Trial by Fire (12 page)

Òh, I don't know about that, George. Other things as good,' said Henry, patting his own rounded stomach. 'Not bad, though, George. Not bad at all. For a living.'

Even at this early hour, George's voice was raised. 'Don't be silly, Henry. Fellow's murdered someone. Got to be defended. Only legal aid, but never mind. Phoned up at midnight, this woman did, in tears. Nothing I could do but pitch up and be a nuisance. Which I was. Couldn't help him then: not allowed. But I've got him now. Stuck with him. Don't mind, really.'

`Bit much, George, bit much.'

`See what you mean, Henry, see what you mean. The victim was John Blundell's better half, and she was, wasn't she? Ha. John won't like it much if I get the fellow off? Well, sorry about that, Henry.'

`Bit much, George, really.'

Ì know, Henry, I know. Nothing I can do, see what I mean.'

They yawed at each other in this fashion, feinting halfhearted verbal blows for a while longer, standing in the modern foyer while three junior solicitors slipped in behind and a receptionist with tinted hair blinked into her telephone. Honour was about to be satisfied when PC Amanda Scott stepped through the door carrying a large buff envelope marked 'On Her Majesty's Service' for the attention of G. Harmoner, Esq. Amanda was wearing blue tights with patterns in lace, a frequent sly adornment to an outfit otherwise perfectly plain, and Henry thought she looked jolly nice indeed.

He also felt she had somehow lost his argument for him. George came to the same conclusion as his brother regarding her appearance, apart from considering that her legs in those things looked as if spiders were crawling down them, and he smirked, obviously. When Amanda identified him so easily out of the two, George smirked even wider. Personal delivery from personable young women was not frequent in conveyancing: teach Henry a thing or two. Amanda, after being thanked by name for her service, left as courteously as she had arrived.

Henry barked incredulously. 'That's a policewoman?' Ìt is, Henry, it is. Lots of them like that now.'

`Good God,' said Henry. 'I give up. Get the bugger to plead, George. He hasn't a chance in hell. First Yvonne Blundell and then a woman like that: they've done for him.'

George knew the sad limitations of brother Henry's criminal wisdom, but after a cursory examination of a relatively small file of evidence, mostly scientific with Sumner's written confession to half the deed, George tended to agree with the verdict given from the depths of Henry's ignorance. Not much scope here for contesting the evidence at preliminary proceedings; at least a prima facie case had been proved.

Shame. No fuss in front of the local magistrates.

George liked fuss in front of the local magistrates and was very good at creating his only chance as a mere solicitor to harangue the witnesses before the whole thing passed into the hands of a barrister and he took the back seat apart from instructing like an ineffective puppeteer, hand-holding some Queen's Counsel who earned twice his own salary. But if this fellow, this poxy fellow of a bloody poetry teacher — his statement as well as his curriculum vitae made you sick — had a thought in his head about pleading guilty to anything, he had another think coming.

Not at George Harmoner's hands would he plead to careless driving en route to the pub, never mind stabbing to death a wealthy woman afterwards. George sat back and thought, saving the full and sickening details of pathology for long after lunch. Good business, this, even if it was a pity about Mrs B., but she was still a case bound to attract plenty of publicity, her and her big house and all. 'See here, Henry, the property boom is slowing down in this neck of the woods. Made us rich but may not make us richer. It may be time to revise the direction of Amor and Harmoner.

Keeping an eye on the ever-moving ball of lucrative but discreet East End crime, shoving a name in front of all those big, dishonest market traders. Only money, nothing nasty; might not be a bad idea.' Again he thought, Pity about Mrs B., but not a time to waste pity, was it? He'd save the kiss of life for the turd who'd killed her. Not bad, the law: not bad at all.

He hummed to himself, undeterred by the pile of files stacked on one side of his desk.

Nothing to it, method was all he required and a sense of order, and with those two qualities, everything was curable.

Then, from the lines of a statement in quite another case featuring the theft of a set of carpentry tools including paring knife, a thought struck George sideways from halfway down the page. Knife. Stab wounds. He dropped what he was reading, picked up Sumner's file, one line stored in his head from the first hurried look at the pathologist's report. What had he said?

'Wounds probably inflicted with single-edge weapon, a knife.' That was what he had read, the very words his photographic memory had transferred to Compartment A along with the contents of the printed exhibit list.

Sumner denied either using or possessing the knife. So where was this single-edge knife, eh? Not on the bloody list. Scrabble around a bit, a good eye glossing pages with speed.

No knife: not in Sumner's house, in the dustbins, or on the ground; not the sort of thing a poetic chap carried about, if you see what I mean, especially in Branston on the way out for a quiet drink at the pub. Not a bloke to fish, either, as George was; single-edge sharp knife handy there. Fishing line, that sort of thing; cuts it.

Has to be very sharp. George was sharp, too.

He sat back and flexed his fingers. He could see the chance for a showy pretend contest in front of the magistrates after all, if only to find out about the knife. Good bloodthirsty stuff, even if unreported in the press; there'd be enough of an audience at the back of court. Make you gasp and stretch your eyes: wounds, causes of wounds, blade of knife, the very sound of it an incantation.

Passing the offices of Amor and Harmoner, sitting on top of the bus, William Featherstone, otherwise in a placid state, ventured a glance at the law firm's windows, scowled, and turned back to face the road before him. While his parents were not aware of one George Harmoner, William was and knew him as more than one local notable who would not have graced their establishment for a funeral.

William had met the man in circumstances unfavourable, a fact his mother would have to learn sooner or later, he supposed. George Harmoner had stood above him in the interview room of Chingford Police Station, called by the police as was perfectly proper in the case of a young shoplifter only just across the boundary of seventeen where the calling out of parents was mandatory. William's response to the question, 'Do you want a lawyer?' had been,

'Dunno. ' Quickly appreciating his uncertain temper, the police had been careful to call a lawyer who was local to where the boy lived.

He gave them the village, not the address. It was also known that Harmoner never refused a case, but on sight of the pale-eyed William plucking at the fraying crotch area of his grubby trousers and gazing out of the window with genuine vagueness, he wished he had.

William did not like George, either. The man had shouted at him slowly as if he was deaf. 'Do you understand, William? They are not going to charge you. You told the lady here' —

indicating a very young probationary woman police constable in the corner of the room —

'that you took those things.' William would have told the pretty probationer anything she wanted to know, and had.

George continued. 'The big police officer' — here he gestured with his hands, making William imagine that the chief inspector he had seen once was shaped like a balloon —'will give you what is called a caution.' Oh, he's a caution: William remembered his mother saying that and sniggered. He had not absorbed what Harmoner was talking about, other than the strictures: yes, he would tell his parents, and no, he would not shoplift again.

He told the balloon inspector he was sorry, because the inspector was a very big man indeed and that seemed a prudent thing to say. William was backward but, within his limitations, not stupid. He did not tell his mother: he expected he might be arrested again if this was the done thing, and he was not sorry at all.

`Come with me, Evie,' he had said earlier.

`No, don't be so bloody silly. Why would I want to do that? And besides, someone might see us. We'll go on the tube another day.'

Pity Evelyn did not care for riding the buses when she had nothing else to do.

Coasting down country lanes, a mile or two of fields between mini conurbations, leaving Greater London behind and then joining it again, sitting above the driver and the throbbing engine, William was in seventh heaven. The No. 61 took him from Branston to Chigwell.

From there the 134 — pay as you enter, nasty flapping doors that prevented jumping out between stops, another game denied — would take him to Epping via Loughton.

Epping had a long High Street full of closed-in stores. He didn't much like that, either; he could not prowl in shops where they were always asking if they could help, the request made in expectation of denial, a mere shooing-away exercise, which he recognized. Worse than market stalls where he could not get a look in. The No. 206, green this time, a dull colour but a nice old bus with a bell, took him all the way to Stortford where there was a perfectly normal modern arcade, the sort he preferred.

Shops were open at the front; he did not have to push open doors and announce his presence. Today was Waltham Cross, at the opposite end of the line from Stortford via the 65

from Theyden, but still as full of glittering things. The heavy hand had fallen on his shoulder in Stortford, so it seemed better to leave it alone for a while. All else failing, he could return to Branston High Street or nearby Woodford, which was probably his favourite. There were endless opportunities for changes of mind. He liked that, too.

William's purposes were confused when he approached the shops. Whether he approached from the front or the rear, he never knew quite what he was going to do next.

Heart-beating, nail-biting suspense. His grin so wide that anyone catching sight of him wondered if he smiled in recognition of them, then turned away embarrassed, wondering who he was and should they say hello. Back entrances did not carry such traffic although he still smiled automatically.

William had been a clumsy mimic as a child, never picking up more than half the idea, but he had mimicked and now mastered in different form his father's scavenging instinct. Bins filled with combustible paper, straw, and polystyrene foam, bits of wire and yards of tissue, and, oh, so often at the bottom of a box, something forgotten, lost in the packaging, or in another, something slightly damaged. At twelve years old, he had played for hours with discarded tapes, holding the endless ribbon of plastic to the light and winding it around his head. At fourteen, he had begun to carve shapes in packing foam, faces and robotlike hands with angular fingers, cut by a Stanley knife too blunt for any use but this.

At seventeen he could spend secret hours in the manufacture of wonderful, if tiny, things made from wire and glass fragments, glittery items half resembling rings, bracelets of bottle fragments, but he was far more selective in what he acquired. Bringing home his own bulk along with more under the arm was too conspicuous these days, even for parents such as his own. He purchased or stole in miniature, all of it acquired with a purpose, and never once did he see it as theft, not even when he took an item from a shop counter. He only grabbed from the shop when it was clear to him that taking one item left a dozen of the same, and no one could possibly want so many, surely. Theft was when you took it straight out of someone else's pocket. He had seen that done once, and it had shocked him.

`How are you today?'

`Very well, thank you. How's your cold?' Showing a mouthful of teeth in a smile as wide as a bay, William was known on the buses as a harmless freak. The motion made him talkative: he would chat to bus conductors if they existed, fellow travellers, if not. Yes, yes, they would say, never quite allowing him to engage their attention unless they were over sixty-five.

The subjects of William's conversations were food prices, learned from home; poor bus service and lying timetables, learned as he went along; the weather, which was a constant disruption to his soul; public transport; and aches and pains, which he understood. He debated all these topics intelligently with the pensioners travelling on cheap off-peak tickets. On the last subject, William was highly sympathetic, even offered advice. He liked the elderly and the very young. Those in the middle were a sinister blur.

Chingford. Should he alight here and find a quicker bus to base? No, he hated this bus shelter; wait a few more stops, then change; half an hour at least between buses, but a nicer shelter farther down the road on this drizzly, damp day. An old-fashioned shelter with yards of graffiti on the concrete walls, plenty to examine from proper wooden seats similarly decorated. Dear, dear — a phrase learned from the pensioners — Waltham would be crowded. School holidays, teenagers on the streets poking fun, boys moving in gangs, girls with thin legs, flouncy hair, fat lips. Little bottoms and tiny bosoms in all those funny clothes.

Just like Evelyn, but nothing like Evelyn. Nothing, no one, no jewel or treasured thing in his whole wide world compared to Evelyn. He closed his eyes for a moment and missed the stop.

William's treasure and father's darling child was trying to listen to her father, stuck in his stuffy office which did not compare with the posher front of the shop — the good plain carpet, carved desk and chairs, banks of plants in bamboo shelving, a mixture of traditional and the new, blueprint for Branston, et cetera. So John Blundell had instructed the eager designer, knocking her down to a cut price for the job, since she clearly hoped for, and he vaguely promised, other jobs to follow in his modest chain of offices and show houses.

None did. Having cheated her slightly, Blundell was perfectly happy with the well-textured result. Since no one else but himself occupied the office behind his, it was not important enough for expenditure. A part of John Blundell was very parsimonious indeed.