Yesterday's Papers (5 page)

Chapter Five

We always bury our darkest secrets

On the right-hand side of the passage were two double glass-paned doors, in front of which he paused. Above them in faded paintwork he could barely distinguish the legend PIERHEAD BALLROOM. Through the dusty panes he could make out the dim shapes of chairs, desks and cupboards heaped on top of each other as if in anticipation of Bonfire Night. Not since Hitler marched into Poland and changed the world forever had the smart couples of Liverpudlian society taken the floor in there.

The open space in which he stood had once been the lobby. A fenced-off shaft occupying the far side now lacked the lift that had whisked people up to street level. During the war, the cavernous ballroom had become an air-raid shelter. It had survived the might of the Luftwaffe, but peacetime austerity had seen it utilised for storage and the main entrance hall above the ground had been demolished to make room for a car park.

Next to the shaft, a complex mass of sewage pipes climbed one wall, in macabre parody of wisteria festooning a country cottage. Walking on, he heard the echoing of his footsteps. Even in the middle of the day this was a place which belonged, he felt, to lost souls. He could almost believe he heard from behind the double doors the faint strains of a band playing Jerome Kern numbers and the delicate tread of ghostly figures in evening dress, dancing cheek to cheek.

Suddenly, a saxophone began to play, a frantic sound. Harry froze, thinking for an instant that his fantasy had been realized and the old sybarites had returned to haunt him. He did not dare to breathe.

Then he recognised the mangled tune. ‘A Hard Day's Night' had been written long after the Pierhead Ballroom closed to customers. And a professional musician would never have played so many false notes. He laughed and told himself not to be ridiculous. Passing through another doorway, he entered a long and wide corridor with white-washed walls disfigured by huge moist patches. Every few yards small metal trays had been placed on the ground. They contained poison, he knew. The intention was to kill the rats for whom this place was a natural home. Necessary, he supposed. Yet he always had a sense of nausea whenever he saw the trays.

The saxophone sounded louder here. Harry paused outside a door on his left, listened for a while, then threw it open. A slender fresh-faced young man wearing shirt, tie and pinstriped trousers was kneeling on a wooden crate and leaning backwards as he blew. His cheeks were puffed out like tennis balls.

Harry put his hands on his hips and grinned. ‘I know the devil has all the best tunes, but I didn't expect to hear them subjected to torture in the Land of the Dead.'

The saxophone gave a maddened squeal as the lad lost his balance and toppled to the floor. He scrambled to his feet, flushing with embarrassment.

‘Sorry. I'm Adrian, I'm articled with Kim Lawrence. Her firm rents storage room here. What did you say about - about the Land of the Dead?'

‘It's the name I give to this place. Where all the solicitors' files are laid to rest. With all their secrets, all their memories. I'm Harry Devlin, by the way. Crusoe and Devlin, a two-man band from Fenwick Court.'

They shook hands and he added, ‘We keep our old papers here as well. Don't tell Jock what I call his second home. He'd be mortally wounded - the cellar archives are his pride and joy.'

Adrian gave an eager nod. ‘He was happy for me to play here before work starts at nine and during my lunch break, said I wouldn't be disturbing anybody. He's a really good bloke. He told me he's always loved music himself.'

‘Wouldn't “Subterranean Homesick Blues” be more appropriate?'

‘Jock prefers ballads. He says nothing beats a decent melody.'

Harry resisted the temptation to make the obvious joke and said goodbye. As he moved away, Adrian started to do his worst with ‘The Long and Winding Road'.

Further down the passageway a heavy door was set into the wall. Next to it were two rows of numbered buttons. Harry entered a four-digit security code and pushed the door open.

Facing him was a large desk, on which stood a visual display unit and keyboard. Sitting behind them was a bald, neatly bearded man with half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose. The archivist who dwelt in the Land of the Dead, known to all who came here simply as Jock, was studying columns of figures with the avidity of a cricket buff devouring the first-class averages in
Wisden
.

‘Morning, Harry,' he said in a Glaswegian accent which many years in Liverpool had done little to soften. ‘What brings you here so soon after opening time?'

‘Not the pleasure of listening to young Adrian down the corridor, that's for sure.'

‘Ah, he's only a wee lad, Harry. Needs somewhere to practise. I thought, he's a decent kid, what's the harm? You don't object?'

‘'Course not. You're doing a public service, Jock, keeping him out of sight and underground. I never knew till now a saxophone was an instrument of cruelty. John Coltrane must be turning in his grave.'

‘To say nothing of John Lennon. Ah well, we all had to start somewhere. Were you looking for anything special, or just having a mooch?'

‘No offence, but I'd rather mooch around Smithdown Cemetery. As a matter of fact, I'm looking for an old file.'

‘You could have phoned,' Jock pointed out. ‘Or sent someone over. I reckon I can lay my hand on most things inside five minutes if I'm given the correct index number.' He gestured to the flickering screen in front of him. ‘The system enables me to...'

‘This isn't an ordinary dead file request,' said Harry, speaking quickly. The Scot was an amiable fellow, but once embarked on an exposition of the technical wonders at his command, he was not easily hushed.

‘Something out of the ordinary? Grand, gives a little spice to the day,' said Jock, rubbing his hands. Not even the dank atmosphere of the Land of the Dead could quench his boyish enthusiasm.

‘It's an old matter from the days of Tweats and Company.'

‘Ah.' Jock tutted, cheerfully disapproving. ‘You may be asking for something there, Harry. No method, that was the trouble with the Tweats archive. No method whatsoever.'

‘I appreciate your problems. Knowing Cyril, I expect half the wills he drew finished up as sandwich wrappings. So I thought I'd best come down here myself and give you a hand.'

‘Fine.' Jock pressed a couple of keys and brought up a new menu on his screen. ‘So tell me the name we're looking for.'

‘Would you believe Smith?'

‘Like to set a challenge, don't you? Any more clues, or have you got all day?'

Harry leaned over his shoulder. ‘The client's first name was Edwin. It was a criminal case.'

‘Criminal, eh?' said Jock abstractedly as he watched the cursor scurry down the screen. ‘What sort of thing?'

‘Murder.'

‘Really?' He turned to face Harry, not attempting to disguise his interest. ‘You mean - this Edwin Smith killed somebody?'

‘He was certainly convicted on that basis,' Harry said. ‘Whether the verdict was fair may be a different story.'

What did he do?'

‘Killed a young girl in Sefton Park, supposedly. Strangled her.'

‘Good grief - oh, bugger it! I've wiped the screen clear in all the excitement.'

Jock was agog. Murder did this to people, Harry had discovered. It was the ultimate taboo: nothing could touch it for thrills.

‘The file would finally have gone to storage in the mid to late sixties.'

Jock fiddled with his computer. ‘Bear with me.'

Storing Crusoe and Devlin's records here had been Jim's idea. Until six months ago the firm's dead files had been kept beneath the office in the basement of New Commodities House. Harry had preferred it that way; if he needed to refer to old papers, he liked to think they were close at hand. As time passed, however, the sea of unstored documents had threatened to drown them and Jim had pointed out that, so disorganised were their records, there was barely a hope of tracing an individual file in any event. The imminent acquisition of Cyril Tweats' practice had forced them into a move to the Pierhead cellars, which boasted up-to-the-minute facilities: an easily accessed database, a full-time archive clerk with computer skills and security sufficient to satisfy the most pessimistic insurer.

But the publicity leaflets said nothing, Harry reflected, about there being enough warfarin here to wipe out every single member of the Liverpool legal profession. He leaned over Jock's shoulder. ‘How are we doing?'

The clerk watched the list of names as it sped up the screen. ‘Edwin Smith, you say? I think we're in business.' He noted the reference on the pad and said, ‘If you're in a hurry to be off, I can send it over.'

‘No problem, I'll take it myself. I may have to do a lot of waiting around the court today. The file will give me something to scan.'

‘Follow me, then.'

They walked down an aisle lined by built-in cupboards. Jock led the way, a short, slightly built man whose working clothes were sweatshirt and jeans. The two-bar radiator by the side of the desk seldom burned and Harry marvelled that his guide had never succumbed to pneumonia. He was aware of his own gooseflesh as they turned into a large cellar containing rows of shelving which reached from floor to ceiling. Each of the shelves sagged under the weight of fat packets bearing numerical codes.

‘If only they could talk, eh, Harry? Plenty of stories there. Shattered reputations, unsuccessful scams. Broken marriages, disputed wills.'

Shaking his head in wonder, Jock marched into a second large room. Long metal racks were piled high with books and buff folders and there was a collection of the bizarre oddments accumulated over the years by a dozen firms of solicitors. Rusty filing cabinets leaned like Pisa's tower under the weight of big black deed boxes bearing such inscriptions as BRIGHTWELL DECEASED and ESTATE OF THE LATE COLONEL TOLMIE. Cardboard crates were scattered over the floor, making the men's progress an obstacle race. Harry peered inside one of them and caught a glimpse of the detritus of Liverpool's glory days: old mariners' charts and pictures of ships in frames with cracked and dirty glass. Another held a trophy case entombing a morose stuffed trout: an unwanted legacy, perhaps. There were chairs with missing legs, a settee with its springs sticking out and even a lumpy mattress in a bilious floral design.

Jock pointed towards the mattress. ‘I've heard it said that during the Blitz the senior partner of Maher and Malcolm entertained the wives of wealthy clients in his private office on that.'

‘I'd feel more comfortable on the floor outside, taking my chance with the rodent population.'

As they came to the back of the cellar, Jock indicated a crater in the distempered wall, with exposed sandstone visible inside the cavity. ‘If a rat dug that out, I wouldn't fancy bumping into the bugger.'

‘If you'd met some of my clients, you'd take it in your stride. So, where do you keep Cyril's stuff? I realise he bequeathed a load of garbage, but we must be under the Mersey by now.'

‘Not far off. I reckon that when we get a thirty-foot tide, I can hear the water washing up not a stone's throw away. As for the material from Tweats and Company, I'm still logging it on the system. It'd be easier to catalogue Dale Street litter.'

‘You have my sympathy. Total quality management meant less to Cyril than Sanskrit.'

‘Hey! I think we've struck gold!'

Jock bent down to a shelf just above the floor and picked out three files of papers held together by a rubber band. He flourished his find in front of Harry's nose.

‘“SMITH, EDWIN, MURDER.” All right?'

‘Jock, you're a genius. Thanks.'

‘So what is all this about?' asked the little man as they picked their way back through the detritus. ‘A murder case thirty years ago - where do you come in?'

‘I don't know yet that I do come in. But I've been asked to look into the old papers, see what I make of them.'

Jock raised his eyebrows. ‘I've heard you have a name as a part-time private detective. Tramping the mean streets of Merseyside.'

‘So someone's told you I'm a nosey sod? Well, I don't suppose I'll be sueing for slander. I can't deny I have an inquisitive streak. And yesterday I met a man who thinks there may have been a miscarriage of justice in the case of Edwin Smith.'

‘Get away.' Jock flourished a dog-eared Ross Macdonald paperback which he had pulled from the back pocket of his jeans. ‘Fact is, I like a good murder mystery myself. You'll have to let me know what you discover. Who knows? I might get a chance to play Watson to your Holmes.'

‘Don't hold your breath. The man I spoke to may be way off beam.'

‘But if he isn't?'

‘Let's see what yesterday's papers tell me. Whether Smith was guilty as charged or just unlucky in his choice of defence lawyer.'

Puzzled, Jock stroked his jaw. ‘But Cyril Tweats was a good brief, by all accounts. He may not have known about keeping proper records, but he was a champion of the ordinary man, not any kind of fool.'

Harry gave a sceptical grunt and nodded back towards the endless shelves of old documents.

‘You know what they say - doctors bury their mistakes and architects build them. Solicitors simply file them.'

Chapter Six

and I feel no sense of guilt at all
.

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.'