A Dead Liberty (3 page)

It had been upon Detective Inspector Sloan that the case had devolved after Trevor Porritt had been injured. Sloan had dutifully read all the evidence that had been carefully assembled by his colleague. He had checked that it seemed all present and correct, forwarded it to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and then forgotten all about it while he dealt with an outbreak of small but disturbingly skilful burglaries in Berebury's main shopping arcade.

And now the case had come to Court.

“Silence is consent,” said the superintendent. His knowledge of law had a magpie quality about it and he had picked up the phrase from somewhere.

“Not in Court it isn't,” responded Sloan with vigour. “She didn't even nod. That girl didn't consent to anything.”

“What did she say when she was charged?” enquired the superintendent with genuine professional interest. “People say funny things then,” he added profoundly.

“They do,” concurred Sloan. This was within his experience too. Someone should—probably would—write a book about them one day. The Charge Book at Berebury Police Station was full of the strange responses of those told that they were going to be prosecuted for misdemeanours of all kinds. To the real police cognoscenti they were a true touchstone of guilt or innocence: in their way as revealing as litmus paper. The prompt and indignant “I never” was only sometimes genuine. The “Turned over two pages, have you, maybe?” seldom was. Sloan himself had only met the “You've got your duty to do, Officer” between the pages of prewar fiction but “It's a fair cop” did crop up from time to time.

So did “It's an unfair cop” or words to that effect. Usually accompanied by threats to report the cop concerned to such national organisations as concerned themselves with attacking the police—and to the press, too, for good measure.

“Catch 'em by surprise,” said the superintendent wistfully, “and you can sometimes be lucky.” He was a great man himself for the immediate rather than the studied response.

“Only sometimes,” said Sloan more cautiously. An officer had to be careful, though, about what could and what could not be construed as an admission of guilt. Being advised, with varying degrees of explicitness, to tell it to the Marines, was one thing: listening to a sobbing hulk of a man asking again and again “Why did she have to scream? I wouldn't have hit her if she hadn't screamed. She wouldn't stop …” was quite another.

“Telling them they weren't up to that sort of job sometimes does the trick,” said the superintendent out of his own experience on the beat. “Gets them on the raw …”

The reverse of that particular coin, as Sloan knew only too well, was “Me, do a little job like that? I've got class, I have.”

“Lucy Durmast didn't say anything when she was charged,” said Detective Inspector Sloan. “That is to say,” he added with painstaking accuracy, “nothing that Trevor Porritt could catch. He made a note that she started to speak and then stopped in mid-breath.”

“Not a lot of help,” said Leeyes heavily.

“No.” As far as Sloan was concerned nothing had been a lot of help in the case so far.

“And she hasn't said anything since?”

“Not a word.”

“Not even to her solicitor?”

“She won't have one,” replied Sloan succinctly.

“You can't altogether blame her for that, now can you, Sloan?” said Leeyes with unaccustomed jocularity.

“I understand, sir, quite informally, of course …”

“Of course …”

“That at the urgest request of Ronald Bolsover he's the deputy chairman of her father's firm—the senior partner of the family's solicitors—er—made himself available for consultation after she had been charged.”

“She wouldn't talk to him?”

“She wouldn't even see him. Quite miffed about it, I'm told he was. She even sent him a message saying he wasn't to take any action whatsoever in any circumstances.”

“She needn't have worried too much about that,” said the superintendent. “Solicitors don't ever take action. All they do is suggest that you take it.”

“There must have been something she didn't want him to do,” said Sloan logically, “or she wouldn't have said so.” It had been the only positive statement of any sort to be issued by Lucy Durmast and as such had been wrung dry of implications.

Leeyes grunted. “Bail? Did she ask for bail?”

“She didn't speak,” Sloan reminded him.

“How did that affect bail?” asked Leeyes.

“Henry Simmonds had to ask his Clerk that,” said Sloan.

“Ha! And what did he say?” pounced Leeyes. “He's supposed to know all the answers, isn't he?”

“The Clerk said that as no application had been made there was no way in which bail could be granted.”

“Typical of the way the legal mind works,” said Leeyes. “What about the police?”

“Had it been asked for,” said Sloan slowly, “we would have opposed it …”

“Ah …”

“She was living alone, for one thing.”

“Alone because she'd killed the chap she was living with?” suggested Leeyes. He, too, knew all about male murderers being mostly widowers.

“No, no,” said Sloan hastily. “Nothing like that. She lives with her father … her mother's dead.”

“But you said …”

“Her father's overseas at the moment. He's designing a new town in Africa.”

“Haven't they got enough problems there already?”

“A town, not a township,” responded Sloan absently. “She was living alone,” he added, coming back to Lucy Durmast, “in a detached house in the village of Braffle Episcopi.”

“That isn't exactly central either,” grunted the superintendent. “Is it?”

“About as remote as you can get in East Calleshire,” agreed Sloan feelingly. “Nearer to Calleford, of course, than to Berebury. The victim was taken to Calleford Hospital.”

“Which is how Trevor Porritt came into the case, I suppose.”

“His patch,” agreed Detective Inspector Sloan, “not mine.” He coughed. “The distance hasn't helped.”

“Never does,” said Leeyes bracingly. The superintendent himself seldom stepped out of his office at Berebury Police Station but was all in favour of everyone else's doing so.

“It isn't usual,” Sloan said, “to bail people on murder charges anyway.” A certain tenacity of purpose was needed sometimes to keep the superintendent to the point; equally he could on occasion be like a terrier who wouldn't let go. “Not,” went on Sloan, “that I think she would have skipped it. Not the sort.”

For someone who had remained totally silent throughout all manner of proceedings—legal and otherwise—Lucy Durmast had managed to project a very definite image.

Leeyes grunted again. “Let's get this quite straight, Sloan. The accused is alleged to have killed a man.”

“Kenneth Malcolm Carline,” supplied Sloan. That part was easy. There had been no difficulty at all in identifying the victim.

“And there was no doubt about how he died?”

“Not according to the Calleford pathologist.” Sloan paused and added cautiously, “He's new and young, of course.”

“That's a sight better than being old and hidebound,” responded Leeyes crisply. “Naming no names, of course.”

“Of course,” agreed Sloan diplomatically. Dr. Dabbe, the Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury District Hospital Management Group, was neither young nor new at his job.

“What killed Carline?”

“Poison.”

“A woman's way,” mused Leeyes. It was a response that would have upset a great many campaigners for Women's Liberation.

“Yes, sir.” Even the most committed defence lawyer would have had to agree that there were precedents for poison's being a woman's weapon.

“Who was he, then?” asked Leeyes. “The victim, I mean.”

“A young man who worked for her father's firm.”

“One of the old stories?” enquired Leeyes.

“Sir?”

“Him wanting to marry the boss's daughter and Daddy telling her she must and her not being keen.”

“No, sir, it wasn't like that at all.” There was a certain simplicity about famous legends that didn't equate with life.

“Sloan,” said Leeyes unexpectedly, “you know there's a time in every fairy story when the frog turns into a prince?”

“Ye-es,” agreed Sloan warily. The superintendent's discursiveness could lead anywhere. Anywhere at all.

“They've just discovered that there are some of those funny inheritance things—DNA molecules—in the phosphate in the skin of the frog.”

“Really, sir?” said Sloan politely.

“Funny, that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Especially when you think how often it was the frog that got turned into a prince.”

“Yes, sir.” He cleared his throat. “It wasn't like that at all with this young man Carline.”

“No?”

“If you ask me,” ventured Sloan consideringly, “it was more of a case of him not wanting to marry the boss's daughter.”

“Doesn't happen so often, of course,” commented Leeyes sagely. “It's the quickest ladder to the top.”

“What I mean is,” amplified Sloan, “that Kenneth Carline had just announced his engagement to someone else.”

“And instead of saying ‘Hard Cheddar' to herself, this Durmast girl reaches for the arsenic?”

“Not exactly, sir,” temporised Sloan. By any standard that was an over-simplification.

“Well, I'm not to know, Sloan, am I, unless you tell me?” said Leeyes. “Calleford Division handed the whole case over as a package after Trevor Porritt got hurt.” He sniffed ominously. “It was meant to be a complete package, too, with no loose ends. That's what they said.”

“Trevor Porritt didn't leave any loose ends,” insisted Sloan. “Calleford said it was all cut and dried and it looked as if it was.”

“What's the difficulty then?” demanded Leeyes.

“There isn't one as far as I know,” said Sloan, hanging on to the shreds of his patience with an effort.

“Except that she won't talk.”

“That's not our problem,” said Sloan. “That's someone else's.”

The someone else whose problem in due course the silence of Lucy Durmast became was Judge Eddington.

His Honour sat in the Crown Court in the county town of Calleford. The scenario there had some of the same components as those of the Magistrates' Court at Berebury but there were some important differences too. There was a certain amount of ceremonial rising and bowing for one thing. The judge was robed and the barristers were gowned for another.

The prisoner was dressed exactly as she had been before.

The judges and counsel were wigged.

The prisoner's hair gleamed like burnished copper.

The skin of the judge was like old, creased parchment. The prisoner had the sort of skin that looked—given sunshine—as if it would freckle easily. There was no sunshine in prison. Confinement there had done nothing to bring freckles out and her complexion looked instead only rather pale under that striking hair.

The judge listened to the formalities with which the trial began with the impassivity of long practice, settling himself into a state of mind in which he could listen to all the evidence with total impartiality. He watched in silence while the Clerk of the Court endeavoured to get Lucy Durmast to plead. Judge Eddington had met mutism before.

He gave no sign of this—nor of whether or not he had taken note of the fact that the Attorney General had apparently waived his traditional right of prosecution in cases of alleged murder by poisoning. He let the Clerk work his way through the proper procedures without interference and when this, too, resulted only in total silence on the part of the prisoner the judge then—and only then—drew breath to speak.

He proceeded to do what many another professional man would also have dearly liked to have been able to do when confronted with a difficult woman. And in so doing he followed a well-worn track.

“Remanded for psychiatric report,” he said briskly. “Next case, please.”

THREE

Haustus
—
Draughts

Lucy Durmast kept on telling herself to try to think of the encounter as a game. If only she could do that she would be able to keep her mind clear. And she certainly needed to keep her mind clear if she were going to outwit the psychiatrist seated opposite her. She clasped her hands tightly together in her lap and fixed her eyes unwaveringly on his face.

The psychiatrist automatically registered the clenched hands and much else besides. He purposely hadn't allowed the need for speech to arise as Lucy Durmast had been brought into the consulting room, busying himself instead with the formalities of divesting her of her coat, getting her seated and reading through her file.

“Let me see now,” he began in the manner of an ordinary doctor at an ordinary consultation, “you've been having some trouble lately, haven't you?”

Even in a prison setting, noted Lucy Durmast drily to herself, the habit of meiosis didn't desert the medical profession. Her grandfather had been a doctor and he, too, had always preferred understatement. A patient's being “not too well,” had, in his canon, meant a death knell.

“Trouble does sometimes affect the capacity for speech,” the man opposite continued easily. “To put it very simply the brain pulls down a shutter on the past to protect itself from unpleasant memories.”

She stared at him, trying not to scream that it hadn't done any such thing: that she remembered with searing clarity everything that had happened the day that Kenneth Carline had died.

“Especially,” the psychiatrist went on, “when the past has got something in it that you particularly don't want to remember.”