When Last I Died

"Ze 'addock, madame?" he enquired, spreading his hands disconsolately. "What I 'ave said to ze fishmonger!"

"No, no, Henri, dear child! This has nothing to do with the haddock, which was eaten in its entirety by Mr. Pratt. It is simply this: do you know any hairdressers?"

Henri gazed at her stupefied. Then he began to talk in French and continued to do so for nearly ten minutes.

"Ah," said Mrs. Bradley, who was old-fashioned enough to believe that French is the most civilised language on earth (except, possibly, for Chinese, which she did not know), "then you will agree with me, Henri, when I suggest that a hairdresser must be, of necessity, an artist."

Henri agreed in another burst of idiomatic rhetoric. His employer nodded and dismissed him. Next day Ferdinand rang up to say that his barber, whose name was Sepulle, would be delighted to recall, for her benefit, his experiences at the trial of Bella Foxley.

Mrs. Bradley met the barber in a room at the back of his shop. It was during business hours, but that, said Mr. Sepulle, mattered nothing. He himself had no appointments that afternoon, gentlemen being, on the whole, more prone to the 'drop-in' than to making appointments, and as to serving on a jury, well, appointments or no appointments, that had had to receive attention before anything.

Not that it was altogether a waste of time, he continued; no, he should be sorry for anybody to think he thought that. We all had a duty, and ought to be prepared to face it. No shirking; that was his motto, peace or war. And it had been a very interesting case, although, in his opinion, it had been 'messed up.'"

"Messed up?" Mrs. Bradley inquired.

Well, there was this woman, Bella Foxley, brought in and charged with the wilful murder of her cousin, and pleading 'Not Guilty,' and then a whole lot of disagreement among a lot of doctors, and then all this stuff about Reasonable Doubt from the judge when the evidence had been completed, and then the jury sent out to consider their verdict.

"We were out about an hour and three-quarters," concluded Mr. Sepulle, "arguing the point, with seven of us for an acquittal and five against. I was against."

"Why?" asked Mrs. Bradley. The barber had believed Bella Foxley to be guilty because he did not like her face. That, surely, was not part of the evidence, Mrs. Bradley suggested, but he denied this. Her appearance was a fact, he protested, and, as such, it had importance. Then he added that the police knew what they were doing when they arrested her. To this Mrs. Bradley agreed, but very cautiously. What, in the end, she enquired, caused the five jurors who were against an acquittal to join those seven who were in favour ?

Well, Mr. Sepulle had always believed that there were two ways of looking at everything, and the judge had stressed giving the prisoner the benefit of the doubt. The doubt in his own mind, he confessed, was rooted in the story that the house was naunted. He did not believe in haunted houses, he explained. Why should not the 'ghost' have committed the murder, and, that being so, there was nothing to suggest that the ghost had been Bella Foxley. Then there was the question of the time. That was extremely important. The medical evidence—not contested by the defence—suggested that death had taken place between eleven o'clock at night and two in the morning. Well, this Bella Foxley was supposed to have been visiting her cousin at this haunted house between those times. The wife swore to it.

Now, he, (Mr. Sepulle), was a married man, and what he wanted to know was, was it likely that a wife was going to let some other woman go gallivanting off at that time of night to visit her husband in an empty house? She had done it once— granted. And, funny enough, the chap fell out of the window. But did it seem reasonable to suppose that the wife would let her do it more than once? Was it sensible to suppose the wife would have it? Not on your life it wasn't. Scared of the haunted house she might have been—thin, whining little thing—but she'd be a darn sight more scared of having some other woman larking about in an empty house with her husband, or he (Mr. Sepulle) was no judge of women.

Then, again, would the prisoner really have been such a mutt as to repeat herself like that? And then, that blackmail stuff. That got nowhere with him. When you talked of blackmail you meant really fleecing people—draining them and draining them like a foul leech sucking blood. You didn't mean a little bit of a five pound note here and there from a woman who'd got a sackful of the ready, and was sweet on the chap anyway.

"So there it was," Mr. Sepulle concluded. "I swallowed my doubts and gave her the benefit of them."

"And how did she take the verdict?" asked Mrs. Bradley, somewhat overcome by Mr. Sepulle's piling of Pelion upon Ossa by following his ripe simile with an unimaginable metaphor.

"She said her prayers," replied the barber, "and, somehow, that seemed to me unnatural."