Corridors of the Night (25 page)

He followed her, without mentioning that it was half-past two in the afternoon, and far too early for cake.

As it happened, Scuff had eaten the cake anyway, but the lemonade was excellent. Its sweet sharp taste seemed peculiarly appropriate. The roses would last another month or two, but there was autumn in the air.

‘What is it you wish to know?’ Hester asked a little guardedly.

He remembered, not without pain, the time he had humiliated her in the witness stand in a case several years ago, because he had believed passionately in the cause he was fighting. She understood why he had done it, but the memory of it was in her eyes also, the lack of trust. She had made it plain she did not blame him. She would have despised him if he had served friendship before justice. She would not have placed sentiment before medicine.

He reminded her of that now.

She smiled ruefully. ‘You are right,’ she admitted. ‘We should speak honestly now, but it isn’t easy.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Did you go with Rand willingly?’

Her eyes widened. ‘No! Of course not!’

‘Hester, I need to know what the defence will ask you that you may find it hard to answer. We must be prepared with the truth now, not when it is too late.’

She smiled very faintly, and her face was a little paler. ‘I did not go willingly. Actually I was unconscious. I think, from the lingering smell, that they used ether. When I came around I was in an upstairs room in the cottage Rand and his brother inherited, somewhere in the country. All I could see from the window was a stretch of garden, and then the fields and slopes of hillside beyond. I had no idea where I was.’

‘Who else was there?’

‘Hamilton Rand, Bryson Radnor – he was the patient – his daughter, Adrienne, and the three children, Charlie, Maggie and Mike. And the gardener. He seemed to patrol the grounds most of the time. He carried a gun.’

‘Do you know what kind of a gun? What did it look like? Can you describe it?’

‘A double-barrelled shotgun. I’m an army nurse, Oliver; I’ve seen guns before. Probably thousands of them.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. I forgot.’

‘And I really am all right,’ she added. ‘Please stop talking to me as if I were about to faint.’

‘Hester, I . . .’ he began, then stopped. What could he say that would not embarrass her and make her more conscious of the fact that he had once loved her so deeply? He was here now as a friend, and as a lawyer who wanted to trust her on the case so she would not be caught out on the stand when the defence would do everything they could to discredit her.

‘Hester, no one is dead,’ he said gravely. ‘The charge is kidnap. If the defence can make it appear that you went willingly, then the case against Rand depends on the testimony of three small children, who are very young, and who can probably neither read nor write. We can’t call them to the stand. The judge wouldn’t believe them and the defence would tie them in knots! It rests on you, and on Monk and whoever else was with him when they found you. They are all Monk’s men and the defence will most certainly point that out.’

Hester frowned, the first shadows of real anxiety in her eyes.

Rathbone leaned forward a little. ‘Hester, they’ll say that Monk stormed the place, and they had no idea who he was. Very naturally they fought back! Who wouldn’t? If they can make it look as if you were a willing part of the experiment, then we have no case. Adrienne Radnor will very probably lie and say that you went as willingly as she did. If you did not tell your husband where you were, that is a domestic issue, and not their fault.’

She looked stunned, a little dizzy, as if he had slapped her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently, putting his hand over hers and feeling her fingers cool and stiff, as if she were afraid of him.

‘Rand would have killed me if Radnor had died,’ she said. ‘And worse than that, he would have bled those children to death, too, if it would have saved Radnor. He actually told me, when I argued for taking better care of them, that he didn’t need all of them alive.’

‘I’m not talking about the reality,’ Rathbone said. ‘I need what we can prove. And that has to be not what is believable, but what is beyond reasonable doubt. Any doubt at all that offers another explanation, and the jury will have to acquit both of them.’

She blinked back sudden tears. ‘How can I prove that I stayed because I couldn’t leave the children alone there? Maybe there’ll be a juror who would have? They’ll all be men, won’t they!’ Jurors were always men.

‘Many will be married, and with children,’ he replied, hating himself for doing this, although with every evasion he would feel the greater and greater need. It was almost something he could taste, like the sharpness of the lemons in the drink. ‘They’ll know that their wives would never leave children to be bled to death like that, frightened, alone and unloved or comforted. We may have to rely quite heavily on character witnesses.’

‘For me?’ she said, forcing a slight smile of self-mockery. ‘I run a clinic for prostitutes,’ she reminded him. ‘You might be better off not raising that one.’

‘An army nurse now looking after the fallen in a different war,’ he said drily.

Her smile widened in spite of herself. ‘What about the children? That can’t be acceptable. You only have to see them to know how small and vulnerable they are. And Maggie could testify. She’d fight anyone if they threatened her brothers. No lawyer will look good if he bullies a six-year-old little girl who’s been bled half to death for an experiment!’

‘We can’t prove that,’ Rathbone said grimly. ‘But it doesn’t matter, because the judge won’t allow the testimony of a child that age. The defence will fight tooth and nail to keep all of them off the stand.’

‘But they were there!’ she protested. ‘That’s a fact.’

‘Rand will simply say he paid the family for their participation in a medical experiment. Even if it didn’t work, could Rand have been close to success? Is it possible that he believed it could? Please . . . be very careful how you answer.’

Hester sat still for so long he thought she was not going to speak. Then she straightened up and faced him. ‘Yes, I think he was very close indeed. And if I am asked on the stand what I thought of his medicine, I would have to say that if he succeeded, it would be one of the greatest steps forward in saving lives that I have ever heard of. It wouldn’t just be people with white blood disease, it would be women bleeding to death in childbirth, anyone injured and dying from the shock of blood loss, soldiers, sailors, people in accidents of any sort – in the street, industrial – anything! It would stretch into the future beyond imagination. Think of having an operation, and not fearing the bleeding, knowing that what you lost would be replaced! There is no counting the people who would not die . . . if that could be made to work.’

He looked at her, searching her face, and he saw the wonder in her eyes.

‘Will you say that on the stand?’ he asked, realising that their case was vanishing in front of him.

‘If I’m asked, I have to. Do we need to punish him more than we need to save all those people in the future? Anyway, it’s the truth. If he succeeds, or anyone does, it would be like a miracle.’

‘And whose children do we bleed?’ he asked.

The colour bleached out of her face, leaving her haggard. ‘We don’t,’ she said hoarsely. ‘We find another way. That’s the problem he didn’t solve. Why was those children’s blood all right, while other people’s works sometimes and other times it doesn’t? And if the blood is wrong, it’s a hard and miserable way to die.’

‘So his success is partial?’

‘Yes. It’s a step along the path, that’s all. But I think it’s the best step anyone has made so far. We can’t say if it would have worked if he’d been able to continue.’ A sudden, dark shadow filled her eyes. ‘And of course if he is found not guilty, then who can even guess how many other people will try something similar?’

Rathbone had not even thought of that. He felt as if the air had suddenly turned ten degrees colder.

‘Then we must be a great deal more certain of success if we prosecute,’ he said quietly. ‘A victory would also be validation.’ He hesitated a moment, hating to ask her, afraid of the answer. ‘If you are asked on the stand what you think of his work, what will you say?’

She bit her lip. ‘That he was wrong to kidnap me, and deeply wrong to take the children and bleed them. But he could be on the brink of solving the problem of using willingly given human blood from one person to save the life of another. Especially if one could take a little from each of several people, adults, and given voluntarily.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Oliver, but that is the truth. I can’t lie about it. He’s a loathsome man, but that has nothing to do with the lives that his work could save.’

‘I understand. I put the law before individual people I care about, if they are wrong. I expect you to put medicine before them as well, in the same way. We must. And if we don’t, then everything else is also lost, sooner or later.’

She nodded, too full of emotion to look for words that were unnecessary anyway.

Rathbone drank the last of his lemonade and stood up to leave. His mind too was crowded with conflicting thoughts and emotions. He had told Ardal Juster that he would accept the case and work beside him on it. Now he was beginning to see that the complexity of it was deeper and far more tangled than he had imagined.

Rathbone went that evening to visit Beata York. It was an impulsive idea and perhaps not very wise, but his longing to see her overrode his judgement. He realised just how much it had done so when he stood on the doorstep and had already pulled the bell rope. It was too late to leave. If he did, he would look like a naughty child who played practical jokes because he was too young to understand how silly it was, and what a nuisance to servants who had better things to do.

The butler received him with not only courtesy but charm, as if he still felt guilty over Ingram York’s appalling behaviour, which was now some time ago.

‘Good evening, Sir Oliver,’ he said graciously. ‘If you will come into the morning room I will inform Lady York that you are here.’

Still feeling self-conscious, Rathbone accepted, following the man across the now-familiar hall and into the morning room. It was still as austere as when York himself had lived here. That was before the awful night when he had completely lost his temper and attacked Rathbone with his cane, finally collapsing to the floor in some kind of seizure. Every time Rathbone came into this room since then, the horror had come back to him. It was not from fear of injury, it was shock and then desperate embarrassment at York’s sudden headlong fall from what had seemed to be merely eccentric into a state of complete insanity. He had disliked the man too much for pity, and yet in spite of himself, he felt something very close to it, if one can feel pity and revulsion at the same moment.

The butler returned and conducted him into the withdrawing room where Beata awaited him.

Rathbone felt a sudden lurch of emotion as he saw her again. It has been over three weeks, and some of the sharpness of memory had faded. There were small things about her that seemed new: a softness of the light on her hair, the way her eyebrows arched, the very direct way she looked at him, yet without challenge. He knew that would change if he said something she felt to be cruel, or unworthy. The loss of the warmth in her would be the most devastating thing he could imagine at this moment.

‘I thought you would be back when you heard about what had happened to Hester Monk,’ she said gently. ‘Isn’t it a sad commentary on our public interests when the trial of a doctor for medical horror is more worthy of news than the kidnap of a nurse and three small children?’ She looked past him at the butler, then back at Rathbone. ‘Have you eaten recently?’

‘Sufficiently,’ he replied. ‘It seems almost an irrelevance at the moment.’ She had indicated a chair on the opposite side of the fireplace from her own. He had a strange, sharp feeling that it had been Ingram York’s, before his collapse. In fact he could remember him sitting in it. How totally even a small time could change everything! It was not so long ago that he had first come here, honoured to be invited. And yet since then he had been a judge himself, and in that office lost even his right to practise law in court.

She had asked the butler to bring cold ham and egg pie and a pot of tea, and he had barely heard her. He murmured his thanks.

‘Are you going to accept the case?’ she asked.

‘Only to assist,’ he answered. ‘Ardal Juster is prosecuting.’

‘I know the legalities,’ she chided him with a tiny smile. ‘Whatever he thinks, you will lead. He is not a fool. He will be out to win, and he knows very well the value of your experience, and your judgement.’

‘My judgement?’ he said incredulously. ‘If he has any wits at all, he’ll not listen to that!’ He allowed himself to smile at her. It had its own kind of absurdity, and he did not want her to hear bitterness in his voice. There was little less attractive than self-pity, and he cared fiercely what she thought of him, far more than it was safe to admit.

She smiled back, this time ruefully, aware of her own weaknesses.

‘You were right in your moral judgement, my dear, just wrong in the law as to how you went about it. But there was no right way. Is there a right way in this? From the little I have read in the newspapers, it is far from a simple issue, but the press always exaggerate so! Competition is good for some businesses – it makes everyone do their best – but seeing who can shout the loudest only ends in deafening us all.’

He felt the knots ease out of his muscles, as if there were warmth in the room that unlocked the old tensions.

‘I only read
The Times
. . .’ he began.

‘But of course,’ she agreed with a hint of laughter. ‘I cannot imagine you reading the penny dreadfuls.’

‘It might be where the story belongs,’ he said ruefully. ‘Hamilton Rand is a brilliant chemist, but he’s not a doctor. According to Hester, and she doesn’t exaggerate, Rand kidnapped her, and the three children whose blood he was taking, and held them in a cottage in the countryside in Kent. Going willingly was Bryson Radnor, a wealthy man suffering from white blood disease, and his adult daughter, Adrienne, who helped to look after him, and with the household chores.’