The Waxwork Corpse: A legal thriller with a chilling twist (Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers Book 5)

by Simon Michael

  Charles hangs his head. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, Dad. Or Mum. It just wasn’t for me.’

  Harry nods. ‘I see that now.’

  ‘And you sat shiva for me!’ cries Charles, old hurt resurfacing.

  ‘Yes, I did. And I see now that it was wrong. You weren’t just acting out of defiance; we were to blame, too. Perhaps if things had been different at home when you were little, you might have chosen a different path. But this isn’t really what I wanted to say to you.’

  Charles laughs. ‘This’ll do! You’ve said quite a bit.’

  Harry laughs too. ‘Let me just add one other thing. It’s taken us a long time to accept the choices you’ve made, but in the end what matters most to us is that you’re happy.’

  ‘“Us”?’

  ‘Certainly to me. Your mother is … slow to change. But I think she’s coming round. We both see how miserable you’ve been, and that’s the last thing we want. And you have been unhappy, haven’t you, son?’

  ‘I suppose so. Since Sally and I split up in particular.’

  ‘She’s a lovely girl.’

  ‘I know it. I’m still not really sure how I mucked that one up.’

  ‘Because it frightened you,’ replies Harry simply.

  ‘How did it frighten me?’

  ‘The big lesson you learned from your mother was not to trust anyone to love you. You always believed it would be torn away again, so you kept yourself at a distance … built a protective wall around yourself. If you don’t commit to loving someone, you can never be hurt. That’s why Sally gave up on you.’

  ‘But we bought the house together! I did commit to her!’

  ‘Did you? Really?’

  Charles falls silent and turns away, staring out of the windows at the yellow sodium light on the pavements outside.

  After a while Harry pats his son’s arm. ‘Just think about it, OK?’

  Harry stands, looking down on his elder son in the half-light. ‘I’ll use the bathroom first and get out your way.’

  ‘Sure,’ replies Charles, distracted.

  ‘But, before I do, do me a favour?’

  Charles looks up. ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘Stand up, and give your old man a hug, would you?’

  CHAPTER 19

  On the Monday before Steele’s trial is due to start, Charles rises early. Despite the fact that it’s still before seven, Harry is already up, pottering in the kitchen and humming to himself. Charles recognises a tune from his childhood: part of the liturgical service from the Day of Atonement. It reminds Charles that the Jewish High Holy Days are only a few weeks off. He’ll have no choice but to discuss arrangements with Harry, which is bound to involve mention of Millie. Deciding to leave that for a more appropriate moment, he declines breakfast and heads to Chambers.

  The roads are still largely deserted and it’s a sparkling late summer’s morning. Charles enters the Temple by Mitre Court and on impulse decides to take a detour. He walks down the slope to the bottom of Kings Bench Row to look over the Embankment at the Thames. A black smudge of smoke from the funnel of a tug chugging into the distance, too far downwind for its engine to be heard, is the only sign of river traffic. The summer breeze blowing off the water ruffles Charles’s curly hair, and he tastes salt air on his lips. He gazes for a while at the sequin-flecked blue waves, feeling calm and at peace.

  On his desk he finds a large cardboard box marked for his attention. He has just opened it and settled down to examine its contents when the door opens.

  ‘Hello, Charles,’ says a fair-haired man in his early thirties.

  ‘Hello, Peter,’ replies Charles, with a broad smile directed at his ex-pupil. ‘Not seen you in ages. Busy?’

  This is a familiar greeting in the Temple. Everyone claims to be “busy”. The opposite, being “quiet” — not having enough work — is every barrister’s fear, but given the competitive nature of the Bar and the cauldron of rumour that is the Temple, few will admit to it. Confessing to being “quiet” risks word getting round that one’s practice has failed, that one is out of favour, or, worst of all, past it. On the other hand, being genuinely “busy” often means working until midnight six nights a week, sometimes preparing cases for the following day at the last minute and doing without sleep at all. Charles knows of half a dozen marriages that failed through “busyness”, including his own. It’s one of the handicaps of a system in which clerks run their guvnors’ diaries: there’s no way the barrister can turn off the tap, even when he’s drowning.

  Bateman shuts the door behind him, dumps his robes bag on the floor despondently and sits at his desk. He looks weary.

  ‘Completely fucking overloaded,’ replies Peter in his perfect upper-crust English. ‘I was still here ’til almost three this morning. Managed an hour’s sleep, a shit and a shave, and here I am again.’ Peter yanks the ribbon off a set of Instructions. ‘I met this lovely girl a few weeks ago and I was — well, I am — quite smitten. I think she was, too. But since the second date, I’ve had to cancel her three times, once at the last minute. Now she won’t return my calls.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it. Sounds all too familiar,’ comments Charles grimly.

  Peter, engrossed in reading, focuses belatedly on Charles’s response and looks up. ‘Oh, course you do. Sorry,’ he says, remembering Charles’s travails with Henrietta. ‘Didn’t mean to be insensitive.’

  Charles waves away the apology. Peter hurriedly opens his desk drawer looking for paper and unscrews his fountain pen. He looks despairingly at the papers in front of him and then at the clock.

  ‘Fuck,’ he says again. ‘I don’t think I’m going to have time for this. Got to be in Aylesbury by nine.’

  ‘The Assizes? A bit early, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. Day One of a five-day fraud and I’ve never met the client, so I need to squeeze in a con first.’

  Charles checks the clock. ‘You’d better get going. If you miss the quarter past, you’ll be screwed.’

  Peter hesitates a moment longer, stands and grabs his bags. ‘You’re right. Look, you couldn’t do me a favour, could you, Charles? I need an indictment drafted by this evening, not straightforward, four or five potential counts. I can leave a note for Barbara to find a pupil to do the legwork, but if it’s finished this afternoon, any chance you could cast an eye over it before it goes out?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Thanks. I owe you one.’ He turns to leave. ‘Oh, by the way, there was a bloke downstairs asking for you.’

  ‘A bloke?’

  ‘Yes. Well, he wasn’t asking for you, more about you. Wanted to know if you worked here. I showed him your name on the board, he seemed satisfied and off he toddled. A client, I guess.’

  ‘Probably. What did he look like?’

  ‘Didn’t really pay much attention. Fifties maybe? Not fat, but a bit beefy. Your height. Anyway, better run. Thanks again.’

  The door closes and Charles listens to Peter’s footsteps running down the stairs. Charles stands and peers out of the window at the cobbles below the main entrance. Other than Peter sprinting towards Fleet Street, there’s no one to be seen.

  Charles had almost put the amateurish blackmail letter out of his mind. It’s several weeks since his return from the Lake District and there’s been no follow-up to the ill-spelt letter. Charles briefly considers running downstairs in the hope of catching sight of the man seen by Peter, but decides against it. If it was the putative blackmailer, he thinks, I’ll let him make his move.

  Charles returns to the box on his desk. Opened, it seems to contain jumble of miscellaneous items, some unused prosecution material but, more intriguingly, items which appear to be the contents of Steele’s desk, presumably from the Royal Courts of Justice. There are also documents seized from the chambers where Steele was in practice at the time of his wife’s disappearance, the most important of which are his court diaries. Charles thumbs through them quickly to the days immediately following Lise’s return
from her dirty weekend with the lover. If the defence were able to call three Court of Appeal judges to say on oath that the accused was appearing before them at the time when, according to the nanny, the body must have been disposed of, that would be the end of the Crown’s case. Charles is relieved to find that the two days, a Thursday and a Friday, are blank; wherever else he was, Steele was not in court.

  Charles digs further into the box and finds some loose additional statements from prosecution witnesses. In the first, the boy’s headmaster confirms that he remembers Steele presenting the rugby trophy. He can’t remember the year, but it has to be the relevant one as in earlier years the boy had not played rugby at all, and by the end of the next term he’d left the school.

  Charles gets out his pen and starts creating a timeline which immediately highlights another difficulty. If Steele was in the West County presenting prizes, he couldn’t at the same time have been tying his wife’s body to a kerbstone and pitching her into Wastwater. So, was the nanny wrong about the timing? Or could she be lying?

  Charles turns to Carr’s notes of his interview of Jenny Sullivan and the formal interview that followed it and reads them again. If there is one thing of which Charles is sure, it’s that Jenny Sullivan is in love with her employer. Why then had she rendered a possibility that he would be charged into a certainty — and, what’s more, dragged herself into it? What motive could she possibly have in lying to Carr? So, her statement’s likely to be true, and she’s unlikely to have made a mistake about such a memorable event. Charles’s experience tells him that memories laid down by witnesses in a state of emotional stress, as Jenny Sullivan must have been when presented with the fact that Steele had killed his wife, are usually the strongest and often the most reliable. Her statement is almost certainly accurate as to this, meaning that somehow Steele had got from Kent to the school in Somerset, from there to Cumberland — either with a dingy or small boat, or finding one by chance at the lake, which seemed very unlikely — and then back the length of the country to Somerset, before returning home to Kent. But in the time available … how?

  Charles turns to the personal belongings and goes through them carefully. Steele is evidently a methodical man. Bills for household services are tied in chronological bundles, the family insurance policies are in card envelopes inserted into a ring binder, each labelled on the front with the monthly payment, the maturity date and the sum payable, and the man’s entire professional life as a barrister is logged in neat handwritten columns in a ledger, with date, name of client, name of solicitor, the type of work, fee charged and the date when it was paid. Again, Charles looks at the two particular dates and finds that the judge apparently did no work of any sort on them. No court appearances, no advices for troubled solicitors, no pleadings. Then there’s a separate file of the documents bearing the numbers by which the state identifies its citizens, birth certificates, National Insurance Cards, National Health Service cards and, finally, a marriage certificate.

  Charles puts the file to one side and digs right to the bottom of the box. The last item he finds is a photograph in a wooden frame. It’s the one taken from the judge’s study wall and it does, as he claimed to the police, show him shaking his son by the hand. The boy is muddy and there’s a smear of what might be mud, or perhaps blood, on his upper lip, but he looks triumphant. Underneath the photograph, in a neat oval cut-out in the mounting card, is the date and the words “Man of the Match”. With their free hands, father and son hold a silver trophy aloft between them. Behind them are the rest of the rugby team and a few members of staff, all applauding. It is a posed photograph, but they both look natural and happy, their smiles exactly alike and their penetrating eyes with identical expressions. The boy will have become a good-looking man by now, thinks Charles.

  Fathers and sons again, he muses, without completing the train of thought. He looks for some trace of evil, some knowing look, to corroborate the appalling fact that had to be true if the prosecution case is sound: that as the man stood there, pride and happiness shining from his eyes, his dead wife, the mother of the victorious rugby player, lay, stiff and stinking, in the boot of his car in the school car park. But there’s nothing. Steele looks as if he hasn’t a care in the world, as if his mind is full at that moment of pride and happiness to the exclusion of all else. He’s either the coolest killer Charles has ever seen, or he’s innocent.

  Charles replaces all the items and shoves the box onto the floor behind his desk. The perusal of the box’s contents has left him unaccountably sad. His discussion with Harry has been much on his mind over the last few days. How can one family be so unhappy and another, without any obvious effort, able to create an atmosphere of loving, nurturing support from which children grow into balanced, happy adults? Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina principle comes to his mind: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. He sits, staring at the ceiling for a while, and then throws himself violently to his feet.

  ‘Bollocks!’ he shouts, in a successful attempt at dispelling his mood. He retrieves his transistor radio, which someone else has moved to the windowsill, and tunes to the nearest pop station to find The Byrds telling him that it’s “a jingle jangle” morning. Satisfied with that sentiment, Charles strides to the shelf on which he keeps the rest of his briefs and throws himself into a buggery defence by way of light relief.

  At the same time, only a hundred yards away across Fleet Street, a stocky middle-aged man stands on Fetter Lane, accurately identifying the block housing Charles’s flat from the description given by an Inner Temple car park attendant who he’d conned into revealing more than he should. The man pushes open the front door, darts inside and leaves on Dennis’s unattended reception desk an envelope marked for the attention of “Mr Charles Holborn”.

  Within seconds the man is out of the building and striding northwards towards Smithfields and a cooked breakfast, whistling as he goes. Mikey McArthur likes being back in the Smoke. He particularly likes having a plan; it always invigorates him. And he’s made his move.

  CHAPTER 20

  September, and autumn, enter with a bang. August was characterised by prolonged hot spells, frequently up to 80°F, but on 1 September, London feels definitely autumnal. On the Sunday almost an inch of rain falls, and it’s so chilly that Charles finds himself digging out jumpers that have been in the back of the wardrobe since April.

  The trial in The Crown versus Steele is listed to start during the third week of September, the precise date to be specified nearer the time. Charles has heard nothing further from Jones. All the pre-trial manoeuvring and circling are over; there remain no more tactical games to be played and everyone concerned is anxious to get on with the main event. The absence of any news hasn’t prevented the newspapers from continuing to run stories on all the main players, including Charles. He has been door-stepped twice in the last fortnight, once outside his flat and once as he left Chambers.

  Harry is still at Charles’s flat and Millie remains with David and Sonia. The sons take turns visiting their parents’ vacant home to collect the post and check that all is well. The High Holyday season looms, and Charles has a growing sense of foreboding.

  Jewish religious festivals have always been important landmarks. To a greater extent than in a Christian family, they form the structure of the year, and the passing of each season is always marked by a festival, a family gathering, particular foods and songs. The New Year and, ten days later, the Day of Atonement, are the most sacred events in the calendar. For five thousand years, Jews the world over have come together on those days to pray, to reflect on their sins and to seek forgiveness. Even those who ignore their religion for the whole year feel the call of the race memory and few resist it. For almost fifty years, Harry has prayed from the front row at synagogue and sat at the head of his table to take and break his fasts, surrounded by his family, supported by his wife. At these times he is the head of the family in more than just name. The rift with Millie, barely su
pportable at any other time, threatens now to break a tradition that seemed inviolable, and Charles isn’t even sure his parents’ marriage can survive it. He broaches the subject once, only to be sharply rebuked.

  ‘Have you thought about Yomtov?’ he asks.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Where I always go. To shul.’

  ‘What about Mum?’

  ‘She’ll go where she pleases.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘No buts.’

  ‘Dad —’

  ‘No.’

  Charles watches as his father’s blotchy hands start to tremble, with anger or distress he can’t tell but, in any event, he retreats.

  That afternoon he telephones David at his office. Millie’s anger buoyed her through the first few weeks of separation, but she has since become silent and depressed. David reports that she spends most of her time in her room, even refusing telephone calls from her sister and friends. She’s begun to lose weight and she looks frail. David is seriously worried about her.

  He and Charles discuss how to resolve the problem. Both Millie and Harry have refused marriage guidance. Sonia invited their Rabbi to the house to counsel Millie. The old lady listened civilly over two glasses of lemon tea, nodded when the Rabbi, who was David’s age, spoke about compromise and understanding the other’s position, and after thanking him for taking the trouble to see her, returned to her room. Not a word was said about the visit until the next evening, when she commented in passing that she thought she might, perhaps, give Golders Green Synagogue a try. There at least the Rabbi had respect for his elders.

  ‘If only they’d make a decision,’ says Charles. ‘They’ve been in limbo for months now.’

  ‘It’s not months, Charles. It just feels that way,’ laughs David.