‘Well,’ said Mr Wainewright, shuffling his feet, ‘I mean to say … I hear that Tooth’s good lady got thousands and thousands of pounds.’
‘A few hundreds, George,’ said Jacket.
‘It isn’t that, Mr Jacket. It’s——’
‘The credit?’ asked Jacket, twitching an ironic lip.
‘Who is she to be made a heroine out of?’ asked Wainewright, looking at his finger-tips.
‘What exactly are you trying to get at, George?’ asked Jacket.
‘Get at? Who, me? Nothing, Mr Jacket.’
‘Then what do you want? What do you want me to do?’
Mr Wainewright looked at the ball of his right thumb and shook his head. ‘There was nothing about me at all in the papers,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a story, too.’
‘Be a pal,’ said Jacket, ‘and go away. I’ve got work to do, George, old man, work. So be a pal.’
‘Right.’ Mr Wainewright got up.
‘Don’t be angry with me. Things come and things go,’ said Jacket, ‘and a story is a nine-days’ wonder. Wash this murder out of your head.’
Mr Wainewright said: ‘Well, you know best. But I’ve also got a story——’
A telephone bell rang. ‘See you some other time,’ said John Jacket, lifting the receiver. ‘So long for now, George.’
Wainewright went out without saying good day. Shortly after he had gone, John Jacket, hanging up the telephone, found himself wondering about something. There had been something wrong with Wainewright. What?
Jacket gnawed a fat black pencil.
He had eaten his way to the last letter of the pencil-maker’s name before he knew what he was trying to remember. He laughed, and said to himself: That silly little man has gone and got himself up in a furry green hat and a tweed suit. What on earth for?
Jacket felt that he was on the verge of a discovery – not a Sunday Special story, but something interesting all the same.
Then his telephone rang. By the time he had stopped listening new things were in his head, and Mr Wainewright, being gone, was forgotten.
Three weeks later, as Jacket was leaving the office at lunch-time, he heard Mr Wainewright’s voice again. The little man came breathlessly out of the cover of a doorway and said: ‘Mr Jacket, sir. Please. One moment. Just one moment.’
‘Well, what is it?’ said Jacket, looking down at him with an expression of something like loathing. ‘What is it now, Wainewright?’
‘It’s something important, sir. Something very important. I give you my word, my word of honour, you’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t listen to me.’
‘I’m in a hurry.’
‘I’ve been waiting for you here in the street for an hour and a half,’ said Mr Wainewright.
‘You should have telephoned.’
‘If I had, you wouldn’t have spoken to me.’
‘True,’ said Jacket. Then he blinked, and said: ‘What the devil have you been doing to yourself?’
Mr Wainewright was dressed in a tight-fitting, half-belted jacket of white stuff like tweed, an orange-coloured shirt and a black satin tie with a diamond horseshoe pin, blue flannel trousers, a panama hat, and brown-and-white buckskin shoes. He had trimmed his moustache to a fine straight line, above and below which Jacket could see a considerable area of tremulous white lip, beaded with perspiration. And he could smell lavender-water and whisky.
‘Doing to myself? Nothing, sir,’ said Mr Wainewright.
‘I like your hat.’
‘It’s real panama.’
‘Um-um!’ Jacket considered him for a second or two, and then said: ‘Come on, then. Tell me all about it. Come and have a drink.’
‘It’s very private,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘It’s not something I could talk about if there was anybody around. Look, Mr Jacket, it’ll be worth your while. Come home with me, just for a few minutes.’
‘Home with you?’
‘To Bishop’s Square – ten minutes in a taxi, no more. I’ve got plenty of drinks at home. Have a drink there. Ten minutes. I’ll show you something…. I’ll tell you something. Please do! Please do, Mr Jacket.’
‘All right, then. But I haven’t long,’ said Jacket.
They got into a taxi. Neither of them spoke until Mr Wainewright said: ‘After you,’ as he unlocked the street door of Number 77, Bishop’s Square. ‘Lead the way,’ said Jacket. The little man bobbed in a shopwalker’s obeisance. They passed through a clean, dim passage hung with framed caricatures out of Vanity Fair, and climbed sixteen darkly-carpeted stairs to the first floor. Mr Wainewright opened another door. ‘This used to be my auntie’s room,’ he said, rather breathlessly.
‘Charming,’ said Jacket, without enthusiasm.
‘It was Tooth’s room, too.’
‘Oh I see. The room in which Tooth was murdered, eh?’
‘Yes, sir. It’s my bedroom now.’
‘And is this what you brought me here to see?’ asked Jacket.
‘No, no,’ cried Mr Wainewright, splashing a quarter of a pint of whisky into a large tumbler, and pressing the nozzle instead of the lever of a soda-water syphon. ‘Please sit down.’
‘That’s a massive drink you’ve given me,’ said Jacket. He observed that his host’s drink was not much smaller.
‘No, not at all.’
‘Cheers.’ Jacket emptied his glass in two gulps. Mr Wainewright tried to do the same, but choked; recovered with a brave effort, and forced the rest of his drink into his mouth and down his throat. Jacket could hear his heavy breathing. ‘Now, tell us all about it,’ he said.
‘There was,’ said Mr Wainewright, swaying a little in his chair, ‘there was a … an astounding miscarriage of justice.’
‘In what way, Wainewright?’
‘In every way, Mr Jacket, sir. In every way. What I have to say will shock you.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Sid Tooth died just about on the spot where you are sitting, sir.’
‘Well?’
‘The rug, of course, is a new one. They couldn’t clean the old one…. But your glass is empty.’
‘I’ll pour drinks. You go on,’ said Jacket, rising.
‘Listen,’ said Mr Wainewright….
Mr Wainewright said, dreamily:
‘What I want to know is this: where’s your justice? Where’s your law? If justice is made a mockery of, and law is tricked – what do I pay rates and taxes for? The world’s going mad, sir. A woman is accused, sir, of killing her hubby with a pair of scissors. It’s proved that she did it, proved beyond doubt, Mr Jacket! And what happens? This woman, a nobody, mind you; this woman does not pay the penalty of her crime, sir. No. She is made a heroine of. She is cheered to the echo. She has her picture in all the papers. She has her life-story published. She marries again, lives happy ever after. Is that fair? Is that right?’
‘What’s on your mind, Wainewright? It was pretty well established as a clean-cut case of self-defence.’
Mr Wainewright, with extraordinary passion, said: ‘She was lying! Tooth was still alive when she left this house! He was hale and hearty as you or me, after the street door closed behind Martha Tooth. Alive and laughing, I tell you. She’s a perjurer … a perjuress. She’s a liar. She got what she got under false pretences: all that money, all that sympathy. “Ill-Used Woman”, as you called her! She never killed Tooth. The world must be going mad.’
‘What about your evidence?’ asked Jacket, skilfully pouring half his drink into his host’s glass.
Mr Wainewright snapped: ‘Evidence! Don’t talk to me about evidence!’