The Progress of a Crime

by Julian Symons

  “Do you like Garney?”

  That was the question. Leslie Gardner did not answer it, but stared at the man whose natural elegance he half-consciously recognised and envied, and fingered his tie. Hardy repeated the question. Mr. Justice Beckles looked inquiringly, finally spoke.

  “Did you hear what counsel asked you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you must reply.”

  Gardner looked at the dark boy in the dock, but there was nothing responsive, nothing that gave a clue to his feelings one way or the other, in King Garney’s face.

  “Yes,” Gardner said, and cleared his throat. “I like him all right.”

  “Do you like him more than you like the others in your group, or gang, or whatever we are to call it?”

  “Yes, I s’pose so.”

  “What do you mean by ‘suppose so’? You know it really, don’t you? You like him more than the others?”

  “What if I do?”

  “I am not saying there was anything wrong about your liking him. But it is right that you do like him, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Gardner said abruptly. It looked as though he might burst into tears.

  It was just at this moment that Hugh Bennett saw on George Gardner’s face, two rows in front of him, a look of eagerness and longing, as though he were waiting for some words that would resolve for him a question he had been waiting half a lifetime to hear answered.

  “Your mother is dead, isn’t she?” the silver voice went on. “Who has more influence on you, Garney or your father?”

  This time there was no doubt of the violence of the reaction. “I don’t take any notice of what Dad says.”

  Was it worth going down this side track? Hardy decided that it was. “Indeed? You go your own way, do you?”

  There was something almost pathetic about the defiance with which Gardner said that he did what he wanted, pathetic because he was a boy so obviously destined to take ideas and wishes second-hand, so plainly one whose dreams were synthetic, distorted echoes of something he had heard at a cinema or on a long-playing record.

  “Did your father try to influence you?”

  The boy said something in a low voice. He did not look at his father.

  “What was that?” the Judge squeaked sharply. “Speak up.”

  “He was always preaching,” Gardner said loudly enough, too loudly. “Going on about the workers and that. He never left me alone.”

  “You resented that?”

  “I couldn’t stick it. He was always going on.”

  Jill put her hand on her father’s arm. He sat there, staring at his son.

  “So you resented your father. You found King Garney more congenial.” Hardy knew very well the impression that is always created on a jury by youthful disobedience, and disloyalty to the family. “Is he your best friend?”

  “Yes.” There was no doubt about it now.

  “Do you admire him?”

  “Yes,” Gardner said boldly. Magnus Newton dug a hole in the paper in front of him with his ball-point pen.

  “Enough to do things when he asked you to do them?”

  “That would depend.”

  “Would depend on what he asked?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you were his partner in some of his exploits? He would choose you before any of the others?”

  “Yes. We’re friends,” Leslie Gardner said with fatuous pleasure.

  “If Garney had asked you to go up to Platt’s Flats with him on that Friday night, would you have gone?”

  Too late, the boy saw something of what he had done. “He didn’t ask.”

  “But supposing he had asked,” the silvery voice said. “Supposing he had asked you to help him teach Rocky Jones a bit of a lesson, you’d have gone, surely?”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “But why not?” Hardy was all silvery surprise. “After all, he was your best friend.”

  “He never asked me.”

  “Isn’t it true that he said something like that to you, because he knew he could rely on you? And that you went along because you admired him?”

  “No. He never asked me.”

  “And when you got there, you found out that Garney meant to kill Rocky Jones?”

  “No, it’s not true.”

  “I suggest that you went along with Garney to this disused cottage, and that once there you did what he told you. When you saw that he was going to attack Jones, you helped him. Isn’t that the way it happened?”

  “No. No.” Leslie Gardner looked round the court now for help. He looked at the Judge and at his counsel and at the dark figure of Garney, but he did not look at his father.

  Eustace Hardy’s voice was incapable of thunderous tones, but Gardner trembled as he heard it, shivered as though he heard a knife scraped across iron. “There was blood on your jacket. Where did it come from?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve said already I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know,” Hardy said softly. “But you are a boy who cares about his clothes, aren’t you? You dress smartly, or try to. Are you saying seriously that you didn’t notice the spots of blood on your black zipping jacket? Are you really saying that?”

  “I must have cut myself.”

  “But you don’t remember doing it?”

  “No.”

  “Can you show me how you might have cut yourself so that blood could have got on to your zipping jacket high up near the shoulder?”

  Newton rose, but the Judge forestalled him.

  “Mr. Hardy, the witness has already said that he does not know how the spots of blood got on to the jacket. I think you must accept that.”

  “As your lordship pleases,” Hardy said loftily. He had now sketched out a whole new plan of attack, and although he could not hope that those unfortunate trousers would be forgotten, he did his best to take the jury’s minds from them by concentration on the bloodstains. The cross-examination lasted no more than three hours, but by the time it had finished, Leslie Gardner was in need of all the buttressing that Newton could give him in a re-examination which brought out that no attempt had been made to remove the blood spots, that he never wore the zipping jacket except when on his motor-cycle, and that he would have been crazy to use a noisy motor-cycle to go out to the cottage after midnight on Friday. Gardner walked back from witness box to dock with his head down. In the dock he looked shyly at the figure by his side. Garney gave him one single sharp approving nod.

  After Gardner, there followed the girl from Coburg Cleaning. Hardy asked her no questions. The only other defence witness of importance, the mushroom-growing Morgan, provided one of those pieces of anticlimax with which trials are so often spotted. His assertions that it was too dark for Pickett to have identified anybody were questioned with delicate irony by Hardy, who pointed out that Morgan had been able to recognise Pickett, and that a bonfire customarily cast a good glow round about. But nobody really cared about Morgan. The question of Gardner’s identification on Guy Fawkes night now seemed much less important than the jury’s weighing of the effect created by the unfortunate prosecution mistake about the trousers against the damage done to Gardner by Hardy’s cross-examination.

  “What do you think?” Hugh asked Fairfield. The crime reporter was sitting in the Goat with Michael. “What are the chances?”

  “For Garney, no chance at all. For Leslie, about fifty-fifty.”

  “No better than that?” He was dismayed. When they had discovered the facts about the cleaning of the gaberdine trousers it had seemed that an acquittal was certain.

  “No. He was bad in the box.”

  “But they built their case on identifying the trousers.”

  “Hardy switched it cleverly. He’s very good. And Leslie got rattled.” Fairfield’s manner lacked a shade of his usual urba
nity. He seemed depressed. “I’ve had enough of the bloody case. Let’s talk about something else. And drink up. On the Banner.”

  They drank up. Afterwards Hugh took a tram to Paradise Vale. Jill opened the door. Her face was white, unreal as a mask.

  “Oh, it’s you. Come in.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s Dad. I think he’s going out of his mind. He said to-day that we’d have to emigrate to Australia.” He was about to say that this might be eccentric, but could hardly be called insane, when she added, “He’s going up to London to-morrow.”

  “To London?”

  “Yes, to arrange about the passages. So he says. And he says just the two of us will go, that Leslie’s not his son. I wish you’d go up and see him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In the bedroom. He’s taken his supper up.” They had been talking in whispers. He put an arm round her, but she pushed him away and repeated, “I wish you’d go up.”

  The conversion of the first floor, the installation of a bathroom, had allowed only the creation of three tiny boxes. In one of these he found George Gardner, sitting up in bed eating curry and rice, which he spooned up eagerly and mumbled in his mouth. He was wearing pyjamas and the open top showed his chest, covered with a mat of grey hair. He raised the spoon in greeting. He looked perfectly sane.

  There were photographs round the walls. A man in a cloth cap addressed bare-headed workers, the same man was seen in a bowling alley holding a tankard and uproariously laughing, and again in a wedding group.

  “My dad,” Gardner said. “A great man. Branch secretary of the miners. I’m the third on the right in that one, with my collar crooked.”

  A pretty girl, resembling Jill, but with less character in her face, looked out in a cabinet portrait.

  “Is that—”

  “The wife,” Gardner said unclearly, his mouth full of curry.

  “Jill looks like her.” Gardner did not reply. “I hear you’re thinking of going to Australia.”

  “Soon as we can. I’m going up to London to-morrow to fix things up.”

  “What about Leslie? The trial, I mean.”

  “Nothing to do with me. I can’t help what happens.” He ate another spoonful of curry. “You get to wondering why you do it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The whole thing. Your whole life. My dad brought me up in the movement, same way I’ve brought up Leslie. Used to ride me on his shoulder to meetings when I was a kid. When I was twelve I addressed a thousand envelopes in a day. And went to protest meetings. I’ve been doing it ever since.”

  “Yes.”

  “But why? What’s it all for? I’ll tell you something.” He leaned forward and a few grains of curry-stained rice spilled on to the sheet. “He’s not my boy.”

  At first Hugh did not understand the backward gesture made towards a small modern chest of drawers. Then he saw the schoolboy with cap on, neat and pertly smiling. “That’s Leslie?”

  “He’s not my boy. I told you I brought him up the same way I was brought up myself. No boy of mine would be a Ted, a little whimpering hooligan who—” He began to shout obscenities.

  “He’s been led away.” How feeble the words were. But what other words, what powerful words, could one use?

  “He’s not mine.” The man in the bed began to talk about his wife, and recounted to Hugh’s appalled ears her sexual habits, describing in detail the men she had been with and the times he had found her with them, and saying it all with a ghastly relish that was almost unendurable. Once or twice Hugh tried to break in, to expostulate, but the obscenities went resistlessly on. There was still a little curry left on the plate, and when Gardner stopped and began to eat it, Hugh opened the door.

  Downstairs Jill asked, “What did he say?” He did not know how to reply. “Was it about my mother?”

  “Some of it.”

  “It isn’t true, you know that, don’t you? They were wonderfully happy with each other, devoted. Mum never looked at anybody else.” She pressed herself close against him. Her body quivered, but she did not cry. “What am I to do?”

  “Perhaps you ought to get a doctor. But most of the time he seemed all right, a bit odd, that’s all.”

  “I’m afraid calling in a doctor will make him worse. The real thing is that he thinks Leslie will be found guilty. He was bad in the box, wasn’t he? But that doesn’t mean anything.”

  She made a pot of tea and they sat in the kitchen and talked for an hour, talked in the haphazard way of lovers, finding satisfaction in the mere exchange of glances and touch of hands. There was no sound from upstairs.

  41

  The letter came the following morning. It was written on the thick paper used by Banner executives, printed in elephant type, and signed by Edgar Crawley, Editor. Like most important letters from newspapers, it was short. It said:

  Dear Mr. Bennett,

  I have read your contributions about the Guy Fawkes murder with great interest, and have heard a lot about you from Frank Fairfield. If you will let me know when you are next in London, we can have a chat together over a bite of lunch.

  Michael read the few lines over and over again, spellbound, and let the toast burn. “Boy,” he said, “oh, boy, you’ve done it. You really have done it. I’d never have believed it possible.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet. I mean, nothing has been offered.”

  “It will be. Don’t you like that bite of lunch? He’d never suggest a bite of lunch unless there was a job going with it.” Michael wiped away an imaginary tear and declaimed perverted Christina Rossetti. “Remember me when you are gone away, gone far away into the noisy land. If there’s a job going for a junior assistant to the assistant dramatic critic, remember me.”

  “I’m not sure I want to go.”

  “Don’t let’s have any of that. This is the sort of chance that you only get once in a lifetime, if that. You really stepped into the horse manure that night in Far Wether. Just allow fertilisation to proceed according to nature, as Farmer Giles would say.”

  “Don’t tell anybody about it.”

  “I’ll be silent as the third murderer. But I don’t see what stops you sitting down and writing a letter now.”

  “I want to think about it. You don’t think they’re paying me off for changing my evidence?”

  “Don’t be crazy.”

  Looking at the long, weak, handsome face that smiled at him enthusiastically across the breakfast table, Hugh said, “Thank you for everything, Michael.”

  “Nothing to thank me for. I’m jealous as hell, and I shall make all sorts of catty remarks about you when you’ve gone. But it’s plain as the nose on King Solomon’s face that you ought to go. Send a telegram.”

  What happened at the office seemed to reinforce Michael’s words. Lane greeted him with a grin of pure delighted malice, and sent him out first to interview a man who had escaped with minor bruises from a lift which crashed down four floors to a basement, and then to see the new plane launched by the city’s flying club and to interview the club’s president. It took a long time to get the plane into the air, the club president was very loquacious, and when Hugh was sent afterwards into the suburb of Natley to see a man who claimed to have the biggest collection of outdoor cacti in the country, he felt inclined to take Michael’s advice and send a telegram.

  “Variety,” Lane said, showing his yellow teeth. “It’s the spice of life, young feller me lad. Later on you’ll thank me, you’ll say he was a tough old so and so but he gave me an education in journalism.”

  “Shall I?” Hugh snatched the piece of paper with the cacti grower’s address on it.

  Lane rolled a cigar round in his mouth and said in mock-affected tones, “I say, I’m awfully sorry you’re missing the end of that trial. I’m sure Newton’s making a perfectly
magnificent closing speech. Hard cheese, young Bennett.”

  So it was that Hugh Bennett did not hear what was said afterwards to have been one of Magnus Newton’s best performances, or Eustace Hardy’s beautifully clear demonstration of the two boys’ guilt, or Mr. Justice Beckles’s tedious but impeccable summing up. The cacti grower also was expansive, pressing upon him a variety of seeds, launching into great bursts of speech about his favourite plants and finally, when Hugh had made far more notes than he would ever use and thought his tribulation over, revealing a whole further group of succulents sprouting away in a roof garden. It was just four o’clock when he got back to the city, nearly ten past when he saw the crowd outside the Assize Court and heard the noise that they were making, a noise that was not precisely cheering but had some unidentifiable quality about it, a sort of baying pleasure. He got off his tram and began to run.

  A woman with a shopping basket appeared in his path. Swerving to avoid her, he struck the basket. Vegetables shot out into the road. “Sorry,” he gasped, “sorry, sorry,” as he knelt down and threw them in again, all the time feeling the people swaying like a cloud of bees, feeling a desperately important need to be with them, asking questions that nobody seemed to answer. At last the potatoes and endless sprouts, the apples and biscuits were back in the basket and he was moving in a jog-trot walk towards the crowd and was positively in it, saying, “What has happened? What’s the verdict?” and getting only a confused roar for reply. He clutched the arm of a woman so fat that she looked as though breasts, stomach, buttocks, were separate inflated balloons. His fingers sunk into the arm, he felt that he might by mistake prick her so that she collapsed with a sigh. Instead she turned, swung the other arm, and slapped his face with a meaty palm, crying “Take your hands off me.”