Newton left this dangerous ground, and led her on to the visit to Brighton. She told him how John had pressed her to go there, how she had mentioned a guest-house in Devon, but he had insisted on Brighton and on these particular two weeks, and she had given way at last, touched by his desire to return to the place where they had spent their honeymoon.
“But the holiday was not a success.”
“No. John was very bad-tempered, and kept leaving me alone.”
That’s enough of concessions, Newton thought, and came to the evening of June the fourth. “You were worried about your husband?”
“Yes. I had not seen him since lunch. I thought he must be out with his uncle, Mr Hunton.”
“At what time did you go to bed?”
“Just before eleven o’clock. But I did not go to sleep.”
“And what time did your husband come in?”
“At twenty-five minutes to twelve.”
Newton repeated the vital time slowly. “You are quite sure of that?”
“Quite sure. I looked at my little bedside clock when he came in. And just before that I had heard the half-hour chime on a clock outside.”
“Will you tell us what happened when he came in?”
“I asked him where he had been, what he had been doing, but he seemed to be dazed and unable to reply. His breath smelt of drink.”
“Did you speak to him sharply?”
May pointed her long nose towards the jury. “I did, and why shouldn’t I? I’d suffered enough from him on this holiday, if you could call it a holiday. Then he said he must wash his hands, and I noticed there was blood on them. He went to the basin and I asked what he had been doing. He said” – she faltered, and went on. “He said, ‘Mind your own bloody business.’ Then I noticed that he had cut his thumb.”
This, Newton thought, was altogether too much of a good thing. He stopped her briskly. “And while he was washing his hands you noticed his jacket.”
“Yes, I noticed the dark stains on his jacket and I said, ‘Look, you’ve got some blood on your jacket.’”
“What was his reaction to that?”
“He snatched the jacket away from me and hung it over the back of a chair.”
“Did he seem in any way alarmed that you had noticed the blood?”
“No.”
“Did he make any attempt to clean it off? Then, or at a later time?”
“He did not.”
“He did not seem in the least disturbed, either now or later on, either that he had blood on his jacket or that you had noticed it.”
“No.”
Newton sat down, feeling that he had got his vital piece of information about the time at a rather high price. And the price was not yet fully paid, as he gloomily realised while listening to Hayley cross-examining her with regard to that conversation on divorce, eliciting from her the statement that in no circumstances would she have considered divorcing her husband. What is she really up to, Newton wondered, looking at the slim, composed figure in the witness box, does she really hate him as much as he says he hates her? And not for the first time he found himself thinking that Wilkins would have had every reason to murder his wife.
Now Hayley was moving on to the question of time. “You know that the hall porter, Shaddock, says that your husband came in at ten minutes to twelve?”
“He is mistaken.”
“When your husband came in, did you switch on the light?”
“No. I was sitting in bed, reading.”
“Very well. And you took one quick glance at the clock, I expect–”
“I looked at the time, and it was twenty-five minutes to twelve. I am quite sure of it. And my little bedside clock keeps very good time.”
Hayley made one last effort. “I suggest to you that what you heard was the clock outside striking three times not for the half-hour but the three-quarters – and so you glanced only casually at the time on your clock.”
“No.” She was perfectly composed, and quite certain. We’re over that hurdle, Newton thought. But five minutes later he was listening, appalled, to the evidence she was giving about the blood on John Wilkins’ hands.
“You said there was blood on his hands. Could you be a little more precise? Was it on both his hands?”
Calmly May said. “There was quite a lot of blood on his right hand, and I am almost sure there was some on his left.”
“On the back of his right hand, or on the palm?”
“On the back. I couldn’t see the palm.”
“And this was dried blood, his hand was not bleeding?”
“No. It was dried blood.”
Mr Justice Morland scratched away with his pen for some seconds. Hayley waited for him – a great deal of court time is occupied with this kind of waiting – and then resumed.
“Was there a handkerchief wrapped round his right thumb?”
“No, nothing at all. His thumb was not covered.”
Leaning forward a little, looking first at the jury, then at the witness, Hayley asked, “Was there a bloodstained handkerchief in his pocket?”
“No. I took a dirty handkerchief from his pocket on the following morning. There was no blood on it.”
So much for Betty Prenton’s handkerchief wrapped round his thumb, Newton thought gloomily. Given a choice of believing wife or prostitute, which would the jury choose? There could be no doubt about the answer.
“Now about this cut on the thumb. Was it a bad cut?” Hayley asked.
“Not very bad. It wasn’t bleeding.”
“It – was – not – bleeding.” Hayley measured out the words. “Could the blood on the back of his hands have come from this cut?”
Newton was on his feet, an image of red-faced puffing anger. “My lord, I must protest on two points. First, what is the value of Mrs Wilkins’ opinion here? If the cut was not bleeding when she saw it, what opportunity would she have of knowing how much it bled? I claim that she should not answer the question. If she does answer it, her answer should refer to the right hand only, since she is not sure that there was blood on the left.”
The judge listened to this contention with his head cocked like some exquisitely courteous little bird. Then he coughed slightly. “Would you find it possible to take another line of questioning that would meet Mr Newton’s objections, Mr Hayley?”
“I will try, my lord. You have said it was not a very bad cut. Would you call it a pinprick?”
“Oh no, more than that.”
“Was it a very bad, bloody gash that horrified you?”
Newton was on his feet again. “My lord, I really cannot see the force of this questioning. We already have medical evidence that this cut was – h’m – nearly two inches long, extending from the base almost to the top of the right thumb. What possible point can there be in asking Mrs Wilkins about something already factually established?”
Now Hayley gave up, feeling perhaps that he had already made his point well enough. “You are quite sure, in any case, that there was no handkerchief round your husband’s thumb, and that it was not bleeding when you saw it?”
Her demure composure unshaken, she said, “I am quite sure of that.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“Wilkins took the box wearing a dark-brown pin-stripe suit, with brown shirt and tie,” wrote the Daily Banner reporter. “He answered the questions of his counsel, Mr Magnus Newton, clearly and emphatically until he came to the events of the fatal evening…”
Clearly and emphatically: on the whole Newton was pleased with the effect Wilkins had created in the box so far, pleased with his obvious gawkish sincerity and his immediate answers. He had admitted his quarrels with May, admitted his affection for Sheila but insisted on its romantic nature, rebutted convincingly the prosecution’s half-hearted suggestion that his blackouts were convenient inventions. Had he been a juryman himself, Newton knew that he would have believed the young man’s evidence so far. But the real tests were yet to come, in the questions he was going t
o ask now and in cross-examination.
Newton looked at the jury, teetered back and forth, and put his next question very slowly. They would know his technique well enough by now to understand that he was emphasising its importance.
“You know that you left Mr Lonergan at twenty minutes to seven. What is your next recollection?”
“Waking up next morning in my bedroom at the hotel.”
“Waking-up-next-morning-in-your-bedroom-at-the-hotel,” Newton intoned, like a communicant repeating the litany. “You positively do not recall any further incident of the evening?”
“No.”
“At nine o’clock you were in a public house called the Toll Gate. You do not remember that?”
“No.”
“Later you went home with a Miss Betty Prenton. Her evidence in the box meant nothing to you?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Later still, your wife has told us of your return to the hotel, of blood on your hand and so on. Do you remember that?”
“I remember nothing.”
The judge had been moving restlessly. “Mr Newton, the witness has already said he remembers nothing of the evening after he left Mr Lonergan. I fail to see the purpose of enumerating the incidents of the evening in this way.”
“As your lordship pleases.” Newton had been about to stop these questions anyway. Wilkins’ replies were somewhat mechanical. He moved quickly to the end.
“I come now to your attitude when you were arrested. My learned friend mentioned in his opening speech that you said you would never have hurt Sheila Morton if you had been in your right mind. What did you mean by that?”
“Simply that I had had a blackout. I didn’t know what I might have done.”
“It was in no sense a confession, then?”
“No. How could I confess when I couldn’t remember?”
“Now, this is my last question. Was there any intention in your mind, when you heard of her engagement, of hurting Sheila Morton?”
Now Wilkins lifted his head and spoke loud and clear. “Before God, I never meant to hurt Sheila Morton. I loved her.”
Not so bad, Newton thought as he sat down, but we could have done without those last three words. Would Hayley exploit them at once, he wondered? But the prosecuting counsel, frowning with a countryman’s uncertainty at all this psychological stuff, was off on another tack.
“These blackouts, as you call them, I should like to know a little more about them. Am I right in thinking that – how shall I put it? – a kind of shutter comes down on your mind for a few hours. You’re absolutely blank about those hours, just can’t say what’s happened afterwards. Is that a fair statement?”
“Yes.”
“And this has happened four or five times in the past year. That must have worried you a lot, no doubt.”
“Yes, it did.” The prisoner’s voice was low.
“It would worry me, I know,” Hayley said with the hint of a man-to-man smile to the jury, a smile which indicated the absurdity of the idea that anything of the kind could happen to a man so perfectly normal as himself. “Why, it was even affecting your work, wasn’t it – mistakes creeping in here and there, very natural too.”
“I had made some mistakes, yes.”
“So, of course, you went to see your doctor.” The prisoner did not reply. “What did your doctor say when you went to see him?”
“I didn’t go to the doctor,” Wilkins said. His hands tightly gripped the rail in front of him.
Hayley affected immense surprise. “Didn’t go to the doctor. That’s very strange. Here you are, suffering from these blackouts which affect your work and upset you, yet you don’t go to see a doctor. Why not?”
Wilkins said something inaudible. The judge leaned forward, hand to ear. “I didn’t catch that. Will you please speak up?”
Wilkins spoke up, his pale face flushed, his voice unnaturally loud. “Caused through drink. I knew they were caused through drink. I didn’t want to see a doctor.”
“But in the end you did see one, didn’t you? You went to see Doctor Glenister. Why did you choose him?”
“He was recommended by my uncle.”
“Yes. But why see this Doctor Glenister instead of your own doctor? What did you expect him to do for you?” Again there was no reply. “You were afraid of what your own doctor might tell you about your state of mind, isn’t that so? You knew you had a disposition towards violence and you drank to get rid of it. Is that why you went to Doctor Glenister, and not to your own doctor?”
“No. No.” Wilkins shouted the word twice, with a violence that quite startled the spectators in the galleries, and caused the jurymen and women to scrutinise him with particular care, as though he were an insect that revealed under the magnifying-glass a venom invisible to the naked eye.
Hayley persisted. “Then why didn’t you go to see your own doctor? Why did you prefer this Doctor Glenister?”
“My uncle recommended him.”
“But why hadn’t you seen your own doctor long before that? Your wife was anxious that you should do so.”
“She put you up to this.” Now he was shouting again. “My wife put you up to it. She hates me.”
Hayley waited, looking at jury, judge, prisoner, spectators. Then he said, “We will leave the point and move on to the last question of your examination. You answered, ‘Before God, I never meant to hurt Sheila Morton. I loved her.’ Now, what were your emotions when, on that Monday late afternoon, you heard of Sheila Morton’s engagement? That must have been a shock to you, surely?”
“It was a shock.” The brief flare of violence had died. The reporter from the Daily Banner noted: “Sudden changes of mood.”
“What were your feelings towards her at that moment? Did you feel loving, angry, upset?”
“I was upset.”
“Did you feel yourself betrayed?”
“No. I – she – I did feel she shouldn’t have done it. But I loved her, I loved Sheila.”
“Do you remember going out with Mr Lonergan for a drink afterwards? Do you remember what you said to him?”
“Yes – I can’t remember clearly.” The prisoner’s confusion now was very evident.
“I will remind you of what you said to him. ‘It was a great shock to Sheila when she found out I was married. Before that she’d been pretty keen on me. Couldn’t keep her away as a matter of fact, always after me to take her out.’ Was that true?”
“We did go out.”
“How often?”
“Once.” The voice was faint.
“I will remind you of more. ‘When Sheila found out I was married she was upset, but before that there was no stopping her.’ Did you say those words?”
“I suppose so, something like them, yes.”
“Then he said that you implied that Sheila Morton had been your mistress and he told you to shut up. Is that correct?”
“More or less.”
“In fact, it was not true that you had been intimate with Sheila Morton, was it?”
“No.” The voice was low now, almost inaudible.
“It did not even approach the truth – you had been out with her only once, she had no intention of going out with you again to your knowledge, and now she was engaged to be married. Those are the facts, aren’t they?”
“I suppose so.”
“But you couldn’t bear to acknowledge those facts – you can hardly bring yourself to do so now. That is why you invented this – what shall I call it? – this fantasy, which you told to Lonergan.” There was no answer. “Do you mean to say that fantasy was invented out of love for Sheila Morton?” There was still no answer. “Or was it an expression of a lust that had turned to hatred, a fantasy that later in the evening you felt compelled to turn to a hideous sort of reality?”
John Wilkins put his head in his hands and wept. When he raised his puffed, ugly face, the tears could clearly be seen on it. He was trying to say something, but whatever it was came through as an i
narticulate gabble, from which there emerged clearly only one word, repeated over and over. The word was Love.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Mr Justice Morland began his summing up almost con-versationally, like a red-robed lecturing midget talking to a class of students, not at all like the austere juridical figure of popular imagination – or rather, perhaps one should say, of the past, for the attitude of the bench has changed almost as much as that of counsel in the past thirty years, so that a judge now appears less as a great law-giver than simply as a man fitted by training and experience to lead other men through the mazes of legal terminology, reducing the complex to an everyman simplicity.
“Just after ten o’clock on that Monday night, Miss Morton went out for a walk. Her fiancé offered to accompany her, but she said she would prefer to be alone. Counsel for the defence has tentatively suggested, in his very able final speech, that she might have gone out to keep an appointment. You may think that is intrinsically improbable, bearing in mind the facts of her father’s illness and her own recent engagement – and you may think also that there is nothing unlikely, after the strain under which she had been living for the past few hours, in her desire to be alone for a little and to take a breath of air.
“Now, at some time between ten-thirty and twelve o’clock midnight (these are the time limits suggested by the expert witnesses for the prosecution, and they were not questioned by the defence) Sheila Morton was brutally attacked and done to death on Brighton beach. Her head and face were beaten by several blows from a blunt instrument which has not been found, but may have been a large stone from the beach. Her clothing had been interfered with, but although there were signs that sexual assault had been attempted, she had not in fact been violated.
“Sheila Morton was a virgin. She was friendly in her manner, but not at all the kind of girl, you may think, to walk on a dark beach at night with a stranger. Bear in mind that she had just become engaged, and you may think that what was unlikely becomes incredible. You may think that when Sheila Morton went down from the lighted promenade to the unlighted beach it was in the company of somebody she knew and trusted. It is suggested by the prosecution that she met John Wilkins, accepted his invitation to walk by the sea, that there she resisted his attempts to make love to her, and that he killed her in a fit of passion. It is my duty to tell you that in this case there can be no question of any other verdict than that of wilful murder. The possibility that Wilkins is not competent to plead has not been raised by the defence, and no evidence has been offered in relation to it. This in spite of the fact that Wilkins can give no explanation of his movements between just after six-thirty that night and the next morning. Such brief periods of amnesia – or, as they are commonly called, blackouts – are not unknown after periods of heavy drinking, or under some mental stress, and although they might be used to suggest that the prisoner was not responsible for his actions, that suggestion has not been made by the defence. The defence is simply that he did not commit this crime.
The Colour of Murder Page 19