The Twisted Root Page 0,120
as gentle, charming, biddable, struggling to fit into a household with a great deal higher social status than she was accustomed to, and unquestionably a great deal more money. It was a portrait quite innocent and touching, until finally he turned to the jury.
"A lovely woman striving to better herself?" he said with a smile. "For the sake of the man she loves - and met by chance out walking on Hampstead Heath." His face darkened, his arms relaxed until his shoulders were almost slumped. "Or a clever, greedy woman blessed with a pretty face, ensnaring a younger man, unworldly-wise, and doing everything she could, suppressing her own temper and will, to charm him into a marriage which would give her, and her foster mother, a life of wealth they could never have attained in their own station?"
He barely paused for breath or to give Rathbone the chance to object. "An innocent woman caught in a dreadful web of circumstances? Or a conniving woman overtaken by an equally cold-blooded and greedy coachman, who saw his chance to profit from her coming fortune but had fatally miscalculated her ruthlessness - and thus met not with payment for his silence as to her past, perhaps their past relationship with each other! Perhaps he was even the means of their meeting - far other than by chance? Instead, he met with violent death in the darkness under the trees of Hampstead Heath."
Rathbone raised his voice, cutting across him scathingly and without reference to the judge.
"Treadwell certainly seems to have been a villain, but neither you nor I have proved him a fool! Why in heaven's name would he threaten to expose Miriam Gardiner's past - which neither you nor I have found lacking in virtue of any kind - before she had married into the Stourbridge family?" He spread his hands as if in bewilderment. "She had no money to pay him anything. Surely he would have waited until after the wedding - indeed, done everything in his power to make sure it took place?" He became sarcastic. "If, as you suggest, he even helped engineer the meeting between Mr. Stourbridge and Mrs. Gardiner, then it strains the bonds of credibility that he would sabotage his own work just as it was about to come to fruition."
His point was valid, but it did not carry the emotional weight of Tobias's accusation. The damage had been done. The jury's minds were filled with the image of a scheming and duplicitous woman manipulating a discarded lover into a position where she could strike him over the head and leave his murdered body on the Heath.
"Was it chance, or was it Treadwell's dying attempt to implicate his murderers that he used the last of his strength to crawl to the footpath outside Cleo Anderson's door?" Tobias demanded, his voice ringing with outrage and pity. "Gentlemen, I leave it to you!"
The court adjourned with Miriam and Cleo all but convicted already.
Rathbone paced the floor of his rooms, resisting the temptation to call Monk and see if he had made any progress. So many times they had faced together cases that seemed impossible. He could list them all in his mind. But in this one he had no weapons at all, and he did not even know what he believed himself. He still was not prepared to accept that either Cleo or Miriam was guilty, let alone both. But there was very little else that made sense - except Lucius or Harry Stourbridge. And if that were so, no wonder Miriam looked crushed beyond imagining any solution, or that even Rathbone could convince the court of the truth.
It all depended on Monk's finding something - if he even knew where to look - and collecting enough evidence to prove it, and on Rathbone's being able to prolong the case another three days at the very outside. Two days seemed more likely.
He spent the evening thinking of tactics to give Monk more time, every trick of human nature or legal expertise. It was all profoundly unpromising.
Tobias called Harry Stourbridge as his first witness of the morning. He treated him with great deference and sympathy, not only for the loss of his wife but for the disillusion he had suffered in Miriam.
Many seats were empty in the court. The case had lost much of its interest for the public. They believed they knew the answer. It was common garden greed, a pretty woman ambitious to improve herself by the