The Complete Short Stories

  I thought of all the people who had slept in this room and others who had been within easy access of it. Some dozens of friends over the years. Who would have an interest in those meaningless photographs? Sometimes, because I am a writer, journalists have been known to snaffle a photograph of myself without permission, but these old Victorian and Edwardian pictures, without even artistic merit …?

  I concentrated on the bundle of photographs that were left to me. They weren’t a bad selection, enough to illustrate my long-ago origins and in some cases my memories. I gave them to Joe and put away the rest. I had other things to think of.

  Damian de Dogherty — you mention Damian de Dogherty — Oh, my God, I haven’t thought of him for five years. Before that he saw to it that I thought of him every month, if not every day. I lived in Paris at the time.

  According to his spin, or rather, one of his spins, the family were Huguenots originating from Ireland, taking refuge in France; members of the family were later in the service of Maria Theresa of Austria who conferred on them a princedom. Being modest people they accepted to be merely barons and he, the last survivor of the family, was Baron Damian de Dogherty. Damian was, I must say, a lot of fun. That is, he was fun at the dinner table and of diminishing fun elsewhere. He was a positive bore on the beach where he would leave whatever companion he was with (he was two ways) and take his good slinky body after strange gods such as arose from the glittering sea.

  One of Damian’s many curious characteristics was his habit of suddenly falling asleep. I believe it is called narcolepsy. It might be at a quiet meeting of friends sitting round a table drinking in a mild way, it might be in a library while he was taking notes from a book (he loved to study), or sitting beside you on a sofa. Suddenly, he would be gone into sleep. It was quite a healthy sleep, and eventually his friends gave up being alarmed. I always, vaguely in my mind, explained this trait as a reaction to reality; all in a moment, I felt, something would cause him to face an unacceptable truth, and he just tuned out. I still think I was right, there. His narcosis was partly, at least, psychological.

  In my early acquaintance with Damian I took his story at its charming face value. I addressed him on the envelopes of my letters as Baron de Dogherty, strange as it sounded. His name was not to be found in any of the reference books for the titles and old families of Europe, although he claimed that it was to be found somewhere. This information, unsought, went unchecked so far as I was concerned. I had other things to do. According to those who had known him some years before, he had been married to a rich Peruvian girl. They had gone their separate ways. It was said she was a talented photographer, still practising in Paris. I took in this fact vaguely; only afterwards did I have some reason to bring it to mind.

  I tried to get to his real personality but after a while I realized that there was none. He was, in fact, pure fake.

  To a considerable extent I think Damian believed his own stories. He was trying to write an autobiography, for which reason, I think, he rang me or dropped in frequently.

  ‘I’ve come to the bit when my aunt, la Comtesse Clémentine de Vevey came to visit me at school in Switzerland.’

  ‘I believe you went to school in Salt Lake City,’ I said, having been so informed by one of his schoolmates.

  ‘Oh, that was earlier.’

  In my role of his literary adviser I suggested that he should turn his autobiography into a novel. He adopted this suggestion.

  Another strange fact: everybody liked to be with Damian while he was alive; he was greatly sought after for weekends, dinner parties and simple picnics in the country; however, in spite of his decided popularity, when he died he was not mourned in any sort of proportion to the force of his attractiveness in life. He was not grieved over at all. He was here, he made us smile, nobody believed a word he said, then he was gone.

  Shortly after his death I was in a bookshop in Ghent, rummaging through some old prints. I came across a pile of photographs, all in quite ornate frames. People would buy these, the owner was explaining to me, precisely for the frames. ‘But personally,’ he said, ‘I also find the photographs very attractive, very nostalgic.’

  I found myself looking at my hard-working grandmother, my great-aunts Nancy and Sally. There was Mary-Ann. And Sarah Rowbottom, stout and bold. And Gladys with a regal sash across her bosom.

  But these were not the original faded sepia images. They were blacker and whiter, with an attempt at a sort of golden-brown haze.

  ‘Where did these come from?’ I said.

  ‘I bought them in England,’ said the owner. ‘They were in a house sale.’

  There was something wrong with my grandmother. My God, she was wearing a tiara and round her neck was the unmistakable Order of the Golden Fleece, an ornate necklace with a ram’s skin hanging from it. The same sort of thing with my great-aunt Nancy. Gone was her ebony locket and in place was a medal that was later identified as the Order of the Black Eagle, a Prussian order exclusive to royal families. My humble relatives, one by one, had been exalted with Orders and Garters, ropes of pearls (my grandmother Henrietta had seven strands), bejewelled tiaras. My great-uncle Jim had the Manchurian Order of the Dragon on his breast.

  ‘Who were these people?’ I inquired.

  ‘Oh they are the noble relations of the late Baron de Dogherty,’ said the owner. ‘These photographs were on the walls of his study. No great interest except for the frames. He was very well connected, of course, so perhaps historians …’

  I bought the pictures without the frames for a price which was too high, although, according to the owner, it was too low; the usual thing.

  On examination by a photographic expert, and comparison with the photos that had not been stolen, it was plain they had been re-photographed with those fake ensignia, about which Damian had been a real expert, tricked in. He had also learned something from his marriage to that Peruvian photographer; it had not been a total loss. But this was what he had lived for: the Order of Henry the Lion, the Order of the Starry Cross, even the Order of the Red Flag …

  I love these fake pictures, all of them. But my favourite is that of my mother’s cousin, slim Mrs Henderson, in profile, stooping, not to examine her sewing machine, but to enter her superimposed Rolls. And standing by the door of the car is the superimposed chauffeur, her dream of a lifetime come true.

  The Hanging Judge

  ‘The passing of sentence,’ wrote one of the newspapers, ‘obviously tried the elderly judge. In fact, he looked as if he had seen a ghost.’ This was not the only comment that drew attention to Sir Sullivan Stanley’s expression under his wig and that deadly black cap required by British law at the time. It was the autumn following the lovely summer of 1947. The yellow and brown leaves scuttled merrily along the paths in the park.

  It had been Justice Stanley’s lot to condemn to death several men in the course of his career — no women, incidentally, but that was due to the extreme rarity of women murderers. Certainly, no one would have suggested that Sullivan Stanley would hesitate in the case of a woman to pronounce the words, like a tolling bell, ‘that you be taken from this place … and that you be there hanged by the neck until you be dead’. (And, almost as an afterthought, ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul.’)

  The man in the dock was in his thirties, good-looking, as respectable a person in appearance as might be found briskly crossing the street outside the Old Bailey where the trial was taking place. He was George Forrester, perpetrator of what were known to the radio-listening and newspaper-reading public of those days as ‘the mud-river murders’.

  Sir Sullivan Stanley’s facial expression throughout the trial had been no different from his expression at any other time or in any other trial. He invariably gave the impression that he was irritated by the accused —especially in one notable case where a man had pleaded guilty and refused to be persuaded by his own counsel or anybody else that ‘guilty’ and ‘not guilty’ were mere technicalities, that in fact to plead guilty
dispensed more or less with the trial. In no previous case, then, had the press remarked on this expression. Sir Sullivan had loose, spaniel-like jowls and looked the age he was and as annoyed as he was. But ‘something seemed to come over the Justice,’ wrote another reporter. ‘He was plainly shaken, not so much when he heard the foreman of the jury pronounce the word “guilty” as when he put on the black cap which had been lying before him. Can it be possible,’ speculated this reporter, ‘that Judge Stanley is beginning to doubt the wisdom of capital punishment?’

  Sullivan Stanley was not beginning to doubt anything of the kind. The reason for the peculiar expression on his face as he passed judgment on that autumn afternoon in 1947 was that, for the first time in some years, he had an erection as he spoke; he had an involuntary orgasm.

  It was said that a man who was hanged automatically had an erection at the moment of the drop. Justice Stanley pondered this piece of information. He wondered if it was true. However that might be, he could find no connection with his own experience at passing sentence. But whenever, throughout the months and years to come, he thought about this case, he felt an inexplicable excitement.

  The murderer, George Forrester, had stayed, as everyone knew, at the Rosemary Lawns Hotel in north London. It was there he had met the last of his victims, and the discovery of her body and the clues he furnished led to the other bodies. During the course of the trial, Justice Stanley had by way of a working scruple deliberately gone to look at the hotel from the outside. It was small, private, moderately priced, refined, and did not seem to deserve the two policemen who stood outside the entrance during the trial to keep the press and other intrusive elements from bothering those few remaining guests who had not packed up and fled as soon as the mud-river murder case hit the headlines.

  In court, the manager gave evidence. A man of good presence, aged thirty-five, direct and frank, he impressed Justice Stanley in inverse proportion to the contempt the judge felt for George Forrester, the man at the bar. Justice Stanley usually despised the accused on some account or other quite distinct from the facts of the case. This time, it was the bright brown, almost orange, Harris tweed coat that the prisoner wore, in addition to his rusty-brown little moustache.

  In 1947 George Forrester managed to murder three women in one year. Before that, he had no criminal record whatsoever. He was a commercial traveller in fishing tackle and gear, and apparently, according to his frightened and helpless wife, was in the habit of going off fishing in rivers throughout the country, wherever he happened to be at the end of a working week. His victims, three in all, were discovered shot in the head among reedy marshes where he had been seen wearing waders, plying his rod.

  The three victims had in common that they were large, overweight women, widowed and middle-aged. George Forrester met them all in medium-priced genteel hotels where the guests had a fixed arrangement. His object was to rob the women of their jewellery and the contents of their handbags, and this he did in all three cases. The last case, that of Mrs Emily Crathie, was the one for which he was tried before Justice Stanley. An interesting feature of the case was that George Forrester claimed to have had sex with Mrs Crathie before bringing her to her muddy death among the reeds, although the forensic evidence argued against any sexual activity.

  George Forrester admitted that he had offered Mrs Crathie ‘a day out fishing’. She occupied the next table to his at the Rosemary Lawns Hotel. This had been noticed by the manager and his wife and also by some of the other permanent clients. Her sudden absence was also noticed and, after a few days, reported to the police, no relatives being known.

  In Mrs Crathie’s case the killer had been obliged to transport her body, minus her considerable diamond solitaire ring and other possessions, from his car to a part of a river in Norfolk where the reeds and banks were thicker than at the equally tranquil spot where he had killed her by pistol shot in the back of the head. The other two women had been killed and concealed in much the same way, but in the case of Mrs Crathie it was a mystery, never to be explained by the investigative brains of England, how George Forrester, a slight man, had managed to convey massive Mrs Crathie from her death place to his car and from his car to her grave among the reeds.

  The hue and cry for the three missing women was afoot when George presented himself at a Norfolk police station with a mud-stained size-42 full bra, claiming he had fished it up when trying out his tackle on some water stretch of the county. The police interrogated George Forrester who, according to psychological explanations, had ‘wanted’ to be caught and, in fact, thus was caught. The specimen of bra had been purchased by George himself from a nearby ladies’ garments store, and, curiously, he had got Mrs Crathie’s measurement right.

  Justice Stanley listened to all this, back in 1947, summed up, took the verdict, passed judgment — death by hanging — and experienced an inexplicable orgasm. He remembered it frequently from that day onwards.

  Sir Sullivan Stanley (he had been knighted) was in his mid-fifties at the time of George Forrester’s trial. The death penalty in England was afterwards abolished, and so there was no further call for Sir Sullivan to experience another such orgasm. Lady Stanley was some years older than her husband, just past her sixties. She was known everywhere as a good lady full of charitable activities such as prison visiting, the governing of schools, the organizing of soup kitchens. She had borne one son, now a lawyer in private practice. Sex in her life was a thing of the past; in fact, her recurring bouts of rheumatism prevented her from sharing anyone’s bed.

  At that time, Sir Sullivan frequented a lady who was known to the legal profession and who occasionally kept an afternoon for him. Lady Stanley suspected nothing of her existence, nor did she need to know. The affair, if it could be called that, between Sir Sullivan and Mary Spike, the lady in question, was something of an animated cartoon. She induced a mild sensation in the Justice; nothing more. Lady Stanley did not think for a moment that her husband could have another woman. She felt he was too pompous to take off his trousers in another person’s house, and in this she was almost right.

  After the death of Lady Stanley, Sir Sullivan, approaching his seventies, now visited Mary Spike occasionally, but just for the visit. The unusual circumstances of his sexual experience on the sentencing of George Forrester had really taken him by surprise.

  He often thought back on the day when he had that orgasm in court. What happened to that gratuitous orgasm? Where was it now? It was like a butterfly fluttering away into the summer, always eluding the net. It even occurred to him that he might achieve one orgasm more before he died, by hanging himself. But it was problematic whether the phenomenon of an erection would amount to the sensation of an orgasm in a man whose neck was on the point of breaking, if not already broken. Besides, the secretly distraught judge mused, a suicide would look so bad in the Times obituary. Not to be thought of.

  When Sir Sullivan retired he stayed for a while with his son in Hampstead. But this didn’t work well. He decided to go and live in a residential hotel, and it was with great excitement that he discovered that the Rosemary Lawns Hotel was still functioning. Memories of the trial of George Forrester came back to him ever more vividly.

  The Rosemary Lawns Hotel sparkled with new paint the day the judge went to seek a room there. The ‘Lawns’ referred evidently to a tennis court, adjacent to the hotel, and an equal-sized stretch of flower-bordered lawn on the other side of a gravel path. It was early autumn, and the leaves scuffled along the tree-lined street. Some schoolgirls were chirpily playing tennis.

  Sir Sullivan asked for the manager. A short figure came out of the back office. His white hair and slightly thickened appearance at first, and only for a moment, concealed the fact that this was probably the very man, the actual proprietor of the hotel, who had given evidence in court all those years ago.

  ‘Are you Mr Roger Cook?’ inquired the Justice.

  ‘Yes, indeed, sir.’

  ‘Good afternoon. I’m Sir Sullivan
Stanley.’

  ‘The Judge! Sir Sullivan, you don’t show your years.

  ‘Yes, I’m the Judge himself. I have been here before, you know. At the time of the trial, when I came to case the joint, if I may use a vulgarism.

  ‘Sir Sullivan,’ said Roger Cook, ‘it was a very hard time for us. All the permanent clients left. We thought of changing the name of the hotel, but we sat it out. We were especially grateful to you for that reference to Rosemary Lawns Hotel in your summing up.’

  ‘What was that?’ said Sir Sullivan.

  ‘You said we were a perfectly respectable place, clean and cosy. That it was no reflection on the establishment that the accused and his unfortunate victim happened to have taken up their abode at Rosemary Lawns. I recall the very words,’ said Roger Cook. ‘We always quoted them to the press when we gave interviews in those tragic weeks.’

  ‘Well, I congratulate you on the appearance of the place. I am glad to see the tennis court is being used.’

  ‘We rent out the court on certain days to a private school,’ said Roger Cook.

  ‘Well, I’ll be direct,’ said Sir Sullivan Stanley. ‘I’m looking for a comfortable place for my retirement. A fairly large room, bath and television. And, of course, a dining-room. If you don’t have the dining-room any more, I’m afraid it’s no good. To me, the dining-room is essential.’

  ‘But of course, Sir Sullivan, we have the same dining-room. Nothing’s changed except the decoration. Come with me. It would be an honour to have you here.’

  He led the way to the dining-room, where the tables were laid for dinner with pink cloths. On one table stood a bottle of Milk of Magnesia, but that alone was not enough evidence against the quality of the dinner. Roger Cook showed Sir Sullivan the menu: mulligatawny soup followed by breast of lamb, peas and potatoes. Cheese (if required — extra charge according to choice), and strawberry or vanilla ice cream. Coffee or decaffeinated, as desired. Tea on request.