The Waxwork Corpse: A legal thriller with a chilling twist (Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers Book 5)

by Simon Michael

  ‘Why?’

  Batchelor’s face reddens slightly. ‘She was always able to persuade me back.’ He flicks another shame-faced glance at the gallery.

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘The Sunday before she disappeared.’

  ‘In what circumstances?’

  ‘I’d told her I couldn’t see her anymore, about two or three weeks before then, but she wouldn’t accept it. She besieged the house with telephone calls. Eventually my wife insisted on answering the phone to tell her to desist.’

  ‘Your wife knew about the affair?’

  Batchelor hangs his head. ‘Yes,’ he says softly.

  ‘Tell us what happened on that Sunday.’

  ‘She called the house, at a time when she knew Wendy would be at church. I guessed it would be her. I nearly hung up, but she said she had the letters I sent her, and I wanted to get them back.’

  ‘Did you meet her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At the telephone box from which she rang. It was on a deserted country road.’

  ‘What was your purpose in meeting her?’

  ‘I just wanted the letters back. I didn’t want Wendy to read them … she would have found them very upsetting, and I was ashamed. I wanted to destroy them, and never see her again.’

  ‘What happened when you met her?’ Batchelor doesn’t reply. ‘Mr Batchelor? Did you hear my question?’

  Batchelor sighs and draws a deep breath. When he answers his voice is quiet, timid. ‘She got round me. Like she always did.’

  ‘So what was decided as a result of that meeting?’

  ‘I was persuaded to give our relationship one last try. Like I said, she could be very persuasive. She wanted to go away for a few days, to a cottage we had rented in the past.’

  ‘Did you go?’

  ‘Yes. We went back to our respective homes to pack some overnight things, and we left that evening.’

  ‘How long were you away?’

  ‘Three days, or two nights.’

  ‘And what happened when you returned?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, did you see her again?’

  ‘No. We arranged to meet but she didn’t turn up. Nor did she call.’

  ‘What did you do about that? Did you call her?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything. It was a relief. Wendy was prepared to have me back as long as I promised never to have anything to do with Lise again, and I promised. We expected her to call or even turn up at the house, but as the weeks passed and we heard nothing, we gradually realised that it was over.’

  ‘Were you not worried about her?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No. She was very … flighty. I just assumed she’d met somebody new. Several of the early breaks in our relationship occurred when she met some other man to whom she took a fancy for a short time.’

  ‘Finally, Mr Batchelor, were you in any way involved in the death of Lise Steele, or the cover-up of that death?’

  ‘Mr Batchelor you don’t need to answer that,’ intervenes the Recorder. ‘You are under no obligation to answer any questions that might lead you to implicate yourself in a crime.’

  ‘But I want to answer it, my Lord. I had absolutely nothing to do with Lise’s death or any cover-up.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Batchelor,’ says Charles. ‘Please remain there. There may be some further questions for you.’

  ‘Before you rise to cross-examine, Mr Beaverbrook,’ says the Recorder, ‘I have a question for Mr Holborne.’

  Charles stands again. ‘My Lord?’

  ‘What is the purpose of this evidence from Mr Batchelor?’

  ‘My Lord, the Crown have not yet heard any of the Defence case. Although Mr Steele has admitted disposing of his wife’s body, we still have no idea what his case is regarding her actual death. He has pleaded not guilty to both murder and manslaughter. He might, for all we know, point the finger elsewhere, and the obvious choice would be Mr Batchelor. For that reason, it was essential for the jury to hear Mr Batchelor’s account of the days before the deceased’s death. They’ve now heard it; they’ve heard him deny any involvement whatsoever. Accordingly, unless Mr Beaverbrook cross-examines him and suggests to the contrary, the jury will know that, whatever the Defence case may be, it is no longer open to them to suggest that Mr Batchelor might have been the culprit. Mr Batchelor will no longer be of any relevance. But until we hear from Mr Beaverbrook, the Crown cannot leave the matter open for the jury to speculate on.’

  ‘I see. Yes, thank you, I see your point. Well, let us find out, shall we? Mr Beaverbrook?’

  ‘Thank you, my Lord. I have no questions Mr Batchelor.’

  ‘Do you accept the point made by Mr Holborne that, in giving up your chance to cross-examine Mr Batchelor, you are accepting that he was in no way involved in Mrs Steele’s death?’

  ‘I do, my Lord.’

  ‘Very well.’ The judge turns to Batchelor. ‘Thank you for your evidence Mr Batchelor. You are free to leave.’

  CHAPTER 27

  ‘Call Inspector Murray!’

  A policeman in the uniform of the Kent Constabulary enters court. He’s a tall man in his late thirties with sandy hair and a freckled complexion. He steps into the witness box and, without being prompted, picks up the Bible in front of him. Without looking at the card, he recites the oath in a clear voice. He then turns towards the Recorder of London, gives his name, rank and collar number and says ‘My Lord’.

  ‘Thank you, Inspector,’ says Charles. ‘Now, in May 1953 I believe you were a police constable at the local police house in the Kent village of Ash, is that correct?’

  ‘That’s correct, my Lord. It was my first posting.’ Murray speaks with a soft Scottish accent.

  ‘Did you ever have occasion to meet the accused, Anthony Steele?’

  ‘Yes. I’d been called away urgently to Canterbury, and I’d actually locked up when Mr Steele arrived. I had to unlock the door and put the lights on again.’

  ‘Do you remember the date of that event?’

  ‘Please may I refer to the records I made at the time, my Lord?’

  ‘What records are those, Inspector?’ asks the Recorder.

  ‘I completed a missing person’s record while I was speaking to Mr Steele. I recorded what he told me in this book —’ he brandishes a large index book with a hard cover — ‘which is what I was trained to do. I would not be able to remember the exact time or date without refreshing my memory from the book.’

  ‘Any objections Mr Beaverbrook?’

  Beaverbrook remains sitting in his seat but shakes his head and mutters ‘No, my Lord.’

  ‘Very well,’ says the Recorder, ‘you may refer to the book insofar as necessary.’

  ‘Thank you, my Lord. Yes, on third May 1953, at 19:05 hours, I recorded an entry regarding a missing person, a Mrs Lise Steele. The person making the report was Mr Anthony Steele.’

  ‘Other than the content of your record, Inspector, do you remember anything else about your exchange with Mr Steele?’

  ‘I do. He was quite well-known in the village and because he was in my line of work so to speak, I had noted him. He looked tired and very worried, which I put down to the anxiety of having a missing wife.’

  ‘Do you remember what he told you, if anything, about his wife’s disappearance?’

  ‘I have a short note here, my Lord, which says that they had a row and she stormed out, four days earlier. I asked Mr Steele why he waited that long to report his wife’s disappearance, which is unusual, and I remember him saying that she’d run off before. There was a boyfriend, he said, in fact there had been several, and she usually turned up again after a few days. So I didn’t think the delay was suspicious.’

  ‘Do you recall anything else?’

  ‘Only that I asked if he thought the lady wanted to be missing, and he said it was quite likely. I tried to reassure him how common this situation was, even in a quiet villa
ge such as ours. I’d recorded several such reports myself. Mostly the person would turn up again, usually when the money ran out.’

  ‘Thank you, officer.’

  Charles had been undecided whether or not to call the inspector. The contents of the record were admitted by the Defence, so it was not disputed that Steele had reported the deceased as missing. But he wanted the jury to hear a first-hand account of Steele’s playacting. Now he had admitted disposing of his wife’s body, it demonstrated that he was not only a liar, but a convincing liar.

  Charles is about to resume his seat when the inspector starts speaking again. ‘May I add something, please, my Lord?’

  ‘As long as it’s admissible, yes.’

  ‘As I explained, I was already on my way out when Mr Steele arrived, and I left the police house with him. After I’d finished taking his report, we walked down the path together towards my police car, and because I was passing his house on the way back, I offered to drop him off. He accepted, and we drove the five minutes or so in the car to the other side of the village.’

  ‘Yes?’ asks Charles. None of this was in the inspector’s statement, so Charles is anxious about what the officer might be about to say.

  ‘When we arrived back at Mr Steele’s house, the three children were playing in the garden with a young woman who I believe to be Miss Sullivan. As Mr Steele approached, they all gathered round him. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the two older children rushed into his arms, looking excited. The nanny put her hand on Mr Steele’s arm and was looking up at him. It looked obvious to me that she had great affection for him.’

  ‘Why are you telling us this, Inspector?’ asks the Recorder, impatience edging his voice.

  ‘Well, my Lord, I remember thinking to myself that they looked like such a happy family. Which seemed a little strange, given the circumstances.’

  CHAPTER 28

  Jenny Sullivan can’t sleep.

  The prospect of giving evidence in the morning terrifies her, fills her tummy with butterflies and makes her sweat. She trusted that awful Inspector Carr, spoke when she shouldn’t have, and as a result made everything much worse for Anthony.

  Charles was wrong; in fact Jenny’s had no contact with her employer since the afternoon he was arrested; she for fear of doing more damage, he for fear of being accused of influencing her evidence. As a result, Jenny is certain that he must now hate her.

  Worried about over-sleeping and missing the London train, she went to bed early, desperate for a good night’s sleep, read for a while and turned the light out shortly after 10 o’clock. It’s now well past midnight, and sleep still eludes her.

  She decides to make herself a milky drink. She rises, pulls on her dressing gown and creeps down the hall. The faint sounds of Radio Caroline come from behind Bobby’s bedroom door, but he plays music as he drifts off, and the radio is often still playing in the morning when he wakes for school, so she slips past his door quietly.

  Bobby has also struggled to sleep over the last few weeks, so worried is he about his father’s case. He envies his older siblings, Stephen, now a civil servant in Northampton, and Charlotte, away at university. They’ve been as worried as he over the charges faced by their father, but they have busy lives in distant towns and haven’t been brought face-to-face with the reality of it every evening when they return home. Both have said they’ll be at court tomorrow and Bobby’s looking forward to seeing them. He’s been lonely in the family home since they left.

  The conditions of Anthony’s bail have kept him away from the house for over three months and Jenny has been unutterably miserable and anxious. She pauses by his open bedroom door. The room is clean and tidy, awaiting his return. She has continued with her routine of changing his bed linen every week even though it’s not been used. She won’t allow herself to think about what will happen if he’s convicted; if he never comes back.

  In the kitchen she puts a saucepan of milk on the gas to warm up and sits at the table, not thinking of much. Above the table is a photograph of the whole family, the three children, Anthony and herself. It was taken by a helpful fellow-tourist on the island of Kos a decade earlier. Anthony stands in the middle of the group, his arm resting on Stephen’s shoulders. Charlotte stands just in front of Jenny who has Bobby, then aged five, in her arms. She remembers that he wriggled and didn’t want to be picked up, but he had to be lifted if he was to be in the photograph. Blue sky merges with blue sea behind them.

  On impulse she stands and goes to a bookcase in the corner of the room. It’s cluttered with the usual detritus that gathers in a kitchen, bills to be paid, some pages torn from Bobby’s maths exercise book with his working out in pencil, and the keys to the shed, which she forgot to hang up earlier. She pushes it all to one side and reaches for a photograph album, taking it back to the table.

  She flicks through the pages of holidays, birthdays and graduations. She’s had to make compromises with life, yes, but overall, these snaps remind her how happy she’s been. Her eyes arrest on a photograph taken two or three years after the holiday in Greece. That page, and those that follow, are full of photographs from a particular event, the party in 1958 to celebrate Anthony being “made up” — becoming a judge.

  Unlike most judges, Anthony decided not to have a stuffy “lawyers” party in the Temple. He wanted to celebrate his success with the people who were most important to him, and while that did include a handful of barristers, solicitors and other judges, the guest list was mostly made up of family, friends and neighbours from the new village where they’d put down fresh roots. The lives of everyone in the family were neatly divided into two: the period when Lise lived with them and the period afterwards. These are all “after Lise”.

  Jenny peers at the face of her employer, now The Honourable Sir Anthony Steele QC. In almost every photograph he is smiling or laughing, completely at ease whether speaking to a senior High Court judge or to the village postmistress. Shortly after moving into the house, when the demands of his practice allowed, he began to drop into the local on Friday evenings, something he’d never done before, for a quiet pint and to show his face. Within a couple of years he was completely immersed in village life, helping his neighbours with their bales of hay, pushing their cars on winter mornings when their batteries were flat and writing references for their children when they sought their first jobs. He wouldn’t tolerate any of the “my Lord” or “Sir Anthony” nonsense; he was, simply, “Tony”.

  The photographs show their crowded back garden, full of adults laughing and chatting in the sunshine, drinks in their hands and children everywhere, some being entertained by a magician at the back of the garden. She remembers how happy their children were, particularly Stephen. Shortly after Lise’s disappearance, Anthony brought him back from boarding school, and by the time of this party he was a changed boy, happy and popular at the local school, studying hard for his A-levels.

  Jenny catches sight of herself in several of the photographs as she hands plates of food around with other village mums. She flicks ahead quickly through the pages of the album — she dislikes photos of herself — and is about to close the album when she sees one last photograph, from the end of that evening.

  She guesses it must have been taken by Stephen or perhaps one of the other guests who remained to help tidy up. She and Anthony are shown in the kitchen, he washing up and she drying. It’s not a good photograph — Anthony must have been moving slightly just as the shutter opened — and it portrays a common and ordinary household scene. Although Anthony’s hands are still in the soapy water, he is caught in the middle of saying something, as his head is turned to look at her over his left shoulder. Jenny looks closely at her own face. She is staring up at him, a quiet smile on her lips, and her eyes locked onto his. My God! she thinks to herself, Was it really so obvious how I felt about him?

  She thinks back to the end of that evening, and sighs. By the time they had finished clearing up it was gone midnight and everybody e
lse had departed. The children were in bed and the house was silent. It had been such an enjoyable day that neither of them wanted it to end. He lifted the last clean platters to the top shelf of the dresser while she hung up the saturated tea towels to dry. She turned to find him looking at her. The intensity of his gaze made her self-conscious, and she remained still, afraid that any movement would be awkward and reveal her emotions. His regard of her lasted so long that she had to break it.

  ‘I’ll lock-up, then,’ she said and, in speaking, disrupted his scrutiny.

  He hesitated and then simply said, ‘OK. Goodnight,’ before leaving the room and climbing the stairs to his bedroom without a backward glance.

  Jenny still remembers the aching disappointment.

  She closes the album firmly and returns to the hob, just catching the milk before it boils over. She pours it into the waiting mug, washes up the saucepan and is about to carry the hot milk up to her bedroom when she is startled by a noise behind her. She whirls around, slopping hot milk onto her fingers.

  There is a dark shape outside the back door leading to the garden. Her heart leaps, and she is suddenly afraid, but then there is a quiet tap at the glass.

  ‘Jenny!’ comes a hoarse whisper. ‘Jenny!’

  It’s him! She scrambles to unbolt the door.

  Anthony is almost unrecognisable. He wears a woollen hat and thick-rimmed glasses. His nose is red from the cold night air and he needs a shave. For a second she is puzzled but then she realises. Of course! He’s disguised; his face is all over the evening papers.

  He stands there for a second on the threshold, as if a stranger waiting to be invited in.

  ‘Oh, Anthony!’ she cries. ‘I’m so sorry!’

  He takes a step into the kitchen. He stares at her, his mouth working, but no sound emerging. Then he reaches for her, enveloping her in a tight embrace, as if his life depended on never letting her go. She feels him sob and her body shudders in sympathy. She finds herself crying into his chest, long, deep gulps of air being drawn painfully into her lungs.