Buffet for Unwelcome Guests(114)

‘I don’t want any defence. I’ve told you. I killed the boy for what he did to my child. I don’t want any defence.’

‘It’s just a matter of mitigating circumstances. But anyway,’ said the lawyer, ‘this wouldn’t help us either, so I think we’ll just drop the whole matter.’ Hardly a mitigating circumstance if the boy turned out to have been shot for something he had never done.

The lawyer went away. But the memory came back. That cry, only half heard, all unattended to. ‘It wasn’t my fault, Uncle John. She made me take her there.’ Dear God! If Simon had been innocent after all!

Goodness, the photographers outside the court! It was like being a film star. And of course her hair was done now and Freesia, quite thrilled, had made a special job of it and it looked terrific. And the bruises on her face had faded. Pity she couldn’t have used her proper make-up but it would be best, they’d said, to appear very young and fresh and innocent, not to say generally gormless: so that Daddy couldn’t be blamed too much for what he’d done. And, indeed, in the witness box she looked like a flower, the light shining down from the canopy above on the careful halo of golden hair: the golden, Golden Daffodil.

Your name is Daphne Jones? Of such and such an address? And you are sixteen years of age…?

Only sixteen years of age.

Only sixteen; and had been with every boy in the top form at school, with or without drugs for extra kicks.

‘Yes, sixteen last birthday.’

‘Now, don’t upset yourself, Miss Jones—or Daphne, may I call you

Daphne? I just wanted to ask you to tell us very simply in your own words what happened that night, the night your cousin died.’

(It wasn’t my fault, Uncle John. She made me take her there.)

Best to cover all tracks. They weren’t going to use it in court, she knew that now. But best to cover all tracks: the man might talk to the paper afterwards, one never knew.

‘He wanted to take me to a dance place he knew about. He used to go there, he used to take other girls. But it sounded like a horrible place so I wouldn’t go.’

‘You went instead to—?’

‘We went to the Singing Café and then we came home by the path along the river bank—’

‘Would that be your direct way home?’

‘No, he just wanted to come that way. He made me come that way.’ But she saw from beneath her eye-lashes the suddenly tightened grip of the two thin hands clasped on the edge of the dock and she knew that that had been a mistake. Daddy would know better; Simon had never in all his life made her do anything against her will—it had been all the other way.

‘He wasn’t like his usual self,’ she said quietly. ‘He’d been smoking this pot.’

‘And then I think you came to a certain bench—?’

‘Yes,’ she said, quickly again, running it on into the next sentence, ‘and then we sat down and we were looking at the river—’

It made no difference whatever to the case against John Jones, which bench it had been. But something had to be said in the wretched man’s defence and if one could spin it out a little more, Counsel felt, it would look a bit more like earning one’s fee. He humped himself over, leaning on both fisted hands, looking earnestly down at a map laid out before him.

‘That would be the bench outside Dent’s warehouse—here?’

‘Yes,’ she said, slurring it over quickly again, into the following words, ‘and we sat there—’

She saw the quick upwards jerk of the bowed head. He called out sharply from the dock, called out sharply in that high, harsh too-well-remembered voice he had spoken in that night, just before Simon died. ‘You told me it was Mardon’s bench.’

Shushing from the Clerk of the Court and ushers; a glance of compassionate severity from the Bench. But now she knew that Daddy knew. There was nothing to be done about that—nothing. She must concentrate on convincing the court that she spoke the truth. She explained it all away in her frank little, rather charmingly garrulous way.

‘I keep just saying that it wasn’t the bench by Mardon’s but then people seem to remember that I said the word “Mardon’s” and they think I said it was. But it wasn’t. It was the warehouse bench. He took me to the warehouse bench.’

‘Very well. In fact, which bench it was doesn’t really matter. But something happened there which you later told your father? Now—what did you tell him? Tell us, please, just as you told it to him.’

So she told it all again: lived yet again through that horrible half hour with the sailor, Butch—lived through the last half of the time anyway: the less said about the first ten minutes the better, but the rest she lived through as she had lived through it many times already—each time ascribing her injuries, as now, to her cousin. Lived through it: poured it all out, the filth, the bestiality, the brutality, the dress half torn away, the terrible bruising… They listened breathlessly and, as her voice fell silent in the hushed court, she knew that she had won—had won for herself but had won for Daddy also—if only he would accept it. A father—hearing that story poured out through bruised and bleeding lips, seeing the white young face ugly with bruising, the bitten and broken skin, the torn, dishevelled hair—whatever the father had subsequently done, must be condoned to the fullest limit of the law’s discretion. Poor little injured blossom, poor smirched and broken golden Daffodil! Not a man in court but knew—but hoped with all his heart—that he would have done the same. Not a man in court who did not feel sick to the pit of his stomach at the wrongs that had been done to this lovely child. Not one man.