by Vicary, Tim
Trude promised to catch the hamster when she had taken the girls to school but Esther, in floods of tears by now, would have none of it. They considered sending Jessica to walk to school on her own while Trude stayed behind with Esther, but there was a main road to cross where a child had been run over and killed by a lorry only last month; so instead Terry promised his younger daughter faithfully that if she would only go to school NOW so that Jessica could be a dolphin in the school assembly, he, a senior Detective Inspector leading a murder investigation but more importantly for the moment their father, would not leave the house until Rastus was safely returned to custody.
It was a promise he broke five minutes after the children left the house.
He locked all the doors and windows so that there was no way the hamster could leave, then he scribbled a note for Trude explaining what he had done, snatched up his briefcase and hurried out to his car, which God be thanked for small mercies, started first time. Then he drove carefully the long way around the estate to avoid any possibility of being seen from the school, before emerging onto the Hull Road and getting stuck in exactly the traffic jam he had planned to avoid.
It was on occasions like this that he realized, more than ever, how much he, and the children, depended on Trude. Since Mary’s death she had brought sanity and stability back into their home again, almost - but not quite - like a wife. He could trust her and share crises like this hamster business with her just as he once would have done with Mary. Probably tonight when the children were tucked up in bed and Rastus - please God - was back in his cage, they would have a whisky together and laugh over it. But there would be a catch in Terry’s laughter, a necessary reserve as between any widower of forty and a young nanny of twenty three. One day he knew, she would leave, to go back to Norway with her boyfriend, Odd. And how would he cope then? It was a future that Terry dreaded.
Another thing he dreaded was the appearance of his boss, Will Churchill, at the barristers’ chambers this morning. There was no real need for Churchill to come to this conference at all, but he had made a point of it nonetheless. And when Terry finally arrived, hot and flustered after a frustrating search for a parking space, there was Churchill, just as he had feared, standing outside on the pavement with the rest of the team, looking ostentatiously at his watch.
‘Afternoon, Terence,’ the Detective Chief Inspector said, making a point of using Terry’s full name, which he hated. ‘Glad you managed to fit us in.’ He glanced at the two others, hoping for appreciation of his joke, and was rewarded, to Terry’s disgust, with an embarrassed, complicitous grin from DS Mike Carter. DS Tracy Litherland, however, met her boss’s sally with a straight wooden face, as though sarcasm was something she didn’t get. For all his efforts, Will Churchill had yet to win the loyalty of the team he had taken charge of a year ago; but the less successful he was, it seemed to Terry, the harder he tried. And the main focus of Churchill’s efforts was to undermine Terry, who, together with Sarah Newby, the barrister they were here to meet, had undermined him so badly in the past.
Mumbling some excuse about traffic, Terry followed his younger boss into the chambers, where the clerk showed them into a conference room on the first floor. Here they were welcomed by the CPS solicitor, Mark Wrass, a tall hearty jovial pinstriped man with oversized hands and feet which, if he had had more co-ordination, might have belonged to a farmer or rugby player. As it was, Terry had several times seen him knock a glass of water all over the table or sweep the papers to the floor with gestures of earnest, clumsy enthusiasm. Terry prudently seated himself at the opposite end of the table.
As he did so the door opened and Sarah Newby came in. She looked very different here, to the relaxed hostess at her garden party. A slender woman in her mid thirties with dark shoulder length hair and hazel eyes, she wore a black trouser suit with a thin gold chain round her neck under the collar of a white embroidered blouse. The men rose politely and she went round the table, shaking hands with each in turn. For Terry her smile was warm, the pressure of her hand firm; for Churchill it was merely civil, a brief acknowledgement of ancient enmity. There was a history to this meeting. It was less than year since Will Churchill had arrested this woman’s son on a charge of murder; a charge which from which she had successfully defended him in court. Sarah Newby had savaged Will Churchill in the witness box, accusing him of bullying, witness intimidation and incompetence, but Churchill had stood up to her forcefully and Sarah had been convinced, until the moment when the jury came in with their verdict, that she had lost the case and this man had put her son away for life. However smooth her complexion and polite her smile today, no one in the room doubted that the wound of what had so nearly happened was still tender under her skin.
As it must be under Churchill’s too, Terry, thought. For in the end, Sarah Newby had beaten him and he had been publicly humiliated in his first major case since he had joined the York force; a humiliation that ran even deeper when Terry had uncovered evidence that Churchill had been pursuing the wrong man. For an ambitious young officer like Churchill, hoping to spend three or four years at most in his present post before rising to higher things, the acquittal of Sarah’s son had been a major setback, a blemish on his CV; for Sarah, it had been a dagger pointed at the heart of her family and her career.
So Terry watched with more than normal curiosity as she seated herself at the head of the table, a few feet from the man she must detest above all others.
‘Gentlemen, DS Litherland,’ she began coolly, nodding at Tracy on Terry’s right hand. ‘I’ve read the file which Mr Wrass gave me, and, as usual, there are a number of questions to be settled before we decide whether to proceed, which is why we are all here. As I’m due in court this afternoon, I suggest we get down to business straight away.’
11. Counsel’s Opinion
SARAH NEWBY had thought long and hard about taking this case, when her clerk proposed it to her. Over the past year she had appeared mostly as defence counsel in minor cases, the staple diet of a junior criminal barrister - burglaries, muggings, drugs - the usual round of petty crime. She had hoped that the publicity she gained for the successful defence of her son Simon on a murder charge would have raised her image with commissioning solicitors, but this had not happened. A few solicitors, like her friend Lucy Parsons, sent their harder cases to her, but many others fought shy. Mostly, she found herself scrabbling around for work as before, in the mire of petty crime, no nearer the prestige of a silk Queen’s Counsel gown that, despite her late entry to the bar, she craved.
So this approach from the Crown Prosecution Service to undertake a murder trial was a compliment, a step up. The CPS, after all, had its own barristers - juniors employed on a salary to prosecute the mound of cases that clogged up the courts every day of the year. Sarah saw these people in court all the time, clutching heaps of files which they had only received the night before; it was because of their enforced lack of preparation that she was so often able to run rings round them. Any of them would have given their eye teeth for a case like this; but their very lack of experience in prosecuting major cases made them less likely to be entrusted with one, and more likely for the CPS management to go outside to a self-employed barrister like Sarah.
And Sarah, being only two rungs up the slippery ladder of success, was equally eager to take it. Even if it meant prosecuting for a change, instead of defending, as she was used to.
‘As I see it,’ she said now, ‘our first problem is with the forensic evidence. It’s not clear exactly what this poor girl died of. According to your pathologist it was “heart failure caused either by major haemorrhage or partial drowning, or a combination of both”. Hardly a model of clarity that, is it?’
For half an hour they went through the details – the pathologist’s report, the forensic evidence that showed three of David Kidd’s fingerprints – and none of Shelley’s – on the knife, and the background to the fatal relationship. Terry explained it clearly, with occasional interruptions f
rom his boss.
‘What we know for certain is that this young couple, David Kidd and Shelley Walters, were having an affair of some kind - well, the obvious kind, really. She was a first year student at the uni and her parents didn’t like him - thought he was a conman and a cradlesnatcher; you’ve all read their statements. It’s also clear that the affair wasn’t going well. We’ve got statements from her student friends saying that she meant to dump him, in fact they thought she had dumped him the week before ...’
‘Why was that, exactly?’ Churchill asked, unable to resist filling the silence left by Terry’s pause. Does he think I don’t know? Terry wondered. Churchill, to Terry’s annoyance, had stepped in to supervise the investigation for ten days while Esther was ill in hospital, which was the reason for his presence now.
‘Because she found him in bed with another girl,’ Sarah answered smoothly.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Terry nodded, approvingly. At least she had done her homework. ‘A girl called Lindsay. She’s the mother of his three year old kid - though he’s no loving father. Takes her to bed every now and then and bungs her a few quid to keep her quiet, that seems to be his style. Anyway, when the dead girl, Shelley, found this girl in his bed it was the last straw, according to her friend Sandy. Shelley saw the light, and brought it to an end.’
‘So why did she go back to his flat?’ Sarah asked thoughtfully. ‘The defence are bound to ask that. Did she want to see him again?’
‘According to him, yes, according to her friend Sandy, no. She’d left a few clothes and books in the flat and wanted them back, that’s all. But David now claims she’d forgiven him: she came in, they talked for a while, then made love, he says. That’s the big change to his story. He didn’t mention it in the first interview.’
‘Why not?’
‘He was shy, he says. He was respecting her privacy.’ Terry shrugged dismissively.
‘No sign of rape, though?’
‘Not according to the pathologist, no.’
‘So that, presumably, is an avenue the defence will want to explore. Who is representing him, by the way?’
Mark Wrass’s large hands blundered earnestly through his papers. ‘Savendra Bhose.’
‘There you are then.’ Sarah smiled. ‘Savvy knows his job all right. He’ll claim the girl thought up an excuse to see her lover one last time, hoping he’d forgive her. I know it was really a question of her forgiving him, but that’s how a young girl’s mind might work, especially if she was as naive and lacking in self-confidence as these statements from her mother and her tutors imply. She’d dumped him, but somehow he’d made her feel guilty, and part of her wanted forgiveness, so she went there hoping that something like that might happen. And it did, didn’t it? They made love, then she got in the bath. Then while he was out of the flat she was overcome by remorse and killed herself. That’s what he’ll say. Trust me, I can see Savendra inventing it now.’
Inventing it. This was what unsettled him about lawyers, Terry thought. He liked Sarah, but she was still in love with her own cleverness, all of them were. She hadn’t had to see the girl’s dismembered body on the mortuary table as he had, or confront her hysterical mother in the hospital, wrapping his arms around hers to prevent her scratching the eyes out of the boyfriend who stood there brazenly claiming that Shelley had killed herself because of the incessant pressure from her parents to succeed. Sarah hadn’t witnessed that, nor had she sat in the interview room for hours as he had, carefully restraining his temper while the cocky young bastard faked his grief and changed his story by the day.
And yet it was her job to face him in court. If she could be persuaded to take up the case at all, that is.
‘He may say all that, but her student friends disagree,’ he responded sourly. ‘The affair was over as far as she was concerned, they say. She just went back to collect her possessions.’
‘What possessions?’ Sarah said. ‘A bag, some underwear and jeans, a couple of novels, a magazine? Couldn’t she have bought new ones?’
‘They were her things. Students are poor.’
‘Granted. And I’ll make that point of course. But we have to accept the possibility that this girl Shelley went back to her boyfriend’s flat at a time that made it virtually certain she would meet him.’
‘Her friend Sandy might corroborate that,’ said DS Tracy Litherland, speaking for the first time. ‘She’d offered to go back with Shelley several times to collect these things, but Shelley always put her off. And then she went alone.’
‘There you are then.’ Sarah sat back in her chair, smiling. ‘First break of serve to the defence. And, it seems, she’d been seeing a psychiatrist. What’s that all about?’
‘Bi-polar disorder,’ said Tracy warily. ‘She’d had treatment for a couple of years, her mother said. She took lithium to keep it under control.’
‘Any suicidal tendencies?’
‘Not according to her mother, no. None at all.’
‘The defence aren’t going to believe that, are they? Given that Kidd is claiming suicide. Savendra’s going to call that psychiatrist, for sure. This could get nasty, for the parents. Especially if Kidd claims they put pressure on her, as ...’ she leafed through the papers in front of her ‘... it seems he does. Not looking so easy now, is it?’
Terry felt a little tic throbbing in his throat as it often did when he was angry. The case his team had spent a month knitting together was unravelling in front of him.
‘It’s your job to counter those arguments,’ he said sourly. ‘If they put them at all.’
‘I’ll do my best, of course,’ said Sarah. ‘If I advise the CPS to go ahead, that is. It’s my duty today to evaluate whether we have a chance of winning. What I’m pointing out is that the evidence to support your story is hardly conclusive. Not yet anyway.’
‘All right,’ said Terry angrily. ‘Okay, she had a psychiatric disorder and she was a first year undergraduate, I’ll grant you that. But most undergraduates don’t kill themselves. Maybe she did go back to the flat to meet him again, I don’t know. But look at his response when I asked him about these things in her bag. He said she’d come to stay and brought them with her. It was only when we’d spoken to her friend Sandy that he admitted he’d lied. You can hit him with that surely?’
‘Certainly,’ Sarah nodded coolly.
‘Just as he lied about their happy reunion. He persisted with that until we told him his neighbour - a priest - had heard a quarrel. A violent quarrel, he said. Then Kidd admitted they’d had an argument.’
Sarah made a note.
‘Then in the flat we found a meal half-prepared - onions, potatoes and carrots chopped up in a pan, steak in the fridge. And Shelley’s clothes strewn all over the floor where she’d taken them off before she got in the bath.’
‘Or made love?’ Sarah asked.
‘Or made love, yes,’ Terry agreed. ‘That’s what he admitted they did, later.’
‘And after that you think he killed her?
‘That’s what I think happened, yes,’ Terry confirmed grimly. ‘Whether this love-making was consensual or not is impossible to say; there’s no evidence of rape, so perhaps it was. Maybe, as you say, she was in two minds about whether to break up with him; perhaps it was a fond farewell, I don’t know. But he was never going to let her go, he’s not that type. You haven’t met him, I have. He’s a psycho, a control freak. So when she’s in the bath he goes in and says something that scares her - I don’t know what. Maybe he has a kitchen knife in his hand - that would freak her out. Anyway she tries to get out of the bath and there’s a struggle. He thrusts her head under water - that’s how she gets the bruises round her neck and her throat - and she starts to drown. She nearly did drown, remember - the pathologist found water in her lungs and the ambulance crew say she coughed up pink frothy fluid - classic drowning symptoms. But of course, from David’s point of view this is no good - how can he explain away a drowned girl in his bath? He thinks he’s killed he
r but he’s got to disguise how she died, make it look like suicide. So he cuts her wrists, sees the blood seeping out in the bath, and thinks what do I do now? That’s when he decides to go to the shop. If he’s out of the flat long enough he can claim an alibi, say she committed suicide while he wasn’t there. So he goes out, and has a conversation with the shopkeeper who knows him. He even buys flowers, remember - a bunch of flowers for his girlfriend who’s come back to him. He tells the shopkeeper all about this, then he meets his neighbour, a priest, on the stairs and tells him about it too. Then when he thinks she’s had enough time to die he comes home, leaves a knife by her hand to make it look like suicide, and phones 999.’
‘Only the ambulance crew find she’s still alive,’ murmured Sarah softly.
‘Exactly. Not only that but they find a young man who seems more shocked than relieved that she’s still breathing.’
‘Do they say that?’
‘Something like that. It’s in their statements somewhere.’
‘I see.’ Sarah studied Terry thoughtfully. ‘And is this the story you want me to put before the jury?’
‘Yes.’
There was a silence. Will Churchill broke in, his Essex accent harsh and intrusive. ‘Before you start questioning it in your clever lawyer’s way, Mrs Newby, there’s something else you should know.’ He passed two slim files across the table. ‘Those are the trial and probation reports on David Kidd. Three years ago he was charged with the rape and kidnap of a sixteen year old schoolgirl in Nottingham. The trial collapsed when the girl changed her story in the witness box, so all they could get him for was possession of cocaine. He got six months and probation for two years. But look at the witness statements and probation reports. He’s a nasty piece of work, this lad.’
