David Dickinson - Death of an Old Master

Johnny Fitzgerald handed the note back to Powerscourt. He passed it on to Lady Lucy, sitting on his other side.

‘Nevertheless, I put it to you, Mr Morton, how could you possibly remember this lady in court here today, from the vast numbers you serve, and at such a length of time?’

‘Why, sir,’ said Morton, as if this was perfectly obvious. Powerscourt looked quickly at the jury. Samuel Morton came from their world. He was one of them. Perhaps they too were shopkeepers keeping a careful eye on their regular customers. ‘Strangers from outside are quite rare in Richmond. It’s not like the West End shops, sir, where every customer every day is a stranger. We don’t get customers like the lady here more than once or twice a year. She was a society lady, sir. I’m not saying there’s anything cheap or wrong about the good people of Richmond, sir, but she was different. She was class, if you follow me.’

Powerscourt read the note once more. ‘The tide is running very strongly in our favour. If I put Mrs Buckley back in the witness box now, we might finish the case before lunch. If we wait, she may compose herself or even come back with her own bloody lawyer. Yes or No? CAP.’

Powerscourt saw that Johnny and Lady Lucy had both put Yes at the bottom. He added a third one and passed it back to Pugh.

‘Indeed, Mr Morton,’ Sir Rufus carried on. ‘But I must ask you the question once again. Are you one hundred per cent certain – and remember that a man is on trial for his life here – are you absolutely convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the lady here was the one who came into your shop ten long weeks ago?’

Morton stood his ground. Sir Rufus had failed to shift him. ‘I am certain, sir,’ he said, looking at the jury. ‘If I hadn’t been certain, I wouldn’t have identified her in the first place, would I?’

The jury smiled. William McKenzie beamed with delight. Horace Buckley was looking very worried indeed. Chief Inspector Wilson was checking his notes. The bookmaker among the ranks of the press gallery was changing his odds. After the prosecution case he had offered two to one on for a conviction. He thought he might lose quite a lot of money with that one. Now he offered his colleagues even money on an acquittal. He found no takers. The gentlemen of the press did not like the odds.

Charles Augustus Pugh rose to his feet and requested the recall of Mrs Buckley. He took another long draught from his glass. Johnny Fitzgerald had been looking at the vessel with some scepticism. He sent a quick note to Powerscourt. ‘Fellow’s not drinking water at all. Look at the colour of the stuff. He’s got bloody gin or something in there. Lucky blighter.’

‘Mrs Buckley,’ Pugh began with his most unusual question yet, his witness shaking slightly in the box, ‘I believe that you are an expert archer and travel extensively in the pursuit of your sport. Would you say this leaves you with very strong wrists and arms, stronger wrists and arms, let us say, than those of a sedentary man like Christopher Montague?’

Mr Justice Browne looked astonished. Sir Rufus stared open-mouthed at Pugh. Pugh’s junior, a bright young man called James Simpson, had wanted to bring a bow into court. ‘It would be like the end of the Odyssey in reverse, sir,’ he had said to Pugh. ‘You remember the bit where none of Penelope’s suitors can draw the bow. Only Odysseus disguised as a beggar can do that. Here none of the jury can pull the bow. Neither can you. But Mrs Buckley can. It would be fantastic.’ Pugh doubted if he could have imported a bow into the Central Criminal Court. He saw that the scheme could backfire if Mrs Buckley either couldn’t, or pretended to be unable to pull the bow either. But he wanted to convince the male jury and the male judge that a woman might be more powerful than a man.

‘Archery does give you strong wrists and arms, sir,’ she said demurely. ‘But I fail to see what that has to do with this trial.’

Charles Augustus Pugh looked carefully at the jury He felt he had made his point. ‘I want to put a hypothesis to you, if I may, Mrs Buckley.’ Pugh paused. The fingers of his right hand were back at the imaginary piano on his gown, working their way through Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. He was speaking more in sorrow than in anger, as if he sympathized with Rosalind Buckley’s plight.

‘I put it to you that you were furious, more than furious, with Christopher Montague for jilting you in favour of a younger woman, a woman he might have been able to marry before God, blessed in church by the Holy Sacrament, a woman with whom, forgive me, he could father legitimate children rather than bastards. I put it to you that you remembered the details of the case in Rome, not so many years before, when revenge was extracted with a piece of piano wire. I put it to you that you did indeed go to Richmond and complete your first purchase of this deadly material. On the night of the murder I suggest that you went to Christopher Montague’s flat, as you had done so often in the past. I put it to you that the knowledge of what was going to happen in there only served to fuel your anger even further. For your husband was going to ask Montague for his decision about whether to give you up or not. Montague would have told him that the affair had ended some months ago. You would have been humiliated in front of your husband from whom you were already estranged. Think how he might have mocked you.

‘So, I put it to you, Mrs Buckley, you entered the flat that evening with your own keys. I suggest that you took precautions to give yourself a better chance of success. The police found two wine glasses that had been washed up in Mr Montague’s kitchen. His cleaning lady had not cleaned them. Mr Montague was not in the habit of washing up his glasses. I suggest you put laudanum or some similar drug into the wine to make him sleepy and less able to resist. Then you murdered Christopher Montague. You removed all the papers on his desk to confuse any investigation that might follow. You removed some of his books that might have given clues about the article he was writing on forgeries in the Venetian exhibition. The police might assume that the murder was intimately connected with what Montague was working on at the time of his death.’

Pugh paused. The jury were staring transfixed at Rosalind Buckley. So was the judge. So were the gentlemen of the press, preparing vivid descriptions in their minds of the demeanour of the witness. Only Powerscourt was not looking at Mrs Buckley. He was looking at the prisoner in the dock, Horace Aloysius Buckley opening and closing his mouth very rapidly as if he wished to speak.

‘I further put it to you, Mrs Buckley,’ Pugh’s eloquence rolled on, ‘that you also found it necessary to commit a second murder. Maybe Thomas Jenkins was in London that night and met you after the murder in Montague’s flat. Maybe you thought he knew that you were the killer and could not be sure that he would keep his mouth shut. Maybe you thought he would betray you to the police. I put it to you that you took a further trip to Richmond to purchase more piano wire.’

Pugh picked up the piano wire labelled Exhibit A from its table and began twisting it slowly in front of Mrs Buckley. Powerscourt could have sworn that Pugh was bending it into the shape of a noose.

‘And furthermore, Mrs Buckley, I put it to you that you brought with you to Oxford not just the wire, but also one of your husband’s ties. You left it there at the scene of Thomas Jenkins’ murder to incriminate your own husband. Again we find the washed-up cups at the scene of the crime, suggesting that you put laudanum or some similar substance in Mr Jenkins’ tea. You removed the papers from the desk as you had removed the papers from Christopher Montague’s desk in order to confuse any investigation. I put it to you, Mrs Buckley, that you committed both these murders. Is that true?’