by HRF Keating
‘So, can we now proceed to the photographic evidence? Miss Parker?’
‘Mrs, actually,’ the youngish woman in grey-striped, mannish shirt and neat grey suit jacket, dared to put in.
‘I’m sorry. Mrs Parker then.’
Harriet could feel, almost as if it were real, the black mark being ticked against the impudent name Parker on some internal list.
Mrs Parker, conscious of that mark or not, went laboriously through the photographs. Scores of them of the room where Roughouse’s body had lain, starch-white pillow over his face. Others of all the places inside the clinic which Monty-tonty and Harriet between them had seen as providing possible evidence. The drying wet footmarks, the forced window of the disused storeroom, a door with a trace of mud on it.
And, at last, came Stonewall Smith’s comment.
‘Very well. That seems in order. Now, eye-witnesses. Superintendent Martens, perhaps you should enlighten us here?’
Harriet braced herself.
Tonelle was the only eye-witness she had offered, if in fact the man who had come to the clinic door at dusk with those duff questions was Drummond. If it was Drummond who had turned away, defeated, and plunged in the darkness into the bramble-infested shrubbery and there lost the Zealot tie that, modified, indicated membership of the Cabal.
Now, how can I present Tonelle as a witness who will convince a jury she is rock-solid in everything she says?
‘Yes, sir,’ she said, looking Stonewall Smith straight in the eye. ‘We have, as you will know from the summary in front of you, only one eye-witness, since extensive house-to-house inquiries in the barely inhabited farmland round the Masterton Clinic failed to produce any reliable evidence. She is Miss Tonelle Danbury, receptionist at the much respected Masterton Clinic.’
‘Much respected?’ Stonewall Smith interrupted sharply. ‘How is the respectability or otherwise of the Masterton Clinic relevant to the case you are presenting, Superintendent?’
Harriet gave herself a second to think.
‘Sir,’ she said. ‘I believe that it is. It will be important, should the case come to trial, to show the jury that Miss Danbury is an absolutely reliable witness. But she is, as it happens, black, and her speech is liable to veer into the language she was brought up with in a black area of London. You will appreciate, sir, that both those factors, though it is perhaps a sad thing to have to acknowledge, may adversely affect some members of the public among the jurors. Unless, of course, they themselves are black.’
‘So, how do you propose to present Miss — er — Danbury as being reliable in the witness-box?’
‘I don’t think, from what I know of her, sir, that it will be possible to coach her into using the best middle-class language. She is not a person to accede to the conventions. But emphasising the respectability of the Masterton Clinic will, as it were, endorse her own.’
‘Indeed? So, in what way do you propose to make it clear to a jury how very respectable the Masterton Clinic is?’
Another second or two to think. But not now to any avail.
How respectable in fact is the Masterton, she had asked herself. And, in that fraction of time the answer had come clearly into her head. A clinic could hardly be described as thoroughly respectable when, she knew from her own discoveries, it had taken Charity Nyambura in to be detoxed but whose authorities — Mrs Fishlock, in all probability — had allowed it to be given out she was there because of a leg injury.
‘Well, sir,’ she said, unable to keep the tinge of doubt out of her voice, ‘the Masterton is known for the film stars and the top footballers and — and — and, yes, cricketers who have been patients there. The facts have been recorded in the press.’
‘In the press, Superintendent? I take it by that you mean in the gossip columns?’
‘Yes, sir, I suppose, many of the mentions would have been of that sort.’
‘Then I think we need pursue this line no further. Shall we put, let us say, a large question mark against Miss Danbury’s name? And, since apparently your inquiries have failed to produce a single other person who saw the man at the clinic’s doors, I fear we shall have to discount the whole of that episode.’
‘Very well, sir.’
Harriet fought against a wave of depression that threatened to topple down on her.
‘So we come,’ Stonewall Smith went steam-rollering on, ‘to the officers who interviewed the suspect. And they are?’
‘Only myself, sir.’
And will I, she thought, be able to produce from that one occasion on which I spoke to Drummond anything that will convince this uncompromising sceptic that there is a case against him, now that he has demolished Tonelle, the best witness I thought I had?
‘I conducted a short interview with Drummond,’ she said, ‘in the course of checking the alibis for the time of the murder of all the persons I saw as possible suspects. I asked him, as soon as I had been admitted to his flat at the top of a building near Parliament Square, if he could tell me where he had been during the evening of Saturday, September the twenty-fifth, and he replied, without hesitation, that he had been at a party given by a certain Lady Margaret Tredannick at her house, Ravenham Court, on the Kent coast. I decided, however, that I should see Lady Margaret and ask her to confirm Drummond’s presence there.’
‘Which she did or did not?’
‘Lady Margaret was unable to state to my satisfaction that Drummond was definitely at that party, though she indicated that there were witnesses in plenty, herself among them, who would say he was there.’
‘You did not accept Lady Margaret’s word on its own?’
‘No, sir. I thought it possible she might be protecting Drummond, whom I understood to be a friend of long standing. So I went directly to the one person she had claimed could say with certainty he was among the party guests, one Miss Daphne Morgan-Woods, a columnist on the magazine All the Way Round.’
‘And from this journalist, on a woman’s magazine, you learnt what, Superintendent?’
‘I received from her,’ Harriet replied, a little beat of triumph throwing light over the gloom increasing in her mind, ‘an unequivocal statement that Valentine Drummond, whom she knows well, had not been a fellow-guest with her as she made her way backwards and forwards all evening in pursuit of her business at the party.’
‘One witness to an absence, Superintendent? I cannot see a Defence counsel, any Defence counsel, allowing that to go unchallenged.’
‘No, sir. And on that account I secured from Lady Margaret, not without difficulty, a full list of those invited. However, since that comprises some two hundred persons the process of checking their recollections has not yet been completed.’
‘And when will it be, Superintendent? By next July?’
‘I am unable to say, sir. You will realise it could take a great deal of time. But, unless it produces reliable evidence from more than one witness that Drummond was present, I am happy to rely on Miss Morgan-Woods in the box.’
‘So was it that assertion of hers that led you to see Drummond as the most likely suspect for the murder of Robert Roughouse?’
‘It confirmed to the hilt, if I may put it this way, sir, my suspicions of Drummond.’
‘An assertion by a gossip columnist, Superintendent? One who makes a living, and no doubt a good one, by exaggerating any scraps of fact she may have learnt. Or, indeed, by inventing semi-likely stories when no such scraps come to hand?’
‘Yes, sir. I accept that claim as a description of gossip columnists, though I suppose it is possible that there are those to whom it does not apply. However, when I interviewed Miss Morgan-Woods, at some length, I was perfectly satisfied she was telling me the truth about her time at that party. I believe she will make an excellent witness in court.’
‘Very well then,’ Stonewall Smith said, with the faintest of sighs. ‘I suppose we had better proceed with the remaining items which we customarily examine. I gather that Detective Sergeant William Woodcock also qu
estioned Miss Tonelle Danbury about the visitor she encountered at the door of the Masterton Clinic on the evening of the murder. I understand you do not think it necessary to have him here today. But we must certainly hear a report on his notebook, which is among the documents submitted to us. Mr Hastings, I believe you have conducted that examination.’
‘I did, sir,’ said a hunched, grey-suited heavily bespectacled figure.
As soon as he began to go through the pages of Bolshy’s notebook, Harriet’s disquiet grew. She could guess that whatever words Bolshy had written would be at best scanty and at worst totally incoherent.
Looking down the table she saw, with fresh dismay but no surprise at all, that even the cover of the notebook appeared to have been subjected to considerable mistreatment. Had Bolshy stubbed out cheroots on it? Very likely. So what would the contents be like?
The document examiner’s report at once confirmed her fears. Bolshy was about to be shown up as one of the worst notebook keepers in, possibly, all the forces in England. The examiner began with a loud sniff.
‘I have not been able to make out a great deal of what was written — scrawled would be the better word — concerning DS Woodcock’s interview with Tonelle Danbury. I have noted, however, that her name is mis-spelt throughout as T-o-n-e-l. But the gist of what Detective Sergeant Woodcock wrote is that Miss Danbury told him only that a man, he added two words I made out as possibly being brown hat, had come to the clinic’s door. But he noted no other description of that individual. I was able to decipher only that the individual at the door had asked some questions about, I quote, what rooms, what else. That, in fact, was all.’
‘Thank you, Mr Hastings. I note that the inquiries into Mr Roughouse’s death have not all been carried out with that degree of efficiency one might expect.’
Then Harriet burst in, unable to help herself.
‘I am sorry, sir, that, since you dismissed Tonelle Danbury as a witness worth putting forward, you have not heard anything of her account to me of the visitor DS Woodcock described so briefly, and, I will admit, incompetently. Sir, Miss Danbury can offer a much fuller account, one which you will find fully written up in my own notebook.’
‘I think we have dealt with that matter sufficiently already, Superintendent,’ Stonewall Smith snapped back. ‘If you are to put to a jury the account in your notebook, it would be necessary to have it corroborated by Miss Danbury, and we have already decided she would be a witness altogether unlikely to impress a jury.’
‘Sir, nevertheless I must insist the inquiry hears my notebook account.’
Is this the moment, she asked herself, when somehow I see one of those half-exceptions which any iron structure of rules and regulations seems of necessity to create?
The silence that followed hung in the air of the arid room, tense as waiting thunder.
Boats burnt, Harriet thought. So will it be resignation? Well, if it is, it is. A lifetime’s work in the waste basket.
Then Stonewall Smith produced a long sigh which Harriet, at the far end of the table, heard as clearly as if he had breathed it in her ear.
‘Oh, very well then, Superintendent, let us hear your account. Never let it be said that a CPS inquiry omitted to consider even the least likely shred of evidence.’
Yes, the half-exception, the wriggle in the iron structure that lets something go through.
So, reading from the notebook she had taken from her uniform pocket, she gave the inquiry a full account of her own interview with Tonelle and of what they both had discovered in the brambly shrubbery outside the Masterton’s glass doors, the barely visible little black circles on the regulation Zealot tie indicating membership of the secret Cabal.
And, bit by bit as she contrived to read her notes about the Cabal, she sensed the others round the table — she dared not look at Stonewall Smith at the far end — had begun to see a different case from the one that had been put so far. Even, next to her, she recognised that the ACC himself, from his occasional shufflings and in-taken breaths, was beginning to see the case might be sound.
She brought her account to an end, filled with a certain pleasure that, after all, Tonelle, the bright crossword lover, despite her irredeemably colloquial speech, had had her influence on the proceedings.
It had been more than she had dared to hope for.
‘We come next,’ Stonewall Smith said, blandly as if nothing new had been brought to light, ‘to considering the evidence that will be offered by the SOCO team which investigated the murder, and then, in accordance with our laid-down rules, finally to considering the evidence of the expert witnesses, Dr Edwards, of the Forensic Science Service, and the duty forensic physician. When we have heard them our deliberations will be over.’
He slapped his papers together with a crack of finality.
But what is he saying, Harriet asked herself? Isn’t he going to comment in any way? He’s been quick enough to do so all along, dismissing as worthless almost every aspect of my inquiries. So why isn’t he dismissing the whole case I presented?
And the answer came to her. Because he has changed his mind. Because he now believes Valentine Drummond does have a case to answer.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Events moved swiftly once Stonewall Smith had indicated, in however roundabout a way, that any further evidence they heard would not affect his eventual decision that Valentine Drummond should be prosecuted for the murder of Robert Roughouse. It had been too late, when the conference was at last brought to a formal end, to do anything about making arrangements for the arrest. But, outside, Harriet managed to seize an opportunity to contact Maria’s softly rattling toy mobile.
‘He here,’ came a whispered answer, from somewhere in Drummond’s eyrie flat.
‘He’s there with you?’
‘I saying. Here.’
The voice was plainly angry, and frightened.
‘Yes, I heard you. I just wanted to make doubly sure.’
‘What doubly, please?’
‘Never mind, never mind. Tell me, has he said anything about going? About leaving the flat?’
‘Not ready. But he say tomorrow I must go out all morning. Keep out of bloody way. Busy tacking. What is tacking?’
Tacking? Tacking? Then suddenly the penny dropped.
‘No, not tacking, Maria. Packing. Wasn’t that what he said? Packing? That tomorrow he is going to be packing up his things? Putting them in his cases, and boxes? Before he leaves the country?’
‘Is packing, yes. Now I knowing.’
‘Very good, Maria. You do what he’s asked you to. Stay out, stay well away all morning.’
‘But is bad day for out.’
‘What do you mean, bad day?’
‘Much people in street.’
‘Oh, I don’t expect there’ll be many more than usual. Why do you think that there will be?’
‘Is hunting day.’
Heck, what does she mean now? Hunting? Is this something to do with the attack on Roughouse in Gralethorpe? Can’t be. No, some fantastic misunderstanding of some sort. Forget about it.
‘OK, Maria, But tomorrow you stay out of the flat. All right?’
‘If you tell.’
*
It was only, late that night back in Birchester, summoned by the ACC to discuss the best way to effect Drummond’s arrest, that Maria’s babbled out words hunting day became suddenly clear.
‘You say Drummond’s flat is in a building at the edge of Parliament Square?’ the ACC had asked, his voice prickling with unexpressed objections.
‘Yes, sir. As a matter of fact it is. The building’s rather odd, and pretty old. I imagine in a few years at the most it will come tumbling down under the demolition men’s sledgehammers. You have to climb interminable stairs to get to Drummond’s flat, which I suppose is why he lives there. The eagle safe in its eyrie, safe and watchful.’
‘Very romantic, Superintendent. But what you’ve evidently managed somehow totally to ignore is that tomo
rrow there’s going to be a vast protest meeting outside the House of Commons because of this Bill to ban hunting. People are disgusted at the way the countryside is being trampled all over just to please townee voters. There’ll be thousands there, thousands, making themselves heard. How can you have seen nothing about it, in the newspapers, on every TV news?’
‘Oh, yes, I did of course, sir. But just in the days up to the CPS meeting I’m afraid I ignored everything except getting together the evidence against Drummond. I just wasn’t able to think of anything else. But thank you for pointing out the scale of the protest, sir. You’ve alerted me just in time. I suppose it’s possible Drummond’s building could become almost totally surrounded.’
‘You had better check with the Met, Superintendent. But I suggest you bear in mind what people say about the early bird and the worm. I strongly recommend it to you.’
When Harriet contacted the Met she learnt, to her dismay, they were taking an even more apprehensive view of the Houses of Parliament demo than the ACC.
‘Superintendent,’ her senior officer contact had said. ‘I really think you should consider postponing your operation. There are going to be, so far as our intelligence goes, a greater number of demonstrators involved than ever before. To tell you the truth, it’s damn scary. So to come up almost to Parliament Square itself and to try to effect an arrest — I don’t ask who your target is, I’d much rather not know — is, what shall I say? An utterly foolish thing to do.’
Harriet thought.
No, it’s not simply a question of arresting Drummond for the murder of Robert Roughouse. No, there’s a great deal more involved. The Cabal must be on the point of putting into operation their whole plan to send those mercenaries to Transabistan, and topple President Olengovili. Then they’ll replace him with some dummy of theirs so they can exploit that huge mass of pitchblende and sell its uranium to the highest bidder. The only way it can be stopped is to arrest Drummond. It’s only if he’s suddenly removed from the scene tomorrow, that Fledge will be prevented from cancelling the whole operation, destroying all evidence of it.
