon Mr Kastellanos, and he has never once told me anything, and he is about thirty three years old now and he has been on this file for a quarter of his working life.
I was in the gatehouse. It was twenty to six and I had my hand on the switch to turn the telephone off, because it is Thursday, and there is an hour on a Thursday and I take the battery out of my life for it, and I looked at the screen and I saw who it was and I turned it on instead.
“You will have had the letter,” he said.
“I have.”
“I wanted to say,” he said, and then he stopped, and I stood in a gatehouse nine feet by eleven with a kettle in it and let him have as long as he needed, because he has given me twenty seven months of his life and he has never once been anything but exact.
“I have been doing this for nine years,” he said. “Nobody comes in. In nine years nobody has ever come in.”
“I know.”
“It made no difference,” he said. “I want you to understand that. It made no difference to the decision and it will not be recorded anywhere and if you had come in on the day we knocked on your door instead of two months before it, the outcome would have been the same, and I have thought about that a great deal and I do not like it.”
“It is not a complaint,” I said.
“No,” he said. “It is not.”
There was a pause on the line, and I could hear an office behind him, a printer and somebody laughing, on a Thursday afternoon, in a building in Stratford.
“Daniel Marsh,” he said.
I did not understand him for a second.
“My name,” he said. “You have never asked me.”
Twenty seven months. Two hundred and some telephone calls, and six hours in a room on the first day with a box on a trolley, and a man told me his name at the end of it because he had worked out that I would never ask, and that I had not asked anybody anything about themselves in four years, and that it was not rudeness.
“No,” I said. “I have not.”
“Good afternoon, Mr Kastellanos,” he said, and he rang off, and I have not heard from him since and I never will.
I turned the telephone off.
I put it on the shelf in the gatehouse next to the kettle, and I took the hat off the peg, and I signed the book, and I went out into the yard, where my daughter was waiting for me on a step in the cold with a piece of site chalk and a wall drawn out around her with the window on the wrong side.
I did not tell Nora until nine o’clock that night.
It kept.