The Paying Guests(161)

‘“Following this incident I continued to see Mrs King, but less frequently than before. Mr Barber, however, continued to see Miss Grey regularly. On several occasions I was aware that he had represented to his wife that he had made an arrangement to spend an evening with me, when in fact he had arranged to meet Miss Grey, and I know for a fact that the two of them remained on intimate terms. By ‘intimate terms’ I mean that those relations were taking place between them which normally occur between a husband and a wife. I know it because Mr Barber sometimes met Miss Grey privately at my rooms at Tulse Hill, where he left particular traces behind him. I remained uneasy about this, because of the warning given to Mr Barber by Mr Ward. I considered Mr Ward to be a dangerous man.”’

Another sip of water and a clearing of the throat, another page turned; and the tortuous mincing language ran on.

‘“Friday the fifteenth of September this year was one of those evenings which Mr Barber had arranged to spend in the company of Miss Grey, having previously told Mrs Barber that he would be spending it with me. I myself did not see Mr Barber at all that evening, but passed it with Mrs King at the Empress Picture Theatre, Islington. The following day I received a visit at my home from Police Sergeant Heath of P Division, informing me of Mr Barber’s death, and enquiring as to my whereabouts the previous night. I immediately suspected that Mr Barber had been killed by Mr Ward. I did not mention my suspicions to the police because I feared that my own activities with Mrs King would be brought to light, and that her husband would hear of it. I also feared the effect that such a disclosure would have on my fiancée Miss Nixon, on Mr Barber’s wife and on Miss Grey. I knowingly made a false statement to the police in which I said that Mr Barber and I had spent the evening together at public houses in the City, and that I had last seen him at the Blackfriars tram-stop at ten p.m. In the days which followed I had several opportunities to retract my statement, and I did not do so. This decision is one which I now heartily regret.”’

Here the inspector had to pause again, in order to rearrange his folder. For a minute there were murmurs, along with the furious whisper of pens on paper as the court recorder made his notes and the newspaper men made theirs.

Frances sat staring at nothing, trying to weave the grubby threads of Charlie’s statement around her own recollections of the past few months. She thought of all those summer evenings when Leonard had been kept late at work. She remembered occasions when he’d come home yawning in that showy way of his; or other nights when he’d come whistling, then gone springing up the stairs. All those times, when she and Lilian had leapt apart at the sound of his key in the door, he must have just come from his girl, come straight from kissing her to – She bent her head, put a hand to her mouth, seeing clearly, for the first time, the tawdry chain of lies and infidelity that had been in place without her knowledge, a chain with Leonard at its centre, and herself at one end, and – who, precisely, at the other? This boy, this boy in the dock! This boy with his slouch and his smirk and his Dickensian teeth. She gazed across at Lilian’s profile, and for a moment, just a moment, she felt a burst of resentment towards her so violent that it could only be called hatred. How could you do it? she wanted to cry at her. How could you involve me in all this? How could you have brought me to this place, this horrible room, with its beastly people and its revolting peelings-back?

But the inspector’s voice had started up again; she had to haul her attention back to it. He had begun on his next document – the statement of the girl, Billie Grey, confirming the essentials of Charlie’s account. Yes, she had seen Mr Barber on many occasions in the summer, and, yes, her friend Spencer Ward had sometimes objected to it; they had once had a ‘falling out’ because of it, in which he had knocked out one of her teeth. On the night of the first of July, after the incident at the Honey Bee night-club, Mr Ward had come to her rooms at half-past midnight and shown her bruises on his knuckles that he said he had got from having ‘smashed Mr Barber’s face in’. But on the night of Mr Barber’s murder she did not know where he had been. She herself had had an arrangement to spend that evening with Mr Barber, but had been ‘suffering from an indisposition’: she’d had tea and bread and butter with him at the Corner House on the Tottenham Court Road, but had been obliged to part from him at half-past seven. She had known nothing about his death until she had seen it reported in the Sunday newspapers, and she had been thoroughly shocked and upset. She had immediately found Spencer Ward and challenged him over it, and the news of the murder had not seemed to surprise him. He had said that Mr Barber had been ‘owed a wallop like that for a very long time’.

There were hisses from Leonard’s father and brother at that – though the boy, Frances saw, was smirking again. He still had his hands in his trouser pockets, he was still chewing away at his gum. His gaze was fixed on the floor of the dock; he seemed to be worrying at a splinter in the boards with the toe of one of his shoes.

He lifted his head, however, for the series of statements that were read next. They were from men, youths, boys – associates of his from Bermondsey; pals or, perhaps, enemies – anyhow, four or five people who said he had boasted ‘pretty freely’ of having attacked his fiancée’s boy-friend in July, threatening to ‘do worse to him next time’. None of them could say what he had been doing on the night of Leonard’s death. But all of them confirmed that he was in the habit of carrying a cosh.