The Husband's Story (45 page)

Mr Stranger-Milne, QC for the Crown, was a lifelong acquaintance of Mr Justice Streetley's; same prep school, same public school, both at Trinity, and finally, a shared staircase in the Temple. Mutual dislike at first sight had, over the years, ripened and become something deeper. In consequence, they were always excessively polite to each other both in their Club and in open court. There were always compliments and politeness on both sides; and, behind it all, a keen personal resentment of each other. And envy: Mr Stranger-Milne for Mr Justice Streetley's elevation to the Bench, and Mr Justice Streetley for the reported size of Mr Stranger-Milne's income.

It was the ‘how-do-you-plead?' part that presented the first problem, and Stan made a complete mess of it. He was so self-conscious that he could not even raise his head. Fortunately his voice, in consequence, was curiously muffled and indistinct.

‘G… uilty,' was the best that he could manage.

Immediately, he was aware of a sudden disturbance down below in the body of the Court where Mr Marbuck and Mr Jeremy Hayhoe were sitting, and he remembered what he had promised them. He hurriedly corrected himself.

‘Not guilty, I mean. That's it, not guilty.'

He still had his chin down on his chest and was not looking up at anybody. Mr Justice Streetley meanwhile had removed his spectacles. Others of the press who, like Mr Cheevers, were familiar with the performance held their pencils at the ready.

‘The plea,' he observed, ‘must be either “Guilty” or “Not Guilty”, and it is plainly necessary that I should know which. As things are at the moment, first I seem to hear one thing and then I seem to hear the other. Would you kindly assist the Court, Mr Hayhoe.'

Mr Hayhoe rose and bowed respectfully.

‘As your Lordship has so acutely observed,' he replied, ‘the acoustics
of this Court are notoriously difficult. I will endeavour to make amends.'

But it was not easy. Stan did not want to raise his head: what had upset him was the sight of Beryl sitting there. She looked somehow so out of place, too. The navy blue two-piece with the contrasting collar and cuffs was conspicuously smarter than anything that anyone else in Court was wearing, and the headscarf had an almost holiday-ish air about it. But that wasn't what Stan objected to. He didn't like the idea of Beryl being there at all.

For her part, Beryl would have been quite ready to give Stan a wave if he had looked in her direction. Her last two visits to the prison had not been very consoling to either of them; and, on reflection, she felt inclined to blame herself. Even now, a wave and a smile just to show that she was ready to forgive him for all the trouble he had caused might, she felt, help him to put up a more convincing performance.

Mr Stranger-Milne for the prosecution was certainly nothing if not thorough, like starting off by asking who Stan really was, for instance; and where he lived; and what his job was and how long he had been employed there. Stan was amazed: if they didn't know even that much about him he reckoned that something must have gone wrong somewhere. Then it dawned on him. Something
had
gone wrong. But not this time. It must have been in some earlier case that there had been carelessness, and they were taking every precaution to avoid a similar mix-up this time.

And it was the same with Stan's confession. Sentence by sentence, he took him through it again, and it all came out – about Mr Karlin and his picture agency, and the kind of hotels he stayed in, and the payments in notes at a hundred pounds a time, and the camera that looked like a wrist-watch.

Beryl listened with amazement, tapping with the heel of her navy blue calf shoe until she found that she was jogging the person seated next to her; and she was glad now that she hadn't been able to wave to him. Mr Karlin and the cheap hotels and the fake wrist-watch did not interest her so much; what she wanted to know was what had happened to all those pound notes. Gazing up at the ceiling she tried hard to remember the rate for fourteen days at Pineland Colony and what she had paid for the matching travel cases and how much a Morris II00 car cost to hire. Try as she could to fill it in, there still seemed to be a pretty sizeable gap somewhere.

As it happened Stan was gazing up at the ceiling, too, and he was
wondering how Beryl was taking it all. It must, he realized, come as something of a shock to any woman to think that she was married to just an ordinary kind of chap and then suddenly find out that he was top criminal class really. The odd thought occurred to him that it might even make her admire him just a little bit.

But already Mr Stranger-Milne was back to his examination. It was hardly the lethal, ding-dong stuff that Beryl had been led to believe went on all the time at the Old Bailey, and she began to wonder what Mr Cheevers could see in it.

Q. You say that this Mr Karlin made you a number of payments?

A. That's it, sir.

Q. And how many would that be?

A. Four or five, sir.

Mr Stranger-Milne put the fingers of his two hands briefly together, and then separated them again as though momentarily breaking off from prayer.

‘I must ask you to recall,' he said, ‘that you are under oath. It is the truth, the whole truth, that I require. And “Four or five” is not an answer.'

Mr Justice Streetley leant forward, thrusting his arms out of his long scarlet sleeves as he did so. Then he put his hands together precisely as Mr Stranger-Milne had done. Mr Justice Streetley's hands, however, were paler than Mr Stranger-Milne's, and his fingers conspicuously more tapering.

‘Mr Stranger-Milne,' he said. ‘I do not have to remind counsel of your standing that consideration of the mentality of the prisoner is of the utmost importance in these matters. Indeed, I have heard you rightly so argue in this Court. The prisoner whom I now see before me is a clerk, but not a legal clerk. It is unreasonable to assume that he has any knowledge or understanding of the law. He must therefore be protected against his own confusion. Accordingly, I must advise you that the reply, “Four or five”
is
quite definitely an answer. It might not be a satisfactory answer, but it is an answer nevertheless.'

And, having intervened, Mr Justice Streetley then withdrew. There was something of the air of an elderly tortoise retreating into the shelter of its own gorgeous coloured shell.

‘As your Lordship pleases,' Mr Stranger-Milne replied in his most courteous tone. He had learnt from long experience that nothing annoyed Mr Justice Streetley more than to have his rebukes bowed-to
and acknowledged almost before he had finished speaking.

Without a pause, he resumed his questioning.

‘Do you mean four or do you mean five?' he asked.

‘One or the other. I don't remember.'

‘Why don't you remember?'

‘Because I've forgotten.'

Mr Stranger-Milne grasped the lapels of his gown.

‘I put it to you that you remember perfectly well. I further put it to you that you are refusing to answer me.'

There was no response. It was as though Stan had not even heard Mr Stranger-Milne's question. The silence was so long, indeed, that Beryl bent forward to see what was happening. And it was impossible to tell. Stan looked all right. Looked better than she had expected, in fact; but that may have been simply because he wasn't wearing that dreadful Isle of Wight sports jacket of his.

Mr Justice Streetley leant forward, too, this time without the rather self-conscious shuffling with his sleeves.

‘You have to answer Counsel's question, you know,' he told Stan. ‘That is what you are here for.'

His voice was noticeably warmer, more human, when talking to Stan than when addressing Mr Stranger-Milne.

‘But I haven't been asked a question,' Stan explained. ‘All the other gentleman said was…'

Mr Justice Streetley raised his hand to stop him. Then, with a little bow, he turned towards Mr Stranger-Milne.

‘Perhaps you could find some other way of putting it,' he said. ‘Clearly the prisoner does not comprehend.'

Mr Stranger-Milne was equally polite.

‘I am most grateful for your Lordship's intervention.'

He twisted round to face Stan again.

‘Could it have been only on three occasions that he gave you money?' he asked.

Stan shook his head.

‘More like four or five,' he told him.

‘Or six, possibly. Tell me, was it six?'

‘Not so many,' Stan told him. ‘More like…'

This time it was Mr Stranger-Milne who raised a hand to stop him. Beryl felt rather sorry for Mr Stranger-Milne. She knew what Stan could be like when he was in one of his obstinate moods. At this rate
the trial could go on forever, with Stan not budging and Mr Stranger-Milne not getting anywhere, either.

But Mr Stranger-Milne was already trying a fresh approach.

‘And what did you do with all this money? You didn't pay it into your own bank account, did you?'

‘No, sir.'

‘And why not, may I ask?'

Mr Stranger-Milne was still on about Stan's Number Two account, the one that he had opened under an assumed name, when the Judge decided that he, for one, had already had enough and would adjourn things until after lunch.

There was no difficulty about lunchtime for Stan; for the prisoners, the Old Bailey has a perfectly good meals-on-wheels kind of service with your luncheon tray carried right into your own cell for you. The Judges and Counsel – and the jury, too, for that matter – are all quite nicely looked after. It is the interested parties, the hangers-on, who are least catered for. And, even at the best of times, the City doesn't have very much to offer to the single woman in search of something light. Beryl might have done better if she had turned up Holborn Viaduct: there are one or two little places there, hidden away between Hatton Garden and the Gray's Inn Road. But she chose Newgate Street instead. And that was fatal. In the result, she finished up in Cheapside, practically by the Bank of England, still without having found what she wanted. And this surprised her because she remembered that, when she had been a girl, every street you went down was fairly bristling with a Lyons' and an ABC and an Express Dairy; and a Fuller's, and Slater's, too, if you wanted something a bit more substantial.

In the end, she sat herself on a high stool up against the counter of an establishment that specialized in selling sandwiches. She was lucky. The seat had only been vacant for a second before she pounced on it. But that was evidently the spirit of the place; pop in, bolt something down and dash out again.

Anyhow, she was past caring. She had, at last, realized how old she was; how old and how disastrously out-of-date. All round her were eighteen-year-olds, fresh and pretty and bouncy, happily carrying off paper-bags containing cheese-and-tomato or sausage-and-chutney that they were going to eat among themselves, with the bag balanced on top of a typewriter somewhere. And there she was, thirty-fourish
and nine stone five in weight, dressed all wrong for the City and with only the Old Bailey to go back to.

Nor had Stan read her mind aright when he thought that those revelations in Court about his ingenuity might have made her admire him just a little. On the contrary, the disclosure of the second banking account had really upset her. It meant that, all the time she had been trusting him, he had simply been holding out on her.

By now, she had finished all that she wanted of her egg-and-cress on rye; the other half lay uneaten in its Cellophane envelope. And she was saying something to herself. If there had not been so much noise and bustle in the place, the customers perched up on either side of her would have heard the actual words.

‘Sneaky little creep,' she repeated quite audibly. ‘Sneaky little creep to have me on like that.'

There is always a pervading air of somnolence about any Court after the lunchtime adjournment; even, on occasion, a marked reluctance to resume.

As with Mr Stranger-Milne, for example. For years he had made it a matter of principle never to examine either a prisoner or a witness at a time of day when, in the ordinary way, he would have been taking a short nap. In consequence, so far as he was concerned, two o'clock to three o'clock every day was junior counsel's hour; their playtime, as he teasingly used to refer to it. Once the young man, whoever he was, had got up onto his feet, Mr Stranger-Milne would perceptibly sink back in his seat, eyes half-closed, neither sleeping nor awake.

Not so Mr Justice Streetley. Severe with himself as with others, he made a point of always lunching lightly when he was on the Bench. One glass of sherry beforehand, ordinary tap-water at table, and meat, but no bread and no potatoes, was by now his regular diet. In the result, he was as wide-awake after lunch as he had been at breakfast time.

There was evidence of it almost immediately. Junior counsel was a Mr Crowhurst. He was short-sighted, studious and inclined to nervousness. Carefully following the notes in his hand, he put his questions pointedly and with precision. Mr Justice Streetley was watching him closely. Then he pounced. He shook back the cuffs of his gown and brought his two hands together; only the tips of his fingers were actually touching.

Mr Crowhurst heard the rustle and glanced apprehensively in his direction. Mr Justice Streetley had expected him to do so and was ready for him.

‘I have been observing you,' he said. ‘Are you addressing the prisoner or are you addressing those notes which you are holding? Because the notes cannot answer, can they? Only the prisoner can answer and, even then, only if he is quite sure that he is the sole object of your attention.'

‘I… I stand corrected, m'Lud,' Mr Crowhurst began. ‘I was intending to…'

It would, however, have made no difference to Mr Justice Streetley whatever Mr Crowhurst had been intending. Mr Justice Streetley had reasserted his authority and, for the time being, he was content. Motionless he now sat there, his long grey face staring out impassively over the silence of the open Court.