A Capital Crime

by Laura Wilson

  ‘That’s better! Come here …’ Gathering her to him once more, James ran his thumb down her cheek as if he was sculpting her, then, in a swift movement, tilted up her chin. ‘I’ll settle for a kiss.’

  It lasted a long time. At the end of it, Diana felt as though they were already lovers.

  ‘I’d better not wear this ring, you know,’ she said later, when they were strolling towards Hyde Park Corner. ‘I’m not yet divorced.’

  ‘I’ve never cared much how things look, but you’re right. You can wear it in private. We mustn’t spoil your reputation.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve got one to spoil,’ said Diana, ruefully. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘You did the right thing, you know,’ said James. ‘You’d have gone mad with frustration and boredom stuck out in the country. Anyway, I need you, and now I’ve got you I’m certainly not going to let you go.’ He stared around him. ‘Extraordinary, isn’t it, the way that history is crumbling into dust before our eyes. Mutability … the way bombed-out places’ – he pointed at the hulk of a huge wrecked building in the distance, its harsh outlines rising, softened, out of the mist – ‘look like the ruins of ancient castles from a distance, especially in this light. We could be in a fairytale.’

  ‘Until we get close to it and see the nettles and the rubbish and the stray cats,’ said Diana.

  ‘That’s no way for a princess to talk. Especially in one of my fairytales.’

  ‘Well, what happens next in your tale, then?’

  ‘Well, the princess is so beautiful that everyone is madly in love with her, down to the castle’s lowliest scullion and kitchen-maid—’

  ‘Rubbish!’

  ‘Stop interrupting. In any case, it’s perfectly true. Even that little make-up girl. I’ve seen how she looks at you.’

  ‘What little make-up girl?’

  ‘The one you’re always sneaking off to chat to. In fact, I’ve been wondering whether I shouldn’t be starting to get jealous …’

  ‘You mean Monica Stratton?’ asked Diana, incredulously.

  ‘Never heard of a schoolgirl crush, my dear?’

  ‘I didn’t go to school. That’s why I don’t know anything.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’ James leant over and kissed her cheek, squeezing her bottom at the same time. ‘Well, not quite … Anyway, where was I?’

  ‘Everyone’s in love with this wretched princess.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Well, the prince – that’s me, in case you’re wondering – being possessed of infinite sagacity as well as the courage of a lion, a countenance like the sun, and a … oh, you know, all that other stuff that princes have … Anyway, he leads the princess to a nice little place where an aged crone peps them up with the elixir of life.’

  ‘But we’ve only just had lunch.’

  ‘The tragedy of this particular prince, my darling, is that he was born several drinks behind the rest of the world and is doomed to spend his life catching up … And we’ve got to celebrate. This is the beginning of a real adventure, my darling.’ His eyes were shining, his excitement almost palpable. ‘And apart from anything else, it’s bloody cold out here. Come on!’ He began to run across the grass, tugging her behind him.

  Much later, alone in the taxi on the way back to Jock and Lally’s, she closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the seat. Flushed, tipsy and languorous, with a delightful tingly pain between her thighs, she felt as though she actually had been making love all afternoon. When she arrived at Albemarle Street, a disapproving Mrs Robinson was waiting for her with a note from Lally. ‘Mr and Mrs Anderson were waiting,’ she said, and Diana remembered, with a guilty pang, that she’d agreed to accompany the two of them to a performance of choral music at St James’s Church in Piccadilly with a reception afterwards.

  Despite the housekeeper’s ill-concealed censoriousness, Lally’s note was breezy.

  Waited for you as long as we could – you’re obviously gadding about somewhere with gorgeous Mr Carleton (don’t blame you at all – much more fun!). Hope you enjoyed yourselves. Jock brought back a letter for you from F-J. He found it when he was going through the last of F-J’s papers and thought you ought to have it. It’s on yr bed – I thought you’d prefer to read it in private. See you as soon as we can get away, L.

  Diana carried the cup of tea, grudgingly produced by Mrs Robinson, up to her room. Picking up the letter, she sank into the armchair without bothering to remove her gloves or coat and sat turning the envelope over in her hands. It was neither addressed nor sealed, so clearly someone – Jock, perhaps – had already read its contents. Given the nature of F-J’s work and the manner of his death, she decided, that was inevitable.

  The juxtaposition of these thoughts with the events of the afternoon made her feel uneasy, guilty about her new-found happiness, and she couldn’t help wondering if it would last. Had F-J ever thought he could be happy, she wondered, or had he merely hoped to escape detection?

  The letter inside the envelope was scrawled so that the words were ugly tangles, hard to decipher, with minimal punctuation, degenerating into a list of sentences down the page. Diana wondered if F-J had been drunk when he wrote it. Perhaps, she thought, it was just some notes towards a letter he’d been planning to send her, but had never got round to finishing. Anyway, why did it matter? It meant he’d thought of her, didn’t it?

  Dear Diana,

  I owe you an apology. I am sorry not to be able to deliver it in person.

  I deeply regret my behaviour over Neville Apse. I hope that you can

  now forgive me.

  He must have known what he was going to do when he wrote it, Diana thought – he’d never have set those words down on paper otherwise. ‘I do forgive you, F-J,’ she murmured. ‘Of course I do.’ From her cocoon of happiness, she could have forgiven anything.

  That slate is clean at least.

  Perhaps the only one, who knows?

  I hope you will be happy.

  Remember what I said about Ventriss. You are the natural prey of

  an unscrupulous man (as I was)

  If in trouble, you might contact Edward Stratton

  I am sure you remember him. He is a good man

  It wasn’t signed, but at the bottom of the page there was an address – somewhere in north-east London, with a street name Diana couldn’t read, but which she supposed must be where Inspector Stratton lived. F-J’s trying to provide me with a guardian angel, she thought. The fact that she didn’t now need one made it, somehow, all the more touching. Perhaps F-J had guessed how unhappy she was in Hampshire, and had thought that Stratton might be able to save her from Claude Ventriss at some unspecified future time … Diana glanced at the letter again. The natural prey of an unscrupulous man. The words leapt at her as if they were written in crimson ink. But James wasn’t unscrupulous, so she had nothing to fear. A tiny flare of alarm, like some misshapen thing glimpsed out of the corner of the eye and not quite recognised, flickered in her mind, then died. Regretfully, she tugged James’s ring off her finger and bent down to put it into her handbag. Nothing must be said before the divorce, not even to Lally. The gesture made her remember how she’d taken her wedding ring off in the war years, working for F-J. Even in the depths of his despair, about to take his own life, he had thought of her …

  ‘You were a good man too, F-J,’ she said aloud. ‘You were, and you didn’t deserve this.’

  Later, lying wakeful in bed, she found herself clutching at the sides of the mattress as if the room were about to start shifting around her. Everything seemed to be mutating so much that really, there was no reason for the furniture – the very house – not to move as well. All the old values, the ones she’d grown up with, must be reexamined, weighed in the balance. Never, she thought, had life seemed so precious, and so fragile.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  From the witness box, Stratton looked down at the sea of wigs in the Old Bailey’s Number One Court. The greyish-white curls reminded hi
m, as they always did, of cauliflowers with the leaves cut off, and they seemed incongruous, bobbing about amidst the wood and leather of the heavy, dark furniture and the rolls of paper tied up with pink tape. He looked round at the jury, upright and self-consciously solemn in their box, at the press in the well of the court, and then up at the gallery, which was packed with the usual array of ghouls. They all looked the same, somehow, with dull hair and dun-coloured faces, leaning down, mouths agape, as if they had all been cut out of the same piece of damp wool. So far, February had been very cold and very wet, and periodically the ghouls broke the silences with salvos of bronchitic coughing, so that Stratton imagined a thickening cloud of germs hanging in the air above the lawyers and clerks.

  He looked across at the judge, Lord Justice Spencer, seated on his elaborate throne. He was an ascetic-looking man, who reminded Stratton of newspaper pictures he’d seen of Sir Stafford Cripps. He wore half-moon spectacles and, staring at Davies over the top of them, he could have served as a symbol for the unwavering and pitiless scrutiny of the law.

  Some criminals Stratton had seen in the dock seemed to have a sense of their celebrity, a consciousness that they were the focus of attention. Davies wasn’t one of them. Standing in the pen that was easily large enough to hold ten or even twelve people, he seemed smaller and more insignificant than ever. Tidy, in a clean shirt, with hair so neat and shiny that it might have been creosoted, he stood quite still, eyes down, while behind him the seated guard doodled with a slightly open mouth and the absorbed air of a child with a crayon in its fist. For Davies, it was the difference between life and death; for the guard, it was the rather dull means of putting food on the table, regardless of the impressive surroundings.

  And they were impressive – everything about the Old Bailey was meant to intimidate, from the high ceilings and the paintings of varnished darkness on the walls to the unassailable might of the law in all its pomp and ceremony. Stratton had given evidence at the Old Bailey a fair few times in his career, but still found it unnerving enough to get an actual sensation of discomfort in his scrotum; what it must be doing to Davies was anybody’s guess …

  August Ronstadt, for the Crown, was a man with the sort of fine-grained portliness that looked as though it came from beef and good wine, whose appearance exactly matched his rich, plump voice. He strode about the court – no mere walking for him – and, even though he was on their side, Stratton’s instinctive dislike of all lawyers, but especially ones like this, made him wonder sourly if the man ever merely ate, drank or farted, either. Not for him such ordinary animal functions – he would devour, imbibe, and blast like a celestial trumpet afterwards. Although Stratton had put hundreds of dullards in the dock and witnessed equal numbers of barristers smashing their evidence to pieces, the immense gulf between Ronstadt and Davies – in stature, intellect, opportunity, entitlement, and every other possible thing – impressed him as never before.

  The Crown had decided to proceed on the indictment charging Davies with Judy’s murder, rather than his wife’s. It was easy to see why, although there had been a sticky half-hour’s wait earlier on while council argued whether evidence about the death of Muriel was admissible. Hearing that it was, Stratton uttered one of the most heartfelt Thank Christ’s of his whole career, and hearing that none of the workmen would be called and that Davies would be the only witness for the defence had made him feel even better.

  Of course, if Lord Justice Spencer had deemed the evidence inadmissible, the Crown could simply have gone ahead with the indictment for Muriel’s killing, but it was much more likely to be plain sailing this way round – as, so far, it had proved. Dr McNally the pathologist, Backhouse, Edna Backhouse, Mrs Howells and the Welsh policeman Williams had so far been called for the prosecution, and August Ronstadt had done a splendid job. The judge had helped, too. As Ballard had remarked, sotto voce, ‘Well, he’s on our side.’ Despite the business of Backhouse’s previous convictions, Ronstadt, with a surprising amount of assistance from the judge, had done a very good job of painting the chief witness as a reformed character, a hero of the Great War and a man struggling valiantly against ill health. Lord Justice Spencer had even asked him if he’d prefer to give his evidence sitting down, and when the time came for the defence lawyer Humphrey Shillingworth (less richly plump than Ronstadt but, in Stratton’s opinion, well on the way there) to suggest that Backhouse had had something to do with the baby’s death, it looked like simple bullying. Shillingworth himself clearly found the task distasteful. His unease had been evident when he’d questioned Backhouse; he’d hedged the allegations round with semi-apologies to a degree that Stratton couldn’t remember ever having heard before. After all, given what they did for a living, expecting sincerity from barristers was as unreasonable as expecting genuine passion from prostitutes. It was appearance that counted, which was why Shillingworth’s obvious lack of appetite for his work had made an impression on him, and, Stratton thought, the jury.

  Given that there was no medical evidence whatsoever to back up Davies’s cock and bull story about Backhouse killing Muriel in the performance of an unsuccessful abortion – not to mention a single reason why Backhouse should want to kill the baby – Stratton was surprised that nobody had tried to talk the little man out of issuing instructions that would be bound to fail, but he could see that they had bugger-all else to go on.

  The questions from Ronstadt were a piece of cake. After a brief pause, filled with a lot more coughing and wheezing from the gallery, Shillingworth stood up and started taking Stratton through the statements Davies had made at West End Central, with a lot of questions about the timings and who’d said what to whom and when. Stratton could see the point of these – Shillingworth was trying to find out if they’d put words into Davies’s mouth about the circumstances in which the bodies were found. This had given him a couple of sleepless nights before the trial started, but when it came to the point it was all pretty straightforward and he hadn’t needed to check his notebook once. This wasn’t something he liked doing, because it called up the image of the comedy plod, shuffling and thumb-licking, and the bloody lawyers were quite condescending enough already, thanks very much, without all that.

  After that, Shillingworth started on the timber used to hide the bodies from view. ‘He told us he’d concealed his wife’s body behind timber in the washhouse, sir.’

  ‘He said that, did he?’ asked Shillingworth. ‘“Concealed behind timber”?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The moment he’d spoken he realised that he wasn’t actually sure that Davies had used those words – in fact, he had a distinct memory of saying them himself when he’d cautioned the man – but Shillingworth moved on to another question and it was too late to go back. Not that he wanted to go back, of course, and besides, Davies had known about the timber because of the workmen, hadn’t he, so … Trying to clarify it all in his mind, Stratton failed to hear Shillingworth’s next question and had to ask for it to be repeated. Bloody well concentrate, he told himself. Just get through the next ten minutes without landing on your arse, and we’re laughing.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  After a break for lunch, during which Stratton and Ballard, who’d followed him into the witness box, toyed with two pieces of very dead plaice, they sat together at the back of the court. They’d found, on checking their notebooks, that Stratton had mentioned the timber in the caution, but, Ballard having agreed with him that Davies knew about the timber because he knew about the workmen, he’d felt reassured. In any case, the moment had passed, and it was only one tiny thing … Something in the back of his mind told him that that wasn’t the only incidence where they’d put words into Davies’s mouth, but it had been so bloody hard to untangle the truth from all the lies the man had told. And he’d confessed, hadn’t he? So why did he, Stratton, feel the need to justify his actions? Why did it bother him? Irritable with himself, he put the thoughts from his mind and concentrated on Davies, who was giving evidence.

  Sh
illingworth was taking Davies through the statements he’d given in Wales, his allegations about Backhouse, and the stuff about selling his furniture. Standing alone in the dock, clutching the rail with white knuckles, Davies looked more insignificant than ever, as if struggling against the onslaught of some remorseless force of nature against which he was powerless. This, thought Stratton, was entirely true, even if the bloke was supposed to be acting for him. As for when Ronstadt got to his feet … Stratton scribbled ‘What do you think?’ in his notebook, tore out the page and pushed it towards Ballard. After a moment, the answer came back. ‘Hasn’t got a prayer.’

  ‘What happened when you got to West End Central police station?’ asked Shillingworth.

  ‘Inspector Stratton told me my wife and baby were dead, sir.’

  ‘Did he say where?’

  ‘Yes, sir. At number ten Paradise Street in the washhouse, and he said he thought I’d done it.’

  ‘Did he say how it appeared they died?’

  ‘Yes, sir, by strangulation.’

  ‘Did he say with what?’

  Puffy-eyed and squinting with concentration, Davies said, ‘With a rope, sir, and my daughter had been strangled with a tie.’

  ‘Did I say she’d been strangled with a tie?’ whispered Stratton to Ballard.

  The sergeant looked through his notebook. ‘No, sir, but the tie was in the Charge Room with the rest of the stuff.’

  ‘Was anything shown to you at that time?’ said Shillingworth.

  ‘Yes, sir. The clothing of my wife and daughter.’

  ‘Before Inspector Stratton told you, had you any idea that anything had happened to your daughter?’

  ‘No, sir. No idea at all.’