The Paying Guests(183)
The morning was given over to the counsels’ closing speeches. Mr Ives went first, and there it was, laid out again, every incriminating detail, the threats, the boasts, the weapon, the blood. The boy’s distress over the behaviour of his fiancée, he told the jury, was of no account at all. He had shown himself in his treatment of her to be a most degenerate character. As for his alibi, well – Here his tone grew withering. Mrs Ward’s devotion to her son was so complete, it might almost be said to be blind. Her neighbour claimed to have seen the boy at home on the critical night, but he had admitted his own dishonesty in other matters, and it was for the jury to decide how far that dishonesty extended. Perhaps the best that could be said about a man like that was that he would take on just about any sort of employment for a fee…
He spoke for an hour and three-quarters. When Mr Tresillian rose to begin his own long speech for the defence, the room had begun to feel airless; he had to raise his voice over coughs and shuffles. He had every respect, he said, for his learned colleague Mr Ives, but the Crown in this case had failed in its first duty: that of establishing the guilt, beyond any particle of doubt, of the accused, Spencer Ward. What, after all, did the evidence against the boy really amount to? Miss Grey, a key witness, had morals that would shame a shop-girl. The hairs and the blood were as good as worthless. The rest was circumstance and supposition. There were two points only on which the jury could be certain, and one was that Leonard Arthur Barber had been killed by a blow to the head; the other was that the person or persons who had struck that blow had so far evaded capture. The accused himself had speculated that they were ‘laughing themselves sick’. Mr Tresillian did not know about that, but they must certainly be looking on at these proceedings with very mixed feelings indeed…
By the time the lunch hour had passed, and it was the judge’s turn to speak, and Frances understood that he meant to take them in close, dry detail through the crime, the police inquiry, through every single scrap of evidence that had been submitted to the court, a great weariness overtook her – not just the accumulated weariness of the past few days, but a vaster fatigue, a thing like a heavy, heavy cloak suddenly laid across her shoulders. She did her best to listen, but his voice was nasal and elderly and retained its peevish note, and it was shockingly easy, she found, simply to think of other things. He reminded the jury that the accused, by his own confession, was a violent young man, who had never attempted to deny the grudge that he had borne against the victim… Here she found herself gazing at a man on the bench in front of her: he was holding his head at such an angle that she could see right into his ear, see the hairs in the little tunnel and the crumbs of wax that clung to them. She blinked, and returned her attention to the judge. He was talking now about the traces of blood that had been found on the cosh. Mr Palmer, he said, a police surgeon of many years’ standing, had given it as his opinion that the blood was human. Another surgeon, of lesser experience, but nonetheless a man to whom the jury might feel inclined to give credence, had stated by contrast that…
But she’d begun looking around the court again, at the people gathered in it. A uniformed policeman was blank-eyed with boredom: he was fingering his chin, worrying away at a pimple or shaving-cut. Mr Ives and Mr Tresillian were both making notes. Inspector Kemp and Sergeant Heath were murmuring together, the inspector polishing his spectacles as he did it: without the discs of glass before them his eyes looked naked as unshelled molluscs. Spencer’s face was slightly puffy. Perhaps he had passed a sleepless night.
She thought of that little chalk gallows: the stick figure was almost complete. She heard the ticking of the courtroom clock, casually chipping away at the future. If only Lilian would turn to her – if only Lilian would look, just once, in the old way – it would all be a shade, just a shade, more bearable.
But Lilian sat rigid, in that beetly coat, that horrible veil, and looked at nothing.
And presently the nasal voice paused, then changed its note. ‘Members of the jury,’ it was saying, ‘you have had the evidence laid before you. I am going to ask you now to retire and begin your deliberations. Have you any questions or requests?’
Frances’s heart lost a beat. They had got to this point already! All eyes went to the jury; but it seemed they had everything they needed. They rose and filed away, she noticed, without a glance at the boy, without once looking at his mother or his uncle.
And then there was nothing to do but wait, and nowhere to do it but there in the courtroom or just outside, in the cathedral-like hall. They had been sitting for hours, and the room was stuffier than ever. The Barber men went off at once, and after a few indecisive minutes she and Lilian followed, to stand blinking at the riot of marble and fresco. Why on earth, she wondered, couldn’t the place have been made restful? Why couldn’t it have plain white monastery walls? The swirls of colour set her stomach quivering. The polished hard floor made her think of falling over with a smack. Leonard’s father and Uncle Ted and Douglas had claimed one of the padded benches. A neighbouring bench came free; she and Lilian took it, in silence. Presently Spencer’s mother and uncle appeared, and settled down a few yards off, avoiding the Barbers’ eyes as they did it. Douglas watched them, but addressed his father in a pointed, unmuted way.
‘All right, Dad? We won’t be here long. The jury’s got nothing to debate, has it?’
His confidence, however, went for nothing. Thirty minutes became forty, became fifty, became an hour. Lilian remained shut in a realm of her own. The padding on the bench seemed to lose its spring. Voices and footsteps swelled and faded. A bit of heat struggled inadequately from a metal grating. If one closed one’s eyes, Frances found, the sensation was that of sitting in some bleak but unavoidable municipal place – a bus station, say.