A Dead Liberty (2 page)

It must then have been Mrs. Sperry who had made a movement. She was doubtless itching to remind him that no reply to a charge constituted a technical plea of Not Guilty. But he was in no hurry to proceed. Henry Simmonds was a humane man, more than competent and well aware what was required of him by the peculiar triumvirate made up of the Lord Chancellor's Office, the great British Public and—oddly enough—those arraigned before him for misdemeanours arising out of various degrees of deviance from the Common Law.

There was a Fourth Estate, too, only it was never mentioned.

Henry Simmonds hadn't realised this until he had been on the Bench a little while. He wouldn't have wanted to admit it for worlds, but he was aware that the expectations of the police force came into the matter too. It had been some time before he had appreciated that improperly light sentences almost always resulted in the speedy reappearance of the offender before the Bench on another charge.

In the ordinary way he picked his way through the minefield of everybody's conception of justice with a sure touch, but today was rather different. Henry Simmonds had his normal share of human curiosity too. He was more than a little intrigued by the girl before him as well as by her silence.

For one thing she patently didn't fit the usual run of petty offenders who came the way of the Berebury Bench and he couldn't remember when he had last seen anyone facing a charge of murder who was young and pretty and female. Lucy Durmast certainly didn't fit the usual run of homicidal criminals whom he had seen either. Most murderers, his police friends were wont to say with a touch of cynicism, are male and—as a rule—widowers by the time they appeared in Court.

“Have you heard the indictment?” he asked the girl himself. If she were deaf, the newspapers would enjoy themselves at his expense on Friday.

She turned her head from the Magistrates' Clerk towards him as he spoke, so she had heard it all right, but she still did not speak. At least she was facing him, he thought philosophically. There were those who demonstrated that they did not recognise the jurisdiction of the Court by turning their backs on those sitting in judgement.

“And do you understand it?” asked Henry Simmonds mildly.

There had been a memorable motoring case in his Court once when an interpreter had had to be sent for on behalf of a Bulgarian driver whose English had been limited to “please” and “thank you.” Vitally important as Henry Simmonds's nanny had always insisted these two phrases were, they hadn't got the man very far in defending a charge of driving a motor vehicle without due care and attention.

Unfortunately the interpreter's Bulgarian had been better than his knowledge of the law and he had enthusiastically entered the lists in defence of the erring motorist. Whoever had said that only a Bishop gained by translation was right. Without the detached impartiality of the true translator, the case had fallen …

“Charge.” Henry Simmonds's train of thought was interrupted by a whisper from the Clerk to the Magistrates. “Not indictment.”

“What was that?” he asked, sotto voce.

“Charge, Mr. Simmonds,” insisted the Clerk. “Not indictment. She's here on a charge.”

He nodded and turned courteously to the prisoner. “The Clerk has quite properly reminded me that you come before this Court on a charge and not on an indictment.”

The Bench was entitled to believe that Lucy Durmast had been advised on the difference between the two and knew what an indictment was. If she did know, thought Henry Simmonds, then she was a better man than he was. He certainly hadn't grasped the detail at his own first appearance on the Bench. All he'd had at the back of his mind then had been something called “a True Bill,” which he had read about somewhere, but that, he had been told at the time, was an archaism that had been left behind in some reform or other.

“An indictment,” he explained now as there was no visible sign of anyone acting for the Defense, “is a written accusation made on behalf of the Sovereign …”

There was the Queen cropping up again.

This time Lucy Durmast's gaze did tilt fractionally upwards to take in the Royal Coat of Arms above his head. Henry Simmonds wondered if she knew what the motto on the scroll beneath the crest meant—
Honi Soit qui mal y pense
. He always thought it very apposite for a Court of Law—Evil unto him who evil thinks. And not written in Latin either but in Norman French. Perhaps it had come over with William the Conqueror, or was it merely a legacy of those days when England's territory rather than her tourists had extended into France?

It was a visit to the Abbey at Fontevrault that had cemented that period of history in Henry Simmonds's mind. It hadn't been so much the royal tombs themselves lying there in the transept—Henry II and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard Lionheart and Isabelle of Angoulême—as the fact that the French Government wouldn't even now let the Foreign Office arrange for them to come back to lie at Windsor that had underscored the past to him.

“An indictment …” He wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that that word had come over with William the Conqueror too. That might explain why it wasn't pronounced as it was spelt.

“An indictment,” he persisted, “sets out a serious crime …” He paused and decided that to explain that murder was a serious crime would be mere pedantry.

And yet, oddly enough, the only time when he had fallen into argument with Terry Watkins had been over the age-old allegation that the Bench always felt more strongly about the defence of property than it did about attacks on the person. Goodness knew who would have been the first malcontent to say that—a disgruntled peasant in the Middle Ages probably. It was certainly old hat by Wat Tyler's day.

The young radical Watkins had once quoted Proudhon's dictum “Property is theft” to the others in the Magistrates' Retiring Room. This hadn't gone down very well with Mrs. Mabel Sperry. To begin with, she hadn't understood what Terry Watkins had been talking about, and when it did eventually dawn on her she hadn't liked what he had said.

Henry Simmonds would have liked at that point to have brought in a mention of Victor Hugo's piece from
Les Misérables
about the Bishop's candlesticks—countering one Frenchman with another rather neatly, he thought—but Terry Watkins and Mrs. Sperry had fallen into such bitter argument that he had had practically to bind the pair of them over to keep the peace under one of the oldest statutes in the book.

In their own recognizances, too.

He cleared his throat, looked at Lucy Durmast and finished his piece from the chair “… for which the accused may be tried by jury.”

Lucy Durmast still did not speak but she did turn her head to look at the jury box.

It was empty.

She looked back at Henry Simmonds. For one fleeting moment he thought she might also have raised her eyebrows slightly too, but he could have been mistaken in this. Silent she might be, unresponsive she was most certainly not.

“This is not a trial.” Henry Simmonds seized upon the opening that this created—if such it could be called. It certainly wasn't a dialogue because Lucy Durmast still hadn't spoken. Non-verbal communication described what had happened better.

This time Lucy Durmast's gaze drifted in the direction of the prosecuting solicitor representing the Director of Public Prosecution. There was nobody sitting beside him on behalf of the Defence. Henry Simmonds always thought how subtle it was that those acting for the Prosecution and the Defence should sit side by side in Court. This was because they weren't supposed to be surrogate adversaries in the tournament sense but—in theory at least—both servants of that mythical and abstract concept known as Justice.

“These are only committal proceedings,” said Henry firmly. This was one of the reasons why he wasn't too worried that Lucy Durmast hadn't replied to the charge. Time was when a prisoner couldn't plead guilty to a charge of murder anyway. That was the Law bending over backwards to see that no one went to the gallows without a fair trial.

He amplified this, too, lest there be any misunderstanding. “Committal proceedings are short dress rehearsals of the prosecution case, so to speak, to give the defence a chance to know what case it must answer.”

Lucy Durmast ran her tongue over lips that looked as if they had gone suddenly dry but she used neither tongue nor lips for speech.

“And,” went on Henry Simmonds formally, “to enable the magistrates to decide whether a jury, acting reasonably, could convict on such evidence and thus whether to commit the case for full trial at a higher Court.”

In the event, after they had heard the evidence the Examining Justices didn't even retire …

TWO

Linimenta
—
Liniments

“Not a word?” barked Superintendent Leeyes incredulously. His office in Berebury Police Station was only little more than a stone's throw from the Magistrates' Court.

“Not a word, sir,” replied Detective Inspector Sloan, who had arrived back there hotfoot from the Court.

“Are you sure, Sloan?”

“Not a single dicky bird,” declared Detective Inspector Sloan with all the assurance of someone who had been there.

“All day?” said Leeyes irascibly. “Do you mean to tell me that that girl didn't say a thing all day?”

“All day,” intoned Sloan.

“It would have to happen to us,” complained Leeyes. He was inclined to self-pity anyway and a totally silent prisoner could only mean trouble: there was no doubt about that.

“Yes, sir.”

“The last thing we needed, of course, was a difficult woman.”

“Yes, sir,” agreed Inspector Sloan with something approaching fervour.

“The last thing any setup needs is a difficult woman.” He grunted. “They've got one on the Watch Committee, too, Sloan, and …”

“Very unfortunate,” concurred Sloan firmly, before the Superintendent could embark on a long recital of his running battles with the Watch Committee.

“In the circumstances,” said Leeyes heavily.

“In the circumstances,” agreed Sloan. Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan—Christopher Dennis to his wife and family—was inevitably known as “Seedy” to his friends. He was head of the tiny Criminal Investigation Department of the Berebury Division of the Calleshire Police Force and thus responsible to Superintendent Leeyes.

“And on top of everything else,” said Leeyes in a tone pregnant with meaning.

“Quite so,” said Detective Inspector Sloan.

“Just my luck,” said Leeyes bitterly.

Detective Inspector Sloan refrained from pointing out that Detective Inspector Porritt of Calleford Division had been even more unlucky. What had happened to Trevor Porritt had been very unfortunate indeed. His investigation into the murder of Kenneth Carline completed and his full report on the case against Lucy Mirabel Durmast duly submitted, Detective Inspector Porritt had then, as was customary, returned to other duties.

It was in the executing of one of these that he had met with disaster. During the course of giving chase to one of Her Majesty's less lawful lieges Trevor Porritt had lost his footing and this had led to his undoing. He had promptly been hit on the head while he was down by the liege's partner in crime. Even more unfortunately he had been hit with the blunt instrument that had been intended for use on a night watchman at a superstore.

Since this assault upon his person Detective Inspector Trevor Porritt had not been the man he had been before and, alas, manifestly never would be again. The neurologists had said so. With unaccustomed unanimity, too. There had been no question of doctors differing and thus letting in a glimmer of hope. Henceforth, all the doctors said, Inspector Porritt would have a very short memory. What they did not tell his wife was quite how short that memory would be.

Like a minute.

Or that the hand that held the fork might forget the way to the mouth.

A cynic would have said that the real clue to the gravity of Inspector Porritt's condition lay in the studied kindness and courtesy which the medical profession extended to Mrs. Porritt. There were other pointers too. Especially in what was said about the future and, more important, what was left unsaid. There had been much talk of disability pensions and early retirement on health grounds and no mention at all of possible improvement and getting back to work in time.

“When shall we come back, Doctor?” a bemused Mrs. Porritt had asked the hospital consultant. Trevor Porritt hadn't asked him anything at all.

Neurology is a speciality more concerned with diagnosis than with treatment—since so much neurological disorder is untreatable—but Mrs. Porritt was not to know that.

Yet.

It did mean, though, that the neurologist had his answer to her question off pat. “Your general practitioner will let me know if he wants me to see your husband again,” he said with practised smoothness, ignoring an unresponsive Trevor altogether.

Mrs. Porritt had pulled herself together by then. “Like that, is it?” she said.

The neurologist had nodded slowly.

Inspector Porritt's wife had allowed her one and only touch of bitterness to creep in. “I get it, Doctor. You don't have to tell me. ‘Don't call us, we'll call you.' That it?”

“I'm very much afraid so,” said the other regretfully. Reality was meant to appear after the consultation when the expert would be at a safe distance from awkward questions—not during it when Olympian detachment might be threatened by the intrusion of real-life relatives with real-life questions to be answered.

Mrs. Porritt had taken Trevor home and set about the business of coming to terms with a different way of life from henceforth. Trevor himself had retreated into a private world inside his damaged brain and nobody knew what he thought any more. This was a pity, because by the time Lucy Mirabel Durmast had appeared in Court there were a number of questions Detective Inspector Sloan would have liked to have asked him.