The Veteran (6 page)

“The first constable who reached the scene. He bent over the man and saw his face before it began to swell. And the first paramedic, the one who tended him on the pavement and in the ambulance. If we put them together with a police artist ... ?”

Burns traced the paramedic through the London Ambulance Service and the man, hearing his patient had died, agreed to help. He was on an early shift the next day, but could be free after two p.m. and would happily give his time.

The police constable was right there in Dover Street station and was traced through the duty roster and incidents log. A skilled police sketch artist agreed to come up from Scotland Yard the next day at two.

Burns finished his day in a long tactics session with Alan Parfitt. The chief of detectives examined every scrap of evidence Burns laid before him and finally agreed.

“We can get a result here, sir. We have the evidence of Mr. Patel, two identifications of the men by Patel, the blow to the nose, the repair three hours later by Dr. Melrose and the wallet. We can send them down for life.”

“Yes, I think we can,” said Parfitt. “I’ll back you. I’ll be seeing a senior bod at the GPS tomorrow and I think I can persuade him that this one will go all the way.”

There were statements, statements and more statements. The file was two inches thick. The full reports from the postmortem and the fingerprints department had yet to come in and be added. But both men agreed it was a ‘go’ and Parfitt was sure he could persuade the GPS of the same.

TUESDAY

Price and Cornish were back in the dock at Number One court, Highbury Corner the next day and Mr. Stein presided. Miss. Sundaran represented the Crown, and her parents beamed with pride behind the glass panel shielding the public gallery as she handled her first murder case. Mr. Slade looked somewhat glum.

Mr. Stein kept it short and efficient. The Clerk read out the new charge, murder, and Mr. Slade rose to say again that his clients denied the charge and reserved their defence. Mr. Stein raised an eyebrow at Miss. Sundaran, who asked for a new remand in custody for one week.

“Mr. Slade?” he asked.

“No application for bail, sir.”

“Then granted. Miss. Sundaran. Hearing is set for next Tuesday at eleven a.m. Take them down.”

Price and Cornish were led away to the prison van. Miss. Sundaran now had the entire file and was pleased with what she had. Back at her office she had been told that this would almost certainly go to trial and that she would be involved. Hopefully the file would be passed by the GPS to Mr. Slade in the next twenty-four hours. Then preparation for the defence could begin.

“Some ruddy defence,” thought Slade, even this early in the case. “I’m going to need a genius in a wig to get them off this one.”

The sketching session went well. The paramedic and the constable agreed on the approximate appearance of the man on the pavement a week earlier and the artist went to work. It was a team effort. The artist sketched, erased, sketched again. A face came into view. The cast of the eyes, the short-backand-sides grey hair, the line of the jaw. Both men had seen the man only with his eyes closed. The artist opened the eyes and a man was looking at them, a man that once was, now battered and sawn meat in a refrigerated drawer.

Luke Skinner took over. He had a senior contact in the Scotland Yard press office and he wanted a spread in the Evening Standard for the following day. The pair of them met the chief crime correspondent later that evening. They all knew August was the ‘silly season’. News was thin. This was a story.

The crime correspondent took it. He could see his headline.

“BEATEN TO DEATH. DID YOU KNOW HIM?” There would be a panel to accompany the sketch, with a full description, stressing the once-shattered right leg and hip, the pronounced limp. It was. Skinner knew, about as good as they were going to get, and the last chance.

WEDNESDAY

The Evening Standard is London’s only evening newspaper and covers the capital and most of the South-East pretty intensively.

Skinner was lucky. News through the night had been exceptionally light, so the Standard ran the sketch of the staring man on the front page. “DID YOU KNOW THIS MAN?” asked the headline above it, then came a note to turn to more details inside.

The panel gave approximate age, height, build, hair and eye colour, clothes worn at the time of the attack, the belief that the man had been visiting the local cemetery to place flowers on the grave of one Mavis Hall and was walking back to the bus route when he was attacked. The clincher was the detail of the leg shattered about twenty years earlier and the limp.

Burns and Skinner waited hopefully through the day, but no-one called. Nor the next, nor the next. Hope faded.

A brief coroner’s court was formally opened and immediately adjourned. The coroner declined to grant the borough the right to bury in an unmarked grave, lest someone might yet come forward.

“It’s odd and very sad, guv,” said Skinner to Burns as they walked back to the nick. “You can live in a bloody great city like London, with millions of people all around you, but if you keep yourself to yourself, as he must have done, no-one even knows you exist.”

“Someone must,” said Burns, “some colleague, some neighbour. Probably away. August, bloody August.”

THURSDAY

The Hon. James Vansittart QC stood in the window bay of his chambers and gazed out across the gardens towards the Thames. He was fifty-two and one of the most notable and successful barristers at the London Bar. He had taken silk, become a Queen’s Counsel, at the remarkably early age of forty-three, even more unusual in that he had only been at the bar for a total of eighteen years. But fortune and his own skill had favoured him. Ten years earlier, acting as junior for a much older QC who had been taken ill during a case, he had pleased the judge, who did not wish to abandon the case and start again, by agreeing to proceed without his leader. The senior QC’s chambers had taken a gamble, but it paid off with a triumphant acquittal of the defendant. The Bar agreed it was Vansittart’s forensic skill and oratory that had turned the jury, and the later evidence that showed the defendant was not guilty did no harm.

The following year, Vansittart’s application for silk had met little opposition from the Lord Chancellor’s office, which was then in the hands of a Conservative government. His father, the Earl of Essendon, being a Tory whip in the House of Lords, was probably not unhelpful either. It was generally thought at the Bar and the clubs of St. James’s that the second son of Johnny Essendon was the right stuff. Clever, too, but that could not be helped.

Vansittart turned from the window, walked to his desk and pressed the intercom for his Chief Clerk. Michael ‘Mike’ Creedy ran the affairs of the thirty barristers in these chambers with oiled precision and had done so for twenty years. He had spotted the young Vansittart shortly after he came to the bar and had persuaded his then Head of Chambers to invite the young man to join. His judgement had not been wrong; fifteen years later the former new junior had become deputy Head of Chambers and a star in the legal firmament. A charming and talented portrait-painting wife, a manor in Berkshire and two boys at Harrow completed a pretty successful picture. The door opened and Mike Creedy entered the elegant, book-panelled room.

“Mike, you know I seldom take legal aid cases?”

“Seldom is good enough for me, sir.”

“But now and again? Once a year, say? Sort of paying one’s dues, good for the image?”

“Once a year is a good average. No need to over-egg the pudding, Mr. Vee.”

Vansittart laughed. Creedy was in charge of the finances and though this was a very wealthy set of chambers, he hated to see ‘his’ barristers taking peanuts for a legal aid brief. Still, whims are whims and have to be indulged. But not too often.

“You have something in mind?”

“I’m told there is a case at Highbury Corner. Two young men accused of mugging and killing a pedestrian. They claim they didn’t do it. Could even be true. The names are Price and Cornish. Could you find out who their solicitor is and ask him to take my call?”

An hour later Lou Slade sat and stared at the telephone as if it had suddenly turned into gold studded with diamonds.

“Vansittart?” he whispered. “James bloody Vansittart?”

Then he collected himself and re-addressed the phone, at the other end of which was Mike Creedy.

“Yes, indeed. Well, I am most honoured. And surprised, I admit. Yes, I’ll hold on.”

Seconds later the call was transferred and the QC came on.

“Mr. Slade, how good of you to take my call.”

The voice was easy, confident, courteous and beautifully modulated. Eton, maybe Harrow, oh and Guards, thought Slade.

It was a brief talk, but covered all that needed to be. Slade would be delighted to instruct Mr. Vansittart in the matter of Regina versus Price and Cornish. Yes, he had the prosecution file, it had arrived that very morning and he would be happy to come to the Temple for a first tactical discussion with his clients’ new barrister. The meeting was fixed for two p.m.

Vansittart turned out to be all Slade had expected: urbane, charming and courteous, plying his guest with tea in bone china and, spotting a slight yellow stain on the two first fingers of the right hand, offering a silver box of Balkan Sobranie. Slade lit up gratefully. A good East End lad, these bastards made him nervous. Vansittart looked at the file, but did not open it.

“Tell me, Mr. Slade, how do you see this case? Just run over it for me.”

Not unnaturally, Slade was flattered. It had already been quite a day. He ran over the events of the past eight days, since he had been called to the Dover Street nick while eating his supper.

“So, it would seem that Mr. Patel is the key and yet only witness,” said Vansittart when he had finished. “The rest is forensic or circumstantial. And it’s all in here?”

“Yes, it’s all there.”

Slade had had one hour in his office and a further hour in the taxi to flick through the GPS file, but it had just been enough.

“But I think it is pretty strong. And the clients have no alibi except each other. They claim they were either in bed at their squat or mooching around the streets together.”

Vansittart rose, forcing Slade to put down his half-drunk cup and stub out his butt before doing the same.

“It’s been more than kind of you to come personally,” said Vansittart as he ushered Slade to the door, “but I always feel that if we are going to work together an early personal meeting is best. And I am grateful for your advice.”

He said that he intended to read the entire file that evening and would call Slade in his office the next day. Slade explained that he had court work all morning, so the call was fixed for three p.m.

FRIDAY

The call was precisely at three.

“An interesting case, Mr. Slade, wouldn’t you say? Strong, but not, perhaps, impregnable.”

“Strong enough, if the witness statement of Mr. Patel holds up, Mr. Vansittart.”

“Precisely my conclusion. Tell me, have our clients offered any explanation for either the prints on the wallet or the treating of the broken nose just three hours after the mugging?”

“No. They just keep repeating ‘Dunno’ and ‘Can’t remember’. They are not all that bright.”

“Ah well, can’t be helped. But I think we do need a couple of reasonable explanations. I feel our first consultation is in order. I would like to see them at the Ville.”

Slade was jolted. This was damned quick.

“I am afraid I am in court all day on Monday,” he said. “Tuesday is the further remand in custody. We could see them in the interview room at Highbury Corner before they are taken away.”

“Y-e-e-e-s. I had hoped to make an intervention on Tuesday.

Better if I could know the nature of the ground under my feet before then. I hate to interfere with a chap’s weekend, but would tomorrow suit?” Slade was jolted again. Intervention? He had no idea a highflying QC would even want to be present for a formal renewal of remand in custody. The meeting at Pentonville Jail was agreed for ten o’clock the next day. Slade would make the arrangement with the prison authorities.

SATURDAY

There must have been some confusion. Mr. Vansittart was at the prison at a quarter to nine. To the prison officer at visitor reception he was polite but insistent. The appointment was for nine o’clock, not ten, and he was a busy man. The solicitor would doubtless come along later. After conferring with higher authority, the man asked a colleague to show the barrister to an interview room. At five after nine the two prisoners were shown in. They glowered at the lawyer. He was not fazed.

“I’m sorry Mr. Slade is a bit late,” he said. “But no doubt he will be along later. Meanwhile, my name is James Vansittart and I am your defending barrister. Do sit down.”

The escorting warder left the room. Both men sat across the table from Vansittart. He took his seat and produced the prosecution file. Then he flicked a packet of cigarettes and a book of matches across the table. Both men lit up greedily.

Cornish pocketed the pack. Vansittart gave them a genial smile.

“Now you two young men have got yourselves in a bit of trouble here.”

He flicked through the file as they both watched him through a haze of smoke.

“Mr. Cornish ...” he glanced up at the lank-haired Harry Cornish, “one of our problems is the wallet. Apparently it was found last Sunday morning by a dog-walker, lying in waste ground, deep in the grass, just over the fence from Mandela Road. No question it belonged to the dead man; it had his prints on it. Unfortunately, it also had yours.”

“Dunno,” said Cornish.

“No, well, memory fades when you are busy. But there has to be an innocent explanation. Now, I suppose you are going to tell me that on the Wednesday morning, the day after the attack, you were walking along Mandela Road to get some lunch at a caff when you saw a wallet lying in the gutter?”

Cornish may have been the brains of the outfit, but he was not really clever, just sly. Nonetheless, something gleamed in his eyes.