Clock Without Hands
SEVERAL years ago, when newspapers had space to spare for all kinds of sensational trivialities, John Jacket of the Sunday Special went to talk with a certain Mr Wainewright about the stabbing of a man named Tooth whose wife had been arrested and charged with murder. It was a commonplace, dreary case. The only extraordinary thing about it was that Martha Tooth had not killed her husband ten years earlier. The police had no difficulty in finding her. She was sitting at home, crying and wringing her hands. It was a dull affair; she was not even young, or pretty.
But Jacket had a knack of finding strange and colourful aspects of drab, even squalid affairs. He always appproached his subjects from unconventional angles. Now he went out on the trail of Wainewright, the unassuming man who had found Tooth’s body, and who owned the house in which Tooth had lived.
Even the Scotland Yard man who took down Wainewright’s statement had not been able to describe the appearance of the little householder. He was ‘just ordinary’, the detective said, ‘sort of like a City clerk’. He was like everybody: he was a nobody. At half-past seven every evening Wainewright went out to buy a paper and drink a glass of beer in the saloon bar of the ‘Firedrake’– always the Evening Extra: never more than one glass of beer.
So one evening at half-past seven John Jacket went into the saloon bar of the ‘Firedrake’, and found Mr Wainewright sitting under an oval mirror that advertised Bach’s Light Lager. Jacket had to look twice before he saw the man.
A man has a shape; a crowd has no shape and no colour. The massed faces of a hundred thousand men make one blank pallor; their clothes add up to a shadow; they have no words. This man might have been one hundred-thousandth part of the featureless whiteness, the dull greyness, and the toneless murmuring of a docile multitude. He was something less than nondescript – he was blurred, without identity, like a smudged fingerprint. His suit was of some dim shade between brown and grey. His shirt had grey-blue stripes, his tie was patterned with dots like confetti trodden into the dust, and his oddment of limp brownish moustache resembled a cigarette-butt, disintegrating shred by shred in a tea-saucer. He was holding a brand-new Anthony Eden hat on his knees, and looking at the clock.
‘This must be the man,’ said Jacket.
He went to the table under the oval mirror, smiled politely, and said: ‘Mr Wainewright, I believe?’
The little man stood up. ‘Yes. Ah, yes. My name is Wainewright.’
‘My name is Jacket; of the Sunday Special. How do you do?’
They shook hands. Mr Wainewright said: ‘You’re the gentleman who writes every week!’
‘“Free For All”– yes, that’s my page. But what’ll you drink, Mr Wainewright?’
‘I hardly ever——’
‘Come, come,’ said Jacket. He went to the bar. Mr Wainewright blinked and said:
‘I take the Sunday Mail. With all due respect, of course. But I often read your efforts. You have a big following, I think?’
‘Enormous, Mr. Wainewright.’
‘And so this is the famous … the famous …’ He stared at Jacket with a watery mixture of wonder and trepidation in his weak eyes. ‘With all due respect, Mr Jacket, I don’t know what I can tell you that you don’t know already.’
‘Oh, to hell with the murder,’ said Jacket, easily. ‘It isn’t about that I want to talk to you, Mr Wainewright.’
‘Oh, not about the murder?’
‘A twopenny-halfpenny murder, whichever way you take it. No, I want to talk about you, Mr Wainewright.’
‘Me? But Scotland Yard——’
‘—Look. You will excuse me, won’t you? You may know the sort of things I write about, and in that case you’ll understand how this Tooth murder affair fails to interest me very much. What does it amount to, after all? A woman stabs a man.’ Jacket flapped a hand in a derogatory gesture. ‘So? So a woman stabs a man. A hackneyed business: an ill-treated wife grabs a pair of scissors and – pst! Thousands have done it before; thousands will do it again, and a good job too. If she hadn’t stabbed Tooth, somebody else would have, sooner or later. But … how shall I put it? … you, Mr Wainewright, you interest me, because you’re the …”
Jacket paused, groping for a word, and Mr Wainewright said with a little marsh-light flicker of pride: ‘The landlord of the house in which the crime was committed, sir?’
‘The bystander, the onlooker, the witness. I like to get at the, the impact of things – the way people are affected by things. So let’s talk about yourself.’
Alarmed and gratified, Mr Wainewright murmured: ‘I haven’t anything to tell about myself. There isn’t anything of interest, I mean. Tooth——’
‘Let’s forget Tooth. It’s an open-and-shut case, anyway.’
‘Er, Mr Jacket. Will they hang her, do you think?’
‘Martha Tooth? No, not in a thousand years.’
‘But surely, she’s a murderess, sir!’
‘They can’t prove premeditation.’
‘Well, Mr Jacket, I don’t know about that …’
‘Tell me, Mr Wainewright; do you think they ought to hang Martha Tooth?’
‘Well, sir, she did murder her hubby, after all …’
‘But how d’you feel about it? What would you say, if you were a juryman?’
‘The wages of sin is … ah … the penalty for murder is the, ahem, the rope, Mr Jacket!’
‘And tell me, as man to man – do you believe that this woman deserves to swing for Tooth?’
‘It’s the law, sir, isn’t it?’
‘Is it? They don’t hang people for crimes of passion these days.’
At the word ‘passion’, Mr Wainewright looked away. He drank a little whisky-and-soda, and said: ‘Perhaps not, sir. She might get away with … with penal servitude for life, Mr Jacket, do you think?’
‘Much less than that.’
‘Not really?’ Mr Wainewright’s voice was wistful.
‘She might even be acquitted.’
‘Well, sir … that’s for the judge and jury to decide. But to take human life …’
‘Do you dislike the woman, Mr Wainewright?’
Jacket blinked at the little man from under half-raised eyebrows.
‘Oh good Lord no, sir! Not at all, Mr Jacket: I don’t even know her. I only saw her for an instant.’
‘Good-looking?’
‘Good-looking, Mr Jacket? No, no she wasn’t. A … a … charwomanish type, almost. As you might say, she was bedraggled.’
‘As I might say?’
‘Well … without offence, Mr Jacket, you are a writer, aren’t you?’
‘Ah. Ah, yes. Not a handsome woman, eh?’
‘She looked – if you’ll excuse me – as if she …. as if she’d had children, sir. And then she was flurried, and crying. Handsome? No, sir, not handsome.’
‘This Tooth of yours was a bit of a son of a dog, it seems to me. A pig, according to all accounts.’
‘Not a nice man by any means, sir. I was going to give him notice. Not my kind of tenant – not the sort of tenant I like to have in my house, sir.’
‘Irregular hours, I suppose: noisy, eh?’
‘Yes, and he … he drank, too. And worse, sir.’
‘Women?’
Mr Wainewright nodded, embarrassed. ‘Yes. Women all the time.’
‘That calls for a little drink,’ said Jacket.
He brought fresh drinks. ‘Oh no!’ cried Mr Wainewright. ‘Not for me: I couldn’t, thanks all the same.’