Indictment for Murder Page 2

  Jonathan interrupted him. ‘They will be speaking the truth. If they don’t, I will tell you.’

  Harold Benson said, ‘There are the details about the time when you arrived at the house, Sir Jonathan, and what was said by you to the nurse and—’

  ‘Very well,’ Jonathan said, ‘if you both consider it will be useful, we can talk. But not this evening. I’m tired. Come to my home at noon tomorrow, Saturday, and we can discuss whatever you wish over a glass of sherry.’ He spoke as though he were conferring a favour.

  Shelbourne looked again at Harold Benson and cursed under his breath. His home was thirty miles away. If they were to meet tomorrow it meant his driving thirty miles home this evening; thirty miles back tomorrow, Saturday; and then thirty miles home again before returning on Sunday evening to be ready for court on Monday. And, this weekend, he was expecting a visitor.

  ‘Tomorrow—’ he began. Jonathan interrupted him. ‘Yes, I’m too tired this evening. I’m sure you understand. So tomorrow, if you please.’

  By now the ushers were clearing the court. Some of the public before they left stood on their seats to get a better look at the prisoner – until they were shouted at by the clerk and driven out of the courtroom. James and Mary Playfair joined Shelbourne and Benson beside the dock. James, Jonathan’s cousin, was a bald, tubby man, eight years younger than Jonathan, dressed in a formal dark suit, a black tie under his stiff white collar. When they had driven to court that morning Jonathan had thought that James looked as if he was attending a family funeral, which, in a way, perhaps he was. Mary, James’ wife, with her grey hair tucked under a dark crimson hat and with her faded good looks, was in a sensible coat over a sensible suit. She looked as if she were going to a fête at the Women’s Institute.

  ‘The car’s waiting, whenever you’re ready,’ said James. ‘It’s bloody cold outside. Looks like snow.’ He handed Jonathan his overcoat over the side of the dock. ‘Thank God they’ve let you come home.’

  ‘That was to be expected after I’d got bail from Templar in the summer,’ said Shelbourne stiffly.

  ‘Is that so?’ said James. ‘Good. Good. Anyway, you’re coming home.’

  They got away eventually, James in the front next to the chauffeur; Jonathan impassive and erect in the back with Mary; the photographers running beside the car. There were more waiting at the gates to the drive, but James had telephoned from the car and the lodge was ready; the gates swung open and the chauffeur accelerated up the drive.

  Pembroke House was a large, square house of Portland stone, built by a Playfair in the first years of the nineteenth century. Jonathan had known it since the time of his and James’s grandfather. After their children had grown and gone, James and Mary had lived there alone until Jonathan had moved in, occupying an apartment they made for him out of three rooms on the ground floor entered through a large door on the left of the hall – a drawing-room lined by bookshelves, with a high ceiling and french windows opening on to the park; a bedroom furnished with mahogany wardrobes and a tall four-poster bed; and, leading from the bedroom, a bathroom made out of what had once been a sitting-room. A lobby on the other side of the drawing-room had been converted into a small kitchen and pantry with an electric stove, a refrigerator and a sink. Normally Jonathan ate with his cousins in the main dining-room.

  ‘I told Mason to keep up the fire,’ said Mary as Jonathan opened his door from the hall. ‘And they’ll bring you some tea. I’ll look in later.’

  By now it was dark and the curtains had already been drawn. Jonathan hung his overcoat in the wardrobe in his bedroom and then went and sat by the fire. The butler, Mason, brought him tea on a tray.

  ‘It is good to have you back, Sir Jonathan,’ he said gravely.

  ‘Thank you, Mason. I’m glad to be home.’

  After he had gone, Jonathan poured himself a cup of tea and sipped; the toast and cherry jam he left untasted. He stared into the fire where the apple-wood logs crackled and blazed cheerfully.

  This, then, was the final chapter. He had thought the story was over when he had stood by Trelawney’s bedside, but he should have known that it would not, could not, end there. He knew he should have stayed. When he had reached home, he knew what must happen. And it had, two days later when the police had come – the aggressive inspector and his nervous detective-sergeant. That had been six months ago.

  Jonathan stared into the fire, and began to think of the story’s beginning – when, even as a child, he had run when he should have stayed.

  * * *

  ‘Jonathan, Jonathan.’

  He remembered her voice calling him, heard it now as clearly as if she had been with him in this room – the voice of the woman, her fair hair mistily framing her face, whose photograph, fading and sepia-coloured, stood in a silver, oval frame on the desk by the window. It had been taken when his mother, Julia, was twenty-nine and he eight, almost seventy years ago.

  When she had called, she was in the field across which he had just run to reach the river bank by the pool. There he had hidden in the shelter he had made in the reeds, his head on his arms, hugging his bare knees.

  ‘Jonathan, Jonathan.’

  The voice was louder now, coming from the edge of the field by the river bank. She would have guessed he would have gone to this place, his secret place – except that it wasn’t very secret, for she knew about it. So did Beau, his father. So did David, to whom he had shown it on the day before. But if the place wasn’t really secret, it was still his private place. She had no right to come there.

  It was not a proper river, just a stream a few feet broad which flowed out of the lake where his father, Beau used to fish for pike from an old flat-bottomed boat, and it meandered away between high banks, through the woods and meadows along which the otter hounds hunted, until it joined the true river, which flowed out to the sea on the coast many miles to the south. When the water of the lake was high, it poured in a torrent through a rusted iron sluice-gate, and the stream became swollen. But that did not happen often. Usually it was a quiet, narrow stream, and where he had built his hideaway it broadened into a shallow pool surrounded by tall reeds. Here, many years ago, a tree, long dead, had fallen across the stream. Not right across, for it only stretched two thirds of the way and there was a gap of about three feet between the opposite bank and the end of the trunk. To cross, he had to jump from the end of the tree. Sometimes he fell, but he had never fallen when the stream was in flood and he had always been able to stand with the water up to his waist. In any event, since his eighth birthday he could swim.

  The one person he allowed to come there unasked was Nicola. She was younger than he, with a snub nose and freckles, and she lived a mile up the lane, in the Manor. He had no secrets from Nicola.

  ‘Jonathan, Jonathan’, his mother called, now louder still. She must be standing at the top of the steep bank behind him, but she would not be able to see him in his shelter in the reeds.

  David and he had been in the lane when the accident had occurred. They had been on the way home after he had shown David the woods and the lake. Nicola had come when he was showing David his secret place, and she had stood watching them. He didn’t think David had seen her, but when he called her to join them she had turned and run off. So the two boys had gone on alone. From the crumbling boat-house by the lake they had taken Beau’s old boat. The oars were locked away, so they had to paddle with their hands and a branch David found, and the voyage had taken them some time. Afterwards they walked back home between the high banks of the lane, and they could hear Jim Williams, the farmer’s eighteen-year-old son, working in the field above them on the tractor. It was a shiny 1924 model, which had been delivered new only that morning on the back of an open Ford lorry. Jonathan had taken David to the farm to see it in the afternoon, and Jim had given the boys a ride, sitting them on his lap one after the other, circling the farmyard before he took it off to work the field. He had not been very good at driving, reversing when he was meant to go
forward and steering clumsily even in the empty yard. He was more used to horses.

  After their ride the boys had gone to the woods and the lake and Jim took the tractor to the field. He was still at it when they passed in the lane and he must have been turning by the hedge on the steep bank when he either failed to turn the wheel sufficiently or accelerated when he should have braked. Whichever it was, the tractor broke through the low hedge and fell, turning on its side, crashing and sliding halfway down the bank until it came to rest just above where the boys were walking in the lane, pinning Jim in the seat. They heard him cry out and when the motor cut they heard him groaning. They scrambled up the bank to where he lay, blood on his face from the scratches from the thorns in the hedge. When he saw them looking down at him he cried out, ‘Get help. I can’t move.’

  ‘Where?’ said David. ‘Help from where?’

  ‘From the farm. My God, my leg. I can’t move.’

  ‘Come on,’ said David, and he began to slide back into the road.

  ‘Go to your house,’ Jim shouted. ‘It’s nearer.’

  Jonathan had stayed, looking at Jim trapped in the tractor and the blood on his face.

  ‘Come on,’ David shouted. By now he was in the lane and running in the direction of the house. It was when David was almost out of sight at the bend that Jonathan had climbed up the bank away from the lane, scrambled through the hedge and ran, not with David to get help, but across the fields to his hiding place by the dead tree across the stream.

  * * *

  Later the boys had been climbing an old, tall apple tree at the end of the orchard.

  ‘You should have seen the horses,’ David was saying. He was sitting astride a branch above Jonathan. ‘They got a rope around the tractor, and the horses pulled it off him. He wasn’t badly hurt, but his father, the old farmer, was furious.’

  Jonathan could see his own father, Beau, coming from the house – a tall, handsome man, then in his early thirties, very bronzed, with dark hair brushed back from his forehead and a thin black moustache which he had grown in France after he had first gone out as a young man just before the battle of Loos, nine years earlier. He was dressed in an open flannel shirt and his old, white, rather yellowed trousers with a Free Forester tie wrapped around the waist through the belt loops. He had been playing cricket on the village green when they had all been sent for and run to where Jim lay trapped under the tractor, the match abandoned. ‘Your mother said he was only scratched and his leg badly bruised,’ David went on. ‘She said he was very lucky.’ Jonathan didn’t want to know about it. He wanted David to stop talking about it. But David Trelawney was his guest, as Beau had reminded him before David had come to stay – and when the accident had happened, David had run for help while he had run away.

  ‘Hullo, boys.’

  Jonathan looked down and saw his father standing at the foot of the tree, knocking out his pipe on his heel. ‘Are you all right up there?’

  ‘We’re fine, sir,’ David shouted down. ‘It’s a great tree to climb.’

  ‘Well, you’d better come down now. Tea’s ready.’

  On the ground, Beau slipped his hand into Jonathan’s and held it. David had run on ahead. ‘Did you show David the lake?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jonathan didn’t say they had taken out the boat. They weren’t meant to do that.

  ‘I like him, don’t you?’ said Beau. ‘Jim’s all right, you know. No broken bones, only a broken tractor.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘But he must have looked pretty awful, lying there.’

  ‘He had blood on his face,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘I suppose he had. Lucky the tractor didn’t roll on him. Then he would have been in trouble. You all right, old chap?’

  Beau stopped and looked down at his small son. Jonathan nodded. Beau still had him by the hand. ‘It never does, you know, to run away.’ Jonathan nodded again. ‘You have to face things, even nasty things. It doesn’t do to run away.’

  And the two walked together to the house.

  David was already at the school where Jonathan was going for the first time at the end of the summer. ‘Jonathan’s too young to go to boarding-school,’ he had heard his mother, Julia, say to Beau in the spring.

  ‘Everyone goes away at eight,’ his father had replied. ‘It brings them on.’

  David’s father, Richard Trelawney, was a friend of Beau’s from the war. They had served together in France, until Richard Trelawney had lost an arm at the Somme and spent the rest of the war as adjutant at the Regiment’s training camp in Yeovil. Beau had come through unscathed, from his first battle in 1915 to the end in 1918 along the Hindenburg Line, where he had won the Military Cross. Few of their contemporaries had survived. Now David was spending a week with the Playfairs in Sussex while his parents were in France. David’s mother, Annette, came from Auvillar, in Périgord.

  ‘While you’re away, let David come and stay with us. The boys can get to know each other,’ Beau had said. ‘It’ll help Jonathan when he goes to the school.’

  At the tea-table, Beau tossed a rock cake across the table to David, who caught it deftly. ‘Well caught,’ said Beau. ‘You did very well today, David.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ David grinned. ‘The farmer was very angry.’

  ‘Can’t blame him,’ said Beau. ‘I hope the tractor was insured, but knowing old Williams I don’t expect it was.’

  No more was said about the accident during the week David spent with them, but Jonathan watched as David basked in Beau’s approval. When the time came for David to be driven home to Canterbury, Jonathan stood in the lane as the Playfairs’ open bull-nosed Morris disappeared up the lane, with Beau at the wheel and David turning and waving madly.

  ‘I’ll look after you when you come next term,’ David had said before he left. And David had been as good as his word, showing him the ropes, protecting him, introducing him to Rory, the third of what became in their schooldays a triumvirate.

  When the car had disappeared around the bend of the lane Jonathan took the boat his father had made for him, a simple, flat piece of wood with a stick for a mast to which Jonathan had tied a lead soldier. He ran back to the stream and launched it. Behind him he heard Nicola sliding down the bank, but he did not turn; he waded out into the water to rescue the boat, which had become stuck against a branch.

  ‘Has your friend gone?’ she called. But he only grunted, and waded back to where she was sitting on the bank.

  ‘I didn’t like him,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t talk to him so you can’t tell.’

  But he was pleased. ‘He’s older than us,’ he said. Then they wandered down the stream to find a better place to launch the soldier on his voyage.

  * * *

  That was how it had begun. Nearly seventy years ago. Now he was standing trial for the murder of the man who had been the boy who had come to visit.

  There was a knock on the door, and Mary came into the room. Jonathan stood up.

  ‘Is there anything I can get you, Jonathan?’ She looked at the tray. ‘You’ve eaten nothing.’

  She knelt and put another log on the fire. ‘Are you going to dine with us?’

  ‘Not tonight, Mary. I’m not hungry,’ he said, sitting again in his chair. ‘Tomorrow, perhaps.’

  ‘You ought to eat,’ she said. ‘You must keep up your strength.’

  ‘I shall,’ he said. ‘I shall.’ She looked up at him as she worked at the fire. He smiled at her and added, ‘There’s a long way to go yet. They’ve only just begun, and the prosecutor, Bracton, is long-winded, like they all are nowadays. I’ll have some biscuits with my whisky before I go to bed’.

  She stood and looked down at him. That he of all people, she thought, has to endure this.

  ‘I’ll bring you some soup later,’ she said and left.

  2

  HALF an hour after Jonathan had been driven away from the court, Hugo Shelbourne appeared from counsel’s robing-room
to be met by the photographers and television cameramen whom he knew would be waiting for him. Whenever there was an important libel case in the High Court, or a sensational defence at the Old Bailey, the newspapers and television news invariably carried pictures of Mr Hugo Shelbourne QC walking in his black court coat and long white bands, either across the Strand with the Gothic façade of the Law Courts in the background, or down Old Bailey away from the Central Criminal Court. This evening he guessed they’d want to photograph him against the wall of the castle, and he was only too ready to oblige.

  Hugo Shelbourne was not a great lawyer; but in court he was immensely effective – pugnacious, sarcastic, often very funny, sometimes wickedly funny at the expense of the witness he was cross-examining or, which was much resented, opposing counsel. Juries liked that, even if judges and his fellow barristers did not. But what mattered was that he won cases – and that, as he used to say, was what it was all about. Solicitors, who queued to brief him, agreed.

  He was a tall, handsome man, in his early fifties, with a dark, narrow face and black hair only slightly flecked with grey. He knew he would be photographed and, because snow was forecast, he had put on a Russian-style winter cap of white lamb’s-wool and a thick black cloak, pleated and gathered beneath his chin by a heavy gold chain and clasp. Altogether he presented a suitably impressive and flamboyant figure.

  The photographers, as he had anticipated, asked him to walk from the Great Door set in its arch in the flint wall and he did as they wished. Suddenly he felt a tug on his arm and found he had been joined by an almost scarecrow figure in a shabby duffel coat with a long scarf in the colours of Merton College, Oxford, wound around the throat. It was Harold Benson. He plucked at Shelbourne’s arm and said earnestly, ‘I’m glad I caught you. I thought we should have a chat before we see Sir Jonathan tomorrow.’