The Evangeline (21 page)

‘That would have been an obscenity, to have us decide who was going to live and who was going to die. What we had decided—all we could decide—is that we were willing to die for one another; but who should do it, and in what order, that was something which could only be left to chance—left to God, if you would rather.’

Darnell turned to the jury. He looked at each of the jurors in turn, drawing their attention to the importance of the question he was about to ask. ‘But you did decide who was going to live and who was going to die, didn’t you, when you decided that neither you nor Hugo Offenbach would be included, that the two of you would continue to live?’

Marlowe nodded grimly. ‘We were all going to die,’ was his only answer.

‘But you did not, did you?’ asked Darnell, staring right at him. ‘You thought you were all going to die, you thought that with the passing of that ship you had lost your last, your only, chance at rescue, but you and Hugo Offenbach and four others survived. If you had known that, if you had known that some of you were going to be rescued, wouldn’t you have had to do the same thing: sacrifice some so at least a few could survive?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you had to be one of the survivors, because you were the only one who could handle the boat?’

‘No,’ said Marlowe vehemently.‘Trevelyn could have done that.’

‘Trevelyn? He was too weak, too injured.’

Marlowe was not listening. He was angry, enraged. His eyes were wild; he looked half-demented. ‘If I had thought there was any chance, any chance at all, that we would ever be rescued, do you think—does anyone think—that I would have allowed it? Do you think I would have let anyone die before I did? Good God, do you believe—does anyone believe—that I would not have killed myself before I let anything happen to that boy?’

Chapter Nineteen

D
ARNELL FELT THE GROUND CRUMBLING beneath his feet. His whole defence—the only defence he had— had been based on the proposition that there had not been any choice, that if Marlowe and the others had not decided that someone had to die, no one would have survived. But now Marlowe had told the jury that before the first victim was chosen, before that first grim lottery was played, he knew that none of them would ever see the shore, that every last one of them would die at sea. What was it one of the survivors, one of the witnesses for the prosecution, had said? Better they all should perish of hunger and thirst than start a slaughter that would go on until there was only one of them left alive and no one left to kill?

Now Darnell had to argue that it did not matter what Marlowe had thought about their chances of survival—the simple fact was that they had survived, and that all of them would have died if they had not done what they did.

‘Forget for the moment what you thought were the chances that anyone would ever find you. There was a point at which you knew that death—not just for you, but for all of you—was imminent. Isn’t that when the decision was made to sacrifice one to save the rest?’

‘Yes,’ replied Marlowe.

‘You were out there forty days before you were rescued?’

‘Yes.’

‘The ship that saw you but did not stop, the one that Arnold Wilson jumped in after, this happened somewhere around the tenth day after the
Evangeline
went down in the storm?’

‘Yes, about then.’

‘And by this time, many of those people whose safety and well-being you felt to be your responsibility were already sick and dying, and some of them, like Arnold Wilson, nearly out of their minds from exposure and the lack of food?’

Marlowe bit hard on his lip and nodded.

‘You could not have lasted—any of you—more than another day or two, if that?’

‘It’s hard to say how long any of us might have lived.’

Darnell dismissed the answer as being of no account. There was a more important point he was trying to make.‘Could any of you have lasted another two weeks?’

‘No, we would all have been dead by then.’

Darnell gave him a look that demanded more precision.

‘Some of us might have lived a few more days.’

‘So even if you had known—if, for example, the ship that had passed by told you that they couldn’t stop, but that they would send help which would arrive in two weeks—it would have done no good?’

Marlowe seemed not to understand the question. It was just the reaction Darnell wanted.

‘It would have done no good to know that you would be rescued forty days after the
Evangeline
sank, because you would all have been dead by then. It would have done no good, unless you did exactly what you did—take the lives of some to save the others. Isn’t that true, Mr Marlowe? No matter what you knew or thought you knew, no matter what you thought your chances were, the only choice you had was to do what you did, or let all those people whose lives were in your care perish!’

Before Marlowe could answer, Darnell turned quickly to the bench.‘No further questions, your Honour.’

Roberts was on his feet, moving around the counsel table. The question of personal sympathy, of what he felt for the terrible moral dilemma in which Marlowe, and not just Marlowe, had been placed had been pushed aside. However easy it might be to understand what had made them do it, what the survivors had done was in some ways worse than murder. Men and women killed each other out of love and hatred, greed, jealousy and obsession—all the range of violent emotions—but they never, or almost never, argued that it was the better thing to do. If you accepted what the defence was arguing, that it was permissible to kill some to save others, where would it stop?

‘Mr Marlowe, let me begin where Mr Darnell ended.You did not know that you and the others would be out there in that lifeboat for forty days before you were rescued, did you?’

‘No.’

‘You had no way of knowing that?’

‘No.’

‘Instead of forty days, it could have been sixty?’

‘Yes.’

‘You testified that you were certain—after that ship refused to stop—that you would never be rescued. Isn’t that what you said?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you were wrong, weren’t you?’

‘Wrong that we would not be rescued? Yes.’

‘The plain fact is that you didn’t know whether you would be rescued or, if you were, when it might happen—correct?’

Roberts stood straight in front of the witness stand, ten feet away. He looked at Marlowe with a cold, determined expression. ‘For all you knew, for all you could have known, you might have been rescued not forty days after the
Evangeline
sank, but the day after the ship that passed you sailed out of view. Isn’t that true, Mr Marlowe? For all you knew, or could have known, another ship might at that very moment have been coming straight towards you?’

‘For all I knew, for all I could have known, that might have happened—but it did not. No ship came, and I—’

‘My point, Mr Marlowe, is that because you could not know whether a ship might not appear the next day or even the next hour, there was no necessity to do what you did!’

Marlowe’s only reply was a stoic glance. All he knew was what had happened.

‘Do you disagree, Mr Marlowe?’ asked Roberts, insistent on an answer.

‘No ship came—’

‘You could not know that it wouldn’t!’

‘No ship came, and it was not likely one would at that time of year in that part of the south Atlantic. It was not something you could count on. That was how we found ourselves, Mr Roberts— shipwrecked and out of food, all of us sick and dying. I won’t quarrel with you if you say we should not have done what we did to stay alive. I wouldn’t quarrel with that at all. But we elected not to do that, not to die before we had to. Let there be no mistake about one thing: if it was wrong for us to have done that, I’m the one who has to bear the burden. Trevelyn was right: I made the decision, the decision to allow it, and I’m the one—no one else— who did it.You have the right man, Mr Roberts. I’m the one who did it; I’m the one who killed those poor souls; I’m the one responsible—no one else.’

‘Because you had to? Because it was necessary?’ asked Roberts, anticipating the defence. ‘That is the question, isn’t it? Whether you had to. And if you had to, or thought you had to, why you were in that situation in the first place.’

Roberts poured a glass of water from a pitcher on the counsel table and took a drink.

‘Mr Trevelyn testified that he went to a lifeboat, but it was filled with boxes of champagne and caviar.You were the captain of the
Evangeline
.Why was a lifeboat used for this? Why was it not ready?’

Marlowe did not blink. ‘It was my fault. There was no place left to store it.’

‘But you did not have to take boxes there was no room for.’

‘It wasn’t my decision. But you’re right, I didn’t have to take them and I shouldn’t have. There would have been time to get rid of them, throw them out in any normal emergency. There would have been time if the
Evangeline
had not started sinking so fast, if the boat had not taken so much water, if there had been any stability.’

Roberts held the glass of water next to his chest, staring down at the water’s surface as he moved the glass back and forth. ‘But the storm had been growing gradually, becoming more intense. You could have emptied the lifeboat and made it ready before the storm got worse.’

‘It happened too quickly. The storm had been getting worse, but I didn’t think there was any danger. I thought the
Evangeline
could sail through anything. There isn’t any question but that I was negligent. I should never have allowed anything to be stored in that lifeboat.’

Roberts put down the glass. ‘So only two lifeboats got away, and one of them was never seen again, correct?’

‘Yes.’

Roberts started to move towards the jury box but then, as if he had made a conscious decision against it, he came back to the counsel table. With a solemn, almost mournful expression, he raised his eyes and looked at Marlowe. ‘You killed the boy first, plunged a knife into his heart, and then gave directions to the others to drink his still-warm blood—is that correct?’

Marlowe held himself stiff and alert, a rigid discipline that could not hide the anguish in his eyes.

‘Is that correct?’ repeated Roberts in the face of Marlowe’s determined silence.

‘Yes, that’s correct. I killed him; I told the others what to do.’

Everything Roberts did now was pure calculation, each question a ruthless attack on what Marlowe had done. ‘Describe how you did it—how you held that fourteen-year-old boy so he could not move and stabbed him in the heart!’

‘Objection!’ cried Darnell as he sprang to his feet. ‘The witness does not have to do any such thing and the prosecution knows it! Let him ask his questions—Mr Marlowe will answer. The prosecution doesn’t have the right to demand that he provide some macabre description, the only purpose of which is to induce a sense of revulsion!’

Homer Maitland agreed. ‘This is cross-examination, Mr Roberts. Ask a question.’

Roberts’s gaze, which had not left the witness, became more intense. ‘You held your hand over his face?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you stab him through his shirt, or did you make him open it first?’

‘I told him he should open it,’ said Marlowe in a bleak, whispered voice.

Roberts’s eyes flashed with recognition. ‘Because it was easier to drive the knife in and because, if he had been wearing the shirt, it would have soaked up the blood instead of letting it gush out— wasn’t that the reason, Mr Marlowe? Isn’t that the reason you made him open it?’

‘Yes,’ said Marlowe with downcast eyes.‘And because that way death would be just a little quicker.’

‘You were concerned about that, were you? Concerned about sparing him any unnecessary suffering?’

Marlowe’s eyes came up. There was a look of warning in them, as if Roberts had threatened something Marlowe could not allow.

‘Yes,’ he said, his voice slowly rising. ‘Killing him was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.’

‘But you did it, didn’t you?’ Before Marlowe could answer, he asked,‘And you drank his blood, too, didn’t you?’

‘I did.’

‘To stay alive?’

‘To stay alive.’

‘And after the blood, there was still the body. We’ve heard testimony that the head was cut off and, besides that, the hands and feet. Is that true? Is that what you did?’

‘Yes, sir, I did.’

‘Because you couldn’t stand to look at the face of the boy you murdered?’

Marlowe’s gaze grew distant. In the midst of all the taunting questions and all the prying glances, a part of him had left. He gave the answers the way a man might repeat the lessons learned in his youth, without a conscious thought as to what any of it meant. ‘No, it wasn’t that. He was dead; the body had to be prepared.’

‘And so you…?’

‘Removed the head, the appendages, gutted it—what you do with anything you have killed for food.’

Marlowe’s eyes suddenly came back to life, raging with self-hatred that quickly turned to anger at the audacity of the question. He gripped the arm of the chair and bent forward. ‘Do you want me to tell you more? Would you like me to tell you how I carved him up? Would you like to know what it was like to eat human flesh? He’s dead! I killed him! Isn’t that enough?’ he cried as the courtroom erupted in noise.

‘Not another word! Not another sound!’ ordered Homer Maitland. He beat his gavel hard and kept doing it until he had silenced the boisterous crowd.‘One more word from anyone—I’ll clear the room!’

Roberts had heard the noise, felt it vibrate up through the floor and go straight to his bones. It drove him forward, made him even more relentless. His eyes cut into Marlowe with all the force he had.‘And then, a few days later, when you had done with him, when there was nothing left, you chose another; a woman this time, Helena Green.You killed her next, yes?’

‘We drew lots a second time.Yes, it’s true.’

‘Killed her and drank her blood?’

‘Yes.’

‘Killed her, drank her blood, then removed her head, her hands, her feet, and then gutted her body. Is that what you did?’

asked Roberts in a fury.