Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“About the wounds on the body, Miss Pateman said that they had — what she called ‘punished’ him. They wanted to teach him to behave.

“I should say that neither she nor Miss Ross have ever admitted that they actually killed him. They have each given accounts of what happened to Eric on the Sunday night. The accounts are different. One is, that he was put on a bus to take him back to the town. The other, which is Miss Ross’, is that they drove him back themselves in the borrowed car, and dropped him at the corner of the road leading to his parents’ house. Needless to say, neither of these stories deserves a moment’s thought. That same night, and early the following morning, that same car was seen, as will be sworn by two witnesses, very close to Markers Copse. Further, when the car was ultimately examined — I must tell you that its real owners had no conceivable connection with this crime — there was evidence of blood, blood of Eric’s group, on the floor of the back seat.”

He turned to the judge, and remarked: “I think I need go no further at present, my lord. It would be my duty, if there were any conceivable doubt about the facts of this case, to make the position clear to members of the jury. But there is no doubt. We know most of what happened to Eric Mawby from the Friday evening until the time that he was buried. I haven’t any wish to add to the intolerable facts you are obliged to listen to. You can imagine for yourselves the suffering of this child. There is no doubt about the way he was killed, nor about who killed him. All I need say is that this has been proved to be a deliberate, calculated, premeditated crime. That is enough.”

During the last few minutes of Bosanquet’s speech, I had flinched — and this was true of Margaret and everyone round me — from looking at the two women in the dock, although, keeping my gaze on Bosanquet, I could not help noticing with peripheral vision the fingers of Kitty obsessively scribbling her notes.

A witness was being sworn, a man in his twenties, soft-faced, soft-voiced. It turned out that, with the indifferent businesslike bathos of the legal process, he was being examined about the loan of his car.

The box was on the judge’s right hand, a couple of yards away from where Bosanquet had been standing: so that prosecutor, dock, witness, were all exposed to the same light. The young man’s fair hair shone against the panelling.

“Your name is Laurence Tompkin? You are a schoolteacher employed by the local education authority? You know both the defendants?”

Yes, said the young man in a gentle, ingratiating manner, as of one who was trying to win affection, but he knew Miss Ross better than Miss Pateman. Do you remember either of them saying they might want to borrow your car? Yes, he remembered that, it was Miss Ross. When was that? In the early summer, last year. In the summer, not September? No, much earlier, more like June. What did she say? She just said they might want to borrow it some time, she wanted to be sure that it was available. Then, some time later she did borrow it? Yes. For a weekend in September? Yes. Can you tell us the date? The weekend beginning September 20. Was the car returned? Yes. When? The following Monday. Did you notice anything odd about it? There seemed to be a lot of mud on the number plate, although it had been a sunny weekend. You didn’t examine the floor of the car, down below the back seat? No, he didn’t think of doing so.

Benskin, Cora’s counsel, got up to speak for the first time that day. He was a small man, with a long nose and a labile merry mouth: his voice was unexpectedly sonorous. He was asking a few questions for appearance’s sake. He had, of course, understood Bosanquet’s tactics, that is, to demonstrate the long-laid planning before the boy’s death. As for the defence’s own tactics, a good many of us were puzzled. They seemed to be in a state of indecision or suspense.

It would be perfectly reasonable to ask a friend, said Benskin, whether he could lend a car? Perfectly reasonable to ask, as a kind of insurance, if one was having any trouble with one’s own? Even if the trouble didn’t become serious for weeks? As for the return of the car, if Miss Ross and Miss Pateman drove it back to the town late on the Sunday night, they couldn’t conveniently have returned it, could they? It was perfectly reasonable to park it outside their own house, and return it next day?

Having registered his appearance, Benskin sat down, with a grim half-smile to his junior. Kitty Pateman’s counsel did not get up at all.

The young man left the box. He was one of George’s group: he had not been asked how he could afford a car, or whether he shared it with anyone, or whether he also shared a cottage, or at what kind of parties he and Cora Ross had met. No one had a reason, so it appeared, to disturb that underground. This had been the guess that I made to George. I glanced at him, heavy-faced, mouth a little open: perhaps, even after the prosecutor’s ending, not so many minutes before, he felt — as we all do in extreme calamities, when a minor selfish worry is taken away — some sort of relief.

Another witness, this time the manager of the garage where the women’s own car had been left for repairs. When had it been deposited? September 19. What was supposed to be wrong?

At this the judge, shifting himself from one haunch to the other as he spoke, became restive.

“Surely we are going into very great detail, aren’t we, Mr Recorder?”

“With your permission, my lord, I wish to establish the whole build up before the child was abducted.”

“I suggest we are all ready to take a certain amount for granted.”

“This is a complicated structure, my lord.” Bosanquet spoke mildly, but he didn’t budge. “I require my pieces of bricks-and-mortar.”

“Spare us anything you don’t require,” said the judge, with a nod which was resigned but courteous.

The garage manager’s mystification: she (Cora Ross) could have put it right in ten minutes. She was a first-class mechanic herself.

Next witness, Detective-Constable Hallam. He was raw-boned, quite young, and as he stood in the box his head was bent down towards his hands. His pertinacity about the car. “I was not satisfied,” he said, for once raising his head. His manner was stern but guilty-seeming, he hesitated over answering matter-of-fact questions. Gradually Bosanquet’s junior, young Archibald Rose, dug the story out of him. How he hadn’t been satisfied. How at the garage he thought something was strange. How he made enquiries all along the half-mile between Eric’s home and the recreation ground, asking if a green Morris had ever been seen. When had the car first patrolled that route? (That couldn’t be answered, but it might have been as much as a month before September 20.)

The young constable, who had been a halting, unhappy witness, was given a special word of approval. Without him, it might have taken much longer to look in the direction of Rose Cottage.

Statements from persons who had noticed a green Morris, read in a strong voice by the Clerk of Assize. “I saw this car when I was getting home from work, but did not take its number…”

A detective-sergeant in the box, the first search of the cottage. The piece of Meccano. Exhibit. A plain-clothes policeman, standing by the clerk, with a stiff robot-like movement held up his hand. From where I sat, just a glint of metal. Then he exposed it on his palm. The gesture was as mechanical as the plaything. An ordinary object, prosaic and innocent: yet it did not seem quite real, or else had its own aura. An object like Davidson’s capsule.

“Was this the piece of Meccano you discovered in Rose Cottage…?”

“It was.”

Another detective-sergeant (the cottage and garden had been crowded with them). The Meccano box. Exhibited. The plain-clothes policeman went through his drill.