The Man Whose Dream Came True (19 page)

There was not much to do at the Villa Majorca, but Sarah Russell had said that she would go in that day and in she went, cleaning and dusting as usual. Mrs Foster had told her that she might be leaving Southbourne after what had happened, but while she was there the place had to be kept clean. She put on a kettle for a cup of tea, looked at the rain shuttering down outside and thought about the Fosters. He had been a perfect gentleman, although rather old and pernickety and set in his ways, but Mrs Foster now… There was something that she had never quite liked about Mrs Foster, although she couldn’t have said what it was, except that she never had a chat with you as in Sarah’s view an employer should chat with her daily help.

As the kettle boiled the bell rang. A little man – medium-sized really, but somehow he looked small – was outside the door, and he was obviously very wet. His hat and raincoat were thoroughly sodden. ‘Miss Sarah Russell,’ he said, and raised the sodden hat.

The gesture touched her. Very few men had ever raised their hats to her, and he looked pathetic in his wet clothes. She had no doubt of his respectability, somehow the age of the car outside certified that, and Dimmock did not even have to produce one of his cards to get into the house. She sat him down in the kitchen, hung his wet coat in front of the electric fire and put his hat beside it. She made him take off his shoes, commented on the wetness of his trousers. Dimmock felt that she would have been quite prepared for him to take them off as well. He put them close to the fire and they steamed.

‘Thank you very much.’ The words came out as a crow-like croak, but the hot tea soothed his throat. ‘I hope I shan’t infect you. I’ve got a cold coming on.’

‘You ought to be in bed.’ She spoke angrily. She seemed a formidable old battleaxe.

‘Tomorrow I shall be. Home in Wembley. And I can tell you I shan’t be sorry.’

‘Wembley,’ she cried. Her brother and his wife lived there. Friendship was cemented, and it was not until he had had a second cup of tea and eaten a biscuit that she said, ‘You’re not a reporter, are you? I’ve had some of
them
round.’ He shook his head and sneezed. ‘Bless
you,’
said Sarah Russell.

He produced his card and told her that he was gathering in-formation for the defence. She stared.

‘You’re too late, aren’t you? The trial’s half-way through. And there’s been someone here already.’

‘Did you tell him anything?’

‘There was nothing to tell.’

Dimmock said that she knew how it was, he had been given this job to do. What use they made of any information he found – he lifted his shoulders.

‘Funny the way they go on,’ Sarah said, and added sharply: ‘Something’s burning. Your socks.’

His feet certainly were near the fire, and he withdrew them. ‘My husband used to burn his socks.’ In fact it came to her now that this little man reminded her of the husband who had been dead for twenty years. He too had always raised his hat to ladies. ‘Do you do this all the time? Going round and talking to people, it seems a funny way to make a living.’

‘I suppose it is. I don’t always get so wet.’ It might have been her husband John sitting in the chair opposite. And because John too had sometimes made incomprehensible jokes she was not disconcerted when he said, ‘When my feet are very wet I sometimes get into a pet.’ He looked at her and said, ‘But not today. You’ve been very kind.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Well, anything – anything odd. Out of the way, you know.’

‘I’ll tell you something that
is
funny, something I’ve remembered.’ At another time and in other circumstances, perhaps even if the sun had been shining, she might have sent him away with a flea in his ear. As it was she told him the something funny she had remembered and then looked with interest at the bit of material he produced, which she recognised at once as resembling Mrs Foster’s raincoat. She looked for the raincoat but it wasn’t where she would have expected it to be, in the hall cupboard. When they found it eventually, tucked away with some old bedding in a tiny junk room, Dimmock knew that for the first time in his life as an operative he had discovered something of importance.

When Tony returned to Court after lunch he saw Jenny immediately. She sat in the row reserved for witnesses, pale and calm. He knew that in her presence it was more than ever important that he should do well.

Hardy opened quietly, almost amiably. ‘Would you call yourself a truthful man?’

‘On the whole, yes.’

‘As truthful as most people?’

‘I think so.’

‘Let us see.’ He consulted or pretended to consult his notes, looked up. ‘You called yourself Bain-Truscott when working for Mr Foster, but that is not your real name.’

‘No.’

‘Have you also used the name of Scott-Williams?’

‘Yes.’

‘And other names too?’

‘I’ve explained, I did it to impress people. I didn’t like the name of Jones.’ Just a hint of his smile there and a glance at the jury. One of them looked angry. Perhaps his name was Jones?

‘Very well. Now, when you produced your references for this job, were they true or false?’

‘I’d written them myself. Again, it was just to impress people.’

‘The references were false?’

‘They weren’t genuine.’

‘They weren’t genuine. Very well again, since that is the phrase you prefer. Now, you will remember when you took the cuff links and pin to Mr Penny. What did you say to him?’

‘I asked what they were worth.’

Hardy raised his hand into the air, then lowered it in a wearily patient manner. ‘But how did you describe them? Let me remind you. Did you say they were a family heirloom?’

‘Something like that.’

‘True or false?’ As Tony hesitated Hardy’s voice rang out for a moment, clear and beautiful as a rapier blade. ‘True or false, Jones?’

‘It wasn’t true,’ he said sullenly. All this was not what he had expected, and it seemed to him unfair.

‘It was not true,’ Hardy repeated. ‘Now, turn your mind for a moment to the time when you were interrogated at London Airport. You said you had a job in Caracas. True or false?’

He looked appealingly at the judge, who must surely understand that nobody could be expected to tell the exact truth in such circumstances, but found no help there. And Hardy was going on without waiting for his answer.

‘And then you told the police that you had saved the money in your possession. True or false?’

This time the judge did speak, quietly, as Tony remained silent. His tone was kind, but the words brought no comfort.

‘Just answer the question.

‘I’ve already explained–’ he began desperately, but now the judge’s voice was hard as a headmaster’s.

‘Answer the question.’

‘I didn’t tell the truth.’

‘False,’ Hardy said, triumphant as a man who has filled in the last clue of a crossword puzzle. ‘You lied again and again. And now do you ask us to accept you as a truthful witness?’

Mr Hussick leaned back just a little, as nearly as it was possible to lean back in his hard chair. The boy was standing up for himself quite reasonably, but how long would he be able to do it when he was stuck with this hopeless story? And for the next hour Hardy, rarely raising his voice above his usual monotone, showed how hopeless that story was, going through it detail by detail, demonstrating that everything the accused man said depended on his unsupported word. He was particularly scathing about the hammer and the cuff links.

‘When as you say Mrs Foster asked you to use the hammer to knock in a nail, didn’t you think it odd?’

‘No. She’d told me that her husband was useless about the house.’

‘Did you regard knocking in nails as part of your duties as secretary?’

‘Of course not.’

‘So it would have been possible for you to have refused?’

There was something hateful about Hardy. The thin long-nosed patrician face, the wearily contemptuous manner, the voice enunciating its syllables with perfect clarity and style, all of them represented an attitude to life which Tony would have liked to think of as his own. He had to restrain himself from shouting his reply, but he said calmly, ‘I couldn’t have refused without being rude.’

‘And I’m sure you are never rude.’ Newton stirred uneasily at this comment, but Hardy continued swiftly. ‘Supposing you had refused, one of the strongest points in the case against you would not have existed?’

With a sense of self-congratulation at his own calmness he said: ‘I can only tell you what happened.’

‘If you had refused Mrs Foster would have had to find some other – lethal implement – and asked you to handle that. Is that what you are asking us to believe?’

Doggedly he repeated ‘I can only say what happened.’

‘Just follow me for a moment. Since she was determined to incriminate you, if you had refused to handle the hammer she might have tried to get your prints on to a sharp knife – or a revolver – or a tin of weedkiller, which she would then have used as the murder instrument.’ Without raising his voice Hardy managed to infuse into it a note of scorn as he said, ‘Is that what you are asking the jury to believe?’

He made some kind of answer, but as he looked round the Court and found no help anywhere, in judge or jury, in his counsel or his solicitor, and as he finally found himself staring across into the pale unmoved face and the eyes that considered him indifferently, his grasp of what was being said to him vanished in a surge of hatred. He had lost the battle of wills with Hardy and his breaking point was only a question of time. The time came a quarter of an hour later when Hardy, showing the distaste of a man handling excreta with tongs, was questioning him about the sexual relations he claimed to have had with Mrs Foster.

‘You have heard Mrs Foster say that hers was a happy marriage. Nobody has come here to say otherwise. But you maintain that this woman of good reputation, against whom there is no breath of suspicion, seduced you?’

‘I thought she was in love with me.’

‘Within a few days of your entering the house she took you to her bed, that is what you are saying?’

The sneering voice insisted, the questions came at him in endless waves, what had she said to him, when had they first done it, how many times, what precisely had she said to him about killing her husband? It seemed to him that there were now only two faces in the Court, that of his tormentor and the white beautiful face that remained like a mask while the questions were asked that destroyed his self-respect and made him seem less than a man, so that at last he shook the witness box with the thump of his fist and cried out in a high woman’s voice that she had done it, she was the bitch who had got him into this, and went on to use filthy words about her, words that had hardly been in his mouth for years.

When it was over he felt spent, as he did after the sexual act. He did not hear the reproving words of the judge or take in what it was that Mr Hussick was saying to him so earnestly. Instead he looked at the jury, saw the expressions on their faces, and knew that he was lost.

Mortimer Lands insisted that he must get out of London for an hour or two. He drove Jenny out to a dinner and dance place on the Great West Road. He had been drinking whisky before he picked her up and went on drinking it throughout dinner. He talked incoherently about the trial.

‘That poor bastard,’ he said. ‘From what I read they crucified him today, really crucified him.’

‘I was there.’ He looked at her almost with terror.

‘He loved you, the poor bastard.’

She had drunk a good deal herself and was less patient than usual. ‘What are you trying to say to me?’

‘We’re going to get caught. I know we are.’ She ate a green bean and looked at him inquiringly. ‘Somebody’s certain to have seen the car.’

‘Nobody saw it. I told you I was careful. And I smeared mud all over the number plates.’

‘Somebody will–’

‘I still don’t know what you’re trying to say.’

‘I must get out of London. I hate London.’

‘Then get out. Go back tomorrow. I don’t know why you stayed in town anyway.’

‘I thought you wanted me to.’

‘It made no difference to me.’

He leaned across the table. ‘Jenny, we can’t do it, he’ll go to prison for life.’

The waiter came to take their plates and she did not speak until he had gone. ‘He was prepared to help in killing you, that’s what he thought he was doing.’

‘I know. But he hasn’t done anything.’

‘And you did help, Mortimer. You wanted to help.’ Before the intensity of her gaze he lowered his eye, mumbled something. ‘Tomorrow there’ll be the verdict, in a week it will all be forgotten, in three months we can be together.’

‘Three months!’

‘That’s what we agreed.’

He looked up at her, then down again at the tablecloth.

‘Are you saying you want to call it off?’

‘That’s what you’d like, isn’t it? You’ve got what you wanted, now you–’ She told him to lower his voice, hushing him as if he were a dog, and he finished the sentence in a ludicrous murmur. ‘–don’t love me at all.’

‘I’m trying to find out what you want. But I’ll tell you this. If you come up with some different story now nobody will believe it. And if they did, then it would be as bad for you as for me. I’m ready to go.’ She picked up her bag.

He stared at her drunkenly. ‘I want to dance. And I want another drink.’ She paused, for once uncertain. ‘I want to hold you in my arms once more. The last time, I know that.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mortimer.’

‘It’s my car. Shan’t go home unless you dance with me.’

She thought, not for the first time, that she would have been better off with Jones. She was a reasonable, logical woman and total lack of logic was something she found it hard to deal with or understand. It was obviously not safe to leave him alone. She said that she would dance with him. He immediately called the waiter.

‘A bottle of champagne. A celebration.’

They did not leave until two in the morning, and by then Jenny herself was slightly drunk.