The Progress of a Crime

by Julian Symons

  Those seconds of consideration had led Crawley to the conclusion that the idea did not justify a special call to Lord Brackman. It could be kept as a titbit for his daily discussion.

  When the catarrhal voice with its background whine of permanent dissatisfaction came on, however, it spoke for five minutes about the iniquities of patent medicine manufacturers.

  “Got a lot of stomach trouble, Edgar. Bowel trouble. Want something to keep me regular and nothing does it. I go once in four days. Why don’t we do something about it?”

  “What’s that?” Crawley had failed to follow this train of thought.

  “Expose these frauds. Take a teaspoonful of this or a tablet of that, guaranteed to keep you regular. That’s what the advertisements say. They don’t do it, and our job as a responsible newspaper is to say so.” Brackman very nearly cleared his throat to launch another volley of speech, but remained disconcertingly silent.

  “I think we should be careful, Brack. Fighting this kind of war doesn’t help anybody.” Crawley’s criticisms were so rare that Brack often paid attention to them, but he did not care for contradiction.

  “What have you got for to-day?” He spoke sharply.

  Crawley endured a running fire of hostile remarks in relation to his handling of half a dozen items. Was this an unfavourable time to mention Gardner? Perhaps not.

  “The Guy Fawkes murder,” he said. “You’ve seen that Garney and Gardner have been committed?”

  “Yes. The story’s finished. Kill it until the trial.”

  “Fairfield thinks there’s a chance that Gardner’s father might agree to our backing the defence of his boy. If we want to run a crusade, that is.” This was well put. The idea appeared to be Crawley’s own, yet it was still easy to transfer responsibility for it to Fairfield.

  There was no sound but that of Lord Brackman’s catarrhal breathing. Then he spoke. “Tell me about it, Edgar.”

  Crawley told him what he had learned from Fairfield. His narrative was punctuated by grunts, and at the end of it there was another hard-breathing silence. In moments of emotion Lord Brackman tended to speak in monosyllables, and he did so now. “I like it, Edgar. I like it. I think it’s good.”

  “Yes, Brack.”

  “What I like,” said Lord Brackman, his words slow and thick as treacle, “is that this chap’s Labour. Show’s we’re straight. We don’t care how he votes, don’t care who he is. We’re for the little man. We want to see he gets a chance. And when it’s a lad like this…”

  Crawley waited until it became evident that the sentence was finished, or was to remain unfinished. “Yes, Brack?”

  “Edgar, I want you to come over. We’ll talk about this. Come and have lunch. ’Bye.”

  Crawley put down the receiver, took off his thick glasses and polished them. His eyes, without glasses, could be seen as pale, small, watery. He spoke to his secretary, and told her that he would be with Lord Brackman.

  During these conversations the question of Leslie Gardner’s guilt or innocence had not been mentioned.

  22

  This was a provincial city, near the mouth of a river. There was a good grammar school and a fine hospital. There were four streets with shops in them which were, as everybody said, as good as any London shops, and these streets led off the square in the centre like spokes off the hub of a wheel. Walking down them you could remain unaware of the docks and canning factories upon which the city lived. The city had two good restaurants, one of which stayed open until ten o’clock, and in the past twelve months three Espresso bars had been opened. Hugh Bennett sat in one of these bars, the Just a Sec, with Jill Gardner.

  “Dad and I went to see Leslie to-day. I’ve never seen him so miserable.” He said nothing. “Have you heard from Frank?”

  They both called him Frank by this time. “Yes. He rang the office. The Banner wants to do it, to pay for the defence.”

  She sipped her coffee. “I can’t make up my mind. Whether it’s a good thing, I mean. Though it’s really up to Dad.”

  “Frank wanted us to go along and see him. It will mean a better counsel. I’m sure it must be worth while. Try to persuade him.” He hesitated. “Of course, it will mean a lot of publicity. You know, pictures of the family, personal articles and so on. And then they want the option to buy Leslie’s story.”

  “If he’s acquitted, you mean.”

  “What’s he like, Jill. Really like?” Hugh was always to have the sense that he never pushed beyond the outer skin of reality, and he was vividly aware that this was not, could not be, all there was to know. If one could push below this flexible yet resilient skin, twitch it aside as one takes the skin off custard, surely there must be some ultimate truth in the liquid depths below? So he asked himself, what are they really like, the people caught up in these events? What circumstances made them as they are? It seemed to him that if he could understand this, he would have penetrated one of the secrets of life itself.

  “Did Leslie help to kill them, do you mean?”

  That was not what he had meant, or no more than a fragment of it.

  “I don’t know. But if he did I blame myself, myself and Dad.” The corners of her mouth turned down.

  “Don’t.” He put his hand across the veined table-top, so that it rested on hers.

  “It’s all right. I shan’t cry, I never cry. There was a boy who wanted to marry me a couple of years ago. He was going out to Rhodesia and I wouldn’t go. ‘You’re just a meat and two veg girl,’ he said to me. ‘That’s you, Jill, and that’s going to be your life.’ And he was quite right, don’t you think?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. But anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

  A waitress was standing over them, listening avidly. “Eight o’clock. We’re shutting.”

  They went out into the streets of the city, where it seemed always to be raining, the soft rain of autumn that made the few cars now moving around the city centre suck and lick at the shiny black roads. Hugh Bennett walked along the streets beside the shut shops in a trance of gentle pleasure, his hand occasionally and as if by accident touching Jill’s, while she talked about herself and about the past.

  “You remember what Frank said that night, the way he talked to Dad. In a way he was right, I expect you’d say he was right, but he was wrong too. Dad only wanted us to be good people, Leslie and I, that was all, he was only doing the right thing.”

  “What he thought was the right thing.”

  “What else is there?” She wore a red plastic mackintosh with a white hood, and now she turned and looked at him in surprise. “Dad says you’ve got to live with your circumstances, whatever they are. There’s no use trying to get away from them. What you are, the condition you grew up in, is something you carry around all your life.”

  He recognised another voice behind the words. “What about the way your brother grew up?”

  “He was the sweetest kid, Leslie I mean. Eyes the same colour as mine, a sort of blue grey, but much bigger. And so pretty. Quick at learning. He’s still only a boy, you know, only seventeen. I don’t understand, I just don’t understand what went wrong with him. I suppose it’s since Mother died. She spoiled him, you know, let him do what he wanted. He was never any good at school after that, always saying he wanted to have a job and earn money. He was at the grammar, but he left before he was sixteen. It changed Leslie’s life, Mother’s death, can you see that? In a way everything was the same, we stayed in the same house and all that, but still it changed our lives. It was after Mother died that he started going about with Jack Garney.”

  “Tell me about Garney.”

  “He’s the eldest of seven children. His father’s a Roman Catholic, works in the docks, good money, knocks his mother about.” Her mouth was drawn into tight, disapproving lines. For an instant she looked like her father. She saw his glance at her, and laughed. “Don’t I sound
awful? That’s what it does to you, being brought up in Peter Street, you’re on one side or the other. Either you’re part of the Garneys and the Joneses or else you’re against them, that’s what it does.”

  “That sounds like a good argument for not living in Peter Street.”

  “In some ways any place is pretty much the same,” she said defensively. “You can call it snobbish, but there are grades of snobbery everywhere. I see lots of them in school. You must remember them from your own childhood.”

  “Not really. My father was killed on D-Day when I was seven. He was a sergeant in the Armoured Corps.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why be sorry? It’s a long time ago.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She was always bored with me, I think, and my father’s death was the last straw. She arranged for me to go to stay for a holiday with Aunt Millie, my father’s sister. She lived twenty miles out of the city, in a village called Parmile. I was to stay while my mother got a new job, and then she’d come down to collect me. It was a long holiday.”

  “Your mother didn’t come down?”

  “It was awkward, you can see that, my mother got a job in London and thought I ought not to be exposed to flying bombs and all that. Eventually I was shunted off to an inferior boarding school. I went on living with Aunt Millie.”

  “But that’s terrible,” she cried. “Simply terrible. I don’t see how she could have done it.”

  “My mother? I used to think that, but I’ve got over it now. She married again. I see her twice a year.” He could talk about it calmly now, without remembering too clearly the terrible feeling of absolute loneliness he had endured so long ago. Her next words astonished him.

  “Very good for you, I expect.”

  “Oh no.” The memories came flooding painfully back. “Not good for me or anybody, how can you say that?”

  “It would have been good for me. To be alone, no responsibilities, you don’t know how I long for it. But I suppose a meat and two veg girl always has responsibilities, whether she wants them or not. Here’s our tram stop.”

  “Tram stop?”

  “You want to see Dad, don’t you? We’d better stand inside here, we’re getting awfully wet.”

  They stood in the doorway of a closed toyshop and he looked at the train sets, the soldiers, the cowboy suits, the parlour games, all the apparatus of childhood that he had missed through the lack of love and the restrictions of war. Her face was turned away from the toyshop window and as she stared out into the wet street he divined behind her softness of voice and feature something hard, not flexible. She took off the white hat, shook it, and turned to him smiling.

  George Gardner sat in the kitchen eating a piece of veal and ham pie with pickle. A coal fire burned in a small grate, and the room was warm. He kissed his daughter, nodded to Hugh, and went on eating, cutting up the pie into small pieces and dabbing each piece deliberately into the pickle.

  Jill shook herself. “How was the meeting?”

  “All right. Jill, pour young Bennett a cup of tea, there’s some left in the pot. And yourself. What’s the news?”

  “Hugh’s got something to say to you,” she said as she poured the tea.

  Gardner listened as he talked about Fairfield’s idea, listened, cut up the pie, speared the pieces and dabbed them into the pickle. Then he took an apple from a plate of fruit and peeled it deliberately. When Hugh had finished, Gardner took a drink of tea. He finished peeling the apple, cut it into four pieces and removed the core from each piece with one brisk motion.

  “That all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Why didn’t your friend Fairfield come down and say it himself? Afraid I’d send him off with a flea in his ear, I suppose. So you’re the Trojan horse.”

  “He’s up in London. I don’t think there’s any other reason.”

  Gardner ate a piece of apple. When he spoke, Hugh was dismayed to hear in his voice the rhetorical tone he used for public meetings. “So you’re suggesting that I should let the Banner pay for the defence of my son on this charge that’s been trumped up against him. Let’s consider for a minute, and see what everyone’s going to get out of it. I can see what the Banner gets, clear enough. A lot of good publicity, some articles by their sob-sisters who say what a rough life we live in Peter Street, how bad conditions are and all that. All going to show this is a slum district and you can’t live decently in it, under-cover propaganda against the Labour movement, which I happen to represent. And what do I get? What do you think the people round here are going to say, people who’ve voted for me and put me on the council when they hear about me being financed by a Tory newspaper?”

  In a perfectly even voice Jill said, “Put a sock in it, Dad.”

  “What?” He stared at her, brows drawn together. “What’s that?”

  “You’re not standing trial for your principles. Leslie is, for murder.”

  Gardner sat at the table, which was covered with red and white plastic, one big hand gripping the cup of tea, staring at her. “You mean you want me to accept? You want our pictures in the paper, is that it?”

  Jill would always argue with her father, Hugh realised, in this cool conversational tone, but the words she spoke were no less direct and wounding than his. Listening to her saying things that he could never have said himself, he sensed the tug of love and distrust between these two. A meat and two veg girl could never have any use for rhetoric.

  “I just want you to think about it from Leslie’s point of view, that’s all. Just for once, don’t worry if people say you’re selling out to the Tories. Suppose it helps to get Leslie off, does that matter? How are we going to pay for his defence?”

  “The union might help.”

  “The union.” She laughed.

  “And anyway, he can choose from the counsel in court. There are always some there, isn’t that right?” He appealed to Hugh.

  She sat down and put her elbows on the table. “Do you mean to sit there and tell me that the counsel we’ll get under the Poor Persons’ Defence Act or whatever it is, will be as good as the one the Banner will get for us?”

  “You don’t believe he’s innocent, then? You think he did it.” He got up with his plate and cup, and took them to the sink. Back to her, he said, “I’m sorry, girl, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Leslie’s in prison now because he went around with Jack Garney. And why did he choose to go around with Garney? I’ve got something to answer for, but my word, Dad, you’ve got a lot more. Isn’t it you that said the conditions you grow up in are something you carry around all your life?”

  He swung round, his face naked, hurt. “Jill, you know I’ve always tried to do the best I could.”

  “Trying wasn’t enough.” He stayed silent. “Another thing. When Leslie comes out he’s not going to be able to stay round here. The Banner wants an option on his story. Whatever the money is—how much do these papers pay?” she asked suddenly.

  Hugh was taken aback. “I don’t know. Five hundred pounds perhaps, or it might be as much as a thousand.”

  “Do you think Leslie will thank you for saying no to it?”

  “It’s not easy, Jill, not as easy as you make it sound.”

  “It’s easy to me,” she said. “Either you think about yourself or you think about Leslie. It’s as easy as that.”

  “I think I ought to go,” Hugh said hurriedly. He felt that he could have borne shouting more easily than her even-toned argument.

  In the draughty, narrow, dark passage outside, she said, “You see what I mean about having responsibilities?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “He’s got to do it, though. I’ll see that he does it.”

  They were very close to each other. He put out a hand and gripped her arm. The flesh was plump and
yielding. Her lips brushed his in the coolest and slightest of caresses, and then she murmured good night. He was out in Peter Street, which was dark and wet, and seemed unnaturally silent.

  On the following morning she telephoned him at the office to say that her father had agreed.

  23

  From the Daily Banner, 10th December:

  Famous Q.C. For Defence In Guy Fawkes Case

  MAGNUS NEWTON BRIEFED BY BANNER TO DEFEND LESLIE GARDNER

  To-day we announce a sensational new development in the Guy Fawkes case, in which two boys, Leslie Gardner and John Garney, are to be tried for the murder of landowner James Corby on 5th November, and of Frank “Rocky” Jones, a key witness who was found murdered in a deserted cottage on the morning of 9th November.

  Mr. Magnus Newton, Q.C., who has appeared for the defence in several of the most important murder cases of the past decade, including the La Perouse trial, the Wilkins case and the Sydenham poisonings, has accepted the brief for the defence of Leslie Gardner. Mr. Newton is probably the most highly paid counsel at present in criminal practice. It is estimated that his income for the past five years has exceeded £25,000 per annum. The whole of the costs of the defence will be paid by the Daily Banner.

  Lord Brackman, proprietor of the paper, said in announcing this yesterday, “The whole problem of juvenile crime is of vital importance in our modern society. It is in pursuit of my belief that the accused should have the benefit of the finest counsel available that my paper has agreed to bear the costs of the defence, and I am delighted that Mr. Magnus Newton, whose eminence at the criminal bar is universally recognised, has found it possible to accept the brief. There are no political issues involved here. The Banner is concerned simply that justice shall not only be done, but shall be seen to be done.”

  Lord Brackman was no doubt referring to the fact that Mr. George Gardner, father of the accused boy, is well known as a Labour councillor. Last night Mr. Gardner said, “I don’t agree with the Banner politically, but I am grateful for the generosity that has led them to sponsor my son’s defence.”