Or only one.
He had to be helped to the witness box; and now the light shone down, not upon yellow halo and pale, uplifted face but on a bowed head whose face and hair seemed almost of a uniform grey. He fumbled his way through the oath. He said: ‘I have to tell. I have to say…’
From the body of the court where now she sat with her mother, she shot up to her feet.
She cried out, sick, faltering, terrified, hardly knowing what she was doing: ‘Daddy!’ And on a note of pleading, again, ‘Daddy!’
Hushing and shushing. Throughout it he stood there looking back at her terrified face: a long, long, searching look. If that boy had all along been innocent…! He looked into her sick white face and knew that she had lied to him. He had killed—murdered—an innocent child.
Her mother saw the first signal: the terrible purple red flush rising up over the ashy grey; and into the silence she, also, cried out, ‘John! Your pills!’ and besought the stern face a thousand miles away up there on the Bench: ‘He’s going to have a heart attack. He must take his pills.’
He stood there, reeling, his hand going slowly, automatically to his breast pocket, his eyes still fixed on the young, scared, pleading face across the courtroom. An usher proffered the glass of water, all eyes were riveted on the scene where he stood there in the witness box. Across the turned heads she stared back at him. Daddy would never give her away. Daddy would rather die than do harm to his golden Daffodil….
Over the turned white wigs, the averted faces—begging, beseeching, almost imperceptibly she shook her head.
The hand reaching for the life-saving drug, dropped to his side. Daddy would die for her.
And he died. Like a ruined building, slowly toppling, crumbling, with horrible acceleration tumbling at last into a crumpled heap on the floor of the witness box, out of their sight. The heart for so long a traitor to its own harbouring body, looked into the fair face of treachery and broke and bled: and beat no more.
The photographs on the front pages of the evening papers were terrific! Freesia’s hair-do was wonderful, just like a halo. It made her look like an angel, honestly it did….
But by the next morning the whispering had begun. And it grew and it grew and it grew…
The Hand of God
THEY COULD SCARCELY BELIEVE their ears. ‘He was driving quite slow?’
‘Well, not fast, Sergeant. I can’t say that. And a country road, very little traffic—’
‘Constable Evans—Jellinks here, he says himself that he was driving fast.’
‘Not all that fast,’ said Jellinks quickly.
‘He’s confused,’ said Constable Bill Evans. ‘Shocked, I daresay, doesn’t know what he’s saying.’ Natural enough, he added, his big, strong, middle-aged face gone so white and pudgy now in the evening light. Jellinks having just run down—just killed—a girl and her little kid.
‘For God’s sake, Bill—your girl and her little kid. Your daughter.’
‘That’s right,’ Evans said woodenly and moved apart, suddenly, and stood with clenched hands, his back turned to them.
Jellinks seized the opportunity. ‘You heard what he said. Driving quite slow, he said, and him a copper. And he ought to know!’
‘Perhaps it’s him that’s shocked and confused,’ said the sergeant.
‘Well, I thought you were driving fast,’ said a woman, coming forward. A couple of cars had drawn up, and a small group of onlookers stood wretchedly around. ‘He passed me ten miles back, going at the rate of knots.’
‘I could’ve slowed down later,’ said Jellinks, growing from wary to a little cocky.
‘Yes, well… Just come out of the Pig and Whistle, Jellinks, had you?’ said the sergeant. ‘At closing time.’
‘Yes, I had. I come out of the Pig and Whistle most nights of my life at closing time,’ said Jellinks. ‘But I wasn’t drunk, I never get drunk, they’ll tell you so—and you’ve done all your breathalysing.’
‘And for once it was not a stolen car?’
‘I’ve shown you all the bumph, haven’t I? It’s me own car. All right, so it was stolen originally, getting away from that job on the shoe shop. But I bought it after I’d done my time. Made a pretty good mess of it, but I could patch it up myself. So I went, honest, to the owner and he was glad enough to get rid of it.’
‘And you had the proceeds of the till to pay for it?’
‘I’d done me stint for that,’ said Jellinks, shrugging.
The sergeant stood, waiting. Two constables were nosing about the road—looking at the car, the tracks, making notes, taking names and addresses. He watched them but he knew his men—they were efficient and thorough; he could safely leave it all to them. And Bill Evans was under control again and had turned back to him. ‘We went into that, Sergeant, when Constable Jones turned up—it’s Jellinks’ own car. And he’s right about the breathalyser too. Just under the margin.’