Chapter Text
Lord Aziraphale Eastgate was a creature of habit. Each morning, he woke at eight, pulled a dressing-gown on over his pyjamas, and sat down for a full English breakfast, prepared with more enthusiasm than skill by his valet, Newton Pulsifer. Said breakfast was accompanied by Aziraphale’s preferred morning reading—a series of newspapers ranging from the highly respectable to the deeply scandalous. He was accustomed to start with the literary pages, proceeding through to theatrical and Society reports before finishing off with his most treasured section—crime.
Today, however, his gaze was drawn sharply from his eggs to the headline splashed across the front page of the uppermost paper: “TRIAL OF THE CENTURY!”
Such a headline would have been wholly unremarkable on several of the more salacious publications in the stack, but this particular paper was not known for exaggeration, and Aziraphale was intrigued.
He bit into a rasher of bacon, and began reading the story.
The trial of noted mystery writer Anthony J. Crowley is set to begin this Thursday and is expected to draw an unusually large audience to the courtroom. Mr. Crowley, the author of such volumes as Death by the Sea and A Fatal Fig Tree, is accused of the murder of his former companion Louis Ferno. Mr. Ferno, himself a writer whose debut novel Myriads Though Bright was shortlisted for several literary prizes, was found to have died from arsenic poisoning last month. Police investigation discovered that Mr. Ferno had visited Mr. Crowley on the evening of his death, and had consumed coffee at his flat. The two men were reportedly overheard having a heated argument, and a search of Mr. Crowley’s flat revealed that he was in possession of arsenic, which he claimed to have purchased as “research for an upcoming novel.”
The trial will be presided over by…
Aziraphale skimmed the rest of the article, which mentioned Crowley’s counsel for the defence (extremely expensive) and how long the trial was expected to take (not very, given the preponderance of evidence).
“Newt?” he asked, eyes still fixed on the paper.
“My lord?” Where a highly competent valet would have appeared soundlessly behind Aziraphale, Newt instead moved from kitchen to table with an amount of noise suited to a much heavier man.
“What do I have scheduled for this Thursday?”
“There’s an auction you were hoping to attend,” said Newt, checking the pocket appointment-book he kept on hand. “Several manuscripts of particular interest are on offer.”
Aziraphale hummed thoughtfully. “Cancel that,” he said, after a moment. “I’ve decided to sit in on the trial of the century.”
As the paper had predicted, the courtroom was packed with journalists, crime enthusiasts, and the generally curious. A fair amount of the latter group left after realizing that the interrogations tended rather more towards the technical than the scandalous, not wishing to sit through hours of belabored medical evidence and a parade of witnesses as to Ferno’s movements on the night of his death.
The salient points, as Aziraphale understood them, were that a postmortem examination had revealed a large quantity of arsenic in the stomach of the deceased; that the arsenic must have been ingested in the last twelve hours of his life; and that the only food or drink he’d been known to consume that day was tea at his publisher’s, fish and chips at a pub, and coffee with Anthony Crowley.
After a brief recess, during which Aziraphale went outside, and smoked a contemplative cigarette, and made pleasant small talk with the less shark-like of the reporters, the Crown called Mary Hodges, secretary at the publishing firm of Hastur & Ligur, to the stand.
Miss Hodges’ testimony was clear, and Aziraphale marked her down as a solid observer, if a somewhat garrulous speaker. She described Ferno’s visit to the firm’s offices on the day of his death—he’d arrived shortly before four and been shown into Hastur’s office for their meeting. Miss Hodges had then made tea, as she always did, in the office kitchen, and brought it in to serve to the three men, who had taken cups at random and had drunk from the same pot. Both Ligur and Ferno had taken sugar. There had also been a tin of biscuits sent as a gift, which Miss Hodges had brought in from the kitchen, and both Hastur and Ferno had eaten those. The essential point, Aziraphale gathered, was that none of the food or drink had been consumed by only Ferno, nor served in such a way that it might be possible to arrange for him to take a certain portion.
Next to the stand was the proprietor of the Sitting Duck, the pub where Ferno had eaten his last meal. He had apparently been in a brown study for most of the meal, brusquely ordering his ale and fish-and-chips, and not saying much of anything to the staff. When questioned as to whether Ferno might have had a packet, or a powder of any sort on his person, the pub-owner shrugged unhelpfully and said he might have done, for all he knew, but he hadn’t seen any such thing.
The crowd had started getting restless again, during the last witness, but they perked up again once he stepped down from the box—because the next witness called to testify was Anthony Crowley.
He’d been sitting in the dock for the entire trial, and where most men looking to convince a jury of their innocence would have kept upright, tried to convey through a ramrod-straight spine that their behavior was equally upstanding, Crowley sat sprawled out on the chair, arms folded across his chest. His expression had scarcely changed the entire trial—Aziraphale had glanced over at him more than once, to see his reactions, and noticed only the smallest tensing in his jaw, the slow blink of his eyes from time to time. As Crowley approached the witness-box, Aziraphale saw that his hands were shaking almost imperceptibly, and realized in a rush that his apparent unconcern was masking some simmering anxiety.
“You are Anthony J. Crowley of 666 Sayers Lane, London?”
“I am.” Crowley’s voice was almost as aggressively casual as his posture, but it, too, had a brittle edge to it.
“Thank you, Mr. Crowley. You have stated that Mr. Ferno visited you at your residence on the night of June twenty-fifth; that is correct?”
“It is.”
“When did he arrive?”
“A bit after eight p.m., I think.”
“And you served him coffee at that time?”
Crowley nodded. “Served both of us coffee. Was making a pot anyway, asked if he’d fancy any.”
“Please describe how you served the coffee.”
Crowley scratched the top of his head. “Well, I would’ve gone into the kitchen—”
“Did Mr. Ferno come with you?”
“No, he stayed in the sitting room. Uh, I went into the kitchen, got down the mugs from the cupboard, poured out the coffee, and brought it back into the sitting room for Louis.”
“Did Mr. Ferno take anything in his coffee?”
“Yeah, uh, he had sugar. Two lumps, I think.”
“Did you have sugar?”
Crowley shifted his weight, slightly enough that a less attentive observer than Aziraphale might have missed it. “Yeah.”
“How much sugar, Mr. Crowley?”
“Four lumps,” said Crowley, making a face, and Aziraphale was seized with the unaccountable urge to laugh. At a murder trial.
“How long did Mr. Ferno remain at your residence?”
“About two hours.”
“And what did you discuss during that time?”
“Our relationship,” Crowley said, an edge of challenge in his voice.
“You had been on terms of intimacy with the deceased?”
“We were lovers,” Crowley said, airily, “if that’s what you mean.”
There was a general scandalized murmur from the galleries. Rather hypocritical of them all, Aziraphale thought privately. As though half the appeal of this trial weren’t the flagrantly open nature of Ferno and Crowley’s relationship. The counsel for the defence was scowling, as though he’d warned his client about being too forthright and been summarily ignored, but Aziraphale rather thought it might actually be wise of Crowley not to underplay the specific nature of his intimacy with Ferno. After all, there was scarcely any chance that any given juror wouldn’t already be well aware of the facts, and by exhibiting no shame whatever about his history, Crowley managed to give off the impression that he had nothing to hide. One or two of the jury might, perhaps, take against such brazen honesty, but it was worth the risk, in Aziraphale’s view.
“But you had ended this... irregular relationship prior to June twenty-fifth?” the prosecutor was asking.
“Yes.”
“Was it ended on your initiative, or Mr. Ferno’s?”
“Mine.”
“For any particular reason?”
“I discovered,” Crowley said, wryly, “that Louis and I had been operating under different assumptions as to the exclusivity of our relationship.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to state that more plainly, Mr. Crowley.”
“If you insist,” said Crowley, shrugging. A muscle in his neck tensed. “I found out he’d been unfaithful.”
“So the relationship did not, you might say, end on amicable terms.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Crowley said lightly. “We didn’t have any sort of quarrel about it, if that’s what you mean. I just—” he looked down, for a second, and Aziraphale was unaccountably frustrated by not being able to see the look in his eyes— “just found out he wasn’t the person I’d thought he was, y’know? That things that I’d thought were important weren’t really, after all. So there just wasn’t any point in it anymore.”
Aziraphale doubted whether that explanation would resonate much with the jury—the Crown would likely continue to push the narrative of Crowley as a scorned lover, reeling from Ferno’s betrayal—but he found that he, for his own part, understood Crowley’s reasoning perfectly.
“And at what point in time did your relationship with Mr. Ferno end?”
“April,” Crowley said. “Early April.”
“And did you see Mr. Ferno at all in the time period between the conclusion of your relationship and June twenty-fifth?”
“Not on purpose,” said Crowley, and the corners of his mouth twitched in a smile.
“Could you clarify that, please?”
“Ah, I didn’t arrange to see him, or anything, but we crossed paths at a party or two. Same circles, same friends—it wasn’t surprising.”
“Do you remember the dates of these parties?”
“Not exactly.”
“Do you attend a lot of parties, Mr. Crowley?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, then, it seems singular that you shouldn’t remember the dates, if you don’t attend so very many.”
“One was in May, I think,” said Crowley, irritably, “and the other early June.”
“Thank you.” There was a slight sneer to it, a suggestion of well, that wasn’t so hard, now was it? The Crown was, Aziraphale noted, trying to make it seem as though Crowley were unreliable in his account of his own movements.
“Now, how did this meeting on June twenty-fifth come about?”
“Louis wrote me and asked if he could come and talk. I said all right, but that I didn’t think it’d do much good. I’d quite made up my mind about the whole thing.”
“And when did this correspondence take place?”
“Ah...about a week or so before,” Crowley said. “Not exactly certain.”
The prosecutor raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “Surely these letters were dated?”
“Probably were,” Crowley admitted, “only I haven’t got the one Louis sent me anymore and I don’t know what he did with mine.”
“You didn’t save the letter?”
“Not really in the habit of archiving trivial correspondence,” Crowley said dryly.
Aziraphale winced. Juries, in his experience, didn’t tend to respond well to irony, or sarcasm, or arch remarks. Crowley’s admission of his relationship with Ferno had been refreshingly forthright; the elliptical way he’d described their break-up and his current vagueness as to timelines gave the opposite impression. Aziraphale, with his extensive experience observing witness testimonies, was certain this apparent contempt was the result of a growing anxiety; he didn’t think the jury would necessarily see it that way.
The prosecutor, having either gotten what he wanted or decided he wasn’t going to, changed tactics. “Did you visit a chemist’s on June fourteenth?”
“Can’t say for sure it was the fourteenth,” Crowley said, “but yeah, around that time.”
“And what did you purchase at this establishment?”
“Arsenic,” said Crowley.
Sensation in the courtroom—and Aziraphale was again irritated, because this had been in all the papers, surely everyone present knew perfectly well that Crowley had bought arsenic, what was the sense in pretending to be shocked?
He wondered, fleetingly, why he found himself so bothered by the behavior of the lookers-on. He tended to view them as an easily ignored nuisance, but today he found them a source of constant vexation. And, indeed, he had a great deal less riding on this trial than most of the others he’d observed—those, he’d spent going over evidence in his mind, the facts as he’d discovered them, the likelihood of a conviction—and the likelihood that his own interference would result in the end of a man’s life. A guilty man’s life, always, he’d never doubted that, but a life nevertheless. He’d asked himself, time and again, whether he was right to meddle, and he told himself, time and again, that without his meddling it would be far more likely than an innocent man might take the blame. But somewhere in the darkest parts of his soul lived an unpleasant certainty—he didn’t investigate crime out of any innate desire for justice. He did it because it was stimulating, and challenging, and fun.
But today was different—today, Aziraphale discovered, wasn’t fun at all, and he considered leaving before realizing that he’d only drive himself mad wondering about the verdict.
“And for what purpose did you purchase this arsenic?”
“Well,” said Crowley, elongating the word, “I don’t know if you’re aware, but I write books.”
Stop, Aziraphale thought, stop, stop, you’ll only turn them all against you, just answer the questions, for Heaven’s sake, stop putting your bloody personality into it.
“I believe everyone present is quite aware of that, Mr. Crowley,” said the prosecutor. He could get away with being deadpan.
“They’re mysteries,” Crowley said, apparently deciding to drop the attitude, “and I do a great deal of research for them, y’know, make sure that what happens in them could actually happen in real life. I’m working on one right now where the crime’s a poisoning, and I wanted to see whether you could, actually, just go on into a chemist’s and buy arsenic, no trouble.”
“And did you have any trouble?”
Crowley shook his head. “They had me sign a sort of book-thing, but that was it. Signed my own name, as I didn’t much care whether anyone knew, but I could’ve put someone else’s, I expect, if I’d wanted.”
That was good, Aziraphale thought, good that Crowley had signed his own name—showed he hadn’t got anything to hide. Less good, of course, that he’d just demonstrated that he’d been thinking like a criminal, about how to hide his actions, but that had to be a side effect of spending one’s days devising fictional murder plots.
“And what did you do with the arsenic, once you had obtained it?”
Crowley shook his head. “I didn’t actually need it, uh, for anything, just needed to buy it, and I didn’t exactly fancy having the stuff sitting around the house, so I dropped it in a bin on the way home from the chemist’s.”
“So you, then, would maintain that you did not have arsenic in your possession on June twenty-fifth.”
“I do maintain it.”
“Despite the fact that you were witnessed having purchased arsenic on June fourteenth, your name is signed in the register, and you admit yourself to having done so, you claim that you did not possess any arsenic eleven days later.”
“Correct,” said Crowley, fidgeting slightly. “Like I said, I only wanted to see if I could buy it.”
“To return, then, to the night of June twenty-fifth. You said you and Mr. Ferno discussed your relationship. What form did that discussion take?”
“Just...a discussion, really. He, uh, he wanted to start things up again, and I told him I wasn’t interested. And it went on like that for a while, actually. Longer than you’d think possible.”
“We have a signed statement from one of your neighbors saying that she heard raised voices coming from your flat that evening. Did this discussion turn acrimonious?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” Crowley said carefully. “Louis became insistent, I suppose, that we ought to have another go of it, and I realized that I couldn’t fob him off with polite refusals any longer. So I got a bit more assertive about it. No shouting, or anything, mind you. Just told him that if he hadn’t got anything of substance to say then he could jolly well shove off, because I wasn’t about to listen to another hour of groveling.”
“And he accepted this?”
“Yeah. At last. Around ten he seemed to pick up on the fact that it wasn’t any use going another round, and told me to think it over again and let him know. I said that I didn’t need to think it over and that he already knew. Well, he didn’t much like that, I suppose, but he didn’t argue any more, just left.”
“And what did you do with the coffee things, after he left?”
“Uh,” said Crowley, and smiled unexpectedly. “Cleaned ‘em up.”
“Right away?”
“Yeah,” Crowley said, a bit defensively, “I prefer things neat.”
“What exactly did you clean up?”
“I washed the pot, and the mugs, and the spoons.”
“Not the sugar bowl?”
“No, there was still sugar in there, so I just put it back on the shelf.”
“And what did you do after that?”
“Went to bed.”
“And when did you hear of Mr. Ferno’s death?”
“The day after. Got a call from my publishers—his publishers too. Wanted to know if I’d heard anything about it.”
The prosecutor nodded. “Thank you, Mr. Crowley.”
Crowley left the witness-box and walked slowly back to the dock. Aziraphale watched his hands. They’d stopped shaking. Only nervous about the testimony, then, he thought. Not the trial itself. He quickly revised this estimation as he saw that Crowley, who’d seemingly not blinked once while under oath, closed his eyes immediately upon sitting back down. Relief, perhaps, or a desire to shield whatever emotions lurked there.
As the judge summed up the case, Aziraphale watched the jury, looking closely for clues as to how they might vote. Most of them looked more bored than anything; a few seemed impatient, presumably wanting to get back to their jobs and families. One woman, middle-aged and shrewd-looking, had a notebook out in front of her and was jotting things down from time to time. Aziraphale found himself watching her, his attention flitting back and forth between her reactions and Crowley’s, which, though subtle, were clear to Aziraphale’s well-trained eye.
At last, the judge finished, and the jury withdrew to deliberate. The prisoner, too, was led away, and the public began standing up, and stretching, and initiating long conversations about how he’d definitely done it, didn’t you see the way he admitted to having arsenic, bold as you please, probably mad…
Aziraphale felt the abrupt need for some air.
On the way out of the courtroom, he collided with a familiar figure.
“My lord!” Detective-Sergeant Shadwell seemed a great deal more pleased to see Aziraphale than he generally was—presumably because, this time, Aziraphale wasn’t swooping in to the middle of an active investigation and turning everything topsy-turvy. “Come to see the trial of the century, have you?”
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, shortly.
“I’m afraid it’s all pretty cut and dried,” Shadwell said, conversationally. “He did it, of course. No doubt of that. The jury won’t be long, I’d think; it’s a strong case. One of our best, don’t you think, m’lord?”
“I don’t, actually,” Aziraphale said, not looking at Shadwell. “As a matter of fact, he didn’t do it.”
“No!” Shadwell said, disbelieving. “You’re having me on. It’s all perfectly clear.”
“Oh, yes,” said Aziraphale miserably, “it’s all perfectly clear. You’ve made an excellent case. Only you’ve got the wrong man.”
“But how do you know?” Shadwell pressed. “Is there something we missed? A flaw in the evidence, something…”
“No,” Aziraphale said, and sighed. “No flaws. Just the big one. I don’t know why I know it, I don’t even know how I know it, but I do know it. Anthony Crowley is innocent.”
“Well,” said Shadwell, sounding unconvinced, “ah, far be it from me to question your expertise, m’lord, but I don’t think the jury will see it that way.”
“I expect you’re right,” said Aziraphale, and stood up. “You’ll excuse me.”
“Of course,” Shadwell said, and Aziraphale brushed by him and headed out to smoke and brood.
It was nearly five hours before the jury returned. After the first hour, Aziraphale began to feel hopeful—it clearly wasn’t as cut and dried as Shadwell had thought, not if they were this long about it. After about the third, he grew despondent again, because surely the majority had to be for conviction, and surely they’d wear down whoever had decided to hold out. And he was just about deciding that no, perhaps they wouldn’t, if he felt morally certain of Crowley’s innocence then why shouldn’t a juror, when a clutter of footsteps from the hallway signalled that the jury was returning.
“Members of the jury, have you agreed upon a verdict?”
The foreman, a tall, thin fellow with a graying beard, shook his head. “We can’t.”
The judge frowned. “Are you certain? You may have more time, you know, if you need it.”
The foreman shot a malevolent glare at the shrewd-looking woman that Aziraphale had noticed before. “We won’t be reaching a verdict anytime before the end of the world, I’m afraid,” he said bitterly.
The judge sighed. “Very well, then, you are hereby discharged. A new trial will commence in thirty days, with a fresh jury.”
Aziraphale felt an ache at the side of his face, and found that he was grinning.
In the dock, Anthony Crowley looked a good deal less celebratory. He didn’t, Aziraphale realized, even look relieved. He looked, more than anything, as though he rather dreaded the prospect of having to go through the whole rigamarole again.
Aziraphale decided that this would not do. He wound his way down the benches to where Shadwell was sitting, grumbling to his neighbor about women who got Ideas.
“My lord,” he said, voice changing as Aziraphale approached. “Seems you know something I don’t.”
“Only one thing,” Aziraphale said, “and I told it to you already. That man isn’t a murderer, and I know you’ll say that you can’t tell a murderer by looking at him, and ordinarily I’d agree with you, but I’ve been watching him all day and I know he’s no killer.”
“What do you intend to do about it, then?”
“I want to see him,” said Aziraphale.