by Ellis Peters
The words were like kisses, and the voice was like an embrace. The wardress knitted, and her face was indifferent as the wall, but she listened.
Dennis said, in the breathless murmur which belonged to the solitude and the dark; ‘You’re the only home I’ve got in the world, and if you even turn your head away from me I shall die.’
‘I never shall, my darling. Don’t be afraid of anything.’
After a moment he asked, drinking her face with wide, grey eyes: ‘Are you never afraid?’
‘No, never!’ she said, lying with the most perfect and affectionate serenity. ‘I’ve told you, everything is going to be all right. You mustn’t even doubt it.’
‘All right, I won’t doubt it. But I wish I could have kept you from having to go through all this.’
‘I think it’s harder for you. No one can get at me here, but everyone can pester you. I’m sorry I had to bring you that gift, as well,’ she said, with a soft and rueful smile.
‘It doesn’t matter. It happens to other people, too. They’ve made their own picture of us – we’re being made to dance for them. But that’s got nothing to do with the reality. It’ll pass!’
In these moments of unhesitating communion they both believed these things. The sentimental shells in which the newspapers were trying to encase them fell off like a sloughed skin. And then suddenly, between the deliberate and defiant endearments, a tremor of fear and doubt would shake them both, and the pure image of their certainty would be torn shivering away, and they would be left struggling again in panic with all the arduous intricacies of language, and staring painfully upon each other to recover the lost conviction of their safety.
‘Is there anything you’d like? Anything I could bring you?’
‘I can’t think of anything.’
‘Do they give you enough books?’
‘Oh, yes. I have plenty to read. I have everything I need.’
‘I’ll try to come again next week. If you’d like me to?’
They groped and touched clumsily, and could get no hold on each other. Even their voices had receded into a laborious unreality, and their bodies felt the weight of the grotesque headline images encasing them, making them heavy and slow, so that they could never again be molten together even by the fury of love.
‘You’ll talk to Mr. Quinn, and do everything he says?’
‘Yes, of course!’
‘We’ve only to stick it out now. Everything will be all right!’
But it was no longer possible to be sure of that. She saw him receding from her, and it was no longer a simple thing to believe that the separation was only for a short time. He would withdraw with many a look back over his shoulder, trying to recapture the certainty of victory, or at least to keep the full memory of the happiness which had already belonged to them once, and might help them to believe in its eventual recovery. But always, when the door had closed between them, she suffered a terrible moment of frenzy and loss, as if she had said good-bye to him for ever.
4
The trial came on at the Assizes at the county town, in the clear, melting weather of May, while the parks were full of tulips, stiff bright candles in their thick candlesticks of leaves. The judge’s procession laid a devious course along the pavement between the flower-beds, weaving its way among the dimpled mirror-grey puddles almost with the eccentricity of Theo’s labyrinth of flake-white; and in the skittish winds the little, shrivelled Judge looked unimaginably old and waxen and vindictive, huddled in his robes like a robin in its feathers, but without the bravado. He had not survived a lifetime of justice without injury; he was sick and saddened with humanity, and would not be able to adjust himself to deal fairly with his enemy for many more years, and even now the tension of his struggle had thinned him to a shred of skin, bone and nerves inside his clothes.
‘You couldn’t fall into better hands,’ said Suspiria’s Counsel, after reciting, with the candour almost of friendship, the curious qualities of this embittered old man. ‘If there’s one creature he hates more than a man, it’s a woman. Because he’s well aware of his own threatening disintegration, he’ll fall over backwards to avoid being unfair to you. With a doubt the size of a walnut, you could draw a life’s-worth of benefit out of him.’
At about the same time Sergeant Grayne was saying to Inspector Tarrant, with whom he had been over and over the meagre personal evidence they had collected on the Freeland marriage: ‘It was worth trying. But we shan’t get a conviction.’
‘We can but try,’ said Inspector Tarrant equably.
They tried their hardest. Not they only, for the Crown had the ambitious assistance of Vincent Perleman, Q.C., who had begun to collect spectacular cases as a means of advertising a talent already proven but not yet sufficiently inflated into legend. He estimated that the conviction of Suspiria Freeland might be precisely what his reputation needed at this stage. She was personable, she was an artist, she had rather more than a national name, and she was not of a dangerously sympathetic type, the public heart would not beat hotly for her, at least without an unconscionable amount of prompting. Too clearly she held herself apart from any appeal to them; too obviously, in her undemonstrative way, she despised them. She was a woman who might find a wave of facile emotion sweeping after her if she escaped, but would neither invite nor excite any partisan feelings if the verdict went against her. It needed success to make a success of Suspiria with the public. Moreover, she was a woman; he would lose nothing if he did not get her convicted, while gaining stature if he did. She was a double investment, and he extended himself to make the most of her.
His assistant in this laudable enterprise was a very young and very active man who had his name to make in the world, and would have followed a first-class principal to any kill. Between them they made a formidable team, capable of spreading a very little evidence a considerable way.
The court was crowded on the first day of the case, and in the shine and showers of the morning perhaps a hundred people waited outside throughout the hearing, avid for even secondhand news. Inside the court many Great Leddington people had managed to secure places, for this was something they could not afford to miss. They inspected a newly-sworn jury as motley and yet as respectable as most, a defendant who seemed to be every moment less of flesh and more of mind and spirit, burning bright in her fragility and her desperate attention. They kept their eyes fixed upon her as unshakably as she kept hers upon Perleman while he opened his case. It was a long exposition, because most of his material was in the circumstances, and he had no intention of letting the trivial answers he would get from his witnesses blur the clarity of the picture he himself knew so much better how to give, the picture of an established marriage suddenly shattered by the most illogical, the most hopeless, of love affairs.
He had a taste for form and symmetry, he wished to give his attack an elegant and compact shape. He was a man of very moderate gestures, but Suspiria thought at times that his handsome hands centred and compelled truth as violently and determinedly as hers had been accustomed to compel the clay. He left it its nature, but imposed on it a shape of his own choosing. Was he within his artistic rights, she wondered? For without question he was an artist. She supposed that she, of all people, ought to acknowledge his claim to a craftsman’s rights over his material.
‘Such, then, is the picture of this household up to the dates with which we are concerned in this case. The marriage was ten years old, and might have been supposed to be about as nearly invulnerable as a marriage could well be. The couple were eminently suited to each other, had every interest in common, and had proved their compatibility and their affection by experience.
‘Then, one evening early in October, something happens to this couple, something quite unforeseen, which is to alter both their lives. The husband has been in London, and is driving home early in the evening. He calls at a garage on the London road near Great Leddington, and the proprietor, who knows him well, sees that he is under the influence of dri
nk, and in no fit state to drive. It was not a particularly unusual state of affairs with him, it appears. To avoid letting him run into trouble, the garage proprietor asks one of his hands, who is just going home, and lives only a quarter of an hour’s walk from Freeland’s house, to drive him home to Little Worth. The young man good-naturedly agrees, and on arrival is hailed into the house by Freeland, who made friends readily and indiscriminately even when sober, introduced to Mrs. Freeland, and detained for some time before he is allowed to go on home. This was the encounter which broke up the Freeland marriage. The parties met again by chance, and Freeland rashly adopted the young man Forbes into his household as a friend. There were frequent visits. The young man of twenty-two began to take an interest in Mrs. Freeland’s work, and a still greater interest in the lady herself. Early in December he became her lover.
‘That the infatuation was mutual and disastrous we have every reason to know, for its results are precisely what engages us at this moment. To look for reason in love is perhaps waste of time at best, but I ask you to consider the particular desperation of this case. On the one side a woman of culture, and of remarkable talent, a woman in her late thirties, admirably matched with a man of her own artistic calibre, of similar background, and of suitable age; on the other, a boy of twenty-two, a garage mechanic, cursorily educated, but without any intellectual resources which could bring him on to the same plane with her – incompatible in age, in temperament, in his whole scale of values. What could possibly be hoped from such a liaison? But remember this, it is precisely against such odds as these that infatuation acquires and asserts its most disastrous hold upon the human imagination. Where little is urged against an unwarranted affection, little will be attempted in order to retain it. Where nothing but the illogical fury of the heart promises any faint hope of successful fulfilment, monstrous feats may be performed to bolster up that hope. It is the Crown’s case that the result here was the death of Theodore Freeland, and that he died as the result of poison administered by his wife.
‘I will not cite precedents,’ said Mr. Perleman, sweeping his magnetic gaze over the line of intent faces in the jury box. ‘Your memories, like mine, will bring to mind the names of other such women, for this is a case which repeats itself with a curious persistency – the case of the ageing woman of parts, and the man who can match against her culture just two qualities made overwhelming by the time and the circumstances of their eruption into her life – his beauty and his youth.’
Suspiria’s translucent face, which seemed to be only faintly shadowed by the bones within, gazed steadily upon him, and gave no sign of outrage or pain. She was thinking, with what energy she could draw off from her single devouring preoccupation with continuing to live: ‘If I survive this, in less than a year I shall know how much of this is true.’
‘By their own story,’ went on Perleman, catching up the skirts of the pause he had left them for digestion, ‘they continued constant lovers from that day, so long as both of them were free. And before Thursday, January 29th, Theodore Freeland became fully aware of the liaison, for I shall call a friend of his, to whom he talked about his tragedy on that day, showing a full knowledge of the extent and the threatened permanence of his loss.
‘On Friday, February 6th, at an early hour in the morning, Mrs. Freeland called the doctor and the police from the call-box at the crossroads near her home, and told them that she had just found her husband dead in his studio.’
He began to tell the story of that day detail by detail, the contorted corpse, the trodden paint, the innocent glass which should not have been innocent, the poison without a source.
‘Precisely three people were in that house on the previous evening, and precisely three people appear in this case throughout. Apart from the husband, the wife and the lover, the stage is completely bare. That is the most notable thing about the entire set-up – it is a drama with only three characters.
‘You will hear medical evidence which will show that the poison was swallowed by Theodore Freeland between the hours of nine and eleven-thirty on the night of February the 5th. The police evidence will tell you that there was a ready source of antimony oxide on the premises, in the accused woman’s workshop. It is a material sometimes used by potters to obtain yellow colouring in glazes and pigments, and she had the greater part of a pound of it in one of the cupboards of her workshop. Access to it was easy enough during the day for anyone who was sufficiently familiar with the household to know that such an ingredient existed, and might be found there. But not one person appears in this case at all but the three angles of this most improbable triangle – the husband, the wife, and the lover. Is it not a reasonable supposition that if there existed one other person in the world with an interest in the death of this inconvenient husband, somewhere in the house, somewhere in the case, there would be a hint, a handprint, a mere whiff of that person? There is none. None whatever!
‘Consider, then, the situation of these three people on the night of February 5th. The wife and her lover, as you will hear, have been temporarily disturbed in their relationship, for he has not been to the house for a week. Why? What has happened to upset their idyll? What new factor has appeared in the triangle? Only this – that the husband now knows what is going on. The first certain knowledge we have of his enlightenment is on Thursday, January 29th, remember. There is a week of abstention – something new between these infatuated people. At the end of it, the young man goes to visit his mistress again, but it is only a short visit – before ten o’clock he is home again. There is evidence to show that he must have left Little Worth only a few minutes after half-past nine. He spent, you will observe, about half an hour of the time in question within that house. He knew something of the lay-out of Mrs. Freeland’s workshop, and had worked occasionally with her materials, but it seems fairly certain that he was not well acquainted with them, and knew very little about their chemical properties. It would not have been impossible for him to acquire the necessary knowledge for the act, nor does the time element rule him out completely, but on the face of it he is not a particularly likely poisoner. He has had what he wanted – the problem of the husband might, no doubt, be a painful one even for him, but how much more painful to the woman!
‘And what of the remaining pair in the house? It was not a matter of a mere half hour together that night for them, but of the whole night, without interference, without witnesses. Take, then, the possibility which will certainly be presented to you at some point by the defence, the possibility of suicide.
‘You may think that a man whose marriage has been shattered after ten years, and whose love for his wife is certainly as strong as ever it was, had a strong motive for putting an end to his life. But you may also think that there are several indications that he did no such thing. There was no farewell note, the door of the studio was not locked from within, as one might well have expected it to be if he intended to kill himself, the studio itself contained no traces whatever of the poison or of his means of swallowing it, and, most significant of all, the dead man himself left us a map of his movements for several hours before his death, in flake-white oil-paint – and it does not once approach the door of the room. However that antimony oxide got from the cupboard in the workshop into Theodore Freeland’s body, he himself certainly did not go to the workshop that night in order to get it.
‘Come, then, to the wife. She is alone with this suddenly troublesome husband all night. He is drunk, he has been drunk for some days and he has shut himself in his studio to try and satiate himself with work. She has the strongest possible motive for wishing him dead, since he threatens her not only with trouble and violence, but also, and more subtly, with the constant mirror of her own guilt, the reproach of his grief. A world without her husband would make everything smooth and simple for her. She alone is in a position to consider at once the full implications of her opportunity. She has an adequate supply of poison, to which it can fairly be claimed that her husband also has free access;
she is perfectly aware of the properties of antimony oxide, she knows exactly where to put her hand on it at a moment’s notice. She has all night to dispose of the immediate evidence – the food or drink in which it is administered. She cannot, perhaps, obliterate the traces of that obliteration. There will be, to say the least, a suspicious blankness about the scene. But she has the desperation, and the determination, to accept that risk.
‘It is the Crown’s case that this woman did precisely that. She took a bold risk to end an intolerable situation. She brought to her husband, at some time before half-past eleven that night, a drink, or possibly food, in which she had secreted a quantity of antimony oxide sufficient to bring on acute poisoning, and to kill before morning. Perhaps she had to use her persuasive powers as a woman in order to induce him to accept the attention from her. Perhaps she pretended a change of heart, a reconciliation. What is certain is that within those hours Theodore Freeland did indeed swallow the antimony, and did with complete finality die. It is the Crown case that no one within the bounds of reasonable probability could have administered the poison to him, and removed the traces of the act, except his wife, Suspiria Freeland.’
He began to call his witnesses; first Inspector Tarrant with evidence of arrest, and the detailed picture of the studio, clear and cold in the frosty morning about Theo’s body. He made the most of his man; and with the picture still uncorrected by cross-examination, the court rose for lunch.