Yesterday's Papers (8 page)

‘You can't tell me that even if by some chance Smith was innocent, you could trace whatever passing maniac happened to strangle the girl and then elude detection for thirty years.'

‘Suppose,' said Harry, articulating an idea which had been germinating in his mind since his meeting with Miller, ‘suppose it wasn't a random attack. Suppose instead someone Carole knew had a motive for murdering her - or maybe just did it in a fit of rage?'

‘And by a stroke of luck found that Smith was ready, willing and able to take the blame?'

Harry leaned forward. ‘It's not impossible. Suddenly the case becomes interesting, don't you think? Maybe what happened in Sefton Park all those years ago was the perfect murder - committed by mistake.'

On arriving back in his flat late that evening, Harry picked up the television remote control and zapped his way from programme to programme whilst he tried to summon the strength to make some black coffee. His session with Ken had lasted longer than either of them had intended and the cold blast of the night air on the walk home had not been strong enough to focus his thoughts.

He moved quickly on from a Swedish film with subtitles, scarcely pausing to take in the highlights of a welterweight boxing match or an alternative comedian who talked a lot about farting and impotence. Harry yawned. Wasn't
Chinatown
due on tonight? He had seen it half a dozen times and on each new viewing he gleaned something fresh from it.

The regional newscast carried the story of the sergeant's collapse in court. His present condition was described as ‘serious but stable', which in Harry's experience of hospitalspeak probably meant that he was already being measured for a shroud. A mouthpiece for the police authority, interviewed briefly, described the sergeant as ‘a dedicated officer'. He looked as glum as if he was expecting the compensation for Kevin Walter to be deducted from his personal salary.

But there would be no payday for Edwin Smith, even if Miller was right to believe in his innocence. Perhaps, thought Harry, that was all the more reason to care about clearing his name, if justice demanded it.

Outside, a gale began to howl. He could hear it even through the double glazing. The heating was on, but he felt a slight chill. He knew it came from the lack of someone warm to share the night with. Since Liz had walked out on him, he had had affairs, but few relationships that had meant anything. He found himself thinking about Kim Lawrence, then reminded himself that the word in the law library was that she was involved with a social worker. A bloody waste, he told himself, though he was honest enough to admit that even if she was here beside him and in the mood for love, he would probably want to keep her up for hours, talking about the Sefton Park case.

Eventually he began to doze and when he awoke with a start, he realised he had missed much of the film. Yet he could still take pleasure in the way Polanski captured the suffocating atmosphere of thirties LA during a drought and in Jack Nicholson's private eye discovering a conscience. J.J. Gittes' quest to expose the corruption of a wealthy businessman brought, not salvation, but death to a woman he had begun to love. The last thing he remembered before he drifted off to sleep again was the sense of menace he felt when he heard Nicholson's nasal tones.

‘You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't.'

Chapter Nine

so that when my own life is at an end
,

He arrived at Fenwick Court the next morning to find the office in a state of uproar. A police car was parked outside and one of the large windows which looked out on to the courtyard had been smashed. In the reception area, a couple of chairs and a table had been upturned and all the staff were standing together in a small group, talking in hushed yet urgent voices.

‘You're late!' complained Suzanne as he approached.

He couldn't deny it. Already the clock showed ten past nine. He had overslept after a night interrupted by two or three wakings from grim dreams in which the sight of Ernest Miller's corpse was a recurrent and inescapable image.

‘Never mind that. What's going on?'

‘We've been burgled!' said the girl, opening her eyes wide and making a dramatic gesture with her arms.

His immediate reaction was amazement rather than shock and as if reading his mind, Jim Crusoe walked through the door, accompanied by a young woman constable to whom he was saying, ‘Who would want to rob us? After all, most of the petty thieves in Liverpool city centre are our own clients.'

‘If this is the work of anyone I act for, you shouldn't be short of clues,' Harry told the policewoman. ‘Fingerprints, fibres, driving licences, you name it, my clients usually scatter them at the scene of the crime. They aren't exactly master criminals. I sometimes think Charlie Pearce must be spinning round in his grave.'

A faint smile spread across the woman's face. ‘Burglars just don't take a pride in their work these days.'

‘This is Detective Constable Lynn DeFreitas,' said Jim. ‘Lynn, meet my partner, Harry Devlin.'

‘Pleased to meet you,' she said, extending a hand. She was slim and pretty and had an air of quiet authority. ‘Well, at least you seem to have got off quite lightly.'

‘Much taken?' asked Harry.

Jim shook his head. ‘Not as far as I can see. The door into the book-keeper's room hasn't been forced and the typewriters and office equipment seem to be all present and correct.'

Harry could have sworn there was a note of regret in his partner's voice. No excuse to buy a new computer system on the contents insurance, then.

‘Looks like the work of one of two kids,' said Lynn DeFreitas. ‘I gather you don't keep much money on the premises.'

‘Barely enough to pay for an hour of your overtime,' said Harry. ‘It makes more sense to rob a church poor box than a solicitor's office. Mind you, there are blank cheques, of course...'

‘Not touched,' confirmed Jim.

‘Did the alarm go off?'

‘It was disabled. The buggers knew what they were doing.'

Amazing
, Harry thought gloomily. The salesman had sworn it was a state of the art system and it had certainly caught him out on his nocturnal office visit last December. So much for security technology. ‘Is that my window they came in through?'

‘Yes. They seem to have started there and begun working their way back through the building before leaving in a hurry. Maybe they were disturbed.'

They had reached Harry's door. ‘Anything of mine gone?'

Jim gestured toward the paper-strewn room and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Frankly, old son, who can tell?'

Harry winced as he stepped inside. The files he kept stacked on every available surface had collapsed on to the floor, spilling their contents everywhere. ‘You don't understand my methods, that's all. Normally, I can always lay my hand on a file any time I want it. But now it looks like a bomb has hit the place. Christ, I don't know where to start.'

‘Personally,' said Jim to Lynn DeFreitas as they followed him in, ‘I think this room looks just the same as usual. Tidier, if anything.'

‘Could they have been looking for anything in particular amongst your working papers?' she asked.

‘In Harry's room?' scoffed Jim. ‘Talk about needles in haystacks. They'd have had to stay all night.'

‘But might there be sensitive information in one of your files?' she persisted. ‘Something that someone would like to be kept quiet?'

Harry ran through his current caseload in his mind before shaking his head. ‘I can't think of anything out of the ordinary.'

Lynn DeFreitas tiptoed through the mess towards the door. ‘Perhaps it was spite? A client who feels you've let him down?'

‘There are no such people,' said Jim hastily. ‘This feller somehow manages to have the villains eating out of his hand.'

‘Chummy with the criminal classes, are you?'

‘Don't worry, we know when to keep our distance.'

‘The last solicitor who said that to me is in Strangeways at present, serving eighteen months for assisting a client to escape from police custody.' She smiled again to soften her words and Harry noticed the frank interest with which Jim returned her gaze. Pleasantly, she said, ‘Looks like common or garden vandalism, then.'

‘I guess. And thank God, it could have been so much worse.'

Harry followed them out and back down the corridor, but he said nothing. It had occurred to him that in his briefcase was one set of papers which would have meant nothing to any of his clients yet which might have been the object of the burglar's search. He must look again at Cyril Tweats' file on the strangling of Carole Jeffries.

He left Jim and the policewoman deep in conversation and his secretary Lucy to the thankless task of bringing a semblance of order to the chaos of his room. He had a date in court with Tina Turner.

Unfortunately, Bettina Mirabelle Turner, a twenty-seven-year-old white Caucasian female from a tower block in Dingle, was less glamorous than her celebrated namesake, although equally vivacious. This Tina was up for the umpteenth time on a soliciting charge and when the magistrates imposed a fine that she could pay off with a couple of afternoons' work in one of the big city centre hotels, she blew them a kiss in relief and almost found herself locked up for contempt of court.

‘How's business?' asked Harry outside. He knew perfectly well that if the prospect of AIDS or a beating did not deter his client from her chosen profession, judicial sanctions were hardly likely to do so.

‘Never better, chuck,' said Tina, showing countless teeth in a vast smile. ‘If I had another pair of legs, I'd open up in Manchester. Mind, some of me clients have fallen on hard times, like. Last week I asked this feller if he'd like a blow job and all he wanted to know was whether it would affect his dole money.'

Harry laughed and said goodbye, but rather than heading back for the office, he ensconced himself in the passenger seat of his MG and began to reread the Edwin Smith file.

Not one word, not one unguarded sentence gave him an inkling as to why any burglar might be desperate to steal the file from him. The only suggestion that Smith was innocent of the killing of Carole Jeffries came in the note of his prison cell retraction, which in turn had been so speedily retracted. Harry reflected that Lynn DeFreitas' assumption that the break-in had been the work of a juvenile vandal, like so many simple solutions to seemingly baffling puzzles, was probably correct. He sighed and set off for his meeting in Sefton Park.

Everywhere was quiet as he parked his car opposite the lake. The trees were bare and the wind was sweeping through the wide open spaces. The place was deserted apart from the usual dauntless dog-walkers, a couple of truanting schoolboys and Ernest Miller, who was sitting on a bench overlooking the water, deep in thought. An empty plastic sandwich box, a thermos flask and the document case which seemed to act as his comfort blanket were at his side. Not until Harry was within a dozen yards did the old man look up.

‘You have made good time, Mr Devlin. Thank you for coming.' The muscles around his mouth twitched in a smile as he waved a hand towards a neatly tended shrubbery. ‘So this is where it happened, all those years ago. Carole's body was found over there, look. She was attacked on the path you see to your right and her killer then pulled her as far as a clump of bushes which used to grow where I am pointing.'

Harry contemplated the scene. It seemed so quiet and empty that a man with less imagination would have found it impossible to picture the crime. But the words from Edwin Smith's confession statement echoed in Harry's head.
I wasn't going to tell you this, but I really fancy you
. Could this conversation with Carole on that fateful day have been fiction? Or was Miller mistaken and everyone else right all along?

He sat beside the old man and placed his folder of papers on his lap. ‘Here is the file. I can't let you take it away. But feel free to look through it.'

‘I do appreciate your assistance,' said Miller, yet although he stretched out a hand for the folder, he did not fall upon it with the greedy relish that Harry had anticipated. Instead he leafed through the documents as casually as a guest glancing at a dull host's holiday snaps.

‘Look at Edwin's confession. You'll see why the police thought it had the ring of truth.'

Miller turned to the statement and raised his eyebrows after reading it. ‘I take your point, but where is the retraction?'

Harry turned to the pages which recorded Cyril's meeting with his client. ‘His solicitor didn't pay it much heed.'

After studying the notes, Miller gave a brief nod. ‘Thank you.'

‘Intriguing, isn't it?'

‘The notes and correspondence are immaculately typed, don't you agree?' said Miller, evading the question with an enigmatic smile. ‘And remember, this was in the days when people took a pride in secretarial work, long before word processors robbed us of yet another skill.'

‘I thought you would be more concerned with Edwin Smith's attempt to claim innocence.'

‘Yes, yes, it bears out what I have been arguing, does it not? And I think his denial is entirely plausible, even though your predecessor poured cold water on it.'

‘Cyril Tweats was hardly infallible.'

‘And yet a man's life rested on his advice.' Miller shook his head. ‘The power that lawyers exert ... it is remarkable.'

‘I never noticed it myself.'

‘Come now. When careers end, reputations are ruined, marriages crumble or death comes, you and your professional colleagues are consulted. People dare not move a muscle without your say-so. Oh yes, if I had my time again, I would be a lawyer. As it is, I would be grateful if you could assist me with my little bit of legal business. If you remember, I have decided that I really ought at last to make a will.'

‘You need to speak to my partner, Jim Crusoe. I know as much about the law of inheritance as I do about the second law of thermodynamics.'

‘I doubt whether an appointment will be necessary. My wishes are straightforward and I have written them down.' He opened the document case but as he did so, a couple of red files slipped out together and fell to the ground, with several sheets fluttering out of them. Miller bent down to pick them up, wheezing and cursing himself for his own clumsiness as he stuffed them back into place.

‘I am not a fit man, Mr Devlin, as you can tell. It is right that I should put my affairs in order.'

He replaced one file in the case. It was marked CAROLE JEFFRIES and Harry recognised it as the one he had seen in the Wallace. From the other, marked PERSONAL, Miller drew out a sheet of lined paper bearing a list of figures and instructions scripted in immaculate calligraphy which he handed to Harry. ‘I trust you and your partner will not object to acting as my executors?'

Probates were where the money lay. Harry nodded his agreement, his interest rising as he took in the details of assets and savings, personal effects and shareholdings.

‘You were too modest on the telephone. I see that your estate is quite sizeable.'

Miller shrugged. ‘I had a reasonably well-paid job for many years and neither my late wife nor I were extravagant with money, quite the reverse. Even so, I recognise the truth of the old saying. I can't take it with me.'

He had set out, in clear if pedantic prose, the intended destination of his wordly goods and Harry opened his eyes wide as he read the instructions.

‘You propose to leave everything to the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation?'

‘They are a worthy charity, are they not? And short of funds, too, I should guess, like so many other deserving causes.'

‘Of course,' said Harry. If anything could make Kim Lawrence whoop with delight, he suspected it would be the news of Miller's gift. He had not imagined the old man as an altruistic benefactor. ‘But...'

‘You are plainly startled by my largesse. Let me try to explain. I said to you when we first met that I find the question of justice fascinating. People sometimes say that justice delayed is justice denied, do they not? I suspect the reality is that justice is invariably delayed and often denied altogether. Well, if the relatively modest sum I have to give will be of value, that is enough for me.'

‘Don't you have any family at all?' Harry did not feel he was being disloyal to Kim Lawrence in putting the question. The last thing she would want would be for some long-lost relative to turn up out of the blue and contest the will. Now was the time to discover if there were any likely claimants.

‘I am a widower, as you will have gathered. My wife died ten years ago and we had no children, nor any other family ties. I left Germany as a young man after the death of my parents and I had no brothers, sisters or cousins. If you and Mr Crusoe do agree to act as my executors, I think you will find the task straightforward.' Miller gave him a stern look. ‘No excuse for over-charging.'

Harry grinned. ‘I'd say “trust me”, but I don't expect you're the kind of chap who trusts anyone and I can't blame you for that.'

‘Mr Devlin, you strike me as tolerably honest, if that is not damning you with too much faint praise.' Miller passed him the file. ‘Here you will find a few odds and ends that your partner might need in preparing the document. No doubt you will return them to me when the will is ready for signature.'