Fog of Doubt

by Christianna Brand

  Counsel for Thomas Evans was on his feet. ‘Dr. Edwards—did you see the defendant’s car outside the house when you arrived?’

  ‘No,’ said Tedward.

  ‘You have told us that you left your car and went up into the house?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tedward.

  ‘Followed by Miss Rose Evans,’ said Counsel, skating delicately over any question as to how closely Miss Rose Evans had followed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And later saw the defendant enter the hall through the front door?’

  ‘Yes; about ten minutes after I got there.’

  ‘Did you observe anything about his attitude to the presence of the dead body in the hall?’

  ‘He seemed very shocked and surprised,’ said Tedward.

  ‘He seemed very shocked and surprised; as though he were seeing this body for the first time?’

  ‘Yes, certainly.’

  ‘And then, Dr. Edwards, what did you do?’

  ‘Well, one or other of us suggested that as the telephone wire had been torn out by the fall, I should go for the police; so I went back to my car.’

  ‘I see. And on this occasion, did you see any car outside the house?’

  Leaning against the wall behind the witness-box, Charlesworth shifted from foot to foot in an agony of suspense. On the answer to this one question, so much hung; if Thomas Evans were committed for trial, what was one to do about Dr. Edwards, about his confession, about Rosie’s confirmation of his confession, about the faked telephone call? They had let the thing drift too far, that was the truth of it; in face of the verdict on Rosie, ought they not to have withdrawn the charge against Thomas and started all over again? But they had not; and whichever way it went, he, Charlesworth, would get the brickbats, that was certain. And rightly so; he had been too damn hasty in charging Thomas Evans. Ted Edwards had thrown out hints that he could clear Thomas Evans; if he didn’t do so now … Charlesworth prayed fervently to heaven to intervene.

  And heaven intervened. The dead hand of Rosie, which in life had tumbled the little pawns about so violently, stretched forth from her casket of ashes and picked up one little pawn and tossed it out into the sunshine of freedom; and thrust another on to the vacant square. And Tedward put his hand into the dead hand of his love, and let it move him where it would. ‘Yes. This time there was a car outside the house: Thomas Evans’ car.’

  ‘Whereas there had not been a car there ten or fifteen minutes before, now his car was there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which you know very well?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Tedward. ‘I’ve known it for years.’

  ‘I see. You’re aware, of course, that the defendant stated to the police that he put his car away, as usual, when he arrived at the house?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tedward. ‘I think in the shock and fuss he must have forgotten.’ In reply to the Magistrate’s reminder that they must not have his thoughts, please, he amended: ‘Well, let’s put it this way: in the shock and fuss I forgot all about it myself.’

  ‘You forgot you had seen the defendant’s car outside the house when you went out to fetch the police?’

  ‘Yes. As soon as I remembered, I told the police,’ said Tedward, who had told the police just as soon as it suited them all for him to do so and not a moment before.

  ‘And when you returned a little later with the police____?’

  ‘The car was not there,’ said Tedward.

  ‘In the interval, he had gone out and put it away?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  ‘You know that the defendant positively states that he did not go out again?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tedward.

  ‘That he put his car away and locked up the garage before he came into the house?’

  Behind him, the police witnesses stiffened to immobility against the wall, all about the court there were little knots and little whisperings. He knew that Mr. Charlesworth’s seconds were preparing to throw in the towel. And he looked across at Thomas and the dead hand of Rosie lifted the noose over Thomas’s head, and came and slipped it gently about his own. And he lifted his head, with the noose about his neck and said, loudly and clearly: ‘He couldn’t have put it away. He’s forgotten, he’s made a mistake.’ He said more quietly, ‘When I drew up in front of the house, I overshot my mark a little, in the fog. And there’s no question of my car being moved, I’d left it locked. He did go back to his car after he came into the house, he went back to put his car away, and by then he had blood on his shoes.’ And he smiled and said, directly to Thomas, in contravention to all court etiquette: ‘My car was right across the entrance to your garage, old boy.’

  The dead hand of Rosie reached up and jerked the noose tight.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AND so it was Tedward who was brought to trial at last for the murder of Raoul Vernet—in Court No. 1, of the Central Criminal Courts, familiarly known as the Old Bailey; with Mr. Justice Rivett on the bench, Sir William Baines for the Crown, Mr. James Dragon defending.…

  He stood at the foot of the narrow steps leading up to the dock; a thin, stooping, elderly man, now, in a suit much too large for him—no trace left at all of the comfortable solidity, the broad, friendly smilingness, the air of youth, the easy-going pride and integrity, the reliability and strength; only that ghostly, ghastly, heart-breaking, eternal pretence at cheerfulness. A decent bloke, the two prison officers said, who brought him to and from the court and throughout the trial would sit in the dock with him; already they had started an elaborate ‘book’ on his chances of condemnation or acquittal and, supposing the former, of his being reprieved or finally topped. Odds would fluctuate enormously during the course of the trial, especially before and after speeches by counsel and the summing-up; reaching fever point while the jury were out and again at the time of the inevitable appeal. By the day set for the actual topping, everyone in the prison world would have a little something, if only a couple of cigarettes, on the fate of Edwin Robert Edwards, charged on indictment that he did on November 23rd, of last year, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Meanwhile, said the two prison officers, he seemed a very decent bloke.

  They stood at the narrow stairway that leads up into the dock, one with his hand on Tedward’s arm, one at the angle of the stairway where he could see the signal from the dock. There were three loud knocks and a sudden shuffle of many feet over their heads; the man on the stairs jerked his head and the man at his shoulder said, ‘Here it comes, cock,’ and gave Tedward a friendly shove. Their broad shoulders almost brushed the tiles as they went forward up the narrow stairway, from the tiled landing with its row of cells, the iron stairs twisting down to more tiled landings, more rows and rows and rows of cells, all with the pervading smell of dust and disinfectant. He came up into the great dock; from the vast dome above his head, light flooded down upon white walls, oak-panelled, upon carved wood and tooled leather, upon a sea of pink faces, white wigs, black gowns, here and there a touch of bright colour, and straight ahead of him, a splash of scarlet. It was like coming up from a public lavatory into a London park; and it was six long weeks since he had looked upon the faces of free men.

  The court was resettling itself after the entry of the Judge. Mr. Justice Rivett was well over seventy and he had never got used to murder cases, never. Criminals were another matter he would say (ad nauseam) to his colleagues on the Bench, but a murderer was really a creature of accident; and every time he picked up that infernal square of black, and, carrying it folded in his hand as a woman carries her gloves, walked through that door heralded by the three knocks, in his bunched red dressing-gown of a robe, with the little tie wig perched over his own white hair, it turned his stomach over, it honestly did. So much abdominal churning necessitated a battered little tin of assorted pills known as ‘my Neurotic Box’ whose absence from his clerk’s desk, close to his own, would have rendered his lordship a murderer in his own right. He glanced up and met the anxious eyes of the man in the dock
; and thought, Another decent one—damn and bloody hell!

  Tedward stood quietly at the front of the dock, a man on each side of him, raised a couple of feet above the rest of the court, level with the dais opposite him, with its seven great carved wooden, leather-backed chairs for the Judge and any Lord Mayors or Sheriffs or Aldermen who happened, by duty or inclination, to be there. Since it was not the opening day of the session, no Lord Mayor was present to see poor Tedward turned off; but a Sheriff in an ancient dark blue robe with a piece of rather tatty-looking black fur round the edge, sat ungracefully in the end chair, toying with his chain of glittering plaques. He looked at the rather shabby, rather untidy figure in the dock who, nevertheless, bore a hall-mark that he envied; and thought, Fancy!—a gent. For he himself was not a gent.

  Between the two gents on dais and in dock, the long table with its brown-paper parcels of ‘exhibits’, its bulging envelopes and files; sitting at the table, the police officers concerned and the experts, Tedward’s own solicitor, Mr. Granger, just below him, and further up the gentleman who stage manages the trial for the Public Prosecutor. Along the wall to his right, rising rows of benches; in the first counsel for the defence and the Crown, with their juniors; behind them barristers, robed and wigged, listening to the case from interest or curiosity or for the education of their minds; behind them again the ‘fashionably dressed women’ who would be in the papers to-morrow, having managed to wangle the coveted places there. Above them, eager faces peering down from the public gallery. To the judge’s right, the witness-box, with the shorthand writer crouched in his little stall at its feet, fountain pen scribbling rapidly; and beyond, the two rows of benches where the jury of twelve sat solemnly regarding the man (a nice-looking chap too, just an ordinary person like theirselves) whom they were probably going to have to condemn to die. Some of them were pleased about it, exulting in their importance; some of them resentful. You had to come. You suddenly got a letter demanding your attendance on pain of lord knows what; and then there was a lot of hanging about and delay, two or three days sitting here in this very court, in the benches behind the dock, waiting till, as each new trial began, the names were shaken up in a box and at last your own turn came. Still, a murder trial was something; a bit more exciting than most of the stuff they had listened to while they waited, forgery and fraud and such—though some had been fruity enough, goodness knew, not to say downright naaaaarsty.… Below them were little loose-boxes housing the police and officials of the court; below them again, on the level of the table, a bench crammed to suffocation with the gentlemen of the press. There was a tremendous amount of hushing and shushing and everybody tried to be wonderfully quiet; the court was so furnished and designed as to make this as difficult as it could possibly be.

  Outside the court, on the flagged, first floor landing, on narrow benches against the chilly wall, for hour after hour sat old Mrs. Evans and Matilda and Thomas and Melissa, waiting to be called as reluctant witnesses for the prosecution; trying to convince themselves that this was not all a hideous, horrible dream; that Raoul Vernet was dead and Rosie was dead, and they were here at the trial for murder of their dearest friend. The wide stone staircase curved on up above their heads and a ceaseless stream of people cast careless glances at them and idly wondered who they were.

  In Court No. 1 the Clerk of the Court got to his feet and mumbled out something which, if anybody could have heard it, would have signified that Edwin Robert Edwards was charged on indictment that on the 23rd of November in last year he had murdered Raoul Vincent Georges Marie Vernet at an address in Maida Vale, London. He raised his voice to add, chattily: ‘Well, Edwin Robert Edwards, are you guilty or not guilty?’

  One had gone through most of it once already at the Magistrate’s court; but of course that only committed you to come here and stand trial for your life. This was more, sort of—conclusive. Tedward said in a voice not his own, ‘Not guilty.’ His attendants took him by the upper arms and shoved him gently backwards on to a wooden chair. Sitting down, with his head and shoulders only just appearing over the wooden side of the dock, he felt less assured than ever, he felt he lost every last vestige of dignity. Still, one couldn’t stand up for three days, or however long it lasted.… Through the hot swimminess in his head, thoughts darted like little fishes. Two or three days; and at the end of that time he would know, perhaps, his exact ‘expectation of life’. How many times he, himself, had been called upon to deliver the death sentence.… Had the victim cared two hoots, then, about the cosy glow of the stove in his comfortable old surgery? Had the careful preparation really made very much difference, had the promises of help and friendship to the end meant anything at all? Yet surely it was better, thought Tedward, than to stand here under this bright white light and be told abruptly that within so many weeks now, one was to hang by the neck till one was dead.… And he tore his mind from that glimpse of home because it brought with it a vision of Rosie, curled up in the big chair by the stove, running her hands through the shining, short black hair of the Anthracite Cat. Rosie’s white hands were grey now, part of a heap of grey ashes in a carved wooden box that nobody quite knew how to dispose of.

  The Crown was represented by the Attorney-General, Sir William Baines, commonly known as S’Will; and a jolly good name for him too, thought many an optimist who had previously hoped he might just get away with it. It was his task now to run through the outline of the case for the benefit of the Judge—who knew all about it anyway—and the jury who must be asked to pretend to themselves that they hadn’t read every detail of it in the papers: to outline the case for the prosecution, to make a sort of blank map, as it were, upon which the jury might place the facts and figures as they emerged through the evidence of witnesses. Hardly waiting for the court to settle, he got to his feet, hitched one heel up against the edge of the bench behind him, and, slightly swaying as he spoke, addressed himself in conversational tones to my lord and members of the jury. He reminded my lord, who seemed to have heard it somewhere before, and the members of the jury who would need to be reminded of it over and over again through the progress of the case, that it was for himself as representing the prosecution, with the aid of witnesses, to establish a case against the accused; it was not for accused to establish his innocence. And the case for the prosecution was this: that this man, Edwards, had struck and killed a man whom he believed to have seduced the girl he loved. Not that it was for the Crown, members of the jury, to prove a motive; it need not matter to the jury why the thing had been done, only that it be proved to have been done by this man. But in this case—in the submission of the prosecution—the motive was perfectly clear and it was important because without it, the jury might think that there was nothing whatsoever to connect the accused with the murdered man. He had not known the man; until the day of the crime, it might be that he had never so much as heard the name of the man: and yet, if one accepted the motive put forward by the Crown, then it would seem that these very facts operated in favour of his having killed the man. For Raoul Vernet was not, in fact, the betrayer who had seduced the girl; and Counsel would try to prove to them later that the accused, Edwards, was the only person concerned who might have supposed that he was.

  ‘Now, I think I had better start,’ said Sir William, changing feet, ‘by taking you back to the third week in November last year, when Rosie Evans arrived back from six months in Switzerland.’ He took them back to the third week in November and through the history of Rosie’s revelations and the family reactions to them; easily, comfortably, conversationally, he sketched in the scene, the lovely, shabby old house in Maida Vale, the old lady in her room upstairs, the young lady in her flat in the basement, the devoted brother and the not quite so blindly indulgent sister-in-law; the casual routine which in one respect only was not casual at all—that the baby must be brought up with absolute regularity and that this regularity extended to nine-thirty in the evening when its mother, without fail, went up to the nursery to attend to its infant n
eeds.… (The jury, and indeed the whole court, indulged in a sentimental vision of the, as yet unseen, Matilda sitting quietly in the firelight suckling her Littel One, and were later rather shaken at discovering that the child was well over two years old.)

  And this habit, this unfailing habit, members of the jury was well known to everyone, was a sort of family joke—certainly was well known to the accused; and it was the contention of the prosecution.…

  Forty minutes later he concluded abruptly that he would now call witnesses to support what he had been saying (which as far as the jury were concerned was entirely unnecessary for Tedward was as good as in the condemned cell already), and wriggled his cramped leg free from its uncomfortable angle and sat down with a bump, raising his seat slightly from the bench to add: ‘I call Matilda Evans,’ and sit down again.

  Matilda, who always dressed in black because it made her look thinner, had gone out and bought an entire outfit of navy blue, because to wear black at Tedward’s trial did sort of seem … Well, anyway, she had bought a blue frock and a blue coat and a blue hat with two white wings to it, tremendously gay. She felt frightfully fat in the blue and her new shoes seemed to echo like thunder through the hushed court as she followed the officer across the polished, linoleumed floor, round behind the dock and along the narrow pathway between the central table and the jury box. Up some polished steps, clatter, clatter, clatter, and into a little wooden box like a pulpit with a canopy. Her head felt full of Thermogene, everything swam in a blur before her; but as she lifted her eyes, trying to focus, trying to shake her mind free of its stupor in preparation for the ordeal to come, she felt the mists clear a little and there in the clearness, was a face she knew—so thin and drawn and unhappy, and yet still the strong, the reassuring one, looking across at her with a little, affectionate smile that said, ‘Go to it, love, everything’ll be all right, you’ll see!’ Tears pricked her eyelids; she looked down again. The usher, in a black gown, thrust a prayer book into her hands and she swore by Almighty God in a very croaky voice and gave the book back to the man.