The Progress of a Crime

by Julian Symons

  “I shouldn’t like to say.”

  “But you must have an idea of what the object might have been. After all, you felt it in his pocket.”

  “Only for a moment. The whole of our contact was over in a few seconds.” Thinking about it was like trying to decide with closed eyes the shape of an object in the mouth. “It was hard, and had hard edges. It might have been a cigarette case. I couldn’t say it was a knife.”

  “Did you later attend an identification parade, and there pick out somebody as the man you had grappled with?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is he in court now?”

  “Yes.” He pointed to Leslie Gardner, and then spoke the words that had given him so much anxiety. “But I am no longer sure of the identification.”

  There was silence in court. Hugh Bennett looked straight ahead of him. He had told nobody, not even Frank Fairfield, of the decision he had reached, believing that he should make up his mind alone, unaided.

  There was a rustle just above him. The Judge peered down, eyes kind, words anti-climactic. “I am not sure if I heard that correctly.”

  “I am no longer sure of my identification,” he said boldly. “I cannot identify Leslie Gardner as the person I struggled with on the green at Far Wether that night.”

  There was a sound in court at this answer, a sound like the expression of some great collective sigh.

  Eustace Hardy’s mind worked like a beautiful, logical machine, capable of working out with extraordinary speed a balance of probabilities. He had heard some sort of vague rumour that this young man had been associated with the Banner, the sensational paper that was putting up money for Gardner’s defence. It would be possible for him to ask permission of the Judge, who was now looking at him inquiringly, to treat Bennett as a hostile witness and then to cross-examine him. But Bennett was not a witness of first importance, and he looked a determined young man. To treat him as a hostile witness might give the whole thing an importance it really didn’t warrant. Better, then, to ask a few destructive questions and leave it at that. These were the thoughts that passed through Hardy’s mind in the space of some thirty seconds. The decision he reached was moved partly, there can be no doubt, by a natural well-bred distaste for dramatic scenes in court. In the rich theatrical air that nurtured the great histrionic advocates of the first quarter of this century Eustace Hardy’s talents would not have thrived.

  There was nothing ironic in his silver voice as he said, “When did you make up your mind about this, Mr. Bennett?”

  “I’ve felt more and more doubtful in the past few weeks. I only made up my mind finally a couple of days ago.”

  “At the time of the identification parade you picked out Gardner immediately?”

  “Yes.”

  “You had no hesitation at all.”

  “No.”

  “How do you explain that?”

  Slowly he said, “I was present when Gardner was arrested, and caught a glimpse of him then. I had also met his sister. They look rather alike.”

  “So you think you may have been influenced by that?”

  “I can’t put that possibility out of my mind.”

  “And Miss Gardner is a friend of yours, perhaps?” This was a piece of nice guesswork, based on the way in which Hugh had mentioned her.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. If Miss Gardner is in court I should like to ask her to stand up so that the jury may see how much she resembles her brother.”

  Jill stood up, came into the well of the court. She looked, Hugh thought, dismayingly little like her prison-pallid brother. Eustace Hardy nodded and sat down, feeling that he had dealt adequately with an awkward but unimportant issue. This, however, was not at all the opinion of his junior, A. V. Carter, who thought, and even in private company afterwards said, that the old man had made a bad mistake in not tearing young Bennett to pieces.

  The way was now clear for Newton to destroy the effect of Maureen Dyer’s testimony, and he did so with relish. He established that Hugh had not seen a knife flashing, or any sign of one, and that in Hugh’s opinion it was not possible to have seen Gardner for long enough to identify him with certainty. It was undoubtedly a morning for the defence, although, as Newton said sagely to Toby Bander at lunch-time, you never can tell what a jury will think.

  Hugh saw Jill and her father just outside the court. “I want to say thank you,” she said.

  He would have liked to explain the complication of the whole thing, to express all the fine shades of it, to say that her face had so truly overlaid her brother’s in his mind that he was utterly unsure of himself and so would have liked to enter not the positive denial that had come out in court but a statement saying that he was not a competent witness in the matter. But of course none of this came out.

  “It was a brave thing to do, wasn’t it, Dad?”

  “I’m sorry you had to stand up like that.”

  Mr. Gardner, sunken-faced and greyish, said, “I never doubted Hugh would do the right thing, never doubted it.”

  “We’re going to have lunch. But perhaps you’d better not come with us.” She pressed his hand as they parted, and in her glance there was something uncomfortably conspiratorial.

  35

  When Fairfield had telephoned through his story he went back to the bar of the Goat, where Michael Baker sat with a glass of beer and a ham sandwich in front of him. Fairfield lifted his pink gin with trembling hand, drank it in two gulps, and ordered another.

  “Your boy did well by his side this morning,” Michael said.

  “He’s not my boy.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you didn’t know. You’ve been chasing up the clues together.”

  The eyes behind the great spectacles considered Michael incuriously. “I didn’t know.”

  “I didn’t know either, and I share a flat with him, so that makes two of us,” Michael said with his agreeable smile. “Our Hugh’s really flying independent colours, isn’t he?”

  “Our Hugh,” Fairfield said solemnly, “is nobody’s boy but his own.”

  At just about the same time Edgar Crawley was saying much the same thing, in rather different words, at lunch in Lord Brackman’s flat. A picture window extended the whole thirty-foot length of the dining-room, and Brack and Crawley sat on black metal chairs at a white marble dining-table. The chair legs were thin and long and they looked rather small on the chairs, rather like two aged children, but the Banner readers on whom they looked out were, from this vantage point eight floors up, even smaller. Lord Brackman was eating his usual lunch, a slice of cold beef with a salad of grated raw vegetables and Ryvita. He drank soda water. Crawley ate a large steak and drank half a bottle of a good claret.

  “Interesting, very interesting,” Brack said. The important points in Fairfield’s story had been telephoned through to the flat at once. “This boy Bennett. What about him?” Brack’s voice was lighter, and less whiningly irritable, than it sounded on the telephone. He had a small head with features rather squashily irresolute, redeemed by a sweep of beautiful silky grey hair. The body below it was short and fat, the little legs dangling from the spindly chair hardly reached the floor.

  “The reporter on the Gazette? He’s been helping Fairfield.”

  “Yes. What’s he like?”

  Crawley knew that a literal answer to the effect that he did not know would be unacceptable. It was his business (that was the unspoken implication) to know such things, by intelligence or intuition, to express an opinion upon which Brack would form his opinion, of dissent or agreement. All this Crawley knew and acknowledged, and it was without a flicker of hesitation that he said, “To me he sounds interesting.”

  “Fairfield’s influenced him?”

  “No. We had no idea this was coming.” Crawley took a sip of claret. “I should say he made up his own mind. Absolutely.”


  “It was a good idea of mine, this. Worked out well.” To this statement Crawley felt it unnecessary to make reply. “I like independence.” Independent spirits both, they looked down upon the figures below, every one of them lacking free will. “This boy might be good. I think we could use him.” Brack suddenly got off his chair, flung down his napkin, walked to one end of the room and bounced down upon a metal-framed bed-chair covered with bright interwoven plastic strips. He tilted the bed-chair so that he could look out of the window, produced a toothpick and began energetically to dig fragments of food from his teeth. “Wasting his time in the provinces. When this thing is over, get him up.” Staring intently out of the window, not for a moment looking at Crawley, Brack said sharply, “That city fire story. Why did it miss the early editions? The Mail had it, and the Express.”

  It was obvious to Crawley that he would not be allowed to finish the steak or the claret. He got up, moved to a chair beside Brack, and began to explain. It seemed that the news editor was not quite measuring up to his job.

  36

  The most important parts of a criminal trial are often the least dramatic. So it was in the Guy Fawkes case. During the afternoon of the trial’s second day Charkoff, Taffy Edwards and Ernie Bogan went into the box and told their stories of the joke that had turned suddenly, and as they said against their expectation, to crime. Patiently Hardy constructed the picture, the boys setting out on their motor-cycles, pockets stuffed with fireworks, subtly he conveyed to the jury the idea that these boys were of less than normal intelligence, tools in the hands of their acknowledged leader, King Garney, and his trusted lieutenant, Leslie Gardner. He did not try to arouse any sort of sympathy for them, but contented himself with showing that these were boys who would never initiate violence. Charkoff and Edwards admitted carrying knives, which they had thrown away after leaving Far Wether, on the way back to the city. They had done so at King’s order. King and Leslie Gardner had thrown away their knives too. They had all dropped them into the Farlow River, which ran near to the road. The three boys did not positively say that they had seen Garney or Gardner attack Corby, but they recounted damning fragments of conversation.

  “When you stopped to dispose of these knives in the river, was anything said about what happened?” Hardy asked Taffy Edwards.

  “Yes. King says to me, ‘You keep your mouth shut about this, Taffy. We haven’t been there.’ And I said I wouldn’t talk, but I asked what had happened, see, because I just didn’t know. And King says, ‘We did him. We did that bastard.’”

  “What did you understand him to mean by that?”

  “Why, that they’d done Corby.”

  “Attacked him?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And who did you understand him to mean by ‘we’?”

  “Himself and Les.”

  “That is, Leslie Gardner. Now, when you got back you parted, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you arrange to meet again?”

  “Yes, at the Rotor.”

  “That is, the Rotor Dance Hall?”

  “That’s right. And Rocky Jones, he says he doesn’t like it, doesn’t think he’ll come along, and King says to him, ‘You’ll come if you know what’s good for you. We stick together. The Peter Street lot’s got no use for squealers.’”

  “Did Gardner say anything?”

  “Yes. He said, ‘Do as King says, Rocky, or you’ll be in trouble.’”

  “Was anything further said about what had happened at Far Wether?”

  “Rocky asks what really happened, he isn’t sure, and King says, ‘We gave him the knife,’ and then says he shouldn’t be surprised if he croaked, and bad luck to him anyway.”

  By the time that these boys had given their evidence, and it had been supplemented by Jean Willard from the Rotor, the case against Garney seemed overwhelming. Gavin Edmonds did his best to whittle down what they said, but although it was easy enough to show the boys as contemptible, it was less easy to dispute the probability of what they were saying. Unimpeachably honest witnesses had already given their opinion that Corby had been attacked by two boys, and now here were three of them implicitly identifying the other two, and doing so not simply in their statements to the police, which Edmonds suggested had been obtained by a mixture of coercion and bribery, but telling Jean Willard very much the same story in the Rotor on the night of the crime. Edmonds made what he could of the fact that Jean Willard was a discarded girl-friend of Garney’s, he was ironical and indignant in turn, but the evidence against Garney piled up and up while the boy stood gripping the sides of the dock with his big dark hands.

  Magnus Newton’s task in relation to these witnesses was less difficult, for there was, after all, little in what the boys said that directly involved Gardner.

  “When Garney made his remark that ‘We did that bastard,’ he did not mention Leslie Gardner by name,” he said to Edwards.

  “No. But they were always around together.”

  “The fact is,” Newton said in an agreeable, confidential tone, “you’ve really got no basis at all for thinking that Gardner attacked Corby, have you?”

  Edwards stared at him with his mouth open, then looked at the Judge for help. Mr. Justice Beckles said gently, “If you could perhaps re-phrase the question, Mr. Newton.”

  Newton rocked on his heels, then said loudly, “Did you see Gardner attack Corby?”

  “No.”

  “Did Garney say that Gardner had attacked Corby?”

  “No, he didn’t, not by name.”

  “He didn’t mention Gardner’s name at all?”

  “No.”

  Newton looked at the jury, decided that they had taken it in, and passed on. If they had not understood the point on this occasion they certainly did so when Newton repeated exactly the same form of questioning to Charkoff and Bogan. What he accomplished, or at least what he intended, was to separate Garney from Gardner in the jury’s mind.

  If Newton was modestly pleased with his success in this respect, however, Hardy was not alarmed. The case against Gardner in relation to the death of Corby lacked something of the real solidity which finally convinced a jury. But there was still the damning evidence of the grey trousers, the evidence that was proof conclusive of Gardner’s guilt. The first shot of this vital encounter was fired when, late that afternoon, Hardy’s scientific witness briskly gave evidence, first of the bloodstains found on the boys’ jackets, and then of the mixture of sand and coal dust found in Gardner’s trouser turn-ups.

  “Did you make a note about the condition of these trousers in your report?” Hardy asked.

  “Yes. I said that these were very nice, smart trousers, nicely pressed, and by the look of them newly cleaned.”

  “They had been worn since cleaning, however?”

  “Oh yes, they had been worn. But very little.”

  Hardy sat down with a satisfied nod. Newton got up and stood puffing and swaying on his feet for so long that the Judge squeaked at last, “Mr. Newton?”

  “Yes, m’lord. Now, Mr.—” Newton looked down at his notes, elaborately forgetful—“Mr.—ah—Price, let us deal first with the matter of what you call the significant bloodstains on Gardner’s jacket. This is a technical term, is it not, this word significant?”

  “I don’t think so. It means that the stains are not absolutely microscopic. They can be seen with the naked eye.”

  “Ha. I am obliged. But it doesn’t necessarily mean, does it, that these stains, however and whenever they were made, have any significance at all in this case?”

  “That is hardly for me to say.”

  “These were stains of Gardner’s own blood group, were they not?”

  “They were.”

  “So that he may perfectly well have cut himself at some time or other, and got blood on his jacket?”<
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  “Not ‘at some time or other.’ These stains were recent when I examined the jacket.”

  “How recent? Could you fix a date to them?”

  “No, that is impossible.”

  “And they may perfectly well be Gardner’s own blood so far as you, as a scientific expert, can tell?”

  “They may be, yes.”

  “I am obliged. Now, Mr. Price, I should like to turn to the trousers. The implication here is that Leslie Gardner wore these trousers on the evening of 6th November, when Jones was killed. Does your scientific skill enable you to say—ah—on exactly what day this mixture of sand and coal dust got into the turn-ups?”

  “No, sir. It does not.”

  “It might as well have been on 6th October as on 6th November, as far as you are concerned?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this view of yours about the trousers being newly cleaned, and having been worn since cleaning, was that based on your expert scientific knowledge?”

  “No. Just on my powers of observation,” Price replied smartly.

  “I am obliged. Now, Mr. Price, if you came home after midnight one night, after having been grilled—I believe that is the significant phrase—for several hours by the police, and then went out again with the intention of killing somebody, would you put on a pair of newly cleaned and pressed grey trousers?”

  Price smiled faintly, and lifted his shoulders in a shrug. Mr. Justice Beckles looked reprovingly at Newton and seemed about to make some caustic observation, when Newton abruptly sat down.

  He left Eustace Hardy wondering just what counsel for the defence could be playing at. Hardy was not, however, a man who fought his cases with deep passion, or who allowed himself to be perturbed by the eccentricities of counsel opposed to him. A legal classicist, Hardy had an unlikely taste for a romantic treatment of history, and he read himself to sleep that night with the third volume of Macaulay’s History of England.

  Twicker, however, was disturbed. He held a conference at six-thirty with Norman, Langton and the Chief Constable. They decided that the evidence against Gardner was watertight, or as watertight as they could make it, and that Newton was simply adopting the last refuge of a counsel in distress, facetious irrelevance. Twicker remained slightly unconvinced by his own arguments. He slept little that night.