Murder in Court Three (19 page)

‘You have interrupted my train of thought. I must finish this judgment then you can ask your questions,' he said. With them standing watching, he picked up the dictaphone and for nearly ten minutes spoke into it, pausing from time to time to consult the material in front of him. The officers could not help being impressed by the flow of logical, grammatical, erudite language in which Hutton explained his decision, apparently unaffected by the drink he had consumed. The theory on which they were working seemed increasingly unlikely as the judgment rolled off his tongue.

At length the machine clicked and he put it down. He took a large mouthful of wine. ‘Well?'

Flick took a deep breath. ‘Does the name Gary Thomson mean anything to you, Lord Hutton?'

A flicker of his eyes said it did. He screwed up his face, apparently in thought. ‘I don't think so.'

‘You tried him and gave him one year for causing the deaths of two people by dangerous driving. The Appeal Court increased it to six years.'

‘Oh yes.' He nodded as if it had just come back to him.

‘Is he your son?'

Hutton looked genuinely taken aback. ‘How is that any business of yours, Inspector?'

‘I am investigating two murders and a fraud, and my suspicions are beginning to crystallise. I should tell you that Gary Thomson has been detained. He was found with his passport and a large sum of money, doubtless trying to leave the country. He has questions to answer about the murder of Mr Knox and the fraud.'

A muscle under Hutton's left eye twitched. ‘Why on earth should he kill Knox?'

Flick leaned forward and put her hands on the table. ‘Did Mr Knox have something on you?'

‘Such as?'

‘Such as Gary's parentage, which puts a totally different slant on the lenient sentence.'

Baggo intervened. ‘Or that you and your son, assuming he is, were the controlling forces in the Nicklaus golf course fraud?'

Hutton looked at Flick coldly. ‘Do you have a scrap of evidence to support these ludicrous suggestions, Inspector?'

Before Flick could reply Baggo cut in. ‘We have evidence that clearly links you to the fraud and two murders, Farquhar Knox and Tam Walker, an old client of yours, I believe. It also links Gary Thomson with Knox's murder and the fraud. There is evidence that you are Gary's father and that can be tested using DNA. I can see both of you going down for life.'

Hutton sat back and curled his lip contemptuously. ‘If I am a suspect you should have cautioned me.' There was no fear in his expression or voice.

Baggo said, ‘You haven't told us anything yet.'

Simultaneously Flick delivered a full caution which had the effect of intensifying the contempt on the judge's face.

Baggo sat on one of the wooden kitchen chairs and, now on the same level, fixed his eyes on Hutton. He said, ‘Unless Gary thinks up a better story, people will believe he got that five thousand in cash from you. They may well believe that he was blackmailing you and that he killed Knox. Tam Walker was probably killed to protect both of you. It would be a short step from there to convict Gary of fraud. We know he's clever and good with IT.'

The officers watched in silence as the judge poured more wine and drank it. ‘So the purpose of your visit …?'

Flick spoke solemnly. ‘Lord Hutton, I am detaining you under the Criminal Justice Act …'

‘I know, I know. But excuse me as I need a pee. One of the problems of getting old.' He sounded almost apologetic as he slowly walked out of the room. Flick told di Falco to follow him, ‘tactfully,' she whispered, as she sat down.

‘He knows he'll have to confess his own guilt if he's to help his son,' Baggo said quietly.

‘You laid it on a bit thick,' Flick said.

‘We can tone it down when the tape's running,' he replied. She raised her eyes heavenwards and they waited in silence.

‘He's taking his time,' she remarked.

Baggo shrugged, not showing his growing concern.

They heard a rattle then di Falco asking Hutton if he was alright. They dashed out of the kitchen and found di Falco putting his shoulder to a door leading from the hallway. It was locked and required prolonged kicking before the wood splintered. A chair had been jammed against the door from the inside but it was not that which grabbed their attention. The judge was hanging by a leather belt from a water pipe leading to the cistern, his feet on either side of the toilet bowl. His head lolled to his right, eyes staring. They knew before they touched him that he was dead.

‘Cut him down!' Flick yelled, and running into the kitchen, she seized a stout knife from a block. While Baggo and di Falco squeezed through the remains of the door and cut Hutton down, Flick phoned for paramedics, SOCOs and a photographer.

The room was small, containing only a toilet and basin, and there was barely enough space to lay the dead man on the floor. ‘He must have dropped this,' di Falco said, pointing to a small cassette tape in front of the toilet.

‘By accident or design?' Baggo said, picking it up. ‘I think we should see if there is anything interesting on it.' He clambered back into the hallway and went to the judge's place at in the kitchen table.

‘What are you doing?' Flick asked as he ejected the tape from the dictaphone and inserted the one from the bathroom floor. ‘We should touch as little as possible till the photographer and SOCOs are finished.'

‘We know what happened here,' Baggo said. ‘I think he meant us to find this. Here goes.' He found the tape had been rewound to the start so pressed the play switch.

The recording was not of high quality but the dead man's voice came over strongly.

‘I have just now been asked a number of questions by representatives of the press. It appears that certain facts which I would have preferred to remain hidden are likely to be made public. Further, I have committed some criminal acts and anticipate police attention in the near future. I have no intention of allowing myself to be pilloried, giving satisfaction to those who have been my enemies, and despatched in disgrace to one of these appalling institutions to which I have sent so many of my fellow citizens.

‘Gary Thomson is my son. When I was a poor legal apprentice I had a brief affair with a typist. She became pregnant and I offered to marry her. The engagement didn't work out and we separated. By then an abortion was out of the question. I was never told anything about the baby nor was I ever asked for money. In those days the natural unmarried father had no rights when it came to adoption and I knew nothing about what happened to my child. My child …' Emotion clouded his voice before he continued strongly once more. ‘The upshot was that my son was adopted by the Thomsons. It was not a happy arrangement and Gary's relationship with his adoptive father was similar to the frankly abusive one I had endured with my father. I knew nothing of this. I had been shut out of my unborn child's life and did not even know its gender or whether it was alive or dead. I now wish I had made inquiries, but I didn't. I was busy making my way at the bar, but that is only an excuse.

‘I first set eyes on him when he stood in the dock in front of me and it never occurred to me that we might be related until the sentencing diet. This was a particularly harrowing case. On the one hand you had a young family destroyed, with only a brain-damaged child surviving. On the other, you had a young man expecting to get a good degree in IT who made the same mistake a number of others have made on that wretchedly unsafe road. He was not drunk, not going at a ridiculous speed. He just made an error of judgement. There was nothing wicked about what he did. I'm sure the jury convicted him simply on the basis of the tragic consequences rather than looking at the quality of the driving, but I had to respect the verdict and send him to jail. I always intended to give him as short a sentence as I could, before I believed him to be my son.

‘After the accident but before the case came to court, Gary, stung by his exclusion from his adoptive grandfather's estate, had done some research. He traced his natural mother and persuaded her to tell him who his father was. He resented me for, as he saw it deserting him, and did not contact me. When I was allocated his trial he should have objected, but he saw it as fate giving him the means of getting his own back and said nothing. Throughout the trial he had worn a beard but for the sentencing diet he shaved it off and I could see his chin was unusually shaped, like mine. The reports showed he had been adopted and when I saw his date of birth I was sure. I should have explained the situation to counsel but I didn't. I went ahead and gave him one year, which was far too little for the relatives of the deceased. When I sentenced him, he silently mouthed “Thanks, Dad”.'

As the officers exchanged glances, the doorbell rang. ‘You see to it. You know what needs to be done,' Flick told di Falco. Disappointment on his face, he went to deal with the various professionals summoned to a high profile sudden death.

Baggo shut the kitchen door then restarted the tape.

‘That began my disenchantment with the law. They say when you get a bad press that it will be a seven day wonder, but the vilification I was subjected to left scars. I was “out of touch”, “unfeeling” and “callous”. When you see your photograph on the front page of a tabloid with the heading “unfit for purpose” it erodes your confidence, makes you hate your job. And all that was without my relationship with Gary being known. We're not allowed to comment on our cases so I couldn't fight back. Not that they'd have been interested in my reasoning.

‘When you reach your goal in life but become dissatisfied, your compass, whatever has held you on a steady path, wobbles. I found myself using pretentious language to sentence pathetic drug mules to many years in jail when few big fish were caught. The criminals I dealt with were squalid and stupid. I never had a criminal mastermind in the dock in front of me. My son was guilty of an error of judgement that any motorist might make, yet finished up with a longer sentence than many a knife-wielding thug. Of course he didn't serve the full six years. No one does. The politicians encourage judges to impose crushing sentences but once they're in power they let everyone out early in order to save money. And that goes for the evil and dangerous ones as well as those who should never have been in jail in the first place. My job was a disappointment, my wife and I had drifted apart and I felt in some way responsible for what happened to my son. After Gary's appeal, I expected the truth to come out, but it didn't. I became used to living with danger and the adrenaline that comes with it. I wanted to rebel. I formed a bizarre respect for criminal masterminds, those who planned crimes and got away with them. In the end I needed to prove to myself, if no one else, that I too could do that.

‘I thought up the Nicklaus golf course fraud and what started as a weekend pastime became an obsession. I had to put it into practice. After Gary's release I had made contact with him. It was difficult for a time but we established a rapport. I needed someone clever with IT for my scheme and was happy to find a way of giving him money and encouraging him back to doing what he was good at. He did not know that it was a criminal enterprise. I told him it was an entrepreneurial sideline which, as a judge, I shouldn't have been involved in. Of course when the fraud became known he understood. He has been guilty of no crime relating to it because he lacked guilty knowledge when he did what he did. His computing skill enabled me to pull the strings of the fraud without anyone suspecting my identity.

‘The people I used …' the first side of the tape stopped. Impatiently Baggo turned it and played the second side.

‘The people I used were people who deserved their comeuppance. Smail is a stupid snob. He had prevented me from joining the Archers although I had taught myself to shoot as well as most of them. Thomson had been an abusive father to my son. Maltravers, I'm sure though I can't prove it, obtains planning permissions with the aid of brown envelopes, and has been doing so for years. Burns is a crook whom I tried a few years ago. It was a nasty timeshare fraud, most victims being elderly or gullible, but there was simply not enough evidence and I had to rule that he had no case to answer.

‘For the fraud, I sent the instructions to Burns, using pay-as-you-go mobiles and untraceable e-mails and let greed do the rest. The one person who knew what was going on was Tam Walker, who produced brilliant artwork and forged Nicklaus's signature. He knew to keep his mouth shut as he would have incriminated himself if he had informed on me. But when that newspaper offered a reward for information regarding Knox's murder, he guessed that I had done it and calculated that he could claim the reward without putting himself in danger. I had paid him well for his work but he tried to get more, threatening to contact the newspaper. I drove through to talk to him. I left my car a distance from the flats and wore an old jacket so I would not be recognised. I tried to persuade him to be sensible but he would not listen. There was a primitive statue to hand, and when he was stupid enough to turn his back on me I killed him.

‘I killed Knox too. Before the archery he came up to me. He had been drinking and made it clear that because of a mention of Culrathie in an e-mail, he had worked out that I had been behind the scheme. He was not the sort to back off something like that and I knew I had to act. After the archery I saw Mrs Traynor leaving Court Three by the judge's door. I recognised her as the woman Knox had been speaking intimately to after dinner. I had not known Gary would be there as a waiter, but I saw him and asked if he had seen a man coming down the corridor from Court Three and he said no. I went to the retiring room, picked up an arrow and went along various back corridors to Court Three. Parliament House is a rabbit warren and only judges and a few others would have known the route I took. I found him sitting back, self-satisfied no doubt, and I just thrust the arrow in. I used a handkerchief to prevent my fingerprints from getting on the shaft. I returned to the party and trying to act normally, I queued up for a drink.