The Paying Guests

  Sergeant Heath caught hold of his elbow and yanked him upright – that set him off smirking again. He kept the smirk in place while the clerk asked him to confirm that he was William Spencer Ward, of Victory Buildings, Tower Bridge Road; and when he answered, he did it with a snigger. The naming of the crime with which he was charged produced no response from him at all. Frances had expected him to protest his innocence; all he did was change his pose, shifting his weight from one foot to another and putting his hands in his trouser pockets, chewing more vigorously on his gum. His neck was a child’s neck, she saw then, thin, white, unmuscular. Beneath the padding in the shoulders of his jacket she could make out the lines of his shoulder-blades, sharp as two narrow plates of metal.

  She was struggling to find something about him that she could pity, that she could like. At the same time, it seemed impossible to her that anyone could seriously believe that he had committed a murder: he was so puny, so youthful, so sham. All around the room, though, she saw people looking at him in fascinated horror. The three Barber men were bristling, Leonard’s brother leaning forward, his eyes fixed on the boy in a sort of malevolent challenge.

  The magistrate called for the prosecution to make their case, and Inspector Kemp got to his feet. With his folder of papers under his arm he stepped smartly up to the witness stand, to take a Bible from the clerk and swear his oath on it. He was Detective Inspector Ronald Kemp, he said, of Metropolitan Division P, and he had been leading the inquiry into the murder of Leonard Arthur Barber. He proposed to read to the magistrate a number of witness statements that, in his opinion, would justify the committal to trial of the prisoner Spencer Ward.

  He began with those documents relating to Leonard’s final hours, and to the finding of his body. He read the reports of Constables Hardy and Evans, the first policemen to arrive at the scene. He read the statements given by Lilian, by Frances’s mother and by Frances herself; Frances listened to the last with her gaze lowered, feeling herself grow hot. What a thing to blush about, she thought, with so much else to be ashamed of! But it was odd and uncomfortable to have her words, her lies, read back to her so publicly. It was odd, too, to realise how phlegmatic the inspector’s tone was, and to note how quickly he passed on from her statement, and even from Lilian’s, to those of the spooning couple who’d heard the scuffling in the lane; and then how briskly he moved on again, to what he plainly considered to be the meat of the case. For, once he’d gone through the principal points of the police surgeon’s report, he cleared his throat, took a sip of water, and uncovered the next document in his folder. The statement he was turning to now, he announced, was that of Charles Price Wismuth. It was the second statement that Mr Wismuth had made to the police, replacing an earlier, false statement which Mr Wismuth had since withdrawn.

  Another rustle of anticipation went around the court. People had begun to look slightly glazed at the continuous reading. They had been here for twenty minutes, and the room was growing stuffy; the inspector had told them nothing that they hadn’t seen already in the News of the World. But now they all became more alert. Leonard’s brother drew his challenging gaze away from the boy in the dock, and his father and uncle grew braced. And it was only as she looked from their faces to those of the men seated around them that Frances realised that Charlie himself was not here. He must have been too ashamed to come. Or did the police have him locked up somewhere?

  Christ, what a mess it all was!

  Then Inspector Kemp began to read, and she understood why Charlie had kept away.

  The statement described how, back in the summer, he and Leonard had become acquainted with two women in a Holborn public house. The women were Miss Mabel Grey, commonly known as Billie, and her elder sister Mrs King. ‘“I knew that Mrs King was married,”’ the inspector read out, in his bland, unvarnished way. ‘“She said that she and her husband did not get along; that they had an understanding, that he went his way and she went hers. I did not tell her that I was myself engaged to be married. I did not consider it important. I did hear Mr Barber telling Miss Grey that he was married. I heard him telling her that he and his wife had a similar arrangement to that of Mrs King and her husband. I heard him profess the belief that such an arrangement was a good idea.”’

  Unable to help herself, Frances glanced again at Lilian. She was sitting with her head lowered, blushing slightly, but apart from that her expression was a dead one.

  ‘“Mr Barber and I,”’ the statement ran on, ‘“continued to meet Miss Grey and Mrs King over a period of four months, between June and September this year. We would meet them once or twice a week, generally at public houses or for walks in the Green Park. We several times made them gifts of jewellery, or of items of female clothing.

  ‘“On Saturday the first of July this year Mr Barber and I spent an evening with Miss Grey and Mrs King at the Honey Bee night-club at Peter Street, Soho. Here we were approached in a threatening manner by two men. The men identified themselves as Alfred King, Mrs King’s husband, and Spencer Ward, who claimed to be the fiancé of Miss Grey. I had never heard Miss Grey mention a fiancé previously, but I had the impression that she and Mr Ward were well acquainted. The two men spoke in angry terms to Mr Barber and myself, and an argument ensued, during which Mr Barber and I thought it wisest to leave the Honey Bee. We travelled together to Camberwell Green, where I left Mr Barber to return to his home at Champion Hill, while I continued on to Peckham to visit my fiancée Miss Elizabeth Nixon. I did not see Spencer Ward again that night, but the next time I saw Mr Barber he had an injury to the face, and he informed me that Mr Ward had pursued him to Champion Hill and had there assaulted him. During the assault Mr Ward had warned Mr Barber to keep clear of Miss Grey, or he would be sorry. Mr Ward’s words, as reported to me by Mr Barber, were something like, ‘If you do not stay away from Billie I will do something to make you sorry. In fact, I will knock your bloody head off.’ He may have said bloody, or he may have used a coarser word —”’ Here the inspector paused for a second, as the boy in the dock let out a snort of laughter, ‘“— but he definitely, as Mr Barber related it, threatened to knock his head off.

  ‘“Following this incident I continued to see Mrs King, but less frequently than before. Mr Barber, however, continued to see Miss Grey regularly. On several occasions I was aware that he had represented to his wife that he had made an arrangement to spend an evening with me, when in fact he had arranged to meet Miss Grey, and I know for a fact that the two of them remained on intimate terms. By ‘intimate terms’ I mean that those relations were taking place between them which normally occur between a husband and a wife. I know it because Mr Barber sometimes met Miss Grey privately at my rooms at Tulse Hill, where he left particular traces behind him. I remained uneasy about this, because of the warning given to Mr Barber by Mr Ward. I considered Mr Ward to be a dangerous man.”’

  Another sip of water and a clearing of the throat, another page turned; and the tortuous mincing language ran on.

  ‘“Friday the fifteenth of September this year was one of those evenings which Mr Barber had arranged to spend in the company of Miss Grey, having previously told Mrs Barber that he would be spending it with me. I myself did not see Mr Barber at all that evening, but passed it with Mrs King at the Empress Picture Theatre, Islington. The following day I received a visit at my home from Police Sergeant Heath of P Division, informing me of Mr Barber’s death, and enquiring as to my whereabouts the previous night. I immediately suspected that Mr Barber had been killed by Mr Ward. I did not mention my suspicions to the police because I feared that my own activities with Mrs King would be brought to light, and that her husband would hear of it. I also feared the effect that such a disclosure would have on my fiancée Miss Nixon, on Mr Barber’s wife and on Miss Grey. I knowingly made a false statement to the police in which I said that Mr Barber and I had spent the evening together at public houses in the City, and that I had last seen him at the Blackfriars tram-stop at ten p.m. In the days which fol
lowed I had several opportunities to retract my statement, and I did not do so. This decision is one which I now heartily regret.”’

  Here the inspector had to pause again, in order to rearrange his folder. For a minute there were murmurs, along with the furious whisper of pens on paper as the court recorder made his notes and the newspaper men made theirs.

  Frances sat staring at nothing, trying to weave the grubby threads of Charlie’s statement around her own recollections of the past few months. She thought of all those summer evenings when Leonard had been kept late at work. She remembered occasions when he’d come home yawning in that showy way of his; or other nights when he’d come whistling, then gone springing up the stairs. All those times, when she and Lilian had leapt apart at the sound of his key in the door, he must have just come from his girl, come straight from kissing her to – She bent her head, put a hand to her mouth, seeing clearly, for the first time, the tawdry chain of lies and infidelity that had been in place without her knowledge, a chain with Leonard at its centre, and herself at one end, and – who, precisely, at the other? This boy, this boy in the dock! This boy with his slouch and his smirk and his Dickensian teeth. She gazed across at Lilian’s profile, and for a moment, just a moment, she felt a burst of resentment towards her so violent that it could only be called hatred. How could you do it? she wanted to cry at her. How could you involve me in all this? How could you have brought me to this place, this horrible room, with its beastly people and its revolting peelings-back?

  But the inspector’s voice had started up again; she had to haul her attention back to it. He had begun on his next document – the statement of the girl, Billie Grey, confirming the essentials of Charlie’s account. Yes, she had seen Mr Barber on many occasions in the summer, and, yes, her friend Spencer Ward had sometimes objected to it; they had once had a ‘falling out’ because of it, in which he had knocked out one of her teeth. On the night of the first of July, after the incident at the Honey Bee night-club, Mr Ward had come to her rooms at half-past midnight and shown her bruises on his knuckles that he said he had got from having ‘smashed Mr Barber’s face in’. But on the night of Mr Barber’s murder she did not know where he had been. She herself had had an arrangement to spend that evening with Mr Barber, but had been ‘suffering from an indisposition’: she’d had tea and bread and butter with him at the Corner House on the Tottenham Court Road, but had been obliged to part from him at half-past seven. She had known nothing about his death until she had seen it reported in the Sunday newspapers, and she had been thoroughly shocked and upset. She had immediately found Spencer Ward and challenged him over it, and the news of the murder had not seemed to surprise him. He had said that Mr Barber had been ‘owed a wallop like that for a very long time’.

  There were hisses from Leonard’s father and brother at that – though the boy, Frances saw, was smirking again. He still had his hands in his trouser pockets, he was still chewing away at his gum. His gaze was fixed on the floor of the dock; he seemed to be worrying at a splinter in the boards with the toe of one of his shoes.

  He lifted his head, however, for the series of statements that were read next. They were from men, youths, boys – associates of his from Bermondsey; pals or, perhaps, enemies – anyhow, four or five people who said he had boasted ‘pretty freely’ of having attacked his fiancée’s boy-friend in July, threatening to ‘do worse to him next time’. None of them could say what he had been doing on the night of Leonard’s death. But all of them confirmed that he was in the habit of carrying a cosh.

  Here the inspector looked up from his papers to ask a uniformed policeman to bring him the weapon that had been removed from the accused at the time of his arrest. He was handed a brown-paper parcel, from which he produced a stubby dark-leather object with a bulbous head and tapering handle. The court officials regarded the horrible thing without excitement, but Frances’s neighbour in tartan craned for a better view, the newspaper men stopped scribbling to watch, and even the boy, finally, paid proper attention as, sure of his audience, the inspector held the cosh higher, then brought it down with a loud smack on the sill of the witness stand. The head, he explained to the magistrate, was loaded with shot. He and his men had found traces on it of what they believed to be blood. The traces were currently being analysed at the Home Office laboratory.

  The cosh was returned to its paper wrapper and handed back to the constable. Leonard’s father, Frances saw, was fishing for his handkerchief; as soon as he got it, he covered his face.

  After that, the reading aloud of the final statement – that of Spencer Ward himself – seemed a mere formality. It was the one testimony, Frances thought, that quite possibly contained no lies; the one document to which they should all have given their fullest attention. But the parading of the cosh had blurred the focus of the chamber. People in the pews behind her were openly chatting: she turned around to glare at them; they met the glare and chatted on. And even the inspector’s tone was perfunctory now. Yes, the boy admitted to having assaulted Leonard Barber on the first of July. He might have threatened to knock his head off; he couldn’t recall. But he strenuously denied the other charge. He’d acquired a cosh for killing rats and black-beetles in the building in which he lived. He carried it about for self-protection; he’d never used it in a fight. He’d certainly never used it on Mr Barber on the fifteenth of September. He could remember that evening very clearly, because he’d been suffering from a headache. He had been at home with his mother and had gone early to bed.

  And that, incredibly, was it. There was no calling of witnesses, no one to speak for the defence. The inspector closed his folder. The clerk and the newspaper men wrote on for a few seconds more; the magistrate turned to Spencer to inform him that since he was currently without a counsel he was at liberty to cross-examine Inspector Kemp on his own behalf. Did he wish to do so?

  It took the boy a moment to understand that he was being addressed. He looked blankly back at the magistrate, who spoke again, with impatience.

  ‘You are charged with the gravest possible crime, Mr Ward. Do you have anything to say to the court in support of yourself against it?’

  Finding all eyes turned his way, the boy began to smirk again. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I never done it. But I’d like to shake hands with the bloke that did!’

  His friends in the crowd laughed out loud. Leonard’s father, uncle and brother let out more hisses of outrage. Frances’s heart sank.

  The magistrate, unimpressed, turned back to Inspector Kemp. ‘Well, I am satisfied that there is enough evidence against the suspect to justify keeping him on remand for seven days. You’ll have the laboratory findings by the end of that period, I take it? And Mr Ward, I trust, will have secured a counsel by then. For now, you may remove him to Brixton Prison. Mr Wells —’

  He called forward some court official. Sergeant Heath led the boy from the dock. People rose to leave the chamber; others shuffled in to take their places. ‘Quickly, please!’ cried the usher, with a shooing gesture. He had to keep the police-court day grinding on, after all.

  Frances got to her feet, and made her way across the courtroom, feeling almost dazed. She had expected some sort of resolution. She had supposed that everything would be decided, for better or for worse. She reached the doors to the lobby at the same moment as the Walworth party, and this time they turned to include her; they went out as a single group.

  Mrs Viney and Vera were flushed. Lloyd was incandescent.

  ‘What a bloody little waster. Excuse my language, Miss Wray, but, really. A good flogging’s what he needs. They should take a horse-whip to him! When I think of the mates I lost in France, and all so as little swines like him can – I was just saying, Mr Barber —’ Leonard’s father had appeared, with Douglas and Uncle Ted behind him; they all moved away from the doors, to allow other people to come and go. ‘I was just saying, that boy needs a bloody horse-whip taking to him! Standing there with his hands in his pockets, chewing gum and grinning like that.
I could see Sergeant Heath itching to have a go at him, couldn’t you? I wanted to have a go at him myself.’

  Mr Barber couldn’t speak; he was still mopping his eyes with his handkerchief. It was Leonard’s brother who answered, in that unnerving voice of his.

  ‘Oh, he’s not worth bruising your hand on. He’s filth. He’s trash! I’m just glad my mother wasn’t here to see him. You saw his mother, I suppose? A nice job she’s done of bringing him up, hasn’t she? Here she comes, look.’ The poor little woman, apparently more bewildered than ever, had just pushed her way through the swing doors. Seeing the eyes of the family on her, she hesitated; then, realising who they were – or, perhaps, simply recognising their hostility – she ducked her head, turned away, and headed off, all alone.

  ‘Oh, God love her,’ said Mrs Viney, in her feeling way.

  Douglas almost spat. ‘God love her? She’ll get what she deserves from Him, all right. And so will that little thug. But he’ll get what he deserves down here, first. Or he will if I’ve got anything to do with it.’

  ‘I’m with you there,’ said Lloyd grimly.

  Uncle Ted said, ‘At least they’re keeping him in prison for the week. Not that that will bother him, mind.’

  ‘Bother him?’ answered Douglas. ‘He’ll probably have the time of his life in there! You know he was in the waiting-room this morning, bragging to all the other men about how his crime was the finest on the charge-sheet? Constable Evans told us, earlier. No, there’s no morality in him. You only have to look at his face to see that.’