corridor to a door which predictably had ‘D.G. Bailey LLB’ written on it.
Douglas Bailey was unlike many of the rather desiccated, elderly lawyers that Richard had met in market towns in Wales and the West Country. He was what his father might have termed a ‘city slicker’, a slim man of about forty in a blue pinstripe suit which Richard suspected had shoulder pads. His dark hair was Brylcreemed flat on his head and he had a small Errol Flynn moustache.
However, in spite of this unpromising appearance, Bailey proved to be well spoken, well informed and very much ‘on the ball’.
After the usual courtesies and a cup of tea provided by the matronly secretary, they sat each side of a cluttered desk and got down to business.
‘I’ll just give you an outline of the problem, Doctor Pryor, then let you take the file away to study at your convenience. If then you feel you can assist us, we’ll meet again with Counsel to discuss the details.’
When Richard nodded his assent, Douglas Bailey leaned forward on his elbows to tell his tale.
‘Our client is a woman, Millicent Wilson, though she went under the surname of her late partner, Arthur Shaw. I say “late”, as he’s the one who she was convicted of killing.’
‘I presume when you say “partner”, you mean it in the conjugal sense, rather than a business partner?’ asked Richard, thinking of his own relationship with Angela Bray.
‘Indeed I do. They lived here in St Paul’s — just down the road, in fact — but were not married. She is twenty-seven; he was thirty-nine at the time of his death. They lived in an old terrace house which was divided into a number of flats, though that’s a rather grand description for a scruffy collection of rented rooms and bedsits with a communal bathroom and kitchen.’
He gently diverged a finger and thumb across his moustache, as if encouraging it to grow a little more.
‘Not to put too fine a point on it, this household was hardly genteel or sophisticated. A couple of the occupants, including Arthur Shaw, were well known to the police and some had done time in prison, mostly for theft, assault and general petty crime.’
‘Did that apply to your client as well?’ asked Richard.
‘She certainly had no convictions, but she may have worked the streets at one time, though not recently. Anyway, this charming character Arthur Shaw used to knock her about regularly, usually when drunk, which again is not all that uncommon in this part of Bristol.’
He paused to drink down the rest of his cup of tea.
‘As I said, I won’t go into the details until you’ve read the papers, but in essence, Shaw had knocked her about a bit one evening, then she had gone with a friend to the cinema. He was at home, playing poker with some of the other men in the house. After she came home at about eleven thirty, sounds of a heated quarrel were heard from their rooms upstairs, but that was nothing unusual. She is seen to run out about midnight with a fresh black eye and cut lip, and goes to stay with her sister in the next street. In the morning, Arthur Shaw is found dead in their bedroom with a knife wound in his chest and a kitchen knife on the floor.’
Bailey handed the file across the desk to Richard Pryor.
‘She denied killing him, but the prosecution medical evidence claimed that the time of death corresponded to her return to the house. The knife had her fingerprints on it, amongst others, though that meant very little as it was from the communal kitchen. But there were spots of his blood on her sleeve, though she maintained that it got there earlier when she had hit him on the nose with a milk bottle when he was assaulting her.’
Richard tucked the file into his briefcase alongside his chair. ‘So she was convicted on mainly circumstantial evidence?’
‘Yes, convicted of murder, though the defence tried getting a manslaughter verdict. Not that it’s made that much difference, as the judge didn’t hand down a death sentence, but commuted it to life imprisonment. I think that was mainly because of all this current political discussion about abolition, though the defence tried to claim that it was because of their mitigation plea of severe provocation by an abusive partner.’
Bailey sniffed to convey his opinion of the previous defence team.
‘I have to say that their efforts were not all that energetic. That’s why Millie Wilson changed solicitors for this Appeal. I hope we can do a better job for her, though trying to get the Court of Criminal Appeal to overrule one of their precious judges is an uphill struggle. Often, they even refuse to hear new evidence.’
Richard tapped the side of his briefcase containing the file. ‘I gather the main issue as far as I’m concerned is the time of death?’
‘Yes, she’s got a cast-iron alibi when she was in the cinema and another when she got back to her sister’s place. It’s the half-hour interval in between that’s the problem.’
He gave his moustache another few encouraging strokes.
‘Also, if there’s any mileage in disputing these blood stains, that would be useful.’
‘My colleague is very experienced in that area,’ Richard assured him. ‘She was a senior biologist in the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, so if there’s anything to be found, she’s the one to find it.’
They spoke for a while longer, the solicitor telling him that the Appeal date had yet to be finalized but would probably be early in the New Year. Promising to send a preliminary report within a week, Richard took his leave and was back in Garth House a couple of hours later, having just missed a ferry at Aust.
Far too late for his lunch, Moira had kept it warm in the Aga and he sat in the kitchen in solitary state to eat his steak-and-kidney pie with mashed potato, followed by apple tart and custard. He had been abroad throughout all the difficult post-war years, so did not fully appreciate the recent improvement in living standards, following a decade of shortages that in some ways had been as severe as the war years themselves. He had missed most of the rationing, the spartan clothing bought on coupons with their E41 economy labels, unbranded ‘Pool’ petrol and books printed on thin, coarse paper.
As soon as he had finished, Angela, Priscilla and Sian came in to share the coffee that Moira was making and to hear what had happened in Bristol. He gave them a quick rundown of the case as he knew it so far, which was rather sketchy until he had read the case papers. ‘So basically, it’s an alibi problem. They say she did, she says she didn’t!’
Sian, whose left-wing views ran in her family, was always a fiery advocate for the underdog, especially if they were female.
‘Typical Establishment stitch-up!’ she snapped. ‘Some poor woman gets regularly beaten up by some drunken thug and when she cracks and sticks a knife in him, she gets life imprisonment and probably told she’s lucky not to have been hanged!’
Richard smiled at her predictably feisty reaction. ‘But she says she didn’t do it, Sian,’ he protested mildly. ‘And we’re being hired to see if we can prove she didn’t.’
Moira put down her coffee percolator. ‘I thought the prosecution had to prove guilt, not the defence prove innocence?’ she objected.
Angela looked at Richard and both their eyebrows rose.
‘We’ve got a budding lawyer in the house, folks! And you’re absolutely right, Moira. But in practice, the two things are not all that distinct, especially in an Appeal. The appellant’s lawyers try to torpedo the prosecution’s case.’
Priscilla was listening with interest to this dialogue.
‘I had a barrister boyfriend a couple of years ago and he used to say that evidence didn’t matter much in the Appeal Courts — they were more interested in procedural errors. If the trial judge put a foot wrong, that offered a better chance of succeeding with the Appeal than picking holes in the factual evidence.’
Moira listened intently as the three doctors bandied experiences and hearsay about the rigid legal system. When there was a pause, she declared her fascination with the law. ‘I used to be a typist in a solicitor’s office, but it’s only since I came to Garth House that it seemed to come alive for me. Thank goodness this poor woman in Bristol didn’t hang, as she might well have done. I suppose it’s all this fuss about Timothy Evans and John Christie that has made them reluctant to carry out the death penalty?’
‘Evans came from my home town of Merthyr, poor chap,’ said Richard, soberly. ‘I see there’s a strong movement again to get him a retrospective pardon this year.’
‘And push forward the political campaign for abolition of hanging,’ said Sian robustly. Timothy Evans had been hanged five years previously for murdering his wife and baby, but John Christie, the serial killer of Rillington Place in Notting Hill, had then confessed to the murders two years ago and caused a national furore about miscarriages of justice. Several major newspaper editors were trying to get the issue raised once again in Parliament, the campaign
