Charles Todd - An Impartial Witness

I smiled and asked for Captain Melton. The young officer who had risen to greet me looked around him and then said, "I expect he's still in hospital, Sister."

Alarmed, I asked, "Is it serious?"

"Um, I'd rather not say."

Which usually meant dysentery. I thanked him, returned to the ambulance, and found my way to the rear hospital where more serious casualties were taken.

The first sister I met as I walked through the door was young and flushed with excitement.

"Rumor says the Prince of Wales is coming here to speak to the wounded," she exclaimed. "Everything is at sixes and sevens."

I gave her a list of the supplies I needed, then asked if there was a Captain Melton in the officers' ward.

She pointed the way, then rushed off to finish my errand before the Prince arrived.

She was right that the hospital was at sixes and sevens. Another sister told me that the Prince was coming to pin a medal on someone. Victoria Cross, she thought. Someone else said that the Prince was coming to see one of his former equerries who was just out of surgery for life-threatening wounds.

Threading my way to the busy ward, I went down the row of cots and looked at each patient, hoping to find Captain Melton without drawing more attention than necessary to my visit. A few patients were heavily bandaged, and I asked quietly, "Captain Melton?" only to receive a shake of the head in return.

I nearly missed him. He was at the far end, a weak and exhausted man who had lost several stone of his original weight. His skin was gray, and his eyes sunken. But a second glance confirmed that this was indeed the man I recalled from the railway station.

I went to sit beside him, and after a moment I spoke his name softly, to see if he slept or was awake.

He turned his face toward me, and his eyes when he opened them were those of a dead man, no life at all in their depths, as if he had given up all hope.

Severe dysentery could kill. But I thought, he's weak, not dying.

When I said nothing, he spoke in a thread of a voice. "Whatever you gave me seems to be working. Thank you, Sister."

He was so far from the cold, heartless man who wouldn't comfort the distressed woman clinging to his arm that I felt a wave of compassion and was torn about bringing up the past. But this might be my only chance. When-if-he recovered, he might be sent anywhere, and the next big push might be his last.

Steeling myself against softer feelings, I said, "My name doesn't matter, Captain Melton. But I happened to be at Waterloo Station when you were saying good-bye to Marjorie Evanson, just before you sailed for France." I gave him the date and the time, told him that it was raining hard, a summer rain that made it impossible for me to find Marjorie again as she was leaving.

He listened, his face changing to a coldness that made him seem more familiar to me than the wasted man lying on the cot as I'd approached.

"What of it?" he demanded.

"The police asked me questions about her and about you. I didn't know your name then, I found it much later when I saw some photographs taken by the husband of a friend." I hoped I could still consider Alicia a friend. "I had met your brother Jack only a few weeks before I saw that photograph. And so I know who you are."

"You've got the wrong man," he said, turning away from me. "Please leave."

"It isn't a mistake. I knew Marjorie by sight and I have a good memory for faces. I also recognized your cap badge. You don't look like your brother, I would never have guessed who you were. But cameras don't lie. You were with Marjorie that night."

He said nothing, keeping his face resolutely turned toward the far wall.

"She was three months' pregnant. Did she tell you that?"

No response, though I saw a muscle twitch in his jaw. It struck me that he was angry, not ashamed.

"She was murdered that same evening. Were you lovers? If you were, perhaps you can tell me who Marjorie Evanson would turn to in her distress, after you got on that train and left her to cope alone." I was guessing at some of what I was saying. "Please, if you know anyone she might have seen after your train left, it would help the police enormously and might even lead to finding her killer."

"He's been found." The three words were clipped, and I was right about the anger.

I was on the point of asking him who had told him, and then of course I remembered that he was Jack Melton's brother. Jack would have passed on the news. But had he realized when he did so that the man he was telling was Marjorie's lover? I wondered too who had initiated that telling of events. Had Raymond Melton asked? Or had Jack Melton volunteered? Perhaps a little of both. It was, after all, expected to be a sensational trial and indirectly the Meltons were involved through Serena and her own brother.

"The question is, have the police got the right man? I'm not very sure of that." I kept my voice steady, interested but impersonal. "I have to be impartial, and while I don't believe you could have killed her-after all, I saw you board that train-I can't help but think your evidence would be helpful. As mine was, for it told the police that she was alive at five forty-five that day."

He showed no interest in what I was saying. And so I pressed a little harder.

"Haven't the police asked you to provide proof that you didn't leave the train at the next stop, and then find someone to drive you to Portsmouth so that you reached your transport just before it sailed?"

His head turned, and his eyes met mine. There was fire in their depths, shocking in so weak a man.

"Get out of here."

"I should like your word that you never left the train. And then I will walk away, even though you've done nothing to help the woman you seduced and then left to deal with the aftermath on her own. I would have believed in her suicide that night. It's amazing that you never gave that possibility even a thought."

"I never left the train. My word."

We'd kept our voices low, in order not to disturb other patients or draw the attention of the ward sisters.

I sat there, looking into his eyes, trying to plumb their depths for truth.

"My word," he repeated, and I had to believe him.

As I rose to walk away, I watched his face. Something stirred there, and I wondered what it was. Satisfaction?

Satisfaction that he'd managed to drive me away with only a portion of the truth?

I wondered how hard Michael Hart's counsel had tried to find this man and establish his alibi, even if the Crown had not. But then, I reminded myself, they might have done, and when it was shown he hadn't left his train, they had not felt it worthwhile to bring him back to England. There was no getting around the fact that Raymond Melton had been in France when Mrs. Calder was stabbed.

I thanked him and turned away as I'd promised, feeling deflated and uncertain. But then I went back to his bedside and said, "Has anyone told you that Helen Calder was also attacked in the same fashion as Marjorie Evanson, and presumably by the same man? Or woman? The two stabbings so close together are most likely linked, because Mrs. Calder was a Garrison before her marriage, and a cousin of Marjorie Evanson's."

He stared at me. "I know Helen Calder," he said, eyes wide now with disbelief. "I was at Mons with her husband. Is she dead as well?"

"She ought to be. But she was found in time, in spite of loss of blood and emergency surgery to repair the damage done. There will be weeks of recovery ahead of her, but she's alive."

He went on staring at me, trying to absorb what I'd said. Then he asked, "Surely she was able to identify her attacker?"

"She has no memory of what happened. What little she recalls of the hours before she was stabbed point to the man the police took into custody. He's been tried, and will be hanged."