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by Brian Freemantle

  ‘When will the trial begin?’ asked Powell, at once.

  ‘Depends on the defence. A month, I’d say. Is there a problem?’

  He didn’t have the slightest doubt he’d have custody of Beth by then; be responsible for looking after her. How was he going to manage that, from three and a half thousand miles away? ‘None at all,’ he said.

  He should have given priority to the Director’s callback demand when he returned to the embassy but instead Powell spoke first to Amy. She hadn’t seen or heard from Beddows so far that day. Because it was so long in the past none of what Harold Taylor had insisted to be facts were computerized. The most obvious – possibly the only – sources were newspaper archives and she’d circulated the material to the appropriate Bureau offices.

  ‘What’s he like?’ she demanded.

  ‘Not at all like a ghost,’ said Powell.

  When he was connected to the Director, Gale said, ‘Anything outstanding you can’t leave to Lobonski?’

  ‘No,’ said Powell.

  ‘The internal inquiry is scheduled for the day after tomorrow,’ said the man. ‘Come back.’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  It was held in a seventh-floor conference room, with a sign on the door forbidding unauthorized entry. There was the ambience of a court, a Bureau counsel presenting the accusation of gross misconduct to a panel of two deputy directors, with Clarence Gale as the chairman/ judge, and Harry Beddows allowed a lawyer from outside the Bureau to defend him.

  Throughout, Beddows stared stonily ahead, never once looking across the room towards Powell, his accuser. Powell looked steadily at the other man, still finding it difficult to imagine everything Beddows – and Ann – had been prepared to do or tried to do. It went beyond deceit or cuckolding. They must, somehow, have come to hate him, which was absurd because he’d done nothing to either of them to earn or justify that hate.

  The realization worried him. This wasn’t the sequence he’d intended. He’d wanted to get the custody hearing over first, get Beth safely with him. Agonizingly he’d arrived back from London to a positive date – just three days from now – but that was still three days too long, too unpredictable, for her to go on living with them. The worst agony of all was having to accept there was nothing he could do about it.

  There was a legal argument about the admissibility of Powell’s claim that Bureau funds had been misappropriated to relocate him to Washington when the purpose had been to reunite Beddows with his mistress but it achieved the objective of bringing the cause of Powell’s marriage break-up before the tribunal.

  There couldn’t be any argument about the fact that Beddows had written unauthorized correspondence in the Director’s name but the claim that Beddows had withheld from the Director information about the extradition procedure was disputed until a written memorandum was produced from the Attorney-General’s office dated four days before Powell had flown to London, when Beddows had insisted to the Director there were still complications to be resolved to get Harold Taylor back to US jurisdiction.

  Amy tried hard that night to reassure him that the postponement of the tribunal’s decision prevented Beddows or Ann from taking their spite out against Beth. ‘He won’t do anything to make things worse. At the moment, officially, he’s only suspended: still got a job.’

  Beth didn’t sound happy when he spoke to her by telephone, but when he posed a series of questions for yes or no answers she indicated that they weren’t being too unpleasant. When Powell openly asked if they’d hit her – ‘or anything like that’ – Beth very positively said ‘No.’

  It would have helped if there had been more activity to fill the intervening days. Amy Halliday had been right about old newspapers being the primary source to support Harold Taylor’s story. The accounts were reasearched from all over America by outside FBI offices and assembled and exchanged between Washington and London by Amy, leaving Powell with little to do but read them.

  There were rare exceptions to newspapers. In the archives of the ship insurers Lloyd’s of London was discovered the passenger manifest of the Discovery, a Harwich-registered brigantine. This proved that Paul Noakes, accompanied by his father George and mother Violet, sailed from Tilbury to Boston in June 1756. In London, over a period of a year before that, the General Evening Post and Rayner’s Penny Morning Advertiser extensively reported six ritual murders of women, all around the St James’s area and all of whose dismembered bodies had been displayed identically to those in the current investigation. Also reported was the mob sacking of a secret ‘Devil’s Disciples’ temple in St James’s and the killing, by burning to death, of ‘an unnamed mystic Priest from the East’.

  Rayner’s talked of ‘atrocities deeply foull’ and described day and night church services at which the Reverend Jeremiah Norton-Smithie, ‘a Priest of the Parish of St James’s most anxiously exhorted a Populace much alarmed that protection could be found against the Devil unquestionably at large by praying most devoutly three times a day and by displaying the Cross of Christ most prominently in every room of their Dwellings. To omit a room, even the privy, risked leaving a door open to Evil.’

  In the year following the Discovery’s arrival in America there were five matching ritual killings in Boston. In 1805, two years after the United States took possession of St Louis, the vigilante hanging was reported in the town’s first news-sheet of Luke Thomas, for the killing of the ten-year-old daughter of an ostler at one of the three brothels Thomas owned. Bigger coverage had been devoted to eight unsolved ceremonial murders.

  Maurice Barkworth’s graduation, with honours, was recorded in the early annals of the San Francisco Medical College in 1824 and so was the enrolment of ‘Maurice Barkworth, American’ in the London College of Surgeons four years later. The archive of the London college also still contained a number of critically acclaimed papers written by Barkworth. Most were on his ophthalmic research into the possibility of retinal retention of their killers by victims of violent attack.

  The Flanders field court-martial in 1916 of Patrick Arnold, for shooting in the back an officer who had ordered a frontal daylight attack upon German machine-gun emplacements, had survived more completely than those of Myron Nolan in Berlin, thirty-three years later.

  On the day of the custody hearing Powell was at the court an hour earlier. Amy was with him.

  As they waited Amy said, ‘I know you’ve got a cast-iron case but it would still help if you were married, don’t you think?’

  He looked sideways at her, initially startled, then smiling. ‘Is that a proposal?’

  ‘I thought I should,’ Amy smiled back. ‘It was taking you far too long to get around to it.’

  He said, ‘I’d be honoured to accept’, and they both burst out laughing, only stopping just before Ann and Beddows arrived with Beth.

  Beth looked subdued, even when she saw them, Powell was immediately aware of the contrast between the svelte sophistication of Amy and Ann’s thrown-together dowdiness. Harry Beddows refused to meet his look.

  It was a closed child’s court, the judge a plump-featured, grey-haired woman who ordered that Beth wait in an ante-room with a female court official.

  Powell sat with a feeling of déjà vu, caught by the similarities with the FBI hearing, and wondered if Beddows was reminded too. Powell’s counsel supported the application for the custody variation on the grounds of fitness by alleging that Ann was not interested in the child – quoting the mistake and abortion remark, her refusal as a qualified teacher to help with Beth’s school work – and said she had conspired with her lover, Powell’s work superior, to move from one side of the country to the other to continue an adulterous relationship unknown to the court at the time of the original order.

  Ann’s counsel attacked Powell’s single-parent inability properly to care for a thirteen-year-old, with a job taking him not just all over America but all over the world, and Powell replied looking directly at Amy that he was shortly to be married, enjoying th
e effect upon Ann and Beddows.

  It was the judge’s decision, at the end of the hearing, to call Beth into court. The child entered nervously, looking to Powell for guidance, not Ann.

  The judge had Beth sit beside her and said, ‘You know what this is all about, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Who I’m going to live with.’

  ‘Who would you like that to be?’ asked the woman.

  ‘Dad and Amy,’ said Beth, at once.

  The order granted Powell total custody, with an additional order for Ann’s visitation to be decided by the court after the submission of specialist reports, in view of the woman’s animosity evidenced during the hearing.

  Hector McLeash formally asked the FBI for Wesley Powell, Barry Westmore, Geoffrey Sloane and Amy Halliday to travel to England for the trial, which was scheduled to start in the last week of the month. Powell arranged for Beth to go to summer camp.

  Having a positive starting date allowed an entire fortnight of normality for Powell, Amy and Beth; and an oasis of delighted discovery that Powell and Amy were compatible in virtually everything, not just in bed. The French café in Georgetown became their favourite. They enjoyed the same music, spanning light opera and modern jazz, and took Beth to a concert featuring both at the Kennedy Center. The following weekend, the last full one they had, they overnighted in New York to see a Broadway production of a Cameron Mackintosh musical, which Amy declared to be their celebration at becoming a new family.

  Powell didn’t like violent crime movies and discovered Amy didn’t, either. She wasn’t offended when he accused her of getting on a popular bandwagon by claiming Hemingway to be overrated and he conceded that Steinbeck sometimes intellectually took too far his recurring theme of original sin. After Beth’s overenthusiasm at their first meeting came a calmness, and the bond between Amy and the girl developed as easily and naturally as Amy’s relationship had with him, neither of them pushing or trying too hard, just letting it happen. Homework help and shared kitchen duties were a standard part of life in the Crystal City apartment. Amy made Beth’s first period (‘welcome to womanhood!’) something to be excited, not frightened about.

  Two days before they flew to England Powell was summoned to the Director’s office to meet Ross Kirkpatrick, the American government lawyer assigned to the already briefed English QC, Cedric Solomon, to make the formal extradition application after the British murder trial. It was a getting-to-know-each-other formality but Clarence Gale held him back after Kirkpatrick’s departure. Abruptly the Director said, ‘We found against Beddows.’

  Powell waited.

  ‘This case is going to cause a sensation. God knows how much.’

  Powell still couldn’t think of a response.

  ‘Publicly to announce Beddows’s dismissal would fuel it further. Risk embarrassing the Bureau. He’s being allowed to resign, on health grounds.’

  And keep his pension as a pay-off. Had Clarence Gale privately condoned the lie that Powell had been suspended? He’d never know, Powell accepted.

  ‘It creates, of course, a division head vacancy,’ said Gale. ‘I’m offering it to you.’

  His pay-off, Powell acknowledged. He said, ‘Thank you, Mr Director. I am delighted to accept.’

  Harold Taylor didn’t want a defence as such, although he decided formally to engage a lawyer, determined against any court obstruction. What he needed was someone who was qualified but incapable, a puppet to his ventriloquism. He met – and rejected – four provably able QCs before he found Jonathan Fry, an obviously bumbling, ineffectual man who clearly sought the brief out of desperation and whom Taylor at once dominated.

  ‘You should not have made that unfortunate statement without legal advice,’ complained Fry, who constantly sifted through his disarrayed bundles of paper and never seemed to be able to find what he was looking for in them. ‘It hasn’t made my task any easier.’

  ‘That’s what I told him,’ complained the instructing solicitor. Michael Joliffe stuttered, which made it difficult for him to pronounce the Latin with which he frequently interspersed his sentences to prove his legal ability, which was limited and was why Taylor had accepted him, too.

  ‘It’s my defence,’ said Taylor.

  ‘What is?’ frowned Fry.

  ‘The evidence is that Myron Nolan is the killer?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the barrister, doubtfully.

  ‘And the evidence also is that Myron Nolan’s dead. And dead men can’t kill. I’m Harold Taylor, twenty-five years old. Not Myron Nolan, who’d be about eighty-three now. The police have got the wrong man.’

  ‘But this reincarnation—’

  ‘No-one’s going to believe in reincarnation. It’s ridiculous.’

  ‘The Hibbses …’

  ‘A sex game that the police burst in upon, between me and my fiancée.’

  ‘But the old woman—’

  ‘Kinky old bitch. You’ll have to question Janet closely about that.’

  ‘There is an alternative …’

  ‘I do not have any mental illness,’ blocked Taylor, almost impatiently. ‘All the psychiatrists agree. You have to accept my instructions, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Fry.

  ‘You’ve just had them. It’s a not-guilty plea.’

  My time to become the most famous person in the world, Taylor thought.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Hector McLeash stood but waited until the first stir of impatience from the judge before beginning: ‘Some of the incontrovertible facts to be brought before you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, may be bewildering in all but one respect – they prove beyond doubt that the man before you in the dock committed terrible murder.’ Harold Taylor, at whom everyone looked, smiled back at them, lounged in his chair, the most relaxed man in the court.

  Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined everything working out so completely – so superbly – as this. Sensation after sensation and ever more to come, with him in total control, the ringmaster of his own spectacular circus with all the animals waiting to perform whatever tricks he chose. And he’d choose a lot.

  More performing animals outside, too. The media’s frenzied anticipation had approached such a crescendo in the days leading up to the trial that before McLeash had got to his feet the judge, Sir Alec Lockyer, had publicly warned newspapers, radio and television against contempt and forbidden the jury to read, listen to or watch any account of the trial until its end.

  People would read, though. In detail greater – more staggering – than anything to emerge in evidence they were about to hear. He’d been amazed by the clamour from publishers not just from England and America but from France and Germany, too. Another opportunity. America would probably do it best and the offers from the five publishers there were all better than any from Europe. Six million dollars was the top so far but it would go much higher by the end of the trial. Double, maybe. He’d need a lot of money – as much as he could get – to set himself up as he had in Alabama in whatever new American penitentiary he was finally sent to. If indeed he bothered, with so much else available.

  An American trial to follow this was another unexpected but fantastic bonus: after both – and the book – he really would be the most famous figure in the global village.

  Already there were a lot of other letters apart from those from publishers. ‘Messiah’ was the most commonly used word. America again would be the place to form a cult – a religion – that would be the biggest personal joke of all: so many stupid people, eager to part with their money. And not just to be his disciples. There were more outright pleas from people desperate for the secret of reincarnation, offering whatever he demanded to be able to live for ever. He’d do it all, Taylor decided. Not just the most famous figure in the world; possibly its richest, as well. Literally its God. Fooling – and laughing at – everyone.

  He began concentrating on his surroundings, wanting to remember it all, relish it all. Pity about there being no camera. T
he only disappointment. The English court would have looked good, a proper setting. The judge, a cadaverous, bespectacled man, bewigged and bird-plumed in scarlet and nested high upon an ornately carved bench covered by a crested canopy. Black-gowned, white-wigged counsel were before him, ravens to the judge’s cock robin: Jonathan Fry, scrabbling as always for missing documents, McLeash, at that moment apologizing for the murder scene photographs being shown to the jury. That jury, all wide eyed with horror at the portfolios through which they were being led, eight women to four men who would be even more horrified when he performed his own trick. Powell, whom it had been so important to identify, was to the left of the chamber, obviously, from their whispered exchanges, with other Americans connected with the investigation there, three men and a woman, the woman very attractive, nice tits, full mouth, looking at him unafraid, curiously. Could fuck a woman like that, just as he could have fucked Janet Hibbs if she hadn’t cheated him. Couldn’t see Janet. Be outside somewhere, waiting to be called, with all the other witnesses. There were three artists by the press bench, sketching furiously. Get my good side, guys. The best way there would be to capture the scene inside the court, without a camera. Have to remember to clip the impressions from the newspapers. Read the accounts. Most of the reporters were taking notes as fast as the artists were drawing but some just stared at him. Word artists, he guessed … ‘an ordinary, nondescript man … difficult to believe such horror, such atrocities … unbelievable stories of previous lives … returning from the dead … occult …’ Wait for it, fellas: you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

  ‘The scientific evidence I have outlined is precisely that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,’ McLeash was saying. ‘Provable, unarguable, undeniable science. Nothing to do with fantasy, with ghosts or spirits or someone returning from a previous life. Yet those scientific facts provide the only explanation for the story you are about to hear. But Harold Taylor is not on trial for returning from the dead. He is on trial for murder. And those same scientific facts conclusively prove that he is guilty of that terrible crime …’ McLeash paused, theatrically. ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I wish to read to you parts of a statement that the accused made, under caution, after his arrest for the further charge of kidnapping …’