The End Of Solomon Grundy

by Julian Symons

  “They were wrong, yes.”

  “Now I want you to consider my next question very carefully, Superintendent. Supposing you had not been told this ridiculous story—”

  THE JUDGE “The witness has already said he thought the conclusions of this Mrs Facey were reasonable, Mr Newton.”

  MR NEWTON “If your lordship pleases. This story. Supposing you had not been told this story, would you have arrested the accused?”

  “Yes. The proof is that when he was detained at London Airport, Detective-Constable Sims telephoned me and told me that he said his wife was staying with her family. I confirmed this within a few minutes. At the time he was charged, therefore, I knew that Mrs Grundy was unharmed.”

  “But then why did you not arrest him earlier?”

  “He hadn’t tried to leave the country then.”

  “Had you told him not to do so?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “He knew very well that he was a suspect in a murder case. Such a warning was unnecessary.”

  “This was a perfectly innocent and unconcealed flight, would you agree?”

  “The most significant thing was that he booked a one way ticket.”

  “Please answer my question.”

  “He flew off at an hour’s notice. He hadn’t even told his partner.”

  “Superintendent, I must put it to you directly that you made an appalling mistake here in taking notice of local gossip, and that when you realised your error you felt you had to go on and make an arrest.”

  “No, sir. That is not correct.”

  “I ask you again, then, why you had not arrested him before.”

  “I have already explained that he had not then tried to leave the country.”

  “You still maintain that this was a panic decision on his part?”

  “I do.”

  “In spite of the open way in which he did it, in spite of his spontaneous reaction at the airport that this had arisen because of Mrs Facey?”

  “Yes, sir. I believe that he knew the net was closing on him, and that if he had got away he would not have returned voluntarily to England…” (end of transcript)

  Newton, Toby Bander and Trapsell considered the “Notice of Additional Evidence” at a gloomy conclave in the room set aside for the defence barristers. Their depression was caused chiefly by the fact that much the most damaging evidence against Grundy was that which professed to place him at Cridge Mews. Leighton was thus a far more important witness than Jellifer or Clements, and it was a pity that he had remained unshaken in cross-examination, but at least Newton had been able to convey the shadiness of Leighton and the doubtful character of his scrap metal dealings. Leighton unsupported was one thing, Leighton confirmed by a respectable witness who could have no possible motive other than a wish to see justice done quite another. It might, of course, turn out that Mrs Stenson was extremely short-sighted or that she was a lifelong enemy of Grundy’s, but these were far-fetched suppositions. Altogether, there was reason for gloom.

  “Better put your amateur detective on to it,” Toby Bander said. Trapsell laughed dolefully. Newton sat with his little legs stuck out in front of him, his head sunk in his double chin. Toby continued, “Anyway, you might see what you can find out about her.”

  “Of course. But there isn’t much time.”

  They both looked at Newton for hope, for inspiration. At last he lifted his head and spoke. “That’s her story, and we’re stuck with it. We shall just have to do the best we can.”

  It was hardly inspirational. Later Trapsell got busy, in the little time he had. He saw Grundy, who said that he had never heard of anybody named Olivia Stenson. He spoke to Dick Weldon, who had no knowledge of her. He had an inquiry, necessarily perfunctory, made in the area of Porchester Terrace. He found out that she was the daughter of a wealthy Irish peer, that stockbroker Stenson was wealthy too, and that she owned the house in which she lived. None of these discoveries was at all helpful.

  During most of the day Hardy nursed his cold, spraying his throat with a product specially prepared for him on the recommendation of his man in Harley Street, preparing himself for the vital witness. It was Stevenage, therefore, who took Tissart through his examination, although to use such a phrase gives a wrong impression for Tissart was like a machine that, once started, could be guaranteed to run as long as was required, or even longer. His act, for it could be called nothing less, was impressive, consisting as it did of an encouragement to the jury to take part with him in a sort of guessing game about handwriting identifications with the aid of his enormous albums. Newton sat watching unhappily as the jury evidently warmed to the idea that they were the favourite and extremely intelligent pupils of a benevolent schoolmaster. Slowly Tissart led them through the maze of style characteristics and personal characteristics in handwriting, spoke of the mysteries of arcades and garlands, elaborated on terminal spurs and connecting strokes, pen-lifts and hesitations, shading and alignments. And when these technical points had been disposed of he told them of his own, not to be too modest about it, infallible system of handwriting comparison, a refinement of the old process by which every handwriting specimen was broken down and given a code number in terms of its precise characteristics in slope, shading, size ratio and shape. The infallibility, Tissart readily agreed, lay in the care and delicacy of perception with which his code system was carried out. An inferior sensibility would produce an inaccurate result.

  “Do you claim that your system of giving a code number to each specimen is infallible?” Stevenage asked.

  “By no means.” Tissart smiled broadly. “There is always a possibility of human error, since we are all human beings.”

  “You have given evidence in many dozens, perhaps many hundreds of cases. Has your own evidence of identification ever been successfully queried?”

  “It has been queried, sir. Never successfully.”

  “And with your immense knowledge, and using your personal and exclusive system, will you tell us what conclusion you have reached?”

  “The conclusion I have reached, sir, is that the specimens of handwriting given me were of the same authorship.”

  “That is to say, that the accused wrote the postcard found in Miss Gresham’s flat.”

  “That is the conclusion I have reached,” Tissart said solemnly, and then smiled at the jury.

  Newton had seen juries blossoming before under the sun of Tissart’s smile. He would be able to cross-examine, but he knew from past experience that what he said was unlikely to smirch the image of infallible Tissart in the eyes of the jury. He left the cross-examination, therefore, in the hands of Toby Bander, as an indication of how little importance should be attached to the evidence of experts. It was twenty past three when Toby Bander rose, his light springy voice coming as an agreeable contrast to the ponderous weight of Newton’s attack. He followed the well-established rule that one expert may cancel out another.

  “You are familiar, of course, with Dr Wilson Harrison’s classic work on Suspect Documents?”

  Tissart bristled. “Of course.”

  “Do you agree with Dr Harrison when he says, ‘The document examiner should insist on being provided with ample specimens, written over a fair period of time, before he ventures on the expression of opinion as to the authorship of a disputed writing’?”

  Tissart smiled. “I think that Dr Harrison was referring particularly there to adolescent handwriting.”

  “Please answer my question. Do you agree with the quotation?”

  “In a general way, yes.”

  “But here you have only one document for comparison, a postcard. Are there not immense possibilities of error?”

  “When the examination is made truly scientifically, no.”

  “Dr Harrison gives a special warning, does he not, about the dangers of being too positive ‘where the handwritings being compared are limited in amount’? And he says that even one dissimilarity, no more than that, jus
t one, should make the examiner doubt the identification. What have you to say about that?”

  “I have borne that warning in mind most carefully. I always do. But I have found no dissimilarity.”

  It was no good, Toby Bander could see, the jury were against him, they positively radiated their confidence in this odious little man. He made some menacing remarks about what would be said by their own expert but as he made them he was aware that Borritt was of much lower jury-impressing calibre than Tissart. Then he sat down.

  “Olivia Stenson. I’ve never heard the name,” Marion said. “Who is she?”

  Dick stroked his nose. “Trapsell was mysterious, but I gather she’s an unexpected witness, prosecution witness that is. He wondered if we knew anything about her.”

  “There’s a villain named Stenson,” Cyprian said, in that new crime series, The Racketeers. Last week he had a man killed by an electronic device which he operated from a thousand miles away. Frizzled the man up in the middle of a desert.”

  “Shut up, Cyprian,” Gloria said. “Do you think Marion wants to hear about that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t mind.” It was forty-eight hours ago now that Marion had come back with Caroline, and the change in her was remarkable. She had had her hair done, much of the tenseness had gone out of her manner, she was prepared to talk cheerfully about life after Sol’s acquittal.

  “I just hope Sol keeps control of himself in the witness box,” she said after the children had gone to bed. She smiled at Dick and Caroline. “Something like this shows you who your friends are. I’m not very good at saying it, but I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

  “You saw about Peter Clements?” The producer had been charged with persistently importuning, and released on bail. “I must say I was surprised.”

  “He’s split up with Rex,” Dick said. “You know what a thing like that can do to someone like Peter.”

  Marion had been staying at the Weldons’, but now she returned home to sleep for the first time. It was strange to be in the bedroom without Sol, to be aware of his presence through clothes, shirts in the airing cupboard, shaving cream in the bathroom. The effect of all this unused maleness was confusing, rather as though Sol were dead and a compulsion rested on her to get rid of the things that belonged to him because they brought up recollections agonisingly painful. But that isn’t true, she said to herself as she fingered the rough cloth of a tweed jacket, it’s silly, it’s wrong to think like that. To prove how wrong it was, she got out the trousers belonging to the tweed jacket – they were baggy, like all Sol’s trousers – and pressed them. When he comes out, she told herself after she had bathed, taken a sleeping tablet and gone to bed, we shall have a really good relationship, and because she knew the importance of such a relationship she dwelt on images of Sol returning home in mid-afternoon and finding her stretched naked on the bed, of occasions when he forced her to submit to him as he had done sometimes in the past and which in imagination were not revolting as they had been in fact, but delightful. Thinking such thoughts, she fell asleep.

  Chapter Seven

  Trial, Fifth Day

  Mrs Stenson presented, there could be no doubt about it, an appearance of some elegance. She was a small thin dark woman, dressed in black coat and skirt and white blouse, and plain but expensive black shoes. She took the stand after Eustace Hardy had explained that this was an additional witness whose evidence had only just come to the notice of the prosecution, and was thought to be of importance. Mr Justice Crumble had graciously agreed to admit this evidence, and Hardy had devoted himself to eliciting Olivia Stenson’s story so that the unexpected bonus was appreciated by the jury at its full worth. He had been disturbed that morning to find his nose stuffy and his throat sore. When he first spoke after waking the words came out in a dismal frog-like croak. Application of the throat spray and of a nasal spray containing some mixture which, as he understood it, temporarily froze the mucous membranes, had an effect little short of miraculous, so that when he got to Court and Stevenage solicitously asked how he felt, Hardy was able to reply in positively ringing tones that he was much, much better. Stevenage, who would have liked the chance of handling this witness himself, said that he was delighted and reflected, not for the first time, that Hardy had remarkably speedy powers of recovery.

  There was no difficulty in handling Mrs Stenson. She was an excellent witness, positive but not dogmatic, sincere and straightforward. She was thirty-two, of independent means, divorced. On that particular September evening she had been to dinner with an old friend who lived in Cridge Street and had parked her car, as she had done before, in the Mews. There she had clearly seen a ginger-haired man ring the bell of Number 12 Cridge Mews. A woman had opened the door, the two had spoken together, the man had gone inside.

  On the following day she had gone abroad to join a party of friends in Paris, and later on a long motoring holiday in France and Italy. At the end of this holiday she stayed in Venice with some other friends. She had returned to England only ten days ago. While she was away she had hardly looked at the papers, but when she read about the trial she remembered the incident in Cridge Mews, and got in touch with Scotland Yard.

  There was not very much evidence, but every word of it was deeply damaging to Grundy, who sat in the dock glowering at the woman in the box and, as it seemed, restraining himself from shouting again only by an effort. At the end of a half-hour question and answer session Hardy sat down, content. If Grundy was acquitted, it would not be Mrs Stenson’s fault.

  It seemed useless to attack her credit. Newton made the only approach possible.

  “I understand you went to the police the day before yesterday, Mrs Stenson.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And you told them about something that you had seen on September 23rd, nearly three months ago, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, these two people you saw standing in the doorway, was there anything special about their behaviour that made you notice them?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I mean were their voices raised, did they kiss each other, did anything at all happen which made you look at them particularly?”

  “Nothing in particular.”

  “It was simply that the woman opened the door, they spoke, the man went in. Something that happens in thousands, in tens of thousands of streets in this city every night, something there was no reason at all to notice specially.” Oh dear, Toby Bander thought, the old thing is blustering about. Still he’s on a sticky wicket no doubt about that. “Then why, why, Mrs Stenson, did you notice it?”

  Mrs Stenson was not discomposed. She patted the pair of white gloves that she had brought with her. “I really can’t say. Why does one remember a particular thing and forget a dozen others? I happened to notice this, that’s the only answer I can give.”

  “Without any particular reason, none at all?”

  Newton drew himself up to the top of his little height, put his thumbs into the top of his gown. “Something absolutely commonplace, but you just happened to notice it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Very well.” He shook his head sadly, conveying his scepticism to the jury. He paused, as if quite at a loss for his next question, and then shot it at her suddenly. “I suggest, Mrs Stenson, that you were mistaken in the date you saw this.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “You had no particular reason for remembering this date—”

  “Oh, but I had.”

  “And what was that?”

  She patted the gloves again. Her eyes were brilliant, they shone like bits of glass.

  “The man I had dinner with, Charles Craigie, is the man I hope to marry. He had been away, and I hadn’t seen him for several weeks. It was an occasion for me, one I remembered.”

  Of course there would be something like that, Newton thought, there had to be something which fixed the date for her so patly. He hitched his
gown up and went on asking questions with the desperate energy of a man pushing through a ploughed field, but when he sat down ten minutes later he had made no progress at all. Mrs Stenson, eyes shining, stepped down from the box, composed and neatly elegant, as she had stepped into it. Hardy rose and said that this completed the prosecution case.

  Magnus Newton’s opening was diffuse and over-emphatic. He had been badly shaken by the sudden transformation of a case which had seemed to be moving along favourably in the direction of acquittal. During the luncheon recess he went down to talk to Grundy, and confirmed that the big man knew nothing of Mrs Stenson.

  “She couldn’t possibly have a grudge of any kind against you?”

  “How do I know? I told you I’ve never seen her before in my life. She made a mistake, that’s all.”

  “She was very positive it was you.”

  “You know the definition of positive, being mistaken at the top of your voice.”

  “So we’re left with another ginger-haired man, someone who looks like you.”

  “That seems to be right.”

  Newton controlled his irritation with difficulty.

  “You’ll be going in the box tomorrow. I want you to be careful. Just tell the story of what happened in your own way. Don’t go in for long explanations, keep to the point. And when Hardy cross-examines, keep your temper.”

  Could it be possible that there was amusement in Grundy’s eyes? “You’ve taken a lot of trouble.”

  Really, he’s insufferable, Newton thought. “I’m being paid for it.”

  “Don’t worry on my account.” Newton stared. “I mean, I don’t much mind what happens either way.”

  What could one do with such a man? Newton stumped off in something resembling a fury.

  Borritt was cadaverous and gloomy, where Tissart had been short and choleric. He did not use albums but huge sheets of paper on a roller, which he draped over a blackboard, rather like a school map. With a long ruler he then tapped the sheets, and proceeded to explain precisely why it was that Grundy could not have written the vital postcard. Borritt did not radiate the impression of utter certainty that came from Tissart. His strength lay rather in a belief that the identification of any handwriting, and indeed by extension of anything that happened at all in the world, was so difficult, and the possibilities of error so immense, that no group of reasonable people could possibly convict one of their fellows on anything but the direct evidence of their own eyes – if, indeed, such evidence itself was not susceptible of error. A conviction of human error was engraved into his long marble cheeks, finely grained with the red lines of the drinker, and perhaps it was this conviction that made him a less convincing expert than Tissart, for where all else was questionable, might not his own opinion be questioned too?