Ordeal by Innocence

‘Yes, I know.’ She spoke again into the receiver. ‘In a way I suppose it’s what you’d call good news, Donald, but–it’s rather upsetting. I’d rather not talk about it over the telephone…No, no, don’t come here…Please not. Not this evening. Tomorrow some time. It’s about–Jacko. Yes–yes–my brother–it’s just that we’ve found out that he didn’t kill my mother after all…But please don’t say anything, Donald, or talk to anyone. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow…No, Donald, no…I just can’t see anyone this evening–not even you. Please. And don’t say anything.’ She put down the receiver, and motioned to Gwenda to take over.

Gwenda asked for a Drymouth number. Leo said gently:

‘Why don’t you go to the lecture with Donald, Hester? It will take your mind off things.’

‘I don’t want to, Father. I couldn’t.’

Leo said:

‘You spoke–you gave him the impression that it wasn’t good news. But you know, Hester, that’s not so. We were startled. But we’re all very happy about it–very glad…What else could we be?’

‘That’s what we’re going to say, is it?’ said Hester.

Leo said warningly:

‘My dear child–’

‘But it’s not true, is it?’ said Hester. ‘It’s not good news. It’s just terribly upsetting.’

Gwenda said:

‘Micky’s on the line.’

Again Leo came and took the receiver from her. He spoke to his son very much as he had spoken to his daughter. But his news was received rather differently from the way it had been received by Mary Durrant. Here there was no protest, surprise or disbelief. Instead there was quick acceptance.

‘What the hell!’ said Micky’s voice. ‘After all this time? The missing witness! Well, well, Jacko’s luck was out that night.’

Leo spoke again. Micky listened.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I agree with you. We’d better get together as quickly as possible, and get Marshall to advise us, too.’ He gave a sudden quick laugh, the laugh that Leo remembered so well from the small boy who had played in the garden outside the window. ‘What’s the betting?’ he said. ‘Which of us did it?’

Leo dropped the receiver down and left the telephone abruptly.

‘What did he say?’ Gwenda asked.

Leo told her.

‘It seems to me a silly sort of joke to make,’ said Gwenda.

Leo shot a quick glance at her. ‘Perhaps,’ he said gently, ‘it wasn’t altogether a joke.’

II

Mary Durrant crossed the room and picked up some fallen petals from a vase of chrysanthemums. She put them carefully into the waste-paper basket. She was a tall, serene-looking young woman of twenty-seven who, although her face was unlined, yet looked older than her years, probably from a sedate maturity that seemed part of her make-up. She had good looks, without a trace of glamour. Regular features, a good skin, eyes of a vivid blue, and fair hair combed off her face and arranged in a large bun at the back of her neck; a style which at the moment happened to be fashionable although that was not her reason for wearing it so. She was a woman who always kept to her own style. Her appearance was like her house; neat, well kept. Any kind of dust or disorder worried her.

The man in the invalid chair watching her as she put the fallen petals carefully away, smiled a slightly twisted smile.

‘Same tidy creature,’ he said. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’ He laughed, with a faint malicious note in the laugh. But Mary Durrant was quite undisturbed.

‘I do like things to be tidy,’ she agreed. ‘You know, Phil, you wouldn’t like it yourself if the house was like a shambles.’

Her husband said with a faint trace of bitterness:

‘Well, at any rate I haven’t got the chance of making it into one.’

Soon after their marriage, Philip Durrant had fallen a victim to polio of the paralytic type. To Mary, who adored him, he had become her child as well as her husband. He himself felt at times slightly embarrassed by her possessive love. His wife had not got the imagination to understand that her pleasure in his dependence upon her sometimes irked him.

He went on now rather quickly, as though fearing some word of commiseration or sympathy from her.

‘I must say your father’s news beggars description! After all this time! How can you be so calm about it?’

‘I suppose I can hardly take it in…It’s so extraordinary. At first I simply couldn’t believe what father was saying. If it had been Hester, now, I should have thought she’d imagined the whole thing. You know what Hester’s like.’

Philip Durrant’s face lost a little of its bitterness. He said softly:

‘A vehement passionate creature, setting out in life to look for trouble and certain to find it.’

Mary waved away the analysis. Other people’s characters did not interest her.

She said doubtfully: ‘I suppose it’s true? You don’t think this man may have imagined it all?’

‘The absent-minded scientist? It would be nice to think so,’ said Philip, ‘but it seems that Andrew Marshall has taken the matter seriously. And Marshall, Marshall & Marshall are a very hard-headed legal proposition, let me tell you.’

Mary Durrant said, frowning: ‘What will it actually mean, Phil?’

Philip said: ‘It means that Jacko will be completely exonerated. That is, if the authorities are satisfied–and I gather that there is going to be no question of anything else.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Mary, with a slight sigh, ‘I suppose it’s all very nice.’

Philip Durrant laughed again, the same twisted, rather bitter laughter.

‘Polly!’ he said, ‘you’ll be the death of me.’

Only her husband had ever called Mary Durrant Polly. It was a name ludicrously inappropriate to her statuesque appearance. She looked at Philip in faint surprise.

‘I don’t see what I’ve said to amuse you so much.’

‘You were so gracious about it!’ said Philip. ‘Like Lady Somebody at the Sale of Work praising the Village Institute’s handiwork.’

Mary said, puzzled: ‘But it is very nice! You can’t pretend it’s been satisfactory to have had a murderer in the family.’

‘Not really in the family.’

‘Well, it’s practically the same thing. I mean, it was all very worrying, and made one most uncomfortable. Everybody was so agog and curious. I hated it all.’

‘You took it very well,’ said Philip. ‘Froze them with that icy blue gaze of yours. Made them pipe down and look ashamed of themselves. It’s wonderful the way you manage never to show emotion.’

‘I disliked it all very much. It was all most unpleasant,’ said Mary Durrant, ‘but at any rate he died and it was over. And now–now, I suppose, it will all be raked up again. So tiresome.’

‘Yes,’ said Philip Durrant thoughtfully. He shifted his shoulders slightly, a faint expression of pain on his face. His wife came to him quickly.

‘Are you cramped? Wait. Let me just move this cushion. There. That better?’

‘You ought to have been a hospital nurse,’ said Philip.

‘I’ve not the least wish to nurse a lot of people. Only you.’

It was said very simply but there was a depth of feeling behind the bare words.

The telephone rang and Mary went to it.

‘Hallo…yes…speaking…Oh, it’s you…’

She said aside to Philip: ‘It’s Micky.’

‘Yes…yes, we have heard. Father telephoned…Well, of course…Yes…Yes…Philip says if the lawyers are satisfied it must be all right…Really, Micky, I don’t see why you’re so upset…I’m not aware of being particularly dense…Really, Micky, I do think you–Hallo?…Hallo?…’ She frowned angrily. ‘He’s rung off.’ She replaced the receiver. ‘Really, Philip, I can’t understand Micky.’

‘What did he say exactly?’

‘Well, he seems in such a state. He said that I was dense, that I didn’t realize the–the repercussions. Hell to pay! That’s the way he put it. But why? I don’t understand.’

‘Got the wind up, has he?’ said Philip thoughtfully.

‘But why?’

‘Well, he’s right, you know. There will be repercussions.’

Mary looked a little bewildered.

‘You mean that there will be a revival of interest in the case? Of course I’m glad Jacko is cleared, but it will be rather unpleasant if people begin talking about it again.’

‘It’s not just what the neighbours say. There’s more to it than that.’

She looked at him inquiringly.

‘The police are going to be interested, too!’

‘The police?’ Mary spoke sharply. ‘What’s it got to do with them?’

‘My dear girl,’ said Philip. ‘Think.’

Mary came back slowly to sit by him.

‘It’s an unsolved crime again now, you see,’ said Philip.

‘But surely they won’t bother–after all this time?’

‘A very nice bit of wishful thinking,’ said Philip, ‘but fundamentally unsound, I fear.’

‘Surely,’ said Mary, ‘after they’ve been so stupid–making such a bad mistake over Jacko–they won’t want to rake it all up again?’

‘They mayn’t want to–but they’ll probably have to! Duty is duty.’

‘Oh, Philip, I’m sure you’re wrong. There will just be a bit of talk and then it will all die down.’

‘And then our lives will go on happily ever afterwards,’ said Philip in his mocking voice.

‘Why not?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not as simple as that…Your father’s right. We must all get together and have a consultation. Get Marshall down as he said.’

‘You mean–go over to Sunny Point?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, we can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s not practicable. You’re an invalid and–’

‘I’m not an invalid.’ Philip spoke with irritation. ‘I’m quite strong and well. I just happen to have lost the use of my legs. I could go to Timbuctoo with the proper transport laid on.’

‘I’m sure it would be very bad for you to go to Sunny Point. Having all this unpleasant business raked up–’

‘It’s not my mind that’s affected.’

‘–And I don’t see how we can leave the house. There have been so many burglaries lately.’

‘Get someone to sleep in.’

‘It’s all very well to say that–as though it was the easiest thing in the world.’

‘Old Mrs Whatsername can come in every day. Do stop making housewifely objections, Polly. It’s you, really, who doesn’t want to go.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘We won’t be there long,’ said Philip reassuringly. ‘But I think we’ve got to go. This is a time when the family’s got to present a united front to the world. We’ve got to find out exactly how we stand.’

III

At the Hotel in Drymouth, Calgary dined early and went up to his room. He felt profoundly affected by what he had passed through at Sunny Point. He had expected to find his mission painful and it had taken him all his resolution to go through with it. But the whole thing had been painful and upsetting in an entirely different way from the one he had expected. He flung himself down on his bed and lit a cigarette as he went over and over it in his mind.

The clearest picture that came to him was of Hester’s face at that parting moment. Her scornful rejection of his plea for justice! What was it that she had said? ‘It’s not the guilty who matter, it’s the innocent.’ And then: ‘Don’t you see what you’ve done to us all?’ But what had he done? He didn’t understand.

And the others. The woman they called Kirsty (why Kirsty? That was a Scottish name. She wasn’t Scottish–Danish, perhaps, or Norwegian?) Why had she spoken so sternly–so accusingly?

There had been something odd, too, about Leo Argyle–a withdrawal, a watchfulness. No suggestion of the ‘Thank God my son was innocent!’ which surely would have been the natural reaction!

And that girl–the girl who was Leo’s secretary. She had been helpful to him, kindly. But she, too, had reacted in an odd way. He remembered the way she had knelt there by Argyle’s chair. As though–as though–she were sympathizing with him, consoling him. Consoling him for what? That his son was not guilty of murder? And surely–yes, surely–there was more there than a secretary’s feelings–even a secretary of some years’ standing…What was it all about? Why did they–

The telephone on the table by the bed rang. He picked up the receiver.

‘Hallo?’

‘Dr Calgary? There is someone asking for you.’

‘For me?’

He was surprised. As far as he was aware, nobody knew that he was spending the night in Drymouth.

‘Who is it?’

There was a pause. Then the clerk said:

‘It’s Mr Argyle.’

‘Oh. Tell him–’ Arthur Calgary checked himself on the point of saying that he would come down. If for some reason Leo Argyle had followed him to Drymouth and managed to find out where he was staying, then presumably the matter would be embarrassing to discuss in the crowded lounge downstairs.

He said instead:

‘Ask him to come up to my room, will you?’

He rose from where he had been lying and paced up and down until the knock came on the door.

He went across and opened it.

‘Come in, Mr Argyle, I–’

He stopped, taken aback. It was not Leo Argyle. It was a young man in his early twenties, a young man whose dark, handsome face was marred by its expression of bitterness. A reckless, angry, unhappy face.

‘Didn’t expect me,’ said the young man. ‘Expected my–father. I’m Michael Argyle.’

‘Come in.’ Calgary closed the door after his visitor had entered. ‘How did you find out I was here?’ he asked as he offered the boy his cigarette case.

Michael Argyle took one and gave a short unpleasant laugh.

‘That one’s easy! Rang up the principal hotels on the chance you might be staying the night. Hit it the second try.’

‘And why did you want to see me?’

Michael Argyle said slowly:

‘Wanted to see what sort of a chap you were…’ His eyes ran appraisingly over Calgary, noting the slightly stooped shoulders, the greying hair, the thin sensitive face. ‘So you’re one of the chaps who went on the “Hayes Bentley” to the Pole. You don’t look very tough.’

Arthur Calgary smiled faintly.

‘Appearances are sometimes deceptive,’ he said. ‘I was tough enough. It’s not entirely muscular force that’s needed. There are other important qualifications; endurance, patience, technical knowledge.’

‘How old are you, forty-five?’

‘Thirty-eight.’

‘You look more.’

‘Yes–yes, I suppose I do.’ For a moment a feeling of poignant sadness came over him as he confronted the virile youth of the boy facing him.

He asked rather abruptly:

‘Why did you want to see me?’

The other scowled.

‘It’s natural, isn’t it? When I heard about the news you’d brought. The news about my dear brother.’

Calgary did not answer.

Michael Argyle went on:

‘It’s come a bit late for him, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Calgary in a low voice. ‘It is too late for him.’

‘What did you bottle it up for? What’s all this about concussion?’

Patiently Calgary told him. Strangely enough, he felt heartened by the boy’s roughness and rudeness. Here, at any rate, was someone who felt strongly on his brother’s behalf.

‘Gives Jacko an alibi, that’s the point, is it? How do you know the times were as you say they were?’

‘I am quite sure about the times.’ Calgary spoke with firmness.

‘You may have made a mistake. You scientific blokes are apt to be absent-minded sometimes about little things like times and places.’

Calgary showed slight amusement.

‘You have made a picture for yourself of the absent-minded professor of fiction–wearing odd socks, not quite sure what day it is or where he happens to be? My dear young man, technical work needs great precision; exact amounts, times, calculations. I assure you there is no possibility of my having made a mistake. I picked up your brother just before seven and put him down in Drymouth at five minutes after the half hour.’

‘Your watch could have been wrong. Or you went by the clock in your car.’

‘My watch and the clock in the car were exactly synchronized.’

‘Jacko could have led you up the garden path some way. He was full of tricks.’

‘There were no tricks. Why are you so anxious to prove me wrong?’ With some heat, Calgary went on: ‘I expected it might be difficult to convince the authorities that they had convicted a man unjustly. I did not expect to find his own family so hard to convince!’

‘So you’ve found all of us a little difficult to convince?’

‘The reaction seemed a little–unusual.’

Micky eyed him keenly.

‘They didn’t want to believe you?’

‘It–almost seemed like that…’

‘Not only seemed like it. It was. Natural enough, too, if you only think about it.’

‘But why? Why should it be natural? Your mother is killed. Your brother is accused and convicted of the crime. Now it turns out that he was innocent. You should be pleased–thankful. Your own brother.’

Micky said:

‘He wasn’t my brother. And she wasn’t my mother.’

‘What?’

‘Hasn’t anyone told you? We were all adopted. The lot of us. Mary, my eldest “sister”, in New York. The rest of us during the war. My “mother”, as you call her, couldn’t have any children of her own. So she got herself a nice little family by adoption. Mary, myself, Tina, Hester, Jacko. Comfortable, luxurious home and plenty of mother love thrown in! I’d say she forgot we weren’t her own children in the end. But she was out of luck when she picked Jacko to be one of her darling little boys.’

‘I had no idea,’ said Calgary.

‘So don’t pull out the “own mother”, “own brother” stop on me! Jacko was a louse!’

‘But not a murderer,’ said Calgary.

His voice was emphatic. Micky looked at him and nodded.

‘All right. It’s your say so–and you’re sticking to it. Jacko didn’t kill her. Very well then–who did kill her? You haven’t thought about that one, have you? Think about it now. Think about it–and then you’ll begin to see what you’re doing to us all…’

He wheeled round and went abruptly out of the room.

Chapter 4

Calgary said apologetically, ‘It’s very good of you to see me again, Mr Marshall.’

‘Not at all,’ said the lawyer.

‘As you know, I went down to Sunny Point and saw Jack Argyle’s family.’

‘Quite so.’

‘You will have heard by now, I expect, about my visit?’

‘Yes, Dr Calgary, that is correct.’

‘What you may find it difficult to understand is why I have come back here to you again…You see, things didn’t turn out exactly as I thought they would.’

‘No,’ said the lawyer, ‘no, perhaps not.’ His voice was as usual dry and unemotional, yet something in it encouraged Arthur Calgary to continue.

‘I thought, you see,’ went on Calgary, ‘that that would be the end of it. I was prepared for a certain amount of–what shall I say–natural resentment on their part. Although concussion may be termed, I suppose, an Act of God, yet from their viewpoint they could be forgiven for that, as I say. But at the same time I hoped it would be offset by the thankfulness they would feel over the fact that Jack Argyle’s name was cleared. But things didn’t turn out as I anticipated. Not at all.’

‘I see.’

‘Perhaps, Mr Marshall, you anticipated something of what would happen? Your manner, I remember, puzzled me when I was here before. Did you foresee the attitude of mind that I was going to encounter?’

‘You haven’t told me yet, Dr Calgary, what that attitude was.’

Arthur Calgary drew his chair forward. ‘I thought that I was ending something, giving–shall we say–a different end to a chapter already written. But I was made to feel, I was made to see, that instead of ending something I was starting something. Something altogether new. Is that a true statement, do you think, of the position?’

Mr Marshall nodded his head slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it could be put that way. I did think–I admit it–that you were not realizing all the implications. You could not be expected to do so because, naturally, you knew nothing of the background or of the facts except as they were given in the law reports.’

‘No. No, I see that now. Only too clearly.’ His voice rose as he went on excitedly, ‘It wasn’t really relief they felt, it wasn’t thankfulness. It was apprehension. A dread of what might be coming next. Am I right?’

Marshall said cautiously: ‘I should think probably that you are quite right. Mind you, I do not speak of my own knowledge.’

‘And if so,’ went on Calgary, ‘then I no longer feel that I can go back to my work satisfied with having made the only amends that I can make. I’m still involved. I’m responsible for bringing a new factor into various people’s lives. I can’t just wash my hands of it.’

The lawyer cleared his throat. ‘That, perhaps, is a rather fanciful point of view, Dr Calgary.’

‘I don’t think it is–not really. One must take responsibility for one’s actions and not only one’s actions but for the result of one’s actions. Just on two years ago I gave a lift to a young hitch-hiker on the road. When I did that I set in train a certain course of events. I don’t feel that I can disassociate myself from them.’

The lawyer still shook his head.

‘Very well, then,’ said Arthur Calgary impatiently. ‘Call it fanciful if you like. But my feelings, my conscience, are still involved. My only wish was to make amends for something it had been outside my power to prevent. I have not made amends. In some curious way I have made things worse for people who have already suffered. But I still don’t understand clearly why.’

‘No,’ said Marshall slowly, ‘no, you would not see why. For the past eighteen months or so you’ve been out of touch with civilization. You did not read the daily papers, the account of this family that was given in the newspapers. Possibly you would not have read them anyway, but you could not have escaped, I think, hearing about them. The facts are very simple, Dr Calgary. They are not confidential. They were made public at the time. It resolves itself very simply into this. If Jack Argyle did not (and by your account he cannot have), committed the crime, then who did? That brings us back to the circumstances in which the crime was committed. It was committed between the hours of seven and seven-thirty on a November evening in a house where the deceased woman was surrounded by the members of her own family and household. The house was securely locked and shuttered and if anyone entered from outside, then the outsider must have been admitted by Mrs Argyle herself or have entered with their own key. In other words, it must have been someone she knew. It resembles in some ways the conditions of the Borden case in America where Mr Borden and his wife were struck down by blows of an axe on a Sunday morning. Nobody in the house heard anything, nobody was known or seen to approach the house. You can see, Dr Calgary, why the members of the family were, as you put it, disturbed rather than relieved by the news you brought them?’

Calgary said slowly: ‘They’d rather, you mean, that Jack Argyle was guilty?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Marshall. ‘Oh yes, very decidedly so. If I may put it in a somewhat cynical way, Jack Argyle was the perfect answer to the unpleasant fact of murder in the family. He had been a problem child, a delinquent boy, a man of violent temper. Excuses could be and were made for him within the family circle. They could mourn for him, have sympathy with him, declare to themselves, to each other, and to the world that it was not really his fault, that psychologists could explain it all! Yes, very, very convenient.’

‘And now–’ Calgary stopped.

‘And now,’ said Mr Marshall, ‘it is different, of course. Quite different. Almost alarming perhaps.’

Calgary said shrewdly, ‘The news I brought was unwelcome to you, too, wasn’t it?’

‘I must admit that. Yes. Yes, I must admit that I was–upset. A case which was closed satisfactorily–yes, I shall continue to use the word satisfactorily–is now reopened.’

‘Is that official?’ Calgary asked. ‘I mean–from the police point of view, will the case be reopened?’

‘Oh, undoubtedly,’ said Marshall. ‘When Jack Argyle was found guilty on overwhelming evidence–(the jury was only out a quarter of an hour)–that was an end of the matter as far as the police were concerned. But now, with the grant of a free pardon posthumously awarded, the case is opened again.’