‘But this was something you treasured a great deal and must have very much wanted to get back?’
‘I didn’t want to make a fuss.’
‘I see. I think the jury will understand.’
‘I’m not the traitor,’ shouted Elwick.
Peace removed his right leg from the seat and stood upright. ‘Let us move on in time. Did you at any time receive special orders from Detective Chief Inspector Barnard concerning what you were to do if you were approached by anyone connected with the drug case?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you remember what those orders were?’
‘To report anything to him.’
‘And did you report to him the telephone call that suggested the meeting at The Mermaid?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve explained why.’
‘I’d like you to try to make things a little clearer.’
‘I knew I was suspected and I could see which way the wind was blowing. This telephone call came out of the blue and I reckoned if it was genuine it could be the chance for me to clear myself and prove I wasn’t the informer.’
‘But surely whatever you might have been able to do could have been done very much better and more efficiently by Inspector Barnard?’
‘Maybe. If he’d wanted to.’
‘Are you suggesting Mr Barnard would not have followed up evidence which might point to your innocence?’
‘He hated my guts,’ said Elwick wildly.
‘You are accusing him of something worse than mere hate.’
‘Someone’s got it right in for me.’
Peace’s quiet, calm manner was in sharp and damaging contrast to Elwick’s rough anger. ‘You went to The Mermaid and had a drink with a man you met there and he passed you an envelope?’
‘He tried to.’
‘Did you know what was in that envelope?’
‘He said there was five hundred quid.’
‘Did he say why he was offering you this money?’
‘He wanted information on how the inquiries were going.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I told him where he could put the money.’
‘Did you later report this attempt to bribe you?’
‘Of course not. People were already looking on me as the traitor. If I’d told Mr Barnard I’d been offered a five hundred quid bribe, he’d have called it one more bit of proof that I was the traitor.’
‘That’s not exactly logical.’
‘You try being in my position and see how logical things get.’
‘The following morning, Mr Barnard questioned you about this meeting and very shortly afterwards you telephoned Miss Keelton and arranged a meeting. Were you panicking?’
‘Yes, I was panicking, but not because of what you’d like to think. When Mr Barnard told me what had gone on, I suddenly woke up and saw they were about to frame me, once and for all. I reckoned they’d maybe stowed some money away to get me. When I found this money I had to do something with it immediately because if it was found on me I wasn’t going to stand a sick dog’s chance.’
‘Your idea of doing something about it was to hand it on to a young, innocent girl?’
‘It’s easy for you to stand there and twist everything and talk about being logical, but I didn’t have the time. Someone was after me, and after me hard and fast. If that money was found on me, I was nailed ten feet high. I had to get rid of it. Joanna was the only person left in the world who’d any faith in me. I didn’t think about what I was doing to her. I just asked for help and she gave it to me without arguing.’
‘You sound almost proud of having dragged her into this very sordid affair?’
Elwick’s face twisted into a savage expression as he struggled to contain his temper.
***
It was the evening and the lights had been switched on.
The judge spoke in an unemotional voice. ‘Robert Elwick, you have been found guilty of a crime that bears a particular odium. A policeman holds a position of trust and when he betrays that trust his offence is the greater. You must suffer a severe penalty and I sentence you to five years imprisonment.’
‘I’m innocent,’ Elwick shouted.
In one of the witness seats, Joanna began to sob.
CHAPTER XIII
‘Five years,’ murmured Mary, as she sat on the settee in the sitting-room.
Keelton said nothing.
‘Five years,’ she repeated. ‘John, can’t you tell me why you … ’ She stopped. ‘Frederick telephoned a short time before you got in,’ she said dully.
‘What about?’
‘He wanted to speak to you. He said he’d ring again.’
Turnbell was being optimistic, saying that because the actual case had been dealt with efficiently and quickly, the damage to the force’s reputation would not be so great as to be fatal to the force. Grimly, he wondered how Turnbell would feel if the other knew the full truth.
Mary lit a cigarette. He went round the end of the settee, sat down by her side, and took hold of her hand.
‘Did you have to do it this way?’ she suddenly said bitterly. ‘Did you have to wreck Joanna’s life and turn her right against you?’
‘She’ll get over it.’
‘John, are you mad, to be able to say a thing like that? Haven’t you yet realised what you’ve done to her?’ She snatched her hand free. ‘You’ve always claimed to believe in justice and I used to respect you for it. Only I didn’t understand what you meant by justice. Your justice is without humanity.’
‘If a man’s guilty, he’s got to be tried and punished.’
‘But justice demands justice to everyone connected with the case, a human justice. What you were really after was a trial and you didn’t care what you had to do to get it. I hope you’re satisfied now and can forget what it means to Joanna to have discovered her own father would betray her without a second’s thought.’
‘She had the money in her handbag.’
‘Which you only learned about in the strictest confidence.’
He spoke wearily. ‘We’ve been over all this before.’
‘So am I supposed to forget it?’
‘Mary, I … ’ He stopped.
‘You just sit there,’ she said, in a voice that trembled, ‘not beginning to understand what you’ve done.’
‘Don’t I?’
‘Joanna’s almost made up her mind to leave home.’ Mary shivered. ‘John, doesn’t even that get through to you? She can’t bear to live in the same house as you.’
He abruptly stood up. ‘I’m going out.’
‘Where?’
‘For a walk.’
‘Supper’s ready.’
‘I’ll eat when I get back.’
‘All right.’
They were rapidly becoming strangers, he thought: strangers who could only disagree with each other. She was tom by the conflict between her love for him and her love for Joanna. He knew how she must be suffering and it made his mind ache, but he could do nothing. For the moment, he just had to watch her suffer.
***
On Thursday morning, Keelton entered the police station at nine-five. The sergeant behind the information desk said ‘Good morning, sir,’ and stood to attention for a second, a uniformed constable on the stairs came to attention as he passed and another uniformed constable who was near his room opened the door for him. He went in and shut the door behind him. In each man’s eyes he had read an open condemnation — yet had such condemnation really been there or had his imagination supplied it?
He hung up his mackintosh, then sat down. He stared out of the window. It was raining, with the kind of steady insistence that suggested it would continue all day.
He lit a cigarette. If Elwick was guilty, his trial and sentence were just. If he was innocent, but such innocence could only be proved after he had been convicted, and because he had been convicted, then such conviction must be justified. He, Kee
lton, had staked his own honour on Joanna’s belief in Elwick’s innocence: but a girl’s beliefs could be so very false.
Perhaps, he suddenly thought, he should have played it safe. Then he cursed himself. There were times when, if a man were to be true to himself, it was impossible to play safe.
He thought of those whom he had so deeply and desperately involved in this thing: Mary, Joanna, Gregory Bolt, and Elwick. If he was wrong, how tragic would their involvement become? And yet wasn’t innocence so precious that almost any sacrifice was warranted to uphold it?
He stood up, crossed to the window, and stared out at the steady rain, falling from a uniformly grey sky.
Had the drug villains and the police traitor realised that once a traitor had apparently been unmasked there could be no further traitorous act or it became obvious the wrong man had been tried and found guilty? Had the real traitor realised that he could never escape? If the drug villains were questioned by the police and it was obvious they were going to be in real trouble, they would inculpate the traitor as a warped act of revenge — nothing would give the villains more pleasure than to turn in a twisted copper once he was no longer of any use to them. If the stage were set properly, would the traitor understand the situation in which he was caught and would he panic, knowing that to give an alarm would be to disclose his existence, but not to give an alarm would mean his unmasking?
The questions were endless and for the moment unanswerable. He, Keelton, had made his own gamble and now he had to sit back and wait. His own career was at stake. If his plans failed he would resign from the force even though no one else but Gregory Bolt need ever know what had happened — his character would force him to resign because he would have failed the trust put in him … It could be true to say that whatever happened he would have betrayed that trust, but for once it was right to believe that the ends could justify the means.
He watched the rain fall. Then he turned and studied his office. It was now neat and tidy, with the filing cabinets containing all the information that needed to be close to hand, but no more than that. When he had taken office those cabinets had been filled with a mass — and mess — of uncorrelated and, more often than not, unnecessary information. In the same way, the force had been untidy and the morale had been low. He had raised the efficiency of the force to a high level. It would hurt like hell to have to resign, quite apart from the very considerable financial difficulties involved in forgoing both present income and future pension.
How soon could he make the first move to try to discover who was the traitor? If he waited too long, Joanna could carry out her threat to leave home. How much longer could he stand seeing the look in Mary’s eyes: a look of pained questioning, antagonism, and sometimes almost hate?
He had to wait a few days, to breed a sense of complacency in the traitor’s mind — always assuming the traitor was not now in jail, suffering the full hatred of his fellow prisoners because he was a busted copper.
***
Joanna drove the Mini through the country lanes, past the old windmill whose wooden sails were rotting because the cost of preservation had become too great, past the grass covered mound that was reputed to be a Roman tumulus, past the village green which still had by the pool the remains of a ducking stool, past the Forestry Commission woods so drab with their absolute regimentation of trees. She reached the hills and parked at Norton’s Point. From here there was a panoramic view across the countryside below and during the summer this point was a mecca for picnickers who littered the countryside with the rubbish of a consumer society, but the first touch of winter had brought an end to picnicking and now the road was little used and the steep grass slopes were inhabited only by sheep and beef cattle.
She stared across the land. In the far distance, determinable for certain only because she knew they were there, she could see the four hills of Flecton Cross. By East Hill, the hill that lay nearest to her, was her home.
Home had become a word that had changed its meaning. Home now was something she hated to think about, yet she had come up into the hills specifically to think about it. She wanted to leave home, but her mother had pleaded with her so vehemently that she could be in no doubt about how hurt her mother would be should she do so. To stay, though, meant constantly to meet her father and every time she looked at him she remembered the night he had betrayed her.
Her father had betrayed her, but she also was to blame for what had happened. It was she who had blurted out the fact that Bob had given her money. But for that, her father could not have betrayed her. Every time she saw her father, her mind tortured her with the knowledge that Bob was now in prison because of what she had said. Her imagination ran riot. She saw his being beaten up by his fellow prisoners: she saw him in his cell, pacing it like some caged animal: she imagined the terrible anguish of his innocence.
She knew he was innocent because he had sworn it and she didn’t give a damn what evidence there was to the contrary. The trial had been a mockery. He had been framed by the real traitor, who was now free and safe: she hated this unknown traitor so much that she often felt sick from hate, just as she often felt sick from guilt because she was free and Bob was in prison and there was nothing she could do to help him.
She desperately needed the kind of help and comfort that only a loving family could give her, yet she no longer had a loving family. She would ask her father for nothing and her mother’s loyalties were sharply divided.
Should she leave home, escape from an impossible situation? Her friend Amy had a flat in outer Chelsea and had offered to share it. Her mother had promised her an allowance that would help her financially until she obtained a job — always presuming anyone as unqualified as she could get a worthwhile job. But what would her leaving do to her mother? She had always boasted that her generation would never allow itself to be strangled by the ties of filial duty, but now that the chips were down she found just how strong those ties really were.
She lit a cigarette. Life had been so simple until she met Bob. The present was for enjoying, the past for rejecting, the future for moulding. She had danced with Bob, that evening she had met him, as a small gesture of revolt against the forms of the Establishment which had forced her, to her embarrassment, to come to a dance where it was all too obvious she was not really wanted. That one small act of revolt had cost her dear. It had taught her that the world was never simple, that the present was not always for enjoying, the past couldn’t be rejected at will, the future was not mouldable.
Rain, which had been threatening for some time, began to fall. It drummed on the roof and the windows became covered with sliding water so that the distant view was distorted out of all coherence.
What was Bob doing now: how much was he suffering? She shivered as she remembered how he’d been when she visited him just before the trial. He’d been scared and that had terrified her. He’d always been so strong, so self-reliant, that to see him scared made her feel there could not be any hope.
She lowered the window and threw out the cigarette stub. The rain spattered her face, but for a while she did not wind up the window. She had come up into the hills to be on her own and to make a final decision about leaving home: she had decided nothing, being confined by the same maelstrom of fear and frenzied imagination that had overwhelmed her from the moment she had heard that Bob had been arrested. She longed to escape from her father, but she desperately needed the sympathy and understanding of her mother: she wanted to escape from a home that constantly reminded her of her own act of involuntary betrayal, but she desperately needed the shelter from the tragedy that home should have offered her.
There was no solution. There had, in her past life, always been solutions to her troubles, but there was none now. Perhaps, she thought bitterly, that piece of knowledge meant she was growing up.
***
Elwick was sent to the county jail where, although the reason for his imprisonment was officially meant to be a secret, his case history was known to every in
mate. Convicts swore to get him. A bent copper was fair game. There was a sharply defined class system in any jail and even below the untouchables, the brown hatters, were the bent coppers … This bent copper was going to be beaten up, to be chivvied until his own mother wouldn’t know him.
The other convicts had forgotten something. Elwick knew his way around their kind of world. The first time he got heavily jostled, at slopping-out time in the early morning, he didn’t wait for apologies, he lashed out. He hit the first man in the Adam’s apple, the second in the crutch, and he violently kicked the third in the shin. All three dropped to the steel floor where they lay, writhing in agony.
Elwick was marched off to a punishment cell. Before the governor, the next day, he was accused of causing an affray. He refused to give any evidence. The governor, who knew exactly what had really happened, awarded Elwick five, five, and five: five days solitary, five days restricted diet, five days loss of remission.
Elwick enjoyed his stay in solitary confinement, glad to be on his own. He knew that he could be certain of one thing. When, at the end of five days, he returned to cell seventy-four, Block D, and entered once more the general life of the prison, there would be no more attempts to get him. In prison, physical toughness was respected beyond all else.
***
It was Tuesday. The clouds were low, heavy, and black-bellied, promising rain although none had yet fallen. Flecton Cross became a strangely altered town, looking almost grimy, like some northern industrial centre.
Keelton spent half an hour in his office, then left at nine-thirty to attend a meeting of the watch committee. This ended just after midday and he and Turnbell had lunch together at the latter’s club, an exclusively masculine club which catered for the businessmen of the town, most of whom had more than forty winks in the reading and smoking rooms after lunch.
He left the club at two-fifteen and drove back to the police station along the back roads, avoiding the traffic congestion in Tyler Road. Once in his office, he hung up his mackintosh and rolled-up umbrella, then went and sat down behind his desk. He checked on the time. Two-thirty-three. The C.I.D had been told to stand by for a meeting at four. Within the next fifteen minutes, he must have a word with whoever was on the switchboard and with Superintendent Webstone, who must have time to get men out on watch. His, Keelton’s, plan had just this one chance of working: after this, the members of C.I.D would understand the real purpose of what had been going on. Because there could be only the one chance, the difference between failure and success was going to be knife-edged.
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