Error of Judgment

by Roy Lewis

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I saw Mr West after admission. This stroke he’s had will kill him. He’s going fast. But he’s worried, anxious. His eyes followed me, almost pleading with me. I realised he wanted to tell me something. He did. We finally managed to communicate. It wasn’t easy but we used a method of communication that was simple enough though prolonged in application. It depends upon asking the right questions, of course.’

  ‘Right questions . . .?’

  ‘You ask the question,’ the young doctor said firmly, ‘and he replies with his eyelids. He blinks, closes an eye. Once for negative, twice for a positive. As I said, it can be a long process.’

  ‘What’s it all about?’

  ‘I think you should ask him yourself.’ The doctor’s tone was suddenly prim. ‘In here, please.’

  The room was stark, cream-painted walls dominating the iron bed and the single chair placed beside it. The man in the bed seemed smaller than Crow remembered, almost wizened. His jaw was sunken and it gave him an older appearance. Crow realised that they had removed his false teeth. He approached the bed, uncomfortably. West hadn’t moved, but from the moment they had entered the room the man’s eyes had followed them. They were a dog’s eyes, a spaniel’s eyes, sad and pleading and desperate. Crow glanced uncertainly at the doctor, who nodded. He turned to Vernon West.

  ‘You wanted to see me.’

  A blink, repeated.

  ‘What about?’

  A desperate stare. Crow looked in surprise at the doctor, then realised the problem. Ask the right questions, the doctor had said. ‘You wanted to see me about the Harland case?’

  A positive reaction from the pouched eyes.

  ‘You’ve got information to give me?’

  Yes.

  ‘About Sadruddin?’

  A violent and determined negative. Crow frowned.

  ‘Sadruddin murdered Rosemary Harland.’ A blink, firm and contemptuous in its negative intensity.

  ‘Well, if he didn’t who did?’

  The stare was fixed, unwavering. Something cold crawled down Crow’s spine, like a finger of ice, making him shiver. Vernon West’s eyes were grey and cold too, unwavering in their determination, unblinking as they waited for the next question, the right question.

  ‘You think you know who killed Rosemary Harland?’

  Two long, slow blinks.

  ‘Someone who knew her at the Polytechnic?’

  Yes. Crow felt a stirring in his veins, the motive impulse of excitement.

  ‘Student?’

  No.

  ‘Staff?’

  Yes.

  Crow stood tensely at the bedside, hesitating.

  ‘Which of the staff was it?’

  The eyes closed, in long, stubborn exasperation. Crow gritted his teeth, aware of the strained silence in the room, broken by the heavy breathing of Wilson standing just behind him. He tried again . . .

  ‘It was the rector, Dr Peters?’

  A blink. A second blink, a third, a fourth, a fifth and a desperate, frustrated continuation. If West could have moved he would have been shaking his head, in desperate vehemence. Then the lids lifted back and he was staring at Crow again and the eyes were ravaged, calling out to Crow with an old, years-old sadness. It was a sadness tinged with terror, drifting up from the past and the dust and the despair, like a prayer lost in the stars of deep space, crying up to a dark heaven, endlessly, for salvation, and peace and an end to it all. Salvation, and torment. The fires of a mediaeval hell within a man’s eyes, as he asked for absolution.

  Crow sat down slowly, staring fixedly at the eyes which held his, appealed to his, told him, opening up to him to expose the man inside, to expose the fear that screamed to come out before death took him by the throat and dragged him into eternity.

  ‘You,’ Crow said in a strangled voice. ‘It was you.’

  A glaze, a film, a clouding relief drifted like a penance over the grey eyes. A weak sigh escaped from Vernon West’s stiff, open lips. Then the eyes closed.

  Twice.

  * * *

  ‘Beautiful,’ he said, ‘beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.’ His name was Scotland, he looked like a white slug, his manner was smooth as a golfer’s swing, and he was a consultant psychiatrist at a London hospital. ‘I’m glad I was called in because he displayed one of the most complete examples of schizophrenia that I’ve ever come across.’

  ‘Displayed.’

  ‘That’s right. He died, late this afternoon. Just before I left as a matter of fact. Dear me, is that the time? I’ll have to be away if I’m to get my train. Now where were we?’

  ‘I just want to know why,’ Crow said tonelessly. Dr Scotland removed his glasses and polished them with a white handkerchief.

  ‘Well, you will know many of the circumstances of course, Inspector, but perhaps I should recap them, to put Mr West’s conduct into perspective. It all began, as you probably realise, when he was divorced by his wife. I have every reason to believe that there was no real guilt attached to him — I think he simply found life intolerable with his wife and acceded to her request to furnish evidence for divorce. He was shattered when the court placed the custody of his daughter in his wife’s hands, nevertheless, and access proved painful and difficult for him. Valerie West . . . a pretty child from her photographs.’

  ‘Then he went to Australia.’

  ‘That’s right. He took a job at a university in Queensland but his heart was very much with Valerie still. He wrote to her at length, but it would seem her mother kept her replies to a minimum by the simple expedient of withholding many of West’s communications. She wasn’t just vindictive, of course; the fact was he’d married again, and Valerie was now known as Valerie White for simplicity’s sake, and the mother found the whole thing a bit awkward to handle. Anyway, the girl got older, and at last she . . . er . . . fell in love.’

  ‘Enter Dr Antony Peters,’ Crow said quietly.

  ‘Precisely. Valerie became engaged to Peters and then, according to West, Peters wanted to break it off. West didn’t know this until later, naturally, but when he heard of his daughter’s tragic death he threw up his job in Australia and came home. He’d understood that she died accidentally, but he was shocked to discover that the coroner’s verdict was only a conventionally careful one — in fact, there was some doubt as to whether the car had stalled at all. He was no fool. He soon realised that his daughter had as good as committed suicide. She had deliberately stopped that car on the railway line to be crushed to death by the express. I understand the car was carried almost three-quarters of a mile . . .’

  ‘And that was when West decided to get Peters.’

  ‘Not exactly. You see, you must appreciate that Vernon West is a very complicated man — sorry, was — but fundamentally he was conventional, believing in the basic virtues, not addicted to violence in any way. But this traumatic experience he had gone through unbalanced him, placed him in a situation where he began to question values. All accentuated by the breakdown of his marriage and the loss of his daughter and finally the crushing blow of her death, probably self-inflicted as a result of her jilting by Peters. At some point he cracked, but not openly.

  He became obsessed with the idea of getting back at Peters — for it was Peters’s rejection of Valerie which had precipitated his daughter’s suicide.’

  Scotland paused and crossed one fat leg over another. He wore yellow socks.

  ‘He tried to discredit him, by supplying various personal details to a journal—’

  ‘I’ve seen the article. It didn’t damage Peters much.’

  ‘No. And he followed him around, of course, subordinated his own career to the pursuit of vengeance. He could easily have obtained a university post but chose to work in the colleges instead. He wanted to be near Peters. Finally he got really near to him, working in the same institution.’

  ‘And that’s when he decided to kill him.’

  ‘One can’t be sure, Inspector. Kill, perh
aps; hurt, certainly. You see, he said that placing the capsule among Peters’s other nostrums was an attempt to cause his enemy at least discomfort, a burned mouth and so on. I’m inclined to think he rationalized to me — tried to say he intended no killing, merely a mayhem, but I think his other self, his alter ego was then in control. He wanted to kill Peters all right.’

  ‘But things didn’t go as they were supposed to.’

  ‘No, they didn’t.’

  The doctor was silent for a moment, smiling thoughtfully with a soft, full-lipped smile. Crow thought of West and the answers he’d given to the police in the long tiring questioning, blink by blink. West had used his keys to get into the college that night when the lights went out and he’d entered Peters’s office to lace the poisoned capsule in the box where Peters kept his anti-histamine capsules. West had long known of Peters’s allergy and of the decongestants Peters kept in the desk; he had obtained the poison from the Chemistry Department, opened a capsule and placed the poison among the coloured anti-histamine grains. He’d found a driving glove in the drawer and worn it to prevent fingerprints appearing on the desk or box.

  But then he’d been disturbed.

  Rosemary had left her handbag in the general office and had come back to collect it after helping Sally to take Sadruddin to the storeroom upstairs and seeing her friend off the premises. She’d noticed a faint glow, torchlight, in the rector’s office and she had opened the door. And there was West, replacing the box, startled, panicky and dark-shadowed.

  She couldn’t have recognized him but the sight of a dark figure, an intruder in the room, had terrified her. She had screamed, turned and run for the stairs.

  ‘West maintained to the end,’ the doctor said, ‘that her death was accidental. He says he came out behind her and in the darkness she tripped at the top of the stairs, fell, struck her head against the rail, and broke her neck. I suppose we’ll never know, now, not really, but you always regarded it as murder, didn’t you?’

  Crow nodded.

  ‘The signs pointed to it. The removal of the body to the lift, the cleaning of the rail all we found there was a smear of blood and skin—’

  ‘He was panicky, irrational, unable to think straight. He wanted to hide her, clean the evidence away.’

  ‘Well, it confused us, made us think it was murder. There’s still the possibility, of course, that he did push her.’

  The doctor’s little eyes flickered reflectively over Crow’s face.

  ‘It’s unlikely. But you never suspected West?’

  ‘Again, we were confused, put off by his heart attacks. He’d gone home and had a mild attack in the afternoon. He told us in the hospital later that the attack had incapacitated him, but in fact it gave him no more than a shock. Perhaps it provided the trigger — made him decide to act against Peters before it was too late. So that evening he went to the Polytechnic and Rosemary died . . . but the exertion and the excitement brought on another attack. He just managed to get home before he collapsed into bed and next morning he was at the hospital. With an alibi.’

  ‘Yes . . . From my observation of him I don’t think he could have been capable of killing the girl deliberately. His anger was directed at Peters, his vengeance motivated by the loss of the daughter he loved — but he had seen a girl die, another man’s daughter, and he was at fault. The sight of her there on the stairs distressed him, frightened him, and all he could think of was to hide the body. He wrapped her cardigan around her head to prevent bloodstains appearing on the floor and he dragged her to the lift. Then he staggered home . . .’

  Dr Scotland placed podgy hands over his broad soft stomach. It rumbled slightly and he allowed an apologetic smile to drift over his rubbery lips. ‘I had to eat at the hospital,’ he explained.

  Crow rose and stood gloomily in front of the window.

  ‘West tried to implicate Peters in the girl’s death.’

  ‘Ah, well, he was still strongly motivated towards removing Peters, and I suppose he thought the law might do it for him. He was in no condition to act again, he was a sick man. Rosemary Harland was on his conscience, and Peters was still there, untouched. He must have prayed that Peters would be arrested for her death. But it wasn’t Peters who was suspected in the end, and there was the obvious distress of Mrs Lambert, whom he liked, at the arrest of the young Arab gentleman—’

  ‘Gentleman!’ Crow snorted and turned to face the doctor. ‘You should have seen him attacking a fellow student called Rhodes! The lad was lucky to get away with minor facial injuries!’

  ‘Well, these foreigners are hot-blooded, aren’t they? Still, the point is when West saw Mrs Lambert struggling and crying out, and saw Sadruddin arrested for suspected murder he was so disturbed that he stepped forward to tell the truth—’

  ‘It’s a pity his conscience hadn’t bothered him sooner.’

  ‘Perhaps, like most of us, he needed the advance of death to commit himself irrevocably to the truth.’

  The doctor reached for his coat, where it hung behind the door. Crow helped him put it on and said,

  ‘I must confess that while I was buzzing around in blind alleys there was one man who had already discovered West’s hatred of Peters.’

  ‘Ah yes, this Fanshaw fellow. I gather he had traced West’s history?’

  ‘That’s right. He was curious about West’s attempt to implicate Peters and he started looking into West’s background. The principal of his first college in England was able to tell Fanshaw about the death of West’s daughter and the remarriage and change of name by her mother. Then the connection appeared; after all, it was only hidden by a surname. And Fanshaw guessed that West hated Peters — and yet was working for him.’

  ‘I’m surprised Peters never caught the connection.’

  ‘Perhaps he did know Valerie’s original name, but why should he connect a girl from his past with the head of one of his faculties?’

  ‘I understand that Mr Fanshaw is well on the way to recovery. However, I must be away, Inspector.’ The doctor smiled benignly and extended a pudgy hand. As they shook hands his expression changed and Crow suddenly saw in the fat man’s face a humanity and a compassion that belied the clinical delight he had seemed to take in recounting West’s schizophrenia. ‘Did you read West’s eyes?’ Scotland asked softly. ‘They never changed in expression, you know; not even when he was dying. It was still there, right at the end. In his mind he could never die other than unshriven.’

  After Dr Scotland had gone Crow sat silently in the chair behind his desk. There was a report in front of him from Wilson: four students had been arrested for the attack in the alley upon Robert Fanshaw. Sadruddin had given their names quickly enough.

  Sadruddin.

  There was more than enough evidence to mount a prosecution against the student leader. The lab had reported traces of drugs in his clothing and the Woods girl would be able to testify that he had provided her and others with narcotics. Rhodes was vindictive now, and was insisting that she testify — and he himself would be pressing charges of assault. There were other charges, assault upon the police, obstruction.

  But not murder.

  Crow had been wrong there. He had seen that photograph, linked it in his mind to the attack upon Fanshaw, and against the background of the Harland enquiry he had reached the conclusion that Sadruddin was the quarry. He remembered the way Wilson had reacted angrily, in an outburst of prejudice against the foreign student. Had Crow also been guilty of leaping to a conclusion too quickly because a student, and a foreigner to boot, was an easy scapegoat? Had he sat in judgment before taking the evidence?

  He stood up, disturbed in his mind, and walked through to Wilson’s office.

  ‘I’ll see Sadruddin now.’

  Wilson rose and left the room, to bring the Arab student up to Crow’s office. Crow waited uneasily: he did not relish seeing the young man again for he remembered him as he had been — lithe, arrogant, strong and glorying in his strength. But the events of
the last few hours and days had broken him. And with Sadruddin’s collapse the student rebellion would collapse also. With Sadruddin and Rhodes lost to the extremists, Peters’s task at Burton would be rendered less difficult. It was ironic, in a sense, that Peters of all people, should derive some benefit from the whole affair.

  There was a tap on the door and Wilson entered, with Sadruddin behind him.

  ‘He’d already heard,’ Wilson said quietly. ‘Down in the cells.’

  Crow felt almost a sense of relief as Sadruddin swaggered in. The man had recovered his composure. His skin seemed to have darkened, the firmness had come back to his features and his head had come up. His eyes were clear, hard and contemptuous. He strode in arrogantly, and placed his clenched fists on the edge of Crow’s desk, leaning forward belligerently.

  ‘I heard all right. And I’m going to fix you, copper. False arrest, assault, battery, false imprisonment, the lot! I’m going to have your skin, Crow!’

  Crow stared coldly at the angry, confident face and sat down, drew the charge sheet relating to Sadruddin towards him. It was good to have a real adversary again, in this student.

  ‘You can try that, young man,’ he said, ‘after we’ve thrown the book at you!’

  And on this at least there would be no question of premature judgments.

  THE END

  INSPECTOR JOHN CROW SERIES

  Book 1: A LOVER TOO MANY

  Book 2: ERROR OF JUDGMENT

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