Dead Against the Lawyers Read online

  He walked into the clerks’ room as Marriott went to call the other members. Traynton was still by his desk, aimlessly checking that everything was neat and tidy. He was plainly bewildered because it did not seem as if he was to be offered any official good-bye and that hurt after fifty-six years in the same chambers, for thirty-five of which he had been head clerk.

  ‘If you don’t hurry, Josephus,’ said Holter, ‘you’ll be late away.’

  Traynton produced his gold hunter from his waistcoat pocket and opened the front. ‘I had no idea it was that late, sir,’ His expression was one of pain borne with dignity. Puffing slightly, he stepped clear of the desk. ‘I must, indeed, depart.’

  ‘We’ll be very sorry to see you go.’

  ‘The time of retirement, sir, comes to all of us and I must confess I am not in harmony with the world of today. My one regret, if I may be permitted the liberty, is that Marriott has not had quite as much experience as I would wish him to have had.’

  ‘He’ll learn.’

  ‘I trust your prognosis is not too optimistic, sir.’ Traynton sighed deeply, went across to the stand, and picked up his umbrella, mackintosh, and bowler hat.

  At that moment the door opened and all the other members of chambers came in and Traynton realized that he was not after all to go without some recognition of this unique event. He became bashful and tried to make out that he had no idea what was about to happen.

  They crowded round in a rough semi-circle in the centre of which stood Traynton, with bowler hat in one hand, mackintosh and umbrella in the other.

  ‘We want to try to thank you for all you’ve done for us,’ said Holter.

  ‘For some of us, anyway,’ murmured Resse, but not very loudly.

  Holter continued. ‘A chambers is only as good as its chief clerk and these chambers are first class. There isn’t one of us here who doesn’t owe you everything and to mark just a small fraction of our very deep appreciation for all you’ve done for us we’d like to give you a small present by which we hope you’ll remember us for many, many years to come.’ Holter handed the case to Traynton.

  Traynton fingered the case, tracing out his initials. He opened it and stared at the matching gold pen and pencil, picked up the pen and held it in his right hand. ‘It’s ... it’s wonderful, sir,’ he said brokenly.

  Good-bye Mr Chips, thought Resse, almost angry because the scene was affecting him as much as it was.

  At a sign from Holter, Marriott left the room. Traynton tried to make a speech of thanks, but choked over the words. Spender started singing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ to ease the sense of nostalgia.

  Traynton sat down at his desk and took out a sheet of paper from the top drawer. Carefully, he wrote first with the pen and then with the pencil. ‘They’re wonderful, really wonderful,’ he said, as if they were the first he had ever seen.

  Marriott came back with a tray on which were six glasses and two bottles of champagne. He filled the glasses and handed them around.

  Holter raised his glass. ‘I give you Josephus Traynton, our friend.’

  They drank. Marriott brought in the savouries on two plates and Aiden ate as much caviar as he could, not deigning to move on to the smoked salmon until he had to.

  By the time the third bottle of champagne had been finished the kindly reminiscences had begun. Traynton recalled his first day at work, as an office boy, when the clerks had worn frock coats, scratched away with quill pens, and the great names at the Bar were as much actors as lawyers.

  During the drinking of the fourth bottle, Aiden discovered all the smoked salmon had been eaten and he loudly demanded to know who had swiped it all. Traynton said that back in the old days he had been noted for his dramatic delivery of a selected piece from The Canterbury Tales. His listeners, unable to ignore so blatant a hint, asked him to recite that same piece now. They had expected to hear a little of The Prologue, but were amazed when Traynton, between giggles, declaimed the touching scene between Nicholas and Absolon at the end of the Miller’s Tale.

  Aiden laughed so much that Resse had to slap him on the back to prevent his choking. ‘Good God!’ said Aiden, when he could finally speak, ‘fancy Old Misery being as gloriously vulgar as that.’

  Holter picked up his glass and drank it empty. He lit a cigarette and as he blew out the match there was a sudden streak of burning pain in his mouth. A second pain was followed by a third, which spread down to his throat.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ asked Resse, coming across from the fireplace.

  There’s a bloody awful burning in my throat and mouth. For God’s sake, give me some more champagne.’

  Resse picked up an opened bottle, still a quarter full, and filled Holter’s glass. ‘What kind of burning pain?’

  ‘It’s like knives slicing.’ Holter groaned. The sweat stood out on his face and forehead. Almost immediately, the pains increased in intensity and frequency. The whole of his abdomen became filled with them. It was as though an ice-cold hand with red-hot fingers were tearing his kidneys to pieces. With sudden urgency, he needed to go to the lavatory and Resse helped him to stagger out of the room and across the corridor. The state of micturition became worse. Someone asked him who his doctor was and he tried to answer, but could only mumble unintelligibly. He began to vomit. The world became a small circle inside which there existed only excruciating pain.

  Chapter Nineteen

  HOLTER, SITTING up in the hospital bed in a private room, ate a peach. The coolness of its juice soothed his throat and temporarily banished some of the pain that still remained. He used the remote control to switch on the TV, but when it came on there was only horse racing or golf. He switched it off and began to read a book, but the banal plot irritated him and after a few moments he dropped the book on to the bedside table.

  He lay back. His stomach and throat still gave considerable pain at times, but it was remarkable how alive he felt now considering how close to death they said he had been. He lit a cigarette. If he had died, his last recorded memory would have been of Resse shouting to someone to telephone for a doctor. That would have been that and Radwick Holter would have ceased to exist. The call for the doctor would have been his epitaph.

  What in the name of hell, he thought with sudden intense irritation, had so nearly killed him? He had asked the nurses and they had fobbed him off with answers that would have done for a five-year-old. He had asked the two doctors who were attending him and they had replied in meaningless generalities. Had it been some kind of heart attack? Food poisoning?

  A nurse came into the room and said his wife had been twice to the hospital that day to try to see him, but that until the doctors gave their permission he was allowed no visitors. She left, after a careful look round to make certain everything was in place.

  He stubbed out his cigarette. What was he going to say to Betty? Did he release all the tortured bitterness that had been born at the hearing before the Benchers? Or was there just nothing to say?

  An hour later, a doctor came into the room. Holter vaguely recognized him as someone he had met at a cocktail party.

  ‘Hullo, Holter, how’s it going?’

  ‘I’m all right except for stabbing pains in my stomach and throat.’

  ‘You’ll get those for a while, I’m afraid, but looking ahead you should be OK before long.’

  ‘What hit me?’

  The doctor stared at him for several seconds before answering. ‘Cantharidin poisoning.’

  ‘Cantharidin?’ The name was familiar. ‘Is it some form of food poisoning?’

  The doctor sat down on one of the two chairs. ‘That depends on what kind of food you’re in the habit of eating. Cantharidin is the active principle present in cantharides, a beetle. We use the stuff in hospitals, mainly as a diuretic. A lot of people in the outside world know it as Spanish Fly and are foolish enough to use it as an aphrodisiac.’

  Holter could only stare blankly at the other.

  ‘It’s not the safest
of things to deal with and there are a lot of doubts about its efficacy.’

  ‘You ... you don’t think I was talking it as an aphrodisiac?’

  ‘Presumably you didn’t imagine it was a pleasant after-dinner liqueur?’

  ‘I didn’t damn’ well take it voluntarily. It was in my room in a phial along with a gun and knives and so on from my cases. Some of the stuff was given to a girl by a chap who wasn’t making any headway. She died and he was up on a charge of murder.’

  The doctor’s expression changed. ‘Did the revolver which killed Corry come from the same cabinet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You keep some pretty lethal mementoes.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Could it have been an accident?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see. No wonder the detective’s been around. He almost certainly saved your life.’

  ‘Who? Brock?’

  ‘That’s his name. When you were brought in here you were well on the way to dying and we hadn’t a clue what from. He came bursting into the hospital and said it was a thousand pounds to a penny the poison was Spanish Fly. After that, we were able to do something for you.’

  Holter lit another cigarette. ‘It’s ... it’s an odd thought that someone tried to kill me.’

  ‘I’d call it a terrifying one.’ The doctor stood up. ‘Carry on as you are now and it won’t be long before we can let you go home.’ He chuckled. ‘And don’t rely on this stuff having any lasting impression!’ He left.

  Holter stared at the closed door and tried, and failed, to believe that he had been poisoned by someone outside chambers.

  *

  Brock visited him in the afternoon. He was carrying a paper bag which he held out. ‘Hope you like grapes, Mr Holter?’

  ‘Love ’em.’

  Brock sat down, ‘I saw your doctor outside and he says you’re making very good progress.’

  ‘Thank God. I hate the stink of hospitals.’ Holter’s voice became diffident. ‘I hear you saved my life.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. Someone here might easily have found out what it was you’d taken.’

  ‘How did you know what was going on?’

  ‘Mr Resse telephoned me from chambers and said you’d been carted off to hospital and it looked as if you’d been poisoned. I went round to chambers, remembered you telling me about the phial of Spanish Fly in the cabinet, made certain the phial was missing and rushed to this hospital to tell them.’

  Holter began to eat some grapes. ‘Do you ... Do you know who did it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Who?’

  Brock did not answer directly. ‘I thought at first you might have been trying suicide because of what you’d learned up in London, but then I reckoned you were too much of a fighter for that. So I checked who in chambers knew about what had happened in London. They knew you’d been cleared, but nothing more.’

  ‘Well?’

  They’d no idea you’d discovered the truth about your wife.’

  ‘I wasn’t bloody well going to broadcast the fact,’ muttered Holter.

  ‘Of course you weren’t, but it was because you’d suddenly learned the truth that the attempt to murder you was made. The murderer was desperately afraid you’d now force your wife to tell the whole truth.’

  To his intense annoyance, Holter discovered his brain was not working sufficiently clearly to understand the significance of what the other had said. ‘If they didn’t know, the poisoner didn’t come from the chambers.’

  ‘Unless one of them knew because he’d been at the hearing with you.’

  ‘Marriott?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘No. That’s impossible. No.’

  ‘He panicked because he was afraid. Because he panicked, he never stopped to realize that in murdering you he would be destroying the image of Corry as your wife’s lover.’

  ‘It can’t have been Marriott.’

  ‘He knew how you worshipped your wife and he was certain, quite rightly, you’d never disbelieve her. But he didn’t know about the sticking plaster on her leg that Wallace would suddenly remember seeing.’ Brock looked at Holter and thought, almost angrily, that no matter how egotistical a man might be, he could still be terribly hurt by another person.

  ‘When did you know?’

  ‘When you’d been poisoned.’

  ‘What ... what happened in chambers?’

  ‘Your wife had been meeting Marriott there for some time. That Tuesday, they knew you would be safely away at the CA Harper Society dinner. Marriott left at his usual time and then returned after you and Corry had gone. He unlocked the doors with his keys and left them unlocked. Your wife, in a borrowed car in case the Mercedes was recognized, drove into town, parked the car, and walked to chambers. Just before she went into the building, Corry saw her.

  ‘We’ll never know why he was back there in the High Street, but it’s easy to think up possible reasons. Anyway, he saw your wife go in and, with his perverted interest, wondered why because he could be certain she couldn’t be expecting to meet you there. He waited a short while and then entered. He found the outer doors of chambers shut but not locked so he went in. If everything inside proved to be innocent, he could always produce a perfectly plausible excuse for his own presence.

  ‘He listened outside your room long enough to become certain your wife and Marriott were ... and then he went in. He found them in ... in ...’

  ‘In a compromising position,’ said Holter harshly.

  ‘Corry hated most people, for one bad reason or another. He hated your wife because she was young and beautiful and because she was deceiving you, just as his wife had deceived him years before. He jeered at her and asked her how you’d receive the news. He jeered at Marriott and wanted to know what kind of job Marriott thought his next one would be.

  ‘Marriott, desperate because all the consequences were very clear, grabbed the gun out of the cupboard and threatened to kill Corry if he ever told anyone what had happened. Corry laughed and said that within twenty-four hours Marriott wouldn’t be in a position to do anything to anybody. Corry naturally thought the gun was empty and Marriott’s threats were even emptier. Marriott panicked and shot Corry.

  ‘Your wife was naturally terrified. She tried to run out of the room, but tripped over her handbag which was on the floor. Her compact fell out and spilled powder on to the carpet.

  ‘Marriott forced her to stay. He was shocked, but not so shocked he didn’t try to save his own skin. He set the evidence to point at you. He knew that if you were tried, the prosecution couldn’t call your wife.

  ‘He dragged the body of Corry across the carpet and dumped it under the photograph of your wife. He knew how this would turn the police’s minds to the Smith case.

  ‘In retrospect, the trail of blood could have told us more than it did. In Smith’s case, Smith found the woman had been deceiving him so he killed her and dragged her body to a photograph of himself: he was laying guilt before innocence. But Corry was laid before a photograph of your wife which would appear to be guilt being laid before guilt.

  ‘Your wife, even in her shocked state, realized what Marriott was doing and tried to help you. She hid the photo in the bottom drawer of the desk. When it seemed certain you were the murderer, the hiding of this photograph merely seemed to point to an attempt on your part to conceal why you’d dragged the body to the desk. When it was certain you weren’t the murderer, it became obvious that Corry wasn’t the ... the lover. To attempt to incriminate you and then remove the final piece of incriminating evidence were two totally contradictory actions.’

  ‘Was she trying to save me or her conscience?’

  Brock was silent.

  ‘She had to stand by her husband or her lover,’ said Holter. ‘So she stood by and watched me charged with murder. What happens now? Will she be charged as an accessory?’

  ‘I don’t know. You know more about the law than me.�
��

  ‘More about the law and less about my wife.’

  Brock stood up. Thankfully, he could now go.

  *

  The evening sunlight was coming through the window and casting a warm patch of light on the near wall when the sister came into Holter’s room. ‘Your wife’s come to see you.’

  ‘Tell her I’m too ill.’

  ‘That’s just being silly.’ Not much more than half his age, she acted as if she were twice as old. ‘You’re not at all ill now. We’ll just tidy things up a bit. There’s this ... and this ... and put that there. Now, she can see you all neat and tidy.’

  He tried to argue further, but she ignored him. Suddenly, a complete lethargy swept over him so that it seemed as if he could not have moved out of the bed if his life had depended on his doing so.

  The nurse left and the pneumatically hinged door hissed shut. He stared at the patch of sunlight. In God’s name, what did one say to a wife who had been prepared to see her husband convicted of murder rather than lose her lover?

  The door opened and she came into the room. She was wearing one of Rachael West’s dresses and looked very beautiful and very ... virginal. That word seemed to gain an independent life so that it could sit in his brain and jeer at him.

  ‘Get out,’ he croaked.

  She came and stood by the bed.

  ‘Get out, you lying bitch.’

  She seemed to be crying. ‘You must understand ...’

  ‘He was my clerk. You had my clerk as a lover.’

  She took hold of his right hand in both hers and he could not find the strength to free it. There was now a tear on each of her cheeks. ‘I was terrified you were going to die, Radwick. I went to church and prayed. I hadn’t done that since I was fifteen.’

  ‘And how often did you pray for me when the police were hounding me? And how often did you pray for me during my trial?’

  She sat down and forced his hand on to her lap.

  ‘Why have you come here?’ he demanded. ‘Isn’t he any more use to you now?’