Flowers For the Judge (10 page)

She hesitated, and some of the colour returned to her face.

‘It doesn’t seem so important now,’ she said. ‘I’m behaving very badly, I’m afraid.’

‘Let’s have it.’

‘Well’ – Gina cleared her throat – ‘I didn’t know you were going to be here, Mike. It’s something you don’t know about, and you’ll probably be surprised or shocked, but there was my side to it, and it wasn’t all my fault.’

She hesitated again, and the two men watched her as she sat there, so small and fragile, in her sophisticated clothes.

‘The Inspector was asking me about Thursday night. I told him Paul and I were going to discuss something over a meal and that I waited in for Paul until nine o’clock, when I phoned Mike and asked him to take me out.’

She paused and her eyes met Campion’s gravely.

‘The Inspector asked me what Paul and I were going to talk about, and I told him. When he heard, he seemed to think it important. It was only an impression I got, of course, and yet …’

‘What were you going to discuss with your husband?’

Campion saw the danger-signal before he heard her confirming words.

‘A divorce. I’d been trying to get Paul to give me one for some time,’ she said.

‘A divorce?’ Mike’s whisper seemed to fill the room.

She turned slowly round to him.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t! No reproaches – not now. I’m just telling you what I told the Inspector.’

A tremor passed over the younger man’s face and it occurred to Campion that she did not realize her injustice.

‘The Inspector was very interested,’ Gina went on. ‘He asked me if we’d spoken of it before, and I told him we had, lots of times, and that Paul wouldn’t hear of it. But on the
Wednesday
I went to see a solicitor and that brought matters to a head. I knew where I stood. I knew I was tied to Paul if he – he – wouldn’t desert or beat me, so I begged him to have an evening at home so that we could discuss it.’

‘You told the Inspector all this?’ Mike’s voice was very quiet.

‘He got it out of me,’ she said helplessly. ‘Does it matter, Albert, does it matter? Will it make any difference?’

Mr Campion rose to his feet. His face was very grave.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said at last, hoping his voice carried conviction. ‘You weren’t quite alone in the flat when you were waiting for Paul, were you? I mean your woman was there to serve dinner?’

‘Oh, yes, of course.’ Gina spoke carelessly. ‘Mrs Austin was there until eight o’clock.’

‘Eight o’clock?’ Mr Campion’s brows were rising.

She nodded. ‘I couldn’t keep the woman all night,’ she said. ‘When Paul was a whole hour late for our conference and the dinner was spoiled, I told her I didn’t care when he came in and I sent her off.’

‘Oh dear!’ said Mr Campion, and, after a little pause, again, ‘Oh dear!’

IT IS PERHAPS
not extraordinary that the mixture of anxiety, irritation and excitement typical of the back-stage of amateur theatricals is nearly always reproduced at the moment when a family sets off for a public performance, be it wedding, funeral, or, as in this case, inquest.

John had arrived, ready dressed for the ordeal, at Gina’s flat no later than half-past eight on the morning of Tuesday the 16th. By a quarter to nine he had phoned Mike three times and had upbraided the startled Mrs Austin because Curley had not yet appeared.

Gina very wisely kept to her own room and left him to rampage up and down the studio.

When Curley came, pink and breathless with the exertion of climbing the stairs, he pounced upon her with a grunt of relief.

‘We’ve got to be there in less than an hour,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to be late. Let me see, there’s Scruby to come yet. Hang the fellow! I told him to be punctual. You told him, Miss Curley, over the telephone. We were all to meet here at nine o’clock. I thought I’d made that quite plain.’

Miss Curley, who was making frantic and futile efforts to tuck her wispy grey curls under the tight head-band of her fashionable but unbecoming tricorne, was apologetic.

‘He has a long way to come, Mr Widdowson. He lives out at Hampstead, you know. Don’t you remember, I told you he said we weren’t to wait for him, but he’d meet us at the court.’

John sank down in a chair, placing his speckless bowler on a table within arm’s reach.

‘Well, I suppose as a lawyer he knows well enough it doesn’t do to be late for court proceedings,’ he said. ‘But I should have liked him to have been here. Miss Curley, go and ring down to Mike. Tell him we’re all waiting. No one seems to realize the publicity involved in an affair of this sort, and not at all the right sort of publicity for a firm of our standing. I was fond of Paul, as you know, Miss Curley, but this final piece of sensationalism makes it very difficult for one to respect his memory as one would have liked.’

‘Oh, well, he won’t do it again,’ said Miss Curley absently, and then, realizing the impropriety and inanity of the remark, grew crimson with confusion.

To her relief John did not appear to have heard. He was entirely absorbed with his own angle on the tragedy.

‘It’s holding up everything. There’s three-quarters of the Spring list to come out and the Autumn one not half made up,’ he observed. ‘Still, we must put all that behind us now. We’ve all got to be calm and courageous. We must see this thing through with dignity and then we must bury our grief and get on with the work.’

He seemed to be much more at ease after he had delivered this little homily, and Miss Curley suspected that he had been saving it for a larger audience which had not materialized. She glanced at him curiously. He was getting older than she had thought, she decided, and wondered why it was that the cares of a firm aged a man so much more unattractively than the cares of a family. There was a great deal that was positively inhuman about John.

‘Mr Wellington rang up yesterday,’ she said, drawing on her short black suède gloves bought for the occasion, ‘and he asked me in confidence whether I thought you’d mind if he made an attempt to get into the public part of the court to-day. He wanted to make it very clear that he was not going after copy, but simply as an old friend of yours and Mr Paul’s.’

The mention of the distinguished author’s name seemed to cheer John immensely.

‘Oh, not at all, not at all. I hope you told him not at all,’ he said. ‘Like to feel we had friends there. It did go through my mind that we might ask one or two people, but it didn’t seem our prerogative, so to speak.’

Miss Curley looked at him sharply, but there was no shadow of a smile upon his deeply lined, yellow little face.

‘I wore a band,’ he said. ‘I think we all ought to wear bands, don’t you? Mourning’s out of fashion, I know, nowadays, but it looked well, I thought. I told Mike about it.’

Miss Curley was growing calmer. There was something extraordinarily soothing about John’s attitude towards the terrifying business. At night, when she went home and she had a little leisure to think of the facts, she found herself growing frightened of the disaster which had overtaken them, but back in John’s presence the habit of a lifetime reasserted itself and she found herself adopting his attitude against her better judgment.

When the Dresden clock on Gina’s mantelpiece chimed the quarter John could bear it no longer.

‘We must go,’ he said. ‘It may take us several minutes to
find
a cab at this hour of the morning. We don’t want to be late. Getting about in London is very difficult.’

Miss Curley hesitated. ‘It couldn’t possibly take us more than ten minutes on foot, Mr Widdowson,’ she said. ‘The court’s only just round the corner. And, anyway, there’s a cab-rank at the end of Bedford Row.’

‘All the same, I wish you’d ask Mrs Brande to come in here at once.’ John was fidgeting. ‘As for Mike, I don’t know what the boy’s up to. With so many Press people about we can’t afford to make a bad impression.’

When Miss Curley was out of the room he rose to his feet and walked over to the long mirror on the far side of the room and stood there for a moment, surveying himself critically. No one who saw him could have dreamed for a moment that he regarded himself as anything but the Head of the Firm. His poise and stance proclaimed it. He was faultlessly dressed in a dark suit and overcoat, upon which the crêpe band was only just visible. His short grey hair was clipped to a point at which it would seem that its growth was discouraged and his perfect hat completed the picture.

He looked, as he hoped, a distinguished public man, shaken but not bowed by private grief.

He turned away from the mirror as Gina and Miss Curley entered. It did not occur to him for a moment to apologize for having commandeered her room for the family meeting-place. Instead he regarded her critically and on the whole with approval.

Her black clothes suited her. They were smart yet very severe. The only touch of softness was the crisp white ruff at her throat, and to this he took exception.

‘I don’t know that I should wear that, Gina,’ he said. ‘It’s very nice, my dear, very becoming, but I don’t know whether it’s quite the thing for an occasion of this sort. Let me see how you look with it off.’

The girl stared at him. Her face was drawn and colourless and her eyes had receded until there were dark hollows where they should have been. She looked ill and on the verge of collapse.

She plucked at the ruff obediently, but the touch of its crispness against her fingers seemed to steady her. She stared at him coldly.

‘Don’t be absurd, John. I’m not going to appear on the stage. Leave me alone – for God’s sake, leave me alone!’

The man was obstinate, but like others of his generation he had a horror of nerves in a woman.

‘Just as you like, my dear,’ he said coldly. ‘Just as you like. But I do think you’d look better without it!’

‘What the hell does it matter what she wears?’

Mike spoke from the doorway, where he had just appeared.

John fixed his younger cousin with a disapproving stare.

‘There’s no need to lose your temper,’ he said stiffly. ‘I’m only trying to think what would be wisest and most dignified for us all to do. We share a common misfortune and we are going to share a common ordeal.’

Mike swallowed his temper. ‘That’s all right, John,’ he said. ‘But you might remember that Paul was Gina’s husband.’

‘Paul was my cousin and my partner,’ said John with dignity.

There was a pause and Miss Curley seized it.

‘I think we should all go down now, Mr Widdowson,’ she ventured. ‘It’ll take us two or three minutes to get down to Bedford Row.’

Mrs Austin put her head round the door, and they stared at it not without justification, since it was adorned by all the rakish splendour of Mrs Austin’s ‘Best that had once belonged to a titled lady’.

‘I think I’ll slip along now, M’m, if you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be late.’

Gina turned to her eagerly. ‘Mrs Austin, I’ll come with you. We’ll go together.’

She moved unsteadily across the room and the charwoman put an arm round her.

‘That’s right, duck,’ she said. ‘You come along with me. You’ve lost your ‘usband and there’s nobody else but me in
this
room that knows what that means.’

And with this Parthian shot she swept the girl out into the passage.

‘Gina’s gone mad … Stop her, Mike. Who is that woman? Where are they going?’

John was half-way out of the door before Mike detained him.

‘They’re going to the inquest,’ he said wearily. ‘We’re all going to the inquest. Hundreds of people are going to be there – it’s not just our show. And now for God’s sake come along.’

Miss Curley touched his arm. ‘I think Mrs Brande should come with us,’ she said.

The boy looked at her curiously. ‘Oh, let her go,’ he said. ‘She’s escaped from this family, Curley. Let her go with her friends.’

In the end they all straggled down Bedford Row together, Gina and Mrs Austin stumbling along in front and John, in high dudgeon, stalking between them and Mike and Curley, who brought up the rear. They arrived at the court with fifteen minutes to spare.

There were still remnants of the last week’s fog hanging about the City and the court seemed to have trapped more than its fair share. To Gina at least the whole place seemed to be filled with a thick brown mist, through which the faces of people she knew and did not know loomed out towards her and peered at her questioningly, only to disappear again in the general maelstrom.

She avoided Mike and clung to Mrs Austin, whose grim determination to assert herself and whose contempt for the police and all their works made her a very comforting pillar on which to lean.

Mike and Curley remained side by side. The old woman’s shrewd eyes took in every detail. She saw the Press benches were crowded and had the presence of mind to nod to the immaculately dressed Mr Wellington, who was doing his best to look sympathetic at a distance of twenty feet.

John had buttonholed old Scruby, the firm’s solicitor, and was talking to him rather than listening to what he had to say, as was his custom.

Scruby was a little skeleton of a man with sparse white hair that had yellow lights in it. At the moment he was peering at his client with protuberant pale blue eyes. As his practice consisted largely of libel and copyright he felt somewhat out of his element in the present situation and was doing his best not to say so. Mike, catching sight of the two of them, experienced a sense of sudden irritation that was well-nigh unbearable.

Scruby evidently had an inkling of the seriousness of the situation, but it was quite beyond him to impress his fears upon John, whose principal concern seemed to be the probable newspaper reports.

A pale young man with horn-rimmed spectacles, accompanied by an enormous person in a long black overcoat, sidled into the back of the court. Mr Lugg and Mr Campion were not on speaking terms that morning. No open rupture had occurred, but each, it seemed, thought it better not to intrude himself upon the other’s private thoughts.

The inquest began in an unorthodox way. Mr Salley addressed the jury. His voice, like his appearance, which was small and fierce, was unexpected. It was deep and very quiet, with a quality of naturalness which took Gina by surprise. He was like the best type of country doctor, she decided; blunt and straightforward and obviously completely without fancies of any sort.