Death in the Coverts

by Roderic Jeffries

  ‘Did you notice a cartridge case?’

  ‘I… I wasn’t rightly looking.’

  ‘Have you not just assured us that you could never ever overlook such an object?’

  Welter, not bothering to stand, spoke loudly. ‘Are you applying to treat this witness as hostile?’

  Calaghan half turned. ‘I wouldn’t call him hostile, merely temporarily obstructive.’

  The judge spoke to the witness. ‘Did you see an empty cartridge case in the ride, near the spot on the plan marked “cartridge”?’

  Adams looked down at the plan that he still held. His grizzled face expressed the worried turmoil in his mind. A genuine love for the family he had served for so many years battled with his dread of lying to the law.

  ‘You will answer,’ snapped the judge.

  ‘Well I… I didn’t, but that don’t mean there wasn’t one there.’

  Calaghan took up the questioning. ‘Are you now trying to reverse your previous evidence and say that you might have missed an empty cartridge case lying out in the ride?’

  ‘I might’ve done.’

  ‘You might have done,’ repeated Calaghan, with heavy emphasis on the word ‘might.’

  ‘One last point. Did any other part of the shoot that day take place near King’s Beat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And did you hear any shots other than the shots you expected to hear from the guns in position?’

  ‘No.’

  Welter cross-examined. He smiled and spoke in his friendliest voice. ‘Mr Adams, please don’t let yourself be bullied into saying something which you don’t mean.’

  ‘By the same token,’ interrupted the judge, ‘the witness will not allow himself to be led into inaccuracies by anything you may say.’

  ‘Quite so, my lord.’ Welter turned back. ‘Mr Adams, on a shooting day you must be a very busy man?’

  ‘Maybe,’ answered Adams, who was determined not to make any more admissions to anyone.

  ‘And since the success, or otherwise, of the day’s shooting falls on your shoulders you have a very great deal to think about.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You must, indeed, have so much to think about that your mind cannot at all times be fully focused on what it is that you are doing at some particular moment? When you were walking down the ride in question, you were probably deep in thought about all the thousand and one things pertaining to the shoot?’

  Calaghan stood up. ‘Perhaps my learned friend would prefer that he should give the evidence?’

  ‘Without a doubt,’ replied the judge, ‘but such opportunity will not be offered him in my court. Mr Welter, you will leave the witness to give the evidence.’

  ‘But of course, my lord, since nothing would better suit my case.’ Welter continued his cross-examination. ‘On Saturday the fourth of December you were holding one of your big shoots, were you not?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Does such a shoot require more planning than a smaller day would?’

  Adams hesitated.

  ‘Let me put it another way. Would you describe yourself as concerned with more details on a big day than on a small day?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Welter looked at the jury. ‘Then in such circumstances it is easy to see how preoccupied you must have been.’ He sat down.

  Calaghan re-examined very briefly. ‘Do you agree with what you said earlier? That whenever you are in the woods you are automatically on the lookout for signs of poaching?’

  ‘Well, I…’

  ‘Are empty cartridge cases one such sign?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you walk along this ride and past the spot where we know this empty cartridge case was found before the shoot began?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes,’ muttered Adams.

  ‘Did you see an empty cartridge case there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank you. That is all.’

  Adams slowly turned and left the box. He looked at the dock and there was an expression of worried shame on his face. For the first time in over thirty years, he had betrayed the Decker family.

  ‘The court will adjourn for lunch,’ the judge said. He stood up, returned counsels’ bows, and left.

  *

  Immediately he was outside the court, Calaghan spoke to his instructing solicitor and asked him to find Detective Inspector Doherty. The solicitor left and returned within the minute with Doherty.

  Calaghan led the way to a comer of the entrance hall. ‘I wanted a quick word with you, Inspector.’ He took off his wig and ran his fingers through his hair.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘The other side has laid a little of the groundwork for a defence of accident although obviously they can’t yet make up their minds whether to use it. We’ve got to be prepared to meet such a defence and I’m just a little worried about the evidence concerning the death of the elder Fawcett Decker.’ He took a cigarette case from his pocket and all three men smoked. ‘We’ve some circumstantial evidence to show that the father died just before the five year period was up and that Julian Decker bribed the French doctor to give the wrong date of death, but we’ve not the final proof, the kind of proof the jury will want. I suppose you haven’t turned up anything in the last day, or two?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir. We’ve checked every lead we have, without luck.’

  ‘The doctor must have given Rafferty a sworn statement – there’s no other reasonable explanation for that large payment into his bank immediately after Rafferty’s visit to him in the south of France this year.’

  ‘Yes, sir, but we haven’t found any such statement.’

  Calaghan tapped his chin with his brief. He turned to his solicitor. ‘It’s a weakness, but I don’t suppose we need worry about it very much.’

  ‘If the other side does plead accident and you present them with the known facts of the father’s death and Rafferty’s and Abbotts’s deaths, they’ll draw the right inference quickly enough, whether or not the statement’s found.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with you.’ Calaghan lowered his brief and held it under his arm. ‘Although it’s nothing to do with the case I’ve been thinking about the question of the date of death in connection with the liability for death duties. On the available evidence it’s obvious what happened, but I doubt very much there’s even the proof for the government to be able to levy the death duties that would have been payable on the father’s death.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, sir,’ said Doherty.

  Calaghan looked at the detective. ‘The possibility doesn’t unduly worry you?’

  ‘No, sir. I never liked death duties even though they’ll not worry my estate.’

  ‘Three men have been murdered because of them.’

  ‘If the date of the father’s death was hushed up, it was done before the murders, sir.’

  ‘That’s an Irish way of looking at things.’

  ‘I was born an Irishman, sir.’

  Calaghan smiled.

  *

  Julian was brought his lunch on a tray. After the warder had left and shut and locked the cell door, Julian removed the covers from the dishes. There was steak, fried potatoes, peas, roll and butter, and trifle and cream. As a person not yet convicted, he was allowed to buy, or have bought for him, food cooked by outside caterers. He cut through the steak. In the centre the meat was red which was how he liked it, yet he had never less wanted to eat. The last time he remembered having eaten steak had been at the Newingreen Motel, when he was with Barbara. Afterwards, they had driven on to Hythe and along the coast road to Greatstone and Dungeness. A mile or so before Dungeness, they had stopped the car and walked across the shingle, past the drawn-up fishing boats, down to the sand. The tide had been out and, slightly formless in the soft moonlight, the sand had seemed to stretch for hundreds of yards. The sea was alive with glitter. He remembered the large ship, ablaze with lights, sailing up the Channel. Both he
and Barbara had had the same thought: a honeymoon at sea…

  He looked round the cell. A honeymoon at sea! What a hell of a bloody thing to think of in a dirty, stinking cell. Bitterly, he pushed the tray of food along the bunk. He could not eat, not when his mind was so savagely torturing his body.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Danelli said he would carry the dish, but Lydia Decker ignored him and took it into the dining-room. She put the dish with the others on the serving table and helped herself to meat, potatoes, and vegetables. She sat down at the head of the table. She was alone, now, one woman at a table which could seat twenty-four. She was the only Decker left in the mansion of thirty-one bedrooms. She had been at the funeral of her husband and of one of her sons, and now her remaining son was on trial for fratricide. Another woman would have been crushed by the weight of the tragedies, but she still had one great thing left to help her retain her courage and sanity. She had Hurstley Place. Here, the Deckers lived on. In this dining-room, George the Fourth, when Prince Regent had dined and wined so well that three men had had to escort him to bed.

  Here, Fawcett Brett Decker had returned from the Battle of Waterloo to find his wife had taken very deeply to religion: the parson left the parish that same day. Here, Elizabeth Decker had been married to one of the Dukes of Weimar, very soon to return from that country because she found the inhabitants ‘barbarous and lacking the graces of a polite society.’ And here she, Lydia Charlotte Decker, waited until it was time to go to the court where they were trying the sole surviving male Decker of the direct line.

  She heard the front door knocker sound as she served herself. As she sat down, Barbara came into the room. Lydia saw in her face grief as great as her own. She stood up, went over to Barbara, and put an arm round her shoulders.

  Barbara wept, with a quiet but bitter passion. After a while, she gained some control over her emotions. She wiped the tears from her eyes and cheeks with a handkerchief.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ said Lydia. She led Barbara to the table and then went across to the small table in the comer of the room where she poured out a whisky. Barbara tried to refuse the drink, but could not outlast the elder woman’s insistence that she should drink it.

  ‘I’ve had to wait all morning,’ said Barbara, in a toneless voice. ‘Wait outside the courtroom, knowing he’s inside and being tried. I heard two policemen talking. They said he hadn’t a dog’s chance in hell: they said that any man who killed his brother deserved everything that was coming to him. I shouted at them and they stared at me as if I was mad. Lydia, I’ve got to go back there and wait all afternoon and when they call me inside they’re going to ask me if I saw him on the ride. I won’t tell them… I won’t.’

  ‘You will have to,’ replied Lydia quietly.

  ‘I’ll lie.’

  ‘They’ll show you’re lying and that will do a great deal of harm.’

  ‘Don’t you care what happens to him?’

  ‘I care.’

  ‘Maybe you think he shot Fawcett. Do you think he’s a murderer?’

  ‘Finish your drink and then have something to eat.’

  ‘I can’t eat anything.’

  ‘You must do.’

  ‘You’re so damned cold blooded,’ shouted Barbara.

  Lydia shivered. She went across to the serving table and put meat and vegetables on the second plate there: the second plate Danelli had laid, as if to pretend there would be two Deckers to lunch, not just one.

  When she returned to the table and placed the plate in front of Barbara, Barbara spoke.

  ‘Please, I’m sorry. I… I don’t know what I’m saying.’

  Lydia touched her briefly before she sat down. ‘Grief is something I’ve had to learn to live with ever since the day Fawcett was not very well and we asked our doctor to examine him. I’ve had to learn to treat grief as something that is completely natural and to be expected.’

  ‘But… but suppose they find him guilty?’

  ‘We must pray they do not.’

  ‘I can’t pray. How can I begin to pray when this has happened to him?’

  ‘It’s worth trying, Barbara. Sometimes prayer has helped me, sometimes it’s seemed to mock me. When my husband died, it did both things at once.’ Lydia watched Barbara finish her drink. ‘Eat as much as you can, now.’

  Around and above them, Hurstley Place stood square to the rising wind, unaffected by any storm.

  *

  The trial resumed at five minutes past two. The police constable who found the game counter was called and gave his evidence. Henry Decker, Cranleigh, Wade, Lenton, and Gross then went in turn into the witness-box, were questioned on what size gun and cartridges they had been using, and how many birds they had shot up to the beginning of King’s Beat. Welter, almost half-heartedly, tried to prove that the numbers they gave could only be approximate since none of them had visibly recorded his bag in any way, but this helped the defence not at all. Even allowing a considerable margin of error, it was clear that none of them had shot more than twenty birds. Julian Decker had told the police that up to the beginning of this beat he had shot thirty-three birds and that out of the early birds to come over, before he went to the ride to look for the fox, he had shot three more. That gave the figure of thirty-six that had been on the game counter found in Fawcett’s tum-up. That figure could not be Fawcett’s total of kills because, by taking all known figures from the total bag, it was obvious that his share to the time of his death could not be more than seventeen.

  Calaghan was a prosecuting counsel who tried to make as certain as was ethically possible that the defence was not given the slightest chance. Therefore, he had advised that the number of birds Julian had shot on November the twentieth must be proved, to refute any possible defence allegation that this was the number on the game counter. Detective Constable Pawley was called.

  ‘Did you go to Hurstley Place after the accused had been taken into custody to make certain inquiries?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What were those inquiries?’

  In the witness-box, Pawley was almost deferential. Although he would not have admitted it, he was almost scared by the outward majesty of the law and the courts. ‘I went to Hurstley Place, sir, and asked for Mr Julian Decker’s game-book.’

  ‘Whom did you ask?’

  ‘The butler sir. His name is Danelli.’

  ‘Did he give it to you?’

  ‘At first he said he couldn’t, but when

  I explained I must have it he went away and got it for me.’

  ‘Is this the game-book he gave you…? Usher, will you pass exhibit number twenty-seven to the witness, please.’ Calaghan addressed the judge. ‘My lord, photostat copies of the relevant page have been prepared for your lordship and the jury.’

  ‘Very well.’

  The witness identified the book and opened it. Calaghan waited whilst the photostat copies were handed around, then questioned the witness once more. ‘Will you look at the last entry on page one hundred and four.’

  ‘I am, sir.’

  ‘What is the date?’

  ‘November the twentieth, sir.’

  ‘Will you read out the figures given there.’

  ‘Pheasants fifty-one, duck nine, woodcock one, hares one, various seven, sir.’

  ‘Does that make a grand total of sixty-nine?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘If the accused were recording on his counter just the number of pheasants shot, then, the figure would be fifty-one: if everything, sixty-nine. Thank you.’

  Welter stood up. So far, tactics had dictated that he did not fight too belligerently. To attack a witness solely for the sake of attacking was wrong tactics, employed only by the rawest of barristers: but at some stage or other of a trial a counsel had, if possible, to attack a witness of the other side because juries would only believe a counsel who appeared to believe in his client. This apparent paradox was more often than not resolved by defence counsel by attacking a
police witness. Police witnesses were fair game, in season throughout the seasons, and an attack on them even when totally abortive need not, if carefully handled, rebound disastrously on the defence. It was Pawley’s bad luck that he was, so far as Welter was concerned, the right person at the right place at the right time.

  Welter stared at Pawley with an obvious dislike. ‘What were your orders?’ he finally demanded.

  ‘My orders, sir?’

  ‘That’s what I asked.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand, sir.’

  ‘Then I shall have to put it more simply.’ The expression on Welter’s face suggested the witness was being deliberately obstructive. ‘Why did you go to Hurstley Place?’

  ‘To obtain the game-book, sir.’

  ‘Yes, yes, we’ve heard that. But did you go on your own account or because you were given order to do so?’

  ‘I was given orders, sir.’

  ‘Were you given any unusual instructions on how to ask for the game-book?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You were to conduct yourself as you normally do?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘Constable, there is no “of course” about it.’ Welter was silent for a few seconds, then he said: ‘What did you say when you spoke to the butler?’

  ‘I asked him for the game register belonging to Mr Julian Decker.’

  ‘What do you mean by the word “ask”?’

  ‘What do I mean?’

  ‘Surely that question is simply enough phrased for you to understand?’

  ‘But I don’t…’

  Welter leaned forward and his voice rose slightly. ‘Would it be correct to say that by “ask” you mean threaten?’

  ‘Certainly not, sir.’

  ‘Let’s examine the facts.’ Welter picked up a sheet of paper and studied it. ‘Do you remember your first words to the butler?’

  ‘Not exactly, sir, but I just introduced myself.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I asked for the game register.’

  ‘Asked for it or demanded it?’

  ‘Asked for it, sir.’

  ‘Were you given it at this point?’