Exhibit No. Thirteen

by Roderic Jeffries

  He finished the drink, poured himself out another. He looked round the room. Most police wives kept the front room spotless because it was the visitors’ room. His front room looked as though it were used hard. Books, magazines, newspapers, wireless set, and furniture, had to compete for the available space.

  Newspapers reminded him. Tomorrow he would be the man who’d planted the evidence to get rid of the unwanted husband. The English public wouldn’t like that. Wives were fair game, but it was a very bad show to attack the head of the family.

  He had another drink. Perhaps he’d get tight on sherry, Empire style, after all.

  CHAPTER 15

  Tuesday morning. Showery weather and a cold wind that added up to autumn. International news as confused as ever and no one other than the politicians caring very much about it.

  Rusk ate his breakfast and was careless whether the egg was overdone or underdone. The toast was burned, but that didn’t worry him either. There was a knock on the front door. Vernon or McBade to say his presence was demanded at the station? He looked inside the coffee pot and saw it was empty. If the incoming detective wanted something to drink, it would have to be instant and out of a tin.

  He went along the hall and opened the door. Because he had been expecting Vernon or McBade, he stared with surprise at Anne Kremayne for several seconds.

  ‘May I come in?’ she asked.

  He noticed the expression of mental hurt in her eyes and as he led her through to the kitchen he wondered if that hurt would ever all go. Once in the kitchen, he said, ‘Coffee?’ When she nodded, he put ground coffee into the filter-type maker, measured out the water and switched on the electricity.

  She handed him a double foolscap piece of stiff white paper. It was a copy of a petition for divorce. Kremayne was seeking a divorce from his wife and had named Rusk as co-respondent.

  *

  ‘It came this morning,’ she said. She played with the envelope.

  ‘If I’m co-respondent, I should have had a copy.’ The moment he had spoken, he cursed himself for a fool. What a time to pick up a piece of procedural law.

  ‘I expect you’ll get one,’ she said dully.

  They sat down. He leaned across and took hold of her right hand.

  There was a hissing sound from the stove as the water boiled. He let go of her hand, stood up and crossed to the stove, turned off the electricity and tipped the coffee maker upside down so that the water could percolate through.

  ‘I’ve never liked facing horrible things,’ she said in a quiet, desperate voice. ‘At school, when it was nearly exam time, I used to tell myself the headmistress would fall down the stairs and break her neck and there wouldn’t be any exams. Part of me knew that was ridiculous because whatever happened to her there’d be exams, but another part of me promised it could happen — perhaps.

  ‘That inability, or refusal, to face certain parts of life until I’m forced to, has grown up with me. When I was twenty-two, my fiancé was killed in a car accident. They told me: and I believed that there’d been a car crash, but that he’d lent it to a friend and it was the friend who was dead.

  ‘When I can’t retreat any more and have to face reality, I manage as well as the next person, which makes my previous behaviour so ridiculous. My fiancé’s parents were morbid about death and believed the body should be on show so that all the relations and friends could say good-bye to it. They used moral blackmail to make me go — and when I was there, in front of the half-open coffin, and was staring at what remained of him, I was all right. — I refused to believe that Jonathan could have been responsible for the murder of those two girls.’

  Rusk poured out the cup of coffee for her.

  ‘Jonathan and I haven’t had a happy marriage and over the last two years it’s gone downhill in a freewheel.’ She was sitting more upright in her chair. She was talking about something that had never before been put into words. ‘We haven’t shared the same bedroom for over a year, and in that year we haven’t … slept together.’ She lowered her head. ‘I wanted to. He didn’t.’

  He offered her a cigarette and she took one.

  ‘After the first girl was murdered, the police and you thought Jonathan had done it. I tried to find out why you should think that, but even when I was trying to find out I wouldn’t admit for one second that he might have done it. Whatever had happened, he couldn’t have raped and murdered the girl.

  ‘You brought reality. I liked you, but because you were forcing me towards reality I also hated you.

  ‘When Jonathan was charged with the murder of Fiona Johnson, you’d thrown me into the deep end of reality and although I could face it because I was finally with it, I detested you for making me.

  ‘I didn’t go to the trial. He asked me not to. So I’d no idea it was over until he telephoned and said he’d been found not guilty. That was a strange moment. I’d been desperately yearning for that verdict and my mind had refused to consider the alternative, yet when it came I was astonished and half afraid of it.

  ‘I told him we’d celebrate as we’d never celebrated before and as soon as we could we’d go somewhere, anywhere, just to get away … He told me he wasn’t coming home that night, and when I read an account of the trial I’d realise he’d had to use unusual methods to get free.’

  She drank some coffee. ‘It didn’t mean anything, then. Unusual methods. I forgot them because I was terribly disappointed he wasn’t coming straight back home. Still, he probably wanted to get blind drunk. You’ll have guessed we’d reached a kind of truce in our marriage. We didn’t pretend to each other it was a roaring success, but we weren’t going to break it up.

  ‘When I read the papers next morning, I felt sick. How could he have publicly said I’d committed adultery? Even if our marriage hadn’t been made in Heaven, I’d always respected it. Then I managed to tell myself that he hadn’t been guilty of the murder and if there was, as there had been, a way to go free, he had had to take it. My reputation didn’t weigh much in the scales against his freedom. He hadn’t been disloyal to me, he’d just been a realist and it was up to me to be the same. I owed him loyalty at the very least, and I was going to give it to him.

  ‘Then this.’ She looked down and touched the petition. ‘He really means you and I …’

  ‘He meant it at the trial.’

  She stopped fiddling with the petition, and finished the coffee in the cup. I’m right up there with reality, aren’t I, Blayne?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m meeting it harder than ever before … He raped and murdered those girls?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If I’d not listened to my sense of loyalty, I’d have realised that long before?’

  ‘Probably. Certainly.’

  ‘And now he’s going to divorce me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But does he really believe you and I …’

  ‘Who knows? Because he seems normal to us, we keep thinking of his mind as normal. It isn’t.’ He stared through the window at the back garden. The weeds waved their heads high.

  ‘But I reckon we can go a little way with it,’ continued Rusk. ‘He produced a defence that succeeded because he was ready to sacrifice your reputation. It’s possible that even he has had a jab of conscience at the thought of what he’s done to you and because he’s had that jab he’s got to wondering what other people think about him. Suppose they decided that he went free only by sacrificing his wife’s name and honour? That makes him a first-class heel, and right now he isn’t in the mood to be thought that. He wants to be the completely wronged husband. So he’s got to have justification and he must know he’s justified in the eyes of others, and that takes him the one logical step further which is to prove in a divorce court that you and I committed adultery together. That isn’t the end of it, though. A divorce gives him another chance publicly to knock me for six — and think what that means to him. It’ll finally allow him to prove that he’s a better man than I am, no matter what�
��s happened before.’

  She sighed, a strange sound of despair and torment. ‘What am I to do?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘I came here so that you could tell me.’

  ‘That’s a hell of an assignment, Anne.’

  ‘I don’t care what it is.’

  ‘You need a lawyer.’

  ‘You’re one.’

  ‘Correction. A good lawyer.’

  ‘You’re not running for once, Blayne. You’re going to live up to your responsibilities.’

  ‘Why …’ He stopped. Why make him responsible for another person?

  ‘What’s the answer, Blayne?’

  He stood up, stubbed out the cigarette he had been smoking. ‘Even a poor lawyer needs time in which to think, Anne.’

  ‘You can have it. But you’ll have to reach there in the end.’

  ‘Reality?’

  ‘Your reality.’

  Bitterly, he thought he liked reaching it as little as she did.

  *

  He walked along the street that evening and reflected that night was kind to the towns of the modern world. It made so much of them disappear. He opened the door of the telephone booth, went inside, and pulled out four pennies from his pocket.

  ‘Rustle-by three double two, please.’

  A pause, then the dialling sound began. There was an answer after only three cycles and he heard Anne Kremayne give her number. ‘Blayne speaking,’ he said.

  ‘Well? Do I defend?’

  ‘Everything depends on you and what he means to you.’

  ‘Because I’m a fool, he still meant a lot until I opened the petition.’

  ‘Can you hate him?’

  ‘What does that matter?’

  ‘It matters.’

  ‘I can hate him.’

  ‘Then you defend. And counter-petition.’

  CHAPTER 16

  The case of Kremayne against Kremayne was brought forward with quite uncustomary speed since it had to be decided as soon as possible. It was heard just before the end of the Michaelmas sittings in one of the ‘temporary’ courtrooms of the Law Courts in London — a courtroom hastily built to take care of the ‘temporary’ flood of divorces after the First World War.

  The day of the trial opened with an anti-climax in the form of three undefended divorce cases, two on the grounds of adultery and the third, cruelty. The private lives of three presumably once happy families were publicly tom to shreds in little over half an hour.

  The associate announced Kremayne against Kremayne, with Rusk named as co-respondent.

  There was a rustle of papers, a clearing of throats, a shifting of limbs, then quiet. Mr Justice Elham — the case was too important for a divorce commissioner — turned over a page in his notebook. He was a heavily built man with a round, red face with wrinkles about his eyes and across his forehead that gave him the look of a bloodhound. ‘Yes.’

  Steine stood up. His manner before a court in which judge alone sat was more constrained than when he appeared before a jury. He still used his hands to make his points, but the gestures normally came less often and with less force. ‘This is a petition for divorce on the grounds of adultery, my Lord. The petition alleges frequent adultery by the respondent with the co-respondent, Blayne Rusk, and more particularly on the night of the twenty-seventh. In the respondent’s answer …’

  The opening was brief.

  Kremayne was called and he left the row of seats immediately behind counsel and walked to the witness-box which was to the right of the judge’s dais and at an angle to it. The jury-box on the opposite side, was being used by the Press.

  ‘Are you Jonathan Edgar Royce Kremayne and do you live at Frithton Look, in the parish of Rustle-by, in the county of Kent? Were you married to Anne Patricia Kremayne then de Pamville, on the third of September in the year nineteen hundred and fifty two?’

  ‘Yes.’ Kremayne spoke easily and confidently.

  ‘Was the marriage at first a happy one?’

  ‘Very happy.’

  ‘And then did something happen to make it less happy?’

  ‘It did.’

  ‘Well you tell the court, please, in your own words, what that something was.’

  ‘Some time ago, a murder took place not very far from my house. Following that, the police came to my house to make routine inquiries.’

  ‘Can we stop there one moment, please. Are you able to identify the person, or persons, concerned?’

  ‘Detective-Sergeant Rusk.’

  ‘The co-respondent in the present case?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please continue, Mr Kremayne.’ Steine leaned against the rail of the seat and casually rubbed the tip of his nose.

  ‘He asked me certain questions regarding the case and very soon we discovered we knew each other from our schooldays. Naturally, I immediately suggested he should come and have a chat about old times when he wasn’t on duty. He came to dinner that night.’

  ‘I expect you laid on a special meal?’

  ‘My wife arranged that, whilst I brought out of my cellar some special wine.’

  ‘One might reasonably say, killing the fatted calf?’

  ‘I was so glad to meet someone from the old school.’

  ‘Did you invite Rusk to your house again?’

  ‘Several times. I discovered I liked him more than when we’d been at school — where we weren’t the closest of friends.’

  ‘Did you, in turn, gain the impression that he appreciated your company more than he had done in the old days?’

  ‘In his odd way, yes.’ Kremayne’s face assumed an expression of slight puzzlement. ‘He’s never what I’d call a … a completely open person, if you can understand what I mean by that. There’s always something held in reserve. That’s why, when although we were getting on well together despite this reserve, I was glad that he was obviously so very friendly with Anne. What I didn’t realise was …’

  ‘In a minute.’ Steine’s voice, lazy in intonation, effectively cut short what the witness had been about to say. ‘You talked about “obviously very friendly.” Will you explain what you mean by that?’

  ‘I must make it clear that I can’t place the incidents in chronological order because it’s only looking back on them that I can see they had special significance. Rusk was always very attentive to my wife, always rushing to help her. I don’t mean the kind of thing that comes from ordinary politeness, but an attention going far beyond that.’

  ‘Will you give us an instance, please.’

  ‘I’ve seen him pull her chair out for her when she went to sit down at the table — which was fine — but after she’d sat he’d rest his hand on her hand or on her shoulder while he played the fool and said something like: “Will that be all, madam?”’

  ‘You saw a special significance in this?’

  ‘At the time, as I’ve said, I was just amused that he could be quite so attentive, but later on I realised he’d rested his hand on her for a long time when it wasn’t at all necessary, and everything else he’d done had been to cover up this fact.’

  ‘How often did this sort of thing happen?’

  ‘I couldn’t give a number, but it was several times on each of the occasions he came to my house.’

  ‘Including that first evening?’

  ‘Nothing took place then.’

  ‘Did any one thing make you look back on all that had happened and cause you to revise your interpretation of the events?’

  ‘I saw him kiss Anne.’

  ‘Where did this take place?’

  ‘We were sitting in the garden and I went into the house to get drinks. I had to cross to the window to pick up a glass and I looked out. He was bending over and kissing her.’

  ‘Would you describe the kiss as a passionate one?’

  ‘It lasted a long time and all through it his right hand was cupping her breast.’

  ‘When you went back into the garden what did you say about this?’


  ‘I was too shocked to mention it … and, although this may sound funny, embarrassed.’

  ‘Did you ever mention it to your wife?’

  ‘Later, when we were about to go to bed, I asked her why she’d let him kiss her as she had. She lost her temper and told me I’d a filthy mind and nothing of the sort had happened. What I’d seen was Rusk fooling around as he so often did.’

  ‘What was your reaction to that?’

  ‘I tried desperately to believe her story because that was what I wanted to believe.’

  ‘And so you did nothing more about the incident?’

  ‘No … And in any case, very shortly afterwards, I had to go to France on business.’

  ‘At this time, were you having regular sexual intercourse with your wife?’

  ‘Until she met Rusk. After that, she refused, on one excuse or another.’

  ‘Can you be certain beyond any doubt that the cessation of sexual intercourse between your wife and yourself occurred after Rusk met your wife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened when you returned from France?’

  ‘I tried terribly hard to get back with Anne to the previous happy relationship that had existed between us.’

  ‘Were you successful?’

  ‘She made it very clear she wanted nothing more to do with me. It was the following day that a friend of mine, Ernest Levine, saw me and told me …’

  ‘As a result of what Mr Levine told you, did you form an opinion about something?’ Kremayne’s voice became harsh. ‘I became certain she had committed adultery with Rusk. I accused her of it. At first she denied it, then she finally said she’d slept with Rusk when I was in France, and was proud of it.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I decided I’d have to seek a divorce.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘I had no chance. Before I could act, I was arrested and charged with the murder of Fiona Johnson on evidence faked up by Rusk. I was far too busy defending myself to worry about the divorce.’

  ‘You must have wondered why Rusk should have faked evidence against you?’