Tragedy at Law

by Cyril Hare

  “Yes,” said Derek. “I had a letter from some people called Faraday something or other. I told them I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”

  “A mistake. You’ll only be subpœnaed. Do as I did and give an identical statement to both sides. But mind you, the action won’t ever come into Court. It’ll have to be settled, pro bono publico.”

  Derek flushed angrily.

  “It’s all wrong,” he muttered.

  “What is?”

  “That Sheila’s father should be prosecuted, and that man get off scot free, just because——”

  “My dear chap, we had all this out before, you remember! Don’t let your ideals run away with you, or Heaven knows what contracts you’ll be sanctioning at the Ministry. Besides, don’t forget this sort of thing cuts both ways. I shouldn’t mind betting that the Shaver is going through a worse time at this moment than your father-in-law elect. Let that comfort you. There are rumours floating round the Temple that——But we’ll talk about that another time. I can see that you’re champing to get back to your files. And I ought to be in my Chambers. After this morning’s miracle, anything might happen. Even a new client calling with a brief wouldn’t surprise me.”

  *

  Pettigrew was right. The anxieties of an ordinary man expecting a charge even of a serious nature in the criminal courts probably seldom reach such acuteness as those with which Barber awaited the prospect of a civil action for negligence. The action indeed was not yet started. By one means or another, Hilda, to whom in his misery he had virtually surrendered the conduct of the affair, had so far succeeded in postponing the evil day. By proposal and counter-proposal, by every device of delay and temporization, she and her brother contrived to keep the matter hanging on from month to month. It was certainly a fine delaying action, fought out with skill and tenacity, but it could be no more than a delaying action. He knew only too well that the struggle could end in only one of two ways—either in a resounding scandal in the Courts, or in a settlement that would completely ruin him.

  Since his return from circuit, the sequence of threats and misadventures which had followed him had abruptly ceased. Always indifferent to personal danger, he positively regretted the placidity of his life. Possibly it was with this in mind that he firmly insisted on the withdrawal of the two Scotland Yard men who for the first few weeks of the new term ostentatiously dogged his footsteps to and from the Law Courts. It made no difference. Nobody, it appeared, thought it worth while to threaten his life any more, and he continued, unhappy and unmolested, to carry out his judicial duties in a mood that grew ever more embittered and morose.

  During this period, as the hard winter began to give place to the lovely, agonizing spring of 1940, he became acutely aware that by now his misfortune had become more and more generally known. Since his memorable encounter with his brother judge in the Athenæum, nothing whatever had been said in his hearing which remotely hinted at the affair, but with nerves made more sensitive than usual by unhappiness he could feel the knowledge of it ever present. He was conscious of embarrassment among his fellow Benchers at the Inn when he joined them at the High Table at lunch. He felt certain that the very ushers in his court looked at him in a peculiar way. His new clerk—and he had experienced unexpected difficulty in replacing Beamish—seemed to show less than the proper respect due to him, as though he knew that he had taken service on a sinking ship. And from time to time, as he made his way about the Temple, he had caught sight of Beamish himself, no doubt haunting the precincts in search of a job, and at the same time busily engaged in spreading the poison of gossip among his former associates.

  Gossip, however widespread, takes some time to permeate to official quarters. Or possibly it may be that those who move in official quarters prefer not to notice gossip until it has been confirmed by discreet inquiry. For whatever cause, it was not until the last week of the law sittings that Barber knew that his fall from grace had passed beyond the stage of gossip to become a matter of concern to persons of high importance. He had long been aware that this was bound to occur sooner or later, but this did not in any way lessen the shock when a very exalted Judicial Personage sought him out and tactfully broached the question of his resignation.

  The Personage was extremely considerate about it. He did his best to soften the blow. He referred several times to Barber’s health, which, indeed, had distinctly deteriorated under the strain to which he had been subjected during the past few months. At the same time, he made his meaning only too clear. A man in Barber’s position could not continue to be a judge. If this unhappy affair could be settled quickly and finally, well and good. The scandal might still be hushed up and forgotten before public confidence in the administration of justice was hopelessly shaken. But if an action should be commenced, or the matter allowed to leak into the press—well, the Personage could not answer for the consequences. On the whole, the Personage, who seemed surprisingly well informed, thought the chances of an immediate settlement very remote. Would not the best solution be to resign now, before the rot had time to spread further? Surely Barber must see that in the interests of the Bench as a whole, indeed of the whole fabric of British Justice….

  The hapless Shaver found himself pleading desperately for a reprieve. He could not resign now, in the middle of the legal year. To do so, he argued, would almost amount to a public confession of misconduct. It would provoke the very scandal which everyone was so anxious to avoid. Besides, he still had hopes of meeting his opponents half-way—indeed, he was sure that the matter would be settled amicably at quite an early date. In any case, he must have time to consider….

  The Personage continued to be considerate. He had, he protested, no desire to exercise any undue pressure on Barber. “Indeed,” he pointed out, “constitutionally I have no power to do so. At the same time….” It boiled down to this. Subject to no writ being issued, when the position would obviously become immediately untenable, Barber might remain at his post until the end of the summer term. Unless by that time the Sebald-Smith affair was dead and buried beyond all chance of revival, then his resignation would be expected during the vacation following.

  “They can’t make you resign!” Hilda’s defiant words came back to him as he made his way homewards. Couldn’t they? Perhaps not, if you were as tough and indomitable as Hilda. Not for the first time, as he dragged his weary feet up the steps of his house and let himself in at the front door, he wished he had her vitality, her indifference to anything but her own ambitions and well-being. In his heart he knew that they could. Of what avail were the constitutional safeguards, the Bill of Rights, the cherished inviolability of his position, against them, whose weapons were the irresistible pressure of public opinion, the unwritten laws by which he and his predecessors were governed and which they transgressed at their peril?

  He ate a solitary dinner, wrapped in dejection which only increased as the evening wore on. Hilda, as it happened, was away for the night. She had gone down to the country to attend the wedding of her brother’s daughter, and at the same time, he suspected, to discuss with him once more plans for the appeasement of the implacable adversary. The house seemed cold and silent. Barber drank two glasses of port, looked at the decanter and decided that one more glass would about empty it and that it was not worth while preserving such a small quantity. He found that he had underestimated the remaining contents of the decanter by more than one half, but he finished it all the same. The effect of the drink was only to depress him still further. When it was finished, he sat long, staring into the mouldering embers in the grate, thinking of his future. What future was there for an ex-High Court Judge, retired under a cloud? When Sebald-Smith had taken his pound of flesh, how was he to live? The Personage had made it perfectly plain that at the present juncture it would be out of the question to ask the Treasury to sanction the payment of a pension after only five years’ service. Perhaps it would have been different if he had been popular, like poor old Battersby, and not merely a goo
d judge. And he had been a good judge, he told himself in angry defiance, ten times as capable as Battersby had ever been. Nobody could deny that. And now, just because of a ridiculous accident that might happen to anybody, the whole of his career was to be shattered, and he could starve for all that anyone cared. The hypocrites! he thought angrily, apostrophizing the whole legal system, from the Personage down to the lowliest clerks in the Temple.

  The spurt of anger died down, to be succeeded by a mood of yet deeper depression. “This is the end,” he told himself, over and over again. “This is the end.” He sat on over the remains of the fire, no longer thinking but simply enduring, his mind a blank to everything except the fact that his world had collapsed about him. And then, quite suddenly, he knew what he had to do.

  *

  At the last moment Hilda decided not to stay the night away after all. Subsequently she declared that it was her instinct which told her that she should be at home. Nobody could ever disprove this assertion, naturally, but it is possible to suppose that in this case instinct was reinforced by her strong dislike for one of the relations who had also been asked to stay and who had been given the best spare bedroom. Whatever the cause, she left her brother’s house immediately after dinner and caught the last train to London. She had some difficulty in finding a taxi at the station, and did not finally reach home until nearly midnight. To her surprise, the electric light was still burning in the drawing-room. Going in, she found her husband unconscious in his arm-chair. An empty glass was on the floor beside him and on a table near by were two letters in his handwriting. One was addressed to Hilda herself, the other to the coroner.

  The doctor whom, after maddening delay, she was finally successful in summoning declared subsequently that without question Hilda’s promptitude and presence of mind alone saved her husband’s life. By the time that he arrived on the scene, everything that an unskilled person, fortified only by recollections of the First Aid Manual, could do had been done. It was touch and go. For half an hour she worked desperately at artificial respiration and was almost at the point of physical collapse when signs of life flickered back. Even in the reaction that followed the knowledge that victory had been gained she did not lose her head. Pale but calm, she assisted the doctor with all the steadiness of a professional nurse, and when all was over had sufficient control of herself to tell him a coherent and plausible story of how the affair must have occurred. Her husband, it appeared, had been sleeping badly. He had formed the habit of taking sleeping draughts. His shortsightedness had led him on more than one occasion to misread the directions on bottles of medicine. Obviously on this occasion he had taken an overdose by accident. Did not the doctor agree?

  The doctor, more impressed than ever, agreed wholeheartedly. None the less, before he visited his convalescent patient next morning, he thought it his duty to report the matter at the local police station. He was an elderly practitioner, called out of retirement to take the place of younger men on war service, but he had his wits about him. And he had noticed out of the tail of his eye the letter to the coroner which Hilda had left on the drawing-room table.

  Chapter 21

  END OF A CAREER

  Hilda capped her triumph in saving her husband’s life by another, less spectacular but more difficult. By the beginning of the next term, the Shaver was back on the bench, carrying out his duties to all outward appearance as though nothing had happened. The tongues which had wagged everywhere when it was published that Mr. Justice Barber was suffering from indisposition were abruptly stilled. Everybody who professed to be in the know had read into the announcement a forecast of his impending resignation. His reappearance had the effect of stifling the rumours for the time being.

  By what means Hilda succeeded in injecting into her husband sufficient vitality to enable him to carry on his normal life under the shadow of a threat which had utterly overwhelmed him remained her own secret. It was certainly not by appealing to the Bill of Rights. Barber had given his word to the Personage, and he intended to keep it. Whether she had contrived, against all the evidence, to persuade him that the position might yet be restored by a last minute change of heart on the part of Sebald-Smith and the woman who controlled him, or whether it was merely that she had convinced him that the manlier course was to play the game out to the end, the fact remained that she succeeded. The result was not obtained without some cost to herself. During the next few weeks it was remarked that she had grown pale and listless. It was as if she had surrendered some of her own vital force to animate the automaton who still went daily to and from the Courts, sat and heard argument, gravely gave judgment as though his position was as secure as that of any live judge, with ten years between him and his pension.

  Accordingly, on a fine April morning, while the British public was anxiously discussing remote Norwegian place-names that had with terrifying suddenness become household words, Barber, still Mr. Justice Barber, was driven in a hired car to the Central Criminal Court, where it was his turn to be the presiding Judge. He did not care for the place. The synthetic atmosphere of the Court, he would complain, always ended by giving him a headache. For some reason of his own he even took exception to the traditional posy of flowers, with which the City still protects its lawgivers from the menace of gaol fever. In previous years, he had seldom let a visit there pass without some covert expression of his distaste. On this occasion he said nothing at all. He was being taken to occupy one more judgment seat, to try one more case, and it was of little consequence to him, under suspended sentence of death, where or what it was.

  Hilda, who sat beside him, was as silent as he. She regularly went to Court with him now, as though afraid to let him out of her sight. That morning she had hardly glanced at the newspaper. The map of Norway had been spread before unseeing eyes. All her attention had been given to a letter which had come by the first post. She had read it without comment before folding it up and carefully putting it away. Barber had asked no questions about it, or shown any sign that he was in any way interested. Now, however, as the car crossed the traffic lights at Ludgate Circus, he suddenly broke silence.

  “You had a letter from your brother this morning, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Hilda flatly.

  “What does he say?”

  “Faradays have made a final offer. It is exactly the same as their last one.”

  “Yes?”

  “They give us until the day after to-morrow to accept it. If not they issue their writ,” Hilda went on, as the car turned the corner into the Old Bailey. “Michael says they mean business this time.”

  Barber sighed. It sounded almost as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He said no more until just as the car was drawing up at the Judge’s entrance in Newgate Street. Then he said very quietly, “In that case, Hilda, it rather looks as if this will be the last Old Bailey Sessions I shall ever have to attend.”

  The policeman who opened the door of the car for him nearly forgot to help his lordship to dismount. The appearance of her ladyship, as he said afterwards, gave him quite a turn. She looked as though she was about to faint. But she recovered herself and walked into the building with a firm step.

  *

  The dock in No. 1 Court at the Old Bailey is an enormous affair. It occupies so much floor space that from the seats behind and beside it it is difficult to get more than a partial glimpse of what is going on at the business end of the Court. Derek Marshall, without influence, or the wit to employ what influence he could have mustered, had not been able to find a seat in front of the obstruction. By attaching himself to a friendly barrister’s clerk he had managed to get inside the Court, and here he squeezed into the end of a row rightly reserved for jurors in waiting. He could hear well enough, but it was maddening not to be able to see better. Above all was it maddening to be utterly out of touch with Sheila, who was with her mother in places reserved for those with a legitimate interest in the case. Sheila had forbidden him to come with them, and he
had perforce obeyed, but he had counted at least on being able to give her encouragement from afar.

  “Let Herbert George Bartram surrender,” said the clerk, and Derek was treated to a fine view of the back of his future father-in-law’s neck as he pleaded not guilty to the charge of feloniously killing Edward Francis Clay. Then, after the usual preliminaries which he knew by heart, he heard a rustle in the far right-hand corner of the Court as counsel for the Crown rose to open what, from his experience, Derek told himself sounded like a pretty bad case of motor manslaughter.

  At the end of the day, the case was still unfinished. Derek had a fleeting glimpse of his adored as she went away on the arm of her father, whose bail had been renewed. On the whole, he considered, it had not gone too badly. Remembering what Pettigrew had said to him, he felt that the chances of an acquittal were good. He had not realized until he came into court who the presiding judge was, and it had been a shock to him when he heard those familiar tones creaking across the air. An insane impulse had seized him to get up and protest that this man of all men was not fit to try such a case. But on reflection he had to admit that, so far, the conduct of the trial had been perfectly fair and impartial. If anything, the Judge had leaned towards the defence. Perhaps after all it was a blessing in disguise that had brought the Shaver to these Sessions. Would he not, would not anybody in his position, feel that there but for the grace of God——? This thought comforted him until he remembered Pettigrew’s account of the trial of Heppenstall. With that, his anxieties began to return.