There was one interruption during the reading of the minutes. Wesby Hythe, who was an invalid, complained that a typewriter in the next room was getting on his nerves. Maling blushed and went out: I think he must have swallowed a tablet because the typewriter stopped. Hythe was impatient. ‘Hurry up,’ he said, ‘hurry up. We haven’t all night.’ But that was exactly what they had.
After the minutes had been read Sir Joshua began explaining elaborately in a Yorkshire accent that their motives were entirely patriotic: they hadn’t any intention of evading tax: they just wanted to contribute to the war effort, drive, economy . . . He said, ‘The proof of the pudden’ . . .’ and at that moment the air-raid sirens started. As I have said a mass attack was expected: it wasn’t the time for delay: a dead man couldn’t evade income tax. The directors gathered up their papers and bolted for the basement.
All except Maling. You see, he knew the truth. I think it had been the reference to pudding which had roused the sleeping animal. Of course he should have confessed, but think for a moment: would you have had the courage, after watching those elderly men with white slips to their waistcoats pelt with a horrifying lack of dignity to safety? I know I should have done exactly what Maling did, have followed Sir Joshua down to the basement in the desperate hope that for once the stomach would do the right thing and make amends. But it didn’t. The joint boards of Simcox and Hythe stayed in the basement for twelve hours, and Maling stayed with them, saying nothing. You see, for some unaccountable reason of taste, poor Maling’s stomach had picked up the note of the Warning only too effectively, but it had somehow never taken to the All Clear.
1940
THE CASE FOR THE DEFENCE
IT was the strangest murder trial I ever attended. They named it the Peckham murder in the headlines, though Northwood Street, where the old woman was found battered to death, was not strictly speaking in Peckham. This was not one of those cases of circumstantial evidence in which you feel the jurymen’s anxiety – because mistakes have been made – like domes of silence muting the court. No, this murderer was all but found with the body; no one present when the Crown counsel outlined his case believed that the man in the dock stood any chance at all.
He was a heavy stout man with bulging bloodshot eyes. All his muscles seemed to be in his thighs. Yes, an ugly customer, one you wouldn’t forget in a hurry – and that was an important point because the Crown proposed to call four witnesses who hadn’t forgotten him, who had seen him hurrying away from the little red villa in Northwood Street. The clock had just struck two in the morning.
Mrs Salmon in 15 Northwood Street had been unable to sleep; she heard a door click shut and thought it was her own gate. So she went to the window and saw Adams (that was his name) on the steps of Mrs Parker’s house. He had just come out and he was wearing gloves. He had a hammer in his hand and she saw him drop it into the laurel bushes by the front gate. But before he moved away, he had looked up – at her window. The fatal instinct that tells a man when he is watched exposed him in the light of a street-lamp to her gaze – his eyes suffused with horrifying and brutal fear, like an animal’s when you raise a whip. I talked afterwards to Mrs Salmon, who naturally after the astonishing verdict went in fear herself. As I imagine did all the witnesses – Henry MacDougall, who had been driving home from Benfleet late and nearly ran Adams down at the corner of Northwood Street. Adams was walking in the middle of the road looking dazed. And old Mr Wheeler, who lived next door to Mrs Parker, at No. 12, and was wakened by a noise – like a chair falling – through the thin-as-paper villa wall, and got up and looked out of the window, just as Mrs Salmon had done, saw Adams’s back and, as he turned, those bulging eyes. In Laurel Avenue he had been seen by yet another witness – his luck was badly out; he might as well have committed the crime in broad daylight.
‘I understand,’ counsel said, ‘that the defence proposes to plead mistaken identity. Adams’s wife will tell you that he was with her at two in the morning on February 14, but after you have heard the witnesses for the Crown and examined carefully the features of the prisoner, I do not think you will be prepared to admit the possibility of a mistake.’
It was all over, you would have said, but the hanging.
After the formal evidence had been given by the policeman who had found the body and the surgeon who examined it, Mrs Salmon was called. She was the ideal witness, with her slight Scotch accent and her expression of honesty, care and kindness.
The counsel for the Crown brought the story gently out. She spoke very firmly. There was no malice in her, and no sense of importance at standing there in the Central Criminal Court with a judge in scarlet hanging on her words and the reporters writing them down. Yes, she said, and then she had gone downstairs and rung up the police station.
‘And do you see the man here in court?’
She looked straight at the big man in the dock, who stared hard at her with his pekingese eyes without emotion.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there he is.’
‘You are quite certain?’
She said simply, ‘I couldn’t be mistaken, sir.’
It was all as easy as that.
‘Thank you, Mrs Salmon.’
Counsel for the defence rose to cross-examine. If you had reported as many murder trials as I have, you would have known beforehand what line he would take. And I was right, up to a point.
‘Now, Mrs Salmon, you must remember that a man’s life may depend on your evidence.’
‘I do remember it, sir.’
‘Is your eyesight good?’
‘I have never had to wear spectacles, sir.’
‘You are a woman of fifty-five?’
‘Fifty-six, sir.’
‘And the man you saw was on the other side of the road?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And it was two o’clock in the morning. You must have remarkable eyes, Mrs Salmon?’
‘No, sir. There was moonlight, and when the man looked up, he had the lamplight on his face.’
‘And you have no doubt whatever that the man you saw is the prisoner?’
I couldn’t make out what he was at. He couldn’t have expected any other answer than the one he got.
‘None whatever, sir. It isn’t a face one forgets.’
Counsel took a look round the court for a moment. Then he said, ‘Do you mind, Mrs Salmon, examining again the people in court? No, not the prisoner. Stand up, please, Mr Adams,’ and there at the back of the court with thick stout body and muscular legs and a pair of bulging eyes, was the exact image of the man in the dock. He was even dressed the same – tight blue suit and striped tie.
‘Now think very carefully, Mrs Salmon. Can you still swear that the man you saw drop the hammer in Mrs Parker’s garden was the prisoner – and not this man, who is his twin brother?’
Of course she couldn’t. She looked from one to the other and didn’t say a word.
There the big brute sat in the dock with his legs crossed, and there he stood too at the back of the court and they both stared at Mrs Salmon. She shook her head.
What we saw then was the end of the case. There wasn’t a witness prepared to swear that it was the prisoner he’d seen. And the brother? He had his alibi, too; he was with his wife.
And so the man was acquitted for lack of evidence. But whether – if he did the murder and not his brother – he was punished or not, I don’t know. That extraordinary day had an extraordinary end. I followed Mrs Salmon out of court and we got wedged in the crowd who were waiting, of course, for the twins. The police tried to drive the crowd away, but all they could do was keep the road-way clear for traffic. I learned later that they tried to get the twins to leave by a back way, but they wouldn’t. One of them – no one knew which – said, ‘I’ve been acquitted, haven’t I?’ and they walked bang out of the front entrance. Then it happened. I don’t know how, though I was only six feet away. The crowd moved and somehow one of the twins got pushed on to the road right in front of a b
us.
He gave a squeal like a rabbit and that was all; he was dead, his skull smashed just as Mrs Parker’s had been. Divine vengeance? I wish I knew. There was the other Adams getting on his feet from beside the body and looking straight over at Mrs Salmon. He was crying, but whether he was the murderer or the innocent man nobody will ever be able to tell. But if you were Mrs Salmon, could you sleep at night?
1939
A LITTLE PLACE OFF THE EDGWARE ROAD
CRAVEN came up past the Achilles statue in the thin summer rain. It was only just after lighting-up time, but already the cars were lined up all the way to the Marble Arch, and the sharp acquisitive faces peered out ready for a good time with anything possible which came along. Craven went bitterly by with the collar of his mackintosh tight round his throat: it was one of his bad days.
All the way up the Park he was reminded of passion, but you needed money for love. All that a poor man could get was lust. Love needed a good suit, a car, a flat somewhere, or a good hotel. It needed to be wrapped in cellophane. He was aware all the time of the stringy tie beneath the mackintosh, and the frayed sleeves: he carried his body about with him like something he hated. (There were moments of happiness in the British Museum reading-room, but the body called him back.) He bore, as his only sentiment, the memory of ugly deeds committed on park chairs. People talked as if the body died too soon – that wasn’t the trouble, to Craven, at all. The body kept alive – and through the glittering tinselly rain, on his way to a rostrum, he passed a little man in a black suit carrying a banner, ‘The Body shall rise again.’ He remembered a dream from which three times he had woken trembling: he had been alone in the huge dark cavernous burying ground of all the world. Every grave was connected to another under the ground: the globe was honeycombed for the sake of the dead, and on each occasion of dreaming he had discovered anew the horrifying fact that the body doesn’t decay. There are no worms and dissolution. Under the ground the world was littered with masses of dead flesh ready to rise again with their warts and boils and eruptions. He had lain in bed and remembered – as ‘tidings of great joy’ – that the body after all was corrupt.
He came up into the Edgware Road walking fast – the Guardsmen were out in couples, great languid elongated beasts – the bodies like worms in their tight trousers. He hated them, and hated his hatred because he knew what it was, envy. He was aware that every one of them had a better body than himself: indigestion creased his stomach: he felt sure that his breath was foul – but who could he ask? Sometimes he secretly touched himself here and there with scent: it was one of his ugliest secrets. Why should he be asked to believe in the resurrection of this body he wanted to forget? Sometimes he prayed at night (a hint of religious belief was lodged in his breast like a worm in a nut) that his body at any rate should never rise again.
He knew all the side streets round the Edgware Road only too well: when a mood was on, he simply walked until he tired, squinting at his own image in the windows of Salmon & Gluckstein and the A.B.C.s. So he noticed at once the posters outside the disused theatre in Culpar Road. They were not unusual, for sometimes Barclays Bank Dramatic Society would hire the place for an evening – or an obscure film would be trade-shown there. The theatre had been built in 1920 by an optimist who thought the cheapness of the site would more than counter-balance its disadvantage of lying a mile outside the conventional theatre zone. But no play had ever succeeded, and it was soon left to gather rat-holes and spider-webs. The covering of the seats was never renewed, and all that ever happened to the place was the temporary false life of an amateur play or a trade show.
Craven stopped and read – there were still optimists it appeared, even in 1939, for nobody but the blindest optimist could hope to make money out of the place as ‘The Home of the Silent Film’. The first season of ‘primitives’ was announced (a high-brow phrase): there would never be a second. Well, the seats were cheap, and it was perhaps worth a shilling to him, now that he was tired, to get in somewhere out of the rain. Craven bought a ticket and went in to the darkness of the stalls.
In the dead darkness a piano tinkled something monotonous recalling Mendelssohn: he sat down in a gangway seat, and could immediately feel the emptiness all round him. No, there would never be another season. On the screen a large woman in a kind of toga wrung her hands, then wobbled with curious jerky movements towards a couch. There she sat and stared out like a sheep-dog distractedly through her loose and black and stringy hair. Sometimes she seemed to dissolve altogether into dots and flashes and wiggly lines. A sub-title said, ‘Pompilia betrayed by her beloved Augustus seeks an end to her troubles.’
Craven began at last to see – a dim waste of stalls. There were not twenty people in the place – a few couples whispering with their heads touching, and a number of lonely men like himself, wearing the same uniform of the cheap mackintosh. They lay about at intervals like corpses – and again Craven’s obsession returned: the tooth-ache of horror. He thought miserably – I am going mad: other people don’t feel like this. Even a disused theatre reminded him of those interminable caverns where the bodies were waiting for resurrection.
‘A slave to his passion Augustus calls for yet more wine.’
A gross middle-aged Teutonic actor lay on an elbow with his arm round a large woman in a shift. The Spring Song tinkled ineptly on, and the screen flickered like indigestion. Somebody felt his way through the darkness, scrabbling past Craven’s knees – a small man: Craven experienced the unpleasant feeling of a large beard brushing his mouth. Then there was a long sigh as the newcomer found the next chair, and on the screen events had moved with such rapidity that Pompilia had already stabbed herself – or so Craven supposed – and lay still and buxom among her weeping slaves.
A low breathless voice sighed out close to Craven’s ear, ‘What’s happened? Is she asleep?’
‘No. Dead.’
‘Murdered?’ the voice asked with a keen interest.
‘I don’t think so. Stabbed herself.’
Nobody said ‘Hush’: nobody was enough interested to object to a voice. They drooped among the empty chairs in attitudes of weary inattention.
The film wasn’t nearly over yet: there were children somehow to be considered: was it all going on to a second generation? But the small bearded man in the next seat seemed to be interested only in Pompilia’s death. The fact that he had come in at that moment apparently fascinated him. Craven heard the word ‘coincidence’ twice, and he went on talking to himself about it in low out-of-breath tones. ‘Absurd when you come to think of it,’ and then ‘no blood at all’. Craven didn’t listen: he sat with his hands clasped between his knees, facing the fact as he had faced it so often before, that he was in danger of going mad. He had to pull himself up, take a holiday, see a doctor (God knew what infection moved in his veins). He became aware that his bearded neighbour had addressed him directly. ‘What?’ he asked impatiently, ‘what did you say?’
‘There would be more blood than you can imagine.’
‘What are you talking about?’
When the man spoke to him, he sprayed him with damp breath. There was a little bubble in his speech like an impediment. He said, ‘When you murder a man . . .’
‘This was a woman,’ Craven said impatiently.
‘That wouldn’t make any difference.’
‘And it’s got nothing to do with murder anyway.’
‘That doesn’t signify.’ They seemed to have got into an absurd and meaningless wrangle in the dark.
‘I know, you see,’ the little bearded man said in a tone of enormous conceit.
‘Know what?’
‘About such things,’ he said with guarded ambiguity.
Craven turned and tried to see him clearly. Was he mad? Was this a warning of what he might become – babbling incomprehensibly to strangers in cinemas? He thought, By God, no, trying to see: I’ll be sane yet. I will be sane. He could make out nothing but a small black hump of body. The man was talking t
o himself again. He said, ‘Talk. Such talk. They’ll say it was all for fifty pounds. But that’s a lie. Reasons and reasons. They always take the first reason. Never look behind. Thirty years of reasons. Such simpletons,’ he added again in that tone of breathlessness and unbounded conceit. So this was madness. So long as he could realize that, he must be sane himself – relatively speaking. Not so sane perhaps as the seekers in the park or the Guardsmen in the Edgware Road, but saner than this. It was like a message of encouragement as the piano tinkled on.
Then again the little man turned and sprayed him. ‘Killed herself, you say? But who’s to know that? It’s not a mere question of what hand holds the knife.’ He laid a hand suddenly and confidingly on Craven’s: it was damp and sticky: Craven said with horror as a possible meaning came to him, ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I know,’ the little man said. ‘A man in my position gets to know almost everything.’
‘What is your position?’ Craven asked, feeling the sticky hand on his, trying to make up his mind whether he was being hysterical or not – after all, there were a dozen explanations – it might be treacle.
‘A pretty desperate one you’d say.’ Sometimes the voice almost died in the throat altogether. Something incomprehensible had happened on the screen – take your eyes from these early pictures for a moment and the plot had proceeded on at such a pace . . . Only the actors moved slowly and jerkily. A young woman in a night-dress seemed to be weeping in the arms of a Roman centurion: Craven hadn’t seen either of them before. ‘I am not afraid of death, Lucius – in your arms.’
Twenty-One Stories Page 8
