A Dead Liberty

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A Dead Liberty

A C. D. Sloan Mystery

Catherine Aird

for North, South, East and West

—
with love

ONE

Guttae Pro Oculis
—
Eye drops

“Come along now,” said the Chairman of the Bench briskly. “This isn't getting us anywhere, you know.”

The girl standing before him made no reply whatsoever.

“You heard what the Clerk said,” went on Henry Simmonds, not unkindly. He knew that a first appearance in the dock of a Magistrates' Court was a daunting business for anyone, and this girl was quite young. And, as far as he could judge after casting his practised eye over the courtroom for obvious friends and relatives, she was also quite alone.

“I'll ask the Clerk to repeat the charge,” said Mr. Simmonds when the girl made no reply, “in case you didn't hear it properly.”

The Clerk to the Berebury Magistrates' Court heroically refrained from raising his voice as he repeated himself for the third time. In a manner that befitted his long years on the administrative side of the law, he also kept any unnecessary inflexion out of his tone. The words themselves were in any case quite awe-inspiring enough as it was.

He said again “Lucy Mirabel Durmast, you are charged that on or about the thirteenth of January last you did feloniously cause the death of Kenneth Malcolm Carline against the Peace of Our Sovereign Lady the Queen, her Crown and Dignity …”

There was a full-size Royal Coat of Arms of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II affixed to the wall of the court at a level above and behind the Chairman's head. If the girl in the dock thought it odd that the act of murder should still be seen—even in this conspicuously egalitarian day and age—as a breach of the Queen's Peace, she did not say so. She raised her head and gravely regarded the Clerk of the Court with bright grey-green eyes, but she did not utter a single word.

The Chairman of the Bench shuffled his papers and took the opportunity while the charge was being read again of having a good look at the person standing before him. She looked about twenty years old, but she could have been more. As his wife constantly reminded him, he was apt to underestimate women's ages. Although Mrs. Simmonds gracefully conceded this to be a good fault in a husband, it wasn't a help on the Bench. If she were under eighteen, he mused to himself, she was
doli capax
, which as the Clerk was sure to remind him at the earliest opportunity, meant she was capable of committing a crime but not always liable to be punished for so doing in the same way as someone of eighteen and older.

Time was when a man could tell a girl's age from her clothes but not any more. This girl—actually she hadn't even admitted to being Lucy Mirabel Durmast either yet, but Henry Simmonds had no reason to suppose she wasn't—was dressed rather more carefully than most of those who appeared before him but not in a way that told him very much about her. She had on a plain velvet jacket in a shade of mid-brown that went very well with her shoulder-length hair, which was of a dark shade of auburn. Beneath the velvet jacket she was wearing a pale, lemon-coloured blouse. Below them both Henry Simmonds was fairly confident that she would be wearing a patterned pleated skirt but the height of the dock prevented him from seeing this for himself.

Over his long years as a lay magistrate Henry Simmonds had schooled himself not to associate sartorial appearance of any sort with either guilt or innocence—but that did not mean he didn't notice clothes. In his day all manner of styles and degrees of fashion had come before him. He had, for instance, been aware rather more quickly than most when the ethnic look had been overtaken by its successor—but he had learned long ago not to be too influenced by them. Guilt, he knew, did not necessarily go with unkempt clothes or a dirty appearance—or indeed with dirt itself—although he was well aware that without exception all the solicitors in Berebury advised their clients that a neat and tidy look went down well with the magistrates.

And short hair.

Actually Henry Simmonds was always a little wary of a short back-and-sides hair cut that had a freshly barbered look about it, but he never said so—not even to his fellow magistrates. And he was noticeably less affected by long, straggling locks and a beard on a young man than the rest of the Bench with whom he sat. They were apt to bracket having long hair with the charge and to think of it as another and separate offence.

The girl in the dock had lovely hair. It fell down on her shoulders with an entirely natural grace.

Even when the members of the Bench were in the privacy of their retiring room discussing sentences and the other magistrates muttered something about “and get his hair cut” as if it were either an additional punishment or a remedy for ill-doing, Henry Simmonds always resisted the temptation to join in. This was entirely due to the influence of his great-aunts. He was old enough to remember their finding a new young medical assistant to their old family doctor unacceptable because he was clean-shaven—but then, they had been brought up in the era of the grand beard that had only gradually given way to the mutton chop and the sideburn.

“Do you wish to say anything?” asked the Clerk to the the Magistrates.

Lucy Durmast turned her head attentively in his direction but made no reply.

Henry Simmonds was still thinking about her clothes.

It was quite difficult, he conceded silently to himself, for anyone to know the correct garment to wear for an appearance in Court but this girl had clearly applied her mind to the problem. There was nothing in the least bit way out in what she had on, but nothing apologetic either. She had seen to it that someone had brought in suitable garments for her to wear and she was as well groomed as prison facilities allowed.

“Have you anything to say?” The Clerk let a note of peremptoriness creep into his voice. “Do you wish to bring witnesses?”

The peremptory note did not affect Lucy Durmast's resolution—if that was what it was—not to speak, and she did not answer him.

There was that though about the way in which she held her head high and yet courteously inclined that made Henry Simmonds reflect that in an earlier day and age Lucy Durmast might have dressed for a different sort of Court appearance. Presentation there in that other Court—a vague memory of old sepia-coloured photographs of ostrich feathers floated through his mind—meant that you were being brought to the Sovereign's attention in a different way.

And yet, in a curious fashion, both Courts were the Sovereign's houses—that was what the very word “Court” meant. The Court was the place where the King or Queen was. The fact that he, Henry Simmonds of Almstone, Justice of the Peace, was there today in the Court at Berebury as the Queen's surrogate descended directly from the fact that Her Majesty couldn't be in every Court up and down the land at the same time—while Justice demanded that she should be. In essence Henry Simmonds of Almstone held the Queen's Commission to act on her behalf.

“Do you wish to say anything?” said the Clerk again.

Answer came there none.

There was not even, noted Henry Simmonds, the faintest shake or nod of that fine head of hair that could possibly be construed as a response to the most dreadful charge in the book. The girl held herself quite still, almost as if she were afraid that any movement at all might be taken for what it was not.

And erect, too.

There was nothing cringing about her posture. No one could have implied guilt from anything about the way in which she stood.

The Clerk fell back on a more ancient formula still. “Lucy Mirabel Durmast, how say you?”

Lucy Mirabel Durmast said nothing at all.

Henry Simmonds wondered if anyone had ever told Lucy Durmast how beautiful her hair was. He glanced down at the list of cases on the bench in front of him to remind himself of a name: Kenneth Malcolm Carline. Had Kenneth Carline ever said anything about Lucy Durmast's hair, he wondered?

Before he was murdered, that is.

If he had been murdered, of course.

The Clerk put down his paper and looked straight at the girl in the dock.

She returned his gaze thoughtfully but said nothing.

There was a stage of response to a situation, Henry Simmonds reminded himself, that was known as “a bit late back.” It was meant to demonstrate that due consideration had been given to the subject under discussion. As the moments of silence ticked by, it was borne in upon him that this was an eventuality that did not apply in this case. He realised that Lucy Durmast was not simply playing for time. She was clearly not going to speak at all.

Henry Simmonds felt a stirring at his side and was reminded by it that the very word Bench was a noun of multitude. He was not sitting alone today although he might have been. He was flanked by two fellow magistrates, both of whom were no doubt thankful that the honour of the Chair was resting on his manly shoulders rather than theirs.

Actually not all their shoulders were manly. Mrs. Mabel Sperry presented the outward picture of the archetypal wife and mother in spite of having a sentencing policy on the Judge Jeffery's side of severe. The third member of the Bench today was young and politically ambitious. He had still to blunt his armour on the realities of the Magistrates' Court. Terry Watkins, appointed by the Lord Chancellor's Office to keep a social balance in Middle England, saw himself as representing Common Man and usually spoke accordingly. So far he had been unusually silent, which meant that he felt there was no underdog to be spoken up for. Henry Simmonds concurred with this unexpressed view. Young and alone as she was, Lucy Durmast did not give the impression of belonging to an oppressed minority.