The Sleep of Reason

by C. P. Snow

  “Those were the first indications which brought the defendants within the scope of the enquiry. I have to remind you that the police had many leads which seemed far more positive and more worth pursuing. But the police routine could not overlook even the most unpromising of suggestions. And so, as a matter of routine, Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were interviewed for the first time on October 6, that is, three days before Eric’s body was found. They were, as you will hear, both calm and co-operative. They expressed themselves as horrified by the disappearance and anxious to help. They denied any knowledge of the boy, but were very willing to account for their movements in the weekend of September 20–22. Their car had, as it happened, needed repairing, and they had left it in their usual garage. So they had gone out to Rose Cottage by bus and spent their usual quiet weekend. On the Saturday morning Miss Ross had done a little shopping in the village. They had returned to the Patemans’ house by the last bus on the Sunday night.

  “All this sounded quite natural. As a matter of routine the police checked one or two details of their account. Miss Ross was remembered as shopping in the village as usual on the Saturday morning. No one had noticed anything unusual, outside their ordinary weekend habits. In the same way, an enquiry was made at their garage, the Wyvern Garage in Whitehorse Street, and their car had duly been left there for repair during the weekend, as they had stated. But here Detective-Constable Hallam, whom you will hear in evidence, asked some further questions. He wanted to know what had been wrong with the car. The answers did not satisfy him. The garage proprietor, Mr Norman, had been slightly puzzled himself. There had been a small jamming in the gear change, but only of the kind which experienced car owners like the defendants could put right in a few minutes themselves. This was simply a straw in the wind, but Detective-Constable Hallam was not satisfied.”

  The enquiries went on, Bosanquet leaving nothing out. The car was conspicuous, it was well known in the neighbourhood. It occurred to the detective-constable to discover whether it had ever been noticed on the other side of the town, in the vicinity of Eric Mawby’s house. He had found witnesses who had seen such a car patrolling, not one evening but three or four evenings consecutively, the route between Eric’s house and the recreation ground.

  “This was still a straw in the wind,” said Bosanquet, with no emphasis at all. “But Detective-Constable Hallam’s superiors thought it justified a visit to the Patemans’ house, at a time when Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were present. We have now come to December last, when, of course, Eric’s body had already been discovered. At this second interview Miss Ross and Miss Pateman were not as co-operative as at the first. They refused to discuss the repairs to the car, and after a while refused to answer further questions.”

  Silence. The hallucinations of fact. Cora had her gaze still turned on Kitty, who had begun, in a frenetic fashion, to scribble notes and push them forward to her solicitor. She was writing as assiduously as the judge himself.

  “There followed a third interview, this time at Rose Cottage,” Bosanquet said. “During the questioning of Miss Ross and Miss Pateman, which was being conducted by Detective-Inspector Morley, other officers were searching the cottage and the garden. For some time this search revealed nothing. The cottage was swept and garnished. But in due course one of the officers, Detective-Sergeant Cross, discovered a small metal object pushed into the corner of a shelf. He recognised it as an angle joint which might have come from a Meccano set. He asked them to explain why it was there. At that point Miss Pateman said or screamed something across to her companion – something like, though no one can be definite about the exact words, ‘You blasted fool’.

  “Neither of the defendants produced any explanation about the presence of this Meccano unit. They said it had nothing to do with them. After a further interval officers searching the garden found, buried in the bushes, the box of what appeared to be a new Number One Meccano Set, containing most of its components, and carrying on the lid a tab from the Midland Educational Company. At this stage the defendants were separated, cautioned, and brought back to police headquarters for further enquiries.”

  Bosanquet glanced at his wristwatch. As though under suggestion, others of us did the same. It was ten minutes to one.

  “By this time, since the officers had spent some hours at Rose Cottage, it was Saturday afternoon. Nevertheless the manager of the Midland Educational Company was immediately contacted, and search, of course, continued at the cottage. The bill for the purchase of a Number One Meccano Set was traced, bearing the date of September 18 last year, that is, two days before Eric’s disappearance. The shop assistant who had made this transaction was visited at her home. She was able to remember the purchaser as someone answering to the description of Miss Ross.

  “Meanwhile Miss Ross was being examined alone by Detective-Superintendent Maxwell. He will tell you that she was still denying knowledge of the Meccano set, although in a parallel examination Miss Pateman was providing explanations, such as, that it was a long-forgotten present which had never been delivered. The detective-superintendent was given the information from the Midland Educational Company. He told Miss Ross and asked her to account for it. Then she said: ‘Yes, we took him out to the cottage that Friday night. We borrowed a car to do it.’”

  In a tone indistinguishable from that in which he quoted her, he spoke to the judge: “I’m inclined to think, my lord, this might be a convenient time to break off.”

  “As you like, Mr Bosanquet.”

  The politeness, the bowing judge, the ritual, Cora’s blonde head disappearing underground. When I had followed George and Margaret downstairs, the entrance hall was full, people were pushing towards the refreshment table. Outside, in the spring air, cameras clicked. Some were press cameras, but the journalists had not emerged yet, and I led the other two away, trying to hurry George’s invalid pace. I heard some whispers and thought I could pick one out as “that’s her uncle”.

  We walked, Margaret in the middle, George’s heavy slow step with feet out-turned delaying us. Neither Margaret nor I could find anything to say. Instead, George spoke: “It’s nasty,” he said.

  His words, like all the words spoken that morning, could not have been more matter-of-fact.

  “It’s nasty, of course,” he repeated.

  “I’m sorry, George,” said Margaret.

  He smiled at her, a diffident, gentle smile.

  “Still,” he went on, “wait till you hear the answer.”

  Margaret couldn’t reply, nor could I. Was he whistling up his old unextinguishable optimism, or was he just pretending? Wait till you hear the answer. I had heard politicians growl that identical phrase across the floor of the Commons, after the bitterest attack from the other side.

  “I must say,” said George, “I thought that—” – he brought out his curse as though the word had just been invented or as though the carnal reality were in front of his eyes – “was unnecessarily offensive.”

  Now he wasn’t pretending. He was speaking out of the hates of a lifetime. I didn’t answer. This was no time to argue, though in fact I thought the exact opposite. I thought also that Bosanquet, in his own fashion, was a master of his job.

  “Well,” said George, “where are we going to eat?”

  Margaret and I looked at each other, hesitating. We didn’t want much, she said. George, with a kind of boisterous kindness, said that we must eat something. He knew of a good place.

  It turned out to be a pub which sometimes we used to visit (he showed no sign of remembering that) at the end of a night’s crawl. Nowadays it served hot lunches: and there, in a small and steaming room upstairs, George, giving out an air of old-fashioned gallantry, placed Margaret in a chair and insisted that she eat some steak-and-kidney pie. His pleasure was extreme, pathetic, when she was ready to join him in drinking a double whisky.

  He was fond of her, because she never blamed him. He had told her a good deal about his life, and found that she casually accepted it. “I
hope that’s really all right for you,” he said, looking at her plate of meat and pastry, like a proud, considerate, but slightly anxious host.

  It was not we who were trying to support him, but the reverse. He might be behaving so out of a residue of robustness greater than most men’s – or out of indifference or a lack of affect. All we knew was that he was behaving like a brave man. He even told a long complicated funny story, so quirky that it didn’t seem unfitting that day.

  He did ask me – in an aside – whether Bosanquet (whom he never referred to by name, but always by the Anglo-Saxon curse, as though it were a kind of title) was going to “drag in” any of the crowd. George hadn’t missed the single oblique reference. I said that it seemed unlikely. Perhaps the people who lent the car might be mentioned – were they connections of George’s?

  George shook his head, his expression for an instant lost and suffering, and said that he didn’t know. “I don’t want anyone else to get into a mess,” he muttered, repeating the words that had chilled me the day before Christmas Eve.

  He turned his attention to Margaret again, trying to think of another treat for her, before we returned to the Assize Hall. Again the crowded entrance, the barristers in the courtroom seen from above, the ascent of those two into the dock. A little delay, only three minutes this time. The ritual bowing. Bosanquet on his feet, beginning: “My lord, and members of the jury, we now turn for a moment to certain statements of Miss Pateman–”

  26: Teaching a Child to Behave

  MISS Pateman made a number of statements to police officers during the period when Miss Ross was being examined by Detective-Superintendent Maxwell,” said Bosanquet in a level tone, without a flick of sarcasm. “On the following day Detective-Superintendent Maxwell decided to take her out once more to Rose Cottage and question her himself. By this time, of course, the search in and round the cottage had been intensified. Traces of blood, small traces, had been found in the bedroom. This blood, as you will hear from experts of the Forensic Laboratory, did not belong to the blood groups of either Miss Ross or Miss Pateman. It did, however, belong to the blood group of Eric Mawby. In the garden were found the remains of a nylon blouse not completely burnt, a blouse which witnesses recognised as having been worn by Miss Ross. On this were detectable some stains of the same blood group.

  “In due course, as Detective-Superintendent Maxwell interrogated her–” (How long had they been alone together? When was she told that Cora had broken down?) – “Miss Pateman withdrew her denials that the child had never been inside the cottage. She now told what appeared to be a coherent and self-consistent account of those events. She and Miss Ross had for some time past wanted to have a child alone, by themselves, to be in control of. She gave a reason for this desire. They wanted to teach it to behave.”

  For the first time in the long and even speech, Bosanquet laid a stress, it sounded like an involuntary stress, upon the words. In an instant he had controlled himself. “They had accordingly, so it appears, picked out a boy at random. For some time they had driven round the city, in places where they were not familiar, looking for a suitable subject. It was the misfortune of Eric Mawby and his parents that they settled on him. They decided on the weekend of September 20. They bought the Meccano set two days before in order to give him something to do. They picked him up on the Friday evening without difficulty. According to Miss Pateman’s account, Eric was pleased to go with them.” Bosanquet paused. “That we cannot, of course, deny or establish. We also cannot establish at what stage exactly they began to ill-treat him. Possibly early on the Saturday. You will hear expert evidence about the many wounds on his body. He suffered them, according to expert judgment, many hours before death. These body wounds were healing when he was finally beaten to death by at least seven blows on the head, probably with something like a poker or a metal bar and also with a wooden implement.

  “About the wounds on the body, Miss Pateman said that they had – what she called ‘punished’ him. They wanted to teach him to behave.

  “I should say that neither she nor Miss Ross have ever admitted that they actually killed him. They have each given accounts of what happened to Eric on the Sunday night. The accounts are different. One is, that he was put on a bus to take him back to the town. The other, which is Miss Ross’, is that they drove him back themselves in the borrowed car, and dropped him at the corner of the road leading to his parents’ house. Needless to say, neither of these stories deserves a moment’s thought. That same night, and early the following morning, that same car was seen, as will be sworn by two witnesses, very close to Markers Copse. Further, when the car was ultimately examined – I must tell you that its real owners had no conceivable connection with this crime – there was evidence of blood, blood of Eric’s group, on the floor of the back seat.”

  He turned to the judge, and remarked: “I think I need go no further at present, my lord. It would be my duty, if there were any conceivable doubt about the facts of this case, to make the position clear to members of the jury. But there is no doubt. We know most of what happened to Eric Mawby from the Friday evening until the time that he was buried. I haven’t any wish to add to the intolerable facts you are obliged to listen to. You can imagine for yourselves the suffering of this child. There is no doubt about the way he was killed, nor about who killed him. All I need say is that this has been proved to be a deliberate, calculated, premeditated crime. That is enough.”

  During the last few minutes of Bosanquet’s speech, I had flinched – and this was true of Margaret and everyone round me – from looking at the two women in the dock, although, keeping my gaze on Bosanquet, I could not help noticing with peripheral vision the fingers of Kitty obsessively scribbling her notes.

  A witness was being sworn, a man in his twenties, soft-faced, soft-voiced. It turned out that, with the indifferent businesslike bathos of the legal process, he was being examined about the loan of his car.

  The box was on the judge’s right hand, a couple of yards away from where Bosanquet had been standing: so that prosecutor, dock, witness, were all exposed to the same light. The young man’s fair hair shone against the panelling.

  “Your name is Laurence Tompkin? You are a schoolteacher employed by the local education authority? You know both the defendants?”

  Yes, said the young man in a gentle, ingratiating manner, as of one who was trying to win affection, but he knew Miss Ross better than Miss Pateman. Do you remember either of them saying they might want to borrow your car? Yes, he remembered that, it was Miss Ross. When was that? In the early summer, last year. In the summer, not September? No, much earlier, more like June. What did she say? She just said they might want to borrow it some time, she wanted to be sure that it was available. Then, some time later she did borrow it? Yes. For a weekend in September? Yes. Can you tell us the date? The weekend beginning September 20. Was the car returned? Yes. When? The following Monday. Did you notice anything odd about it? There seemed to be a lot of mud on the number plate, although it had been a sunny weekend. You didn’t examine the floor of the car, down below the back seat? No, he didn’t think of doing so.

  Benskin, Cora’s counsel, got up to speak for the first time that day. He was a small man, with a long nose and a labile merry mouth: his voice was unexpectedly sonorous. He was asking a few questions for appearance’s sake. He had, of course, understood Bosanquet’s tactics, that is, to demonstrate the long-laid planning before the boy’s death. As for the defence’s own tactics, a good many of us were puzzled. They seemed to be in a state of indecision or suspense.

  It would be perfectly reasonable to ask a friend, said Benskin, whether he could lend a car? Perfectly reasonable to ask, as a kind of insurance, if one was having any trouble with one’s own? Even if the trouble didn’t become serious for weeks? As for the return of the car, if Miss Ross and Miss Pateman drove it back to the town late on the Sunday night, they couldn’t conveniently have returned it, could they? It was perfectly reasonable to park it
outside their own house, and return it next day?

  Having registered his appearance, Benskin sat down, with a grim half-smile to his junior. Kitty Pateman’s counsel did not get up at all.

  The young man left the box. He was one of George’s group: he had not been asked how he could afford a car, or whether he shared it with anyone, or whether he also shared a cottage, or at what kind of parties he and Cora Ross had met. No one had a reason, so it appeared, to disturb that underground. This had been the guess that I made to George. I glanced at him, heavy-faced, mouth a little open: perhaps, even after the prosecutor’s ending, not so many minutes before, he felt – as we all do in extreme calamities, when a minor selfish worry is taken away – some sort of relief.

  Another witness, this time the manager of the garage where the women’s own car had been left for repairs. When had it been deposited? September 19. What was supposed to be wrong?

  At this the judge, shifting himself from one haunch to the other as he spoke, became restive.

  “Surely we are going into very great detail, aren’t we, Mr Recorder?”

  “With your permission, my lord, I wish to establish the whole build up before the child was abducted.”