Most Loving Mere Folly

by Ellis Peters

  Throughout the morning, Suspiria had not once looked at Dennis. He had sat through it all with his hands clenched and stiff with tension, his eyes unwavering upon her face, waiting for the instant of acknowledgment, and she had not granted it. Now turning in the dock to go down the stairs, the wardress’s hand at her elbow, she suddenly lifted her head, and looked at him full, and it seemed to him that within the pallor of her cheeks there was burning a steady and fierce flame of anger and defiance, that every particle of fear and doubt had been fed into that flame and consumed. There was no tenderness in the look she gave him, only a white resolution and fury, intelligent, roused and implacable. It warned him that a like dedicated rage was demanded of him, if she was to live. It conveyed, too, that she had already taken the hint that the precise date of Theo’s enlightenment was bound to come out, and that she meant it should come from her, and that he must bear her out. A lie less for you to tell, her eyes said to him, almost with pity, almost with disdain, as she turned and went alertly, angrily away out of his sight. He wondered that no one else had intercepted and understood the message, but they looked back at her curiously, and seemed to have learned nothing. Only he spoke the language.

  5

  The presentation of the case for the prosecution took two and a half days in all, and throughout that time the prisoner kept her intent eyes fixed upon the faces of her enemies, and her hand alert upon pencil and paper, and burned every hour more transparently away into a rage for life. The little Judge, shrunken and bitter as an ancient, shrivelled hazelnut, watched her without pity or aversion, but with an intelligence as fevered and tragic as her own interest in the police witnesses. It might have been his life, as well as hers, that rose and fell sickeningly upon the tide of feeling in the court, hesitant whether to sink or swim.

  And what was there in all that torrent of words, when all was said and done? Not very much more than she had known from the first. Everything was in the medical evidence and the police evidence, and the few witnesses who had been dredged meagrely out of Theo’s last visit to London served only to weaken and diffuse the hard, compact glitter of condemnation Sergeant Grayne had managed to focus upon the reported facts of the case. It was strange how much more damaging the sergeant was than his superior. His soft, sympathetic voice, his uncharacteristic preference for simple and direct words, gave him a terrible force of conviction, and his gentle and generous eagerness to concede every point in Suspiria’s favour, and the discouraged sadness with which he described her willing co-operation, made cross-examination curiously feeble and ineffective. His manner of offering his admiration for her to full view made plain, at the same time, the measure of his regret that he nevertheless could not believe her anything but guilty. Trying to elicit points in Suspiria’s favour from him was like pushing hard at an unfastened door, and falling flat on one’s face over the threshold. They did better with Inspector Tarrant, in whose adamant professional manner it was easier to claw perceptible scars, and from whose stony assurance useful sparks could be struck.

  The medical and expert witnesses, happy in having a relatively simple kind of truth to defend, maintained their opinions under attack, but granted without distress the possibility of a number of explanations fitting the same set of facts. No, Theo Freeland certainly had not left the studio to help himself to poison from the workshop that night. Yes, granted the idea of suicide had already entered his head, he could have helped himself, in readiness for just such a moment of despair, on almost innumerable previous occasions. He could have had the stuff in his pockets all the time. It was not their job to assess the relative probability of such a theory, but it was certainly possible. Granted it seemed unlikely that he should carry his death about with him, granted it strained belief a little further that he should thereupon dispose of every indication that he had done so, apart from his own contorted body, still the possibility remained obstinately possible. As often as it was obscured again by the circumstantial evidence, up sprang Sir Howard Fallon’s tireless junior to unveil it again, to keep it for ever in mind. It was almost his only ewe lamb, and he did not mean to let it be side-tracked into the wilderness.

  Nevertheless, the prosecution case stood squarely upon the solid ground of probability, and would not be shaken. Three weeks of arduous search for useful witnesses had hardly added anything to the structure. He had drunk himself as near as he could get to forgetfulness on that last visit to London with several people, some old friends, some strangers, but had opened his mind to only two. Both were produced in court. The first was a total stranger to Suspiria, a middle-aged clerk torn between fright and elation, who had merely shared a half-hour of sodden confidences with Theo just before closing-time, and testified that the fellow had said his marriage had broken up on him after ten years, and his wife had told him outright she was in love with somebody else, and never likely to change her mind about it.

  From this witness there were no details of the time and place of the actual revelation, only a fairly shrewd observance concerning the state of mind of the victim. Did he seem to feel that his case was hopeless, and his life virtually ended? Well, he carried on as if he thought so, but all the time he really gave the impression that he didn’t believe in it. He was cut up about it, all right, but in his heart he thought it would blow over, if he sat tight and held his breath. Like a kid with a nightmare, not too deep asleep, cleverly telling himself with the conscious bit of his mind: ‘It can’t really get you! You’re only dreaming it!’

  The second drinking-companion was an old friend, somewhat slipped out of their confidences since the war, but still a constant factor in their visits to London. He painted, desultorily but well, in an attic studio in Chelsea, and Theo had spent his single night in London, on this occasion, on his sofa, and poured out to him, with increasing coherence as the night wore on and the coffee grew blacker, the story of Suspiria’s love affair. To this man it could be told, because he knew her, and was in a position to be just to them both. Only one detail seemed to have been omitted; there was no mention of the opening of the living-room door that night, and the two linked bodies starting apart as the latch relaxed softly into place. ‘She came down in the night, and told me – she said they’d been lovers for two months—’ Not: ‘I found them—’

  His host was a close friend, but only Theo’s own skin, it seemed, had been close enough to be trusted with that one shattering moment. So now she knew exactly how much truth she had to tell, and the readjustment was not quite as terrible as it might have been.

  Sir Howard Fallon, no doubt, expected her to avoid his eyes when he asked her about it that night. Instead, she gazed at him thoughtfully as she admitted the inaccuracy of this part of the story she had told him. There was even a slight, satirical smile on her lips, though no reflection of it touched his.

  ‘Theo’s report was perfectly accurate. The talk I had with him took place on the night of Wednesday, January 28th – or rather – let’s be exact – in the small hours of the next morning. Malcolm seems to have got it the very next night, just as it happened. I suppose I’m lucky that it came out as it did, and not after we’d made some reference to the circumstances ourselves.’

  He was watching her with a bleak and austere face, and for a moment he was silent. Then he said: ‘I advise you to be very careful. Such a slip as that could make a very bad impression indeed – not only on the jury, either. Can you imagine that it makes things easier for me, to know that my client lies to me?’

  ‘It can hardly make any impression on your faith in me,’ said Suspiria, raising her hollow, exhausted eyes, ‘for I know you have none. I’m perfectly well aware that you believe I killed Theo. I’m not so ingenuous as to suppose that it incommodes you at all, nor so disinterested as to feel obliged to fall out with you about it. I don’t care what you believe, provided you’re effective. Besides, it can hardly surprise or shock you to find a client lying to you. You’re not that kind of hypocrite. You must know that very few people for whom you’ve acte
d have ever told you the whole truth.’

  ‘It is commonly felt,’ he said, not without the shadow of irony, though his face remained grave, ‘that only the guilty lie in court.’

  ‘That’s hardly good enough for you, is it? Obviously the innocent lie just as desperately, and almost as often,’ she said, pushing the disarranged plumes of her hair back from the broad, tired, boyish brow.

  ‘Do they? Why do you think so?’ It was a very soft and thoughtful question, as though he really wished to learn from her.

  ‘Because, though your system of law may be the best in the world – I don’t say it isn’t – there are very few people with a sufficiently childlike trust in it to suppose that what it produces is invariably justice. Placing yourself upon your country is all very well on paper, but wait until you have to try it yourself. You’ll find you have some reserves, too, and are trying to keep one of the strings of your life in your own hands. If there weren’t some serious points against me, I shouldn’t be here, and if I didn’t look carefully round in every direction to see if I couldn’t suppress some of them, I shouldn’t be human. You are, no doubt, as good an advocate as I could have, but you’re not the Archangel Gabriel yet – and I’m reasonably sure that little elderly monkey isn’t quite as infallible as God, either.’

  She waited for him to tell her, with a straight face, that nevertheless she must here and now dispose of any other lies she might have told him, and promise to tell him no more from this moment. She watched his face, and its gravity remained constant and severe; but he was not as obvious as she had suspected. All he said was: ‘Well, we’ll have to make the best we can of it. It won’t look so good as if you’d told him about the affair some weeks earlier, of course. Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know if you’ll be able to believe me this time, but this time you can. It really didn’t occur to me, until Dennis pointed it out, that it was any of Theo’s business. That night he told me exactly how it was worrying him. He wanted us to have it out with Theo, and tell him the whole truth. It offended him that we weren’t being honest about it.’ A faint smile, blind and tender, made all the tired lines of her face tremulous for a moment. ‘Until then I hadn’t realised that we weren’t, but I saw his point.’

  ‘And why hadn’t he spoken before? There’d been plenty of time.’

  ‘That, again, is something that might easily not be believed. He thought at first that he’d merely been taken out of liking and pity. He thought it couldn’t last, that in a very few weeks he’d be getting his dismissal, and I’d be going back to Theo. That being what he expected to happen, he thought it the opposite of honest to let any part of our little affair come to Theo’s ears, to sour the future for him without any real cause. By the time he was convinced that the affair was not so little as he’d supposed, he’d kept it quiet so long that he didn’t know quite how to bring it into the open. So he told me. And I talked to Theo. Much good it did any of us! Will the jury believe all that, do you think?’

  ‘I believe it,’ he said, without any change of tone, ‘and I know you can lie.’ And in a moment he added thoughtfully: ‘By the time I’ve known you a little longer, it will be quite useless for you to tell me any lies at all.’

  ‘By the time you’ve known me a little longer,’ she said, with her angry smile, ‘I shall either be free, or dead. In either case, no longer obliged to account for myself to you.’

  ‘And you won’t, I imagine, ever want to see me again?’

  ‘I might have,’ she said wearily, ‘if we’d met in other circumstances. As it is – no, I shan’t want to see you again. Even if I owe you my life,’ she said, ‘I’m never going to be able to be grateful to you or anyone for giving back to me a damaged version of something that was mine by right.’

  He made no complaint of her. She thought afterwards that something in this conversation had reacted perversely against his disbelief in her, for from then on she could no longer be sure what he thought of her.

  In the afternoon of the third day he opened the defence with a clear and unemotional speech, going over the points of the case briefly, and showing that the known facts were not in dispute upon either side.

  ‘The prosecution has produced for you the story of Mrs. Freeland’s liaison with Dennis Forbes in the manner of a conjurer producing a rabbit from a hat. But the curious thing about the whole proceeding, the thing which makes this line of attack seem quite frankly a dishonest one, is that this rabbit was perfectly tame, and well-known to every permanent resident of Great Leddington. The visits of Dennis Forbes to Little Worth were frequent, open, and a subject of scandal in a good part of the town for weeks before the tragedy of Theodore Freeland’s death. It cannot be said that either of the pair took any steps to cover their tracks. They were lovers, and known to be lovers. What is now offered to you as a motive for murder – the desire to eliminate an obstacle to their love – becomes nonsense when you consider the fact that for nearly two months their love had known no obstacle at all, nor acknowledged the possibility of any. Admittedly Freeland himself was one of the last to learn the truth about what was going on, but when he did learn it, it was from his wife’s lips. Why, then, should she want to kill him? Obviously she had no fear of him, obviously she had no intention whatever of letting him determine her future course of action. How, then, was he an obstacle? With lovers of a different kind you might be justified in supposing that they wished to eliminate him in order to be free to marry, and so regain – perhaps they might be ingenuous enough to say, rather, to retain – their respectability. But when you have heard the evidence of their proceedings, heard what the neighbours knew about them, and what the neighbours thought, and how much attention these singularly brave or singularly brazen lovers paid to public opinion – then I shall ask you with confidence to consider how much respectability meant to these two. Kill for it? You may find yourselves wondering whether they would so much as cross the road for it!

  ‘Beware of accepting a conventional motive as credible in dealing with a woman to whom the conventions meant nothing! She had already thrown her good name, as we normally understand it, her reputation and his, and all the established course of her life, clean away for the love of a young man. But do not suppose that these things necessarily meant to her as much as they mean to you. What mattered to this woman was her art, and her single and responsible governance of her own life – and, after he appeared, her love for this young man. Her art she could carry with her any time she cared to walk out of her husband’s house and her husband’s life. It went wherever her body and her brain went, and she could not be asked to give it up. Her sense of her own integrity demanded that she should make her own decisions, by no standards but her own. This, also, was very portable luggage. Her love asserted its pre-eminence in her life, and dictated precisely one course – that she should accept it for what it was, and re-orientate her life to its acceptance. You will hear that she elected to do so, without any hesitation. What you have been asked, in fact, to regard as a lunatic infatuation, emerges on examination as one of the most deliberate, responsible and candid acts of free-will you are ever likely to meet, in a world where many of us allow all our actions to be dictated by the fixed patterns of society.’

  Some of his phrases were headlined that night. He spent rather more time upon opening careful holes in all the prosecution’s assumptions. Too much importance, for instance, had been attached to the emptiness of the stage. How dared they assume that because they had found no one else in the house, and no traces, therefore no one had been there, no one else existed in the case? He would bring witnesses to testify that the door of this most casual and most isolated house was almost never locked. Any casual tramp, any private enemy, could walk in as he pleased. How, then, could it be taken for granted that Mrs. Freeland was alone in the house with her husband throughout the night? Much had been made of the footprints which proved that Freeland had not left his studio for several hours before his death – or, at least, that his shoes h
ad not. How could it be argued from this that he had not taken the antimony from the workshop himself, when it was known and admitted that he had been drunk, depressed, and pouring out the story of his loss a full week previously, and throughout that week had had every opportunity of helping himself to this particular means of ending his life? There were, said Sir Howard, many holes as large as these to be found, in the evidence on which they were being asked to convict a woman of murder. He mapped them all; but what the headlines wanted and took from his speech were the knife-edged phrases about ‘singularly brave or singularly brazen lovers’, ‘lovers and known to be lovers’.

  The legend was growing by then, and grew still more rapidly after Sir Howard had allowed his junior to guide his few casual witnesses through their paces, and had arrived at the point of putting Dennis into the witness-box. Suspiria was being saved for last, but here at least was the other partner in the scandalous romance. They crowded and craned to hear him, and ripples of excitement and gratification passed almost soundlessly through their ranks. He took the oath with the clear, fastidious attention of one about to break it the next moment. He looked once at Suspiria, and then fixed his grey eyes upon his mentor, and moistened his dry lips nervously, like a small boy facing an examination.

  Suspiria saw that gesture, and a small tight spot of fear below her heart began to ache for him, because it was the only childish thing left about him. He looked taller than she had ever thought him, and older by the few decisive years which turn a grown-up boy into a man. He had lost flesh in the last weeks; how was it she had never noticed it before? His face had gained in clarity and form, and the young, vulnerable mouth, once firmly shut after that nervous caress of his tongue, had acquired a new length and stillness, and drawn out its soft lines to a tension of resolution. He would never look so defenceless again; but it needed only the one glimpse he had given her of his eyes to show her how he was suffering.