Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley (bookreader .txt) 📗

into the trap, he would almost certainly have been hanged. Now how often may not a plan to throw the guilt of murder on an innocent person have been practised successfully? There are, I imagine, numbers of cases in which the accused, being found guilty on circumstantial evidence, have died protesting their innocence. I shall never approve again of a death-sentence imposed in a case decided upon such evidence.”

“I never have done so, for my part,” said Trent. “To hang in such cases seems to me flying in the face of the perfectly obvious and sound principle expressed in the saying that ‘you never can tell’. I agree with the American jurist who lays it down that we should not hang a yellow dog for stealing jam on circumstantial evidence, not even if he has jam all over his nose. As for attempts being made by malevolent persons to fix crimes upon innocent men, of course it is constantly happening. It’s a marked feature, for instance, of all systems of rule by coercion, whether in Ireland or Russia or India or Korea; if the police cannot get hold of a man they think dangerous by fair means, they do it by foul. But there’s one case in the State Trials that is peculiarly to the point, because not only was it a case of fastening a murder on innocent people, but the plotter did in effect what Manderson did; he gave up his own life in order to secure the death of his victims. Probably you have heard of the Campden Case.”

Mr. Cupples confessed his ignorance and took another potato.

“John Masefield has written a very remarkable play about it,” said Trent, “and if it ever comes on again in London, you should go and see it, if you like having the fan-tods. I have often seen women weeping in an undemonstrative manner at some slab of oleo-margarine sentiment in the theatre. By George! what everlasting smelling-bottle hysterics they ought to have if they saw that play decently acted! Well, the facts were that John Perry accused his mother and brother of murdering a man, and swore he had helped them to do it. He told a story full of elaborate detail, and had an answer to everything, except the curious fact that the body couldn’t be found; but the judge, who was probably drunk at the time—this was in Restoration days—made nothing of that. The mother and brother denied the accusation. All three prisoners were found guilty and hanged, purely on John’s evidence. Two years after, the man whom they were hanged for murdering came back to Campden. He had been kidnapped by pirates and taken to sea. His disappearance had given John his idea. The point about John is, that his including himself in the accusation, which amounted to suicide, was the thing in his evidence which convinced everybody of its truth. It was so obvious that no man would do himself to death to get somebody else hanged. Now that is exactly the answer which the prosecution would have made if Marlowe had told the truth. Not one juryman in a million would have believed in the Manderson plot.”

Mr. Cupples mused upon this a few moments. “I have not your acquaintance with that branch of history,” he said at length; “in fact, I have none at all. But certain recollections of my own childhood return to me in connection with this affair. We know from the things Mabel told you what may be termed the spiritual truth underlying this matter; the insane depth of jealous hatred which Manderson concealed. We can understand that he was capable of such a scheme. But as a rule it is in the task of penetrating to the spiritual truth that the administration of justice breaks down. Sometimes that truth is deliberately concealed, as in Manderson’s case. Sometimes, I think, it is concealed because simple people are actually unable to express it, and nobody else divines it. When I was a lad in Edinburgh the whole country went mad about the Sandyford Place murder.”

Trent nodded. “Mrs. M’Lachlan’s case. She was innocent right enough.”

“My parents thought so,” said Mr. Cupples. “I thought so myself when I became old enough to read and understand that excessively sordid story. But the mystery of the affair was so dark, and the task of getting at the truth behind the lies told by everybody concerned proved so hopeless, that others were just as fully convinced of the innocence of old James Fleming. All Scotland took sides on the question. It was the subject of debates in Parliament. The press divided into two camps, and raged with a fury I have never seen equalled. Yet it is obvious, is it not? for I see you have read of the case—that if the spiritual truth about that old man could have been known there would have been very little room for doubt in the matter. If what some surmised about his disposition was true, he was quite capable of murdering Jessie M’Pherson and then casting the blame on the poor feeble-minded creature who came so near to suffering the last penalty of the law.”

“Even a commonplace old dotard like Fleming can be an unfathomable mystery to all the rest of the human race,” said Trent, “and most of all in a court of justice. The law certainly does not shine when it comes to a case requiring much delicacy of perception. It goes wrong easily enough over the Flemings of this world. As for the people with temperaments who get mixed up in legal proceedings, they must feel as if they were in a forest of apes, whether they win or lose. Well, I dare say it’s good for their sort to have their noses rubbed in reality now and again. But what would twelve red-faced realities in a jury-box have done to Marlowe? His story would, as he says, have been a great deal worse than no defence at all. It’s not as if there were a single piece of evidence in support of his tale. Can’t you imagine how the prosecution would tear it to rags? Can’t you see the judge simply taking it in his stride when it came to the summing up? And the jury—you’ve served on juries, I expect—in their room, snorting with indignation over the feebleness of the lie, telling each other it was the clearest case they ever heard of, and that they’d have thought better of him if he hadn’t lost his nerve at the crisis, and had cleared off with the swag as he intended. Imagine yourself on that jury, not knowing Marlowe, and trembling with indignation at the record unrolled before you—cupidity, murder, robbery, sudden cowardice, shameless, impenitent, desperate lying! Why, you and I believed him to be guilty until—”

“I beg your pardon! I beg your pardon!” interjected Mr. Cupples, laying down his knife and fork. “I was most careful, when we talked it all over the other night, to say nothing indicating such a belief. I was always certain that he was innocent.”

“You said something of the sort at Marlowe’s just now. I wondered what on earth you could mean. Certain that he was innocent! How can you be certain? You are generally more careful about terms than that, Cupples.”

“I said ‘certain’,” Mr. Cupples repeated firmly.

Trent shrugged his shoulders. “If you really were, after reading my manuscript and discussing the whole thing as we did,” he rejoined, “then I can only say that you must have totally renounced all trust in the operations of the human reason; an attitude which, while it is bad Christianity and also infernal nonsense, is oddly enough bad Positivism too, unless I misunderstand that system. Why, man—”

“Let me say a word,” Mr. Cupples interposed again, folding his hands above his plate. “I assure you I am far from abandoning reason. I am certain he is innocent, and I always was certain of it, because of something that I know, and knew from the very beginning. You asked me just now to imagine myself on the jury at Marlowe’s trial. That would be an unprofitable exercise of the mental powers, because I know that I should be present in another capacity. I should be in the witness-box, giving evidence for the defence. You said just now, ‘If there were a single piece of evidence in support of his tale.’ There is, and it is my evidence. And,” he added quietly, “it is conclusive.” He took up his knife and fork and went contentedly on with his dinner.

The pallor of sudden excitement had turned Trent to marble while Mr Cupples led laboriously up to this statement. At the last word the blood rushed to his face again, and he struck the table with an unnatural laugh. “It can’t be!” he exploded. “It’s something you fancied, something you dreamed after one of those debauches of soda and milk. You can’t really mean that all the time I was working on the case down there you knew Marlowe was innocent.”

Mr. Cupples, busy with his last mouthful, nodded brightly. He made an end of eating, wiped his sparse moustache, and then leaned forward over the table. “It’s very simple,” he said. “I shot Manderson myself.”

“I am afraid I startled you,” Trent heard the voice of Mr. Cupples say. He forced himself out of his stupefaction like a diver striking upward for the surface, and with a rigid movement raised his glass. But half of the wine splashed upon the cloth, and he put it carefully down again untasted. He drew a deep breath, which was exhaled in a laugh wholly without merriment. “Go on,” he said.

“It was not murder,” began Mr. Cupples, slowly measuring off inches with a fork on the edge of the table. “I will tell you the whole story. On that Sunday night I was taking my before-bedtime constitutional, having set out from the hotel about a quarter past ten. I went along the field path that runs behind White Gables, cutting off the great curve of the road, and came out on the road nearly opposite that gate that is just by the eighth hole on the golf-course. Then I turned in there, meaning to walk along the turf to the edge of the cliff, and go back that way. I had only gone a few steps when I heard the car coming, and then I heard it stop near the gate. I saw Manderson at once. Do you remember my telling you I had seen him once alive after our quarrel in front of the hotel? Well, this was the time. You asked me if I had, and I did not care to tell a falsehood.”

A slight groan came from Trent. He drank a little wine, and said stonily, “Go on, please.”

“It was, as you know,” pursued Mr. Cupples, “a moonlight night, but I was in shadow under the trees by the stone wall, and anyhow they could not suppose there was any one near them. I heard all that passed just as Marlowe has narrated it to us, and I saw the car go off towards Bishopsbridge. I did not see Manderson’s face as it went, because his back was to me, but he shook the back of his left hand at the car with extraordinary violence, greatly to my amazement. Then I waited for him to go back to White Gables, as I did not want to meet him again. But he did not go. He opened the gate through which I had just passed, and he stood there on the turf of the green, quite still. His head was bent, his arms hung at his sides, and he looked somehow—rigid. For a few moments he remained in this tense attitude, then all of a sudden his right arm moved swiftly, and his hand was at the pocket of his overcoat. I saw his face raised in the moonlight, the teeth bared, and the eyes glittering, and all at once I knew that the man was not sane. Almost as quickly as that flashed across my mind, something else flashed in the moonlight. He held the pistol before him, pointing at his breast.

“Now I may say here I shall always be doubtful whether Manderson really meant to kill himself then. Marlowe naturally thinks so, knowing nothing of my intervention. But I think it quite likely he only meant to wound himself, and to charge Marlowe with attempted murder and robbery.

“At that moment, however, I assumed it was suicide. Before I knew what I was doing I had leapt out of the shadows and seized his arm. He shook me off with a furious snarling noise, giving me a terrific blow in the chest, and presenting the revolver at my head. But I seized his wrists before he could fire, and clung with