The Husband's Story (47 page)

It was Mr Justice Streetley's prerogative to take as long as he liked before replying. On this occasion, he deliberately took rather a long time.

‘Oh, but I assure you that it can,' he said at last. ‘It can – and, indeed, does – bear directly on a point of law. Your actual words were' – here Mr Justice Streetley consulted his notes again – ‘… “a combination of high professional skill and low criminal cunning”. No one could dispute your right in prosecution to impute the element of cunning or its criminal nature. But the skill and the professionalism simply do not come into it. They belong to a different case altogether. If the attribution of highly skilled professionalism remains, the jury will not know what manner of man it is who stands before them.'

Mr Stranger-Milne had one last try.

‘As your Lordship will recall,' he started, ‘I have been able to produce evidence to show that the prisoner is a highly skilled photographer, a professional in the best sense of the word. He has won many
prizes and competitions…'

‘But not for taking snapshots with a wrist-watch, Mr Stranger-Milne. Not, as I have said, for simply going “click”.'

Mr Justice Streetley looked at his own wrist-watch.

‘The Court will rise and we will adjourn until two o'clock,' he said sweetly.

It had been anything but pleasant for Stan to have to sit there while Mr Stranger-Milne jabbed his finger at him. He had felt himself squirming. He was afraid, moreover, that some of the things that Mr Stranger-Milne had been saying about him were bound to have put the jury against him.

That was why he was so relieved that, at last, it had come to Mr Hayhoe's turn. And Mr Hayhoe showed himself to be in top form right from the very start. His manner was entirely different from Mr Stranger-Milne's. For a start it was apparently effortless. Speaking rather slowly and so quietly that even Mr Justice Streetley had to lean forward to ensure that he was missing nothing, he immediately took the whole Court into his confidence. A hush descended, and everyone present – except, of course, for Mr Justice Streetley himself and Mr Stranger-Milne and his junior – felt instinctively that, for the first time since the trial had started, the truth was being unfolded and justice was in the process of being done.

Mr Hayhoe opened straight away with the matter of Stan's admission of his own guilt.

‘Let's begin by considering the matter of this so-called confession,' he said softly in that low, confiding voice of his; and, to show what he was talking about, he picked up the document and held it up for the whole jury to see.

It could not escape notice, however, that he was holding it by one corner, nipped gingerly between thumb and forefinger, as though closer contact with it might prove contaminating. ‘There is more than one kind of confession in this world,' he went on. ‘At its loftiest, its most exalted, a confession is an irresistible outpouring of the human soul. Every word within it is sacred.'

Mr Hayhoe paused. He was holding the document up even higher by now. ‘And at its lowest, its most contemptible,' he reminded the Court, ‘a confession may be nothing more than a mere string of lies, a worthless collection of frauds and falsehoods. And with such confessions' – here Mr Hayhoe suddenly loosened his grip and let the sheets of paper
flutter onto the floor – ‘we have to ask ourselves one question and one question only: “Why were they ever written?”.

Stan watched him fascinated as Mr Hayhoe made no attempt to pick up the fallen papers; indeed, he appeared entirely oblivious of them. And the bland, honey-dew sweetness of his voice had changed to something altogether more tart and astringent. Stan was amazed. He even doubted whether, if the words had been spoken in the dark, Mr Hayhoe's own mother would have recognized him.

‘I will tell you why such confessions are written,' Mr Hayhoe said. ‘They are written because their authors are too alarmed, too terrified, to do otherwise. They are expressions not of remorse but of fear, not of penitence but of panic. I put it to you that this travesty of a confession was secured by subterfuge and written down under duress. There is, I suggest, not one vestige of truth in the whole document, not one word that has not been manipulated by other hands into a contradiction of its true meaning. And I will go further: I will…'

It was a characteristic of Mr Hayhoe's that he usually did go further. Sometimes much further – especially when he was enjoying himself. And he had already recognized this as being one of his better days, the sort of day that admiring juniors would long remember.

In his own way Stan, too, was full of admiration; indeed, listening to Mr Hayhoe, he didn't think that he had ever admired anyone more. Bit by bit, he had felt himself being compelled to come round to Mr Hayhoe's own way of thinking. He was entirely happy to sit back and leave his whole future in Mr Hayhoe's hands.

That was why Stan didn't mind in the least when Mr Hayhoe turned and slowly extended a hand in his direction. It seemed a friendly and endearing gesture. His voice, moreover, was at its gentlest again, its most dulcet. It was only the actual words that he was using that Stan didn't like so much.

‘You have heard much,' he said, ‘about the ingenious nature, the sheer technical accomplishment, of this imputed crime. “An exhibition of shrewd and diabolical cunning” were, you will recall, the words which my learned friend saw fit to use. My learned friend even went on to describe the author of the plot as “a veritable master-spy, a mixture of Machiavelli and Houdini, someone at once subtle and deceitful, slippery and evasive”.' Mr Hayhoe paused. ‘Machiavelli and Houdini,' he repeated the words, and there was a perceptible chuckle in his voice as he did so. ‘You have had ample opportunity of seeing the prisoner
and studying him and hearing him give evidence, and you will have drawn your own conclusions. Has there ever, I ask you, been a Machiavelli so bemused and bewildered by the attacks upon his character that he cannot remember to plead “guilty” or “not guilty”? Has there ever been a Houdini who floundered into every pitfall that opened up before him? Has there ever been a master-spy so pathetically, so innocently, adept at doing the wrong thing, so anxious it might even seem to incriminate himself by his own ridiculous admissions? That man whom you see standing there before you is another type of human being entirely; a little man in every sense of the word. He is a mere Charlie Chaplin of crime, someone incapable of any offence more heinous than that of travelling one stage too far on a tuppenny bus ride, or not going along to the police station with it if he came upon a half-empty box of matches lying on the pavement. It is for you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to decide in which category you would place him.'

With that, Mr Hayhoe abruptly sat down. Right up to the last sentence he had still kept his hand extended in Stan's direction. Then, with no warning, he dropped his arm to his side again and apparently lost all interest in his subject. He simply sat back, his feet resting on the crumpled pages of Stan's confession, his eyes unfocused staring vacantly up at the ceiling. The only indication that he had recently been so hard at work was that he was still breathing rather heavily.

The schedule was working out exactly as Mr Justice Streetley had planned.

Mr Hayhoe had been long, but not too long, and Mr Justice Streetley himself was poised, fully prepared and ready to the moment to begin his summing-up. Round about fifty minutes was what he proposed to devote to it. That would bring them to three-thirty. At that point he would rise and inform the Court that he would resume his summing-up the next day. The pieces were fitting perfectly.

In the matter of summing-up, Mr Justice Streetley was generally acknowledged to be a master. He allowed himself no tricks, no sallies. There was never anything quotable for the newspapers. Just the salient points, carefully selected, touched-up a bit, rearranged and strung together. As an intellectual exercise it was all highly stimulating in a rather chill, frost-bitten sort of way.

And in the case of Regina v Stanley Pitts, boiled down, it all came
quite simply to this: that selling Admiralty secrets to anyone was in itself so grave an offence that all that members of the jury had to do was to keep it tucked away at the back of their minds. What they had to consider was whether Stan knew, or had reason to know, that he was trading with a foreign power. Mere cupidity – a favourite word of Mr Justice Streetley's and one which he always uttered with his lips drawn back and his teeth bared – was one thing: treachery which endangered the very throne itself was quite another. The jury should direct their thoughts to such a difference.

And, to end up, Mr Justice Streetley impressed upon them that, if on any point they were in the slightest doubt, it was their solemn duty to give the benefit of that doubt to the prisoner. Mr Justice Streetley's own mind had been made up long ago.

During the whole of Mr Justice Streetley's summing-up, Mr Hayhoe continued to stare at the ceiling. Stan himself did not know where to look. Hearing what was being said about him had a strangely ghostly quality about it, a spookiness. It might have been someone else to whom the Judge kept referring – a total stranger who had briefly entered into his life, destroyed it and then quietly slipped away again. It hadn't been the real Stan at all, Stan felt. Come to that, it wasn't even the real Stan who was sitting there in the dock at this moment.

He was, indeed, so much preoccupied in thinking about the oddity of it all that he hardly noticed when Mr Justice Streetley had finished his remarks. He did not bother either to turn his head when the jury stood up and began to file out in their two rows. It was simply the sound of shuffling that he heard. And even that was already getting fainter. The policeman who was standing behind him had to tap him twice on the shoulder before he realized that it was time for him to go below again.

He got up and turned, avoiding looking in Beryl's direction as he did so.

There are those who have gone through the ordeal of a long trial who say that the time spent waiting for the jury to return is easily the worst of all. Stan did not find it so. Instead, he was conscious of a great wave of relief to think that at least the prosecution and defence part of the proceedings was all over and done with, and that he wouldn't have to face either Mr Stranger-Milne or Mr Hayhoe ever again. In their separate and individual ways they had both hurt his feelings more than he would have been prepared to admit to anybody, and he was only
sorry that Beryl had been there to listen to them.

Nor did he expect to have to wait very long before the jury came back again. He wouldn't have blamed them if they had reached a verdict inside the first ten minutes. Had he been in their place, he reckoned that was what he would have done. And then he changed his mind because he knew perfectly well that he wouldn't really have liked finding anybody guilty. And apparently the jury didn't like it either. They took two days over it.

In the meantime, the police couldn't have been nicer to him. They did all that they could to make things as pleasant as possible for him. They brought Stan large chipped mugs of thick, very syrupy tea, and said that he was welcome to another one if he felt like it. The sergeant even dropped his voice a little and said that if it would help to calm Stan's nerves to have a cigarette while he was waiting he believed that he knew where he could find one.

Stan very politely refused the cigarette, explaining that he didn't really, and that he and Beryl only kept them in the house in case any of their smoker friends should happen to drop in. But he accepted the second cups of tea. On the second day, he was just about to ask if he could have a third one when the cell door opened and a constable said that they were ready for him upstairs.

He only just had time to say thank you for everything to the sergeant before he was being led into the dock again. Those stairs seemed by now every bit as familiar as his own staircase at No. 16 Kendal Terrace; he might have been going up and down them for years.

The verdict was exactly as Mr Justice Streetley had predicted. He thanked the jury, congratulated them on their good sense and promised that they would not be called upon to do service again for at least another five years. Then with one eye on the clock and speaking very slowly and deliberately, he added that, in a case of such unusual complexity with so many and so far-reaching ramifications, he would postpone sentencing until the morrow. It was, as he uttered the words, six-fifteen precisely; and, even using public transport, Mr Justice Streetley knew that he would be back in nice time for a drink and a hot bath before his dinner.

As at most widowers' dinner tables, it was a silent, rather melancholy meal. The portrait of the late Honoria Streetley stared down at him from the sideboard end of the room and the lamb cutlets were overdone
and tasteless. Not that Mr Justice Streetley minded. He was not thinking of his food. He was thinking of Stan. And his thoughts pleased him. That was because Stan fitted so perfectly into a criminological theory of his own.

Over the years, Mr Justice Streetley had observed that forgers, con men, dishonest bank clerks and the like all tended to be below average height; two or three inches below, in fact, and he supposed that the group could reasonably be enlarged to include disloyal civil servants. Stan was certainly the right size. Then, there was the colour of the hair. Brown, mousy and nondescript made up the general range and, again, that was the category to which Stan belonged. Finally, there was the common behaviour pattern. On this point, Mr Justice Streetley was explicit and convinced. Violent murderers – not poisoners: they could be classed with the con men – criminal assailants and armed bank robbers frequently carried themselves with an air of open and rather engaging defiance. He had even found himself secretly admiring one or two of them. But with the sneaky sort, the cheats and the tricksters, it was different. There was nothing in the least engaging or defiant about them. They made excuses. They tried to ingratiate themselves. They cringed.