Witness for the Defence Part 37

The behaviour of a man whose mind is influenced by that condition cannot be explained always by any laws of psychology. He may be in a wild panic.

He may act as madmen act, or like a child in a rage. And if my explanation is weak it's no weaker than the only other hypothesis: that Mrs. Ballantyne herself dragged him into the open."

Mr. Pettifer shook his head.

"I am not so sure. I can conceive a condition of horror in the wife, horror at what she had done, which would make that act not merely possible but almost inevitable. I make no claims to being an imaginative man, Mr. Thresk, but I try to put myself into the position of the wife"; and he described with a vividness for which Thresk was not prepared the scene as he saw it.

"She goes to bed, she undresses and goes to bed--she must do that if she is to escape--she puts out her light, she lies in the dark awake, and under the same roof, close to her, in the dark too, is lying the man she has killed. Just a short pa.s.sage separates her from him. There are no doors--mind that, Mr. Thresk--no doors to lock and bolt, merely a gra.s.s screen which you could lift with your forefinger. Wouldn't any and every one of the little cracks and sounds and breathings, of which the quietest and stillest night is full, sound to her like the approach of the dead man? The faintest breath of air would seem a draught made by the swinging of the gra.s.s-curtain as it was stealthily lifted--lifted by the dead man. No, Mr. Thresk. The wife is just the one person I could imagine who would do that needless barbarous violence of dragging the body into the open--and she would do it, not out of cruelty, but because she must or go mad."

Thresk listened without a movement until Robert Pettifer had finished.

Then he said:

"You know Mrs. Ballantyne. Has she the strength which she must have had to drag a heavy man across the carpet of a tent and fling him outside?"

"Not now, not before. But just at the moment? You argued, Mr. Thresk, that it is impossible to foresee what people will do under the immediate knowledge that they have committed a capital crime. I agree. But I go a little further. I say that they will also exhibit a physical strength with which it would be otherwise impossible to credit them. Fear lends it to them."

"Yes," Thresk interrupted quickly, "but don't you see, Mr. Pettifer, that you are implying the existence of an emotion in Mrs. Ballantyne which the facts prove her to have been without--fear, panic? She was found quietly asleep in her bed by the ayah when she came to call her in the morning.

There's no doubt of that. The ayah was never for a moment shaken upon that point. The pyschology of crime is a curious and surprising study, Mr. Pettifer, but I know of no case where terror has acted as a sleeping-draught."

Mr. Pettifer smiled and turned altogether away from the question.

"It is, as I said, a minor point, and perhaps one from which any sort of inference would be unsafe. It interested me. I lay no great stress upon it."

He dismissed the point carelessly, to the momentary amus.e.m.e.nt of Henry Thresk. The art of slipping away from defeat had been practised with greater skill. Thresk lost some part of his apprehension but none of his watchfulness.

"Now, however, we come to something very different," said Pettifer, hitching himself a little closer to his table and fixing his eyes upon Thresk. "The case for the prosecution ran like this: Stephen Ballantyne was, though a man of great ability, a secret drunkard who humiliated his wife in public and beat her in private. She went in terror of him. She bore on more than one occasion the marks of his violence; and upon that night in Chitipur, perhaps in a panic and very likely under extreme provocation, she s.n.a.t.c.hed up her rook-rifle and put an end to the whole bad business."

"Yes," Thresk agreed, "that was the case for the Crown."

"Yes, and throughout the sitting at the Stipendiary's inquiry before you came upon the scene that theory was clearly developed."

"Yes."

Thresk's confidence vanished as quickly as it had come. He realised whither Pettifer's questions were leading. There was a definitely weak link in his story and Pettifer had noticed it and was testing it.

"Now," the solicitor continued--"and this is the important point--what was the answer to that charge foreshadowed by the defence during those days before you appeared?"

Thresk answered the question quickly, if answer it could be called.

"The defence had not formulated any answer. I came forward before the case for the Crown finished."

"Quite so. But Mrs. Ballantyne's counsel did cross-examine the witnesses for the prosecution--we must not forget that, Mr. Thresk--and from the cross-examination it is quite clear what answer he was going to make. He was going--not to deny that Mrs. Ballantyne shot her husband--but to plead that she shot him in self-defence."

"Oh?" said Thresk, "and where do you find that?"

He had no doubt himself in what portion of the report of the trial a proof of Pettifer's statement was to be discovered, but he made a creditable show of surprise that any one should hold that opinion at all.

Pettifer selected a column of newspaper from his cuttings.

"Listen," he said. "Mr. Repton, a friend of Mrs. Ballantyne, was called upon a subpoena by the Crown and he testified that while he was a Collector at Agra he went up with his wife from the plains to the hill-station of Moussourie during a hot weather. The Ballantynes went up at the same time and occupied a bungalow next to Repton's. One night Repton's house was broken into. He went across to Ballantyne the next morning and advised him in the presence of his wife to sleep with a revolver under his pillow."

"Yes, I remember that," said Thresk. He had indeed cause to remember it very well, for it was just this evidence given by Repton with its clear implication of the line which the defence meant to take that had sent him in a hurry to Mrs. Ballantyne's solicitor. Pettifer continued by reading Repton's words slowly and with emphasis.

"'Mrs. Ballantyne then turned very pale, and running after me down the garden like a distracted woman cried: "Why did you tell him to do that?

It will some night mean my death."' This statement, Mr. Thresk, was elicited in cross-examination by Mrs. Ballantyne's counsel, and it could only mean that he intended to set up a plea of self-defence. I find it a little difficult to reconcile that intention with the story you subsequently told."

Henry Thresk for his part knew that it was not merely difficult, it was, in fact, impossible. Mr. Pettifer had read the evidence with an accurate discrimination. The plea of self-defence was here foreshadowed and it was just the certainty that the defence was going to rely upon it for a verdict which had brought Henry Thresk himself into the witness-box at Bombay. Given all that was known of Stephen Ballantyne and of the life he had led his unhappy wife, the defence would have been a good one, but for a single fact--the discovery of Ballantyne's body outside the tent. No plea of self-defence could safely be left to cover that. Thresk himself wondered at it. It struck at public sympathy, it seemed the act of a person insensate and vindictive. Therefore he had come forward with his story. But Mr. Pettifer was not to know it.

"There are three things for you to remember," said Thresk. "In the first place it is too early to a.s.sume that self-defence was going to be the plea. a.s.sumptions in a case of this kind are very dangerous, Mr.

Pettifer. They may lead to an irreparable injustice. We must keep to the fact that no plea of self-defence was ever formulated. In the second place Mrs. Ballantyne was brought down to Bombay in a state of complete collapse. Her married life had been a torture to her. She broke down at the end of it. She was indifferent to anything that might happen."

Pettifer nodded. "Yes, I can understand that."

"It followed that her advisers had to act upon their own initiative."

"And the third point?" Pettifer asked.

"Well, it's not so much a point as an opinion of mine. But I hold it strongly. Her counsel mishandled the case."

Pettifer pursed up his lips and grunted. He tapped a finger once or twice on the table in front of him. He looked towards Thresk as if all was not quite said. Harold Hazlewood, to whom the position of a neglected listener was rare and unpalatable, saw an opportunity for intervention.

"The three points are perhaps not very conclusive," he said.

Thresk turned towards him coldly:

"I promised to answer such questions as Mr. Pettifer put to me. I am doing that. I did not undertake to discuss the value of my answers afterwards."

"No, no, quite so," murmured Mr. Hazlewood. "We are very grateful, I am sure," and he left once more the argument to Pettifer.

"Then I come to the next question, Mr. Thresk. At some moment in this inquiry you of your own account put yourself into communication with Mrs.

Ballantyne's advisers and volunteered your evidence?"

"Yes."

"Isn't it strange that the defence did not at the very outset get into communication with you?"

"No," replied Thresk. Here he was at his ease. He had laid his plans well in Bombay. Mr. Pettifer might go on asking questions until midnight upon this point. Thresk could meet him. "It was not at all strange. It was not known that I could throw any light upon the affair at all. All that pa.s.sed between Ballantyne and myself pa.s.sed when we were alone; and Ballantyne was now dead."

"Yes, but you had dined with the Ballantynes on that night. Surely it's strange that since you were in Bombay Mrs. Ballantyne's advisers did not seek you out."

"Yes, yes," added Mr. Hazlewood, "very strange indeed, Mr.

Thresk--since you were in Bombay"; and he looked up at the ceiling and joined the tips of his fingers, his whole att.i.tude a confident question: "Answer that if you can."

Thresk turned patiently round.

"Hasn't it occurred to you, Mr. Hazlewood, that it is still more strange that the prosecution did not at once approach me?"

"Yes," said Pettifer suddenly. "That question too has troubled me"; and Thresk turned back again.

"You see," he explained, "I was not known to be in Bombay at all. On the contrary I was supposed to be somewhere in the Red Sea or the Mediterranean on my way back to England."