He took away the hand, stammered something. Her great flanks struck against him as she moved away. He said loudly to a small anxious-looking man with a tooth-brush moustache, “What happened?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“But weren’t you in court?”
The little man wore a raincoat much too long for him. The sleeves came down so far that you could not see his hands. “Not me. I was just—”
He never learned what the little man had been doing, for a gentle movement in the crowd shifted its pattern, as the pieces in a kaleidoscope change when the tube is shaken. In the re-formed pattern Hugh saw tantalisingly near to him the long face and the enveloping blue duffle coat of the mushroom-farmer, Morgan. Another susurration in the crowd and they were side by side. “Morgan,” he cried, “Morgan.”
“Hallo. Let’s get out of this and have a drink.”
“What happened?”
“Have a drink.”
“The pubs are shut.”
“I know a place.” Morgan leered at him, unnaturally gay.
They were drifting apart. “I wasn’t in court,” he called. “Don’t know the result.”
“Gardner acquitted, Garney guilty,” Morgan shouted. “Too clever for his own good, that Hardy. The Ace of Spades in Clough Street, see you there.”
Hugh pushed and used his elbows, and suddenly was out of the crowd. Like a swimmer coming up from under water he looked at the men and women now slowly dispersing, and saw that there were not so many of them, after all. A hundred, perhaps? Certainly not more. And now that he came to listen to them, his diver’s ears unstopped, he heard fragmentary phrases about Gardner, how lucky he had been and what a flimsy case it was against him and how wrong it was that he should ever have been charged. Had people been saying these things all the time?
In the High Street he got a taxi. On the way out to Paradise Vale he examined his own feelings, and was surprised to find not exhilaration but a sort of numbness in his mind. It was all over, they had won, and he was conscious only of emptiness. It was as though the trial had become for him normality, and the end of it signified not victory or defeat, but some terrible change impending in his own life.
The taxi drew up short of the Gardners’ house in Peter Street. The driver said, “Quite a party.”
Hugh stood staring. Half a dozen cars were drawn up beside or near to the house, and a number of people moved about the gate, some of them with cameras. The door opened, and with a shock he recognised the trim figure and neat fair head of Sally Banstead. He heard her voice, clear and slightly shrill. “You might just as well give up, boys. Leslie’s too tired to talk.”
“Let him say so himself,” somebody called. Another voice said, “Can it, Sally.”
Sally hesitated, then said, “All right. He’ll come out. But just pictures, that’s all. He really is tired.”
Now Leslie Gardner himself appeared in the doorway, with Sally on one side of him and Frank Fairfield on the other. Half a dozen cameras were raised. There was no expression at all on Leslie Gardner’s face. A patter of questions rained down.
“How does it feel to be acquitted?”
“Were you ever worried, Leslie?”
“What are your plans now?”
“What do you think about your counsel, Mr. Newton?”
“Who found out about the second pair of trousers?”
Leslie Gardner stood in the doorway, swaying on his feet a little, and said nothing at all. Sally Banstead put a hand on his shoulder, whispered something, and stepped forward. “He can’t answer questions, boys, you can see that, he’s too tired. You’ve got your pictures.”
“So be good boys and go away,” somebody said. There was general laughter. Hugh pushed his way to the gate as the three figures were going in. “Frank,” he called. Fairfield turned, waved, held the door open.
He was in the dark narrow passage, with Fairfield beside him and Sally facing them. Sally’s lip was drawn back in a snarl. She spoke in a ferocious whisper.
“Who are you? Oh, I know, the boy from the local paper. Is he all right?”
“Of course,” Fairfield said.
“How am I to know, the way you’ve fixed it? Why bring them here at all, why couldn’t we go to a hotel?”
Fairfield’s voice, equally low, was elaborately patient. “Sally dear, they wouldn’t go to a hotel, they wouldn’t come anywhere but here.”
“We paid for the defence, didn’t we? What goes on?”
“If you’ll just wait, you’ll find it works out this way.”
“And what’s wrong with them? The way they’re behaving, you’d think they’d sooner he’d been found guilty.”
“Perhaps it would have been simpler,” Fairfield said.
“I don’t know what you mean.” In the dark passage he could sense Sally’s almost physical irritation. “Oh well, let’s go in and have another try.”
In the small sitting-room Jill and her father sat together on the red moquette sofa. Jill’s hands were folded on her lap, her face was pale. George Gardner stared straight across the room at the Van Gogh self-portrait. He did not turn his head as they came in. The thought passed through Hugh’s mind that George Gardner hadn’t after all, gone to London, and he wondered briefly whether the whole thing last night had been some kind of act put on for their benefit. Then he looked at Leslie, who sat in one of the arm-chairs, perfectly still except that his fingers drummed continuously on its arm. The fourth person in the room was a sports-jacketed photographer, who had put down camera and flash, and stood leaning against the wall looking bored. Into this silent and hostile tableau Sally Banstead crisply stepped. Beside her bright vitality Jill looked slightly washed out, and the stillness of Leslie and his father seemed somehow slightly ridiculous. She stood with her back to the ornamental fireplace.
“That’s got rid of them. For the moment, anyway. You were fine, Leslie. Now, let’s get on. Can we just have a family group first?”
“We don’t want any photographs. I just told you.” George Gardner said it a little unclearly, but with heavy decision.
“Come along now. You made an arrangement with the Banner. It’s up to you to keep it.”
Leslie stopped drumming. “I never made an arrangement.”
“You knew Magnus Newton was going to defend you. The whole thing was explained to you.”
“I never made an arrangement. I never signed anything.”
Sally took a cigarette out of a small jewelled case, snapped a smaller jewelled lighter. The surface pleasantness of her voice was rubbing away. “What is it you want? More money?”
“We don’t want any of your bloody money,” George Gardner said. His lack of teeth turned bloody into bluthy.
Sally puffed twice at the cigarette, then stubbed it out into an ash-tray shaped like a horse. “Frank, you take over.” She went across and stood beside the photographer.
Fairfield had been smoking, too. Now he put down his cigarette on the edge of another ash-tray, this one shaped like a bear with one claw clutching the cigarette, and began to talk in a low voice, as though he were rehearsing arguments which they already knew by heart.
“I don’t know why we’re not all out in a pub having a drink. That’s where I should like to be. It’s a sort of let-down after all this time to be sitting here arguing, instead of celebrating.”
“I don’t feel like celebrating,” George Gardner said.
Fairfield ignored him. “But let’s get this straight. And let’s keep a sense of proportion. You don’t love the Banner, don’t want anything more to do with it. All right. But you ought to face this. Without young Hugh here and me digging around and finding out about the trousers, which was something Leslie himself didn’t remember until he was questioned, perhaps he wouldn’t have been acquitted. Without Newton to defend him he might not have got off. You’ve got
a contract with the Banner—”
“Let them sue,” George Gardner said. It sounded like shoe.
“You think they won’t sue. And you’re probably right. But it doesn’t end with the contract. Whether you like the Banner or not, you owe them just about the biggest debt any family could owe to a newspaper. Probably you can get out of paying it. But I know what sort of names Mr. Gardner here would use for a trade unionist who tried to welsh on that sort of a debt.”
Fairfield picked up his cigarette. His hand was shaking badly. Jill moved on the sofa, as though breaking a spell. “He’s right. You both know it.” They said nothing. Like a general settling the terms of surrender after a defeat, she said to Fairfield, “What exactly do you want?”
They had been over all this before, as Hugh Bennett sensed. “Photographs first. Some of Leslie, one or two groups. After all, the other papers have got them, you wouldn’t want the Banner to be treated worse than the others, I hope. Then Leslie and I go out together, spend the night in some quiet hotel, have dinner, rough out his story. We shall want three articles, four if it seems to run to that.”
“You’re going to write it for him,” George Gardner said.
“That just isn’t true.” Fairfield’s weary patience seemed to be endless. “Leslie can’t write the story himself. There’s a form it’s got to go in, a way people like to read things in a newspaper. This is going to be Leslie’s story, though, I’m not going to invent anything. It’s going to be the story of his life, childhood, family, schooling, everything that led up to the trial, then the trial itself and his feelings while it was going on, and when he heard the verdict. As straightforward as that.”
“Why has it got to be to-night?” That was Jill. “Let him have twenty-four hours. He needs a rest.”
Fairfield shook his head. “To-night. We’re late on it already. We just can’t afford to leave it for another day.”
To nobody in particular, Jill said, “We do owe it to them.”
There was silence. Then Sally Banstead made a gesture to the photographer. Like actors who have been waiting impatiently in the wings, they moved into the middle of the room. “Is the chair all right?” Sally said.
“One in the chair, then standing, then a group.”
“What about boyish treasures?” The words sounded odd on Sally’s lips. “Cricket bats, football boots you used when you got a hat-trick for the first team, cup you won for running, you know the sort of thing. Sounds corny, but people like it.”
Leslie Gardner stirred in his chair. He did not look at Sally, but spoke to Fairfield. “What about King?”
“King?”
“In this story of yours. What about King? Where does he come in?”
For the first time that evening Fairfield seemed taken aback, although he answered easily enough. “We’ll have to talk that over. Of course you’ll have to say something about King.”
“They found him guilty. Is he going to hang?” Again he spoke to Fairfield directly, as though only from Fairfield could he expect the truth.
“It’s possible, Leslie. He’s nineteen years old.”
“They wouldn’t have hung me?”
“That’s right. You’re only seventeen.”
“Oh, come on. Let’s get on with it.” Sally made a gesture. There was a flash of light, momentarily startling. The photographer said something like, “Another one, I think, standing this time.” But Hugh could not hear the words distinctly because Leslie Gardner, his face white as milk, was standing up and shouting at them.
“Then why don’t they hang me? I don’t want to be let off. I was in it too, wasn’t I?”
Jill was on her feet. Hugh never forgot the expressions on their faces, the open-mouthed surprise of Sally Banstead, the questing pleasure in the photographer’s stare, the dismay of Fairfield, the hand that Jill put up as though to ward off an advancing figure in a nightmare. Only George Gardner sat apparently unmoved, his stiff collar tight round his neck, his arms straining at the cloth of the suit he wore. And it was George Gardner who said to his son, in the voice thickened and made ridiculous by the lack of teeth, “What do you mean?”
“I was there. That’s what I mean. I was there. You all know it, don’t you?”
“No.” Fairfield’s voice was for once loudly emphatic. “We don’t know anything. Don’t say it, Leslie.”
The boy took no notice. He was talking now to his father. “I was in it, right up to here. Because King asked me to, that’s why. I’d do anything for King, you know that, don’t you, anything he asked. You knew it all the time. Didn’t you? Didn’t you? Eh?” He said this while Fairfield was shouting at the top of his voice shut up, shut up, said it as though there were only two people in the room.
“The trousers,” Jill said. “What about the trousers?”
“I wore my old brown suit, of course, factory clothes.” Now he looked round at the rest of them. “Doesn’t matter what I say now, does it? I’ve been let off, they can’t do a bloody thing about it.”
Sally Banstead said under her breath, wonderingly almost, “That’s torn it, that’s really torn it.”
Leslie was staring at his father again. His lips were trembling, his eyes were melting with tears. He repeated softly, “You knew it, Dad, didn’t you?”
George Gardner stood up. He looked at his son’s trembling lips and imploring eyes. Then he gathered saliva in his mouth. The spittle landed on Leslie’s cheek. The boy began to cry.
“Oh, Dad,” he said, and kept repeating it. “Oh, Dad.”
“A snivelling boy and a murderer,” Gardner said. “Not my son.” As he walked past Leslie, the boy clung to his jacket. Without visible effort Gardner turned and struck him. It was not a hard blow, but a ring on his finger cut the boy’s mouth. Gardner walked out of the room. They heard the front door slam.
“Frank,” Sally Banstead said. She looked more nearly human than Hugh had seen her. Fairfield nodded. They went out with the photographer.
“That’s the end of it,” Jill said. She looked down at Leslie, who now crouched on the floor, making snuffling noises.
“Is there anything I can do?” He felt the absurdity of the question, the inadequacy of any words.
“Go away, Hugh. I want everyone to go away.”
“Will you come too?”
“How can I? He’s my brother.” She rested a hand on Leslie’s head. He did not look up.
Hugh went away and walked through the streets of Paradise Vale. It seemed long afterwards, but perhaps it was little more than an hour, when he walked into the American Bar of the Grand. Fairfield sat on a stool there, with Sally Banstead by his side. Fairfield raised a hand in greeting, and began to talk.
“You are just in time to take part in a top-level conference, a council of war. Shall we let young Hugh in on our conference, Sally?” Sally stared at him with her bright shallow eyes, but said nothing. “Sally and I are trying to work out a plan. Sally has been revealing the unsuspected presence of a heart, and I have been using the gin-soaked thing that passes for my brain. We have decided that if young Leslie could be parted from his family it would be a good thing for everybody. Young Leslie included. Agreed?”
Fairfield was not drunk, he could never be drunk, but there was something odd about the vague eyes behind the thick glasses.
Hugh said stupidly, “I don’t know. But what’s it got to do with you?”
“There’s a little matter of a life-story being written,” Sally said. “Perhaps it escaped you.”
“But you can’t do that. Not after what he said.”
“Why not?” She snapped open her bag, looked at her face in a square of glass.
“But you heard what he said. You can’t do it, you simply can’t do it.”
The face passed inspection, the bag was shut. “What you can’t do you have to do sometimes.”
“Frank,” he said to Fairfield.
“Look at it Sally’s way, and that’s one answer. The paper’s paid for its story, and it’s got to have it. But look at it another way. Leslie was hysterical this afternoon, didn’t know what he was saying. He said it to spite his father, couldn’t you feel it? He’d have said anything to make his father react in the way he did.”
“I like Sally’s answer.”
“Look at it another way. Do you remember what I said to you once? You play the game according to the rules. There’s no other way to play it. When you lose you don’t cry, and when you have a lucky win you don’t ask questions.”
“I still like Sally’s answer. The paper’s paid its money and you’ve got to give them a story. Isn’t that right?”
Fairfield looked at him for a long moment, and then said almost indifferently, “If you like.”
They had bought him a drink, and it was in his hand. It seemed that there was a great distance between his hand and the bar counter, so that the glass came down heavily, and some of the drink spilled over. He looked once at Fairfield and seemed to see for the first time that what stood at the bar was hardly more than the wreck of a human being, a wreck staying afloat on its sea of drink. Then he turned his back, and again it seemed to be a long way from the bar to the door.
Michael was in the flat, cooking bacon and eggs. “Our boy won,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You don’t look very pleased. Old Beckles summed up dead in his favour, pointed out how thin it all was really, highly circumstantial. But the boob about the trousers did the trick, if you ask me. Have you sent that telegram?”
The Progress of a Crime Page 20
