One must remember, too, that the witness had been sprung on him. Macrea had made it plain that the prisoner had been against her giving evidence at all. It was at her insistence, and because his advisers had thought it essential, that she had been allowed, at the last moment, to speak.
There was only one line that the prosecution could follow – and they hunted it for all it was worth. The whole story, they said, was a fabrication. It had never happened. The prisoner had simply purchased the testimony of this woman to bolster up his own defence. On the face of it, asked the prosecution, did the prisoner look the sort of man who could have had associations with a woman of this type?
Macrea must have grinned.
His next, and final witness was the doctor who had attended Lulu for bruises on her throat. He confirmed the date from his attendance diary. He also recognised the prisoner who had come with Lulu and settled the bill.
The jury acquitted without retiring.
(iii)
“And if I’d been on the jury I should have done the same,” I said. “The man was innocent.”
“He was guilty as hell,” said Hazlerigg.
“Then the evidence was faked—”
“On the contrary. Every witness spoke the truth according to their lights. So far as that goes, even Mason himself spoke the truth, about everything except the one vital point – what went on inside his own head.”
“Are you asking me to believe,” I said slowly, “that Mason was such a diabolical man that he started plotting the murder of his own wife at the age of eight?”
Hazlerigg put back his head and laughed heartily and at length. He rocked with laughter. Whilst he was laughing I began, dimly, to see the weakness in my argument.
“Now don’t start blaming yourself,” said Hazlerigg. “Because that’s exactly what every member of the jury thought, in that instant when they acquitted him. After all, you can’t expect all jurymen to be practising philosophers. If they had, they might have been acquainted with the dialectical trick known as deception by series.”
“Explain.”
“All right. I’ll give you an example of the basic idea. Then when you want to plan your own murder you can work out the details for yourself. Supposing I have to deceive you about – say, the number of my house. For some reason it’s not practical to alter the number plate itself. But I can take it down altogether or hide it. I lead you up the street, and point out that the two houses before you come to mine are numbered, respectively, two and four. You won’t need much convincing, then about the number of my house, will you?”
“Six.”
“So you might think. Actually my house is number four. I altered the number plate of the house on the left – which was really three.”
When I’d worked this one out on the back of an envelope I said, “I think I see it. You mean that Mason—”
“When he decided to murder his wife, which was about three years before he actually did, he recalled the incident of himself and his sister. I have no doubt the story was perfectly true, though it may have become exaggerated a little with the passing of the years. Just the sort of thing any excitable little boy might have done. He knew that his sister remembered it, too. That gave him his true number, all he had to do then was to manufacture the false one. So he went out and picked up this woman – Lulu. He slept with her. In the early hours of the morning he started to strangle her. He didn’t go very far, of course, just far enough to produce some convincing bruises on the throat. Then he quietened her down by paying her a good deal of money – I don’t suppose she’d really have gone to the police, you know, they’re shy birds – and he took her to a doctor and paid for the necessary medical attention. Incidentally, it was about the same time, did you notice, that he doubled his wife’s insurance. Then he let three years go by. Then he strangled his wife.”
“Knowing that any jury with those facts would acquit him.”
“Yes. There was just one practical difficulty, and he surmounted that as well. His three witnesses were his sister, the doctor and Lulu. The sister he would always be able to get hold of. The doctor – even if he retired – would be in some medical directory or easily traceable. Even if he were dead, his records might have been looked up. The girl was different. They move, from time to time, and get swallowed up very easily in the whirlpool of the West End. If they retire, they take great care to sever all connections with their past. How was he to keep track of her unobtrusively? The method he adopted was to send her ten pounds a month, anonymously. He represented himself as some well-wisher who had received her favours in the past and wished to make this periodical contribution. So long as she kept him notified of any change of address, he would continue to send her the money.”
“But if she had to notify him when she moved, surely she must have known who he was.”
“No – the notification had to be sent to him at a poste restante under an assumed name.”
“How long did it take you to find all this out?”
“Well, it took some weeks. We were only doing it to satisfy our own curiosity. But in the end we found the poste restante and the girl behind the counter gave us a definite identification. She picked Mason’s photograph unhesitatingly out of a dozen others. He’d been calling for letters on and off for the last three years.”
“Wasn’t he running a considerable risk?” I said. “Supposing you’d got on to this before—”
“When the defence are allowed to spring last minute witnesses on you!” said Hazlerigg bitterly. “How do you think we were going to unearth all this in five minutes examination and cross-examination? That’s why they kept Lulu up their sleeves until the last moment.”
There did not seem to be a great deal to say. The story seemed to be without a moral.
“So you’re absolutely certain that Mason did this murder, but you can do nothing at all about it. That’s it, isn’t it? You can’t try him again, of course, for the same offence. He’s safe.”
“That’s what he thought,” said Hazlerigg. He was smiling, but his grey eyes had a far away look in them that I had learned to recognise.
“Some time later – more than a year after the trial – Mason was staying at a little hotel in Cornwall. He was still single. I never had much confidence in that story of the other woman. Even if it was true, he certainly never married her. He had a bedroom with a small balcony overlooking the cliff with a straight drop on to the rocks. The maid went to call him one morning, found the window unlatched and the balcony rail broken. What was left of Mason was among the rocks, fifty feet below.”
“Then you were wrong,” I said. “You were all wrong, from beginning to end. He did walk in his sleep.”
“Possibly,” said Hazlerigg. “Possibly. There was certainly no sign of foul play. One curious coincidence came to light later. Brother Hector had the room next door.”
Xinia Florata
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Bohun. “When?”
“Last night,” said the telephone.
“Peacefully, I hope,” said Bohun. “Of course, it wasn’t really unexpected, was it?”
The telephone agreed that it wasn’t unexpected.
“He was – let me see – he would have been ninety this spring. That’s a fine old age. Will you be wanting me to come down?”
In theory, when a valued client dies, the family solicitor always hurries to the house. In fact, there is little he can do that cannot be done, and better done, by the doctor, the vicar and the next of kin.
The telephone went on talking for quite a long time. Bohun listened, a tiny puzzled frown between his eyes.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll come along. But it looks as if what you really want is a competent police searcher.”
Rowley Graine, his articled clerk, looked up, as a dog that hears the click of the front door. Outside in New Square, the trees and grass were green with spring.
“A trip into the country,” he breathed.
“Yes,” said Bo
hun. “Carshalton. It’s old Tobias Buckley. He died last night. They’ve lost the will.”
As they had the first class carriage to themselves Bohun filled in some background.
“The real tragedy of growing old,” he said, “is that you lose things without realising it. Some people simply lose their wind and their waist-line. Others lose their wits.”
Rowley, who was nineteen, said tolerantly, “I’ve got an aunt, sir, who thinks she’s a tortoise. She eats lettuce leaves off the edge of the table.”
“Just concentrate on listening,” said Bohun. “As I was about to add, Tobias was particularly lucky. He remained absolutely sane and just about as fit as anyone can be after four score years and ten in this vale. He kept fit by gardening and he kept sane by hanging on to his sense of humour. I don’t mean that he played practical jokes. He’d got over that stage. His sense of humour had mellowed. It was of the quiet, reflective kind. Not the sort that appealed to Gertrude and Ambrose.”
“The second cousins umpteen times removed who lived with him?”
“To be strictly accurate,” said Bohun, “they were no sort of relative at all. They called themselves second cousins, but in fact they were just hangers-on. They’ve lived with, and on, Tobias for years, and I have no doubt that they hoped that if they hung on long enough he would leave them everything in his will. He was a bachelor, you see, and his mother and father were only children. They’ve long been dead, of course. His only brother died a bachelor too.”
“Then,” said Rowley, casting his mind back over the rules of intestate succession which he had been reading up only the week before, “unless they can find his will it looks as if the Grown will nab the lot. Was he well off?”
“Extremely well off.”
“How very tiresome for Gertrude and Ambrose,” said Rowley. “I bet they’re turning the place upside down.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Bohun.
When they arrived at The Retreat, a solidly unpretentious two-storey building with rather more garden than normal, they found a grim-faced Ambrose, a red-eyed Gertrude, and a house that looked as if it had suffered the attentions of a thorough-going gang of burglars and been hit by a tornado shortly afterwards.
They ate an impromptu lunch, laid on a hurriedly reassembled table (it had been turned upside down and its flaps unscrewed) sitting on chairs the seats of which had been removed, cut open, and roughly sewn together again.
“I think,” said Bohun, surveying the battlefield, “that we may be approaching this from the wrong angle. To start with, do we know that he left a will?”
“I’m certain of it,” said Gertrude. “You know that he had one before – I believe you made it—”
“I drew it up,” agreed Bohun, “About six years ago. At the beginning of this year I was present when he revoked it by destroying it, in the presence of myself and my partner.”
“I believe,” suggested Ambrose, “that we benefited under that will.”
“It may be so,” said Bohun. “I forget the details. They can be of no importance now, surely?”
“Of course not, of course not,” said Ambrose. “But he made another one. He wrote it out himself. He as good as told us so.”
“When was that?”
“About ten days ago.”
“Did he, though,” said Bohun. “That’s interesting. Did he say he had made it, or that he was going to make it? In fact, tell me exactly what he did say.”
“It was after tea,” said Ambrose. “He’d spent the afternoon in the garden. You know he was mad about gardening.” Bohun thought he detected a certain pettishness in Ambrose’s voice. Ambrose was not an outdoor type. “He’d finished digging that big bed the other side of the lawn.” Ambrose went to the window and pointed. “He’d cleared out a lot of old stuff and was going to put in something or other else. I can’t really think why he bothered. He’d quite enough money to pay for a dozen gardeners.”
Bohun looked at the flower bed. It was the show bed of the garden – nearly eighty feet long and perhaps twenty feet deep, and tilted up slightly. When filled with flowers it must have looked theatrically beautiful.
“Did he do that?” said Bohun, surprised.
The bed was pitted with holes.
“No, no,” said Ambrose. “I did that. I was telling you. He said to us, ‘I hope you’ll keep the garden nice when I’m gone.’ I said, of course we would. I’m not keen on it myself but after all, we could always get someone in. He then said, very seriously, ‘If you keep the garden, you’ll find that the garden will keep you.’ He said that to both of us.”
“It was perfectly obvious,” said Gertrude. “Absolutely in character. He’d made his new will, sealed it up in a tin or something, and buried it in the garden.”
“We used to do that with Easter eggs,” said Rowley. He was disregarded.
“I see,” said Bohun. “I gather, however, that you haven’t found it yet?”
“It’s a big garden,” said Ambrose sadly. “We started on that bed, as it was the last one he was working on. Oh, here comes the vicar. And Dr. Plumb.”
Two men were coming up the path from the gate. They were evidently familiar with the house, for they cut across the lawn, stopped to stare at the devastated flower bed, and then turned aside and came up to the French windows.
Ambrose let them in, a little sulkily, it seemed to Bohun.
After introductions had been effected, Dr. Plumb said explosively, “What in the world have you been doing to the garden?”
“As a matter of fact,” said Ambrose, “I – that is to say, we – have been looking for something.”
“Not found the will yet?” enquired the vicar. He sounded uncommonly cheerful, and it occurred to Bohun that neither of these old friends of Tobias Buckley liked Gertrude or Ambrose.
“It’ll turn up,” said Gertrude. “Is there anything we can do for you? If not, we happen to be rather busy—”
“Well—” said the vicar.
Bohun interrupted. “I wonder,” he said, addressing himself to the doctor and the clergyman, “if you would mind stepping outside with me for a minute?”
Although he spoke with studied moderation there was something in his voice that brought all their heads up.
“Why – of course,” said Dr. Plumb. “You’ll excuse us?” said the vicar, preserving his manners. Gertrude nodded coldly. The three men walked across the lawn.
“What exactly,” said Bohun, “was Tobias planning for this bed?”
“Not planning,” said Dr. Plumb. “He’d carried it out. Not much chance of it coming up now, though. Looks like a battlefield.”
“What was it?”
“Xinia florata. New type. Very neat, compact plant, with small leaves and a blue flower. Nurserymen use it sometimes for advertisement beds.”
“Advertisement?”
“You know, ‘Welcome to Smith and Brown’s Nursery Garden’, all done in flowers. That sort of thing. It’s small, and a strong steady grower. As a matter of fact, you can write quite long sentences in it.”
“Can you, though,” said Bohun. “That’s extremely interesting. Would you by any chance happen to know exactly what message Tobias had planted on that flower bed?”
“We don’t know what the message was,” said the vicar. “But it was something of sentimental interest, and it contained his name. We were there when he finished it. He drew his signature in the soil, and scattered in the seeds.”
“And then—?” said Bohun, an unholy light in his eyes.
“Why then,” said Dr. Plumb, “as we were his oldest friends, you know, he got us both to scratch our names, too, and fill them up with seed. It seemed a silly thing to do, but we would neither of us have wished to refuse. He was dying. I’d given him a month. We all knew he’d never live to see the flowers come up.”
“And now,” the vicar sounded quite unclerical in his anger, “those two – those two vandals – in their sordid greed for gold, have made quite certain tha
t no one will ever see them. I doubt if a single seedling will survive.”
Bohun stood swaying on his heels, looking dreamily at the scarred and pitted flowerbed. He agreed with the vicar. Tobias Buckley’s last message would never now see the light.
“What a case it would have made,” he said, at last. “It couldn’t have stopped short of the House of Lords.”
“What on earth?” said Dr. Plumb. “Why, good heavens—”
“His last Will and Testament. Planted in Xinia florata. Something quite simple. ‘I leave everything to Gertrude and Ambrose’. Signed by him and his signature witnessed by the two of you. All in flowers. And then that precious pair had to dig it all up again. Oh dear, oh dear.”
The three men were consumed with such wild and helpless laughter that Rowley came running, and even Gertrude and Ambrose stalked unwillingly out to see what the joke could be.
“If you keep the garden, the garden will keep you,” said Bohun. It was hours later, and they were in the train, heading for London.
“Yes, sir,” said Rowley. “But would it have been effective – a will made like that?”
“Good gracious,” said Bohun. “I don’t know. I’m just a solicitor. You know much more law than I do. Look it up in one of your books when you get back to the office.”
Weekend at Wapentake
When Kilroy Martensen and his wife died in the Skyliner crash at Prestwick, it brought the family settlement to an end and gave Bohun a lot of work to do.
The memorandum came to light when he was searching through the old files. It was in a handwriting that he did not recognise, thin, rounded, not educated, not attractive, but extremely easy to read. “The Surviving Martensen of the last generation,” it started baldly, “is Christabel; of this generation, Kilroy and Harriett, who are the only children of Christabel’s late cousin Alastair. Under the settlement created by the will of Christabel’s grandfather—”
And so on. It was a clear exposition of a complex set of facts. The man who had penned it had obviously been a sound lawyer with a certain talent for exposition.
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