Flowers For the Judge Page 8

  ‘A divorce. I’d been trying to get Paul to give me one for some time,’ she said.

  ‘A divorce?’ Mike’s whisper seemed to fill the room.

  She turned slowly round to him.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t! No reproaches – not now. I’m just telling you what I told the Inspector.’

  A tremor passed over the younger man’s face and it occurred to Campion that she did not realize her injustice.

  ‘The Inspector was very interested,’ Gina went on. ‘He asked me if we’d spoken of it before, and I told him we had, lots of times, and that Paul wouldn’t hear of it. But on the Wednesday I went to see a solicitor and that brought matters to a head. I knew where I stood. I knew I was tied to Paul if he – he – wouldn’t desert or beat me, so I begged him to have an evening at home so that we could discuss it.’

  ‘You told the Inspector all this?’ Mike’s voice was very quiet.

  ‘He got it out of me,’ she said helplessly. ‘Does it matter, Albert, does it matter? Will it make any difference?’

  Mr Campion rose to his feet. His face was very grave.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said at last, hoping his voice carried conviction. ‘You weren’t quite alone in the flat when you were waiting for Paul, were you? I mean your woman was there to serve dinner?’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course.’ Gina spoke carelessly. ‘Mrs Austin was there until eight o’clock.’

  ‘Eight o’clock?’ Mr Campion’s brows were rising.

  She nodded. ‘I couldn’t keep the woman all night,’ she said. ‘When Paul was a whole hour late for our conference and the dinner was spoiled, I told her I didn’t care when he came in and I sent her off.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ said Mr Campion, and, after a little pause, again, ‘Oh dear!’

  CHAPTER V

  Inquisition

  IT IS PERHAPS not extraordinary that the mixture of anxiety, irritation and excitement typical of the back-stage of amateur theatricals is nearly always reproduced at the moment when a family sets off for a public performance, be it wedding, funeral, or, as in this case, inquest.

  John had arrived, ready dressed for the ordeal, at Gina’s flat no later than half-past eight on the morning of Tuesday the 16th. By a quarter to nine he had phoned Mike three times and had upbraided the startled Mrs Austin because Curley had not yet appeared.

  Gina very wisely kept to her own room and left him to rampage up and down the studio.

  When Curley came, pink and breathless with the exertion of climbing the stairs, he pounced upon her with a grunt of relief.

  ‘We’ve got to be there in less than an hour,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to be late. Let me see, there’s Scruby to come yet. Hang the fellow! I told him to be punctual. You told him, Miss Curley, over the telephone. We were all to meet here at nine o’clock. I thought I’d made that quite plain.’

  Miss Curley, who was making frantic and futile efforts to tuck her wispy grey curls under the tight head-band of her fashionable but unbecoming tricorne, was apologetic.

  ‘He has a long way to come, Mr Widdowson. He lives out at Hampstead, you know. Don’t you remember, I told you he said we weren’t to wait for him, but he’d meet us at the court.’

  John sank down in a chair, placing his speckless bowler on a table within arm’s reach.

  ‘Well, I suppose as a lawyer he knows well enough it doesn’t do to be late for court proceedings,’ he said. ‘But I should have liked him to have been here. Miss Curley, go and ring down to Mike. Tell him we’re all waiting. No one seems to realize the publicity involved in an affair of this sort, and not at all the right sort of publicity for a firm of our standing. I was fond of Paul, as you know, Miss Curley, but this final piece of sensationalism makes it very difficult for one to respect his memory as one would have liked.’

  ‘Oh, well, he won’t do it again,’ said Miss Curley absently, and then, realizing the impropriety and inanity of the remark, grew crimson with confusion.

  To her relief John did not appear to have heard. He was entirely absorbed with his own angle on the tragedy.

  ‘It’s holding up everything. There’s three-quarters of the Spring list to come out and the Autumn one not half made up,’ he observed. ‘Still, we must put all that behind us now. We’ve all got to be calm and courageous. We must see this thing through with dignity and then we must bury our grief and get on with the work.’

  He seemed to be much more at ease after he had delivered this little homily, and Miss Curley suspected that he had been saving it for a larger audience which had not materialized. She glanced at him curiously. He was getting older than she had thought, she decided, and wondered why it was that the cares of a firm aged a man so much more unattractively than the cares of a family. There was a great deal that was positively inhuman about John.

  ‘Mr Wellington rang up yesterday,’ she said, drawing on her short black suède gloves bought for the occasion, ‘and he asked me in confidence whether I thought you’d mind if he made an attempt to get into the public part of the court to-day. He wanted to make it very clear that he was not going after copy, but simply as an old friend of yours and Mr Paul’s.’

  The mention of the distinguished author’s name seemed to cheer John immensely.

  ‘Oh, not at all, not at all. I hope you told him not at all,’ he said. ‘Like to feel we had friends there. It did go through my mind that we might ask one or two people, but it didn’t seem our prerogative, so to speak.’

  Miss Curley looked at him sharply, but there was no shadow of a smile upon his deeply lined, yellow little face.

  ‘I wore a band,’ he said. ‘I think we all ought to wear bands, don’t you? Mourning’s out of fashion, I know, nowadays, but it looked well, I thought. I told Mike about it.’

  Miss Curley was growing calmer. There was something extraordinarily soothing about John’s attitude towards the terrifying business. At night, when she went home and she had a little leisure to think of the facts, she found herself growing frightened of the disaster which had overtaken them, but back in John’s presence the habit of a lifetime reasserted itself and she found herself adopting his attitude against her better judgment.

  When the Dresden clock on Gina’s mantelpiece chimed the quarter John could bear it no longer.

  ‘We must go,’ he said. ‘It may take us several minutes to find a cab at this hour of the morning. We don’t want to be late. Getting about in London is very difficult.’

  Miss Curley hesitated. ‘It couldn’t possibly take us more than ten minutes on foot, Mr Widdowson,’ she said. ‘The court’s only just round the corner. And, anyway, there’s a cab-rank at the end of Bedford Row.’

  ‘All the same, I wish you’d ask Mrs Brande to come in here at once.’ John was fidgeting. ‘As for Mike, I don’t know what the boy’s up to. With so many Press people about we can’t afford to make a bad impression.’

  When Miss Curley was out of the room he rose to his feet and walked over to the long mirror on the far side of the room and stood there for a moment, surveying himself critically. No one who saw him could have dreamed for a moment that he regarded himself as anything but the Head of the Firm. His poise and stance proclaimed it. He was faultlessly dressed in a dark suit and overcoat, upon which the crêpe band was only just visible. His short grey hair was clipped to a point at which it would seem that its growth was discouraged and his perfect hat completed the picture.

  He looked, as he hoped, a distinguished public man, shaken but not bowed by private grief.

  He turned away from the mirror as Gina and Miss Curley entered. It did not occur to him for a moment to apologize for having commandeered her room for the family meeting-place. Instead he regarded her critically and on the whole with approval.

  Her black clothes suited her. They were smart yet very severe. The only touch of softness was the crisp white ruff at her throat, and to this he took exception.

  ‘I don’t know that I should wear that, Gina,’ he said. ‘It�
�s very nice, my dear, very becoming, but I don’t know whether it’s quite the thing for an occasion of this sort. Let me see how you look with it off.’

  The girl stared at him. Her face was drawn and colourless and her eyes had receded until there were dark hollows where they should have been. She looked ill and on the verge of collapse.

  She plucked at the ruff obediently, but the touch of its crispness against her fingers seemed to steady her. She stared at him coldly.

  ‘Don’t be absurd, John. I’m not going to appear on the stage. Leave me alone – for God’s sake, leave me alone!’

  The man was obstinate, but like others of his generation he had a horror of nerves in a woman.

  ‘Just as you like, my dear,’ he said coldly. ‘Just as you like. But I do think you’d look better without it!’

  ‘What the hell does it matter what she wears?’

  Mike spoke from the doorway, where he had just appeared.

  John fixed his younger cousin with a disapproving stare.

  ‘There’s no need to lose your temper,’ he said stiffly. ‘I’m only trying to think what would be wisest and most dignified for us all to do. We share a common misfortune and we are going to share a common ordeal.’

  Mike swallowed his temper. ‘That’s all right, John,’ he said. ‘But you might remember that Paul was Gina’s husband.’

  ‘Paul was my cousin and my partner,’ said John with dignity.

  There was a pause and Miss Curley seized it.

  ‘I think we should all go down now, Mr Widdowson,’ she ventured. ‘It’ll take us two or three minutes to get down to Bedford Row.’

  Mrs Austin put her head round the door, and they stared at it not without justification, since it was adorned by all the rakish splendour of Mrs Austin’s ‘Best that had once belonged to a titled lady’.

  ‘I think I’ll slip along now, M’m, if you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be late.’

  Gina turned to her eagerly. ‘Mrs Austin, I’ll come with you. We’ll go together.’

  She moved unsteadily across the room and the charwoman put an arm round her.

  ‘That’s right, duck,’ she said. ‘You come along with me. You’ve lost your ‘usband and there’s nobody else but me in this room that knows what that means.’

  And with this Parthian shot she swept the girl out into the passage.

  ‘Gina’s gone mad … Stop her, Mike. Who is that woman? Where are they going?’

  John was half-way out of the door before Mike detained him.

  ‘They’re going to the inquest,’ he said wearily. ‘We’re all going to the inquest. Hundreds of people are going to be there – it’s not just our show. And now for God’s sake come along.’

  Miss Curley touched his arm. ‘I think Mrs Brande should come with us,’ she said.

  The boy looked at her curiously. ‘Oh, let her go,’ he said. ‘She’s escaped from this family, Curley. Let her go with her friends.’

  In the end they all straggled down Bedford Row together, Gina and Mrs Austin stumbling along in front and John, in high dudgeon, stalking between them and Mike and Curley, who brought up the rear. They arrived at the court with fifteen minutes to spare.

  There were still remnants of the last week’s fog hanging about the City and the court seemed to have trapped more than its fair share. To Gina at least the whole place seemed to be filled with a thick brown mist, through which the faces of people she knew and did not know loomed out towards her and peered at her questioningly, only to disappear again in the general maelstrom.

  She avoided Mike and clung to Mrs Austin, whose grim determination to assert herself and whose contempt for the police and all their works made her a very comforting pillar on which to lean.

  Mike and Curley remained side by side. The old woman’s shrewd eyes took in every detail. She saw the Press benches were crowded and had the presence of mind to nod to the immaculately dressed Mr Wellington, who was doing his best to look sympathetic at a distance of twenty feet.

  John had buttonholed old Scruby, the firm’s solicitor, and was talking to him rather than listening to what he had to say, as was his custom.

  Scruby was a little skeleton of a man with sparse white hair that had yellow lights in it. At the moment he was peering at his client with protuberant pale blue eyes. As his practice consisted largely of libel and copyright he felt somewhat out of his element in the present situation and was doing his best not to say so. Mike, catching sight of the two of them, experienced a sense of sudden irritation that was well-nigh unbearable.

  Scruby evidently had an inkling of the seriousness of the situation, but it was quite beyond him to impress his fears upon John, whose principal concern seemed to be the probable newspaper reports.

  A pale young man with horn-rimmed spectacles, accompanied by an enormous person in a long black overcoat, sidled into the back of the court. Mr Lugg and Mr Campion were not on speaking terms that morning. No open rupture had occurred, but each, it seemed, thought it better not to intrude himself upon the other’s private thoughts.

  The inquest began in an unorthodox way. Mr Salley addressed the jury. His voice, like his appearance, which was small and fierce, was unexpected. It was deep and very quiet, with a quality of naturalness which took Gina by surprise. He was like the best type of country doctor, she decided; blunt and straightforward and obviously completely without fancies of any sort.

  His first words to the jury provoked furious activity at the Press table. He leant over his desk and his sharp eyes ranged over the seven embarrassed-looking citizens.

  ‘Before you hear the evidence in this case,’ he said, ‘ perhaps it would be as well if I defined your duty to you. I do this because possibly some of you may be under a misapprehension concerning this important matter, due to recent misleading criticisms of Coroners and Coroners’ juries which have appeared in the Press.

  ‘In the laws of England your duties are specifically laid down. There can be no question about them. They are clear and rigid.

  ‘First of all let me repeat the oath which you took before me on this day one week ago. I must ask you to listen carefully and judge for yourselves what is the meaning of these very plain words.’

  He paused and they blinked at him owlishly. Taking a card from his desk he peered at it through his spectacles.

  ‘This is your oath,’ he said, ‘listen to it – understand it. “I swear by Almighty God that I will diligently inquire and a true presentment make of all such matters and things as are here given me in charge on behalf of our Sovereign Lord the King touching the death of Paul Redfern Brande, now lying dead, and will without fear or favour, affection or ill-will, a true verdict give according to the evidence and the best of my skill and knowledge.”

  ‘There,’ he said, throwing down the card. ‘You have each of you repeated these words and I now ask you to consider to what you stand pledged. When the evidence has been set before you the law will demand of you that you answer several questions, and I think it would be as well if I told you now what those questions will be.

  ‘Firstly, you will be required to state who the deceased was. Then how and where he died and afterwards how he came by his death.’

  He paused and regarded them steadily.

  ‘This will constitute the first part of your verdict. But afterwards, and it is this point to which I want to call your attention because there has been much mischievous and misleading rubbish talked and written about it, you may possibly be called upon to answer another question. There is set down in Halsbury’s Laws of England, a book whose authority cannot be questioned, the following incontrovertible decree. It is there stated that if the jury find that the deceased came by his death by murder or manslaughter those persons whom they find to have been guilty of such an offence, or of being accessories before the fact of murder, must be pointed out. It is the jury’s responsibility, and they are in duty bound, if they know the persons guilty, to say their names.’

  E
verybody in court save the seven people to whom these sober words were addressed seemed to be more than startled by them. The jury merely looked uncomfortable and cold. In the back of the court Mr Lugg nudged Mr Campion.

  The Coroner had not quite finished.

  ‘I wish to make it clear that this duty of yours does not apply in any particular or special way to the case you are about to hear to-day. It is your general duty. It is the duty of all Coroner’s juries and I have called attention to it because I have found so much misapprehension on the subject, not only among the public, but even among members of the legal profession.

  ‘Now we will hear the first witness.’

  CHAPTER VI

  By These Witnesses

  GINA SHRANK BACK IN her seat and waited for a merciful unreality to settle over the proceedings. In the past, embarrassing or even harassing situations had always had for her this mitigating quality. To-day, however, it was absent.

  Instead the reverse seemed to have taken place. Faces seemed clearer, their less pleasing qualities emphasized, while each spoken word appeared to be charged with underlying menace.

  The Coroner and the jury took on a Hogarthian quality, and those witnesses whom she knew resembled brilliantly cruel caricatures of themselves.

  She tried to disassociate herself from it all, and to look upon the inquiry as though it were a play, but it was not possible even when she forced her eyes out of focus and persuaded her ears to hear only meaningless unrelated sounds.

  Presently she found herself listening intently to Miss Marchant giving evidence about the discovery of the body. The Coroner was taking her gently through her written statement, but his tone became peremptory at the point where the actual appearance of the corpse was mentioned, warning her that any display of nerves which she might have contemplated would not be received sympathetically.

  The fair-haired girl stepped down, relieved and a little nettled, the colour in her demure face heightened and her blue eyes embarrassed. The jury looked studiously disinterested.