My Name is Michael Sibley

by John Bingham

  I said nothing. I sat still, staring at the reports on the Inspector’s desk. I was trying to reorientate things, to think clearly and to see what was jeopardized or compromised by this new evidence.

  “We wondered why Miss Marsden said in her signed statement that she had never been alone for any length of time with Mr. Prosset,” said the Sergeant. “So we saw her this afternoon, like the Inspector said, see? Bearing that in mind, can you remember now what else you spoke about on the phone when you rang her up after our first visit?”

  It was hopeless. It was always hopeless when two people who are trying to keep up a fabricated story are questioned separately by the police. I did not know what she had admitted or what she had not admitted. I thought that possibly they had even bluffed her into thinking that I had admitted things which I had not. I tried to think quickly but it was no good. The Inspector’s voice broke in harshly on my thinking:

  “Why don’t you tell the truth, Sibley? Why don’t you admit you told her to hush up her visit to Prosset? Eh?”

  “Must I answer all these questions, or can I have legal advice?” I asked suddenly. For a second they looked at me in surprise.

  “Stop boxing and coxing,” shouted the Inspector, but the Sergeant interrupted him.

  “Of course you need not answer these questions, if you don’t wish to. But when you think of the various errors in your statement and Miss Marsden’s it might make an unfortunate impression if you won’t assist us to clear them up, don’t you think? What do you think? But of course, you needn’t answer. Of course not, if you don’t want to.”

  “An unfortunate impression on whom?” I enquired.

  “On a jury,” replied the Sergeant calmly.

  “On a jury? A jury?” I repeated the words stupidly.

  “You heard what the Sergeant said,” put in the Inspector. “On a jury. I suppose you know what a jury is, don’t you? Or have you forgotten that, too?”

  So I gave in on that point.

  “All right. I told Miss Marsden on the phone that it would be just as well not to mention her visit to Prosset, because she might be called as a witness at the inquest.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” said the Inspector. “Why not? It’s a citizen’s duty to give evidence when required.”

  “She is very sensitive and shy.”

  He looked at his wristwatch. “Do you realize it’s taken us half an hour to get a couple of straight answers out of you, eh?”

  I did not answer.

  “Is the rest of it going to be like this?”

  “Like what?” I asked patiently.

  “Lies and shuttlecocking about the place. See here, Sibley, take my advice. Stop all this dodging. It’s doing you no good. How many suits have you got?” he asked suddenly. I knew what he was getting at.

  “Four—and two or three pairs of grey flannels and a sports jacket.”

  “I’m not interested in your flannels or your damned sports jacket. My question was how many suits have you got?”

  “Well, four, then. As I said.”

  “How many had you a week ago?”

  “A week ago?”

  “You heard the question, didn’t you? A week ago. Come on.”

  “Well, four. The same. Four. Why?”

  The Inspector looked at the Sergeant and shrugged his shoulders with an air of hopelessness. He said, “See what I mean? Fiddling and twisting all the time. What did I say?” He turned back to me, and said in the manner of one trying to restrain his anger:

  “Just think again, Sibley, will you?”

  “A week ago, I had four suits,” I said dully.

  “Suppose I tell you that the maid at Harrington Gardens says that a week ago you had five suits and now you’ve only four? Where’s the fifth? Or have you forgotten that, too?”

  I said angrily, “I gave that suit away. I gave that fifth suit away three weeks ago, or more.”

  “Gave it away, did you?”

  “Generous, wasn’t it?” said the Sergeant.

  “Must be a rich man, giving suits away, eh, Sergeant? Who did you give it to, eh? The Lord Mayor of London?”

  “I gave it to a chap who asked for some money. A down and out chap.”

  “Did you give him anything else? Some money? Overcoat?”

  “Pair of pyjamas?” said the Sergeant. “What else did you give him? What else did you give him? Why did you give it to him?”

  “Or have you forgotten?” said the Inspector.

  “That was all I gave him,” I replied sullenly. “That and a bob and a bit of chocolate. I was sorry for him. That’s why I gave it to him. It was an old suit. All worn out.”

  The Inspector was looking me up and down like a naturalist might gaze at a specimen in a glass case.

  “Wasn’t there any other reason?” asked the Inspector. “Were there any stains on it, for instance? Which you couldn’t get out? Which even a cleaner couldn’t be relied on to get out completely. If you did give it to him, that is.”

  “What do you mean, stains?” I said it to gain time.

  “Bloodstains,” said the Sergeant briefly. “Bloodstains. That’s what the Inspector means.”

  I was aware that everybody in the room was sitting very still and quiet, waiting for me to say something. The Inspector had his hard, probing eyes on my face; they moved up and down, quickly and speculatively. His mouth was set in the straight, cruel lines I had noted when I first met him. I found that my brain was growing dazed. It was registering impressions, but it was not functioning logically. I heard my heart thumping in my head, felt it throbbing in my breast, my hands, even my fingers. The man at the desk in the corner shifted ever so slightly. I knew I had to say something, but I was not thinking of what to say, but rather wondering what my voice would sound like when I spoke, because I knew my throat was constricted. I was wondering what I looked like, too. All the inferiority complex of my youth returned, all the toughness acquired after years of knocking around as a reporter disappeared. I felt ugly, bespectacled, and insignificant, an ordinary pasty-faced little man surrounded by big self-confident men who did not believe anything I said.

  “Bloodstains?” I asked feebly.

  The tension in the room broke, and with it my own fatal concern with the impression I was making. I began to think again.

  “Yes, bloodstains,” snapped the Inspector. “You heard. Or didn’t you? Or has something gone wonky with your hearing now?”

  “That’s silly. There were no bloodstains on that suit.”

  The Inspector leaned forward in his chair.

  “Don’t start telling me what’s silly and what isn’t, Sibley.”

  “Well, it is silly, because—”

  He would not let me finish. He banged the desk with his fist. “Don’t you tell me I’m silly!”

  He pushed his chair back and came round and perched himself on the corner of the desk, and thrust his red, cleanly shaved face down into mine, so that I could see little beads of perspiration standing out on the side of his nose.

  “Remember what I said when I started? About you and me understanding each other? Well, listen. I don’t want any of your lip, see?”

  “I wasn’t giving you lip.”

  “Listen, I’ll judge what’s lip and what isn’t, see? If I think you’re giving me lip I may lose my temper. I’m a hot-tempered man, aren’t I, Sergeant? It won’t be anything official, mind you. Just something between you and me, see? Kind of man to man. If you’re saucy, that is.”

  He put his right forefinger under my chin and tilted my face up so that he could force me to look into his eyes at close range. He stared at me angrily for about five seconds. It says much for the intimidating effect of his personality and of the surroundings that I did not knock his hand away. He said, “You wouldn’t like that, would you? You wouldn’t like me to smack you around, would you? Eh?”

  He heaved himself off the desk and went back to his chair. I tried to reassert myself.

  “I suppose you
know I’ll put in a report about you if you get rough. They may take some notice, as I’m a reporter.”

  He laughed out loud. It was the first time I had ever heard him laugh aloud.

  “I’ve a damn good mind to bash you for that, Sibley—just man to man, of course.” He laughed again. “There’s two other people here, besides me, who’ll say you were treated with every consideration. That’s so, isn’t it, Sergeant? Sibley here has been treated politely and considerately, hasn’t he? He always will be, won’t he? You know that.”

  The Sergeant looked at him, and smiled faintly.

  “The prisoner was calm and composed throughout the interview, sir.”

  “Of course he was,” said the Inspector, and looked across the room at the man in the corner.

  The man in the corner said, “That’s right, Inspector. He was calm and composed throughout the interview. Of course, he might bruise himself a bit if he slips up going downstairs, so to speak, sir.”

  The Inspector laughed a third time. “That’s right, Sid. He might bruise himself a bit, if he doesn’t watch out. Going downstairs, of course.”

  The other two joined in the laughter.

  I saw myself as a small boy of about nine, pinned in a corner by three or four boys older than myself. One of these boys pulled my hair, and when I turned on him another crept up and kicked me. And now, when I rounded on him in turn, a third pulled my tie round my neck. The recreation yard was bathed in sunshine and the ten minutes’ break was drawing to a close. A master came up and asked what we were doing. “Just playing, sir,” they replied, and when he looked at me I repeated, “Just playing, sir.”

  “Do you know the Sunshine Dry Cleaners?” asked the Inspector abruptly.

  “Yes, I do. In Gloucester Road. I take my things there.”

  “Of course you take your things there. I know that. That’s not information. Do you remember going there on May 31st?”

  “I don’t remember the particular date.”

  “You ought to. It was two days after Prosset was killed. Your friend, you remember.”

  “Yes. I remember now. I went about some ties.”

  “Never mind about the ties.” He leaned forward and said slowly and deliberately, “Do you remember asking them if dry-cleaning would remove bloodstains from clothes?”

  “What? What did you say?” I looked at him aghast.

  The Inspector turned to the Sergeant. “Am I speaking plainly, Sergeant, or is he really getting deaf?”

  But I remembered then. I had gone to collect some ties which had been cleaned. I had been glancing at the evening paper while I awaited my turn to be served. I had been reading about the Hudson trunk murder. I had asked the girl, whom I knew quite well, whether bloodstains could be removed from clothes by dry-cleaners. It was perfectly true.

  “Yes,” I said at last.

  My mouth felt dry, and the word as I spoke it had a funny cracked sound. “Yes, I remember asking them,” I went on. “I had taken some ties there and was collecting them, and had been reading about the Hudson case. That’s why I asked. That’s the reason. The only reason.”

  Perhaps the Inspector did not expect such an outright admission. He looked at me rather oddly for a moment. Surprisingly, he did not pursue the point. Instead he turned over one or two pages of the dossier in front of him.

  “Did you and Prosset quarrel about Miss Marsden at the cottage on your last visit?”

  “No, we didn’t. I’ve told you that.”

  “Well, tell us again,” said the Sergeant.

  “We had a political discussion.”

  The Inspector banged the table. “Come off it, Sibley. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  “Nobody would think you were,” I said bitterly.

  “Keep your damned impertinence to yourself. What did you quarrel about?”

  “We didn’t quarrel. We had a discussion.”

  “What about?” said the Sergeant. “Go on. Tell us about it.”

  It is not easy suddenly to invent a political discussion that never took place.

  “Surely, you’re not interested in our political discussion?”

  “The Sergeant wouldn’t ask you if we weren’t,” said the Inspector. I thought quickly.

  “Well, he said there was a lot to be said for a dictatorship in certain circumstances. I disagreed. He said a dictator could get things done. I said the price one had to pay in freedom wasn’t worth it. We argued about it for a good while, and got a bit heated, but it was all quite friendly in reality.”

  “Prosset said in his diary you quarrelled.”

  “I can’t help that. We didn’t.”

  The Inspector said quietly, “You bashed him, didn’t you?”

  “First with your knuckleduster, then with something heavier, didn’t you?” said the Sergeant.

  The Inspector said, “Then you spread some petrol around, and dragged a few drink bottles in to make it look as though he had got tight, and set fire to the place.”

  “I didn’t bash him,” I said heatedly. “I didn’t do it. I never touched him.”

  “Perhaps you were provoked,” suggested the Inspector.

  “A jury can be very sympathetic in cases like that, especially if you quarrelled about your fiancée,” said the Sergeant.

  “I’m not falling for that line of talk,” I said stolidly. “You can talk till the cows come home. I didn’t bash him, and nobody will make me say I did.”

  I looked at the Inspector. His eyes were blazing.

  “You’re a dam’ liar!”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll prove you’re a liar, if it’s the last thing I do, Sibley.” He tapped the dossier. “See here, in your first statement you say you were with your fiancée between 9:30 and about one o’clock, or so, on the night Prosset was killed. Right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I shouldn’t count on that too much, you know.”

  “My fiancée can vouch for it.”

  “Yes. And I should think it may be true.”

  For the first time since the interrogation began I felt a slight feeling of relief. Here was something that he accepted without quibble. He believed it to be true. He had said so.

  “The only thing is, Sibley, you told me at our first interview that Prosset was killed around midnight.”

  I looked at him in bewilderment. “So he was.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” said the Inspector.

  “It said so in the papers,” I said quickly. “It said so!”

  “I dare say it did; but he was killed around four o’clock in the morning. For some reason the first newspaper report mentioned midnight, and the others repeated the mistake. It’s not a bad idea to let a mistake like that go unaltered, see? In case somebody is preparing an alibi, as it were. See? A lot of people think I’m a bloody fool, but I’m not. Not always.”

  After a while, during which I said nothing for I had nothing to say, he threw his pencil on the desk.

  “Well, Sibley, want to make another statement?”

  “You needn’t, if you don’t want to,” said the Sergeant, “but if you do, it can be used in evidence.”

  My third and final statement ran as follows:

  I now wish to make a third statement, to add certain facts, and to correct errors in previous statements.

  In my first statement I said I stayed with my fiancée until about one o’clock in the morning, but this was not true. I said this to avoid damaging her reputation. I really stayed with her until I left for the office the following morning.

  It was at my suggestion that Miss Marsden said in her statement that I had only stayed until one o’clock. I also suggested to her that she should deny any acquaintanceship with Prosset other than she had cultivated in my presence. I did this to save her being called as a witness at the inquest.

  Some three weeks prior to the date of this statement I gave an old brown suit to a down-and-out man who asked me for money. It was a pinstripe suit, frayed at the cu
ffs and trouser turnups. I have not seen this man since. He was about fifty, bald, dressed in dilapidated clothes, and said he had been in hospital and was an ex-service man. I do not know any more about him.

  It is true that I asked a girl at the Sunshine Cleaners, Gloucester Road, whether bloodstains could be got out of clothes. I did this because I had been reading about a recent murder case in which this point occurred. I did not quarrel with Prosset the night before he was killed. We had a lively political discussion. It was really quite friendly.

  I have read the above statement over, and it is true.

  Michael Sibley.

  At ten minutes past eleven that night I recalled the kind of words I had spoken to Charlie Baines at lunchtime that day: “Mr. Sibley, who has been assisting the police in their investigations into the murder of Mr. John Prosset at Ockleton, accompanied police officers to Scotland Yard last night, and was still there at a late hour.”

  Something like that; the old, old stuff. I had written it often enough about other people.

  The Inspector had taken my statement out of the room an hour before. Maybe two hours. I cannot remember exactly.

  When he came back, accompanied by others whom he left at the door, he said, in almost a friendly voice, “Michael Sibley, I now charge you with the murder of John Prosset at Ockleton in the early hours of May 29th, and I warn you that anything you say may be taken down and may be used in evidence.”