Trial and Error Read online

  Mr Chitterwick nodded. “There was a wireless broadcast for the person or persons to come forward.”

  “Was there? Oh yes, I believe there was. Well, anyhow, they haven’t come forward. That seems a little odd to me.”

  “There might be reasons,” ventured Mr Chitterwick.

  Sir Ernest winked. “Oh yes. And I suppose there were. But the really interesting thing is that one witness swears that the punt, when he passed it in a skiff, was empty.”

  “Oh!” Mr Chitterwick looked puzzled. “But does this have any bearing on the case?”

  “Possibly not. Only . . . supposing there was somebody else in the garden that night. There would be an exceedingly valuable witness, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, I see. Yes indeed. You think the person—or persons—might have landed?”

  “How else could the punt be empty?”

  “Yes, of course,” agreed Mr Chitterwick, as if annoyed with his own stupidity. “But how could we trace them if the police have failed?”

  “There,” confessed Sir Ernest, “you’ve got me beat. There was nothing,” he added to Mr Todhunter, “that led you to suspect that anyone else might have been in the garden while you were there?”

  “Nothing,” said Mr Todhunter firmly. “It was nearly dark. Besides, I was in a state of considerable agitation.”

  “Yes, of course. Well, we must put that point aside for the time being. Now you tell me that you’ve found some evidence, even after all this time, that somebody did make his way from the lane through these gardens. I think we’d better go out and verify that.”

  Not without pride Mr Todhunter and Mr Chitterwick led their new ally down the lane and showed him the mark on the fence where Mr Todhunter had climbed over; and thence, making their way through the other gardens without any more ado than before, the footprint, broken twigs and all the rest of it in the various hedges. This time, however, they did not remain in Sir Ernest’s enclosure but pushed through into Miss Norwood’s own garden. The house, Sir Ernest was able to tell them, had not yet been let; the police had finished with it, and they had the place to themselves.

  “We’d better look at the scene of the crime, I suppose,” Sir Ernest said, “though goodness knows what we can expect to learn from it.”

  Mr Todhunter looked about him curiously. It was the first time he had seen the ground in full daylight, and he was surprised to find how short was the distance from the hedge to the converted barn which had seemed so interminable and tortuous that night.

  They stood on the banked lawn outside and surveyed the structure, with its grey, weather-beaten uprights and its hint, genuine as it was, of something of “ye olde” type of spuriousness about it.

  “It’s not so big as I thought,” muttered Mr Todhunter. “It looked enormous that night.”

  “Things always look bigger at night,” suggested Mr Chitterwick.

  They went on looking at it.

  “Well,” said Sir Ernest, “we don’t seem to be getting much forrader. Anyone got any suggestions? All right. Let’s reconstruct the crime. I see there’s a deck chair or two still here. Where exactly was she sitting, Todhunter?”

  On Mr Todhunter’s directions, so far as he could remember, the scene was set. Sir Ernest Prettiboy, who seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself, then made Mr Todhunter go through the motions of his murder.

  “I approached, I think, from this direction,” said Mr Todhunter, not without reluctance, for he found this play-acting rather horrible. “I came within quite a short distance, and—”

  “Without her seeing you?” put in Sir Ernest.

  “She gave no sign of having seen me,” replied Mr Todhunter drily.

  “Yes? And then?”

  “And then I fired.”

  “And she. . . ?”

  “She seemed to—to—no, that wasn’t the first shot. It was . . . great heavens!” Mr Todhunter clapped his hand to his forehead. “I think I’m going mad.”

  “Tck! Tck!” clucked Mr Chitterwick in distress. But Sir Ernest had been quicker on the point. “What happened?” he shouted, almost dancing with excitement. “Think, man! The first shot? Then you fired. . . ?”

  “Yes,” said Mr Todhunter in a dazed way. “I fired twice—and I’ve never remembered it till this minute.”

  4

  “But you must remember in which direction you fired,” said Sir Ernest Prettiboy despairingly.

  “It was in that direction,” Mr Todhunter repeated for the tenth time. “But I’m probably not a very good shot,” he added.

  Sir Ernest groaned.

  It was in the middle of the afternoon. Half an hour had been taken up in the morning, following Mr Todhunter’s revelation, in an intensive search for the first bullet, without success. Sir Ernest had then carried them back to his house for lunch, despite their polite protests, and had introduced them to his wife, who appeared to accept their presence with equanimity, and to two small Prettiboys of assorted sexes, who showed themselves quite indifferent to it. Now, replete with roast beef and horse-radish sauce, apple pie and, in Mr Chitterwick’s case, a more than passable claret (for those who like details it was a Pontet-Canet, 1925, a light vintage, still quite drinkable but just passing its best), they had applied themselves to the task once more. Bidden to take up the exact position (so far as he could gauge it) in which he had been standing when he fired and point in the direction in which he had aimed, Mr Todhunter had already occupied half a dozen different spots and pointed his finger in a dozen different lines.

  “I can’t help feeling,” ventured Mr Chitterwick, still a little timid in the presence of this great and self-confident man, “that this score on the brick floor may be significant. If that is where the bullet struck, and it rebounded—”

  “Ricocheted,” corrected Sir Ernest.

  “Ricocheted,” accepted Mr Chitterwick gratefully, “why it might be almost anywhere.”

  “But, damn it all, he wouldn’t have hit the ground,” objected Sir Ernest. “You wouldn’t have hit the ground, Todhunter, eh?”

  “I might have hit anything, and the ground is certainly the largest,” said Mr Todhunter with a mirthless grin.

  “Pretty poor shot, are you?”

  “Probably the worst in England.”

  “Humph!” said Sir Ernest and joined Mr Chitterwick in looking in the most unlikely spots for the bullet rather than in the most likely ones.

  These tactics met almost at once with success. It was, in point of fact, Mr Chitterwick who actually discovered the shapeless little lump of lead embedded in a tie beam right at the other end of the barn; though to hear Sir Ernest’s satisfaction, not unmixed with a suggestion of self-commendation, one would have said that it must have been he who had found it.

  It was, at any rate, Sir Ernest who dug it carefully out with his penknife.

  “I’m your witness,” he announced when Mr Chitterwick expressed a hesitation as to whether it might not be better to leave this important evidence in situ. “That’s quite in order. Besides, we want this. I’m no ballistics expert myself, though I do know a bit about firearms, and we shall want a report on this. If it proves to have been fired from your gun, Todhunter, I should say we’ve got ’em cold.”

  Mr Todhunter looked doubtfully at the squashed and misshapen fragment now balanced in Sir Ernest’s palm.

  “Can they really tell what gun that came from?” he asked.

  “Well, I’m not so sure,” Sir Ernest had to admit, his optimism faltering slightly. “Doesn’t look as if it’ll carry much marking, does it? That’s the worst of these lead bullets. Especially after bouncing off this floor. Now if it had been nickel . . .” His tone conveyed disapproval of Mr Todhunter’s remissness in using a lead bullet. It also seemed to suggest that for his next murder, if he wanted it detected without all this difficulty Mr Todhunter had better employ nickel bullets.

  “Anyhow,” he went on, “we must hope for the best. I know the fellow we must send it to. And that revolver
of yours must go with it. I’d like to look at that revolver myself too. I’ll get the car out.”

  “The car?” Mr Todhunter echoed stupidly.

  Sir Ernest looked surprised. “We’ve finished here, haven’t we? Well, we’ll go round and have a look at that revolver. No time to let the grass grow under our feet, you know.”

  As a result of Sir Ernest’s hustling methods, Mr Todhunter found himself unlocking his own front door less than twenty minutes later. Feeling a little overwhelmed, he invited the other two to follow him upstairs.

  In the bedroom Sir Ernest showed interest in the drawer from which the bracelet had disappeared and took the revolver from Mr Todhunter with the easy familiarity of one used to firearms. Mr Todhunter watched him with interest as he squinted down the barrel and up the barrel, sniffed it, twirled the chamber and generally put the weapon through its paces.

  “That sergeant’s a fool,” he pronounced at last.

  “What?” said Mr Todhunter.

  “That sergeant. Said this revolver had never been fired, didn’t he? Well, he’s wrong. It has been fired, and pretty recently; though it’s been carefully cleaned since.”

  “Exactly what I told him,” said Mr Todhunter, not without relief.

  “We’re getting on,” beamed Mr Chitterwick.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Mr Chitterwick had been over-optimistic.

  The next day was a Sunday, and little could be done then. Vincent Palmer’s trial was to open at the Old Bailey on the following Thursday. That gave just three working days for the proving of the case against Mr Todhunter. It was very short.

  During those three days Mr Chitterwick worked like a demon. He spent a whole day trying to get on the trail of the missing bracelet and managed to interview every single person whom Mrs Greenhill could name as having visited the house while its owner was away. In each case he not only drew a blank but was able to feel convinced that the person had had no hand in the theft. Nor could he uncover any evidence that an unauthorised person might have got into the house and purloined the bracelet. He questioned and cross-questioned Mrs Greenhill and Edie, regardless of their tears, protests and indignant handing in of notices. And he advanced not one single step.

  Mr Chitterwick also inserted a desperately worded appeal in the personal column of every national newspaper to the occupant of the empty punt which had been moored at the bottom of Miss Norwood’s garden on the fatal night. No one came forward.

  To add to the depression, the report of the ballistics expert on the bullet found in the barn was disappointing. It was too much damaged for positive identification, and all that could be said of it was that it could have been fired from Mr Todhunter’s gun. The bullet was then handed over to Scotland Yard, and Chief Inspector Moresby confidentially told Mr Chitterwick that the report of their own man was to the same effect. As a decisive factor in the case the bullet, on which such hopes had been pinned, was a failure.

  During these three days Mr Todhunter was equally busy. At first Mr Chitterwick tried to look after him as a hen guarding a chick, for fear that in the rush and scurry Mr Todhunter might wreck the case by bursting his aneurism prematurely, and Sir Ernest Prettiboy was also inclined to act as watchdog over their precious but fragile witness. When, however, Mr Todhunter, irked by his guardianship and feeling himself perfectly capable of safeguarding his own aneurism, had been induced to promise that he would behave as calmly and circumspectly as if nothing was in the air at all, he was allowed to go off by himself in taxis and conduct his own interviews. In this way he again saw Furze, who had to report that the assistant commissioner whom he had sounded had pooh-poohed the whole thing. The opinion at Scotland Yard was quite definite. They no longer considered Mr Todhunter mad. Enquiries had been made about him already, and the state of his health had been ascertained.

  “So what?” demanded Mr Todhunter as Furze paused.

  “So they think you’re just trying to save Palmer, as a friend of the family, knowing it can’t make much difference to the length of your own life.”

  “The devil they do!” Mr Todhunter remained calm only by an effort. “And they think all the evidence I can produce quite worthless?”

  “Quite.”

  “But—but—”

  “You see,” Furze pointed out, “they’re quite prepared to believe that you were in the garden that night. They see no reason why you shouldn’t have called on Miss Norwood yourself. In fact, I gather that they’ve put you down in their minds as the owner of the empty punt. But they think you arrived there, if you did arrive at all, after the woman was shot.”

  “Damn!” stormed Mr Todhunter. “Damn! Blast! Hell! Blazes!”

  “Steady!” implored Furze. “Steady, for goodness’ sake.”

  “Yes,” agreed Mr Todhunter grimly, “I’m damned if I’ll die just yet.”

  Mr Todhunter also had another interview with Mrs Farroway, in which a good deal of veiled and careful talk passed. Felicity was at the theatre, so again Mr Todhunter did not see her; if the truth were told, Mr Todhunter had deliberately avoided the meeting. He did not know much about actresses, and what he did know was not encouraging; and he feared that Felicity might carry drama into private life. Mrs. Farroway, on the other hand, was remarkably calm. She did not appear to think it of very great importance that Mr Todhunter’s efforts to prove his guilt should have been so far abortive, or indeed that her son-in-law was standing trial for a crime that he had not committed. Indeed Mrs. Farroway went so far as to say that she thought it would do Vincent a great deal of good.

  “But supposing, he’s convicted?” asked Mr Todhunter.

  “He won’t be,” replied Mrs Farroway with a confident smile.

  Mr Todhunter could only be impressed by such optimism. For himself, he had regarded the trial as tantamount to a conviction, though he could not have said why.

  On one evening only did Mr Todhunter permit himself a certain relaxation. Taking Sir Ernest and Lady Prettiboy with him (Mr Critterwick was far too busy), he paid a visit to the Sovereign Theatre and witnessed Felicity and the play. To his great indignation there was no box available, and only by great luck were three stalls empty, returned at the last moment. Mr Todhunter, who had not thought to ring up the theatre in advance and arrived with his guests only a minute or two before the certain went up, felt vaguely that there was some mismanagement in this and complained as much to Mr Budd in the interval. Mr Budd, however, was so full of exuberance, of congratulations and (it must be admitted) of whiskey, that it is doubtful whether he ever heard anything that Mr Todhunter mumbled to him.

  After the performance Mr Todhunter felt constrained to apologise to his guests. Felicity Farroway had been good—yes, quite good. But the play, in Mr Todhunter’s opinion, was the most dreadful trash he had ever seen. Mr Todhunter was genuinely surprised that both his guests should disagree with him and ascribed their protests to politeness.

  The next morning the trial of Vincent Palmer opened.

  2

  The trial was a full-dress affair. The expectation was that it would last ten days. In point of fact it lasted eight, from the ninth to the sixteenth of December.

  From the beginning the defence were confident. The case against the prisoner, though one of the gravest suspicion, was felt to be lacking in definite proof. Even the fact that Palmer’s revolver had been recently fired was not of particular importance, for there was no bullet to prove that it had been his gun which had killed Miss Norwood. If there had been a bullet, and if it could have been shown that this bullet had definitely not been fired from Palmer’s gun, there would have been no real case against him at all (as Mr Todhunter was becoming rather tired of hearing people point out); but even in the absence of such concrete evidence for the defence it was felt that there was not nearly enough concrete evidence for the prosecution.

  The question of whether Mr Todhunter should or should not be called was undecided until the last possible moment. Palmer himself was against it. Knowing himsel
f innocent, he could not believe that there was any real chance of his being convicted, and he saw no reason why Mr Todhunter should voluntarily brand himself as a murderer on his, Palmer’s, behalf. In other words young Mr Palmer, who unaccountably seemed to have taken a dislike to Mr Todhunter at sight, announced that he did not want any favours from that quarter and would, in fact, be damned if he’d have any.

  On the whole counsel supported this view. The police opinion was known, that Mr Todhunter had come forward in a spirit of altruistic idiocy, and some difficult cross-examination could be expected on this point. There was, too, the possible effect on the jury, who might be inclined to think that the defence must feel themselves in a very weak position to rely upon such a fantastic tale. For the unfortunate truth was that Mr Todhunter’s tale still sounded fantastic, and Mr Todhunter himself looked like being a most unconvincing witness to it. Moreover neither counsel nor the solicitors for the defence believed it for one moment.

  It was finally decided, therefore, in spite of the unofficial urging of Sir Ernest Prettiboy, not to call Mr Todhunter. In consequence that gentleman, not quite knowing whether to be disgusted or relieved, was able to sit in a privileged position on the witnesses’ benches and listen to the whole trial.

  At first all went well. The opening speech for the prosecution showed clearly the weakness of the case against Palmer, and the attorney general, who was conducting the case in person, spoke with such obvious moderation that the only inference was that he himself was none too convinced of the prisoner’s guilt. Right until the last witness had testified for the Crown the odds were strongly in the prisoner’s favour.

  And then things seemed to go wrong. Palmer himself made an exceedingly bad witness: truculent, assertive and stubborn. The sulky way in which he admitted the rivalry of his father-in-law and himself for the dead woman’s favours, the contempt with which he spoke of Miss Norwood and the obvious change of heart that he must have experienced towards her (he spoke as if her memory were repellent to him), the occasional violence with which he met some particularly awkward question—all these could not but have a bad effect on the jury.