The Sleep of Reason (34 page)

The entrance hall was high, bright from the lofty windows, crowded, people hurrying past. There were spectators making their way into the courtroom, policemen in plain clothes, rooted on thick legs, policemen in uniform stationed by the doors. At the far end of the hall barristers, in gowns but not yet wearing their wigs, pushed to and from the robing-room. The hall fell into shade, as the spring wind outside drove clouds across the sun. Then bright again. On the wall panels stood out the arms of the county regiments. Across the far end, near where the barristers appeared and disappeared, a long trestle table carried a couple of tea urns and plates of sandwiches, cakes, and sausage rolls, as though at an old-fashioned church fête.

Margaret was seeing all that for the first time. She had never been inside this place before – in fact, she had never been inside a criminal court. The curious thing was, I seemed to be seeing it for the first time too. And yet, when I was studying law in the town, I had gone into this entrance hall a good many times. Later, when I was practising, I had appeared in several cases at these assizes, using that same robing-room at the far end, walking through to the courtroom in the way of business. Once, in the minor financial case which had involved George Passant: often we had forgotten that, or at least acted, despite the premonitions, as though it had signified nothing.

In all those visits, I seemed to have noticed very little. Was it that I had been blinkered by my own will? When I had been a “hungry boxer”, to use Charles’ phrase, there were scenes I had wanted to rush through, like one passing in a train.

That morning, just as Margaret was looking round, so was I. One or two acquaintances said good morning, knowing me by sight. I was more familiar to them than they to me. It reminded me that my presence wasn’t unobserved. So it did when a young man came up, telling me that he worked in the Deputy Sheriff’s office. The Deputy Sheriff would be pleased to find places for us, in his own box, near to the bench. I glanced at Margaret. We were waiting for George Passant: we should have to sit in the public court beside him. I thanked the young man and explained that we should have other people with us. Margaret said, surprising me, that if her husband was on his own later in the trial, he would certainly take advantage of the offer.

It was about twenty past ten. Through the door of the entrance hall George Passant trod slowly in. He was wearing an old bowler hat, as he used to do on formal occasions, though there had not been many in his life: underneath the bowler, his hair bushed wildly out. Before he saw us, his face looked seedy and drawn. But, at the sight of Margaret he took off his hat, and broke into a smile – almost of pleasure, of astonished pleasure. He gave a loud greeting, asked how we were, asked after Charles’ health. It might have been a meeting on one of his visits to London, running into us by a lucky chance, somewhere between our flat and the Marble Arch.

I went to one of the doors leading into the courtroom. A policeman told me it was quite full down below but that perhaps there was still room in the gallery. We climbed up the stairs, and there, at the extreme wing, found seats which looked down into the packed and susurrating court. Packed, that is, except for a gaping space in the dock and for the empty bench.

From the gallery, we looked down at the line, not far away, of the backs of barristers’ wigs. Behind them the solicitors, Sharples massive among them, were sitting, one of them leaning over to talk to his counsel. The courtroom was small and handsome, dome-roofed, the 1820s at their neatest. It struck lighter than in my time: that I did, all of a sudden, notice. Turning round, I saw that a vertical strip of window, floor to ceiling, had been unblocked. The whole court might have been a miniature Georgian theatre in a county town, except that light was streaming in from the back of the auditorium.

Without noise (only those used to the courts had heard the order,
put them up
) a policewoman had appeared in the dock, coming up from the underground passage. It happened so unobtrusively that Cora Ross’ head also came up before people were looking. A catch of breath. Then Kitty Pateman was sitting beside her, another policewoman following behind.

The courtroom was quiet. Heads were pushed forward, trying to get a glimpse of them. It wasn’t a natural silence. Something – not dread, more like hypnosis – was keeping us all still.

Cora Ross sat straight-backed in the dock. She was wearing a chocolate dress with white sleeves. That, together with her thick bobbed hair, made her look severe, like some pictures of Joan of Arc. Her face was turned towards Kitty, with a steady undeviating glance. Kitty’s glance, on the other hand, was all over the place. To say she didn’t look at Cora wasn’t true. She looked at everyone, her eyes darting round lizard-quick. She must have seen her parents, whom I had identified just below. She showed no recognition, but her expression was so mobile that it was impossible to read. She seemed prettier than I remembered, in her small-featured peaky fashion: the skin of her neck and forehead, though, appeared stretched, ready to show the etchings of strain. She was wearing a pale-blue blouse of some silky material. She rested her elbows on the front of the dock but shifted about as though she could not find a comfortable position; from above, I could see that one of her legs was entwined with the other.

The silence didn’t last long. From the side door, a couple of barristers hurried in, took their seats, muttered something matey, desultory, to their colleagues, one of them wearing an apologetic smile.

The courtroom clock, high up at the back of the gallery, had turned half past ten. Margaret touched my hand. She didn’t know how casual the timekeeping of a court could be: but she did know that I was irked by unpunctuality, more so when I was anxious, more so still that morning. We had to wait another five minutes before we heard the ritual cry. As we were all rustling to our feet, the assize procession entered, close by the box where Margaret and I had been invited to sit. The old judge limped to his place of state: he was old, but as he faced us, in his red robe and black waistband, he had the presence of a strong and active man. With an amiable, Punch-like smile he made a becking bow to the court in front, to the jury on his left.

He had been a high court judge for many years. The last of the gentlemen judges, so legal acquaintances of mine used to call him. He lived like a country squire, but he was still doing his duty on the assize round – a
red
judge, my mother would have said with awe – at the age of getting on for eighty. Just as through a chance resemblance I felt I knew Detective-Superintendent Maxwell better than I did, so I felt with this man, Mr Justice Fane, whom I had actually met only once, at an Inn guest night. For he reminded me of a man of letters who had done me a good turn: the nutcracker face with the survival of handsomeness, the vigorous flesh, the half-hooded eyes, tolerant, worldly, self-indulgent, a little sad. He didn’t pretend to be a great lawyer, so my informants said. But he had tried more criminal cases than anyone on the bench, and no one had been more compassionate.

In a full, effortless voice, the Clerk of Assize, just below the judge’s place, was speaking to the prisoners: “Are you Cora Helen Passant Ross?”

“Yes.”

“Are you Katharine Mavis Pateman?”

“Yes.”

“Both of you are charged together in an indictment for murder. It is alleged that you, Ross, and you, Pateman, on a day unknown between September 20, 1963, and October 9, 1963, murdered Eric Antony Mawby. Ross, are you guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty,” said Cora Ross in a hard, unmodulated tone.

I had heard that indictment a fair number of times (Kitty Pateman was pleading not guilty, her voice twittering and birdlike): when I was a pupil in chambers in London, with nothing to do, I had attended several murder cases. But there was a difference that morning. In the courtroom – although all of us knew the shadow of horror behind those charges – the air was less oppressive. There was none of the pall upon the nerves, at the same time shameful and thrilling, which in those earlier murder trials I had sensed all round me and not been able to deny within myself. For there was no chance of these two being sent to their own deaths. That was the chance which had, at least in part, in earlier days enticed us to the courts. Yes, young lawyers like myself had gone there to pick up something about the trade: yes, there was the drama: but we had also gone there as men might go, lurking, ashamed of themselves, into a pornographic bookshop. In the mephitic air, the sentence of death would be coming nearer.

That morning, the air was not so dense. There was one specific sensation less. In fact, as the jury were being sworn, I thought that there had been an attempt, despite the excitement in the press, to damp down other sensations. As I had learned some time before, the Attorney-General was not taking charge of the prosecution himself. It had fallen to the leader of the Midland Circuit, and when, just after eleven, he began his opening speech, he was as quiet and factual as if he were proposing an amendment to the Rent Act. The judge had spoken just as quietly a moment before, in telling the jury what the timetable would be: 10.30–1.0, then 2.30–4.30. “We shall not sit longer, because of medical advice in relation to Miss Pateman, you understand.”

We had heard no mention of that, and later discovered that she had nothing worse than an attack of rheumatism. The judge was being elaborately considerate: just as, when he called her Miss, he seemed to be rebuking the old custom of the courts, which the Clerk had had to follow, of charging prisoners by their bare surnames.

Bosanquet began: “My Lord and Members of the Jury, on September 20, last year, 1963, a child disappeared. His name was Eric Mawby. He was eight years of age. He was an only child, and he lived with his parents at 37 Willowbrook Road, which is part of the housing estate in — (he mentioned one of the outer suburbs). You will hear that he told his mother that he was going to play in the recreation ground about half-a-mile away from their house. You will also hear that, on most summer and autumn evenings, at about half past five o’clock, he went to the same recreation ground for an hour or so’s play. He was always expected back before seven o’clock, and had never failed to do so until the evening of September 20, which was a Friday.”

To a foreigner, this lead in could have sounded like English understatement. But a foreigner might not have known the transformation in English rhetoric, both in parliament and in the law courts, since about the middle of the thirties, when Bosanquet was starting to practise. He was using the tone of speech which was becoming common form. He had actually joined this circuit not long after I gave it up and went to an academic job. He had already been referred to in court as “Mr Recorder”, which had made Margaret give me a puzzled glance: he worked, besides having his solid practice, as Recorder, which meant in effect judge of a lower court, in a city close by. As he stood a couple of yards away from the dock on his right hand, he was looking at the jury with an expression unmoved and unassuming. Distorted by the wig, as some faces are, his appeared preternaturally foreshortened, round and Pickwickian.

The quiet unaccented voice went on: “He did not return by seven o’clock that evening. His parents became anxious, as any of us with children would be. They made inquiries of their neighbours and their neighbours’ children. At nine o’clock they got in touch with the police. At once there was set in motion the most thorough of searches, of which you will hear more. I think you will agree that the police forces at all levels deserve many congratulations for their devotion and efficiency in this case. There was no news of Eric for over a fortnight, although many thousands of reports had been investigated and already certain lines of investigation were in train. But Eric had not been found, and there was no direct news of him. When the news did come, it was the worst possible. His body had been discovered through a very remarkable piece of fortune, if I may use the word in happenings such as these. It was the only piece of fortune that the police had throughout their massive investigations. There is, I think, no reason to doubt that, without this accident, they would shortly have discovered the burying place. However, something else happened. Very early in the morning of October 9, a pack of hounds belonging to the—” – he gave the name of a local hunt – “were out cubbing in a wood or covert to which the nearest village is Snaseby, though that is some distance away. The wood is known locally as Markers Copse.”

Like most people, perhaps everyone, in the court, I had heard of the bizarre incident which he was – without a trace of acceleration – coming to. During the police court proceedings, it had been carried, more than any single feature of the case, all over the press. He was telling us nothing new. But up till now I hadn’t read or heard the name of the exact spot. Now I did hear it, and it meant something to me. The place was a few miles out of Market Harborough, where, as a boy, I used to stay with my Uncle Will. On these holiday visits I went walking over the countryside and sometimes followed the hunt on foot (which my uncle approved of, considering it in some obscure fashion good for his estate agency). I knew Markers Copse well enough. There had been, and presumably still was, an abandoned church down in the next fold of the gentle, rolling country: a church with an overgrown graveyard, relic of a village long deserted. Below the church ran a stream, in which a friend and I often went to fish. It had been pretty country, lonely, oddly rural: sometimes I, who was used to townscapes, had liked to imagine that I was back in the eighteenth century.

“In Markers Copse, then, in the very early morning of October 9, Mr Coe, the huntsman, took his hounds. In a short time he found that two of them had got loose from the pack. They were well-trained hounds and he was naturally irritated. He had to go some distance through the copse to find them. They were smelling, apparently without any reason, at a patch of earth between two of the trees. Mr Coe couldn’t understand their behaviour. It took him considerable effort, and a good deal of discipline, to draw them away. Later that same day, when his work was done, Mr Coe was still puzzled by their behaviour. He is an extremely experienced huntsman and knows his hounds. He will tell you that he felt silly, but he had to make sure whether there was any explanation or not. So he went back that evening to Markers Copse with a neighbour and a couple of spades. He could remember the precise location where the hounds had been smelling. He and his neighbour started to dig. It didn’t take them long to find the body of Eric Mawby – although the grave was fairly deep and had been carefully prepared.”