The Veteran (3 page)

Back at the station Jack Burns started on the telephone. He asked for an ‘all points’ on the missing men, made one quick call with a simple enquiry to Mr. Carl Bateman, the A and E surgeon at the Royal London, and then rang around the A and E departments at three other hospitals. A junior doctor at the St. Anne’s Road hospital came up trumps.

“Gotcha,” shouted Burns as he put the phone down. There is a hunter instinct in a good detective, the knowledge of a nice adrenalin rush when the evidence is coming together. He turned to D S Skinner.

“Get down to St. Anne’s. Find a Dr. Melrose in A and E. Get a full signed statement. Take a photo of Mark Price for identification. Get a photocopy of the accident log for the whole of yesterday afternoon. Then bring it all back here.”

“What happened?” asked Skinner, catching the mood.

“A man answering to Price’s description wandered in there yesterday with a sore nose. Dr. Melrose discovered it was broken in two places. When we find him, that hooter will be reset and heavily strapped. And Melrose will give us a firm ID.”

“When was this, guv?”

“Guess. Just on five p.m. yesterday afternoon.”

“Three hours after the punch in Paradise Way. We’re going to get a result on this one.”

“Yes, lad, I think we are. Now get over there.”

While Skinner was away, Burns took a call from the sergeant who had led the POLSA team. It was disappointing. Before sundown the previous day they had scoured every inch of that estate on hands and knees. They had crawled into every nook and cranny, examined every passage and alley, culled every patch of weary grass and every slick gutter. They had removed and emptied the only five public garbage cans they could find.

They had a collection of used condoms, dirty syringes and greasy food wrappings typical of such a place. But they had no blood and no wallet.

Cornish must have stuffed the stolen wallet into one of his own pockets until he could examine the prize at his leisure.

Cash he would have taken and spent, the rest he would have thrown away somewhere, but not on the Meadowdene Grove estate. And he lived half a mile away. That was a big area, too many trash cans, too many alleys, too many builders’ skips. It could be anywhere. It could, O blessed joy, still be in one of his pockets. Neither he nor Price would ever be contestants on Mastermind.

As for Price, stuffing his tee shirt over his bleeding nose must have kept the blood from falling to the pavement until he was well clear of the estate. Still, one superb eyewitness and the evidence of the broken nose at St. Anne’s just three hours after the punch was not bad for a day’s work.

His next call was from Mr. Bateman. That, too, was a slight disappointment, but not disastrous. His last call was a beauty.

It came from D S Coulter, who had more snouts out in the territory than anyone else. A whisper down the line had told him Cornish and Price were playing pool at a hall in Dalston.

Luke Skinner was entering the front lobby as Burns came down the stairs. He had a complete statement from Dr. Melrose, positive ID and a copy of the treatment log in which Price had identified himself under his true name. Burns told him to lock up the evidence and join him in the car.

The two thugs were still playing pool when the police arrived. Burns kept it short and businesslike. He had backup in the form of a police van with six uniformed men who now protected all the doors. The other pool players just watched with the engaged curiosity of those not in trouble observing someone who is.

Price glared at Burns with piggy eyes flanking a broad band of plaster over the bridge of his nose.

“Mark Price, I am arresting you on suspicion of grievous bodily harm on an unidentified adult male at or about two twenty p.m. yesterday afternoon at Paradise Way, Edmonton. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

Price shot a panicky glance at Cornish, who evidently passed for the brains of the outfit. Cornish gave a slight shake of his head.

“Piss off, filth,” said Price.

He was spun around, cuffed and marched out. Two minutes later Cornish followed. Both went into the van with the six constables and the small cavalcade returned to Dover nick.

Procedures, always procedures. In the car on the way back, Burns asked for the FMO (force medical officer) to be summoned as a matter of emergency. The last thing he needed was a later claim that police brutality had in any way if, contributed to that nose. Also, he needed a blood sample to compare with the blood on the tee shirt. If there was any of the victim’s blood on that shirt, that would do it.

As he awaited the arrival of a blood sample from the man in the coma, he pondered the disappointing reply from Mr. Bateman to his query concerning the right fist.

It was going to be a long night. Arrest had been at 7.15 p.m.

That gave him twenty-four hours before either his chief superintendent gave him twelve further hours, or the local magistrates gave him a further twenty-four.

As arresting officer, he would have to fill out yet another report, signed and witnessed. He would need a sworn statement from the FMO that both men were fit enough to be questioned. He would need every stitch of their clothing and the contents of all pockets, plus blood samples for elimination.

Luke Skinner, watching like a hawk, had already made sure neither man jettisoned anything from their pockets as they were arrested and marched out of the pool hall and into the van. But no-one had been able to prevent Cornish telling the police constables that he wanted a lawyer, and fast. Until then, he was saying nothing. This message was not for the policemen; it was for his thick accomplice. And Price got the message, loud and clear.

The procedures took over an hour. Dusk was descending.

The FMO departed, leaving behind his statement as to the fitness of both men to be questioned, and the state of Price’s nose at the time of arrest.

Both thugs were lodged in separate cells, both dressed in paper one-piece overalls. Both had had a cup of tea and would later receive a canteen fry-up. By the book, always by the book.

Burns looked in on Price.

“I want a brief,” said Price. “I ain’t saying nothing.”

Cornish was the same. He just smiled and insisted on a lawyer.

The duty solicitor was Mr. Lou Slade. He was disturbed over his supper, but insisted he wished to see his clients before turning in for the night. He arrived at Dover Street just before nine.

He met both his new clients and spent half an hour closeted with them in an interview room.

“You can now conduct the interviews in my presence if you wish, Detective Inspector,” he said when he emerged. “But I have to say my clients will make no statement. They deny the charge. They say they were nowhere near the place in question at the time in question.”

He was an experienced lawyer and had handled similar cases. He had got the measure of his clients and believed not a word, but he had a job to do.

“If you wish,” said Burns. “But the case is very strong and building steadily. If they went for an admission, I might even believe the victim hit his head on the pavement as he fell. With their records ... say, a couple of years in the Ville.”

Pentonville was known locally as the ‘Ville’.

Privately, Burns knew there were a score of kick marks on the injured man, and Slade knew he knew.

“Stinking fish, Mr. Burns. And I’m not buying. They intend to deny. I shall want all you have got under the disclosure rules.”

“In due course, Mr. Slade. And I shall need any claim of alibi well in time. But you know the rules as well as I.”

“How long can you keep them?” asked Slade.

“Seven fifteen tomorrow night. Twelve hours extra from my super would not be enough. I’ll almost certainly want an extension in custody from the magistrates tomorrow, around five p. m., the last hearing of the evening.”

“I shall not oppose,” said Slade. He knew not to try and waste time. These were two thugs and they had half-killed a man. The magistrates would extend the custody remand without a blink.

“As for your interviews, I suppose you will insist, even though on my advice they will say nothing.”

“Fraidso.”

“Then as I am sure we both have homes to go to, may I suggest nine tomorrow morning?”

It was agreed. Slade went home. Price and Cornish were locked up for the night. Burns had one last call to make. When he was connected to the Royal London he asked for the duty nurse in the ICU. The injured man might, just might, have come to.

Mr. Paul Willis was also working late that night. He had operated on a young motorcyclist who seemed to have tried to break the land-speed record coming down Archway hill. The neurosurgeon had done his best, but privately he gave the motorcycle rider a fifty-fifty chance of seeing out the week. He heard about Burns’s call after the staff nurse had put the phone down.

The twenty-four hours since anaesthetic was administered had elapsed. With its effects gone, he would have hoped for the first signs of stirring. Before heading home he went to look again at the limping man.

There was no change. The monitors indicated a regular heartbeat, but the blood pressure was still too high, one of the signs of brain damage. On the Glasgow Scale the patient still hovered around three over fifteen, deep coma.

“I’ll give it another thirty-six hours,” he told the staff nurse. “I was hoping to get away this weekend, but I’ll come in on Saturday morning. Unless there is a happy sign of recovery, in which case, not. Would you leave a note that I be informed of a change for the better, either here or at home? If there’s no change by Saturday, nine a. m., I’ll want a re-scan. Please book it for me.”

The second day ended with Price and Cornish, stuffed with fried food, snoring ox-like in their cells at Dover Street nick. The victim lay on his back wired to three monitoring machines under a low blue light, locked into some faraway private world.

Mr. Willis cast thoughts of patients from his mind for a while and watched an old Clint Eastwood spaghetti western in his elegant house in St. John’s Wood Terrace. D S Luke Skinner was just in time for a date with a very pretty drama student from the Hampstead School whom he had met in the crush bar at a Beethoven concert a month earlier. This was the sort of taste (Beethoven, not girls) that he emphatically did not discuss in the Dover nick canteen.

D I Jack Burns returned to rustle up some baked beans on toast in an otherwise empty house in Camden Town, wishing that Jenny and the boys would return from their holiday at Salcombe, in his native Devon, where he dearly wished he could have joined them. August, he thought, bloody August.

THURSDAY

The interviews with Price and Cornish turned out to be useless. It was not Jack Burns’s fault; he was a skilled and experienced interrogator. He took Price first, knowing him to be the more dense of the two. With Lou Slade sitting quietly by his client’s side. Burns took the line of sweet reason.

“Look, Mark, we’ve got you bang to rights. There’s a witness, saw it all. Everything. Start to finish. And he is going to testify.”

He waited. Nothing.

“For the tape, my client declines to make a statement,” murmured Slade.

“Then he hit you right on the nose. Mark. Broke your ruddy hooter. No wonder you lost your rag. Why on earth did an old guy like that do it?”

Price might have muttered, “I dunno,” or “Stupid old git.” That would have gone down well with the jury. Admission of presence at the scene. Bang goes any alibi. Price glared but stayed silent.

“Then there’s your blood. Mark. Pouring out the broken nose. We’ve got samples, laddie.”

He was careful not to say he only had blood from the tee shirt, not the pavement, but he did not tell an untruth. Price shot a panicky glance at Slade, who also looked worried. Privately the lawyer knew that if samples of his client’s blood, proved by DNA tests to be Price’s blood and no-one else’s, had been found on the pavement close to the beaten man, there would be no defence. But he still had time for a change of plea, if necessary. Under the disclosure rules, he would insist on everything Burns had got, and long before any trial. So he just shook his head, and Price’s silence went on.

Burns gave each defendant an hour of his best efforts, then packed it in.

“I shall need to make an application for extension of police custody,” he told Slade when Price and Cornish were back in their cells. “Four this afternoon?”

Slade nodded. He would be present, but say virtually nothing. There would be no point.

“And I am setting up two identity parades for tomorrow morning at St. Anne’s Road. If I get two results, I shall go for a formal charge and then a remand in custody,” he added.

Slade nodded and left.

As he drove back to his office, the duty solicitor had little doubt this was not going to go his clients’ way. Burns was good at his job: meticulous, thorough, not given to silly mistakes that the defence could exploit. He also thought privately that his clients were guilty as hell. He had seen their record sheets and so would the magistrates that afternoon. Whoever the mystery witness was, if he was a respectable person and stuck to his guns. Price and Cornish would not be seeing much daylight for a long time.

Years before, the police used to carry out identity parades inside the station. The new method was to have Identification Suites dotted at various places around the city. The nearest to Dover nick was in St. Anne’s Road, just down the pavement from the hospital where Dr. Melrose worked and Price had had his nose attended to. It was a more efficient system. Each suite was equipped with the latest in parade platform, lighting and one-way mirrors through which the identification could be made without the chance that a real hard case could ‘eyeball’ the witness and terrify him into silence without a word being said. The suites also had an on-call panel of men and women of different sizes and aspects to make up the parade at short notice. These volunteers were paid to appear, stand in line and then walk out again. Burns asked for two parades, giving careful descriptions of his prisoners, for eleven a.m. the next day.