Yesterday's papers

Chapter Ten

‘Is he dying?’ demanded Jim Crusoe an hour later.

‘Not as far as I’m aware,’ said Harry. ‘Miller is one of those characters who always seems to be ailing but the old bugger will probably outlive the lot of us.’

‘His will is straightforward. I can let you have the engrossment before the end of the day if you want.’

‘Thanks. I may want an excuse for another word with Mr Ernest Miller before too long. So if you can prepare it quickly, so much the better.’

‘No problem. Mind you, if we had the latest software, we could turn out any document based on the standard precedents in a matter of minutes at the press of a button. Do you know what we’re missing by not having the latest packages?’

‘No, but from the evangelical light in your eyes, I’m afraid you’re going to tell me.’

His partner sighed. ‘I suppose it’s no use asking if you’d be interested in seeing a rep offering a fifty per cent discount on promotional videos for solicitors’ firms?’

Harry pulled a face. ‘Only if my part will be taken by Richard Gere.’

‘Peter Falk might be better casting.’

‘And I suppose you’d want to be played by a young Sean Connery?’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Wait a minute. Who made this approach to you about the video?’

‘I received a mailshot a couple of days ago. The follow-up phone call came today. The company is Frederick’s, the people who made the management video-tape you vandalised.’

‘I told you, it was the only spare cassette I could find the other night. I wanted to record The Postman Always Rings Twice — the Lana Turner version, that is, from the days when the postman didn’t spend most of his time delivering computer-generated junk mail to impoverished businessmen. But I might just be willing to make amends. Pass me the literature and I’ll give it the once-over.’

Jim’s bushy eyebrows lifted. ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this. Harry Devlin showing an interest in PR?’

‘I might even be interested in a meeting to see if they could do anything for us. On one condition.’

Jim gave him a suspicious look. ‘Go on.’

‘That we meet the organ grinder, rather than the monkey. I don’t want to waste time with a junior salesman. I’d like a presentation from Benny Frederick himself.’

Benny Frederick was away at a conference in London, the monkey told them, and although he would be willing to see any prospective new customer, he would not be available until after the weekend. Harry had to accept that as good enough, but he could not help chafing with impatience. His conversation with Miller had puzzled him and he could not push the Sefton Park case out of his mind.

He was at a loose end the following day and in the morning he wandered into town, telling himself that he needed to pick up a few odds and ends for the flat as well as food for the week ahead. Yet he did not really fool himself, and before long he found his way to the Bluecoat Gallery, where posters on the railings outside announced an exhibition of Snaps of the Sixties, photographs from the Beatles era taken by Benny Frederick. He paid his money and strolled inside.

A girl at the door handed him a leaflet which told him a little about Benny’s career. He had inherited his father’s studio as a young man in 1961 and had proved to be in the right business in the right place at the right time. His candid camera had caught pop singers, poets and comedians and made him as much of a star as most of them: what Patrick Lichfield was to high society and David Bailey to the world of fashion, Benny Frederick had been to the age of the Mersey Sound. As the city’s golden decade had drawn to a close, he had recognised the need to move with the times and his nose for commerce had prompted him to diversify into video, but it was for his photography that most people knew him best. With justice, Harry thought: despite the self-deprecation of the exhibition’s title, he could see that the photographs were the work of a talented artist. Benny could capture a personality in a single shot, whether it was Ringo Starr cavorting on Blackpool Beach, Ken Dodd clowning at the Empire or Bessie Braddock haranguing a heckler at an election meeting. Brian Epstein was pictured standing offstage at the Cavern, watching with rapt attention as a young John Lennon sang ‘Baby, It’s You’, but Harry was more intrigued by a photograph of a nightclub pianist. His hair was plastered with lotion and his lips curled as if he held his piano in contempt. The caption said simply WARREN HULL AT THE PEPPERMINT LOUNGE — 1961. So this was the Brill Brothers’ guru, yet another man who would later die violently and long before his time. But of Ray and Ian Brill themselves there was no sign.

For a minute or two, Harry flirted aimlessly with the girl on the door, but then her boyfriend arrived and it was time to move on. He had decided to watch the soccer at Anfield in the afternoon, but even after a liquid lunch at the Dock Brief, he still had time to drift into the second-hand bookshop in Williamson Lane. Normally he haunted the fiction room, thumbing through shabby copies of long-forgotten mysteries by the likes of Anthony Berkeley and John Dickson Carr. He relished the sorcery of the old books, with their bodies discovered in rooms that had every door and window locked and barred and their murders in Turkish baths committed by daggers made of ice. The Golden Age of crime fiction seemed to him to be a time of innocence and charm: between the wars, artifice was everything and only authors, not policemen, indulged themselves in creating elaborate fictions.

For once, though, he concentrated on the true crime shelves, keen to see if anyone had ever written up the strangling in Sefton Park. There were endless accounts of the cases of Charles Bravo and Constance Kent, while Florence Maybrick and James Wallace had a whole row to themselves — but he could find nothing on the killing of Carole. Her death had caused a sensation in its day, but it held no interest for the murder buff: there was no suspense in a case that everyone regarded as open and shut.

What if Miller could establish with Renata Grierson’s evidence — whatever it might be — that Carole Jeffries had not died at the hands of Edwin Smith? Would the public interest be stirred and would the men who had known her, the likes not only of Ray Brill, but also Benny Frederick and Clive Doxey, at last come under the microscope? Might long-forgotten motives suddenly emerge?

The thought fascinated him as he made his way upstairs. Perhaps he should do a little background reading. The first floor of the shop was dusty and quiet and he suspected most of the stock stayed on the shelves from one year to the next. Never before had he bothered to search out books about politics or the social sciences — they were subjects he would ordinarily travel a distance to avoid — and it took him a while to find his way around. But in the end he came up with a fat hardback and a dog-eared Penguin that made his visit worthwhile. Our Sterile Society by Guy Jeffries and Radicalism And The Law, a collection of articles by Sir Clive Doxey. A little light reading for after the match.

At home that evening, Harry listened to Dionne Warwick asking the way to San Jose while he studied his purchases. Guy Jeffries’ face appeared on the back of his book’s dustwrapper. He was giving the camera a youthful grin: the photograph must surely have been taken in the early fifties, years before first publication. Harry had little experience of the literary world, but he had noticed before that in real life authors always seemed far older than their publicity pictures made them appear. The biographical notes were more up-to-date, recording the glittering prizes Guy Jeffries had earned so rapidly during his academic career and including an encomium from a future Prime Minister.

There is no more fluent exponent of the integral link between politics and philosophy in Britain today than Guy Jeffries, Harold Wilson had proclaimed, and although it was hardly an epitaph that would have encouraged Harry to glance inside the book in normal circumstances, now he opened it at once.

Even before he reached chapter one, he was struck by the dedication which came immediately after the title page. To Carole, whom I adore. Both Harry’s parents had been killed in a road accident when he was a boy but somehow he had never doubted that his own old man, taciturn and undemonstrative though he had been, would have done anything to spare his son from pain. Again he tried to guess at the grief Jeffries had felt at the death of his daughter. To lose one’s mother and father when young was a cruel blow, but to lose an only child must be a hundred times worse.

Guy’s writing was fluent and — even in a chapter on the unpromising subject of British industrial policy — passionate. There was no denying the strength of his convictions or the verve with which he propounded them. The strangler, Harry reflected, had not only robbed Carole of life but also her father of the will to continue his march down the path to fame and fortune.

Late in the evening, Harry turned to Clive Doxey’s book. It had been written during his socialist phase and the biographical note at the front did not reflect the author’s subsequent political metamorphoses although the elegant style of the main text was familiar to Harry from Doxey’s more recent journalism. A forceful essay on Punishment made it clear that he belonged to the school of penal reform that believes in fining householders careless enough to allow themselves to be burgled and concentrating the resources thereby acquired on the rehabilitation of those driven by deprivation to commit the burglaries. What, Harry wondered, of the person who had committed the murder in Sefton Park? If neither Smith nor some other inadequate was guilty, he came back to the possibility that the culprit was someone who had known Carole well. Someone who had been able to cast his crime aside and carry on living in civilised society without apparent strain or shame.

Unless, thought Harry as his eyelids began to droop, that someone was Ray Brill and the decline of his career was due to something more significant than his failure to come to terms with the changing world of pop.

When he woke the next morning, he was still haunted by the same idea. Now he could pinpoint Miller’s change of attitude towards the Cyril Tweats file. Even after speaking to Renata Grierson, he had been curious about its contents at the time of his telephone call on Thursday. But that same afternoon he had been anxious to choke off any interest Harry might have in the case. Could it be that Ray, taken off balance by Miller’s news that Smith seemed to be in the clear, might have said something that amounted to an admission of his own guilt?

Yet the more Harry debated with himself, the more fanciful his guesswork seemed. Hadn’t Sherlock once said that it was a capital mistake to theorise without data? What he needed was hard facts and Miller’s determination to play his cards close to his chest simply had the effect of making him more eager than ever to find things out for himself. Yet where should he start?

Best to begin close to home, he concluded. At least he knew the man who had been at the heart of things thirty years ago. The time had come to pay a call on Cyril Tweats.

It was not a decision he took lightly. He had always found Cyril an infuriating companion and had reacted with horror to Jim’s suggestion, when the practice of Tweats and Company came on the market, that they should put in a bid.

‘Are you serious?’ he had demanded. ‘We’ll be the laughing stock of Liverpool.’

‘Laughing all the way to the bank, if the figures I’ve seen stack up,’ his partner had replied. ‘Cyril’s comfortably off and he’s not seeking much money for the goodwill.’

‘Goodwill? Most of his files are marked with the black spot.’

‘You exaggerate, as usual. Say what you like about Cyril — and you usually do — he has plenty of profitable work-in-progress in his cabinets. Besides, his overheads are minimal.’

‘Of course they are. He pays his staff peanuts and never moves a muscle on any of his files unless someone forces his hand. What about the risk of negligence claims?’

‘Warranties and insurance,’ said Jim with a wave of the hand. ‘Believe me, we can afford a bank loan to pay him what he’s looking for and wait for the money to roll in.’

‘If it’s such a good deal, why aren’t our competitors biting his hand off?’

‘Same reason you’re so nervous. Cyril has a wonderful reputation with his clients, quite the opposite with other solicitors. Besides, most firms are trying to move upmarket. They’re aiming for the corporate business, that’s where the money is supposed to be. I tell you, though, Harry, I’ve examined Cyril’s accounts as sceptically as if they had been prepared by Robert Maxwell and as far as I can see, we simply can’t lose.’

So the deal had gone through and although Harry still had the occasional nightmare that one day a knock on their door would herald the arrival of joint envoys from the Fraud Squad and the Law Society, he had to admit that thus far their investment had paid off. But he still thought it a fluke: rather like the entire career of Cyril Tweats.

As soon as he had studied the last football league tables in The Sunday Times and consigned the business and personal finance sections to the wastepaper bin unread, he set off for Aigburth. Cyril had retired to a palatial villa in a quiet road with views over the cricket field. Only a stone’s throw away from Battlecrease House where Florence and James Maybrick lived, thought Harry, but then he bit his lip and told himself to watch out: crime was rapidly becoming not only his bread and butter but also the obsession of his every waking hour. As he turned into the drive, he saw a man bending over a drain underneath one of the downspouts on the side of the building. Harry thought it was a tramp but when the man straightened, he realised his mistake. Cyril himself had been clearing out a handful of soggy brown leaves. In his donkey jacket and elderly trilby, he hardly looked like a distinguished professional man, but Harry reflected that was fair enough, since he had not been one.

Cyril’s whole career might have been planned to prove that it is better to be born lucky than rich. His rise to fame and fortune had become the stuff of Liverpool legend and these days it was hard to separate truth from the layers of accumulated myth. He seemed always to provoke exasperated amusement, and every solicitor in the city had a Cyril story to tell.

He stood up at the sound of the car and waved as Harry walked towards him, a vague gleam in his watery eyes.

‘My dear fellow, how are you? Good to see you.’

‘Hello, Cyril. How’s retirement?’

‘Splendid, absolutely splendid. I seem to be so busy about the garden that I can’t recall now how I managed to fit any legal business into my working day. Come in and have a cup of tea and a jaffa cake.’ He led the way to the house, calling out, ‘Dolly! We have a visitor.’ Turning at the door, he confided, ‘She looks after me damned well, you know. Not that I’m much trouble.’

‘I’m sure.’ Privately, Harry entertained the greatest respect for Cyril’s widowed sister. Amiable as the old man was, prolonged exposure to him would test anyone’s patience. But Dolly Harris would have made Job seem like a chain-smoking neurotic.

As they entered the lounge, Cyril pointed to the huge aquarium that was his pride and joy. Perhaps the open mouths of his exotic fish reminded him of clients past. He tapped the side of the tank and said, ‘Exceptionally thick glass, you know. It would stop a bullet.’

‘Very handy, if someone wants to assassinate your fish.’

Cyril shook his head sadly and settled himself into an armchair. ‘Oh Harry, Harry. You’re so sharp that one day you’ll cut yourself. Well, young man, what brings you here? I suppose you’ve come to pick my brains?’

God forbid, thought Harry, but aloud he said, ‘Sort of, Cyril.’

Cyril gave a comfortable nod. He always liked to say that he had had a marvellous education in the university of life and he saw nothing risible in the idea that a professional colleague might seek to benefit from his accumulated wisdom.

People said he had only scraped through his exams because the Law Society could not face marking any more of his resit papers. The principal who had signed his certificate of fitness to practise once he had completed his articles had been either drunk or simply desperate to get rid of the lad. After gaining a little more experience at the expense of a series of luckless clients, Cyril had put up his own nameplate outside an alcove in the Cunard Building, less from a desire to become a sole practitioner than from a growing awareness that no-one else would have him. He made a vow early on not to narrow his horizons through specialisation and as a result he applied his inverse Midas touch to an infinite variety of legal problems. His conveyancing clients ran the risk of finding a main road running through their back yard within months of completion and people who came to him for advice on a divorce could count themselves fortunate if they were not reduced to penury by the financial settlement. Yet for all that, his unflappable, if insensitive, good nature coupled with a native Liverpudlian’s ability to talk himself out of trouble helped him to make ends meet. And then one day, Cyril Tweats struck gold.

It began in a small way, as causes celebres often do, when he was consulted by a Toxteth resident aggrieved by the noise and smell from a local glue factory. Impressed by Cyril’s talk of taking the attack to the multi-national which owned the offending premises, the client encouraged a dozen of his neighbours to make similar complaints. Cyril duly wrote a ferocious letter to the company and when its failure to disclose any realistic cause of action prompted the managing director to consign it to the waste bin, he issued a writ and promptly forgot about the matter.

As the proceedings lumbered along, head office in Illinois was informed and hotshot in-house lawyers came on to the scene. When their powerful defence failed to persuade the litigants to throw in the towel, they sent a letter making a token offer of settlement with a view to saving time and expense. Cyril, as was his custom, ignored the offer and in due course the Americans increased it in the hope of ridding themselves of the case once and for all. Further correspondence and telephone calls provoked no reply and as time passed a degree of panic set in. The company was engaged in a fierce takeover battle and needed to be squeaky clean. As the day of the hearing drew near, the commercial cost of the dispute mounted and before long the need to resolve it became a cornerstone of boardroom policy. Cyril had scarcely turned his mind to details like the need to brief counsel when nerves finally cracked on the other side of the Atlantic. The lawyers put forward a proposal designed to make every plaintiff rich. When Cyril laughed at it, they took him to be hell-bent on making legal history rather than simply unable to credit the sum being mentioned and so they hurriedly doubled it. The name of Tweats and Company became the toast of Toxteth; Cyril’s reputation was made. Thereafter he was often described as a pioneer of English environmental law.

Yet he was not a man to brag. ‘Ah yes, the case of the glue factory,’ he would say. ‘Damned sticky business.’ And he would smile in his charming manner.

‘So what can I do for you?’ he asked when Dolly had served tea in china cups and a plateful of biscuits.

‘Cast your mind back thirty years. Do you remember a client by the name of Edwin Smith?’

‘Remember him? As if it was yesterday, my dear boy, how could I ever forget? The press were buzzing round like wasps over a rotten apple. The city hadn’t seen a bigger murder trial since the Cameo Cinema case.’

‘I happened to look at the old file the other day. I have it here.’ Harry slid the folder across the table. ‘I hadn’t known that he actually retracted his confession.’

Cyril frowned. ‘Well, yes, I recall that he did. Of course, they often do.’

‘Who?’

‘Criminals, of course. For all manner of reasons, but mainly because they hope to get off. And quite frankly, given the state of justice in this country nowadays, they are usually in with a good chance of that.’

‘So it never crossed your mind that the retraction might be genuine and his confession to the police false?’

‘Good heavens, no.’

‘But with the benefit of hindsight, might you think differently?’

‘Whatever for? The chap was as guilty as a monk’s thoughts in a nunnery.’

Harry bit his tongue. ‘Tell me about him. What sort of man was he?’

Cyril dipped a biscuit into his drink and took a bite out of it as he collected his thoughts. ‘Unprepossessing lad. Freckles, no chin, too much neck. In a word, shifty. No backbone. Far too much of a mummy’s boy.’

‘I see from the papers that mummy paid your fees.’

‘Quite correct. Young Edwin could never keep a job down, never made two pennies of his own to rub together. All the same, there was money in the family. The father had died years before, a stroke, I think, but he was in cotton in the days when there was still something to be made from textiles and he left his widow a few pennies, as well as an enormous house on Sefton Park. She was a forceful character too, but the boy was a sore disappointment. Her own fault, I suppose, all that mollycoddling. Unhealthy. Of course, a heavy price was paid. Poor young Carole Jeffries wasn’t the first person he’d molested.’

‘He was hardly a major criminal. I gather from the file that he had a history of exposing himself and stealing knickers from a washing line.’

Cyril clicked his tongue. ‘You know as well as I do that with such a pathetic specimen, one thing invariably leads to another. As it did with young Smith. One day, he simply went too far.’

‘He had had a girlfriend of his own, though.’

‘Yes, I believe there was someone, but that only made things worse. He admitted she’d finished with him around the time he strangled the girl, if memory serves. Obviously, the rejection tipped him over the edge.’

‘Name of Renata Yates, according to his statement. Did you ever see her?’

‘Lord, no. She’d made herself scarce and besides, I could tell she was going to be bad news. I mean, from the little he said about her she was no better than a street-walker.’

‘So you never heard any suggestions that her evidence might have exonerated Edwin?’

‘Good gracious me, certainly not. Wherever did you get such an idea?’

‘From the same person who tells me that Edwin was an attention-seeker, the sort who might admit guilt simply to claim his fifteen minutes of fame.’

‘Look, Harry,’ said Cyril in his most fatherly manner, ‘don’t you believe all that you hear in those saloon bars of yours.’

‘Okay, okay, so tell me about the victim, Carole. What was she like?’

‘Pretty girl. Headstrong, by all accounts, possibly rather spoiled. Her mum was a bit of a tartar, I remember, but Carole was the apple of her father’s eye, he thought she could do no wrong. Her death finished him, you know. He’d been a powerful figure in the Labour movement, but after his daughter’s death, he was never the same man again. Of course, you might say that’s the inevitable fate of people who devote themselves to the Labour movement. Even so, I often thought that he was Edwin Smith’s second victim.’

‘Although he survived Edwin by — what? — nearly fifteen years?’

‘Yes, killed himself on the day Margaret Thatcher came to power, would you believe? Ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. You don’t need me to tell you she was the finest Prime Minister this country ever had. And how did her own party reward her?’

Keener even than usual to avoid a discussion about the Iron Lady, Harry said hastily, ‘Smith cut his throat in prison. It was careless of the authorities to let him have the opportunity. Wasn’t he marked down as a suicide risk?’

‘You know how these things occur,’ said Cyril in his man-to-man tone. ‘I’m afraid my client was an unpopular fellow. I suspect a warder turned a blind eye to the possibility of felo de se. It happens, as you know.’

Looking at the amiable, contented face, Harry marvelled. Cyril was a man who had always been at ease with himself, no matter what disasters befell those for whom he had acted.

‘What about the people close to the Jeffries family? Clive Doxey was one of them, wasn’t he?’

‘Ah yes,’ said Cyril with a chuckle, ‘he experienced quite a crisis of conscience, as I recall. He’d been an outspoken advocate of abolishing capital punishment, but when his best friend’s daughter was murdered, he seemed to have second thoughts for a while. I remember it well.’

‘I suppose there was never any suggestion that the police should have cast their net more widely in searching for suspects?’

‘Lord, no. Everyone regarded it as an open-and-shut case.’

‘Carole’s boyfriend, the pop musician — was he ever a suspect?’

Cyril smiled a superior smile. ‘Ah, Harry, you never change, do you? Constantly seeking a complex explanation where a perfectly simple one exists all the time. I’m surprised you have time for all this nonsense, with such a busy practice to attend to. When I was your age…’

‘The musician,’ prompted Harry.

‘Oh yes, I remember the chap you’re referring to, though I forget his name, but I’m quite certain he had an alibi for the killing. As you will appreciate, it was one of the first things the police had to check.’

‘And the strength of the alibi?’

A dismissive shrug. ‘I don’t believe there was ever the slightest indication that he might have committed the crime.’

Succumbing to frustration, Harry said, ‘All right, Carole worked for Benny Frederick, didn’t she? Did anyone consider whether he might have had a motive for killing her?’

‘My dear fellow, I don’t think I’m talking out of turn when I say that Frederick was well known for being rather more interested in young men than young girls.’

Harry decided to fly a kite. ‘Homosexuality was illegal in 1964. She might have been blackmailing him.’

Distaste spread across Cyril’s placid features like a stain. ‘A lurid suggestion, Harry, and frankly a slanderous one. I do urge you to think carefully before you make some of your more outrageous statements. Yes, I really do advise that you look before you leap.’

Harry felt it was a sound principle to do the opposite of whatever Cyril advised, but he simply nodded and said, ‘Would you like to look at your old file? It may trigger one or two memories.’

Cyril picked up the folder and started to glance through it. Every now and then he gave a small grunt of pleasurable reminiscence, rather like a minor celebrity leafing through an old album of press cuttings.

‘A well-organised file, though I say so myself. Quite immaculately presented. Say what you like about her, Mrs Miller was certainly a good secretary.’

The name struck Harry like a slap across the cheek.

‘Mrs Miller?’

‘Yes, yes. Marlene was her first name, although we were never on such familiar terms. Let me see, she must have worked for me for the best part of twenty years. An immaculate typist, precise and well organised, the best I ever had.’

‘She wasn’t by any chance married to a man called Ernest?’

Cyril tutted. ‘My dear fellow, I can hardly be expected to recall the Christian name of the spouse of an employee who worked for me donkey’s years ago. And yet, as it happens, you may just be right. The two of them were Germans, of course, though I did not hold that against them. Now I come to think of it, I believe he changed his name from Mueller.’ Cyril beamed at his feat of memory. ‘Yes, I’m sure that was his name. Ernst Mueller, who became Ernest Miller. Is that the chap you’re asking about?’