Ritter most admired in his leader. John Cade had made him feel special, and later, in the last years when the older man had become frail and frightened, Ritter had found fulfillment in protecting him. Except that he had failed. He could protect Cade from the outside world but not from his sons. The younger one had put a bullet in his father’s head, and the older one had probably put the younger one up to it. Ritter hated them both. He felt that he was Cade’s true son, and today was his day to honour the dead.
Ritter put his hands on his wife’s shoulders and turned her round as if she was on a pivot. By and large, he was satisfied with what he saw.
“You’ll give your evidence standing up,” he told her. “Don’t sit down even if they ask you if you want to. It puts you at a disadvantage. Every lawyer has his bag of tricks, so you be ready for them.”
“Yes, Reg,” said Jeanne, keeping her voice flat and compliant.
“And don’t pull at your hands and your sleeves like you do at home all the time.”
“No.”
“I’ll be watching you to see that you don’t. You’re to be a credit to me and to the colonel. Without us, you’d be nothing. You know that, don’t you, Jeanne?”
“Yes, Reg.”
“Turning tricks in some seedy French town. That’s what you’d be doing to make ends meet.”
This time Jeanne didn’t reply, but she didn’t need to. Ritter, amused by the image that he had summoned up from the depths of his imagination, had burst out laughing. And he was still laughing as he eased the car into second gear and turned out of the manor gates onto the road to London.
TEN
Detective Constable Clayton wouldn’t have admitted it for the world, but the truth was he felt intimidated by the Old Bailey. He was only five years out of police training college, and he’d never given evidence at a murder trial before. It was just luck that had got him involved in the case in the first place. He and Watts had started the nighttime roster less than two hours before the call came in to attend at Moreton Manor. Clayton remembered his first sight of the victim. There was very little blood. Just a small hole in the middle of his forehead. The study looked like it was a theatre set down at the Oxford Playhouse, with the professor in his armchair at the centre of the stage.
They’d waited for Trave to arrive and then gone to work: asking questions of the people in the house, looking through their rooms, searching for evidence. Not that they’d found anything to move the finger of suspicion away from the main suspect. Clayton had felt sorry for him at the time. Stephen Cade seemed so young, even though he was in fact less than five years younger than Clayton. He and Watts had taken turns guarding him in the kitchen. He’d been noisy at first, shouting out his innocence and demanding to see a lawyer, but by the time it was Clayton’s turn, Stephen had subsided into a quiet misery, sitting slumped at the long deal table with his head in his hands.
It was funny, his lack of bravado. He had to have planned the murder. The gun wouldn’t have just been sitting in the study waiting for him to use it. He would have had to buy it from some black marketeer, weigh it in his hand, practice with it a few times, setting up a target in some deserted place, and then wait for his opportunity. Strange, then, that he should be so distraught after the event.
But that wasn’t evidence. You had to concentrate on the facts and follow them where they led, and this was a fairly simple case: Stephen Cade had been caught red-handed. Most of the work had seemed to involve filling in endless forms, tapping away on the old Remington typewriter that had seen better days even before it became the property of the Oxfordshire Police. Still, it had been a privilege to work with Trave, and Adam Clayton hoped he’d have the chance to do so again. Trave was something of a legend in the local force. He was very good at his job. Everyone agreed about that. He got results, but he did not inspire affection. He had no nickname, and no one seemed to have ever visited his house. Trave’s fellow officers knew where his lines were, and they took care not to cross them. He was a loner, and perhaps this was why he had not achieved promotion above the rank he’d held for the last fifteen years.
But Clayton had seen another side of Trave. It was standard practice for two policemen to attend autopsies, and Clayton had been picked to accompany Trave to the Cade postmortem. He’d thought he was prepared for the experience but had found to his shame that he wasn’t. He’d felt violently sick even before the first incision and had been unable to conceal his distress. Trave hadn’t wasted time asking him if he was all right. He’d just told the pathologist to wait, taken Clayton by the arm, and walked him out into the air. They’d crossed the road to a pub where Trave had ordered two whiskies and then waited for the younger man to regain his composure. And after that it had been all right. Not great, but all right. With Trave’s help, he’d got through it.
Clayton half wished that Trave was with him now, but Trave had already given his evidence at the start of the trial, and so there was no reason for him to be in the witness waiting room. It was an airless place on the fourth floor of the courthouse with a row of small grimy windows above head height, which let in precious little light. Clayton sat at a Formica table with his back to the door, trying to distract himself with a copy of yesterday’s Daily Mail.
“Mind if I join you?” Bert Blake, the police photographer, sat down opposite Clayton without waiting for an answer to his question. Some of the coffee from his Styrofoam cup spilled onto the table as he settled his large bulk into the chair, but he made no move to clear it up even when it began to drip down onto the floor between them.
Clayton groaned inwardly. Blake was a gossip. Always ferreting out information and then passing it on to people he hardly knew. He was a lonely man and gossip made him feel important, even though his indiscretions had already got Blake into serious trouble on several occasions. He was kept on because he was one of the best at what he did. His photographs left nothing to the imagination.
“When are you on?” asked Blake. His coffee was hot, and he spoke in between noisy sips.
“I don’t know. They said it wasn’t likely before this afternoon.”
“Which means tomorrow,” said Blake, with the knowledgeable air of someone who spent a good part of his working life lazing around in courthouse cafeterias waiting to give evidence.
“Do you think so?” Clayton was unable to keep the anxiety out of his voice, and Blake was quick to pick up on it.
“Is this your first time here?” he asked.
“No.”
Surprisingly, Blake seemed to accept the lie and transferred his attention to a bar of half-melted chocolate that he had extracted from the pocket of his crumpled suit jacket. Clayton watched mesmerised as Blake slowly separated the runny brown chocolate from its purple wrapping, and he didn’t notice Ritter and his wife come through the door behind him and sit at a table in the corner.
“Why do you say tomorrow?” Clayton repeated.
“Well, they’ve got the brother in there now-you know, the one with the funny name.” Blake stopped and scratched his head as he made a vain search through the junkyard of his memory.
“Silas. Silas Cade,” said Clayton.
“That’s right. Silas. Well, I wouldn’t mind betting that he’s going to take some time.”
“Why?” asked Clayton, curious in spite of himself.
“You know what I’m talking about. Your lot found some pictures in his room, which I’d be proud of. Naughty pictures. Taken with a telephoto lens.”
“Who told you that?”
“A friend of a friend,” said Blake mysteriously. He swallowed the piece of chocolate that he had just fitted into the corner of his mouth, and then leant forward conspiratorially toward Clayton.
“Did you see them?” he asked.
“No, I didn’t search the rooms on that side of the house.”
“But you heard about them, didn’t you?” asked Blake with a leer.
“I heard that there were some photographs found but that they were returned to Mr. Cade because they weren’t relevant.”
