The Assize of the Dying

by Edith Pargeter

  ‘I tell you again,’ said Malachi patiently, ‘we won’t involve you in anything we do. But can’t you see that it would pay you to help us? You want him found, you want him safely locked up, because you’ll be safer then. Identify him for us, and somehow we’ll manage the rest without dragging you in. Keep your mouth shut, and it looks as if he’s going to get away with it. Heaven help you, then, if he finds out who you are, and how much you even may know. At least you must have sized him up, age, bulk, clothes. He must have looked a good touch, or you wouldn’t have bothered to pick his pocket.’

  ‘He was tall, and nearly as broad as you – and somewhere about your age, maybe. Yes, he was dressed all right, he looked smart enough.’

  ‘Not in evening dress?’

  ‘No, it was a dark lounge suit. That’s all I know, so help me.’

  He licked his meek, mauve lips, and flashed the quick little eyes from Malachi’s face to Margaret’s. It began to look as if that was all they were going to get out of him. And yet he was tempted; Margaret could see it in the speculative yet timorous glance, that could not rest nor confront them directly, and yet could not leave the exploration of their faces for long. After all, how did he know they might not be effective, and really relieve him of this nightmare shadow upon his almost blameless little life? If he helped them, there might be heavenly security, and pay as well. They had money to spare; he had an earnest of it already.

  ‘Yes,’ she thought, intuition stirring vehemently, ‘he wants to talk, if he dared. Only not the face! He isn’t going to admit to anybody, ever, until the murderer’s in custody, that he could recognise the face. So there must be something else. But if that was the full extent of their encounter, what else can there be?’

  Gently, avoiding the suddenness which might surprise him into defence again, she said: ‘What became of the other thing you took out of his pocket? We don’t want it. But it might help if you let us see it. That’s all – it might help.’

  Malachi’s sharp silence was the only violent thing that happened. Jody sat, quiet, looking at Margaret, and it seemed to her that his nervous tension had perceptibly relaxed, now that she had put her finger inescapably on his secret.

  ‘There’s nothing to lose,’ she said, carefully indifferent. ‘We’re not asking you to come forward.’

  He had it on him, of course. When he had made up his mind to trust them as far as he must, he plunged a trembling hand into his inside pocket, and took out a little wad of cotton-wool, from which he disentangled and shook out upon his palm a tiny, glittering thing.

  Margaret drew in her breath sharply, and closed her fingers upon Malachi’s arm. They sat staring in fascination at the minute sapphire petals, the wisps of green enamel leaf, the thin stem. The reality was more flower-like, more true in colour even than the painted copy. The problem of disposal of bulky jewellery in a well-fitting suit must have caused the murderer to leave only small, flat pieces in the pockets of his jacket. This tiny, elegant thing could not have disturbed the set of his clothes by so much as a visible ripple.

  ‘This was all?’ said Malachi, in a low voice.

  ‘Yes, this and the brooch. If there was another o’ these, I missed it.’

  ‘You didn’t try disposing of this?’

  Jody grinned, though a sweat of anxiety stood on his lip. ‘Whatd’you take me for? Too identifiable by half, that is. I reckoned it would have to be slipped abroad, or wait a long time till the shindy died down. Another thing – I knew nothing about a murder, but I figured these were stolen before I lifted ’em. Who goes round carrying pebbles in his jacket pocket? It was the cigarette-case I tried for, only I picked the wrong side. And now, after this business …’

  ‘It’s still identifiable – only more dangerous than ever!’

  The bright, small eyes shrank, smiling. ‘More valuable, too – to somebody!’ Even his smile was agonised, yet its anxiety was sweetened by the compensating thought of the lucrative hold he had over another human being. Yes, he knew enough to find the man who had carried that minute and revealing treasure, if only he dared exercise his advantage.

  ‘It might be worth a fair sum to me,’ said Malachi, holding down his tone with difficulty from too much eagerness.

  ‘Not as much as it will be to somebody else,’ said Jody softly.

  ‘But my price wouldn’t have a funeral attached to it.’

  ‘I can take care of myself, thank you!’ But his eyes blinked rapidly, and he wiped the sweat from his lip nervously.

  ‘You could be too ambitious. Wouldn’t you rather take a sensible hundred for it, and stay alive? And free? Thousands won’t be any use to you if you make just one slip handling a man like that.’

  Jody had thought of that, too, he was thinking of it all the time.

  ‘And, don’t forget, this thing happens to be mine. I could call a policeman now, if I liked, and turn you in for being in possession of it. Instead, I’m offering you a hundred for it, and no trouble.’

  The narrow, womanish hand closed jealously upon the ear-clip at Malachi’s slight movement towards it. ‘You could raise that offer a lot before I’d be interested. In fact, mister, I doubt if you can afford this little lot – I doubt it very much! Sold in the right market, it’s worth more than you could raise.’

  ‘It might be,’ said Malachi, ‘if you were immortal. But somehow I don’t think you’d live to collect from the customer you’re thinking of.’

  ‘You can let me alone to take care of that.’ But the very asperity of his voice was a reaction from the agony of dread that chilled the ardour of his greed. He could not make up his mind to part easily with his advantage, and yet he doubted himself if he could ever screw up his courage to use it. Horribly torn, he trembled and writhed, trying to make up his mind.

  ‘You can save your breath, you’re not getting it. I’m not parting. You wouldn’t call the police – you promised this was between you and me, and you won’t go back on it, I know your sort. Well, I’m keeping this, see? I’ll have plenty of time to plan out how to use it.’

  Malachi and Margaret exchanged a quick glance. It was plain that they could not persuade him to give up his perilous asset, and the terms of their approach to him precluded any measures of compulsion.

  ‘All right, then, keep it. But at least let me have a closer look at it. Give it to Miss Manton, if you don’t trust me – you know she’ll hand it back to you.’

  On these terms Jody surrendered it pliantly enough, himself laying it upon Margaret’s outstretched palm.

  ‘Open the clip, Margaret – hold it with your handkerchief. I expect the prints, if there ever were any, are gone to blazes long ago, but no need to deface any marks that may be left. And you, my lad, if you want to keep your asset at its most valuable, don’t handle it with your fingers.’

  Through the lawn, Margaret’s finger-tips delicately parted the little blue flower from its flat, silver lobe, patterned inside and out with a fan of fine indentations. Malachi leaned his cheek against hers, and they studied it together, closely, breathlessly. Then Margaret’s hand shook, the clip sprang to again and the blue speedwell fell and glittered upon the reed mat.

  On the silver inner surface they had seen the remnant of a small brown stain; the smooth planes had been rubbed clean by much handling, but a dull, dry line of brown, fine as a hair, still coloured every indentation for a length of half an inch, the last lingering traces of Zoë Trevor’s blood.

  She could not look at her fingers, that evening, without seeing again the thin corrosion of brown in those grooves; and her depression, her sense of having been very near to the truth and yet somehow having missed it, weighed on her like a gathering storm. She drifted through her solitary tea, and smoked the one cigarette she allowed herself before beginning preparations for the evening. Tomorrow was dedicated to a friend who seldom came to town, and for one day at least her fever would have to cool itself as best it could. But even if she could have rejoined Malachi early tomorrow, where were they
to go next? They had already talked it over and over between them, and arrived nowhere the ear-clip stayed with Jody MacClure, safe but unfruitful, and even if they could induce him to part with it, what use were they to make of it? It was valuable only when he chose to provide them with the face that went with it. Or, of course, from his point of view, when he took action to contact the man from whom he had stolen it.

  As anonymous as ever, the murderer moved freely, somewhere about the world, immune, no path leading to him; and, unless something caused him to break cover, for all Margaret could see he might go invisible for ever. Now if they could keep a watch upon the activities of Jody MacClure, and he should attempt the contact he feared and desired so much, on which his greed and his terror alike were centred—

  ‘But he won’t!’ said Margaret aloud, with absolute conviction. ‘He’ll sweat blood planning it, he’ll always be meaning to make the approach, but he’ll never manage to do it. When it comes to the point his nerve will fail him. He won’t be able to bring himself to use the thing, or to let go of it.’

  And what, after all, was he to do? She began to wonder about that. How could the approach be made, supposing he knew only his man’s face, not his name and whereabouts? What did one do in a case like that? One could hardly put a notice in the ‘Personal’ Column—

  Then she thought, why not? People read it. Almost everyone reads it – not every day, perhaps, but occasionally. And it isn’t so difficult to say, ‘I’ve got something it would pay you to be reasonable about,’ in terms which will pass by every eye but the ones for which it is intended. If Jody MacClure hasn’t the nerve to do it, why shouldn’t someone else draw the wood for him? How is the murderer to know who drew up the advertisement? All he’ll be sure of is that whoever drew it up knows something, knows far too much.

  Put yourself in the murderer’s place, she told herself, growing excited. At this moment he’s already alerted, because this morning’s papers carried the item about the brooch being found and identified. He’ll be watching the papers more closely than usual. Now he knows that he lost two bits of jewellery from his pocket that night, not just one, and the odds are a thousand to one on, that where the one went, the other went too. Ergo, he knows that whoever let Fredericks have the brooch to sell for him has retained the ear-clip, and is well aware now of its significance. He’ll have spent quite a lot of time recalling everything recallable about that ear-clip, and he, of all people on earth, knows only too well that the lobe of Zoë’s ear bled a little. He may not know that the clip is marked. He’ll certainly fear that it may be. Supposing, then, that he suddenly comes up against a ‘Personal’ which is unmistakably inviting him to a date with some unknown person, to talk business about that clip. Will he go? I don’t think he can afford not to go. With the money to pay – or the means to make payment unnecessary. Because only one person, he’ll be sure, could have issued the invitation, and that’s the one person in the world who knows too much, and must be prevented from passing on what he knows – the man who picked his pocket that night. Yes, he’d be very interested indeed in an appointment like that. It wouldn’t matter much whether the advertiser brought the clip to the meeting with him or not – once he was quiet for good it wouldn’t be important, because no one would know where it was lifted from, or be able to identify the man who had it in his pocket on the night of the murder.

  She had reasoned herself into a kind of hypnosis. But it was already too late for this evening’s papers. No, perhaps not too late for the last Gazette, if Charlie was at the office. Better an evening sheet than a daily. There was too much variety by daylight, but everyone reads the last editions at night, with really only two papers to choose from, or at most three.

  She ground out her half-smoked cigarette, and sat down with pencil and paper to compose her bait. Several times she crossed out her efforts impatiently, but at last it read to her like the right blend of candour and mystery.

  ‘SPEEDWELL: Early meeting to our mutual advantage. Name time and place. LIGHT FINGERS.’

  It was a cocky junior who answered her ring at the office, and he told her that Mr Manton was out on an important assignment, and might be out of town overnight. However, it seemed that as a special favour to Miss Manton the front office would accept her ‘Personal’ by telephone, so that it could be included in tonight’s final edition – though such a late insertion was, the junior intimated, most irregular. She dictated it slowly and distinctly. Spoken, it sounded curiously commonplace, and she suffered a revulsion of feeling, and half wished it back again. Nothing could possibly come of it! But there was no withdrawing now; and even if the bait caught nothing, there was at least nothing to lose by the attempt.

  She bathed and dressed, and wound her way down the three flights of stairs in the narrow old house, three times encountering her reflection upon the dim landings cold in the late autumn evening. A fair girl, very slender in a dark dress, with a pointed chin and a plaintive width of brow, searching her own face at every turn of the staircase. She seemed to herself not quite real, as though she had dispatched the vital part of herself somewhere else upon a necessary errand, and could not get it back in time to be convincing in the eyes of her uncle and her uncle’s guest. She was waiting all the time for the evening papers to thrust their way through the letter-box and drop with a heavy sibilance upon the hall floor; and she was thinking of the quick magnificence of Zoë Trevor, and its unbelievable extinction. No one had ever been more alive than she, nor left a greater devastation round her when she died; not even the Spanish countess.

  It was only two days since she had seen Sir Robert Wyvern in court, yet when he came into the full light of the drawing-room she was astonished at the change in him. The monumental brow had lost its marble smoothness; faint, unaccustomed furrows of perplexity marked it painfully. The heavily correct face, long and immobile, between aristocratic and equine, had sagged from its perfect tension, and for the first time he looked middle-aged, almost old. She thought at first, instinctively: ‘He’s ill!’

  But in a moment she knew that he was afraid. Not rebelliously, not combatively afraid, but deep in a regretful resignation. ‘Good God!’ she said to herself, ‘he believes in this curse!’ And the mere fact of his quiescence under that belief seemed to bring death into the house with him. She looked round the bright room, silver, cream and rose, as lofty as its own breadth, and it seemed to her to have dulled with his coming.

  Mr Justice Manton came down as they were drinking sherry, and his granite presence, unshaken by the preoccupations and doubts of lesser men, seemed to thrust his colleague, by contrast, a step nearer to disintegration.

  ‘Charlie not home yet? Has he telephoned?’

  ‘I rang up his office, and it seems he’s on a job that may take him out of town for tonight. Sherry, Uncle John?’

  ‘Thank you, Margaret! They didn’t say what chimera he’s chasing now? It seems an unreal existence to me,’ admitted the Judge, taking his guest by the arm and drawing him to the fire.

  ‘It has change and variety,’ said Sir Robert. ‘These boys came out of the Forces at the wrong time and the wrong age, it seems to me. They were overtuned before they were even grown up, they can’t get back to a normal pitch now. All they can do is try to accelerate every job to their own speed, and as one collapses move on to another, and speed that up until they wreck it. It takes a lot of one-act melodramas like that to make up a lifetime. I often think it must seem an endlessly dreary business to them.’

  ‘The trouble is that they have every gift except application,’ said the Judge roundly. ‘Charlie’s certainly run through several – one-act melodramas, as you say – since he came out.’

  ‘Application!’ Sir Robert smiled wryly into the fire over his glass. ‘That’s a virtue for which there was neither time nor need in their world of enforced celebrity. I suppose as their physical apparatus slows down the tempo will become a little easier. It seems hard to have to wait for old age to get a little peace.’ He look
ed up at Margaret. ‘The papers haven’t come in yet?’

  ‘Not yet!’ She had started at the apposite question. Sherry spilled on to the skirt of her dress.

  ‘You haven’t been in court today?’ asked the Judge.

  ‘No – no, I was wondering if there would be any more developments in this wretched Trevor business. The brooch, you know. It seemed curiously vindictive of fate to turn the thing up the day after Stevenson died.’

  ‘I don’t see that it alters the case. You’re not letting Stevenson’s little vengeance prey on your mind, Robert, are you? You conducted a perfectly fair and balanced case, and obtained a completely justified conviction. The truth is, you’ve been overworking grossly for months; you must expect to feel the effects of it sooner or later. You haven’t actually any qualms about your safety, have you?’

  ‘I have qualms about the verdict,’ said Sir Robert in a low voice.

  ‘I have none. Our business is justice, and we have done justice. A medieval story, however dramatically apposite, alters nothing.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Sir Robert sadly, ‘if our conception of justice is not sometimes a little arrogant.’

  Over dinner in Mr Justice Manton’s house they forswore all such topics of conversation. The old man drew on his amazingly catholic relaxations for his table-talk, and brought out in his lighter moments a kind of marmoreal charm, gracious but cold, which shed light about him without warmth. Not until they were sitting over the fire in the drawing-room once again, and the papers rattling through the letter-slot made Margaret spring up from her coffee, did they return to the case of Louis Stevenson.

  ‘I doubt if there’s anything to worry you tonight, Robert. The whole sensation will drain away slowly, as they always do, without giving us the satisfaction of seeing it end. Doubts about the facts of guilt and death,’ he said, with surprising gentleness, ‘are occupational risks in our profession. They show that the heart is still alive to one’s fallibility – that one is, in fact, still fit to practise.’