Chapter Six
When Harry emerged into the open air, the Pierhead was as cold and grey as before. Yet in comparison to the Land of the Dead, it suddenly seemed as bright and warm as Malibu.
On his way to Derby Square, he wondered again whether there could be any doubt that Edwin Smith had strangled Carole Jeffries. A thin layer of dust lay over the papers in the folder tucked under his arm. Cyril Tweats hadn’t agonised over the case, hadn’t kept going back to it, striving to find a way to prove Smith’s innocence. Once Smith’s mother had paid his bill, he’d closed his file and consigned it to the vaults. Harry could picture him discussing the trial at his club, shaking his head and saying that it was a sorry business, but although he had done his best, the evidence had damned his client. Yet, Harry reminded himself, the conviction of Kevin Walter had once seemed equally sound.
On Kevin’s twenty-fifth birthday, a jeweller’s home in South West Lancashire had been burgled. He had been watching television when a masked man brandishing a gun burst in and bound and gagged him before stealing rings, watches and silver worth a small fortune. The jeweller was a mason, a member of the same lodge as several senior officers in the local force, and the investigating team was under pressure from the start to find the guilty man. Kevin Walter, a robber with a violent streak whose curriculum vitae read like a teach-yourself guide to the British penal system, headed the queue of the usual suspects.
Under questioning, Kevin claimed that on the evening of the break-in, he and Jeannie had quarrelled furiously because he had accused her of seeing another man. He had hit her and then stormed out to celebrate his birthday with a one-man pub crawl. But he could not provide an alibi and after eighteen hours in the cells, his nerve snapped. He confessed and said his accomplice was a man he’d met in a pub whom he knew only as Terry. It had all been Terry’s idea, of course, and Terry had conned him good and proper: he’d never seen any of the proceeds of the raid. Long before the trial came around, Kevin changed his story and was vehement in protesting his innocence. He’d been bullied into making a false confession and Terry was a figment of his own mind. But the jury didn’t believe him and the judge sent him down for ten years.
He would still have been doing time had it not been for a stroke of luck. One fine morning another jeweller was offered several of the stolen rings and watches. He became suspicious and called in the police; for once their enquiry went like a dream. They traced the fence who had supplied the hot property and he identified his own supplier, a young villain from Toxteth called Gurr who had no known links with Kevin Walter. When Gurr was charged he exercised his right to silence. Meanwhile Kevin remained inside.
After they had spent so long apart, Jeannie remembered her husband’s virtues more clearly than his vices and began to campaign actively for his release. She sacked his original solicitor and instructed Harry instead, whilst urging the media to help put right yet another miscarriage of justice. Harry discovered from transcripts of the interviews prior to Kevin’s confession that he had been denied proper access to legal advice and that the interrogation had been oppressive. Revealing a flair for publicity which any kiss-and-tell bimbo would envy, Jeannie Walter soon began to attract support from journalists and pressure groups. Clive Doxey, no less, was one of those who had penned a column espousing her cause, Harry remembered. Gurr went to jail, still without opening his mouth, and Kevin remained inside. But a bandwagon had started to roll.
Jeannie dubbed the case Waltergate: the papers loved it and made the tag their own. She had once been a disco queen and when she organised a Jive for Justice at Empire Hall, it sold out and made national headlines. A tabloid paper bought exclusive rights to her story and portrayed her as a modern Joan of Arc. Even when a rival rag, disappointed to lose out in its bid for the biography of Jeannie for Justice, broke the news that she had picked up a couple of convictions for prostitution during Kevin’s years inside, she revelled in the limelight. She was a victim of society, she said, just as her innocent husband was. It was easier to make a monkey blush than to embarrass Jeannie Walter.
Before long, the Home Secretary, who was heading for retirement and wished to be remembered as a man of conscience, referred the case back to the Court of Appeal. The three judges, perhaps appalled by the threat of a Strip in the Strand outside London’s Law Courts if Kevin did not walk free, promptly ruled his conviction unsafe and unsatisfactory.
Since then the Walters’ quest had been for compensation. The Home Office, keen to sweep the case under the carpet, had offered a handsome sum which Jeannie promptly denounced as derisory. Kevin wanted ten times as much after all he had been through, she proclaimed. And so they had opted to resist all settlement overtures and hazard everything on sueing the police. The truth was, Harry guessed, that the Walters wanted blood: preferably that of the detectives who had stitched Kevin up.
By the time he arrived at the courthouse, it was filling with people and the ashtrays were already piled high with half-smoked stubs. Men and women with anxious faces and urgent voices were talking too much in a feverish effort to pass the time before their case was called. They had waited a long while for the day when they must take part in the legal lucky dip.
He caught sight of his court clerk, Ronald Sou, arms full of files and books, at the far end of the ground-floor lobby with Patrick Vaulkhard. Although he was on his home territory, the barrister too seemed tense and expectant and his fox-like features were twitching in anticipation of the battle ahead.
Harry walked over to say hello. Ronald Sou, habitually inscrutable, gave a scarcely perceptible nod, but said nothing. Harry and Jim Crusoe had once speculated on what it would take to prompt Ronald to express surprise. Doubling his salary might do it, they agreed, but so far they had not been able to afford the temptation to put their theory to the test.
Vaulkhard said, ‘So, Harry. A crucial cross-examination for us this morning. Let’s see if we can bait the trap.’
A Liverpudlian born and bred, he had kept close to his roots, and life at the Bar had never rubbed the Scouse edge off his accent. His reputation was that of a crafty and cynical individualist, someone who did not quite fit in. The old men in smoke-filled rooms who made such decisions had never allowed him to take silk and Harry guessed they never would.
‘Here come our clients,’ said Harry, glancing through the glass windows into Derby Square. He could see twenty or more journalists crowding Kevin and Jeannie Walter and throwing questions at them as if feeding fish to dolphins. It was plain that the real focus of their interest was Jeannie. Although her husband might be the plaintiff seeking huge damages, she was the character with reader-appeal. Love her or loathe her, Jeannie Walter had star quality and even the most hardbitten members of the pack were hanging on her every word.
Pushing through the swing doors, she detached herself from the group of journalists and, her husband lumbering two paces behind, headed towards the lawyers. She moved as if on a catwalk, slinky and self-confident. Harry guessed she had been up as early as he had that morning, contriving her platinum curls into that exotic cascade. He had a gloomy feeling that she nurtured ambitions of becoming a new icon for the fashion industry.
‘How’s my favourite pair of briefs?’ She squealed with laughter, as she always did when she cracked that joke, then rushed on without waiting for an answer. ‘Rarin’ to go, Paddy? Great!’
‘Ready to give them bastards hell, I hope.’ Kevin Walter’s years in prison had left him with a carefully preserved sense of martyrdom and a vocal whine that set Harry’s teeth on edge. His skin was pallid, his shoulders hunched; he had suffered at the hands of the legal establishment and, like a cantankerous invalid, was bent upon making the most of his misfortune.
‘The moment of truth!’ said Jeannie, her eyes gleaming.
‘It’ll be a day to remember,’ said Vaulkhard wryly, ‘if we hear the truth in this court of law.’
As he sat in the courtroom, listening to Vaulkhard question the detective sergeant who had taken Kevin Walter’s confession, Harry recalled a conversation from Crime and Punishment. He had read it as a schoolboy and the story of Raskolnikov’s downfall had made a lasting impression. In later life, it had even given him a little understanding of the forces that moved his own clients to their pointless acts of self-betrayal. A few lines about cross-examination stuck in his mind: Porfiry’s explanation of the method of starting an interrogation with trivial irrelevances as a means of putting the witness off his guard before stunning him with the most dangerous question of all. It seemed to him that Patrick Vaulkhard had taken the message to heart.
The early exchanges were low-key, little more than a series of pleasantries. Vaulkhard lingered over the
