The Paying Guests(175)

For a time, then, her fear was so sharp that it all came to her as if from a distance. She saw Spencer appear in the dock, rising like a conjurer’s assistant from the floor of the pen as a warder brought him up from some underground passage. She watched them read the charge to him and ask him how he pleaded, and heard his answer – ‘I plead not guilty’ – his voice splintering on the words like a schoolboy’s. Then came the swearing-in of the jury, eleven men and a single woman: with the monotony of the process her panic receded a little, and she searched their faces for signs of kindness as they took their oaths. But they looked ordinary, inexpert, the woman in a fussy hat, the men with the slightly silly expressions that came from knowing they were being stared at, or else straight-backed, with lifted chins, enjoying their own importance. That one at the end, she thought, would make himself foreman. He was a man like a clever shopkeeper: already she could see him gazing at the boy as he might have turned in his experienced hand some bit of cheap merchandise that had come to him soiled from the supplier.

Now a middle-aged barrister with a pouchy face had risen and begun to address the court. She understood that he was Mr Ives, of whom the solicitor had spoken, and that this was the opening speech for the prosecution. She forced herself to pay attention, leaning forward, sitting tensely; beside her, Douglas was doing the same. But the boy’s threats, the first assault, the cosh, the blood, the hairs on the coat: it was all crushingly familiar from the police court hearings, right down to the horrid thrill that coursed around the room when, after twenty minutes or so, Mr Ives paused to have the weapon displayed to the jury. Once he had begun to call in his witnesses Frances could have stood in the box for them, for they were all men whom she had seen give evidence before: a policeman to show a plan of the lane, Constables Hardy and Evans to describe the finding of the body, the doctor who had pronounced Leonard dead at the scene… He was followed on to the stand by the police surgeon, Mr Palmer, and then came all the grisly details about the bruising to Leonard’s brain. But this time he had brought along an exhibit to give an idea of the nature of the bleeding: he drew the lid from a small box and produced a curled, earth-coloured thing that was, apparently, Leonard’s collar. His collar! Frances gazed at it in disbelief. It didn’t resemble anything she could remember from the night; it might have been the withered skin of a snake. When it was taken and shown to the jury, some of them leaned for a better view; some of them looked once, then looked away. The woman made a show of turning her face from it, queasily. But they all looked queasy at what came next: photographs of Leonard’s broken head, which were handed to the clever shopkeeper and passed on by him. Up in the public gallery there were tuts of frustration as people tried, and failed, to see.

Here, for the first time, Mr Tresillian rose to ask questions for the defence. He wanted to know more about the bleeding. Wasn’t it likely that, with such an injury, splashes of blood would have found their way on to the clothing of Mr Barber’s attacker?

Mr Palmer nodded, in a generous way. ‘Yes, there might very well have been splashes.’

‘Then what do you have to say about the fact that no such splashes were ever discovered on the clothes of the accused?’

‘I have nothing to say – except, of course, that clothes are easily washed or discarded. Blood was certainly discovered on the cosh.’

‘Blood that has not been proved to be human?’

‘Blood that is almost sure to be human.’

‘Blood, however, that cannot be proved to have belonged to the human named Leonard Barber, any more than the hairs that were taken from Mr Barber’s overcoat can be matched, to your own satisfaction, with the hair of the accused?’

The surgeon inclined his head, less generously than before. ‘No.’

With that, Mr Tresillian returned to his place at the counsels’ bench. Frances watched him sit, thinking, What are you doing? Don’t leave it there! Keep going! But he was adding notes to a piece of paper now, in the most leisurely way imaginable: a plain young man in horn-rimmed spectacles, only a year or two older than herself, with a lean face and long, pale hands that brought to mind those of John Arthur. He might have a sister like her, a mother like hers at home. He had risen this morning from an ordinary bed, and eaten a breakfast just as she had, perhaps with a flutter in the pit of his stomach… Her heart shrivelled at the uselessness of it all. He’d never manage it. He was too young. She wanted the other man, Mr Ives. He was like a barrister in a book, like a barrister in a film – just now, for example, he was discussing some detail with the judge, and that was what she wanted, someone who would debate a point of law like that, with one hand nonchalantly clasping the lapel of his gown. She and Lilian would never be saved by a man who might as well be her own brother, who went about the house in his socks, who lay on the sofa with his long legs raised and crossed at the bony ankle.

She listened tensely again to the two or three witnesses who came next. One of them was Inspector Kemp, looking pink and pleased with himself, describing the stages of the inquiry, making it sound like a game of hopscotch, one square leading neatly to another with only a few small sideways jumps. She became aware that her head was aching. The court had a white glazed ceiling; the clear, cold light was hard on the eyes. And then, sounds were travelling oddly. There were regular scrapings of chairs, and coughs and rustles up in the gallery; clerks and policemen came and went, in creaking shoes, with slips of paper. What must the boy be making of it all? He had seemed to listen keenly at the start, but his expression had grown blanker as the witnesses had come and gone, and now he was leaning forward with his elbows on the high ledge in front of him, his chin in his hand. She remembered his chewing-gum, his sniggers. His suit today was the same cheap blue one that he had worn at the police court, but someone had found him a soberer neck-tie, and his hair was improbably neat. His face was pale but slightly fuller, less ratty, than she recalled. He must have been eating better in prison, she thought, than in his own home.