The Veteran

by Frederick Forsyth

  As he awaited the arrival of a blood sample from the man in the coma, he pondered the disappointing reply from Mr Bateman to his query concerning the right fist.

  It was going to be a long night. Arrest had been at 7.15 p.m. That gave him twenty-four hours before either his chief superintendent gave him twelve further hours, or the local magistrates gave him a further twenty-four.

  As arresting officer, he would have to fill out yet another report, signed and witnessed. He would need a sworn statement from the FMO that both men were fit enough to be questioned. He would need every stitch of their clothing and the contents of all pockets, plus blood samples for elimination.

  Luke Skinner, watching like a hawk, had already made sure neither man jettisoned anything from their pockets as they were arrested and marched out of the pool hall and into the van. But no-one had been able to prevent Cornish telling the police constables that he wanted a lawyer, and fast. Until then, he was saying nothing. This message was not for the policemen; it was for his thick accomplice. And Price got the message, loud and clear.

  The procedures took over an hour. Dusk was descending. The FMO departed, leaving behind his statement as to the fitness of both men to be questioned, and the state of Price’s nose at the time of arrest.

  Both thugs were lodged in separate cells, both dressed in paper one-piece overalls. Both had had a cup of tea and would later receive a canteen fry-up. By the book, always by the book.

  Burns looked in on Price.

  ‘I want a brief,’ said Price. ‘I ain’t saying nothing.’

  Cornish was the same. He just smiled and insisted on a lawyer.

  The duty solicitor was Mr Lou Slade. He was disturbed over his supper, but insisted he wished to see his clients before turning in for the night. He arrived at Dover Street just before nine. He met both his new clients and spent half an hour closeted with them in an interview room.

  ‘You can now conduct the interviews in my presence if you wish, Detective Inspector,’ he said when he emerged. ‘But I have to say my clients will make no statement. They deny the charge. They say they were nowhere near the place in question at the time in question.’

  He was an experienced lawyer and had handled similar cases. He had got the measure of his clients and believed not a word, but he had a job to do.

  ‘If you wish,’ said Burns. ‘But the case is very strong and building steadily. If they went for an admission, I might even believe the victim hit his head on the pavement as he fell. With their records . . . say, a couple of years in the Ville.’ Pentonville was known locally as the ‘Ville’.

  Privately, Burns knew there were a score of kick marks on the injured man, and Slade knew he knew.

  ‘Stinking fish, Mr Burns. And I’m not buying. They intend to deny. I shall want all you have got under the disclosure rules.’

  ‘In due course, Mr Slade. And I shall need any claim of alibi well in time. But you know the rules as well as I.’

  ‘How long can you keep them?’ asked Slade.

  ‘Seven fifteen tomorrow night. Twelve hours extra from my super would not be enough. I’ll almost certainly want an extension in custody from the magistrates tomorrow, around five p.m., the last hearing of the evening.’

  ‘I shall not oppose,’ said Slade. He knew not to try and waste time. These were two thugs and they had half-killed a man. The magistrates would extend the custody remand without a blink. ‘As for your interviews, I suppose you will insist, even though on my advice they will say nothing.’

  ‘’Fraid so.’

  ‘Then as I am sure we both have homes to go to, may I suggest nine tomorrow morning?’

  It was agreed. Slade went home. Price and Cornish were locked up for the night. Burns had one last call to make. When he was connected to the Royal London he asked for the duty nurse in the ICU. The injured man might, just might, have come to.

  Mr Paul Willis was also working late that night. He had operated on a young motorcyclist who seemed to have tried to break the land-speed record coming down Archway Hill. The neurosurgeon had done his best, but privately he gave the motorcycle rider a fifty-fifty chance of seeing out the week. He heard about Burns’s call after the staff nurse had put the phone down.

  The twenty-four hours since anaesthetic was administered had elapsed. With its effects gone, he would have hoped for the first signs of stirring. Before heading home he went to look again at the limping man.

  There was no change. The monitors indicated a regular heartbeat, but the blood pressure was still too high, one of the signs of brain damage. On the Glasgow Scale the patient still hovered around 3 over 15, deep coma.

  ‘I’ll give it another thirty-six hours,’ he told the staff nurse. ‘I was hoping to get away this weekend, but I’ll come in on Saturday morning. Unless there is a happy sign of recovery, in which case, not. Would you leave a note that I be informed of a change for the better, either here or at home? If there’s no change by Saturday, nine a.m., I’ll want a rescan. Please book it for me.’

  The second day ended with Price and Cornish, stuffed with fried food, snoring ox-like in their cells at Dover Street nick. The victim lay on his back wired to three monitoring machines under a low blue light, locked into some faraway private world.

  Mr Willis cast thoughts of patients from his mind for a while and watched an old Clint Eastwood spaghetti western in his elegant house in St John’s Wood Terrace. DS Luke Skinner was just in time for a date with a very pretty drama student from the Hampstead School whom he had met in the crush bar at a Beethoven concert a month earlier. This was the sort of taste (Beethoven, not girls) that he emphatically did not discuss in the Dover nick canteen.

  DI Jack Burns returned to rustle up some baked beans on toast in an otherwise empty house in Camden Town, wishing that Jenny and the boys would return from their holiday at Salcombe, in his native Devon, where he dearly wished he could have joined them. August, he thought, bloody August.

  DAY THREE – THURSDAY

  The interviews with Price and Cornish turned out to be useless. It was not Jack Burns’s fault; he was a skilled and experienced interrogator. He took Price first, knowing him to be the more dense of the two. With Lou Slade sitting quietly by his client’s side, Burns took the line of sweet reason.

  ‘Look, Mark, we’ve got you bang to rights. There’s a witness, saw it all. Everything. Start to finish. And he is going to testify.’

  He waited. Nothing.

  ‘For the tape, my client declines to make a statement,’ murmured Slade.

  ‘Then he hit you right on the nose, Mark. Broke your ruddy hooter. No wonder you lost your rag. Why on earth did an old guy like that do it?’

  Price might have muttered, ‘I dunno,’ or, ‘Stupid old git.’ That would have gone down well with the jury. Admission of presence at the scene. Bang goes any alibi. Price glared but stayed silent.

  ‘Then there’s your blood, Mark. Pouring out the broken nose. We’ve got samples, laddie.’

  He was careful not to say he only had blood from the T-shirt, not the pavement, but he did not tell an untruth. Price shot a panicky glance at Slade, who also looked worried. Privately the lawyer knew that if samples of his client’s blood, proved by DNA tests to be Price’s blood and no-one else’s, had been found on the pavement close to the beaten man, there would be no defence. But he still had time for a change of plea, if necessary. Under the disclosure rules, he would insist on everything Burns had got, and long before any trial. So he just shook his head, and Price’s silence went on.

  Burns gave each defendant an hour of his best efforts, then packed it in.

  ‘I shall need to make an application for extension of police custody,’ he told Slade when Price and Cornish were back in their cells. ‘Four this afternoon?’

  Slade nodded. He would be present, but say virtually nothing. There would be no point.

  ‘And I am setting up two identity parades for tomorrow morning at St Anne’s Road. If I get two results, I shall go for a
formal charge and then a remand in custody,’ he added. Slade nodded and left.

  As he drove back to his office, the duty solicitor had little doubt this was not going to go his clients’ way. Burns was good at his job: meticulous, thorough, not given to silly mistakes that the defence could exploit. He also thought privately that his clients were guilty as hell. He had seen their record sheets and so would the magistrates that afternoon. Whoever the mystery witness was, if he was a respectable person and stuck to his guns, Price and Cornish would not be seeing much daylight for a long time.

  Years before, the police used to carry out identity parades inside the station. The new method was to have Identification Suites dotted at various places around the city. The nearest to Dover nick was in St Anne’s Road, just down the pavement from the hospital where Dr Melrose worked and Price had had his nose attended to. It was a more efficient system. Each suite was equipped with the latest in parade platform, lighting and one-way mirrors through which the identification could be made without the chance that a real hard case could ‘eyeball’ the witness and terrify him into silence without a word being said. The suites also had an on-call panel of men and women of different sizes and aspects to make up the parade at short notice. These volunteers were paid £15 to appear, stand in line and then walk out again. Burns asked for two parades, giving careful descriptions of his prisoners, for eleven a.m. the next day.

  Luke Skinner was left to handle the media, to whom Burns had a deep aversion. Anyway, the DS did it better. He was that fairly rare phenomenon, the public-school-educated policeman, with a polish much mocked in the canteen, but very useful on occasion.

  All press enquiries had to funnel through Scotland Yard, which had an entire bureau dedicated to public affairs, and they had asked for a brief statement. It was still a low-interest case, but apart from a serious wounding there was also a missing-person angle. Skinner’s problem was that he had no good description and certainly no picture, because the injured man was simply unsketchable with his bloated head swathed in bandage.

  So Skinner would simply appeal for anyone who had gone missing from home or work in the Tottenham/Edmonton area the previous Tuesday and had not been seen since. A man who walked with a pronounced limp, between fifty and fifty-five, short grey hair, medium height, medium build. August was a thin month for news; the media might carry the item, but not intensively.

  Nevertheless, there was one paper that might give the item a good run and he had a contact on it. He had lunch with the reporter on the Edmonton and Tottenham Express, the local rag that covered the whole area of the Dover Street nick. The reporter took notes and promised to do what he could.

  The civil courts may go into recess for a long vacation in the summer, but the network of criminal courts never ceases to labour. Over 90 per cent of lawbreaking is handled by the magistrates’ courts and the processes of the law have much to go on seven days a week and every week in the year. Much of the day-to-day work is carried out by lay magistrates who take no pay but work as a civic duty. They handle the mass of minor offences – traffic violations, issuing of warrants for arrest or search, drinking-licence extensions, minor theft, affray. And the granting of extensions to police custody or remands to prison to await trial. If a serious case comes before the magistrates’ court, it is the modern custom for a paid stipendiary magistrate, a qualified lawyer, to take the bench, sitting alone.

  That afternoon, Court No. 3 at the Highbury Corner court was in the charge of three lay magistrates, chaired by Mr Henry Spellar, a retired headmaster. The issue was so simple it took but a few seconds.

  When it was over, Price and Cornish were led away and driven back to Dover Street. Burns reported to Detective Superintendent Parfitt.

  ‘How’s it going, Jack?’ asked the head of the whole CID branch at Dover Street.

  ‘Frustrating, sir. It started fast and well, with an excellent witness who saw it all. Start to finish. Respectable shopkeeper across the road. Good citizen. No hesitation at ID and prepared to testify. I am short of the missing wallet taken from the victim. Plus forensics linking Price and Cornish to the time and the place. I’ve got Price’s broken nose and the treatment of that nose in St Anne’s just three hours later. It tallies perfectly with the eyewitness statement.’

  ‘So what is holding you?’

  ‘I need the wallet, linkage to the thugs; I need forensics to hurry up, and I’d like to ID the victim. He’s still a UAM.’

  ‘Are you going to charge them?’

  ‘If Mr Patel picks them out of the line tomorrow, yes, sir. They mustn’t walk on this one. They’re both guilty as hell.’

  Alan Parfitt nodded.

  ‘All right, Jack. I’ll try and chivvy forensics. Keep me and the CPS informed.’

  At the Royal London dusk fell again but the man in ICU did not see it. It had been forty-eight hours since the operation; the effects of the anaesthetics were long gone, but he did not flicker. He was still farawayinhis ownworld.

  DAY FOUR – FRIDAY

  The newspaper came out and it had given Luke Skinner a good spread. The story was the second lead, front page. The reporter took the angle: Limping Mystery Man – Who Is He? Police Ask. There was a description of the assault and reference to two local men who were ‘helping the police with their inquiries’. This is one of those much-used phrases comparable with hospital bulletins that describe people in absolute agony as being ‘comfortable’. It means the opposite and everyone knows it.

  The reporter gave a good description of the victim, his height, build, short grey hair and that giveaway limp, then ended with a query in bold capital letters: DID ANYONE SEE THE LIMPING MAN? DS Skinner grabbed a copy and took it to his canteen breakfast. He was pleased with the coverage. A small sidebar mentioned the renewal of custody and a further twenty-four hours.

  At eleven, Price and Cornish were taken by van to the St Anne’s Road ID suite. Burns and Skinner followed, with Mr Patel. There were two parades, each with the suspect and eight others of roughly similar appearance. Due to the state of Price’s nose, the other eight burly men in his parade had a strip of plaster across the bridge.

  Mr Patel did not hesitate. Within twenty minutes he had positively identified both men and again confirmed he would testify to what he had said in his statement. Burns was happy. Neither thug had seen him, neither ran with a gang; with luck Mr Patel would remain unintimidated.

  They drove him back to his shop. The volunteers were paid and left. Price and Cornish were restored to the cells where Burns intended to charge them formally when he returned.

  He and Skinner were entering the nick to do precisely that when the desk sergeant called out.

  ‘Jack, there was a call for you.’ He studied a notepad. ‘A Miss Armitage. A florist.’

  Burns was puzzled. He had ordered no flowers. On the other hand, Jenny was returning in another week. A bunch of flowers might help with the romantic side of things. Good idea.

  ‘Something about a limping man,’ said the sergeant.

  Burns took the address and went back to the car with Skinner.

  The Misses Armitage, twin sisters of many summers, ran a small flower shop on the Upper High Road. Half of their wares were inside the shop, half displayed on the pavement. The latter blooms fought a battle for survival with the billowing clouds of fumes from the juggernauts heading south towards Highbury or north to the industrial Midlands.

  ‘It might be the man,’ said Miss Verity Armitage. ‘He seems to answer the description. You did say Tuesday morning, did you not?’

  DI Burns assured her that Tuesday morning would have been about right.

  ‘He bought a bunch of flowers. Not an expensive one, in fact about the cheapest in the shop. Oxeye daisies, half a dozen. From his appearance he did not have much money, poor dear. And the paper says he has been injured.’

  ‘Badly hurt, ma’am. He cannot speak. He is in a coma. How did he pay?’

  ‘Oh, cash.’

  ‘In coins, f
rom his trouser pocket?’

  ‘No. He produced a five-pound note. From a wallet. I recall that he dropped it and I picked it up for him because of his leg.’

  ‘What kind of wallet?’

  ‘Cheap. Plastic. Black. And then I gave it back to him.’

  ‘Did you see where he put it?’

  ‘In his pocket. Jacket pocket. Inside.’

  ‘Could you show me a bunch of oxeye daisies?’

  They lunched back at the Dover Street canteen. Burns was glum, disappointed. A credit card would have left a record: name, and from the credit company an address or a bank account. Anything. But cash . . .

  ‘What would you do, on an afternoon in August, with a bunch of flowers?’ he asked Skinner.

  ‘Take it to a girlfriend? Give it to your mum?’

  Both men pushed their plates aside and frowned over the mugs of tea.

  ‘Sir?’

  The voice was timorous and came from further down the long table. It was from a WPC, very young, just arrived from training school. Jack Burns looked down the table.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘It’s just an idea. Are you talking about the limping man?’

  ‘Yes. And I could use a good idea. What’s yours?’

  She blushed a fetching pink. Very new PCs do not usually interrupt detective inspectors.

  ‘If he was walking where he was, sir, he would have been heading for the High Road five hundred yards ahead. And the buses. But five hundred yards behind him is the cemetery.’

  Burns put down his mug.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ he asked the girl.

  ‘Sorting files, sir.’

  ‘That can wait. We’re going to look at a cemetery. Come along.’

  Skinner drove, as usual. The WPC, who came from the borough, directed. It was a big cemetery, hundreds of graves, in rows. Council owned and ill maintained. They started at one corner and began to patrol, taking a row of headstones each. It took nearly an hour. The girl found it first.