Death Turns the Tables_aka The Seat of the Scornful Read online

  I

  “Members of the jury, have you agreed upon a verdict?”

  “We have.”

  “Do you find the prisoner, John Edward Lypiatt, guilty or not guilty of murder?”

  “Guilty.”

  “You say that he is guilty, and that is the verdict of you all?”

  “It is. With,” the foreman added, gulping hastily, “a strong recommendation of mercy.”

  The courtroom stirred. There had been a faint gasp at the verdict, followed by dead silence: the recommendation was too thin and slender for a cheer. Yet the wretch in the dock did not seem to think so. For the first time in that trial, an edge of hope appeared in his face. His numb eyes looked at the jury, as though he expected them to say something else.

  The Clerk of Arraigns made a note of the recommendation and cleared his throat.

  “John Edward Lypiatt, you have pleaded not guilty to murder, and put yourself upon your country. That country has now found you guilty. Have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be pronounced on you according to the law?”

  The prisoner stared back dully, as though startled. He opened and shut his mouth.

  The Clerk of Arraigns waited.

  “I done wrong,” said the prisoner humbly. “I know I done wrong.”

  Then a frenzied look appeared in the smeared eyes.

  “But you, sir,” he appealed to the judge. “And you, sir,” he appealed to the Clerk of Arraigns: who, either out of stoicism or embarrassment, looked away. “I done it because I loved her. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. When I come home and seen that fellow’d been there, and she laughed and admitted it, I just couldn’t stand it.”

  He swallowed hard.

  “I hit her. I know I hit her. I don’t rightly know what I done. And then there she was lying on the floor, and the kettle boiling on the fire as though nothing had happened. But I didn’t mean to do it. I loved her.”

  Not a muscle moved in Mr. Justice Ireton’s face.

  “Is that all you have to say?” asked the judge.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mr. Justice Ireton removed his spectacles, slowly disengaging them from one ear under his tie wig, and folded them up. He put them carefully on the desk in front of him. Then he interlaced his small plump fingers, without removing those placid but terrifying eyes from the prisoner.

  He was a small man, plump rather than fat. Nobody would have guessed that under his wig he had thin ginger hair parted in the middle; or that his fingers were cramped to agony with note taking; or that under his red robe, slashed with black he was hot and weary at the end of the Westshire spring assizes. His clerk approached from one side, carrying the square of black silk that represented the black cape, and draped it point downward over his wig. The chaplain stood up on the other side.

  Mr. Justice Ireton’s voice was soft, but as detached and impersonal as death or fate.

  “John Edward Lypiatt,” he said, “the jury have found you guilty of the brutal murder of your wife.” He drew the air through his nostrils, slowly.

  “In an attempt to justify yourself, you have pleaded that you acted in an uncontrollable fit of passion. That is no concern of ours. The law recognizes no mitigation there except under such circumstances as you acknowledge were not present in your case. I cannot see, any more than the jury, that your counsel’s plea for a verdict of manslaughter was for a moment valid.”

  He paused, during a bursting hush.

  Counsel for the defense—Mr. Frederick Barlow, K.C. —sat motionless, his head down, and twiddled with a pencil. In counsels’ benches behind, one of his fellow silks looked at another, and significantly turned down his thumb.

  “The fact remains that, in your right senses and knowing what you were doing, you beat your wife to death. The jury have recommended you to mercy. That recommendation will be considered in the proper quarter. But I must warn you not to expect too much from it.

  “There remains only for me to pass upon you the sentence prescribed by law. Which is: that you be taken hence to the place whence you came, and thence to the place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy on your soul.”

  “Amen,” said the chaplain.

  The befuddled look had not left the prisoner’s eyes. Suddenly he seemed to go frantic.

  “It ain’t true,” he said. “I never meant to hurt her! I never did! Oh, my God, I wouldn’t have hurt Polly.”

  Mr. Justice Ireton looked at him steadily.

  “You’re guilty and you know it,” he said flatly. “Remove the prisoner.”

  At the back of the small and overcrowded assize court, a girl in a light summer dress got up from among the spectators, and began to edge her way out. She felt that she could not stand the smell of the place any longer. She tripped over large boots; she felt the heavy breathing of fascinated but uncomfortable spectators.

  Her companion, a thick-set, much too well-dressed young man, first looked puzzled and then followed her. An empty bag of crisps, which somebody had discarded, crunched under her foot. Before she reached the glass doors leading out into the hall of the session house, Miss Constance Ireton heard a stream of whispered comments.

  “ ’Ardly seems ’uman, do ’e?” whispered a voice.

  “Who?”

  “The judge.”

  “Him?” said a woman’s voice, with satisfaction. “He knows a thing or two, he does. He can see straight through ’em! And if they’re guilty—well!”

  “Ah,” said the first voice, conceding the point and closing the discussion, “there’s got to be law.”

  The hall outside was crowded. Constance Ireton went down a short passage, and out into a little garden tucked between the gray stone back of the sessions house on one side and the gray stone back of a church on the other. Though it was only the end of April, spring with the warmth of summer kindled the clouds over the little West Country town.

  Constance Ireton sat down on a bench in the center of the garden, near a chipped and blackened stone statue of a man in a periwig. Constance was just twenty-one. She was a pretty and fresh-colored blonde, who affected a desperately sophisticated style of make-up and hair dressing. But she could not, except among her friends in London, affect the same desperately sophisticated style of speech. Her eyes—a surprising brown, with dark eyebrows, against the fair skin and fair hair—wandered round the garden.

  “I used to play here,” she said, “when I was a little girl.”

  Her companion ignored this.

  “So that’s your father,” he observed, jerking his head toward the sessions house.

  “Yes.”

  “Bit of a tough egg, isn’t he?”

  “No, he isn’t,” said the girl rather sharply. “That is—oh, I don’t know what he’s like, really! I never did.”

  “Touchy?”

  “Yes, sometimes. But I never knew him to lose his temper. I doubt if he could. He never says very much. And … I say, Tony.”

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve made a mistake,” said Constance, scuffling the toe of her slipper round in the gravel path, and studying it. “We can’t possibly see him today. I forgot that this was the last day of assizes. There are all sorts of ceremonies and processions and things; and he has a traditional drink with his clerk, and—and—anyway, we can’t. We’d better go back to Jane’s party. Then tomorrow we can go to ‘The Dunes’ and see him.”

  Her companion smiled slightly. “Not keen on facing the music, my darling?”

  He stretched out his hand and walked his fingers along her shoulder. He was one of those
self-consciously virile types which are associated with the Southern European; the sort of man who, as Jane Tennant once put it, always makes a woman feel that he is breathing down the back of her neck.

  If he had not borne the English name of Anthony Morell, you would have taken him for an Italian. He had an olive complexion, very strong white teeth, prominent moving eyes under strongly furred eyebrows, and heavy hair which reflected back the sun. His smile was charming, and his manners languid. It was also a self-consciously intellectual face, but with a good deal of tenacity in it as well.

  “Not keen on facing the music?” he repeated.

  “It’s not that!”

  “Sure, my darling?”

  “Don’t you see? Today he’s simply surrounded by people! But tomorrow he’s going down to that bungalow he’s just bought at Horseshoe Bay. There won’t be anybody else there except the woman who ‘does’ for him. Wouldn’t that be a much better time to approach him?”

  “I’m beginning to think,” said Mr. Morell, “that you don’t love me.”

  Her face lit up. “Oh, Tony, you know that’s not true!”

  Mr. Morell took her hands. “I love you.” he said. It was impossible to doubt the raw sincerity of his manner. He was so earnest that he almost snorted. “I want to kiss your hands and your eyes and your throat and your mouth. I could go down on my knees to you, here and now.”

  “Tony, don’t!—for heaven’s sake!—no … !”

  Constance would not have believed that she could have felt so powerfully embarrassed.

  In London, in Chelsea or Bloomsbury, this had seemed all right. Here, in the little garden behind the sessions house, it seemed almost grotesque. It was as though a large dog had put its paws on her shoulders and begun to lick her face. She loved Tony Morell; but she felt obscurely that there was a time and a place for everything. And Morell, with his quick intuition, saw it. He sat back, smiling slightly.

  “More repressions, my darling?”

  “You don’t think I’m repressed? Do you?”

  “Very much so,” said her companion, with mock solemnity. “But we can change all that. In the meantime, I feel a little offended that you shouldn’t want to present me to your father.”

  “It isn’t that. But I do feel—” she hesitated— “that he ought to have some warning. As a matter of fact—” again she hesitated— “I’ve sort of intimated to a friend of mine that he ought to—sort of break the news, you see? Before we get there.”

  Mr. Morell’s eyebrows drew together.

  “Oh? Which friend?”

  “Fred Barlow.”

  Tony Morell reached into his waistcoat pocket, and fished out a pocket piece, or mascot, which he had a habit of tossing up and catching when he was preoccupied or thinking. It was a bullet, a small revolver bullet. He said it had an interesting history, though Constance was not sure how a bullet could have an interesting history before it had been fired. He tossed it into the air, and caught it with a flat smack against his palm. He tossed it up and caught it again.

  “Barlow,” he repeated, turning his eyes sideways. “Isn’t that the fellow who was in court? The fellow who defended that man your father just sentenced to death? The fellow your father wants you to marry?”

  To her surprise, Constance saw that his face was suddenly white with what she knew must be jealousy. She thrilled to it, with unholy pleasure; but she hastened to correct him.

  “Tony dear, for the hundredth time I tell you there’s nothing in it! I’ve never cared two pins for Freddie Barlow, and he knows it. I practically grew up with him! As for what Daddy wants—”

  “Yes?”

  “He wants what I want. Or at least I hope so.” The brown eyes were uncertain. “Listen, dear. I wrote Fred a note. Usually, when a trial’s over, the barristers all go into a place like a club locker room, and take off those funny collars, and wash their hands, and argue. But I asked Fred to come straight out here as soon as he could get away. I said I had something terribly important to tell him.” Her voice grew urgent and pleading. “Tony, he’s coming now! You will be nice to him, won’t you?”

  Once more Tony Morell tossed the bullet into the air, caught it, and replaced it in his pocket. He glanced along the gravel path, where a figure in wig and gown was bearing down on them.

  In person Frederick Barlow was long and lean, with a permanently satiric expression which indicated that he watched the world and discovered that it lacked much. In later years —if, for instance, he did not find the right sort of wife—this quality would turn to dry sourness on the bench. For he would probably be raised to the bench, one day.

  His career was a triumph of bitter training over nature. By nature he was easy going: but this, in law, must be crushed out and no nonsense about it. By nature he was a romantic: this must be crushed out even more quickly, unless it can be serviceable in addresses to the jury. He was known as a good businessman, though he hated business more than anything else on earth. To become a K.C. at thirty-three is something of a minor miracle, and perhaps justifies self-discipline carried to the point of a mental hair shirt.

  He came sauntering along the path, his black gown open and his thumbs hooked in his waistcoat pockets. His wig rode high on his head, with an open space above the ears which Constance had always thought rather absurd. His eyes, cat-green, were disconcerting to witnesses. He was smiling.

  “Hello, old girl,” he said. “I thought you were at Jane Tennant’s house party.”

  “We were,” Constance answered rather breathlessly, “but Taunton’s only a few miles from here, so we thought we’d come over and—and see how things were. Fred, this is Tony Morell.”

  Mr. Morell responded handsomely. He got up, wearing his most winning smile, and shook hands with effusive heartiness. But Constance was disturbed.

  “I say, Fred. I’m sorry you lost your case.”

  “That’s all right. Fortunes of war.”

  “I mean, I felt horribly sorry for that poor Lypiatt man. It made me half sick to watch him. Will he really—”

  “Hang?” supplied Barlow. “No. At least, I don’t think so.”

  “But the law—you heard what Daddy said—!”

  Frederick Barlow whistled between his teeth, his expression only half interested. For he was watching Tony Morell.

  “My dear Connie,” he said, “that’s your father’s idea of playing cat and mouse. He doesn’t care twopence about the law. What he is interested in is administering absolute, impartial justice as he sees it.”

  “But I still don’t understand.”

  “Well, Lypiatt committed murder. If I read it rightly, your father doesn’t think, under the circumstances, that Lypiatt ought to hang. On the other hand, he did commit murder and he deserves to be punished. So your respected parent will let him stew in his own juice as long as possible, thinking he’s for the eight o’clock walk and the rope. Then Mr. Justice Ireton will formally approve the recommendation to mercy; and the Home Secretary will change the sentence to imprisonment for life. That’s all.”

  Tony Morell’s expressive face darkened. “Bit like the Inquisition, isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps. I don’t know. Ask the judge.”

  “But has he the right to do a thing like that?” demanded Mr. Morell.

  “Technically, yes.”

  “But morally?”

  “Oh, morally!” said Barlow, with a dry smile and a wave of his hand.

  Constance felt that this interview was not going according to plan; that there were undercurrents she did not quite understand. She had an uneasy feeling that Fred Barlow half suspected what she was going to say. So she took the plunge.

  “I’m glad to hear that. I mean, it would be a kind of bad omen, or leave a kind of bad taste, if something like that happened today. I’m terribly happy, Fred. Tony and I are engaged to be married.”

  This time Barlow thrust his hands into his trousers pockets. In spite of himself the blood rushed up under his eyes; he seemed to hate th
is involuntary outward sign more than anything else. He hunched his shoulders under the black gown, looked at the ground, and teetered on his heels as though reflecting.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “Does the old man know?”

  “No. We came up today to tell him, but you know how it is on the last day of assizes. He’ll be going down to the seaside tonight, and we can see him there. But, Fred. You’re going down to your cottage tonight, aren’t you?”

  “So you want me to break the news to him. Is that it?”

  “Well, just sort of hint at it. Please, Fred! You will, won’t you?”

  “No,” said Barlow after more reflection.

  “You won’t? But why not?”

  Barlow grinned at her. Taking hold of the lapels of his gown as though he were addressing a jury, he put his head on one side and spoke mildly.

  “For about twenty years,” he said, “ever since you were learning to walk and I was a boy of twelve, I’ve fetched and carried for you. I did your sums and your French exercises when you were too lazy to do ’em yourself. Whenever you got into trouble, I squared it. You’re a goodhearted wench, Connie, and your sex appeal is limitless; but you never did have a sense of responsibility. If you’re going to get married, you’ll have to develop one. No. This is one piece of dirty work you must handle for yourself. And now you’ll have to excuse me. I must get back to my client.”

  The girl sprang to her feet.

  “You just don’t care, do you?” she cried.

  “Care?”

  “You and Jane Tennant—” She checked herself. Then her voice poured with scorn. “And you’re afraid of him too, like everybody else!”

  Barlow did not answer. He directed toward Tony Morell something which was between a nod and a formal bow. Turning round, he walked back up the path at an unhurried pace. His gown billowed about him. Even the tail of his wig seemed eloquent.

  Mr. Morell, who seemed to be darkly fuming over another matter, broke off and smiled at Constance.

  “Never mind, my darling,” he consoled her. “It’s hardly his affair, is it? I can handle the matter, you know.” The white teeth flashed.

  “But, Tony. After all, you have got a dreadfully bad record, haven’t you? In other people’s eyes, I mean?”