The Paying Guests (61 page)

The girl stared at him. No, it hadn’t been like that. That was making it out to be something common, but she and Lenny – They had been in love. They had used to talk and talk to each other. He’d told her all about when he was a boy and things like that. It hadn’t been their fault that the world was against them. They had been like Adam and Eve.

And here, horribly, there was a snort of laughter in the public gallery; and the girl blinked up at the faces again, and her mouth gave a twitch, and she began to cry. That produced a boo from someone. Frances didn’t know if the boo was aimed at Billie herself or at the person who had laughed at her, but she cried harder at the sound, and the tears – real, grown-up, painful – quickly transformed her face into a swollen mask of grief. The usher handed her a glass of water, doing it in the neutral, professional way in which he might have retrieved a sheet of paper that had glided to the floor. Mr Tresillian waited, unmoved and unimpressed. The only figure visibly agitated by her upset was the boy in the dock: he was leaning forward, urgently trying to pass something to the nearest clerk. Frances, seeing the small square whiteness of it, thought at first that it was a note. Then she realised that it was a handkerchief that he had fished from his pocket; he wanted it carried to the witness-box for the girl to wipe her eyes with. The clerk took it, looking uncertain, but the judge saw, and waved him back.

‘No, no. There must be no communications from the prisoner. Mr Tresillian, I don’t see that this sort of display is assisting matters at all. Do you mean it to continue?’

Mr Tresillian said, while the girl wept on, ‘It’s a question of reliability, my lord. Miss Grey has made some damaging allegations against my client. I have been trying to establish her character for the jury.’

The judge spoke with distaste. ‘Yes, well, it seems to me that you have established it all too plainly. If there are no further questions from you or from Mr Ives, you might ask the wretched young woman to step down, I think.’

The two men consulted for a moment, and Billie was gestured from the stand. The usher had to catch hold of her arm in order to help her out of the courtroom; she was sobbing worse than ever.

From his place beside Frances, Douglas watched her go with another curl of his lip. ‘Go on, clear off, you little tart,’ he muttered.

Soon after that, the court was adjourned for the day. Frances and Lilian made the journey back to Walworth in silence.

The second morning was easier only in the sense that they knew now what to expect from it. Again Frances presented herself like a hapless suitor at Mrs Viney’s; again Lilian received her in her veil and beetly coat. They even had the same taxi-driver that they had had the day before. For all Frances knew, the crowd outside the Old Bailey might have been the same crowd, too. But, anyhow, they went through it less flinchingly this time, entered the building without a blink, found ‘their’ bench in the courtroom: she felt quite like an old hand. By the time the robed men were back on the dais and Spencer had done his conjuring trick in the dock, there might never have been a pause in the proceedings at all. The only difference was in the weather, which was wet and very grey: the rain came drumming on to the glazed roof to blunt the harsh light of the room, but make it harder than ever to hear.

But was it even worth straining one’s ears to listen? The damaging evidence continued. A clerk from the Pearl, for example, was called to confirm that Leonard had extended his life assurance policy in July. And wasn’t that, mused Mr Ives, rather a curious thing for him to have done? A man in the very pink of health, perhaps in hopes of starting a family, who might have been expected, not to increase his premiums, but to save his money? Could the clerk think of any reason why Mr Barber would have done that, unless he’d had in mind the wife he had wronged, and her future as his widow? Unless, in other words, he had been in real and serious fear of his life?

It was the point, Frances remembered, that Lilian herself had made: she saw the jurymen whispering together; she saw that shrewd shopkeeper making notes, as if totting up a bill. If only they could be brought to appreciate the tangle of it all! But no one was interested in tangles here. And though Mr Tresillian rose to protest to the judge against Mr Ives’s question – they had not gathered, he said, to hear the speculations of witnesses – the discussion that followed was like an elaborate sport between the three well-bred men, with little to do with the boy who sat gazing blankly on at it from the dock.

By the time the case for the defence had been opened, and Spencer himself had been called as a witness, and Frances had watched him cross the court, and enter the stand, and make his first, stumbling responses to Mr Tresillian’s easy, leading questions, she had begun to be frightened again. All this time, she had imagined herself to be entirely without hope, but she
had
had hope, she realised: it had all been pinned on this moment, when at last, after so many weeks, the boy would have the chance to put his own case, clear up every scrap of confusion. But how could he possibly do it? How could anyone have done it, in that crushing, unnatural place, with so many greedy eyes on them, and with everyone present save herself and Lilian convinced of their guilt? He repeated the statement he had made at the start, that on the evening of Leonard’s death he had gone home from work with a headache and spent the evening with his mother. The tale sounded stilted – but of course it did. He must have told it a thousand times. He couldn’t remember having said that Mr Barber had been owed a wallop, but he supposed he must have said it, if Billie said he had. But there was a difference between saying a thing and doing it, wasn’t there? It was like going about with that cosh in his pocket. There was a difference between carrying something and using it. If there was blood on the cosh, that had come from rats and black-beetles. He’d never used it on Leonard Barber. Yes, he had given him a smack in the face that time in the summer, but that had only been to scare him off from messing about with Billie.

‘I think you rather enjoy giving people smacks, don’t you, Mr Ward?’ said Mr Ives, when he rose to begin his cross-examination. ‘Did you enjoy knocking out Miss Grey’s tooth, back in June?’

The boy’s narrow shoulders sank. ‘For God’s sake, I only tapped her to try and get some sense into her! Half the teeth in her head have fell out by themselves. She said I done her a favour, after it. She’s been putting money by for a set of uppers. She didn’t tell you that, did she?’

‘Did you enjoy going after Leonard Barber on the fifteenth of September?’

‘How could I have enjoyed it? I’ve already said, I never went near him!’

‘Did you enjoy pursuing him into that dark lane and striking him down, from behind, with your cosh?’

The boy appealed to the judge, to Mr Tresillian, to the clerks, to anyone who would listen. ‘This is mad, all of this is. I never done it. I never done it! Some bloke’s going about right now laughing himself sick over all of this…’

On and on it went, while Frances and Lilian sat and watched. It was like looking on at torture, Frances thought, knowing that with a word they could stop it; feeling the word wanting to come out, feeling it rise in her gullet, but swallowing and swallowing to choke it back down. For, of course, in saying the word they would simply have to take the boy’s place… By the time he had been released, they were limp and sweating. The court broke for lunch, and they let the Barbers go. ‘God! God!’ said Lilian softly. Her face shone white as a bone through the mesh of her veil.

Then it all started up again. The boy’s railway-porter uncle offered a feeble character reference. A man who ran a Bermondsey boxing club said that Spencer had been ‘willing to learn’ and ‘quick to get the hang of the punching’ – there were more snorts of laughter up in the gallery at that. And then the mother, Mrs Ward, was called to the court. She went creeping into the stand, to answer the counsels’ questions in a voice so faint and uncertain it was like the cobwebby voice of a ghost; the judge had to lean forward out of his chair in order to catch it. She confirmed that the cosh on display was one she had seen in her son’s possession. He had killed any amount of vermin with it at home. But as for carrying it about the streets with him, it was her belief that he did that – well, as he might have carried a boy’s pistol. In fun, she meant.

In fun, said Mr Ives. And on the night of the murder? Had Mr Ward been out having fun, then?

Oh, no. It was all just how he’d told the police. He had come home from work that day with his head hurting; he had spent the evening indoors with her. No, they hadn’t had no visitors, but – well, she had seen him there with her own two eyes.

Did he often suffer from headaches?

Oh, yes, he had them quite regular. He’d had them since he was little.

Could she refer the court to a doctor who might vouch for that?

She looked thrown. ‘Well, he never saw the doctor, sir.’

‘He never did. That’s a pity. And how did he pass the evening, precisely?’

‘He was on his bed, sir.’

‘In his bedroom?’

‘He has his bed in the parlour, sir.’

‘I see. And what was he doing?’

‘He was reading his
British Boy
, sir.’

Here Mr Ives paused, and the judge leaned further out of his chair, his hand cupping his ear. ‘What does the witness say?’

‘The witness was telling us, my lord, that on the night in question her son was reading a copy of the
British Boy
. I believe it’s a —’

‘Yes, I know what it is. My grandson reads it. Mrs Ward —’ Screwing up his face, the judge addressed the woman directly. ‘You are asking the court to believe that your son, a young man of nineteen years, used, as we have heard, to going about the town to night-clubs and dance-palaces, spent his Friday evening at home with you, reading a boy’s picture-paper?’

She looked at him doubtfully, clearly sensing that there was a catch in his question; but just unable, Frances thought, to put her finger on what it was.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

He sat back without comment. In the dock, Spencer hung his head. The jurymen whispered again, and Frances covered her eyes.

And when she uncovered them, and saw the next witness, and understood that he was some Bermondsey neighbour, here perhaps to offer another lacklustre character reference, the futility of it all nearly overwhelmed her. The man had a yellowish, underfed cast to his features, and shiny patches on his ill-fitting suit. He looked like the sort of ex-service man who asked for money on the streets – as though he might swear to anything for the price of a meal. And, yes, Mr Tresillian’s first questions were all to establish his War record, the campaigns he had fought in, the wounds he had received. He had been demobilised in February ’nineteen, he said, and had had various addresses after that. But since March of this year he had been living in the same building as the accused and his mother. He had a single room there, that he rented from another family.

‘Now,’ said Mr Tresillian briskly, ‘to get one unpleasant detail out of the way first: have you ever seen rats and black-beetles in the building?’

The man nodded. ‘You might say that. The place is crawling with them. The rats come up the drain-pipes. The beetles come out from behind the wallpapers at night.’

‘And what is the best way of dealing with them, in your experience?’

‘If you can catch them, you can give them a thump – say, with the heel of your shoe. Or with a heavy book, if you have one.’ He added, after the slightest of pauses, ‘A book like a Bible will do it.’

The deliberate way in which he said this made Frances pay more attention to him. He wasn’t like a beggar on the street, after all. He was too truculent for that, or had been too ill-used, perhaps; he gave the impression of no longer caring whether he got the coin or not. Mr Tresillian asked what he was employed at. He said he’d had a number of situations since the Army had ‘dispensed with his services’: he had put the bristles on brooms in a factory, he had sold boot-laces door to door. Until very recently – here, inexplicably, he became almost sour – he had been a traveller for an electric light-bulb company.

‘A good position?’ suggested Mr Tresillian. ‘One you were keen to hold on to? And an occupation which, naturally, took you away from home now and then; but not to the extent of making you a stranger to your neighbours, nor of making them strangers to you… By which we come to the heart of the matter. Your room, I understand, faces, across a small courtyard, the rooms in which Mr Ward resides with his mother. You’re used to seeing them at their windows, going back and forth and so on?’

Frances grew still. The man was nodding. ‘Yes, I see them more than I care to; especially the boy. In the summer just gone he used to think it a great sport to shoot things across at me – stones, and dried peas and what have you.’

Mr Tresillian spoke rather hastily. ‘At any rate, you know him well?’

‘I do.’

‘And you remember the evening of the fifteenth of September? How did you spend that evening?’

‘I spent it at home.’

‘With your window-curtains open or closed?’

‘Not quite closed.’

‘Why was that? On a chill autumn evening?’

‘I find I want air, since the War. I’d rather be cold than stifled. I keep the window ajar, and the curtains parted, all year round.’

‘And did you look out of the window, that night?’

‘As I passed it, I did.’

‘You looked out of the window, as it might be, as a diversion, whilst stretching your legs? And what did you see?’

He jerked his head at the dock. ‘I saw that boy over there, lying on his bed with his picture-paper.’

Frances’s heart contracted so sharply that it might have been touched by the point of a blade. Beside her, Lilian drew a breath. There were murmurs across the court. Mr Tresillian waited for the murmurs to subside.

‘You’re quite sure it was Mr Ward you saw?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t call him mister, myself – but, yes, it was him all right.’

‘There could be no mistake about it? No other curtain was in the way?’