Yesterday's Papers (9 page)

‘It won't take long. I'll ask him to let you have it as soon as possible.' He glanced inside the folder and picked out a small booklet and a clip of yellowing papers. ‘I see you have a pension and some insurance. What did you do when you were working?'

‘I was personnel manager with a small firm of printers in the city. I spent years doing battle with the trade unions, but in the end it was computerisation which hit us hardest. I made half the workforce redundant and then found myself out of a job as well.'

Harry nodded. So much for Jim's belief that technology was the answer to everything, he thought. Along with its benefits, it brought cuts in employment: not all the changes it made to people's lives were for the better.

‘I've seen it happen before.'

‘Perhaps it was for the best,' said Miller. ‘I had always suffered badly from asthma and I found the pressures of business life were becoming intolerable. Besides, I realised in the end that I was not ideally suited to the work I was doing and in particular my role as welfare officer.' He smiled his discomfiting smile. ‘People have always intrigued me, you see. Yet eventually I discovered I
like
very few of them.'

‘Misanthropy isn't the ideal qualification if you're planning to reincarnate as a solicitor.'

‘But you do not have primarily a welfare role. You delve for facts, organise them, then present your case. It does not matter if you loathe your client. You certainly need not love him.'

‘Maybe it's as well,' said Harry, thinking of the thieves, rapists and murderers for whom he had acted over the years.

‘As for Mr Tweats, my impression is that his main concern was to wash his hands of young Smith. He never seems for a second to have doubted his guilt.'

‘But you must agree that the evidence was damning. How could Smith have known about the scarf, for instance, unless he actually committed the murder?'

‘Could it be that he saw Carole Jeffries wearing the scarf that day and, knowing she had been strangled, made a fortunate guess at the murderer's means?'

‘But why?'

‘I am no psychiatrist, Mr Devlin. I cannot explain the workings of an inadequate mind. But that is my best guess, following my telephone conversation with Renata Grierson.'

‘What did she tell you?'

‘At first she was most reluctant to say anything, but when I pressed her, eventually she said that she was positive that it was impossible for Edwin Smith to have killed Carole Jeffries. When I asked why, all she would say was that she had not learned of that impossibility until after Smith's own death. Hence her silence until now. Evidently I am the first person in whom she has confided the truth.' Miller gave a satisfied smile. ‘So far she has been reluctant to divulge all she knows about the case but I am hopeful that soon she will be more forthcoming. I plan to meet her in the near future, but in the meantime I think you will agree that her remarks are as fascinating as they are significant.'

‘It all sounds vague to me. Are you sure she wasn't simply telling you what she guessed you wanted to hear?'

‘Of course that thought has crossed my mind, but I am happy to trust my instinct. I do not doubt her sincerity.'

‘What of Ray Brill, then? Did he shed any light?'

Miller fiddled with the buttons of his coat. Harry could sniff evasion in the air. ‘He was unable to add anything of substance so far as the murder of Carole was concerned. Although he had seen her on the morning of the twenty-ninth of February, he then set off to London in the company of his singing partner, Ian Brill. There was no way that he could have been the culprit.'

Miller was choosing his words with even more care than usual. Taking a leaf out of Patrick Vaulkhard's book, Harry decided that gentle flattery was the method most likely to draw him out. ‘You have obviously been busy. How many other people involved with the case are you hoping to see?'

‘Frankly, Mr Devlin, I am far from sure. Benny Frederick and Clive Doxey, of course, are in the public eye and easy enough to find, should I wish to do so. Renata proved by far the most elusive of those connected with the case: in the end, I had to resort to advertising in the local press. All I knew was her maiden name, but happily she saw my advert and called me up. It was much easier to trace the whereabouts of Kathleen Jeffries; Shirley, the girl with whom Carole worked; and Deysbrook, the policeman who headed the murder team. Fortunately, all of them still live in Merseyside.'

‘Did Kathleen ever remarry?'

Miller shook his head. ‘By all accounts, she has been something of a recluse since her husband died.'

‘And Shirley, what has happened to her?'

‘Thirty years ago, her surname was Basnett. She has changed it several times since then. I gather her third husband, a man named Titchard, died recently, leaving her a wealthy widow.'

‘So you might speak to each of them?'

‘As I say, I may decide to change my original plans. After all, I have established to my own satisfaction that Smith was not guilty of the crime. On reflection it would, perhaps, be hoping for too much if I were to press on with my investigation in the vain belief that I might be able to identify her killer.'

‘That's not the way you were talking when we first met.'

‘Perhaps I became carried away with myself on that occasion. But I feel I shall probably rest content once I have met and talked in greater detail to Renata Grierson and ascertained precisely why she is so confident that Edwin Smith was no murderer.' Miller smiled his infuriating smile and handed back the old Tweats file. ‘Thank you, Mr Devlin. I do appreciate your help.'

Harry found himself becoming irritated. At the precise moment when Miller had aroused his curiousity in the Sefton Park case, the old man was giving the impression that his own enthusiasm was beginning to wane. Or was he simply seeking to discourage further inquiries now that he had seen Cyril Tweats' papers? Harry decided it was time to tease him.

He tucked the file under his arm and said casually, ‘Better look after this. I have the idea you aren't the only person interested in it.'

He felt a childish sense of gratification to see Miller's eyebrows shoot up. ‘Oh really?'

‘My office was burgled during the night. Nothing seems to have been stolen and it crossed my mind that the intruder might have been looking for this.'

Miller stared at him. Harry had the impression that the old man's mind was working rapidly, but when he spoke again, his manner was elaborately patronising. ‘A far-fetched notion, surely? You and I are the only people who knew of my interest in the file.'

‘Unless,' said Harry gently, ‘you happened to mention it to Renata Grierson, say - or Ray Brill.'

‘Oh ... I am sure I did not. No, Mr Devlin, you are mistaken. Depend upon it.'

But looking at Ernest Miller's pensive expression, Harry suspected that he had made no mistake.

Chapter Ten

people can judge my confession

‘Is he dying?' demanded Jim Crusoe an hour later.

‘Not as far as I'm aware,' said Harry. ‘Miller is one of those characters who always seems to be ailing but the old bugger will probably outlive the lot of us.'

‘His will is straightforward. I can let you have the engrossment before the end of the day if you want.'

‘Thanks. I may want an excuse for another word with Mr Ernest Miller before too long. So if you can prepare it quickly, so much the better.'

‘No problem. Mind you, if we had the latest software, we could turn out any document based on the standard precedents in a matter of minutes at the press of a button. Do you know what we're missing by not having the latest packages?'

‘No, but from the evangelical light in your eyes, I'm afraid you're going to tell me.'

His partner sighed. ‘I suppose it's no use asking if you'd be interested in seeing a rep offering a fifty per cent discount on promotional videos for solicitors' firms?'

Harry pulled a face. ‘Only if my part will be taken by Richard Gere.'

‘Peter Falk might be better casting.'

‘And I suppose you'd want to be played by a young Sean Connery?' A thought occurred to him. ‘Wait a minute. Who made this approach to you about the video?'

‘I received a mailshot a couple of days ago. The follow-up phone call came today. The company is Frederick's, the people who made the management video-tape you vandalised.'

‘I told you, it was the only spare cassette I could find the other night. I wanted to record
The Postman Always Rings Twice
- the Lana Turner version, that is, from the days when the postman didn't spend most of his time delivering computer-generated junk mail to impoverished businessmen. But I might just be willing to make amends. Pass me the literature and I'll give it the once-over.'

Jim's bushy eyebrows lifted. ‘I don't believe I'm hearing this. Harry Devlin showing an interest in PR?'

‘I might even be interested in a meeting to see if they could do anything for us. On one condition.'

Jim gave him a suspicious look. ‘Go on.'

‘That we meet the organ grinder, rather than the monkey. I don't want to waste time with a junior salesman. I'd like a presentation from Benny Frederick himself.'

Benny Frederick was away at a conference in London, the monkey told them, and although he would be willing to see any prospective new customer, he would not be available until after the weekend. Harry had to accept that as good enough, but he could not help chafing with impatience. His conversation with Miller had puzzled him and he could not push the Sefton Park case out of his mind.

He was at a loose end the following day and in the morning he wandered into town, telling himself that he needed to pick up a few odds and ends for the flat as well as food for the week ahead. Yet he did not really fool himself, and before long he found his way to the Bluecoat Gallery, where posters on the railings outside announced an exhibition of
Snaps of the Sixties
, photographs from the Beatles era taken by Benny Frederick. He paid his money and strolled inside.

A girl at the door handed him a leaflet which told him a little about Benny's career. He had inherited his father's studio as a young man in 1961 and had proved to be in the right business in the right place at the right time. His candid camera had caught pop singers, poets and comedians and made him as much of a star as most of them: what Patrick Lichfield was to high society and David Bailey to the world of fashion, Benny Frederick had been to the age of the Mersey Sound. As the city's golden decade had drawn to a close, he had recognised the need to move with the times and his nose for commerce had prompted him to diversify into video, but it was for his photography that most people knew him best. With justice, Harry thought: despite the self-deprecation of the exhibition's title, he could see that the photographs were the work of a talented artist. Benny could capture a personality in a single shot, whether it was Ringo Starr cavorting on Blackpool Beach, Ken Dodd clowning at the Empire or Bessie Braddock haranguing a heckler at an election meeting. Brian Epstein was pictured standing offstage at the Cavern, watching with rapt attention as a young John Lennon sang ‘Baby, It's You', but Harry was more intrigued by a photograph of a nightclub pianist. His hair was plastered with lotion and his lips curled as if he held his piano in contempt. The caption said simply WARREN HULL AT THE PEPPERMINT LOUNGE - 1961. So this was the Brill Brothers' guru, yet another man who would later die violently and long before his time. But of Ray and Ian Brill themselves there was no sign.

For a minute or two, Harry flirted aimlessly with the girl on the door, but then her boyfriend arrived and it was time to move on. He had decided to watch the soccer at Anfield in the afternoon, but even after a liquid lunch at the Dock Brief, he still had time to drift into the second-hand bookshop in Williamson Lane. Normally he haunted the fiction room, thumbing through shabby copies of long-forgotten mysteries by the likes of Anthony Berkeley and John Dickson Carr. He relished the sorcery of the old books, with their bodies discovered in rooms that had every door and window locked and barred and their murders in Turkish baths committed by daggers made of ice. The Golden Age of crime fiction seemed to him to be a time of innocence and charm: between the wars, artifice was everything and only authors, not policemen, indulged themselves in creating elaborate fictions.

For once, though, he concentrated on the true crime shelves, keen to see if anyone had ever written up the strangling in Sefton Park. There were endless accounts of the cases of Charles Bravo and Constance Kent, while Florence Maybrick and James Wallace had a whole row to themselves - but he could find nothing on the killing of Carole. Her death had caused a sensation in its day, but it held no interest for the murder buff: there was no suspense in a case that everyone regarded as open and shut.

What if Miller could establish with Renata Grierson's evidence - whatever it might be - that Carole Jeffries had not died at the hands of Edwin Smith? Would the public interest be stirred and would the men who had known her, the likes not only of Ray Brill, but also Benny Frederick and Clive Doxey, at last come under the microscope? Might long-forgotten motives suddenly emerge?

The thought fascinated him as he made his way upstairs. Perhaps he should do a little background reading. The first floor of the shop was dusty and quiet and he suspected most of the stock stayed on the shelves from one year to the next. Never before had he bothered to search out books about politics or the social sciences - they were subjects he would ordinarily travel a distance to avoid - and it took him a while to find his way around. But in the end he came up with a fat hardback and a dog-eared Penguin that made his visit worthwhile.
Our Sterile Society
by Guy Jeffries and
Radicalism And The Law
, a collection of articles by Sir Clive Doxey. A little light reading for after the match.

At home that evening, Harry listened to Dionne Warwick asking the way to San José while he studied his purchases. Guy Jeffries' face appeared on the back of his book's dustwrapper. He was giving the camera a youthful grin: the photograph must surely have been taken in the early fifties, years before first publication. Harry had little experience of the literary world, but he had noticed before that in real life authors always seemed far older than their publicity pictures made them appear. The biographical notes were more up-to-date, recording the glittering prizes Guy Jeffries had earned so rapidly during his academic career and including an encomium from a future Prime Minister.

There is no more fluent exponent of the integral link between politics and philosophy in Britain today than Guy Jeffries
, Harold Wilson had proclaimed, and although it was hardly an epitaph that would have encouraged Harry to glance inside the book in normal circumstances, now he opened it at once.

Even before he reached chapter one, he was struck by the dedication which came immediately after the title page.
To Carole, whom I adore
. Both Harry's parents had been killed in a road accident when he was a boy but somehow he had never doubted that his own old man, taciturn and undemonstrative though he had been, would have done anything to spare his son from pain. Again he tried to guess at the grief Jeffries had felt at the death of his daughter. To lose one's mother and father when young was a cruel blow, but to lose an only child must be a hundred times worse.

Guy's writing was fluent and - even in a chapter on the unpromising subject of British industrial policy - passionate. There was no denying the strength of his convictions or the verve with which he propounded them. The strangler, Harry reflected, had not only robbed Carole of life but also her father of the will to continue his march down the path to fame and fortune.

Late in the evening, Harry turned to Clive Doxey's book. It had been written during his socialist phase and the biographical note at the front did not reflect the author's subsequent political metamorphoses although the elegant style of the main text was familiar to Harry from Doxey's more recent journalism. A forceful essay on
Punishment
made it clear that he belonged to the school of penal reform that believes in fining householders careless enough to allow themselves to be burgled and concentrating the resources thereby acquired on the rehabilitation of those driven by deprivation to commit the burglaries. What, Harry wondered, of the person who had committed the murder in Sefton Park? If neither Smith nor some other inadequate was guilty, he came back to the possibility that the culprit was someone who had known Carole well. Someone who had been able to cast his crime aside and carry on living in civilised society without apparent strain or shame.

Unless, thought Harry as his eyelids began to droop, that someone was Ray Brill and the decline of his career was due to something more significant than his failure to come to terms with the changing world of pop.

When he woke the next morning, he was still haunted by the same idea. Now he could pinpoint Miller's change of attitude towards the Cyril Tweats file. Even after speaking to Renata Grierson, he had been curious about its contents at the time of his telephone call on Thursday. But that same afternoon he had been anxious to choke off any interest Harry might have in the case. Could it be that Ray, taken off balance by Miller's news that Smith seemed to be in the clear, might have said something that amounted to an admission of his own guilt?

Yet the more Harry debated with himself, the more fanciful his guesswork seemed. Hadn't Sherlock once said that it was a capital mistake to theorise without data? What he needed was hard facts and Miller's determination to play his cards close to his chest simply had the effect of making him more eager than ever to find things out for himself. Yet where should he start?

Best to begin close to home, he concluded. At least he knew the man who had been at the heart of things thirty years ago. The time had come to pay a call on Cyril Tweats.

It was not a decision he took lightly. He had always found Cyril an infuriating companion and had reacted with horror to Jim's suggestion, when the practice of Tweats and Company came on the market, that they should put in a bid.

‘Are you serious?' he had demanded. ‘We'll be the laughing stock of Liverpool.'

‘Laughing all the way to the bank, if the figures I've seen stack up,' his partner had replied. ‘Cyril's comfortably off and he's not seeking much money for the goodwill.'

‘Goodwill? Most of his files are marked with the black spot.'

‘You exaggerate, as usual. Say what you like about Cyril - and you usually do - he has plenty of profitable work-in-progress in his cabinets. Besides, his overheads are minimal.'

‘Of course they are. He pays his staff peanuts and never moves a muscle on any of his files unless someone forces his hand. What about the risk of negligence claims?'

‘Warranties and insurance,' said Jim with a wave of the hand. ‘Believe me, we can afford a bank loan to pay him what he's looking for and wait for the money to roll in.'

‘If it's such a good deal, why aren't our competitors biting his hand off?'

‘Same reason you're so nervous. Cyril has a wonderful reputation with his clients, quite the opposite with other solicitors. Besides, most firms are trying to move upmarket. They're aiming for the corporate business, that's where the money is supposed to be. I tell you, though, Harry, I've examined Cyril's accounts as sceptically as if they had been prepared by Robert Maxwell and as far as I can see, we simply can't lose.'

So the deal had gone through and although Harry still had the occasional nightmare that one day a knock on their door would herald the arrival of joint envoys from the Fraud Squad and the Law Society, he had to admit that thus far their investment had paid off. But he still thought it a fluke: rather like the entire career of Cyril Tweats.

As soon as he had studied the last football league tables in
The Sunday Times
and consigned the business and personal finance sections to the wastepaper bin unread, he set off for Aigburth. Cyril had retired to a palatial villa in a quiet road with views over the cricket field.
Only a stone's throw away from Battlecrease House where Florence and James Maybrick lived
, thought Harry, but then he bit his lip and told himself to watch out: crime was rapidly becoming not only his bread and butter but also the obsession of his every waking hour. As he turned into the drive, he saw a man bending over a drain underneath one of the downspouts on the side of the building. Harry thought it was a tramp but when the man straightened, he realised his mistake. Cyril himself had been clearing out a handful of soggy brown leaves. In his donkey jacket and elderly trilby, he hardly looked like a distinguished professional man, but Harry reflected that was fair enough, since he had not been one.