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

by Simon Michael

  CHAPTER 35

  ‘Is he in?’ asks Charles.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ replies Mr Justice Steele’s clerk. ‘You’re lucky you caught him. He’s packing up to leave. I’ll just announce you.’

  The clerk moves off down the wide corridor, his footsteps muffled by the thick blue carpet. Charles examines the oil paintings on the wall: originals, he guesses. Very different from the Royal Courts of Justice’s public corridors, he thinks. The clerk, a thick-set man with black hair glued horizontally to his scalp by half a jar of Brylcreem knocks deferentially on a door marked “Sir Anthony Steele” and waits to be invited to enter. A few moments later, he steps back into the corridor and beckons to Charles.

  ‘His Lordship will see you now,’ he announces.

  Charles enters and the door closes softly behind him. The room is beautiful: large and well-lit, with a tall, ornate ceiling and a chandelier hanging from an impressive ceiling rose. Two walls are lined with bookcases, a third with oak panelling surrounding a tall marble fireplace, and the last containing a large window overlooking a courtyard. The furniture, upholstered in red leather, looks and smells expensive and comfortable. The floor and desk are dotted with boxes and books.

  To Charles’s surprise, Steele wears a green and blue check shirt and corduroy trousers. He looks a decade younger than he did five days earlier when the trial ended. His arms are full of books.

  ‘Holborne. To what do I owe this pleasure? Come to say goodbye?’ He speaks easily, without rancour.

  ‘Partly, my Lord.’

  ‘It’s “judge” when in chambers, and it’s not even that now. So “Mr Steele” is probably sufficient.’

  Charles stands uncomfortably by the threshold. Steele mistakes his hesitation, and is cheery and welcoming.

  ‘Well, come in, take a seat. I hold no grudges. You did your job, well and fairly. I couldn’t have asked for a straighter closing speech.’

  ‘I did it fairly perhaps. But not very well.’

  ‘You do what you can with what you’re given.’

  Steele continues to potter about, stacking books on the floor, selecting some to go into boxes and some for the bin, but then something about the quality of the silence makes him look up. Charles is staring at him, his eyes narrowed, his lips set in a hard line. Steele suddenly becomes uneasy.

  ‘Look, I don’t know what you’ve come here for, Holborne, but as you can see, I’m very busy…’

  His voice tails off as he watches Charles hold out his hand. ‘The police will return everything else, I expect,’ says Charles. ‘They collected what I had in Chambers yesterday. I wanted to deliver this in person.’

  Steele hesitates and then lowers the books in his arms. He takes the paper bag offered by Charles, opens it and draws out the photograph of himself and his son, each holding one handle of a large silver cup. ‘Oh, that is kind. You could have given it to the police, I’m sure.’

  ‘I had it all the time. It was among the things taken from your study when it was searched.’

  ‘Thank you —’

  ‘You never did show your scar to the jury, did you? You took a dreadful risk there. Got carried away, I suppose.’

  Charles now has Steele’s undivided attention. The disgraced judge lowers the photograph to his crowded desk.

  ‘Do you want to show it to me?’ asks Charles. ‘The scar from the terrible wound your wife inflicted on you? The one that splashed blood all over the room?’

  Steele doesn’t answer. He leans back against the stone window sill, the noise from the Strand just audible in the background, and stares at Charles, waiting. His body is intensely still, every muscle frozen, and his clear blue eyes are narrowed almost to slits. He is frightened, sees Charles; far more so than before the jury delivered its verdict.

  ‘The photograph’s a good one isn’t it?’ comments Charles conversationally, almost enjoying the fear he is causing. ‘I was looking at it yesterday, marvelling how alike you and your son were then, the same fair hair, lean faces, cold hard eyes. Even the way your hands each grasp a handle of that cup. And then, just as I was about to put it back in the box with the diaries and the papers and all the rest, I realised: no bandage; no cut. You can see your hand very clearly. It’s unmarked.’ Steele continues to stare at Charles silently. ‘Are you going to say anything?’

  Steele shrugs. ‘What would you have me say?’

  ‘Perhaps that you murdered her? Or maybe that it was, after all, manslaughter; you lost your temper, you were provoked into an uncharacteristic outburst. Something like that, perhaps?’

  ‘You think I killed her, deliberately?’

  The question puzzles Charles. ‘Of course!’

  For a split-second, Steele’s expression reveals something so unexpected that Charles can’t identify it. For an instant, he seems to be on the verge of smiling, his posture relaxes, and he starts to breathe again. Then the frown reappears, but there remains something about him that is different, an inexplicable confidence that makes Charles hesitate.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asks Steele.

  ‘What does it matter? You know the law as well as I; you can’t be tried again for it. Double jeopardy. You got away with it.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I think you did murder her. The blood all over the room was not yours, it was hers. There was no knife — or, if there was, it wasn’t your wife who used it. But that wasn’t the best part, was it, my Lord? The best part was your “confession” to that poor woman.’

  Steele shakes his head slowly. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he says, averting his eyes.

  ‘No, sorry, that doesn’t have the right ring to it at all. Do you want to try again? It’s a cliché, that one; I wouldn’t use those words if I were you. In a way, I find that the most venal thing you’ve done. You’ve shamelessly used Jenny Sullivan for the last ten years. You even risked her prosecution as an accomplice, but that didn’t bother you. She was your insurance policy. Insurance against the day when the improbable, the almost impossible, occurred, and the body was found and identified.

  ‘You even planned for that. You knew she loved you, that she’d never knowingly betray you. So you gave her a story about a knife, about self-defence and a terrible accident. And you cried, and you made her believe it. And then for ten years you kept her at arm’s length because as your wife, she wouldn’t be compellable as a witness against you. The law says a wife can’t be forced to give evidence against her husband. But I can force an employee to give evidence against her employer, can’t I? And you wanted her to be a witness against you; you needed her to testify for the prosecution. Such a tragic figure she’d make in the box: a woman in love, forced to betray her heart. How could any jury not believe her, or the false account you’d planted in her?’

  ‘You deduce all this from that one black and white photograph? How do you know I didn’t make a mistake and get the date wrong? It could be from the year before!’

  ‘The cup you presented, the one you’re holding between you and Stephen, is the inter-house rugby trophy,’ replies Charles, pointing at the photograph. ‘Stephen’s house only won it that year. I checked with the sports master this morning. It didn’t win the cup in the eight years previously, and hasn’t won it since.’

  The judge laughs briefly, a short bark devoid of any mirth. ‘I repeat: what are you going to do then?’

  ‘Nothing. You’re retiring. I suppose I could have you charged with perjury, but for what purpose? To destroy the woman who stood by you all this time?’

  ‘Then we have nothing more to say.’

  Charles wants to say something more, even if it’s useless and inadequate. Someone had to say it. ‘You’re an evil calculating man, and a disgrace to your profession,’ he says.

  Steele smiles. ‘Now who’s using clichés?’

  He strides to the door and opens it for Charles. Charles stares hard at the older man, thinking seriously about knocking him down. Then he sweeps past Ste
ele and leaves.

  CHAPTER 36

  It’s the day after Charles’s interview with the disgraced former judge, and it is Kol Nidre. Everywhere throughout the diaspora and in the Holy Land, Jews are preparing to fast for 25 hours. No food, no drink; nothing. Harry makes himself a light lunch, preparing for a large early evening meal, around five or five-thirty, he calculates. He hasn’t asked Charles about his plans, but he cooks enough for two anyway. Charles hasn’t mentioned his conversation with Millie. Earlier that morning he went into Chambers, read the papers in an armed robbery defence, got bored and returned to Fetter Lane.

  The smell of freshly-made soup now fills the flat, making his mouth water. The kitchen in the Horowitz household was always Millie’s domain, and no one else was allowed to touch anything in it, let alone do any cooking, but in fact Harry has always been an accomplished cook. He and his sister were both taught by Charles’s grandmother, and if anything, Harry had shown the greater aptitude.

  The table in the corner of the lounge is laid for two, and without saying anything, Harry ladles out two steaming bowls of soup, less salty than usual — one gets thirsty enough after 25 hours — and places them on the table. Charles sits and eats with his father.

  For the first two days after the trial ended, he talked of nothing else, and Harry, realising that his son needed to get it off his chest, listened and tried to make appropriate comments. Now it’s talked out. So they chat about David and Sonia and the forthcoming addition to their family. Harry is anxious to have grandchildren before he dies. His peers’ grandchildren are all approaching their teens and bar mitzvah age. That’s a joy he fears may not be reserved for him, but he’d like a grandson or daughter to crawl all over him, play with his glasses and sit on his knee.

  When the soup is finished, Harry collects the bowls and returns to the kitchen. He takes a baked side of salmon out of the oven and re-enters the lounge, brandishing a fish slice and fork, one in each hand.

  ‘Well? Are you eating or not?’ he demands.

  ‘Sure, I’ll keep you company. I can’t remember the last time I ate home-cooked salmon. I don’t think I’ve eaten it here, in the flat, at all.’

  Harry serves the meal and they eat in companionable silence. Charles offers to clear up while Harry gets changed. He is only gone fifteen minutes. As he returns to the lounge in his best suit, the intercom buzzes. Charles answers it. ‘It’s your cab,’ he announces.

  Harry pulls on his coat while Charles opens the door for him and calls the lift. The two men face one another in the doorway. Harry guesses what’s going through his son’s mind.

  ‘You can still come, if you want.’

  ‘No thanks, Dad.’

  ‘Got nothing to say to your Maker? No sins you would like to be forgiven?’

  ‘Plenty, but what if there’s no one there to do the forgiving?’

  ‘But what if there is?’

  Charles shakes his head. ‘If there was, the world would be a more just place.’

  ‘Who said the world was going to be fair? Maybe that’s the whole point. You’ve got to learn to cope with it as it is, and maybe do a little to make it better. Well?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Harry shrugs sadly and enters the lift.

  Charles is in bed by the time Harry returns that night and, the next morning, he creeps out of the flat early. Charles eats no breakfast because, he assures himself, he’s not hungry. He works with half his mind on the robbery papers until four and then makes a decision.

  The synagogue smells of bodies that have not eaten or moved for several hours. Charles sees his father and brother from the back, and goes to sit beside them. Both smile at him and Harry grips his hand for a moment.

  ‘I kept your place for you,’ he whispers.

  ‘Thanks, but I could have sat anywhere.’

  ‘I don’t mean your seat. I kept your place,’ and he raises his eyebrows to the heavens. Then he winks, but Charles knows he’s only half-joking. If Charles won’t save his own soul, Harry will do it for him.

  Charles cranes his neck to look up to the gallery but can see neither Millie nor Sonia. He opens his prayer book, finds the page and allows the songs and chants of his childhood to wash over him like a balm as he examines his conscience.

  As he prays and sings, his mind keeps drifting back to Steele, not to the trial or even their interview afterwards, but to two photographs taken a decade apart: that of the prize-giving which had revealed the former judge as a liar and probably a murderer, and that taken on the steps of the Old Bailey with his family surrounding him. It was a good photograph, the recent one, so natural, so happy; it made every single national daily. Jenny, looking up into the eyes of the man she could now marry after all those years of waiting, the two younger children, half-laughing and half-crying with relief in the sunshine, and Stephen, the unhappy eldest son.

  Charles’s mind returns to Stephen. In both photographs, he and his father are staring at one another across the heads of others: two tall, handsome men with identical eyes and identical expressions. It is odd though, Charles muses, that at the very moment of triumph, immediately after his acquittal, Steele should look with such intensity at his eldest son. This was the first time that Steele and Jenny had been in touching distance since, in the full glare of the public eye, they had declared their love for each other, a love suppressed for fifteen years. Yet Steele was not looking adoringly at the woman he could now marry; instead the photographer had caught him staring at Stephen, and their shared glance brimmed with silent communication, the participants’ expressions uncannily similar to those in the earlier photograph.

  Fathers and sons, thinks Charles again.

  Such love there was in that look, such protectiveness, such — and the word flashes into Charles’s mind with such an electric clarity that it blots out everything going on around him, the choir, the rabbi and his father’s quiet singing beside him — such sacrifice!

  Charles lowers himself slowly to the bench as the realisation of how mistaken he had been strikes him with a physical impact. The memory of the earlier photograph comes back to him as clearly as if he still held it in his hand. He remembers the cup held aloft between father and son and the revealing lack of bandage on the father’s hand, but … then his mind’s eye travels across the convex curve of the shiny silver cup until it rests on Stephen’s hand; Stephen’s bandaged hand, the hand that Charles assumed without thinking must have been injured in the victorious game of rugby, but which Charles now knows, beyond any reasonable doubt, had borne a deep cut between thumb and first finger. A cut inflicted by his mother.

  Harry sits next to Charles. ‘Are you all right?’ he whispers.

  Charles shakes his head. So stunned is he that he cannot speak for a moment. ‘He was innocent all along.’

  ‘Who? Your judge?’

  Charles nods. ‘It was his son … he was covering up for his son.’

  Harry thinks about that. ‘There you are; justice was done after all.’

  ‘But he almost went to prison for murder … his career is finished…’

  ‘So? You think I wouldn’t do the same for you or David? How old was the boy, eleven, twelve?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Harry shrugs.

  ‘But … my God … he risked everything!’ whispers Charles.

  ‘But you, of all people, should understand,’ explains Harry. ‘There are those for whom you’d do anything. Lose your job, give up your freedom, even sacrifice your life.’ He takes Charles’s hand in his. ‘You’re not going to do anything about it, are you? You’ll leave them alone now, surely?’

  Charles nods. ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘Good. Enough damage has been done to that family already, don’t you think?’

  Charles doesn’t answer. For the rest of the service he sits with his prayer book open on his lap, staring into the middle distance, his eyes focused on something invisible to anyone else.

  The end of the serv
ice is marked, as always, by the blowing of the ancient ram’s horn, and, as always, it brings goosebumps to the arms, and tears to the eyes, of many in the congregation. For more than five thousand years it has been the Jewish call to prayer, to war, to life; it has become a race memory, buried deep in the unconscious of Jews throughout the world. The congregation stands en masse, tired and hungry, while the cantor blows his trumpet blasts and the rabbi asks for the last time, on behalf of his community, for forgiveness for the year that is past, and strength for them to be better people in the year that is to come.

  Then Charles kisses his brother and his father, and they file out. Again they wait, without speaking, at the foot of the stairs. Sonia and Millie approach and greet them. Millie addresses Charles.

  ‘Thank you, son,’ she says. Then she turns to Harry. ‘Will you take me home, Harry?’ she asks simply.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I was wrong. You’re my husband, and my place is by your side. I am truly sorry, and I ask your forgiveness.’ Harry smiles at her, his eyes and his heart melting. ‘I’ve prepared a meal, and the house is warm,’ she continues. ‘Can we be a family again?’

  David and Sonia, looking on, beam with pleasure.

  ‘Sure. Let’s go home,’ he says. He takes her arm.

  ‘And Charles,’ she says, turning again to her eldest son. ‘I owe you an apology too. Your father’s right; I’ve not treated you fairly.’

  ‘It’s fine, Mum.’

  ‘Will you break your fast with us?’

  Charles knows that Millie’s post-repentant glow of love for all men probably won’t last beyond the main course and might even falter at the chicken soup, but he smiles nonetheless.

  ‘I’d be delighted,’ he says. ‘But I have a call to make on the way.’

  Harry turns to him, eyebrows raised.

  ‘You’re right. I need to speak to Sally.’

  ***

  Join the Sapere Books mailing list for the latest releases, eBook deals, author news, and much, much more!