A Certain Justice (5 page)

They would be seated one each side of his small hissing gas fire with only one section burning because the Frog had to put coins into the meter and the Frog was poor. But there was a gas ring beside the fire, and he would make cocoa for them both, strong and not too sweet, just as she liked it. She must have been there with him in summer surely, in spring and in autumn, but in memory it was always winter, the unlined curtains drawn, the noise of the school muted now that the boys were in bed. Her parents, in their sitting-room in the main part of the house, were unworried about her, because she was supposed to be in her bedroom finishing her homework. At nine o’clock she would break off their talk and go downstairs to say good-night, to answer the predictable questions about how her work had gone, the timetable for the next day. But she would return always to the only room in the house in which she had ever been happy, to the hiss of the fire, the armchair with the broken springs which was made comfortable because the Frog would take a pillow from his bed and put it at her back, to the Frog sitting opposite her in the upright chair with his six volumes of
Notable British Trials
piled on the floor by his side.

He had been the least regarded, the most exploited of the teachers at her father’s suburban prep school, Danesford, where he had been employed to teach English and history throughout the school, but was required to undertake almost any job at the headmaster’s whim. He was a neat, delicately boned little man, snub-nosed, with small bright eyes behind the pebble glasses and a fringe of ginger hair. Inevitably he was nicknamed the Frog by the boys. He could have been a good teacher, given the chance, but the small barbarians could smell out a natural victim in their juvenile jungle, and the Frog’s life was a patiently borne hell of noisy insurrection and calculated cruelty.

If a friend or acquaintance asked Venetia about her childhood — and few did — she had an answer ready, always in the same words, always spoken with a tone of casual acceptance which somehow still managed to prohibit further curiosity.

“My father kept a boys’ prep school. Not exactly the Dragon or Summerfields. One of those cheaper places which parents send their children to when they want them out of the way. I don’t know who disliked it most, the pupils, the staff or I. But I suppose being brought up with a hundred small boys wasn’t a bad preparation for a criminal lawyer. Actually, my father taught rather well. The pupils could have done worse.”

She herself could hardly have done worse. The school, the pretentious red-brick residence of a nineteenth-century local worthy and former mayor, had originally been built some two miles outside the pleasant Berkshire town which had then been little more than a village. By the time Clarence Aldridge bought the school in 1963, using a legacy from his father, the village had grown into a small town, though still with an individual character and a sense of identity. Ten years later it had become a dormitory suburb, spreading over the green fields in a creeping cancer of red brick and concrete, executive estates, small shopping precincts, office buildings and blocks of flats. The fields between Danesford and the town had been bought by the local council for housing, but when the money ran out with only part of the estate developed, the ground remaining had been left vacant, a junk-strewn wilderness of scrub and broken trees, the playground and the rubbish tip of the surrounding estate. She would cycle through it on her way to the high school, a journey she came to dread but invariably took because the alternative route was twice as long and by way of the main road, and her father had forbidden her to use it. Once she had disobeyed him and had been seen by one of his friends as his car sped past. Her father’s anger had been dreadful, painful and long-lasting. The weekday journey across the scrubland, over the railway bridge which divided it from the town, and through the housing estate was an ordeal. Daily she ran the gauntlet of taunts and shouted obscenities, provoked by the sight of her school uniform. Daily she tried to judge the roads which were most clear, on the watch for the larger, more frightening boys, accelerating or slowing down to miss the waiting mob, despising herself and hating her tormentors.

The high school was a refuge from more than the estate. She was happy there, or as happy as she was capable of being. But her life was so separate from her life at Danesford as her parents’ only child that all her schooldays she had the sensation of living in two worlds. One she would prepare for when she put on the dark-green uniform and knotted her school tie, and would physically take possession of when she dismounted and wheeled her bicycle through the school gates. The other would receive her back each late afternoon, a world composed of boys’ voices, feet ringing on boards, the slamming of desktops, the smell of cooking, drying clothes and young inadequately washed bodies and, overlaying all, the scent of anxiety, incipient failure and fear. That, too, had its solace. She sought it out every evening in the Frog’s small, under-furnished bed-sitting-room.

He used his six volumes of the
Notable British Trials
series as textbooks and training exercises, he putting the case for the prosecution, she for the defence, and then changing roles. Every character in the trial became familiar to her, every murder projected an image as powerful as it was vivid, feeding an imagination which was fertile but circumscribed always by a sense of reality, the need to know that those desperate men and women, some buried in lime in the prison yard, weren’t the creatures of her imagination but had actually lived, breathed and died, that their tragedies could be analysed, discussed and made sense of. Alfred Arthur Rouse, with his blazing car flaming like a fatal beacon in a Northampton lane; Madeleine Smith proffering a cup of cocoa, and perhaps arsenic, through the bars of a Glasgow basement; George Joseph Smith playing the harmonium in a Highgate lodging house while the woman he had seduced and murdered lay dead in the bath upstairs; Herbert Rowse Armstrong holding out the scone dosed with arsenic to his rival with the words “Excuse fingers”; William Wallace making his conscientious way through the suburbs of Liverpool to find the non-existent Menlove Gardens East.

The Seddon case was one which they found particularly fascinating. The Frog would briefly recount the facts before they turned once again to the transcript of the trial.

“The year: 1910. The accused: Seddon, Frederick Henry. Rapacious, miserly, obsessed with money and profit. Lives with his wife, Margaret Anne, and their five children, his elderly father and a servant girl at Torrington Park in Islington. In a healthy way of business with the London and Manchester Industrial Insurance Company. Owns his house and has acquired a chain of small properties in different parts of London. And then, on 25th July 1910, he acquires a lodger. Eliza Mary Barrow is forty-nine, unattractive in character and personal habits, but she does have money. She also has an eight-year-old orphan, Ernie Grant, the child of a friend, who moves in with her and shares her bed. He probably loved her, no one else did. Ernie’s uncle, Mr. Hook, and his wife also moved into the Seddon house but didn’t stay long. They left after a quarrel with Miss Barrow and a scene with Seddon, whom they accused of trying to get hold of Miss Barrow’s money. And over a period of little more than a year he did just that. It was worth having. We are talking of 1910, remember. One thousand six hundred in three-and-a-half-per-cent India stock, the leasehold interest in a public house and a barber’s shop. Two hundred and twelve on deposit in a savings bank, and cash in gold and notes which she kept under the bed. All was transferred to Seddon in return for a promised annuity of just over a hundred and fifty pounds per year. An annuity means that Seddon took all the money and promised to pay her in return that amount each year for the rest of her life.”

Venetia said: “She was asking to be murdered, wasn’t she? Once he’d got his hands on all her cash she was just a liability.”

“Certainly no lawyer would have advised such a show of trust. But being cold-blooded and greedy for money doesn’t make a man a murderer. You must try to keep an open mind if you’re going to make a speech for the defence.”

“You mean I have to believe he didn’t do it?”

“No, what you believe isn’t at issue. Your job is to convince the jury that the Crown failed to make out its case against the prisoner beyond reasonable doubt. But you should never reach a decision about anything without first examining the facts.”

“How did he do it? All right, how did the prosecution allege that he did it?”

“With arsenic. On 1st September 1911 Miss Barrow complained of stomach pains, sickness and other unpleasant symptoms. A doctor was called and was in regular attendance for two weeks, but early in the morning of 14th September Seddon called at the doctor’s house to tell him that his patient was dead.”

“Didn’t the doctor order a post-mortem?”

“I suppose he saw no reason for one. He issued a death certificate showing that Miss Barrow had died from epidemic diarrhoea. That same morning Seddon arranged for her to be buried in a common grave for four pounds and demanded a commission from the undertaker for introducing the business.”

“The common grave was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

“So was the way he treated Miss Barrow’s relations when they began inquiries. He was arrogant, unfeeling and offensive. Not surprisingly, they became suspicious and decided to communicate with the Director of Public Prosecutions. Miss Barrow’s body was exhumed and arsenic was found. Seddon was arrested, and his wife six months later; they were jointly charged with murder.”

She had said: “But wasn’t he hanged because he was avaricious and greedy, not because the Crown really had a case? He was supposed to have sent his fifteen-year-old daughter, Maggie, to buy the arsenic for him, but she denied it. I don’t think that chemist’s evidence — Mr. Thorley, wasn’t it? — can be relied upon. Do you think you could have got him off?”

The Frog had given a little smile, but not without satisfaction. He had his small vanities and sometimes she amused herself by provoking them.

He had said: “You’re asking me if I could have done better than Edward Marshall Hall. Now, there was a marvellous advocate. I would like to have heard him, but of course he died in 1927. Not a great lawyer, he was said to dread the Court of Appeal. But one of the great advocates, wonderfully eloquent, an astonishing flow of language. Of course, it wouldn’t do today. That kind of histrionic, dramatic advocacy hasn’t a place in a modern court. But there was something he said I have never forgotten. I’ll write it down for you. ‘I have no scenery to help me and no words are written for me to speak. There is no curtain. But out of the vivid dream of somebody else’s life I have to create an atmosphere — for that is advocacy.” Out of the vivid dream of somebody else’s life. I like that.”

She had said: “I like that too.”

The Frog had said: “I think you’re going to have the right kind of voice. Of course, you’re young yet. It may not develop.”

“What kind of voice is that?”

“Attractive to listen to. Not strident. Versatile, warm, perfectly modulated and controlled. Persuasive — above all persuasive.”

“Is that so very important?”

“Its vital. Norman Birkett had a voice like that. I wish I’d had a chance to hear it. Voice is as important to an advocate as it is to an actor. I might have been a lawyer if I’d had a voice. I’m afraid mine lacks strength. It wouldn’t carry as far as the jury box.”

Venetia had bent her head over the
Notable Trials
volume so that he wouldn’t see her smile. It wasn’t only his voice — high, pedantic, with that occasional disconcerting rodent squeak; even to picture a wig atop that dry thatch of ginger hair or a gown on that diminutive, graceless body was risible. And she had overheard her father’s dismissive comments on the Frog’s lack of qualifications too often to have any doubt that he had had few chances in life. But she enjoyed his praise, and the game they played together had become an addiction. It satisfied her need for order and certainty. The Frog’s bed-sitting-room with its faint smell of the gas fire and the two ragged chairs, provided a refuge more reassuring even than her desk at the high school. Each gave what the other needed; he was a wonderful teacher and she was an intelligent, enthusiastic pupil. Night after night she would hurry through her homework and choose her moment to slip unobserved from the main schoolhouse, across to the annexe and up the lino-covered stairs to his room, to listen to his stories, to indulge in their common obsession.

The game ended three days after her fifteenth birthday. The Frog had borrowed from the local library an account of the trial of Florence May-brick, which they were to discuss that evening. He had left the book with her overnight, but she was anxious not to carry it to school or to leave it in her room, where it could invite the curiosity of one of the school’s two maids, or be discovered by her parents. She had very little faith that her privacy was ever respected. She decided to leave the volume in the Frog’s room. Her knock was perfunctory; she hardly expected to find him in. It was seven-thirty and he would be supervising the boys’ breakfast. The door, as she expected, was unlocked.

To her astonishment the Frog was there. There was a large canvas suitcase on the bed, its battered lid open. The counterpane was covered with a tumble of shirts, pyjamas and underclothes, only his socks were neatly twisted into balls. It seemed to her that she was simultaneously aware of his look of horror at her eruption into the room and of the pair of pants, soiled at the crotch, which, following her gaze, he shoved with trembling hands under the lid of the suitcase.

She said: “Where are you going? Why are you packing? Are you leaving?”

He turned away from her. She could only just hear his words. “I’m sorry if I distressed you. I didn’t mean…I didn’t realize…I can see now that it was unwise, selfish of me.”

“What do you mean, distress me? What was unwise?”

She came into the room and, shutting the door, leaned against it, forcing him by an act of will to turn and look at her. But when he did, she saw on his face ashamed embarrassment and a desperate appeal for pity, which she knew was as much beyond her understanding as it was beyond her power to help. She was filled with a terrible apprehension, a fear for herself, which made her voice sharper than she realized.