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“But Havilland was a nuisance, wasn’t he?” Dobie raised his voice, challenging him now. He took a couple of steps toward the stand. “He believed you were moving too quickly, didn’t he, Mr. Argyll? He feared you might disturb the land, cause a subsidence, and possibly even break through into an old, uncharted underground river, didn’t he?”
Argyll was now so white he looked as if he might collapse. “I don’t know what he thought!” he shouted back, his voice ragged.
“Don’t you?” Dobie said sarcastically. He turned away, then spun around and faced the witness stand again. “But he was a nuisance, wasn’t he? And even after he was dead, shot in his own stable at midnight and buried in a suicide’s grave, his daughter Mary pressed his cause and took it up herself, didn’t she?” He was pointing his finger now. “And where is she? Also in a suicide’s grave! Along with your ally and younger brother.” His smile was triumphant. “Thank you, Mr. Argyll. The court needs no more from you, at least not yet!” He waved his arm to invite Rathbone to question Argyll if he should wish to.
Rathbone declined. Victory was almost within his grasp.
The judge blinked and looked at Rathbone curiously, but he made no remark.
Dobie called Aston Sixsmith. Rathbone’s ploy was hardly a gamble anymore.
Sixsmith mounted the stand. The man exuded intelligence and animal power, exhausted as he was. There was a rustle of sympathy from the crowd now. Even the jurors smiled at him. He ignored them all, hoarding his emotion to himself, not yet able to betray his awareness of how close he had been to prison, or even the rope. He looked once again at Jenny Argyll. For an instant there was a softening in his face, gone again almost before it was seen. A sense of decency? His gaze barely touched Alan Argyll. His erstwhile employer was finished, worthless. From the gallery Monk watched Sixsmith with an increasing sense of incredulity.
Rathbone had won. Monk looked across at Margaret Bellinger and saw her eagerness for the moment, her pride in Rathbone’s extraordinary achievement for justice.
Dobie was questioning Sixsmith, ramming home the victory. “Did you ever meet this extraordinary assassin before the night you paid him the money Mr. Argyll gave you?” he asked.
“No, sir, I did not,” Sixsmith replied quietly.
“Or after that?”
“No, sir.”
“Have you any idea who shot him, or why?”
“I know no more than you do, sir.”
“Why did you give him the money? For what purpose? Was it to kill James Havilland because he was causing you trouble, and possibly expensive delays?”
“No, sir. Mr. Argyll told me it was to hire men to keep the toshers and navvies from disrupting the work.”
“And what about Mr. Havilland?”
“I understood that Mr. Argyll was going to deal with that himself.”
“How?”
Sixsmith’s gaze was intense. “Show him that he was mistaken. Mr. Havilland was his father-in-law, and I believed that relations were cordial between them.”
“Could this man, this assassin, have misunderstood you?”
Sixsmith stared at him. “No, sir. I was quite specific.”
Dobie could not resist making the very most of it. He looked at the jury, then at the gallery. “Describe the scene for us,” he said at last to Sixsmith. “Let the court see exactly how it was.”
Sixsmith obeyed him, speaking slowly and carefully, like a man emerging from a nightmare into the daylight of sanity. He described the room in the public house: the noise, the smell of ale, the straw on the floor, the press of men.
“He came in at about ten o’clock, as near as I can tell,” he went on in response to Dobie’s prompting. “I knew him straightaway. He was fairly tall, and thin, especially his face. His hair was black and straight, rather long over his collar. His nose was thin at the bridge. But most of all, he had these extraordinary teeth, which I saw when he smiled. He bought a tankard of ale and came straight over to me, as if he already knew who I was. Someone must have described me very well. The man introduced himself, using Argyll’s name so I would know who he was. We discussed the problem of the toshers in particular, and I told him a little more about it. I gave him the money. He accepted it, folded it away, and then stood up. I remember he emptied the tankard in one long draught, and then he left, without once looking backwards.”
Dobie thanked him and invited Rathbone to contest it if he wished.
Rathbone conceded defeat with both dignity and grace. Not by so much as a glance did he admit that it was actually the most elegant and perhaps the most difficult victory of his career.
The jury returned a verdict of guilty o
f attempted bribery, and the judge imposed a fine that was no more than a week’s pay.
The court erupted in cheers, the gallery rising to its feet. The jury looked intensely satisfied, turning to shake one another’s hands and pass words of congratulation.
