The judge summed up with scrupulous impartiality, treating the jury to an exposition on the nature and value of circumstantial evidence and an interpretation of the expression “reasonable doubt.” The jury listened with respectful attention. It was impossible to guess what went on behind those twelve pairs of watchful, anonymous eyes. But they weren’t out long.
Within forty minutes of the court rising, they were back; the prisoner reappeared in the dock, the judge asked the formal question. The foreman gave the expected answer, loud and clear. “Guilty, my Lord.” No one seemed surprised.
The judge explained to the prisoner that he had been found guilty of the horrible and merciless killing of the woman who had loved him. The prisoner, his face taut and ashen, stared wild-eyed at the judge, as if only half-hearing. The sentence was pronounced, sounding doubly horrible spoken in those soft judicial tones.
Gabriel looked with interest for the black cap and saw with surprise and some disappointment that it was merely a square of some black material perched incongruously atop the judge’s wig. The jury was thanked. The judge collected his notes like a businessman clearing his desk at the end of a busy day. The court rose. The prisoner was taken below. It was over.
The trial caused little comment at the office. No one knew that Gabriel had attended. His day’s leave “for personal reasons” was accepted with as little interest as any previous absence. He was too solitary, too unpopular to be included in office gossip. In his dusty and ill-lit room, insulated by tiers of filing cabinets, he was the object of vague dislike or, at best, of a pitying tolerance. The filing room had never been a centre for cozy office chat. But he did hear the opinion of one member of the firm.
On the day after the trial, Mr. Bootman, newspaper in hand, came into the general office while Gabriel was distributing the morning mail. “I see they’ve disposed of our little local trouble,” Mr. Bootman said. “Apparently the fellow is to hang. A good thing, too. It seems to have been the usual sordid story of illicit passion and general stupidity. A very commonplace murder.”
No one replied. The office staff stood silent, then stirred into life. Perhaps they felt that there was nothing more to be said.
It was shortly after the trial that Gabriel began to dream. The dream, which occurred about three times a week, was always the same. He was struggling across a desert under a blood-red sun, trying to reach a distant fort. He could sometimes see the fort clearly, although it never got any closer. There was an inner courtyard crowded with people, a silent black-clad multitude whose faces were all turned towards a central platform. On the platform was a gallows. It was a curiously elegant structure, with two sturdy posts at either side and a delicately curved crosspiece from which the noose dangled.
The people, like the gallows, were not of this age. It was a Victorian crowd, the women in shawls and bonnets, the men in top hats or narrow-brimmed bowlers. He could see his mother there, her thin face peaked under the widow’s veil. Suddenly she began to cry, and as she cried, her face changed and became the face of the weeping woman at the trial. Gabriel longed desperately to reach her, to comfort her. But with every step he sank deeper into the sand.
There were people on the platform now. One, he knew, must be the prison governor, top-hatted, frock-coated, bewhiskered and grave. His clothes were those of a Victorian gentleman, but his face, under that luxuriant beard, was the face of Mr. Bootman. Beside him stood the chaplain, in gown and bands, and, on either side, were two warders, their dark jackets buttoned high to their necks.
Under the noose stood the prisoner. He was wearing breeches and an open-necked shirt, and his neck was as white and delicate as a woman’s. It might have been that other neck, so slender it looked. The prisoner was gazing across the desert towards Gabriel, not with desperate appeal but with great sadness in his eyes. And, this time, Gabriel knew that he had to save him, had to get there in time.
But the sand dragged at his aching ankles, and although he called that he was coming, coming, the wind, like a furnace blast, tore the words from his parched throat. His back, bent almost double, was blistered by the sun. He wasn’t wearing a coat. Somehow, irrationally, he was worried that his coat was missing, that something had happened to it that he ought to remember.
As he lurched forward, floundering through the gritty morass, he could see the fort shimmering in the heat haze. Then it began to recede, getting fainter and further, until at last it was only a blur among the distant sandhills. He heard a high, despairing scream from the courtyard—then awoke to know that it was his voice and that the damp heat on his brow was sweat, not blood.
In the comparative sanity of the morning, he analysed the dream and realised that the scene was one pictured in a Victorian news-sheet which he had once seen in the window of an antiquarian bookshop. As he remembered, it showed the execution of William Corder for the murder of Maria Marten in the Red Barn. The remembrance comforted him. At least he was still in touch with the tangible and sane world.
But the strain was obviously getting him down. It was time to put his mind to his problem. He had always had a good mind, too good for his job. That, of course, was why the other staff resented him. Now was the time to use it. What, exactly, was he worrying about? A woman had been murdered. Whose fault had it been? Weren’t there a number of people who shared the responsibility?
That blonde tart, for one, who had lent them the flat. The husband, who had been so easily fooled. The boy, who had enticed her away from her duty to husband and children. The victim herself—particularly the victim. The wages of sin are death. Well, she had taken her wages now. One man hadn’t been enough for her.
Gabriel pictured again that dim shadow against the bedroom curtains, the raised arms as she drew Speller’s head down to her breast. Filthy. Disgusting. Dirty. The adjectives smeared his mind. Well, she and her lover had taken their fun. It was right that both of them should pay for it. He, Ernest Gabriel, wasn’t concerned. It had only been by the merest chance that he had seen them from that upper window, only by chance that he had seen Speller knock and go away again.
Justice was being served. He had sensed its majesty, the beauty of its essential rightness, at Speller’s trial. And he, Gabriel, was a part of it. If he spoke now, an adulterer might even go free. His duty was clear. The temptation to speak had gone for ever.
It was in this mood that he stood with the small silent crowd outside the prison on the morning of Speller’s execution. At the first stroke of eight, he, like the other men present, took off his hat. Staring up at the sky high above the prison walls, he felt again the warm exultation of his authority and power. It was on his behalf, it was at his, Gabriel’s, bidding that the nameless hangman inside was exercising his dreadful craft…
But that was sixteen years ago. Four months after the trial the firm, expanding and conscious of the need for a better address, had moved from Camden Town to the north of London. Gabriel had moved with it. He was one of the few people on the staff who remembered the old building. Clerks came and went so quickly nowadays; there was no sense of loyalty to the job.
When Gabriel retired at the end of the year, only Mr. Bootman and the porter would remain from the old Camden Town days. Sixteen years. Sixteen years of the same job, the same bedsitting room, the same half-tolerant dislike on the part of the staff. But he had had his moment of power. He recalled it now, looking round the small sordid sitting-room with its peeling wallpaper, its stained boards. It had looked different sixteen years ago.
He remembered where the sofa had stood, the very spot where she had died. He remembered other things—the pounding of his heart as he made his way across the asphalt; the quick knock; the sidling through the half-opened door before she could realise it wasn’t her lover; the naked body cowering back into the sitting-room; the taut white throat; the thrust with his filing bodkin that was as smooth as puncturing soft rubber. The steel had gone in so easily, so sweetly.