The Paying Guests(178)
And here, horribly, there was a snort of laughter in the public gallery; and the girl blinked up at the faces again, and her mouth gave a twitch, and she began to cry. That produced a boo from someone. Frances didn’t know if the boo was aimed at Billie herself or at the person who had laughed at her, but she cried harder at the sound, and the tears – real, grown-up, painful – quickly transformed her face into a swollen mask of grief. The usher handed her a glass of water, doing it in the neutral, professional way in which he might have retrieved a sheet of paper that had glided to the floor. Mr Tresillian waited, unmoved and unimpressed. The only figure visibly agitated by her upset was the boy in the dock: he was leaning forward, urgently trying to pass something to the nearest clerk. Frances, seeing the small square whiteness of it, thought at first that it was a note. Then she realised that it was a handkerchief that he had fished from his pocket; he wanted it carried to the witness-box for the girl to wipe her eyes with. The clerk took it, looking uncertain, but the judge saw, and waved him back.
‘No, no. There must be no communications from the prisoner. Mr Tresillian, I don’t see that this sort of display is assisting matters at all. Do you mean it to continue?’
Mr Tresillian said, while the girl wept on, ‘It’s a question of reliability, my lord. Miss Grey has made some damaging allegations against my client. I have been trying to establish her character for the jury.’
The judge spoke with distaste. ‘Yes, well, it seems to me that you have established it all too plainly. If there are no further questions from you or from Mr Ives, you might ask the wretched young woman to step down, I think.’
The two men consulted for a moment, and Billie was gestured from the stand. The usher had to catch hold of her arm in order to help her out of the courtroom; she was sobbing worse than ever.
From his place beside Frances, Douglas watched her go with another curl of his lip. ‘Go on, clear off, you little tart,’ he muttered.
Soon after that, the court was adjourned for the day. Frances and Lilian made the journey back to Walworth in silence.
The second morning was easier only in the sense that they knew now what to expect from it. Again Frances presented herself like a hapless suitor at Mrs Viney’s; again Lilian received her in her veil and beetly coat. They even had the same taxi-driver that they had had the day before. For all Frances knew, the crowd outside the Old Bailey might have been the same crowd, too. But, anyhow, they went through it less flinchingly this time, entered the building without a blink, found ‘their’ bench in the courtroom: she felt quite like an old hand. By the time the robed men were back on the dais and Spencer had done his conjuring trick in the dock, there might never have been a pause in the proceedings at all. The only difference was in the weather, which was wet and very grey: the rain came drumming on to the glazed roof to blunt the harsh light of the room, but make it harder than ever to hear.
But was it even worth straining one’s ears to listen? The damaging evidence continued. A clerk from the Pearl, for example, was called to confirm that Leonard had extended his life assurance policy in July. And wasn’t that, mused Mr Ives, rather a curious thing for him to have done? A man in the very pink of health, perhaps in hopes of starting a family, who might have been expected, not to increase his premiums, but to save his money? Could the clerk think of any reason why Mr Barber would have done that, unless he’d had in mind the wife he had wronged, and her future as his widow? Unless, in other words, he had been in real and serious fear of his life?
It was the point, Frances remembered, that Lilian herself had made: she saw the jurymen whispering together; she saw that shrewd shopkeeper making notes, as if totting up a bill. If only they could be brought to appreciate the tangle of it all! But no one was interested in tangles here. And though Mr Tresillian rose to protest to the judge against Mr Ives’s question – they had not gathered, he said, to hear the speculations of witnesses – the discussion that followed was like an elaborate sport between the three well-bred men, with little to do with the boy who sat gazing blankly on at it from the dock.
By the time the case for the defence had been opened, and Spencer himself had been called as a witness, and Frances had watched him cross the court, and enter the stand, and make his first, stumbling responses to Mr Tresillian’s easy, leading questions, she had begun to be frightened again. All this time, she had imagined herself to be entirely without hope, but she had had hope, she realised: it had all been pinned on this moment, when at last, after so many weeks, the boy would have the chance to put his own case, clear up every scrap of confusion. But how could he possibly do it? How could anyone have done it, in that crushing, unnatural place, with so many greedy eyes on them, and with everyone present save herself and Lilian convinced of their guilt? He repeated the statement he had made at the start, that on the evening of Leonard’s death he had gone home from work with a headache and spent the evening with his mother. The tale sounded stilted – but of course it did. He must have told it a thousand times. He couldn’t remember having said that Mr Barber had been owed a wallop, but he supposed he must have said it, if Billie said he had. But there was a difference between saying a thing and doing it, wasn’t there? It was like going about with that cosh in his pocket. There was a difference between carrying something and using it. If there was blood on the cosh, that had come from rats and black-beetles. He’d never used it on Leonard Barber. Yes, he had given him a smack in the face that time in the summer, but that had only been to scare him off from messing about with Billie.