Flowers For the Judge (18 page)

He gulped a lungful of rain-soaked, soot-laden air, and glanced at Campion for approval.

‘Well, I see Mr Barnabas turn the corner of the street down there.’

He waved his hand in the direction of Nemetia Crescent.

‘Now I
know
it is him – there’s no doubt about that. (My eyes are better than what they are now, it being twenty years ago.) And I watch him coming up the street for a bit. There he is, striding along in the sunlight swinging his cane, looking as calm and happy as you please.

‘Well, when he’s about fifty yards away I say to meself, “I’d better get his papers.” So I turn back into me shop like this,’ he trotted back to the counter and picked up a couple of newspapers which he thrust under Campion’s nose. ‘There they are — see? Then I hurry back to the door and’ – he stopped, and peered up and down the street, ventured out into the rain, and finally returned, bewilderment expressed in every line of his features – ‘not a sign of him,’ he said. ‘Street empty all ways. You could knock me down with a wave of the hand, as the saying has it.

‘“Well,” I said, “he’s vanished!” And he had, too.’

Again the look of wonder.

‘Of course you’ll say,’ he continued after a silence which Mr Campion had not liked to break, ‘that he must have snapped into a trot and run past the shop. But he couldn’t have done. I wasn’t in here above five seconds. Besides, the constable who was standing on the corner saw him go. One minute he was there and one minute he wasn’t. In the middle of the pavement about fifteen yards from this shop, just along by the wall there, he disappeared and was never seen by mortal eye again.’

‘Top hat, gold-headed cane and all?’ said Mr Campion.

‘Yellow gloves
and
spats,’ said Mr Higgleton. ‘Clean as kiss yer hand.’

‘I’d like to have met the policeman.’ Mr Campion sounded wistful.

‘So you should have. I’d have taken you round myself if he hadn’t retired and gone to live in the country. Somewhere Norfolk way he is. But he drops in here now and again when he comes to Town. He was here as little as two years ago. Next time I see him I’ll tell him you’re interested and perhaps he’ll let you have his side of the story. His name’s on the tip of me tongue, but I’ve forgotten it.’

Mr Higgleton thought for a while but to no purpose.

Mr Campion expressed his thanks and made an attempt to leave, but he was not to get away so easily.

‘I don’t like to pretend I know what happened, because I don’t,’ said his new friend, skilfully edging between him and the exit. ‘But then funny things do happen. There was a man in that house over there – you can see it if you stand on the step – who ran off with every servant-girl his wife had in the course of twelve years. Every single one of them!’

This time the expression of wonder was a little overdone.

‘She fetched him back one week and off he’d go with the new girl the next.’

‘What happened in the end?’ said Mr Campion, interested, in spite of himself.

‘Cut his throat on a golf-course in Scotland,’ said Mr Higgleton. ‘And then there was the woman with the snakes.’

‘Really?’ murmured Mr Campion, moving adroitly to the right and gaining six inches in his progress to the door.

‘She used to live in this house at the back of mine, on the other side,’ said Mr Higgleton frantically. ‘Her garden used to run down behind mine and finish up alongside this wall. Of course, she left before the war, but at one time her place was
alive
with ’em. She used to breed ’em and train ’em. Some of them were very clever, I believe, but I never liked them.’

He sighed. Mr Campion was going to get away; he could see it.

‘If ever that Police Sergeant should drop in, sir, perhaps you’d like me to give him your name?’ he ventured, breathless with defeat.

‘That’s very kind of you.’ Campion drew a card from his wallet and Mr Higgleton took it and placed it with great care behind a jar of tobacco on the shelf at the back of the shop. ‘Any time you want to know anything about this district,’ he said wistfully, ‘you’ll come to me, won’t you?’

Mr Campion felt a cad.

‘I certainly shall,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘It’s been a pleasure, sir,’ said Mr Higgleton truthfully, and Campion went down to the High Street to find a cab, convinced in spite of his stern belief in the material that something very odd indeed had happened to Tom Barnabas twenty years before.

When he arrived back at Bottle Street he was still absorbed by the past, and the urgent message from the present head of the firm of Barnabas and Company, Limited, demanding his immediate attendance at Twenty-three, Horsecollar Yard, brought him back to the problem of the moment with the uncomfortable conviction that he had spent an unprofitable morning.

He arrived at the office at a little after two o’clock and was shown at once into John’s big room on the ground floor, where a conference was in progress. Before he entered the room, while he was still in the hall, the sonorous voice from within warned him what to expect, and he did not come upon Cousin Alexander altogether unprepared.

The first thing he saw upon entering the room was the back of John’s head and the arc of his forehead. He was leaning back in his chair, which had been turned away from the door and appeared to be entranced or even stupefied by the spectacle confronting him.

On the hearthrug Sir Alexander Barnabas stood in one of his more famous attitudes, and Campion had the full benefit of his commanding presence. He was a big man, tall and heavy, with a magnificent physique and a great head surmounted by a mass of iron-grey curls parted sleekly down the middle and brushed up at the sides so that, whether by accident or design, one was almost deceived into thinking that his barrister’s wig was a fixture.

His face was handsome in an orthodox way and its clean-shaven mobility had a trick of emphasizing the slightest inflection in its owner’s voice with appropriate expression.

At the moment he was radiating authority. One long graceful hand was upraised to drive home some point while the other rested behind his broad, dark-coated back.

‘There is no question of that,’ he was saying. ‘Ab-so-lutely no question.’ And Mr Campion was quite convinced that, whatever the subject of conversation might be, there could be absolutely no question about it.

At Campion’s entrance John pulled himself out of the stupor into which he had fallen and performed the introduction.

Mr Campion was aware of a personage condescending to do a great honour. Two immense fingers rested in his hand for a second, and then he was dismissed to the realm of unimportant things and Cousin Alexander’s melodious voice took up the thread of his discourse once again.

‘We must have an acquittal,’ he said. ‘Complete and unconditional acquittal with no stain left upon the boy’s character. I shall work for that and I shall achieve it.’

Mr Campion sat down on the edge of a chair in the far corner of the room and listened politely. Miracles seemed to be the order of the day.

‘But you must understand, John,’ the Counsel continued firmly. ‘The case against Mike is very strong. Circumstantial
evidence
can be very deadly indeed. At the moment Michael is in a position of the gravest danger.’

Mr Campion pulled himself together with a jerk. The effect of so powerful a personality at close range was disconcerting. When Sir Alexander spoke of gravity one automatically thought of international crisis and in his mouth the word ‘danger’ had the shrill insistence of a fire-alarm.

John attempted to speak, but was answered before a word had left his mouth.

‘I have seen the boy,’ said Cousin Alexander, ‘and I am convinced of his innocence. Innocence,’ he repeated and stared at Campion, who found himself feeling like a rabbit caught in the glare of a headlight. ‘Innocent,’ Sir Alexander again dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘I heard his statement. Only an innocent man would have dared to make such a damaging confession. Why did he admit he had no alibi? Because he was telling the truth. Because he was innocent.’

His glance swept round the room.

‘Can’t you see what happened?’ he went on passionately. ‘Are you blind? Or does the very nakedness of truth offend your modesty? Imagine it…’

His voice had become persuasive, his excitement passing as rapidly as it had arisen.

‘Think of the story he told the police. Think of the damaging history of that fatal night, related as simply as a child might have told it, a child not only innocent, but so guileless as to believe that not for a moment would its innocence be called into question.’

Mr Campion settled back in his chair and reflected how much more bearable drama was when it had a little art to help it along. On the witness-stand Mike had presented a depressing tale, but in Sir Alexander’s hands his story became an exhilarating experience, if not in particularly good taste. Meanwhile the great man was off again, filling the room with melodious but overpowering sound.

‘The Coroner demanded to know where Mike was between the hours of five and nine in the evening, hours
which
have since proved to be critical in the history of this terrible case. What did the boy do? Did he invent a history of little alibis to be broken down one by one by a pitiless police inquiry? Or did he tell the truth? “I walked,” he said. “I walked alone through the London streets, amid thousands of my fellow-men, not one of whom will come forward to bear me witness. I was unknown to them – a stranger. I was alone.”’

‘Yes, but what was he doing?’ said John irritably, the paralysing quality of Cousin Alexander’s peroration having apparently passed over his head. ‘What purpose could he possibly have had in wandering about like that?’

Just for a moment the great man seemed to have been taken off his balance. He was evidently not used to interruptions, for his eye wavered and when he spoke again there was a reproving quality in the beautiful voice which had very little to do with art.

‘If you will have patience,’ he said, ‘I will tell you. Mike is a young man, and he committed a crime which, although reprehensible, is one of those misfortunes which overtake young men in spite of themselves. He fell in love with another man’s wife. But he did not tell her so. He stood by and saw her neglected and tyrannized over by a man who did not realize her worth. From beginning to end their association was innocent. It does not follow that because of this restraint his passion was any the less real. An evening came when he knew the woman he loved was going to have a long interview with the man to whom she was bound by every legal and moral tie which our civilization has devised. Imagine him –’

The sonorous voice took on a hushed quality that Mr Campion, who felt he was listening to the truth in dramatized form, found a little shocking.

‘Imagine him sitting at his desk early in the evening of that cold January day. He was due to attend some literary function where a great deal of rubbish, some of it witty, some of it not, would be bandied from mouth to mouth, while in the very house in which he lived, in the very room
two
floors above that in which he slept, the woman whose being was the very core of his existence was talking to the man against whom she was completely defenceless, the man to whom the law gave every conceivable right in her, the man from whom she could not escape and from whom he dared not protect her.

‘Do you see him there?’ he went on, fixing Campion with a steely blue eye strangely reminiscent of the portrait in the waiting-room. And then, in an even quieter voice: ‘I do. He cannot work, he does not want to go to the witty gathering whose chatter cannot save him from himself, nor can he go to his own home because he knows that in the room upstairs
she
is talking to his rival, her husband.

‘What more natural for him, then’ – the voice became musical as its rich tones played over the euphonious words – ‘than to feel he must get away? Even his car is denied him: the fog is too thick. So he walks. He takes refuge in the time-honoured escape which men of every age and every generation have used to soothe their troubled spirits.

‘He walks through London, through the crowds, thinking of her, trying to reason with himself, no doubt: trying to wrest himself from the cloying embraces of the pitiless emotion which consumes him.’

John attempted to rise to his feet at this juncture, but was subdued by the famous eye.

‘The little shop in Bayswater,’ said Cousin Alexander. ‘A second-hand jewellery store. A little place of curios, sentimental trifles scarcely of any value. He went there to buy her something, so engrossed in his thoughts that he forgot the day, forgot that it was a Thursday afternoon upon which the keeper of the shop took his holiday and closed the shutters over the little trinkets, bidding lovers and their ladies wait until the morrow.’

He paused, evidently feeling that he was navigating a dangerous stretch, and his keen eyes appraised their discomfort.

‘He turned back. He walked on through the wet, cold streets. He did not notice they were wet, he did not notice they were cold; he was thinking of her, he was thinking
of
the woman. When he reached his home he had still come no nearer his goal, he had still not thrashed out his problem. It remained as large, as terrifying, as piteous, as wearying as ever before. He still felt the need of escape.’

The great voice quivered and boomed, and at such close quarters was well-nigh pulverizing.

‘What did he do? He saw the night was clearer. He thought of his car. He thought of the cool roads, the open fields, little remote villages – freedom, solitude. He went round to the garage and because it was his habit, because he wanted complete obedience from his car, he switched on the engine, intending to let it run for a while so that the cylinders should be warm, the oil moving smoothly and evenly.

‘And at that time he was completely unaware that his car had been, or was going to be, used by some enemy to destroy the very man to whom the woman he loved was tied. Unfortunately for him he did not take the car straight out of the garage. Instead he remembered the key of the yard gate and went to his lonely little flat to fetch it.