A Dead Liberty Page 2

  He amplified this, too, lest there be any misunderstanding. “Committal proceedings are short dress rehearsals of the prosecution case, so to speak, to give the defence a chance to know what case it must answer.”

  Lucy Durmast ran her tongue over lips that looked as if they had gone suddenly dry but she used neither tongue nor lips for speech.

  “And,” went on Henry Simmonds formally, “to enable the magistrates to decide whether a jury, acting reasonably, could convict on such evidence and thus whether to commit the case for full trial at a higher Court.”

  In the event, after they had heard the evidence the Examining Justices didn’t even retire …

  TWO

  Linimenta—Liniments

  “Not a word?” barked Superintendent Leeyes incredulously. His office in Berebury Police Station was only little more than a stone’s throw from the Magistrates’ Court.

  “Not a word, sir,” replied Detective Inspector Sloan, who had arrived back there hotfoot from the Court.

  “Are you sure, Sloan?”

  “Not a single dicky bird,” declared Detective Inspector Sloan with all the assurance of someone who had been there.

  “All day?” said Leeyes irascibly. “Do you mean to tell me that that girl didn’t say a thing all day?”

  “All day,” intoned Sloan.

  “It would have to happen to us,” complained Leeyes. He was inclined to self-pity anyway and a totally silent prisoner could only mean trouble: there was no doubt about that.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The last thing we needed, of course, was a difficult woman.”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed Inspector Sloan with something approaching fervour.

  “The last thing any setup needs is a difficult woman.” He grunted. “They’ve got one on the Watch Committee, too, Sloan, and …”

  “Very unfortunate,” concurred Sloan firmly, before the Superintendent could embark on a long recital of his running battles with the Watch Committee.

  “In the circumstances,” said Leeyes heavily.

  “In the circumstances,” agreed Sloan. Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan—Christopher Dennis to his wife and family—was inevitably known as “Seedy” to his friends. He was head of the tiny Criminal Investigation Department of the Berebury Division of the Calleshire Police Force and thus responsible to Superintendent Leeyes.

  “And on top of everything else,” said Leeyes in a tone pregnant with meaning.

  “Quite so,” said Detective Inspector Sloan.

  “Just my luck,” said Leeyes bitterly.

  Detective Inspector Sloan refrained from pointing out that Detective Inspector Porritt of Calleford Division had been even more unlucky. What had happened to Trevor Porritt had been very unfortunate indeed. His investigation into the murder of Kenneth Carline completed and his full report on the case against Lucy Mirabel Durmast duly submitted, Detective Inspector Porritt had then, as was customary, returned to other duties.

  It was in the executing of one of these that he had met with disaster. During the course of giving chase to one of Her Majesty’s less lawful lieges Trevor Porritt had lost his footing and this had led to his undoing. He had promptly been hit on the head while he was down by the liege’s partner in crime. Even more unfortunately he had been hit with the blunt instrument that had been intended for use on a night watchman at a superstore.

  Since this assault upon his person Detective Inspector Trevor Porritt had not been the man he had been before and, alas, manifestly never would be again. The neurologists had said so. With unaccustomed unanimity, too. There had been no question of doctors differing and thus letting in a glimmer of hope. Henceforth, all the doctors said, Inspector Porritt would have a very short memory. What they did not tell his wife was quite how short that memory would be.

  Like a minute.

  Or that the hand that held the fork might forget the way to the mouth.

  A cynic would have said that the real clue to the gravity of Inspector Porritt’s condition lay in the studied kindness and courtesy which the medical profession extended to Mrs. Porritt. There were other pointers too. Especially in what was said about the future and, more important, what was left unsaid. There had been much talk of disability pensions and early retirement on health grounds and no mention at all of possible improvement and getting back to work in time.

  “When shall we come back, Doctor?” a bemused Mrs. Porritt had asked the hospital consultant. Trevor Porritt hadn’t asked him anything at all.

  Neurology is a speciality more concerned with diagnosis than with treatment—since so much neurological disorder is untreatable—but Mrs. Porritt was not to know that.

  Yet.

  It did mean, though, that the neurologist had his answer to her question off pat. “Your general practitioner will let me know if he wants me to see your husband again,” he said with practised smoothness, ignoring an unresponsive Trevor altogether.

  Mrs. Porritt had pulled herself together by then. “Like that, is it?” she said.

  The neurologist had nodded slowly.

  Inspector Porritt’s wife had allowed her one and only touch of bitterness to creep in. “I get it, Doctor. You don’t have to tell me. ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ That it?”

  “I’m very much afraid so,” said the other regretfully. Reality was meant to appear after the consultation when the expert would be at a safe distance from awkward questions—not during it when Olympian detachment might be threatened by the intrusion of real-life relatives with real-life questions to be answered.

  Mrs. Porritt had taken Trevor home and set about the business of coming to terms with a different way of life from henceforth. Trevor himself had retreated into a private world inside his damaged brain and nobody knew what he thought any more. This was a pity, because by the time Lucy Mirabel Durmast had appeared in Court there were a number of questions Detective Inspector Sloan would have liked to have asked him.

  It had been upon Detective Inspector Sloan that the case had devolved after Trevor Porritt had been injured. Sloan had dutifully read all the evidence that had been carefully assembled by his colleague. He had checked that it seemed all present and correct, forwarded it to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and then forgotten all about it while he dealt with an outbreak of small but disturbingly skilful burglaries in Berebury’s main shopping arcade.

  And now the case had come to Court.

  “Silence is consent,” said the superintendent. His knowledge of law had a magpie quality about it and he had picked up the phrase from somewhere.

  “Not in Court it isn’t,” responded Sloan with vigour. “She didn’t even nod. That girl didn’t consent to anything.”

  “What did she say when she was charged?” enquired the superintendent with genuine professional interest. “People say funny things then,” he added profoundly.

  “They do,” concurred Sloan. This was within his experience too. Someone should—probably would—write a book about them one day. The Charge Book at Berebury Police Station was full of the strange responses of those told that they were going to be prosecuted for misdemeanours of all kinds. To the real police cognoscenti they were a true touchstone of guilt or innocence: in their way as revealing as litmus paper. The prompt and indignant “I never” was only sometimes genuine. The “Turned over two pages, have you, maybe?” seldom was. Sloan himself had only met the “You’ve got your duty to do, Officer” between the pages of prewar fiction but “It’s a fair cop” did crop up from time to time.

  So did “It’s an unfair cop” or words to that effect. Usually accompanied by threats to report the cop concerned to such national organisations as concerned themselves with attacking the police—and to the press, too, for good measure.

  “Catch ’em by surprise,” said the superintendent wistfully, “and you can sometimes be lucky.” He was a great man himself for the immediate rather than the studied response.

  “Only sometimes,” said Sloan more c
autiously. An officer had to be careful, though, about what could and what could not be construed as an admission of guilt. Being advised, with varying degrees of explicitness, to tell it to the Marines, was one thing: listening to a sobbing hulk of a man asking again and again “Why did she have to scream? I wouldn’t have hit her if she hadn’t screamed. She wouldn’t stop …” was quite another.

  “Telling them they weren’t up to that sort of job sometimes does the trick,” said the superintendent out of his own experience on the beat. “Gets them on the raw …”

  The reverse of that particular coin, as Sloan knew only too well, was “Me, do a little job like that? I’ve got class, I have.”

  “Lucy Durmast didn’t say anything when she was charged,” said Detective Inspector Sloan. “That is to say,” he added with painstaking accuracy, “nothing that Trevor Porritt could catch. He made a note that she started to speak and then stopped in mid-breath.”

  “Not a lot of help,” said Leeyes heavily.

  “No.” As far as Sloan was concerned nothing had been a lot of help in the case so far.

  “And she hasn’t said anything since?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Not even to her solicitor?”

  “She won’t have one,” replied Sloan succinctly.

  “You can’t altogether blame her for that, now can you, Sloan?” said Leeyes with unaccustomed jocularity.

  “I understand, sir, quite informally, of course …”

  “Of course …”

  “That at the urgest request of Ronald Bolsover he’s the deputy chairman of her father’s firm—the senior partner of the family’s solicitors—er—made himself available for consultation after she had been charged.”

  “She wouldn’t talk to him?”

  “She wouldn’t even see him. Quite miffed about it, I’m told he was. She even sent him a message saying he wasn’t to take any action whatsoever in any circumstances.”

  “She needn’t have worried too much about that,” said the superintendent. “Solicitors don’t ever take action. All they do is suggest that you take it.”

  “There must have been something she didn’t want him to do,” said Sloan logically, “or she wouldn’t have said so.” It had been the only positive statement of any sort to be issued by Lucy Durmast and as such had been wrung dry of implications.

  Leeyes grunted. “Bail? Did she ask for bail?”

  “She didn’t speak,” Sloan reminded him.

  “How did that affect bail?” asked Leeyes.

  “Henry Simmonds had to ask his Clerk that,” said Sloan.

  “Ha! And what did he say?” pounced Leeyes. “He’s supposed to know all the answers, isn’t he?”

  “The Clerk said that as no application had been made there was no way in which bail could be granted.”

  “Typical of the way the legal mind works,” said Leeyes. “What about the police?”

  “Had it been asked for,” said Sloan slowly, “we would have opposed it …”

  “Ah …”

  “She was living alone, for one thing.”

  “Alone because she’d killed the chap she was living with?” suggested Leeyes. He, too, knew all about male murderers being mostly widowers.

  “No, no,” said Sloan hastily. “Nothing like that. She lives with her father … her mother’s dead.”

  “But you said …”

  “Her father’s overseas at the moment. He’s designing a new town in Africa.”

  “Haven’t they got enough problems there already?”

  “A town, not a township,” responded Sloan absently. “She was living alone,” he added, coming back to Lucy Durmast, “in a detached house in the village of Braffle Episcopi.”

  “That isn’t exactly central either,” grunted the superintendent. “Is it?”

  “About as remote as you can get in East Calleshire,” agreed Sloan feelingly. “Nearer to Calleford, of course, than to Berebury. The victim was taken to Calleford Hospital.”

  “Which is how Trevor Porritt came into the case, I suppose.”

  “His patch,” agreed Detective Inspector Sloan, “not mine.” He coughed. “The distance hasn’t helped.”

  “Never does,” said Leeyes bracingly. The superintendent himself seldom stepped out of his office at Berebury Police Station but was all in favour of everyone else’s doing so.

  “It isn’t usual,” Sloan said, “to bail people on murder charges anyway.” A certain tenacity of purpose was needed sometimes to keep the superintendent to the point; equally he could on occasion be like a terrier who wouldn’t let go. “Not,” went on Sloan, “that I think she would have skipped it. Not the sort.”

  For someone who had remained totally silent throughout all manner of proceedings—legal and otherwise—Lucy Durmast had managed to project a very definite image.

  Leeyes grunted again. “Let’s get this quite straight, Sloan. The accused is alleged to have killed a man.”

  “Kenneth Malcolm Carline,” supplied Sloan. That part was easy. There had been no difficulty at all in identifying the victim.

  “And there was no doubt about how he died?”

  “Not according to the Calleford pathologist.” Sloan paused and added cautiously, “He’s new and young, of course.”

  “That’s a sight better than being old and hidebound,” responded Leeyes crisply. “Naming no names, of course.”

  “Of course,” agreed Sloan diplomatically. Dr. Dabbe, the Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury District Hospital Management Group, was neither young nor new at his job.

  “What killed Carline?”

  “Poison.”

  “A woman’s way,” mused Leeyes. It was a response that would have upset a great many campaigners for Women’s Liberation.

  “Yes, sir.” Even the most committed defence lawyer would have had to agree that there were precedents for poison’s being a woman’s weapon.

  “Who was he, then?” asked Leeyes. “The victim, I mean.”

  “A young man who worked for her father’s firm.”

  “One of the old stories?” enquired Leeyes.

  “Sir?”

  “Him wanting to marry the boss’s daughter and Daddy telling her she must and her not being keen.”

  “No, sir, it wasn’t like that at all.” There was a certain simplicity about famous legends that didn’t equate with life.

  “Sloan,” said Leeyes unexpectedly, “you know there’s a time in every fairy story when the frog turns into a prince?”

  “Ye-es,” agreed Sloan warily. The superintendent’s discursiveness could lead anywhere. Anywhere at all.

  “They’ve just discovered that there are some of those funny inheritance things—DNA molecules—in the phosphate in the skin of the frog.”

  “Really, sir?” said Sloan politely.

  “Funny, that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Especially when you think how often it was the frog that got turned into a prince.”

  “Yes, sir.” He cleared his throat. “It wasn’t like that at all with this young man Carline.”

  “No?”

  “If you ask me,” ventured Sloan consideringly, “it was more of a case of him not wanting to marry the boss’s daughter.”

  “Doesn’t happen so often, of course,” commented Leeyes sagely. “It’s the quickest ladder to the top.”

  “What I mean is,” amplified Sloan, “that Kenneth Carline had just announced his engagement to someone else.”

  “And instead of saying ‘Hard Cheddar’ to herself, this Durmast girl reaches for the arsenic?”

  “Not exactly, sir,” temporised Sloan. By any standard that was an over-simplification.

  “Well, I’m not to know, Sloan, am I, unless you tell me?” said Leeyes. “Calleford Division handed the whole case over as a package after Trevor Porritt got hurt.” He sniffed ominously. “It was meant to be a complete package, too, with no loose ends. That’s what they said.”

  “Trev
or Porritt didn’t leave any loose ends,” insisted Sloan. “Calleford said it was all cut and dried and it looked as if it was.”

  “What’s the difficulty then?” demanded Leeyes.

  “There isn’t one as far as I know,” said Sloan, hanging on to the shreds of his patience with an effort.

  “Except that she won’t talk.”

  “That’s not our problem,” said Sloan. “That’s someone else’s.”

  The someone else whose problem in due course the silence of Lucy Durmast became was Judge Eddington.

  His Honour sat in the Crown Court in the county town of Calleford. The scenario there had some of the same components as those of the Magistrates’ Court at Berebury but there were some important differences too. There was a certain amount of ceremonial rising and bowing for one thing. The judge was robed and the barristers were gowned for another.

  The prisoner was dressed exactly as she had been before.

  The judges and counsel were wigged.

  The prisoner’s hair gleamed like burnished copper.

  The skin of the judge was like old, creased parchment. The prisoner had the sort of skin that looked—given sunshine—as if it would freckle easily. There was no sunshine in prison. Confinement there had done nothing to bring freckles out and her complexion looked instead only rather pale under that striking hair.

  The judge listened to the formalities with which the trial began with the impassivity of long practice, settling himself into a state of mind in which he could listen to all the evidence with total impartiality. He watched in silence while the Clerk of the Court endeavoured to get Lucy Durmast to plead. Judge Eddington had met mutism before.

  He gave no sign of this—nor of whether or not he had taken note of the fact that the Attorney General had apparently waived his traditional right of prosecution in cases of alleged murder by poisoning. He let the Clerk work his way through the proper procedures without interference and when this, too, resulted only in total silence on the part of the prisoner the judge then—and only then—drew breath to speak.

  He proceeded to do what many another professional man would also have dearly liked to have been able to do when confronted with a difficult woman. And in so doing he followed a well-worn track.