The Husband's Story Read online

  THE

  HUSBAND’S

  STORY

  Norman Collins

  Contents

  PREFACE

  Introducing Mr Cheevers

  BOOK ONE

  A Garden with Gnomes

  BOOK TWO

  The Man with Two Wrist-Watches

  BOOK THREE

  Trial and Punishment

  BOOK FOUR

  Grounds for Divorce

  POSTSCRIPT

  Au revoir, Mr Cheevers

  Author’s Foreword

  This isn’t a particularly nice story because even the very nicest people don’t always behave very nicely; and it isn’t a particularly happy story because human happiness has always been notoriously haphazard. But, by and large, it probably works out somewhere around the national average – better for some, and not so good for others. And that’s where the luck of the game comes in: in all spectator sports there has to be someone who loses, and it isn’t always the favourite who wins.

  Preface

  Introducing Mr Cheevers

  I

  You couldn’t have fitted another one in.

  The Press Box was packed solid, elbow-to-elbow, as it always was when one of the really big cases came on. For the past two-and-a-half hours, the place had been a cramped, oak-panelled factory, with ball-points and propelling pencils all working flat-out to be ready with the finished product for the breakfast-table and commuter markets next morning.

  Not that there could be much more to come.

  It was now only the sentence, the sheer, hard arithmetic of it, for which they were all waiting. And the alert had just been signalled. Mr Justice Streetley had brought the tips of his fingers together and was nodding his head like a metronome in time with the words that he was speaking – always a sure sign with him that he was about to pronounce.

  The old hands, the experienced ones, had thrust themselves back as far as they could go from the schoolroom row of desk tops, all with their little let-in inkwells, and were sitting on the edge of their seats with their notebooks gathered up in their laps in readiness. The men from the news agencies and the evening papers had already left their places and were standing alongside the policemen by the doorway nearest to the telephones.

  As always happens at such a moment, the body of the Court had become frozen. The ushers, feet together and eyes front, were as motionless as snowmen, and even Counsel had stopped fiddling with their headpieces.

  It had all gone quiet, too; quiet and church-like and muffled. It might have been the blessing that they were hearing, and only just hearing it at that. Mr Justice Streetley was a notoriously soft-spoken Judge. His faint, precise tones, with all emphasis and emotion ironed out of them, were never more than barely audible. The Clerk of the Court himself had to lean forward to make sure that he was not missing anything.

  When His Lordship had finished – and his voice had dropped almost to a whisper as the words ‘Eighteen years’ came out – someone up in the other gallery, the Public one, shouted ‘Shame’; and, out of sight down below near where Counsel and solicitors were sitting, a woman uttered a little cry – half gasp, half sob – and there was a noise that might have been caused by someone falling, or a chair overturning.

  Mr Justice Streetley ignored both interruptions, did not even seem to have noticed them in fact. He was feeling tired; tired and relieved that it was all over.

  In getting ready to rise, he had separated his finger-tips and was now closing the embossed folder on the polished table-top in front of him. Under the fullness of the wig, his creased grey face was expressionless. Face and wig might have been made of the same material.

  But it wasn’t yet quite over. The policeman standing duty outside the dock had opened the door leading to the cells, and the other policeman, the one who had stood there throughout, tapped the prisoner on the shoulder to let him know that it was time to go below.

  The prisoner, however, took no notice. He was trying to say something. Mr Justice Streetley ignored him too.

  Even so, the prisoner persisted.

  ‘Thank you very much, my Lord,’ he said. ‘I’m deeply sorry to have put you to all this trouble and expense on my account.’

  II

  Even though the curtain was already down, it was really the key speech of the whole performance. It contained everything. That was why it was such a pity that, in the rush, the agency men and the evening-paper reporters missed it altogether.

  Not that it really mattered: the Stop Press, with the smudged lines saying ‘Eighteen Years’, was the only bit for which their readers had been waiting.

  But there was one person who hadn’t missed it, one very special person who recognized it immediately for the courtroom treasure that it was.

  And he was still sitting up there in the Press Box, a brooding, concentrated observer, with a discreet bow-tie and neatly combed-back hair. There was no panic scramble to the telephone-booth for him. He could afford to wait; just sit there, sucking up the last few drops, and savouring them.

  That was because he wasn’t a common Court Reporter like the rest of them. He was Mr Cyril Cheevers, Crime Correspondent of the Sunday Sun. He was a somebody. His pieces carried a signature line. It was to him that his paper turned when they wanted the big, human-interest, heartbreak stories, the behind-the-scenes disclosures.

  The Old Bailey was Mr Cheevers’s special province; practically his preserve. Even if he spent most of his time hanging round Scotland Yard and enjoyed it, it was only when he turned left off Ludgate Hill towards the Central Criminal Court that he felt really at home. And he always made a point of going there on foot from his office because he liked the walk so much, because it was so full of happy memories for him. Faces of past swindlers, bigamists, spies, arsonists, murderers, extortionists – many of them now dead and mere images – kept passing through his mind in nostalgic succession.

  Every time he mounted the worn stone stairs, the policemen at the door greeted him like one of themselves. And for good reason. His latest book, I Condemn…, was by way of being a best-seller in the paperbacks; and his earlier works, Blind Justice, Cases Famous and Infamous and The Old Bailey: Lore and Legend were still on the shelves of all the Public Libraries.

  I Condemn… was largely about Mr Justice Streetley himself. Of all the Judges whom Mr Cheevers had watched, studied, analysed and written about, Mr Streetley came out nearest to his ideal. On every count, too. His presence, his manner, his imperturbability, his perfectly modulated phrases, his great, grey face, his aloofness, his severity, his occasional flashes of sly, sarcastic humour, even the finger-tip posture, all added up to something very near perfection. Mr Cheevers had offered to dedicate I Condemn… to Mr Justice Streetley personally, but His Lordship, though flattered and appreciative, had felt impelled to decline.

  As well as being a keen student of human nature, the Crime Correspondent was something of a stylist. It was some years now since he had coined the word ‘Crimeograph’ for his full-length descriptive pieces; and, combined with the name of the paper he worked for, the phrase was now copyright. It was something to live up to, and he did not forget it.

  Even as he sat there watching the back of the departing prisoner, he could feel the scene transforming itself inside his mind into little isolated globules of prose: ‘Court Number One today had never seen the like… an event unparalleled in the bleak, darkly-chequered history of the dock… the graven, Sphinx-like face of the Judge beneath his flowing and archaic wig… condemned to a sentence that left Mr Jeremy Hayhoe, QC, Counsel for the Defence, a stunned, bewildered man… within the Court, a rasp of protest and a scream of pain… a boyish, upright figure calmly and politely saying thank you to someone who had just deprived him o
f his prime of life…’

  Mr Cheevers remained quietly confident. He did not doubt that, over a cup of tea in the Canteen, the gem fragments already in his mind, and others as yet uncut but just as sparkling, would all come together, and almost automatically rearrange themselves, paragraph by paragraph, into the sort of tabloid jewellery which was expected of him. Typed out in double-spacing on one of the office Remingtons, another brilliant and characteristic ‘Crimeograph’ would have been completed.

  The piece, moreover, would appear in the same issue as the exclusive, two-part, double-spread revelations that the Features Editor had got all signed-up. They were the wife’s revelations, of course: the readers of the Sunday Sun were always interested in what wives had to say. And Mr Cheevers was very pleased about them, too. He had a nose for such things, and had tipped off the Features Editor long before the rest of Fleet Street had spotted what a story they would make.

  Because the Features Editor set great store by Mr Cheevers’s judgment and discretion, he had asked him to be the go-between. The go-between and the ghost. That was how Mr Cheevers first met the tall, distracted woman with the red-rimmed eyes and the elaborate hair-do.

  The partnership had been a brief but fruitful one. Two sessions of an hour-and-a-half apiece, and Mr Cheevers had got all that he needed. That was because of the knack he had. He knew just the right questions to ask; got her to remember all sorts of things that she would otherwise rather have forgotten, re-opened old wounds that she had thought were long-since healed.

  Mr Cheevers felt now that he could relax. Professionally, he was satisfied. A bachelor son, he looked forward to returning to his mother’s small house in Dulwich.

  But the journey home did not prove to be a quiet one. The image of the man who had just been sentenced rose before him, and remained there. He could see again the pale blue eyes which kept closing momentarily when he replied to anything, as though he were trying hard, really hard, making a great effort of it, to give the truthful answer; the way his hair rose up in a little quiff on one side, giving him a strangely youthful, even rather jaunty, appearance; the sagging, shapeless lapels of the inferior, ready-made suit that he was wearing. He could even see him holding up his hand politely like a schoolboy before making that final thank-you speech to Mr Justice Streetley.

  As the train bumped and rattled over the points, the pale blue eyes continued to stare into Mr Cheevers’s own dark brown ones. It was then that his great idea came to him, his moment of revelation. With the hard, plastic buttons of British Rail upholstery pressing into his back he was on his way not to Dulwich but to Damascus.

  He knew now what his life’s work was to be. It had been made plain to him. Instead of merely pursuing cases in which the Police had already become interested, or studying the actions and behaviour of men brought up before the law, he would select one particular wrongdoer and go back to the origin of things, trace events to their starting place and lay bare the very roots of crime.

  In the notebook which he always carried he had got the wife’s telephone number. It was a new one, of course; fixed up by him with the Post Office so that outsiders shouldn’t bother her. He’d give her a ring as soon as he got home; say something consoling, hold out at least a token promise for the future. She’d need a bit of bucking-up, he reckoned.

  Then, when she had learnt to live with herself again, had come to grips with separation, they could get down to some serious literary work together. This time it was not the wreckage of her life in which he was interested: it was her husband’s story.

  And he knew that it was only from the wife that he could hope to get it.

  Book One

  A Garden with Gnomes

  Chapter 1

  Because it was raining so hard, really hard, Stanley Pitts put down his parcels on the wooden settee in the booking-hall and then, one by one, fitted them into the side pockets of his raincoat. Even in the short walk down the platform the fancy wrapping-paper had become blotched and uninviting-looking.

  But Crocketts Green was like that. No proper protection for the passengers in bad weather; not even a covered footbridge over to the Elmers Road side. And it was important to Stanley Pitts that his parcels shouldn’t get ruined. They were presents. He wanted them still to have the original boutique-and-salesgirl gloss about them when he reached home.

  Even on fine nights, it was a brisk ten minutes’ walk; ten minutes exactly, that is, if he turned off at the Launderette and cut across the service area by the Post Office – longer, of course, if he carried straight on past the Bank and down Westmorland Crescent. Over the years he had got into the habit of timing it; keeping himself up to scratch as it were. This evening, all bundled-up and with his hat pulled down over his forehead, it might take him as much as twelve to twelve-and-a-half; even thirteen, possibly, if the downpour persisted.

  As he turned into Kendal Terrace, he already felt himself at home. There was something so wonderfully welcoming about the little row of villas, all precisely the same and all so startlingly different. For whereas the woodwork at No. 10 was painted a light heliotrope, No. 12 was olive green, and No. 14 had favoured rich chocolate. It was the same, too, with the front doors. Going down the street, you came on plain black; green; green with the panels picked out in cream; royal blue; even canary yellow, flat-surfaced and modern-looking, with aluminium-finish knocker and letter box. At No. 16, where Stanley Pitts lived, it was different again: shining white paintwork and the only front door in Kendal Terrace with a glass panel and a Spanish-type ironwork grille on the inside.

  But there was more to distinguish No. 16 than the front door. Stanley Pitts’s house had concealed lighting for the bell-push. As soon as night came, the device shone out in the darkness like an illuminated fruit-gum. There were also the gnomes. There were three of them stationed there in the front garden, all dressed in red and all heavily bearded. The one with the longest beard – he was a replacement, actually – held a fishing-rod dangling over the miniature, heart-shaped pond; the second in seniority was seated, legs crossed, on top of a heavily speckled toadstool; and the youngster of the party, by the look of him, lounged flat-out, with his chin supported on his hands, simply looking on.

  At one time there had been another quite outstanding feature, too, up beside the flowerbed next to the house – an eighteen-inch, fibre-glass windmill, all in imitation weather-boarding, with scarlet sails that would have turned merrily if any passing gust could have got down low enough to reach them. But the mill was there no longer. It had simply disappeared; vanished overnight from the surrounding elfin landscape. And not by magic, either. The general view of Kendal Terrace was that it must have been the holiday-relief milkman who had pinched it, along with the rock plants from No. 17, on his early delivery round one August Sunday morning.

  That was why the gnomes were now all firmly cemented in.

  Tonight, however, Stanley Pitts hardly gave them a thought. Nor did he have to; even in that dampness they could idle their time away in perfect safety. The piece of copper tubing let in two inches below the brim of the pool saw to that. Before he had fitted it, anything might have happened. After one sudden summer cloudburst, he had known the angler up to his armpits in flood-water, the toadstool entirely marooned and nothing showing of the little lazy one except the tassel on the top of his cap. As it was, Stanley Pitts could hear the reassuring gurgle of the drainage-system as he stood there in the shelter of the porch, and knew that everything would be all right.

  Soaked through, Stanley Pitts uttered a sigh of sheer contentment as he felt the key in the Yale lock begin to turn beneath his fingers. Remembering the presents that he had bought, he must have been one of the happiest men in London.

  ‘That you, Stan?’

  Because it was coming from the far end of the little hallway where the kitchenette-cum-diner was, and because the electric mixer was electrically mixing something, the voice sounded a trifle muffled and indistinct. And, at the moment, it carried just the faintest n
ote of tension, of anxiety even. To an eavesdropper, it could have sounded as though, after a whole day’s waiting for him to come home, his wife had suddenly suspected that it might be someone else.

  But Stanley Pitts knew every intonation in that voice. And he had learnt to make allowance for it. There was nothing to it, really. It was simply that she was the highly-strung, keyed-up kind. Things affected her more than they did other people.

  ‘Coming, Beryl,’ he told her.

  The glass bead curtain over the alcove parted, and Beryl herself stood there. Silhouetted against the background of built-in, Viceroy-range domestic units, and with the tubular light fittings, all bright chromium, shining down on her, she looked beautiful. Friday was the day for her regular hair appointment. And there she was, with it all piled up and gleaming, raven-black and perfect, above the long white nylon overall that she was wearing.

  He started to come forward so that he could kiss her, but she stopped him.

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ she said breathlessly, ‘you’re all soaking. Is it raining or something? You stay just where you are until you’ve got those things off. You’re dripping over everything, you are.’

  Obediently, he stepped back onto the doormat. Beryl was quite right, of course. With the side pockets of his raincoat crammed full, the rainwater was trickling down in little channels on either side. He was standing in a puddle already.

  In the state he was in, Beryl told him, he had better take his shoes off on the mat while he stood there. Then he could go straight up to the bathroom and hang his raincoat on the hook behind the shower curtain. What’s more, he’d better put his trousers straight into the press while they were still damp so as to get the creases out, she added; otherwise they’d look like nothing on earth when he came to wear them again.

  It was all said in a rush as though it were a single sentence that she was uttering. And halfway through the electric mixer, which was automatic, abruptly turned itself off. That was why towards the end she seemed to be speaking so much louder; almost as though she were scolding him.