Free The Ability to Kill by Eric Ambler Page B

very questionable behaviour; but murder, no.
    On the day that the doctor was to give his evidence the corridor outside the courtroom became packed to suffocation. For once, the air-conditioning seemed ineffective. One elderly lady, who fainted in the queue, came to as she was being borne away and piped a despairing ‘Hold my place.’ Nobody did. Inside, things were scarcely better. Five visiting South Americans somehow managed to get into the press box. All credentials had to be checked before the interlopers could be identified and ejected. A columnist famed for her appearance on the ‘What’s My Line?’ television programme was mobbed by autograph hunters. A woman juror got into a violent argument with one of the court sheriffs who refused to leave his post to get her book autographed. One cameraman was standing on the judge’s desk to get a wider angle on the scene. The court was a little late in getting down to business; but in the end order was restored and the great moment came.
    Dr Finch took the stand with the air of an experienced pilot taking over for an instrument landing in dense fog—tense but steady, nerves well under control. He asked at once if he could dispense with the microphone and rely upon the strength of his own voice to carry. ‘If you can’t hear me,’ he instructed Cooper, ‘hold up your hand.’
    After Cooper had taken him through his account of the events leading up to the night of July 18, the doctor described what had happened at the house.
    He had approached his wife in the garage saying that he wanted to talk to her. She had pulled out the gun. He had closed with her in order to take it away. She had fought with him. He had had to hit her with the gun—hence the skull fractures. When he had put the gun down (presumably to deal with the maid) she had snatched it back and started running down the driveway.
    He did not know where Miss Tregoff was. He thought that his wife had seen her. He ran after his wife. When he caught up with her, she had the gun in her two hands (as she had always held it in target practice) and was pointing it—not at him but in a direction that could have meant that she had seen Miss Tregoff and was going to shoot her.
    He grappled with her and there was a second struggle. As he again wrenched the gun away from her and started to throw it into the bushes, she started to run.
    At that moment—he did not know how or why, or even if the gun had been cocked—the gun went off.
    When he reached his wife, who was lying on the ground, he did not realise that she had been shot.
    He said to her: ‘What happened, Barbara? Where are you hurt?’
    She said that she had been ‘shot in the chest.’
    ‘I told her not to move. I said, “I’ve got to get an ambulance for you and get you to the hospital.” Barbara said, “Wait.” She said, “I’m sorry, I should have listened.” I said, “Barbara, don’t talk about it now. I’ve got to get you to a hospital.” ’
    At this point Dr Finch began to weep as he told the story.
    ‘She said, “Don’t leave me” and then she paused and said, “Take care of the kids.” ’
    Dr Finch’s voice broke and he had difficulty continuing.
    ‘I checked her pulse right away. There was no pulsation. I turned up her chin. There was no respiration. She was dead.’ And then he repeated it. ‘She was
dead.
I said “Barb,” but she couldn’t answer.’
    Dr Finch was not the only one weeping now. Some of the jurors were weeping with him.
    But not all of them.
    Cooper made the doctor act out the second struggle over the gun to show how it happened; but the demonstration did not really help.
    Mrs Finch had been shot in the back and not at very close quarters. The doctor said that the gun had gone off as he had flung it away into the bushes. Could it have been defective? There was no way of knowing. The bushes had been searched and searched again. The gun had not been found, there or anywhere else.
    The cross-examination of