Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“Was this the box you discovered in the garden of Rose Cottage…?”

“It was.”

The shop assistant at the Midland Educational Company. The bill for a Number One Meccano Set.

“Is this bill dated September 18?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you remember selling this set?”

“Yes, I do.”

“To whom did you sell it?”

“To the one sitting there—” She glanced at Cora and away again.

“That was on Wednesday, September 18?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bosanquet asked her to make sure of the date. “I’m sorry to press this, my lord, but you will see what I am establishing—” The judge turned to the jury. “Bricks-and-mortar,” he said. He sounded affable and half-sardonic: but he was being fair to Bosanquet, underlining that this was evidence of intent. Following him, Benskin tried to shake the identification, but the girl was both gentle and strong-willed, and he got nowhere.

Witnesses, names, occupations, addresses, came, went, were forgotten, a random slice of the town. One stood out, a Mrs Ramsden, who testified about seeing a boy being driven in the car. She was plump, with a sharp nose poking out of the flesh: as a girl she must have had a cheerful, impertinent prettiness. As soon as she gave evidence, she gave the impression (much more so than any of the policemen) of being a natural witness. She was one of those people, and there were very few, who seemed to be abnormally observant and at the same time scrupulous. Yes, she had seen a brown Austin driving out of the city on the evening of September 20. What time? She could be fairly exact: she was hurrying home for a television programme: about 5.45. Where was this? Not far from the recreation ground? A few hundred yards away. What did she notice? A small boy sitting between two people in the front seat. She didn’t know Eric: from the photographs, it could have been him, it looked very like him, she couldn’t be more positive than that. A woman was driving the car. The other person in the front seat? Might have been a man or woman. Fair-haired, wearing dark glasses. What was the boy doing? He seemed to be waving. He might have been struggling? He might have been, but she didn’t think of it at the time. She thought that he was laughing. The person with dark glasses had an arm round him? Yes, round his neck. Like this? Bosanquet beckoned one of the plain-clothes policemen, who, sheepish and red-faced, had his neck encircled by counsel’s arm. There was a titter, tight and guilty, the first that afternoon. Both defence counsel cross-examined. Kitty’s, a young silk called Wilson, his actor’s face hard, masculine, frowning, was trying to demonstrate that the boy had gone willingly. Benskin, that the kidnapping might have taken place much later. To most people in the court, none of this could matter, it only dragged out the strain. All those who were used to courts of law would have known by now, though, that they were struggling with their instructions, though I for one couldn’t be certain what any of them were hoping for.

When Mrs Ramsden had left, the judge coughed, and said in an amiably testy fashion: “I see the clock has stopped.” Heads turned to the back of the court. “I make it,” said the judge, “very nearly half past four. I don’t want to go much beyond the half-hour, Mr Bosanquet. I hope you can be brief with the next witness. After all, no one challenges the fact that the boy was taken by car to Rose Cottage. That is so, Mr Benskin, Mr Wilson?”

For the first time, Bosanquet conceded the point. He left the witness — who swore to sighting the car near Rose Cottage on the Friday evening — to his junior, and within minutes the judge was bowing himself out of court.

It had been difficult to feel, since the end of Bosanquet’s speech, how much people in the courtroom had been anaesthetised by the sheer mechanics of the trial. We soon knew. As we walked with George through the entrance hall, there was an air of hostility which, like a blast of freezing wind, tightened the skin. Then came, not loud, but menacing and sustained, the sound of hissing. George threw his head erect, jamming his hat further back so that his forehead was exposed. The hisses went on. They were not directed at him as a person (at the time I didn’t think of it: all I wanted was to lead him through the angry crowd). He wasn’t well enough known in the town for that. But he was connected with those two, and this was enough.

We got him into the street. There were no taxis anywhere near, and we had to walk half-a-mile, people following us, women shouting at him, before we found one. On the way to the station, where Margaret had to catch a train back to London, none of us spoke. When we came in sight of the station building, the red brick glared like a discord in the spring sunshine.

While I paid off the taxi, George stood mute by Margaret’s side. Then he said: “Well, I’d better leave you now.”

No, we each told him, he must wait and see her off.

“I’d better leave you now,” George repeated.

We looked into his face. It was wild, his eyes gazing past us: and yet, how was it different from lunchtime, what did his expression mean?

“I don’t want you to, you know,” said Margaret.

“I think I’d better. I’ve got some things to do.”

Without even glancing at each other, we thought we couldn’t press him any further. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then?” he said to me. “Of course,” I replied. He said to Margaret: “It was very nice of you to come,” and kissed her.

When we were alone in the booking hall — the smell of damp wood and train smoke so familiar to me, but that evening bringing back neither homesickness nor meaning — Margaret said: “That must be the worst of it over, mustn’t it?”

Her eyes were sharp with pain. All I could say was that I didn’t know.

Down in the refreshment room, gazing at me across the marble table, she was saying that she was glad I was staying with the Gearys. That had happened because Vicky and her father had by this time left the Residence. Margaret had spent the previous night with me at the Gearys’ house; she had liked them and trusted them more than she did usually at first sight. She wasn’t being entirely protective; she would have welcomed their good nature for herself as well as for me; she had been appalled by that day in the court. Before she went through it, she had imagined what it would be like. She had believed that she would be stronger than I was. Now she didn’t want (and this was true of the reporters and police officers, more used to the horrors of fact than the rest of us) to be alone.

We were sitting there fidgeting with the glasses on the table, as we might have been in a love affair that was going wrong, articulateness deserting us, pauses between the words.

She said: “Could we have taken it?”

After a gap, I said: “I’ve told you, sometimes I am afraid that one can take anything.”

“I wasn’t thinking only of the little boy.”

I nodded.

“I was thinking of the parents. If it had been ours—”

I didn’t need to reply.

In time, she went on: “And I was thinking of the parents of the others. The ones who did it. If they had been ours—”

Slowly I said: “Perhaps there, life’s a bit more merciful. Somehow one might cover it up or make excuses—”

“Do you really believe that?”

When the London train drew in, she clung to me on the platform until the whistle shrilled.

The Gearys’ house was right on the outskirts of the town, in a district which had been open fields when I was a boy. Small gardens lay in front of the neat semi-detached pairs on both sides of the road: junior managers lived there, as well as modest professional men like Denis Geary. He and his wife were waiting for me in their sitting-room, bright, well-kept, reproductions of Vermeer and Van Gogh on the walls, on the mantelpiece photographs of their children, groups of the family on holidays abroad.