Kif

by Josephine Tey

  'You wouldn't risk that even for Kif?'

  'I wouldn't risk it for anyone. Why should I? I didn't ask him to do that job at Kew and make a fool of himself by killing someone, did I?'

  'No, but you'd go dancing on the proceeds,' said her brother brutally. 'He's taken all the risks so far, and you've had the good times. It's surely up to you to take a risk to help him out of as tight a place as this?'

  'Not that risk,' she said. 'Think again!'

  Angel lay and looked at her in a half-curious disgust. 'Well, I always thought even the rottenest women did decent things when they were stuck on a man.'

  'Oh, shut up,' she said, 'you make me tired. Put your great brain to some use instead of playing parson.'

  She picked up the untouched bowl of cold soup and went out.

  Angel lay looking at the closed door for a moment or two, clutching his head with feverish hands in an attempt to think clearly, and then he got slowly but determinedly out and began to dress. Baba found him there, half-dressed and only half conscious, an hour later, and her rage knew no bounds.

  That afternoon Danny, very well brushed and neat, walked into what he always referred to as his favourite police-station. It was not clear whether his liking for it was due to its familiarity, its locality, or the shade of the paint on the walls. He found Wilkins there in earnest talk with the sergeant.

  'Hullo, Dago!' said Wilkins, friendly but surprised. 'I've just sent for you. You haven't had my message already?'

  'No, I've come to save you trouble by giving myself up.'

  'Oh? What for? Have you killed someone at last? I always said you'd do it some day.'

  'Yes. I killed Lisman. And you know it.'

  'I know nothing of the sort. When did this happen? Lisman seems to have been a popular sort of target.'

  'I don't know what you're trying to pull. You've found my gun, haven't you! And it's just my luck that you happen to know it's mine.'

  'Oh yes, I know the gun's yours. It's the one I took from you that night at d'Agostino's. But you didn't kill Lisman, all the same.'

  'Why? Isn't he dead?'

  'Because at a quarter to one your long-suffering landlady went up to ask you to stop playing your fiddle, and Lisman was killed about one-fifteen.' Wilkins smiled triumphantly.

  Danny's eyes, which had been unfathomable black pools, became suddenly hunted things.

  'You don't know my landlady,' he said in a moment. 'She'd perjure her immortal soul if she thought it would keep her house respectable. I think you'd better arrest Mrs Frazer too. Or will you let her off now that you have me?'

  Wilkins ignored him. 'When did you give your gun to Vicar?'

  'Never,' said Danny. 'He has one of his own,' and bit his too-ready tongue.

  'Quite so,' said the inspector. 'It was reposing all last night in his collar drawer.'

  'He doesn't carry one,' Danny said, trying to retrieve his error.

  'No, just keeps it to look at,' agreed Wilkins facetiously.

  'Look here,' said Danny, beginning to draw one hand through the other, 'you've got a perfectly good confession with perfectly good evidence. I was there—with another chap—and I shot the fat rotter. Isn't that enough for you?'

  ''Fraid not, Dago. There was only one in the business last night, and your feet are three sizes too small. Besides, we've got all we want. Vicar was charged this morning. Do you mind identifying this as your property?' He produced the automatic.

  'Of course it's my property! I've said so.'

  'Well, when did you give it to Kif Vicar?'

  'I didn't.'

  Was Vicar with you last night?'

  'Yes.'

  'Till when?'

  'About eleven.'

  'What did he come for?'

  'He often comes.'

  'And he took nothing away with him?'

  'Yes, he had two books.'

  'Oh?' The inspector grinned. 'Three Weeks, and How To Open a Safe.'

  'No,' said Danny indifferently, 'a Heraclitus and a Sophocles.'

  The inspector's grin vanished. 'Well, you'll hear further from me, I expect. It has still to be discovered how Vicar had that gun.'

  'I've been offering you the explanation, but you don't want it.' Danny buttoned his coat, and the inspector watched him curiously.

  'What makes you so keen to go through the drop?' he asked as Danny turned to go.

  'I thought I might as well have the honour and glory of croaking that fat swine. But you're so—particular.'

  And Danny went out into the grey afternoon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The shooting of Philip Lisman created a sensation without any adventitious aids; for once the press came panting in the rear of public interest. Lisman was well known—and universally disliked—in London, and Mrs Lisman was famous throughout Britain and a large section of Western Europe. The trial for murder of the man who was said to have shot him became a cause célèbre. In those days Angel lost for ever the bloom which had made his beauty the singular thing it was. He became merely a good-looking youth who dressed well; his clothes no longer looked mundane and incongruous. Mr Carroll too had lost something which could not be accounted to the after-effects of influenza; and Danny looked like one crucified. Only Baba flourished among the horror and the strain and the fight against despair which occupied the men around her. Instead of being involved in the squalor of an obscure murder trial, as she had feared, she found herself a central figure in a case of intense public interest. She therefore forgave Kif his criminal folly and spoke kindly and affectingly of him. When an admiring reporter said: 'It's on the stage you should be!'—he referred to her looks, not to her histrionic ability—she played with the thought and turned over the possibilities in secret delight. She would become famous one day, see if she didn't.

  The combined resources of the two Carrolls and Danny proved insufficient to brief the greatest criminal lawyer of his time, Stanley Arden-Davis, in whom lay what seemed their only hope. Mr Carroll, making an attempt to see the great man and perhaps get him to accept what was the most they could offer, was met by the bland refusal of his secretary, and the assurance that the case did not present sufficiently interesting features to make defence worth while. At least, that is how it sounded in Carroll's ears. It was Murray Heaton who proved the god from the machine and gave Kif all the chance that remained to him. He came, grave, self-possessed, solicitous, into their hot distress and helplessness and 'got things done' as of old. He interviewed Arden-Davis, pointed out the popularity of the case, guaranteed his fee, and left that famous man cancelling an engagement.

  When he was ushered into the visitors' room he occasioned the first spark of real interest that Kif's face had shown since the hand-cuff closed round his wrist in the light of Wilkins' torch. He shook hands warmly, as one war veteran with another.

  'I came along,' he said 'to see if I could do anything I didn't know until last night that you were a friend of Ann's. I had forgotten that you and Tim used to be chummy. I've just been to see Arden-Davis and he'll undertake the wangling business for you. You seem to be always butting into trouble. Last time it was that little —— of a corporal—forget his name—who had to be saved from your clutches.'

  'Blyth,' said Kif. 'Well, that wasn't exactly the last time.'

  'Oh? What have you been doing since then?' Heaton sat down as one would sit down to chat with a club acquaintance, and when the warder indicated that time was up they were discussing the best method of making a sprinter into a stayer, and Heaton had learned the salient points of Kif's history since his discharge from the army, and had guessed the rest with his uncanny accuracy.

  He shook hands again and said that he would come as often as he could wangle it. 'Tim's in Canada, but we expect him back in about a fortnight. Ann said to give you her good wishes and to say to keep your pecker up.'

  The door clanged, and Kif came back from the atmosphere of cheerful good-fellowship and legitimate adventure to the realisation of his loneli
ness. Ann had sent him that message, but it was a small weak echo in the cold vastness that his life had become. It was meaningless, irrelevant, in this numb immensity of horror. He tried to picture her saying it. 'Tell Kif to keep his pecker up.' He pictured her in the drawing-room at Golder's Green, and then remembered that she did not live there any longer. She had married Heaton, and he had had Baba, and it was very long ago that they had taught each other dance-steps, and been curious about each other's ideas, and made toffee with Alison in the kitchen at Golder's Green. 'Tell Kif to keep his pecker up. The words sang in his head, but it was like listening to unrelated voices on the telephone—thin, far-away voices that had nothing to do with him. What had Ann to do with the thing that had happened to him? What had anyone to do with it? They were all outside—spectators. He was alone with the thing.

  Arden-Davis found him an uninspiring client when he came to interview him.

  'You confessed to the police. What made you do that?'

  'They had a gun that I borrowed from a friend. So I just told them the truth.'

  'What was the truth?'

  'That he fired first. I never meant to kill him.'

  'Did you say that of your own accord?'

  'Yes.'

  'They didn't suggest things to you?'

  'No.'

  'Well, tell me exactly what happened that night.'

  Kif told him wearily, Arden-Davis watching him the while. Good living had thickened the lawyer's jowl, but the eye in the fat face was keen and clear as a bird's. When Kif finished, and had answered his questions, he said:

  'You needn't be so despondent, Vicar. You have a good fighting chance.'

  'Of what? Of what?' said Kif, with a passion so sudden that the lawyer was staggered.

  'Of getting off, surely,' he said.

  'Getting off! There's no getting off. Do you call fifteen years getting off? Fifteen years!' Kif's hands came together white-knuckled and beat a despairing tattoo on his knees. His eyes, staring at the opposite wall, reminded Arden-Davis of the eyes of a horse he had seen whose back had been broken at a point-to-point. He could find no words.

  Perhaps we may get it to less than that,' he said mendaciously, and got himself away to where he could forget unpleasantness in Italian cooking and French wine.

  But that was the only occasion on which the drowning, helpless Kif became articulate. He came into the packed court to stand his trial pale and quiet, his heavy dark eyes seeking round for familiar faces. When he found them a smile that was more a ray of light than a movement of feature went over his face, and after that he did not glance their way again. The small wizened piece of concentrated acuteness that was his judge examined him minutely from his hooded eyes, and the jury glanced furtively or stared curiously as their several natures were. But Kif did not appear to care, or even to be aware of the battery. He and the custodian on either side of him were mere onlookers—the only onlookers in the arena. They would argue and fight, all those others; strain their wit and understanding, whip their straying minds back to the narrow path of attention, take oaths and declare and deny, weigh the worth of phrases, snatch a doubtful word before it fell, and juggle with it till the nut became a tree sprouting new meanings; they would steep themselves in a hot mesmerising bath of words and struggle to keep their brains cool, the jury because it was their duty, the judge because it was his habit, the prosecution because the Crown counsel had a new appointment in his eye, the defence for the greater glory of Arden-Davis and the ultimate advancement of his two juniors. But Kif and his stiff large guardians could only watch. Nothing he could say or do would arrest the spate of words, put an end tor the heavy mockery of the play. He, Kif, was the subject of it all, but no one in the arena remembered it now. He was translated for them into an abstraction, a cause. He was a real person only to the pleased mob that breathed and coughed subdued coughs and exchanged surreptitious whispers beyond the pale, and to them he was something between a monster and a hero. His very presence filled them with a delightful entrail-gripping mixture of horror and pity, his smallest movement, for which they watched with greedy eyes, thrilled them as would a sign from Heaven. When he blew his nose they remarked it with éclat and felt themselves privileged among mortals that they had witnessed it. They had scamped their too-early breakfasts in order to procure a good place at this free show, they had planned and manoeuvred to be here, and the value of the show was enhanced accordingly. Now they sat breathing comfortable breaths of achievement and content, the sandwiches they had prepared the night before resting reassuringly in pocket or bag, or lying careless and casual in newspaper on complacent laps.

  Through the preliminaries—that careful setting out of facts with all the jealous relevance of the law—the court stirred gently and continuously with the slight indeterminate sound of wind over grass. They had heard all this before, this why and when. All this minute explanation of the game, this dreary prologue demanded by the beloved of the law, was but tedious recapitulation of an old tale. Had there not been an inquest to enlighten them? To say nothing of a police-court and the press of a whole nation. The law was a self-conscious bore. And so, with the eye that was not occupied with Kif, they searched the court for amusement, criticised the jury, compared the fleshy power of Arden-Davis with the lean acuteness of Kinsley, the Crown counsel, decided that in a tight place they would like to have Arden-Davis on their side, speculated as to who was paying his fee in the present instance.

  And then the first witness was called; there was a quick concerted movement as the whole crowd leaned forward, and complete silence fell.

  The first witness was Lisman's butler, Allen, who described the habits of the household, his being roused from sleep by revolver shots, and his discovery of his master's body. He was unable to say how many shots there were. He had not actually heard any shot. It was merely the noise that had awakened him. His master did not habitually carry firearms, though he was apprehensive of burglars.

  Arden-Davis: Was Mr Lisman a quick-tempered man?

  Allen thought not.

  Arden-Davis: Was he habitually clear-headed?

  Allen thought he could say he was.

  Arden-Davis: At one-thirty in the morning?

  No, Allen must say that by evening Mr Lisman was not often clear-headed.

  The butler was succeeded by Wilkins, who gave his testimony in the usual model police fashion. He described his finding the body—he had been at the police station on other business when the call from the Lisman house had come in—and his search for clues. There were no finger-prints, but outside the window of the room were two perfect footprints, one of a whole foot and one of a toe. He took a cast of them, which, as could be seen, fitted in every detail the boots which the accused was wearing at the time. On the far side of the wall separating the Lisman house from that on the east side of it he found the revolver from which the bullet that killed Mr Lisman had presumably been fired. The bullet from Mr Lisman's own revolver had been found in the soil of the garden. Behind the street wall of a garden further along the road was found a case of burglars' tools. The tools had been thrown into the case carelessly and evidently in great haste. On his way to the Lisman house he had met the accused and caused him to be detained, since he could give no proper account of himself. The spot where he had stopped and interviewed the accused was less than twenty yards from the place where the case of tools had been found. The accused was charged on the following morning.

  Arden-Davis did not cross-examine, and Wilkins was succeeded in turn by the constable who had talked with Kif before the arrival of Wilkins, and by the officer who had charged him.

  Next came Danny, who was shown a revolver and identified it as his. His appearance was hailed by the mob with a sigh of ecstasy. A real crook—and a thoroughly bad lot, no doubt! Anyhow, he certainly looked it. They prepared themselves for drama. The hostility on Danny's face as he turned to Kinsley was unmistakable, and his slight round-shouldered figure in the tight-fitting navy blue coat had the qual
ity of a bent spring. But they were disappointed. Having claimed the revolver as his, Danny was dismissed. He hesitated a moment as if surprised, and then went. Neither when he came in nor as he went out did he cast a glance at Kif. A faint unexpected colour had mounted in Kif's weary face at sight of him, but no one noticed it except the little blinking brown image in the red robes, who noticed everything.

  As the day wore on the weariness that marked Kif's face deepened, until one of the jurymen, catching sight of it at a moment when his thoughts were elsewhere, was jerked suddenly into realisation and humanity. For two painful minutes he contemplated things as they were, and then pulling himself sharply together became once more an unthinking plumber and a juryman. It didn't pay to see things like that.

  When the case for the defence opened Kif was preceded into the witness-box by the Lisman housemaid. She said that on the night of the tragedy she was not asleep. She suffered from insomnia. She had heard the shots quite distinctly. Two of them. They differed in sound, the first being louder than the second and not so sharp. She was quite sure about the order of the sounds. She was slightly deaf, but not deaf enough to be unable to hear sounds like that. On the contrary her very deafness made her more aware of the character of sounds as detached from their meaning than she would otherwise be.

  And then Kif came, quiet and very white. He told his story in answer to Arden-Davis very much as he had told it to the lawyer in the first instance; bald bare phrases without explanation or excuse. When the lawyer wanted a qualification he had to ask for it. Kif made no attempt to justify himself. What did it matter? What did anything matter?

  Arden-Davis brought out all the defence there was: that Lisman had fired first and left Kif no choice, that Kif had had no intention of using his weapon. And the great man sighed with pleasure as he sat down. What a model witness! Would all witnesses were so amenable. There was a lot to be said for indifference in an accused person. The over-anxious always spoiled the game.

  'You say Mr Lisman shot first?' Kinsley asked Kif.