The Progress of a Crime

by Julian Symons

  (Pictures of the Gardner family at home, and a profile of Magnus Newton, on page 6.)

  In fact, the briefing of Magnus Newton had been almost entirely Edgar Crawley’s work. It was Lord Brackman’s habit to originate schemes, leaving the details to others. Just as Crawley had adopted Fairfield’s idea as his own, so Brack had adopted Crawley’s, and just as Crawley had sketched an alibi for himself by mentioning Fairfield’s name, so Brack in conversation linked Crawley’s name with the defence of Leslie Gardner—not as its originator, certainly, but rather as an obstacle whose in some ways admirable caution had to be overcome by Lord Brackman’s verve and tact. This deceived nobody, yet it was a precautionary measure that allowed Lord Brackman to go into the enterprise with an easy heart, and he put himself at one farther remove from the actualities of the situation by quite refusing to say what counsel he wanted to engage.

  Crawley, for his part, built defensive barriers by getting advice in writing from the paper’s Legal Department, and by approaching first of all Sir Godfrey Challon and Athelstan Vickers, both of whom he knew to be far too busy to take on the case. These were feeble enough defences, to be sure, and nobody was better aware than Crawley that there is no real defence against the accusations of a superior, yet they put something on the file.

  Opinion in the office was not favourable to the briefing of Magnus Newton, nor in fact to the scheme itself. “Your boy’s had it now,” Banks of the Legal Department said to Fairfield. “He’s a regular kiss of death, Newton. Never got an acquittal yet in a murder case.”

  “There always has to be a first time,” Fairfield said cheerfully.

  “But not this time. Mind you, the boy’s guilty as all get out, I’m not saying that even a good criminal lawyer could get him off, but with Newton you’ve just about hammered the last nail in his coffin. Hold on, though, he’s only seventeen, isn’t he? So it won’t be a coffin, but just detained during Her Majesty’s pleasure.”

  “I don’t like your taste in jokes.”

  “Still, you’ve made a nice little stunt out of it. What are you working on now?”

  “I’m going back. There’s a lot of work to be done before we’ve finished.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “When he’s acquitted.”

  24

  For Hugh Bennett these weeks of his association with Frank Fairfield were always linked with the wet, mild fogginess of that winter, a fogginess so persuasive that the reporters’ room of the Gazette was always filled with a faint mist. It seemed to be through this sort of slight fuzziness that he saw Fairfield’s face. They met and talked always, or this at least was as he remembered it afterwards, in bars, in the American bar of the Grand or the station, the Shades at the County, the saloon bars of a dozen other pubs, most commonly the Goat, which was used by several people from the Gazette. And it seemed also, in retrospect, that Fairfield never ate anything more than an occasional sausage or sandwich, although he drank all the time. He drank large pink gins for choice, but among inveterate beer-drinkers he would drink beer too, pouring pint after pint down his throat with no apparent effect beyond, at the end of an evening, a slight further glazing of his vague eyes. He always said that the drinks were on the Banner, and the Gazette reporters, accustomed to having the shillings of their expense account questioned by an acidulous female accountant, were deeply envious of the largesse in which they shared.

  “Do you know what your friend Fairfield is?” Michael asked one day. “Just a soak. Pure and simple. I do really rather despise that.”

  “I don’t honestly see how that man Fairfield holds down his job,” Clare Cavendish said after one session in the Goat. “I mean, he drinks all the time, and he doesn’t seem to be doing anything.”

  It was Farmer Roger, however, who was most outspoken. One day, after they had drunk with Fairfield until closing time, he walked a little unsteadily back to the Gazette and asked Hugh to come into the little cubby-hole that served him as an office. Here, flanked by the Farmer’s Journal on one wall and the works of Surtees on the other, he stroked his blue chin with a well-kept hand, and spoke like a patriarch.

  “I’ve watched your progress in this office, young Hugh, and I’ve thought, there’s a boy who’ll go far, a lad who’s got the real stuff of journalism in him and is still aware of life’s richer realities. Life has a natural rhythm, my boy. The surge of the life force is not to be found on city pavements.” His hand waved the air, he hummed a little.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “A boon companion, I don’t doubt, your friend from the great wen, but beware of thinking he is anything more. A man without roots, Hugh, a drifter on the sea of life, a scavenger fish feeding greedily on the misfortunes of others, the parasite inhabiting the shark.” He hiccupped. “You see my similes are not confined to farm and field.”

  “Nor your inventions.”

  Farmer Roger looked at him drunkenly. “I beg your pardon.”

  “It wasn’t true, was it, the story you told me about Mrs. Corby and Weddle?”

  Farmer Roger ran a hand through his curly grey hair. “It sometimes amuses me to embroider the plain cloth of fact with the golden thread of fancy. But my general thesis is incontestable. It can be put, indeed, as a syllogism. Your Wesleyan Presbyterian steeple-hatted sort of psalm-singer is randier than my prize bull Braggart. Weddle is a Wesleyan Presbyterian steeple-hatted psalm-singer. Hence Weddle is randier than Braggart.”

  “There wasn’t a word of truth in it now, was there?”

  Farmer Roger hiccupped again. He said gravely, “All my words are words of truth.”

  He could not now even be annoyed by Farmer Roger’s evasions, but was left wondering how the witty profundities that had once enthralled him could have changed so utterly to the interminable ramblings of a club bore. Slowly his attitude towards the whole office altered, so that Lane seemed no longer a cigar-smoking omnipotent ogre but a failure bolstering self-importance with a loud voice, and Michael’s talk of mares and poppets appeared not fashionable as he intended but an echo of what had been fashionable the year before last, and Clare’s desperate striving for modernity stamped her somehow as incurably second-rate. All these things came about through his association with Frank Fairfield, yet they did not come through anything that the crime reporter did or said, and certainly not through any criticism he voiced of the Gazette or its staff. He seemed content to stand for whole evenings or lunch-times at a bar, buying drinks and taking desultory part in the conversation, smiling occasionally at some private joke. He never voiced again the criticism of provincial journalists that he had made on that first evening in the flat. Yet this battered man, his raincoat wrapped round him like a flag, seemed to Hugh an epitome of some odd sort of journalistic integrity.

  “You know, Hugh,” he said one day, “you’re one of the biggest bloody stumbling blocks we’ve got. Are you absolutely certain you saw Leslie that night?”

  He had been over and over this in his mind. The image of Leslie’s face (they both now used the Christian name in speaking of him) seen in that flare of green fire, and then seen again outside the house in Peter Street as he dashed unavailingly for freedom, had become almost inextricably mingled with the face of his sister, but he was bound to say, “Yes.”

  “And then you felt this something hard in his pocket which might have been a knife. It might have been fifty other things too, even if it was Leslie. You know he denies it.”

  “Yes.”

  A face seen in the light of a flare, some object momentarily felt and tentatively identified, it was upon a dozen such things that a boy’s freedom depended. Fairfield voiced something of his thoughts.

  “It’s all very circumstantial, you know, the case against Leslie. If he hadn’t been a friend of Garney’s, I doubt if they’d have tried to pin it on him. All cases are circumstantial in a way, but I’ve seen the depositions, and I w
ouldn’t say this is strong. These bad boys who turn Queen’s Evidence are never liked by juries. Not but what I should say Garney’s for the high jump anyway. It would be a good thing if we could get them tried separately.”

  “What are the chances of that?”

  “About sixty-forty against, I should say. But what we really want is some defence witness who would say that all the identifications made on the night of November the fifth were so much baloney (begging your pardon, Hugh), because it was too dark to see your hand in front of your face, something like that.”

  The words revived a memory. “There was a chap in a duffle coat. A chap who said he’d seen the whole thing, but it was too dark to identify anybody. What was his name, now? Morgan.”

  They went out to Far Wether in a car which Fairfield had hired, and which he drove with disturbing insouciance. George, the landlord of the Dog and Duck, knew Morgan. “Chap as always wears an old duffle coat, long-faced chap looks as if he needs a shave. Yes, he lives up the road a couple of mile, Pebwater Farm, can’t mistake it. Red brick tumble-downish sort of place.”

  “He is a farmer?”

  This caused some amusement. “That’s what he calls himself,” one of the regulars said. “Leastways, he’s got a farm.”

  “A bad farmer?”

  “He’s tried all sorts, Morgan. On to mushrooms now.”

  The gate of Pebwater Farm was open, but the house appeared deserted. When they had thundered on the knocker for the third time the door suddenly opened. A woman stood there. She was in her late thirties, a lush beauty gone to seed. She wore a grubby housecoat and satin slippers. Her hands were well shaped, and the red nails were immaculate.

  “Mrs. Morgan? Can we speak to your husband?”

  “He’s doing the mushrooms.” She made a gesture towards three disused railway carriages some thirty yards away from the house. “What do you want?”

  “I’m from the Banner. My name is Fairfield. This is my colleague, Hugh Bennett.”

  “Oh.” She said flutteringly, “If you’ll wait just a moment I’ll come and help you find him.”

  They waited ten minutes, and then she came out wearing a coat and skirt, and with freshly applied lipstick. They went into two of the carriages. The fungi sprouted in their beds of mould, but they saw nobody. “Would be the last, wouldn’t it?” she said with a bright smile. Before they reached the door of the third carriage it opened, and a man came out. Hugh recognised him at once.

  “Darling, these gentlemen are from the press,” Mrs. Morgan said with delicate suburban refinement.

  Morgan did not look at them. “You left this door open,” he said, pointing to the door behind him. “Last night.”

  The red-tipped fingers went to the red mouth. But she was not really disturbed. “I certainly did not.”

  “The crop’s done for.” He said, not to anybody in particular, “You’ve got to keep them at an even temperature.”

  “The door must have blown open.”

  “That’s the profit on a week’s growth, gone like that.”

  “Oh, please, darling, don’t let’s wrangle. From the Banner, I think you said, Mr. Fairfield?”

  “And what do you want?” Morgan asked gloomily. “If you’re looking for someone to tell you farmers are feather-bedded, you’ve come to the wrong man.”

  “Shouldn’t we just go inside and talk about whatever it is over a nice cup of coffee?” Mrs. Morgan’s laughter gaily and meaninglessly trilled.

  Women’s magazines had overrun the living-room. They were piled in heaps beside the window and on tables, and littered singly on chairs. A chair sagged and creaked as Fairfield sat in it. “You’ll have to forgive me,” Mrs. Morgan said. “I’ve had just no time to tidy. Now, in half a jiffy I’ll have the coffee ready.” They had a glimpse of a kitchen cluttered with dirty plates and saucepans, and Hugh saw with astonishment that the women’s magazines, like some science fiction monster, had crept out to the kitchen too.

  “It’s about the Guy Fawkes night business, I suppose. I’ve told the police already. I couldn’t say anything that was any use.”

  “But we’re not the police. My paper, the Banner, is backing Gardner’s defence.” Fairfield made a gesture to Hugh.

  “I was there on that night myself,” Hugh said. “You were there too. I heard you say you were standing by and that it was too dark to see anything.”

  “That’s right. I was a few yards away, mind.”

  “And later in the pub, when Joe Pickett said he’d recognised two of them, you said it was dark and he couldn’t have seen a bloody thing.”

  “Here we are.” It was Mrs. Morgan again, with four cups of steaming liquid and a plate of biscuits on a tray. The liquid was not coffee, but one of its synthetic substitutes. “Have you been able to help the gentlemen, darling?”

  Morgan ignored her. “I coulda been mistaken.”

  “Or Pickett could have been mistaken,” Fairfield said.

  “I’m a man that’s used to speaking my mind. Always have, always shall. But I wouldn’t have said what I did about Corby asking for it if I’d known they stabbed him. Caused a bit of bad feeling, that did. What I say, would you print it in the paper?”

  “No. We’d get the defence solicitor to come out and see you, take a statement. Then you’d give evidence at the trial.”

  “Nothing in the paper,” said Mrs. Morgan disappointed.

  “You keep out of it,” her husband snarled. “You’ve done enough, leaving the shed door open.”

  “If you want to see Joe Pickett get away with it, all right.”

  “I don’t want to see anybody get away with anything. I don’t want to run into any trouble, either.”

  “It was too dark to see faces?”

  “For me or Joe Pickett, yes. I know where Joe was standing, couple of yards from me.”

  “It’s up to you,” Fairfield said with apparent indifference.

  Morgan crunched a thin rich tea biscuit, took a mouthful of liquid, and said savagely to his wife, “This ain’t coffee. If you ain’t going to make coffee, why don’t you say so?” He walked deliberately to the window, pushed aside a pile of magazines, and emptied the contents of his cup on to the garden.

  His wife burst into tears and ran to the door. There she turned to them a face ravaged with tears and said, before she vanished, “Excuse me.”

  Morgan faced them. “I’ll do it. You can send out your solicitor. I’ll stand up there in court and say what a bloody liar Joe Pickett is.”

  When they drove away they heard the sound of weeping from an upstairs room.

  25

  The sense of liberation, of a horizon slowly widening, that came to Hugh Bennett through Fairfield, did not extend to the activities of Fairfield’s colleagues on the Banner. The crime reporter gave the impression of being somehow detached from the two photographers and the girl from features named Sally Banstead who came down. Sally Banstead was a girl smarter than paint, with a trim figure, a lively look, and every single strand of hair on her neat head perfectly in place at nine o’clock in the morning. Sally Banstead drank whisky, but she was not a drinking girl, and when she came to look for Fairfield in the Goat or in the Grand, as she sometimes did during her three days in the city, her undoubted respect was mixed with a sort of vague impatience. The impression she produced was not so much that she did not understand people like Frank Fairfield, as that she lacked time for the solution of a puzzle that was of no practical use.

  “There goes a woman on her way to the top,” said Fairfield once as she left them in the Grand, walking away with a step brisk but unhurried and a buttock-waggle that was both feminine and entirely impersonal. “And she’ll get there, you know, she’ll get there. If that’s what you want, Sally’s the kind of person to be.” He suddenly sang in a voice ludicrously cracked, “‘I know where I’m going, and I know
who’s going with me.’ But personally I should say the man who’s going with our Sally won’t have an easy ride.” He lifted his pink gin with that slightly trembling hand, and drank.

  Just where Sally Banstead was going and what she was doing he learned from a rather chastened Jill, when she came in one day to the Pile Street flat.

  “It was really awful, Hugh, the way they went on in Peter Street. If I’d known what it was going to be like I’m not sure that I’d have told Dad to accept. It’s like—I don’t know what it’s like, but Magnus Newton had better be good, that’s all.”

  She told him the kind of thing that he had heard about but never seen. Sally Banstead had been assigned to get interviews with all the families involved, and to get pictures. The Bogans had refused to talk or to provide photographs, and Sally had abstracted a photograph of Ernie Bogan from the front parlour while Mrs. Bogan was explaining just why the family didn’t want to be interviewed. She had asked Garney’s father such personal things that he had chased her out of the house, whacking at her with a stick. One of the photographers had taken a picture of Garney standing at the door with the stick raised, and Sally had revenged herself by raking up all the details of his misdemeanours.

  “We weren’t popular in Peter Street before, but our name really stinks now. We shall have to leave, even Dad says so.”

  “How has he taken it?”

  “We knew what we were in for ourselves, and we didn’t mind that, even though it was so silly. She asked me about my boy-friends, and they’ve played up Dad being politically opposed to the Banner and my being a teacher—how Dad was determined to keep his children respectable. But I expect you’ve seen it.” She shivered. “Why does it have to be like that, journalism?”

  He had no answer. “How’s Leslie?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. When we see him he never says anything, just says he’s all right and stares at us. I don’t think he wants us to come at all.” She looked at the floor and then up again. “I’m not crying. I told you, I never cry.”