First Cut is the Deepest (Harry Devlin)

by Edwards, Martin

  ‘Well, yeah. He’s got enough on his plate without having the life drained out of him by an anorexic girlfriend whose head is stuffed with garbage.’

  ‘You’re being unfair. She’s an intelligent woman, she’s not insane.’

  ‘You think not?’ Harry asked sourly.

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Daniel gazed at him. ‘You told me you like mysteries. But you don’t seem able to come to terms with any that you can’t unravel.’

  Stung, Harry said, ‘Listen, Andrea Gibbs is a disturbed young woman who’s filled her head with clap-trap and it hasn’t solved one single problem in her life.’

  Daniel sighed. ‘That’s one of the differences between us, isn’t it? You keep looking for solutions. Answers to puzzles, everything neatly tied up in the final chapter. Me, I’m fascinated by the things that can’t so easily be explained.’

  Harry finished his drink. ‘I’ll get the bill.’

  Daniel leaned across the table. ‘What do you believe in, Harry?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You heard, I think. I asked what you believed in.’

  Harry sucked in his cheeks. Every conversation with Daniel unsettled him. Partly because the man had made him question things he’d taken for granted all his life. Partly because he felt as if he were being measured, judged, as if his every word were being pored over, examined for inconsistencies. It was worse than being a witness at the Old Bailey. He wasn’t ready to reveal his feelings to a near-stranger, whatever their ties in blood. Stubbornly, he demanded, ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘I made a mistake, didn’t I, when we first talked? It was all about our mother, not about you and me. I want to know what makes you tick.’

  ‘When I want psychoanalysing, I’ll get in touch.’

  ‘There’s a bond between us, don’t you feel it? We can help each other.’

  You’re just a bloke I hardly know who’s crazy about vampires. ‘Maybe.’

  Daniel put his head in his hands. ‘This isn’t working, is it?’

  He sounded like a lover at the end of an affair. Harry stood up. ‘Sorry, Daniel. I’ve got things to do, you know? I’m back at work tomorrow. There’s a lot of catching up to do.’

  In a muffled tone, Daniel said, ‘Can we talk again?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘I’ll call you some time.’

  Back in his flat, Harry picked up The Journal of Quincy Harker. By the time he put the manuscript down, he knew more about the Un-Dead than he could have wished to learn in a lifetime. The material was barmily melodramatic, the literary style at times clumsy and over-ornate. Unexpectedly, he felt an ache of disappointment. Perhaps he’d secretly hoped his half-brother was a literary wunderkind awaiting discovery. The truth was, the book was a potboiler, nothing more. And yet there was something in the whole farrago that made him keep turning the pages. The man could tell a story, that was for sure. If the book was rubbish, it was no more so than many of the paperbacks that crowded supermarket shelves. The only trouble was that Daniel wasn’t simply writing a fantasy; he was trying to live one.

  Harry sighed. In the quiet of Empire Dock, his conscience was troubling him as much as the sore ribs. He hadn’t meant to be so blunt with his half-brother. Yet the nonsense about vampires, imagined and supposedly real, had been too much to take. Andrea didn’t need humouring, she needed psychiatric help. Meanwhile, lawyers kept being murdered and the odds now must be that Brett Young was the culprit, had been the guilty one all along

  On any logical view, Mitch Eggar and Ken Cafferty were right: Brett had motive, means and opportunity. Maybe this vampire stuff even related in some obscure Freudian way to the problems in his relationship with Andrea. Wherever he was hiding, surely the police would soon find him.

  Harry winced as he thought that after their drinking session, Brett had gone out and set fire to Nerys’s office with her body lying inside it. He had nothing, logically, to feel guilty about, but logic wasn’t always his strong point. The killings were now the lead item on the national news, but he couldn’t bring himself to watch the reports. He was sickened by the senselessness of the deaths - and tormented, too, by his inability to do anything to help bring the perpetrator to justice.

  One thing he could do was get back to work, a desperate remedy designed to take his mind off the things that really mattered to him. He filled his briefcase with files and headed over to Fenwick Court. The office building was cold, dark and silent. Even though he’d worked there for so long, it seemed unfamiliar. Before he switched the light on in reception, the shadowy leaves of the yucca plant seemed to menace him, like knives in the hand of an assassin. His footsteps echoed as he walked down the corridor to his room. As he stepped inside and surveyed the files piled high on desk, chairs and floor, he sighed and told himself that he’d spent too long listening to malarkey about vampires. The real threat to his survival would come from the Law Society if he didn’t catch up with the backlog of work.

  He found his pager in the top drawer of his desk and shoved in a new battery. Normal service had to be resumed. It didn’t take long to toss half the contents of his in-tray to the bin. Leaflets advertising unmissable seminars on tax avoidance, letters from recruitment consultants extolling job candidates keen to specialise in mezzanine finance - whatever that was - and gold-embossed invitations to subscribe to fine wine clubs created especially for solicitors with discerning palettes, all met the same swift fate. The correspondence that Carmel and his clerk Ronald Sou had left to await his attention proved heavier going. At least he could blame the fuzziness of his thinking on the after-effects of his accident. He dictated a dozen terse replies into the machine before taking a deep breath and started sifting through papers due to be produced in a High Court trial. In comparison, he thought gloomily, cleaning the Augean stables must have been a doddle.

  At five past ten the pager began to bleep. Harry stared at it. How could he have forgotten how irritating that sound was? At least it offered a temporary reprieve from drafting a list of documents.

  ‘Harry Devlin.’

  ‘Back in the land of the living, then?’ The catarrhal voice belonged to a veteran custody sergeant called Mortensen. ‘Heard you’d had an accident.’

  ‘I’m on my feet now.’

  A throaty chuckle. ‘More than can be said for some of your brethren, eh? You’re not trying to eliminate all the competition, by any chance?’

  ‘You know as well as I do, lawyers are like weeds. Uproot one and half a dozen more spring up in its place. Anyway, it’s nice of you to ring for a chat, but…’

  ‘Look,’ Mortensen said, ‘we’ve pulled in one of your clients. She’s asking for you to represent her and so I said I’d give you a bell, see if you were around.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Sheryl Quigley.’

  ‘What’s the charge, Bob?’ Harry asked as a matter of form. With Sheryl, there was only ever one charge.

  ‘What do you think? She’s like you. All she knows about is soliciting.’ Mortensen gave a wheezy guffaw at his own wit. ‘Matter of fact, she was in the back of a car with a priest. Teaching him that God moves in mysterious ways, I guess. They even had Radio 2 switched on. I’ve heard of elevator music, but that’s ridiculous.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they were playing “Never On a Sunday”?’

  Mortensen sniggered. ‘Anyway, usual form. She’ll be remanded to appear in the magistrates’ tomorrow at ten. You want a word with her?’

  ‘Put her on.’

  Harry spoke briefly to his client and arranged to meet her in the cells at the main Bridewell before her court appearance the next morning. Sheryl was a realist. She agreed there was no point in protesting her innocence. The plan was to plead guilty and hope that the fine wasn’t so heavy that she’d have to go straight back to the back streets of Toxteth to start earning the money to pay it off.

  After he put the phone down, he gazed at the mound of documents. Perhaps he’d be more in the mood tomorrow. It was rather
like Al Capone promising to jump on the wagon, but he’d had enough for one evening. He limped home, set the alarm and fell on to the bed. Within seconds he was asleep. If he dreamed of vampires, real or imagined, he didn’t remember anything about it when the buzzer sounded the next morning.

  He called in at the office on his way to the main Bridewell. Jim was already squinting at a set of title deeds in copperplate. ‘Welcome back, Lazarus. What’s on the agenda for today?’

  ‘I was paged last night by Bob Mortensen. Sheryl Quigley has been arrested. She’s been found in a priest’s car, providing her own special brand of pastoral care. I’m seeing her at nine. Better be off, I’m late now.’

  ‘Don’t you want to hear about the new property work I’ve picked up?’

  Harry could contain his enthusiasm. Tenancy agreements and building estates contracts couldn’t hold a candle to court work. Whatever its shortcomings, at least it concerned human beings, human frailties. He waved a hand. ‘Keep it as a pleasant surprise, eh? See you later.’

  Sheryl proved, predictably, to be unabashed by her misdemeanour. She was a fat shameless girl with a gleeful sense of humour. Her spotty complexion attested to a lifelong love affair with doughnuts and chocolate eclairs. Harry had always had a soft spot for her. Where working girls were concerned, it made a change to act for one who was more likely to plough her earnings into confectionery than heroin. Her chins were apt to wobble as much as the massive breasts which Juliet would no doubt have described as her unique selling points. He had defended her half a dozen times over the years. She could turn her hand to most things, but her particular specialism lay in administering discipline. At one time she’d worked over in Manchester at a brothel catering for masochists. Maybe the priest was an old, guilt-ridden customer who’d wanted to soak up a bit more punishment.

  ‘Usual fine?’ she asked.

  ‘You could go to prison,’ he warned her, although they both knew it was unlikely.

  ‘You won’t let them do that, will you?’ She laughed, shook her straggly dyed-blonde curls. ‘Christ, I’m starving. When will they leave us alone, Harry?’

  ‘Don’t hold your breath.’

  ‘It’s my client I feel sorry for.’

  ‘On the Lord’s day, though.’ Harry tutted.

  ‘He’s a man first, a Catholic second. I suppose they let him off with a caution?’

  ‘First offence, why not?’

  Sheryl gave him a wicked smile. ‘You’re sweet, Harry. You believe the best in people.’

  It wasn’t even true, he thought, as he wandered upstairs to the courtrooms. He was all too willing to imagine the worst. His suspicions of Daniel and Juliet, for example. Sheryl should have said what she meant and told him he was often naïve. That, perhaps, he couldn’t deny. He ascertained that her case was to be heard in court number three. Most of the prostitutes were dealt with there; half of them were on first name terms with the clerk to the bench. It turned out that Suki Anwar was prosecuting here today. As usual, the court was a bear garden at this hour, full of lawyers, clients and witnesses, all of whom wanted to talk at the same time.

  But today there was only one topic on everyone’s lips. He heard Rick Spendlove’s name a dozen times as lawyers joked nervously, asking each other who would be next. Eventually he spotted Suki in a corner, browsing through a wad of court documents, trying to familiarise herself with her caseload for the morning. He ploughed through the ruck of people so that he could have a word.

  ‘Sheryl Quigley, you say? I’ve just been handed the papers,’ she said briskly, keeping her eyes on the file. ‘Guilty plea?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘You’re lucky, the chairman’s soft on soliciting. She’ll get off with a light fine.’

  ‘And we all know how she’ll find the money, don’t we?’

  She gave him a mirthless smile. ‘At least justice will have been served.’

  ‘Oh yes, I was forgetting that.’

  ‘See you in there.’

  ‘Wait,’ he said as she moved away. ‘Now that Rick Spend love has been…’

  But she had moved quickly - deliberately? - out of earshot. Easy to imagine that she had no wish to discuss Spendlove or his death, but in that she seemed to be alone. Harry heard the name at least half a dozen times as he made his way through the ruck of people to take his place in the courtroom.

  The case was soon over. Suki might not be in mourning for Rick Spendlove, but plainly she was in sombre mood today. Her usual style was to address the magistrates with eyes open wide, appealing to them to see the irresistible force of the prosecution case. Today, though, she kept her gaze fixed on her papers and spoke in little more than a mumble. It made no difference. Within five minutes the fine had been imposed and Harry was accompanying Sheryl down the stairs that led to Dale Street.

  Her plump cheeks were pink, her eyes bright, her beam triumphant. In court, she’d seemed startled, unexpectedly overcome by the solemnity of her surroundings. But now he sensed that she would have been skipping ahead of him and taking the steps two at a time, had her buxom frame not been ill-equipped for it.

  ‘Better result than you expected, then?’

  ‘It’s not that.’ She burst into a fit of coughing, perhaps in an effort to contain her delight, and her mighty bosom swayed dangerously. ‘It’s just that…’

  ‘Yes?’

  As they reached the doorway that led on to the street, she turned to face him. ‘Oh, Harry. I’ve seen some things in my time. But I must have seen everything now.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘That woman, the prosecuting solicitor - it’s Chantal!’

  He gaped at her. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t suppose it’s her real name.’

  ‘You’re talking about Suki Anwar? What do you mean?’

  ‘She was at college in Manchester, of course, when I knew her. I remember her telling me that one day. It was like a holiday job to her. She’d run up a lot of debt.’

  He gripped her wrist. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

  ‘On my baby’s life!’ It was news to Harry that Sheryl was a mother, but he got the message. ‘When I was at the Handcuff Hotel, Chantal was one of the girls who worked weekends. To make ends meet, she used to say. We had a good laugh about that, I can tell you.’

  ‘You’re sure about this? Suki Anwar was a prostitute?’

  ‘Why so surprised?’ Sheryl asked, all wide-eyed innocence. ‘She’s a prosecution brief now. It’s not exactly a career change, is it? She’s still dishing out the punishment.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  After he’d parted company with Sheryl, Harry wandered back to the office, pondering what her revelation might mean. He was sure she wasn’t lying or mistaken. Sheryl might have her faults, but she was no fool. If she recognised Suki as a fellow prostitute, he wasn’t going to argue. She’d even been generous in her appraisal of her former colleague’s professional skills.

  ‘She had what it takes, Harry, no question. Knew how to keep a client hungry for more. She could have gone all the way. Set up her own knocking shop, I mean. Chantal was no fool.’

  No wonder Suki had kept her head down during the trial. An unforeseen encounter in the magistrates’ court with a former colleague at the Handcuff Hotel must have featured high on her list of dread experiences. Unlucky to come across a working girl who’d plied her trade at the other end of the East Lancs Road, of course. She wouldn’t have recognised Sheryl’s real name when she’d read the file, wouldn’t have spotted the need to feign sudden illness or make some other excuse to avoid having to come face to face with her.

  He felt a rush of sympathy for Suki. He was well aware of the financial stresses suffered by people who wanted to qualify in the law these days. He’d talked to Carmel about it and what she told him made him angry. As far as he could see, politicians who talked a lot about equality had made it harder than ever for ordinary kids to compete with those who were better
off. They looked after their own children, of course; the rest had to take their chances. If Suki had paid for her tuition fees by going on the game, he could understand it. But it was risky for any intending lawyer. What if someone found out?

  As he turned into Fenwick Court, another question struck him. Suppose Carl Symons had found out?

  Lost in thought, he walked into New Commodities House. A client was waiting in reception, reading the Financial Times. The sight was sufficiently unusual in the offices of Crusoe and Devlin for Harry to pull up short. People who came here tended to favour the sports pull-out of the Daily Mirror. The man was hidden behind the broadsheet, but it was easy to deduce from his polished brogues and immaculately pressed trousers that he wasn’t a typical Crusoe and Devlin client. A sales executive from the fine wine club, perhaps? An envoy from the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors?

  Suzanne was engrossed in study of her vade-mecum, Feng Shui Can Heal Your Life. Harry stifled a groan. Juliet had a lot to answer for. He could only hope that the author would recommend a change of job as an essential precursor to self-improvement. He coughed to attract her attention and mouthed: ‘Who is he?’

  For reply, she put down the book and mimed, ‘We are not worthy.’ Harry spun round in time to see the paper being lowered. It revealed the face of a man he had never met before, a face that was yet frighteningly familiar.

  ‘Mr Crusoe?’ Casper May asked.

  ‘Er … no. Sorry.’ Harry was staring at him, hypnotised. It was like being trapped in a closet with a boa constrictor. ‘I mean - my name’s Devlin. I’m Harry Devlin. One of the partners here.’

  Casper May got out of his chair. ‘Oh yes,’ he said coolly. ‘I’ve heard about you.’

  Harry felt his gorge rise. His legs were about to buckle under him. He clutched at the edge of Suzanne’s desk to steady himself. He didn’t know what to say.

  ‘You’re the litigation partner, aren’t you? Good to meet you.’