A Tangled Web

by Nicholas Blake

  “I beg your pardon?” For a moment there was a stupid, groping expression on Daisy’s face.

  “I will put it this way,” said Counsel patiently. “If the prisoner had not used the revolver recently—used it to shoot Inspector Stone, how could its discovery do him any harm? What, otherwise, was the point of your plan to hide it in a ‘safer’ place?”

  Daisy’s lips trembled. “You’re trying to catch me out,” she cried.

  “I’m trying to get at the truth.”

  Daisy burst out sobbing. “I won’t say anything more to anybody—only the truth.”

  The crime reporters scribbled busily. This was more like it. Scene in Court. Woman Breaks Down in Witness-Box. I Only Want to Tell the Truth.

  When Daisy had recovered, Mr. Brownleigh pressed the matter no further. He went on to the arrest of the witness and Dr. Jaques, obtaining from her an admission that, during her subsequent questioning at the police station, no undue pressure had been exercised, and sat down.

  Sir Henry Jervoise, a tall, lanky man with a monocle and quizzical eyes which could set suddenly into a pebbly and incredulous stare, vastly discomposing to opposition witnesses, rose to his feet. His first words sent another frisson through the Court.

  “Miss Bland, forgive me if I ask you a personal question. You are deeply in love with the prisoner?”

  “Yes.” She said it in a low voice, bowing her head, but it sounded thrilling and clear as a distant trumpet call.

  “You are soon to become the mother of his child.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You would do nothing, willingly, to incriminate this man you love so deeply?” Sir Henry’s slight emphasis on the fifth word of this question indicated the line his questioning would take. He was going, not merely to grasp the nettle boldly, but turn it against the prosecution.

  “Indeed I wouldn’t,” was Daisy’s answer; and again a tenderness breathed from her voice which for a moment turned the Court, the wigs and gowns, all the paraphernalia of the Law into an insubstantial pageant.

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t. What is puzzling us all”—Sir Henry ran a confiding eye along the jury—“is how you came to make your statement to the police and the deposition before the magistrates—a statement so much more damaging to the man you love than the truth would have been.”

  “You must not make speeches, Sir Henry,” interrupted Mr. Justice Prentiss with a dyspeptic primming of the lips.

  “I am coming to the question, m’lord,” Sir Henry blandly remarked. Then, turning back to Daisy, “Would it be fair to say that you were trapped into making that statement?”

  Mr. Brownleigh was on his feet, protesting.

  “I will rephrase the question. When you made the statement you have since retracted, was it because you had been led to believe it was in the prisoner’s interests to do so?”

  “He told me to.”

  Sir Henry’s monocle dropped from his eye. “I beg your pardon? Who told you?”

  “Dr. Jaques gave me a message from Hugo—from the prisoner—saying I was to tell that story.”

  “Ah. I see.” Sir Henry gave a strong rendering of a man to whom abundant light has at last been vouchsafed. “And naturally you would do anything which Mr. Chesterman asked you to?”

  “Yes.”

  “You trusted Dr. Jaques implicitly?”

  “Yes. He was our closest friend.”

  “Would it surprise you to hear that Mr. Chesterman gave him no such message to pass on to you?” asked Sir Henry, after a pregnant pause to warn the jury that something important was coming.

  “Yes. Well, perhaps not now.”

  Sir Henry laboured the point no further. And just as well, thought Bruce Rogers, knowing how thin was the ice upon which Sir Henry had been cutting these fancy figures.

  “Now, Miss Bland. After you and Dr. Jaques had failed to find the revolver, and been arrested, you made this statement to the police. Entirely of your own free will?”

  “I was frightened. The Inspector said I’d be charged as an accomplice if I didn’t make a full confession which satisfied the police.”

  “So it wasn’t altogether of your own free will?”

  “Well, of course, I’d had that message from Hugo—”

  “Yes, yes,” Sir Henry broke in swiftly. “And what happened next? After you’d signed the statement?”

  “The Inspector said he’d make arrangements for me to stay at Southbourne. I had hardly any money.”

  “To stay with Mrs. Chance?”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew that she had been till recently a Police Matron?”

  “Yes. They told me so.”

  Sir Henry’s eye twinkled. “Made you feel as if you were still under arrest?”

  “Don’t lead the witness, Sir Henry,” said the Judge sternly.

  “I apologise, m’Lud,” Counsel replied, in a far from apologetic tone. “Did you ask to see Mr. Chesterman?”

  “Oh yes, sir. Several times. But they wouldn’t let me.”

  “Did you try to get in touch with any of your relations, or friends?”

  “No, sir. I wasn’t well. I didn’t want to see anyone except Hugo.”

  “But the police doctor visited you?” Sir Henry faintly emphasised the word “police.” In these questions to Daisy, and later in his cross-examination of Crown witnesses, one line of the defence became clear. Sir Henry, using all the latitude which is commonly allowed to Defence Counsel in a capital trial, was aiming to suggest to the jury that, apart from her retracting of the deposition, Daisy Bland had given it under duress. The picture he wanted them to see was of a sick, desperate and innocent girl forced to make a false confession and incriminate her lover in order to escape being charged with murder; and then an unseemly scramble by the authorities to get an indictment before the girl retracted her statement, as well she might. Miss Bland had been virtually held incommunicado, under supervision of a police doctor and a retired police matron, thus cutting her off effectively from outside influence. Chesterman had been brought at once before the magistrates, in spite of the failure of any witness to identify him; and instead of formal evidence of arrest alone being given, as is normal, Miss Bland was hustled into Court the first moment her health permitted it, and taken through her statement by Treasury Counsel.

  What all this implied, as Sir Henry would bring out in his closing speech, was that—since the authorities had made such extraordinary (and at times dubious) efforts to get the girl’s deposition, the Crown case, apart from her evidence, must self-admittedly be of the flimsiest. And it was Sir Henry’s contention that the jury were not entitled to treat as evidence one word of a deposition which had now been retracted.

  Although he well knew that the verdict would depend upon the Judge’s direction on this point, Sir Henry contested every other one that offered him the least purchase. He got little change from the two Inspectors, who were old hands in the witness-box and flatly denied putting any undue pressure on Daisy Bland: he did, however, obtain an admission from Inspector Thorne that, after his arrest, the accused had stated he was in a cinema at the time of the murder. Sir Henry made great play with the failure of any Crown witness to identify Chesterman; but he had more trouble with a new witness—a holiday-maker who believed he could identify Daisy Bland as a woman he had seen under a lamp on the esplanade just at the time of the murder. When the medical evidence had been given, Sir Henry cross-examined the police doctor on Daisy’s condition in the Magistrates’ Court. He was seeking to impress upon the jury that Daisy had given her evidence there in a dazed, mechanical way suggestive of utter mental exhaustion, the result of pressure applied by the police. The doctor agreed she had been extremely agitated, and said he had recommended a rest owing to her condition: he, cautiously admitted that Daisy’s demeanour before the magistrates would not be inconsistent with the theory that her “confession” was in fact a false one. Re-examining the doctor, Mr. Brownleigh asked:

  “Have you any reaso
n to think that Miss Bland had actually undergone, as my learned friend seems to suggest, a brain-washing process?”

  There was a small diversion while Counsel explained to the Judge the meaning of “brain-washing,” a phrase which Mr. Justice Prentiss professed himself unfamilar with. Then Mr. Brownleigh repeated the question, and the doctor replied:

  “No. She was agitated. But in my opinion she knew perfectly well what she was saying.”

  On the second day of the trial, after a few minor witnesses had been called, Dr. Jaques’s evidence was taken. Mr. Brownleigh took him through the events from his arrival in Southbourne with Mark Amberley, the day after the murder, to his second visit there and the search for the revolver. Mr. Brownleigh’s examination was puzzling to the general public, who knew nothing of the role Dr. Jaques had played in this affair: Sir Henry had leisure to admire the skill with which Mr. Brownleigh picked his way through what was a positive minefield; but he himself was in a difficult enough position, for if he attacked this witness on character, it would allow the prosecution to bring evidence proving Chesterman’s criminal record.

  Discussing the case afterwards, Sir Henry said he had never, in a long acquaintance with the seamy side of life, come across a more utterly despicable human being than Dr. Jaques. When he rose to cross-examine, he fixed the witness with a long, cold stare which sufficiently indicated his contempt. Dr. Jaques met it in his own way—that look in his brown eyes, at once servile and impudent, masking a mind warped by its lust for power, for destruction. A deeper silence fell upon the Court, and it was noticed that the two warders in the dock moved closer to the prisoner.

  “The accused man is your dearest friend, I believe?” Sir Henry began.

  “I have known him well for some years.”

  “And Miss Bland—she is a very dear friend of yours too?”

  “Certainly.”

  “You have been in communication with her fairly recently?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you write to say, ‘I’m doing my best to help Hugo in everything’?”

  “I don’t think I said quite that. I wrote that, if I could in any way assist him, I should be pleased to do so.”

  “When you communicated to the police a confidential statement alleged to have been made to you by Miss Bland, was that for the purpose of assisting her and the accused?”

  “I considered it my duty as a citizen to help the police when a murder had been committed.”

  “Your duty as a citizen. I see. And did your conscience also direct you to tell the prisoner or Miss Bland, your dearest friends, that you had given the police this information?”

  “I did not tell them. No.”

  Sir Henry, replacing his monocle, stared distastefully at the witness. “On the day Chesterman was arrested, you had arranged to meet him in the buffet at Charing Cross station?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was your arrangement, not his?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it to assist him?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Did anyone except him and yourself know about this rendezvous?”

  “Yes, Inspector Thorne.”

  “When you went to Charing Cross station, were you surprised to find the police turning up?”

  “No.”

  “Did the prisoner give you a letter to pass on to Miss Bland?”

  For a moment, Dr. Jaques’s glib effrontery deserted him. This was clearly a question he had not expected. He glanced at the man in the dock; then, with an extraordinary quiver of the mouth which made him look, for an instant, like a torturer gloating, he replied:

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And what did you do with this letter.”

  “I destroyed it.”

  “Did you indeed? May I ask why?”

  “Miss Bland was then under my medical care. She was in poor health, and I considered that the contents of the letter would be dangerously disturbing.”

  “You read this private letter, then, before destroying it?”

  “That is so.”

  “And you formed the professional opinion that a proposal of marriage, made by the man she loved and whose child she was carrying, would endanger Miss Bland’s health?”

  Dr. Jaques shrugged his shoulders.

  “Answer my question,” said Sir Henry, scowling at him.

  “It would have over-excited her, and raised false hopes.”

  Sir Henry gave the jury an eloquent look. “Your solicitude for your patient was remarkable indeed, was it not?”

  “Does that require an answer, too?”

  “Your whole evidence so far has provided the answer. Now then: when the police arrested Chesterman at Charing Cross, did they go through the form of arresting you as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did that alarm you very much?”

  “I had no reason to be alarmed.”

  “Quite so. And when you went down to Southbourne with Miss Bland, you knew that you were going to show the police where the revolver was hidden?”

  “No, I thought that she would unintentionally show the police where it had been hidden.”

  “A fine distinction, Dr. Jaques. So you were not surprised to find the police were watching you both when you went down on to the beach?”

  “No, I was not. When we couldn’t find the revolver, I thought she’d been fooling me.”

  “At the station, the police went through a form of arrest?”

  “I don’t know whether you could call it arrest.”

  “Whatever term we apply to it, it came as a great shock to this poor girl?”

  “Possibly.”

  “A shock which, as her friend and medical adviser, you might have considered extremely dangerous to her health?”

  Dr. Jaques was silent.

  “You did not have time to break to this unhappy girl the news that she might be arrested?”

  Looking full at Sir Henry, the witness deliberately replied, in the voice which Bruce Rogers was later to compare with barbed-wire hidden in a saucer of cream:

  “I had the time, but no intention.”

  Sir Henry indicated that he had no more questions to ask. Seldom has any witness left the box as thoroughly discredited as was Dr. Jaques now. It was clear that, on his evidence alone, the prisoner could never be convicted. But, though Jaques had been shown up in all his wellnigh incredible baseness, Daisy’s deposition before the magistrates remained intact: and, as Jaques, bowing to the Judge, left the witness-box, Sir Henry was aware of something damnable in his face and bearing—an expression he hardly troubled to conceal now, one of triumph, as if, mercilessly though he had been exposed, his real object was finally and irrefutably achieved.

  After these exchanges, the trial ran its course less dramatically. The Prosecution closed its case that afternoon, and Sir Henry intimating that he would call no witness except the prisoner, the trial was adjourned till next day.

  Hugo Chesterman was in the witness-box for three hours the following morning. His demeanour throughout remained calm, subdued, frank. While Sir Henry was taking him through his story, Hugo never faltered, and it was evident that he was making an unexpectedly good impression on the jury: from time to time now the jurymen allowed their eyes to dwell upon him, instead of, as heretofore, merely glancing at him in a furtive and flinching way. Sir Henry’s final question was, “I am going to ask you one thing more. Are you the man who murdered Inspector Stone on that night?”

  “I am not,” Hugo emphatically replied.

  When Mr. Brownleigh rose to cross-examine, however, the balance soon began tilting the other way. Patiently and dispassionately he drew the prisoner’s attention to the holes in his own defence, to small discrepancies and contradictions in his evidence, to the fantastic coincidences which it implied. Was it not an extraordinary thing, if he had really thrown away the parcel containing the rope on the night before the murder, that it should not have been discovered till the morning after it? Was it not strange that a
t the Magistrates’ Court he should not have mentioned his having been in a picture palace with his wife at the time of the murder? Was it not an extraordinary coincidence that a hat, purchased for him in Brighton, should have turned up near the scene of the crime? And that whoever shot Inspector Stone should have used a revolver of a pattern identical to Hugo’s? Was it not difficult to credit that an innocent man would, simply from fear of the police, take such trouble to remove fingerprints from his revolver and hide it?

  So it went on, Mr. Brownleigh chipping away at Hugo’s story from this side and that, till it seemed like some plaster construction hollow and empty at the core. The impersonal way he went to work upon it was matched, almost throughout the cross-examination, by Hugo’s air of cool detachment: they might have been two experts discussing the merits of some abstract proposition, arguing keenly yet without personal animosity, politely agreeing to differ.

  After lunch, Counsel made their closing speeches. Sir Henry arguing with all his skill and force that Daisy’s deposition at the Magistrates’ Court should be ruled as inadmissible at the present trial. Then Mr. Justice Prentiss summed up the evidence. He instructed the jury first in the legal definition of murder. It was very possible, he said, that the man who shot Inspector Stone had not intended to murder him: but if a person engaged in an unlawful enterprise fired at another person in order to facilitate his own escape, and the shot killed, the crime was murder. The judge pointed out the reasons why this should be so, and paid a tribute to the dead man’s devotion to duty. There was no direct evidence, he continued, that the prisoner was the man who had fired the fatal shot; but circumstantial rather than direct evidence was a feature of an overwhelming proportion of cases in which nevertheless the guilt of the accused had been sufficiently established. Whereas the Crown had produced no evidence of identification, the jury must equally bear in mind that the defence had brought forward no independent witnesses testifying to the prisoner’s alibi.

  The prosecution had asked the jury to draw, from the prisoner’s conduct after the murder, the inference that such conduct was consistent only with his guilt. The prosecution’s case was based largely on the evidence of two witnesses, Daisy Bland and Dr. Jaques. Every citizen, said the Judge, who had knowledge of a crime, was in duty bound to inform the police: on the other hand, one could not extend approval to a man who had given the police information he had received as a trusted friend; and certainly Jaques should not have continued to take advantage of the prisoner’s confidence and Miss Bland’s, once he had communicated with the police. The defence had severely censured Dr. Jaques’s conduct, and also suggested that the police methods of obtaining evidence through him’ were improper: the Judge saw no justification for criticism of the police; and it was not Dr. Jaques, he reminded the jury, but Hugo Chesterman who was on trial. It was true that one could not have the same confidence in Dr. Jaques’s evidence which one would have had if it had been obtained in a different way. However, the jury were entitled to consider it in so far as it threw light upon the evidence of Miss Bland.