Gleave was smiling.
“Would it surprise you to know, Mr. Pitt, that the maid who dusted and polished the billiard room is no longer certain that the scratch you so providentially noticed was a new one? She now says it may well have been there earlier, and she had merely not noticed it before.”
Pitt was uncertain how to reply. The question was awkwardly phrased.
“I don’t know her well enough to be surprised or not,” he said carefully. “Witnesses sometimes do alter their testimony … for a variety of reasons.”
Gleave looked offended. “What are you suggesting, sir?”
Juster interrupted again. “My lord, my learned friend asked the witness if he was surprised. The witness merely answered the question. He made no implication at all.”
Gleave did not wait for the judge to intervene. “Let us see what we are left with in this extraordinary case. Mr. Adinett visited his old friend Mr. Fetters. They spent a pleasant hour and a half together in the library. Mr. Adinett left. I presume you are in agreement with this?” He raised his eyebrows enquiringly.
“Yes,” Pitt conceded.
“Good. To continue, some twelve or fifteen minutes later the library bell rang, the butler answered it, and as he was approaching the library door he heard a cry and a thud. When he opened the door, to his distress, he saw his master lying on the floor and the steps over on their side. Very naturally, he concluded that there had been an accident—as it turned out, a fatal one. He saw no one else in the room. He turned and left to call for assistance. Do you agree so far?”
Pitt forced himself to smile. “I don’t know. Since I had not yet given my evidence, I wasn’t here for the butler’s testimony.”
“Does it fit with the facts you know?” Gleave snapped above another ripple of laughter.
“Yes.”
“Thank you. This is a most serious matter, Mr. Pitt, not an opportunity for you to entertain the onlookers and parade what you may perceive to be your sense of humor!”
Pitt blushed scarlet. He leaned forward over the rail, his temper boiling.
“You asked me an impossible question!” he accused Gleave. “I was pointing that out to you. If your folly entertained the gallery, that is your own fault—not mine!”
Gleave’s face darkened. He had not expected retaliation, but he covered his anger quickly. He was nothing if not a fine actor.
“Then we have Dr. Ibbs being overzealous, for what reason we cannot know,” he resumed as if the interruption had never occurred. “You answered his call and found all these enigmatic little signs. The armchair was not where you would have placed it had this beautiful room been yours.” His tone of voice was derisive. “The butler thinks it sat somewhere else. There was an indentation on the carpet.” He glanced at the jury with a smile. “The books were not in the order that you would have placed them had they been yours.” He did not bother to keep the smile from his face. “The glass of port was not finished, and yet he sent for the butler. We shall never know why … but is it our concern?” He looked at the jury. “Do we accuse John Adinett of murder for that?” His face was filled with amazement. “Do we? I don’t! Gentlemen, these are a handful of miscellaneous irrelevancies dredged up by an idle doctor and a policeman who wants to make a name for himself, even if it is on the death of one man, and the monstrously wrong accusation against another, who was his friend. Throw it out as the farrago of rubbish it is!”
“Is that your defense?” Juster said loudly. “You appear to be summing up.”
“No, it is not!” Gleave retorted. “Although I hardly need more. But have your witness back, by all means.”
“Not a great deal to say,” Juster observed, taking his place. “Mr. Pitt, when you first questioned the housemaid, was she certain about the scratch on the billiard room door?”
“Absolutely.”
“So something has caused her to change her mind since then?”
Pitt licked his lips.
“Yes.”
“I wonder what that could be?” Juster shrugged, then moved on quickly. “And the butler was certain that the library chair had been moved?”
“Yes.”
“Has he since changed his mind?” Juster spread his hands in the air. “Oh, of course you don’t know. Well, he hasn’t. The bootboy is also quite certain he cleaned his master’s boots sufficiently thoroughly that there were no tufts or threads caught in them from the center of the carpet or the fringes.” He looked as if he had suddenly had an idea. “By the way, was the piece you found a thread from the fringe or a piece of soft fluff, as from the pile?”
“Soft fluff, of the color from the center,” Pitt replied.
“Just so. We have seen the shoes, but not the carpet.” He smiled. “Impractical, I suppose. Nor can we see the library shelves with their mismatched books.” He looked puzzled. “Why would a traveler and an antiquarian, interested most especially in Troy, its legends, its magic, its ruins that lie at the very core of our heritage, place three of its most vivid books on a shelf where he is obliged to climb steps to reach them? And obviously he did want them, or why would he have incurred his own death climbing up for them?” He lifted his shoulders dramatically. “Except, of course, that he didn’t!”
That evening Pitt found it impossible to settle. He walked around his garden, pulling the odd weed, noticing the flowers in bloom and those in bud, the new leaves on the trees. Nothing held his attention.
Charlotte came out beside him, her face worried, the late sunlight making a halo around her hair, catching the auburn in it. The children were in bed and the house was quiet. The air was already growing chilly.
He turned and smiled at her. There was no need to explain. She had followed the case from the first days and knew why he was anxious, even if she had no idea of the foreboding he felt now. He had not told her how serious it could be if Adinett were found not guilty because the jury believed Pitt was incompetent and driven by personal emotions, creating a case out of nothing in order to satisfy some ambition or prejudice of his own.
They spoke of other things, trivia, and walked slowly the length of the lawn and back again. What they said did not matter, it was the warmth of her beside him he valued, the fact that she was there and did not press with questions or allow her own fears to show.
* * *
The following day Gleave began his defense. He had already done all he could to dismiss the evidence of Dr. Ibbs, of the various servants who had seen the tiny changes Pitt had spoken of, and of the man in the street who had observed someone roughly answering Adinett’s description going into the side gate of Fetters’s house. Now he called witnesses to the character of John Adinett. He had no shortage from which to choose, and he allowed the whole courtroom to know it. He paraded them one after another. They were drawn from many walks of life: social, military, political, even one from the church.
The last of them, the Honorable Lyall Birkett, was typical. He was slender, fair-haired, with an intelligent, aristocratic face and a quiet manner. Even before he spoke he impressed a certain authority upon his opinions. He had no doubt whatever that Adinett was innocent, a good man caught in a web of intrigue and misfortune.
Since he had given his evidence, Pitt was now permitted to remain in the court, and since he was in command of the Bow Street station he was not answerable to anyone else to return to it. He chose to hear the rest of the trial from a place on the benches.
“Twelve years,” Birkett said in answer to Gleave’s question as to how long he had been acquainted with Adinett. “We met at the Services Club. You can usually be pretty sure of who you meet there.” He smiled very slightly. It was not a nervous smile, not ingratiating, certainly not humorous, merely a gesture of good nature. “Small world, you see? Field of battle tests men. You get to know pretty quickly who’s got the mettle, who you can rely on when there’s anything to lose. Ask around a bit and you’ll run into someone who knows your man.”