‘He’s not a murderer,’ Vincent said. Isaac instinctively liked the man, a professional; Larry did not. Although what Larry didn’t like, which Isaac could see, was that Larry Hill and Wally Vincent were, in terms of experience and age, very similar, but one was lean and fit, the other was suffering the effects of alcoholism.
To Larry, Vincent represented a threat.
‘How can you be so sure?’ Isaac asked. The three of them were sitting at Vincent’s desk in the police station. The top of the desk, as the man, was neat, not a thing out of place. The impression that it gave was that this was a man on top of his game.
‘We keep an eye on him. Not me particularly, but there’s a file as long as your arm, the times a neighbour made a complaint, the times he has. There’s not much we can do, and as long as he’s not violent, there’s not much that can be done. And if he wanted to get some barking dogs, then the neighbours can complain all they like. We’re paper tigers to him, and he knows it.’
‘You know that the man’s wealthy?’
‘We do.’
‘We found a body in one of his houses,’ Larry said. ‘We believe there must be a connection between the dead man and Stanford. We need him to open up.’
‘What you need and what you get are two vastly different things,’ Vincent said. ‘I apologise for my flippancy in this matter, but there’s one thing that separates Stanford from the other eccentrics and troublemakers we’ve all dealt with.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The man has been a barrister, a QC, a judge. He’s highly educated, knows the law better than we do. Fifteen years ago, he started causing trouble. Up until then, we didn’t know anything about him. The man has never committed a crime apart from local violations, arguing with his neighbours. How he got to be that way is not our concern.’
‘You’re just dealing with the consequences, not the cause.’
***
It was eight in the evening when Isaac and Larry drove into the car park at the back of Challis Street Police Station in Bayswater. Up on the second floor, the lights still burnt; burnt as they were going to for the next few weeks until the murderer of Marcus Matthews had been apprehended.
Sergeant Wendy Gladstone was the first to welcome the two men as they entered Homicide. A veteran of the police force, it was Isaac who had brought her into the department. Even after thirty years in the south of the country, her Yorkshire accent was still strong. An earthy woman in her fifties, her enthusiasm was boundless, although her mobility was suffering because of her arthritis and her health was of concern. Bridget Halloran was also present.
A few of the ancillary staff that a police department always has too many of, or increasingly too few as technology and cost-cutting take effect, beavered away in the background. Most had left for the evening; their work could be done the next day. However, Isaac was an acknowledged workaholic, even by his wife, though she had lasted the distance in their relationship when others hadn’t. An attractive man, he had had more than his fair share of women over the years, and while others had not been willing to accept the hours he spent away from home, Jenny had.
Bridget handed over her preliminary report, a copy to each of the people in Isaac’s office.
‘A summation,’ Isaac asked. It was another late night, and Jenny had already been on the phone, understanding when he said he’d be home in a few hours.
‘Charles Ernest Stanford, 86 Knoyle Road, Preston, Brighton, East Sussex. The man is aged sixty-eight,’ Bridget said.
‘We were told he was a judge,’ Larry said.
‘It’s all in the report. He graduated from Oxford University. He was a barrister before becoming a Queen’s Counsel, taking the silk as they say. A judge at the age of forty-nine, a recluse two years later.’
‘Recluse? Is that known?’ Isaac asked.
‘There are no marks against him. He presided over a couple of controversial cases in his time as a judge; defended a few villains as a barrister, got some of them off. One of them had his case dismissed for murder on a technicality, the police putting forward false evidence. The freed man went on and killed another man two days after his acquittal. Charles Stanford copped a lot of flak in the media for defending him.’
‘The murderer?’
‘In Broadmoor for life. The man should never have been on the street in the first place. But if we locked up everyone who’s a threat to society…’
‘…there wouldn’t be enough prisons to hold them all,’ Wendy completed the sentence.
‘Does that explain Stanford?’ Isaac asked.
‘The last case that he judged was another murderer, this time a woman on trial for murdering her husband. The woman was convicted, although the case and the judgement were controversial,’ Bridget said.
‘Give us the précised version.’
‘Yanna White, a Romanian immigrant, forty-three years of age, an internet bride. She had married Douglas White, a man twenty-one years older than her.’
‘A desperate misfit?’ Larry asked.
‘That wasn’t put forward at the trial. They had been married for thirteen years; two children, a girl of ten, a boy of eight. On the face of it, the family had been happy. That’s according to those who knew them: neighbours, work colleagues from where the husband worked as an engineer; from where Yanna White worked as a store manager.
‘Yanna Nastrut was degree-educated in Romania, and her English was flawless. She had been attractive when she had met Douglas; still attractive when she appeared before Charles Stanford. The media were against her from
