Derby Day (55 page)

But if Captain Raff, now deceased, was no help to Captain McTurk (they buried him down in Epsom, before a congregation of two persons: Mr Delaney, and a very old lady down from Northumberland, who was thought to be the captain’s aunt) then there were other avenues that were worth the exploring. He had Mr Masterson go down to Leather Lane and interview Mr Solomons, to that gentleman’s profound alarm. He himself routed out Mr File again in Amwell Street. He would have questioned Mr Gresham, but word came from Belgrave Square that the old man was very ill indeed, so ill as to altogether prohibit any interrogation by the police, or indeed anyone else. Still, Captain McTurk procured a search warrant and, together with Mr Masterson, spent an instructive afternoon in Mr Gresham’s study going through his son-in-law’s effects. He had the powder which had been put into Mr Gresham’s milk-and-arrowroot analysed by a man from a chemical laboratory, who demonstrated that it was a powerful sedative that should certainly not have been given to an elderly gentleman in poor health and had probably come near to killing him. He had Mr Masterson go down to Scroop and see what Mr Happerton had left behind him there. But it was remarkable how comfortless all this was to Captain McTurk. He felt like a digger in the vault of some ancient temple, who has assembled a hundred fragments of some shot mosaic, without having the least idea of the originating pattern. And yet Captain McTurk knew that there was a pattern, and that only the guile of its designer kept it from him.

But all this time Captain McTurk had one trump card up his sleeve, an asset which he thought would enable him to vanquish everything from the caution of the great legal eminence from the Home Office to the evidential desert of Ryder Street. This was Mrs Happerton. A married lady cannot, of course, be compelled to testify against her husband in a court of law. But Captain McTurk fancied that no compulsion would be necessary. At the same time, Captain McTurk had not quite known what to do about Mrs Happerton. He had begun by thinking that he might charge her with old Mr Gresham’s poisoning; expedience had then dictated that she might best be used as a witness to her husband’s overbearing design. On the other hand, a lady in such circumstances cannot really be allowed out into polite society. So Captain McTurk had conspired with the Honourable Major Stebbings and other interested persons, and for the last two weeks he had had her shut up in a house in Marylebone High Street, with a very discreet woman to care for her and instructions that she should be conciliated and indulged in every way, have friends to visit her, be let out into Marylebone High Street for air and recreation if she wished it, only that – she should not be allowed out of the discreet woman’s sight. The discreet woman was called Mrs Martin, and on calling at the house in the week before Midsummer, Captain McTurk made sure that he had a little conversation with that lady in the kitchen. How had Mrs Happerton spent her time? Mrs Martin thought that she had read novels, twenty or thirty novels at least from Mudie’s. Had anyone come to see her? It transpired that the Honourable Major Stebbings had called twice. And how did Mrs Martin think her charge was faring? But to this question Mrs Martin had no answer, and Captain McTurk had proceeded to the drawing room, in which Mrs Happerton was accustomed to spend her afternoons, not quite knowing what he would find.

She was sitting in a little high-backed chair by the empty grate – the sun, streaming in through the open window burned off her shoulders – and there was something about her manner that made him stop in the doorway and look at her. She was simply dressed, in a print frock, with the neatest pair of slippers on her feet, and as immaculate as a fashion plate, but that a strand or two of her hair had escaped from the chignon behind her head and she was chewing at them like an animal that has nothing better to eat. She looked very sandy and dry, as if the heat of the day had quite shrivelled her up, and Captain McTurk thought that he did not envy Mrs Martin her task.

‘They are looking after you, I hope?’ he said as he came into the room. He could hear Mrs Martin clattering the dishes in the kitchen, and a part of him wished he could be there with her.

‘Mrs Martin is very kind,’ Mrs Rebecca said, with a little tug of her mouth at a strand of hair that showed signs of escaping. ‘Indeed, I think I know every inch of Marylebone High Street and the contents of every shop window in it.’

‘You will not credit it perhaps,’ Captain McTurk said, ‘but I knew you when you were a child. That is – I used to call at your house, when your papa and I had business. Do you recollect it?’

‘No, I do not recollect it. Papa knew so many people.’

And Captain McTurk knew that he had made a mistake. He had tried to introduce a personal note into his dealings with Mrs Happerton and it had been thrown back at him. And, thinking this, he remembered the young Miss Gresham, whom he had thought spoiled and captious. That was the end of any sentiment, he thought.

‘Tell me about the money your father gave to Mr Happerton,’ he proposed. ‘The seven thousand pounds from the account at Gurney’s bank.’

‘The money was lent, I believe,’ Mrs Rebecca said, very coolly.

‘And what condition was your father in when he lent it, I wonder?’ Captain McTurk asked. ‘Did he know what was going into his milk?’

‘There was nothing went into his milk but arrowroot,’ Mrs Rebecca said. Captain McTurk looked at her face, but it was quite without expression. ‘Or if there was, I cannot say how it got there. I cannot answer for Mr Happerton.’

Captain McTurk thought that he had never seen anything so disagreeable as the way Mrs Happerton chewed at her hair.

‘You realise that this is very serious? Your father is very unwell. There is a man dead in Lincolnshire, and half a dozen bills forged that helped to kill him. It is very probable that you may be charged as an accessory.’

‘Everything is very serious,’ Mrs Rebecca said. ‘I am always being told that. Marriage is very serious, and yet gentlemen don’t seem to think it so. Living in a house in Belgrave Square and being driven in a carriage in the park is very serious, or so I was always led to believe, and yet it makes me laugh. So many things make me laugh. Half a dozen gentlemen ruining themselves over a horse, and Captain Raff cutting his throat because his life isn’t to his liking. I should like not to be serious. I should like to please myself. I should like to drive my own carriage, and not have anybody to wonder where I go and when I should return. I should like to live my own life, and not to be at anybody’s beck and call except my own. And I have been an accessory to nothing, unless it is to my own humiliation. Poor Papa,’ she added.

It was that ‘Poor Papa’ that convinced Captain McTurk that some game was being played with him. Until then he had listened with a sense of something very near wonder – he had never heard a woman speak like that before, and scarcely ever a man. But the mention of Mr Gresham, which Mrs Rebecca could not quite carry off as she had done the earlier part of her speech, made him suspect that she and Mr Happerton had been confederate together – the transfer of the seven thousand pounds could not have taken place without some collusion – but that Mrs Rebecca meant to throw her husband over while saving herself. In these circumstances the ‘Poor Papa’ struck him as highly duplicitous, but he was anxious above all things – Mr Happerton’s lawyers were very pressing – to secure a conviction. And so, going back to the room above the stable yard in Northumberland Avenue, he wrote Mrs Happerton a letter setting out what she might testify to in court, and what she might not, and what the consequences of these admissions, and refusals, might be. To this, a day or so later, Mrs Happerton replied.

‘What does she do with herself?’ he asked Mrs Martin again at about this time.

‘Do with herself?’ Mrs Martin repeated. ‘Why, nothing now. Nothing at all. Sits in the parlour and twists her hair. That Major Stebbings as is her cousin called again and she wouldn’t see him. There was an afternoon the other day when I thought I heard the sound of her crying to herself, so I went in to see her, thinking that she might take a morsel to eat – for she has had nothing this past week, to speak of – and she was sitting in that chair straight as a ramrod, and said to me: “Mrs Martin, ma’am, I’ll thank you to come into this room only when a bell is rung for you and not before.”’

And Captain McTurk shook his head and thought once again that he did not envy Mrs Martin her task.

There was by this time a Happerton party – not much of one, perhaps but vociferous, and consisting of a few gentlemen from the Blue Riband Club, who maintained that the whole thing was a plot contrived by Mr Happerton’s enemies in the sporting world to discredit him. There was also, it goes without saying, a movement for Mrs Rebecca, genteel, and more vociferous still, which held that she had been badly treated, coerced and browbeaten by the man in whom she had placed her trust and was as innocent as the driven snow: driven snow is always thought to be innocent, and yet it takes the dirt like anything else. All this naturally gave Mr Happerton’s trial, which began in the first week of September, an unusual piquancy. He was arraigned on two counts – the forging of Mr Davenant’s signature on bills, and the administration of poison to old Mr Gresham in pursuit of pecuniary advantage. There was no mention of Mr Pardew, or the robbery at Mr Gallentin’s shop, or indeed of Mrs Rebecca, and one or two people thought that Captain McTurk was playing a dangerous game, and that there were weaknesses in the case which Mr Carker, whom Mr Happerton’s friends had engaged on his behalf, might very well exploit.

The first two days of the trial were very dull. Serjeant Daniels, the Crown prosecutor, produced the sheet of facsimile signatures from the study at Scroop and handed it round to the jury. Mr Silas was brought to the witness stand to give his account of the despoliation of Mr Davenant’s estate. A Sleaford hay chandler testified that a bill in his name with Mr Davenant’s signature on it was a forgery. A medical man was brought in to quantify the hurt done to old Mr Gresham by the administration of the sedative powder, and a representative of Messrs Gurney to confirm the transfer of the seven thousand pounds into Mr Happerton’s account. Mr Happerton, very soberly dressed in a subfusc suit and with not an equine pin upon him, denied each calumny that was attributed to him, and Mr Carker was judged to have been very clever. He put a question or two to Mr Silas about the legal procedure for collecting a debt that entirely flummoxed him, and the little homily he pronounced on the value of sedative medicines and the possibility of honest confusion by those who administered them was thought to have tied Captain McTurk’s medical man up in knots. He interrogated Mr Glenister to such effect that an observer might have thought him entirely motivated by spite against Mr Happerton rather than affection for his dead friend. A sample of the powder which had been used to quieten Mr Gresham was brought onto the stand, and Mr Carker positively snapped his fingers and said it could have been got from anywhere, and never had a solicitous son-in-law been so unfairly stigmatised, and was shushed by the judge for his impertinence. Captain McTurk, watching from the gallery, was almost in despair.

But the arrival of Mrs Rebecca at the witness box on the third day caused a sensation. Quite whether Captain McTurk had had a hand in her costuming was uncertain, but it was noted by the reporters present that she appeared in a dress of the deepest black, as black as widows’ weeds, and that this, combined with the pallor of her face, produced a very striking impression. There had been a rumour in the newspapers that old Mr Gresham was very near death, and this created an additional sympathy for her, and the judge ordered that a chair be brought and asked: would she have a glass of water? When she spoke it was in a low voice with her head sunk down upon her breast, and her green eyes were very subdued. Serjeant Daniels was, of course, very gentle with her. She had married Mr Happerton less than a year before, had she not? And Mrs Rebecca nodded her head very meekly and said that she had. And what had been her impression of the gentleman who – Serjeant Daniels was a very polite man and made a little bow as he said the words – won her heart?

And very timorously at first, with frequent shy glances at judge, jury and a stout woman who sat upon the public benches and was assumed to be her particular friend, but was later found to have no connection with her at all, she told the story of her husband’s pursuit of Tiberius, his descent upon Mr Davenant’s estate at Scroop to claim his prize, his desire to obtain his father-in-law’s money and the manner in which this assistance had been procured. Asked by Serjeant Daniels whether she believed that the powder given to her father – her own father, as Serjeant Daniels sternly reminded the jury – was injurious, she was observed to bite her lip, give a sad little twist to a tendril of hair that had escaped from her chignon and remark that she believed it her duty as a newly married woman to obey her husband’s instructions in all things. Did she know anything of the forged bills? Mrs Rebecca put her head on one side and said, with what appeared to be the greatest reluctance, that she did.

Naturally Mr Carker could do nothing with her. When he hinted – it was not something he could decently say – that she was determined to betray her husband because of some personal slight that had no bearing on the case, there was a cry of ‘Shame!’ from the public gallery. When he implied that she was not telling the truth, she stared at him in such a sorrowful way that even the defence barristers began to look uneasy and wonder whether Mr Carker had overreached himself. There was an attempt to prove her an accessory – ‘a vixen determined to play upon a fond parent’s partiality’ as Mr Carker rather forlornly put it – but Mr Happerton’s defence had by this time collapsed into ruins, and he was very soon after this found guilty on both counts.