by Bruce, Leo
At last came the judge’s summing-up in cold concise terms, and then with slow and somewhat stiff dignity the jury rose to retire and consider their verdict.
Chapter XXVII
FROM the moments in which the jury filed slowly out of the Court I was convinced that there was no chance of an acquittal. Those twelve citizens, with two solid-looking women among them, would scarcely need to debate over the clear case which had been presented by the police. The brilliance of Sir William Petterie would in itself be suspect in their determination not to be hoodwinked by an obviously clever man, and a man of great culture and eloquence. They would automatically react against his persuasions. Shrewd little FitzAllen, who had contented himself with succinctly summarizing his powerful case and making no emotional appeal whatever, was far more what they wanted. For one afternoon at least he had played John Blunt, and though in fact I felt him to be the more cunning of the two great lawyers, this role would be the more likely to succeed.
Perhaps that was a more than usually solemn conscientious-looking jury, the sort of conclave of grimly pudding-like business men and women that one sees in American films being indifferent to the tearful verbiage of the hero’s lawyer. They marched slowly out without looking back at the shrunken figure of Stewart Ferrers who was being removed by his warders.
“Time for a cup of tea,” said Beef, jerking his thumb unnecessarily towards the exit.
“I should scarcely have thought there would be,” I said with attempted irony, meaning to make him feel how completely the decision had already gone against the man he was defending.
“Oh yes, there is. A lot like that will want to have a good old talk over it. Besides, they wouldn’t like to come back too quick as though they hadn’t taken the time to go into everything.”
“All right,” I said, and we left the Court to find a basement café not far away.
I do not think that at any time during the case I was more convinced than then of Stewart’s guilt, and if I was convinced, how could the jury be otherwise? But Beef sank lethargically into a chair and did not speak while we were waiting for the tea to be brought to us.
“Beef,” I said, trying to disturb this phlegmatic dullness, “are you certain he’s not guilty?”
“Yes, I’m certain,” said Beef.
“Then, good Heavens, man, why can’t you do anything? Do you realize that that jury is going to send him to the gallows as sure as fate?”
“I shouldn’t be surprised if they found him guilty,” admitted Beef.
“Well, then…”
“It’s no good,” Beef assured me, “I’ve done all I can. I found out everything there was to find out, and that’s all there is to it.”
“But don’t you realize what this means? I’ve tried to make you see how awful it will be for both of us if they hang an innocent man. Peter chose you to get the evidence to defend his brother, and it’s on your shoulders. If he’s hanged because you weren’t clever enough to get at the truth, you’ll never forgive yourself.”
“Can’t help that,” said Beef glumly.
“Besides, think of your reputation. It’s absolutely unheard of for a novelist’s detective to fail. It’ll be the first time it’s ever happened. You’ll have made a fool of yourself and me.”
“Can’t help it,” Beef said, pouring out the tea which had been brought for us. “Do you take sugar?”
At that point a new idea suddenly came to me. I can’t think why I had never thought of it before, or if I had unconsciously done so, why it had never registered.
“Do you think,” I burst out, “that Stewart may be shielding someone? After all, there were a lot of things he wouldn’t speak the truth about. Surely when a case is as desperate as this, even if the truth reflected badly on his character, he wouldn’t consider it. Perhaps he knows who did it and is deliberately sacrificing himself.”
Beef grunted. “Do you think that Stewart is the sort of man who would sacrifice himself?”
“Frankly, I don’t know what kind of a man Stewart is. He’s mystified me from the beginning. I know that I ought to be able to give a complete and snappy psychological portrait of anyone who comes into your cases, but this man defeats me.”
“Ah,” said Beef, and took a giant bite from a Bath bun.
Just then some of the witnesses in the case appeared in the doorway. Ed Wilson and Rose had had the same thought as we had. Beef flourished a tea-spoon towards them to attract their attention. They came to our table at my invitation and sat down. They were more welcome than the antique-dealer’s wife who followed them, and made straight for us.
“I was lucky to get a seat, wasn’t I?” she said, “but then I deserved it. I more than half expected you’d have two seats sent to me like the Theatre Royal do when I show their card in my window. I mean, I have helped with the case, haven’t I? Do you think he’ll get off?”
“No,” said Ed Wilson, lighting a cigarette from the stump of another.
“He must have done it,” said the antique-dealer’s wife. “I mean, it came out plain, didn’t it? Fingerprints on the knife, and everything. I haven’t read all the cases I have done for nothing, you know. Besides, you could see he was guilty.”
In spite of all this Beef remained stolid and indifferent. None of the woman’s gossip, or of the obvious concern of Ed and Rose, seemed able to disturb his calm.
Ed Wilson in particular evidently felt the genuine concern of a decent young man faced by an abnormal tragedy.
“You know,” he said, “he was always a funny fellow, and you never quite knew where you were with him. But I shouldn’t like to think of his being hanged if he didn’t do it. I didn’t like the way things went with him. That little lawyer there was clever, wasn’t he?”
“But how do you know he didn’t do it?” burst in the antique-dealer’s wife. “In my opinion he’s as guilty as he can be. I mean, who else would have had any reason to, that’s what I say.”
Rose looked very near tears. The strain of giving evidence, and seeing the man for whom she worked stand in the dock, had evidently told on her. “I think you’re all horrible,” she said, “the way you treat it as a peep-show. Even if he did do it, it’s nothing to come and stare at. And Sergeant Beef said he didn’t do it, and he ought to know.”
Even that piece of flattery failed to rouse Beef to words.
“Ought to know, I daresay,” went on the more garrulous woman. “But if he knows so much, why can’t he find out who did do it? That’s supposed to be a detective’s job.”
Ed Wilson made a gesture to silence her, for at that moment Peter and Sheila Benson came into the café together. They saw us and took a distant table, but I felt it my duty to go across and try to give them some encouragement. They asked me to sit down, and for the first time I was aware that on Peter Ferrers also the strain had told. He looked as though he had had a number of sleepless nights, and Sheila Benson was uncharacteristically quiet and unhappy. She only made one remark. “What a dreadful place a court is,” she said feelingly, with a glance at Ferrers.
“I know,” I said, “I’ve been sympathizing with you both all through the trial. But don’t lose hope yet. One can’t foresee the verdict.”
“He will be found guilty,” said Peter grimly.
And after a few minutes in which I tried to produce a few words of brightness and enlivenment, he looked at his watch and said that the jury had been out for an hour and that we had better get back.
As it transpired, he was perfectly right, for we hadn’t been in our places more than ten minutes when the usher appeared.
Beef spoke at last. “Now for it,” he whispered in my ear, and I realized that he was more deeply concerned than I had believed in the verdict which was to be given.
I knew that the correct thing for me to do was to study those jurymen’s faces and try to discover in them some indication of what their verdict was to be. And I was relieved to find that they respected tradition sufficiently to show nothing. They sat comfo
rtably in their places as though prepared for at least another hour of self-importance, and for a few minutes of real conspicuousness. They had been given, I reflected, for once in their lives, a chance to express themselves in a manner so profound and final that Dante or Shakespeare himself might have envied them. With one word they were to sway, not vaguely or remotely the emotions and hearts of an incalculably small number of their fellows, but the actual destiny of a man. Their clay, their paint, their notes, their words, were a human life.
The foreman, a little sparrow-like man with a few long hairs streaked obliquely over a dough-coloured head, rose when summoned and admitted in an almost falsetto voice that he and his fellow jurymen were agreed. He kept his eyes fixed on the judge while the next question was put to him, and in answer to it piped “Guilty” much more loudly than was necessary.
There was complete silence. Nobody fainted, nobody wept, nobody rose from his place. The prisoner glanced once towards the jury and then let his head sink forward. The whole mass of people in that court-room were either too appalled, or perhaps too pleased with their own prescience, to move or speak.
The judge cleared his throat to pronounce sentence, and we walked out into the open air after having heard that Stewart was to be hanged.
Chapter XXVIII
I DID not see Beef for some days after the trial, as I had left London. The verdict on that last day had shaken me so that although I knew that I should be unable to work, yet I had to get away from the case for a while. It was with something of a jolt that I realized how facile had been my philosophy during this and previous cases. Everything will come right in the end, I had seemed to say to myself, and however unsuccessful Beef’s investigations might look at any particular moment, and however agitated I might be over his waste of time, I had felt all through that by some miraculous discovery Beef would be able to produce sufficient evidence on the day to exonerate Stewart and round off the book satisfactorily. But nothing of the sort had happened, and I saw for the first time how foolish it was to suppose that it could have done.
When, some three or four days later, a letter arrived from Beef, I opened it sceptically. Beef would not be likely to write unless there was some new “development,” and I had lost faith in developments. I felt bitterly that the continued optimism of the Sergeant was now a very shabby cloak to hide his inefficiency.
The letter was written from his house in Lilac Crescent and dated the previous day.
DEAR T. (it said),
I had an interview yesterday with Sir William Petterie. I might say that he realizes better than some others I could mention the value of my work in this case, and he has decided to appeal. I still feel that Justice may win. I think you ought to have been here to have come to that interview as it may turn out to be an important part of the case.
Yours truly,
W. BEEF.
What case? I said to myself, studying his large scrawl. There was no case. So far as I was concerned, the past weeks had been a ghastly waste of time, for quite obviously there was no story for me to write. One couldn’t write a detective novel in which one’s pet detective had believed the wrong man to be innocent, and failed to find the guilty party.
I had no hopes whatever of the appeal, and did not take the trouble to find out on what grounds it was based. Petterie’s only hope, I felt, would be if there had been some technical breach, or if the judge could be thought to have summed up unfairly. As Seebright’s summary had been a dispassionate and concise affair, and the trial had been conducted with (as it seemed to me) exemplary forbearance, I could not build much hope on this. No, I had to face it. Beef had failed, and I had failed with him. I should have to look round now for some other private investigator whose exploits would furnish me with material for novels, and who would not let me down in this humiliating way. I regretted Beef because his personality enabled me to exercise that facetiousness which I believe is my forte, but I realized that I must cut my losses on him.
I had heard stories of an elderly clergyman in Worcestershire who had done some remarkable work, and seemed to have a personality fitted to this kind of fiction. He apparently never left his booklined study, but, puffing gently at his meerschaum pipe, elucidated problems which were baffling the police of two continents. Perhaps, I thought, I could constitute myself his Boswell, if someone had not already found him. Belonging to a highly specialized profession—that of a private investigator’s private crime writer—I realized that I might have some difficulty in finding another situation for myself. But it was obviously quite useless to continue with Beef. Stewart would be hanged, and when his corpse was shuffled underground, with it would be buried the last shreds of Sergeant Beefs reputation.
However, in the meantime I needed rest. I gave no thought to all the queer and rather sordid people we had met in Sydenham, did not allow myself to wonder whether Mrs. Duncan had purchased her public-house, or whether the antique-dealer’s wife had found other suspicious characters to follow, dismissed from my nostrils the stench of old Fryer’s yard, and the musty odour of the Cypresses, gave no thought to the two ill-assorted pairs of lovers: Ed Wilson and his quiet pale wife, and Peter Ferrers with the doctor’s talkative widow; did not ask if Freda had found herself another situation in which to exercise her talents for invective and breaking dishes; forgot the sinister face of Wakefield, and the narrow eyes and tight lips of Wilkinson, reverted no more to the young mechanic as a suspect, or the shadowy personality of Oppenstein, dismissed from my mind all those things which had once seemed clues; swordstick and key, bloodstain and paper stolen from Peter’s room; turned, in other words, from all the mass of misery and ugliness which had made up the Sydenham murder case, and settled myself into the Norfolk countryside.
I used to get up at dawn and look for mushrooms, finding in that simpler search more satisfaction than I had known in the pursuit of evidence.
When the morning papers eventually gave news of the appeal, it seemed unreal to me, and by the time I came to read that the appeal had failed I was reconciled to the conviction that Stewart was guilty, and that he would be hanged. I was sorry for Beef, but like him I could do no more.
One morning, as I returned to the cottage in which I was staying, my landlady met me at the door and handed me a telegram.
“I hope there’s no bad news,” she said, coming from a class to whom telegrams are still fateful and sinister things. I read it with irritation.
MUST WRITE HOME SECRETARY URGENTLY NEED YOUR HELP PLEASE RETURN TO LONDON BEEF.
I turned this over in my hand for five minutes, until I was told that lunch was ready, and while I ate some excellent cold roast chicken I debated sourly over it. Why should I give up the peace and pleasure of this quiet and level countryside to return to London with no better object than to help Beef compose a letter which would in any case do no good now? There was nothing more for me to get from this case, and I only wanted to finish my holiday and start work afresh in new surroundings. I decided that I would not be called back to London in so forlorn a matter, and wired back that afternoon:
USELESS TO WRITE HOME SECRETARY CANNOT LEAVE MUCH NEEDED HOLIDAY ADVISE YOU ABANDON DETECTION AND PURCHASE PUBLIC HOUSE TOWNSEND.
Just before tea-time the postman, with an aggrieved look as though he took it as unfair that he should have to journey twice in one day to my cottage, handed me another telegram which I read with a sigh.
PREFER CUSTOMER’S SIDE OF COUNTER ARRIVE 8:10 BEEF.
Well, if he was nothing else, the Sergeant was tenacious. It seemed that he was not going to admit having blundered in this case until Stewart was actually hanged.
I felt perhaps slightly flattered at his mountain to Mohammed tactics, but at the same time realized again how little experienced in life he must be. First to think that a letter from him to the Home Secretary could help Stewart, and second, to need me to write it for him. However, I went down to the station to meet him.
He looked fitter and more cheerful, I thought, than when
I had seen him during the trial, and it was the old Beef who, as he gripped my hand, asked what the darts were like at the local.
“I thought you’d come to get a letter written,” I pointed out severely.
“Plenty of time for that tomorrow,” said Beef. “He’s not being hanged for a week, and I couldn’t give my mind to anything of that sort after being shut up in a train all these hours. You and I will see the two best in the house. I hope you play better than you did in London. If you’d only keep them on the board it would be something.”
That was all I could get out of him before we sat under the low beams of the Anglian Maid, and the rest of that evening was spent as Beef wished. I must own that he became very popular with the local customers whom he flattered by saying that they threw as pretty a dart as he had seen outside London.
But no sooner had we had breakfast next morning than he asked for pen and paper, and sat facing me across the little table.
“Now,” he said, “you write, and I’ll tell you what to say.”
Out of charity, I suppose, out of sheer kind-heartedness for old Beef in these moments of his failure, I wrote the letter he asked, realizing that with every word that went down on paper how useless it would be. His clumsy flattery was my only reward.
“You don’t half know how to put words together,” he said before he thrust out a great length of tongue to lick the envelope. “He’ll have to take some notice of that, won’t he?”
And because I felt too dispirited by his optimism to argue, I said, “I suppose so,” and left Beef to post our joint effort.
Chapter XXIX
BUT when the day for the execution of Stewart Ferrers approached I found that I could not remain placidly in the country. I grew nervous and irritable, and the kindly little Norfolk woman who was my landlady asked me more than once if I “wasn’t well.” It began to seem to me that I myself had been responsible for this approaching hanging of an innocent man. If, I argued miserably as I lay awake at night, a more competent detective than Beef had been called in, surely he would have found the evidence that would have cleared Stewart. Beef had discovered just enough to be sure that he had not done it, and not enough to be able to prove it. And then, I thought, the calling in of Beef had been my fault. For if I had not taken him up while he was still a village policeman and turned his lucky solutions into complicated triumphs, he would never have had enough reputation for Peter Ferrers to have employed him.