Yesterday's Papers

by Martin Edwards

  She turned to page one and stared at the title. ‘Confession To Murder. Good grief, did Miller write this?’

  ‘No question.’

  She glanced down the first few paragraphs and whistled. ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘I think you should,’ said Harry quietly. ‘It’s quite short. Would you like to read it aloud to me?’

  She cleared her throat and gave him a wry smile. ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I killed her many years ago, but I shall never forget the day of her death, when I broke forever with the past and made my murderous dream come true. We always bury our darkest secrets and I feel no sense of guilt at all. I doubt whether people would believe me even if I admitted everything.

  I shall put the facts down on paper so that when my own life is at an end, people can judge my confession to the ultimate crime.

  In the aftermath of death, I relished the sense of having settled old scores: she was always so provocative. She had only herself to blame: the fatal outcome was inevitable and I had to gamble everything, hoping that luck would be on my side.

  People talk about justice, divine retribution. Yet I have concealed a most terrible crime and I may succeed in carrying my secret to the grave. For the record, I do not regret the murder at all, but I have not altogether escaped punishment, since for the rest of my days, I am condemned to stay in this house, where buried beneath the cellar floor lies the bludgeoned body of my wife Marlene.

  Excerpt from The Devil in Disguise

  Prologue

  He had dreamed of this.

  Her parting words echoed around the cellar. ‘Don’t go away.’

  As if he would. As if he could. Listening to her high heels click-click-click up the stone steps, he smiled to himself. He could have sworn he heard her choke back a grunt of pleasure at the prospect of what lay in store. The door closed behind her: was that a key turning in the lock, or just wishful thinking? He had always wanted to be her prisoner. And tonight his imagination was working overtime.

  The steel handcuffs were cutting into his wrists, but for him the sensation was exquisite. At last she had consented to play the game. She seemed different, somehow, as if the fantasy excited her as much as he had ever hoped.

  Waiting for her return, he stretched his limbs. She had snapped the other half of each pair of cuffs around the hooks set into the wall a little above head height. He let his mind wander. This was an old room; perhaps eighteenth-century merchants had once tethered their own slaves here. Those poor devils would not have chosen such a fate, but he luxuriated in it. He could move his trunk and legs, feel the warmth of the sheepskin rug against his feet. Presently she would release him and they would make love with wild passion.

  Although he was in the heart of Liverpool, he might have been marooned on a Pacific atoll for all that he was aware of the world above ground. It was night-time in the city, but he could hear no voices or traffic noise, nothing but the faint buzz of an unseen fly. The air was damp and musty but he did not care. This was as close to heaven as he was ever likely to come.

  The fly landed on his chest and he blew it off. She was taking her time, he thought. Impossible to understand: she had promised to be back within a minute, once she had checked that the front door was locked. They did not want any unexpected callers, not tonight of all nights.

  He opened his eyes and tried adjusting to the gloom. An unshaded bulb glowed overhead, but most of the room was in deep shadow. Straight ahead, she had propped the dusty old mirror. All the better to see everything with, she had said. She had written something in lipstick on the splintered surface of the glass and he craned his neck so that he could read it.

  YOU KILLED HIM, YOU BASTARD

  It was as though a donkey had kicked him in the balls. He blinked once, twice, unable to believe the message in the words. Was his mind playing games of its own? He screwed up his eyes so hard that the muscles hurt and looked again.

  YOU KILLED HIM, YOU BASTARD

  It couldn’t be true. She was teasing him. He sucked the moist air into his lungs and held his breath, telling himself that she was on her way back, that it was all some kind of joke. But in the end he had to exhale.

  Slowly, experimentally, he tried to move his wrists. The handcuffs did not give. His skin was beginning to itch. The unseen fly was buzzing in the shadows, as if in mocking reminder that it was free.

  Time passed. His breath was coming in short shallow gasps. He did not understand what was happening. Everything had seemed so perfect. Yet now he was limp and cold and afraid. And the heaven he had dreamed of had turned into his own private hell.

  Chapter 1

  A solitary candle lit the darkness, allowing Harry Devlin to see the man in crimson robes. The sickly smell of incense hung in the air. The high priest was standing in front of the altar, his arm raised. As the flame flickered, Harry caught sight of a gleaming blade.

  ‘Blood is the sacred life-force in both man and beast,’ a disembodied voice intoned. ‘The rite of sacrifice enables gods to live and thus man and nature may survive.’

  A small bundle lay trussed up on the altar. The whimper of a child cut through the silence. Harry’s stomach lurched and instinctively he took a pace forward. Suddenly he remembered where he was. He halted, feeling foolish. Why did his imagination always run away with him? He was a grown man, a solicitor of the Supreme Court, supposed to be dispassionate and the master of his emotions. Yet he could not help shivering when he felt a touch upon his spine.

  ‘Frightening, isn’t it?’

  He spun round. A woman was studying him intently, as if he were a specimen in a glass case. His cheeks felt hot and he said awkwardly, ‘For a moment, I almost believed...’

  ‘That’s what we like to hear, Harry.’ She bent her head towards his and added in a whisper, ‘You know, the sign outside does make it clear that the exhibition isn’t suitable for small children. Parents never cease to amaze me.’

  A harassed teenage girl hurried past them, dragging a pushchair. Its occupant’s whimper had matured into a wail. Harry always admired the fortitude of those who had children, but he kept quiet, guessing that Frances Silverwood would regard his reaction as another example of the inability of his head to rule his heart.

  ‘Very lifelike,’ he said. ‘I know a judge who might be the twin of your high priest. Come to think of it, I’m not sure which one is the dummy.’

  ‘Sorry to keep you waiting after I begged you to come over here,’ she said, raising her voice to compete with the loudspeaker commentary. ‘I had to take a call from my opposite number at the Smithsonian.’

  ‘When they told me you were engaged I thought I’d take a look,’ Harry said. He gestured to the sign by the entrance: Understanding the Supernatural. ‘I wondered if it might give me a clue to the workings of the British legal system.’

  ‘Bad day in court?’ she asked over her shoulder as she led him through a door marked Museum Staff Only. He followed her down a long corridor so still that the slap of her flat-heeled shoes against the floor tiles sounded unnaturally loud.

  He gave a rueful grin. ‘The woman I was acting for was found guilty of not being a witch.’

  She paused in mid-stride. ‘You’re teasing me.’

  ‘Lawyer’s honour. When witchcraft ceased to be a hanging offence, Parliament made it a crime to pretend to use sorcery. So being a genuine witch became a defence to the charge. My client was accused of casting a spell on her best friend’s unfaithful husband, to make him love her again.’

  ‘Good God. What happened?’

  ‘The magic didn’t work. To make matters worst, the friend found my client in bed with her man. There was a fight, the police were called and a prosecutor with time on his hands decided to test out the law on fraudulent mediums.’

>   ‘Only in Liverpool.’

  Frances laughed, a rich deep sound. On a bad day, Harry thought, she might be mistaken for a witch herself. She was striking rather than beautiful in appearance, with a high forehead and sharp chin. As he had got to know her, he had begun to realise that her abrupt manner was a mask for shyness. He’d grown to like her and to believe it would do her good to laugh a little more often.

  They arrived at a door whose sign bore her name and title: Keeper of Ethnographical Artefacts. She waved him inside and as he took a seat on a hard plastic chair, his eye caught a ghastly face staring at him from a display cabinet on the wall. It was a shrunken brown head with flowing black locks and its ravaged features had formed into the expression of a soul in torment. Harry’s flesh prickled. With an effort he tore his eyes away and focused his gaze on the Native American portrait calendar on the wall behind Frances’s desk.

  ‘Sorry to startle you,’ she said briskly. ‘I should have given you advance warning. I’m very fond of Uncle Joe, but I tend to take him for granted nowadays.’

  Trying to make light of it, he said, ‘I ought to expect something out of the ordinary in a place like this. But why isn’t he out on display?’

  ‘Preservation is a problem with human remains,’ she said crisply. ‘Many of them were brought over from the colonies in the nineteenth century. We had to inter a number of Uncle Joe’s colleagues in the local cemetery when the smell became too much to bear.’

  Harry shuddered and glanced again at the shrunken head. Once it had belonged to a human being who lived and breathed. He felt his gorge rising.

  Frances said, ‘You don’t approve?’

  ‘Perhaps I’m too squeamish.’

  ‘He keeps me company,’ she said with a shrug.

  Forcing a smile, he said, ‘He looks even sterner than Luke Dessaur when a trustee turns up late for a meeting.’

  To his surprise, she flushed. ‘Strange you should say that. Luke is the reason why I asked you to come over here at such short notice.’

  ‘I assumed that it was in connection with the meeting tonight.’

  ‘It is. You see, Luke’s told me that he’s unable to come. The first time he’s ever missed since he became chairman. I’m worried about him, Harry.’

  He stared. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘I think - he’s afraid of something.’

  ‘Afraid?’

  Harry did not try to hide his incredulity. Could she be joking? Her earnest face gave no hint of it: no smile, no twinkle in the deep-set eyes. She was leaning forward, chin cradled in her hands, elbows touching her overflowing in-tray. Her whole body was rigid and he could sense the tension in her shoulder blades, almost taste the dryness of her lips.

  Yet the thought of the chairman of the Kavanaugh Trust experiencing fear was comic in its absurdity. In Luke’s presence, Harry always found himself fretting about the shine on his shoes or the length of his hair. Luke was the sort who had a fetish about punctuality and never took the minutes of the last trustees’ meeting as read. He was capable of great personal kindness, but Harry had never heard him split an infinitive and suspected that he would rather face torture than surrender the crease in his trousers. What could perturb such a man - other than, perhaps, the prospect of having to act on Harry’s advice?

  ‘What exactly is the problem?’

  Harry noticed a tear in the corner of Frances’s eye. Hot with embarrassment, he studied his palms whilst she dabbed at her face with a tissue.

  ‘I wish I knew. Last week he and I went to a rehearsal of a musical the Trust is subsidising. He seemed preoccupied, but then, he’s hardly an extrovert. After a quick drink, I left him in the bar having a chat with the producer. I had to be up early for a train trip to London the next morning. When I arrived back, I gave him a ring at home. He was out, so I left a message on his answering machine. He didn’t call back the next day, which puzzled me. It was so unlike him.’

  Harry nodded. Luke always returned calls and responded to letters without delay. Something of a paragon. And as a client, therefore, something of a pain as well. Most of the people Harry acted for were consistent only in their incompetence. The previous day he’d been called out to advise a burglar arrested after being spotted by a woman whose house he had robbed the night before. She had recognised him because he was wearing her husband’s clothes.

  ‘I called again. Same thing. This time he did ring back. He sounded agitated and I asked if he was all right, but he assured me everything was fine. I thought he might be ill and not looking after himself properly. That night I dialled his home at around ten thirty, but again I could only get the answering machine. The day after, I bumped into him in the street as I was coming back from a meeting at the Albert Dock.’

  ‘How did he seem?’

  ‘His face was like chalk and he’d been gnawing at his fingernails. He looked as though he hadn’t slept a wink since I’d last seen him. His hands kept trembling and his manner was twitchy. Suddenly I realised that he wasn’t ill. He was worried sick.’ She let out a breath. ‘I said as much and he bit my head off. Told me not to interfere in his private business, said he could look after himself perfectly well. He’d never felt better. I was dumbstruck.’

  ‘I bet.’ Harry began to realise why Frances was concerned. Luke being rude? The Archbishop of Canterbury was more likely to let rip with a string of obscenities.

  ‘After a couple of minutes, he calmed down and apologised. He did admit he had things on his mind, but said I shouldn’t trouble myself about them. He would be fine. And that was that. There was nothing more I could do. Luke’s lived alone ever since Gwendoline died. And he’s proud, too. He wouldn’t seek help even if he really needed it.’

  ‘He’s no fool.’

  ‘But people don’t always behave rationally, do they?’ Frances said.

  Don’t I know it? thought Harry. Yet Luke Dessaur was one person who had always struck him as supremely rational. He had been personnel director for an arts and heritage charity before taking early retirement at fifty, weary of the endless round of redundancies and budget cuts, and devoting himself to the Kavanaugh Trust. ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I called round at his house this lunch-time. I rang his bell and rapped on the door until my knuckles were sore, but there was no answer. Then a woman passed by. His next-door neighbour. She said that if I was hoping to find Luke, I was out of luck. She’d seen him driving off a few minutes earlier. He’d put an overnight case into his car.’

  ‘Observant lady.’

  ‘She’s an old gossip with too much time on her hands,’ Frances said. ‘Though who am I to talk? I suppose you think I’m overreacting.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  What he really thought was that Frances’s dismay revealed how sweet she was on Luke. He’d suspected it for a while. Looking round her office, he saw no evidence of a private life. No photographs, nothing unconnected with her work, although he knew that in her spare time she was a keen singer. He had heard her once at a private party, singing about the loss of love and loneliness. For his part, Luke had been a widower for years. Maybe she thought it time they both had a change of status.

  ‘When I arrived back from Luke’s house, there was a message from him on my voicemail. He asked me to present his apologies to the meeting tonight. He spoke in a jerky way, as if his nerves were in pieces. I called his mobile this time and managed to catch him. Though I guessed that he regretted answering as soon as he heard it was me on the line. It was as if he’d been hoping to hear from someone else.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said he needn’t try to bluff me. I knew him too well not to realise he was sick with worry. I asked him to talk to me, to trust me with the problem, whatever it was. He didn’t bother to deny the truth of what I was saying, but he said there was nothing I could do, nothing
anyone could do. He was desperate to get off the line. Finally he said a quick goodbye and put down the phone before I could utter another word.’ She groaned, put her head in her hands. ‘This must all sound ridiculous to you. Am I being silly?’

  ‘You’re bound to be anxious. And confused.’ Harry paused. He thought about telling her of his own last conversation with Luke Dessaur, but something held him back. ‘What’s the explanation for the overnight case? Is there anyone he might be visiting? What about his godson?’

  ‘You know Ashley Whitaker?’

  ‘Yes, I often buy books from him. I first met Luke through Ashley, as it happens - years before Crusoe and Devlin started to act for the Kavanaugh Trust.’

  ‘Luke can’t be staying with him. Ashley and his wife are attending a book fair in Canada. I remember Luke mentioning it that night at the theatre.’

  ‘Any other lines of inquiry?’

  ‘You sound like a policeman,’ she said. ‘I know you have been involved in a number of - unusual cases, but I would hate to think...’

  Harry loosened his tie. The room was warmed by twin radiators and poorly ventilated. Perhaps that, and the watchful presence of Uncle Joe, explained why he felt so uncomfortable. ‘Luke’s behaviour is a mystery.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not...’

  Again, she allowed her voice to trail away. Harry could guess the reason. She had meant to say: it’s not a murder mystery. He said gently, ‘Anyone else who might be worth contacting?’

  She pushed a hand through her thick black hair. ‘He’s a good man, as you well know, but I wouldn’t say that he has many friends. He and Gwendoline lived for each other. Since she died, I think he has led a solitary life. But I would have expected him to let me know if anything was amiss.’

  Harry caught the eye of the shrunken head and quickly glanced away again. How could Frances concentrate on her work with that face staring down at her? ‘Has he seemed out of sorts before?’