AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Hester was pale. ‘Seconds of delay can allow a man to bleed to death when he has lost a limb, Mr Colbert,’ she said a little harshly. ‘There may be no doctor there to ask. And by the time you find one it would be too late. With Mr Radnor I did all I could to preserve his life. He was suffering from a disease that is usually fatal, but not in a matter of minutes. I had plenty of time to ask Mr Rand’s counsel and then act according to his instructions.’
‘And yet you do not know if he was recovering or not?’ Colbert said with disbelief.
‘The treatment was experimental,’ she explained again carefully. ‘The essence of that is that no one knows whether it will work or not.’
‘Your answers are very considered, Mrs Monk, very well thought out. You sound as if you are picking and choosing your words to protect yourself from accusations of complicity in this . . . experiment. Did you believe it would fail?’
Rathbone looked across at Juster and saw the anxiety flicker for an instant in his face. Had the jury seen that? Was it the same fear that he felt gnawing inside himself? Hester was sometimes painfully honest. Where would her first loyalty lie now? Towards justice, safety for the children she had come to know and protect? Even to love. It could be anger at what had been done to them, but he doubted it would be as simple as revenge. Might her loyalty be to medicine itself, to all the future lives that could be saved if Rand succeeded, or even if someone else picked up the knowledge so far and went forward with it?
How would her conscience drive her to answer? She must not hesitate too long, or it would look contrived. Colbert would press on that. More importantly, the jury would see her indecision as lies.
Rathbone looked at Juster again. Perhaps he should object, say that Colbert was asking her to give the very speculation he had claimed she was medically untrained to offer. It would be legally correct, but it would also quite clearly be an evasion. The question had been asked. It must be answered, or the jury would provide their own answer. Colbert was a great deal less mild than he looked.
‘Mrs Monk?’ Colbert said with a lift of curiosity in his voice.
Hester smiled. ‘As you have said, sir, I am not medically qualified to give such an opinion. But since you have opened the door by asking me, I can say that I was deeply impressed by Mr Rand’s means of keeping freshly taken blood from coagulating, which would make it unusable to give to another person. His equipment was well designed and seemed to work efficiently . . .’
‘Mrs Monk—’ he interrupted, frowning his annoyance.
She ignored him as if she had not heard, and continued, ‘. . . to carry out the function of giving the blood to the patient. Occasionally Mr Radnor’s reaction was not good, but with nursing he recovered. I think it is impossible to say if in time he would have recovered from his illness, or if he would have continued to need blood regularly. Nor did Mr Rand ever learn why the blood of these children always worked, and with other people sometimes it did, but more often it did not. That is a series of experiments one cannot make. More often than not they failed and the patient died, not always could one say from exactly what cause – whether the transfusion killed them, or merely failed to save them.’
Colbert knew when to leave a subject alone. He thanked her and dismissed her.
Juster decided not to question her again. He too knew a winning hand when he had played it.
The next witness he called was Hooper. As soon as he was sworn and stated his name and occupation, Juster moved forward into the open space, and stood gracefully and at ease looking up at him on the stand. He was confident Hooper could take care of himself, and that certainty was in every angle of his body as he began.
‘When did you know that Mrs Monk had been kidnapped by Mr Rand?’
Hooper smiled very slightly. ‘When we found her in his cottage near Redditch, and he was standing there with a surgeon’s knife in his hand, the blade at her throat, threatening to kill her, sir.’
It was not the answer Juster had expected, but the response in the courtroom more than satisfied him. There was a gasp around the gallery and a rustling of clothes as if a wind had passed through a great tree in full leaf. The jury stiffened, some staring at Hooper, others at Hester, who was now seated in the gallery herself.
Mr Justice Patterson bit his lip, and still failed to conceal a smile.
Colbert was on his feet. ‘My lord!’ he protested.
Patterson raised his hand. ‘It was a fair question, Mr Colbert, and a fair answer.’ He looked at Hooper. ‘Do I take it, sir, that until that time you did not know what had happened?’
‘I believed it, my lord,’ Hooper said soberly. ‘But until that time I did not know. It was just what seemed most likely from the evidence, and evidence can be wrong.’
‘Indeed it can, Mr Hooper,’ Patterson agreed. ‘Please continue, Mr Juster. I imagine you have other questions?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ Juster bowed his head very slightly, mostly to conceal his smile. Rathbone knew that, because he was doing the same. But they were a long way from victory yet. The defence had not even begun.
‘Mr Hooper,’ Juster continued, ‘Mr Monk is your immediate superior, is that correct?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Did he order you to join him in this journey to look for Mrs Monk?’
‘No, sir. He didn’t order me to do anything apart from my usual River Police duties. We’re kind of short-handed after several of us were wounded in a battle on a gunrunning ship.’ His voice dropped. ‘And one of us bled to death. I’m officially still on sick leave, sir.’
Rathbone looked at Hooper more carefully and noticed that he was standing in the witness box not entirely straight. One might have taken it for the awkwardness of a big man in a confined space, and perhaps taken by the tension of the experience. Now he could see it was truly the adjustment of weight of someone who was not entirely healed from an injury.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Juster answered. ‘I hope you are close to recovery.’
‘Thank you, sir, very close,’ Hooper acknowledged it.
