The Crimson Rooms (51 page)

“I believe some homes send children to Canada. Could that have happened to the Marchant children even though their parents are living?”

This time the bell was rung, and I was so terrified that she might, in a fit of pique, withdraw her offer to release the children that I sprang to my feet and said no more. Lady Curren was too well-bred not to extend her fragile little hand when the butler appeared. I crushed her fingers briefly in mine and marched away, though within a hundred yards I was leaning on a wall, clutching my arms about my breast. The children were to be released and that was surely a triumph. But what would happen when Nicholas broke his engagement with Sylvia Hardynge and Lady Curren discovered that her loyalty to him had been misplaced? Would the offer be withdrawn? I had nothing in writing and I had gained nothing for all the other children perhaps destined for the colonies.

I longed to be in the library at Girton, when the due process of law had seemed such a clear and obvious route to follow.

P
erhaps my interview with Lady Curren,
which should, on the face of it, have made me triumphant, had instead lowered my spirits irretrievably, perhaps it was the atmosphere in the courthouse, which was that of a death ritual coming to its inevitable conclusion, but as I sat in the advocates’ benches on Thursday morning, I wondered why anyone would choose to be a lawyer responsible for a life in jeopardy such as Stephen Wheeler’s. Did I really want to spend my days as a party to this process of harrowing through people’s lives and turning up the underbelly, the sadness, the weakness, the catastrophic lapses of judgment?

Breen, by contrast, was buoyant, and amused by the account of my conversation with Lady Curren. I think, had we not been in court, he might even have patted my knee. “Brilliant, Miss Gifford. You’re shown a shortcut but insist on viewing it with suspicion until you know the price you’ll have to pay. A woman after my own heart.”

“What should I do next?”

“Once the children are released we’ll continue to make a nuisance of ourselves. You were right to raise questions. There could be all kinds of implications in the future should anything befall those unfortunate children.”

He told me that Warren, the previous afternoon, had dragged Wheeler through a minute retelling of events surrounding the fateful picnic. Nothing new had emerged and Wheeler had not swerved from his story, which Warren had described as suspiciously consistent with the first time he’d told it to the police. (Warren had been rebuked by the judge for his emotive use of the word
suspiciously
.)

“Did he question Wheeler any further about who planned the picnic? Mr. Breen, I was disappointed that Mr. Wainwright didn’t press Wheeler on a couple of points. If Stella had been planning to run away that day, if she had made an arrangement with someone, she would need to be sure that every last detail remained fixed.”

“We’ll see what comes out today. Listen carefully. If there’s more you think needs asking, we’ll pass a note to Wainwright.”

Warren began Thursday morning on the offensive. The twinkle was gone and his collar so starched that it had already, so early in the day, worn a red line in his fleshy neck. “We learned yesterday that a week or so before her death Mrs. Wheeler suggested the picnic which you described to us in such meticulous detail yesterday. At what stage did you begin to lay your plans, Mr. Wheeler?”

“Plans?”

“Plans, Mr. Wheeler. Plans to journey to Chesham in order to prepare the ground? Plans to take the revolver with you.”

“What do you mean,
prepare the ground
?”

“You tell me. Ah, Mr. Wheeler, you seem nettled. It’s for you to answer the questions, not to ask them.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Prepare the ground
.”

“All right,” said Warren, “you have maintained a silence on these points ever since your arrest, so it would be hoping too much for enlightenment now. Let’s look instead at the overall picture of your marriage. I can’t be alone in thinking that I’ve heard two conflicting accounts of your life with Mrs. Wheeler. You tell me that you were devoted to her, but we have all heard how you doubted your good fortune and were anxious about your ability to keep her amused. The victim’s sister, Mrs. Leamington, says you were a jealous man and when displeased you were prone to long silences. I think we’ve all learned, Mr. Wheeler, that you are an expert on silence. What was going on in your head while you were so quiet?”

“I was just thinking.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Objection,” said Wainwright. “Can a man really be expected to list his private thoughts?”

But Wheeler cut in. “I was usually thinking about Stella. About how to make her happier, less restless.”

“She showed signs of restlessness even a fortnight into your marriage? Did you find that distressing?”

“It was her nature. She couldn’t help it. When I got in from work she wanted to know every last detail of what I’d been doing because she said her own day was so boring. She got angry with me when I had nothing to tell her. I said she must make friends in the street. She said they was all too old. I thought if a baby came . . .”

“Was there any likelihood that there might be a baby, Mr. Wheeler?”

Wheeler’s head sank.

“Mr. Wheeler, did you and your wife enjoy normal marital relations?”

Deathly silence in court.

“Mr. Wheeler,” said Warren. “I think we can infer from your silence that your wife may have had cause to be restless. I suggest you thought that you would never satisfy her in any kind of way, including sexually, and that if you couldn’t please her, she would be off. After all, the court has heard that you couldn’t dance with her and now, thanks to your silence, we may conclude you were unable to satisfy more intimate needs. You were so jealous that you watched her all the time, didn’t you? You collected her from work most days during your engagement. You never let her go dancing after you were married, and only reluctantly before. In other words, you kept your eye on her constantly. This paints a portrait of a very jealous man indeed.”

Wheeler was silent.

“I put it to you, Mr. Wheeler, that you were eaten up by fear of losing your wife. I wonder who, precisely, you were jealous of.”

“What sort of question is that?” interrupted Wainwright.

But Wheeler said, more firmly than he’d spoken before: “There was no one. I trusted Stella.”

“Then why did you watch her?”

“Because I loved her.”

“So tell me again why you waited so long to marry your wife? Six years. Is it because she was a reluctant bride, perhaps?”

“No, I was the reluctant one. I couldn’t believe she’d want me. I didn’t dare ask her before.”

“All those years you never hinted at marriage?”

“Sometimes we talked about it, joked. But I was saving money until I had something to offer. And then at last I thought, now or never.”

“Did you ask her before or after you took out an insurance policy on her life?”

“Before. We needed to be engaged,” said Wheeler. “The policy only began on the day of the marriage.” Just for a moment I saw Wheeler the insurance man, who must have sat innumerable times behind an oak desk, hands folded, papers neatly arranged before him while he explained to a stream of anxious clients the minutiae of each policy. And they would have listened trustingly (though perhaps not attentively, his voice and demeanor were so lacking in spark), and he would have achieved many sales, because a man with eyes such as his could surely never lie.

“And now, to change the subject, Mr. Wheeler,” said Warren, “I’d like to ask about Stella’s hat. The defense has made much play of the fact that her hat somehow got separated from her body.”

Wheeler’s head was well down and he was scarcely audible. “I can’t explain it. She would never have left her hat.”

“And yet, despite the strangeness of finding the hat and the picnic basket, you still left Chesham and went home without her. Why was that?”

“I’ve said, I thought she might have been angry and taken the train on her own.”

“Without her hat? I travel frequently in trains of all sorts, Mr. Wheeler, and I must say I cannot recall an occasion when I’ve seen a lady or indeed any woman without her hat. I put it to you that your account of what happened that afternoon is a pack of lies. You planned the picnic meticulously using every convenient detail, including the new picnic basket, which would easily have held a Webley revolver. What actually happened is that after you’d eaten your picnic, you persuaded your wife to walk with you to an isolated copse where you killed her, in cold blood, out of some bizarre mix of tortured jealousy and greed, and that you then went hotfoot into town where you downed a couple of drinks in order to provide yourself with an alibi, before returning to the picnic place, which was of course deserted. I put it to you that you went home that evening because you knew exactly where your wife was, under a few inches of freshly dug soil, so you didn’t need to look any further for her.”

Silence.

“What do you say to that, Mr. Wheeler?”

Silence.

“I put it to you, Mr. Wheeler, that there could be no other possible explanation for your wife’s death. Did she go to the copse and shoot herself, and bury herself and the revolver? Did some mad, invisible person appear from nowhere, lure her, hatless, to a wood, and shoot her with a revolver that happened to be yours? You’ve insisted in cross-examination that there was no other man in her life. She was a waitress, for heaven’s sake. Who would want to kill a former waitress? Who could have killed her with your gun and your gloves, which only you and she knew about, on a trip to Chesham that you and she had planned in private? Mr. Wheeler, everyone’s time is being wasted in this court. You killed your wife that day as surely as my name is Michael Warren.”

I spent the lunch break with Meredith,
who had persuaded Rose to make us sandwiches, which we ate on a bench in the park. She was scathing about Warren’s behavior. “Wheeler is condemned by his own actions, there was no need to be so contemptuous of him. Murder, it seems to me, is a terrible but grand crime. A man who could plan and carry out such a thing at least deserves respect.”

I laughed. “You amaze me. You, a nurse. Surely the taking of a human life is abhorrent to you.”

“So it is. But would Warren have spoken like that to a general who signed the order paper that resulted in thousands of men being killed in half an hour on the Somme? I think not. The difference is that one kind of slaughter is sanctioned by the law, the other isn’t. But at least Wheeler gave the matter some considered thought. At least only one person was killed.”

The afternoon began
with reexamination by Wainwright. “Pay attention, Miss Gifford,” murmured Breen, “these are your questions.”

“Mr. Wheeler, I want to discuss the arrangements for the picnic one more time. You have told the court that it was your wife who decided the date and the location, and it was she who persuaded you to go for a drink.”