The Gate of Angels (16 page)

And now you will want me to return to my analogy. However, it is not quite that, after all. We set out to discuss the whereabouts of an unfortunate carter and of the third bicyclist, who had also disappeared. They were not found on the road, or by the road, the police assure us of that. But tell me, should we not also look
under
the road? I do not mean that the carter and the bicyclist have been the victims of any human violence. Buried, however, beneath the tarmac, where the ancient brick culvert runs, I believe, they are. Peace to what remains of them! We talk of ‘vanishing into thin air'. They, however, have been swallowed by gross earth and fen water. There are places, not always impressive, or even noticeable in themselves, which cannot be disturbed. Something so loathsome or so cruel has once happened there, that any disturbance will demand a repetition—we may call it a reparation in human blood. When, and how often? Well, it is not for us to know the times and the places. Let each of us lay a hand on his heart and consider whether he has been, at some
time or another, in a place which appears not to have settled down peacefully, but seems, on the contrary, to be waiting to be laid to rest. The carter and the bicyclist are gone. Let us say that it's happened. I have been asked, not once, but often, do I believe these things? Well, I can only say that I am prepared to consider the evidence, and accept it if I am satisfied.

 

Dr Matthews' story was written. Where and to whom should it be read aloud? This was the second part of his usual exorcism of whatever lay on his mind. It was his habit to wait until October, for the Feast of All Souls and All Saints, when the past year's dead are invited to return from their uncanny kingdom to their old places, and to sit at their own table. He often read aloud at this season to the Burrowers, a society for mediaeval palaeographers. But he did not feel like waiting for their next meeting.

‘A singular impatience,' he said to himself. Crossing the Protector's Court at St James's with his manuscript in his pocket, he met the Junior Dean.

‘Ah, Hartley!' Hartley could scarcely refuse to spare his Provost half an hour. The two of them went back to Dr Matthews' house. When the reading was over—Dr Matthews read deliberately, imitating each voice in turn—he paused, and looked searchingly through his round glasses.

‘I enjoyed that very much, Provost,' said the Junior Dean. There was silence, which couldn't be what was required, so he added, ‘There was a certain symbolism in it, I thought, and perhaps a hint of sex.'

‘I hope there is nothing of the kind. I never make alterations in my stories, once written, and I shan't alter this one. Still, as I say, there is, I hope, nothing of the kind. Sex is tiresome enough in novels. In a ghost story, I should have no patience with it.'

‘Surely if one doesn't find sex tiresome in life, it won't be tiresome in fiction,' said the Junior Dean.

‘I
do
find it tiresome in life,' Dr Matthews replied. ‘Or rather, I find other people's concern with it tiresome. One is told about it and told and told!'

 

The Junior Dean did not think he had repeated the story to anyone. It circulated, however, and with it the rumour that the Provost of St James's believed there was someone—perhaps two people—buried quite recently underneath the Guestingley Road, just a few miles before you come to Dr Sage's lunatic asylum. After a while, the tale elaborated itself with the addition that the police were considering an application to close the road while they made a preliminary search—that, of course, would mean a considerable detour for horse and motor traffic. The police, who had taken no action on the Guestingley Road incident, because they couldn't see how to proceed, were well aware that the Provost, though cranky, carried weight, and was known often to go up to London, where he was consulted by influential people. Perhaps he was not very likely on these occasions to talk about the disappearing carter, but they decided in any case to put an end to a troublesome business. A summons was served on George Turner, farmer, for having provided a carter or driver, with whom he had a master and servant relationship, with an unsafe vehicle not showing front lights or rear lights, as specified by the Roadway Lighting Act of 1904 and also holding him responsible as an employer for the wrongs committed by his employee who, on February 26th, 1912, drove the above-mentioned cart without reasonable care and foresight, causing injuries to Frederick Aylmer Fairly and Daisy Saunders and damage to their machines. The magistrate's clerk wrote to Turner to ask him whether he proposed to appear in court, or whether he would be represented by a solicitor. Turner sent a message to say: both. The police gave up hope that the whole thing would be not much more than a formality. They summoned Fred, Daisy and Mrs Wrayburn as witnesses.

‘They won't need you dear,' said Mrs Wrayburn to her husband. ‘There is nothing for you to worry about.'

‘I imagine they know my time is valuable. They may be aware that I'm overwhelmed with work. I'm surprised that they've got so much sense. If they had tried to make me attend, I should have been obliged to refuse. And if, as a result, they had seen fit to arrest me, I should have been ready, on a point of principle, to face prison. The suffragettes need not think they have the monopoly of that.'

He was not called upon, and continued to complain.

18

The court opened at ten, before the lately appointed stipendiary magistrate. Fred, Daisy and Mrs Wrayburn were told to wait in the witnesses' room. The proceedings were not expected to take long, and Daisy had her things in a bag ready to bicycle to the hospital. She seemed very pale. Her face was still fresh, but she looked blindly, as a statue does, not being given any feelings to show. Gallant Mrs Wrayburn, in crimson Russian boots and a linen tabard, did her best to encourage both of them by suggesting (the room was small and stuffy) that they had all been mistaken for prisoners and would be soon given their skilly and required to sew mailbags.

‘Mrs Wrayburn, I can't smile,' said Daisy, ‘and the Lord knows how you can. If you hadn't done a good action and picked us up off the road, you wouldn't have to be wasting your time here this morning. Don't you think about that?'

‘Perhaps a little,' said Mrs Wrayburn.

The witnesses were not allowed into court until George Turner had been charged. An inspector from the station appeared to conduct the prosecution. ‘Your name is Richard Catcher, you are a detective sergeant,' he had read out rapidly to his first witness. ‘Did you, on the 4th of April, interview Mr George Turner at Turner's farm, Guestingley Road, and did you charge him with the two offences, and did he become abusive and show signs of endeavouring to hinder you in the execution of your duty, and did he ask you why you had not found the missing carter, and state that the Cambridgeshire
police had less idea how to find anyone than a bitch chasing fleas on her own arse?' The sergeant had agreed to this.

Fred was sworn in and taken through his evidence. It was the first time he had seen George Turner, who sat there intransigent, his neck shrunken by the east winds inside his hard Sunday collar, his hands on his knees, a blameless, simple man bewildered by the processes of the law. The defence solicitor, who got up to cross-examine, appeared anxious to earn his money. He asked Fred whether he had good eyesight. Fred said that he had. The solicitor looked disconsolate. Had it been pitch dark? No, but dark enough.

‘Mr Fairly,' said the solicitor, ‘do you consider yourself a scientist and a philosopher?'

The magistrate asked whether this was material to the case. The solicitor said he was questioning the witness's reliability.

‘I've never been a philosopher,' said Fred. ‘If you mean, as I think you do, that as a scientist, I'm not able to look where I'm going, then I must tell you that you're mistaken.'

Mrs Wrayburn, after Fred had sat down, was sworn in, and told that she was a housewife. ‘I should be a graduate,' she said, ‘if the university allowed women to take degrees.'

‘Mrs Wrayburn, you are a housewife,' the inspector went on. ‘On the night of February the 26th you heard what sounded like a collision outside your house. You put on a waterproof and, going out into the road, discovered two individuals, a man and a woman lying apparently injured. You were not at that time able to identify them. You then went for assistance to the neighbouring farm and found Mr Turner's son, who conveyed the two victims to your house one at a time on a handcart.'

‘Is Mr Turner's son in court?' asked the magistrate. The son had been excused because he had been taken poorly. He had been allowed to put in a sworn statement, in the course of which he stated that he didn't know who his father had hired to drive the cart or whether it had lights or not. But he
reckoned it must have had some or how would the driver have been able to see?

‘You were lucky to have got as much sense as that out of him,' called out George Turner.

The magistrate told him that he would have the opportunity to speak later. ‘I've got plenty to say,' replied Turner.

 

Every time Fred saw Daisy he was taken off guard and, although it seemed to him he never forgot anything about her, he was overwhelmed by all that, after all, he had not remembered quite correctly. The evidence, so far, had only taken twenty minutes or so. Twenty minutes or so ago, then, he had been sitting with her in the witnesses' waiting-room. He had noticed then that she was pale, but now he saw that he hadn't given proper attention to the kind of pallor, something more like a white tea-rose, where the colour is below the surface and can only just be guessed at. While Fred (totally oblivious of Mach's principle that the element of wonder never lies in the phenomenon, but always in the person observing) raved on to himself like this, Daisy was sworn in.

‘Mr Fairly has said earlier on in evidence that you were riding either side by side with, or just behind, another bicyclist,' the inspector began, ‘a man, who would naturally have been a witness to the accident. You must, of course, have seen this man, and there is a possibility that you know him. Now, Miss Saunders, could you tell the court his name, or give us any other information about him?'

‘No, I couldn't,' said Daisy.

‘You don't know who he was?'

‘No, I don't.'

‘You are a friend or an acquaintance of this man?'

‘No.'

‘But you were bicycling with him?'

‘I was cycling behind him.'

The magistrate said he would like to clarify the point. He, too, had noticed Daisy's pallor, but attributed it to menstrual trouble. Since he very much disliked having anyone fainting in court, he tried to rally her a little.

‘The police, you know, Miss Saunders, have not been successful in tracing this man. Have you any idea where he might be found?'

‘If I don't know who he is, how can I know where he's gone?' Daisy cried.

‘That doesn't follow, Miss Saunders.'

 

‘The defendant is entitled to testify on his own behalf,' said the magistrate.

‘I've plenty to say,' George Turner repeated, ‘but my lawyer here tells me there's no case to answer.'

‘Is that your submission?'

‘Yes, that's my submission, according to the laws of the land.'

‘I don't need instruction about the laws of the land,' said the magistrate. ‘Is that all you have to say?'

‘What I am telling you is that you can't hold me responsible for someone you can't lay hands on, and none of us can't remember what his surname is. Why, there's a professor walking about Cambridge at the moment saying that this man, the one who was driving the cart, I mean, that he's lying dead and buried under the Guestingley Road.'

As George Turner made this last remark in a tone which suggested he was telling a joke, his solicitor allowed himself a smile. Turner sat down, folding his arms. The inspector got to his feet and reminded the magistrate that the police now had some additional evidence. The magistrate and his clerk bent towards each other and murmured in harmony.

‘You want to put in a written statement?'

‘I can call the witness in person, your worship. He got here ten minutes ago.'

A constable was sent to the waiting room and Kelly walked into the court. He was wearing a fawn waistcoat, like a tipster's, and looked ill and savage. As he gazed about him, knowing and experienced, there was for the first time in the court a physical sensation, like hot breath close to the cheek, of guilt and danger.

Kelly gave his occupation as a newspaper editor and journalist. The magistrate, who was becoming short-tempered, said that surely one implied the other. Kelly did not reply. He stared straight in front of him, licking his lips as though thirsty. Asked where he was on the evening of February the 26th, he replied that he was coming out of Cambridge, cycling in the direction of Guestingley.—Did he in fact reach Guestingley? No, he didn't. He'd only just about missed being hit by a horse and cart and he had had to swerve clean across to the right of the road.

The magistrate said: ‘I want to know if you can describe or identify the driver of the cart.'

‘Yes, I can. When he saw what he had done he jumped off the driver's seat and ran off towards the farmhouse. I saw him in the light of my headlamp.'

‘Can you describe him?'

‘I don't need to do that. He's here.' He jerked his head towards Turner. ‘He was driving the cart.'

Turner bellowed and was escorted bellowing out of the court, but could be heard from the corridor outside with the constable calmly arguing restraint, and then less calmly.

‘I shall dismiss this case until the summons is amended,' said the magistrate. ‘Please tell them to make a great deal less noise outside the court, and if necessary to take the defendant into detention. Meanwhile I shall take one or two additional points. Mr Kelly, what exactly did you do after the accident?'