The Paying Guests(166)
‘You’ve been following the papers?’ Frances asked her.
She shook her head. ‘I can’t bear to do it.’
Frances drew back from her. ‘You’d rather do nothing? You’d rather do that?’
She spoke with scorn – again, because she longed so hard to do nothing herself. And Lilian looked at her, for a moment, in a way she never had before: a level, wounded, let-down way. Ashamed, Frances put out her hand. ‘Lily —’
Then the door burst open and the little girl ran in, bringing the hysterical Jack Russell.
The next day the Daily Mirror reported that when Spencer Ward was sixteen he had been one of a gang of youths who had assaulted another boy by tying him up and setting fire to his trousers. The Times ran an article on juvenile delinquents; the Express lamented the ‘great tide of youthful lawlessness’ that had swept the country since the War. The case was still in its earliest stages. The boy hadn’t even been given a chance, yet, to speak in his own defence. But everything Frances read, every neighbour she spoke to, seemed to take it for granted that he had murdered Leonard. She could see the guilty verdict being steadily built up against him – it was like the word game, Gallows, that she had used to play with her brothers, where each false guess resulted in another stroke of the chalk on the slate, and before one’s eyes there appeared the beams of the scaffold, the round head, the body, the stick-like limbs…
She couldn’t believe it. She wouldn’t believe it. She kept telling herself, The plain fact is, he isn’t a murderer. He’s done nothing. It was like arithmetic, she thought: a sum could only come out one way. He couldn’t be found guilty of a crime he hadn’t committed. And she fixed all her hopes on the second police court hearing.
But when the hearing took place, it was worse than the first one. Spencer was paler, less cocky, but no more likeable this time than he had been the week before, and though he had got himself a counsel – a Mr Strickland, a Bermondsey solicitor who, Frances gathered, had taken on the case under some sort of legal assistance scheme – the man did not inspire confidence. He had wispy hair, and lopsided spectacles, and nicotine stains on his fingers; he looked, she thought, like a harassed Latin master from a third-rate school.
The prosecuting counsel was altogether more impressive. He went smoothly over the facts as put together by Inspector Kemp, then summoned a series of witnesses to the stand. The first was one of the boys who claimed to have heard Spencer making threats against Leonard’s life. He kept looking at Spencer as he spoke, in a sly, gloating way: it was so patent that he had come to settle some sort of score that Frances’s spirits rose slightly. No one could possibly consider him a credible witness, she thought. But after him came the Camberwell servant who had been in the lane with her sweetheart on the night of Leonard’s death; and as she began to answer the prosecutor’s questions, Frances’s confidence shrivelled. Now that the girl was in front of her, real, solid, fattish-faced, it was more horrible than ever to think that she had been there in that stretch of impenetrable darkness with Lilian and herself, breathing the same flannelly air. The prosecutor wanted to know what precisely she had heard. She repeated what she’d stated to the papers: there had been footsteps and sighs, along with a cry of ‘No!’ or ‘Don’t!’ – that could only, thought Frances, unnerved, have been the cry that she herself had given when Lilian had touched her arm. Could the girl describe the voice? It had been ‘high’, she said, so high that just at first she’d mistook it for a woman’s. Frances began to sweat. ‘Then I saw about the murder, and —’
‘You decided, on reflection, that the voice was a man’s? Perhaps made high or light by fear?’
‘Oh, yes, it was awful fearful. I should hate to have to hear it again. Oh, it made your blood run cold!’
It was obvious that she believed every word she was saying, and the simplicity and sincerity of her manner impressed the room. Leonard’s father was hunched up with his hand across his eyes; Douglas was patting his shoulder – and Frances could see that their distress was impressing people, too.
Then the prosecutor called on the police surgeon, Mr Palmer, to report on the findings of the Home Office laboratory. He spoke first about those hairs that had been taken from Leonard’s coat: they were a ‘fair’ match with the head of the accused, he said; but no more than fair. He wouldn’t care to stake his reputation on them. The traces of blood that had been found on the cosh, however, were ‘almost certainly human’. The laboratory couldn’t be more precise than that, but he had seen the slides himself and, in his opinion as well as theirs – yes, almost certainly. The shape of the weapon was also a reasonable fit with the shape of the wound on Mr Barber’s head.
Could he say with what degree of violence the blow to the head had been delivered? – Oh, a great degree of violence.
It wasn’t a casual blow? A glancing blow? It couldn’t have been delivered accidentally? It couldn’t have been made in self-defence?
Mr Palmer almost smiled. ‘Oh, no. I shouldn’t think that likely, given that the wound was slightly to the rear of Mr Barber’s head. As for the intention – If I might have the instrument for a moment, please?’ A constable took it to him, and he held it up as Inspector Kemp had held it up at the first hearing. ‘A short weapon like this, you see,’ he went on, pushing his cuff back from his wrist, ‘can have no momentum of its own. The momentum comes all from the arm.’ He swung his own arm, two or three times, to demonstrate the action. ‘With a longer object – a mallet, a poker, something like that – then, yes, I would certainly suggest that the force of the blow might be greater than the assailant had anticipated. An inexperienced assailant, that is. But with this sort of thing – no. The person who made that injury to Mr Barber’s head, with this particular weapon, would have known precisely what he was doing.’