The Best British Mysteries 3 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  ‘And what about you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m much more law-abiding.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me.’

  Old Bag Dad beamed. ‘I always tell the truth to a man in a peaked cap,’ he declared. ‘And you look as if you were born with it on.’

  Ken Latimer was stymied. He realised that bullying would get him nowhere this time. If he wanted cooperation from the old man, he had to trade. It was a bitter pill to swallow but the future of the park was at stake. He could not let an unsolved murder hang over it like a dark cloud.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s have it. What’s the deal?’

  ‘Deal?’

  ‘You were a witness. We need you to come forward.’

  ‘But I was forbidden to come here at night,’ the tramp reminded him. ‘If I give evidence, you’ll prosecute me for trespassing on council property. My lawyer would never allow me to do anything like that.’

  ‘There’ll be no prosecution, Bag Dad.’

  ‘What guarantee do I have of that?’

  ‘My promise,’ said Latimer, proudly. ‘I’ll stand by it.’

  ‘I need something more. I want to go back to the old arrangement.’

  ‘You, staying the night here? I won’t have that.’

  ‘Then there’s no deal. Got it?’

  ‘There has to be. My reputation is at stake here.’

  The old man indicated the bench. ‘So is my bed.’

  ‘If I let you stay overnight, I’d be breaking the rules.’

  ‘Join the club, Mr Latimer.’

  The keeper’s head sank to his chest. After a lifetime of enforcing rules and regulations, he was faced with an impossible dilemma. He could stay true to his principles and risk having an unsolved crime leaving a permanent stain on his park. Or he could compromise. It required a huge effort on his part.

  ‘Very well,’ he conceded, grudgingly. ‘You win.’

  ‘I’d prefer it if we could shake hands on that.’

  It was almost too much to ask. Latimer was a fastidious man with a deep-seated hatred of tramps but he knew that Old Bag Dad was in a position to dictate terms. With severe misgivings, he extended his hand. The other man shook it then walked across to pick up his bag.

  ‘I think I’ll go and have a talk with Tom Fallowell,’ he said.

  * * * *

  When he arrived at the police station, Old Bag Dad was taken straight to the Chief Inspector. A mass of evidence had already been collected but no suspect had yet emerged. The police were baffled. The tramp was able to supply a crucial detail.

  ‘I caught a glimpse of the registration number on the car.’

  ‘What was it?’ pressed Fallowell.

  ‘This is only a guess, mind you,’ said the old man. ‘It was quite dark. Luckily, he left the door open when he got out of the car so the courtesy light was on. That meant I saw him clearly.’

  ‘Did you recognise him?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘And the number of the car?’

  ‘I think it was W848 MJK.’

  ‘Any idea of the make?’

  ‘A Mondeo. But don’t ask me the colour, Tom.’

  Fallowell wrote down the details on a slip of paper and handed it to a colleague. The latter immediately picked up a telephone to trace the owner of the vehicle. The Chief Inspector turned to Old Bag Dad.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us this before?’

  ‘I was held up by a legal technicality.’

  ‘Would his name happen to be Ken Latimer?’

  ‘No wonder you became a detective!’

  ‘Thanks for coming forward, Bag Dad,’ said Fallowell. ‘This may be the breakthrough that we need. But next time you have evidence,’ he stressed, ‘make sure that you give it immediately. In a murder inquiry, we expect help from the public.’

  The old man winked. ‘Oh, I think you’ll find that I’ve given that.’

  * * * *

  Ten minutes later, Chief Inspector Fallowell was in a police car, leading a convoy to an address that they had been given. When they reached their destination, they found the house in a quiet cul-de-sac. Standing on the drive was a blue Ford Mondeo with the correct registration plate. The Inspector leapt out of the car and deployed his men around the property. He rang the bell but got no response. When he pounded on the door with his fist, he still elicited no reply. Standing back, he nodded to a waiting police officer who smashed down the door without ceremony. Armed detectives surged into the house to be met by a sight that made them stop in their tracks.

  Chief Inspector Fallowell was as astonished as the rest of them. The man they wanted to interview could not have answered the door, even if he had wanted to do so. Sitting in an upright chair, he was bound and gagged. The look of desperation in his eyes was a confession of guilt in itself. He was untied, asked his name then formally arrested on a charge of murder. Fallowell ordered his men to take the prisoner out. Others were told to search the premises. One of the detectives sniffed the air. He wrinkled his nose. ‘What’s that?’ he asked. ‘Smells like aftershave lotion.’

  ‘Funny,’ said Fallowell with a knowing smile. ‘Can’t smell a thing.’

  * * * *

  Douglas Pym soon got to hear how a brutal murder had been solved with the help of a tramp who was trespassing on council property. He was delighted to learn how Old Bag Dad had wrested a vital concession from the new head park keeper. The tramp had the freedom of the park once more. Pym caught his friend on his usual bench, finishing the last chapter of War and Peace. The old man let out a chuckle of satisfaction.

  ‘I always wondered how the book ended,’ he said.

  ‘What’s it to be with Ken Latimer from now on - war or peace?’

  ‘Peace with honour, Doug.’

  ‘Be careful. He bears grudges.’

  ‘I fancy that he’ll keep out of my way from now on.’

  ‘Until the cold weather sets in,’ noted Pym. ‘Even you won’t stay around the Memorial Park then. You’ll be up and away.’

  ‘Following the sun.’

  ‘But where to? I do wish you’d tell me that.’

  ‘Then I’ll let you into the secret, Doug. I go to the Middle East.’

  ‘The Middle East?’

  ‘My spiritual home.’

  ‘Are you pulling my leg?’

  ‘Of course not. There’s only one place I could go.’

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the tramp with a grin. ‘Old Baghdad.’

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  * * * *

  John Mortimer

  Rumpole and the Christmas Break

  I

  ‘We must be constantly on guard. Night and day. Vigilance is essential. I’m sure you would agree, wouldn’t you, Luci?’

  Soapy Sam Ballard, our always-nervous Head of Chambers, addressed the meeting as though the forces of evil were already beating on the doors of 4 Equity Court, and weapons of mass destruction had laid waste to the dining hall, condemning us to a long winter of cold meat and sandwiches. As usual, he longed for confirmation and turned to our recently appointed Head of Marketing and Administration, who was now responsible for the Chambers’ image.

  ‘Quite right, Chair.’ Luci’s north country voice sounded quietly amused, as though she didn’t take the alarming state of the world quite as seriously as Ballard did.

  ‘Thank you for your contribution, Luci.’ Soapy Sam, it seemed, thought she might have gone a little further, such as recommending that Securicor mount a twenty-four hour guard on the Head of Chambers. Then he added, in a voice of doom, ‘I have already asked our clerk to keep an extremely sharp eye on the sugar kept in the coffee cupboard.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I ventured to ask our leader. ‘Has Claude been shovelling it in by the tablespoonful?’

  Claude Erskine-Brown was one of the few barristers I have ever met who combined a passionate affection for Wagner’s operas with a remarkably sweet tooth, continuously sucking wine gums in court and lo
ading his coffee with heaped spoonfuls of sugar.

  ‘It’s not that, Rumpole.’ Soapy Sam was getting petulant. ‘It’s anthrax.’

  ‘What anthrax?’

  ‘The sugar might be. There are undoubtedly people out there who are out to get us, Rumpole. Haven’t you been listening at all to government warnings?’

  ‘I seem to remember them telling us one day that if we went down the tube we’d all be gassed, and the next day they said, “Sorry, we were only joking. Carry on going down the tube.’“

  ‘Rumpole! Do you take nothing seriously?’

  ‘Some things,’ I assured Soapy Sam. ‘But not the government.’

  ‘We are,’ here Ballard ignored me as an apparently hopeless case, and addressed the meeting, ‘especially vulnerable.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ I was curious enough to ask.

  ‘We represent the Law, Rumpole. The centre of a civilised society. Naturally we’d be high on their hit list.’

  ‘You mean the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, and number 4 Equity Court? I wonder, you may be right.’

  ‘I propose to appoint a small Chambers emergency committee consisting of myself, Claude Erskine-Brown, and Archie Prosser. Please report to one of us if you notice anything unusual or out of the ordinary. I assume you have nothing to report, Rumpole?’

  ‘Nothing much. I did notice a chap on the tube. A fellow of Middle Eastern appearance wearing a turban and a beard and muttering into a Dictaphone. He got out at South Kensington. I don’t suppose it’s important.’

  Just for a moment I thought, indeed I hoped, our Head of Chambers looked at me as though he believed what I had said, but then justifiable doubt overcame him.

  ‘Very funny,’ Ballard told the meeting. ‘But then you can scarcely afford to be serious about the danger we’re all in, can you Rumpole? Considering you’re defending one of these maniacs.’

  ‘Rumpole would defend anyone,’ said Archie Prosser, the newest arrival in our chambers, who had an ill-deserved reputation as a wit.

  ‘If you mean anyone who’s put on trial and tells me they’re innocent, then the answer is yes.’

  * * * *

  Nothing alarming happened on the tube on my way home that evening, except for the fact that, owing to a ‘work to rule’ by the drivers, the train gave up work at Victoria and I had to walk the rest of the way home to Froxbury Mansions in the Gloucester Road. The shops and their windows were full of glitter, artificial snow, and wax models perched on sleighs wearing party dresses. Taped carols came tinkling out of Tesco’s. The Chambers meeting had been the last of the term, and the Old Bailey had interrupted its business for the season of peace and goodwill.

  There was very little of either in the case which I had been doing in front of the aptly named Mr Justice Graves. Mind you, I would have had a fairly rough ride before the most reasonable of judges. Even some compassionate old darlings like Mr Justice ‘Pussy’ Proudfoot might have regarded my client with something like horror and been tempted to dismiss my speech to the jury as a hopeless attempt to prevent a certain conviction and a probable sentence of not less than thirty years. The murder we had been considering, when we were interrupted by Christmas, had been cold-blooded and merciless, and there was clear evidence that it had been the work of a religious fanatic.

  The victim, Honoria Glossop, Professor of Comparative Religions at William Morris University in east London, had been the author of a number of books, including her latest, and last, publication Sanctified Killing - A History of Religious Warfare. She had been severely critical of all acts of violence and aggression - including the Inquisition and the Crusades - committed in the name of God. She had also included a chapter on Islam which spoke scathingly of some Ayatollahs and the cruelties committed by Islamic fundamentalists.

  It was this chapter which had caused my client, a young student of computer technology at William Morris named Hussein Khan, to issue a private fatwa. He composed, on one of the university computers, a letter to Professor Glossop announcing that her blasphemous references to the religious leaders of his country deserved nothing less than death - which would inevitably catch up with her. Then he left the letter in her pigeonhole.

  It took very little time for the authorship of the letter to be discovered. Hussein Khan was sent down from William Morris and began spending time helping his family in the Star of Persia restaurant they ran in Golders Green. A week later, Professor Glossop, who had been working late in her office at the university, was found slumped across her desk, having been shot at close quarters by a bullet from a revolver of Czech origins, the sort of weapon which is readily and cheaply available in certain south London pubs. Beside her on the desk, now stained with her blood, was the letter containing the sentence of death.

  Honoria and her husband Richard ‘Ricky’ Glossop lived in what the estate agents would describe as ‘a three-million-pound townhouse in Boltons’. The professor had, it seemed, inherited a great deal of money from a family business in the Midlands which allowed her to pursue her academic career, and Ricky to devote his life to country sports, without the need for gainful employment. He was clearly, from his photograph in the papers, an outstandingly handsome figure, perhaps five or six years younger than his wife. After her murder, he received, and everyone felt deserved, huge public sympathy. He and Honoria had met when they were both guests on a yacht touring the Greek Islands, and she had chosen him and his good looks in preference to all the available professors and academic authors she knew. In spite of their differences in age and interest, they seemed to have lived happily together for ten years until, so the prosecution said, death overtook Honoria Glossop in the person of my now universally hated client.

  Such was the case I was engaged in at the Old Bailey in the runup to Christmas. There were no tidings of great joy to report. The cards were stacked dead against me, and at every stage it looked like I was losing, trumped by a judge who regarded defence barristers as flies on the tasty dish of justice.

  Mr Justice Graves, known to me only as ‘The Old Gravestone’, had a deep, sepulchral voice and the general appearance of a man waking up with an upset stomach on a wet weekend. He had clearly come to the conclusion that the world was full of irredeemable sinners. The nearest thing to a smile I had seen on the face of The Old Gravestone was the look of grim delight he had displayed when, after a difficult case, the jury had come back with the guilty verdict he had clearly longed for.

  So, as you can imagine, the atmosphere in Court One at the Old Bailey during the trial of the Queen against Hussein Khan was about as warm as the South Pole during a blizzard. The Queen may have adopted a fairly detached attitude towards my client, but the judge certainly hadn’t.

  The prosecution was in the not altogether capable hands of Soapy Sam Ballard, which was why he had practically named me as a founding member of Al-Qaeda at our chambers meeting. His junior was the newcomer Archie Prosser.

  These two might not have been the most deadly optimists I had ever had to face during my long career at the bar, but a first-year law student with a lowish IQ would, I thought, have had little difficulty in securing a conviction against the young student who had managed to become one of the most hated men in England.

  As he was brought up from the cells and placed in the dock between two prison officers, the jury took one brief, appalled look at him and then turned their eyes on what seemed to them to be the less offensive figure of Soapy Sam as he prepared to open his devastating case.

  So I sat at my end of counsel’s benches. The brief had been offered to several QCs (Queer Customers I always call them), but they had excused themselves as being too busy, or unwell, or going on holiday - any excuse to avoid being cast as leading counsel for the forces of evil. It was only, it seemed, Rumpole who stuck to the old-fashioned belief that the most outrageous sinner deserves to have his defence, if he had one, put fairly and squarely in front of a jury.

  Mr Justice Gravestone didn’t share my views. When Ballard r
ose he was greeted with something almost like a smile from the bench, and his most obvious comments were underlined by a judicious nod followed by a careful note underlined in the judicial notebook. Every time I rose to cross-examine a prosecution witness, however, Graves sighed heavily and laid down his pencil as though nothing of any significance was likely to come.

  This happened when I had a few pertinent questions to ask the pathologist, my old friend Professor Arthur Ackerman, forensic scientist and master of the morgues. After he had given his evidence about the cause of death (pretty obvious), I started off.

  ‘You say, Professor Ackerman, that the shot was fired at close quarters?’