“That it gave him rope enough to hang me with,” said Cummins. “Or words to that effect.”
“Did that frighten you?” his barrister asked him.
Cummins nodded, loosening his tie for emphasis. “It did,” he said.
“Remembering where you stand and the oath you have taken, did you have anything to do with the murder of that unfortunate woman, Mrs Bettencourt?” Flowers said.
Cummins shook his head. “No, I did not.”
“Bastard,” hissed Duch from the public gallery. She turned her head again to look at Marjorie Cummins, who had leaned forwards to the very edge of her seat. Her sister, by comparison, had slumped back in hers, arms folded across her chest. She looked as if she believed Cummins could trick the jury the way he obviously had her sibling.
But now it was McClure’s turn to cross-examine the accused for the Crown.
“You were frightened by Mr Greenaway?” he asked with a doubtful frown.
Cummins nodded. “Yes,” he said.
“Will you tell the jury why you were frightened?”
“Quite naturally,” Cummins’s hand went up to his tie again. “I was frightened because Inspector Greenaway made that remark with reference to murder and hanging and well, he frightened me.” He cast another fretful glance in the DCI’s direction.
But McClure did not look convinced. “I want you to tell the jury more about why you were frightened,” he said. “Were you frightened because you told a lie?”
Cummins’s head jerked. It looked like a nod.
“Would you please speak so the jury can hear your response?”
“Yes, sir,” said Cummins.
“It is quite untrue that you met Simpson again that night,” McClure waved his copy of Simpson’s statement for emphasis. “We have his testimony that he left you at Piccadilly Circus at ten-thirty and did not see you again until the morning. You told him that you had arrived back at your barracks via the fire escape at the back of the building at three-thirty in the morning, while he was asleep. Between those hours, is there any living soul who knows what you did?”
Cummins moved from one leg to the other. A strand of hair broke loose from his carefully groomed forelock. “I saw no one else,” he said.
“The mistake you made – so you call it – was to say in your statement that you got back to Piccadilly Circus and met Simpson there at about ten pm,” McClure now read from Cummins’s statement. “A mistake that you made before you were, as you say, frightened?” The prosecutor’s eyes narrowed.
“Yes,” Cummins said. “I was very vague as to times. In my statement, all my times were probably wrong like that. It’s because of the blackout, you see, sir. I had not a watch myself, and of course, in the dark, one cannot see public clocks.”
McClure sighed. He and the jury, his expression suggested, had had enough of Cummins’s fabrications.
“Can you explain,” he stepped his questioning up a gear, “that if you had never been to Mrs Bettencourt’s flat in Wardour Street, why your fingerprints were found there? And how her neighbour, Mrs Poole, managed to identify you as the last man she saw go to Mrs Bettencourt’s room with her on that same evening?”
Cummins’s pale eyes, the mesmerist’s stare he had used so powerfully on his victims, seemed to fail him in the sepulchral Old Bailey. The expression they currently held, as they rolled around the courtroom, was that of a man going under a wave.
“I’m afraid I can’t recall,” he said. “I’d had rather a lot to drink at the time …”
Duch looked back at Marjorie Cummins’s sister. Freda Stevens stared down on her brother-in-law, a grim smile of triumph on her face.
– . –
“A sadistic sexual murder has been committed here of a ghoulish and horrible type,” Justice Asquith summed the case up for the jury while keeping his eyes on Cummins. “But of a type which is not at all uncommon. What you have to determine is whether, upon the evidence, it has been proved beyond reasonable doubt that the murderer is the man who stands in the dock. His life and liberty are in your hands. But in your hands are also the interests of society.”
– . –
The jury took only thirty-five minutes to make their deliberations. As they filed back into the courtroom, none of them looked towards the defendant.
“How do you find the accused?” asked the court clerk.
The foreman stood. “Guilty of murder,” he said.
Freda Stevens closed her eyes in relief.
The clerk turned to face Cummins. “Prisoner at the bar,” he said, “you stand convicted of murder. Have you anything to say why the court should not give you judgement of death according to the law?”
Cummins’s veneer was broken. He was ashen, shocked to the core. “I am completely innocent,” he said, struggling to keep his voice from breaking.
Freda Stevens put her arms around her sobbing sister as the court chaplain approached the Justice’s bench and placed the black cap on Asquith’s head.
“Gordon Frederick Cummins,” the Justice said, “after a fair trial, you have been found guilty, and on a charge of murder, as you know, there is only one sentence which the law permits me to pronounce, and that is that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison, and thence to a place of execution, and that you be there hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may the Lord have mercy upon your soul.”
Duch got to her feet and looked down on Greenaway’s head and the tangle of grey hairs that had sprouted on his crown since the last time they had met. She made one last scan of the rows around her, vainly searching out a cloud of white-blonde curls amid the throng. But it seemed Lil had not returned to see justice served today.
Duch sighed, cast her parting glance on Greenaway. “You done us a mitzvah, Ted,” she said.
30
GUILTY
Monday, 27 April 1942
It was Madame Arcana who dragged the Duchess back to the Old Bailey a week later. The Frenchwoman had recovered from the harrowing testimony on the fate of her former client and was glad Cummins had got what he deserved. Yet, she worried Nina was not at peace. There was a matter that still troubled her, that could only be resolved by a trip to the trial of Private Joseph Muldoon.
There were no crowds gathered about the court steps on this morning, no Miss Bracewell being forcibly removed from the railings and only two others waiting to be let into the public gallery: a middle-aged woman in a dark-blue coat and hat and a broad, battered looking man in a threadbare black suit. Entering in silence, they took up seats apart from each other. Below, the snowy-white head of Swaffer mingled with a smattering of reporters in a similarly depleted press gallery. Once more, Judge Asquith presided and G. B. McClure prosecuted. Muldoon’s defence counsel was the state-appointed Mr Stephen Lincoln.
As the jury was being sworn in, one last straggler arrived in the public gallery. While Madame’s eyes remained fixed on the dock for her first glimpse of the prisoner, Duch turned her head in time to see Bear take a seat behind them.
Madame jumped in her seat. “I knew it!” she said. “Look!” The prisoner had arrived.
“What?” Duch turned her eyes towards the swarthy serviceman. “You know him?”
Muldoon had made sure to have a decent shave and haircut before he appeared in public. Unlike Cummins before him, he did not swagger his way into the courtroom, but kept his curly head down, his expression a mix of fear and apparent bewilderment that he should find himself in such a situation.
“It’s him,” hissed Madame. “Nina’s old boyfriend, the Canadian. Mon Dieu,” she shook her head, “what an unfortunate woman she was. The Knight of Swords was determined to have her for his bride.”
She had only met him once before, in Berlemont’s with Nina, during the full flush of her former client’s infatuation. Madame had felt him to be malignant then, draining the room of life with his repertoire of crude jokes and stories, which that night had been mainly at the expense of the First French Army and expressly
for her benefit, she felt. So when she heard of a Canadian soldier called Joe being tried for the murder of a woman on Waterloo Bridge, she had to ride her hunch. The fact that he belonged to a Highland regiment sharpened her certainty – as well as the tartan Balmoral cap he had worn when she met him, all his talk that night had been of how the cowardice of the French had cost the lives of his comrades at Dunkirk.
“Things have got peculiar all of a sudden,” said Duch.
– . –
At his place in front of the witness bench, Greenaway was quietly seething. Despite the trouble he had taken to make sure Parnell received his Summons while alone, it appeared his witness had done a flit the moment it was served. The plainclothesman from Leman Street station who had done the necessary for Greenaway reported seeing Parnell being driven away from Brick Lane by Bear within ten minutes of their encounter and not one of the DCI’s snouts or fellow officers in the whole of London had seen hide nor hair since. The magician had vanished.
Greenaway was disgusted, but not altogether surprised: Parnell was a weakling hiding behind his bag of tricks, who would have found it easier to go running to Bear with his troubles than to turn up like a man today. He pondered briefly how permanently the Maestro’s misdemeanours might have been punished by his firm. Right now, that mattered little compared to losing a crucial witness. It was a bad omen.
In the press gallery, Swaffer felt it, too. He was tired – of the constant bombing of letters from Miss Bracewell, who was getting up a new petition to try to prove Cummins’s innocence; and from the events in the world that had shifted his editor’s focus far away from courtroom concerns. The raids on the historic German towns of Lübeck and Rostock that had been reciprocated last night by the bombardment of Bath and Exeter; the repercussions of the raid on Tokyo that had resulted in public beheadings of their ARP wardens. Even the bizarre story of a man sketching the ruins of St Clement Danes and finding the five farthings of “Oranges and Lemons” fame on the floor had been given more space than he had been promised for the coverage of Muldoon’s case. Swaffer wondered if the jury would share his editor’s feeling, that the successful conclusion to Cummins’s outrages had drawn a premature curtain over the activities of his fellow stocking-strangler serviceman.
Greenaway heard his name called and rose with a heavy heart. Though logic told him that the evidence stacked up high enough against Muldoon even without his gangland connections being taken into account; that his defence was a state-acquired hack who rarely roused himself to make an effort; and that no honest British jury could sympathise with such an obvious delinquent as this Canadian, Greenaway still couldn’t shake his feeling of imminent doom.
– . –
“How does the jury find the accused?” the clerk asked the foreman, seven hours later.
The man rose. Madame gripped Duch’s hand tightly.
“Not guilty,” came the reply.
“No!” Madame hissed. Duch turned her head. The woman in the blue coat sat with her hands together, rosary beads between her fingers, her face disbelieving. The man in the funeral suit buried his head in his hands and gave out a low moan. Bear got straight to his feet and made swiftly for the exit, not looking behind him.
“I don’t believe it,” Madame went on. “How could they?”
“How indeed …?” Duch said to Bear’s departing back, before turning to her friend. Muldoon had stuck stubbornly to the line that he had not been there when Margaret McArthur, or Peggy Richards, as she had introduced herself to him, fell from the bridge. Instead, he said, they had been arguing when she refused to provide the services he had already paid her three quid for. The Crown’s witness, GPO cableman Alf Simmons, had heard them, but crucially, his defence argued, never actually seen them together. Her stocking had come off as Muldoon attempted to retrieve his money from where she had hidden it, he had no idea how it wound itself around her neck, it was dark and the struggle chaotic. Finally, and most ludicrously in Duch’s opinion, he had snatched her handbag in self-defence after she hit him over the head with it. Then, he said, she must have either fallen or thrown herself off the parapet in her drunken rage – despite all the evidence Spilsbury and Greenaway had supplied to the contrary.
In all, it was a load of old pony that would not have fooled a child, let alone twelve grown men. Only, as they were dismissed, the jury didn’t look too pleased with their unanimous verdict either, just eager to get away from the whole stinking business.
“C’mon,” said Duch, catching Swaffer’s weary eye below and then Madame’s elbow. “Let’s not hang about here. Let’s go down Archer Street, talk about it there.”
– . –
On the steps outside, Muldoon stood triumphant, talking to a reporter from The News of the World. A couple of his friends from his regiment had come to greet him.
“Gee boys, it’s good to be free!” he exclaimed.
“Were you never afraid you would go down for murder, then?” the reporter asked.
“Hell no, I never worried,” Muldoon lit a cigarette, caught sight of Greenaway coming down the steps beside them and tossed the match in his direction. “Why should a guy worry when he’s innocent? Now if you’ll excuse me …” He broke free of the little group, in pursuit of his former pursuer.
Greenaway felt a hand on his back. He turned around, came face to face with the first man he had ever arrested not to have been found guilty at a court of law.
“Say, Inspector.” Muldoon fixed him with a twisted smile. “Seeing as you’re all done with it, can I take that handbag back with me now?”
– . –
When Swaffer arrived at the Entre Nous he went straight to the piano, began banging out a sombre version of ‘St James Infirmary’. He had filed his copy, all sixteen lines of it, and now he wanted to rid the whole ghastly affair from his system. But not before he had made some kind of requiem for the poor woman McArthur, who had received no justice in this world today.
“That’s all I need,” Madame put her hands up to her ears. “I think I’m going to call it a night. You coming?”
Duch shook her head. She welcomed the gloomy dirge, it matched her own mood. Part of the reason she had wanted so much to come down to the Archer Street club was to see if, just maybe, Lil might have wandered back here yet. She’d still heard nothing from her since their parting, and that weighed heavily upon her heart.
“No, I’ll stay here a bit,” she said. “I want to talk to Swaff.”
– . –
“C’mon,” Frankie got up from the table at which he, Dennis and Muldoon sat in the Hero of Waterloo and jerked his thumb towards the bar. “One more for the road.”
Muldoon stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “OK,” he said. “But let me go take a piss first.” He stumbled as he rose to his feet, the effect of all the hours of celebratory drinking taking its toll on his head as well as his bladder. The pub was packed to the rafters with servicemen and tarts and it took him a while to fight his way through them to get to the doorway that led to the downstairs lavatories. It was worth it for the relief that came when he emptied himself in one long, gushing stream, a satisfaction similar to seing the outraged look on that detective’s face outside the Old Bailey.
He still felt a bit dizzy as he made his way back up the steps. There was a woman standing at the top of them, a blonde.
“Hello, soldier,” she said, as he drew level with her. Muldoon’s jaw gaped a little as he took her in. She was stunning: flawless, creamy skin, red lips and dark-brown eyes fringed by thick lashes, her hair a shimmering cloud around her shoulders.
“Am I dreaming?” he asked her.
She chuckled. “D’you want to find out?” She motioned towards the door with her head, crooked a red-painted fingernail. Muldoon wavered for a second, thinking of his loyal friends on the other side of the wall of bodies that were clustered around the bar. Then he looked back at the blonde. They would do the same in his place, wouldn’t they? It wouldn’t take more than a few
minutes and after all he’d been through, surely he deserved it …
She smiled as he lurched towards her, got hold of his collar and tugged him out into the street, the door closing on the lights and music inside the bar, back out into the blackout. “This way,” she said, taking hold of his hand, pulling him past the front of the pub and around the corner into the little alleyway beside it, where he’d stopped with a woman once before. This time, Muldoon was too drunk to reach for his torch and suggest a different location nearby.
“Now then, soldier,” there was laughter in her voice as she pushed him up against the wall, pressed herself against him until he shut his eyes, breathed in the heady smell of violets. “You are a naughty boy,” she said.
“Oh, he’s that all right,” said a familiar voice beside them. “A right little trickster is our Joe. Thank you, love, I can take over from here.”
Muldoon opened his eyes. The girl had melted away and there instead was Parnell, holding a six-inch-long blade to his throat.
– . –
“You got any idea,” Duch asked Swaffer, “what Bear was doing there today?”
“Bear?” Swaffer’s eyes widened and a fresh torrent of ash cascaded from his cigarette. “He was there, at the trial?”
Duch nodded. “Left a bit sharpish, mind; soon as they’d given the verdict. Have you ever seen such a miserable-looking jury in your life?”
Swaffer’s mouth opened and the fag dropped into the ashtray between them. “You’ve heard about Bluebell, haven’t you?” he said.
Duch frowned, shook her head.
“Ah,” Swaffer leant forward conspiratorially, ready to tell her, when he caught sight of Ava Abraham throwing her expensive stole over the back of a seat near the stage.
“Cavé,” he said. “His wife’s just arrived.”
– . –
Greenaway stood on Waterloo Bridge, leaning against the parapet where Margaret McArthur had fallen. He stared out into the night at the searchlights criss-crossing the sky behind St Paul’s Cathedral, while below his feet the Thames roiled and hissed. On his tongue, along with the acrid sting of too many cigarettes, was the bitter taste of defeat. He had failed Margaret McArthur and the worst of it was, he knew why. Because he hadn’t played straight, because he had bent the rules to fuel his own personal vendettas and blinded himself to the dangers such corruption would bring. This was his comeuppance; he knew it and could not bear it.
Without the Moon Page 27