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“You had everything sensibly organised, Miss Ross,” said Bosanquet in his level tone. “Then you thought you might do a little sensible organisation about — something else?”

“No.”

“Think a moment. What you did to this boy, beginning with the kidnapping, that required a good deal of organisation?”

“No.”

“It required just as much careful thinking as the way you planned your household accounts?”

“No.”

“We know already how you sensibly allocated your combined income. A certain proportion to the drinks bill—”

“She didn’t drink.”

“No, you were a careful household. But you gave exactly the same sort of attention when you decided to make away with a harmless child?”

Sensible, careful, organised: Bosanquet was reiterating the words, letting no one forget how competent they were. It made an extraordinary picture, just because it was so commonplace: the two of them coming back to their room, Cora allowing herself a couple of evening drinks (a bottle of whisky lasted them a fortnight). It made too extraordinary a picture, for there were many in court, uneasy, disturbed, feeling that their life together, even well before the crime, couldn’t have been quite like that. Yet at times it might or must have been.

“You did a great deal of careful planning — when you decided it was a good idea to make away with a harmless child?”

“No.”

“Of course you did. You have told your own counsel so. We have all heard how you picked on that child weeks beforehand. You organised the whole operation just as thoughtfully as you did your household, isn’t that so?”

“No.”

“Do you deny that you planned it?”

She raised her head. “I thought about one or two things.”

“You planned it step by step?”

No answer.

“Every inch along the way?”

With a kind of scorn or irritation, she said: “It wasn’t like that.”

“You planned it very lucidly, Miss Ross. It’s not for me to find an answer to why you did so. Were you getting bored with everything else in your life together?”

“No.” Her face was convulsed.

“Were you ready for anything with a new thrill?”

“No.”

“Well then. What put this abominable idea into your head?”

For some instants it seemed that she was not going to answer. Then, as though she were wilfully getting back into the groove, or as though it were an answer prepared beforehand, she repeated what she had said to Benskin: “You get carried away.”

Bosanquet, looking up at her, said again that it was not for him to find an answer. He returned to the planning, extricating each logistic point, sounding as temperate as though it were a military analysis. By this time — perhaps it was a delayed reaction — Cora had lost her temper. Her monosyllables were shouted, her expression changed from being wild and riven to something like smooth with hate. Then she sank back into sullenness, but her fury was still smouldering. When he finished with her, her eyes for once followed him: she stared down upon him, face pallid, minatory, deadened.

Benskin half-rose, then thought better of it, and left that impression of her, standing there.

There was not time to begin Kitty’s examination before lunch. After the judge’s procession had departed, I went out, and found his clerk waiting for me. A car was ready to drive me to the judge’s lodgings, in the old County Rooms in the middle of the town: he would be following at once with another guest.

In fact, as I walked into his dining-room, white-panelled, perhaps later than Georgian, but light and lively on the eye, the judge was hallooing cheerfully behind me. “We caught you up, you see,” said Mr Justice Fane.

Do you two know each other? he was saying. Yes, we did, for his other guest was Frederick Hargrave, whom I kept meeting on the University Court. For an instant I was surprised to see him there, he looked so quiet, unassuming, insignificant beside the judge’s bulk: I had to recall that Hargrave (whose grandfather and father had lived in the town like simple Quaker businessmen) was a deputy lieutenant of the county and not unused to entertaining circuit judges.

Still wearing his red gown — he had taken off only his wig — Mr Justice Fane stood between us, as tall as I was, weighing two or three stone more, very heavily boned and muscled, offering us drinks. No, that’s no use to you, he corrected himself; speaking to Hargrave: his manners were just as cordial and attentive out of court as in. So Hargrave was equipped with ginger beer, while the judge helped me to a whisky and himself to a substantial gin and tonic.

“It’s very good of you both to have luncheon with me today,” he said. “I don’t like being lonely here, you know.”

As we stood up, there was some talk of common acquaintances: but the judge, like the barristers at Rose’s house, couldn’t keep from living in the trial.

“You haven’t listened to much of it, have you?” he said to Hargrave, who replied that he had attended one afternoon.

“It can’t have been a pleasant experience for you, Eliot,” said the judge.

“Terrible,” said Hargrave in a gentle tone.

“I think it’s as terrible as anything I’ve seen,” the judge added. In a moment, he went on, his Punch-like nose drawn down: “I don’t know what you think. All this talk of responsibility. We are responsible for our actions, aren’t we? I’m just deciding whether to have another gin and tonic. Eliot, if you give me five pounds on condition that I don’t have one, I’m perfectly capable of deciding against. That’s my responsibility, isn’t it? As you don’t show any inclination to make the offer, then I shall, with equal responsibility, decide to have another one. And I shall bring it to the table, because it’s time we started to eat.”

That was a Johnsonian method of dealing with metaphysics, I thought as we sat down, one on each side of the massive old man. The long table stretched away from us, polished wood shining in the airy elegant room.

The judge told us he had ordered a light meal, soup, fish, cheese. He and I were to split a bottle of white burgundy. He was brooding, he was drawn back — as obsessively magnetised as any of us, despite his professional lifetime — to the morning in the court.

“She tried to be loyal, didn’t she?” he said to me.

I said yes.

The judge explained to Hargrave, who had not been present.

“The Ross girl was loyal to her friend this morning. She tried to take all the blame she could.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Hargrave.

“I don’t believe her,” said the judge.

“I meant, it shows there’s some good in her, after all,” Hargrave insisted, at the same time diffident and firm.

“I don’t believe that she was so much in charge.” The old man was wrapped in his thoughts. Then he looked up, eyes bright, hooded, enquiring.

“Do you know what went through my mind, when I was listening to that young woman in the box? And remember, I’ve been at this business not quite but almost since you two were born. I couldn’t help pitying anyone in her position. You can’t help it. But ought you to pity her? Think of what she’d done. She’d helped get hold of that little boy. I expect they promised him a treat. And they took him out there and tortured him. That was bad enough, but there was something else. He must have been frightened as none of us has ever been frightened. Just remind yourself what it was like your first days at prep school. You were eight years old and you’d got some brutes pestering you and you didn’t see any end to it. Well, that poor child must have gone through that a million times worse. All I hope is that he didn’t realise that they meant to kill him. I don’t know about you, Eliot, but I can’t imagine what he went through. Perhaps it’s a mercy not to have enough imagination. So I ask myself, ought you to pity her?”