A Mind to Kill

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘She called you a mother-fucker.’

  ‘She’s got a dirty mouth,’ taunted Hall.

  ‘Will I have to go back to the prison hospital?’

  Hall shook his head. ‘I got Jarvis to agree to bail, on condition you resided here.’

  ‘ Well aren’t you the smarty pants! ’

  ‘Never?’ demanded Jennifer, intensely.

  ‘Whatever the result of the exhumation, Jarvis is going to direct the jury that it’s unsafe to convict.’

  Jennifer closed her eyes. ‘Thank God for that!’

  ‘ Doesn’t matter a damn.’

  ‘She says it doesn’t matter a damn.’

  ‘Why’s she so hysterical then?’

  ‘ Kiss my ass, cocksucker.’

  ‘You believed me from the beginning, didn’t you?’ said Jennifer. ‘No-one else believed me but you.’

  ‘Yes,’ lied Hall. He did now, he accepted, finally confronting the phenomenon. He was talking to a woman inside of whose head there was another woman, a woman he knew all about, a murderer. Believed it so much he was talking to Jane as if she existed: was a real person, in the same room. He shivered, visibly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ frowned Jennifer.

  ‘ Scared shitless, that’s what’s the matter.’

  ‘Someone walked over my grave,’ Hall said, inadequately.

  ‘ Leave mine alone! ’

  Jennifer held his eyes for several moments. Then, nodding to the corridor outside, she said, ‘There’s more police than before.’

  Hall shifted, further discomfited. ‘The hospital is virtually under media siege. The police outside are to keep them away from you. There’s a lot more downstairs.’

  ‘ Freak. ’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘Neither had I, not until now. Everything’s happened very quickly.’

  There was another wan smile. ‘You did what I asked you. Proved me not guilty. Thank you.’ She reached out her hand, towards him.

  Hall hesitated, then took it.

  ‘ Where’s the fucking violins and pink doves? ’

  ‘I was testing you,’ confessed Jennifer.

  ‘Testing me?’

  ‘To see if you’d take my hand. To see if you were frightened of me. She says you are.’

  Hall retained her hand. ‘Then she’s wrong about that, too, isn’t she?’ It wasn’t a lie. He wasn’t scared. He was… He didn’t know what he was but it wasn’t fear. Disbelief, perhaps? No, it couldn’t be that. He’d already decided he did believe. It was, he supposed, how someone would feel confronting a creature from outer space, although the analogy offended him, because Jennifer Lomax wasn’t an alien creature. Despite what she’d gone through – was still going through – she was a very beautiful and physically attractive woman. He released her hand. Not that he felt any physical attraction. To have allowed that would have been unprofessional: he had to behave like a doctor in that respect.

  ‘ I’m not wrong! He’s scared. Everyone’s going to be scared. You’re going to be a pariah for the rest of your life. We’ll get you a drum. That’s what it means, you know. A drummer because that’s what Hindu pariahs do, beat a drum as a warning for people to get out of the way when they’re coming.’

  ‘I’ve got to think of Emily, haven’t I?’

  ‘You haven’t ever stopped.’

  ‘I mean about getting back with her. Properly.’

  ‘I’ve told you, Annabelle says she’s virtually forgotten what happened here.’

  ‘She’ll remember, when I go home.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘I’m frightened that’s how it will be.’

  ‘You’ll have to take it a step at a time,’ said Hall, hating the cliche.

  ‘How long, before it’s all finished with the court?’

  ‘Depends how long the DNA takes. Just days.’

  ‘It’s been a lifetime.’

  ‘ And it’s only just beginning! ’

  ‘Now it’s over.’

  ‘I won’t have to go back to prison to get my things?’

  Hall shook his head again. ‘I’ll have them collected and taken back to Hampshire. Or to the flat here, if you’d prefer.’

  Now Jennifer shook her head, but much more positively. That’s where he went with Rebecca. In our bed. My bed. I don’t want to go there again. Not ever. I’ll sell it. In fact…’ She paused. ‘I’ll certainly be here all day tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ask Geoffrey Johnson to come. He can make arrangements to put it on the market immediately.’

  ‘I’ll fix it,’ undertook the barrister. It all sounded very normal, so very ordinary. Would it ever be possible for Jennifer Lomax to know normality – to be normal – again.

  Jennifer looked abruptly to the bedside cabinet and what was on top of it. ‘And I can use the telephone, whenever I like, can’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Hall, guessing the point of the question.

  ‘So I could telephone Emily?’

  ‘If you want to.’

  ‘I want to,’I said Jennifer, hesitantly. There was a pause. Then she said, ‘But I don’t know what to say to her.’ There was a further silence before she added, ‘And there’s something else…’

  Hall waited for Jennifer to finish but she didn’t.

  Jeremy Hall wasn’t conscious of being followed from the hospital until he parked along the Embankment and was immediately surrounded by people who leapt from three separate cars which screeched to a haphazard halt behind him. There were seven reporters, three women among them. They all began talking and shouting at once, drowning each other out, and for several moments Hall was totally bewildered.

  ‘Who are you? What…?’

  The names of the newspapers were the first thing that positively registered. He didn’t bother to match the identification with the representatives.

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘What’s she say?’

  ‘What’s Jane telling her?’

  ‘Can Jane make her do whatever she wants?’

  ‘She’s a Frankenstein, isn’t she?’

  ‘Will she always have to be locked up, as a danger?’

  Hall used his bulk to shoulder his way through, shaking his head but saying nothing. Envelopes were thrust at him and instinctively he took them.

  ‘That’s not final.’

  ‘We’ll negotiate.’

  ‘Call us first, before anyone else.’

  ‘We’ll be sympathetic, put Jennifer’s side of the story.’

  The cordon was much bigger around his chambers. When the crowd saw him approaching there was the blinding whiteness of cameras and television lights and Hall actually stumbled into people he could not see. It was impossible to distinguish anything from the shouted, screaming questions. More envelopes were thrust towards him, which he let fall to the ground. It wasn’t until after he bulldozed his way through and was admitted through the briefly unbolted door by the uniformed porter that Hall realized he was still clutching those that had first been forced upon him.

  Everyone was already assembled in Proudfoot’s room. The QC and Bert Feltham were in shirt-sleeves: Mickey Mouse figures were propelled up and down Feltham’s braces by the heaviness of his breathing. Humphrey Perry looked mournful.

  Proudfoot said, ‘What the hell have we opened up here?’

  ‘Pandora’s Box?’ suggested Hall. After the previous night entirely without sleep he was suddenly extremely tired.

  ‘I’ve never known anything like it. It’s incredible. We’ve called the police, to clear them,’ said Proudfoot.

  Choosing partly to misunderstand, Hall said, ‘There’s never been anything like this. That’s why they’re here. It’s as bad at the hospital. I was followed back.’ He looked uncertainly at the envelopes in his hand and thrust them towards Perry.

  ‘It’ll be more offers,’ predicted the solicitor, holding up a sheaf of already opened letters. ‘ The Sunday Times
heads the list at the moment. Quarter of a million. They all say they’re prepared to negotiate. And that they’ll be sympathetic, whatever that means.’

  Proudfoot indicated the open cocktail cabinet and said to the younger barrister, ‘Help yourself.’

  Hall wasn’t a drinker but he poured whisky, deciding that night he not only needed but deserved it. He wondered if there would be any congratulations for representing a client as he had. He said, ‘I hadn’t thought this far ahead. Anticipated the reaction.’

  ‘I don’t want it to continue,’ declared Proudfoot, accusingly. ‘I’m wondering what the Bar Council attitude will be.’

  ‘Disappointment among its members that they’re not involved,’ guessed Hall, cynically. ‘And I don’t see how I could have avoided it.’

  ‘Applying for exhumation was unnecessary,’ insisted Proudfoot.

  ‘If the DNA is the same as that at the scene, Jennifer Lomax will be officially and fully declared not guilty instead of the trial closing because the evidence is unsafe.’

  ‘Which means Gerald Lomax was murdered by a ghost,’ said Proudfoot, contemptuously.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hall, with flat simplicity. ‘The court has already accepted evidence that proves that.’

  A heavy silence encompassed the room. It was broken by the wheezing Bert Feltham. ‘I’ve gone through the transcript of today’s evidence. That’s exactly what it proves.’

  ‘Precisely a Pandora’s Box,’ said Perry, distantly.

  Hall helped himself to more whisky, uninvited. ‘We can only go on a day at a time,’ he said, remembering it was the cliche he’d used at the hospital because he couldn’t think of anything.

  Proudfoot smiled, in sudden affability. ‘Thought I might sit in, at the resumption.’

  Wigged, gowned and ready for recognition inside and out of the court, guessed Hall, bitterly. ‘I’m sure Mr Justice Jarvis would welcome someone rumoured to be his successor.’ He was tired and fed up and didn’t care.

  ‘It might not be a good idea, for that and other reasons,’ cautioned Feltham.

  ‘Reasons that might affect my case?’ demanded Hall, considering the impertinence justified if it did, although he couldn’t imagine how. He slightly stressed ‘my’.

  Proudfoot looked sharply at his Chief Clerk, who flushed in unaccustomed and rare embarrassment, dragging an inhaler from his pocket. Proudfoot said, ‘It’s of no consequence. I don’t think I will attend.’

  ‘It is of consequence if it is in any way connected with my client,’ insisted Hall, curious at the obvious feeling between the two men.

  Proudfoot sighed, heightening Feltham’s colour with another look. The older barrister said, ‘We have accepted the brief to represent Enco-Corps in a civil matter. Some derivatives dealing in copper, predominantly on the Far East market.’

  ‘And?’ persisted Hall, dissatisfied.

  Now Proudfoot looked at Humphrey Perry. ‘We understood at the outset there was no question of culpability on the part of Enco-Corps: that they were acting in genuine good faith for Asian dealers. It would seem, however, that there might be some doubt…’

  Hall waited.

  ‘Gerald Lomax was inflating prices on offer to Hong Kong and Singapore,’ finally admitted Proudfoot. ‘Manipulating the buy-in prices. It created a snowball effect, artificially heating both exchanges. Dealers panicked, continuing to buy high to cover their losses.’

  ‘Will it become public?’ demanded Hall. The deal, he recognized at once. His uncle had allowed the Jennifer Lomax murder to be dumped on to the chambers – and personally on to him, whose career was still too new to be of any importance – to gain a civil brief that would take months to prepare and months to litigate, all at a fee of?1,000 a day.

  ‘In my opinion any British prosecution will have died with Gerald Lomax himself,’ said Proudfoot. ‘Rebecca Nicholls’ name is on some of the sell orders but she says she was acting on Lomax’s instructions: there’s nothing criminally to link her.’

  And with Gerald Lomax’s death went the hope of all that money, thought Hall, satisfaction warming through him. ‘Thank you, for advising me.’

  ‘I would have done so, had I considered it had any relevance,’ insisted Proudfoot. Now it was he who coloured.

  ‘I have no doubt whatsoever that you would have done,’ said Hall, maintaining the sarcasm.

  ‘What shall we do with all these offers,’ Perry hurried in to the rescue, waving the letters in his hand like a flag.

  ‘We’re Mrs Lomax’s agent,’ reminded Hall. ‘We’re required to pass on any correspondence.’ He paused. ‘I doubt she’ll be interested. Money’s the one thing she isn’t in need of.’

  At the hospital Peter Lloyd said, ‘There was something you needed to know?’

  ‘I was lesbian raped in prison. They used something: an artificial penis. If it had been used on someone else, someone with AIDs, could I have been infected?’

  Lloyd swallowed, swamped with pity. ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘But you’re not one hundred per cent sure?’

  ‘Would you like to be HIV tested?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘ Now here’s a whole new ball game! ’

  ‘Are there really ghosts?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Annabelle.

  ‘Margaret Roberts says there are.’

  ‘Well there aren’t.’

  ‘Margaret Roberts say’s Mummy is a ghost.’

  ‘How can your mummy be a ghost? She’s your mummy.’

  ‘She’s not here though, is she?’

  ‘She will be, soon.’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Conducting the exhumation in the traditional early hours, just before dawn, to minimize public awareness and offence was totally pointless. There needed to be practically a shoulder-to-shoulder cordon of police to enforce the judge’s five-hundred-yard radius order around Jane Lomax’s grave and beyond that barrier night was transformed into day by the permanently switched-on film and television lights. It was made even brighter by the constant flicker of flashes for cameras that looked more like field guns from the length of their zoom and magnifying lenses, and the noise was almost at battleground level, too. The screens were totally inadequate, diaphanous and far too low, and concealed practically nothing.

  It was equally crowded around the burial plot. Two gravediggers toiled under arc lights swarmed by insects, carefully shovelling earth on to canvas protecting the surrounding interments. A black-cassocked vicar stood at the gravestone (‘Jane Lomax, much loved and missed wife of Gerald. Always in my heart’), his lips moving in silent prayer. Felix Hewitt and Anthony Billington were encased in sterile white plastic scene-of-crime tunics, complete with fully enclosing head cowls and over-shoes. So were the forensic experts whom Jeremy Hall had engaged, a slim and unexpectedly young woman named Phylis Shipley and beside her a man to whom he had only just been introduced. Harold Carter looked old enough to be the girl’s father but visibly deferred to her. There were two uniformed police superintendents, one standing permanently with the exhumation group, the other acting as liaison with the outer police cordon. Hall wasn’t sure the liaison officer needed to go back and forth as often as he did but at every approach to the media there was a flashlight explosion, which Hall supposed provided the reason. Standing slightly apart from the superintendents was a police photographer, at the moment the only such operator in the cemetery with an unused camera. Hall had been unsure how to dress and settled for cords and heavy-weather anorak, which was a mistake because it was too hot under the arc lights. Now he stood with it open as wide as possible. He hadn’t expected Keflin-Brown but understood the other barrister’s presence the moment he saw the size of the press invasion. The older man wore a gaitered plus-four shooting suit, with highly polished brogues and topped off by a peakless cap. Humphrey Perry was dressed for court.

  Keflin-Brown said, ‘I’ve got the newspapers in the car: found a shop open early. Astonishing. Absolutely astonishing. You�
�ll be beating clients off with sticks from now on.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to make a reputation this way.’

  ‘It’s happened, whether you like it or not. You’re made, old boy. Famous.’

  Hall’s flat had been surrounded when he’d finally arrived home the previous night. Among the inevitable envelopes in his pigeon hole had been three invitations to television chat shows:?100,000 had been the highest bid for his personal story but all the other offers, nine in all, had insisted they were open to negotiation. Among a lot of messages on his machine from newspapers and publishers there’d been a message from Patricia asking him to ring her. He hadn’t. Two cars had followed him when he’d left an hour earlier, to drive to the cemetery. He hadn’t opened their envelopes yet and wasn’t sure if he’d bother. Pointedly Hall said, ‘Mrs Lomax broke three ribs.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said Keflin-Brown, reminded. ‘Painful things, broken ribs.’

  ‘To go with all her other problems.’

  ‘But you’ve solved her biggest one.’

  ‘Have I?’ asked Hall, seriously, looking at the milling scene beyond the police line. ‘I’m not sure we even know the full extent of her problems. How many there are, even.’

  ‘You know the rules, old boy. Do your best in wig and gown but say goodbye at the court door.’

  ‘You forgot to mention the fee,’ said Hall, sarcastically.

  ‘Never, dear boy. Never forget the fee. And yours should take care of the rent for a year or two.’

  There were some muted calls from the grave and almost at once an instinctive move forward. The cleric immediately halted it, indicating a cleared area of canvas to be left for the coffin. One of the diggers lowered himself gently into the grave to thread lifting straps beneath the casket. After several grunted minutes he re-emerged to call for help. The second gravedigger eased himself into the hole and the vicar said, ‘Be careful! Do be careful! It’s probably very rotten by now.’

  For the first time Hall became aware of a smell he’d never experienced before, an odd combination of sour mustiness which was at the same time sweet: at first it was almost pleasant, an unusual perfume but very quickly it became overwhelmingly sickening and Hall’s stomach began to churn at the very moment everyone around the grave, with the exception of the two men inside and the vicar, puiled back. Hall saw Phylib Shipley and Hewitt put on nose clips.