Corridors of the Night (37 page)

Juster did not look at him, as if he felt Rathbone’s fury. It was exactly the sort of chance that Rathbone had taken, and earned himself disbarment. Juster had been the one who had defended him. That was a debt of which he had never once reminded Rathbone, but Rathbone himself could not forget. No man of any honour whatever, would.

Lyons faced Hester and she looked back at him, stiff and pale. Was she afraid of Lyons, of making a slip that could not be retrieved, or simply haunted by the memory of what had happened at the cottage? Please heaven, Juster would make certain the jury believed it was the last of these, even if he had to do so in his final questioning of her.

‘Mrs Monk,’ Lyons began, his voice respectful, even gentle. ‘Are those three children still alive, as far as you know? You do know, don’t you? You have not forgotten them in the events that have happened since then?’

‘They are recovering well,’ she replied. ‘At least as far as physical health is concerned. They still have nightmares. So do I.’

Lyons was annoyed, but he did his best to conceal it.

Juster did not. He was openly pleased.

Rathbone held his breath.

‘Mrs Monk, please restrict yourself to answering my questions, without adding your own . . . diagnoses,’ Lyons said tartly. He might have meant it to sound critical to the jurors. They did not see it that way. Rathbone saw one of the jurors frown. Lyons’ manner with Hester displeased him.

Perhaps Lyons saw it. He hurried on.

‘Will you describe for the court your relationship with Miss Radnor, during your acquaintance with her, before your stay in the cottage, during it, and since, if there was one.’

Hester looked a little puzzled. ‘She was the daughter of the patient,’ she began. ‘Our only concern was to save his life, and to assure her that all the treatment was to that end. She helped a great deal with the general care, cooking, laundry and so forth. She helped nurse him, as she had done at home, seeing to his more personal needs.’

‘I meant the relationship between her and you,’ Lyons corrected her.

‘She was devoted to her father. We spoke of nothing else but his needs, his treatment, what we could do to make him comfortable. Once or twice she asked me if I believed he would recover. I always referred her to Mr Rand.’

‘And in the cottage? If you were there as reluctantly as you say you were – in effect a prisoner – did you not ask her to assist you in escaping?’ he said incredulously.

‘I thought about it—’ Hester answered.

‘Yes or no, Mrs Monk?’ he cut across her words. ‘You did, or you didn’t?’

Hester looked at him wearily. ‘It is impossible to answer so simply, Mr Lyons. Her only care was her father’s survival. That was always quite plain—’

‘So you did not!’ His face lit with triumph for a moment. ‘You do not know, beyond doubt, that she would not have helped you, were you to ask. May I suggest, Mrs Monk, that your medical knowledge and interest, your understanding of the dramatically beneficial effect of Mr Rand’s work, was sufficient for you to wish to be part of it? You did not want to escape. You wanted to see it through. You wanted to be part of its success. You are a military nurse, you have seen dozens, perhaps hundreds of deaths in the battlefield, and you knew what this meant – didn’t you?’

It was a question to which there was only one possible answer. No one would believe her were she to deny it.

She smiled with a sad twist to her lips. ‘I wanted him to succeed,’ she admitted. ‘Of course I did. I imagine everyone here would do. But in my case it was very personally immediate. If he failed and Mr Radnor died, then he would be guilty of a crime he could not afford to pay for. I was a witness to it. He would have to kill me too—’

‘My lord!’ Lyons protested. ‘That is the wildest speculation—’

Juster shot to his feet. ‘My lord, my learned friend asked the witness a question regarding her wishes in the experiment. He cannot now complain if he does not like the answer. Whatever the actual outcome, Mrs Monk wished the experiment to succeed for the very personal reason that she feared for her life if it did not.’

Patterson smiled bleakly. ‘Your point is well taken, Mr Juster. And yours also, Mr Lyons. Perhaps you would like to rephrase your question?’

Lyons faced Hester, thin-lipped and angry.

‘Perhaps we would fare better if I stuck to facts. Mrs Monk, did Mr Rand ever harm you, physically? Did he lay hands upon you at all while you were in the cottage, or since? I think you might manage to answer that with a yes or no!’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Did he ever threaten you with harm?’

‘No, never.’

‘Yet you expect the gentlemen of the jury to believe that you feared he would kill you, if the experiment failed? Again, yes or no will suffice.’

‘Yes.’ She looked across at the jury. ‘They are gentlemen of position and intelligence. They understand how someone with sufficient knowledge to be useful could, as circumstances change, become someone with enough knowledge to be a liability, even a danger.’

Juster hid his smile by pretending to blow his nose. When Lyons gave up, he declined to question Hester any further.

After the luncheon adjournment Juster resumed with his final witness, Bryson Radnor. It was masterful. Rathbone watched it with professional admiration, and a growing feeling of unease.

At first his anxiety was only slight. Radnor stood in the witness stand facing the court. He was a handsome man, broad and strong, his head like that of an old lion made gaunt by grief. He had allowed his mane of hair to grow a trifle long. The light caught the white in it, drawing the eye to his head, with his dark eyes and powerful features.

Juster led him to describe Adrienne’s care for him, and the devotion she had shown him since her mother had died. He said in hushed and dramatic tones how her dependence upon him in her grief had gradually turned to the strength as his health had failed. It began when it had been slight, only after some time did he realise that he was experiencing the onset of a fatal disease.

The entire courtroom listened to him with intense emotion. His grief was palpable. Some of the women in the gallery wept. Men sat stiff-faced, attempting to be stoic in the presence of such loyalty, and tragedy.

Juster could hardly lose.

Rathbone knew that the substance of the case was already over. There did not seem to be anything Lyons could do that would substantially change the conviction that was grasping the jury.

At Juster’s prompting, Radnor described what he could remember of his treatment. Any answer that might be uncomfortable he simply said he did not recall. No one could blame him. Even Patterson appeared impressed.

Rathbone did not even know why he was so disconcerted. Could he be feeling anything as base as envy, because Juster had got away with it. The right man was going to be convicted at last.

Or was he?
Was
Rand the right man?

All the evidence said so – at least, it seemed to. There was no one else to suspect. The murderer was someone Adrienne had known. She had been too busy to form any other relationships. And why would anyone else wish her harm, let alone to kill her?

Hester had argued that she did not believe Rand had killed her. She thought Radnor had killed her himself, to reclaim his freedom to indulge the rest of his life as he would, alone, unencumbered, without criticism, or the additional expense of a daughter to whom he owed such a debt.

What could the defence produce, or even suggest, that would raise a reasonable doubt?

Rathbone learned the day after: doctors. Two brilliant and over-articulate doctors explained to the court just how many people died of shock and blood loss who could be saved if Hamilton Rand’s procedure were to be proved successful. It would revolutionise medicine. They each described bleeding to death with sufficient horror to paralyse the jury with fear.

The second doctor reinforced everything the first had said.

Juster did not argue.

His final witness was Magnus Rand. He testified to his brother’s dedication to medical research, since the time of Edward’s death. He could not prove that Hamilton had not killed Adrienne, but he drew a vivid picture of a man obsessed with finding a cure for white blood disease. He was not likeable. He was frequently insensitive, dogmatic, thoughtlessly rude. He did not hate anyone, since he was not sufficiently emotionally involved to care. He had not the personal imagination to envisage such a thing.

This testimony did not affect the jury at all. To judge from their faces, they saw only that he was cold, dedicated to his science and impervious to the human cost to others.

They returned with a verdict of guilty.

Rathbone was disturbed by it. It was the verdict he had wanted and expected, but now he was unsatisfied. He went to see Monk, and more importantly, Hester.

‘No,’ she said quietly in answer to his question. ‘Rand is blind to other people’s pain, if it isn’t connected with injury or white blood disease. He can’t imagine any other kind of pain. But I don’t believe he killed Adrienne. I think Radnor did it himself, to be rid of her dependence on him, to be free of the expense and the obligation of his debt to her.’

‘Is that because yer knew ’im when he was sick?’ Scuff asked seriously.

Hester was too tired to argue, but she was clearly uncomfortable.

Scuff looked down. ‘Sorry . . .’

‘Not just that,’ she said quietly. ‘I think Hamilton Rand has all kinds of faults, but he wasn’t afraid of Adrienne. He didn’t even see her as a threat. I don’t think he thought of her at all after she left the cottage.’

‘Her own father?’ Monk bit his lip. ‘I wanted Hamilton Rand to pay for what he did to the children, and for taking you – but not for something he didn’t do.’

‘We lost.’ Rathbone said, looking from one to the other of them. ‘Rand is going to hang for something he didn’t do. We have no idea whose bodies were buried in the orchard. And Radnor is going to walk away! I can’t think of anything we can do about it.’

THE WEEKS passed very slowly until Hamilton Rand was hanged. Hester continued to work at the hospital. There was no more experimental work, but she stayed out of a sense of loyalty to her patients, who were in as much desperate need as before. They required reassurance, and even a new insistence upon hope.

She also stayed with a certain loyalty to Magnus Rand. The brothers had never seemed very close in life, but watching Magnus now, she realised that there had been a silent affection between them taken for granted. Growing up, Magnus had always known Hamilton was in the background, taking care of the material things, believing in their purpose, always having the energy of mind to press forward, however difficult it might appear, or however exhausted he was. Even hopeless causes did not deter him. He might have seemed cold, but there was a unique determination in him that drove him to believe in the work, regardless of temporary failure, other people’s disapproval, even derision.

It was a different kind of heart from most other people’s. It was not comfortable or attractive. Sometimes it was frightening. But it was admirable.

Certainly he had bought the Roberts children to use them in his experiments, although they were now healthier than ever before. Their parents not only feared public opinion enough not to neglect them, but also had the means to care for them, thanks to Mr Roberts obtaining work. He did not dare fail at it.

Certainly Rand had kept Hester prisoner in order both to use her skills and prevent her telling anyone about his use of the children. But she was sure that he had not killed Adrienne Radnor. He had not been sufficiently afraid of her to care one way or the other, and had no belief she would attempt to harm him.

What about the bodies in the orchard? Hester did not doubt that Hamilton and the gardener had buried them. But they might have died of natural causes, such as white blood disease. Perhaps they were people whom he had tried to save, and failed. It was probably a crime to experiment on patients without their consent, but that was not the offence for which he had been tried, and not one for which he should hang. All doctors lose patients. Sometimes error or carelessness contribute, but usually doctors have done everything they could, and still failed. She knew that all too well. She had lost too many herself.

Now Hamilton had been dead two weeks, and Hester was nursing in the hospital, still waiting for Jenny Solway to return, and doing what she could to offer some kind of comfort to Magnus Rand.

As if seeing that she was one of the very few people who both understood Hamilton’s manner, and believed he had not killed Adrienne, he sought her company when time allowed. She was actually standing in the corridor talking to him when one of the nurses came running towards them. This was against hospital rules, but there was such panic in her face that neither Rand nor Hester thought to criticise her.

‘What is it?’ Hester stepped forward and the woman almost stumbled into her. ‘What’s happened?’ Hester demanded firmly.

‘Mr Radnor . . .’ she gasped. ‘He’s back an’ he looks terrible. Bad as he ever did . . .’

‘Where is he?’ Hester asked, shock all but freezing her. Her calmness was the result only of the training of years.

‘In the hall, by the front,’ came the reply. ‘I called the porter to get him to a bed before he passed out right where he stood. Dr Rand, I dunno what to do with him.’

Rand, too, was stunned. He fumbled for words. It was Radnor’s whole case that had brought Hamilton to ruin.

And yet there was no proof. And even if there had been, could he now turn away and ruin a man whose life was in such jeopardy, and who had come to him for help?

‘Take us to him,’ Hester directed the nurse. ‘We’ll do what we can.’

Looking relieved and intensely grateful, the woman swivelled on her heel. She strode at a brisk pace back the way she had come, with Hester and Magnus a yard behind her. They looked neither to right nor left, as they rushed straight across the entrance hall and the room where Bryson Radnor lay on the bed, fully clothed. His face was ashen grey, his eyes sunken in their sockets, sweat on his skin. But ill as he was, he was fully conscious and he looked first at Magnus, then at Hester. His gaze remained on her, as if he considered her the one who was in charge, and would decide his fate.