Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“And can you prove it?”

“We can prove enough,” he said in a businesslike fashion, a good policeman at the end of his career, one who had brought so many cases to the courts. “You can trust us on that.”

“Yes,” I said, “I can trust you on that.”

“They’ll go down for life, of course. There’s just one dodge they might pull. And you know that as well as I do.” He stared at me, with meaning and, at last I realised, with suspicion.

He said, in a level, controlled tone: “I’m going to tell you something. I mean every word of it. Those two are as sane as you or me. When we had them in here and found out what they’d done, if I could have got away with it, I’d have put a bullet in the back of both their necks. It would have been the best way out.”

Once more I wanted to get back to something matter-of-fact, or innocent.

“They’ll get life, you said. This isn’t a capital murder, then?”

At this time we were still governed by the 1957 Act, a bizarre compromise under which the death penalty was kept, but only for a narrow range of murders, depending on the choice of weapon and the victim: that is, poisoning was not capital, unless you poisoned a police officer; but murder by shooting was.

“No,” said Maxwell.

“How did they do it?”

“They beat him to death. In the end.”

“You may as well tell me—”

“We don’t know everything. I doubt if we ever shall know.”

I said, once again, tell me.

“We’re pretty sure of this. They played cat-and-mouse with him. He wasn’t a very bright lad. They picked him up at random, they don’t seem to have had a word with him before. They’ve got a hideout in the country, they took him there. They played cat-and-mouse with him for a weekend. Then they beat him to death.”

He wasn’t being lubricous about the horrors, as I had heard other policemen or lawyers round the criminal courts, telling stories of killings which I remembered clinically, as though they had happened to another species: I had to remember them clinically just to remember them at all, and yet I believed that, despite appearances, I was less physically squeamish than Maxwell.

“The worst they can get for that,” he said, “is life. Which doesn’t mean much, they’ll be let out all right, you know that. But it’s the worst they can get, and by God they’re going to get it.”

“The alternative is—”

“The alternative is, a nice comfortable few years in a blasted mental hospital. Diminished responsibility. They’ll try that. What do you think I’ve been talking to you about tonight?”

Yes, he had been suspecting me. He had seen me in action as an official, he could imagine me going round to doctors, talking to them about “diminished responsibility”, which was another feature of the 1957 Act.

“Yes, they’ll try that, Clarence,” I said. “On the strength of what you tell me, any competent lawyer would have to.”

“They don’t want any help,” he said.

“But don’t you think they’ll get it—”

“I told you something else a minute ago. Those two are as sane as you and me.”

“How are you so certain?”

“I’ve seen them.”

“That’s not enough—”

“If you’d seen them and talked to them as I have, you’d be certain too. You’d be as certain as that you’re sitting there.”

He went on: “If anyone pretends they didn’t know what they were doing, then we’ve all gone mad. We might as well give up the whole silly business. Will you listen to me?”

He was more intense. And yet, I had been misjudging him. Yes, he was inclined to see conspiracies, he thought I might be one of those standing in his way. He was a policeman: he had “brought them in”, he wanted his conviction. But, staring open-eyed at me in the flowery office, he didn’t want only, or even mainly, that. Strangely, he was making an appeal. It was deeper than his professional pride, or even moral outrage. He wanted to feel that I was on his side. He wanted to drag me, with all the force of his great strong body, on to what to him was the side of the flesh, or (to use a rhetorical phrase which he would have cursed away) of life itself.

In a sharp but less passionate tone, he asked: “You don’t believe in hanging, do you?”

“No.”

He gazed at me, unblinking.

“Don’t you think you might be wrong?” he asked.

“I’ve made up my mind.”

He still gazed at me.

“I’ll give you one thing,” he said. “I don’t believe in all the crap about deterrence. It deters some of them from carrying guns, that’s about all. Nothing in the world would have deterred those two.”

“And you go on saying they’re quite sane.”

“By God I do. They just thought they were cleverer than anyone else. They just thought, I expect they still think, they’re superior to anyone else and no one would ever find them out or touch them.”

There was a silence.

“I can’t get away from it,” he said. “There are some people who aren’t fit to live.”

I replied: “We’re not God, to say that.”

“I didn’t know you believed in God.”

“It might be easier if one did,” I said.

Maxwell shook his head. “Either those two aren’t fit to live,” he said, “or else the rest of us aren’t.”

“Why did they do it?” I broke out. “Have you any idea why they did it?”

“I think it was a sort of experiment. They wanted to see what it felt like.”

His lip was thrust out, his face, interrogating, confronted mine. After a moment, he said: “I told you, when we had them in and discovered what they’d done, I’d have put a bullet in them both. What would you do with them? That’s a fair question, isn’t it? What would you do with them?”

I had a phantom memory of another conversation, a loftier one, in which a character more tormented than Maxwell asked a similar question of someone better than me. But I was living in the moment, and I had no answer ready, and gave no answer at all.

AS I looked up from the road outside my father’s house, the winter stars were sharp. I had gone there straight from the police headquarters: looking up at the stars, I had a moment of relief. I was getting ready for the mutual facetiousness which, as a lifetime habit, I expected with my father.

When I got inside his room, though, it wasn’t like that. First, there was something unfamiliar about the room itself which, to begin with, I couldn’t identify. Then his voice was toneless as he said hello, Lewis. He was watching a kettle beginning to boil on the hob. He was ready to make himself a cup of cocoa, he said. Would I have one?

No, I said (the flicker of how I usually addressed him still showing through), I wasn’t much given to cocoa.

“I don’t suppose you are,” said my father.

His spectacles were at their usual angle from forehead to cheek, the white hair flowed over the wings. Through the lenses, his eyes were lugubrious.

“How are you getting on?” he said, not half-heartedly, nothing like so much as half.

“How are you getting on?”

“They’ve given me the sack, Lewis.” Suddenly his eyes looked magnified: tears began to glisten down his face. They were the tears, as abject and shameless as a child’s, of extreme old age. And yet, watching them, I wasn’t shameless myself, but the reverse. I had never seen him cry before. Not in all his misfortunes or his humiliations: not when he went bankrupt, or when my mother died.

I said: Hadn’t he told the people at his choir that I would provide transport? That it was all arranged? In fact, immediately after my last visit and before the operation, I had, through Vicky, made contact with a car hire firm in the town. They were to produce a car and driver any time he asked. I had written to my father, spelling out precisely what he had to do. I had had no answer: but then, that was nothing new.