The Progress of a Crime

by Julian Symons

  He put his arms round her and they kissed, lovingly but without passion. Her last words were about Sally Banstead. “She’s a real horror, that woman. I knew people like that existed, people without human feelings at all, but I’d never met one.”

  Fairfield shook his head when Hugh told him this. “She’s wrong there, Jill. Sally’s not exactly a machine, she looks after her father and mother. Her father’s blind and her mother’s partly paralysed, but they don’t want to go into a home and she won’t send them to one. She pays for someone to look after them all the time.”

  “But suppose this happened to her? Suppose somebody came in and forced them to give interviews and stole photographs, what would she think?”

  “She’d be upset. But she’d go on doing the same thing herself. You can’t change life, you’ve got to accept it.” On this same evening he went on to talk, as though there were some logical connection, about Twicker. Fifteen years ago, he said, Twicker had been the youngest detective-superintendent in the C.I.D., a man marked out by his intelligence and devotion for advancement. “The thing about Twicker is that he really hates crime and criminals. He’s not just a chap doing a job, he feels real passion about it. He’s absolutely honest, you could never even suspect him of taking dropsy, he’s got no personal vanity like a lot of them, he’s truly devoted to the idea of justice.”

  “An ideal police officer.”

  “I didn’t say that.” Fairfield went on with his story. A man named Weston had been suspected of murdering a girl. Twicker had been in charge of the investigation. There had been a good deal of evidence against Weston, but not enough to justify his arrest. Twicker had been certain of Weston’s guilt, and the fact that this murderer remained free infuriated him. He made Weston’s life a misery in all sorts of obscure ways, ensured that his landladies knew that the man who’d taken a room with them was still under suspicion of murder, had unofficial visits paid to a whole series of people who gave Weston a job, so that they knew just what sort of man was in their employ. Weston lost job after job, moved from place to place when landladies found suddenly that they wanted his room. He complained, but Twicker had covered his tracks too well for the complaints to be effective. At last he gave in. He went to his local police station and said that he wanted to see Detective-Superintendent Twicker and make a confession. In Twicker’s presence Weston confessed to the girl’s murder, and added a good deal of detail about things like throwing the murder weapon into a ditch nearby. The ditch was searched and no weapon found, but Weston was arrested. In due course he came to trial.

  “At his trial Weston said that the confession had been made only so that he could prove his innocence. He had been subjected to intolerable persecution. He wanted to clear his name fully and finally, so that at last he would be a free man. He said that the confession was untrue in every detail.

  “There was no decisive evidence against him beyond the confession. The Judge, before the opening of the defence case, advised the jury that it would be unsafe to convict. The jury acquitted Weston without leaving the box.”

  “And Twicker?”

  “He’d been made a fool of. He’s never really recovered from it.”

  “Would you say that was why he let those boys go when he ought to have held them?”

  “I expect so. He’d made his mistake. He wasn’t going to make the same sort of mistake again.”

  “Mistake’s a kind word for it. He’d been persecuting an innocent man.”

  Fairfield stared. “Not at all. Twicker and everybody else on the case knew Weston had done it. Three years afterwards he killed another girl and was hanged for it.”

  26

  In the third week of December the weather became still milder, damper and foggier. Fairfield and Sally Banstead had gone back to London, with the reporters from the other nationals. They would return again, most of them, for the trial in January, but until then the case was wiped out of their minds. Hugh spent a hectic three-quarters of an hour with Frank Fairfield drinking in the station bar, before the crime reporter caught his train.

  “Don’t forget, Hugh, if you come across anything at all that might be useful to Leslie, let me know. I’ll be down on the next train.”

  “What does Magnus Newton think about it?”

  “The likes of me aren’t allowed into the councils of the mighty. It’s said he’s very hopeful.” He sipped his drink and lit a cigarette. “Providing Leslie’s been acquitted, will you feel it’s all been worth while?”

  He stared. “Of course.”

  “And your girl-friend?”

  “I’m sure she will.”

  “She’s a girl of character, that one, she reminds me of my second wife. But whether it’s wise to marry a girl of character, I’m not so sure about that. How about her father?”

  “How about him?”

  “Our infantile Leftist, the Labour councillor who doesn’t like the Banner, what does he think about things now?”

  “I don’t know. He’s pretty cut up about all the publicity, they don’t love him any better in Peter Street for it. But if everything comes out right he’ll accept it.”

  Fairfield finished his drink, turned his blurred gaze upon Hugh and, as often, appeared about to make some profound remark. In fact he said, “You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs. Good-bye, young Hugh.”

  He picked up his bag and was gone. Hugh felt, to his surprise, a sense of loss.

  A couple of days later he went round to Peter Street to have supper. They ate grilled chops and drank beer. George Gardner hardly spoke, and it was not a comfortable meal. At the end of it he said to Hugh, “Your friend Fairfield gone back to London?”

  “Yes.”

  “Finished picking the bones and gone with the other vultures.”

  Jill was washing up. She banged a saucepan on the sink.

  “She doesn’t like my saying it. She thinks I ought to be grateful,” Gardner said.

  “I don’t say grateful. It was a sort of deal, wasn’t it? We knew what we were doing.”

  “I didn’t know what it was going to mean,” he said heavily. “I didn’t know old Slattery, who’s been a good Labour man all his life, was going to say he’d vote Tory at the next council election or that Bogan, Fred Bogan, that layabout, would say I’d been stirring up trouble for the whole street.”

  “You can’t help what they say.” To Hugh she said sharply, “You can dry.”

  “But it’s true. I have caused trouble for the whole street. That bitch pinching a photograph out of a house. Do you justify that?” he said to Hugh. “Does your friend Fairfield justify that?”

  “You knew what it was like,” Jill said. If Michael could have seen her now, Hugh reflected, he would not have said she was a poppet or anything like it. “If you didn’t know you should have done. You’ve talked enough about what the capitalist press is like.”

  “When you get it done to you and the people you know, it’s different.”

  “Don’t think about yourself so much. Think about Leslie a bit more. You don’t suppose I like what they say at school, do you?” She wiped the bowl and said to Hugh, “Let’s go out.”

  When she had put on her coat she came back to the kitchen. Gardner was still sitting at the table. She patted his shoulder. “Cheer up, Dad. We’re in for it now. No use crying.”

  In his upward look Hugh Bennett saw behind the face’s fine façade weakness and doubt. “I expect you’re right.”

  In the street she said, “I feel sorry for Dad, don’t think anything else. But showing it doesn’t do any good.”

  “We can’t always help that, can we? Not doing any good, I mean.”

  “Then we ought to. Not to be able to control your feelings, that’s feeble. I’ve always admired Dad because he was so strong. Now, I don’t know.”

  They went to the flat in Pile Street and he made coffe
e. Before she went to catch the last tram back she kissed him fiercely. “I’m sorry I’m so awful. I’ll be better later on, when this is over. We shall get him out, shan’t we?”

  “We shall get him out.”

  At the office also the Guy Fawkes murder dwindled into insignificance. Hugh had one conversation with Grayling in which the editor, with a good deal of plate-clicking, referred again to the excellent stories that had been done on the case. Mr. Weddle felt, he said, that the whole thing had been handled with admirable discretion. Now we must get back, mustn’t we, to the more humdrum affairs of every day? Hugh, who had spent part of the afternoon at a Christmas bazaar organised by the Townswomen’s Guild and opened at some length by the wife of a local M.P., refrained from saying that he had got back long ago.

  There was no chance of forgetting that Christmas was upon them. In the space of one week he attended seventeen different bazaars, fairs, jumble sales and sales of work, organised by various churches, British Legions and local shops. He suspected Lane of putting him through this agonising experience deliberately, and Michael and Clare of enjoying his frantic legwork. The friend of the great London reporter was being shown his exact place in the Gazette hierarchy. But he did not complain even when Lane, yellow teeth bared, complimented him upon the niceness of his touch in handling this sort of thing.

  “You’ve regularly got the Christmas spirit,” Lane said in great good temper. “Never known a lad so full of Dickensian jollity. Does my old heart good to read paragraphs of true Christmas cheer.”

  Clare gave an uncustomary giggle. “He does do it rather well, doesn’t he?”

  Lane looked at her appreciatively. “You’ve got a new hair-do.”

  “Do you like it? Maurice in Pickard Street did it. He’s really rather good.”

  “I’m so glad,” Lane said, in a parody of her voice. “Because Maurice is doing the hair of one of our city’s typical housewives, forty-eight-year-old Mrs. Jackson, at three-thirty this afternoon. It’s a special demonstration of the new Crispa brush cut, or that’s what it says here. Will you just toddle down there and get an interview with Mrs. Jackson? And with Maurice, too, if he has anything to say.”

  “Oh, my God.” Clare picked up her notebook, banged her desk and went out.

  “As for you, Hugh, my boy, just to vary the routine, there’s a Religious Training Centre out at Welby which is having a sort of passing-out parade this afternoon. Let’s have a piece of your deathless prose about that, will you.”

  He took his raincoat off the peg and went out to Welby. For the first time he admitted to himself that he was bored with life at the office. He said as much to Michael that evening, over supper in the flat.

  “You’re suffering from London fever. I told you not to get any ideas.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Honestly now, didn’t you dream about being offered a job in London?”

  “Perhaps I did. But not seriously.”

  “We’ve all done it, my boy, we’ve all done it.” Out of his greater experience Michael sighed. “I remember how excited I was when the New Statesman printed a piece of mine about local reps. I had visions, I dreamed dreams, I went up to London. I was given a book to review, a book on theatre, five hundred words. I wrote the most dazzlingly witty piece you can imagine, sweated blood over it. And do you know what happened? A printers’ strike. My review never even got into proof.”

  Hugh sighed. He had heard the story, with slight variations, several times. “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. You can forget about the Guy Fawkes murder. It ran into some nice linage, that’s all. Shall we go out and have a drink on that?”

  “If you like.” He would not admit, even to himself, how bored he was, with what vague, eager expectancy he looked forward to the trial in January.

  27

  Just a week before Christmas, Magnus Newton came down from London in the company of the defence solicitor, Charles Earl of Earl, Sheldick and Partners. They sat in a private sitting-room at the Grand, waiting for George Gardner and his daughter. Magnus Newton stumped round the room on his little legs, took one glance out of the window at the gleaming wet streets and said in a grumbling voice, “The father’s a red-hot Labour councillor, is that right?”

  “I believe so.” Looking at the two one would have thought that Earl, elegant and darkly handsome, was the barrister. Newton was short, puffy, red-faced, and appeared chronically irritable. In cross-examination, however, he used this irritable manner to good purpose, giving an impression of just managing to contain himself in the face of impenetrable stupidity, which often put a self-confident witness out of his stride. At times, however, Charles Earl found himself wishing that Newton would reserve his petulance for cross-examination. He had maintained a sort of subterranean grumbling about various aspects of the case all the way down in the train.

  “We certainly don’t want politics drawn into this affair, it’s messy enough already. Still, if he’s a councillor, I suppose it means the boy was well enough brought up. What time are we due to see him?”

  “At four o’clock.”

  “I’m glad I’ve got a thick overcoat, it’s damned cold in prison. Damned cold in here for that matter. Why don’t they have a decent coal fire instead of these filthy radiators?”

  The solicitor knew perfectly well the reason for Newton’s annoyance. Very few counsel nowadays care to interview a client they are defending on a murder charge. They prefer that the solicitor should act as intermediary, remaining themselves detached from personal contact. But in this case the Banner had insisted—or, rather, had conveyed through the assistant editor, Edgar Crawley, the wish of the proprietor, Lord Brackman—that Newton should visit his client. There was a Banner photographer in the hotel now who would take pictures of George and Jill Gardner in conference with Newton and Earl, a picture of barrister and solicitor at the prison gate, and pictures of them visiting Far Wether and Platt’s Flats. It would make a picture feature, and Newton was a glutton for publicity. At the same time, he accepted the whole thing with a bad grace.

  There was a knock at the door. Earl said with some relief, “Here they are.” As the Gardners came in he nodded to the man who had brought them up and said, “Five minutes.”

  As he shook hands with the Gardners, Newton summed them up. The man a typical working-class figure, ill at ease in his best suit. A fine head, though, good broad shoulders, a look of awkward honesty. Upon the whole Newton was favourably impressed. The daughter was pretty enough, in an unpretentious, unfashionable way. Newton, who liked flamboyant beauty, paid little attention to her.

  They had been talking for a little while when the photographer came in. “Is it all right now?”

  Earl said, “All right.”

  “If you’ll sit a little closer. Mr. Newton in the middle talking to Mr. Gardner.”

  Newton brushed away the ash that always collected on his waistcoat. Gardner stood up. “What is this?”

  “This gentleman is from the Banner,” Earl said. “He’s here to take pictures.”

  “This is just another publicity stunt, then?”

  “Certainly not. They’re simply taking a couple of pictures, that’s all.”

  “Taking a couple of pictures. What have they been doing ever since it all started but taking prying pictures, poking their noses into other people’s business? I’d like to break his bloody camera.” Gardner took a step forward. The photographer retreated. “I thought this was to be a serious conference about my son’s case. Seems we’re just jumping through the hoops again when the Banner cracks the whip. I’m not doing it, that’s all. Either he clears out or I do.”

  “Mr. Gardner.” Newton stood with his head thrust forward, a little red-faced bullock about to charge. “You made this arrangement with the Banner.”

  “Yes. But I never knew what it would mean.”


  “You made the arrangement. You knew it would entail personal publicity, just as Mr. Earl and I knew it. If you don’t want to abide by the arrangement, say so. Mr. Earl and I will withdraw from the case.” Gardner glared at him. Newton went on remorselessly, “If you wish us to go on acting in your son’s interest, sit down.”

  Gardner sat down and folded his arms. “Take your pictures.”

  The conference lasted twenty-five minutes. There was really little to say. Afterwards Earl congratulated Newton. “I thought you handled him very well. He’s an awkward customer.”

  Newton puffed a little. “Trouble-maker. I know the type. But respectable.”

  “What the girl said about the boy being timid was interesting, useful perhaps.”

  “Yes. Though you’ve got to be careful about these things. If we make much of that, very likely it’ll turn out that he enjoyed sticking knives into dead birds or something. Let’s have a look at Master Gardner, shall we?”

  They went to the prison in one taxi and the photographer followed in another. He took a couple of shots outside the prison gate, of Newton bare-headed in the rain looking pensive, with Earl, brief-case under arm, standing by his side. Then Newton and Earl went inside.

  Newton saw the boy alone, in a tiny room with two chairs in it. Leslie Gardner was very pale, and looked less than his seventeen years. The main points of his story had already been established, but Newton ran over the details again. On Thursday night he had gone to Far Wether and had thrown fireworks. He had not knocked over a little girl and had not struggled with a young man. He had not shouted, “Get him, King.” On the following night, Friday, when Rocky Jones was killed, he had been released by the police at the same time as the other boys, and had come straight home and gone to bed.

  “Now, about the bloodstains on your leather jacket. They’re your own blood group, Group O. Have you any idea when you made them?”