The Paying Guests (56 page)

It took the boy a moment to understand that he was being addressed. He looked blankly back at the magistrate, who spoke again, with impatience.

‘You are charged with the gravest possible crime, Mr Ward. Do you have anything to say to the court in support of yourself against it?’

Finding all eyes turned his way, the boy began to smirk again. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I never done it. But I’d like to shake hands with the bloke that did!’

His friends in the crowd laughed out loud. Leonard’s father, uncle and brother let out more hisses of outrage. Frances’s heart sank.

The magistrate, unimpressed, turned back to Inspector Kemp. ‘Well, I am satisfied that there is enough evidence against the suspect to justify keeping him on remand for seven days. You’ll have the laboratory findings by the end of that period, I take it? And Mr Ward, I trust, will have secured a counsel by then. For now, you may remove him to Brixton Prison. Mr Wells —’

He called forward some court official. Sergeant Heath led the boy from the dock. People rose to leave the chamber; others shuffled in to take their places. ‘Quickly, please!’ cried the usher, with a shooing gesture. He had to keep the police-court day grinding on, after all.

Frances got to her feet, and made her way across the courtroom, feeling almost dazed. She had expected some sort of resolution. She had supposed that everything would be decided, for better or for worse. She reached the doors to the lobby at the same moment as the Walworth party, and this time they turned to include her; they went out as a single group.

Mrs Viney and Vera were flushed. Lloyd was incandescent.

‘What a bloody little waster. Excuse my language, Miss Wray, but, really. A good flogging’s what he needs. They should take a horse-whip to him! When I think of the mates I lost in France, and all so as little swines like him can – I was just saying, Mr Barber —’ Leonard’s father had appeared, with Douglas and Uncle Ted behind him; they all moved away from the doors, to allow other people to come and go. ‘I was just saying, that boy needs a bloody horse-whip taking to him! Standing there with his hands in his pockets, chewing gum and grinning like that. I could see Sergeant Heath itching to have a go at him, couldn’t you? I wanted to have a go at him myself.’

Mr Barber couldn’t speak; he was still mopping his eyes with his handkerchief. It was Leonard’s brother who answered, in that unnerving voice of his.

‘Oh, he’s not worth bruising your hand on. He’s filth. He’s trash! I’m just glad my mother wasn’t here to see him. You saw
his
mother, I suppose? A nice job she’s done of bringing him up, hasn’t she? Here she comes, look.’ The poor little woman, apparently more bewildered than ever, had just pushed her way through the swing doors. Seeing the eyes of the family on her, she hesitated; then, realising who they were – or, perhaps, simply recognising their hostility – she ducked her head, turned away, and headed off, all alone.

‘Oh, God love her,’ said Mrs Viney, in her feeling way.

Douglas almost spat. ‘God love her? She’ll get what she deserves from Him, all right. And so will that little thug. But he’ll get what he deserves down here, first. Or he will if I’ve got anything to do with it.’

‘I’m with you there,’ said Lloyd grimly.

Uncle Ted said, ‘At least they’re keeping him in prison for the week. Not that that will bother him, mind.’

‘Bother him?’ answered Douglas. ‘He’ll probably have the time of his life in there! You know he was in the waiting-room this morning, bragging to all the other men about how his crime was the finest on the charge-sheet? Constable Evans told us, earlier. No, there’s no morality in him. You only have to look at his face to see that.’

‘I did wonder,’ said Mrs Viney, ‘whether he’s quite all there.’

‘Oh, he’s all there, all right.’

Frances gazed at them in frustration. Couldn’t they see that the boy’s manner was all bravado, all pose? She said, ‘I don’t think he’s taken it in yet. I don’t think he understands his situation.’

Douglas snorted. ‘He understood his situation when he went after my brother in July, Miss Wray. He hasn’t denied that, has he? Yes, he understood his way from Soho to Champion Hill!’

‘Didn’t he just,’ said Vera, as the others nodded. ‘Mind, he wouldn’t have had to understand it, if Len hadn’t been in Soho in the first place.’

That shut Douglas up. There was an uncomfortable silence. People lowered their heads and looked furtively at Lilian, who all this time had been standing just behind Frances’s shoulder, staring at the floor.

Finally Mr Barber, tucking away his handkerchief, said, ‘I hope Lilian knows how sorry I am that she had to hear those things read out from Charlie’s statement like that. If I hadn’t heard them myself, I should never have believed them. To think of Leonard carrying on in such a way – well, it’s upset me almost more than anything.’

And, ‘Yes,’ said Douglas stiffly. ‘Yes, that was very shabby. I can’t think what Len thought he was playing at.’

Mrs Viney said, ‘Well, neither can I! It didn’t even sound like Lenny, did it? It didn’t sound like Charlie, either. I said to Lil, “Do you think it’s all true?” I wonder if the inspector hasn’t made it out to be worse than what it was – put words in Charlie’s mouth, I mean. The police can be very artful, you know. And those two girls —’

‘
Them!
’ said Douglas, suddenly back on surer ground. ‘I’d like to get my hands on them! That Billie, or Mabel, or whatever the hell she calls herself. I’ve a few choice names for her! Her, and that sister of hers. If they know nothing about the murder, then I’m a Dutchman!’

Mrs Viney looked shocked. ‘You don’t say so!’

‘I do. You just wait. It’ll all come out. You notice they didn’t turn up today? Didn’t want to look us in the eye, I suppose. No, I bet they damn well didn’t…’

And he was off again, railing against the two girls now, his colour higher than ever, his brother’s infidelities forgotten.

Frances felt Lilian change her pose. She turned, and found her with her head raised, her eyes on Douglas and the men. As Lloyd repeated his call for a horse-whip, she spoke to Frances softly.

‘They’ve all got someone else to hate now, haven’t they?’

But then that shadow of apprehension came across her face again; and Frances grew sick. For this, of course, was the moment – the moment they had put off confronting on Monday. Here they were, face to face. They had to talk, they had to plan, come to some sort of a decision… While Douglas ranted on they moved away from the others. There was no privacy to be had; the lobby was filled with men and women wanting admission to the cases still to be heard in the courtroom. In the midst of so many individual emergencies, however, it was possible to stand and murmur. They found a spot near a ragged woman with a grotesquely beaten face, who kept starting forward every time the doors to the street were opened, only to fall back, dashed, when the wrong person appeared.

Lilian spoke with an effort. ‘What do you want us to do, Frances?’

Frances answered after a pause. ‘Nothing’s changed, has it? I thought everything would be different. I had no idea that the hearing would be so one-sided. I thought it would all have become clear. But nothing’s clear. I feel badly for the boy’s mother. I feel very badly for her. As for him —’

‘He isn’t at all how I thought he’d be.’

‘No.’

‘He seemed almost to – to like it.’

Their gazes met, then slid apart. Frances said, ‘Seven more days in prison, though… But then, he’ll get himself a solicitor. His alibi will be proved. There’s nothing against him save hearsay and boasts.’

She could feel Lilian looking at her, wanting it to be true. ‘Do you think so?’

‘I just can’t believe it’ll go all the way to a trial.’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘Don’t you?’

Lilian said miserably, ‘I don’t know what I think any more. I don’t trust myself. This morning I was all ready for it to be the worst it could be. I was really, truly ready. But now that I’ve seen him… I know it isn’t fair. But he did hurt Len that other time. And the girl said he’d knocked her teeth out, didn’t she? Nobody’s mentioned that.’ Here the doors to the street were pushed open and she fell silent, watching the beaten woman dart forward then slink back in fresh disappointment.

And when she spoke again, her tone had changed, become shy. ‘What – What do you think she can be like?’

Frances frowned. ‘The girl? Billie?’

‘I keep trying to imagine her. I thought she would be here. I wish I could just see her and get it over with. I still can’t believe it of him. A girl like that! I just can’t believe that he was meeting her for all those months. I keep thinking of things, little things, things he said, things he did. She must have been doing his nails for him, Frances.’

‘His nails?’

‘You remember? His manicures? We used to laugh at him, didn’t we? But she must have been doing it. I’m sure she was. I thought of it when the inspector was reading, and I felt such a fool.
Such
a fool. If you could die from feeling a fool, I’d have died right then…’

Her voice had begun to waver, and her mouth to twitch. But perhaps now she was remembering that moment in Vera’s bedroom when Frances had spoken so sharply to her about taking the wall. She drew in her breath, and her features steadied.

‘I don’t want to go to the police,’ she said. ‘Not if you really think it’ll all come to nothing. I wouldn’t say it if the boy was different, but we’ve waited three days and he’s all right. We might as well wait another seven. I want us to wait another seven. It must become clear then, mustn’t it?’

Frances hadn’t realised that her heart was clenched, but at Lilian’s words she felt it slacken like an uncurling fist. Another seven days of freedom! The sudden release of it made her giddy. She nodded, saying nothing. She couldn’t look at Lilian again. She couldn’t speak warmly or kindly to her. She didn’t know if that was from shame, or squeamishness, or what it was. They hadn’t so much as touched hands since before Leonard’s funeral, and there were only inches between them now. If they could somehow close the space – But how could they do that, there? And Lilian had made no mention of coming home to Champion Hill.

So they stood in an awkward silence, then moved back to join the others.

As they did it, Inspector Kemp and Sergeant Heath appeared in the lobby. They came across to discuss the hearing, seeming well pleased with how it had gone. The sergeant had just seen the boy put into the police van for his journey to Brixton Prison. ‘They’ll look after him there, don’t you worry,’ he assured Leonard’s father, in an ominous way. Frances caught the inspector’s eye over Mrs Viney’s shoulder. He gave her a nod – and then, as if unable to resist it, he came around the group to her. He was smirking, just as Spencer had smirked in the dock.

‘So, Miss Wray, you were sharper than me.’

She didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You seemed to take a dim view of husbands when I spoke to you last week. You were right to be doubtful, you see. You were right about Mr Wismuth’s innocence, too. I hope you feel that we are up to the mark at last.’

He spoke lightly, of course. She answered in earnest. ‘No, I don’t.’

His smirk faltered. ‘You don’t?’

‘The boy’s all swagger. Can’t you see it?’

‘He’s an out-and-out villain! They’ve had their eye on him for years, up at Bermondsey.’

‘He didn’t murder Leonard Barber. He just likes the idea that he did.’

Now he was shaking his head. ‘Oh, Miss Wray, what an extraordinary woman you are.’

‘He didn’t do it,’ she repeated. ‘You’re making a mistake.’

There must have been something to her tone, something out of place, excessive. His smile returned, but less naturally than before. He was impatient with her, perhaps even slightly disappointed; she could see him putting her down, finally, as a simple crank. He made some humouring remark about keeping her words in mind, but even as he did it he was gesturing to Sergeant Heath. They were busy men, of course – busy in a way that didn’t include her now; busy in a way that barely included Lilian. When he said his goodbyes to the others, he spoke mainly to Douglas and to Lloyd. He would ‘keep the families informed’, he promised, as he and the sergeant moved off.

Frances watched them go, thinking,
I could call you back and astound you
.
I could do it right now
…

She didn’t do it. She saw them disappear into some other part of the court-house. They passed the woman with the beaten face, who was still starting forward in her hopeful way, still falling back.

And then it was time to leave the building. They steeled themselves to face the spectators gathered outside. Vera took Lloyd’s arm, Frances offered hers to Mrs Viney; they put Lilian between the four of them, to shield her from the worst of it. But when they went out through the doors, though people strained to look at them, something else happened to the crowd: there was a tremor at one of its edges, and then, before their eyes, the tremor spread. People were turning, moving away. It took Frances a moment to understand why. The police van was just emerging from some side gate, and everyone was desperate for a glimpse of the boy inside it. A couple of youths were jumping up, trying to see through its louvred windows. Others were hammering on its panels as it passed – she couldn’t tell if they were doing it in malice or in glee. She didn’t care why they were doing it, she realised, so long as they weren’t doing it to her.

She had the same uneasy mixture of feelings as the week wore on. Every morning she lay in bed, giddy again with sheer relief at the thought of the hours of liberty ahead of her; but every morning she made herself rise and dress and go down the hill to the news-stand, convinced that if she once let a day go by without thinking of Spencer Ward, without giving him her anxious attention, he would be lost. It was as if he were caught in a piece of machinery and only she could see it; as if all that was keeping him from the grinding cogs was her hand, hauling at his collar.

But every morning he seemed to have been tugged away from her by another half-inch.

‘
DO
WORSE
TO
HIM
NEXT
TIME
’
appeared as a headline in two or three of the papers, the day after the police court hearing, along with
SMILES
IN
DOCK
and
‘
OWED
A
WALLOP
’
. There were pictures of the boy being led to the prison van, one of him grinning full at the camera with his deplorable teeth, another of him attempting to shield his face in a spread-fingered style he could only, Frances thought, have got from American crook dramas he had seen at the cinema. On the Sunday there were dismal quotes from some of his Bermondsey neighbours: he’d been in and out of trouble since he was a lad, and during the War he had ‘run quite wild’. He had stolen a motor-car and overturned it on Streatham Common; he’d been involved in a ration-book racket; he’d gone on numerous pilfering sprees. His uncle, a railway porter, gave an interview to the
News of the World
asking for understanding. ‘There is no real harm in Spencer,’ he said. ‘He is the victim of circumstances. He was a sweet-tempered child, but has been a different character ever since the death of his father at Neuve Chapelle. A year ago we were in hopes that he was settling down, but then he met Miss Billie Grey and lost his head to her completely. She led him to believe that the two of them were engaged, and as far as I know she accepted his ring. But once she got to know Mr Leonard Barber it was a different story.’ He finished by saying: ‘I cannot believe that my nephew was capable of this despicable crime, and I cannot help but ask myself why Miss Grey is so keen to pin the blame for the murder upon him. I have stated my concerns in a letter to Scotland Yard, and am awaiting their reply.’

That sent Frances’s anxiety hurtling in a brand new direction. She recalled what Douglas had said about the girl and her sister having had some part in Leonard’s death. If they were to be blamed now, too —! When photographs of Billie began to appear in the press, she found herself poring over them in just the same tense way that, a week before, she had pored over those pictures of Lilian. They showed an ordinary face made cheaply pretty by bottle-blonded hair, by a darkened mouth and lashes, by eyebrows plucked into two thin arcs. ‘The Bermondsey
femme fatale
,’ was how the
Express
snidely described her; in a similar vein there were frequent mentions in all the papers of her ‘Tulse Hill trysts’ with Leonard – as if the south London settings somehow made the whole thing worse. But, oh, thought Frances, how squalid it was! What on earth had Leonard been thinking? Looking into the girl’s face, she recalled that moment in the starlit garden… And again she felt an odd sting of betrayal, at the thought that he had had such a secret; at the knowledge that he had been, at heart, a greater liar than she.

‘Oh, put them away!’ her mother pleaded, when she found her at the kitchen table with the newspapers spread out before her. ‘I can’t think why you persist in reading them. What good is all this brooding? Give yourself a rest from it, can’t you?’

‘How on earth can I rest?’ Frances answered – and she knew she was speaking all the more indignantly because resting was secretly what she longed and longed to do. ‘How can I rest while that boy’s in prison with all this hanging over his head?’

‘But surely it’s out of our hands now? Do you plan to follow the case all the way to the Old Bailey?’

She began to fold up the newspapers, and spoke stubbornly. ‘It won’t go as far as that.’

‘What do you mean? Why do you say that? We must hope that it does, mustn’t we? For the sake of Mr Barber’s family.’

‘It can’t go anywhere on no evidence.’

‘Oh, Frances, how contrary you are! The boy’s to be pitied, of course, but —’ Her mother’s tone grew delicate. ‘Well, from everything I’ve seen and read, he sounds a thoroughly nasty type.’

‘He’s a thug,’ said Frances bluntly. ‘But who turned him into one? The rest of us did. The War. Poverty. The papers themselves. The pictures! He comes from a world where killing a man is something to boast about. Can you blame him? A few years ago they were doling out medals for the same thing. And in any case, he could be the biggest thug in London – that doesn’t mean he killed Leonard.’

‘But if he didn’t do it,’ said her mother in perplexity, ‘then who did?’

And that, of course, was the one question that Frances could not answer – or, rather, the one question that she
could
answer, and, in answering, utterly resolve. That terror stirred in her again. She put the papers out of sight.

If only she could talk it through with Lilian. If only Lilian would come home… As the days passed, and there was no word from her, she began to want to see her, in the old, pure craving way. At last she gave in, and trudged back to Walworth. But she regretted it almost at once. Her visit had coincided with some break in Mr Viney’s working day: he was in the kitchen in his shirt-sleeves, eating fried bread and bacon. The little girl had just arrived home from school, and was full of the hardness of the playground. ‘Why do you keep coming here?’ she asked Frances loudly; and Frances could tell from the violence with which she was scolded that the others were wondering the same thing. She was wondering it herself. The craving for Lilian seemed to have disappeared at the first sight of her. She took Frances through to the parlour; the door was closed, they were left alone. But it was just as it had been at the police court: now that they had made their decision there seemed nothing more to say. The little over-furnished room was drab and oppressive. Lilian was again dressed in some gown of Vera’s, with her hair put up in combs.

‘You’ve been following the papers?’ Frances asked her.

She shook her head. ‘I can’t bear to do it.’

Frances drew back from her. ‘You’d rather do nothing? You’d rather do that?’

She spoke with scorn – again, because she longed so hard to do nothing herself. And Lilian looked at her, for a moment, in a way she never had before: a level, wounded, let-down way. Ashamed, Frances put out her hand. ‘Lily —’

Then the door burst open and the little girl ran in, bringing the hysterical Jack Russell.

The next day the
Daily Mirror
reported that when Spencer Ward was sixteen he had been one of a gang of youths who had assaulted another boy by tying him up and setting fire to his trousers.
The
Times
ran an article on juvenile delinquents; the
Express
lamented the ‘great tide of youthful lawlessness’ that had swept the country since the War. The case was still in its earliest stages. The boy hadn’t even been given a chance, yet, to speak in his own defence. But everything Frances read, every neighbour she spoke to, seemed to take it for granted that he had murdered Leonard. She could see the guilty verdict being steadily built up against him – it was like the word game, Gallows, that she had used to play with her brothers, where each false guess resulted in another stroke of the chalk on the slate, and before one’s eyes there appeared the beams of the scaffold, the round head, the body, the stick-like limbs…

She couldn’t believe it. She wouldn’t believe it. She kept telling herself, The plain fact is, he isn’t a murderer. He’s done nothing. It was like arithmetic, she thought: a sum could only come out one way. He couldn’t be found guilty of a crime he hadn’t committed. And she fixed all her hopes on the second police court hearing.

But when the hearing took place, it was worse than the first one. Spencer was paler, less cocky, but no more likeable this time than he had been the week before, and though he had got himself a counsel – a Mr Strickland, a Bermondsey solicitor who, Frances gathered, had taken on the case under some sort of legal assistance scheme – the man did not inspire confidence. He had wispy hair, and lopsided spectacles, and nicotine stains on his fingers; he looked, she thought, like a harassed Latin master from a third-rate school.

The prosecuting counsel was altogether more impressive. He went smoothly over the facts as put together by Inspector Kemp, then summoned a series of witnesses to the stand. The first was one of the boys who claimed to have heard Spencer making threats against Leonard’s life. He kept looking at Spencer as he spoke, in a sly, gloating way: it was so patent that he had come to settle some sort of score that Frances’s spirits rose slightly. No one could possibly consider him a credible witness, she thought. But after him came the Camberwell servant who had been in the lane with her sweetheart on the night of Leonard’s death; and as she began to answer the prosecutor’s questions, Frances’s confidence shrivelled. Now that the girl was in front of her, real, solid, fattish-faced, it was more horrible than ever to think that she had been there in that stretch of impenetrable darkness with Lilian and herself, breathing the same flannelly air. The prosecutor wanted to know what precisely she had heard. She repeated what she’d stated to the papers: there had been footsteps and sighs, along with a cry of ‘No!’ or ‘Don’t!’ – that could only, thought Frances, unnerved, have been the cry that she herself had given when Lilian had touched her arm. Could the girl describe the voice? It had been ‘high’, she said, so high that just at first she’d mistook it for a woman’s. Frances began to sweat. ‘Then I saw about the murder, and —’

‘You decided, on reflection, that the voice was a man’s? Perhaps made high or light by fear?’

‘Oh, yes, it was awful fearful. I should hate to have to hear it again. Oh, it made your blood run cold!’

It was obvious that she believed every word she was saying, and the simplicity and sincerity of her manner impressed the room. Leonard’s father was hunched up with his hand across his eyes; Douglas was patting his shoulder – and Frances could see that their distress was impressing people, too.

Then the prosecutor called on the police surgeon, Mr Palmer, to report on the findings of the Home Office laboratory. He spoke first about those hairs that had been taken from Leonard’s coat: they were a ‘fair’ match with the head of the accused, he said; but no more than fair. He wouldn’t care to stake his reputation on them. The traces of blood that had been found on the cosh, however, were ‘almost certainly human’. The laboratory couldn’t be more precise than that, but he had seen the slides himself and, in his opinion as well as theirs – yes, almost certainly. The shape of the weapon was also a reasonable fit with the shape of the wound on Mr Barber’s head.

Could he say with what degree of violence the blow to the head had been delivered? – Oh, a great degree of violence.

It wasn’t a casual blow? A glancing blow? It couldn’t have been delivered accidentally? It couldn’t have been made in self-defence?

Mr Palmer almost smiled. ‘Oh, no. I shouldn’t think that likely, given that the wound was slightly to the rear of Mr Barber’s head. As for the intention – If I might have the instrument for a moment, please?’ A constable took it to him, and he held it up as Inspector Kemp had held it up at the first hearing. ‘A short weapon like this, you see,’ he went on, pushing his cuff back from his wrist, ‘can have no momentum of its own. The momentum comes all from the arm.’ He swung his own arm, two or three times, to demonstrate the action. ‘With a longer object – a mallet, a poker, something like that – then, yes, I would certainly suggest that the force of the blow might be greater than the assailant had anticipated. An inexperienced assailant, that is. But with this sort of thing – no. The person who made that injury to Mr Barber’s head, with this particular weapon, would have known precisely what he was doing.’

‘He would have intended his blow to be fatal?’

‘He must have expected that result.’

Frances couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The thing had taken on a life of its own. The surgeon, the lawyers, the police – they were all working backwards from their own idea of what had happened to Leonard and tailoring everything else to fit. There was no logic to it. Why couldn’t anyone else see? If she and Lilian were to stand up now and say what had really happened, the trial would fall to bits. If they could only bring themselves to do it! Wouldn’t it be easier than sitting here, listening to the facts being mangled? If they could only tell the truth, calmly – if they could just lead Inspector Kemp back to Champion Hill; if they just could show him the ashtray – he might be brought to believe, now, that it was all an accident. The surgeon had as good as said so, hadn’t he?

But even as she raised her hands to the back of the pew in front of her, all the power in her muscles seemed to begin to drain away. She had to lean forward for a moment, close her eyes, fight off her own fear… And in that moment the trial moved on, and she did nothing. Mr Strickland requested more time in which to pursue his client’s defence. With every respect to Mr Palmer, he wished to consult another surgeon. He hoped that the medical evidence might be put at his disposal.

The magistrate ordered that the hearing be adjourned. Spencer Ward was to be returned to Brixton for another seven days.

And that was how it went on – exactly like that, not just for one week but for two, with, incredibly, no advance, no resolution; with Frances every time preparing herself for the worst, then receiving that sickening reprieve; with the boy being dispatched back to prison – until she began to feel as though they’d all slipped into some nightmarish other life, some hell or purgatory from which they would never get free.