The Paying Guests(180)

‘And what is the best way of dealing with them, in your experience?’

‘If you can catch them, you can give them a thump – say, with the heel of your shoe. Or with a heavy book, if you have one.’ He added, after the slightest of pauses, ‘A book like a Bible will do it.’

The deliberate way in which he said this made Frances pay more attention to him. He wasn’t like a beggar on the street, after all. He was too truculent for that, or had been too ill-used, perhaps; he gave the impression of no longer caring whether he got the coin or not. Mr Tresillian asked what he was employed at. He said he’d had a number of situations since the Army had ‘dispensed with his services’: he had put the bristles on brooms in a factory, he had sold boot-laces door to door. Until very recently – here, inexplicably, he became almost sour – he had been a traveller for an electric light-bulb company.

‘A good position?’ suggested Mr Tresillian. ‘One you were keen to hold on to? And an occupation which, naturally, took you away from home now and then; but not to the extent of making you a stranger to your neighbours, nor of making them strangers to you… By which we come to the heart of the matter. Your room, I understand, faces, across a small courtyard, the rooms in which Mr Ward resides with his mother. You’re used to seeing them at their windows, going back and forth and so on?’

Frances grew still. The man was nodding. ‘Yes, I see them more than I care to; especially the boy. In the summer just gone he used to think it a great sport to shoot things across at me – stones, and dried peas and what have you.’

Mr Tresillian spoke rather hastily. ‘At any rate, you know him well?’

‘I do.’

‘And you remember the evening of the fifteenth of September? How did you spend that evening?’

‘I spent it at home.’

‘With your window-curtains open or closed?’

‘Not quite closed.’

‘Why was that? On a chill autumn evening?’

‘I find I want air, since the War. I’d rather be cold than stifled. I keep the window ajar, and the curtains parted, all year round.’

‘And did you look out of the window, that night?’

‘As I passed it, I did.’

‘You looked out of the window, as it might be, as a diversion, whilst stretching your legs? And what did you see?’

He jerked his head at the dock. ‘I saw that boy over there, lying on his bed with his picture-paper.’

Frances’s heart contracted so sharply that it might have been touched by the point of a blade. Beside her, Lilian drew a breath. There were murmurs across the court. Mr Tresillian waited for the murmurs to subside.

‘You’re quite sure it was Mr Ward you saw?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t call him mister, myself – but, yes, it was him all right.’

‘There could be no mistake about it? No other curtain was in the way?’

‘No, there was no mistake. His mother has nothing but a scrap of lace up; you can see clean through it when the lamps are lit. He was lying there giving out the orders to her as he usually does. She was fetching him cups of tea and the like all evening long. And when she took herself off to bed at a quarter to eleven he was still there; and he called her out of her bed a half-hour later to fetch him a glass of water. I heard his voice, that time, clear across the courtyard.’

Now the blade seemed to be pushing its way right into Frances’s heart. There were more murmurs, from the benches in front of her and from the spectators overhead. She couldn’t tell, however, if the murmurs were sceptical or impressed. She looked at Mr Ives, at the boy in the dock, at the jury, at the judge. The latter was sitting forward making notes, his face impassive.

As before, Mr Tresillian paused to let the disturbance subside – and also, she thought, to choose his next words carefully. When he addressed the man again, his tone had grown delicate.

‘I am going to put a question to you now,’ he said, ‘because I know that if I do not, my learned friend Mr Ives will, quite correctly, put it to you himself. That boy over there has been in prison for many weeks. I imagine you read the newspapers. I imagine you talk to your neighbours. I imagine there have been police about, asking questions, all over your building. You must have known the bearing your evidence would have on this case. Why did you delay so long in volunteering it?’

And, for the first time, the man looked uncomfortable. A touch of shiftiness entered his gaze. ‘Yes, I knew all about it,’ he said. ‘I was in two minds about going to the police, for reasons of my own.’

‘And those reasons were? Remember now, it is Mr Ward who is on trial here, not you. Remember, too, will you, that he is on trial for his life.’

The man changed his pose, moved his weight from one foot to another; and answered grudgingly at last. ‘I was in fear for my position. My employers had supposed me in Leeds on the night of the fifteenth. It wasn’t in my interest to enlighten them.’

‘You had misrepresented your movements to them?’

‘I had claimed expenses that weren’t due me… It sounds shabby to admit it, here.’

‘It does sound shabby,’ said Mr Tresillian. ‘But, then, there can’t be a man in this room – saving, of course, his lordship on the bench – who hasn’t given way to a shabby impulse at one time or another. When was it that you approached the police with your statement?’