Norman slept soundly. He dreamed of naked women jumping through a hedge.
Hugh Bennett did not find the emotional release he had expected from admitting in evidence his inability to identify Gardner. The encounter with Jill should perhaps have prepared him for his reception in the office, but he was in fact taken quite unaware when Lane, puffing bluely from one of his cigars, said, “So you’ve done it. When does the train leave?”
“What’s that?”
“I hear they’re putting on a Bennett Special Express,” the news editor said. “For young reporters on their way up. To London, I mean.”
Hugh understood then. He sat down beside his typewriter, pulled out a notebook, and began furiously to type a paragraph for the gossip column.
“One more boy from the backwoods smells the sweet smell of success,” Lane said. “But we’ll say no more about it, shall we, Hugh? Just put a penny in old Lane’s hat when you see him begging in the streets next Christmas, that’s all I ask.”
Half an hour later Clare came in and put a copy of the Evening Standard under his nose. “You’ve made the front page.”
Hugh read the headlines: GUY FAWKES WITNESS SENSATION. LOCAL REPORTER RETRACTS EVIDENCE. He nodded, and folded over the paper. Clare sat on the desk beside him, her long legs swinging.
“He must be persuasive, your friend Fairfield. What did they promise you, Hugh, a job as understudy? It’s just a matter of waiting till he gets D.T.s, is that what they said?”
“Fairfield knew nothing about it.”
“You’re a bit of a dark horse. I’d like to get to London as much as anybody, but there are some things I wouldn’t do.”
Lane leered at her, yellow-fanged. “Would you sell your beautiful body, girlie?”
“Oh, you. But I mean it.” Clare got off the desk, stuck her nose in the air. “Some things are really a bit much.”
Hugh walked out of the room and slammed the door. In the corridor he met Grayling. “In the news again, I see,” the editor said without smiling. “You really can’t seem to keep out of it, can you?”
“I was called to give evidence.”
“That was a painful necessity. But to say first of all that you identified somebody and then that you didn’t, that’s, eh, a little sensational.”
“It’s the truth.”
“I’ll tell you just what the chairman said about it when I spoke with him on the telephone. He said, ‘Eh, Grayling,’ he said, ‘this kind of thing shows, eh, a disturbing lack of responsibility.’ I felt bound to agree with him.”
“You mean if I made a mistake I should have stuck to it.”
“I’ll say no more, Bennett. I’ll say no more.”
The door of Farmer Roger’s little room was open. Within, a grey head could be glimpsed, brooding over copy. Hugh hesitated, fatally. The head was raised.
“Ah, Hugh, my boy, come in. You see a literary artist in the final throes. Polish, polish, polish, it’s the first rule of style. Was it Stevenson who said that? And how many of our readers appreciate it, I ask you? How many care whether a piece is written well or badly? We do it to please ourselves, Hugh, that’s the way of it, to satisfy the mysterious something, the force that drives us on to produce the best we can, and not to be satisfied with anything else. You know the old phrase, virtue is its own reward, it has no others. And what is it I’m hearing about you, my boy, what’s the news that’s cried in the market-place? Don’t go away, I must speak to you seriously.”
How can it be, Hugh wondered, although he did not put it to himself in quite those terms, that a man can appear in one light a profound philosopher and in another a sententious old bore? He tried deliberately to plug his ears against the tide of words that flowed over him, but was unable to avoid hearing phrases. “…the glittering prize that always eludes us…was it Chesterton who said that the glitter is the gold?…watched over you like a son…exercise of Christian charity…the great law of life…a bad influence, a true limb of Satan…to use a homely simile, fouling your own nest…was it Huxley, not always a favourite of mine but at times a wise and wonderful man, who talked about the bitch goddess Success?”
“Shut up, you canting old hypocrite.” Hugh shouted, as he had never thought that he could or would shout, at Farmer Roger. “I changed my evidence because I wasn’t sure. Hasn’t one of you got the decency to believe that?”
That evening he got drunk for the first time in his life. He took drink for drink with Frank Fairfield in the American Bar of the Grand, and then in half a dozen pubs. He remembered little of the evening, except that he said over and over again to Fairfield, “You know the truth, Frank, you didn’t know what I was going to say when I went in the box. That’s the truth, isn’t it?”
“That’s the truth. You made up your own mind.”
He thumped the bar counter. “Why won’t any of them believe it?”
Fairfield said consideringly, “I think Michael does.”
“Good old Michael. But why doesn’t Jill? If you’d seen the way she looked at me afterwards.”
He repeated variations on the same theme, no doubt with infinite tedium, for the rest of the evening. Fairfield said very little, but remained wrapped behind his curtain of drink. In a sense, Hugh thought afterwards, nothing could have been kinder than this courteous silence. Before the pubs closed Hugh became very drunk, and Fairfield took him back to the flat in a taxi. The stairs seemed to Hugh to have the consistency of jelly. At the top of them Michael was standing.
“Ah, the disappearing witness. Your girl’s been here for you. She left a note. My word, you’re drunk.”
“Where’s the note?” The words moved unsteadily in front of him, but there were not many of them. “Hugh. I think I said something wrong to-day. Just the way you looked. Sorry. You were wonderful. I don’t understand much. I told you, just a meat and two veg girl. Love, Jill.”
When Hugh had managed to read this he flopped back in the arm-chair, laughing helplessly. Fairfield and Michael put him to bed.
37
On the following morning Hardy unrolled his wares publicly for the first time, as it were, displaying the trail of evidence that had not been made public. First Twicker, erect, gauntly anxious, to tell of the visit to Platt’s Flats, and of the sample of sand and coal dust taken from outside the back door, and to say that the sample had proved identical with that taken from Gardner’s turn-ups. Then Norman, big and cocky, to tell of his inquiries at the Kwick-N-Clean laundry.
“Do you produce in court now the laundry book handed to you by the manageress, Miss Pligh?” Hardy asked.
“I do.”
“And does this book show that a pair of grey trousers was returned cleaned to the Gardners on Friday, November the sixth?”
“It does.”
“Have you examined the book for any other entries relating to the cleaning of grey trousers?”
“I have, sir.”
“And what did you find?”
“The only other entry related to a pair of trousers cleaned in June.”
To tie the last knots, there was the van driver, who testified that he had delivered the laundry on that Friday afternoon, and that it had been taken in by Miss Gardner. The grey trousers had been, as usual, in a separate brown paper bag.
“I don’t see how Newton’s going to touch this evidence,” Hardy had said to his junior earlier in the morning. “It’s a beautifully neat consecutive chain, perfectly logical and clear.”
“How would you handle it if you were Newton?”
Hardy’s face was alight with intellectual pleasure. This kind of problem was one that he found extremely congenial. “I think, you know, I think I should be inclined to ask as few questions as possible. Play it down all the time, pick a few small holes perhaps, and then later on try to convince the jury that the whole thing isn’t very important.” Hardy’s features took
on that look of disdainful superiority which helped to explain why he had few friends. “But I doubt if Newton will see it in quite the same light.”
Apparently, however, Newton did see it in the same, or a very similar, light. He asked no questions at all of Twicker or the van driver, and his interrogation of Norman was mild, and almost vague.
“How did you discover that the Gardner family used the Kwick-N-Clean laundry?”
“I made inquiries in the neighbourhood.”
“From the family?”
“Not from the family,” Norman said stolidly.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to ask the family what laundry they used and where things were cleaned, and so on?” Newton flapped his hand to indicate that this was a generality.
“I thought it better in this instance, sir, to make inquiries elsewhere.”
“I see. And then at the laundry itself, did you speak to the managing director, Mr.—ah—Mr. Bostick?”
“No, sir. Simply to Miss Pligh.”
“And that was for the same reason, to keep the inquiry quiet?”
“I wanted to confine it to as few people as possible, yes.”
“Was that so that the defence shouldn’t get to know of it too soon?” Newton asked mildly.
Hardy was on his feet. “I am advised that the defence knew of this evidence in good time before the opening of the trial, my lord.”
Mr. Justice Beckles peered, squeaked. “Are you suggesting that this was not so, Mr. Newton?”
Newton waved again, airily. “I withdraw the observation, my lord.”
“In that case it was a most improper question.” Mr. Justice Beckles was squeakily indignant.
“Should I be right in saying that this was the extent of your inquiry regarding the grey trousers, that once you had discovered that they had been returned to Miss Gardner on November the sixth, you asked no further questions about them?” Newton asked Norman.
“That is right.”
Hardy re-examined briefly, to establish even more firmly in the jury’s minds the fact that the trousers could not possibly have been worn before the evening of November the sixth. Then he said: “That is the case for the Crown, my lord.”
Mr. Justice Beckles nodded, looked at the clock. “This will be a convenient time at which to adjourn for lunch.”
38
The evidence had been interesting enough in its way, but still the journalists had been disappointed of their morning fireworks. There had been none of the cuts and thrusts, the almost downright accusations of lying, that make good copy. Some of the crime reporters decided that Newton was resigned to letting nature take its course, others believed that some stupendous card remained still up his sleeve, and one or two of these latter tried—although they should have known better—to get some information out of the Banner’s crime reporter. But Fairfield, sitting on the bar stool that was now regarded in the Goat as almost his personal property, ate his ham sandwiches and drank his bitter and refused to be drawn, even by Michael.
“You know, this is awfully like the trial of Mary Duggan or an Agatha Christie play or something,” Michael said. “Some really smashing actress—like Nita Elvin, who was at the Theatre Royal last week—is going to give evidence and cry, ‘The boy is innocent, he spent the night with me.’ Right?”
“Wrong.”
“I thought so. You do know what’s going to happen though, don’t you?”
“A bit of it, yes.”
“I don’t see how you can get round the trousers. Back from laundry Friday afternoon, found on Saturday full of muck out of Platt’s Flats. What’s the answer? I simply can’t wait to find out.”
Michael did wait, however, waited through an opening speech by Gavin Edmonds, in which he said that there was nothing beyond vague suspicion to link Garney with either crime, and to a speech by Magnus Newton, stressing the same thing, and emphasising that the defence would call a witness who would say that on the night of November the fifth it was too dark to distinguish one face from another. Michael thought that Newton was going to avoid any reference to the trousers, but he came to them almost at the end.
“One of the points that the prosecution has made a great deal of, ladies and gentlemen, is related to a pair of trousers belonging to Leslie Gardner, a pair of trousers sent to the Kwick-N-Clean laundry for cleaning, and returned by them on November the sixth. I might fairly say, I think, that in the welter of fancies and improbabilities that make up the prosecution case against my client, this is put forward as the one solid fact that holds all the rest together. It is said that these same trousers were found on the following day to have traces of coal and sand in the turn-ups, that this mixture could only have come from Platt’s Flats, and that this positively proved Gardner’s presence there on that Friday night. You may have noticed, ladies and gentlemen, that I did not spend much time in cross-examination relating to this matter. That is because Gardner has a complete answer to it. He will go into the box, and you will hear from him that these trousers were never sent to the Kwick-N-Clean laundry, and hence never came back from that laundry, that they were another pair of trousers altogether…”
The reporters began to write with frantic eagerness. The secret was about to be revealed, then? But Newton said no more, and their curiosity remained unappeased, for now Garney entered the witness box. And this, the reporters knew, was a lost one, for this one there was in practical terms no hope. There are racing outsiders that come triumphant home, and zero will sometimes fortify optimists on a roulette wheel, but for Garney the only chance lay in the possibility that somebody on the jury, one could almost go further and say some woman on the jury, would be romantically impressed by his youth and dark handsomeness, and would hold out staunchly for acquittal. It was necessary only to look at the three housewives who sat in the jury box, embattled images of respectability, two of them lean and hard-fleshed as though their bodies had been cut from wood, and the fat third one tougher still, the bulbous curves of her cheek and nose like solid rock, to realise that King Garney’s chances were small indeed. It seemed that he understood this himself, for he wore in the witness box the manner of spitting defiance that some great animal may have when finally boxed. From such useless violence the human animal is in general mercifully free. We feel it natural for human beings at times of their own impending utter destruction to collapse and cry, and Garney seemed to some of those who watched him snarling and snapping at his own counsel, Gavin Edmonds, something less, and yes, perhaps something more than human.
“He’s wonderful,” Michael Baker whispered to Fairfield. “Don’t you think he’s wonderful?” In reply Fairfield’s lips shaped the words, Look at the other. Michael looked and saw Leslie Gardner leaning forward, lips parted, staring across the court at the figure in the witness box with all the intensity of a lover. Yet, although Gardner was immature, there was nothing feminine about him. It was, rather, as if the boy in the dock heard the boy in the witness box speaking for some outcast group of the inarticulate, as if in all these long proceedings that had been given their deliberate weight and pomp through centuries of precedent and subtle change, and in all these arguments conducted by the finest and fairest kind of legal logic, this animal defiance of Garney’s was for Leslie Gardner the only thing that made sense. Garney, as he stood there in the box, offering answers that were often transparent lies, trying with the lowest sort of cunning to turn each incident to his own benefit, seemed to the perhaps over-impressionable Michael Baker to be asserting rights that did not belong at all to this court or to legal processes, the right to behave as he wished, the right to come roaring into Far Wether on a motor-cycle and kill quite casually the man against whom he bore a grudge, the right to destroy a traitor to his self-constructed code. It was not that Garney admitted doing any of these things in his evidence, but that in his attitude there rested the implication that whether or not he had done them was of no imp
ortance.
This might be wonderful, as Michael Baker had incautiously whispered, but it was not law. In that time and place Garney had no weapons at all against the silver tongue that wounded him again and again in the long passage of Eustace Hardy’s cross-examination. Recollection of all this was blurred by what happened afterwards, but at the time everybody—that is, the reporters, and the literary gentlemen who like to attend criminal cases, and the solicitors, and, a little reluctantly perhaps, the barristers—were agreed that this was one of the classic cross-examinations, and that whatever remnant of a chance Garney might have had before Hardy rose had disappeared completely by the time that the prosecuting counsel sat down. If there was one thing that mitigated the triumph it was that the struggle was so unequal, that Garney seemed not merely to lack the weapons but also the wish to defend himself. And although guilt by association has no legal existence, there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that the effect produced by Garney in the witness box must have prejudiced Leslie Gardner’s chance of acquittal.
39
Hugh nursed his hang-over until midday and then, strengthened by several cups of tea, went into the office. He spent the afternoon interviewing a number of people, including the city architect and surveyor, the chairman of the city council, some local residents and small shopkeepers, to ask their opinions about the construction of a vast car-park on an area of waste ground near the city centre. He found, not surprisingly, that the shopkeepers were in favour of the project, the local residents considered it an outrage, and the city authorities regarded it as a painful necessity. It was quite an interesting job, but his head ached, and he did not do it well. He walked back to the flat leaning against an east wind that seemed to cut through his thin raincoat. Snow that never fell hung like a permanent threat in the grey sky. He felt himself to be shivering, and was lying on the bed when the doorbell rang. He went down the stairs past the cabbage smell, and let in Jill.
The Progress of a Crime Page 17