The Brief: Crime and corruption in 1960s London (Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers)

by Simon Michael

  At first she doesn’t appreciate the significance of the emptiness of the garage. Then, with a shock, she remembers. She does all the foolish and illogical things one does when refusing to believe the obvious: she checks the drive and the road and even looks over the road to the stable yard. The Jag isn’t there. Eventually she acknowledges with surprise that someone really has stolen it.

  ‘What idiot steals a car that doesn’t run?’ she says out loud in astonishment.

  She catches part of herself enjoying in anticipation Charles’s frustration when he finds out, but the nicer part of her decides to report the theft. There isn’t a police station in the village but there’s a police house with a blue lamp outside it where the local bobby lives. She rings the number but receives no reply, so she scribbles a note informing the policeman that her husband’s broken-down car has been stolen from their locked garage. She reads the note over, wondering if it reads like a practical joke, but content that she’s fulfilled her duties as the owner’s wife. She locks the house and cycles into the village, dropping the note through the police house letterbox on the way.

  She needn’t have bothered. Late that night, while she sleeps, the man who took the car quietly drives it up to the house, now repaired, carefully opens the garage doors as he did before and backs the car into the garage. Had Henrietta looked in the garage the following day and seen the Jaguar there, she’d no doubt have thought she was going mad or, perhaps, that she’d drunk too much gin. In fact, she has no cause to go to the garage again, and so never realises that the car is back in its place.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Henrietta watches out of the window as Jo, the stable girl, closes the stable gates opposite the house. Jo waves goodbye to someone still in the stables and walks off down the lane, her riding boots crunching on the gravel at the side of the road.

  It’s 6:40 p.m. and Charles might arrive at any minute. The thought causes Henrietta to gulp down half a glass of gin and tonic. She knows what’s on the agenda for the evening’s discussion. She’s been hoping for a frank but kind conversation between the two of them for months; years in fact. Now it’s imminent, and she still hasn’t decided what she’s going to say or even what conclusion she wants. About the only two fixed points in her emotional reference frame are that, firstly, she was right to finish the thing with Laurence and, secondly, despite all, she still loves Charles. Maybe some counselling? She heard someone at the tennis club talking about the Marriage Guidance Counsel. The idea of discussing the details of their relationship with a total stranger fills her with shame, but maybe they just have to do it. She’s sure they still love one another, but she can’t fathom how matters have deteriorated to this degree, how they are now so far apart, so maybe a third party could help.

  Despite her earlier resolve, she takes her empty glass back to the cocktail cabinet and replenishes it with another two inches of neat gin. She catches sight of herself in the mirror above the mantelpiece. She’s made an effort with her makeup and wears a long, quite formal dress which shows off her slim figure. The smell of Basque lamb stew, one of Charles’s favourites, drifts from the kitchen. If it’s going to end, she wants Charles to see what he’ll be missing.

  She leans closer into her reflection, noting the puffy eyelids and bloodshot eyes. Too much gin and too many tears, she thinks, and for a second her nerve deserts her and she considers calling a taxi and disappearing.

  She takes a deep breath to steady herself, smiles experimentally at herself in the mirror, and goes into the kitchen to poke at the stew and check that the pommes dauphinoise are browning nicely. Earlier she’d thought to calm herself by playing some music, but she was so distracted that, an hour later, Albinoni still revolves soundlessly under the raised stylus. She throws herself into an armchair and stares into the garden.

  Charles puffs, pants and curses his way over the stile at the back of the garden. He’s hot and sweaty and extremely cross. He arrived at the station to find himself in a losing battle for the one taxi waiting there and was forced to carry his briefcase and coat for a mile and a half over rutted and extremely muddy fields, made all the more treacherous by the recent rain. Having taken off his jacket, he then slipped, fell, and got it and his trousers covered in mud and grass stains.

  His shoes heavy with adherent mud, he trudges across the garden, aware that he’s leaving footprints on Henrietta’s beautiful lawn, and clatters through the back door. Henrietta, startled by the noise, runs into the kitchen to find him swearing as he tries to hook off his shoes without touching either of them with his hands.

  She stares at him, aware of the risk of laughing, but unable to suppress giggles.

  ‘You look quite a sight,’ she says, covering her mouth with her hand.

  ‘Can you get some newspaper?’

  ‘OK, hold on. Just stay there.’

  Henrietta opens a cupboard and takes out an old newspaper which she spreads on the floor in front of him. He attempts to hook a shoe off the heel of one foot with the toe of the other, managing only to spray gobbets of mud onto the clean floor.

  ‘Mind out, Charles!’ shouts Henrietta. ‘This is a decent dress. Be patient, and I’ll do it!’

  He obeys, and looks down at her shiny hair as she crouches in front of him. ‘This isn’t quite the civilized, dignified entrance I intended,’ he says wryly.

  ‘Right,’ says Henrietta, standing up, having taken the second shoe off. ‘I think the shoes have had it; they’re saturated inside and out. You actually look as if you’ve been wading. And your socks and trousers are a complete mess. Why don’t you go up and have a bath, get changed, and I’ll put dinner on hold.’

  ‘Won’t it spoil?’ he asks. ‘I’m already late.’

  ‘No, luckily, it’s quite forgiving. Twenty minutes won’t do any harm.’

  Charles does as he’s told. Five minutes later he’s in the bath. There’s a knock on the door and Henrietta enters with a glass of whisky.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, smiling. ‘That’s kind.’

  ‘Mind if I stay?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Charles pats the side of the bath. Henrietta takes a hand towel to dry enough space for herself, and sits. She leans forward on impulse and kisses Charles on the lips. She means it to be a light gesture of affection but Charles’s lips soften and he bites her lower lip gently. She responds with her tongue and leans into him, bracing herself with her hands on the tiles above Charles’s head. Charles would have touched her —earlier in their marriage he’d have pulled her into the bath on top of him, clothed or not — but he keeps his hands to himself and after a moment Henrietta disengages and sits up.

  ‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘I’d forgotten how nice that was.’ She looks down at his hairy muscular body, the dark triangle of hair between his legs and his response to her kiss. ‘I see you approve,’ she says.

  Charles follows her gaze and lies back in the warm water.

  ‘You’re not in the least shy, are you?’ she says.

  ‘Not with you, no. God knows what I’d be like with someone else.’

  The comment, meant to be innocuous, touches a nerve in Henrietta. ‘I’ll see you downstairs, then,’ she says abruptly, and leaves without making further eye contact with him.

  Fifteen minutes later, cleaned and refreshed, Charles sits down opposite Henrietta to eat.

  ‘Well,’ she says brightly, as she takes a spoonful of soup, ‘you called this meeting.’

  Charles takes a deep breath and replaces his spoon on the table. ‘OK. Before anything else I want you to believe that despite everything, despite the fact that I may be the worst husband on the planet, and despite the fact that I know we’ve torn huge chunks out of each other, I love you. That’s never changed.’

  ‘Thank you for saying that.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘There’s a “but”?’

  ‘You know there is; look what’s become of us! And I’ve come to the conclusion that we can’t live together. I don�
��t know how to make you happy, Etta. And I don’t think you really want me to try anymore.’

  ‘But upstairs —’

  ‘That’s never been the problem, has it? The passion’s always been there. But it’s the rest. I can’t live with this constant fighting. The ups are wonderful but the downs are too depressing, and too frequent. I’d trade half the passion for someone who wanted to share my life in peace and quiet.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying I think we should divorce.’

  Charles looks up as he delivers his conclusion, the first time he’s looked at Henrietta’s face since he started speaking. She too has stopped eating. She stares silently into her soup, her arms resting on the table either side of her bowl. He stands and looks out into the darkening garden.

  ‘I’ve known you’ve been having an affair for some time.’ Henrietta doesn’t reply. ‘And it’s so out of character for the girl I met at Cambridge. You were so repelled by your father’s sordid entanglements over the years, so scathing of him, and yet here you are doing exactly the same. But I don’t think that alone would make me give up on us. It’s more that ... well… I think it just tells us how unhappy you are. And…’ he pauses, ‘I think it makes you hate yourself. And me.’

  He turns back to her and sees a fat tear roll down her cheek and splash into her home-made tomato soup. She seems unaware of the spots of red accumulating on the tablecloth and her white dress.

  ‘Oh, Etta!’ he exclaims, from the heart, and rushes over to her.

  ‘No, Charles! Don’t touch me!’

  She shoves her chair back from the table, scraping noisily on the tiles, and retreats from him to the kitchen door, her shoulders heaving. After a moment she controls her breathing enough to speak quietly, with deathly calm. ‘I want you to go. Right now. Don’t say another word, just leave.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘I mean it! Not another word. It’s over. You said so. So, just leave.’

  Charles hesitates, his mouth open to say something, but he then brushes past her into the hallway. He runs upstairs, packs a bag and collects a spare suit. His saturated shoes are by the front door on the mat and he forces his feet into them. For a few seconds he hesitates, his hand raised to the doorknob, wondering if he should say something more, but then he opens the door, closes it quietly behind him and sets off up the muddy lane, and away from his home.

  Henrietta is still in the kitchen, crying as she empties the soup into the sink. She hears the back door and assumes that Charles has forgotten something. She doesn’t turn when she hears footsteps behind her. She is unaware of the cosh as it descends onto the back of her head. She does, however, move at the last moment, and it ends its downward arc by striking her cheek and then her shoulder. She cries out in pain and surprise and turns for the first time. The man raises the cosh again, but before he can bring it down, she lashes out with the heavy ironware saucepan in her hand. It strikes her attacker in the eye and he grunts with pain. He nonetheless gets in his second blow, and this one lands directly on Henrietta’s temple. She collapses the instant it lands.

  The man bends over the sink and washes cold water into his eye. It’s extremely painful and already closing, but it isn’t bleeding much. He bends and retrieves the saucepan which rolled onto the floor. Holding it by his gloved hand, he rinses it thoroughly under the hot tap and places it neatly with the other utensils in the drying rack. Pressing a dishcloth to his face to prevent blood dripping onto the floor, with his free hand he drags Henrietta’s unconscious form by an ankle into the lounge. He places her in the middle of the Persian rug, and takes out of his coat pocket a cut-throat razor. Bending over her from behind, and careful to stand away from the direction of his swing, he brings the blade down swiftly and efficiently across her throat. Blood spurts out in a great leap, arcing over the coffee table and splashing in bright red washes over the wall. It continues pumping for a few seconds, and then gradually stops, as Henrietta’s life ebbs away.

  The man stands, picks up a chair and throws it at the display case of vases given to Henrietta and Charles for their first wedding anniversary by her godparents. It smashes, sending shards of glass and porcelain over the room. He then turns over the other occasional table and flings the decanters at the wall. At the same time, he shouts; oaths, curses, meaningless words, a one-sided argument, concluding in a long, high-pitched shriek.

  He hurries back to the kitchen. He picks up the briefcase and blue cloth bag he brought with him and leaves the house by the kitchen door. He enters the garage. He unlocks the main doors from the inside but doesn’t push them open. He runs back to the house, sprinting through it to the front door, the cloth bag and briefcase sending an umbrella stand flying, and re-emerges onto the front drive. Now he pulls wide the garage doors, allowing them to swing against the walls with a loud double crash. He unlocks the Jaguar, throws the case and bag inside, gets in and starts the engine. He revs it loudly, and then, just to make sure, drives the car at an angle out of the garage, dragging the nearside coachwork along the concrete doorpost. The screech of protesting metal would have been heard a street away.

  The Jaguar shoots out of the drive, sending dust and gravel into the air, and disappears down the lane.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It is nearly midnight by the time Charles reaches the flat in Fetter Lane. He throws his things on the couch and sits, staring out of the window. The streets are almost deserted. An occasional vehicle passes beneath his window, its true colours leached by the yellow sodium lights on the pavement. He’s exhausted, having trudged from the station to the house and back again and then having to endure the last all-stations slow train back into London, but his mind is whirling and he knows that sleep will be an impossibility. After a while he stands, fixes himself a Scotch and returns to the fraud papers he left open on the kitchen table.

  Half an hour later he realises that he’s forgotten to bring Archbold, the criminal practitioner’s Bible, from his desk in the Temple. With a heavy sigh he puts his muddy shoes back on, throws on a jacket and walks downstairs to Fetter Lane.

  The streets of the City are empty. Not a single vehicle is in sight as Charles crosses Fleet Street. There’s an unnatural stillness, as if the night is holding its breath. Charles walks through the arch into the Temple. The trees are utterly immobile, their branches, now in full leaf, fixed against the night sky. His footsteps echo around Chancery Court. He’s about to climb the staircase to number 2 when he notes that one of the lights on the first floor had been left on. It takes him a moment in the dark to find the right key for the great studded outer door. It stands open during office hours and the barristers, although supplied with keys, rarely have to use them. Eventually he gets both doors open, and walks through the silent waiting room and up the stairs to the first floor. The place smells of old books and stale coffee. The light was shining from the room next to his but, having reached it, all the rooms on that side of the landing are now in darkness.

  ‘Hello?’ he calls.

  There’s no answer. He reaches forward to push open his own door when the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly rise and he knows he’s not alone. He whirls round, and remembers nothing more.

  ‘Sir! Mr Holborne sir!’

  Charles opens his eyes. There’s a woman’s black court shoe in front of him and an ankle in stockings, and Charles can’t fathom why a shoe or an ankle should be on his pillow. He then realises that he’s extremely uncomfortable and not, after all, in his bed. He tries to sit up and a wave of nausea overwhelms him. He closes his eyes again to prevent the world spinning.

  ‘Sir? Are you all right?’

  Charles tries again, opening one eye just a fraction. ‘Sally?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Have you fainted, sir?’

  ‘Do you want to try to sit up, sir?’ says another voice, a young male’s.

  ‘Yes,’ responds Charles, and he feels hands from each side under his armpits pulling him into a seated position. Cha
rles realises that he’s on the floor just outside his office in Chambers. He’s still disorientated.

  ‘Should I call a doctor?’ asks the male voice, apparently of Sally.

  ‘Sir, should we get an ambulance?’

  ‘No … at least I don’t think so. I don’t understand… What’s the time?’

  ‘Just gone eight in the morning, sir,’ says the male. ‘Have you been here all night?’

  Charles moans. His head is full of little men with big hammers. ‘I’m not … yes, I must’ve been. The last thing I remember is coming up here late last night to get my Archbold. I remember … there was a light on … but then there wasn’t…’ Charles opens his eyes further and sees Sally and Robert, the office junior, both crouched in front of him, looking concerned. ‘Christ, my head hurts.’

  Charles reaches behind him and discovers a painful lump on the back of his head. He takes his fingers away and examines them, but there’s no blood.

  ‘Looks like you hit your head as you fell,’ says Robert.

  ‘Yeah … maybe… Robert, can you help me into my room?’

  ‘Don’t you want to go to the flat, sir? You’re pretty muddy, if you don’t mind me saying so, and maybe you need to change.’

  Charles looks down at his clothes, shakes his head and wishes he hadn’t. ‘Jesus, remind me not to do that again. No, I’d just like to sit down for a few minutes. I’ll make my own way over in a bit.’

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ asks Sally. ‘I’m about to put the kettle on.’

  Robert helps Charles back to his room where he collapses in his leather chair. He has barely sat down when there’s a knock at his door. Coffee, he thinks.