Prisoner at the Bar Read online

  Whicheck, the D.I., stared down at the dead man’s head which was twisted round so that his face was fully visible. “You reckon that wound on the forehead was caused by a weapon?”

  “Something fairly thin and very solid: probably metal.” The police surgeon, a man of just over fifty, had a brusque manner of talking. “It’s a lacerated wound, with the typical splitting of skin and underlying tissue.”

  “And what about those cuts in the bruise under the eye?”

  “You’ll have to wait for the autopsy for anything definite, but you won’t go far wrong if you take it that’s a kick.” The doctor looked at his watch. “I’ll be getting along.” He left, climbing the grassy slope on the right-hand side of the rock face.

  Whicheck rubbed his right ear, which was battered as a result of a particularly fierce game of rugger, and stared reflectively at the body. After a while, he looked up at the top of the rock face. If a man was kicked over, pushed over, or if he fell over, he would probably land where the body now lay. This agreed with the injury to the top of the skull, caused by falling on a piece of rock that lay, bloodstained, by the head. Death, the police surgeon had said, must have been either immediate or almost so.

  “Shall we start the search yet?” asked Eastbrook, the divisional detective sergeant.

  Whicheck nodded. “Tell the men to keep clear of the area round the body and between it and the rock face.”

  Eastbrook gave the orders and the two uniformed P.C.s, the detective constable, and himself, began to search, covering the ground in rough squares.

  Jones, the photographer, came across to Whicheck. “I’ve finished down here for the moment, sir.”

  “Have you taken his dabs?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “O.K. Go up top, then, and take some general shots. We’ll want a panoramic picture of the place.”

  Jones climbed up to the lane, using the same path as the police surgeon had done. Whicheck jammed his huge hands in his pockets. He was interested by the hint of something about the dead man’s face: a hint that he’d been a bit simple, perhaps? His hands were large and roughened and the fingernails were embedded with soil so that he was some sort of manual labourer.

  Whicheck heard a car door slam above. A minute later, the forensic pathologist, middle-aged, tall, well built, came down the slope, followed by a second man, carrying a large suitcase, who was handicapped by a serious limp.

  “Morning,” said the forensic pathologist.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Quite a time since we worked together, eh?” The pathologist had a hearty man-to-man manner — except when working — tinged with only the slightest bite of authority. He dressed very carefully and had strong handsome features. He walked round the body. “Have you been able to identify him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “There’s something about that face… Slightly simple, maybe.”

  “I thought he could be, sir.”

  The pathologist turned and spoke to his secretary, the man with the limp. “Let’s start then, Burgess.”

  Burgess had put the suitcase down on the grass. He opened it and brought out a set of white overalls. The pathologist removed his coat, handed it to Burgess, took the overalls and put them on. He began his examination of the body and Burgess wrote down the notes he dictated.

  Whicheck, who suffered from a hay-fever that was triggered off by an endless number of dusts and pollens, sneezed heavily. He blew his nose on one of the three handkerchiefs he always carried round with him, sneezed twice more, then overcame the spasm. If this was a homicide case, a logical assumption, it would be the first he’d handled as D.I. He wondered if the detective superintendent from county H.Q. would come down and take direct charge of the investigation, or whether the other would be content to remain in the background.

  Their first major problem was to identify the man. The shepherd — old enough to know everyone, man and boy — who’d discovered the body said the dead man wasn’t a local and the village P.C. didn’t recognise him. With any luck, though, there’d be something in the dead man’s pockets to suggest who he was. Whicheck had not searched the body at all before the pathologist’s arrival because he believed in giving the specialists an absolutely clear field. A detective sensible enough to work with science, rather than against it, soon learned the benefits of doing this.

  *

  Katherine drove back to Forden House and parked her Mini in the end bay of the garage. The Rolls was not there which was odd because Elmer had said he would be back in the late afternoon since his conference should only take an hour or so and it was unusual for him not to do what he said he was going to.

  She walked back from the garage to the drive, passed the central circular flowerbed that was filled with colourful chrysanthemums, and went into the house through the front door. The house was large, very large by today’s standards, yet ironically when in it she often suffered a sense of claustrophobia perhaps brought on, she thought, rather by the overpowering degree of what was to her the pretentious elegance than by any size. Or maybe it was just that it was Elmer’s house and when inside it she couldn’t escape from Elmer?

  Rollo met her in the hall. “Good afternoon, Madame. Did you have a pleasant time?”

  “Yes, thanks.” She could usually understand and evaluate other people’s characters, but she couldn’t understand Rollo’s. Under his lardy manner was there resentment, contempt, or just nothing?

  “Mr. Curson rang, Madame.”

  “Yes?”

  “He said he won’t be home today.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “No, Madame.”

  She went up the staircase, with over-ornate wrought-iron balustrade and handrail, which curved round to a large landing. At the head of the stairs was a cumbersomely large gilt-framed mirror. It was said to have come from Versailles, stolen after the Revolution, which was why Elmer so liked it.

  She and Elmer slept in different rooms, a separation that had occurred after eight months of marriage. He would still come and lie with her, but it seemed as if this was a burdensome chore that he observed for his own peace of mind because he would leave immediately afterwards. Inevitably, she was left feeling she had been used as a prostitute would be.

  She changed into a more casual frock and then went downstairs to the green drawing room. This was the smaller of the two drawing rooms, but even so it was over thirty-feet long. The furniture was all genuine Regency, the wallpaper and curtains were Regency style, the carpet was an Aubusson, the three paintings were by Géricault: it reminded her of a museum.

  She lit a cigarette. Because she was essentially of a warm character, the coldness of her present life was doubly hateful and had she been possessed of slightly less willpower she would have left it all and gone away with Bob. Often, she bitterly wondered why she had so much willpower and why she couldn’t jettison some of it.

  Rollo came into the room. “Excuse me, Madame, but I forgot to mention it to you just now that Thompson has not been here today.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose he’s got one of his odd spells.”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  She watched Rollo leave. She’d been tempted to suggest that to make up for Thompson’s absence, he should go out into the garden and get down on hands and knees to do some weeding. Rollo, however, had no sense of humour.

  Chapter 4

  The morgue was in south Paraford Cross, near the railway station and one of the three town bridges over the river Para. It was new, built five years before when the disgraceful state of the old wooden building became too great even for the council. The post mortem room, on the ground floor, was fully equipped and had the same air of clinical neatness as a hospital operating room — a comparison underlined by the central table which was on a hydraulic arm and could be tilted to almost any angle.

  The pathologist and mortuary assistant worked round the table and Burgess stood clear of them but close enough to take notes, whil
st photographer, coroner’s officer, Whicheck, exhibits officer, and forensic scientist, kept out of the way.

  The pathologist in green P.M. gown, rubber apron, gloves and galoshes, stood upright, then leaned backwards to ease his back. “The bruises on the chest and bruises and cuts on the face were caused by kicking, the wound to the forehead by something very solid, and the crushed skull by a rock.”

  “How much damage did the blow on the forehead cause, sir?” asked Whicheck.

  “I can’t say yet, but it won’t have killed him. Probably knocked him half unconscious.”

  “Will there be any chance of saying in what order the injuries were received?”

  “I can hardly answer that yet, now can I?”

  Whicheck smiled. “No inspired guesses, sir?”

  “You people are always in a tearing hurry. On the reasonable assumption that the blow to the forehead stunned, we get the picture of a man knocked to the ground, kicked twice, then either rolled over, or rolling over to avoid further kicks, and falling ten feet on to a rock which fractured the skull. From a purely medical viewpoint, there’s no chance of saying whether the bruises occurred before or immediately after death: if time’s short enough, blood will passively flow into the tissue space.”

  Whicheck visualised the natural bay, between the rhododendron bushes, above where the body had been found. The ground there was so packed from constant usage that even after the recent rain it would not generally take prints: but in a water-softened hollow they had found a clear footprint and in another a tyre-print. If the tyre-print had been made by the off-side tyre, then the car had been parked so that the driver’s door would be in line with the point where blood had been found on some leaves and on the ground. The man must have been hit when in the bush, he reeled out and collapsed to the ground, was kicked, he fell over the edge and landed head first on the rock that had shattered his skull

  It had been a wild, frenzied assault. What had been the motive for this? Robbery? The dead man’s clothes were of very poor quality and he’d clearly been a manual labourer, most unlikely to be carrying around anything of value. No, remembering the look on the man’s face, remembering he had first been hit when in the rhododendron bush close to the parked car, it seemed a far more likely explanation that he was a peeping Tom who’d been caught peeping and assaulted by someone wild with anger. Lovers’ Lanes often attracted peeping Toms and those whom they disturbed were likely to be wild. If this were so, it was going to be a bastard of a case! The couple in the car could have come from anywhere not too far away and every couple with a bit of passion in their veins could be termed suspects. To find the couple and identify them was going to be a task…

  Whicheck rubbed his nose, as battered as his ear and from the same cause. Why the hell couldn’t one of the other divisions have drawn this case?

  The pathologist was completing his examination of the body before opening it up. He had reached the right fist, which was clenched, and was gently easing open the fingers in order to take scrapings from under the nails, when he stopped. “Inspector.”

  “Sir?” Whicheck crossed to the table and looked down at the hand. He suddenly thought, with a trace of fear, that life was so much less stable than one imagined it. When one said goodbye to one’s wife in the morning, it never occurred to one that the next time of seeing her she might not be cooking dinner, but might be stretched out on a cold marble slab

  “Well?” said the pathologist impatiently.

  Whicheck jerked his mind back to the present. He saw that caught up in the fingers was a single blonde hair.

  “What we’ve got here is a classic example of a cadaveric spasm,” said the pathologist, in a lecturing manner. “There’s a violent spasm of the muscles at the moment of death. Things get swept up by the fingers and clutched hard.”

  “From the length of the hair it looks like a woman’s,” said Whicheck, in puzzled tones.

  “The textbooks will tell you that anything over eight centimetres comes from a woman’s head — but they were all written before the advent of the present generation of simian monstrosities. In any case, why shouldn’t it be a woman’s hair?”

  “Up to date, it looks a bit like a peeping Tom case with the man in the car driven into a sudden frenzy. But if that were so, any hair the murdered man grabbed hold of should have been a man’s hair… Unless…” He tailed off into silence.

  “The couple having fun were probably both women,” snapped the pathologist, confirming the fact that he found nothing admirable in the modern generation. “Now d’you want photos, or don’t you? I’ve got a suicide in Brayford after this.”

  Whicheck called Detective Sergeant Jones over. Jones set up his camera and then, to the open annoyance of the pathologist, took over five minutes to arrange the lights exactly as he wanted them.

  Whicheck returned to the far end of the room. He leaned against a work table and visualised the scene. A man and woman, probably in a car, were making love. The peeping Tom did something to attract the man’s attention and the latter, in a frenzy of rage, embarrassment, fear of recognition and identification, attacked the peeping Tom. The peeping Tom reeled out of the bush, collapsed to the ground, was kicked, and was then rolled over the edge of the rock face or he rolled over in an effort to escape further kicks. The man scrambled down the slope and found the peeping Tom, head shattered, on the point of death. At that moment, the peeping Tom’s hand swept across his coat or trousers, catching up in a cadaveric spasm a blonde hair that had earlier been transferred on to the clothes from the woman’s head.

  “All finished,” said Jones. He carried camera, stand, and lights out of the way.

  The pathologist carefully eased the dead man’s fingers free. The mortuary assistant passed him a pair of forceps and he picked up the hair with these. His secretary handed him a plastic tube and he dropped the hair into it, fitted the cap, and initialled the label. Holding the test tube horizontally, his secretary passed it to the exhibits officer, who put it down on one of the side tables, close to where the dead man’s clothing was neatly stored in large plastic bags.

  *

  Judge Splatt was a querulous and self-opinionated county court judge who strongly believed he should have been appointed to the high court. He was frequently rude to those who appeared before him, but should they be tempted into replying in kind he was quick to remind them of the penalties of being in contempt of court.

  Having delivered judgement — surprisingly, he was an excellent judge being more concerned with justice than observance of the strict letter of the law — he very perfunctorily returned counsel’s bows and left the courtroom by the door at the back of the dais.

  Bladen collected up the papers of his brief, packed them inside the back-sheet and looped the red tape round them. He wrote down the judgement, signed his name, turned, and handed the brief to his instructing solicitor. “That’s one we didn’t make, Jack.”

  Smeart, a man with the red rosy face of someone who lived well, smiled. “I told Mrs. Green we hadn’t a hope in hell, but she said it wasn’t the money, it was the principle. When a client says that, old boy, who am I to object?”

  “Principles get damned expensive.”

  “But may the great British public long remain people of principles, thereby ensuring that you and I don’t starve.” Smeart put the papers in his briefcase. “You’re getting a bit pricey, aren’t you, Bob?”

  “Am I?”

  “Your cunning old bastard of a clerk won’t let you appear under twenty-five, now.”

  Bladen smiled. “He likes the guineas.”

  “You won’t…” Smeart cocked his head slightly to one side. “You won’t be getting so big you quit the local Bar and move up to London, will you?”

  Bladen shook his head. “No.”

  “That’s the right decision, Bob. You’re good enough to stay here and get much of the work that would normally go up to London. It won’t be a secret to you that there aren’t many solicitors now who d
on’t first of all look to see if you’re free — unless they want silk, of course.”

  They left the courtroom together. Smeart said goodbye and then went over to speak to his client. Bladen crossed the landing to the robing-room, a small, mean and smelly place. He dropped the two textbooks on to the table, took off his wig and gown, untied the tabs and removed his wing collar. As he fixed his semi-stiff collar and tied his tie he thought about what Smeart had said. It was the most forthright indication he had received that he had attained success at the Bar. Solicitors were hard-headed businessmen who briefed the best counsel their clients would afford. When he had chosen to start practising at the Paraford Cross Bar, friends had called him stupid: a man of ambition practised in London or, as second best, at one of the large provincial Bars. He had just been told that he wasn’t so stupid after all.

  The door of the robing-room opened and another barrister — his late opponent — came in. He dropped his books on to the table with a loud clatter. “I’ve met judges I prefer to that one!”

  “Haven’t you appeared before him before?” asked Bladen.

  “Not for eight years.” The speaker was a man in late middle age. His gown was tattered, the elbows of his coat were shiny, the cuffs were frayed. “That was when he’d just been appointed to the Bench and wasn’t quite so objectionable.”

  Bladen put gown, wig-box, and books, in his red bag and drew the cords tight. By chance, he glanced down at the other’s brief and saw that it was marked at only ten guineas, which explained his rather seedy appearance. Bladen said goodbye and left.

  The building housing the county court was on an island in the centre of the High Street and the pedestrian crossings on either side were controlled by lights. A small group of people were waiting to go over to the north side and Bladen joined them. As he waited, a newsvendor came along and he bought an Evening News. The lights altered as he was handed his change.

  He passed two supermarkets, a shoe shop that was part of a chain, a men’s outfitters, a garden shop, electricity showrooms, and then came to Market Road. As he turned into this, he looked at his watch. A quarter to five. He should return to chambers and do some work — there were several sets of pleadings waiting to be drawn up — but after what Smeart had said he felt like celebrating. Was there any chance that Elmer hadn’t returned so that Katherine could go out with him and help share the bubbles of life?