A Tangled Web

by Nicholas Blake

  What bloody silly questions women do ask, he thought. He said, “I doubt it, my dear. It’d have been too dangerous.”

  Presently he pulled her to her feet, and they climbed up on to the promenade. The young man in the open-necked shirt followed them at a discreet interval, noticing how the girl’s steps dragged and how she kept turning her head to look back at the beach where she had been sitting, like a child saying good-bye to its seaside holiday.

  “If we can’t find it, the police certainly won’t,” said Jacko—not from any wish to comfort Daisy, but because he wanted to get her along faster to the station and bring down the curtain on this act. In London, they had decided to leave Southbourne by train, after walking to the end of the harbour mole and dropping the revolver into the deep water there: or rather, Jacko had decided it, having arranged with Thorne that they should be arrested immediately after leaving the beach, should their search have proved successful. Otherwise, they would go to the railway station, where a reception committee would be awaiting them.

  The stalwart young man, who had been keeping them under surveillance, knew they had not found the revolver. He therefore allowed them to proceed.

  “Where’s the police station?” Daisy suddenly asked.

  Jacko began to point inland, towards the clock tower, then killed the gesture at birth. He had nearly given himself away: a girl quicker in the uptake than Daisy would have asked, “How do you know? Have you been there? Why did you go there?” Rather disagreeably he replied:

  “The police station? What on earth do you want that for?”

  “Hugo’s there.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Will they let me see him soon?”

  It was on the tip of Jacko’s tongue to reply, “You’ll be visiting the police station very soon, my dear.” But such ironies, with a slow-witted girl like Daisy, lacked savour.

  “Do hurry up, my dear, or we’ll miss that train.”

  So they walked up the station approach, and the trap was tactfully sprung.

  “Miss Bland? I must ask you to step this way. And you, sir,” said a large, round-faced man who confronted them just inside the entrance.

  Fatalistically, Daisy allowed herself to be led to the station-master’s office. She was beyond feeling shock or terror: it was as though, all along, this had been going to happen, and she was prepared for it. When the train had left, and the station was empty again of travellers, Nailsworth took them outside to the police car.

  18. From Evidence Received

  For two hours, Daisy was questioned by Thorne and Nailsworth. They did not bully her: indeed, she was treated with a certain humanity; sandwiches and tea were provided half-way through the interrogation, and from time to time the police officers asked her if she would like to rest. Thorne had only seen her for a few minutes on Sunday, when she was in a state of collapse. Nailsworth was seeing her for the first time: having expected a brassy, pert delinquent, he was taken out of his stride by this girl—so quiet, so amazingly beautiful, mature beyond her years. She made him feel almost paternal, and there were moments when he inwardly cursed that young ruffian in the cells for having dragged such a girl into his disreputable life: when she spoke of him, her voice took on a tenderness, an eagerness which pierced Nailsworth’s official hide. It was clear that she believed passionately in Chesterman’s innocence. All the time she was making statements which were so many nails in his coffin, this faith shone the brighter. Even Thorne, a harder, more cynical man than Nailsworth, was affected by it. After half an hour’s questioning, both officers had mentally acquitted Daisy of any complicity in the crime.

  At the start of the interrogation, she had shown considerable reluctance, or rather, it was as if her mind were on something else; and indeed it was—she could only think of Hugo, so near that if she called out he might be able to hear her. Thorne, who at this stage was standing no nonsense from her, hinted pretty broadly that, unless she made a statement which satisfied the police, they would be compelled to arrest her as an accomplice of Chesterman. Whereupon, coming out of her dream, she had said with a spurt of animation, “Do you think I’d mind that, sir?” But then, remembering what Jacko had told her—that Hugo wanted her to tell the truth—she said, “Very well, I’ll answer your questions.”

  When it was over, and the stenographer had taken out his sheets to type the material in the form of a statement, Daisy felt a strange mixture of relief and vague disquiet. She was so exhausted, physically and emotionally, that at first she could not trace the disquiet to its source. Then it suddenly broke upon her that no questions had been asked about what she and Jacko were doing on the beach this morning. Perhaps the London Inspector, who had just left the room, had gone to question Jacko about it. Wearily she tried to think what she should say, what Jacko might be saying now: they had never discussed what account they should give: they mustn’t contradict each other. But perhaps they hadn’t been seen on the beach at all—yes, how stupid I am, she thought; if the police had seen us, it’s the first thing they’d have asked me about. And a little hope glowed in her heart again.

  But not for long. Thorne, appearing at the door, beckoned Nailsworth out. Daisy sat on the hard chair, looking, with her shopping bag and head-scarf and dumb, forlorn air, like a displaced peasant; a parcel, bearing no label, at some lost luggage office of human souls. When the door opened again, she started up from her apathy, saying, “Can I see him now?”

  “Dr. Jaques is engaged at the moment,” said Nailsworth.

  “No, I mean Hugo—Mr. Chesterman? Please may I?”

  Nailsworth turned his head away: he was unable for a moment to master the feelings which must be showing through the official severity on his countenance.

  “Now that I’ve told you everything you wanted to know?” the girl persisted.

  Nailsworth, clearing his throat, faced her across the desk.

  “Certain new evidence has come to light, Miss Bland, and I shall have to ask for your explanation.” He rang a bell: the stenographer appeared, followed by Inspector Thorne who placed a cardboard box on the desk in front of his colleague.

  “Now, Miss Bland,” said Nailsworth, restored to his official self again. “From evidence received, we understand that you and Dr. Jaques were on the beach between 11.50 this morning and 12.35. Will you please tell us for what purpose?”

  “We—I came down to try and see Hugo.”

  “On the beach? Come, come, Miss Bland,” said Thorne, “that won’t do.”

  “I wanted to go to the beach first, because—because it was the last place Hugo and I—”

  “What were you searching for?”

  “Searching?”

  “You were seen turning over stones, looking for something.”

  “Oh,” said Daisy desperately, “it was Jacko’s—Dr. Jaques’s spectacle case.”

  “Are you quite sure?” Nailsworth was relentless now. “Were you not looking for something you and Chesterman had hidden there?” He removed the lid of the cardboard box, took out an object wrapped in a handkerchief, and laid it on the desk. “This revolver?”

  “You never asked me about that,” was all Daisy could say.

  “I’m asking you now, and I want the truth.”

  With the weapon which he believed had killed his friend lying before him, Nailsworth was again in a vindictive mood: but he was also fair-minded enough to know that, in this mood, he should not continue the interrogation, so with a movement of the hand he turned it over to Thorne.

  “Do you identify this revolver as having been in the prisoner’s possession?” Thorne asked, his long nose directed upon Daisy like a probing finger.

  “I don’t know,” she faltered. “He had one rather like it.”

  “The one with which he threatened Mrs. Amberley?”

  “He didn’t mean any harm.”

  Thorne questioned the girl for some time about that incident, then abruptly asked:

  “Surely you can recognise a gun you helped the pri
soner to hide away?”

  “I didn’t look at it very hard, I was too frightened.”

  “You admit, then, you helped the prisoner to bury it?”

  “I—no, I don’t.”

  “If you didn’t help him, how did you know the exact spot on the beach where it was buried?”

  Daisy could say nothing to this.

  “Would it surprise you to know that Dr. Jaques has identified the weapon?”

  Nailsworth gave his colleague a glance of some consternation. Surely it was a mistake to let that cat out of the bag so soon? But the girl did not seem suspicious: she only said:

  “If he has identified it, why do you ask me?”

  “Confirmation, Miss Bland. Dr. Jaques might be mistaken… Mightn’t he?” Thorne added, after a slight pause.

  “I suppose so.”

  “What did you propose to do with this revolver, if you found it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hand it over to the police?”

  “Don’t be daft,” Daisy answered, with a flash of spirit.

  “Why not, if you are convinced that Chesterman did not use it to shoot Inspector Stone?”

  Again Daisy made no answer. Inspector Thorne slowly wrapped up the revolver and replaced it in the box, which he handed to a constable he had summoned. “Fingerprints first. Then the bullet,” he said.

  Daisy made an involuntary movement. She believed that scientific experts could tell if a bullet had been fired from a particular gun. For a week she had been evading the question—why did Hugo want to hide it if he is innocent? She could evade it no longer. And now, as if voicing her own thought, the Inspector said, putting a still worse edge on that terrifying question:

  “Would you not have supposed, Miss Bland, assuming Chesterman to be innocent, that he would have handed his revolver over to us at once? To prove that the bullet was not fired from it, and clear himself of suspicion straight away?”

  “Hugo was in a—very upset—he couldn’t think straight just then, I mean. He believed—didn’t trust the police to be fair about it—because he’d been in prison for theft, and it was a policeman who’d been shot,” the girl jerkily answered. She was at the end of her tether, and Thorne pressed her no more. When she had signed her statement, they told her she was free to go, but would be required to give evidence in Court when the prisoner was brought forward again.

  “Have you no relatives you could stay with till then?” Nailsworth asked, not unkindly.

  “My mother won’t have anything more to do with me, since I went to live with Hugo. Dr. Jaques is the only person who’s stood by me.”

  “I see. Just wait here a few minutes, will you?”

  Nailsworth and Thorne retired for a brief discussion. It seemed highly undesirable to them that the girl should remain in Jaques’s house: Thorne disliked the idea for purely tactical reasons—the danger of her prematurely discovering the part Jaques had played, while Nailsworth was revolted at the thought of any further human contact between the two.

  When they returned, Daisy’s eyes lit up. But they had not come to tell her that she might see Hugo at last. They had made arrangements for her to board with a retired police matron in Southbourne for the next few days: they would have her belongings fetched from Dr. Jaques’s house. Daisy put up little resistance to this proposal: at least it meant she would be nearer to Hugo, even if she might not visit him; and, although Jacko, her only friend, had done his best for her, his house was tainted with her misery and she dreaded returning there.

  Hugo Chesterman was brought forward again at the Magistrates’ Court two days later. He was represented by Bruce Rogers, partner in a local firm of solicitors. Charles Brownleigh, Q.C., appeared for the Director of Public Prosecutions. The Chief Constable had again taken steps to insure that no cameras should be used when Hugo was being brought into the courthouse.

  Most of this Friday morning was occupied with Mr. Brownleigh’s outline of the case. He gave an account of the actual crime, then turned to the prisoner’s movements during the period preceding it. He related how, on the evening of the murder, the prisoner had left his lodgings with Daisy Bland, walked to the esplanade, given her a brown paper parcel to hold, then gone off alone in the direction of the Queen’s Hotel, returning half an hour later. Next morning, he said, the accused had cleaned his revolver in the bedroom of his lodgings, and with Bland’s help buried it on the beach. He added that, last year, the accused had produced a revolver during a quarrel and threatened to shoot his brother’s wife.

  Mr. Brownleigh then began to call his witnesses. Princess Popescu, her companion, and the cab-driver gave evidence about the shooting. The typist who had seen a man running along Queen’s Parade was also called. None of these was able to identify the accused. The Police-Surgeon described the results of the post-mortem, and a detective-sergeant told how a squad of police under his charge had dug up the beach in front of the bandstand and found the revolver. The rest of the day was taken up with the evidence of two landladies, at whose lodgings the accused and Daisy Bland had been staying: the second of these was questioned in some detail about the prisoner’s movements and demeanour on the night of the crime. Mr. Brownleigh said that one of his chief witnesses, Miss Bland, was ill, and her evidence would therefore have to be taken later, out of order. The prisoner asking no questions, the case was adjourned till the following day.

  On Saturday, the stream of witnesses for the prosecution continued. Mark Amberley was called, and after being questioned about the quarrel between his wife and the prisoner, described how he had come down to Southbourne at the latter’s request and given him money: he also described, with some reluctance, how his brother had reacted so violently during a conversation they had had on this occasion about the crime. A picture of Hugo as a man of uncontrollable temper and brutal character was beginning to emerge. Dr. Jaques, who was called next, confirmed Mark Amberley’s statement about this interview, and told how he had accompanied Miss Bland back to London. As a result of what she told him later, they had returned to Southbourne on Wednesday to look for the buried revolver, but had failed to find it: they were arrested, and released a few hours later. Dr. Jaques, on being handed a revolver in court, identified it as the property of the accused.

  It was noticeable that Chesterman, who up to this point had seemed to take little interest in the proceedings, followed Dr. Jaques’s evidence with great attention, scrutinising him thoughtfully, his expression rather puzzled. However—it may be to Mr. Brownleigh’s relief, for he well knew what dangerous ground he was treading—Hugo’s solicitor did not rise to cross-examine. Jaques had given his evidence with the frankness he could so readily assume, but cautiously confined himself to plain yea and nay in answering Counsel’s questions.

  His evidence was, of course, extremely damaging. And when he was followed by the ballistics expert who gave his technical reasons for believing that the bullet found in Inspector Stone’s body had been fired from the revolver exhibited in court, it seemed all over with Hugo. Bruce Rogers got the expert to admit that such revolvers were common enough in England, and that the bullet was not the normal type used for this make of revolver. But it did little to dispel the impression already created. And worse was to come. The prosecution could not, of course, make any reference to the accused’s prison sentence or his criminal career; so the motive for a well-dressed, presentable young man’s having attempted to break into a house remained obscure. Mr. Brownleigh delivered himself of no theories on this point. Instead, he called a Detective-Sergeant Mann, who deposed that, a few hours after Chesterman had been arrested, and acting on the usual “information received,” he had gone with another police officer to a lodging-house in Pimlico, where the prisoner had recently been staying, and discovered in his room a kit-bag: it contained a leather belt with holster attached, a steel chisel, a file, two pairs of jewellers’ forceps, a jemmy, and a photograph of the accused and Daisy Bland.

  Bruce Rogers questioned this witness, as h
e had questioned the police officers who gave evidence of the arrest, on the statements the prisoner had made to them. They all agreed that he had protested his innocence throughout, claiming he had been at a cinema with Daisy Bland at the time when the murder took place.

  It was not till the following Monday that Daisy was put in the witness-box. Reaction from Wednesday’s ordeal, and her advanced state of pregnancy, had made her ill. She lay in bed, comatose at first, under the police doctor’s sedative drugs, then passively yielding to the despair which came flooding back as the effect of the drugs wore off. She felt there was no fight left in her, even had she known how best to fight for Hugo. The doctor and the landlady were kind, but kindness could touch her no longer. Time stretched around her like an ice age, obliterating not only all the features of hope but her happy memories too: Hugo seemed infinitely remote.

  Newspapers had been kept from her while she was in this condition. On the Monday morning, however, while preparations were being made to take her to court, Daisy was left for a few minutes alone in the parlour. The end of a folded newspaper protruded from behind a cushion where it had been hastily concealed. With a strange expression, both guilty and reluctant, Daisy took out the paper. Her eye lit at once upon a paragraph reporting Bruce Rogers’ examination of the police witnesses. She had no time to read more: hearing footsteps in the passage, she thrust the newspaper back where she had found it.

  The police doctor, entering with the ex-matron, observed a blind, staring look on the girl’s face.

  “Are you sure you feel up to it, Miss Bland?” he asked gently.

  “Yes, thank you. I only want to get it over.” Her voice was low and dull.

  The appearance of Daisy Bland in the witness-box caused a great stir. It was not only that the Press had been playing up the “mysterious woman in the case,” and even the magistrates were improperly eager to set eyes on her. But her pallor, her pregnant state, and the beauty which neither of these could impair, sent a vibration of sympathy through the courtroom. Daisy then proceeded to hand the newspaper tribe another gift, dear to their sensation-loving hearts. She fainted. Or, as several reporters were to cautiously phrase it, “On entering the box the witness fell down, apparently in a state of collapse.” The doctor who, with Inspector Thorne, had led her in, at once—as the newspapers said—“applied restoratives.” While the two men bent over her, slumped in her chair, Bruce Rogers, who had been coldly eyeing this new and most dangerous witness against his client, felt a curious pang: the scene suddenly took on a macabre quality for him, becoming a scene of torture: he saw Daisy as a victim being revived for further agonies. Bruce was not a highly imaginative man, and therefore all the more shocked by this unpleasant picture which had risen into his mind.