“Could someone handle them if he or she wished?”
“It is almost impossible. In fact, I am prepared to say that they could not.”
“Under what sort of supervision is the filling made?”
“Under the strictest possible. There isn’t the slightest chance that anything could be added to it. Not the slightest.”
“Can you be certain of that?”
“I have just said so.”
“Quite, but we have heard in this court that some of the celery straws manufactured by your firm contained poison in them.”
“The poison was added after the straws were sent out from our factory. If there were any truth in the monstrous allegation that the poison could have been put in the filling in the factory, why wasn’t anyone else poisoned?”
“Has anyone else been to your knowledge?”
“Of course not.”
Charlton sat down.
“No questions,” said Gretnor, yet again.
Cathart, having completed his evidence, left the witness-box, stepped down, and walked across to the witness-benches.
“This is a convenient time to adjourn,” said the judge. “The court will resume sitting at ten-thirty to-morrow morning. Mr. Charlton, can you give any estimate as to when this case is likely to be completed?”
“My Lord, I would expect it to be ended by to-morrow. I have only one more witness to call.” He looked at Gretnor.
Gretnor shook his head quickly to indicate he was not prepared to guess how long his case would take to present. So much depended on what course Catalina Plesence’s cross-examination took.
CHAPTER XVII
It was some time in the early morning. David lay on the cell bunk and could not be bothered to raise his hand to look at his watch. Outside, away from the iron bars, a bird had started to sing: he thought it was a cock blackbird.
At ten-thirty, the trial would be resumed. By the end of the day, twelve good people and true would have decided whether he was ever again to return to the green fields, the heavy clay soil, the hedgerows, the coppices, the woods, the lanes, the factory, the farm, and Frogsfeet Hall. And whether he would return to Patricia. God knows how she really was. Her thoughts would be as tortured as his and she would not have imprisonment to prove there was nothing she could do.
Catalina woke up. She groaned. Her head was throbbing to a headache: caused by her mental suffering, not by what she had drunk the previous night.
It was time to get up. She went through to the bathroom and whilst there saw her face in the long mirror over the bath. The reflection shocked her. In terms of harsh reality, she was looking old. She began to cry. It was all David’s fault that she was looking old: before she had married him, she had been young, gay, attractive, irresistible.
She washed, dressed, and had breakfast — two cups of black coffee.
After breakfast, she made up her face. It was silly to think about getting old. A little powder here, a touch of lip-stick there, some cream, some lotion, some lip-stick, some eye-shadow, and she was mature and desirable. Men liked maturity.
She must show everyone who she was and that meant dressing in her best clothes and wearing all her jewellery. She opened her jewel case and was shocked to find how empty it was. Several seconds passed before she realised that most of her jewellery had been stolen by the Cabbot woman. She wept. After a short while, she stopped crying. There was still some jewellery left and she put on all the pieces, regardless of whether or not they suited each other. Amongst this jewellery were the pearl ear-rings that Gual had given her.
Everyone in court stood. Mr. Justice Fletcher crossed the dais to the desk, returned counsel’s bows, and sat down. “Yes, Mr. Charlton?”
Charlton stood up. “Mrs. Plesence.”
The uniformed constable on duty at the main doors opened the left-hand one, stepped outside, and called for the witness.
Catalina entered the courtroom. She walked unhurriedly to the witness-box and once in it looked sadly at the floor. She took the oath in a low voice, so low that she was asked to speak up.
She gave her evidence.
David stared at her with a hatred that was so great he knew a wild fury. She was without pity, remorse, honesty, decency, without anything but a total and overwhelming greed for money. She was incapable of love, yet insanely jealous.
As he studied her grossly over made-up face, he noticed she was wearing the pearl ear-rings Gual Larraga was supposed to have given her. So she still didn’t suffer any qualms over wearing jewellery given to her by the man she murdered. Perhaps she had forgotten she had poisoned him.
He suddenly remembered something. It had been the pearl ear-rings she had made him look for in her bedroom, the day Cabbot had been poisoned at Frogsfeet Hall. The ear-rings she had claimed to have lost and so forced him to go upstairs to look for them.
He tried to attract the attention of his counsel.
“Watch it, mate,” murmured the warder, sitting by his side in the dock. “No tricks.”
“I must speak to my counsel.”
The warder hesitated a moment, then beckoned across the constable on duty at the main doors. The constable listened, then attempted to step lightly and quietly across to counsel’s benches: an attempt spoilt by squeaking boots.
Illington listened to the constable, tapped Gretnor on the shoulder and spoke to him, then slid his way along the bench to the gangway from where he walked to the dock.
“Those ear-rings that Catalina’s wearing,” said David, “are the ones she sent me to find in her bedroom the day Cabbot turned up. She said she’d lost them.”
“Are you sure they’re the same pair?”
“She only had one pair of pearl ear-rings. Her first husband gave them to her.”
“She might have found them afterwards?”
“She said they were quite definitely lost.”
“O.K.” Illington returned to his seat, leaned forward, and whispered to Gretnor.
Catalina described, in a voice thick with emotion, how she had fallen in love with, and married, David. She had cared for him and had then suffered the torments of broken love when she discovered he was having an affair with Patricia Brakes. Speaking huskily, she related how she had almost gone out of her mind with worry as she saw the marriage breaking up.
“I adored him,” she declared passionately. “I did everything I could to make him come back to me. I begged him, I pleaded with him, I promised to forget everything that had happened if only he’d come back.”
“And what was his attitude towards you?” asked Charlton.
She gestured despairingly with her hands. “He laughed at me. He said I was just in the way. When I told him I loved him more than ever, he called me a fool.”
“He used the word ‘ fool’?”
“He called me worse than that, but I...I can’t tell you. The shame of it hurt me like a knife.”
“I am afraid you must try to tell us exactly what he said.”
“He called me an old...An old bitch. Said I wasn’t any good to him as I was worn out. I loved him so much I went down on my knees to beg with him on one day and he just laughed. He did everything he could to humiliate me. Whenever I pleaded with him, he started telling me about Patricia and the kind of fun he was having with her.”
“What effect did all this have on you?”
“I became desperate with sorrow. I wanted to kill myself, but my religious faith was too strong to let me. Night after night when I was alone in my bed and I knew he was in her bed, I longed for the peace of death. My mind tortured me, hour after hour, minute after minute. If only I hadn’t loved him so...” She became silent.
“Did your attitude towards him ever change?”
“One day...he hit me. I’d been pleading with him to leave her and come back to me and I took hold of him as I swore I’d do anything, anything, for him if only he’d come back to me. At first he laughed, but then he suddenly became angry and hit me hard across the face. I fell b
ack, hit my head on a chair, and was stunned. He stood over me, looked down, and said he wished I’d broken my neck because that would get me out of the way. No one had ever hit me before: no one had ever tried. I felt so humiliated I didn’t know what to do. At that moment I knew he detested me so much that there could never be any hope for me. I’m a woman with very strong feelings. I live each day right through. With him, I’d reached the point where I couldn’t just lie back and accept his insults, his humiliations, any more.”
“So what did you do?”
“I saw my solicitors and asked them to arrange a judicial separation. Just after that...Gual died. If David hadn’t hit me, hadn’t humiliated me, I’d never have said anything to anyone, I’d never have answered a single question the police asked. They could have tortured me and I wouldn’t have spoken a word. But David destroyed my love so I told the police the truth.”
“Would it be true to say you went so far as to volunteer the truth?”
“That is so.” Her voice rose. “I am not a woman of ice. I am a woman who knew the fires of love. Yet he scorned me, mocked me, spat on me. That’s why I spoke to the police.” She looked down at her gloved hands which gripped the edge of the witness-box. “If only he had not hit me,” she murmured.
At 11.18, Gretnor rose to cross-examine. He stared at Catalina. She had put on a very accomplished act. Generally, the ordinary English man or woman disliked flamboy-ancy of character, yet she had exhibited a flamboyancy but still undoubtedly gained the sympathy of her listeners. She had successfully built up the picture of a woman who suffered to the limit for a man she loved and then, when beyond that limit and long after she might reasonably have been expected to do so, had in a moment of revenge turned on him.
How did he conduct this cross-examination? Did he attack her from the beginning, or would that be a bad tactical error in view of the sympathy she had gathered to herself? Would it be a worse tactical error to allow her to gain even more sympathy for herself by leaving the attack for some time? Did he attack in a high key or a low key? Was he right when he thought that with her character an attack in high key might draw sparks from her where the alternative would surely fail?
“Mrs. Plesence, how many pairs of pearl ear-rings do you possess?”
She had been expecting anything but this. She stared at him in amazement.
“How many pairs of pearl ear-rings do you possess?”
“What’s that matter?”
“Please answer my question.”
“Well, one pair. But...”
“The pair you are wearing?”
“Yes.”
“Have you only ever owned one pair?”
She was bewildered and upset by the line of questioning. It failed to give her a chance further to appeal for the sympathy of the court. “Yes,” she finally answered.
“Thank you, Mrs. Plesence.” Gretnor smiled before he shuffled through the papers in front of him. He looked up. “Will you now tell the court whether you ever complained to the accused about anything?”
“I told him I couldn’t stand him sleeping with that other woman.”
“Yes, yes, we’ve heard about this at some length and in some detail. Can we now forget this aspect of things for the moment?” He was silent for a few seconds. “Did you, for example, ever complain to your husband that you were short of money?”
“But that woman...”
“Did you?”
“I may have done,” she answered sulkily.
“Did you frequently point out to him that previously you had been married to a man who had enough money to be called very rich and that you weren’t used to living in your present poverty?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“That you were living in poverty?”
“I had nothing and could buy nothing.”
“But were you not given by your husband a personal allowance of one thousand pounds a year which was over and above all housekeeping money? Do you know that there can be but very few women in this country who are given so large an allowance by their husbands?”
“He could have given me more.”
“Which is what you were for ever demanding?”
“No.”
“You kept on and on that you were being forced to live in poverty — when you were in receipt of a thousand pounds a year. You kept reminding him of your first marriage?”
“He could have given me more,” she repeated angrily, careless that her answer was a tactless one.
“Did all this begin long before he met Mrs. Brakes?”
“I don’t know when he first met her.”
“What were you after — his very last penny?”
“I had to dress decently, didn’t I?”
“The majority of people have to live, house, and dress themselves and their families decently on about a thousand pounds a year.”
“I was different.”
“Clearly.” The scorn in Gretnor’s voice increased.
“Did you suffer any remorse when you betrayed your husband?”
“I told you what happened and I didn’t betray him.”
“You didn’t? Did you then not speak to the police and volunteer certain information which, unless you had told them, they would have known nothing about?”
“I’ve explained.”
“You still haven’t answered the question. Did you suffer any remorse?”
“I loved him. He humiliated me.”
“Is this an explanation of why you didn’t suffer any remorse at betraying your husband?”
“He’d spat on my bed, hadn’t he?”
“And any love you might once have had for him turned into hate? A hate so burning that you deliberately betrayed him?”
“I didn’t betray him.”
“Did you say to the police that it was your husband who had poisoned the dead man?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Let me assist your memory. It is on record that you accused your husband of murder.”
“The detective said it was him or me.”
“And you hastened to say it was he?”
“Well, it wasn’t me.”
“I wonder if it would interest you to know what your husband said when the police suggested the poisoner must be either he or you? And remember that, according to you, your husband was the man who hated you, despised you, humiliated you...Do you know what he said?”
“No.”
“He said it couldn’t possibly be you. That is exactly what he said. So we have this situation. The man who hated you went out of his way to protect you and you, the woman who loved him beyond all measure, went out of your way to betray him.”
“But it’s not like that.”
“What is it like, then?”
“I told you all about the things he did to me. I couldn’t stand it.”
“You don’t deny his loyalty and your betrayal — you merely offer what you are pleased to term an explanation?” Gretnor turned over a page of his note-book. “When, after your marriage to David Plesence, did you first see or hear from your previous husband, Gual Jose Cirilo Lar-raga?”
“When I saw him at the house in the evening.”
“The evening on which he died?”
“Yes.”
“Until then vou’d no idea he was in the country?”
“No, I hadn’t.”
“He hadn’t previously telephoned you?”
“No.”
“To tell you he was alive?”
“No.”
“He hadn’t tried to blackmail you?”
“No.”
“He hadn’t successfully blackmailed you?”
" No.”
“He hadn’t told you that your marriage to him was still valid and therefore your present marriage was invalid?”
“No.”
“He hadn’t pointed out to you that if there was no marriage to David Plesence, there couldn’t be a
divorce or a claim for maintenance?”
“No. No. No. How often do I have to tell you, no.”
“Then what would you imagine Larraga, your first husband, so urgently wanted to say to David Plesence, your second husband, a man whom he’d never met or ever had any communication with?”
“How should I know?”
“And what would you imagine so changed Larraga’s mind that when he arrived at Frogsfeet Hall he said there was nothing to talk over and the matter was finished with?”
“I tell you I know nothing.”
“Wouldn’t you agree that the most feasible explanation is that Larraga tried to blackmail you, you refused to pay him anything, so he said he’d tell David Plesence the truth? He telephoned to make an appointment and you took fright and agreed to meet his blackmail terms? And that was why he no longer had anything very important and confidential to talk over with David Plesence?”
“It’s a filthy lie.”
“Have you ever stopped to think to whose advantage it was that Larraga died?”
“Of course I haven’t.”
“It couldn’t have been to David Plesence’s, could it, because he wanted a divorce which you were refusing to give him, but whilst Larraga was alive there was always the proof that a divorce was quite unnecessary because there was no valid marriage? But whereas David Plesence would have welcomed the truth’s becoming known, you dreaded it. You wanted your last farthing of maintenance. The death of Larraga was your insurance.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.” Her voice was shrill. “Did you put the poison in the celery straws?”
“I couldn’t do such a terrible thing.”
“Not if the poison’s toxicity had been tragically underestimated by you? Not if you believed that the amount of poison you’d put in each straw was only enough to frighten Larraga into silence?”
“It’s monstrous.”
Charlton stood up. “My Lord, I agree. This line of attack is quite monstrous unless my learned friend intends to produce proof of these allegations.”
“Well, Mr. Gretnor?” said the judge.
“My Lord, may I be allowed to continue for a short while when I feel certain my learned friend will find things less outrageous?”
After a short pause, the judge said: “Very well.” Gretnor addressed Catalina once again. “Did you expect to see Gual Larraga at Frogsfeet Hall when you went there on the evening of the thirtieth of May?”
A Deadly Marriage Page 20
