Paradise Court

by Jenny Oldfield

  ‘No, sir.’ She could feel Ernie’s full gaze fixed on her. ‘I never.’

  ‘So you thought the best thing to do was to pack him off straight to bed? Did he object?’

  ‘No, sir. Like I said, he was a bit dazed.’

  ‘I imagine he was, Miss Parsons. Now think carefully, and remember your oath. We’ve learnt from fingerprint evidence, and the presence of the cap of the accused that he had indeed been in the room where the murder had taken place. He doesn’t deny that outright, at least. He only goes so far as to tell us that he can’t remember having been there! Now, did he mention this vital fact to you?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Jess fell into the same dull, monosyllabic replies. Her mouth felt dry. She looked up to the gallery for Maurice, but a sea of faces looked back.

  ‘Hm. It would account for his distress, would it not? If he had been in that room, I mean? No, don’t answer that, Miss Parsons. That was merely for us to ponder. Now, he mentioned nothing about the murder. That suggests he was trying to conceal it from you?’

  ‘Maybe, but maybe not.’ This was where Jess knew more about Ernie than they did in this court. ‘If he’s upset, he goes quiet, sometimes for days on end. It’s a kind of shock, I think.’ She spoke eagerly, turning to the jury. ‘He don’t remember nothing till he comes out of it, then he’s right as rain again.’

  ‘Very convenient, Miss Parsons.’ Forster stood and demolished her with a single look and phrase. ‘Selective amnesia, I think they call it, gentlemen.’ He shared a joke with the jury, then reached the pinnacle of his questioning of this particular witness. ‘Let’s say he was concealing it. We must ask ourselves, was there anything about him to suggest that he’d been in a struggle?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Jess looked down at her own trembling hands.

  ‘He’d lost his cap. Did you not notice that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Perhaps in a struggle?’

  ‘It didn’t strike me at the time, no, sir.’

  ‘Was his clothing torn?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Were his boots dirty, Miss Parsons?’ The tension in Forster’s naturally high, thin voice rose a further pitch.

  Jess hesitated.

  ‘Yes or no, Missie!’ Judge Berry barked.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Was there blood on them?’ Forster realized he had her. Honesty was such a flimsy commodity in these circumstances; it could be turned both ways.

  ‘Yes.’

  Foster’s head went back. ‘What did you do? Did you dean it off?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Louder, Miss Parsons.’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked up for help. There was none to be found.

  ‘You cleaned blood off his boots, yet you say there was no sign of a struggle on him?’ He sounded shocked, disbelieving.

  Jess’s lip trembled. She hung her head.

  ‘That’s all, Miss Parsons.’

  Forster sat as Mayhew stood, quickly rethinking his tactics. This was more damning than Sewell had led him to believe, and the witness was in no state to act as character reference for the accused. But there was one point he must make clear in the minds of the jury. He would get it over with quickly. ‘Miss Parsons, I’m sorry to distress you further, but let’s be clear about this matter of the blood.’

  Jess fought to look him in the eye.

  ‘It was on your brother’s, boots, you say?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Was it on his trousers?’

  She frowned. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Speak up!’ Judge Berry snapped. ‘So we can all hear your answers, Missie!’

  ‘No, sir!’

  ‘Was it on his jacket?’ Mayhew picked up the thread.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Was it on his hands or his face? Was it anywhere at all, except on Ernie’s boots?’

  ‘No, sir,’ she said, loud and clear now.

  ‘That’s odd,’ Mayhew remarked. He looked quizzically at the jury. ‘This is an exceptionally neat murderer, whose hands and clothes carry not one stain of his victim’s blood, don’t you think?’ He waived any further questions and watched Jess half-stumble from the witness-box, then he bent to confer with the solicitor. Numb and weak, Jess returned to her seat.

  ‘Good for you,’ Hettie whispered as she sat down. ‘You stood up to them, and Mr Mayhew nailed them good and proper.’

  They brought Frank Henshaw to the stand next, to provide a good character for Ernie. The defence case would rest on the clean record to date of the accused. They would dismantle press reports of bad living and poor family support, and ask how a young man of unblemished reputation and admittedly limited capabilities to think for himself could suddenly transform himself into a vicious, frenzied attacker of a defenceless woman. His employer was the first port of call in the journey to re-establish Ernie’s good name.

  Henshaw took the oath and acknowledged judge and jury. He stood full square, hands behind his back, a solid tradesman like them. Mayhew established him as a chapelgoer and a thriving businessman, with the pick of a dozen errand boys to deliver his groceries. ‘So why choose Ernie Parsons, Mr Henshaw?’ Mayhew sounded relaxed. The shopkeeper wouldn’t let them down.

  ‘I knew him as a reliable lad,’ Henshaw explained. ‘I’ve known the family more than twenty years, ever since they came to live on Duke Street.’

  ‘But as a chapel man, a Methodist, we might imagine you to have objections towards the family who lived at the pub, surely?’

  Happy to be drawn out, Henshaw contradicted this view. ‘I ain’t one to ram my religion down another man’s throat, sir. Like I say, I get on well with the Parsons family. I offered work to Ernie and he turned out like I expected, a steady, honest, reliable lad.’

  ‘He presented no problems at all, Mr Henshaw?’

  ‘None, sir. And my wife, Mrs Henshaw, she found him just the same. You tell him what to do and it’s good as done. The best lad we had in years.’

  Mayhew nodded. The words penetrated even Ernie’s bleak misery, and those who watched him saw his head go up and a faint look of pride appear on his face. A lump rose to the sisters’ throats. Sadie allowed her hopes to rise.

  ‘No questions,’ Forster said abruptly, hardly bothering to stand, dismissing the witness as a tiresome waste of time and unworthy of cross-examination.

  A new figure took Henshaw’s place. The reporters in the gallery licked their pencils and began to scribble anew as the woman’s faint voice repeated the oath. ‘I, Mary Kathleen O’Hagan do swear by Almighty God . . .’

  Annie Wiggin shouldered people aside for a better view. ‘Good for you, Missus!’ she said under her breath. Who better to give evidence for Ernie than the mother of the corpse? She glared in triumph at the surprised prosecution bench, and hoped that the shrivelled scarecrow of a judge would sit up and take notice. Morale rose. Dolly came and settled close to Annie, shoulder to shoulder.

  Mary found the ordeal truly terrible. Naturally reticent, and worn down by long years of struggle, her instinct at the best of times was to shy away from the limelight. And this was the worst of times. But she did it for Hettie. She put on her one worn and dowdy brown coat and she came to court. She knew she looked what she was; a poor washerwoman from an immigrant family, whom life had treated badly.

  ‘Thank you for taking the stand, Mrs O’Hagan,’ Mayhew began gently. Sewell had done well to get her here. She was a strong weapon in the emotional argument. He said he really only had two questions for her. ‘Firstly, did your daughter, Daisy, ever talk to you about the accused, Ernie Parsons?’

  ‘She did, sir. She mentioned him to me every so often.’ Mary swayed and grasped the brass rail which ran along the top of the witness-box.

  ‘Did she like him? Would you say she got on well with him?’

  ‘She did, sir. She told me there was no harm in the boy and she liked to have him come to see the show. She was a good-hearted girl, sir, and she knew she could make Ernie’s day, just by be
ing friendly and nice with him.’

  ‘Did she like him better than some of the other men who came to visit her backstage?’

  ‘She did.’ Mary’s voice grew stronger. ‘Some she didn’t care for at all, sir, but they could be difficult to shake off. She knew her own mind in these things, sir.’

  ‘But Ernie?’

  ‘She liked him a lot, in a friendly way.’

  ‘Not a romantic way, Mrs O’Hagan?’

  ‘No, sir. They was just friends.’

  Mayhew nodded. ‘She trusted him?’

  ‘Yes, sir. We all do.’

  ‘Good. Thank you, Mrs O’Hagan. Which leads me to my second question, and this is really very important. In your opinion, would the accused be capable of committing this brutal act against your daughter?’

  They held their breath as Mary paused. Her face looked long and weary. There were dark shadows under her eyes, and a hopelessness at the centre of her being. But she pulled herself upright.

  ‘Do you understand the question?’ Mayhew asked softly.

  ‘I do, sir.’ She looked straight at Ernie and her whole heart went out to him. ‘I don’t believe he done it, sir. Whatever they say against him, I don’t believe he killed my girl!’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Ernie’s defence counsel hoped he’d judged the public mood right as he watched Robert Parsons swear the oath. A special provision had been made for him to give his evidence from the floor of the court, still seated in his wheelchair, and it was true that he cut a sympathetic figure. Poetic phrases gathered around the injured man’s head; ‘Cut down in the flower of his youth’, or more gloomily still, ‘Think not for whom the bell tolls’. And that was the problem. Robert stood for the frailty of the human condition as well as for glorious sacrifice. Worse still, his uniform was evidently useless on him now, except as an emblem of the supreme indifference of war. But this pessimistic knowledge lay deep under layers of brash patriotism. Although the generals battling it out in Belgium and France were now prepared to admit that the war might well continue beyond Christmas, the demon Kaiser remained a figure of intense public hatred against whom the British Tommy would willingly fight to the death.

  Mayhew banked on this image of the common-or-garden East End boy giving his all for king and country as he began his even-paced questioning of the wounded soldier.

  Robert listened, and explained why he liked to take his young brother to watch the shows at the Palace. ‘To give him a bit of a break. He was always on at me to go and watch Hettie and Daisy with him.’

  ‘Why was that? Couldn’t he go by himself?’

  ‘No, sir. He needs someone with him. He ain’t too good by himself.’

  ‘No confidence?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘What would happen to Ernie out on the streets alone?’

  Robert didn’t hesitate. ‘He’d get lost. Pa never let him go off, especially at night. And we wouldn’t want him to neither.’

  ‘He’d get lost, you say? So it was entirely consistent for him to do so when he was separated from you on the night of the murder? I mean, you weren’t surprised to hear he’d got lost while trying to find his way home alone?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘And what was the reason for your separation?’ Mayhew let the jury get used to the sound and look of this, his last witness. Robert’s deep, sure voice with its military overtones came across well.

  ‘I came out ahead of him. I told him we had to get a move on if we wanted to nab the girls. They didn’t know we was there. So I shot off. But Ern’s a bit slow in a crowd. I never thought of that, so I lost him somewhere. Then I ran into a bit of bother of my own.’ Robert was reluctant to tell this part of the story, knowing that it was his own hot temper that had caused him to make an enemy of the powerful Chalky White, and this had led directly to his altercation with Syd Swan that night. Still, Sewell had convinced him to tell the whole truth, after Jess’s experience on the stand. ‘I planned to give Swan and his mates the slip as quick as I could, then double back for Ern.’

  ‘How long were you gone?’

  ‘About a quarter of an hour.’

  ‘So you arrived back at the Palace at eleven fifteen?’

  ‘Yes, then I met up with Hettie and heard there was no sign of Ern, so we set off home together, then we thought better of it, so we cut back again and went inside to check.’

  ‘Inside the Palace, using the stage door?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘I’m not sure exactly. Before half eleven.’

  Mayhew nodded. ‘Now we won’t trouble the court with another description of events surrounding the discovery of the body. Suffice it to say that the disaster coincided with your enlistment into His Majesty’s regular army, and that your brother’s arrest for this murder occurred on the eve of the fourteenth of September, the very day that you left Duke Street to join your regiment?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘It must have been a terrible blow, Private Parsons?’

  ‘We was all staggered. Frances wrote me the news and I jumped right up and said, “Oh no, that ain’t right!” They had to sit on me to stop me jumping on a train back home to put them right about Ernie.’

  ‘What was so incredible?’ Mayhew had taken off his gold-rimmed glasses and swung them horn his forefinger. He nodded encouragement at Robert.

  ‘I knew in my bones they got it wrong. That’s the first thing. Now, if they told me Ernie killed a bloke to stop him laying a finger on Daisy; maybe, just maybe I could see that. He’d die for that girl.

  ‘Second thing, like you said yourself, sir, why wasn’t he covered in blood then? All right, so suppose he goes into the room and suppose he finds her lying there. The poor bloke goes to see what they done to her, don’t he? He goes over and he tries to get her up. Only she don’t get up, and he gets blood all over his boots, like we heard. But if he’d been the one, it’d be all over his hands and clothes and all. And there ain’t no sign of that.’ Robert followed the logic without flinching at the details. ‘He ain’t never seen a dead body before. I bet he’s scared stiff. He finds the knife on the floor beside her, and he grabs it and throws it away ‘cos that’s what done the damage. Now he’s upset. He knows she ain’t gonna wake up and he goes wild. He gets up and he runs out of the place quick as he can. That’s when he bumps into Swan. By the time Frances runs into him, he’s practically back home, and he’s trying to block out what he just seen.’

  ‘Explain to us why he would do that, if you please, Private Parsons.’

  Robert sighed. ‘’Cos if he talks about it and tells anyone he’s seen Daisy lying in a pool of blood, then it’s true, ain’t it? If he locks it up inside his own head, it can still be a bad dream. He can wake up. Daisy’ll waltz into the room like normal, and everything’s fine!’

  Mayhew let this version sink in before he finished off. ‘Private Parsons, why did you enlist with the army?’

  Robert registered slight surprise. ‘They need blokes like me,’ he said, more subdued.

  ‘Blokes like you?’

  ‘Yes. Fit and strong. We can do out bit.’

  Mayhew left it at that. ‘And did your family approve?’

  Robert looked straight ahead. ‘Pa was with the army in India. He says it’s the making of a man.’

  ‘So you did it in part for him? Your family has a strong loyalty to king and country?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And finally, Private, could you tell us briefly the extent of your present injuries and how they occurred? No need to go into distressing detail, of course.’ Mayhew’s voice was respectfully lowered. He wanted to finish with this strong emotional impact.

  Robert recalled for them the place, the time, the circumstances of the order to go over the top. He didn’t tell them of the bitter cold, the muddle of command and counter-command, the sprawled bodies of comrades face down in the mud, the soft whine and thud of enemy shells. He said he wa
s knocked unconscious by the explosion, and woke to find himself snagged on barbed wire, being hauled back to the Allied trench on the back of George Mann, a private in his regiment. ‘He went on his belly with me slung round his shoulders, lying on top of him. He could’ve left me, but he never. They got me on a stretcher and they took me off in an ambulance. I never got a chance to thank Mann. Everything went black again. Next thing I know I’m in the field hospital. I’ve lost my right leg from the knee down, and they’ve had to patch up my hip and side.’

  Silence reigned. Mayhew thanked him sincerely for gathering the strength to appear in court. He folded his glasses into his waistcoat pocket and sat down.

  Forster stood and manoeuvred himself into position alongside the jury-box. This mood of reverence required quick deflation. ‘Private Parsons, what was your relationship with the deceased?’

  Robert pulled himself round to answer the snappy question. ‘We was friends, sir.’

  ‘No more than friends?’

  ‘No, sir. We had a lark. We grew up in the same street together.’

  ‘But she was an attractive girl, would you say?’

  ‘You could say that, yes.’

  ‘Private Parsons, the question is not whether or not I would say she was attractive, but what you have to say about the matter.’ Forster’s urbane voice picked up Robert’s speech mannerisms and played with them. ‘Did you find her good-looking?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Have you had lots of girlfriends?’

  Robert’s resentment began to show through. ‘A few.’

  ‘You’re a good-looking man.’

  There was a muttering in the gallery at the overt insensitivity of this remark, but Forster wasn’t out to win any popularity stakes.

  ‘You were a favourite with the ladies?’

  ‘It ain’t for me to say.’

  ‘Oh, come, no need to be modest. You had the girls practically falling at your feet, didn’t you? Weren’t you what we call a ladies’ man, Private Parsons?’

  ‘I went about with women, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘But not with Daisy O’Hagan?’