A Tangled Web

by Nicholas Blake

  “Oh, thank you, sir. We’ll pay it back when—when Hugo is free. He was going to get a job, and marry me. They won’t convict him now, will they?”

  Her ingenuousness was heart-rending. Bruce felt again that he was in the presence of a being from a legend, from some simpler, more luminous world where right and wrong had a different meaning and legal text-books were unknown.

  “My dear child,” Uncle Percival was saying, “we’re nothing like out of the wood yet. We mustn’t live on false hopes.”

  “Hope is all I’ve had to live on ever since they took Hugo away.”

  She said it simply, unaware of her eloquence: the emotion behind her words seemed to overflow the room, and even Uncle Percival was momentarily silenced.

  “We’ll do our level best for him, Miss Bland. You can rely on that,” said Bruce.

  They discussed plans for a while, then Daisy left. Bruce would go with her to Oakhurst Jail to-morrow. When the door had closed behind her, Percival Rogers gave his nephew a quizzical glance.

  “Bowled you over all right, didn’t she, eh?”

  “She’s a remarkable girl.”

  “You look as if you’d enlisted for a Crusade, my boy. Starry-eyed.”

  “Oh nonsense!” replied Bruce testily.

  Percival Rogers took a pinch of snuff. “Two things are quite evident. Dr. Jaques is an unmitigated scoundrel; and that charming creature you’ve fallen for was lying her beautiful head off.”

  “But I thought you were satisfied that—”

  “I’m satisfied that she’ll stand by this new story at the trial. And I dare say she’ll have the same effect on the jury as she had on you. But the Judge—oho, Prentiss J. is another matter. Sourpuss Prentiss. Helen of Troy couldn’t put anything over on him.”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle, but I can’t accept your position. I find it perfectly credible that Miss Bland should have been forced into giving the evidence we heard at the Magistrates’ Court: she was misled by this man Jaques—I quite agree with what you say about him—and then intimidated by the police. They got her in a thorough muddle between them, and she mixed up the dates.”

  “Bless your innocent heart! She’s deeply in love with young Chesterman—you grant me that much?”

  “It seems obvious enough.”

  “And she’s no fool, for all her naïveté. Do you really suppose she could ever have been persuaded or bullied into giving that evidence about Chesterman’s leaving her on the sea front just at the time of the murder, if in fact they’d been at the cinema together, as she now claims? No, no, no, it won’t wash. I’ve no doubt in my own mind that Jaques told her she’d got to come clean—that it was Chesterman’s wish she should come clean. So she did. And then she realised the damage she’d done. She’d only got to glance at a newspaper yesterday to see that her young man would be putting up the cinema alibi. So she comes to us with this new story, backing him up.”

  “That’s a pretty cynical interpretation, I must say.”

  “Cynical my foot! I admire the girl. I think she’s a heroine. I know she’s been done down by that scoundrel Jaques. But all this doesn’t alter the facts.”

  “The probabilities.”

  “The simple fact that, if you really were sitting in a cinema with your young man at a time when a murder was committed, no power on earth is going to make you get up in Court and invent a story about his leaving you on the sea front and walking off in the direction where the murder took place. Miss Bland’s evidence in Court would be preposterous, insane, inconceivable, unless it was the truth.”

  “So the case is hopeless?”

  “I never said that. The case can be fought. But it’ll be decided now on a tricky point of law. Jervoise has got to argue that the evidence Miss Bland gave at the Magistrates’ Court is inadmissible. If he can convince the Judge of that, we’ve got a fair chance. If not”—Percival Rogers snapped his fingers—“good-bye to young Chesterman.”

  20. Trial and Verdict

  A Late-Autumn mist hung over the hills round Byworth in the Cotswolds. The village was silent: its stone houses seemed to be huddling closer together in the hollow where it lay, as if for warmth against the coming winter. Smoke rose up straight from the chimneys, and a few lights already showed in the windows. Walking slowly down the hill, past the dun fields which she remembered from childhood as yellow with charlock, Daisy felt like a ghost returning. The events of the last fortnight washed aimlessly to and fro across her mind, circling and jostling together like flotsam in a back-eddy: she could see no pattern or sense in them: she was a piece of driftwood herself, at the mercy of currents, pushed for the time being out of the main stream into a deadwater creek where all activity was suspended.

  And indeed there was nothing more she could do now till the trial. Seventeen days to go still. She did not know whether she wanted them to crawl or to gallop. In retrospect, the first ten days after her visit to Bruce Rogers seemed to have flicked past so quickly that her impressions of them had run together into a blur. There had been further meetings with Bruce and his uncle; a change of lodgings; visits to a new doctor; several attempts by the Press to interview her; lonely walks on the sea front at Southbourne, during which she was followed by curious gazes, neither hostile nor sympathetic but speculative and almost timid, as though she were a walking riddle, an animal of some unknown species. And then there were the journeys to see Hugo.

  Three times Bruce Rogers had taken her to Oakhurst Jail. They were memories she found difficult now to face with equanimity. Her passionate longing to see Hugo had become an obsession with her during the period after they had parted. Bruce had tried to prepare her mind for the physical conditions she would meet—the cheerless room, the grille, the warder attentive in the background. But it was not these which, looking back on it now, Daisy was desolated to remember. Something in Hugo himself had come between them far more effectively than any grille: he had looked at her and spoken to her tenderly; but each time she visited him she received a stronger impression, accentuated by his prison pallor, that he was living in a world which she could not, with all her love for him, enter. He was like a mortally sick man who was training himself to renounce all claims upon her, upon life itself. He talked in a quiet, subdued way, as a sick child might or an old man, seldom taking his eyes from her face, sitting very still and self-contained. His attitude towards the coming trial seemed quite fatalistic; and had Bruce not expressed to her several times his admiration for Hugo’s courage, Daisy might have interpreted this fatalism as a cowardly resignation. She soon found out that Hugo wanted her to talk about herself, the coming baby, what she had been doing, the projected visit to her mother and the memories of her own childhood which this evoked—anything rather than the trial.

  On one occasion only did he show a flash of his old spirit. Daisy had received a letter from Jacko, inquiring most solicitously whether he could do anything to help Hugo and expressing mild sorrow that she had not got in touch with him since leaving London. When she told Hugo about this, his face darkened and he said, “If I had Jacko alone for a few minutes, I’d give them something to hang me for.” The chill anger in his voice startled Daisy, who was not yet altogether aware of the vileness of Jacko’s conduct. She began to defend him, but Hugo cut in harshly, “Don’t talk to me about that—He put the police on to me. He helped them find the revolver. He bounced you into telling that story in Court. I suppose he never even gave you my letter.”

  “Your letter, darling? Did you write me one? I felt sure you would.”

  “I wrote to say I’d marry you—asking you to make the arrangements—just as soon as we could. The little—must have been laughing up his sleeve all right, knowing he’d got the police lined up outside waiting to nab me.”

  “But he could have given me the letter. It’d have made such a difference.” It was Jacko’s wanton destroying of the letter, not his betrayal of Hugo, which struck Daisy for a moment as the worst infamy of all.

  “He gave you no me
ssage at all from me that day?”

  “He said you wanted me to—” Daisy glanced uneasily round towards the warder—“to give that evidence in Court. Otherwise I’d never have—”

  “I know, love. Rogers has told me about that. You mustn’t ever blame yourself for it. Promise?” He said it so kindly that her heart overflowed with gratitude and she could not speak. Yet there was something remote, abstracted in his kindness which made him a stranger: the old Hugo, selfish sometimes and brusque and thoughtless, would have been preferable. When Daisy’s mother wrote, asking her to come home, Hugo thoroughly approved the plan.

  “But then I shan’t be able to come and see you any more,” Daisy had said.

  “Well, it isn’t very cosy here, is it? What do we get out of it? Two people trying to keep up a conversation through a grille.”

  His reply had hurt her bitterly at the time, though she knew she must make allowances for him in his present state. But to-day, walking down the hill towards her mother’s cottage, Daisy felt light breaking in on her: Hugo had only been trying to spare her: the withdrawal which she had sensed in him was deliberate—he would not let her share his own suffering or his forebodings, would say nothing to increase her agitation. It was almost as if he had been gently loosening the bonds between them, doing what he could to soften for her the ordeal of their final parting.

  “You’re a good man, my Hugo,” she muttered. “You couldn’t have done it. You didn’t do it, did you, my dear?”

  She often asked him in her mind this question which she had never dared ask to his face, and the lover in her mind always answered No. Not even to her mother would she admit the possibility that Hugo might be guilty.

  Mrs. Bland had turned out a good refuge in trouble. She offered no recriminations, received Daisy as if she had only left home a month or two ago, and was evidently looking forward to the baby’s arrival. Daisy was not to know it, but her featuring in the Press had on the whole proved no disadvantage to her mother. The whole village had been agog about it, of course: but Daisy had always been popular with the villagers, never committing the one sin they considered unforgivable—that of becoming stuck-up. The Chesterman case provided them with drama, a source of endless gossip, and a vicarious sense of being front-page news themselves. Mrs. Bland, so the general opinion went, was taking it very well: she was neither defiant about it, nor cowed. And when Daisy arrived, looking so sad and frightened and appealing, so entirely different from what might have been expected of a girl who’d gone wrong in the big city, it silenced all but the most censorious gossips. That she was going to bear a child out of wedlock meant little in a community where such events were quite traditional. For the first few days, she kept herself to herself, which was considered right and proper under the circumstances. Then one or two neighbours, compelled by ungovernable curiosity, dropped in at Mrs. Bland’s cottage. Once the ball had been set rolling thus, any fears Daisy might have had that she would be treated as an outcast were set at rest: her demeanour satisfied the sternest critics, while her predicament—however much the village may have gloated over it privately—gained her much kindness from those she met.

  Daisy was determined to work her passage. She spent the mornings, while her mother was out at work, dusting and polishing in the cottage: she gave her two youngest brothers midday dinner when they returned from school: and in the afternoons she took her little solitary walks, for Hugo had told her she must have plenty of exercise, and during these walks she could think about him without interruption. She walked slowly and carefully, since her most immediate fear was lest the baby, due to be born only a week after the trial opened, should arrive prematurely and prevent her from giving evidence. Every day the neighbours saw the girl stepping with her heavy, somnambulist gait along the road which led out of the village: the older ones recalled how, as a child, she had skipped along that road with her companions, bringing back armfuls of cowslips in the summer, returning in autumn wreathed with berries and the cobweb trails of Old-Man’s-Beard. She had been a wonderful pretty child, they remembered—a proper little Queen of the May.

  And for Daisy, too, these days meant a return to childhood. Her mother, with a countrywoman’s instinctive tact and emotional reticence, never referred to Daisy’s life in London or to Hugo. They talked instead about the remoter past, about village affairs—anything but what was most on Daisy’s mind. Mrs. Bland, having made it up with her daughter, was determined to put the cause of their break out of her mind for ever: her manner implied that Daisy Had learnt her lesson and finished with Hugo, and the girl did not mind keeping up this polite fiction; for she sensed it as part of a healing process, which was strengthening her for the ordeal to come—the two ordeals.

  On the afternoon before the trial, Bruce Rogers met Daisy at the station at Oakhurst and drove her to a small hotel on the outskirts of the old country town. A sleepy, genteel place normally, Oakhurst presented to-day an indefinable atmosphere of excitement, anticipation: people lingered in the main street, talking, forming groups which dispersed only with reluctance, as it might be on the eve of some civil disturbance; and there was a noticeable influx of strangers into the town.

  All this mounting tension seemed to tower up like a wave and break into absolute silence when, the next morning, after Counsel for the Crown had outlined the case against Chesterman, Daisy Bland was at once called to the witness-box. Her evidence, owing to her delicate state of health, would be taken out of order. The purity of her features, the beauty and transparent candour which emanated from them, strangely contrasting with the girl’s blurting, countrified accents as she took the oath, made an extraordinary impression in the Court. It often happens in criminal trials that the prisoner, after the spectators’ first curiosity about his appearance is satisfied, becomes almost a lay figure, all attention being concentrated upon the Counsel who are dressing him in the robes of guilt or innocence. But Daisy’s appearance had the effect of turning attention as much upon Hugo as upon herself. It was not only the look of love which passed visibly between them when she stood up in the box: Bruce Rogers could feel a, stir amongst the spectators, could almost hear them thinking “How could a girl like that get mixed up with a burglar, a murderer?” He saw the jurymen’s eyes move back to the figure in the dock, as if seeking there an answer to the riddle: and he guessed that Hugo, looking so calm, so manly, so gentlemanly indeed, was appearing to them in a new light—a light reflected, as it were, from Daisy.

  But, if the girl’s beauty made a strong impression, her first words rocked the Court to its foundations. Mr. Brownleigh, leading for the Crown, had made it quite clear in his opening remarks that the prosecution’s case would rest very largely upon Daisy Bland’s statement. He had even asked the Court to extend towards her the greatest possible indulgence, in view of her condition and her relationship with the prisoner. So her reply to his first question gave the unfortunate Mr. Brownleigh the sensation of walking through a familiar door and finding a completely unknown room beyond it. Gripping the edge of the witness-box, and speaking in her clearest, most forthright tones, Daisy said:

  “I’m sorry, sir. I can say nothing. I can’t give evidence. I don’t know anything about the murder at all.”

  The whole Court buzzed and rustled, and there was a restless flashing everywhere, like the stir of silver-poplar leaves in a wind, as faces turned this way and that to observe the Judge, the prisoner, Counsel, the witness, and the reactions of other spectators. Mr. Brownleigh’s mouth hung open for an instant; then he recovered self-command.

  “Are you feeling quite yourself, madam?”

  “Oh yes, sir, thank you.”

  “Do I understand that you wish to retract the statement you made in the Magistrates’ Court?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Brownleigh at once asked the Judge’s leave to examine Miss Bland on the deposition made before the magistrates. There was nothing for it but to treat her as a hostile witness, now. Point by point he took her through the depositio
n: in every case she admitted that this was what she had said, but claimed that every word she had said was untrue. Mr. Brownleigh paused; then, regarding her sternly, said:

  “Will you please tell the Court why you made this statement, which you now claim to be a complete fabrication.”

  “I was forced to make it.”

  “Are you suggesting that the police put pressure upon you?”

  “No, sir. It was Dr. Jaques. He told me that unless I made that statement, I should be charged with the murder.”

  “You believed him?”

  “Yes. I was ill. I couldn’t think straight.”

  “I suggest to you that your original statement was the truth, and you made up this new story about being at a cinema with the prisoner at the time of the murder—made it up when you realised what harm your deposition had done him.”

  “No, sir,” replied Daisy, with a sob.

  Mr. Brownleigh’s voice remained polite and dispassionate—to bully this witness would infallibly alienate the jury—while he probed all along the line of her new evidence. She could neither be shaken nor tripped up about her movements on the night of the murder: she and the prisoner had been at a cinema from 5.15 to about 7.45 o’clock: they returned to their lodgings, and went to another picture house a quarter of an hour later.

  Daisy, to the disappointment of the more ghoulish section of the spectators, maintained her composure throughout this examination. But when Mr. Brownleigh began questioning her about the visit to Southbourne with Dr. Jaques, it was evident that the girl became deeply distressed.

  “Will you tell the Court why you paid this visit?”

  “Dr. Jaques said the police would start looking for the revolver on the beach, and it must be hidden in some safer place.”

  “In fact you knew the revolver was incriminating evidence against the prisoner?”