Yesterday's papers

Chapter Six

When Harry emerged into the open air, the Pierhead was as cold and grey as before. Yet in comparison to the Land of the Dead, it suddenly seemed as bright and warm as Malibu.

On his way to Derby Square, he wondered again whether there could be any doubt that Edwin Smith had strangled Carole Jeffries. A thin layer of dust lay over the papers in the folder tucked under his arm. Cyril Tweats hadn’t agonised over the case, hadn’t kept going back to it, striving to find a way to prove Smith’s innocence. Once Smith’s mother had paid his bill, he’d closed his file and consigned it to the vaults. Harry could picture him discussing the trial at his club, shaking his head and saying that it was a sorry business, but although he had done his best, the evidence had damned his client. Yet, Harry reminded himself, the conviction of Kevin Walter had once seemed equally sound.

On Kevin’s twenty-fifth birthday, a jeweller’s home in South West Lancashire had been burgled. He had been watching television when a masked man brandishing a gun burst in and bound and gagged him before stealing rings, watches and silver worth a small fortune. The jeweller was a mason, a member of the same lodge as several senior officers in the local force, and the investigating team was under pressure from the start to find the guilty man. Kevin Walter, a robber with a violent streak whose curriculum vitae read like a teach-yourself guide to the British penal system, headed the queue of the usual suspects.

Under questioning, Kevin claimed that on the evening of the break-in, he and Jeannie had quarrelled furiously because he had accused her of seeing another man. He had hit her and then stormed out to celebrate his birthday with a one-man pub crawl. But he could not provide an alibi and after eighteen hours in the cells, his nerve snapped. He confessed and said his accomplice was a man he’d met in a pub whom he knew only as Terry. It had all been Terry’s idea, of course, and Terry had conned him good and proper: he’d never seen any of the proceeds of the raid. Long before the trial came around, Kevin changed his story and was vehement in protesting his innocence. He’d been bullied into making a false confession and Terry was a figment of his own mind. But the jury didn’t believe him and the judge sent him down for ten years.

He would still have been doing time had it not been for a stroke of luck. One fine morning another jeweller was offered several of the stolen rings and watches. He became suspicious and called in the police; for once their enquiry went like a dream. They traced the fence who had supplied the hot property and he identified his own supplier, a young villain from Toxteth called Gurr who had no known links with Kevin Walter. When Gurr was charged he exercised his right to silence. Meanwhile Kevin remained inside.

After they had spent so long apart, Jeannie remembered her husband’s virtues more clearly than his vices and began to campaign actively for his release. She sacked his original solicitor and instructed Harry instead, whilst urging the media to help put right yet another miscarriage of justice. Harry discovered from transcripts of the interviews prior to Kevin’s confession that he had been denied proper access to legal advice and that the interrogation had been oppressive. Revealing a flair for publicity which any kiss-and-tell bimbo would envy, Jeannie Walter soon began to attract support from journalists and pressure groups. Clive Doxey, no less, was one of those who had penned a column espousing her cause, Harry remembered. Gurr went to jail, still without opening his mouth, and Kevin remained inside. But a bandwagon had started to roll.

Jeannie dubbed the case Waltergate: the papers loved it and made the tag their own. She had once been a disco queen and when she organised a Jive for Justice at Empire Hall, it sold out and made national headlines. A tabloid paper bought exclusive rights to her story and portrayed her as a modern Joan of Arc. Even when a rival rag, disappointed to lose out in its bid for the biography of Jeannie for Justice, broke the news that she had picked up a couple of convictions for prostitution during Kevin’s years inside, she revelled in the limelight. She was a victim of society, she said, just as her innocent husband was. It was easier to make a monkey blush than to embarrass Jeannie Walter.

Before long, the Home Secretary, who was heading for retirement and wished to be remembered as a man of conscience, referred the case back to the Court of Appeal. The three judges, perhaps appalled by the threat of a Strip in the Strand outside London’s Law Courts if Kevin did not walk free, promptly ruled his conviction unsafe and unsatisfactory.

Since then the Walters’ quest had been for compensation. The Home Office, keen to sweep the case under the carpet, had offered a handsome sum which Jeannie promptly denounced as derisory. Kevin wanted ten times as much after all he had been through, she proclaimed. And so they had opted to resist all settlement overtures and hazard everything on sueing the police. The truth was, Harry guessed, that the Walters wanted blood: preferably that of the detectives who had stitched Kevin up.

By the time he arrived at the courthouse, it was filling with people and the ashtrays were already piled high with half-smoked stubs. Men and women with anxious faces and urgent voices were talking too much in a feverish effort to pass the time before their case was called. They had waited a long while for the day when they must take part in the legal lucky dip.

He caught sight of his court clerk, Ronald Sou, arms full of files and books, at the far end of the ground-floor lobby with Patrick Vaulkhard. Although he was on his home territory, the barrister too seemed tense and expectant and his fox-like features were twitching in anticipation of the battle ahead.

Harry walked over to say hello. Ronald Sou, habitually inscrutable, gave a scarcely perceptible nod, but said nothing. Harry and Jim Crusoe had once speculated on what it would take to prompt Ronald to express surprise. Doubling his salary might do it, they agreed, but so far they had not been able to afford the temptation to put their theory to the test.

Vaulkhard said, ‘So, Harry. A crucial cross-examination for us this morning. Let’s see if we can bait the trap.’

A Liverpudlian born and bred, he had kept close to his roots, and life at the Bar had never rubbed the Scouse edge off his accent. His reputation was that of a crafty and cynical individualist, someone who did not quite fit in. The old men in smoke-filled rooms who made such decisions had never allowed him to take silk and Harry guessed they never would.

‘Here come our clients,’ said Harry, glancing through the glass windows into Derby Square. He could see twenty or more journalists crowding Kevin and Jeannie Walter and throwing questions at them as if feeding fish to dolphins. It was plain that the real focus of their interest was Jeannie. Although her husband might be the plaintiff seeking huge damages, she was the character with reader-appeal. Love her or loathe her, Jeannie Walter had star quality and even the most hardbitten members of the pack were hanging on her every word.

Pushing through the swing doors, she detached herself from the group of journalists and, her husband lumbering two paces behind, headed towards the lawyers. She moved as if on a catwalk, slinky and self-confident. Harry guessed she had been up as early as he had that morning, contriving her platinum curls into that exotic cascade. He had a gloomy feeling that she nurtured ambitions of becoming a new icon for the fashion industry.

‘How’s my favourite pair of briefs?’ She squealed with laughter, as she always did when she cracked that joke, then rushed on without waiting for an answer. ‘Rarin’ to go, Paddy? Great!’

‘Ready to give them bastards hell, I hope.’ Kevin Walter’s years in prison had left him with a carefully preserved sense of martyrdom and a vocal whine that set Harry’s teeth on edge. His skin was pallid, his shoulders hunched; he had suffered at the hands of the legal establishment and, like a cantankerous invalid, was bent upon making the most of his misfortune.

‘The moment of truth!’ said Jeannie, her eyes gleaming.

‘It’ll be a day to remember,’ said Vaulkhard wryly, ‘if we hear the truth in this court of law.’

As he sat in the courtroom, listening to Vaulkhard question the detective sergeant who had taken Kevin Walter’s confession, Harry recalled a conversation from Crime and Punishment. He had read it as a schoolboy and the story of Raskolnikov’s downfall had made a lasting impression. In later life, it had even given him a little understanding of the forces that moved his own clients to their pointless acts of self-betrayal. A few lines about cross-examination stuck in his mind: Porfiry’s explanation of the method of starting an interrogation with trivial irrelevances as a means of putting the witness off his guard before stunning him with the most dangerous question of all. It seemed to him that Patrick Vaulkhard had taken the message to heart.

The early exchanges were low-key, little more than a series of pleasantries. Vaulkhard lingered over the sergeant’s past record, and the commendations he’d received for shrewd detective work. The sergeant, a heavily built man in his forties, was on the alert for traps and for some time his responses were cautious and monosyllabic. But gradually he began to unbend and by the time Vaulkhard moved on to his part in the Walter case, he was in the mood to defend his actions with vigour.

‘I suppose you will say that you were working long hours?’

‘As a matter of fact, I was. We all were. It was an important investigation and we had plenty more on besides.’

‘But you put considerable effort into detecting the man who committed this particular robbery?’

‘You can say that again.’

‘Yet no-one seems to have quizzed the real perpetrator, Denny Gurr, in any detail about the crime.’

The sergeant shrugged. ‘I was only one of the team. I can’t answer for everyone.’

‘So,’ said Vaulkhard. He paused for a moment before continuing and allowed himself the faintest of smiles. ‘The fact that you bullied Kevin Walter into his so-called confession had nothing to do with the fact that Denny Gurr was, at the time, going out with your only daughter, Tracey?’

The silence seemed to last forever. Harry could see spots of sweat shining on the sergeant’s forehead and watched as the man’s hand moved to loosen his tie. It seemed as if his legs were starting to buckle beneath him and he stretched out an arm to steady himself.

Vaulkhard’s face seemed more vulpine than ever. ‘Yes or no will suffice, sergeant.’

The man turned to the judge. His naturally florid complexion seemed to have darkened. ‘My Lord…,’ he began, but his voice was barely a whisper and it trailed away into nothingness.

‘Are you feeling unwell, sergeant?’ asked the judge.

For answer, the man clutched at his chest. He was gasping for breath. Then, as everyone looked on in frozen and fascinated horror, he slowly crumpled to the floor.

The silence was broken by a cry of alarm from someone in the public gallery. Harry was immobile. So Dostoyevsky had it right, he thought. And from the row behind him, he could hear the voice of Jeannie Walter: ‘It’s fantastic, absolutely fantastic! Paddy’s killed the bugger!’

‘I’ve heard of deadly cross-examinations,’ said a voice in Harry’s ear, ‘but this is ridiculous.’

He was standing outside the court cafeteria. The sergeant had been whisked away to intensive care: the paramedics reckoned he had suffered a coronary. Kevin and Jeannie Walter had departed to give their media minders their exclusive reaction to the morning’s sensational development and the staircase and corridors of the courthouse were no longer buzzing with excitement. The rest of the cases on the list today were humdrum by comparison: the usual assortment of broken marriages and shattered lives. The judge had adjourned the case until the following Monday, although over a coffee Patrick Vaulkhard had expressed the view that that was due more to old Seagrave’s fondness for a four-day week than to any serious expectation that the sergeant would soon rise Lazarus-like from his sick bed to explain why he had never drawn his daughter’s brief fling with Denny Gurr to the attention of his superiors.

He looked round and saw a lean woman in white shirt and black jacket and skirt. A Greenpeace badge was pinned to her lapel and an Amnesty International magazine peeped out of the briefcase at her feet. Kim Lawrence, partner in another small city-centre practice and specialist in civil liberties law.

‘So you’ve heard about our little sensation in court?’

‘You know what this place is like for gossip, and any new twist in the Jeannie Walter saga is hot news.’

‘She’s become a legend in her own time, I agree. And after this case, what’s the betting but that she’ll make a career out of it?’

‘Out of campaigning for justice?’

‘No, out of being Jeannie Walter.’

Kim Lawrence’s habitually watchful expression relaxed into a smile. Her blonde hair was brushed off her forehead and held in place by a slide; she shunned make-up and the only jewellery she wore was a pair of CND earrings. A career spent trying to bridge the gulf between truth and evidence had etched frown-lines into her forehead, and she wasn’t someone he had ever socialised with. But looking at her now, his interest was awakened, and not simply because she currently chaired the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation.

‘As it happens, I wanted to have a word with you. I’m interested in a case which is right up MOJO’s street.’

Kim leaned forward. MOJO campaigned on behalf of those who claimed to have been wrongly convicted, whether through mistake or malice, yet whose cases were deemed by the authorities to be closed. It had supported the original fight for Kevin Walter’s release although Jeannie’s bandwagon had soon developed a momentum of its own.

‘Another dodgy prosecution?’

‘Too soon to say — even though the case in question dates back thirty years.’

‘Thirty years? You’re going back in time, aren’t you? How come you’re involved?’

Harry described his meeting with Ernest Miller and outlined what he knew about the Sefton Park Strangling. She listened with care and he enjoyed the feeling that she was concentrating her attention upon him, even if only to hear the story he had to tell. He knew that, as he spoke, she was weighing up the facts, assessing the strength of the case against the convicted man. As soon as he had finished, she slipped into the role of devil’s advocate.

‘So — if Smith was innocent, did he plead not guilty?’

He hesitated before replying. ‘Apparently not. His confession stood and the jury took it at face value. Don’t forget, those were the days when most people thought the British bobby could do no wrong and it was inconceivable that someone might untruthfully admit to having committed murder.’

‘Okay, but what makes you think there’s anything in Miller’s story? The world is full of oddballs who like to spin strange yarns.’

‘Don’t I know it? Half of them seem to wind up on the other side of my desk. But sometimes those oddballs turn out to be telling the truth.’

She nodded and he knew that she understood. The people for whom she took up the cudgels were also apt to be social misfits and committing herself to their cause often meant a long and lonely struggle against judicial hostility and public indifference. Harry knew her prime concern was always to do her best for her clients, however unlovely they might be, rather than for Kim Lawrence.

‘True enough. Most of MOJO’s campaigns begin with one person who refuses to accept the received wisdom.’

‘Miller might be such a man. He makes my flesh creep, but he’s no fool. I’m sure he knows more about the Sefton case than he’s let on so far, enough to convince him Smith may well have been innocent. But at the same time he’s still gathering evidence. I simply wondered whether MOJO would be willing to become involved if I did find proof of an injustice.’

‘Sorry, we have enough on our plate at present with contemporary disasters. But if it would help, I’d be glad to look at anything you turn up myself. If Smith didn’t kill the girl, he deserves to have his name cleared.’

‘Thanks. I’ll let you know if I find anything of note in old Cyril’s file.’

She gave him a sceptical look. ‘If I know Cyril Tweats, you’re most likely to find a trail of paper which exists solely to prove that he strove mightily but to no avail. Did you ever hear of that eighteenth-century breach of contract claim where the plaintiff turned out to be a highwayman? Not only did he lose the action, but he was hanged into the bargain. I often suspect he was represented by Tyburn’s answer to Cyril Tweats.’

Harry laughed. ‘Good old Cyril. Yet his clients loved him. When they phone up now and find he’s retired, they’re desolated by the thought they now have to depend on Crusoe and Devlin. Cyril made them feel good. It’s a rare skill for a lawyer — and it earned him a few bob over the years.’

‘Another miscarriage of justice.’

Jim Crusoe was in reception when Harry stepped over the threshold of New Commodities House. He was a big, bearded man whose mane of hair was turning grey prematurely — something he always attributed to the strain of being in partnership with Harry Devlin.

‘I gather the police case collapsed this morning.’

‘In more ways than one.’

‘So Ronald Sou told me. He reckons the odds are that the police authority will make a much-improved offer.’

Harry groaned. ‘From the gleam in your eye, you’ve already spent the fees.’

‘I wasn’t thinking only of the money. But of course, we ought to invest sensibly. New technology, that’s what we need. A bar-code system for recording the time we spend, visual display units for every typist, an upgraded accounts package. There’s a new debt-collection program on the market which…’

‘Christ, the office will look like the Starship Enterprise by the time you’ve finished with it. Didn’t we leave Maher and Malcolm to escape the tyranny of computers? Talk about looking over your shoulder. That place made Big Brother look like someone who was happy to keep himself to himself. I don’t want Crusoe and Devlin to turn into a law factory.’

Jim’s brow darkened. ‘Look, old son. The law’s no place for Luddites. We’re in business, remember? We need to compete, to provide a decent service.’

‘I haven’t heard Kevin or Jeannie Walters complaining.’

‘You’ve done a superb job, I’m the first to say so. But we must move with the times. We can’t keep living in the Dark Ages.’

Harry shrugged and ambled back to his room. He knew his partner’s arguments were unanswerable and that in time he would have to surrender. His reluctance to agree to change was not born of stubborn stupidity, but rather of an unwillingness to acknowledge that he was first and foremost a businessman, that simply seeing justice done would never in itself pay the mortgage. He resented, not his partner, but the failure of the world to match his more romantic notions of what was right and what was wrong.

A heap of messages awaited him, but the excitement in court had quenched any thirst he might have had for desk work. What he wanted was to take a look at the file he had retrieved from the Land of the Dead. He slipped off a couple of clips that held the old bundle of documents together and the papers spilled on to his desk. Statements of witnesses, correspondence, typed notes of evidence from the committal proceedings, instructions to counsel tied up with pink string, together with a couple of handwritten sheets in a young person’s unformed hand.

He looked at those last two pages. They comprised a record of the trial at the old Liverpool Assizes. Cyril Tweats’ clerk had faithfully taken down every word uttered when Edwin Smith was tried for the murder of Carole Jeffries. Yet not much had needed to be said, in view of Edwin’s guilty plea.

Once more Harry asked himself the question that had been nagging away at the back of his mind ever since Miller had first accosted him. Why was the man so sure Edwin Smith was innocent?

He turned to the correspondence. Cyril had written the usual letters to his client and to the police. A reference in one letter made Harry pause for thought. He turned to the separate set of notes on the meetings between Cyril Tweats and Edwin Smith. Soon he found what he was looking for.

One day in April, not long after his arrest, Edwin had asked to see his solicitor. When the two men were alone together, Edwin had insisted that he had not killed Carole Jeffries. His confession to the crime had been false.

Harry caught his breath as he read the neatly typed notes. At last — an indication that Miller might be on the right track and that Carole could have been murdered by someone else. Yet Edwin had not denied the crime in court. Following his change of heart, what had gone wrong?

The answer was: Cyril Tweats. He had simply not believed Edwin’s retraction. It was clear from the papers that he felt sure that his client had simply panicked at the thought of what lay ahead. Stronger men than Edwin Smith had been terrified by the prospect of the rope. So Cyril had laid down a challenge to the young man: how do you explain your knowledge of facts of which only the murderer could be aware? No answer had been forthcoming. Harry could imagine the young man trembling as his solicitor pointed out that a not guilty plea in a case such as this would mean that he must give evidence on his own behalf and face up to rigorous interrogation from a prosecuting counsel who held all the cards.

Edwin’s nerve soon broke; within twenty-four hours he withdrew his claim to innocence. By changing his tune again, he kept things simple for everyone: his defence team, the police, the courts and himself. He said he was willing to stand by his confession after all, plead guilty and allow the law to take its course.

Harry wondered if that was the moment when, overcome by the relentless inevitability of the legal process, Edwin Smith had decided that he could bear it no more and that, one day when the opportunity presented itself, he would put an end to his torment by taking his own life.