Past Caring (77 page)

“Leo Sellick was the illegitimate son of Lady Couchman’s late husband. I killed him to stop his campaign of harassment against the Couchman family.” Really, it was addressed to Strafford: a dead letter to a dead man. An attempt to tell him his supposed failure had really been a glorious triumph if it could force me to make a stand alongside him. But he couldn’t hear.

A sleepless night in a police cell. I was still stunned by the calm that had followed the act, still bathed in an absurd fulfilment.

The mood lingered through the morning. June 22nd: the day after a killing. In Guildford, I knew, the inquest into Henry’s death was opening. In Chichester, I lay on my bunk and awaited whatever my action had made inevitable.

In the afternoon, the inspector called for me again. I was taken back to the interrogation room. On the table, there was a thick cellophane bag. It contained the gun.

“It’s what you said,” he began ruminatively. “An army revolver dating from the turn of the century. We’ve had it checked.

It’s in good nick. Lady Couchman confirms it belonged to her husband.”

“You’ve questioned her?”

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“Yes—and got more of the same: academic riddles. Only there’s nothing academic about murder.” He stared at me for a moment. “If that’s what it was.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re a weird one—that’s a fact. You’re no killer. Yet you’ve killed a man.”

“So what happens now?” We were still in the vacuum, the hollow, waiting time.

“You’ve been charged. Tomorrow, you’ll appear in court.

Meanwhile, you’ve got a visitor—your lawyer.”

“I don’t have a lawyer.”

“Sort that out with him. Walter Tremlett: he’s known to us. I gather he’s Lady Couchman’s solicitor.” There was a knowing look in his eye that was really just a policeman guessing. “Maybe she’s put you on the strength.”

“It’s not like that.” But what was it like? Who was this man, this emissary from Elizabeth? I had no need of a lawyer, no need of a defence—or so I thought.

“Do you want to see him?” He asked, but he knew I would.

What else could I do?

They took me back to my cell. A few minutes later, Tremlett was shown in. Rotund, red-faced, half-moon spectacles, receding salt and pepper hair, a country solicitor, in a heavy tweed suit, sweating in the afternoon. He shook my hand clammily.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Radford.”

I sat down on my bunk and he perched on the single chair, cradling a scuffed and bulging briefcase in his lap. “Who sent you, Mr. Tremlett?”

“Lady Couchman—as I expect you surmised.”

“But why?”

“Young man, somebody in your position needs help.”

“Do you really know what that position is?”

“You’ve been charged with murder, which carries a man-datory life sentence.” He smiled disarmingly. “But I imagine you mean rather more than that. Well, as a matter of fact, I do know what your position is, because Lady Couchman has fully 480

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briefed me. Have they told you what happened at the inquest this morning?”

“No.”

“The verdict was accidental death—as we’d hoped. Without Mr. Sellick on hand, what else could it be?”

“You tell me.” I resented this stranger’s assumption of so much knowledge and association.

Once again, the broad, genuine smile. “Mr. Radford, I’m here to help you. Do you want to be convicted of murder?”

Since killing Sellick, I’d not stopped to consider more than just the relief it had given me and others. Now I was being forced to confront the actuality of legal retribution. “I’ve already made a statement admitting that I killed him. It’s too late for anything else.”

“I’ve read your statement. It’s an admission of homicide, yes, but not murder. That’s more than just a fine legal point, as you must realize. Lady Couchman feels beholden to you. She’s instructed me to do my best for you. With a good barrister, I think there’s every chance of successfully pleading manslaughter and receiving a light sentence.”

I looked at him quizzically. “Mr. Tremlett, I shot a man in cold blood. How can you dress that up as anything other than murder?”

He pulled off his glasses and sucked one of the arms.

“Murder may be commuted to manslaughter on several grounds, one of them being provocation. I think we may be in a position to argue that the killing was provoked.”

It had been, but not in any of the ways I expected a court to entertain. “You’re not convincing me, let alone judge and jury.”

“Bear with me, young man. You’ve not heard me out. Such a plea would rely upon evidence of the late Mr. Sellick’s vendetta against the Couchman family and his recent threats towards Lady Couchman. I see his killing as the drastic act of a good friend. I think a jury might see it that way too. Lady Couchman will certainly testify in support of you. I hope your ex-wife may be persuaded to do so also.”

“You know a great deal.”

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“Lady Couchman has told me all that I need to know—which is only prudent.”

“I’m grateful to her for trying to help, but I still don’t think it’ll work. Personal testimony’s one thing, but proving Sellick was an unpleasant character isn’t enough. You’d have to prove he had a genuine grievance against the Couchmans and was trying to blackmail them. But there
is
no proof, and without proof I’m sunk. The only document confirming Sellick’s connexion with the Couchmans was destroyed straight after Henry’s funeral.

Didn’t Elizabeth tell you that?”

“Oh yes. But Lady Couchman visited me at my office here in Chichester the day before the funeral—and deposited with me a copy of that document. I have it with me in my case.” I didn’t know what to say. Strafford’s Postscript—plucked back from the flames. Was it possible? Tremlett pulled a file from his case and handed it to me.

It was—as he’d promised—a complete photocopy of the Postscript. So it was true. The agonized debate, the formal pyre, the dreadful act. And all the time, an anonymous clutch of papers had been waiting in Tremlett’s office to give us—whether we wanted it or not—a second chance. Even at desperate need, Elizabeth had remembered Strafford. “Why did she do it?” I said at last. “The whole point was to erase the evidence of Sir Gerald’s bigamy.”

“And so you did. The copy would have been quite safe with me, unread—until I was instructed to read it, unknown—until it was needed.”

“But what for? She couldn’t have . . .”

“No.” He shook his head. “But from what I know—and from what I imagine you know—is it hard to infer why she would have wanted to keep a secret copy, why she would have saved this last word from Strafford: for her eyes only?”

“No.” I’d misjudged her. Elizabeth had succeeded where failure had been inevitable, in standing by both of the men she’d loved. For Strafford’s sake, she’d saved the Postscript. For Couch’s sake, she’d tried to kill Sellick. And now, for my sake, she’d disinterred the family secret. “But it is only a copy.”

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“True, but comparison with the original Memoir should verify its authorship. If necessary, I shall go to Madeira to find that.”

I looked straight at him. “You’re going to great lengths.”

He nodded soberly. “Those are my instructions, Mr. Radford.”

I stood up. “Not if you’re to act for me. I appreciate what you’re saying, but there’s something you don’t quite understand.”

He blinked at me owlishly. “Which is?”

“Sellick was threatening Elizabeth with public ruin and humiliation. If we bring all this out in court, we’ll be doing the same thing. If I killed him for anything, it was to stop that happening.”

He smiled. “I know you think I’m just an ignorant con-veyancer, Mr. Radford, but, strangely, I had thought of that. It would all be bound to come out. Of course, it wouldn’t be slanted as Mr. Sellick intended, but it would become public knowledge, which might be just as bad. I think most judges would agree to leave the political connotations strictly alone, which would greatly diminish the story’s appeal to the press, but it would inevitably attract the sensation-seekers.”

“Exactly.”

“I made the point to Lady Couchman in precisely those terms. Like you, I have her interests at heart. I found her response persuasive, so much so that for you to resist would seem ungrateful as well as foolish.”

“So persuade me.”

“I’ll content myself by quoting Lady Couchman’s own words.

What she said was that Mr. Sellick—whatever his background—had no right to demand such a thing of her, but that you—in her judgement—had every right, not least because, of course, you’ve demanded nothing.” A silence fell, warmed by Elizabeth’s generosity of spirit. Then Tremlett returned the Postscript to his case and gathered himself together. “Think it over, Mr. Radford. I’ll attend the court tomorrow. You’ll need to have decided by then.”

I stood up. “I can’t afford to stand on my dignity, Mr. Tremlett.

I’d be grateful for whatever you can do.”

“Very well. We’ll give it a try then.”

“When you see Elizabeth, tell her . . . tell her I’m honoured to have her support. She’ll understand.”

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“I’m sure she will.” He shook my hand. “In fact, I rather think I do myself.”

Tremlett had offered me a way out when I’d least expected one.

In a way, that only made what followed worse, only made the fragile optimism harder to bear in the stretched, corrosive phase just about to begin.

For the courtroom was only the most formal and visible place of my trial in the months ahead. I knew, I suppose, when I killed Sellick that the penalty for that one act was bound to be long and lingering. And so it proved. A brief appearance in court on June 23rd was immaterial, a plea of manslaughter easy to forget, while I passed the summer in the brick vacuum of Lewes Prison’s re-mand wing, craving the trial to come with all the fervour of a deprived man.

Tremlett worked hard. He got the services of a fine barrister, Clifford Dane, Q.C., an old friend of Henry’s, and made that promised trip to Madeira on my behalf. To compound the ironies, Helen came once, to express her stilted version of gratitude. I refrained from telling her that she had nothing to thank me for.

There was no point in working off grudges anymore. I was more amazed than she was that it had turned out as it had. I insisted that Nick and Hester be informed and they were good enough to give me a chance to explain at last what I’d involved them in. It can’t have made much sense, but they insisted it did.

Aside from Tremlett’s progress reports, I saw most of Elizabeth. Our relationship had reverted to those distant, deceptive days when I’d first visited her at Quarterleigh, when we’d explored the past at leisure, ignorant of Ambrose’s discovery and what it portended. We talked less of my defence and her part in it than of Strafford and his part in our lives. We’d come to share his memory like a widow and her brother-in-law, we’d come to cherish every trace of him for all the reasons that had prevented her from letting the Postscript be wholly lost.

I asked her about the visitors I didn’t receive, but she could tell me nothing. Eve’s whereabouts were a mystery and Timothy had vanished to Spain, leaving Couchman Enterprises in the lurch.

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They’d apparently recovered well without him. Nothing at all was known of Alec, except that he hadn’t returned to Madeira.

At last, in early October, the case opened in Lewes Crown Court.

One week in a legal itinerary, Regina versus Martin Radford, a weight of jurisprudence to grind down the fact and fantasy. For me, it was the strangest of puppet shows, remote from the events it was supposed to consider, an alien realm of wigs and gowns where what really mattered—Strafford’s nobility and Couch’s fraud, Sellick’s vengeful will and Elizabeth’s abiding dignity—held less sway than the whims and strategies of legal technocrats.

“Martin Kenneth Radford, you are charged that, on the twenty-first day of June, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventy-seven, at Miston, in the county of West Sussex, you did murder Leo Sellick of Madeira, Portugal, a citizen of the Republic of South Africa. How do you plead?”

“Not guilty to murder, but guilty to manslaughter, on grounds of provocation.”

Provocation: the crafted key to Dane’s mortice-locked defence, or so he thought. To me, it seemed the prosecution’s deficiencies rather than Dane’s virtuosity that gave me my best chance. It seemed, by a macabre twist, Sellick’s self-imposed mystery that might save me in the jury’s eyes.

The case against me had been made by the second day, with plodding, constabulary competence. The facts were undisputed and swiftly told. They allowed Dane little chance to impress.

I’ve often wondered since whether Dane did some deal behind the scenes with Thorndyke, counsel for the prosecution.

There was something contrived about their disagreements, something prepared about their approaches, something suspicious about the failure to present Sellick as a tragic, innocent victim of mindless murder. The thought was to recur to me later.

The press and public galleries had filled when Dane opened for the defence. He’d already persuaded me—instructed would be more accurate—that to give evidence myself could prove disastrous. So I had to rely on his professional expertise and the witnesses he called. And they didn’t let me down.

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Elizabeth was the central figure. She was in the box for a whole day, charming the judge and winning the jury. When she revealed her late husband’s secret marriage in South Africa and Sellick’s connexion with it, the whole court felt for her. Her decency in seeking to effect a reconciliation was undeniable, her gallantry in resisting Sellick’s true intentions irresistible. Did the strain fatally affect her son’s driving? She allowed the possibility.