by Ellis Peters
‘Then, to get there—’ Margaret’s voice was an awed whisper.
‘Yes, of course! The Infanta on the eleventh day, the King on the twentieth – and before the thirtieth, Count Alarcos. They all died. There was no other way of complying with the summons, naturally. They had to die – that’s what the Assize of the Dying meant.’
Margaret sat behind the tea-cups, surrounded by the shoddy gilt and fake marble of a cheap London café, and felt the comfortable scepticism of the age dissolving about her before a cold wind of credulity. ‘But you tell it almost as if you believed in it!’ she cried, pushing the possibility away from her.
‘Believed in which, the belief or its effectiveness? I believe in the belief, of course, the evidence is plentiful enough. And in its effectiveness – well, people died of it. Does it make much difference whether they died because there was really a compulsion on them to die and keep their appointment, or because they believed in the thing and suggested themselves into a decline out of despair and resignation? In either case,’ he said simply, ‘wasn’t the curse equally effective?’
‘But it’s fantastic! This is the twentieth century—’
He smiled. ‘So they said, I understand, when they caught a coelacanth alive.’
‘You don’t seriously mean that you expect my uncle, and Sir Robert Wyvern, and the foreman of the jury, and some unknown person, to fall dead in the street?’
‘I don’t expect anything – except that once this story is in the headlines – and it probably is by now – London will be seething with such a hysterical sort of excitement that the accumulation of emotion might well be enough to blow a few people off the earth. In an atmosphere like that, would it be so very surprising if somebody’s nerve gave, and he auto-suggested himself into dying?’
‘They may not find out,’ said Margaret, clutching at a hope which felt precarious in her hand.
‘It isn’t as abstruse as all that. They’ll find out soon enough. Your uncle,’ said Malachi, smiling a little wryly, ‘looks durable enough, but they can’t all be granite. And then, you see, it needs only some quite harmless, ignorant person to pass out in the Underground with heart failure, and they’ll have him for the real murderer – because that’s what makes it so beautifully universal, no one knows who he is. No, the only way of saving everybody else, as far as I can see, is by saving Stevenson. By finding out who really killed my cousin Zoë, and proving it on him beyond doubt.’
Margaret raised her wide eyes, which were as blue as gentians and, by this subdued indoor light, as dark. ‘You’re absolutely sure that Stevenson is innocent?’
‘Absolutely sure. Circumstantial evidence can prove what it likes, I prefer the evidence of my own senses. Stevenson laid a particularly awful curse on the man who killed Zoë and got him into this mess. And – surely you could see it yourself? – whoever doesn’t believe in the Assize of the Dying, Stevenson does.’
It was just half-past five, and the traffic rush was in its full frenzy, when they walked to the corner of the street together. She had declined a taxi, and elected to walk through the park. Dusk was falling mistily over the din and flashing of the street, and the late evening editions were on the pavements. They heard, for once, a distinguishable cry from the doorway of the tube station, and started and drew closer together at the prophetic scream:
‘Murder verdict sensation! Assize of the Dying – four people condemned!’
‘You were right,’ said Margaret. ‘They’ve got it already. Now what happens?’
‘Now everybody watches his neighbour, and wonders if he’s the fourth man. Unless somebody can find out who is, in time to get Stevenson off.’
‘I believe you feel as involved as I do,’ she said, looking up into his face as they walked side by side, alone on pavements where thousands of anonymous others were rushing hither and thither round them.
‘She was my cousin. And don’t forget, what she left comes to me. I’m involved whether I like it or not.’
‘But if the police didn’t find out anything, what can we do?’ The ‘we’ came naturally, and was not even noticed. ‘Where can we even begin, after all this time?’
Malachi said, taking her arm instinctively as they halted at the edge of the pavement to wait for the lights to change: ‘I got the key of her house today – the house in Hampstead, where it happened. I’m going up there tomorrow to have a look at the place. I don’t know where else to start. Probably there’s nothing to find there, and not much anywhere else. But I’ve got to try.’
‘I should like to come with you,’ she said.
They forgot about the lights, and the released surge of people across the street left them still standing there, gazing at each other, trying to see more than there was to be seen in a human face, trying to drag years of understanding out of a mere moment of feeling.
‘Of course!’ said Malachi very slowly and quietly. ‘If you’re sure you don’t want to turn back now, while there’s time.’
‘I’m sure.’
He took her arm again, suddenly moving with a new abruptness, as if she had pointed out his direction to him, and reassured him that it led somewhere definite. ‘Come on, let’s get out of this din. We can talk better in the park.’
But the orange light was already bright again in the dusk, and as they turned to cross on the heels of the scuttling crowd the red winked into life. They checked resignedly as the wave of cars shot forward. A little drab, darting figure jostled them at the last moment and made off across the road at a practised run, head down, abstracted and frowning inwardly upon his own private worries even under the wheels of the traffic. A middle-aged man in a fawn raincoat and a bowler hat, spectacled, running like a whippet and still dignified – something you could see a dozen times a day in London, thought Margaret, watching him with a sudden impulse of laughter. The cars checked and shrieked indignantly in the act of bounding forward, withheld their weight just long enough to let him spring clear. A heavy van resignedly hesitated, poised like a ballerina, and swooped forward on his heels.
It was at that instant that the frog-voiced newsboy on the pavement opposite shook out under the lamp his brand-new red-and-white poster that shrieked: ‘Assize of the Dying!’ in letters eight inches high, and gave tongue triumphantly to match the mammoth type, with a bellow of: ‘Sensation! Four people to die! Four people to die!’
What happened was over in a moment, and yet it seemed to Margaret as deliberate and balletic as a slowed-up section of film. The running man, hit in the face by the shout and the scare-type together, leaped out of his abstraction with a quivering start, and hung for an instant incredibly still, apparently in mid-air. The brakes of the nearest car screamed; the tension broke and bore him not forward but backward, under the wing of the van, which was in the act of accelerating to draw clear. Spun round by the blow, he faced them for a fraction of a second under the lamplight, his bowler gone, his thin, lank fringes of hair flung erect, his face a recognisable mask of terror. Then the van was braking too late, voices were screaming with a knife-edged sound, and under the wheels a brownish bundle was dragged limply over and over along the blackly shining street.
Margaret had not uttered a sound. Malachi took her forcibly by the shoulders and pulled her round breast to breast with him, and when she instinctively turned her head to gaze back at the horrid knot of men and vehicles in the middle of the street he seized her by the chin and jerked her face round to him again, not even gently.
‘Don’t look! Here, come away! There’s nothing we can do, they’ve got more than enough witnesses here.’
He shut his arm round her hard, and drew her away along the street until the queer clamour and queerer succeeding quietness fell behind. She was trembling, but silent. As soon as she was forced to move she had control of her body again; she shook off his constricting arm, and walked beside him steadily.
It was he who halted, as soon as they were too far away to see anything. He drew her to the shop windows, and said in
a strained voice: ‘Will you wait for me here? And not come after me? I’ve got to be sure.’
‘You are sure,’ said Margaret, lifting to him eyes dilated and fixed with horror. ‘You saw his face when he was hit. So did I. We couldn’t be mistaken, not both of us.’
‘That isn’t what I meant. I just have to find out if – how badly he’s hurt.’
She had never been more sure of anything in her life than that the little man was dead, but she consented to wait with resignation while Malachi went back to make more certain of certainty. When he came back to her his face was arduously blank and quiet, but the level of his voice was too brittle to be convincing. ‘Come on, let’s get out of this. The ambulance is there already. They didn’t lose any time.’
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ said Margaret, flattening her cold palms unsteadily against the plate-glass window at her back. He tried to take her arm and lead her gently away, to avoid the far too intimate and naked meeting of eyes in which stillness immediately involved them, but she resisted the persuasion of his hand at her elbow, and suddenly took him by the lapels and held him facing her, insisting in a whisper: ‘He is dead – isn’t he?’
‘It was his own fault, he lost his head. He – the van went over him. Yes – he’s dead.’
He felt her trembling, though the motionless calm of her face was not shaken. He shut her body between his big hands to steady her, and was astonished by her slightness. It was like holding a child. He did not want to look into her eyes, because she would only see in his the reflection of what she was thinking, and it would be far better for her if she could forget it; but now her face seemed all eyes, and there was nowhere else to look.
‘And it was him – wasn’t it? We didn’t make a mistake? We didn’t imagine it?’
‘We didn’t imagine it,’ he said, in what was almost a groan. ‘It’s the foreman of the jury.’
By the time she let herself into her uncle’s house in Clevely Square she had regained her balance, and was repeating to herself all the sensible arguments Malachi had poured into her ears during the walk through the park. There was nothing supernatural about the death, it was a simple case of over-wrought nerves giving way at a dangerous moment, and causing a perfectly understandable accident. The case, in a manner of speaking, had certainly been the cause of the lapse, but not for any esoteric reasons. And most convincing of all, as Malachi had reminded her, not even the most credulous could attribute the disaster to the Assize of the Dying, since that would take effect only when Louis Stevenson was dead, supposing that there was anything in it at all; and Louis Stevenson had all the resources of appeal left to him yet before he need resign himself to dying.
The shock had left her exhausted, but she had control of herself now, and could look at the thing reasonably. All the same, she lost no time in looking for her uncle. The accident was scarcely news at all until its connection with the Stevenson case dawned upon the pressmen, and in any case it had happened too late for the last editions tonight, so the Judge could not yet have heard of it. She was not sure why she felt bound to report it to him so promptly; it was as though he were entitled to know all the developments in the case, in order to protect himself. And yet she did not believe in it!
He was in the library, sitting over a fire with the late evening papers. Without his wig, and in slippers and spectacles, he did not appear to her much more approachable than in court, with all the weight of the law in the lift of his ascetic fingers. The long, clear, fastidious profile against the flames had a forbidding beauty, the carriage of the shoulders and head was as upright as a guardsman’s. Wherever you looked at him, however you approached him, he had no weaknesses. She thought that was why she had never been able to feel anything warmer than respect for him. Charlie was all his mother, according to the accounts Margaret had heard of that enchanting and lamented lady: unpredictable, fallible, human, insubordinate, prepared to attempt anything for a dare. It was so easy to go and pluck Charlie by the arm, and pour out to him anything that might be on your mind; nothing could daunt him and few things astonished him. But this just and immovable being was quite another matter.
He looked up when she entered, and met her with his grave smile. ‘Why, Margaret, my dear, I was wondering where you were.’
‘I was in court this afternoon,’ said Margaret. She went and knelt on the rug to tease the fire into a brighter blaze. ‘I met somebody and had tea with him afterwards, or I should have been back before. But what I wanted to tell you was that something happened on the way home—’
Mr Justice Manton folded the newspaper meticulously while he listened to her, without interruption, with all the attentive courtesy he had extended to Louis Stevenson before sentencing him to death. Then he said, but more clearly and decisively, all the sensible things Malachi had said before him. All but the last. She could not see that the additional death had moved him in the least, because it was a part of his ethical equipment, as a judge, to resist being moved either back or forth by emotional considerations. Even his feelings were incorruptible.
‘I know all that! And then, of course,’ she said, with a sigh, ‘they can hardly even make out that there’s anything supernatural about it, I suppose, while Stevenson is still alive. The curse could hardly be supposed to take effect until he died, could it?’ She rose, shaking out her skirts sadly. The old eyes were watching her with a remote and intent gentleness.
‘I should not attach any importance to that idea, either, if I were you, my dear. The poor fellow’s death was simply a regrettable accident, caused by his – I’m afraid – too impressionable nature. It has no other connection whatever with the Stevenson case. Put the idea out of your head.’
‘What matters isn’t what goes on in my head, but what the public are going to make out of it,’ said Margaret sharply. ‘Telling them to forget it isn’t going to be very effective. If it weren’t for the fact that Louis Stevenson is still alive, there’d be a fine orgy of hysteria starting up by morning, when this affair hits the headlines—’
The curious, rueful fixity of his gaze stopped her. He was holding out to her the paper he had been reading.
‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
She took the paper slowly. A long forefinger touched the blurred red type of the stop-press item, the only one, askew in its column. It was brief enough:
STEVENSON COMMITS SUICIDE
Louis Stevenson, sentenced to death this afternoon for the murder of Zoë Trevor, was found to have severed an artery on his way back to prison after sentence, and died in the prison hospital shortly after half-past five this evening.
It is not known how he obtained the instrument used, which is thought to have been a worn-down metal plate from a shoe.
Half-past five! Staring at the blank space beneath the smeared red type, Margaret saw again, with peculiar clarity, the round, confident face of the jeweller’s clock at which she had stared steadily all the time she was waiting for Malachi to bring her the news she already knew. When he had left her there, it had stood at twenty-one minutes to six, and already some three or four minutes had passed since the traffic had screamed to a stand-still. Between death and death, between the crime and the first act of redress – how many minutes? Five?
‘This is the room where the maid found her body,’ said Malachi. ‘Nothing’s been moved since, except that they took away both the cushions from the ends of the settee. This one, nearer the door, was torn by the buckle of her shoe, so they told me. That one, where her head was, was stained with a drop or two of blood from the lobe of her ear. Her ear-clips – well, they must have been pulled off in a hurry – before—’
‘Before she was quite dead,’ said Margaret, relieving him of the words he baulked at saying.
‘Well – yes. She’d been reading, they said; the book was turned down quite neatly on the floor by the settee, the way you might put down some not very important novel when somebody came in.’
‘As somebody did come in. Somebody she knew
, or she’d have abandoned her book in a very different fashion. Somebody she was expecting.’
‘That was considered as strong a point against Stevenson as for him, if you remember.’
‘Does that matter to us?’ asked Margaret. ‘We know he was innocent.’ Somehow the past tense had also removed all the conditions from that knowledge.
‘Yes. We know it, but we’re too late to save him.’
She said in a low voice: ‘I think we always were. In a way he was murdered when they arrested him. But we might save something for him. He still has a right to justice. We can’t stop now.’
‘No,’ he agreed soberly, ‘we can’t stop now.’
To this point all conversation led this morning. Louis Stevenson’s resolute exit from a world which used him so ill had not made the pursuit of truth unnecessary, but only more urgent. The issue had become something much bigger than just one man, and they could not stop now.
‘She was lying here on the settee with her book,’ said Margaret, sitting down there slowly where Zoë Trevor had reclined that night for the last time. ‘He said she had the table beautifully laid for two in the next room, and she was watching the door expectantly when he left her. The man who came in must have been the man she expected. When did the doctors say she must have died?’
