Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“Neither of the defendants produced any explanation about the presence of this Meccano unit. They said it had nothing to do with them. After a further interval officers searching the garden found, buried in the bushes, the box of what appeared to be a new Number One Meccano Set, containing most of its components, and carrying on the lid a tab from the Midland Educational Company. At this stage the defendants were separated, cautioned, and brought back to police headquarters for further enquiries.”

Bosanquet glanced at his wristwatch. As though under suggestion, others of us did the same. It was ten minutes to one.

“By this time, since the officers had spent some hours at Rose Cottage, it was Saturday afternoon. Nevertheless the manager of the Midland Educational Company was immediately contacted, and search, of course, continued at the cottage. The bill for the purchase of a Number One Meccano Set was traced, bearing the date of September 18 last year, that is, two days before Eric’s disappearance. The shop assistant who had made this transaction was visited at her home. She was able to remember the purchaser as someone answering to the description of Miss Ross.

“Meanwhile Miss Ross was being examined alone by Detective-Superintendent Maxwell. He will tell you that she was still denying knowledge of the Meccano set, although in a parallel examination Miss Pateman was providing explanations, such as, that it was a long-forgotten present which had never been delivered. The detective-superintendent was given the information from the Midland Educational Company. He told Miss Ross and asked her to account for it. Then she said: ‘Yes, we took him out to the cottage that Friday night. We borrowed a car to do it.’”

In a tone indistinguishable from that in which he quoted her, he spoke to the judge: “I’m inclined to think, my lord, this might be a convenient time to break off.”

“As you like, Mr Bosanquet.”

The politeness, the bowing judge, the ritual, Cora’s blonde head disappearing underground. When I had followed George and Margaret downstairs, the entrance hall was full, people were pushing towards the refreshment table. Outside, in the spring air, cameras clicked. Some were press cameras, but the journalists had not emerged yet, and I led the other two away, trying to hurry George’s invalid pace. I heard some whispers and thought I could pick one out as “that’s her uncle”.

We walked, Margaret in the middle, George’s heavy slow step with feet out-turned delaying us. Neither Margaret nor I could find anything to say. Instead, George spoke: “It’s nasty,” he said.

His words, like all the words spoken that morning, could not have been more matter-of-fact.

“It’s nasty, of course,” he repeated.

“I’m sorry, George,” said Margaret.

He smiled at her, a diffident, gentle smile.

“Still,” he went on, “wait till you hear the answer.”

Margaret couldn’t reply, nor could I. Was he whistling up his old unextinguishable optimism, or was he just pretending? Wait till you hear the answer. I had heard politicians growl that identical phrase across the floor of the Commons, after the bitterest attack from the other side.

“I must say,” said George, “I thought that—” — he brought out his curse as though the word had just been invented or as though the carnal reality were in front of his eyes — “was unnecessarily offensive.”

Now he wasn’t pretending. He was speaking out of the hates of a lifetime. I didn’t answer. This was no time to argue, though in fact I thought the exact opposite. I thought also that Bosanquet, in his own fashion, was a master of his job.

“Well,” said George, “where are we going to eat?”

Margaret and I looked at each other, hesitating. We didn’t want much, she said. George, with a kind of boisterous kindness, said that we must eat something. He knew of a good place.

It turned out to be a pub which sometimes we used to visit (he showed no sign of remembering that) at the end of a night’s crawl. Nowadays it served hot lunches: and there, in a small and steaming room upstairs, George, giving out an air of old-fashioned gallantry, placed Margaret in a chair and insisted that she eat some steak-and-kidney pie. His pleasure was extreme, pathetic, when she was ready to join him in drinking a double whisky.

He was fond of her, because she never blamed him. He had told her a good deal about his life, and found that she casually accepted it. “I hope that’s really all right for you,” he said, looking at her plate of meat and pastry, like a proud, considerate, but slightly anxious host.

It was not we who were trying to support him, but the reverse. He might be behaving so out of a residue of robustness greater than most men’s — or out of indifference or a lack of affect. All we knew was that he was behaving like a brave man. He even told a long complicated funny story, so quirky that it didn’t seem unfitting that day.

He did ask me — in an aside — whether Bosanquet (whom he never referred to by name, but always by the Anglo-Saxon curse, as though it were a kind of title) was going to “drag in” any of the crowd. George hadn’t missed the single oblique reference. I said that it seemed unlikely. Perhaps the people who lent the car might be mentioned — were they connections of George’s?

George shook his head, his expression for an instant lost and suffering, and said that he didn’t know. “I don’t want anyone else to get into a mess,” he muttered, repeating the words that had chilled me the day before Christmas Eve.

He turned his attention to Margaret again, trying to think of another treat for her, before we returned to the Assize Hall. Again the crowded entrance, the barristers in the courtroom seen from above, the ascent of those two into the dock. A little delay, only three minutes this time. The ritual bowing. Bosanquet on his feet, beginning: “My lord, and members of the jury, we now turn for a moment to certain statements of Miss Pateman—”

MISS Pateman made a number of statements to police officers during the period when Miss Ross was being examined by Detective-Superintendent Maxwell,” said Bosanquet in a level tone, without a flick of sarcasm. “On the following day Detective-Superintendent Maxwell decided to take her out once more to Rose Cottage and question her himself. By this time, of course, the search in and round the cottage had been intensified. Traces of blood, small traces, had been found in the bedroom. This blood, as you will hear from experts of the Forensic Laboratory, did not belong to the blood groups of either Miss Ross or Miss Pateman. It did, however, belong to the blood group of Eric Mawby. In the garden were found the remains of a nylon blouse not completely burnt, a blouse which witnesses recognised as having been worn by Miss Ross. On this were detectable some stains of the same blood group.

“In due course, as Detective-Superintendent Maxwell interrogated her—” (How long had they been alone together? When was she told that Cora had broken down?) — “Miss Pateman withdrew her denials that the child had never been inside the cottage. She now told what appeared to be a coherent and self-consistent account of those events. She and Miss Ross had for some time past wanted to have a child alone, by themselves, to be in control of. She gave a reason for this desire. They wanted to teach it to behave.”

For the first time in the long and even speech, Bosanquet laid a stress, it sounded like an involuntary stress, upon the words. In an instant he had controlled himself. “They had accordingly, so it appears, picked out a boy at random. For some time they had driven round the city, in places where they were not familiar, looking for a suitable subject. It was the misfortune of Eric Mawby and his parents that they settled on him. They decided on the weekend of September 20. They bought the Meccano set two days before in order to give him something to do. They picked him up on the Friday evening without difficulty. According to Miss Pateman’s account, Eric was pleased to go with them.” Bosanquet paused. “That we cannot, of course, deny or establish. We also cannot establish at what stage exactly they began to ill-treat him. Possibly early on the Saturday. You will hear expert evidence about the many wounds on his body. He suffered them, according to expert judgment, many hours before death. These body wounds were healing when he was finally beaten to death by at least seven blows on the head, probably with something like a poker or a metal bar and also with a wooden implement.