The End Of Solomon Grundy (19 page)

Trial, Fifth Day

Mrs Stenson presented, there could be no doubt about it, an appearance of some elegance. She was a small thin dark woman, dressed in black coat and skirt and white blouse, and plain but expensive black shoes. She took the stand after Eustace Hardy had explained that this was an additional witness whose evidence had only just come to the notice of the prosecution, and was thought to be of importance. Mr Justice Crumble had graciously agreed to admit this evidence, and Hardy had devoted himself to eliciting Olivia Stenson’s story so that the unexpected bonus was appreciated by the jury at its full worth. He had been disturbed that morning to find his nose stuffy and his throat sore. When he first spoke after waking the words came out in a dismal frog-like croak. Application of the throat spray and of a nasal spray containing some mixture which, as he understood it, temporarily froze the mucous membranes, had an effect little short of miraculous, so that when he got to Court and Stevenage solicitously asked how he felt, Hardy was able to reply in positively ringing tones that he was much, much better. Stevenage, who would have liked the chance of handling this witness himself, said that he was delighted and reflected, not for the first time, that Hardy had remarkably speedy powers of recovery.

There was no difficulty in handling Mrs Stenson. She was an excellent witness, positive but not dogmatic, sincere and straightforward. She was thirty-two, of independent means, divorced. On that particular September evening she had been to dinner with an old friend who lived in Cridge Street and had parked her car, as she had done before, in the Mews. There she had clearly seen a ginger-haired man ring the bell of Number 12 Cridge Mews. A woman had opened the door, the two had spoken together, the man had gone inside.

On the following day she had gone abroad to join a party of friends in Paris, and later on a long motoring holiday in France and Italy. At the end of this holiday she stayed in Venice with some other friends. She had returned to England only ten days ago. While she was away she had hardly looked at the papers, but when she read about the trial she remembered the incident in Cridge Mews, and got in touch with Scotland Yard.

There was not very much evidence, but every word of it was deeply damaging to Grundy, who sat in the dock glowering at the woman in the box and, as it seemed, restraining himself from shouting again only by an effort. At the end of a half-hour question and answer session Hardy sat down, content. If Grundy was acquitted, it would not be Mrs Stenson’s fault.

It seemed useless to attack her credit. Newton made the only approach possible.

“I understand you went to the police the day before yesterday, Mrs Stenson.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And you told them about something that you had seen on September 23rd, nearly three months ago, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Now, these two people you saw standing in the doorway, was there anything special about their behaviour that made you notice them?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I mean were their voices raised, did they kiss each other, did anything at all happen which made you look at them particularly?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“It was simply that the woman opened the door, they spoke, the man went in. Something that happens in thousands, in tens of thousands of streets in this city every night, something there was no reason at all to notice specially.” Oh dear, Toby Bander thought, the old thing is blustering about. Still he’s on a sticky wicket no doubt about that. “Then why, why, Mrs Stenson, did you notice it?”

Mrs Stenson was not discomposed. She patted the pair of white gloves that she had brought with her. “I really can’t say. Why does one remember a particular thing and forget a dozen others? I happened to notice this, that’s the only answer I can give.”

“Without any particular reason, none at all?”

Newton drew himself up to the top of his little height, put his thumbs into the top of his gown. “Something absolutely commonplace, but you just
happened
to notice it.”

“That’s right.”

“Very well.” He shook his head sadly, conveying his scepticism to the jury. He paused, as if quite at a loss for his next question, and then shot it at her suddenly. “I suggest, Mrs Stenson, that you were mistaken in the date you saw this.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“You had no particular reason for remembering this date—”

“Oh, but I had.”

“And what was that?”

She patted the gloves again. Her eyes were brilliant, they shone like bits of glass.

“The man I had dinner with, Charles Craigie, is the man I hope to marry. He had been away, and I hadn’t seen him for several weeks. It was an occasion for me, one I remembered.”

Of course there would be something like that, Newton thought, there had to be something which fixed the date for her so patly. He hitched his gown up and went on asking questions with the desperate energy of a man pushing through a ploughed field, but when he sat down ten minutes later he had made no progress at all. Mrs Stenson, eyes shining, stepped down from the box, composed and neatly elegant, as she had stepped into it. Hardy rose and said that this completed the prosecution case.

Magnus Newton’s opening was diffuse and over-emphatic. He had been badly shaken by the sudden transformation of a case which had seemed to be moving along favourably in the direction of acquittal. During the luncheon recess he went down to talk to Grundy, and confirmed that the big man knew nothing of Mrs Stenson.

“She couldn’t possibly have a grudge of any kind against you?”

“How do I know? I told you I’ve never seen her before in my life. She made a mistake, that’s all.”

“She was very positive it was you.”

“You know the definition of positive, being mistaken at the top of your voice.”

“So we’re left with another ginger-haired man, someone who looks like you.”

“That seems to be right.”

Newton controlled his irritation with difficulty.

“You’ll be going in the box tomorrow. I want you to be careful. Just tell the story of what happened in your own way. Don’t go in for long explanations, keep to the point. And when Hardy cross-examines, keep your temper.”

Could it be possible that there was amusement in Grundy’s eyes? “You’ve taken a lot of trouble.”

Really, he’s insufferable, Newton thought. “I’m being paid for it.”

“Don’t worry on my account.” Newton stared. “I mean, I don’t much mind what happens either way.”

What could one do with such a man? Newton stumped off in something resembling a fury.

Borritt was cadaverous and gloomy, where Tissart had been short and choleric. He did not use albums but huge sheets of paper on a roller, which he draped over a blackboard, rather like a school map. With a long ruler he then tapped the sheets, and proceeded to explain precisely why it was that Grundy could not have written the vital postcard. Borritt did not radiate the impression of utter certainty that came from Tissart. His strength lay rather in a belief that the identification of any handwriting, and indeed by extension of anything that happened at all in the world, was so difficult, and the possibilities of error so immense, that no group of reasonable people could possibly convict one of their fellows on anything but the direct evidence of their own eyes – if, indeed, such evidence itself was not susceptible of error. A conviction of human error was engraved into his long marble cheeks, finely grained with the red lines of the drinker, and perhaps it was this conviction that made him a less convincing expert than Tissart, for where all else was questionable, might not his own opinion be questioned too?

Yet Borritt faced Stevenage’s cross-examination with a sort of hangdog determination. He had his own system, one in which he awarded points for similarities in handwriting, and deducted points for dissimilarities, making a positive identification at the end only if he reached a total of one hundred. It was about this that Stevenage questioned him.

“I understood you to say, Mr Borritt, that you discovered sixteen points of dissimilarity between the postcard and the handwriting specimens of the accused.”

“Yes.”

“And you deducted points accordingly.”

“That is so, yes.”

“Sixteen sounds a great many for one small postcard.”

“It is.”

“Am I right in saying that six of these points were found in the letter ‘a’?”

“Yes.”

“But should this not be simply one point of dissimilarity, as it is a single letter repeated?”

“Certainly not.”

“And your other points were concerned with punctuation marks, were they not?”

“And with diacritics. It is possible to learn a great deal from individual use of diacritics.”

“Diacritics, in plain language they are the dots over the letter ‘i,’ the crossing bar of the ‘t,’ that kind of thing.”

“That is so, yes.”

“And what you are saying is that these diacritics and punctuation marks show sufficient differences to establish a genuine dissimilarity.”

“I am.”

After fifty minutes of this, Stevenage decided that he had cast enough doubt on Borritt, and the tall man rolled up his sheets of paper, tucked the rollers under his arm, bowed to Mr Justice Crumble, and shuffled out of Court on very obviously flat feet. There was nothing wrong with Borritt, perhaps he knew as much as Tissart, but those flat feet were somehow a final dubious mark against him.

At this stage of the trial an air of boredom pervaded the Court. The day was stuffy, although it was December, and Mr Justice Crumble, head sunk low in his gown, plum fingers playing with each other, gave the impression that he was on the verge of sleep. Eustace Hardy had listened to Borritt’s evidence with his eyes closed and a look of ineffable weariness on his face. Two of the jurors seemed to find it impossible to stop yawning, a third was occupied in creating a most intricately patterned doodle.

Elsewhere in Court there was the subdued rustling of papers, the popping up and down and in and out of altogether junior and unimportant figures, that can only take place during one of those periods in a trial when people feel that what is going on is not really worth their attention.

Borritt had been permitted to give his evidence first through that consideration often afforded to expert witnesses on the ground of their presumably extreme busyness, but everybody had been hoping that Grundy would go into the box that day. When Stevenage sat down, however, it was five minutes to four, and Mr Justice Crumble, emerging perhaps from a profound meditation on the nature of man, decided that it was time to adjourn. The Grundy fireworks, if there were to be Grundy fireworks, were left for the morrow.

There were no rejoicings in The Dell that evening. Cyprian put the matter with his usual brutality by asking about Mrs Stenson.

“What about her?”

“I mean, if what she says is right he’s had it, hasn’t he?”

“Cyprian,” Caroline said. Marion tried to look as if she had not heard.

Cyprian stuffed veal and ham pie into his mouth.

“Has anyone investigated her?”

Dick answered. “Yes. George Trapsell’s been looking into her background. Can’t have turned up anything or they’d have used it.” Cyprian mumbled something unintelligible. “What?”

“I said it was pretty funny her not knowing about the case.”

“I don’t know. She went abroad the next afternoon—”

“Did she? Has anyone checked on that?”

“Greedy,” Gloria said. Cyprian’s hand was stretched out for another piece of pie.

The Weldons had been right in thinking that Marion’s return would sway opinion – that is Dell opinion, which within this narrow enclave was more important than anything said in the outer world – in her husband’s favour. It was a mark of this changed opinion that Peter Clements, returning from a hard day’s administrative argument about a new thriller series, in which everybody had been most painstakingly nice and there had been not a hint of a snide remark, had found himself decisively cut by Sir Edmund Stone. As Sir Edmund said afterwards to his wife, that fellow Grundy might be a perfectly awful character, but for somebody like that fellow Clements – a fellow who was, Sir Edmund said with a very inaccurate glance at the charge on which Peter Clements had been arrested, very likely no better than Grundy himself – to get up and give evidence against him was something that a gentleman really didn’t do. Peter Clements was shaken almost equally by this and by the curt nod which was all he received from a neighbour named Adrian Leister, who was a saxophonist in a successful jazz band, and with whom he had always considered himself to be on the most friendly terms.

Back in the house where the blankness of Rex’s room stared at him as though it were a symbol of some great gap suddenly created in his physical being, the nerves of the ears suddenly cut or the tongue torn out, he decided that life in The Dell was no longer bearable. He went that very evening to stay with an adoring aunt who lived at Penge, and a couple of days later wrote to Edgar Paget to say that he wanted to put up his house for sale. Edgar sold it for him within a month, to an advertising man who was rather pleased to be able to tell his friends that Peter Clements, the well-known queer mixed up in the Grundy murder case, had lived there. Peter was eventually fined ten pounds on the charge of importuning, but he did not lose his job. Nor was his heart actually broken, for shortly afterwards he rented a flat in a new, rather smart block in what used to be called Maida Vale. He shared this flat with a film executive of about his own age, and they got on awfully well together.

Edgar Paget also found himself no longer a hero of the Grundy saga but suddenly recast, to his disgust and astonishment, as a minor villain. When he went into his local for a pint that evening and the same thing happened, with slight variations, on many evenings to follow, unpleasant remarks were made in his hearing about pathologically untruthful schoolgirls who were encouraged by their fathers in the un-English pastime of kicking a man when he was down. To have his character as a bulldog Englishman attacked was for Edgar almost like an accusation of illegitimacy and he snapped vigorously at these cowards who, as he said to Rhoda, would never name names or say anything you could really get hold of. He refused to admit to Rhoda or even to himself, the possibility that Jennifer might not have been telling the truth.