The Hamilton Case (14 page)

Fellows he had never set eyes on before—Tamils, by the look of them—accosted him in the Hulftsdorf corridors or in the street, and seized his hand. Baskets of Jaffna mangoes arrived daily at his chambers. But on the third morning of the trial there was a polecat, its throat cut, left at his door.

Nagel gave his evidence with commendable calm. A week before the trial opened he had been returned to the rank of chief inspector. The trick to carrying off any egregious move is to treat it as preordained, a matter of destiny not policy. The officer who replaced Nagel had twelve years’ seniority over him; ergo, he was better fitted for the post. It was obvious to everyone who met him that the new superintendent, plucked from the malarial lethargy of the east coast where he had spent his days lying in a hammock strung between two jamfruit trees, was a lumbering blockhead. But he was the senior man. That he happened to be English was irrelevant.

Once, in the previous century, a private from Bradford had faced a court-martial over the knifing of his quartermaster in a Pettah brawl. But Taylor was the first Englishman in the colony to be tried for murder. Like all novel situations it elicited predictable sentiments. A famous London silk, William Earnshaw, was retained for the defense. His fee, reputed to be outrageous, was to be met out of a fighting fund set up by Taylor’s countrymen.

An anonymous pamphlet appeared, hinting in three languages at a British conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Sam, pressed for his opinion, would say only that he had every confidence in trial by jury.

All this time, he was conscious that he had received no reply to the letter he had sent Sir George indicating his willingness to enter the judiciary. An Additional District Judgeship had recently fallen vacant. Soft prickles of expectation ran over Sam’s scalp at the news. Now that the acuteness of his mind had been so dazzlingly demonstrated, a judge-ship was no more than he might look forward to. He allowed himself to hint as much to Billy Mohideen, his rather pushy junior, over a drink in chambers.

Mohideen eyed him oddly. “Well, but . . .” He broke off.

“Go on.”

“No, nothing.” But then Mohideen could not help himself; he resembled one of those lead-weighted toys that cannot lie down. “You see, you are putting a noose around an English neck, isn’t it.”

“I brought a murderer to justice.” He remembered that he had never really liked Mohideen. It was the double whiskey, downed too fast, that had led him to confide in the oily little squirt. “I think you’ll find that’s the crux of it.”

“Oh, but can you be sure, Obey?”

“I flatter myself that I know what counts with Sir George rather better than you do, old chap.”

“No, no—I am referring to what you said two ticks ago about Taylor being a murderer.” Mohideen bounced on his chair and beamed. “You are forgetting the presumption of innocence, isn’t it. What is your situation if they find him Not Guilty?”

Sam was at his usual post at the back of the room when the court was shown an enlargement of the photograph that had provided his vital clue. James — “Jumbo” — Minton, who was leading the case for the Crown, drew the jury’s attention to the single footprint clearly visible in a patch of mud to one side of the jungle path. Experts had established beyond doubt that the footprint was Hamilton’s, said Minton. Would the murdered man have dismounted if accosted by strangers in the jungle? No. It was obvious — obvious, repeated Minton, fixing the jury with his famous fish-eyed stare — that Hamilton was on friendly terms with his assailant. The planter had so little reason to be suspicious of the man who came around the corner of that deserted track carrying a shotgun that he got off his horse and walked a few steps with him.

“Perhaps the murderer persuaded him to dismount by pretending to have seen something of interest in the jungle. That we shall never know. But what we do know,” thundered Minton, aiming both his chins at the dock, “what we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, by his own admission, is that the accused was out with a gun that afternoon. For the purpose of shooting pigeon, according to his statement. And yet, gentlemen of the jury, he returned home empty-handed that evening.”

Minton’s oratory was bruising. It left Sam untouched. His brain toiled on the mill where Billy Mohideen’s insinuations had set it. Now the silence from the KA’s office appeared wholly sinister. Yet he refused to believe that the color of Taylor’s skin could outweigh his guilt; and he was certain that the man slumped like a sack in the dock was guilty.

The next day he called on Sir George. The KA was affable and vague. He spoke in labyrinthine periphrases of shifting circumstances and offered his visitor a bull’s-eye from a brown paper bag.

Finally, there was only the sound of sucking.

A trapdoor swung open inside him.

Sir George skipped ahead on his tiny feet to open the door. With his shapely red fingers on the handle, he said, “Word to the wise. The judiciary . . . Personal discretion, don’t you know. Limelight not entirely . . .” He shifted the sweet across to his other cheek and turned the brass doorknob.

Twenty-four hours later, it was official: Shivanathan had an Additional District Judgeship. The appointment was not without genius. Putting a Ceylonese on the Bench quelled the hullabaloo over the Hamilton case, while the choice of a Tamil engendered rancor and division in nationalist quarters.

For the rest of Sam’s life he would associate the scent of peppermint with betrayal.

E
arnshaw set about unraveling the prosecution’s case with the apologetic air of a maiden aunt called on to point out the dropped stitches in someone else’s knitting. He was a trim little man with a large head that photographed handsomely. Where Minton bullied, Earnshaw flattered. Juries loved him for it. In cross-examination he took witnesses by the hand, walked them with infinite sympathy into quagmires.

Nagel found himself admitting that Taylor’s failure to bag any game was proof of nothing more than a bad afternoon’s shooting. As for the canvas holdall with Taylor’s fingerprints on it that had been found, half charred, on the rubbish heap behind the bungalow, anyone could have placed it there. Were there not several other people, asked Earnshaw kindly, the White Falls coolies, for instance, and Hamilton’s servants, who knew about and had access to the rubbish heap on the side of the hill? Nagel had to concede that there were. His client’s fingerprints proved only that he had handled the bag, went on Earnshaw—as, indeed, Taylor had readily admitted. Since he had often helped Hamilton divide up the estate’s wages, there was nothing surprising or sinister in that.

When Sam took off his jacket at night he would find that the courtroom wall had left a streak of powdery white distemper across the shoulders. But he was leaning there as usual, wedged in beside a potted palm, when Earnshaw made his only mistake.

The defense called Yvette Taylor.

She was wearing a lavender maternity dress, with a matching coatee. Her voice, with its distinctive vowels, trembled a little on the oath. The judge, old Matthew Coote, peering at her with his head tilted, called for a chair. A carafe of water and a tumbler were placed within her reach.

The sight of her affected Sam as directly as a blow. Her smallness. The straight fair hair held off her face with a flowered clip. Yet he could see very well that by any conventional measure she was not pretty. This hurt him. One of the instincts she aroused was protective.

Earnshaw, solicitous as a father, was leading her through her questions. These were innocuous at first: how long had she been married, where had she met Taylor, and so on. She answered softly but with precision. Having set his witness at ease, Counsel moved on to the events of the day on which Hamilton had died. Mrs. Taylor corroborated the evidence already given by the apu, gazing at Earnshaw with her small colorless eyes.

The jury—British to a man, shop keepers, shipping agents, an engineer, the manager of a plumbago mine—watched Mrs. Taylor, shifting their thighs. Her clothes, the pale pink color she had applied to her mouth, even the high mound of her stomach, each element of her appearance colluded in the impression of a child impersonating an adult. Sam found himself wondering if her condition was genuine, or a ploy suggested by Earnshaw to win sympathy. He allowed himself the brief fantasy of ripping her dress open, disclosing the cushion strapped to her taut white flesh.

And then Yvette Taylor faltered. She drank some water, grasping the tumbler with both hands. Justice Coote, leaning forward and adjusting his gold-rimmed spectacles, enquired if she was quite well. Tears pooled in her eyes but she nodded her head.

Earnshaw had been asking Mrs. Taylor about life at White Falls, a line of questioning designed to establish Hamilton’s generosity toward the couple and the longstanding friendship between the two men. Justice Coote now directed him to repeat the question he had just put to the witness.

It was possible, as Sam later swore, that a trace of unease stiffened the loose line of Counsel’s bearing at that moment. Earnshaw’s voice kept its habitual mildness, but he looked very intently at his witness, as if to remind her that the question served a purely rhetorical purpose: “Mrs. Taylor, can you conceive of any reason why your husband might have wished to harm Angus Hamilton, his oldest friend and a generous benefactor to you both?”

“Yes,” whispered Yvette Taylor.

The monosyllable brought Sam upright at his post. Taylor, with a strangled noise, half rose in the dock. His wife turned her soft white face to him. “I’m so sorry. But I’ve promised before God . . .”

Earnshaw said hastily, “My Lord, the witness is clearly not fit to continue. I request . . .”

But Mrs. Taylor had risen to her feet. With her hands clasped in front of her, like a dutiful performer, she gazed up at Justice Coote and embarked on her story.

She spoke in jerky rushes but there was no mistaking the significance of what she said. For some time before his death, she had felt uncomfortable in Hamilton’s company. He had a way, she whispered, of looking at her. Once, he had walked into her bathroom as she was preparing for her bath. He mumbled some excuse about looking for Taylor, flagrantly trumped up, since they both knew her husband was playing billiards at the club.

On the day before Hamilton died, he had returned to the bungalow halfway through the morning. This was unexpected. After breakfast, both men were usually away until lunch. Her husband was in the factory that day, where the sifter that separated the coarser tea leaves from the finer had broken down. She was in their bedroom, sorting linen for the dhobi, when Hamilton came in and shut the door behind him. He said that he was mad for her. He said . . . “All kinds of things,” confided the faint voice, audible everywhere in the coffinlike hush of the court.

In her distress, Yvette Taylor had blurted that she was going to have a child, hoping that the news would bring the planter to his senses. Instead, “It seemed to excite him,” said that terrible whisper. Hamilton took hold of her roughly, clamped his hand over her mouth.

At that moment, with the planter’s weight forcing her backwards onto the bed, a horn sounded at the bottom of the hill. It was the usual signal that a car was on its way to the bungalow. Hamilton let her go, and she fell back onto the coverlet. She heard him leave by the side door. Minutes later, a cheerful voice was calling out at the front of the house. Yvette Taylor smoothed her hair, arranged her clothes and went out to greet a planter’s wife who was dropping off jumble for a sale in aid of the mission school.

She kept to her room for the rest of the day, telling the apu, and her husband when he returned, that she had a headache. But as darkness fell and she heard Hamilton’s heavy tread coming and going about the bungalow, she was seized by terror. She begged Taylor to take her away at once. He was baffled, of course, and dismissed her tears as the “nerves” that habitually overcome a woman in her condition. Finally, she told him what had happened that morning. And ever since, she whispered to Justice Coote, she had been afraid.

With every eye directed at it, the lavender dress swayed. Glass and carafe crashed to the floor.

In the second before the tumult, Sam saw Jumbo Minton’s gaptoothed grin. In barely eleven minutes, Taylor had been delivered to the hangman.

At the cocktail party Sam attended that evening no one talked of anything but the sensational turn taken by the Hamilton case. He was the center of a knot of women with smooth, bare arms. Aloysius Drieberg, his head of chambers, took him aside and confided that his doctor had advised him to ease out of the harness while there was still time. He pressed Sam’s hand to confirm what he was offering; they would talk on Monday, they agreed.

Later, with sheeted rain and drivers lining up to bring cars in under the porch, his hostess took advantage of thunder and umbrellas to murmur that she was always alone between two and three in the afternoon. She had a mole at the corner of her thin magenta mouth and pearls as plump as eyeballs in the folds of her neck. Everyone knew that her husband kept two mistresses and forty-three cats in a house by the Wellawatte Canal.

Insomnia, which would eventually transform his nights into ragged holes held together with threads of sleep, was already a moth blundering softly into Sam’s dreams. At four he came awake to clammy darkness and the certainty that Yvette Taylor was lying. Yet everything she had said proved him right about Taylor.

Somewhere near at hand a leaky gutter or garden tap dripped onto stone at unpredictable intervals. Its maddening irregularity syncopated the conundrum that was still occupying him when the servant-boy came in with bed tea. What monstrous calculation lay behind the woman’s decision to condemn her husband when Earnshaw had demolished the case against him?

S
am was the only churchgoer in the house. Iris no longer left her room, and Kumar used her illness as an excuse to spend Sunday mornings pottering around the back garden in his pajama bottoms. He had taken to keeping chickens in a wired enclosure just off the kitchen verandah, where he liked to supervise the mixing of their feed. The diets he devised were elaborate and erratic, fluctuating with whichever manual or expert he was swearing by at the time. Two servants had already given notice.