Mydworth Mysteries--The Wrong Man

by Matthew Costello

  “Didn’t put up a fight?” said Kat, surprised.

  “No,” said Loxley shaking his head, as if he, too, found Brown’s reaction unexpected.

  Then he checked his watch. “We done? Sergeant Timms will have had his tea by now.” A grin. “Be looking for me, I imagine.”

  “Yes, sure. This is so helpful. One last thing though,” she said. “Just curious. Why did you want to come up here with me this morning? Why help?”

  Loxley shrugged. “Dunno. Just interested in how you might see things, I suppose.”

  “Or maybe you doubt the conviction?”

  Loxley paused before answering that one.

  Shrewd officer, Kat thought.

  “Not my job,” said Loxley. “I arrest ’em. I don’t judge them.”

  “But I’m guessing you have an opinion. Don’t you?”

  She saw him rub his chin, look around as if to check nobody might hear.

  “All right,” he said. “Between you and me? Promise it’ll go no further?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He stepped close. “When we put Brown behind bars, I was, well, thrilled. Really was! Nabbed a killer – barely a day after the crime? Top class policework.”

  “But?”

  “But, since then, I can’t help feeling it was all too easy. Everything falling into place? The knife. The shirt. And now, see, there’s a question, keeps coming back, riling me, waking me in the night...”

  “Go on.”

  “That question: have we all somehow been played?” he said. “Stitched up, you know? Taken for fools. Because, if we have, there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s too late. So yeah, reckon I thought the only person who can save an innocent man from being hanged – if he is innocent – is you.”

  He looked at her long and hard, then he turned and headed back down the alleyway, disappearing from view.

  Leaving Kat, alone in the snow on the edge of town, knowing that Loxley might be right.

  But in a sense, he was also wrong.

  Because it wasn’t all down to her to save Ollie Brown’s life.

  It was down to Harry too.

  As Kat set off through the snow, back into town, she wondered how Harry was getting on in London.

  Because, so far, all she’d found were some curious uncertainties.

  While all that incriminating evidence remained firmly in place.

  8. The Condemned Man

  Harry jumped out of the cab, paid the driver, and then turned to take in the forbidding shape of the fortress-like Pentonville Prison.

  Although it was just midday, the sky was dark with brooding snow clouds gathering, which didn’t augur well for his train journey back to Mydworth later.

  A bit of a growl from his stomach, and he realised he’d not had a bite to eat since breakfast.

  No time for lunch: a two-hour meeting at the Foreign Office, followed by some discussion with his boss about a proposed meeting in the South of France (Good opportunity to squeeze in a little jaunt with Kat perhaps, he thought).

  And then a rush across town to Lincoln’s Inn Fields where an old school pal (who had chambers there) had called in a favour and arranged access for Harry to one of Brown’s defence team juniors.

  But though Harry had been able to read more details on the case, he was none the wiser as to any grounds for a further appeal. He’d never read anything more open-and-shut.

  Now he was here to meet the condemned man, and see if Brown himself might provide a thread to – somehow – unpick the looming hangman’s rope.

  He crossed the pavement and approached the prison guard on duty at the entrance.

  “Sir Harry Mortimer, to see the Governor,” he said.

  He watched the guards retreat to the cabin by the gates, check the log book, then return and unlock the tall, heavy iron gates that clanked with a solemn finality.

  “This way, sir,” said the guard, and Harry slipped through, then followed him into Pentonville Prison.

  *

  “Must tell you, Sir Harry, I’m quite surprised the Intelligence services have an angle on Brown,” said the Governor, as he led Harry from the prison offices, through a maze of locked gates into “A” Wing, where the condemned man – and the gallows – awaited.

  Harry didn’t respond. He knew the Governor – clearly an old hand – wasn’t expecting an answer anyway.

  Harry’s clearance in a small secretive offshoot of the Foreign Office had given him privileged access – no questions asked – to Brown on death row.

  So, he’d told a white lie that Brown was “a person of interest”. He’d felt it served no purpose to say his visit was a last-ditch attempt to find evidence that might delay the hanging.

  Moving through one last set of locked gates, they now entered “A” Wing. The long, Victorian building with its open staircases, metal gantries and lines of cells three stories high, echoed to their footsteps.

  Otherwise the place felt – to Harry – uncannily quiet.

  “Visited us before, old chap?” said the Governor.

  “Why, yes. I was here in ’25 to observe an execution,” said Harry, the grim memory of that day returning.

  A foreign spy whom Harry had helped to nail, paying the ultimate price for his treachery.

  “Bit more civilised now since we did the place up a bit, I’m sure you’ll agree,” said the Governor cheerily.

  Harry recalled a primitive shed out in the prison yard, and the long walk the prisoner had to make to the gallows.

  “Moved the whole show inside,” said the Governor, stopping at a staircase by a section of the wing separated from the rest, then leading Harry up the first flight of steps. “Modernised, you see,” he said, as they emerged and Harry saw a line of prison doors with small windows, and a prison guard on a small folding chair outside one.

  “So, there are two condemned cells. The gallows room sits nice and tidy in between them – though the poor beggars don’t realise that until the last minute.”

  Harry wondered if that was a warning to him not to spoil the surprise?

  “Here we are,” said the Governor. “I imagine you won’t want a guard with you?”

  “No, thank you,” said Harry. “I’ll be fine.”

  He waited while the guard took keys from a loop on his belt and unlocked the metal prison door.

  The door swung open, and Harry peered in – the cell bigger than he’d expected, and Brown not yet in view.

  “Just give us a shout when you’re done,” said the Governor.

  Harry nodded, then entered the cell. And as the door was pulled shut behind him, he saw Oliver Brown sitting at a table in the corner, staring at the grey prison wall.

  Looking very much like a doomed man.

  “Oliver,” he said.

  But Brown didn’t respond, his broad shoulders hunched, his arms held tight to his chest as if he was in a straitjacket.

  Harry could imagine how the bulk, the sheer strength, of this man could be intimidating. And how with all that force he could easily be responsible for the fierce, almost inhuman, attack on Carter.

  He paused for a second – knowing this was going to be difficult – then walked over to the table, gently dragged a chair across, and sat opposite him.

  “Oliver,” he said again, softly.

  He watched as slowly Brown turned from the wall and stared at him: as if only now was he aware that someone had come into the room.

  “I’m Harry Mortimer.” A pause. “And I’m here to help.”

  *

  “Harry Mortimer?” said Brown, his eyes narrowing. “Sir Harry, from the big house?”

  For a second, Harry tensed as he watched Brown sit up, stare at him.

  This chap could do me a lot of damage before they get that door open to help me, he thought.

  Then he nodded, and Brown laughed. “I know you!”

  Harry stared back at him, surprised.

  “Harry Mortimer!” said Brown again, rocking back on his chair. “I
got you out back in ’19, that gentlemen vs players game? Up on the field, when we all came home from France. You weren’t half bad, hit a couple of sixes. But you didn’t see my slow ball coming, did you? Ha ha! Bought it hook, line and sinker, you did!”

  And Harry suddenly remembered that cricket match ten years ago, so unreal after the horrors of the Front, the villagers crowding the boundary, the soft summer evening, a younger Brown bearing down on him as he batted, each ball whistling past his ears.

  “Brown! Of course – yes, I remember you!” he said, laughing at the memory. “How the hell did you do that?”

  “My lips are sealed! Sent your middle stump flying though, didn’t it!”

  “It did indeed!” said Harry. “Never lived it down! All we needed was one more run, but I blew it.”

  “I can see you now – still looking for the ball in the air, umpire already telling you to go. I got no end of pints bought for me that night, I can tell ya!”

  Harry laughed again – and for a few seconds the two of them were back in the pavilion at Mydworth Cricket Club, young men from opposite ends of the village, opposite lives, but bound together in one glorious peacetime memory.

  Then... the memory suddenly disappeared into thin air.

  “Give anything to be back there now, I can tell you,” said Brown.

  “I’m sure,” said Harry.

  He leaned forward, feeling there was no need for artifice now; he could just ask the questions as they came to him. “So, what the hell happened, Oliver? What are you doing here? Why?”

  “Beats me,” said Oliver. “All been a bit of a blur, really.”

  Harry took his time with the next question.

  “Did you do it? Did you kill Ben Carter?”

  Brown’s voice rose at that.

  “Course I didn’t. He was my best mate. Fact, I hope they find out who did, because if I’m still around I’ll damn well kill him, I will, I swear.”

  Harry shot a look at the jail cell door.

  “You’d better not say that too loud, or you’ll be back here again – and they’ll hang you twice!” said Harry, and, impossibly, they both laughed at this.

  “But seriously, Oliver, what did happen? I mean, the evidence against you... I’ve seen it, old chap. I would convict you too if I were on the jury.”

  “I know, it’s a right old mess. None of it makes sense. Trouble is, Sir Harry – when I try and piece together what happened that night, my mind just goes blank.”

  “What do you mean? You can’t remember, or you don’t want to? That can happen, you know, when something terrible occurs. The mind just goes into shock—”

  “No, no, it’s not like that. It’s something else. See – I know me and Ben had a go at each other in the pub that night. Bit of pushing and shoving.”

  Oliver looked away. “About to come to blows, we was. But then that copper turned up? Had a word with us, calmed us down. And my mate Will, well he got us laughing again. Then he bought a round. We even had a game of darts.”

  Harry knew that everything Oliver Brown was telling him could be easily checked.

  And none of it fit the picture of man planning on stabbing someone to death.

  “But then, see, next thing I remember, I’m in the cell in Mydworth Police Station, biggest headache I ever had.”

  “You seriously don’t remember anything in between?”

  “Nothing – nothing at all.”

  “Sounds to me like you just had a few too many pints?”

  “Had some, sure. But wasn’t that. I know it wasn’t that. I never, in all my years, had no hangover like that, never.”

  Harry looked at him: the poor man so confused, so lost, desperately trying to retrieve memories that might rescue him.

  “So, you don’t even remember leaving the pub?”

  “No.”

  “Getting home?”

  “No. Though Mabel says it was a while after closing time.”

  “But you don’t know where you were?”

  “That’s just the thing! Not a clue.”

  “For that whole time?”

  “No.”

  Harry sat back. Again, it was no wonder the jury voted as one.

  Brown had no defence at all.

  “Ollie,” said Harry, leaning close, “you don’t think maybe you got angry with Carter, went after him, lost your temper?” A breath. “Did him in?”

  Harry expected the man to rise to that. But he just shrugged.

  “Listen. I don’t think I did. But who knows? Maybe I went mad. Maybe that’s what really happened! Went mad and killed my best pal.”

  Harry leaned across, put a hand on Brown’s forearm.

  “If it’s any comfort, Oliver, I don’t believe that for one minute. I’m starting to believe you might just be innocent.”

  “You are?” said Brown, raising his head and looking at Harry as if in wonder.

  “I am,” said Harry. “Despite all that evidence. But if you’re a God-fearing man, you’d better start praying. Because there isn’t much time to fix this. Couple of days, that’s all we have. You need to tell me everything that you do remember.”

  He saw Brown sit up again, wipe his chin, as if resolving to help.

  “You really think you can get me out of this mess?” said Brown. “I’ve already lost the appeal, you know that? They even weighed me for the drop. I ain’t never heard of anyone coming back from a hanging as late in the day as this.”

  “There’s always a first time,” said Harry. “We’ll go through it now, from the beginning, all over again. I want you to tell me everything you know about Ben Carter – and about why you were fighting. Because maybe there’s something that happened that night that just might get you out of this place. I promise you this: I’m going to try my damnedest.”

  He watched Oliver take this in – the man thinking the case wasn’t totally lost.

  And something told Harry that if he listened, really listened to this account, there might be an idea, the merest seed of an idea that could save the man from his appointment with the hangman.

  9. The Station Inn

  Kat sat in the Alvis in the station car park, engine running to keep warm, and watched the London train pull in late, the steam and smoke swirling among the falling snow in great clouds, brightly lit by the light from the gas lamps on the station platform.

  She heard the carriage doors slam, then with a whistle, the great steam engine pulled away, wheels screeching on the frozen tracks.

  Weather like this, she thought, amazing the train is running at all.

  A few figures emerged into the car park, huddled low against the now-driving snow. Finally, she saw Harry and tooted the car’s horn.

  “Boy, am I glad to see you,” he said, opening the passenger door of the Alvis, shaking off the snow and climbing into the front seat. “Sorry you’ve had to wait.”

  “Least I could do,” said Kat, as he leaned across for a kiss. “Your nose is cold.”

  “And you – my dear – are wonderfully warm.”

  She saw a sparkle in his dark eyes.

  “Well, Sir Harry, I wouldn’t get too comfortable,” said Kat. “There’s somewhere we need to go before we head home.”

  “Let me guess. The Station Inn?” said Harry.

  “You thought so too?”

  “Oh, yes. Definitely. Seven o’clock, perfect time to grab any regulars who might have been around that night.”

  “Your meeting with Oliver Brown... anything?”

  “Well, good news and bad news,” said Harry. “Good news – I think there may be a chance that our boy Oliver is innocent.”

  “And – let me guess – that’s also the bad news?”

  “Exactly. Quick catch-up?”

  With the car heater doing its best to keep them warm, new snow clumping on the windshield, Kat told him about her visit to Ben Carter’s lodgings in the dilapidated Blackmead Farm, followed by her morning with Timms and Loxley.

  “Loxley sounds u
seful,” said Harry when she’d finished.

  “Sharper than Timms, that’s for sure.”

  “What about the solicitor?”

  “In the end, I phoned him. Said he was quite happy for us to take a second look at the case. But hardly optimistic.”

  “I don’t blame him,” said Harry. And Kat listened as he went through the details he’d picked up from the barrister’s junior.

  “So, no leads there,” she said.

  “Nope.”

  “And Pentonville?” Kat said. “I’m very curious. Never been in a British jail.”

  “Not at all convivial. Best avoided, in my opinion. I didn’t learn a great deal more about what happened at the pub. But I did – more or less – find out what the row with Ben Carter was about.”

  “La femme?” said Kat. “It’s always about la femme, isn’t it?”

  “Vraiment,” said Harry. “Cherchez, as they say. Oh, that reminds me – you will positively love this – the office wants me to go to Nice for a week, debrief some chap who’s been undercover in North Africa. Fancy coming along for the fun?”

  “The Riviera? Really? Do you even have to ask?”

  “We can stay at the Negresco.”

  “Your favourite hotel. Can’t wait, darling. Now – back to la femme?”

  “Ah, yes. Well, seems Ben and Oliver and Mabel all grew up together here in Mydworth. Ben apparently courted Mabel for a year or two but it was Oliver who won fair maid in the end.”

  “How romantic,” said Kat.

  “Indeed. Anyway, for some reason, Oliver got it into his head in the summer that Mabel and Ben were having a bit of a fling again.”

  “Oh dear. Classic stuff. When it comes to murder, that is. But how did he get that idea?”

  “Not at all sure. He did admit that he and Ben had a few run-ins, nothing serious until that night.”

  “Any idea why it got serious?”

  “Oliver told me he heard a rumour that Mabel and Ben had been seen canoodling in the Green Man the week before, while he was working.”

  “A rumour?” said Kat. “You think it happened?”

  “Who knows? But, when he heard about it, Oliver apparently blew his top. And I suspect that the lad does have a top to blow.”