Corrupted: Murder and cover-up at the heart of government (Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers Book 4)

by Simon Michael

  The woman’s eyes focus completely on Charles’s for the first time as she understands what he is suggesting. Tears now course freely down her cheeks but she weeps in complete silence. Her wretchedness is all the more unnerving for the absence of any noise. Has she had to learn to cry silently? Charles wonders. She chews her lip, agonising indecision distorting her blotchy features.

  ‘We might be able to arrange something…’ says Charles, although from the corner of his eye he sees Max shrugging helplessly.

  ‘I have no money. No clothes. Nothing,’ she says. ‘And I couldn’t go back to collect anything.’

  Charles senses a glimmer of light. ‘But if we could arrange all that … would you do it?’

  Charles has suddenly remembered a place in Eastbourne where one of his former clients settled. She’d been beaten and raped by her ex-husband for over a decade before fighting back, for which the abusive husband brought charges against her. After Charles secured her acquittal she started a bed and breakfast business under a new name and, two years later, was thriving. Perhaps she’d take in a couple of desperate runaways? I’ll have to take them down, he thinks; this isn’t something I could arrange by telephone. Probably have to give her some money too, he reflects, wondering if he’ll be able to get back to the bank before it closes.

  When Mrs Whitehouse replies, her voice comes out in a whisper. ‘Yes, perhaps,’ she says. ‘But I think Teddy will refuse. He … he …’ her voice tails off and becomes a mere whisper, ‘… hates me, I think.’

  She shakes her head again, but Charles sees enough uncertainty in her expression to be cautiously optimistic. The taxi slows and pulls up on Whitechapel Road outside the London Hospital.

  Charles scans the area around the entrance. ‘It looks all right, but there’s so much coming and going it’s difficult to tell. Which, I suppose, was your plan.’

  ‘I wanted to lose him in a crowd,’ says Max. ‘The Royal London seemed perfect.’

  Charles leans through the window behind the cabbie’s head and pays the fare. The three of them get out. ‘Do you know where Teddy is?’ he asks Max.

  ‘I think so. I’ve not been yet, but I was given directions.’

  They climb the steps and enter the building through its central arch beneath a huge clock, and cross a courtyard. The area teems with members of the public, doctors, nurses, and patients, many in nightclothes, some wheeling mobile infusion stands, several in wheelchairs and a few being moved on gurneys. Big working men in dressing gowns and slippers smoke in groups. Max pauses, trying to get his bearings, and gives up. He stops a nurse hurrying across their path.

  ‘Could you direct us to Buxton Ward, please?’ he asks.

  She points. ‘If you go down that corridor, there is an information desk. If it’s unattended there’s a plan of the building on the wall.’ She rushes off.

  The group negotiates its way through the crowd to the information desk where they are given further directions, but the London Hospital resembles a small town of interconnected buildings and covered corridors and it takes them a further fifteen minutes and two additional sets of directions to reach Buxton Ward.

  Through the small window in the closed doors Charles sees two long rows of beds. All but a few of the beds are occupied by a child, some in their mid-teens and some as young as two or three. Several lie still as corpses under identical white sheets and blue blankets, but others kneel or sit on their beds, talking across the gaps separating them, gesticulating and laughing. Mrs Whitehouse pushes between the two lawyers and reaches to open the door.

  ‘Not in there,’ says Max. ‘I was told he was down there, in a side ward.’ He leads the way past the children’s ward and down a short flight of linoleum-covered steps. A few steps further on to their right is a set of double doors forming an airlock. Above the first set of doors is a sign reading ‘Isolation Ward’. A double window forms a hatch through which food can be passed without the medical staff coming into contact with the occupants of the ward.

  Charles looks through the windows and sees four beds equally spaced in the ward. Only one is occupied, that closest to the window overlooking East London. A small table and chair stand in the corridor beside the doors, but they are unoccupied and the corridor is deserted. There is a half-drunk mug of tea on the table on top of a well-thumbed copy of that day’s Daily Sketch bearing several brown tea rings. Charles reaches out and feels the mug: still lukewarm.

  ‘Is it locked?’ asks Charles.

  Max tentatively tests the first door, which opens towards them. ‘Apparently not,’ he says, and he pushes at the second door of the airlock which also gives way. He holds the door open for Charles and then Mrs Whitehouse to enter.

  As Charles steps into the centre of the ward between the first two unoccupied beds, a chill suddenly sweeps through his body and the hairs on the back of his neck rise. Later, when the next few seconds replay in his mind’s eye — as they do, against his will, for the rest of his life — he cannot say with certainty what made him instantly aware that something was terribly wrong. Perhaps it was the fact that the sudden noise of their entry into the silent ward, cut off from the hospital bustle by the double doors, caused no movement from the bed by the window. Perhaps it was the smell; later Charles cannot say if at that moment he noticed the metallic odour of copious quantities of blood or that feature was later added by his imagination. Perhaps Mrs Whitehouse’s thin high-pitched scream started at that instant rather than when she reached the foot of the bed and saw her son’s staring eyes.

  Teddy faces the window, his knees drawn up to his chest and his eyes open. At first it looks to Charles as if he is gazing over the rooftops of London, the chimneys belching smoke, the constant ebb and flow of miniature people, and the cars and buses moving and stopping, moving and stopping with the heavy London traffic. Teddy’s left arm hangs just outside the rectangle of the neatly-tucked blankets and beneath it is a widening and slowly-expanding pool of dark red blood. When in due course the police arrive and Charles describes the scene to them, he realises that the size of the circular puddle, almost a yard in diameter, means that Teddy must have been almost completely exsanguinated before the three of them even entered the room. Later still, when the sticky sheets are eventually peeled back by a forensic expert wearing gloves there will be found, held loosely between Teddy’s right thumb and forefinger, both smeared with blood, a razor blade; a blade which the pathologist will be able to match perfectly to the two neat lateral incisions in Teddy’s left wrist which completely severed his radial artery.

  Charles’s shock cannot prevent the barrister’s part of his mind clicking instantly into gear, as he wonders why the expected blood spray from a severed artery, often on an adjoining wall, sometimes even on the ceiling, is not immediately evident. Then, looking more carefully, he sees that there is indeed an arc of fine droplets on the wall although, underneath the blankets and next to the bloody limb, the sheets are saturated red. Teddy must have pulled his arm in almost at the same instant as the cut was made, thinks Charles. Perhaps to hide the gush of blood from someone looking through the doors; perhaps to hide it from himself and allow himself to pretend he was merely falling asleep; or, and this is the possibility that most disturbs Charles’s dreams for many years, perhaps someone else pulled the arm in and held it there forcibly.

  That prompts Charles to look around him for any sign that someone else inflicted the cuts, but the room looks calm and orderly. The bedclothes are undisturbed; the furniture is all in place; there’s no sign of anything in the room that should not belong there. Charles wonders if the pathologist conducting the post mortem will find tell-tale fingerprint bruises on Teddy’s forearm, perhaps on both arms, revealing that he was held fast until his heart pumped enough of his life’s blood onto the floor for him to slip into unconsciousness. Charles can see no such bruises, although they could well be invisible on the skin surface anyway.

  Mrs Whitehouse’s first lungful of air is exhausted and she draws breath
for a second, but she is distracted by the noise of the sealed doors opening as a nurse enters, bearing a tray with what would have been Teddy’s lunch; a bowl of soup, a white roll and an apple. She stops dead in her tracks.

  ‘Who are you?’ she demands.

  ‘We’re Teddy’s lawyers,’ says Charles. ‘And this is his mother.’

  ‘Yes, the officer said you’d likely be along. He only left a few minutes ago. I’m just organising —’

  ‘Look!’ commands Charles, and he points at Teddy.

  The nurse takes a few further steps into the room and sees the blood on the far side of the bed. With remarkable sangfroid she places the tray at the foot of Teddy’s bed and pushes past Max and Mrs Whitehouse. ‘Excuse me,’ she says peremptorily.

  Seeing all the blood around his wrist, she places the pads of her fingers gently under the angle of Teddy’s jaw and feels for his jugular pulse. Charles cannot help but hold his breath along with Mrs Whitehouse, clinging to the slenderest of hopes that perhaps, against the evidence of their eyes, Teddy might still be alive. But Charles has seen death often enough to recognise it immediately and he is not surprised when, without looking up or removing her gentle hand, the nurse sighs deeply and shakes her head. Before the nurse can speak Mrs Whitehouse lets out her retained breath and, with it, a high-pitched scream. It’s an inhuman sound, the keening of an animal in unbearable pain.

  Charles and Max step out of Cloak Lane police station into bright sunshine, having each given a statement of what they’d seen. Neither has mentioned any suspicion that Teddy’s death might have been murder rather than suicide. As Charles pointed out to Max while they waited in the corridor outside Teddy’s room for the police to return, nothing could be gained by sharing their concerns. It was undeniable that Teddy had already attempted suicide, and by the same method, a mere two weeks earlier, and the hospital staff confirmed that since he arrived from the remand home he had remained completely uncommunicative and mentally unwell.

  Charles is almost certain that Teddy was murdered, but he can’t totally dismiss the possibility that the lost boy used the opportunity of the removal of his police guard to take his own life. Could he have acquired a razor blade at some point, either at the remand home or in one of the hospitals, and hidden it until presented with an opportunity of using it? Yes, Charles concludes; of course he could. Would it do any good for him to express his concerns to the police? Certainly not. He has bitter experience of attempting to persuade the Metropolitan Police of the criminality of the Kray twins, and knows that accusations from his quarter will be ignored. It is still commonly believed in London that Charles is, variously, in the Krays’ pockets or waging a vendetta against them, but both preconceptions make it unlikely that he’d receive serious attention. Except perhaps by DS Sean Sloane, but Sloane is himself now suspended, perhaps even about to be dismissed. And then finally there is the issue of Charles’s own safety. Making an official complaint to the police about Teddy’s supposed murder, whether believed or not, would inevitably come to the attention of the Krays. Thereafter his life would no longer be worth a tuppenny damn.

  So Charles swallows it down again. He tells himself that he did everything he possibly could to protect the boy, more than anyone else would, and more than was wise for his own safety. He tells himself that he couldn’t have affected the outcome. He has been playing a weak hand throughout against a strong opponent, and eventually his bluff was called. But he cannot ignore the insistent voice in the back of his head: what did he miss? What more could he have done to save the poor boy’s life? Whether Teddy Behr was guilty of murder or not, Charles cannot accept that his death has in any way balanced the scales. He was a victim; a boy who needed love like a plant needed water. And he died of thirst.

  So it is with mixed feelings and minds in turmoil that Charles and Max silently shake hands on the London pavement, turn and go their separate ways. Charles is about to cross the road and jump on a bus heading back towards the Temple when he changes his mind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Wednesday, 29 July, 1964

  Charles has now been drunk for almost thirty hours. The degree of intoxication has fluctuated during that period, but only because for sections he has been unconscious. There are other sections where he is reasonably confident he wasn’t asleep but has no recollection of where he was or what he was doing. Right now he is less drunk than he has been, but he is still, by any standards, very drunk.

  He remembers having a shower at the flat on Fetter Lane and eating his first solid food for a couple of days, a greasy burger, somewhere around St Paul’s Cathedral. For a short period he felt better, and it was during that moment of relative lucidity he made the decision to go on a tour of the Krays’ clubs, pubs and other drinking establishments.

  As the tour lengthened with a drink or two at each bar; as he asked questions and deliberately made a nuisance of himself, he became progressively more belligerent and, finally, outright violent. He now sports a swollen black eye and a lump on his chin, courtesy of the bouncer at an illegal speiler, an East End gambling club dealing in hard liquor and palmed poker cards where he pushed once too often and a bit too hard.

  He decides to return to the club where he started his search earlier that day, the Kentucky Club on Mile End Road. However his increasingly loud and indiscreet enquiries have by now reached the ears of those manning the doors of all the Krays’ watering holes: this time he’s expected and he’s barred entry altogether. As Charles prepares, drunkenly optimistic, to take on both of the bouncers at the same time, through the velvet curtains into the bar beyond he catches sight of someone he recognises.

  ‘Charlie! Charlie!’ he calls loudly.

  A good-looking slim man with light brown hair turns; Charlie Kray, the older brother of Ronnie and Reggie. Charles has known Charlie even longer than he has known the twins. The eldest Kray boy is three years Charles’s senior, but he too boxed at the same gym and was looked up to by the thirteen-year-old Charlie Horowitz when the latter started the sport. Less violent than his younger siblings, although reputed to be almost as steeped in their criminal enterprises as they, he and Charles have never actually fallen out despite the problems with Ronnie and Reggie.

  The two bouncers ignore Charles’s shouts and each grabs one of his arms to restrain him and force him back out of the door. Charles struggles violently, causing a noisy scuffle, and one of the velvet curtains is pulled off its rings. The brass circles scatter on the floor, some rolling inside the bar. The commotion causes several of the guests within to turn to watch, and it is that which prompts Charlie Kray to walk over.

  ‘Come on, Charles,’ he says reasonably. ‘You’ve had too much to drink, and you’re making a scene. There are celebrities and members of the press inside. You don’t want your picture in the papers again, do you?’

  ‘I wanna talk to your brothers!’ shouts Charles.

  ‘Well they don’t want to talk to you, chum, and if you’ll take my advice you’ll go home and sleep it off.’

  Even in Charles’s drunken state he realises that he’s not going to be able to force his way into the club. Maybe less punch and more persuasion? he thinks. He makes an effort to slow his breathing and calm himself. He straightens his tie, not altogether successfully, and brushes down his jacket where he was rolled over the pavement at the speiler. He takes a deep breath and speaks levelly, slurring his words only slightly.

  ‘If I promise to make no trouble, may I speak to Ronnie, please?’ Charlie Kray looks over the dishevelled barrister sceptically. ‘You have my word, Charlie,’ insists Charles. ‘I just need to ask him something.’

  After a moment’s further consideration Charlie Kray replies, ‘Just wait here.’ He speaks to the bouncers. ‘Don’t let him in.’

  He disappears for a few moments and then returns. ‘Frisk him. If he’s clean, escort him to the back room. Keep hold of him, and at the first sign of trouble of any description, knock his fucking head off and throw him out. Yo
u’ve got five minutes, Horowitz, but only ’cos letting you go means you’ll turn up somewhere else and cause more trouble. You’d better behave.’

  Having satisfied themselves that Charles carries no weapons, each bouncer takes one of Charles’s elbows and he is walked like a naughty schoolboy through the crowd, which parts for him and his escort. He is taken to the far side of the building and through a second pair of velvet curtains covering an archway. The honour guard comes to a halt at a door and one of the bouncers knocks. The door opens inwards and Charles is shoved into the room.

  Sitting round the table are the Krays, a man who Charles knows vaguely and whom he believes to be their accountant, and a couple of other suits. He appears to have interrupted a business meeting because, in addition to the glasses of drinks and half-empty plates of sandwiches, the table is littered with documents and architects’ plans.

  The final member of the group is a man whom Charles has never seen in life, but whom he recognises immediately from the documents provided by Wolfgang: Angelo Bruno, otherwise known as the “Gentle Don”. According to Wolfgang, Bruno, a bona fide member of the American Mafia, a Sicilian whose family controls Philadelphia, has been in London to negotiate a partnership with the Krays to run the new casinos springing up in the West End. He is also Patrizia’s “manager”.

  Reggie Kray speaks first. ‘We’re busy, Charlie, as you can see. What’s up?’

  Although he hears Reggie’s question, Charles is completely distracted by Angelo Bruno’s presence at the table. Charles stands between the two bouncers, swaying slightly, his lips parted, and raises his hand. He manages to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth.

  ‘You,’ he says, pointing at Bruno.