Witness for the Defence — chaps. 11-12

CHAPTER XI THRESK INTERVENES

Thresk reached his hotel with some words ringing in his head which Jane Repton had spoken to him at Mrs. Carruthers' dinner-party: "You can get any single thing in life you want if you want it enough, but you cannot control the price you will have to pay for it.

That you will only learn afterwards and gradually."

He had got what he had wanted--the career of distinction, and he wondered whether he was to begin now to learn its price.

He mounted to his sitting-room on the second floor, avoiding the lounge and the lift and using a small side staircase instead of the great central one.

He had passed no one on the way.

In his room he looked upon the mantelshelf and on the table.

No visitor had called on him that day;

no letter awaited him.

For the first time since he had landed in India a day had passed without some resident leaving on him a card or a note of invitation.

The newspapers gave him the reason.

He was supposed to have left on the _Madras_ for England.

To make sure he rang for his waiter; no message of any kind had come.

"Shall I ask at the office?"

the waiter asked.

"By no means," answered Thresk, and he added: "I will have dinner served up here to-night."

There was just a possibility, he thought, that he might after all escape this particular payment.

He took from his pocket his unposted letter to Stella Ballantyne.

There was no longer any use for it and even its existence was now dangerous to Stella.

For let it be discovered, however she might plead that she knew nothing of its contents, a motive for the death of Ballantyne might be inferred from it.

It would be a false motive, but just the sort of motive which the man in the street would immediately accept.

Thresk burnt the letter carefully in a plate and pounded up each black flake of paper until nothing was left but ashes.

Then for the moment his work was done.

He had only to wait and he did not wait long.

On the very next morning his newspaper informed him that Inspector Coulson of the Bombay Police had left for Chitipur.

The Inspector was a young man devoted to his work, but he travelled now upon a duty which he would gladly have handed to any other of his colleagues.

He had met Stella Ballantyne in Bombay upon one of her rare visits to Jane Repton.

He had sat at the same dinner-table with her, and he did not find it pleasant to reflect on the tragic destiny which she must now fulfil.

For the facts were fatal.

At daybreak on the morning of the Friday a sentry on the outer edge of the camp at Jarwhal Junction had noticed something black lying upon the ground in the open just outside the door of the Agent's big marquee.

He ran across the ground and discovered Captain Ballantyne sprawling, face downwards, in the smoking-suit which he had worn at dinner the night before.

The sentry shook him gently by the shoulder, but the limpness of the body frightened him.

Then he noticed that there was blood upon the ground, and calling loudly for help he ran to the guard-room tent.

He returned with others of the native levies and they lifted Ballantyne up.

He was dead and the body was cold.

The levies carried him into the tent and opened his shirt.

He had been shot through the heart.

They then roused Mrs. Ballantyne's ayah and bade her wake her mistress.

The ayah went into Mrs. Ballantyne's room and found her mistress sound asleep.

She waked her up and told her what had happened.

Stella Ballantyne said not a word.

She got out of bed, and flinging on some clothes went into the outer tent, where the servants were standing about the body.

Stella Ballantyne went quite close to it and looked down upon the dead man's face for a long time.

She was pale, but there was no shrinking in her attitude--no apprehension in her eyes.

"He has been killed," she said at length; "telegrams must be sent at once: to Ajmere for a doctor, to Bombay, and to His Highness the Maharajah."

Baram Singh salaamed.

"It is as your Excellency wills," he said.

"I will write them," said Stella quietly.

And she sat down at her own writing-table there and then.

The doctor from Ajmere arrived during the day, made an examination and telegraphed a report to the Chief Commissioner at Ajmere.

That report contained the three significant points which Repton had enumerated to Thresk, but with some still more significant details.

The bullet which pierced Captain Ballantyne's heart had been fired from Mrs. Ballantyne's small rook-rifle, and the exploded cartridge was still in the breech.

The rifle was standing up against Mrs. Ballantyne's writing-table in a corner of the tent, when the doctor from Ajmere discovered it.

In the second place, although Ballantyne was found in the open, there was a patch of blood upon the carpet within the tent and a trail of blood from that spot to the door.

There could be no doubt that Ballantyne was killed inside.

There was the third point to establish that theory.

Neither the sentry on guard nor any one of the servants sleeping in the adjacent tents had heard the crack of the rifle.

It would not be loud in any case, but if the weapon had been fired in the open it would have been sufficiently sharp and clear to attract the attention of the men on guard.

The heavy double lining of the tent however was thick enough so to muffle and deaden the sound that it would pass unnoticed.

The report was considered at Ajmere and forwarded.

It now brought Inspector Coluson of the Police up the railway from Bombay.

He found Mrs. Ballantyne waiting for him at the Residency of Chitipur.

"I must tell you who I am," he said awkwardly.

"There is no need to," she answered, "I know."

He then cautioned her in the usual way, and producing his pocket-book asked her whether she wished to throw any light upon her husband's death.

"No," she said.

"I have nothing to say.

I was asleep and in bed when my ayah came into my room with the news of his death."

"Yes," said the Inspector uncomfortably.

That detail, next to the dragging of the body out of the tent, seemed to him the grimmest part of the whole tragedy.

He shut up his book.

"I am afraid it is all very unsatisfactory," he said.

"I think we must go back to Bombay."

"It is as your Excellency wills," said Stella in Hindustani, and the Inspector was startled by the bad taste of the joke.

He had not the knowledge of her life with Ballantyne, which alone would have given him the key to understand her.

But he was not a fool, and a second glance at her showed to him that she was not speaking in joke at all.

He had an impression that she was so tired that she did not at the moment care what happened to her at all.

The fatigue would wear off, no doubt, when she realised that she must fight for her life, but now she stood in front of him indifferent and docile--much as one of the native levies was wont to stand before her husband.

The words which the levies used and the language in which they spoke them rose naturally to her lips, as the only words and language suitable to the occasion.

"You see, Mrs. Ballantyne," he said gently, "there is no reason to suspect a single one of your servants or of your escort."

"And there is reason to suspect me," she added, looking at him quietly and steadily.

The Inspector for his part looked away.

He was a young man--no more than a year or two older than Stella Ballantyne herself.

They both came from the same kind of stock.

Her people and his people might have been friends in some pleasant country village in one of the English counties.

She was pretty, too, disconcertingly pretty, in spite of the dark circles under her eyes and the pallor of her face.

There was a delicacy in her looks and in her dress which appealed to him for tenderness.

The appeal was all the stronger because it was only in that way and unconsciously that she appealed.

In her voice, in her bearing, in her eyes there was no request, no prayer.

"I have been to the Palace," he said, "I have had an audience with the Maharajah."

"Of course," she answered.

"I shall put no difficulties in your way."

He was standing in her own drawing-room, noticing with what skill comfort had been combined with daintiness, and how she had followed the usual instinct of her kind in trying to create here in this room a piece of England.

Through the window he looked out upon a lawn which was being watered by a garden-sprinkler, and where a gardener was at work attending to a bed of bright flowers.

There, too, she had been making the usual pathetic attempt to convert a half-acre of this country of yellow desert into a green garden of England.

Coulson had not a shadow of doubt in his mind Stella Ballantyne would exchange this room with its restful colours and its outlook on a green lawn for--at the best--many years of solitary imprisonment in Poona Gaol.

He shut up his book with a snap.

"Will you be ready to go in an hour?"

he asked roughly.

"Yes," said she.

"If I leave you unwatched during that hour you will promise to me that you will be ready to go in an hour?"

Stella Ballantyne nodded her head.

"I shall not kill myself now," she said, and he looked at her quickly, but she did not trouble to explain her words.

She merely added: "I may take some clothes, I suppose?"

"Whatever you need," said the Inspector.

And he took her down to Bombay.

She was formally charged next morning before the stipendiary for the murder of her husband and remanded for a week.

She was remanded at eleven o'clock in the morning, and five minutes later the news was ticked off on the tape at the Taj Mahal Hotel.

Within another five minutes the news was brought upstairs to Thresk.

He had been fortunate.

He was in a huge hotel, where people flit through its rooms for a day and are gone the next, and no one is concerned with the doings of his neighbour, a place of arrival and departure like the platform of a great railway station.

There was no place in all Bombay where Thresk could so easily pass unnoticed.

And he had passed unnoticed.

A single inquiry at the office, it is true, would have revealed his presence, but no one had inquired, since by this time he should be nearing Aden.

He had kept to his rooms during the day and had only taken the air after it was dark.

This was in the early stages of wireless telegraphy, and the _Madras_ had no installation.

It might be that inquiries would be made for him at Aden.

He could only wait with Jane Repton's words ringing in his ears: "You cannot control the price you will have to pay."

Stella Ballantyne was brought up again in a week's time and the case then proceeded from day to day.

The character of Ballantyne was revealed, his brutalities, his cunning.

Detail by detail he was built up into a gross sinister figure secret and violent which lived again in that crowded court and turned the eyes of the spectators with a shiver of discomfort upon the young and quiet woman in the dock.

And in that character the prosecution found the motive of the crime.

Sympathy at times ran high for Stella Ballantyne, but there were always the two grim details to keep it in check: she had been found asleep by her ayah, quietly restfully asleep within a few hours of Ballantyne's death; and she had, according to the theory of the Crown, found in some violence of passion the strength to drag the dying man from the tent and to leave him to gasp out his life under the stars.

Thresk watched the case from his rooms at the Taj Mahal Hotel.

Every fact which was calculated to arouse sympathy for her was also helping to condemn her.

No one doubted that she had shot Stephen Ballantyne.

He deserved shooting--very well.

But that did not give her the right to be his executioner.

What was her defence to be?

A sudden intolerable provocation?

How would that square with the dragging of his body across the carpet to the door?

There was the fatal insuperable act.

Thresk read again and again the reports of the proceedings for a hint as to the line of the defence.

He got it the day when Repton appeared in the witness-box on a subpoena from the Crown to bear testimony to the violence of Stephen Ballantyne.

He had seen Stella with her wrist bruised so that in public she could not remove her gloves.

"What kind of bruises?"

asked the counsel.

"Such bruises as might be made by some one twisting her arms," he answered, and then Mr. Travers, a young barrister who was enjoying his first leap into the public eye, rose to cross-examine.

Thresk read through that cross-examination and rose to his feet.

"You cannot control the price you will have to pay," he said to himself.

That day, when Mrs. Ballantyne's solicitor returned to his office after the rising of the Court, he found Thresk waiting for him.

"I wish to give evidence for Mrs. Ballantyne," said Thresk--"evidence which will acquit her."

He spoke with so much certainty that the solicitor was fairly startled.

"And with evidence so positive in your possession it is only this afternoon that you come here with it!

Why?"

Thresk was prepared for the question.

"I have a great deal of work waiting for me in London," he returned.

"I hoped that it might not be necessary for me to appear at all.

Now I see that it is."

The solicitor looked straight at Thresk.

"I knew from Mrs. Repton that you dined with the Ballantynes that night, but she was sure that you knew nothing of the affair.

You had left the tent before it happened."

"That is true," answered Thresk.

"Yet you have evidence which will acquit Mrs. Ballantyne?"

"I think so."

"How is it, then," the lawyer asked, "that we have heard nothing of this evidence at all from Mrs. Ballantyne herself?"

"Because she knows nothing of it," replied Thresk.

The lawyer pointed to a chair.

The two men sat down together in the office and it was long before they parted.

Within an hour of Thresk's return from the solicitor's office an Inspector of Police waited on him at his hotel and was instantly shown up.

"We did not know until to-day," he said, "that you were still in Bombay, Mr. Thresk.

We believed you to be on the Madras, which reached Marseilles early this morning."

"I missed it," replied Thresk.

"Had you wanted me you could have inquired at Port Said five days ago."

"Five days ago we had no information."

The native servants of Ballantyne had from the first shrouded themselves in ignorance.

They would answer what questions were put to them; they would not go one inch beyond.

The crime was an affair of the Sahibs and the less they had to do with it the better, until at all events they were sure which way the wind was setting from Government House.

Of their own initiative they knew nothing.

It was thus only by the discovery of Thresk's letter to Captain Ballantyne, which was found crumpled up in a waste-paper basket, that his presence that night in the tent was suspected.

"It is strange," the Inspector grumbled, "that you did not come to us of your own accord when you had missed your boat and tell us what you knew."

"I don't think it is strange at all," answered Thresk, "for I am a witness for the defence.

I shall give my evidence when the case for the defence opens."

The Inspector was disconcerted and went away.

Thresk's policy had so far succeeded.

But he had taken a great risk and now that it was past he realised with an intense relief how serious the risk had been.

If the Inspector had called upon him before he had made known his presence to Mrs. Ballantyne's solicitor and offered his evidence, his position would have been difficult.

He would have had to discover some other good reason why he had lain quietly at his hotel during these last days.

But fortune had favoured him.

He had to thank, above all, the secrecy of the native servants.

CHAPTER XII THRESK GIVES EVIDENCE

Thresk's fears were justified.

Sympathy for Stella Ballantyne had already begun to wane.

The fact that Ballantyne had been found outside the door of the tent was already assuming a sinister importance.

Mrs. Ballantyne's counsel slid discreetly over that awkward incident.

Very fortunately, as it was now to prove, he did not cross-examine the doctor from Ajmere at all.

But there are always the few who oppose the general opinion--the men and women who are in the minority because it is the minority; those whom the hysterical glorification made of Stella Ballantyne had offended; the austere, the pedantic, the just, the jealous, all were quick to seize upon this disconcerting fact: Stella Ballantyne had dragged her dying husband from the tent.

It was either sheer callousness or blind fury--you might take your choice.

In either case it dulled the glow of martyrdom which for a week or two had been so radiant upon Stella Ballantyne's forehead; and the few who argued thus attracted adherents daily.

And with the sympathy for Stella Ballantyne interest in the case began to wane too.

The magisterial inquiry threatened to become tedious.

The pictures of the witnesses and the principals occupied less and less space in the newspapers.

In another week the case would be coldly left with a shrug of the shoulders to the Law Courts.

But unexpectedly curiosity was stirred again, for the day after Thresk had called upon the lawyer, when the case for the Crown was at an end, Mrs. Ballantyne's counsel, Mr. Travers, asked permission to recall Baram Singh.

Permission was granted, and Baram Singh once more took his place in the witness-box.

Mr. Travers leant against the desk behind him and put his questions with the most significant slowness.

"I wish to ask you, Baram Singh," he said, "about the dinner-table on the Thursday night.

You laid it?"

"Yes," replied Baram Singh.

"For how many?"

"For three."

There was a movement through the whole court.

"Yes," said Mr. Travers, "Captain Ballantyne had a visitor that night."

Baram Singh agreed.

"Look round the court and tell the magistrate if you can see here the man who dined with Captain Ballantyne and his wife that night."

For a moment the court was filled with the noise of murmuring.

The usher cried "Silence!"

and the murmuring ceased.

A hush of expectation filled that crowded room as Baram Singh's eyes travelled slowly round the walls.

He dropped them to the well of the court, and even his unexpressive face flashed with a look of recognition.

"There," he cried, "there!"

and he pointed to a man who was sitting just underneath the counsel's bench.

Mr. Travers leant forward and in a quiet but particularly clear voice said: "Will you kindly stand up, Mr. Thresk?"

Thresk stood up.

To many of those present--the idlers, the people of fashion, the seekers after a thrill of excitement who fill the public galleries and law-courts--his long conduct of the great Carruthers trial had made him a familiar figure.

To the others his name, at all events, was known, and as he stood up on the floor of the court a swift and regular movement like a ripple of water passed through the throng.

They leant forward to get a clearer view of him and for a moment there was a hiss of excited whispering.

"That is the man who dined with Captain and Mrs. Ballantyne on the night when Captain Ballantyne was killed?"

said Mr. Travers.

"Yes," replied Baram Singh.

No one understood what was coming.

People began to ask themselves whether Thresk was concerned in the murder.

Word had been published that he had already left for England.

How was it he was here now?

Mr. Travers, for his part, was enjoying to the full the suspense which his question had aroused.

Not by any intonation did he allow a hint to escape him whether he looked upon Thresk as an enemy or friend.

"You may sit down, sir, now," he said, and Thresk resumed his seat.

"Will you tell us what you know of Mr. Thresk's visit to the Captain?"

Travers resumed, and Baram Singh told how a camel had been sent to the dâk-house by the station of Jarwhal Junction.

"Yes," said Mr. Travers, "and he dined in the tent.

How long did he stay?"

"He left the camp at eleven o'clock on the camel to catch the night train to Bombay.

The Captain-sahib saw him off from the edge of the camp."

"Ah," said Mr. Travers, "Captain Ballantyne saw him off?"

"Yes--from the edge of the camp."

"And then went back to the tent?"

"Yes."

"Now I want to take you to another point.

You waited at dinner?"

"Yes."

"And towards the close of dinner Mrs. Ballantyne left the room?"

"Yes."

"She did not come back again?"

"No." "No. The two men were then left alone?"

"Yes."

"After dinner was the table cleared?"

"Yes," said Baram Singh, "the Captain-sahib called to me to clear the table quickly."

"Yes," said Travers.

"Now, will you tell me what the Captain-sahib was doing while you were clearing the table?"

Baram Singh reflected.

"First of all the Captain-sahib offered a box of cheroots to his visitor, and his visitor refused and took a pipe from his pocket.

The Captain-sahib then lit a cheroot for himself and replaced the box on the top of the bureau."

"And after that?"

asked Travers.

"After that," said Baram Singh, "he stooped down, unlocked the bottom drawer of his bureau and then turned sharply to me and told me to hurry and get out."

"And that order you obeyed?"

"Yes."

"Now, Baram Singh, did you enter the room again?"

Baram Singh explained that after he had gone out with the table-cloth he returned in a few moments with an ash-tray, which he placed beside the visitor-sahib.

"Yes," said Travers.

"Had Captain Ballantyne altered his position?"

Baram Singh then related that Captain Ballantyne was still sitting in his chair by the bureau, but that the drawer of the bureau was now open, and that on the ground close to Captain Ballantyne's feet there was a red despatch-box.

"The Captain-sahib," he continued, "turned to me with great anger, and drove me again out of the room."

"Thank you," said Mr. Travers, and he sat down.

The prosecuting counsel rose at once.

"Now, Baram Singh," he said with severity, "why did you not mention when you were first put in the witness-box that this gentleman was present in the camp that night?"

"I was not asked."

"No, that is quite true," he continued, "you were not asked specifically, but you were asked to tell all that you knew."

"I did not interfere," replied Baram Singh.

"I answered what questions were asked.

Besides, when the sahib left the camp the Captain-sahib was alive."

At this moment Mr. Travers leaned across to the prosecuting counsel and said: "It will all be made clear when Mr. Thresk goes into the box."

And once more, as Mr. Travers spoke these words, a rustle of expectancy ran round the court.

Travers opened the case for the defence on the following morning.

He had been originally instructed, he declared, to reserve the defence for the actual trial before the jury, but upon his own urgent advice that plan was not to be followed.

The case which he had to put before the stipendiary must so infallibly prove that Mrs. Ballantyne was free from all complicity in this crime that he felt he would not be doing his duty to her unless he made it public at the first opportunity.

That unhappy lady had already, as every one who had paid even the most careless attention to the facts that had been presented by the prosecution must know, suffered so much distress and sorrow in the course of her married life that he felt it would not be fair to add to it the strain and suspense which even the most innocent must suffer when sent for trial upon such a serious charge.

He at once proposed to call Mr. Thresk, and Thresk rose and went into the witness-box.

Thresk told the story of that dinner-party word for word as it had occurred, laying some emphasis on the terror which from time to time had taken possession of Stephen Ballantyne, down to the moment when Baram Singh had brought the ash-tray and left the two men together, Thresk sitting by the table in the middle of the room and Ballantyne at his bureau with the despatch-box on the floor at his feet.

"Then I noticed an extraordinary look of fear disfigure his face," he continued, "and following the direction of his eyes I saw a lean brown arm with a thin hand as delicate as a woman's wriggle forward from beneath the wall of the tent towards the despatch-box."

"You saw that quite clearly?"

asked Mr. Travers.

"The tent was not very brightly lit," Thresk explained.

"At the first glance I saw something moving.

I was inclined to believe it a snake and to account in that way for Captain Ballantyne's fear and the sudden rigidity of his attitude.

But I looked again and I was then quite sure that it was an arm and hand."

The evidence roused those present to such a tension of excitement and to so loud a burst of murmuring that it was quite a minute before order was restored and Thresk took up his tale again.

He described Ballantyne's search for the thief.

"And what were you doing," Mr. Travers asked, "whilst the search was being made?"

"I stood by the table holding the despatch-box firmly in my hands as Ballantyne had urgently asked me to do."

"Quite so," said Mr. Travers; and the attention of the court was now directed to that despatch-box and the portrait of Bahadur Salak which it contained.

The history of the photograph, its importance at this moment when Salak's trial impended, and Ballantyne's conviction of the extreme danger which its possessor ran--a conviction established by the bold attempt to steal it made under their very eyes--was laid before the stipendiary.

He sent the case to trial as he was bound to do, but the verdict in most people's eyes was a foregone conclusion.

Thresk had supplied a story which accounted for the crime, and cross-examination could not shake him.

It was easy to believe that at the very moment when Thresk was saying goodbye to Captain Ballantyne by the fire on the edge of the camp the thief slipped into the marquee, and when discovered by Ballantyne either on his return or later shot him with Mrs. Ballantyne's rifle.

It was clear that no conviction could be obtained while this story held the field and in due course Mrs. Ballantyne was acquitted.

Of Thresk's return to the tent just before leaving the camp nothing was said.

Thresk himself did not mention it and the counsel for the Crown had no hint which could help him to elicit it.

Thus the case ended.

The popular heroine of a criminal trial loses, as all observers will have noticed, her crown of romance the moment she is set free; and that good fortune awaited Stella Ballantyne.