One Fight at a Time (22 page)

Wharton looked up at Grover. He took the swazzle out of his mouth.

“It won’t come to that surely.”

“It might. The police have prints which put Harry at the scene. His knife is the murder weapon. The killer was left handed and so is he. His alibi won’t stand up, because it’s an invention. If he hangs on to it and the prosecution team convince the jury that he’s lying... which they will... he has no chance. He will go to the gallows.”

Wharton looked back through the shop doorway. He pinched his nose with his left thumb and forefinger, balled his hand into a fist and bounced it off his chin three or four times.

Grover tried again.

“I’m working for Fincher Reade and Holborne,”

“Officially?”

“No. I’m in the US Army.”

“So you’re not bound by the same lawyer client confidentiality?”

“Yes I am. I talk about stuff with the defence attorney Zoe Easton and the outdoor clerk Melanie. I don’t reveal anything to anyone else.”

“Not even to Ellie and Arthur?”

“Only if it’s good news and not prejudicial to the case.”

Grover was only just resisting the desire to grab Wharton by the throat. Wharton could see this. He nodded, as if making time to organise what he was going to say. Grover waited. Wharton made two attempts at a sentence. Grover waited a bit more. Wharton squared everything away in his head. And then the final version came out, crisp and unhelpful. Not what Grover wanted to hear.

“I can’t tell you anything, Ed. You need to talk with Harry.”

Wharton took a key ring out of the left hand pocket of his jacket, turned and unlocked the door of his green Austin A35 van parked at the kerb. He got in behind the wheel, closed the door and wound down the window.

“I’m sorry, Ed.” He fired up the engine. “Talk to Harry. Try again.”

He selected first gear and pulled away from the kerb. Grover watched until the van disappeared around the corner, then went back into the shop.

Ellie was in the wash house, Harry was in the kitchen.

“I’m making some more tea,” he said. “Do you want a cup?”

“No thanks.”

Grover looked at his watch. 5.20. He moved to the phone sitting on the sideboard, picked up the receiver and called Fincher Reade and Holborne.

“Is Mel still there?” he asked. Waited for an answer then went on. “I’m coming in to see her.”

He put the receiver down.

“Tell your mother I’ve gone to the chambers,” he said to Harry.

“Right.”

Grover left the kitchen.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Is this good news?” Mel asked him.

“Maybe.”

They were in the meeting room again. The tea was Earl Grey and the biscuits were Edinburgh Shortbread. Grover went through everything that had happened since mid-morning.

“You do get through a serious workload,” Mel said.

“So far, to little or no effect.”

He pushed his chair back, got to his feet and walked as far as the length of the room would allow. Then back the other way. Mel watched him, sensing his mood, waiting for the moment to interrupt.

“Harry has to talk to us. He has to.” He stopped, took a deep breath, stretched his neck and looked up at the ceiling. “Shit.”

Now Mel spoke.

“Have you wondered if you’re too close to all this?”

Grover turned to face her. “Too close. How can I possibly be too close?”

“Alright. Let me ask that question another way. What is driving your need to do this?”

“Need?”

“That’s what I said. You shouldn’t be here. You should be thousands of miles away.”

Grover moved back to his chair and sat down again. He looked at Mel on the other side of the table.

“I’m here by force of circumstances. In the same way I was in Normandy. In Berlin. But...”

He stopped. Mel waited again, giving him time. He pulled his thoughts together.

“I have killed countless men. Deliberately. Sometimes under orders, sometimes in anger, sometimes in fear. Sometimes in a state which came close to madness probably. And, in the end, it became routine. It was just what I did. Me and a whole bunch of buddies. Day by day, for a year. Berlin was a god awful place, a stink hole, a charnel house. Smelling of rubble, dust and death – like the morning I stood in the ruins of the
Rex
cinema. Corpses turned up all over Berlin. This time, people I didn’t kill. And in the end that became much harder to deal with. Before, we were on a mission. Now we were tidying up. And it was truly, heartbreakingly desperate.”

He took a deep breath, then looked directly in to Mel’s eyes.

“There was a girl in a rain-soaked alleyway. Fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. Killed probably, over a couple of lumps of coal, a handful of potatoes, or a loaf of bread. Because she was trying to get by. In a place where the misery just went on and on. You mentioned ‘need’. Well, in that moment I needed to do something. I needed to know all about that girl. I needed to find someone to mourn for her.”

“And did you?”

“No. I was transferred to another part of the city, so that I wouldn’t.”

Grover paused. Mel waited.

“Then there was Nicholas Hope. Another body I stumbled over. And like the girl in the alley, maybe, in his own way, he was just trying to get by too.”

“This is different surely.”

Grover shook his head.

“Doesn’t feel like it. Yes, this is a different place and time. But it feels the same. Another murder on my watch, if you see what I mean.”

He sat back in his chair. Finished. Mel chose carefully what she wanted to say next.

“Ed, we’re getting somewhere with this. It’s unravelling. Slowly. And Mark Chaplin has come out of the woodwork. A relationship that Harry has kept very low key.”

Grover responded. “So why would Chaplin come visiting and risk meeting us all?”

“Because Harry was doing as he was ordered,” Mel said. “Staying at home. And because they had to talk. About something which Harry, Chaplin and the Punch and Judy man are determined not to share.”

“So we find out what that is and we make a huge step forward?”

“That’s a fair assumption, yes.”

Grover looked across the table at Mel, the portrait of Gabriel Fincher, founder of the firm, on the wall behind her. She smiled, then looked beyond Grover, to the clock on the wall. 6.15.

“I’m sorry, I have to go,” she said. “It’s my father’s birthday. And we’re all going out to celebrate.”

“All?”

“Parents, grandparents, two brothers, one sister, an uncle and aunt and two cousins.” Mel stood up. “Stay here and finish the biscuits.”

Grover watched her leave and close the door. He began counting. Two, four, six, seven, eight, ten, twelve members of Mel’s family. Celebrating together. It was a decade since the members of the Grover family had done that. Christmas 1939. Since then, his brother had married and moved to Detroit, his mother had died and he had become an uncle to a boy and a girl he had never seen. And home was an ocean away.

He stared at the be-whiskered Gabriel Fincher, who had sat down at this table in January 1836 and made plans. Messrs Reade and Holborne had hitched their wagon to his star somewhere along the way and gone on to leave a substantial legacy. The firm was one hundred and fourteen years old. Rich, prestigious and comfortable, in a building which was twice that age, which cocooned and kept warm the clever people who worked in it, like an old sweater. Only one of them had a founder’s name – the Head of Chambers, Alexander Reade, the great great great grandson of the man on the wall behind him. Grover turned around in his chair. Herbert Reade, bearded as well as be-whiskered, upright, grave and solemn, looked down at him with unblinking Victorian confidence. Which, Grover surmised, came from ruling over a fifth of the world.

The British were good at this stuff, he reflected. Tradition. Like warm clothes in the night air; best when they’re old and shaped by the years to fit. There was a knock on the door. Grover looked across the room. The door opened and Neil Adkins poked his head around it.

“You’re still here,” he said.

“Sorry. Should I have left by now?”

He got to his feet. Adkins moved into the room.

“Not at all, not at all. I was just wondering if you have any plans for this evening.”

“No.”

“Then may I invite you to dinner? My wife would like to meet you. So would my two daughters. They’re convinced you must be Audie Murphy.”

“He’s got more medals than I have, but I’m taller than he is. And thank you, yes I will come to dinner.”

“I need five minutes to sort my desk out for tomorrow.”

He left the room. Grover looked around, once again, at the generations of Finchers, Reades and Holbornes. And marvelled for the umpteenth time, at the grace and courtesy of the British people he had fallen among.

*

The Adkins family lived in a late Georgian villa, overlooking the Downs. Four hundred acres of protected woodland and green lawn space on the north side of the Clifton Gorge. A glorious slice of Bristol’s historic common land, free to all citizens. The Downs played host to funfairs every May and August and to Bertram Mills’ Circus for the first week of the school summer holidays. And to the Downs Football League, every Sunday morning during the football season. Eighteen teams and reserve sides played between goal posts erected at opposing ends of adjacent football pitches. If you stood on the Westbury Road, you could watch all twelve matches at the same time.

The Adkins girls were twins. Twelve years old, hair in bunches, dressed in green and blue. And going to be as stunning as their mother. Sarah Adkins was in her late thirties, red haired, tall, sophisticated and probably unflappable in all situations. The women were obviously the cool members of the family. Adkins, the brisk, organised man at work, was the opposite at home. Fussing and asking for jobs to do, while the household went on with business around him. At 8 o’clock, the girls said ‘goodnight’ to Grover and went upstairs to bed. Adkins said he would be up to put the lights out in twenty minutes. Sarah said that dinner would be ready in half an hour.

Adkins wanted to talk with Grover and ushered him into the study. The two man sat down in the soft brown leather armchairs on opposing sides of the fireplace. A gas fire burned in the re-built grate, humming along quietly.

“You like Jerry Wharton I understand,” Adkins began.

“Sure. Who couldn’t like an existentialist, communist, Punch and Judy Man?”

“Indeed. But you ought to know, he’s rumoured to be a homosexual, existentialist, communist, Punch and Judy Man.”

He sat back in his armchair and crossed his right leg over his left. Grover did the same. The leather in both chairs creaked. Adkins waited for his guest to process the information.

“Rumoured to be,” Grover eventually said. “Do we believe rumours?”

“We might do well to, in this case. Jerry Wharton is...” He searched for an appropriate word. “...Colourful.”

Over the past ten years, Grover had encountered the odd ‘colourful’ soldier. He had never considered it much of an issue. Of all the elements in Jerry Wharton’s ‘colourful’ portrait, Grover’s fellow countrymen would, in all probability, consider being communist his major misdeed. Homosexuality was not the greatest American sin. Unnatural, disgusting and ungodly though he was considered to be, the faggot was a featured player. The star, with his name above the title, was the left winger.

US soldiers had American newspapers flown in from home. The news arrived three days late. But back in February, Grover had taken more notice than usual. The representative of his home state had got into the headlines. Speaking at a local meeting of the Women’s Republican League, Wisconsin’s Senator Joseph MacArthy had waved a scrap of paper at his audience and announced he had the names of two hundred and five communist party members working in the State Department. The daughters of America were shaken to the core. And MacArthy was on a crusade. A couple of weeks later, Grover had heard him on US Forces Radio. He spoke in a tuneless kind of plainsong and whined on monotonously. Grover had only voted once, but he’d voted Democrat and within moments, he had lost interest in MacArthy’s nonsense. During the war, he had found Lord Haw Haw more likeable. He pondered on what would happen when MacArthy unearthed his first homosexual communist. You begin by railing against the fringe and before you know it, a whole bunch of other ‘colourful’ people become targets too.

Adkins voice seeped back to him.

“There were over fifteen hundred prosecutions for homosexual behaviour in Assize Courts last year. Eleven hundred and ninety-five convictions.”

“Carrying what sort of penalty?”

“Serious buggery – rape in other words – the sort of thing perpetrated on Nicholas Hope, carries a life sentence. Other activities can earn up to five years. Consenting homosexual acts, defined by law as ‘gross indecency’, get anything from six months to three years.”

“Small wonder nobody’s talking,” Grover said.

Explanation over, Adkins watched Grover thinking and waited. Grover shuffled in his chair. The leather squeaked again.

“Should we proceed then,” he said, “on the assumption that Harry is not talking because he was in a homosexual relationship with Nicholas Hope? If that was the case and it gets into court and the jury don’t believe his alibi...”

“Which we know is more than likely,” Adkins said.

“We’ve got a serious double whammy here.”

“I assume, that colourful Americanism means that Harry –”

“It means that both buggery and murder will be thrown at him. Jesus. He won’t have a prayer.”

“It gets a little easier if he’s having a relationship with Mark Chaplin,” Adkins suggested.

“Sure, but he still has to admit to that. Instead, he’s sticking with watching Dirk Bogarde shoot Jack Warner.”

“At least now you can make an educated guess at why.”

“Because he’s on a hiding to nothing.”

“Psychologically, it goes deeper,” Adkins suggested. “Harry is so frightened of being exposed, he’s prepared to risk offering himself up to a charge of old fashioned, heterosexual murder as the lesser of two evils. If, as we’re assuming he was with Chaplin or Wharton, or both, on the night of the murder; that alibi could net him three years in prison, followed by years in purgatory.”

He looked long and hard at Grover.

“Ed... In Harry’s shoes, given that choice, what would you opt for?”

Sarah knocked on the door and called from the hall that dinner would be ready in ten minutes. Adkins got up out of his chair.

“I’m going to tuck the girls in. See you at the table.”

*

El
Paradis
closed at one in the morning. The clients had gone and Xavier Carrera and his Rumba Band were unwinding with shots of Bacardi. Rachel was getting changed. Leroy Winston was standing under the canopy outside the front door. He was joined by Fidel Johnson the saxophone player.

“Good to get some fresh air,” Johnson said. “Though not much of a novelty for you I guess.”

“I don’t mind it on a night like this,” Winston said. “I’ve taken to watching the stars. I’ll get a book and learn something about them one day.”

The sound of singing drifted to him from his right. He looked along the cobbles to the junction with Colston Street. A quartet of men, a little the worse for wear, swayed up the incline, singing the Bristol Rovers club song.

Goodnight
Irene
,
Irene
goodnight

I’ll
see
you
in
my
dreams