Indictment for Murder Read online

  My first criminal trial, Graham thought. ‘It is,’ he said. Again there was a silence.

  ‘I knew them both, you know,’ the High Sheriff added.

  Graham looked at him.

  ‘Both?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yes. Old Jonathan, and Trelawney, David Trelawney.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Graham said.

  ‘I used to meet Playfair with my father. He used to come and dine and browse in our library.’

  ‘And Trelawney?’

  ‘I only met him once or twice. My elder brother used to bring him to the Turf for lunch. That was soon after the war. He had a wonderful war. Second World War, that is. A lieutenant-colonel at twenty-six. He got every decoration that was going.’

  ‘Had you met him recently?’

  ‘No, he seemed to have dropped out a bit. I think he was living in Paris for a time. Somewhere abroad. Then quite recently I heard he’d come to live here in the city, but I never saw him. Shortly after he came, he got ill.’

  ‘Do you know why he came to live here?’

  ‘No, I suppose he was getting on and wanted to settle somewhere.’ The colonel shook his head. ‘It’s a wretched business, wretched. But from what I’ve read about it, I can’t think why they ever started to prosecute and—’

  Graham cut him off. ‘I think it’s beginning to snow,’ he said. He was looking across the room at the window behind the High Sheriff’s head. The butler had not troubled to draw the curtains.

  ‘Is it, by God?’ The colonel drained his glass. ‘Then I’m afraid I’d better be going. There’s the devil of a hill just before the drive to my house. But it’ll be good for the scent tomorrow – make for a good day, if it doesn’t get too deep.’

  He got up. Graham too rose. ‘Well, goodnight, judge. Thank you for the whisky. Have a good weekend. I’ll be back first thing Monday morning to escort you to court. I suppose they’ll start the evidence on Monday?’

  ‘They will.’

  When Colonel Basildon got home he said to Susan, ‘You missed nothing. Just him, in his open shirt and no socks. He’s an odd fellow. Moody, highly strung. Funny them sending such a young fellow to try old Jonathan, but then I suppose they had to find someone who didn’t know him.’

  At the Lodgings, the butler explained they had no provisions but, snow permitting, they’d get more in tomorrow. He asked Graham if he would mind dining off ham and eggs.

  ‘That will do very well,’ Graham replied.

  After his supper he again studied the witness statements in the case of Regina v. Playfair. Then he put them aside and sat staring into the fire, as at the same time, some twenty miles away, Jonathan was staring into his. Jonathan was thinking of the past; Graham Harris of the present.

  The death of the old hero, thought Graham, and the trial of the old judge, each old enough to be my father. Why should Playfair want to do away with him? But then why had Playfair behaved so oddly, leaving the dead man and telling nobody. Hardly the behaviour of a man with nothing to hide. Then there were the fingerprints – and the letter. Was money the reason, the motive, as the prosecution alleged? What was behind it all?

  Then he forgot Regina v. Playfair and thought about Anne. At this moment she would be with Keating. Probably in bed. Not, he hoped, in their bed. She wouldn’t, surely, do that.

  He rose from his chair, put the guard in front of the fire, turned off the light and walked through the icy hall to the stairs and up to his bedroom.

  * * *

  At Pembroke House, at about the time when Graham Harris in the Lodgings was being served his ham and eggs, Mary had brought Jonathan a bowl of soup. He made a show of eating it, but when she left he poured the remainder down the sink in the pantry. Then he walked slowly up and down his room. After a time he went to the french windows and drew back the curtains. The snow had come and the lawn was already dazzling white, lit by a floodlight which James had installed after some houses in the neighbourhood had been broken into. Jonathan watched the snowflakes floating like feathers, glistening as they were caught in the light. Suddenly it went out. Then it came on again, went out and came on. It had been doing this recently. James had said he’d have it seen to, but he hadn’t. The light flashing off and on made Jonathan remember once again what he had been thinking of in court – the flares that had lit Rory Connor when he lay dying on the mountainside fifty years ago.

  He drew the curtains and went back to his chair, staring now into the fire. Rory; his mother and father, Beau and Julia; Nicola – they were all dead now. David was the last. He himself could not survive long. Ever since David’s death he had been thinking so much of their youth, when they had first come together as a triumvirate at their first school. Rory, with his fiery red hair, had been the devil-may-care one; he, Jonathan, the one for books and work; and David, the leader – Head of everything, captain of games, brilliant at cricket, even as a small boy at Beau’s cricket matches. What a charade Beau’s matches had been! Nicola had come one year, and David had spoken about her.

  It had begun on Jonathan’s first Prize Day, in 1925, when his father, with Jonathan’s hand in his, had gone up to the headmaster and offered to bring a family team to play the school eleven. ‘I’ve four brothers,’ Beau had said, ‘and Julia has a couple. With a few cousins and some odds-and-sods I could get up a side and take you on.’

  The headmaster had looked doubtful, but his wife, a pert little woman with bobbed, auburn hair, had said eagerly, ‘What a splendid idea, Captain Playfair. That sounds great fun. I’m sure the boys would love it.’ From the day when he had first come to inspect the school she had been very taken by Captain Playfair. So, to Jonathan’s dismay, it had been settled.

  On the day of the first match, the Uncles had been late. Then, led by Beau in his bull-nosed Morris Oxford, with Julia beside him, her Pekinese on her lap, with much tooting of klaxons and pumping of ‘serpentine’ horns, a cavalcade of Humbers, Armstrong-Siddeleys, Wolseleys, Ford flivvers, an open Chrysler, even a Morgan three-wheeler, and, grandest of them all, an immense touring Hispano-Suiza, swept into the drive, with girls in very short skirts and very scarlet lips hanging over the sides waving giddily. The ‘Uncles’ came in all shapes and sizes, and in different styles of dress. One even carried a saxophone. As their captain led them up to the cricket field with the flappers clinging to their arms, he played a ‘blues’.

  ‘Aren’t they delightful?’ said the headmaster’s wife to matron, as they brought up the rear of the procession. ‘This really will be most amusing.’

  When the Uncles took up their positions on the field one or two tripped and fell, and as the afternoon went on substitutes were hastily summoned by Beau to replace those who had wilted. Even the saxophonist was required to down his instrument, which he had been playing to an admiring circle of small boys.

  At the tea interval the Uncles trooped off to eat strawberries and cream and be revived by iced coffee, generously laced (matron observed acidly) from the flasks which most of the Uncles had been carrying on their hip-pockets.

  Beau, alone of his team, covered himself with glory, lashing out with his broomstick with which the grown-ups were made to bat, despatching the ball all over the field. But despite his efforts the school eleven, as was proper, won easily. All in all the school, led by the headmaster’s wife, voted it the best match of the season. Everyone had enjoyed it, except the reluctant headmaster and Jonathan, who had sat disconsolately with his mother, trying not to watch his family making fools of themselves.

  So the match had become an annual fixture, the great occasion in the small school’s summer calendar. In Jonathan’s last year he had been selected to play – but only because it was the last time the school would ever meet his father’s exotic team. That was the year when Julia had brought Nicola, a solemn little ten-year-old, and it had been when Jonathan was taking her for a stroll during the tea interval that they had seen Beau kissing the headmaster’s wife behind the pavilion.

  Jonathan, the last to bat fo
r the school, had been out first ball to one of Beau’s faster and meaner deliveries, preventing the not-out batsman, David, who had scored forty-nine, from making his well-deserved fifty. For the first and only time the Uncles won.

  After the match Beau produced champagne, accepted hesitantly by the headmaster and eagerly by his wife and the staff, and then the Uncles piled back into their cars. The Aston Martins and Armstrong-Siddeleys, to the accompaniment of the squeals of the flappers and the sounds of the saxophone, roared away down the gravel drive, and the Uncles team was no more.

  In the day-room at the school Jonathan had gone up to David. ‘Sorry about getting out, David,’ he said.

  ‘It was a pity,’ said David. ‘I’d’ve liked to have got a fifty against your father’s side.’

  ‘If you ask me, this year they were more weird than ever,’ said Rory Connor. ‘Some of them could hardly stand up. Fancy having a family like that. Poor old Playfair, no wonder you’re bats.’

  The three of them walked out into the garden. It was by now dusk and soon it would be time for bed. It was then that David had asked about Nicola.

  ‘Who was the girl sitting with you and your mother?’ he asked.

  ‘Nicola.’

  ‘Is she a cousin?’

  ‘No, she lives in the Manor, up the lane from us.’

  ‘The lane where we saw the tractor fall?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jonathan replied.

  ‘She’s jolly pretty. I want to meet her when next you ask me to stay.’

  * * *

  Jonathan put down his glass. Nicola and David. She had been at the pool when he had been showing David his secret place before the accident with the tractor. She had come to the last Uncles match when David had said he wanted to meet her again. She came into it so often. Then and later.

  He got up from his chair and put the guard in front of the fire. The lawyers were coming in the morning and they would ask questions which he had no intention of answering. He would tell his own story in his own way in his own time.

  As he got into bed he made himself forget about the court and the trial. He’d think instead about Rory Connor, who had said that the Uncles were weird, and fifteen years later had died on the mountainside, singing to himself. ‘Whom the Gods love’, Jonathan thought – and at last he slept.

  4

  FOR Hugo Shelbourne it was a thirty-mile drive to his house in the country, and, when the snow came, the going was not easy. The night before he had stayed at the hotel where he had booked a large bedroom and sitting-room for the duration of the trial, but he was expecting a guest from London for the weekend and had always planned to get home as soon as the court rose on Friday. Because Playfair had refused to see them that evening he had got away earlier than he’d expected, despite having to spend time with Harold Benson. Glad as he was now to be on his way he was still infuriated by Playfair’s demand that they come to see him tomorrow. Tomorrow he’d have to waste hours away from his guest.

  In all his experience of many trials over many years, he had never encountered so maddening a client nor so useless an instructing solicitor. They seemed to think that all Playfair had to do was deny that he was guilty, say he couldn’t remember what had happened when a man had died in his presence, and he’d be acquitted! On Monday the evidence would begin, but Playfair had already said he did not require the appearance of two witnesses – Francis Lightwood, a friend to whom Trelawney had written on the morning of the day he died, expressing concern over Playfair’s visit; and George Symes, the solicitor to whom Lightwood had handed the letter. Shelbourne had wanted both called to give evidence. Their evidence, he had warned, should be tested in cross-examination. But Playfair had refused. So neither would be coming to court; instead their statements would be read to the jury and the first witnesses actually to appear would be the nurse and the doctor who had attended David Trelawney before his death. Of them Playfair had merely said they would be telling the truth; and if they didn’t, he would tell him.

  The first flakes of snow began to fall and Shelbourne switched on the windscreen wipers. Now the going had become really difficult and he had to concentrate on his driving, made no easier by his exasperation over Playfair. How on earth, he fumed, cursing the dazzle of the headlamps from the oncoming traffic, how on earth could he be expected to conduct cross-examination on the basis of last-minute messages from the dock! So on Monday, when the evidence began, two witnesses who should be called to give their evidence in person would not appear and two witnesses who would appear were to be challenged only if Playfair disagreed with what they said while they were saying it!

  But Hugo Shelbourne had made up his mind what he would do. Before he’d left the robing-room that evening he had told his junior, Andrew Benjamin, that whether Playfair liked it or not he was not going to sit there like a dummy while the prosecution built up their case brick by brick. He was going to cross-examine and probe the prosecution evidence whatever Playfair might say. He also comforted himself that he’d been putting it around the Temple and to his friends in the press that Playfair had saddled him with an incompetent solicitor; was proving obstructive and secretive and was giving no proper instructions as to what was his defence.

  By now the snow had become almost a blizzard, forcing him to peer through the windscreen, across which the wipers thrashed wildly, as he approached the last stretch of his journey on to the secondary roads and the narrow winding lane which led to his house. It had been a derelict farmhouse when he had bought it three years ago, with two acres of paddock and an unkempt garden, now splendidly landscaped. With it had come twenty-five acres which he let out to a tenant farmer. He didn’t come every weekend. If he had a heavy case in London he remained in Edwardes Square in Kensington. Some weekends he went to stay with friends; on others he made discreet trips to Paris or Le Touquet. When he did come down, Mrs Green, the wife of his gardener from the village, looked after him and prepared the meals. Often he was accompanied by a woman friend, whom Mrs Green would call ‘the flavour of the month’.

  He had been married briefly as a young man, but marriage had not suited Hugo Shelbourne and he had remained unattached – or rather semi-attached, for he was never long without a succession of women. He needed them, he told himself, because of the adrenalin aroused by a life of courtroom battle. However, recently there had been fewer ‘flavours of the month’ and the expeditions abroad had been less frequent. For he had met someone to whom he had been much attracted – and it was she who was coming to stay.

  By now he could see the lights in the upper windows. That should mean she had made it from London and he hoped Mrs Green had turned up the heating. Otherwise, he thought, his reception might be as frosty as the road he was travelling, for his visitor did not enjoy, she had made very plain to him, the frigidity she had too often encountered in too many English country houses.

  He had first met her, or rather had first seen her, at a dinner party in New York, where he had gone on legal business. One evening he had been invited to dine at the apartment on East 61st Street of one of the American lawyers, and Hugo had noticed her the moment she had come into the room. It would have been difficult not to, for she was very striking – tall, with jet-black hair brushed back tightly over her head, bound at the nape of her neck by a crimson, velvet ribbon, the colour of her dress. She had arrived late and the party had immediately gone into dine. He had not caught her name and she was seated on the opposite side and at the far end of the table. His dinner neighbour was a sour-looking, expensively dressed woman of about fifty, with fair hair and a greasy, shiny skin, especially at the corners of her nostrils. When she began to talk he disliked her conversation even more than he did her appearance. For some reason she passed around little cellophane packets containing plastic penises and decorative packets of condoms. After a time he had looked across the table and seen the woman in the crimson dress with the white flower in her hair looking at him quizzically but he had no chance of speaking with her. For once he had kept
silence at a dinner table, and, bored, soon left.

  The next time he had seen her was a few months later, in London, at the house of a friend in Hyde Park Gate. Again she had made a late appearance, and again she looked very striking, this time in white.

  ‘Virginia,’ the hostess had called out, ‘you’re next to Hugo Shelbourne.’

  When they were seated he said, ‘We were guests at the same dinner party in New York last summer.’

  She turned and faced him. Her eyes were green and abnormally large. ‘I remember. You didn’t seem to be enjoying yourself.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ he replied.

  ‘I suppose you were shocked,’ she said.

  ‘I was bored.’

  ‘In England you have that kind of talk among the men after dinner, when the women have been obliged to retire,’ she said.

  ‘Not even then,’ he replied.

  ‘We’re as good as you now.’

  ‘Do you mean as bad – or, rather, as coarse?’

  ‘You’ll catch on, or rather you’ll catch up. You English usually do.’

  ‘What’s your name, apart from Virginia?’ he asked.

  ‘Katz. Do you think it suits?’ He had looked into her strange green eyes. ‘I’m from New York, and I’m no WASP, as you can probably guess.’

  He had not known how to reply, so he asked, ‘Do you live in London?’

  ‘Yes, since six months,’ she replied, not looking at him. ‘I know all about you. Two weeks ago I watched you questioning a friend of mine in court. You made people laugh at her.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I expect I was only doing my job.’

  ‘You were, and you looked as if you were enjoying it. Now,’ she said, ‘amuse me.’

  He had tried, but not very successfully. She let him go on for several minutes. Then she said, ‘Apparently you only make people laugh at other people.’ She looked at him, unsmiling, her eyes studying him. ‘You look,’ she said, ‘very sure of yourself.’

  Before he could reply she had switched to the companion on her other side. They had not talked again that evening. Later Hugo learned that she was the London editor of an American women’s journal.