by Andrew Garve
“Where is he, Mary?’’
“He’s in Wandsworth at the moment, but I think he may be moved soon.’’
“I see.’’ There was another strained pause. Then I said, “Nobody seems to have known you were connected with the case. No one I’ve met, anyway. I saw Lady Dimmock, you know. She obviously had no idea.’’
“No, she wouldn’t have. I never told them my father was John Galloway. It just didn’t arise.’’
“And you didn’t have to give evidence?’’
“No—I didn’t really know anything. I desperately wanted to speak up for Daddy, but the lawyers said there was absolutely nothing I could say that would do any good and Daddy begged me to keep out of it—he was much more worried about the effect on me than he was about himself. So I stayed in the background.’’
I nodded, and silence fell again. It was difficult to talk to her, impossible to get to grips with her. She’d been living with her tragedy for a long time and she seemed to have grown a hard, protective shell.
After a moment she said, “Well, there it is, Peter—you know everything now. I’m sorry we had to break things up. You must have had a bad time, too. I often thought about you. It was nice of you to come in search of me.… And now I really think you’d better go.’’
“Why must I go?’’
“Because it’ll be easier for both of us that way.’’
“But, Mary,’’ I said, “I don’t want to leave you—I’ve only just found you again. Don’t you understand, I love you. Please, darling, try and thaw out a bit. What your father’s done doesn’t affect us—it doesn’t alter our feelings for each other. It hasn’t altered mine, anyway.’’
“It will when you’ve had time to think about it. I’ve had time.… It’s no good, Peter—we’ve got to be realistic. That’s all over and finished with—it was a different existence.’’
“I don’t accept that, Mary, not for a moment. I love you. I want to look after you. I want to help you.’’
“There’s only one way anyone can help me,’’ she said, “and that’s to prove that my father didn’t do this thing. And no one will try to do that because no one believes it.’’
It was an angle that hadn’t even occurred to me. From what I remembered of the case it had been an open-and-shut affair.
I said, “Do you believe he didn’t do it?’’
“I’m sure he didn’t do it,’’ she said.
“Why?’’
“I just know.’’
I looked at her, rather hopelessly. There never had been, I supposed, a murderer whom some devoted friend or relative hadn’t believed in.
There was a framed photograph on a table near the window. I said, “Is that your father?’’ and Mary nodded. I went over and had a look at it. It showed a man of about fifty, silvering at the temples, with a lively, sensitive face, a humorous mouth, a determined chin. It was an interesting face, a distinguished face, a face full of life and character—but none of that meant much. A murderer didn’t have to look like a thug.
I put the photograph down. “Well,’’ I said, feeling my way delicately, “I was out of the country all through the trial—I really know too little about the case to have a view.…’’ I met her cold, level gaze and I knew that I’d got to have a view. It wouldn’t be her view, I felt sure, but it would be something. “I’ll read it up,’’ I said.
“Yes, read it up. And there’s no need to study my feelings. Don’t think you have to come back, if you find you’d rather not. I shan’t expect you and I still think it would be better if you didn’t.’’
“At least,’’ I said, “you won’t disappear again?’’
“No, I won’t do that,’’ she said, softening a little.
“Can I ring you?—I couldn’t find a number for you here.’’
“The telephone’s in my landlady’s name. It’s down in the hall but I can use it. Ring if you want to.’’
She came downstairs with me. I made a note of the phone number. I tried to think of some parting word of comfort that wouldn’t sound trite but I couldn’t. She said, “Good night, Peter,’’ in a politely distant voice and I left almost like a stranger.
Chapter Four
I went straight along to the office. As it was Saturday night the building was empty except for the commissionaire at the front box and a solitary reporter on the News Desk. Conditions were just right for a bit of quiet research. I went up to the library, switched on the lights and nosed about in the metal filing cabinets till I found the cuttings of the Galloway case. There was a huge bagful of them, clipped from a dozen different newspapers. The court proceedings had been covered for the Post by a man named Wilson, an elderly reporter who always did a very thorough job, and I sorted out his pieces to read first. There were columns and columns of stuff, starting with the usual description of the Old Bailey scene and a pen picture of the prisoner in the dock and then taking in the speeches and evidence almost verbatim. I lit my pipe and began to read the Attorney General’s opening for the prosecution. It was factual and restrained and went as follows:
At about eight o’clock last Easter Sunday morning the fully clothed body of a man was found by a lock keeper floating in the River Thames above Teddington Lock. It was subsequently identified as that of Robert Shaw, aged 35, of 12A, Cavendish Road, South Croydon, a librarian employed at a public library in Streatham. There was a severe wound at the back of the head and the skull was later found to be fractured. Death, it was established, had resulted from drowning during unconsciousness and had occurred some twelve hours earlier. The police examined the banks of the river upstream, and about halfway between Teddington and the next town, Kingston, they found a pair of spectacles beside the towpath which were later identified as Shaw’s. One of the lenses was broken. The ground was too hard to have taken any clear footprints at this point but there were signs of trampling in the grass at the edge of the bank consistent with a man having been assaulted there and knocked into the river.
Following the broadcast of a news item in the one o’clock bulletin that day, a man and a girl who lived in the district—Donald Thorpe and Anita Robinson—called at Kingston police station with information. They stated that between eight and nine o’clock on the previous evening they had been walking along the towpath between Kingston and Teddington when they had overheard two men engaging in a violent quarrel aboard a boat tied up at the bank on the tow-path side of the river about three hundred yards above Teddington Lock. The police had already noticed this boat, an auxiliary motor yacht named Aurora. It was lying about two hundred yards below the point where Shaw had apparently been attacked and when seen by the police was unoccupied and locked. They proceeded to identify the owner as Francis Noel Smith, a man known to a wide public as the author John Galloway, who is now the prisoner in the dock. Later that day they called on Smith at his flat in London and interviewed him. In reply to questions he admitted that he knew Shaw and that Shaw had visited him on his boat the previous evening and that there had been a quarrel, but he said he knew nothing at all about Shaw’s death. He appeared surprised and very worried at the news. He said he would like to write out a complete statement covering his relations with the dead man, and after being cautioned he did so. He was subsequently charged with the murder of Robert Shaw.…
I broke off there to have a look at the picture of Shaw that appeared higher up on the page. It showed a rather studious type of man, with a high, prematurely-balding forehead and old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses with circular lenses that gave him an owl-like appearance. I was about to switch back to the Attorney General when my eye was caught by a headline in an earlier cutting—“Galloway’s Own Story’’—and I decided to read Galloway’s statement first. It was as follows:
My first contact with Robert Shaw occurred about the middle of February last year. I’d just got back from the Canary Islands, where I’d been holidaying for a month between books. There was a lot of accumulated correspondence waiting for me at my flat,
including a package from this man Shaw, who was a stranger to me. It contained the typed manuscript of a book-length story—The Great Adventure, by Robert Shaw—tied up with pink ribbon. Tucked under the ribbon there was a covering letter. The letter said that Shaw had always been an admirer of my work and that his greatest ambition was to write successfully himself and that he thought he had quite a lot of talent and he’d done a number of short crime stories which he hadn’t actually managed to get into print yet, but still hoped to find a home for, and meanwhile he’d written a full-length adventure story and he’d be grateful if I’d read it and let him have a detailed criticism. I didn’t much care for the tone of his letter, and as I was anxious to start work myself on a new story that I’d thought up during my voyage back from the Canaries I returned his manuscript to him without opening it, saying I was very sorry but I was too busy to read it.
I heard no more from Shaw for over a year. I spent the next few months writing my story. The idea of it was based on an actual happening reported in the newspapers about twelve months earlier, when two large liners had collided and one had sunk and there’d been talk about trying to recover the sunken liner’s automatic course indicator from a depth of 250 feet in an effort to establish responsibility for the disaster. In my story, a bunch of crook divers attempted to recover the indicator first, with the aim of exploiting it financially according to what it revealed. It was a fast-moving story with a lot of action and it turned out very well. It was bought by an American film company before publication for £8,000 and was published in England last January under the title Full Fathom Forty.
It was toward the end of March that I had another letter from Shaw. At first I could scarcely remember who he was. His letter said that he’d just finished reading my new novel Full Fathom Forty and had been astonished at the extraordinary similarity between my plot and the plot of his own unpublished story The Great Adventure, the manuscript of which he’d sent me a year ago. He would very much welcome, he said, an opportunity to meet me and discuss the matter.
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. Minor similarities between plots can occur very easily and they can lead to a lot of unpleasantness. It was the more worrying because I hadn’t the slightest idea what was actually in his manuscript. Anyway, I asked him to come and see me at my flat and to bring a copy of the manuscript with him.
As soon as he arrived I took a quick look through it. Even a superficial glance was enough to tell me there were indeed some remarkable likenesses in the two plots, though the names of places and characters and ships were all different. I asked him where he’d got his plot from and he said the main idea had come from the newspaper story that everyone had read and that he’d then done a lot of research and reading on the technical aspects and had gradually worked the plot up. I said it was an astonishing coincidence that we’d both worked it up along such similar lines. He said he supposed it was a coincidence. I said sharply that it couldn’t be anything else. He said the only other explanation he could think of was that, having paged through his manuscript a year ago, I might—quite unconsciously, of course—have absorbed something of his plot and made use of it myself. I told him I hadn’t looked at his manuscript—that I hadn’t even untied the ribbon. He said my memory must be at fault about that because the manuscript had come back to him with the ribbon tied in quite a different way from the way he’d tied it, so obviously someone had looked at it. I knew then that I was in for trouble. I wasn’t at all surprised when he went on to suggest that in the circumstances and considering how lucrative the plot had been—apparently he’d read about the film sale in a trade paper—some financial compensation was due to him. I said that was out of the question. I said I’d like to have a closer look at his manuscript and he agreed to leave it with me.
After he’d gone I read it right through and I was horrified. It was very badly written and as it stood it was quite unpublishable—but the story was the same as mine. Four or five separate incidents, as well as the general structure of the plot, were almost identical. It was hard to believe any longer that the similarity was just a coincidence. The alternative seemed to be that Shaw was a crook.
By now I was too worried to do any serious work and I thought I might as well go and stay on my boat and get on with some fitting-out jobs I was doing, until the situation had cleared up. Meanwhile I telephoned Shaw and asked him to come and see me again, this time at the boat. When he arrived I took the offensive. I said how did I know this manuscript he’d shown me was the same one he’d sent me a year earlier? How did I know he hadn’t typed it out after the publication of my story Full Fathom Forty, taking my plot and changing all the names and putting it into his own words? He looked very hurt at that and said there were plenty of people who could vouch for the fact that this was his original story, because he’d talked about it and shown it to them directly he’d got it back from me the previous year. He said did I know a thriller writer named Arthur Blundell, and I said of course I did, only he wouldn’t be of much help as a witness because he’d died a week or two ago—I’d seen his obituary in the paper. Show said that was true, but he’d been alive when he (Shaw) had sent the manuscript to him nearly a year ago, and he’d read the manuscript and sent a letter about it which Shaw would be happy to show me. I asked him if he’d got the letter with him and he said, no, it hadn’t occurred to him that I’d take this line, but he’d bring it for me to see.
He brought it along the next evening. It said that Blundell had read Shaw’s manuscript The Great Adventure with considerable interest. Blundell thought the plot was absolutely first class, the underwater incidents full of promise, and the description of the Shomura (the name Shaw had given to one of the two liners) as she lay on the bottom quite well done—but the writing as a whole was far below publishable standard. He recommended complete rewriting in a much tauter style. It was a very fair criticism and good advice. The letter was dated April 14 of the previous year—a good nine months before my own book had seen the light of day and well before the story had taken final shape even in my own mind. It proved conclusively that Shaw had not copied my book.
I offered him my apologies and said I’d like to think the whole matter over. By now I was very worried indeed. Against all common sense I could only conclude that the duplication of the two plots had been a coincidence after all. There was no other possible explanation. But I thought it most unlikely that people would believe that. They’d be much more likely to believe that I’d opened Shaw’s manuscript when he’d first sent it, and stolen his plot—and there was only my word for it that I hadn’t. I decided that things had become much too serious for me to handle any longer on my own. That night I wrote to Shaw and said that in the circumstances I was putting the whole matter in the hands of my solicitors.
The next evening, Easter Saturday, he called on me unexpectedly at the boat at about eight o’clock. His attitude was a good deal more unpleasant this time. He said there was no point in my wasting a lot of good money going to law and that I wouldn’t have a chance as any jury would be bound to decide that I’d stolen his plot. What was more, the American film company that had bought the story might well demand the return of its money when they found that the ownership was in dispute. In short, it would be much wiser and cheaper for me to settle the whole thing for half the film money, namely, £4,000. If I didn’t, he said, he would write to my publishers and the Society of Authors and the British Mystery Writers’ Guild and tell the whole story. I lost my temper, then, and told him to go to hell and practically threw him off the boat. It was about nine o’clock. He went off along the towpath toward Kingston and I didn’t see him again. Half an hour later I also left for Kingston. I picked up my car there and drove back to my flat. That is all I know.
I sat back, wondering grimly if Galloway had consulted his lawyer before making that fascinating statement, and very much doubting it. I had the impression he’d been much more concerned to get his version down quickly than to seek advice. It was a very
plausible statement, of course, even engagingly frank, but he’d made a lot of extremely damaging admissions in the course of it and I couldn’t help feeling they must have weighed heavily against him with the jury.
I relit my pipe and turned again to the prosecution case. The Attorney General had gone back now to what he called “the beginning of things.’’ The first point he brought out concerned a television appearance that Galloway had apparently made just before his departure for the Canaries. It had been a five-minute interview during which Galloway had given his views on the future of the thriller, described his habits of work, been encouraged to puff the book he’d just finished, and confessed rather ruefully that he hadn’t an idea in his head for the next one. Most authors dried up from time to time, he’d said, and that was the position he seemed to have reached. The interviewer had said brightly that perhaps some member of the public would write in and suggest something and Galloway had said heaven forbid and the interview had ended.
Next, the prosecution moved on to Galloway’s financial position at that time. It might have been thought, the Attorney General said, that in view of the large and steady sales that Galloway’s work had enjoyed for years on both sides of the Atlantic, not to mention frequent serial and film sales, he would have been a rich man—but this was far from being the case. Though his earnings had been high, his expenditures—which included the rent of a service flat in the West End, the purchase and upkeep of a fine boat, and a large outlay on ambitious holidays—had been extravagantly high, too. In addition, some heavy incometax arrears had begun to catch up with him and he’d been in need of some £7,000 to clear his debts to the Inland Revenue and the Special Commissioners, who had become pressing.
In short, the Attorney General said, the position at the time of his departure for the Canaries had been that he owed a great deal of money which he couldn’t hope to pay unless he secured another big film sale, and to be sure of doing that he’d needed an exceptionally good plot, which he hadn’t got.