A Tangled Web Page 19

  Presently, Daisy was recovered. She heard herself swearing the oath, heard the chairman of the bench saying she could give her evidence seated. Mr. Brownleigh, as he began to question her, treated Daisy with almost exaggerated deference and solicitude: she might have been the widow of a national hero, not the mistress of a suspected murderer.

  “I want to cause you as little distress as possible, Miss Bland. I shall try to word my questions so that you can answer them briefly, yes or no. If you feel, at any point, the strain is too much for you, just tell me.”

  Daisy smiled wanly. There was only one strain she felt, and that was the terrible struggle between fear and desire—the desire to raise her eyes, look round the courtroom and find Hugo, and the fear which prevented her so doing; for she dreaded what she might see upon his face.

  Automatically she answered Mr. Brownleigh’s questions, retracing the course of events which she had already worn thin in her own mind. The walk to the esplanade that night, the paper parcel, the agonised waiting, Hugo’s return—it had all become unreal for her, like a thing she had read about long ago. So she gave her answers in a dazed, mechanical manner which affected rather uncomfortably some of those who were present. At one point only did she come to life. A green cloth cap was handed up to her, and Counsel asked if she could identify it.

  “It’s like one I gave Hugo,” she replied. Throughout, she was unable to call him “the prisoner” or “the accused,” nor did the Bench rebuke her for this breach of etiquette.

  “The one you bought for him in Brighton?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you will look at the label inside—is that the name of the shop where you bought it?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t notice the name of the shop.”

  “When the prisoner left you on the esplanade, was he wearing a green cap?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when he returned, was he still wearing it?”

  “No.”

  “Did you make any comment on this at the time?”

  “I asked had he lost it.”

  “And what did he reply?”

  “He said it had blown off.”

  “Were you surprised that he had not retrieved it—a new cap, one you’d recently given him?”

  Bruce Rogers was on his feet, protesting, and Daisy’s low-voiced reply was lost. During the mild wrangle that followed, Bruce’s eye caught Daisy for a moment; her thumb was gently stroking the cap, and a tear fell upon it.

  When Mr. Brownleigh indicated that he had finished with the witness, Bruce Rogers did not rise to cross-examine. His client had made it very clear that he did not want the girl to be badgered any more than was necessary, and Bruce had no wish to disclose at this stage the line which the Defence would take at the trial. As she turned to leave the witness-box, Daisy made a great effort and looked, for the first time, straight at Hugo. Almost imperceptibly, he shook his head; then smiled at her—a smile of such warmth and tenderness that she felt as if her heart was dissolving. She tried to smile back, but her lips were quivering uncontrollably, and the next moment she was led out of Court. Hugo had forgiven her. Hugo loved her still, in spite of what she had done. And she knew now that she had done wrong: that little shake of the head had told her everything. From now on, there was only one purpose in her mind—to undo the harm.

  At the end of the day, the case for the Prosecution was closed. In reply to the Chairman of the magistrates, the prisoner said, “I’m innocent of this charge. That is all I have to say.” He reserved his defence, and was committed for trial at the next Assizes. So much Daisy read in the newspaper next morning. She then left the house, telling her landlady that she wanted a breath of air on the sea front: but it was not towards the sea front that she made her way.

  19. Daisy Consults a Solicitor

  Bruce Rogers was a conventionally-minded young man. Born and bred in Southbourne, he had never had ambitions beyond the partnership in the family firm of solicitors which would follow his legal training, after a decent interval, as night follows day. This training was interrupted by the war, during which he did his bit, and a little more, surviving it by exercise of the caution so necessary both to the lawyer and the fighting soldier. His experiences in the Normandy and Dutch campaigns, far from unsettling him, made the cosy billet at Southbourne, the protective routine of a lawyer’s office, seem more desirable than ever: he had returned to them with all the relief of a hunted fox going to earth. In due course, the partnership was his. He married, furnished a pleasant little house on the outskirts of Southbourne, played bridge and an occasional round of golf, was solicitous about his own health and conscientious over the affairs of his clients. He loved his wife; but for the Law he had a special feeling—an almost filial devotion—as well as a natural aptitude.

  His uncle, the senior partner—a somewhat Dickensian character running to madeira, snuff, and calculated eccentricities in dress and manner—considered young Bruce to be a stick-in-the-mud. A young man whose mind had already developed a middle-aged spread, who positively relished the minutiæ of the legal profession, and whose only use for wild oats would be as a breakfast cereal, needed shaking up, so Uncle Percival thought, fortified by the recollection of a brief affair with a barmaid forty years ago, which time had transmuted into a fling of Antony-and-Cleopatra-like splendour. So when the defence of that plausible young ruffian, Chesterman, was entrusted to his firm, Uncle Percival put Bruce on to it. His laudable object, to shake up his nephew’s ideas and enlarge his horizons, was now being fulfilled in ample measure.

  Bruce had three main obstacles to contend with—the Southbourne public, the Press, and his own client. Local feeling had run so high over the murder that even the prisoner’s legal representative moved through troubled waters: without putting it into so many words, some of his acquaintances made it clear that they deprecated his connection with the case, while others, equally ignorant of legal etiquette, were offended because he would not gossip about it and give them the low-down about his disreputable client: and once, leaving Court, he had been booed by a group of bystanders. Bruce, who had plenty of courage with his integrity, felt all this as no more than a minor annoyance.

  The Press was rather more of a nuisance. As the case proceeded, reporters swarmed over Southbourne, attracted by the smell of a cause célèbre—the nature of the crime itself, the figures of the accused and his mistress, were sufficient to excite special interest. When it became evident that the public-school type in the dock was not only a probable murderer but a professional burglar, things began to hum. While the case was sub judice, little but the bare facts from the Magistrates’ Court could appear in print: but reporters were busily unearthing background material, interviewing Hugo’s smarter acquaintances in London, pestering his brother, and so on, for the pulsating human-interest stories which could be released when the trial had run its appointed and inevitable course—stories through which the word “Raffles” would run like a signature tune. Bruce Rogers, who had been at first aware of all this merely as a distant if offensive odour, was soon brought into much more disagreeable contact with it. To be starred in one paper as “War Hero Defends Accused in Police-Murder Drama” was repugnant enough: but when press men buttonholed him in the street and even badgered his wife for interviews, things had become intolerable.

  However, these were little troubles compared with the difficulty presented by Hugo Chesterman himself. First, there was Hugo’s personality. By turns evasive or candid, sullen or charming, lively or sunk in a kind of stubborn, lethargic moodiness, Hugo was an extraordinarily difficult client to deal with. Bruce felt, now and then, that Hugo was secretly laughing at him: as an officer, he had come across the old sweat’s brand of mulishness and covert derisiveness, which could never be quite pinned down to insubordination, and now he was meeting it again. Gradually, during their conferences, he realised that Chesterman was a natural anarchist, despising, or perhaps incapable of responding to, the social values which he himself took for
granted. Throughout, Hugo insisted that he had been at the cinema with his “wife” at the time of the murder, and that the police had framed him. When Mr. Brownleigh, in his opening remarks, had indicated that he would call Daisy Bland and outlined her story, Hugo told Bruce afterwards that she had “got it all mixed up” with the events of the previous night—or else the police had bullied her into it. But Bruce could obtain no confirmation of this alibi from the cinema attendants; and his client would not allow him to cross-examine Daisy. This recalcitrance nearly made Bruce throw up the case there and then: but he was restrained by his conscientiousness and by the prisoner’s evident devotion for the girl. Also, since it was a certainty that the case would be sent up for trial, there was little point in divulging more of the defence at this stage than the alibi on which it would rest.

  This morning, the day after Hugo had been committed for trial, Bruce Rogers was gloomily contemplating his resources. He had tried to keep an open mind about his client’s innocence or guilt, but the weight of evidence against him was overwhelming. In his favour there was nothing but an unsupported alibi, the fact that none of the witnesses had identified him, and a vague story about a Joe Samuels who had made an appointment with him for—so Hugo declared—the night before the murder, and then failed to keep it. Joe and two other men, known to the police, had certainly been staying at the Queen’s Hotel that night: but their subsequent movements had been traced, and Chief Inspector Nailsworth was satisfied that they had been on their way back to London when the murder was committed.

  Bruce could hire a private detective to investigate Joe Samuels’ alibi: but, if the police had found no flaw in it, a private operative would be unlikely to do better. On this point, Uncle Percival vigorously disagreed with him. “My dear boy,” he had said, “the police have built up a strong case against our client. Why should they start knocking it down? Do you suppose they’d work really hard on the Joe Samuels line when they’ve got a perfectly good suspect in the can?” This argument shocked Bruce, who had the conventional middle-class attitude towards the police, as incorruptible guardians of property, law and order. He said something about the expense that such inquiries would involve.

  “Expense? Damn that!” remarked Uncle Percival, feeding an enormous pinch of snuff into his nostrils. “It’s all good advertisement for the firm. Put it down to that, if you’re fussed about the expenses. There’s only one slogan for our profession—‘My client, right or wrong.’ Are you going to fight the case or just go through the motions?”

  “Well of course, uncle—”

  “Then fight it to a standstill, my boy. We’ll brief Henry Jervoise for the Defence—he was a great friend of your father’s in the old days. And don’t tell me we can’t afford him. That stick, Mark Amberley, is contributing to the legal costs, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. Extremely generously.”

  “Generous my foot! The least he could do, after blowing the gaff about his brother. Conscience-money, eh? That girl—what’s her name?—Daisy Bland—ought to stump up too.”

  “She hasn’t a penny, I believe.”

  “She could get it on account, son. Think what one of those Sunday rags would pay her for a story—My Life with Hugo Chesterman.”

  Bruce Rogers was indeed thinking about this now. Daisy’s evidence in court had proved even more disastrous than he had anticipated. It flatly contradicted the cinema alibi, and this was bad enough: but far worse was the impression of candour and honesty which the girl had given. No one could be more effective than Sir Henry Jervoise at turning inside out a prejudiced or dishonest witness; but what would he be able to do with a girl who was so patently neither? especially when her condition meant that she must be handled very gently if the jury’s sympathies were not to be alienated?

  Interrupting Bruce Rogers’s thoughts, a clerk came into his room.

  “A young lady to see you, Mr. Bruce. It’s Miss Bland.”

  “Has she an appointment?” Bruce automatically asked: then, “Who did you say?”

  “Miss Daisy Bland.”

  “Good lord! What on earth?—well, show her in.”

  Daisy bore down upon him like the figure-head of a ship in full sail. He was immediately aware of a purposefulness, a strong impetus in her, for which her passive, woebegone appearance at Court had left him quite unprepared.

  “What can I do for you, Miss Bland?”

  “I’ve come to help Hugo, sir. What I said in the Court yesterday—it wasn’t true. They frightened me into it. I—”

  “Just a minute, please. This is most irregular, you know. Do please sit down, and let’s get this straight. Are you telling me you committed perjury?”

  “They said I’d be accused of the murder too, if I didn’t tell that story. You see—”

  “Please, Miss Bland. If you gave false evidence under oath—I take it that’s what you are trying to tell me—you should at once inform the magistrates or the police—”

  “But it was the police who made me do it, sir. Them and Dr. Jaques. Hugo and I were at the cinema, like he said, when it happened. They got me so muddled. It was really the night before the murder that he left me on the sea front.”

  As she spoke, the Gloucestershire accent coming out stronger, Bruce felt overawed, diminished by the intensity of passion she conveyed. The wan candour which had struck him in Court was changed now to an incandescence, a positive fury of conviction; and it was almost with the panic of a man faced by a galloping heath-fire that he rang the bell and told the clerk to ask Mr. Percival if he could spare him a few minutes.

  Uncle Percival greeted Daisy with the old-world courtesy he reserved for attractive women, and with no apparent surprise at finding her here. But he eyed her shrewdly enough as she repeated the reasons for her visit.

  “My dear young lady,” he said, “are you asking us to believe that the story you told in Court was a pure fabrication? Why did you give that evidence, when you knew it would be so damaging to our client?”

  “I was frightened, sir. Jacko—that’s what we call Dr. Jaques—he said the police would accuse me of being an accomplice if I didn’t. And he said Hugo wanted me to save myself by telling it that way. That’s why Jacko and I came down here to try and find the revolver.”

  “One thing at a time, madam,” said Uncle Percival, rather frostily now. “I still can’t understand why you should have thought it safer for you, if you were trying to save your own skin, to tell that story about being on the sea front than to tell the truth—that you were at the cinema with Chesterman.”

  Her blue eyes blazed at Percival Rogers, like fires of self-immolation. “I know it was wrong of me. But I was ill. I couldn’t think properly. I did what Jacko said was best. Can’t you see that I’m telling the truth now?”

  If Uncle Percival could see it, he gave no indication. He proceeded to put Daisy through a questioning so merciless that Bruce almost interposed: but soon he perceived that his uncle was testing the girl, to see how she would stand up to hostile cross-examination at the trial. Daisy, though flustered at times, came through it pretty well. To Bruce, at any rate, her manner carried more conviction now than the dazed, mechanical way she had told her story in the Magistrates’ Court: Sir Henry Jervoise would no doubt make the most of her having been subjected to undue pressure by the police.

  “Well, young lady,” said Uncle Percival, with a grunt when he had finished, “let’s hope the harm hasn’t gone too far. You realise you’ll be treated by the Crown as a hostile witness, if you give this new evidence? And I suppose you know the meaning of perjury?”

  “I don’t want to tell anything but the truth now,” Daisy replied, her fists clenched as if anticipating the ordeal to come, and that blind, fanatical expression in her eyes still. Bruce fidgeted with his papers. Uncle Percival took a meditative pinch of snuff.

  “What are you going to do now?” he asked.

  “I want to see Hugo. Surely they’ll let me see him now?”

  “He’s been moved to Oa
khurst Jail—that’s the Assize town, you know. We can arrange for you to visit him.” Percival Rogers paused. “You realise that a warder will be present during the interview? What I mean is—you’ll have to watch what you say to him. No cooking up a story between you.”

  The girl did not seem to have heard. She was glowing with an emotion which Bruce found almost intolerable to contemplate: it was as though a creature out of a fable had walked into his drab little room.

  “How soon?” she asked. “To-morrow?”

  Bruce explained the formalities that were necessary and promised to put them through immediately. Daisy listened, glowing at him, as if it was the key of paradise, not of a prison cell, which he was offering her.

  “Are you all right for money?” he then asked.

  “No. I haven’t any. But I expect Jacko would lend me some more.”

  “It is quite out of the question that you should see Dr. Jaques till after the trial,” said Uncle Percival. “Have you no relatives who would help you?”

  “My mother won’t have anything more to do with me—not since I went to live with Hugo. I’ve an auntie in London who—”

  “You must write to your mother,” said Percival Rogers firmly. “Make it up with her, eh? And in the meanwhile we’ll advance you a little money to be going on with.” He winked at Bruce, adding, “Without prejudice, of course.”