The Crimson Rooms (47 page)

From the defense point of view, Julie’s evidence was damning, because it was clear that she’d made up her mind both about Stephen’s guilt and about his motive. “He loved her to pieces, anyone could see that. But he watched her all the time. He never believed himself good enough for her. I said to her, Stell, don’t marry him. He’ll want you always there, under his eye.”

“She must have loved him very much to go against such advice.”

“The fact is, Your Lordship, Stell was terrified of being left on the shelf. We all were. She thought he was the best she could get. I don’t mean to be cruel to Stephen but I know I’m right. He was a good man, had a good job, and she was really very fond of him.”

“Your Honor, I must object, this is all speculation . . .”

“Mr. Wainwright, the dead girl is not here to give her own reasons for marriage so we must pay attention to her sister. The jury should understand that in the case of murder where the victim cannot speak for herself, hearsay evidence from those close to her is admissible. Perhaps Mrs. Leamington, however, might be persuaded to give us more detail of the evidence upon which she based her conclusions as to her sister’s state of mind.”

“Mrs. Leamington, you do not describe the late Mrs. Wheeler, your sister, as being a contented person. What about in more intimate areas of her marriage, did she ever give you cause to think things were not well there?”

Julie shrugged and pouted. “I never had the chance to speak to her after she was wed.”

“You say Wheeler was a jealous man.”

“I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. In some ways I thought he was too good to Stella, overindulged her. He knew she loved dancing. He tormented himself, sometimes, I thought, by watching her dance, but apart from not letting her go to the Trocadero he never stopped her. When she was a girl she had dreamed of becoming a dancer, you know, in shows. Dad paid a fortune for lessons, but it came to nothing. She wanted money for her dancing frocks and such so she started in Lyons. She never saved her money, just spent it on clothes.”

“You say Mr. Wheeler didn’t like her going to the Trocadero. Did she conform to his wishes?”

“Mostly. Sometimes she went but didn’t tell him.” She glanced at Wheeler, who sat as usual, eyes downcast, hands clasped.

“So on the one hand you have a husband who loves to watch his wife dance, on the other a man who was perhaps conscious of his own physical deficiencies.”

“You are putting words into the witness’s mouth,” said the judge.

“This is a difficult question for you, Mrs. Leamington, but did your sister ever give her husband real cause to be jealous?”

“If you mean, did Stella have an affair? Of course not. She was a good girl. She didn’t have to marry him. If you mean, did she flirt? Yes, she flirted.”

“And what form did that flirting take?”

Julie started to weep, rather daintily, and produced a lace handkerchief from her cuff. “If she was noticed by someone she liked the look of, she would become different; more of everything, more smiles, more movement, more spark, you know. She would perform for them, not obviously but so only they and she would know. I’ve seen her do it a hundred times.”

Wainwright, in cross-examination, asked gently: “You say Stella flirted but she never seemed to have been drawn to one man in particular or allowed herself to be carried away. Yet you claim Mr. Wheeler was jealous.”

“He would go very quiet sometimes after a night out. Not speak to her for days. He never shouted. Just silence. She hated his silence.”

“To your knowledge, was he ever violent toward her?”

“Never. She would have told me.”

“So the idea that he might actually have taken her life out of jealousy is, in your mind, absurd.”

“Objection,” shouted Warren.

He needn’t have bothered. Julie was determined to reply to Wainwright’s question. “She’s dead, isn’t she?” was what she said.

The next prosecution witness was
Doctor Reardon, the medical officer who had served with Wheeler in 1917. He was a plump, smart man, more like a naval captain than an army doctor, with a scar on his cheek and another, quite vicious, on the back of his hand.

Once the doctor’s report had been read in open court, Warren said: “Dr. Reardon, you wrote:
I would strongly recommend that Wheeler be examined for his psychological fitness to plead. What is acceptable, even convenient in times of war, does not allow a man to survive in more normal circumstances.
You’ll be aware that the defense chose not to follow that recommendation. Perhaps you could clarify to the court why you wrote as you did.”

“It’s exactly as I said in the report. I am not sure that a man’s apparent sanity in time of great stress will necessarily hold in later life.”

“You think that Wheeler may be suffering from delayed shell shock or some such.”

“Possibly.”

“But you have not examined him recently, so could not possibly comment on his current state of mind.”

“I could not.”

“And since the defense is not choosing to call any other experts to give evidence concerning Stephen Wheeler’s state of mind at present, or indeed at the time when his wife, Stella, was killed, the court must draw its own conclusions. Now, Dr. Reardon, I have a couple of very simple questions to put to you, concerning army protocol. In your report, you said that Wheeler had formed part of a firing squad. I wonder if you could tell the court the process that was gone through prior to an execution.”

“What possible relevance,” asked Wainwright, “can this question have to a murder committed in 1924 in Buckinghamshire countryside?”

The judge said irritably: “I’m sure Mr. Warren has his reasons.”

“The man in question is given a last meal,” said Reardon, “and allowed to pray, and then he is led before his fellows, blindfolded if he wishes.”

“And tell us how the men who form the squad are selected.”

“Again, it varies from regiment to regiment. Sometimes by lot. Sometimes handpicked. In our case, the former.”

“And what was your role, as the doctor?”

“To declare a man dead, obviously.”

“Any other function?”

“Sometimes to ensure members of the firing party were fit.”

“Anything else?”

Silence. Then Reardon said: “It was my job to place a marker.”

“A marker?”

“The men needed a precise target to ensure that the job was done without inflicting unnecessary suffering. We pinned a square of white flannel over the heart of the prisoner, to ensure that he would be quickly and humanely killed.”

“So that he would be shot in the heart.”

“Precisely.”

Wainwright was on his feet. “Your Honor, it’s late in the morning and we’re all weary but I crave your forgiveness. I repeat, I fail to see the relevance of this line of questioning to the murder of a girl in a wood.”

Warren looked pained: “I have finished my questions. I was merely demonstrating to the jury that the defendant, Wheeler, had formed part of a firing squad in which he was ordered to shoot a man through the heart.”

Wainwright shuffled his notes and began his cross-examination: “Dr. Reardon, much will hinge, in this trial, on whether Mr. Wheeler was capable of killing his wife in cold blood for some spurious reason to do with money. Give us your impressions of the man.”

Warren cried: “Your Honor, this court is surely not interested in
impressions
, particularly impressions formed more than half a dozen years ago.”

The judge bowed his head for a moment, as if summoning strength. “Objection upheld, Mr. Warren.”

“Tell us more, then,” said Wainwright, urbane as ever, “about the case in which Wheeler formed part of the firing squad. You say he knew the man who died.”

“It was a regrettable incident in every respect. Wheeler was a member of a firing party that executed a man who I later discovered had been especially dear to him, all the more tragic as Wheeler was not generally known for his ability to form close friendships. This particular boy had been a junior employee at Imperial Insurance and joined up underage, at sixteen and a half, with other members of the firm, then twice ran away and was captured. In my view he was shell-shocked, but another, more senior doctor dismissed the diagnosis. The first time his sentence was suspended, the second the court-martial had no option but to recommend he face the firing squad. Fox—the young boy—had not been alone in trying to escape and when he and his fellow were captured, one of them turned on the military policeman and shot him in the elbow. Though Wheeler had attempted to nurture and protect this boy, when his name was drawn from the hat he did not flinch from forming part of the firing party, though under the circumstances he would certainly have been excused. I suspect he took on the work because he knew that he at least would not miss the mark. I would say this was evidence rather of a merciful action than otherwise.”

I was barely listening. Fox. Yes, there’d been another soldier—a pimply lad—in the only photograph of Wheeler in uniform, kept with its face to the wall in the spare room of the marital home. I’d assumed that it was Stella who had set the photograph aside out of indifference but perhaps after all it was Wheeler who couldn’t bear to look at it. I glanced at Wheeler but he did not show by the flicker of an eyelash that he was moved by what he’d heard.

“One question in reexamination,” said Warren, rising to his feet again. “As you said in your own report, and I quote:
I have noted that there are types of personality that survive better in war than in peacetime—a man like Wheeler thrives on the routine of war and the absolute necessity to obey orders. The shocks of trench life register less with this type than with others . . .
Does not this suggest a lack of feeling?”

“No, sir, it suggests that here is a man who has found a mechanism for dealing with what to others would be unbearable.”

Over lunch Breen went into conference
with Wainwright, so I walked by myself up and down the little streets of Aylesbury. Nicholas was on my mind, and the copse on the Chesham hillside.
This bloody war
, he’d said,
it goes on and on, doesn’t it?
An invidious link had been made in the jury’s minds between Stephen forming part of a firing squad and his wife meeting her death through a shot in the heart.

I passed gabled cottages, grander Georgian houses, cobbled alleys that reminded me of Chesham. It was all so pat, this gradual unraveling of evidence against Wheeler. Each time another witness was called, a new piece was added to the jigsaw. The jury was being led inexorably toward a verdict of guilt, but if it were true, it was almost as if Wheeler had gone out of his way to frame himself. We were all being made to look only in his direction. But if that was the case, what had we turned our backs on? To what had we made ourselves blind?

Don’t look at the act,
implored my brother from beyond the grave,
look at the cause
. What was the
cause
of Stella’s death? And I realized now that what we had not been seeing was the obvious—whoever killed Stella had known everything about her husband: his jealousy, what he’d kept in a tin box in the shed, his love of a lunchtime drink, his war record, every last detail, including that he’d formed part of a firing squad. So what else did they know that had led them to the terrible conclusion that Stella had to be killed? What was the cause?

And more to the point, from whom had they learned all these things? Only two people had such intimate knowledge of Wheeler. The man himself, and his wife.