“Can I start now?” she said. As soon as she spoke, he had recognised her. He had seen her in two plays and half a dozen films. He watched, fascinated, as she wrote her name Janine Mann. So that was her real name, as well as her stage name. He and Mr. Henry witnessed the signature. Mr. Beeding introduced him.
“A rising young architect.”
“Not true,” he had said. “Planning to rise, if you like, but not yet left the runway.”
“A lot of people I know,” she had given a sideways glance at Mr. Beeding as she spoke, “would be glad to be safe back on the runway.”
And that was the beginning of it. How long had it been, after that, before she was first in his arms?
She was ten years older than he was. Away from footlights and camera and make-up artists, she was not particularly beautiful. It was her body which had fascinated him. Like all actresses, models, and courtesans, she was conscious of it, but never self-conscious about it, that extraordinary putting together of flesh and muscle and skin and bone which made her a woman in a thousand.
“I am an architect,” he had told her, stroking her bare shoulder. “And I know that what pleases the eye is proportion – and the proper assembly of parts into a whole.” And she had laughed at him.
She was always laughing at him. He sometimes wondered why she bothered with him at all. He had no money, and money was one of her preoccupations. She had not been in a big film or a successful play for some time, and he guessed that, like most stage folk, she was finding it hard to pay the tax on the years of success. Probably that accounted for her frequent visits to Mr. Beeding.
May be it was his youth, and his intolerance, that she found refreshing. She liked talking. She would spend long afternoons lying on a sofa in his drawing office (Sandpit Cottage had turned out to be all he hoped); she would talk about life, about plays (with plenty of detail), about men (but with less detail), about religion and politics, hope and fear, life and death.
She had never given him anything. Not her money, nor her body – that sensuous, sensitive body, an artist’s pleasure, a sculptor’s delight, thrown down like a discarded toy on his shabby sofa; not even when, one afternoon, provoked beyond enduring, he had tried to take it by force, and she had astonished him with the strength in her thin wrists.
But though she would give him nothing, she had borrowed something. Once.
The camera jerked forward again.
She had arrived unusually late, out of the murk and the drizzle of a November night. It must have been nearly eight o’clock when he heard her red Aston Martin draw up, with the distinctive squeal of its unadjusted brakes, in the courtyard behind his house.
The moment she came in, he saw that she was frightened. He tried, for nearly an hour, to find out what was wrong. And all he had learned was that she was meeting a man, later on that evening, at his home, which she would get to by driving down the Great West Road, and that she was frightened of him.
The first part might have been true or untrue. She lied often, and easily. But of the second part, there was no doubt. Her voice said it, her eyes said it, her hands said it.
All the same, he had been surprised at her request.
“I know you’ve got a revolver somewhere,” she said. “You told me you brought one back from Germany. I want to borrow it.”
“It’s not a revolver,” he said, playing for time. “It’s an automatic. And it’s a dangerous weapon.”
“It’s got a safety catch – something like that. You could show me how it works. I only want to frighten him.”
“Frighten who?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“If you won’t tell me, I won’t lend you the gun.”
But of course he had, first carefully removing every bullet from the magazine. And just before nine, she had driven away. And five minutes later, he had followed her.
He could pick her up easily enough, even on such a vile night. If she was going down the Great West Road, she would take the North Circular. She had the faster car, but he was the better driver. He picked up the Aston Martin near Ealing, and fell in behind her.
He had no firm idea of what he wanted to do. It seemed unlikely that there was anything he could do. But he was infatuated with her. And she was going to meet another man. He had to be there.
At the road junction before London Airport he lost her. He got caught, for a moment, behind a block of airport traffic. She slipped through, and was gone.
It was the worst of all possible places for it to happen. She might have turned right, down the Slough Road, gone straight ahead, to Staines, or even forked left, through Hounslow.
With no clue to help him, he had chosen the middle road. After a couple of miles that, too, forked: left to Laleham and Chertsey, right to Staines.
It was the beginning of an hour of fruitless searching, casting round, questioning pedestrians who, hurrying home, their heads down against the driving rain, had seen no Aston Martin and wouldn’t have recognised one if they had – and goodnight to you.
At about half past ten, he had stopped at a big road-house, drunk two double whiskies and eaten a sandwich in the crowded saloon bar. At midnight, with the rain easing up a little as the wind dropped, he had got back to Sandpit Cottage.
The red Aston Martin was standing in the yard. Janine was on the back seat, crouching down, as though hiding from him. He knew she was dead before his hand felt the blood, caked, but still sticky, on the front of her coat. His gun was on the floor of the car.
Why didn’t I send for the police at once, he thought. While my car was still warm, and the mud on it was wet, and the road-house might still have had my whisky glass, unwashed-up, with my fingerprints on it, and the girl who served me might still have remembered me, and one of the people I’d stopped – just one of them – might really have remembered it, if asked about it straightaway.
Instead of which, his one idea had been to get rid of everything – body, gun and car. Epping Forest seemed to him to be the best place. In the lonelier parts of the Forest a body might lie undiscovered for weeks, or months; then drive the car back to within a mile or two of Highgate, and walk the rest of the way home. The gun could go down a drain. And the bullets, which he had so carefully removed from the magazine. He must take care not to be seen driving away from the house. He must wear gloves the whole time. He must not lose his head.
It might have worked, too, if, turning off the main road into the Forest, he hadn’t bogged the low-slung Aston Martin in a mud patch. And if, while he was accelerating desperately to get out of it, a police car had not slid up behind him, and a maddeningly polite voice enquired, “Can we help you, sir?”
That stout, competent, middle-aged solicitor Alfred Beeding, of Bastwick and Beeding, drove down to Pentonville Prison in a taxi, with Hargest Macrea, Q.C., and Bridget Avery. Mr. Macrea had a long thin face, smiled rarely and enjoyed classical music and the wines of the Médoc. Bridget was pretty and normally laughed a good deal, but that morning she, too, sat under a black cloud.
The silence in the taxi was broken only once, by Macrea, who said suddenly, “If only it had been a fine night. When it’s raining people notice nothing, except their wet trouser-legs.”
Mr. Beeding nodded. It had been one of the most puzzling things about the case. Gordon swore that he had spoken to at least four pedestrians but, in spite of an appeal splashed in all the newspapers, only Mr. Keun had come forward, and he had been a most unsatisfactory witness, vague about times, uncertain about details, self-contradictory.
At the door of the interview room, Mr. Beeding, noticing Bridget’s white face, had said, “If you’d rather not come in, I could manage—”
“I’ll be all right,” she said in a shaky voice.
“It’ll be a great help if you can get down everything he says. Don’t worry about Macrea and me. But anything he lets drop. Anything at all. It might be useful.”
It was a long interview, and Bridget’s wrist was aching before it was fini
shed. He talked too fast. It was as if he realised that there was a time limit for talking, as for everything else.
“Slow,” she wanted to say. “Go slower. Stop for a moment, stop, and think.” But the words came, faster and faster; repeating the story she had heard so many times before, picking it up, putting it down, wringing the last, stale drop of fact out of it.
Mr. Beeding prodded with an occasional question, Macrea sat unmoving, and apparently unmoved.
It was when they rose to go that Harry Gordon looked at Bridget. He seemed to be noticing her for the first time, to be taking in her pleasant face, her white skin under her reddish hair.
She looked at him, too, and saw what lay behind his eyes. She saw that realisation had begun to creep back into him, like feeling into a frozen limb. She saw that he was terrified, and desperate and alone. And she hated herself, and everyone else, bitterly, for what they were doing to him.
“Do you think he’s got a chance?” she asked the question as they were driving back, and it was Hargest Macrea who answered, in his dry Lowland voice.
“A lot depends,” he said, “on who we get. Some of the younger judges are not too happy about the Homicide Act. It won’t affect their legal judgment, of course, but if we could get any new evidence – of any sort – I think they’d be happy to listen to it.”
“How long have we got?”
“About three weeks . . .”
At the same moment, two very different men were talking about the case.
Chief Superintendent Lacey, who had a healthy red face and white hair cut very short, was the head of the C.I.D. in No. 3 District. Anderson, the man he was talking to, had the look of a barrister. He had, in fact, abandoned a career at the Bar to come to New Scotland Yard of which he was now the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the C.I.D.
“It was lucky for us,” said Lacey, “that none of the three defence witnesses really stood up to cross-examination.”
“No,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “It doesn’t mean, of course, that they weren’t telling the truth – to the best of their ability.”
“They may have been truthful. They were pretty muddled, though. And the old girl, I’d say, was definitely cracked.”
“Yes.” The Assistant Commissioner turned the pages of the report. There had been nothing wrong with the case. Harry Gordon had killed the girl. No doubt about it. And yet standing, as he did, a little further from the case than the superintendent, he had a feeling – something too indefinite to be called doubt – a feeling of a loose end, somewhere, which needed tying up before the case could be docketed and put away.
He said, “The garage hand – Walters – was their best witness. He knew the girl’s Aston Martin well, and had serviced it that morning. He had noted the speedo reading on his own service log as 16733. When the car was found in Epping Forest, it showed 16814. Eighty-one miles. It isn’t more than ten from Highgate to where Gordon was picked up. How do you account for that?”
“She could have driven it seventy miles that day herself.”
“No one remembers her doing it.”
“Or the garage hand got it wrong. He could easily have written ‘33’ when it was really ‘83’. Easy to do.”
“He might have done. Garage hands aren’t accountants. Then we have André Keun, formerly of Paris, now of Laleham, who says that he was walking home, in the rain, at about ten o’clock when a young man, who might have been the prisoner, driving a car which might have been an Austin, or might have been a Ford, stopped him and asked him if he’d seen a red car. His English wasn’t very good, was it?”
“I thought we’d have to bring in an interpreter, sir. Lucky we didn’t have to. No one really likes interpreters.”
“Finally, there was Miss Huckstep of Muswell Hill, who was passing the north end of Highgate Wood, at a point where the cul-de-sac from Sandpit Cottage runs out into the main road, and saw a sinister man come out of the cul-de-sac, at exactly half past eleven. How did she know it was half past eleven? She heard the church clock strike. How did she know he was sinister? He reminded her of an uncle, a most unpleasant man. He had this same habit of swinging his rolled umbrella from side to side, behind his back – swishing it, as if it was a tail.”
“She’s quite a local character,” said Lacey. “Always bothering the police to give evidence. They know her well down at the station.”
“I see,” said the Assistant Commissioner. With his barrister’s eye he was picturing the three witnesses, estimating the effect they might have had on a jury – Walters: solid, but possibly mistaken. Keun: vague, and a foreigner. Miss Huckstep: if not mad, eccentric.
“It didn’t carry a lot of weight against the sort of stuff we could produce,” said Lacey. “Those letters – I’d hardly call them love letters. More threats than love. The bullet in the girl’s body, fired from his own gun. No doubt about the ballistic evidence. The way he tried to get rid of the body.”
“If he was guilty,” said the Assistant Commissioner, “it was the only thing he could do. If he was innocent, it was the biggest mistake he ever made.”
The words “if he was innocent” hung in the air, twisting round on themselves like cigarette smoke.
“You don’t think he’s innocent, do you, sir?”
“The thing I can’t quite fit in,” said the Assistant Commissioner, “is the bullets. You found eight of them in his handkerchief drawer, didn’t you?”
“That’s right, sir.”
“And the magazine holds nine.”
“That’s right.”
“So to that extent, it fits in with his story. That he emptied the magazine, and forgot there might be one up the spout. A lot of people who know more about guns than Gordon forget that every year.”
“I agree, sir,” said Lacey, “but—”
“If he shot her, can you think of any reason why he’d then empty the magazine into his handkerchief drawer?”
“To support his story, sir.”
“He wasn’t thinking about stories – not then. He was going to dump the body, and throw the gun down a drain. Why not take the bullets with him?”
The superintendent shook his head. He wanted to say that there was no accounting for what murderers did. There was often no logic about it. They just lost their heads.
Instead he said, “Do you think he’ll appeal?”
“Certainly he’ll appeal,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “This is one sentence they can’t increase.”
Macrea knew, almost as soon as he rose, that the Court of Criminal Appeal was against him.
Ranged on the bench, in the most attractive of the many curious Courts in the Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, the burly figure of the Lord Chief Justice looked down at him, flanked on the right by Mr. Justice Jerrold, and on the left by Mr. Justice Rymer.
“Couldn’t have been a worse Court,” said Macrea to himself. And aloud, “I should now like to draw your Lordships’ attention to a passage in the summing up which, it seems to me, seriously mis-states the position as to onus of proof.”
The dock was much smaller than the one at the Old Bailey. Harry Gordon’s white, tightly clenched face showed just above the edge of the woodwork, and below the iron rail which crowned it. Beside him, on his left, a warder sat on the edge of his chair and tried to take an interest.
Curiously, in this Court, the prisoner seemed much less important. He was a lay figure, propped up in one corner, while the legal argument occupied the centre of the stage.
Admissibility of Evidence, Weight of Evidence, Onus of Proof.
They might, thought Bridget, from her seat on the solicitors’ bench, they might have been talking about a bale of hay. Had any of them a single thought for the animal behind the bars?
It was apparent, when the Lord Chief Justice started to sum up in his deep voice, that he was trying his hardest to find some merit in the appeal. He was trying so hard that Macrea made a face, scribbled Appeal dismissed on a piece of paper, and handed it bac
k to Mr. Beeding, who looked at it and nodded. Tiny drops of sweat were standing on his forehead. He was not as tough as Macrea.
On the floor below the Court, Mr. Arbuthnot, Q.C., who knew nothing at all of Harry Gordon and his affairs, chose this moment to enter the story.
Mr. Arbuthnot was engaged in the case which was due to come on next in the Court of Criminal Appeal. His client, a previously convicted receiver of stolen goods, was waiting, as he knew, in a small room at the foot of the winding stone stairs which lead up to the interior of the dock. He therefore knocked at the door which guarded the foot of the stairs, and peered through the thick glass spy-hole to see if one of the warders had heard him.
At this moment, the Lord Chief Justice, swivelling his bulk round in his seat, and looking directly at the prisoner, had started a sentence with the words, “In all the circumstances, and having regard to every possible contention so ably put forward by Counsel on your behalf, this Court has come to the unanimous conclusion—” when Harry Gordon rose in his chair, hit the sitting warder very hard in the lower part of his stomach, and dived down the winding staircase.
At the foot of the stairs the second warder had the door open, and was explaining to Mr. Arbuthnot, Q.C., that the preceding case would very shortly be concluded.
He was right. Harry, taking the last three stairs with a jump, landed in the middle of his back. The warder fell forward on to his hands and knees, hitting his head against the door post. Harry picked himself up, said, “Excuse me” to the astounded Mr. Arbuthnot, and disappeared in the direction of the Main Hall.
As he did so, an electric alarm bell began to ring . . .
“He did what?” said Chief Superintendent Lacey.
The telephone stuttered at him.
“Did you get the entrances sealed? Within thirty or forty seconds? A desperate man can go a long way in forty seconds. Yes, I’m sure you did your best.”
In ten minutes, Lacey was listening to the Superintendent of the Royal Courts of Justice, Mr. Breadwell.
“We have to cope with quite a few bad habits,” said Breadwell. “Criminals, defaulters, lunatics, all sorts. And we’ve got quite an efficient alarm system. It’s operated by a bell relay. As soon as it starts, Court officials and police officers close all the exits except the front door, and that’s guarded. It should be effective well inside sixty seconds.”
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