The Veteran (9 page)

“Mr. Adams, the wallet was plucked from the deceased’s pocket just after two last Tuesday fortnight. By the same hour on Wednesday or shortly afterwards, Mr. Cornish was in police custody. He must have put his prints on that wallet within that twenty-four-hour period?”

“Yes.”

“But the wallet was only found on Sunday morning. It must have lain in that grass for between four and a half and five and a half days. Yet the prints were clear.”

“There was no sign of water damage, sir. In fine dry conditions that is perfectly possible.”

“Then can you say precisely whether Mr. Cornish’s prints were impressed onto the plastic on Tuesday afternoon or the Wednesday morning?”

“No, sir.”

“Wednesday morning two young men are walking down Mandela Road when they see, lying in the gutter, a wallet. With quite normal curiosity, one of them stops to pick it up. He opens it to see what it contains. But there is nothing, neither money nor papers. It is a cheap wallet, worth nothing. He flicks it high over the sheet-metal fence separating Mandela Road from some waste ground; it lands some ten yards into the area and lies in the long grass until discovered by a dog on the Sunday. Feasible?”

“I suppose so.”

“Yes or no, Mr. Adams. Would the prints then match the ones you found?”

“Yes.”

Another message for Jonathan Stein. That is what Harry Cornish is going to insist happened, and it is a complete explanation of his prints on that wallet. Mr. Jonathan Stein stared down thoughtfully and made notes.

There remained Mr. Veejay Patel. His two identifications and his statement were completely unambiguous. Miss. Sundaran led him through his evidence stage by stage. At the back. Burns relaxed. He would get his committal. Vansittart rose.

“Mr. Patel, you are an honest man.”

“I hope so.”

“A man who, if he thought, just thought, that he might have made a mistake, would not be too arrogant to admit the possibility?”

“I hope not.”

“You say in your statement that you saw Mr. Price quite clearly because he was facing towards you.”

“Yes. He was to my right, from the shop window, facing three-quarters towards me.”

“But he was also facing the victim. So the victim was facing away from you. That was why you could not later help in the identification of his face.”

“Yes.”

“And you say the second mugger, whom you believe to be Mr. Cornish, was standing behind the victim. Surely he also was facing away from you?”

“Well, yes.”

“Then how did you see his face?”

Mr. Patel looked worried.

“I did not do so, then. Only when they began to circle the man on the ground, kicking him.”

“Mr. Patel, if you were kicking someone on the ground, where would you look?”

“Well, at the man.”

“Meaning, downwards?”

“Yes.”

“If I may crave the court’s indulgence, sir. Mr. Cornish, would you stand up?”

In the dock, Harry Cornish rose, as did the prison officer to whom he was handcuffed. Mr. Stein looked startled, but Vansittart would not pause.

“Mr. Cornish, would you please look down at a spot in .front of your feet.”

Cornish did so. His lank hair fell in a screen covering any sign of his face from the court. There was a stunned silence.

“Sit down, Mr. Cornish,” said Vansittart.

He addressed the Indian shopkeeper quite gently.

“Mr. Patel, I suggest you saw a thin, sallow-faced man with ear-length hair at a distance of thirty yards. The next day when you saw a photo of a thin, sallow-faced man with ear-length hair you assumed it must be the same man. Could that be what happened?”

“I suppose so,” mumbled Veejay Patel.

Burns tried vainly to catch his eye. He would not make eye contact. He’s been got at, thought Burns in despair. Someone has been on the blower to him, a quiet voice in the middle of the night, mentioning his wife and daughter. Oh God, not again.

“Now, regarding Mr. Price. Do you ever go to watch Arsenal at Highbury, Mr. Patel?”

“No, sir.”

“You see, looking across that road on that terrible day, you saw a beefy young white man with a shorn skull, did you not?”

“Yes.”

“And if you went to Highbury, you would see a hundred of them. And if you look behind the windscreens of fifty per cent of the white vans that cut up other drivers on the roads of north London every day, you would see another hundred. And do you know what they wear, Mr. Patel? Blue jeans, usually grubby, leather belts and a soiled tee shirt. It is almost a uniform. Have you ever seen men like that before?”

“Yes.”

“All over the streets of London?”

“Yes.”

“On television when we are all shamed by the spectacle of foreign policemen trying to cope with English football hooligans?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Patel, the victim could not have punched his attacker with the force you describe. It would have grazed his right knuckles, probably bruised the bones of his hand. I suggest you saw him raise his right hand, probably to ward off a blow to his face he thought was coming. Could that be what you saw?”

“Yes, I suppose it could.”

“But if you could make a mistake like that, could you not also make a mistake about a human face at thirty yards?”

Burns held his head in his hands. Whoever had briefed the frightened shopkeeper had done a good job. Patel had not withdrawn all co-operation from the police, for then he could have been treated as a hostile witness. He had just changed ‘absolutely’ to ‘possibly’ and ‘definitely’ to ‘maybe’. Maybe is not enough; a jury cannot convict on maybe.

When the abject Mr. Patel had left the witness box, Miss. Sundaran said to Mr. Stein, “That is the case for the prosecution, sir. We would ask for a committal to Crown Court on a charge of murder.”

The stipendiary raised an eyebrow to James Vansittart. Both knew what was coming. One could have heard a pin drop.

“Mr. Stipendiary, we both know the meaning and the significance of the Law’s Test. You have to have before you sufficient evidence upon which, if uncontradicted ...” Vansittart dragged the last word out slowly to stress how unlikely this was “... a reasonable jury, properly directed, could safely convict.”

“It just is not there, sir. The Crown had three real pieces of evidence. Mr. Patel, the broken nose and the wallet. Mr. Patel, clearly a thoroughly honest man, has come to the view that he could, after all, have picked two men bearing a similarity, but no more, to the ones he saw that afternoon.

That leaves the matter of the broken nose of Mr. Price and the fingerprints of Mr. Cornish upon an empty and discarded wallet. Although you here today, sir, are not strictly concerned with what may, or may not, be said at another date in another court, or indeed with the obvious lines of defence which arise in this case, it must be clear to you from your considerable experience that in due course the allegations regarding both nose and wallet will be comprehensively and indeed compellingly refuted.

There is a perfectly logical explanation both to the broken nose and the wallet. I think we both know that a jury cannot safely convict. I must ask for a dismissal.”

Yes, thought Jonathan Stein, and a jury will see your clients looking spruce and clean, shirt, jacket and tie; the jury will never see the records of these two homicidal thugs. You will get your acquittal and waste a deal of public time and money.

“It is with the most considerable reluctance that I must concur with Mr. Vansittart. The case is dismissed. Let the accused be discharged,” he said. Thoroughly disgusted by what he had had to do, he left the bench.

“All rise,” shouted the Clerk, a bit late, but most of those present were rushing for the doors.

Cornish and Price, uncuffed, tried to reach from the dock to shake Vansittart’s hand, but he stalked past them towards the corridor.

It takes time to get from the second to the ground floor: the several lifts are usually busy. By chance. Jack Burns made it first and was staring gloomily and angrily.

Price and Cornish, free citizens, swaggering, swearing and snarling, came out of a lift and walked towards the doors. Burns turned. They faced each other across twenty feet.

In unison, both thugs raised rigid middle fingers and jerked them up and down at the detective.

“So much for you, filth,” screamed Price.

Together they swaggered out into Highbury Road to head back to their squat.

“Unpleasant,” said a quiet voice at his elbow. Burns took in the smooth blond hair, the lazy blue eyes and languid, self-confident manner and felt a wave of loathing for Vansittart and all his type.

“I hope you are proud of yourself, Mr. Vansittart. They killed that harmless old man as surely as we are standing here. And thanks to you they are out there again. Until the next time.”

His anger boiled over and he did not even make an attempt at courtesy.

“Christ, don’t you make enough taking cases for the mega-rich down in the Strand? Why do you have to come up here for legal aid peanuts to set those animals free?”

There was no mockery in Vansittart’s blue eyes, but something very like compassion. Then he did something strange. He leaned forward and whispered into Burns’s ear. The detective caught a whiff of an expensive but discreet Penhaligon essence.

“This may surprise you, Mr. Burns,” the voice murmured, “but it has to do with the triumph of justice.”

Then he was gone, out through the revolving doors. A Bentley with a driver at the wheel swept up as if on cue. Vansittart threw his attache case onto the rear seat and climbed in after it. The Bentley eased away and out of sight.

“Triumph of my arse,” snarled Burns.

It was the lunch hour. He decided to walk the two miles back to the nick. He was halfway there when his pager sounded. It was the station. He used his mobile. His colleague on the front desk came on.

“There’s an old boy here wants to see you. Says he knows the deceased.”

He turned out to be an old-age pensioner and a Londoner to his boot heels. Burns found him in one of the interview rooms, quietly enjoying a cigarette beneath the ‘No Smoking’ notice. He took to him at once. His name was Albert Clarke, “but everyone calls me Nobby.”

Burns and Nobby Clarke sat facing each other at the table. The D I flicked open his notebook.

“For the record, full name and address.”

When he reached the borough where Nobby lived, he stopped.

“Willesden? But that’s miles away.”

“I know where it is,” said the pensioner. “I live there.”

“And the dead man?”

“Of course. That’s where we met, dinwee?”

He was one of those cockneys who feel obliged to turn statements into questions by adding an unnecessary interrogative at the end.

“You came all this way to tell me about him?”

“Seemed only right, ‘im being dead an’ all,” said Nobby. “You got to get the bastards what did that to ‘im. Bang ‘em up.”

“I got them,” said Burns. “The court just let them go.” Clarke was shocked. Burns found an ashtray in a drawer and the old man stubbed out.

“That’s well out of order. I don’t know what this bloody country’s coming to.”

“You’re not the only one. Right, the dead man. His name?”

“Peter.” Burns wrote it down.

“Peter what?”

“Dunno. I never asked him.”

Burns counted slowly and silently from one to ten.

“We think he had come this far east on that Tuesday to put flowers on a grave in the local cemetery. His mum?”

“Nah. He didn’t have no parents. Lost them as a small child. Orphan boy. Raised at Barnardo’s. You must mean his Auntie May. She was his house mother.”

Burns had an image of a small boy, bereft and bereaved, and of a kindly woman trying to put his shattered little life back together. Twenty years after her death, he still came on her birthday to put flowers on her grave. Eighteen days ago it was an act that cost him his life.

“So where did you meet this Peter?”

“The club.”

“Club?”

“DSS. We sat side by side, every week. They give us chairs. Me, with the arthritis, ‘im with the gammy leg.”

Burns could imagine them sitting in the Department of Social Security waiting for the crowd of applicants to thin out.

“So while you sat and waited, you chatted?”

“Yeah, a bit.”

“But you never asked his surname?”

“No, and ‘e never asked me mine, did ‘e?”

“You were there for your pension? What was he there for?”

“Disability money. ‘E had a thirty per cent disability pension.”

“For the leg. Did he ever say how he got it?”

“Certainly. ‘E was in the army. In the Paras. Did a night jump. Wind caught him and smashed him into a rock pile. The chute pulled him through the rocks for ‘arf a mile. By the time his mates got to him, his right leg was in bits.”

“Was he unemployed?”

Nobby Clarke was contemptuous.

“Peter? Never. Wouldn’t take a penny wot wasn’t due to him. ‘E was a night-watchman.”

Of course. Live alone, work alone. No-one to report him missing. And the chances were the company he worked for had closed down for August, bloody August.

“How did you know he was dead?”

“Paper. It was in the Stennit.”

“That was nine days ago. Why did you wait so long?”

“August. Always go to my daughter on the Isle of Wight for two weeks in August. Got back last night. Good to be back in the Smoke. All that wind off the sea. Catch me death, I nearly did.”

He had a comforting cough and lit up again.

“So how did you happen on a nine-day-old newspaper?”

“Spuds.”

“Spuds?”

“Potatoes,” said Nobby Clarke, patiently.

“I know what spuds are. Nobby. What have they got to do with the dead man?”

For answer Nobby Clarke reached into a side pocket of his jacket and pulled out a torn and faded newspaper. It was the front page of the Evening Standard of nine days ago.

“Went down to the greengrocer this morning to buy some spuds for me tea. Got ‘ome, unwrapped the spuds and there ‘e was staring at me from the kitchen table.”

An old-fashioned greengrocer. Used newspaper to wrap potatoes. From the paper, grimed with stains of earth, the limping man stared up. On the reverse side, page two, was the panel with all the details, including the reference to Detective Inspector Burns of the Dover Street nick.