The Tumbled House
Page 29
“They can’t really prove … oh, yes they can.” Michael got up and hobbled to the dressing-table to pour himself a glass of beer.
“We’re both in this, I with my face, you with your leg. Let Gilbert once see me and I’m sunk. And you’re carrying this bullet around like a visiting card.”
“Let me see the money,” said Michael.
They tipped out the attaché-case on the bed and divided the notes into bundles of fifty.
“Odd,” said Michael. “ We do all this for a few bits of paper. Stick ’em in the fire and they’d be gone in smoke.…”
Yet against his saner judgement the money warmed him, gave him confidence. If they could only bluff this out, just this once. Someone would take the bullet away privately for hard cash. Abortionists had operating theatres of some sort. His father‘ s promise of a new job opened up vistas that he hadn’t been aware of before; it meant that he could begin life with Bennie quite afresh, his main problems no longer problems at all. It was quite staggering. It was better even than he had pictured for himself. In any event he was going straight after this: he had finally learnt his lesson. But if his father’s plans went through, even the temptation to break out would be gone.
“If I were you,” Peter was saying, “I’d get away abroad for a few weeks somewhere. It would be safer.”
“Safer for you but not for me. If I go off everyone will start asking questions. I shall bluff it out.”
“You can’t bluff away a .25 pistol bullet.”
“No, but who’s going to see it? In a week I shall be walking normally.”
“And in the meantime if Gros sells you up the river?”
Michael swallowed his drink; “I think it’s a risk I have to take. The chances are he’ll never see the notice.”
Peter got up. “And if I go to Estoril? What will you feel about that?”
“Nothing.”
“You won’t think I’ve let you down—you being crippled?”
“Why should I? I can walk now. Your staying only doubles the risk.”
In a few minutes Peter began to look better. They had a last drink together.
Peter said: “Anyway we’ll part company for a few months. I shan’t go to Portugal until Sunday. So ring me before then if there’s any new development. And let’s keep in touch.”
“When it blows over, maybe. But not for this kind of thing again. That’s settled.”
“We’ve been unlucky,” said Peter meditatively. “Anyway, let’s be thankful if we don’t share a common cell.”
Michael wondered afterwards what it was that made him limp off into the unlighted living-room and pull back the curtains to watch Peter drive his battered taxi away for the last time.
By the time he got there Peter was already in the front seat and the self-starter was turning. It whirred reluctantly as if the battery was down; presently the engine fired. Peter backed the taxi until the bumper was touching the kerb, then swung round and made for the Old Brompton Road.
As he did so, about a hundred yards along, a black Wolseley pulled sharply out in front of the taxi-and blocked its way. The taxi stopped. A man got out of the Wolseley and then another man. They went across to the taxi and spoke to Peter. There was an argument. Then one of the men pulled a card out of his pocket and showed it to Peter. They wanted Peter to get down. Peter wouldn’t. One of the men put a hand on Peter’s arm and half pulled him off his seat. Peter got down. Another man got out of the car. He was wearing the flat cap of a police driver. Peter, still protesting, got into the back of the Wolseley with the man who had taken hold of him. The policeman in the flat cap got in the taxi and drove it into a space among the cars parked by the kerb. He got out again and rejoined the Wolseley. The Wolseley drove off.
There was perhaps half an hour. It couldn’t be more. Michael dragged off his pyjamas, struggled into a dark suit, grabbed a tie, threw a few things into a small suitcase. The sweat was pouring off him, partly from pain but mostly from the urgency to get away.
Money in the pockets—wads of it; dark overcoat, trilby, one extra suit, a few shirts.
When he looked out of the living-room window again the street was absolutely quiet. Lamps burned stilly, with the moon above them like an obsolete competitor. In the distance the traffic was murmuring and remote.
The lavatory to the flat looked out at the back over the mews towards Cranley Gardens, this small window being the only one facing east. He dropped the bag through and his stick, and then somehow got out himself. For a few minutes he lay flat on a strip of damp sooty grass, recovering from the effort. Then he hobbled to the wall.
He managed to climb up by way of a dustbin and topple over. Instead of taking the easy way he crossed the mews and made a devious back-alley detour to the road beyond.
There he paused to rest and to watch. A group of girls were giggling in a doorway. Otherwise nothing stirred. Gritting his teeth, he picked up his bag and began to limp towards the Fulham Road.
He spent the night at the Cumberland thinking that that would be the sort of place where he would not be noticed; but he felt people were staring at his limp and at his face, as if between the two they read something strange. He slept very little; when he woke his leg was nagging.
He ate a light breakfast in bed and stayed there till nearly twelve. The struggle to dress when it came was not as bad as he had expected, as if in spite of everything the healing processes were going on. But there was no healing process in his mind.
He went down and paid his bill and sat for a few minutes in the foyer watching the people.
Did this mean the end of his own identity? Did it mean the end of everything, including Bennie? This couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be. Yet even if disappearance was possible, would she ever be the wife of a man on the run living under a false name? The idiocy of this last robbery, now that it had gone wrong, seemed monumental. And all the time Roger had been working on his behalf, planning a job for him which would provide him both with the sort of occupation he would delight in and enough money to marry Bennie.
He could have banged his head on the floor. Was there no way of getting round it? No way of going to the police and saying it was all done for a wager, we never meant to sell the stuff we stole? What would Peter’s defence be? Would it be better to give oneself up and take the stand with him, get a good barrister in? They might get off as first offenders. Roger might pull strings.
That was baby talk. Whatever you pulled strings for in England, you didn’t do it to the law. Nor could a clever lawyer do much. “This young man, led astray by evil influences; I ask you not to blight his career at its outset by giving him a prison sentence. A first offender, only just twenty-one.…” A lot the judge would care. Anyway his new job would be gone.
At present, on him in cash, he had eight hundred and twenty-three pounds. What would that buy him? Nothing remotely worth what he had lost. A trip out of the country? A quiet room somewhere in London where he could watch for a week or two to see how things turned? A lot would hinge on what happened to Peter. A quiet room where no one asked questions.
But it would never bring him nearer to Bennie. Not now. Perhaps not ever. It was the end, the end, the end.
The barber’s shop was in a side street not far from Hammersmith Broadway. Michael paid off his taxi at the mouth of a ravine of Victorian brick and limped down through the rain. A few stallholders were crouched under their awnings. Orange papers and cigarette packets lay sodden in the gutters. Two women nattered endlessly in a doorway.
Good trade. Both chairs full, three men waiting; chromium gleamed a synthetic welcome; the snip-snip of scissors, the smell of violet hair-oil. Everyone was coloured. Little black wires like multiple watch-springs lay in curls over the floor. A big man growing out of has dove-grey suit moved a grudging inch or two to let Michael sit down.
When one man was finished and the assistant came across to brush his coat Michael said: “Is Dick in?”
“Sah?”
“Dick. Dick Balla
nce.”
Bloodshot eyes looked him over. “What name, sah?”
“Michael Shorn.”
“I’ll just go see. I’ll go see if Mister Ballance is in.”
He moved through the bead curtains at the end which tinkled like a French bistro. After a minute he came back. “This way.”
Michael followed him into a shabby kitchen, where a stout coloured woman in a tight vermilion silk dress was frying chip potatoes, and then up a flight of stairs. In a tiny sitting-room, in half light because of the heavy lace curtains, Dick Ballance was bulging over a desk. He didn’t seem to be doing anything, but perhaps that was because he had stopped doing it as Michael came up the stairs.
“Hullo, boy. Nice to see you. By gosh, it’s quite a surprise after all this time. How’s that Peter Waldo; going great guns, I guess?”
“I’m in a jam, Dick. I want help.”
Ballance wiped his hands cautiously on a yellow silk handkerchief. “Yeh? What sort of a jam?”
“I’ve got in a mess, and I want to lie low for a couple of weeks—perhaps more. Think you can help?”
Ballance took a fountain-pen out of his breast-pocket and tapped it against his teeth. There were five other pens in his pocket. “Well, man, I could and I couldn’t. It might cost you a lot of loot.”
“I can pay.”
“Mind, it wouldn’t be for me; but these landlords.… You just have to pay the earth for a hide-out these days.”
“How much?”
“There’s Negro folk where I would send you. Mind Negro folk?”
“No. Not if there are no questions asked.”
“Brother, no questions are never asked.”
“That’ll suit.”
Dick’s eyes grew speculative as he fastened the two top buttons of his trousers. “ Yah. Yah.” He pulled forward an old envelope and scribbled an address on the back. “It’ll be maybe about ten pounds a week for one room, man. And it’ll be, say, fifty pounds for going in.”
“Payable to you?”
“Yah.” Dick’s eyes shifted the responsibility on to someone on the other side of the street. “ I pay half of it out when I see my friend.”
“When do I move in?”
“Got any luggage?”
“What I have is near at hand.”
“Go right ahead, then. The room’ll be ready for you when you get there. I’ll give my friend a tinkle right away. But don’t expect luxury. It’ll be bare.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
On Friday the 16th of October, in the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court of Justice the hearing was begun before Mr Justice Alston of the libel action between Roger Norman Shorn of Belgrave Street and Donald John Anthony Marlowe of Trevor Square. Mr Aubrey Lytton Q.C. and Mr B. J. Partridge appeared for the Plaintiff, Mr Vincent Doutelle Q.C. and Mr H. Borgward for the defendant. Mr K. A. Smith held a watching brief for the Hanover Club, and Mr R. Rogers for The Sunday Gazette.
“Great pity the Lord Chief Justice is ill,” said Whitehouse. “We might have come before him, and I’d be happier if we had. Alston’s very unpredictable.”
Mr Lytton opened the case for the plaintiff. (“ The fashionable man at the moment,” said Whitehouse, “but past his best and no great lawyer. I suppose that’s why he never quite made the bench.”)
“The defendant, Mr Donald Marlowe,” Mr Lytton was saying in a throaty, elderly, not too audible voice, “is a young conductor of some eminence. He is the eldest child and only son of the late Sir John Marlowe, Queen’s Counsel and Recorder of Cheltenham, who died in January of this year. Sir John Marlowe was a barrister of distinction. At the age of fifty he retired from the Bar, and a year later he published his book Crossroads, a work which has become well-known in the world; so that when he died, prematurely and before he was fifty-three, he was mourned by many outside the range of his personal acquaintances.
“This renown was prized by his son: he believed his father’s repute to be unassailable. But Mr Roger Shorn, the plaintiff in this case, has assailed it. That, members of the jury, is in essence what this action is about; and when you have heard all the evidence I venture to predict that you will not call into question the sincerity or good faith with which my client undertook his no doubt distasteful task.
“I say distasteful because there has been friendship between the two families over a number of years, and it cannot have been anything but distasteful for Mr Shorn to put his public duty before his private feelings. But he did so, and staked his reputation upon the truth of the facts he published. You will hear in evidence that in an attempt to heal the breach he repeatedly offered to make a public apology to Mr Marlowe for any unhappiness he had caused. But he would not, he could not, retract what he believed so sincerely to be true.”
Mr Lytton at seventy had a weather-beaten and fleshy face with cheeks that quivered in battle. When he addressed the jury he blinked at them repeatedly as if they were too bright a light.
“It may be, it may be, members of the jury, that some play will be made in this action on the natural distaste that Englishmen feel for maligning the dead. It is not a practice any of us wishes to see adopted as a part of our democratic way of life. But great reputations bear a heavy burden. The higher they ride the more unassailable must they be to the inquiries of the biographer, the historian, the seeker after truth. The responsible journalist fails in his responsibility if he allows repute to stand when he sincerely believes it to be undeserved, whether that repute belongs to a dead man or to a living. That was Mr Shorn’s dilemma.
“Mr Shorn is forty-two years of age. He has had a distinguished career in letters, has broadcast many times and appeared on television. For a while he was on the ‘Critics’ programme. He has his own column in The Sentinel and another, under the journalistic nom de plume of Moonraker in The Gazette. It was through his column in The Gazette that he chose to make known what he had discovered.…”
Joanna glanced about the court, trying to see as much as she could without turning her head. The judge was a florid man, yet his face had an ascetic narrowness and his mouth was astringent between its furrows. There were three women and nine men on the jury and they sat in three rows of four in a jury box hung with green curtains on brass curtain rings. The foreman was a middle-aged Jew with a shock of greying hair sticking up like a fan.
Bennie was beside her. They had met in the Gothic main hall, where the day’s cases were posted up in frames, but had not been able to understand what it all meant in terms of finding a way through the dark stone passages. In time Paul Whitehouse had turned up and had taken them to the court which was already full. They had had to push their way through a crowd of thirty or forty people who couldn’t get in.
Don was already there, and they took seats next to him. There were a lot of barristers in front. Roger was in court but not Michael. Marion Laycock was sitting with her father. It was the first time Joanna had seen Vincent Doutelle, their own Q. C. He looked like a tall highly polished bird; his was the neatest wig, the newest gown, the best manicured nails. His face gleamed with smooth alert good health. No worm escaped him.
There had been a ripple of amusement through the court but she had missed it.
Mr Lytton said: “It is no laughing matter, members of the jury. These are bitter words, wounding words, written with the most deliberate malice, and exhibited in that place where they were calculated to do the greatest harm to Mr Shorn’s professional reputation, namely in his club, which was the meeting-place for his business and social friends. The law of libel is designed to protect the ordinary citizen against being held up to hatred, ridicule or contempt. How more obviously, how more maliciously, could one man hold another up to hatred, ridicule and contempt than by comparing him to the louse, the jackal, the wolf, and calling him a liar and a coward? Following this—if this were not enough—in attempting to justify the writing of these doggerel verses Marlowe wrote to the secretary of the Hanover Club the letter which I will now read to you.…”
“.… The crux of the matter is this. What the defendant in effect is saying is: ‘All these things I have said about Roger Shorn are true’. And, since the defendant is now relying only on these broad grounds of justification, that is the only issue, members of the jury, which you have to decide. Do you agree that every man is a liar and a coward and a disgrace to his profession as a journalist who chooses to assail responsibly the reputation of the dead? Or do you not? I will put it to you another way. Do we incur the abuse of the present Lord Nelson by mentioning Lady Hamilton in the same breath as his distinguished ancestor? Of course not, members of the jury! Essays are published every day qualifying or setting to rights this or that reputation of the past. Who knows, another essay may be written tomorrow restoring the fallen idol. The moment a man dies he becomes a part of history. This attack upon Mr Roger Shorn is, I suggest, an attempt to put the clock back, an attempt to muzzle the freedom of the Press and to curtail the right of free discussion. No filial piety can for a moment excuse it.”
Aubrey Lytton looked down at his brief, half turned his head and said in a low voice: “Mr Shorn.”
Roger got up and went towards the box. He looked and felt composed and unhurried. Mr Lytton began to take him through his evidence in chief. The judge was looking at the point of his pen as if it didn’t satisfy him. Every now and then he would lift himself in his chair and take up a different position. When he did so he usually accompanied it with a suspicious glance at somebody from under his lids.
After Roger had given evidence about the quarrel and the verses in the “Suggestions Book”, Mr Lytton said: “ What made you first feel, Mr Shorn, that John Marlowe’s reputation was open to question?”
“I had heard ugly rumours for some time, but I had been inclined to ignore them. Then one day last January I happened to meet Lord Kinley, the economist, and the conversation turned on Sir John Marlowe’s death. Lord Kinley then told me that Sir John had been forced to retire because of some scandal, though he did not know the precise details. I asked him how he knew this much, and he said Sir John had confessed to him in confidence that he was a hypocrite and that his retirement was very far from being voluntary. Lord Kinley said he had never told anyone this while Sir John was alive but that there didn’t now seem quite the same necessity to keep silent about it.”