Letter after letter. Why, here was that silly chlorodyne letter now, as though chlorodyne would hurt anybody; and all the letters she had written Leo about their meetings and about when he was coming back. Why, he was even reading one that she had written after she had managed to get rid of the baby.
Julia came out of her dream, and leaned forward. How horrible. He was making it sound as though it referred to getting rid of Herbert. What was he reading now?—My heart. I always think of you as my heart. How horrible, to hear that sort of thing read aloud in that dreadful place. What was he saying now … something about a meeting between Mrs. Starling and Leo on the afternoon of the crime, a meeting at which they had planned the crime.
But she hadn’t known she was going to see Leo that night. They had quarrelled about it. Oh, why hadn’t she written to him that last day, instead of just talking to him on the telephone? Then everyone would know she had made no arrangement to meet him.
She sat back in her chair exhausted by the time the man who was against her sat down. She hardly listened to the first few witnesses. A policeman—the policeman whose cheeks were like a child’s balloon—had made a plan of which he was evidently very proud. Everybody looked at the plan. It was handed up to the judge, it was handed to the jury. As though it mattered how wide the pavement was, and how wide the road was, and how big the Square was.
Why, this must be one of the young men who had come to help her. He was saying that she had said: “Oh, help! help! my husband’s ill.” She relaxed slightly. The other young man said much the same thing and added that she asked him to go for a doctor. Well, all that was true. Didn’t it show that she hadn’t known anything about it?
The bearded man, who hadn’t a telephone. … There he was, saying how he had heard her crying out: “Stop! stop! stop!” That was true, too. Of course, they couldn’t say that she had anything to do with it.
Then came Dr. Ackroyd. He did not look towards her, but he was very quiet, and she felt more confident, happier, when she heard his voice. Yes, he had found Herbert dead. The deceased was lying on his back in the gutter, and he did not wish to disturb him until the police came, because he had discovered at once that he was dead. The only wound he had been able to see was a contused wound on the inner angle of the left eye, and on the left cheek-bone. The bone had not been fractured in either wound. Deceased had … and here Dr. Ackroyd went off into technicalities about Herbert’s heart which Julia did not understand.
Now Julia’s man was on his feet.
“Yes,” agreed Dr. Ackroyd, “Mrs. Starling was terribly upset, hysterical.” His first object was to get her away. No, the notion of foul play had not occurred to him. It still did not, as regarded Mrs. Starling. He had known her ever since she was a child. Yes, she was romantic, indulged in day-dreams. No, he could not be mistaken, she was genuinely upset. She kept on begging him to let her take her husband home and nurse him. She didn’t know that he was dead.
Here was somebody in a uniform who said he was the station officer. She didn’t know him well enough to be able to recognise his face from here, but she recognised the voice. He was the man who said she must go to the police station.
And now the nightmare became deeper and darker, for here was Bertha. Bertha was hating her more than ever, she felt that: and although she could only answer the questions that were put to her, about what had happened when she had first heard the news in the flat, she gave the impression that Julia’s agitation was all “put on.”
Julia’s counsel was talking to her now, only one question, asking her about Herbert’s health. Bertha was admitting Herbert had told her he was suffering from a bad heart and indigestion often made him giddy. If he had been as bad as that, thought Julia, drearily, why hadn’t she known? Of course, she had only thought it was Herbert fussing about himself as usual. Why, he might have died, anyway, in a year or two.
Here was the police surgeon telling in horrible detail what he had found. There had been a contused wound on the back of the head in the occipital region, the skull had been fractured. That blow could have been inflicted with the spanner that had been picked up in Saint Clement’s Square, and would have caused death. There had also been a second blow on the shoulder. The deceased’s clothing had not been cut, but the markings of the blow were very evident on the body. The first wound was the fatal wound; the blow on the shoulder would not have been fatal.
Leo’s counsel now stood up, and there was much talk about the wound on the temple. How could it possibly be said that the wound on the back of the head had proved fatal? Leo’s man “suggested” or “put it” to the witness—what funny expressions they used, thought Julia —that striking the edge of the kerb with his temple had killed the deceased. The police surgeon said this could not possibly have been so, since there had been no fracture of the bone, save in the occipital region. That blow must have been fatal. Leo’s man had to sit down again.
For the first time Julia looked, with only a vague curiosity, at Leo, who was sitting with his arms folded and his head held high. He didn’t seem to mind. He seemed to be following everything with his bright, darting eyes.
Now he picked up a bit of paper from the ledge in front of him where blotting-paper, ink, and a lot of slips of paper were arranged. He looked at the ink dubiously, and the officer with the genial face who was sitting in the corner of the dock, leaned forward and handed him a pencil. Leo began to write busily, and then looked at the point of the pencil dubiously. He turned his head towards the officer and away from Julia. She could tell that he was smiling by the sudden outward curve of his cheek—that charming smile that she had seen so often. He was holding out the pencil to the man. The constable felt in his pocket and took out a pen-knife and sharpened the pencil and handed it back to Leo. He wrote busily, and the constable took the slip and leaned over the edge of the dock and, catching the eye of Leo’s counsel, handed the slip down to him. After that Leo was always writing. What on earth was he writing for …? Sometimes the policeman tried to attract the attention of counsel, but none of them was looking up. The constable would throw the slip, or a man in ordinary clothes seated behind counsel touched one on the arm and then counsel stood up and took the note, read it and passed it to the counsel next him. Julia didn’t look much at Leo after that, but she wondered vaguely what he found to write about.
He stopped writing when his father came into the box and described how Leo had stayed at home the evening of the tragedy, and about eleven o’clock said he would go out for a breath of fresh air; his mother had gone to bed by then. No, witness could not say where his son went. Yes, Saint Clement’s Square was quite near. Yes, his son often went there. And then Leo’s counsel got up and made everything sound quite different. Mr. Carr said in answer to Leo’s counsel that his son had seemed quite as usual that evening. No, he did not seem as though he had anything on his mind. The witness had certainly not received the impression that he was going out to keep an appointment. Mr. Carr left the box. Nothing had been said by counsel on either side about what Leo had had to drink. Julia’s solicitor had explained this to her. He said it would not help either side, whatever he meant by that.
Then to her intense surprise Marian came into the box. I should have thought she would have been called for me, thought Julia, not against me. Marian hadn’t much to say—just that once or twice she had seen Mrs. Starling with the prisoner Carr outside the shop. Fancy … you wouldn’t have thought Marian noticed so much about people!
Here was Gipsy. Julia could tell from the direction of her face that she was looking towards her. She knew Gipsy well enough to know that she was smiling at her. Yes, Mrs. Starling had been telephoning during that last day at work. She had asked whether she could go out to tea.
Now Julia’s man was on his feet talking to Gipsy. Gipsy in her warm, kind voice was saying how good Julia had always been at her work, how conscientious, how trustworthy. Julia relaxed again a little.
At some time during the day there was an interval for lunch. She was told she could have anything she wanted, but she really didn’t want anything much. The interval seemed to make no break in this nightmare of a day. She had left what dazed mind she still had in the court. All day long people had gone into the box. All day long first one man in black, her man or Leo’s, or the man who was against them, had been getting up. All day long that other man in red, seated opposite her, had been making remarks. He talked often about adultery. How odd and strange it sounded—as though that was what she and Leo had had together! Even now, when she was bitterly resenting him, when she wished nothing had taken place—because nothing was worth this terror—still she never thought of it just as adultery. That was only a thing you read about in the Sunday paper. You didn’t think about it in your daily life.
Tired, and with a pain that seemed to constrict her temples, and with swimming eyes from being so long without her glasses, Julia stumbled down the steps and was again put into that shameful van and jolted once more across London.
That was the rhythm of her days now … different from the blank, white rhythm of the prison days and nights. More tiring, more terrifying, and yet somehow, as she lay in her little bed, with her eyes closed, she thought if only she could concentrate more … if only she didn’t feel as though she were in some curious sort of nightmare, these new days would be less awful than the days of waiting. The truth was bound to come out. She herself was going into the box to tell them just how it had all happened. Silly she had been, perhaps, but nothing worse. She must try and pull herself together before she went into the box.
The second day was like the first. Getting out of the car in the yard of the Old Bailey, passing the man at the counter, going down the stairs, waiting in the cell, talking to her solicitor, going up again into that awful dock, into that place of light and staring eyes, and strange voices, saying such strange things—things they evidently believed and that yet were not the truth at all, as Julia knew it.
Why, here was the woman who had kept the tea-shop where they had had tea on that last day, saying how she had seen her and Leo together. Well, she had never denied that they had had tea together. Of course they had. She had had to tell Leo she could not come out with him that evening … that she couldn’t get out of her engagement with Herbert … that was when Leo had been so furious.
Here was another policeman, one she didn’t know. He said he was a detective-inspector. He had been to Leo’s home, and taken charge of a locked tin box. That was what all her letters had been found in, and her photographs. Oh, why, why had Leo kept them?
Here was another detective who had gone all over the flat at Saint Clement’s Square. Why, he was holding up her silly little bottle of chlorodyne, and the spanner which, apparently, he had found thrown over the railings into the Square—half hidden by the bushes.
Oh dear, here was another inspector. Why, she remembered this one. He was the one who had first talked to her at the police station. He was reading her statement—they called it a voluntary statement. As though anything you did when you were in a state of nightmare was voluntary! It was the one in which she had said that there had been nobody there when Herbert staggered and fell down. Oh, why had she thought of nothing but shielding Leo? Why hadn’t she told at once what he had done? Now the inspector was describing how he had taken her past the room where Leo was. How she had looked in and seen him; and how she had made another voluntary statement saying that Leo had quarrelled with Herbert and ran away. Now he was reading Leo’s statement. She sat up and listened more intently. He had behaved as she had, of course. He had said that he had never been to Saint Clement’s Square that evening.
The dreadful man in the box was repeating what he had said to Leo—“I am going to charge you and Mrs. Starling with the wilful murder of Herbert Starling.” Leo had said: “Why drag her in? She knows absolutely nothing about it.” Well, it was true that Leo had said that, and what was more, it was the truth.
Then he read Leo’s second voluntary statement … how he had tried to fight Herbert, and Herbert wouldn’t fight him … and how he had hit him, and thrown the spanner into the Square and ran away. Now he was talking about the tin box and the letters. Oh, those letters … those letters. Why had Leo kept them?
Now there was a man from the aircraft-carrier. Yes, he was Flight-Officer Smythe. He was the Stores Officer in H.M.S. Thunderous. She heard him identify something which was called Exhibit No. 1. He was saying he could identify it by the markings on it as an eight-inch spanner of the R.A.F. Yes, a leading aircraftsman would be issued such a spanner.
Julia was feeling relaxed again, even more in a dream than she had been the first day. What had it got to do with her that Leo had attacked Herbert with a spanner, and thrown it over the railings into the Square? She hadn’t known he was going to do these things.
The next witness again caused her to sit up with that strained, eager attention which alternated with her fits of dreaming. Through both phases she was aware of Leo perpetually smiling, perpetually writing notes; very practical, living in the present … Leo as, she realised now, he had always been, and not the Leo of her imagination. He sat forward and examined the next witness eagerly, and this action brought his face slightly round towards Julia. He had no look for her. Those bright intent eyes were fixed on the witness in the box, somebody who said he was the senior official analyst of the Home Office. He had found blood on the right sleeve of Leo’s coat. He had examined Herbert’s internal organs. How odd … for years she had heard from Herbert’s own mouth of his internal organs, of the trouble that they gave him, and now she was listening to somebody else talking about them; somebody who had received them in a jar. There had been no traces of poison in Herbert’s liver and kidneys. Why, indeed, thought Julia, frantically, should there be? The only serious way in which she had thought of liver and kidneys in connection with Herbert was his passion for eating them for supper. He had always been fond of what, in the war, was called offal, which she had always disliked. It seemed too absurd that a human being had liver and kidneys just the same as you bought from Palmer’s Stores. That they should be the cause of serious argument in a court of law!
Another man was in the box now, a pathologist. He described Herbert’s wounds. He was asked whether he had found any trace of poisoning, and replied in the negative. Julia’s own counsel cross-examined him at length on this point, and Julia again was able to relax.
When the man who was against her—for the matter of that against them both—stood up and remarked: “That is the case for the Crown”—Julia was still relaxed. After all, it hadn’t been so dreadful, she thought.
Leo’s counsel was telling him to go into the box; and head up, hands in pockets, with a slightly swaggering gait, he walked past her out of the dock and made his way towards the witness-box. Again she listened to so much that she knew. Yes, he had known Mrs. Starling since she was a girl at school. Yes, his family had always known her family. Yes, he had had a quarrel on December 21st with Herbert Starling because they had come in together after going to a cinema and Starling had knocked his wife about. Had he been in love with Mrs. Starling? Well … yes … certainly. Julia bent her head, and gazed at her hands still lying in her lap. In love? What in heaven’s name did it mean? In a dream of the past she missed a good many questions and answers. There was, it seemed to her, a ghost of many conversations going on, as though this examination had power to raise the dead. Leo was telling his counsel about the times that Herbert had been asked for a divorce—a divorce … as though any of that mattered now. He was telling of the suicide pact, of their plans
for going away together, of the time limit they had set themselves, of how he had told her to be patient. He wasn’t, she thought bitterly, recounting the times he had threatened to leave her if she would not make it possible for him to make love to her.
“These letters,” said Leo’s counsel, leaning forward and speaking impressively, “these strange letters that she wrote you, did they incite you in any way to raise your hand against Herbert Starling?”
“Not in any way,” said Leo.
“Nothing that was written to you made you feel that you must get hold of some poison that could be used in a deadly manner against Herbert Starling?”
“Nothing.”
“These letters never made you consider doing anything you should not do against Mr. Starling … they did not affect you in any way?”
Leo almost laughed. “Oh no. I never took them seriously.” he said.
The next day there he was again in the box detailing that last Easter leave. How he had come home … how he hadn’t even seen Mrs. Starling … how he had gone away the Easter holiday with his father and mother. And then, not mentioning at all that night of love at the shop, he went on to describe how he had tea on the last day with Mrs. Starling, who had come out to meet him.
A Pin to See the Peepshow Page 39
