Yesterday's Papers (6 page)

‘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.

Chapter Seven

I doubt whether people would believe me even if I admitted everything.

Harry licked his forefinger and turned back through the file to find the copy of the statement in which Edwin Smith had confessed to murder. How plausible was the young man's claim to have strangled the girl? In this bundle of papers, surely, must lie the answer.

He read slowly and, to his surprise, with a sinking heart. For the terms of the statement were unequivocal and he realised he had from the outset been hoping that Miller's instincts were sound and that the Sefton Park case was a mystery unsolved.

Edwin explained how he knew Carole Jeffries as a neighbour. He had always regarded her as pretty but unattainable. She had given barely a sign that she was aware of his existence, but he sensed she knew of his two criminal convictions: one for exposing himself to a woman walking her dog in Otterspool and another for the theft of knickers from a nearby washing line. He guessed that, if she ever thought of him at all it was with disgust and he did not blame her for such a reaction: sometimes he disgusted himself.

On the last afternoon of Carole's life he had been on his way home when he saw her a few yards ahead of him and on the other side of the road, walking along the path which skirted the boundary of Sefton Park. She seemed to be wandering aimlessly and when he caught sight of her face as she passed beneath a street lamp, he saw that her expression was miserable, which made him sad, since he thought a girl who had everything ought surely to be happy all the time.

Something prompted him to change course and follow her into the park. Perhaps he would be able to cheer her up and thereby earn her favour. He described her as wearing a brown sheepskin jacket and green silk scarf, as well as black leather boots. After a couple of hundred yards or so he caught up with her and tried to strike up a conversation.

‘Bitter weather, isn't it?'

Carole took no notice.

‘You look a bit fed up,' he ventured.

She continued walking.

‘My mum says, a trouble shared is a trouble halved.'

She didn't falter in her stride as she said, ‘Why don't you just piss off?'

He kept pace with her in silence for another couple of minutes. It was a grim winter's evening, cold and dark enough to have deterred even the most resolute of dog walkers, and the park was deserted. Their path took them by the side of the lake for a while before branching off through a dip in the landscape bordered on either side by large spiky shrubs.

Edwin decided to dare everything. ‘I wasn't going to tell you this. But the truth is, I really fancy you.'

At last he'd got through to her. She halted and faced him. ‘You fancy me? So what am I supposed to do? Grovel with gratitude at the admiration of a subnormal little pervert like you? You're pathetic, Smithy. Now fuck off and go and play with yourself like you usually do in that garden shed of yours and leave me alone.'

The harsh response would always stay in his memory, word for word. Yet according to Edwin, it was the contemptuous sneer on her pretty face that made him snap. He wanted her and he had the chance to do something about it. Without another word, he seized hold of her and dragged her into the bushes. She struggled and screamed as he tried to undo her jacket. He was not a strong young man and, once she had recovered from the initial shock, she fought back fiercely enough to make him fear she was about to break free. He had no weapon to frighten her. All he could see ahead was misery and humiliation. He felt he must do something to avoid that. Anything.

So he pulled the silk scarf tight around her neck. She kicked out wildly, but he did not let go. As he increased the pressure on her throat, gradually her resistance weakened. Within moments - or so it seemed to him - she was limp in his arms. He had not meant to kill her. The sight of her blue face horrified him, repulsed him too. He shoved her body aside and ran blindly down the path, desperate to make his escape before the park keeper came to lock him in for the night with his victim's corpse for company.

Harry read every word of the confession before he put it down. Each page was initialled and at the very end was a terse paragraph.

This statement is true. I make it of my own knowledge and belief and I have been told that I may alter, add or delete anything in it with which I do not agree
.

Underneath was a large, childishly scrawled signature,
Edwin Smith
, followed by the date.

It was as clear and convincing an admission to murder as any Harry had read. Its simplicity gave it the ring of truth and so did the crucial corroborative details. Edwin knew what the girl had been wearing when she met her death. Even more significantly, he knew how she had been killed, and with what ligature. Harry was certain that such information would not have been public knowledge at the time Edwin was taken in for questioning. The police were bound to have held it back. Even in the sixties, attention-seekers with a taste for confessing to crimes were not unknown and a detective wishing to verify a witness statement would be looking for precisely the kind of specific and accurate information that Edwin Smith had been able to provide.

Harry sighed. So what was he to believe? Flicking again through the mass of paper, he concentrated with the ease of long experience on the key points to emerge from the documents, tracing every development in the case.

Carole had died on a Saturday. According to a statement taken from her father - still devastated by the killing and by his own admission scarcely able to take it in - she had gone shopping in the city centre during the morning, leaving home at around the same time as he set off to meet a group of his students. From the statements of Shirley Basnett, Benny Frederick and Ray Brill, it appeared that Carole had called in at Benny's shop for a chat, even though it was her day off. Ray had called in while she was there before he drove down to London for a gig. Carole and he had had a tiff - about nothing in particular, he claimed - and she had left, saying she was going to catch the bus back home.

Clive Doxey had visited the Jeffries' house shortly after lunch, hoping to catch Guy. The two of them were working on an idea for a book called
Liberty, Law and Labour
and Clive had come up with some fresh thought for the synopsis. Carole had been alone in the house at the time and she had seemed her usual self - warm and vivacious was how he described her. They had chatted for a while, but although Carole said she expected her father home soon, Clive could not stay.

Guy Jeffries missed his friend, Carole told him, by a few minutes only. He explained that he had been delayed by a colleague from the University and his daughter gave him a brief summary of her morning, implying that she regarded the squabble with Ray as something and nothing. After that Guy had retired to his study, to work on an article for
The New Statesman
for which he had a strict deadline. At about four o'clock, whilst he was bent over his typewriter, Carole had popped her head round the door and said she was going out for a stroll in the park, but would not be long. He had not, he told the police, even bothered to turn his head to catch a glimpse of his daughter for the very last time. The article had absorbed all his attention and only when Kathleen arrived back from Manchester shortly after six and Carole was still nowhere to be seen had he started to become anxious about her fate. He had looked round the part of the park nearest to the house but found no trace of her. Calls to her friends yielded no result. Eventually, at Kathleen's insistence, they had called the police.

Vera Smith, Edwin's mother, had confirmed that she was out of the house for most of the weekend in question, paying a visit to an old schoolfriend who lived on the other side of the Pennines. She could not give Edwin an alibi. All she could do to help was instruct Cyril Tweats to act on her son's behalf.

‘Your first mistake,' muttered Harry under his breath.

The file contained a careful note of Cyril's interviews in prison with his client. At their first meeting, Edwin had been uncommunicative. Psychiatric reports indicated that he had a low IQ and poor self-image. He appeared to be dazed by all that had occurred since the police had picked him up. When they met again, however, the young man was more eager to talk. The gravity of his own position had finally dawned on him and he began by insisting that he was not a murderer. He claimed to have made up the confession, although he did not allege that the police had beaten it out of him. But when Cyril had pressed for more information, he had retreated into his shell, refusing to explain how he could have known how Carole was dressed and how she was killed. The following day, he summoned Cyril again and formally retracted his protestations of innocence.

Cyril had briefed Mr Hugo Kellerman of Brasenose Chambers to act as defence counsel. In his written instructions he had referred to the discussion in which Edwin had denied his guilt. Yet he had made little of it and no barrister would have experienced any difficulty in reading between the lines. Cyril thought his client knew too much and had confessed too readily for there to be any chance that he was innocent.

Kellerman had evidently taken the same view when Edwin had discussed the case with his legal advisers. According to Cyril's notes on the conference, the pros and cons of a guilty plea had been debated. There was no evidence of undue pressure on the part of the police and the prosecution had not only the confession but also Edwin's damning knowledge about the scarf. The chances of an acquittal were negligible and if Edwin pleaded guilty he would not have to cope with the intense strain of giving evidence in hostile surroundings, knowing that his life might depend on it.

How would I have reacted if I had been unjustly accused of murder?
Harry asked himself. An easy one to answer: he would have striven to defend himself to the last drop of blood. Yet experience had taught him that many criminal clients saw the world differently. They were fatalists, not fighters, people who saw life as a lottery in which they were destined to lose.

As Cyril completed his preparations for the trial, the news came through that Edwin had been found in his cell by a warder, more dead than alive. He had used a shoelace to try to hang himself. The file did not explain how he had obtained the means for suicide, but Harry knew that prisons were places where blind eyes were often turned and anything was possible. Somehow, he felt, it was characteristic of Edwin that he had even bungled his first attempt to kill himself.

Eventually Edwin's injuries healed.
They wanted his neck to be perfect, with the skin unbroken and the wounds all healed - so that they could put it in a noose
, thought Harry, remembering what Miller had told him. He found it difficult to choke back revulsion at the picture in his mind of doctors checking the prisoner, to make sure no-one would be embarrassed by a beheading when the time came for him to mount the scaffold. Harry had in his own life met murderers who, he felt, deserved to die, but he hated the cold-bloodedness of capital punishment.

The trial took place at last in the classical surroundings of St George's Hall, scene over the years of cases more celebrated by far than that of the wretched murderer of Carole Jeffries. Its outcome had been swift and certain. The judge described Edwin as a savage and dangerous young man and, donning the black cap, sentenced him to death for his heinous crime.

The file contained a short note recording that straight after the trial Cyril had visited his client in the cells. Apparently Edwin had thanked him for his efforts. No question of any appeal arose and there was no indication as to whether anything passed between the two men other than anodyne, half-embarrassed remarks. The purpose of the note was to help justify Cyril's fees - and, no doubt, to cover his back: if his legal skills had ever matched his survival instinct, Cyril would have made it to the House of Lords.

A press cutting that Cyril had preserved in the file announced that, in the August before judgment was passed on Edwin, two men had been hanged for murder, Gwynne Evans at Strangeways in Manchester and Peter Allen at Walton Jail here in Liverpool itself. They had the dubious distinction of being the last men to go to the gallows in Britain. In October, a Labour government came to power and the end of the death penalty was in sight. Cyril conferred with Kellerman and they debated the possibility of a reprieve. And then they learned that their client had saved everyone a great deal of trouble. He had again attempted to commit suicide and this time, for once in his wretched life, he had achieved success. He had slashed his own throat and bled to death on the floor of his cell before anyone felt inclined to raise the alarm.

A messy end and yet one which, Harry guessed from the faintly relieved tone of the final letters on file, Cyril had regarded as bringing the case to a neat conclusion. Dead clients don't complain. Nor are they in a position to revive their claims of innocence. Until Ernest Miller had come along and started to ask questions, no-one had doubted that Carole Jeffries' killer had suffered poetic justice at his own hands after the legal system had flinched from inflicting the ultimate retribution.

Harry wondered what to do. It was easy to understand why Cyril had taken the line of least resistance. Edwin was one of those clients who don't help themselves. The likelihood was that he had sought to withdraw his confession only when the extent of his peril had begun to sink in. When he came to understand that there was little hope of escape, he'd given up.

Yet Harry had in his time known other inadequates prepared to accept punishment for crimes they had not committed. The old file did not disprove Miller's theory, although if Edwin was innocent, much was unclear. How had he learned about the scarf and what Carole had been wearing? What had prompted him to confess? And did he have any idea, however remote, of the identity of the true culprit?

The telephone rang. Suzanne, the switchboard girl, had a clutch of messages for him.