The Paying Guests(159)
It was too late. The pews were filling up, with reporters, with officials – she noticed Inspector Kemp, looking more than ever as if he belonged behind the desk of a bank as he added notes with a fountain pen to a folder of type-written papers. A moment later the doors were opened to the public and in came two or three dozen people, all with the same look on their faces: the repellent triumph of shoppers bagging the best of the bargains in the January sales. A woman of fifty-five or so plonked herself down next to Frances. She blew out her cheeks, rolled her eyes, undid the top two buttons of her tartan coat and flapped the lapel back and forth. It was always a squeeze when it was a murder, wasn’t it! Had Frances come far? She herself had come all the way from Paddington. She generally came to the courts with a friend – that made it easier to keep places – but today her friend had the neuralgia, so she had come along on her own. It was worth it, though. She hadn’t wanted to miss this one; she’d been following it in the papers. Oh, her friend would be sick when she heard how well she’d got on!
Her gaze was darting about the courtroom as she spoke; now, leech-like, it fastened on Lilian. ‘There’s the widow, of course. Doesn’t look quite so handsome as she does in her pictures, does she? No, she’s quite a disappointment. The ladies beside her – that’s the mother, I believe, and a sister. I don’t know who the gentleman is… Oh, now, who’s this?’ She had turned her head as the courtroom doors swung open to admit three newcomers.
They were Leonard’s father and Uncle Ted, with the older brother, Douglas. They came in with a self-conscious air, and were shown to a place by a court official. ‘Here, do you mean?’ Frances heard Douglas ask, through a lull in the general hubbub; and at the sound of his voice, once again, a chill came over her: it was so very like Leonard’s.
Automatically, she looked at Lilian. She too was watching the Barbers find their seats. This must have been the first time since the funeral that the two families had met. For a minute Frances saw them all eyeing each other across the room, Vera with a face like thunder, Mrs Viney and Lloyd with their colour high, but Lilian simply looking embarrassed and unhappy. Then the three Barber men spoke quietly together, and Leonard’s father got to his feet and made his way around the crowded pews, baring his sandy head as he went. He and Lilian murmured and nodded; finally she put out her gloved hand to him. He took it and held it, and they murmured again.
On his way back to his seat he had to pause for a moment to let Constable Hardy lead in a new arrival. This was a sad little wisp of a woman in a limp brown coat and hat. She looked around with a bewildered air as she headed to the place pointed out to her, then lifted her face to Mr Barber in dazed apology as he went by. A change had come over him, however: his cheeks were suddenly blazing. He returned to his brother and his son, appeared to mutter something to them; they turned to study the woman, in a conspicuous sort of way. People all around the room were also gazing keenly at her. Frances’s neighbour in tartan was staring at her as she might have stared at a monkey in a cage. Finally, noticing Frances’s blank expression, she said, ‘But you know who that is, don’t you? That’s Mrs Ward, the mother of the boy who’s up for the murder!’
Frances looked again at the cowed little woman; then dropped her eyes in shame.
And then the magistrate came in, and they all had to clamber to their feet. People settled down again with the throat-clearings, the rustles and readjustments, of an expectant theatre crowd. His own manner, as he ran through the preliminaries, was unexcited – for, of course, thought Frances in wonder, this was simply the beginning of a long day of business for him. He would see case after case, crime after crime, between now and tea-time… Still, murder was murder, and even he looked interested as the usher summoned the accused. As for the crowd – the room grew stiller. There was a sudden extra hush, like a drop in temperature. A door at the side of the court was opened. Sergeant Heath brought in the boy, Spencer Ward, and escorted him to the dock.
Frances’s immediate feeling was one of plunging disappointment. What exactly had she been expecting? The boy was slight and quite unmemorable, at least as far as appearances went. He had ordinary darkish hair, parted and flattened with ordinary pomade. He wore an ordinary ready-made blue suit, with a young man’s tie, ordinarily garish. His face was lean, with prominent cheekbones; his jaw was narrow and overcrowded – a little like Leonard’s jaw, in fact, though, unlike Leonard’s, his chin was weak, and overall he had none of Leonard’s bounce, Leonard’s gingery vitality. Instead he slouched his way across the room at Sergeant Heath’s elbow, then climbed the two or three steps to the dock with an air – she could hardly believe it – of smirking nonchalance. He seemed to be chewing gum. Did he look for his mother at all? Frances didn’t think so. Rather, recognising some friends on the public benches, he leaned over the rail of the enclosure to call a question to them, and then to query the answer with a curled upper lip, displaying a mouthful of awful teeth.
Sergeant Heath caught hold of his elbow and yanked him upright – that set him off smirking again. He kept the smirk in place while the clerk asked him to confirm that he was William Spencer Ward, of Victory Buildings, Tower Bridge Road; and when he answered, he did it with a snigger. The naming of the crime with which he was charged produced no response from him at all. Frances had expected him to protest his innocence; all he did was change his pose, shifting his weight from one foot to another and putting his hands in his trouser pockets, chewing more vigorously on his gum. His neck was a child’s neck, she saw then, thin, white, unmuscular. Beneath the padding in the shoulders of his jacket she could make out the lines of his shoulder-blades, sharp as two narrow plates of metal.