Marguerite got up from her place. She went and knelt beside him, lifted his head, pushing back the damp, soft, spiky young-boy hair from his forehead; caught at the writhing hands and held them steady in her own two hands, so white and well-cared-for with their long, pink, manicured nails. ‘Hush, love, hush! Of course it isn’t true.’ And she looked across the room at Mr. Mysterioso and said, ‘A secret—between us and these kind people here who’ll be too generous, I know, ever to give us away.’ She glanced at the door. ‘Nobody could be listening?’
‘No,’ said the Inspector.
‘Between these four walls then?’ She looked round at them, appealing, looked back to Mysterioso. She said, ‘I think we must tell.’
An actress, ‘over the hill’, glad of the attentions of even a scruffy young press photographer using her as a sitter to practise his craft. Thankful beyond words for the advent of a new admirer and a rich, famous, and handsome one at that, ‘good to be seen about with’ at the fashionable restaurants where theatrical agents and managers would be reminded of her. Entertaining him at home, not at all secretly; dropping naughty hints to anyone who would listen—my darling, he’s fantastic! Using it all to further her own ends, to bolster her tottering career.
And a man, larger than life size, not quite like other men. Big, handsome, with his mane of tawny hair, a man who looked like a lion and must live like a lion; a man with a reputation for affairs, in middle age still strutting in the pride of his well-publicised virility. And all in an hour, in a moment….The accident that had left him a crippled thing, humiliatingly powerless, had left him powerless in other ways as well. ‘She was—kind,’ he said, looking at Marguerite, still kneeling by the boy’s chair. ‘She kept my secret a secret.’ To the boy he said, ‘Even if I’d ever set eyes on her, my child, your pretty young mother would have been safe from me.’
‘It’s true,’ said Marguerite. She looked down at her hands. ‘I know.’
Inspector Block helped her up from the floor and back to her chair. He said to them both, with something like humility in his cold voice, ‘Thank you.’
The Grand Mysterioso stirred and sighed and came back to the present with a jerk. ‘Well, now… My dear boy, I think you have no cause to complain. We’ve done what we came here to do—talked it all out, put it all before you, all the facts, the ifs and the ands, the probabilities and the just possibles—riddled out our very souls for you, so that you may save your own. So save it! Accept the judgment of this court—who also have heard it all—and get rid of this bug that has been obsessing your mind and spoiling your splendid young life. I’ll help you. I’ll be your friend—you can start all over again, grow-up, be a man.
‘So now—you two have been the accused: you, playing the part of your father, and Mr. Photoze here. Go outside this room and wait; and we will arrive at a verdict in here, all of us, me and Inspector Block and this kind and lovely lady, Miss Devine, and these three kind people who have come here as witnesses, at no small trouble to themselves, to help you too. None of us with any axe to grind, remember that. So—whatever verdict we come to, will you accept it?’ And he said very kindly, ‘All we want, boy, in all honesty, is to arrive at the truth and set your mind at rest.’
‘Suppose,’ said the boy, ‘the truth doesn’t set my mind at rest.’
‘Then we’ll tell it just the same,’ said Block. He made a small-boy gesture, licking his thumb and crossing his heart with it. ‘I swear you shall hear the truth. I’ll tell you no lie.’
‘Considering that I’m in the dock too,’ said Mr. Photoze, getting up and going towards the door with his accompanying jingle, ‘and I’m ready to accept the verdict, I think you can too.’ He opened the door. ‘Come along, the jury is about to retire!’
The door closed behind them. Mr. Mysterioso said, ‘Photoze will keep him safely out of earshot.’ But he looked anxious. ‘Can you really swear to tell him the truth of it? For that matter—what is the truth of it?’
Inspector Block went and stood in the middle of the room. He said, ‘The truth of it is very short, and very simple. I can tell it to you in’—and he counted on his fingers—‘in fourteen words. In fact, I could reduce those words to six, and give you the whole story. Of course, I could say a lot of other words, but I’m not going to. It’s not for me to accuse. Our business is to exonerate.’ And he spoke the fourteen words. ‘I think the rest is self-explanatory… Verdict unanimous? Let’s have the boy back.’