Blood and Judgement (12 page)

“Certainly.”

“He was not in hiding? He was living there under his own name?”

“He hadn’t advertised his presence there.”

“Would you kindly answer my question?”

“Yes. So far as I know he was living there under his own name.”

“Then you could have found him there at any time. Why did you select an hour of the morning more commonly associated with the activities of the Gestapo?”

(Considerable excitement in the press box. “QC attacks Police.” “‘Gestapo methods,’ says Wainwright.”)

“I have explained before,” said Kellaway, “that I should not have been certain, at any more orthodox hour, of finding him at home.”

“I see. And after you had pulled him from his bed, in the middle of the night, and marched him down to the police station, what next transpired?”

“He was questioned.”

“You interrogated him?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“I think we broke off for breakfast at about eight o’clock and were finished by midday.”

Mr Wainwright made a show of counting on his fingers.

“Then am I right in saying that he was interrogated, practically without pause, for more than seven hours?”

“Well, there were pauses. To write down what he had said, and so on. It’s a long business.”

“It must have seemed so to the prisoner. How many interrogators were there?”

“I asked most of the questions. I was helped by Detective Sergeant Dodds, and Detective Constables Mote and Cobley took it in turns to write it down.”

“Four of you,” said Mr Wainwright, turning slightly toward the jury. “Four of you. For seven hours. Yes, I see–”

A black, thick darkness, broken only by the yellow light from the two helmet torches. Now that they had stopped searching and had started to dig, their lights were dimmed by the mud and sediment that their fingers were scrabbling up a few inches away from their faces.

They were living in a half world; a world in which sight and touch were effective, but ears and nose were cut off. All that Petrella could hear was a steady buzzing and throbbing inside his own head, caused by the exertion of the work which had set up all sorts of unexpected pressures inside his watertight shell. For a moment he felt the air sucking dry at the inlet, and panicked, and knew in the same instant that it was only imagination.

Their hands sank in deeper. It was there, right enough. Not a shadow of doubt. After five nights of patient searching,
this
was what they had come to find. It was bedded down and sunk into the soft mud and gravel but their efforts were stirring it. Shapeless, sodden, grotesque, inert, it was preparing to rise from its long sleep, up from the darkness of night and underwater, to the cruel light of day.

One complete arm was free now, one enormous flipper, the ends apparently encased in black leather. Then a leg, with a monstrous, padded thigh. Borden touched Petrella, and indicated that the time had come for them to lift. Both together. Hold it tight.

It was a little easier as the buoyancy of the water began to help them. Inch by inch they fought their way upward, hugged to the monster they were raising. Then the surface. Then the slow job of dragging shoreward the waterlogged hulk which rolled and surfaced and dipped and played in their wake.

As soon as they were ashore, Petrella stripped off his mask.

The charnel stench assaulted the sweet night. He stepped aside to control his heaving stomach.

Borden, impassive, stared down at their obscene salvage.

“They’ll have to argue bloody hard,” he said, “if they want to argue this one away.”

“Before opening the case for the defence,” said Mr Wainwright, “I have a submission to make on a point of law.”

“Yes, Mr Wainwright,” said Mr Justice Rowan courteously. He had had a little bet with his clerk that Mr Wainwright would go for “no case”. Well, Porter could afford to lose five shillings. Porter was a much richer man than he was.

“I would submit,” said Mr Wainwright, “that there is no necessity for the defence to put forward its case at all. It is one of the fundamentals of the English legal system that the Crown must make out its case. The Crown must show that the accused murdered Rosa Ritchie by shooting her on September 22nd at Binford Park Reservoir. Not that he was
at
the reservoir. Even if that were admitted – and it is far from being admitted – it is a fairly long step to take from saying that a man was
at
a place to saying that he committed a murder there. All the evidence as to the murder is circumstantial. I hasten to add – and I say this because I am certain his Lordship will say it if I do not – that there are crimes which have to be proved by circumstantial evidence because no other sort is available. But” – Mr Wainwright turned round and glared for a moment at Mr Younger, sitting impassively beside him – “there is circumstantial evidence
and
circumstantial evidence, and my learned friend will perhaps excuse me if I say that the evidence he has seen fit to produce is circumstantial to the point almost of non-existence.

“He was good enough to point out that no cogent motive exists. A number of motives have been put forward. Indeed, so many that they must have reminded the jury of the famous clock that struck thirteen, the last note being not only absurd in itself but casting considerable doubt on the twelve that had gone before.

“The only direct link in the whole story which has been suggested between the dead woman and the accused, is the gun. And observe how weak that link is. I should like to emphasize. It is not denied that this is the gun which fired the bullet which killed Mrs Ritchie. All the weighty scientific evidence bearing on this point can be accepted – and put on one side. What is left? Two persons who say that they
think
they once saw the accused carrying a gun
like
the gun recovered from the water. That is the link which we are asked to believe will be strong enough to hang this man.

“I would say two things about it. First, that the pistol, as we have heard, is of a standard type, the
P
38 issued to the German Army, and issued by the hundred thousand. How many misguided souvenir hunters brought them back to England at the end of the last war I should not like to begin to calculate.

“The second point is that the witnesses who have, somewhat hesitantly, identified the pistol are neither of them worthy of a moment’s credence in this Court. Both of them, as they admitted under my cross-examination, are professional criminals with long records of offences. Men who live by their wits, under the eye of the police, and who are only too willing, I imagine, to oblige those authorities under whose sufferance they live.”

(“QC again attacks Police. Were Witnesses Influenced?” scribbled the
Daily Courier
gleefully. It had got its knife into Scotland Yard ever since a scoop which one of its enterprising crime reporters had secured had been killed by the Yard’s press relations officer.)

Mr Justice Rowan thought to himself that it must have been a terribly difficult decision to make. Clearly they were two vital witnesses, and if their credibility could be attacked, it should be. They had, in fact, left a very poor impression on His Lordship. Nevertheless, by attacking them, counsel had opened a very dangerous sluice gate. For the rule of evidence, which, like most English legal rules, was based on rough notions of fair play, laid it down that a prisoner’s own character and record could be attacked if he, in turn, saw fit to attack the character of the prosecution witnesses. “Those in glass houses–” as the old rule said. And the judge already knew (although it was to be hoped the jury did not) that in this sort of mud-slinging the prisoner would certainly come out second-best.

The alternative, of course, was not to allow the prisoner to give evidence at all. He looked a surly brute and would probably, although you could never tell, be a bad witness, one who would prejudice the jury against himself the moment he opened his mouth. And yet – not to give evidence at all! To offer no explanation of what did take place that night! It would be an exceedingly risky course and one calculated to annoy the jury even more than telling them some sort of story which they might believe or not. What perilous alternatives faced any advocate charged with the defence in a capital case. No one, except possibly a surgeon, had a life more exactly balanced upon his professional skill.

“I should therefore submit,” concluded Mr Wainwright, “with confidence, that the defence has no case to answer.”

The judge said, “The court is much obliged to you for your cogent presentation of this point. It must be ruled, however, as a matter of law, that the Crown has made out a case which requires answering.”

“In this case,” said Mr Wainwright, rising to his feet with renewed energy, “I will call the prisoner.”

“In the name of heaven,” said Superintendent Haxtell, who had been aroused at a godless hour from the first deep and satisfactory night’s rest he had enjoyed since the discovery of Corinne Hart, and was, by now, in a brittle temper, “in the name of heaven, why didn’t you tell someone what you were up to?”

“Well, sir–”

“You’re a policeman, a member of a police force. You’re quite entitled to have bright ideas, but when you have them, why not tell someone else about them and get them worked out properly?”

“I did tell someone. I told Kellaway that I was sure there was something else there.”

“And what did he say?”

“He told me to leave it alone.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

This was an awkward one. Petrella was saved by the telephone bell. It was Dr Summerson.

“I’ve finished the autopsy,” he said. “I gathered from your young man when he called me at four o’clock this morning that you might want the results in a hurry.”

Haxtell said, “Hmp.”

“Very interesting, medically. The body had been weighted with three heavy pieces of marble fender, inside the clothes, and it went straight down into the silt and stayed there. There’s no current in a reservoir to knock it about, so it was in pretty good shape. I’ve sent the hands down to your laboratory.”

“Will they get any prints?”

“No difficulty at all, I should say. The skin’s pretty well intact. Particularly the right hand, which was under the body. This one was shot, too.”

“You surprise me,” said Haxtell bitterly.

“And has been dead, as far as one can tell, about the same length of time.”

“Any chance of an identification – apart from fingerprints?”

“Face and general appearance, you mean? No. Not a chance of that. I noticed an old dislocation of the hip. It might have made the man hobble a bit, or it might not. Difficult to say. Failing the prints, the best thing would be to wait till they’ve got the clothes dried and sorted out and try someone on them. I may have some more for you later.”

Haxtell thanked him, and dialled the Water Board. He caught Mr Lundgren at his desk. The General Manager said, “Another one? How – no one told me you were still working at the reservoir.”

Haxtell passed that one up. He said, “What I wanted to find out was whether your man Ricketts had ever had a dislocated hip. It might have shown as a very slight limp.”

“I’ll look up his medical sheet,” said Lundgren. “But I doubt if it’d show a thing like that. He was wounded, as a very young soldier, in the first war. Do you think–?”

“I’m afraid so, yes,” said Haxtell. “He never got to Blackpool. He got in the way of whatever was going on that night. We may need you, later on, to look at his clothes.”

Lundgren said he would do what he could. Time was going on. It was eleven o’clock. Haxtell said, “There’s one thing we must do. Tell Kellaway what’s happened, and get the news down to the court. I don’t know that it’s going to make a lot of difference, but–”

Heavy steps in the corridor heralded the arrival of Chief Superintendent Barstow. He came through the door like a rhinoceros through a bamboo screen, turned a deeper shade of red when he saw Petrella, and jerked his head at him. Petrella removed himself.

Lurking nervously in the CID room he heard, muted by the intervening passages, the turbulent bass of Barstow in eruption, with shorter, softer passages from Haxtell’s tenor. It was a performance which, at any other time, might have seemed amusing, but he felt no desire to laugh. He knew well enough that it was his bones they were fighting over.

“I think a certain amount of the blame must attach to Kellaway,” Haxtell was saying. “I’ve noticed it before with these Central Office types. They think the rules don’t apply to them. Surely, if there was a decision on policy to be taken – whether or not to carry on with the search after they found the gun – they should have referred it to you.”

“Certainly,” said Barstow. It had not, in fact, occurred to him before, but the point was one well calculated to appeal to him.

“I’m not prejudging the question of whether or not the search should have been widened. If it had been put to me–”

“If it had been put to
me,”
said Barstow, “I should have said, never leave a job half done. But the point is, that it wasn’t put to me.”

“Kellaway is probably so used to being called in by doddering old chief constables, and taking complete charge, and running their shows for them, that it didn’t occur to him that while he was in a London district–”

“Exactly,” said Barstow.

“I’m not saying it wasn’t wrong of Sergeant Petrella to do what he did.”

“Absolutely irregular.”

“And if a disciplinary complaint has been made–”

“We must deal with that when it arises. The first thing is to get this news down to Kellaway.”

“We tried his house as soon as we knew what it was all about, but he had gone. We tried the court too, but he hadn’t turned up there.”

“He could hardly leave court until the summing-up’s over,” said Barstow. “Try them again.”

“So you never went to the Binford Park Reservoir,” said Mr Younger.

“That’s right,” said Howton.

“Neither on that night nor any other night.”

“That’s right.”

“And if you never went to the reservoir, of course, you never went to the reservoir cottage.”

“That’s right.”

“Then how would you account for the fact that a full set of the prints of your right hand were found in the paint work of the cottage window?”

“
If
they were found there.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow that answer.”

“It’s only the police say they found them.”

“I see. You are suggesting that the whole of that evidence was faked by the police.”

“That’s right.”

“The jury will have to decide for themselves on the value of that suggestion,” said Mr Younger politely. “Are you the owner of a blue Riley saloon car, registration number GKR692?”

“No.”

“Have you ever owned such a car?”

“No.”

“Have you ever hired, or used, such a car?”

“Yes. I hired one.”

“And you were using it in September last?”

“As far as I can remember.”

“And, as you have heard, one of the witnesses, a Mrs Gurney, observed a car with this number drive up to the reservoir and a man whom she has identified as you, and the other men, who correspond closely in description to friends of yours, get out of it.”

“I heard her say so.”

“You mean that she made it up?”

“I mean, if she saw someone, it wasn’t me.”

“Then she made a mistake.”

“That’s right.”

“And she imagined the number of the car.”

“That’s right.”

“A curious coincidence that she should have imagined a number that exactly corresponded to the number of your car.”

“Of course it wasn’t a coincidence,” said Howton. “The police told her what number to say.”

“I see. The whole of this evidence is also an invention of the police.”

“That’s right.”

“And the evidence of Mr Carver and Miss Brownlow?” (Mr Carver and Miss Brownlow were a courting couple unearthed by the efforts of Sergeant Dodds.) “Who saw you returning to your parked car just before midnight. And were so suspicious of your behaviour that they, also, took a note of the number?”

“I don’t believe they saw anything.”

“Then where would you suggest they got their information from?”

“I don’t know. They read it in the papers, perhaps.”

“As far as I am aware, no mention of your name ever appeared in the papers.”

“Then someone told them.”

“Told them what?”

“Told them,” said Howton, “that the police were after pinning the killing onto me. There’s some sort of people, as soon as they hear that, they’ll come forward and say anything.”

(Why anyone should have imagined, thought Mr Justice Rowan, that it was in the interests of the prisoner that he should be allowed to give evidence passed the bounds of human understanding.)

“Come again,” said Petrella, into the telephone. “You’ve got what? Damn this line. I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. No, that’s better.”

“Sergeant Blinder. Fingerprints here,” said the voice patiently. “I want to speak to Sergeant Petrella.”

“You’re speaking to him.”

“Oh, it’s you, is it, Patrick. Look here, I’ve got an identification for you.”

“Of those prints we sent you this morning? That’s quick work.”

“Not those. They’re still working on them.”

“What are you talking about, then?”

“A single print you submitted about a week ago.”

“That,” said Petrella. He had forgotten all about it. “Who–?”

“It’s not an absolutely firm identification, mind you. It wasn’t a complete print.”