‘No offence meant and none taken, I hope,’ said the old man, running all the words together until they formed a single apologetic sound. ‘Only I saw you wandering up and down the road just now and it came into my head that you might be looking for lodgings. This part isn’t what it used to be, but I could put you on to several nice respectable women who’d look after you very well. Perhaps you’d like a widow, now?’ he finished, his little bright eyes watching Campion with the inquisitive yet impersonal interest of a sparrow.
‘Not at present,’ said Mr Campion, who had a literal mind. ‘As a matter of fact, I came down here on a sort of sentimental errand. A friend of mine disappeared, or is supposed to have, disappeared, walking along this street.’
Tremendous interest appeared at once on the small face.
‘I believe you’re referring to my phenomenon,’ he said. ‘I always call it mine, although it wasn’t really. I just happened to be there. Now that was a funny thing, if you like.’
‘Do you remember it?’
‘Remember it? Wasn’t I in this very shop?’ The little man seemed hurt. ‘Wasn’t it me who gave interviews to all the newspapers –? or would have done, only they didn’t believe me. It was hushed up really. Did you know that? In my opinion, sir,’ he went on, eyeing Mr Campion with portentous solemnity, ‘that was the most important thing that ever happened to me in all my life. And, luck being what it is’ – he spread out his hands and hunched his shoulders in a gesture of resignation – ‘I turned me back on it.’
‘Infuriating,’ murmured Mr Campion sympathetically.
‘It was,’ said his informant and, returning to his position behind the paper counter, leant across it and took a deep breath. ‘I didn’t always talk about this,’ he began. ‘My name’s Higgleton, by the way.’
‘How d’you do?’ said Campion pleasantly.
‘Pleased to meet you, sir,’ complied Mr Higgleton, with grace, and plunged into his story. ‘It was on a Monday – no, a Tuesday morning, I think it was. Or it may have been a Thursday – I can’t really remember – but I can see it as plain as daylight. I didn’t talk about it much at the time because – well, you know what people are. Once you start seeing things that other people know can’t have happened, you’re apt to get the reputation of being a little queer.’
‘Fanciful,’ suggested Mr Campion.
‘Exactly. But I remember that Wednesday morning as though it was yesterday. Only it was May then, not February like it is now. It was a beautiful clear morning, bright sunlight, we didn’t have summer-time then, so there was no hanky-panky – just a bright clear summer’s day. This place is very pretty in the summer, though you might not think so. When there’s leaves on those trees over there you can’t see the houses. There were more trees in those days. It was when the children kept getting run over that they had one or two of ’em down. The children couldn’t see the road from the gardens because of the trees and they used to run out and – there you are, as the saying is.’
‘I suppose that’s why no one saw Mr Barnabas from the houses?’ said Mr Campion.
‘Barnabas!’ said Mr Higgleton, pouncing on the name. ‘That’s it! That’s it! Couldn’t remember it for a moment, although it was on the tip of me tongue. That’s why I was hedging about. Oh, I knew him as well as I know – you, I was going to say. Used to come in here every day for his papers. He was an ornament to the neighbourhood. I don’t know what his business was; it was something in the City. But he used to turn out to it as though he was going to a Mr Higgleton paused and searched in his mind for a simile.
‘Ball?’ suggested Mr Campion idiotically.
His new friend glanced at him reproachfully.
‘Well, not exactly a ball, but a wedding. City gentlemen used to dress more tastefully then than they do now. You probably wouldn’t remember it very well, but they did. Silk hats and tail coats and fancy trousers were all the go, and a nice pair of yellow gloves to top everything off.’
‘And was Mr Barnabas dressed like that when he disappeared?’ said Mr Campion.
‘He was. A very well-dressed man indeed was Mr Barnabas. I can see him now – in me mind’s eye, of course – silk hat, nicely brushed, gold-topped cane, and spats. A big handsome man he was, too, and very nicely spoken.’
‘How did it happen?’ The question escaped Mr Campion involuntarily.
‘In the twinkling of a hand – like that!’ said Mr Higgleton, and snapped his fingers.
He had an odd trick of pausing after he had made an announcement and surveying his listener with a wide-eyed expression, as though inviting him to join in a wonder.
Mr Campion, who had liked him from the start, began to feel a positive affection for him.
‘I’ll show you how it happened,’ said Mr Higgleton, and, running out from behind the counter, he planted himself on the doorstep. ‘Now here am I – see?’ he said over his shoulder, ‘standing on the corner of the street. It’s nine o’clock in the morning, but I’m not so busy as all that, and I’m just standing here taking a deep breath of the ozone.’
He gulped a lungful of rain-soaked, soot-laden air, and glanced at Campion for approval.
‘Well, I see Mr Barnabas turn the corner of the street down there.’
He waved his hand in the direction of Nemetia Crescent.
‘Now I know it is him – there’s no doubt about that. (My eyes are better than what they are now, it being twenty years ago.) And I watch him coming up the street for a bit. There he is, striding along in the sunlight swinging his cane, looking as calm and happy as you please.
‘Well, when he’s about fifty yards away I say to meself, “I’d better get his papers.” So I turn back into me shop like this,’ he trotted back to the counter and picked up a couple of newspapers which he thrust under Campion’s nose. ‘There they are — see? Then I hurry back to the door and’ – he stopped, and peered up and down the street, ventured out into the rain, and finally returned, bewilderment expressed in every line of his features – ‘not a sign of him,’ he said. ‘Street empty all ways. You could knock me down with a wave of the hand, as the saying has it.
‘“Well,” I said, “he’s vanished!” And he had, too.’
Again the look of wonder.
‘Of course you’ll say,’ he continued after a silence which Mr Campion had not liked to break, ‘that he must have snapped into a trot and run past the shop. But he couldn’t have done. I wasn’t in here above five seconds. Besides, the constable who was standing on the corner saw him go. One minute he was there and one minute he wasn’t. In the middle of the pavement about fifteen yards from this shop, just along by the wall there, he disappeared and was never seen by mortal eye again.’
‘Top hat, gold-headed cane and all?’ said Mr Campion.
‘Yellow gloves and spats,’ said Mr Higgleton. ‘Clean as kiss yer hand.’
‘I’d like to have met the policeman.’ Mr Campion sounded wistful.
‘So you should have. I’d have taken you round myself if he hadn’t retired and gone to live in the country. Somewhere Norfolk way he is. But he drops in here now and again when he comes to Town. He was here as little as two years ago. Next time I see him I’ll tell him you’re interested and perhaps he’ll let you have his side of the story. His name’s on the tip of me tongue, but I’ve forgotten it.’
Mr Higgleton thought for a while but to no purpose.
Mr Campion expressed his thanks and made an attempt to leave, but he was not to get away so easily.
‘I don’t like to pretend I know what happened, because I don’t,’ said his new friend, skilfully edging between him and the exit. ‘But then funny things do happen. There was a man in that house over there – you can see it if you stand on the step – who ran off with every servant-girl his wife had in the course of twelve years. Every single one of them!’
This time the expression of wonder was a little overdone.
‘She fetched him back one week and off he’d go with the new girl the next.’
‘Cut his throat on a golf-course in Scotland,’ said Mr Higgleton. ‘And then there was the woman with the snakes.’
‘Really?’ murmured Mr Campion, moving adroitly to the right and gaining six inches in his progress to the door.
‘She used to live in this house at the back of mine, on the other side,’ said Mr Higgleton frantically. ‘Her garden used to run down behind mine and finish up alongside this wall. Of course, she left before the war, but at one time her place was alive with ’em. She used to breed ’em and train ’em. Some of them were very clever, I believe, but I never liked them.’
He sighed. Mr Campion was going to get away; he could see it.
‘If ever that Police Sergeant should drop in, sir, perhaps you’d like me to give him your name?’ he ventured, breathless with defeat.
‘That’s very kind of you.’ Campion drew a card from his wallet and Mr Higgleton took it and placed it with great care behind a jar of tobacco on the shelf at the back of the shop. ‘Any time you want to know anything about this district,’ he said wistfully, ‘you’ll come to me, won’t you?’
Mr Campion felt a cad.
‘I certainly shall,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘It’s been a pleasure, sir,’ said Mr Higgleton truthfully, and Campion went down to the High Street to find a cab, convinced in spite of his stern belief in the material that something very odd indeed had happened to Tom Barnabas twenty years before.
When he arrived back at Bottle Street he was still absorbed by the past, and the urgent message from the present head of the firm of Barnabas and Company, Limited, demanding his immediate attendance at Twenty-three, Horsecollar Yard, brought him back to the problem of the moment with the uncomfortable conviction that he had spent an unprofitable morning.
He arrived at the office at a little after two o’clock and was shown at once into John’s big room on the ground floor, where a conference was in progress. Before he entered the room, while he was still in the hall, the sonorous voice from within warned him what to expect, and he did not come upon Cousin Alexander altogether unprepared.
The first thing he saw upon entering the room was the back of John’s head and the arc of his forehead. He was leaning back in his chair, which had been turned away from the door and appeared to be entranced or even stupefied by the spectacle confronting him.
On the hearthrug Sir Alexander Barnabas stood in one of his more famous attitudes, and Campion had the full benefit of his commanding presence. He was a big man, tall and heavy, with a magnificent physique and a great head surmounted by a mass of iron-grey curls parted sleekly down the middle and brushed up at the sides so that, whether by accident or design, one was almost deceived into thinking that his barrister’s wig was a fixture.
His face was handsome in an orthodox way and its clean-shaven mobility had a trick of emphasizing the slightest inflection in its owner’s voice with appropriate expression.
At the moment he was radiating authority. One long graceful hand was upraised to drive home some point while the other rested behind his broad, dark-coated back.
‘There is no question of that,’ he was saying. ‘Ab-so-lutely no question.’ And Mr Campion was quite convinced that, whatever the subject of conversation might be, there could be absolutely no question about it.
At Campion’s entrance John pulled himself out of the stupor into which he had fallen and performed the introduction.
Mr Campion was aware of a personage condescending to do a great honour. Two immense fingers rested in his hand for a second, and then he was dismissed to the realm of unimportant things and Cousin Alexander’s melodious voice took up the thread of his discourse once again.
‘We must have an acquittal,’ he said. ‘Complete and unconditional acquittal with no stain left upon the boy’s character. I shall work for that and I shall achieve it.’
Mr Campion sat down on the edge of a chair in the far corner of the room and listened politely. Miracles seemed to be the order of the day.
‘But you must understand, John,’ the Counsel continued firmly. ‘The case against Mike is very strong. Circumstantial evidence can be very deadly indeed. At the moment Michael is in a position of the gravest danger.’
Mr Campion pulled himself together with a jerk. The effect of so powerful a personality at close range was disconcerting. When Sir Alexander spoke of gravity one automatically thought of international crisis and in his mouth the word ‘danger’ had the shrill insistence of a fire-alarm.
John attempted to speak, but was answered before a word had left his mouth.
‘I have seen the boy,’ said Cousin Alexander, ‘and I am convinced of his innocence. Innocence,’ he repeated and stared at Campion, who found himself feeling like a rabbit caught in the glare of a headlight. ‘Innocent,’ Sir Alexander again dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘I heard his statement. Only an innocent man would have dared to make such a damaging confession. Why did he admit he had no alibi? Because he was telling the truth. Because he was innocent.’
His glance swept round the room.
‘Can’t you see what happened?’ he went on passionately. ‘Are you blind? Or does the very nakedness of truth offend your modesty? Imagine it…’
His voice had become persuasive, his excitement passing as rapidly as it had arisen.
‘Think of the story he told the police. Think of the damaging history of that fatal night, related as simply as a child might have told it, a child not only innocent, but so guileless as to believe that not for a moment would its innocence be called into question.’
Mr Campion settled back in his chair and reflected how much more bearable drama was when it had a little art to help it along. On the witness-stand Mike had presented a depressing tale, but in Sir Alexander’s hands his story became an exhilarating experience, if not in particularly good taste. Meanwhile the great man was off again, filling the room with melodious but overpowering sound.
‘The Coroner demanded to know where Mike was between the hours of five and nine in the evening, hours which have since proved to be critical in the history of this terrible case. What did the boy do? Did he invent a history of little alibis to be broken down one by one by a pitiless police inquiry? Or did he tell the truth? “I walked,” he said. “I walked alone through the London streets, amid thousands of my fellow-men, not one of whom will come forward to bear me witness. I was unknown to them – a stranger. I was alone.”’
‘Yes, but what was he doing?’ said John irritably, the paralysing quality of Cousin Alexander’s peroration having apparently passed over his head. ‘What purpose could he possibly have had in wandering about like that?’
Just for a moment the great man seemed to have been taken off his balance. He was evidently not used to interruptions, for his eye wavered and when he spoke again there was a reproving quality in the beautiful voice which had very little to do with art.
‘If you will have patience,’ he said, ‘I will tell you. Mike is a young man, and he committed a crime which, although reprehensible, is one of those misfortunes which overtake young men in spite of themselves. He fell in love with another man’s wife. But he did not tell her so. He stood by and saw her neglected and tyrannized over by a man who did not realize her worth. From beginning to end their association was innocent. It does not follow that because of this restraint his passion was any the less real. An evening came when he knew the woman he loved was going to have a long interview with the man to whom she was bound by every legal and moral tie which our civilization has devised. Imagine him –’
The sonorous voice took on a hushed quality that Mr Campion, who felt he was listening to the truth in dramatized form, found a little shocking.
‘Imagine him sitting at his desk early in the evening of that cold January day. He was due to attend some literary function where a great deal of rubbish, some of it witty, some of it not, would be bandied
from mouth to mouth, while in the very house in which he lived, in the very room two floors above that in which he slept, the woman whose being was the very core of his existence was talking to the man against whom she was completely defenceless, the man to whom the law gave every conceivable right in her, the man from whom she could not escape and from whom he dared not protect her.
‘Do you see him there?’ he went on, fixing Campion with a steely blue eye strangely reminiscent of the portrait in the waiting-room. And then, in an even quieter voice: ‘I do. He cannot work, he does not want to go to the witty gathering whose chatter cannot save him from himself, nor can he go to his own home because he knows that in the room upstairs she is talking to his rival, her husband.
‘What more natural for him, then’ – the voice became musical as its rich tones played over the euphonious words – ‘than to feel he must get away? Even his car is denied him: the fog is too thick. So he walks. He takes refuge in the time-honoured escape which men of every age and every generation have used to soothe their troubled spirits.
‘He walks through London, through the crowds, thinking of her, trying to reason with himself, no doubt: trying to wrest himself from the cloying embraces of the pitiless emotion which consumes him.’
John attempted to rise to his feet at this juncture, but was subdued by the famous eye.
‘The little shop in Bayswater,’ said Cousin Alexander. ‘A second-hand jewellery store. A little place of curios, sentimental trifles scarcely of any value. He went there to buy her something, so engrossed in his thoughts that he forgot the day, forgot that it was a Thursday afternoon upon which the keeper of the shop took his holiday and closed the shutters over the little trinkets, bidding lovers and their ladies wait until the morrow.’
He paused, evidently feeling that he was navigating a dangerous stretch, and his keen eyes appraised their discomfort.
‘He turned back. He walked on through the wet, cold streets. He did not notice they were wet, he did not notice they were cold; he was thinking of her, he was thinking of the woman. When he reached his home he had still come no nearer his goal, he had still not thrashed out his problem. It remained as large, as terrifying, as piteous, as wearying as ever before. He still felt the need of escape.’
Flowers For the Judge Page 14
