Free The Ability to Kill by Eric Ambler Page A

officers. Was that out of the goodness of your heart?’
    Cody: ‘No, on the advice of my lawyer.’
    Laughter in court. Mr Cooper turned in his hand.
    Mr Egan also tried. He adopted the classical mode of attack. After a build-up based on the witness’s lamentable record, he delivered what he hoped would be the
coup-de-grâce.
    ‘You’ve testified you’ve been hired to murder someone for money. Is that right?’
    Cody: ‘Yes, sir.’
    Mr Egan: ‘Would you lie for money?’
    Mr Egan was silent. Cody thought about the question. Obviously he wanted to give a helpful, reasonable reply. Finally, he nodded. ‘It looks like I have,’ he said thoughtfully.
    His meaning was plain. He meant that he had lied to get money out of Dr Finch and Miss Tregoff. There really was nothing to be done with the man.
    With the departure of Cody (he returned to a cell in Minneapolis), the trial left the front pages for a bit. Asian flu and bronchitis claimed one of the male jurors, who was replaced by a female alternative—seven women and five men were the arbiters now. Important witnesses were also ill. Miss Tregoff’s attorneys scored a minor victory when they eliminated some of her self-incriminating statements from the record. There were scenes of jubilation and kisses were lavishly bestowed. But everyone knew that there were real charges for the pair to answer and that the only man who could answer them was Dr Finch.
    As the moment approached when we would hear Grant Cooper outline the arguments for the defence, the tension rose. The queues waiting to occupy the seats reserved for the public lengthened. There was pushing and shoving. And not only inthe corridor outside the courtroom. The press box became crammed. A San Francisco paper sent in a columnist noted for the trenchant advice he gave to his readers about the joys of mixed bathing in the nude. It was even rumoured, on the basis of the appearance in the press room of a tall, thin man with a bright blue suit and a long ginger beard, that the beatnik paper
Underhound
was covering the trial. Actresses with reporter’s notebooks were two-a-penny.
    On February 3, a month after the trial had begun, Cooper rose to address the jury.
    The defence was that Dr Finch had lied steadily to Mrs Finch about his relationship with Miss Tregoff and that, until he had been served with the divorce papers in May, had believed that he had lied successfully.
    When he learned that he had not, all his efforts had been bent to preventing a divorce, which would, he had feared, damage both his business prospects and his professional standing.
    He had had two courses open to him. He could stall by pretending to want a reconciliation, or he could try to get evidence that his wife had been going with other men and was not, in fact, the innocent party she claimed to be.
    He had tried to do both. When the reconciliation idea had not worked, he had employed private detectives to follow her. They had proved useless. They would follow her for a couple of hours and then lose her. And they had proved expensive. He had asked Miss Tregoff if there were not someone in Las Vegas who could do the work.
    Dr Finch was also prepared to admit to discreditable behaviour. When Cody, whom he had hired to follow his wife, had suggested that, if it proved impossible to get other evidence against Mrs Finch, he himself should seduce her in order to provide it, the doctor had agreed dubiously that hecould try. That had been all that Cody had been paid to do.
    As for the alleged assaults on her, Dr Finch’s case was that his wife had been a neurotic woman, who had imagined things and spread stories of his violence solely in order to substantiate her charges of cruelty in the divorce case. As for her being scared to death of guns, she had been able to hit a beer can at twenty feet with the very revolver that had killed her. In happier days, they had used it to practise target shooting on a hillside behind the house.
    All in all, some