by Francis Iles
Dr. Bickleigh smiled inwardly. He knew where the vanadium and gold came from.
Unable, that was (proceeded Mr. Pymm), up till only a few days ago. Had the combination then suggested something to him? Yes, it had.
Dr. Bickleigh sat up alertly. This was something new.
By a curious chance, there had then occurred to Mr. Pymm’s memory a proprietary preparation which had appeared a few years ago, and which, in the course of his duties, he had had to analyse. This preparation was known as Farralite, and it was one of the many proprietary medicines designed to correct uric acid diathesis, of which samples are circulated from time to time among members of the medical profession. This particular preparation had not been a success, owing to its high cost and to the fact that it induced violent headaches, and it had not been taken up by the profession.
A sick feeling took possession of Dr. Bickleigh. They were going to disclose everything, show exactly what he had done, expose to the glare of expert examination that secret plan which he had thought so undetectable. This was disaster.
By calling on every atom of his self-control, he was able to sit impassively through the terrible evidence that followed, listening to his method being described in the minutest detail (only as a theory, of course, but the way the man spoke showed that he had not the faintest doubt of the truth of it); hearing Mr. Pymm give it as his unalterable conviction that this preparation could certainly have induced such headaches as Mrs. Bickleigh suffered from and he could think of no other drug which would; hearing Mr. Pymm quite unshaken in cross-examination; realising the prosecution’s point being made more and more dependent on proof that Dr. Bickleigh had had access to this preparation, and watching the feeling in court becoming more and more tensely crystallised on this one question; then listening to a representative of the firm in question detailing, with the ledger in front of him, that on this date, on that date, on the other date, Dr. Bickleigh had ordered supplies of Farralite, and hearing the Attorney-General asking, in tones undisguisedly triumphant, that the ledger be put in as an exhibit in the case.
There was no doubt about it. The prosecution had managed to close up a link in the chain which more than made up for the one that Madeleine had snapped. The last secret of the way he had killed Julia had been snatched from him and held up like a conjurer’s handkerchief before the jury—turned this way and that, left with no further possibility of deception. Dr. Bickleigh, turning for a moment unguardedly harassed eyes upon them, looked hastily away again as he saw how they avoided his look.
The recalling of Dr. Sourby and Sir James Clerihew to confirm Mr. Pymm’s conclusion was hardly necessary; but the prosecution would leave nothing to chance; they meant to hang him.
At last the medical aspect of the case was finished. And with it went Dr. Bickleigh’s buoyant hopes. He hadn’t a chance now.
Only one witness of any importance remained to be called— Ivy. She entered the box shrinkingly and timidly, keeping her eyes turned from her lover in the dock. Dr. Bickleigh, too depressed almost to keep up appearances, looked at her dully.
They were kind to her. Everybody on counsel’s and solicitor’s benches, almost everyone in court, knew that she had been the prisoner’s mistress, but no reference was made to the fact. It was not necessary to the prosecution’s case. But something else was. As Ivy quaveringly told her story of meeting him on the fatal afternoon, Dr. Bickleigh had a flash of terrible premonition. He saw with sudden, awful clarity, the ghastliness of a blunder he had made. In his anxiety to show Chatford’s interested maliciousness he had shown, too, Ivy’s unreliability as a witness against him. The case for the prosecution depended entirely on being able to prove that he had had time that afternoon to get back to Fairlawn between the time of his meeting the two villagers in the road and being seen by Ivy. On Ivy alone hung his chance of proving that he could not—Ivy and her evidence as to the time when she gave it to him. But now Ivy was suspect. They would press her, hint that she was wrong, hint even that she was wilfully altering that time to help her old lover.
Dr. Bickleigh listened, with face set so rigidly that the muscles of it quite ached; his jaws were clamped tightly together.
Ivy knew.
Ivy knew that he had killed Julia, that he had tried to kill Chatford and Madeleine. Dr. Bickleigh felt her knowledge instinctively and surely. Ivy knew, but—she was not going to give him away. Oh, bless the girl: bless her. When he was free, if he ever was free, he would make it up to her. She loved him in spite of what she knew he had done, loved him and still wanted to marry him. She should marry him. Next time there should be no mistake. By God, no! He owed her that, and he would pay— with Chatford’s life.
His face relaxed; the set lines of his jaw lost their hardness. His lost hope began to creep back.
The Attorney-General bunched his gown a little higher on his hip. He scratched very delicately with his forefinger at the extreme point of his nose. His junior sat up. He recognised the nervous habit which meant that his leader was going to make a very special effort.
Ivy! What a slender thread (Dr. Bickleigh felt) on which to hang his last chances of escape from the hangman’s rope. And yet the thread had held.
During the next few minutes Dr. Bickleigh watched, with mask-like face, the thread chafe, fray, and snap. With the tears streaming down her face, Ivy at last admitted to the Attorney-General’s persistence that the time had not been as she had given it. It was a quarter of an hour later. The prisoner had told her, long afterwards, that her watch must have been wrong.
It was all up.
6
WHEN HIS own counsel rose to open to the court the case for the defence, Dr. Bickleigh had no hope left at all. One by one his props had been knocked away from under him. Sir Francis was fighting a hopeless case. Dr. Bickleigh listened with complete apathy.
It was not for quite an appreciable time that it dawned on him that, if the hope was a desperate one, Sir Francis himself seemed unaccountably ignorant of the fact. He spoke with confidence. His diffident manner of cross-examination, which had led so many unsuspectingly superior witnesses to let out things which they bitterly regretted afterwards, had given place to a resolute and finely tempered indignation. Dr. Bickleigh began to understand that it was a cruel and scandalous thing that he had been put on trial at all, to answer a charge of mere possibility of opportunity and imputed motive, without a shred of real evidence to support the case against him. He was so surprised to learn that there was no real evidence against him, in spite of what had undoubtedly gone before, that his apathy began to melt.
It melted faster and faster. There was no evidence against him. That was astonishing, but it was perfectly true; Sir Francis showed it quite clearly. What he had considered the most damning facts, conclusively proved, turned out to be neither facts at all, nor proved, but one and all capable of the most innocent and far more probable explanations. Of course Dr. Bickleigh had ordered Farralite—openly, in his own name, without concealment. Why ever not? He had nothing to hide in doing so. Farralite was known to him as having obtained the most remarkable results in the complaint for which he required it for Mrs. Bickleigh, namely, excess of uric acid; that it had given rise to headaches his client neither knew nor even now believed. In any case, he had certainly not connected Mrs. Bickleigh’s headaches, which no less an authority than Sir Tamerton Foliott had agreed must be due to quite other and perfectly natural causes, with Farralite at all. Why should he? After all, one can hardly open the human brain to discover whether there is a tumour on it or not. When all the facts known to medical science point to the supposition that there is, an ordinary general practitioner must accept the verdict.
As for Ivy—well, somehow or other Sir Francis showed quite kindly but very plainly that Ivy simply did not matter one way or the other. Mrs. Chatford and Mrs. Bourne . . . Interested witnesses. . . . Very painful to have to impugn a word given in such solemn circumstances, but really his duty compelled him to . . . Ivy and Madeleine simply
did not count.
As for the rest of the case for the Crown—pure guesswork! Pure guesswork, from beginning to end; guesswork, guesswork, guesswork, guesswork, guesswork, GUESSWORK. . . .
As for the secondary charge, well really . . . Sir Francis just smiled. Obviously there was nothing else to do. The potted meat had been found to be infected. That was the whole point, was it not? Found—by the police themselves—to be infected—just as it would have been if the prisoner’s story were true—just as it would not have been if the prisoner’s story were untrue. . . . Infected—infected—infected—infected—INFECTED! There was simply no case to answer.
“I call the prisoner, Edmund Alfred Bickleigh.”
Dr. Bickleigh felt as if somebody had suddenly hit him a violent blow in the stomach.
He walked, on shaking legs, from the dock to the witness-box.
Even in his moments of highest confidence he had dreaded this ordeal: even when he had considered it only part of the whole unpleasant prelude to liberty. Occasionally he had tried to persuade himself that it would be fun to cross rapiers with no less a person than the Attorney-General himself, and beat him at his own game (and secretly he had, in spite of his fears, been sure that he would beat him), but it was only an effort to fight the remains of that strange inferiority complex of his which made him dread the battle while still not doubting the ultimate victory. Now that the ordeal had come, he felt sick and faint with terror.
But he must control himself. He must not show it. An innocent man would never show fear.
He gripped the edges of the witness-box till his knuckles showed up starkly white.
Sir Francis saw his agitation so desperately concealed and pretended to be busy for a moment with his brief, to give him time to recover. Then he smiled at him, in a perfectly charming and friendly way, and said: “Dr. Bickleigh, did you administer to your wife the dose of morphia which killed her?”
“No, I did not,” said Dr. Bickleigh indignantly; and with the words his fear fell completely away from him—so completely that he was quite astonished. Stage-fright—that’s what it must have been. Simply stage-fright. And now it had gone. Besides, he was sure now that he could detect a friendly feeling in the court towards him. They were on his side. Even the jury. It was Sir Francis and himself and the spectators and the jury and everyone against the Attorney-General, with his beastly insinuations.
Dr. Bickleigh went on to delight Sir Francis by being a perfect witness.
He had been thoroughly rehearsed, of course, as to the line his examination would take, though not as to its exact questions; the right answers fell from him one by one, delivered in just the right tone. Beforehand he had spent nerve-racked hours debating his attitude in this witness-box. If too calm and collected, might not that be construed as the brazenness of the criminal? If flustered and anxious, as a guilty conscience? Now he did not worry. The right attitude had come to him instinctively. He just knew it was the right attitude.
Even when the Attorney-General rose to cross-examine, that nauseating fear did not return. He felt no fear at all. His wits were all about him. He was going to beat the man at his own game, and it was going to be fun.
And it was fun.
The Attorney-General pressed him hard. About Madeleine, about his alibi, his opportunity of getting back to the house, his wife’s illness, the Farralite, and on top of that about the still more dubious (yes, really, the far more dubious) circumstances of the attempted murder charge, the germ-culture and all the rest of it. But Dr. Bickleigh never lost his head for a moment. Not a moment. His formidable opponent got no change out of him at all. The few points on which it was impossible to avoid being more or less equivocal were put right in cross-examination, and Dr. Bickleigh returned to the dock hard put to it not to grin derisively in the Attorney-General’s face. It would be nice to know that he had had no small part in obtaining his own acquittal. Dr. Bickleigh had seldom felt so intensely pleased with himself.
Sir Francis called his other witnesses.
Ever so many people were anxious to save Dr. Bickleigh’s neck. There were witnesses to his character, his amiability, his popularity, his affectionate relations with his wife. There were even the Crewstantons. There was Mrs. Holne, a most whole-hearted witness, to swear indignantly that the sandwiches had never been out of her sight for a single instant. There was a handwriting expert, to swear just as firmly that the prescription and its signature was a forgery, and a most obvious one too. There were expert medical, bacteriological, and pathological witnesses, all prepared confidently to contradict the expert medical, bacteriological, and pathological witnesses for the Crown (simply and solely, of course, because the latter were mistaken, not for a moment because the former disliked them); names just as eminent, too. More so really, because unbiased.
Then there were witnesses to prove Madeleine’s predilection for lies: maids from London and Devonshire, to prove hearing their mistress sobbing and howling at four o’clock in the morning at her unfortunate husband because he had been rash enough to look fondly on other women before he ever so much as knew that she herself existed. (“Yes, sobbing and ’owling— well, like a wild beast it was,” admitted a fat and motherly cook whose very appearance amounted to a certificate of character in Dr. Bickleigh’s favour. “Yes, like a wild beast. You could ’ear it all over the ’ouse. Scream, too, she would. Well, you couldn’t ’elp but ’ear it, try as you would. Made me and the other maids feel quite ashamed, it did, and that’s a fact.”) People came from Wyvern’s Cross, too (people who liked the doctor more than Madeleine, and there were plenty of them), to prove Mrs. Bourne’s malicious stories against the doctor, and the palpable lies she had told. Sir Francis offered to call sixty-five different witnesses on this point alone, till the Attorney-General had to accept the evidence as given.
But even then nothing was left to chance. Expert witnesses in yet another branch were called to prove that Madeleine was suffering from a not common but certainly not rare neurotic complaint which in this case had had its outlet in this insane retrospective jealousy, but might have taken, or still take, any other similar form. Insane? Well, in a way, really, yes: a form of mental unbalance almost amounting to insanity; not certifiable, though, of course; just on the safe side of the borderline. Giving rise to delusions? Oh, certainly. Such as that people were in love with her who were in reality nothing of the sort? Precisely; the exact kind of delusion which would occur. A lack of proportion, in fact, about everything in any way concerning herself which touched, in some respects, genuine megalomania, and meant a complete disregard of truth and fact. Conceit gone mad. Very sad, very sad. But sadder still for any unfortunate man who happened to marry one of these raving creatures. And decent parents, of course, would prevent such a daughter from marrying (oh, yes, they would know her to be unbalanced, certainly), but of course in this case . . .
Nobody mentioned Madeleine any more. A prosecution’s chief witness can never have been more effectively disposed of.
The trial dragged on.
Dr. Bickleigh’s confidence was now unshakable. He knew, just knew now, that an adverse verdict was impossible. So did Gunhill. So did Sir Francis himself. Every evening, after the expenditure of a few more thousand pounds in the day’s proceedings, they would meet in Dr. Bickleigh’s cell for a few minutes before he was taken back to the prison, rub their hands vigorously, and smile at each other. It was a foregone conclusion. Sir Francis told Dr. Bickleigh frankly that he had never been so confident of a verdict in the whole of his career before.
Even the Attorney-General’s closing speech did not shake Dr. Bickleigh’s settled optimism. The man was simply making the worst of a bad job. No one could fail to see that, not even the jury. The unfairness of allowing him to speak last, after Sir Francis, did not really matter. Dr. Bickleigh simply smiled openly at the ludicrous imputation that he had committed one murder and tried to commit two others. One simply did not do such things.
The judge was not at all bad
. Not at all bad. Dr. Bickleigh, listening critically to the summing-up, was quite prepared to admit that. On one or two points perhaps he did not emphasise as strongly as he should have done the absurdity of the suggestions of the prosecution, and it was annoying of him to appear to attach quite as much weight to the evidence (such as it could be called) against Dr. Bickleigh as in his favour. Still, on the whole he really was quite fair. But far too long. Far, far too long. Good heavens, how that measured, unemotional voice droned on and on and on. Would it never come to an end?
It did. The jury filed out to consider their verdict. Dr. Bickleigh retired from the public’s gaze.
He was very chatty with his warders during the time of waiting. They were not bad fellows at all. He must look them up when he was free, and they would all have a good laugh over this business. He told them quite plainly that a verdict of guilty was utterly out of the question. They were inclined to agree with him.
The jury was only absent a bare forty minutes.
“I told you so,” Dr. Bickleigh smiled, as they went up the stairs into the court-room together. One of the warders, with gloomy leanings, had said that under the hour in a doubtful case like this always meant an acquittal.
Dr. Bickleigh was not in the least nervous. Not even perturbed. His confidence was undiminished as he looked over the faces of the jury in a kind of proprietary way. Twelve good men and true.
Sir Francis was not even in court. Gunhill had told Dr. Bickleigh that he had an urgent engagement elsewhere, which he had left to keep as soon as the summing-up was over. To wait for the formality of the verdict, Sir Francis had felt, was a mere waste of time.