Take My Life by Winston Graham
The Assistant Commissioner said: ‘In fact, of course, it doesn’t affect the evidence against him in the slightest.’
‘Not in the slightest,’ agreed the Director. ‘But what it might do in the minds of a jury is create a psychological state in which it would seem to them that the police had not been sufficiently thorough. If that occurred we could have all the evidence possible and still fail to send him down.’
The Assistant Commissioner rose and stood warming his hands at the fire. ‘I think that’s rather taking the gloomy view. What does this discovery amount to? There are about three recent years of Elizabeth Rusman’s life unaccounted for, and it is probable she now spent them in England. Well, there’s still time before the trial if we dont postpone it. You should be able to do something, Archer. An intensive search will probably produce the necessary results. As I see it, the thing fits together much better now. Quite clearly she found herself with child, perhaps by Talbot, and changed her name and went to live quietly somewhere out of London. That’s why her identity card was not renewed in 1943. It’s quite possible the child is still alive somewhere, and that she was going to threaten Talbot with a maintenance claim. The case fits together much better without this American red-herring.’
‘I’ll talk it over with the Attorney-General,’ said the Director. ‘In the meantime do your best, Archer. If you tie up this loose end you may feel pretty sure of a conviction. If it’s left flapping the defence is sure to make a lot of it, for they’ve precious little to go on at present. That man Tyler is bound to try all his tricks.’
‘There’s this question of Mrs Talbot wanting to go to America, sir,’ said Archer. ‘Clearly we can’t let her go on a fool’s errand.’
The Assistant Commissioner grunted. ‘The facts will come out some time; you’d better give them to the press at once. It’s only fair to Talbot, and we’ve nothing to hide. The more publicity they give it, the easier your work will be.’
‘I’ll tell Mrs Talbot first thing in the morning,’ said Archer.
‘See Superintendent Priestley before you go,’ the Assistant Commissioner suggested. ‘If I were you I should check up on Talbot’s army leaves again; I shouldn’t be surprised to find that he’d been meeting Elizabeth Rusman more recently than 1942. The new situation may help our case, not Talbot’s.’
Chapter Twelve
Philippa’s heart leapt at the news. The knowledge that Elizabeth might have been in England all the time seemed to open up great new possibilities. In an eager meeting with Nick she plagued him vehemently again for all he could tell her about the murdered girl; and though at the end there seemed nothing in all their talk she went away lighter of spirit than she had been for some time. Then after two days more of searching, a chance remark by a woman ’cellist in a ladies’ orchestra in Bournemouth sent her hurriedly off eighty miles to a small country town and to a garage owned by a man named Shaw.
There she found to her chagrin that the police had forestalled her only by a matter of a few hours. Mr Shaw, a tough, sandy-complexioned young man with hairy wrists, having been thus officially questioned so recently, was cautious and faintly sly. He couldn’t quite believe that Philippa had also come here specially to ask him about the girl he had had an affair with in July, 1942, and kept thrusting back her questions at her as if they were playing some not quite decent party game. Philippa felt hot and humiliated and angry, but persevered until she was sure he had nothing more to tell. He came out with her to the car and held the door open, eyeing her and talking to her about swing music for so long that she was relieved to hear another car hooting behind for petrol.
Though she did not know it until later, the police had quickly got one stage farther than this, having located the doctor and nurse who attended Elizabeth Rusman in 1943. From them they learned that a son had been born to her in April of that year, that the child had died, and no more. In May Elizabeth had left the district, and wartime England had swallowed her up. That she had changed her name was obvious, but the obliging person who had sold her a faked identity and ration card was not forthcoming.
They came to a void, a vacuum, in which no clue or track existed. If Elizabeth Rusman had lived in England during the last three years she had left no trace. It was quite possible, they knew well, that some simple explanation existed to account for no one coming forward, but both the press and themselves were doing all that was possible, and no more could be done.
Once, on the Thursday when they gave Traviata for the last time, Philippa sneaked in at the stage-door of Covent Garden and listened from the wings. Ravogli, being cheated of his Philippa, had had the bright idea of engaging another English girl, and Caroline Winthram was singing in her place. She had had good notices, and Philippa listened with terrible feelings of discomfort to the strong sweet voice of her deputy. Her feelings became so intense that she could not stay to the end; and she slipped out as secretly as she had come and called a taxi and went home to the flat. She’d been crazy, she knew now, to go near the place.
She lay on the bed and her mind tried to unthink the happenings of the last weeks, so that instead of being here solitary and bitter she was at Covent Garden on the stage tonight, and Nick in the box again, and all the lovely fruits of long years of struggle were back in her grasp and not rotting in the gutter where she had thrown them.
She lay on the bed with open eyes until the early hours of the morning.
So Thursday became Friday, and Friday ran into the week-end, and the week-end flowered and died and gave way to the dry seed-pod of Monday morning. It was the last week-end before the trial. Worn out, Philippa at last consented to spend it with the Newcombes at their home in Surrey; Nick spent his in Brixton reading Middlemarch and smoking interminable cigarettes; Mr Tyler, KC, golfed with Sir Boyd Dyson, for whom he had once devilled, and Inspector Archer took an hour off to sow another patch of grass. Mr Sidney Fleming read all the Sunday newspapers, in particular the sensational ones, which for once gave him the sort of reading he was looking for.
On the eve of the trial Mr Stephen Tyler had a final conference with Mr Claude Land, who was to be his junior, and Arthur McNeill and Mr Frobisher. When it became known that there was this gap in the murdered woman’s history, McNeill, knowing his chief’s quick changes of front, would not have been greatly surprised to see him scrap the line of defence they had been working on and use this unexpected flaw in the prosecution’s case as part of a new plan.
But Tyler accepted the news with reserve. The police were still working full pressure to fill the gap and might any time succeed. Also it was just as plain to him as to the Director of Public Prosecutions that the weakness was really no weakness in the circumstantial evidence of the crime. It could be made use of, should be made use of, if still available. But there were bolder courses to take.
To attack the reputation and veracity of one of the witnesses for the Crown was a dangerous game. Once done, it enabled the prosecution to attack the reputation of the prisoner, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred that would be fatal. Bad faith, debts, previous convictions were the record of most men standing in the box on a capital charge. But Nicolas Talbot’s record seemed clean enough, and Tyler’s view was that this could be turned to advantage.
‘It’s all very well,’ McNeill said, arguing more on principle than because he was unconvinced. ‘But which of us here would like to stand in the box to be cross-examined by Wells on his past life? Nobody’s been an angel, certainly not Talbot.’
‘D’you think he’ll keep his temper?’ Land asked.
‘Talbot gives me the impression of being a pretty tough character,’ said Tyler, rubbing his bald head. ‘But likeable. A man who should make a good showing in the box. But in any case it should be worth the risk. Heaven seldom sends one a witness quite like the principal witness for the Crown. With a free hand I’ll tear him to shreds.’
‘There are – er – certain features of Mr Talbot’s life,’ said Frobisher in his grey careful voice, ‘
‘McNeill and I read it through in the early hours of this morning,’ said Tyler. ‘It can and will be used against him, but I’m convinced it’s worth the risk.’
The day of the trial broke warm and sunny. It was the first Thursday in May, and as Philippa looked out of the window of the flat she could hear the sparrows chirping and chattering. It was a day for going out and seeking the first green fields, to walk by a river or to wander in a wood. Middlesex were playing their first match of the season at Lord’s.
In the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey spring existed on hearsay evidence. Only the brightness of the light falling in through the glass dome suggested that an outer, freer, sunnier air existed somewhere and that all men might not be bent on the grim faded processes of human law.
To Philippa, after a sleepless night of foreboding, the court came as an anticlimax. As at Bow Street, she had expected something bigger and more imposing. This might have been a small county court, drab and yellow and unimpressive and built for the consideration of trespass and petty thefts. Little wonder the policeman said that the long patient queue stretching round the building outside had no hopes of getting in. She was glad of that. The fewer to peer and whisper the better.
Joan and John Newcombe were both there to greet her, and they sat together on one of the front benches. Philippa knew she would have to go into one of the outer rooms as soon as the trial started, since she was an important witness for the defence, but she wanted first to see Nick and to feel the general atmosphere into which she would suddenly be called either late today or early tomorrow.
Presently leading counsel drifted in, and Philippa glanced anxiously at Sir Alfred Well, KC, who was leading for the Crown. He was a taller, older, more imposing man than Tyler, with a beak of a nose and a habit of pursing his lips suddenly as if about to say ‘shush’. As the benches filled up round her, Philippa’s heart began to beat and the old sick, feeling returned. She realized that somehow the court was not unimpressive after all. She realized that she was frightened, and getting more frightened, for Nick.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Your name is Mrs Catherine Evans, and you keep a small private hotel at No. 29A, The Esplanade, Dolgelly?’
‘Yes,’ said the woman in the box.
‘Do you recognize the prisoner?’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘Tell us when you met him.’
‘Well, he came to stay at my place in the spring of 1942.’
‘What name did he use?’
‘Talbot he says was his name. And Elizabeth Rusman stayed with him as Mrs Talbot.’
‘How did you know she was Elizabeth Rusman?’
‘Well, I had seen her playing in a ladies’ orchestra at Llandudno the year before and using her maiden name. I told her so to her face and they said they were just married.’
‘How long did they stay?’
‘Three weeks or nearly so. Then one morning Mr Talbot pays the bill and leaves. The lady stayed on two more days and then she left. Fairly down in the mouth, she was, I assure you.’
Nick yawned. Yes, he was on trial for his life, but the natural reactions would not be balked. The court had grown stuffy as the morning wore on and this early evidence seemed so useless, since it only proved what was already admitted. The first part of the morning, Wells’s opening speech had been a different matter. Quietly and without enmity he had given in detail the facts of the Crown’s case. Methodically he had woven together the evidence, thread by thread, until it seemed to Nick like a giant net of misapplied testimony that would presently be flung over his head and drawn tight. The old liaison with the murdered woman, the two love letters she had preserved and the locket photograph about her neck, the encounter in the theatre, the assignment to meet, the silver pencil lying on the floor among the debris, the injury to his head and the contradictory stories he had told of how he had received it …
Certain phrases of Wells’s speech still rang in Nick’s head.
‘We cannot say with certainty what Nicolas Talbot’s feelings were when Elizabeth Rusman spoke to him behind the stage at Covent Garden. Nor do we need to guess. The evidence, we contend, shows that she was determined at all costs to attempt a renewal of their old intimacy. Not only did she exact the promise of a meeting, but in scribbling her address added a few words which can only be construed as a deliberate threat. ‘‘Come,’’ she said in effect, ‘‘or I’ll make all the trouble I can.’’ Faced with this sudden acute danger to the success of his new marriage, the probability of shipwreck …
‘This, members of the jury, is the statement made and signed by the prisoner that night in the presence of Inspector Archer and Detective Constable Kellett. May I read you an extract: ‘‘ I received this injury in a quarrel with my wife. It was a stupid quarrel and no doubt I was very irritating. She threw something at me and I left the house in a temper and walked round the streets for three-quarters of an hour before going into a chemist’s shop.’’ But in the early morning, let me remind you, the police went round to Pelham Court to see Mrs Talbot. They found her awake and a little anxious about her husband’s absence; but when they questioned her she denied any such quarrel as he had mentioned. Nor was there any evidence of it when later she changed her story to agree with his …’
Wells had gone on: ‘What is the next thing the accused man says? ‘‘I never at any time that night went near Elizabeth Rusman’s flat.’’ Yet on the following morning at Bow Street there was an identification parade of ten men, one being the accused. They were all dressed exactly alike, in trilby hats and raincoats, and all with a bandage over their left temples. Present at this parade was Mike Grieve, the janitor, the only man to see the murderer leave the house. Now among those ten men, whom did he identify? He identified Nicolas Talbot …’
So it had mounted and mounted until there seemed no alternative for the jury but that they should rise at once and pronounce him guilty without wasting more of the court’s time.
Now, having said all that, Wells was painstakingly going about the business of proving it. Poor Mrs Evans was dragged away from the Welsh fastnesses of Dolgelly to play her part; stage hands from the Opera House who had witnessed his meeting with Elizabeth, the tall shabby chemist, the young doctor and the young nurse, Inspector Archer and the Divisional Surgeon, Mr Grieve …
At these people Tyler waved a hand or cross-examined briefly. From Archer he established the fact that no finger-prints belonged to the prisoner had been found in the murdered woman’s room, and then let him go. On the afternoon resumption Mr Justice Ferguson made everything drag by writing the testimony down in longhand, and Nick could see the trial running into Tuesday or Wednesday of next week at this rate.
He stole a glance at the jury, and was relieved to find none of them staring at him. On the whole a fairly intelligent group, the exception being a burly red-faced young man in the back row who looked as if he had just come out of prison himself. The three women had been given seats in the front row: two might have been school teachers or civil servants, the other was a motherly soul with a kind eye. The foreman, a man called Pindar, had a nervous sniff that irritated Nick. He wanted to pass a handkerchief along.
Mr Tyler was asking questions. It all seemed very unimportant.
‘You say the time you reached your home was about ten minutes past eleven, Mrs Grieve?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Where was your husband when you first saw him?’
‘Coming out of the bedroom, gaspin’and chokin’with the smoke.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He shouts to me: ‘‘For Gawd’s sake fetch the cops, Maggie, the ’ouse is on fire an’ there’s been bloody murder done!’’ ’
‘Quite,
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Was there anyone else about when you first reached your home?’
‘No, sir, but by the time I’d done my phoning and got back there was a bob – a policeman there who’d seen the smoke from down the street and come without bein’ asked.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Grieve.’ Tyler sat down.
Her husband was next to be called, and Nick stared with interest at this witness whom he had only seen once before, for a moment at the identification parade. A tough-looking man, worthy companion for that odd juror: coarse red face, a chin built for bristles, eyes screwed up a little as if unusued to bright lights.
Sir Alfred Wells was treating him gently, courteously, trying, one suspected, by his deferential attitude to hypnotize the jury into a similar attitude of mind. He went through it all, and Grieve, to do him justice, was a good witness while the expected questions could be met with the well-drilled answers. Nick felt it was all old stuff, but he could see the effect it had on the jury.
Sir Alfred Wells sat down satisfied, and Mr Stephen Tyler got up. He looked at Mr Grieve, blew his nose, and looked at him again reflectively while he stowed the handkerchief away in an under pocket.
‘How old are you, Mr Grieve?’
Grieve stared at this new, smaller, wigged figure. He knew all about this one.
‘Fifty,’ he said in his husky voice.
‘Ever been in a witness-box before?’
‘No,’ said Grieve.
‘Have you ever been in a court before?’
There was a moment’s hesitation. ‘Maybe.’
‘The witness-box is not your usual position?’
‘Eh?’
‘What I mean is that you are more accustomed to standing in the dock?’
‘No, I ain’t.’
Mr Tyler raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you telling the court that you have never been in the dock?’