First Cut is the Deepest (Harry Devlin)

by Edwards, Martin

  ‘And what can I do for you, Harry?’ She had a mass of thick dark hair and lots of teeth which showed when she smiled. As she often did. ‘You name it. I can help out with some of your work, if you’d like. Jim asked me to amend his standard client care letter, but I’m struggling for synonyms for “pay up or we’ll sue the pants off you”.’

  Harry grinned. Talking to Carmel always lifted his spirits. She loved life, that was her gift. Perhaps she’d joined their firm simply to test her capacity always to look on the bright side. ‘When you were chair of NAYL, did you ever come across Andrea Gibbs?’

  ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci,’ she said. Her French accent was about what Harry would have expected from the daughter of a Kerry colleen and a miner from Bold. ‘Broke a few hearts, did Andrea. Bone structure to die for. My vice-chair lusted after her, used to pass her romantic notes during seminars about the Public Interest Disclosure Act. Disclosing his interest in public didn’t do him any good at all, I can tell you. She liked older men. Personally, I thought she was pretty weird.’

  Harry couldn’t help protesting. ‘Liking older men isn’t weird.’

  Carmel wrinkled her nose. ‘Not in itself, no. But she was seriously strange. Drama queen, liked to be noticed, but you couldn’t say she was a mixer. She’d never turn up for the meals out we arranged, said she didn’t have much of an appetite. Anorexic, that was my guess. Most of the blokes fancied her like mad, but she had a pretty high turnover in boyfriends. Like, not many of them made it past the first date.’

  ‘Their choice or hers?’

  ‘Bit of both, I guess. Dare I ask why you’re interested?’

  Harry told her. ‘It was an odd conversation. It left me feeling baffled, curious.’

  ‘If it’s any consolation, she had that effect on the lads in NAYL. Funny that she called, though, especially just after the man she used to work for has been killed. Makes you wonder if it’s a pure coincidence.’

  Carmel was no fool, Harry reflected. ‘How did she get on with Symons, any idea?’

  ‘None at all. Obviously, it was a firm with problems. We had a helpline for trainees who were given a hard time by their principals, but so far as I know, Andrea never used it. That’s par for the course with her. If she had troubles, she’s not the sort who’d be likely to share them. Probably she bottled a lot up. It must have been tough, seeing the firm she worked for going down the pan.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I heard she transferred her training contract to Windaybanks. She qualified eventually, but then she left private practice. I’ve not seen much of her lately but then, I never did. To be honest we didn’t hit it off. Not a lot in common. I’m not sure where she works now, but I could find out, if you like.’

  ‘Leave it,’ he said, ‘it’s probably something and nothing.’

  She clapped a hand to the side of her head. ‘One other thing. I nearly forgot. She did get on well with at least one of the partners in Symons’ firm. Last I heard, she was having a torrid affair with him. Bloke by the name of Young. Brett Young.’

  ‘And did the affair survive the break-up of the partnership?’

  ‘That’s the funny thing. As far as I know, it did.’

  In mid-afternoon, he packed a set of files into the boot of his car. It was a way of easing his conscience: he told himself that even though he was taking a couple of hours off, he could put in more time during the evening. All being well. He couldn’t settle until he’d had another word with Peter Blackwell, but first he wanted to make a detour via Dawpool.

  He left the MG at the country park, a mile away from Linda’s cottage. Here the path curved gently down through a little dell to the Dee. Within five minutes he was walking along the wet sand that edged the river. The sky was the colour of slate and the air was damp. But he found the breeze refreshing and as he stretched his legs the tension in his body began to ebb away. Apart from a middle-aged woman in a Barbour throwing sticks for her spaniel to retrieve, there was no-one else around. He could see grey boulders scattered around the shoreline and the reddish sandstone slabs that were the sole surviving remains of the ancient jetty. Behind him, small boats bobbed around the marina at West Kirby, further on the river turned into salt marsh. The impression he had was of loneliness and peace. Hard to credit that less than forty-eight hours earlier his torch had illuminated the butchered corpse of Carl Symons, only a stone’s throw from here.

  There were buildings ahead, one or more cottages just above the high-water mark. Lifting his eyes above and beyond them, he could glimpse through the trees the half-hidden homes of Linda Blackwell and the late Crown prosecutor. In daylight, when the wind had dropped, everything was very different. In the dark, this place had seemed wild and dangerous. Now it was a picturesque spot, not menacing at all.

  Hands in pockets, he ambled on towards the track that led up to the cottages. Dark clouds, he noticed, were gathering over the Welsh hills. It would rain again before the day was through. The breeze wafted faint voices over to him, he thought he even heard the sound of a walkie-talkie. The police were still busy up there.

  An oyster catcher screamed. It occurred to him that coming here wasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever done. What if Eggar subscribed to the school of thought that holds that a murderer always returns to the scene of his crime? The killing had brought him back, not from guilt, but because of a yearning to understand why Symons had met his fate. He needed to make sense of it for his own peace of mind. That so savage a crime might have been committed for no reason at all was too terrible to contemplate.

  But there was nothing he could do. He stopped in his tracks and after a moment’s thought retraced his steps back to the car. Time to call on Peter Blackwell and make sure that he was going to keep his lip buttoned.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ Peter said as he opened the door on to the street. His tone was brusque, his eyes icy with suspicion. All in all, he made Harry feel as welcome as a gypsy peg-seller.

  ‘Just passing by,’ Harry lied. ‘Thought I’d drop by to have a word. Say thanks again for all your help.’

  ‘I was on my way out.’ It wasn’t an excuse; he was wearing an outdoor jacket and boots and a canvas bag was slung over his shoulders. ‘Just popping round to the off-licence down the road.’

  ‘I’ll walk with you,’ Harry said quickly.

  ‘If you’ve nothing better to do.’

  Peter might be down on his luck, but he could still muster a formidable curl of the lip. Harry cast his mind back again to the photographs in Linda’s cottage. Peter was an only child and his behaviour still betrayed traces of the spoilt brat. Not that parents always spoiled only children. Harry’s mother and father had brought him up to toe the line, hadn’t been afraid to smack him when he broke the rules. Every now and then he wished he’d had the chance to talk to them as an adult, to get to know them better.

  As they headed down the street, Harry said, ‘I don’t know how to put this. You’ll forgive me for mentioning it, I hope. But - you do realise how important it is to Juliet and me that no-one gets wind of our relationship?’

  ‘Especially her husband, eh?’

  ‘Since you mention it, yes. Especially her husband.’

  ‘You needn’t worry,’ Peter said in an off-hand way. ‘My mother can’t stand Casper May. A few years ago, when she first started working for Juliet, he tried it on with her. She might not be in the first flush of youth, but she’s a hell of an attractive woman for her age. I’m sure you’ll agree.’

  ‘Well, er, yes, of course.’ Harry coughed, unsure what to say. ‘Definitely.’

  ‘He obviously thought he could get away with anything. From what I hear, it’s not so far from the truth.’

  Harry could manage no more than an affirmative grunt. He was struggling to keep up. Peter had set a brisk pace, his long legs taking enormous strides along the pavement. Evidently the booze hadn’t sapped all his strength.

  ‘She was happily married to my father, people used to say
they were the perfect couple. So there was never any question of her getting involved with a rogue like that. She believed in fidelity. So do I, come to that.’

  Harry felt waves of disapproval flowing towards him. No point in protesting that he’d been faithful to Liz, until she’d left him for good. ‘Sure,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘May took it badly. Not used to being rejected, that’s for sure. They’ve ignored each other ever since. Juliet found out what had happened, realised Mother was someone she could rely on. And she’s done Mother a good turn or two, I’m the first to admit it, especially after Dad died. Mum’s devoted to Juliet, wouldn’t do anything to harm her. So - why should I?’

  They had reached an off-licence at the corner of the road. As Peter held the door open, the assistant greeted him by name. A good customer, Harry guessed. ‘Thanks again. You’ll keep in touch if Mitch Eggar contacts you again?’ He reached inside his wallet. ‘Here’s my office phone number if you need to give me a ring.’

  Peter frowned at the business card. ‘You’re a solicitor? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Yes, Juliet advises us on marketing. That’s how we met.’

  ‘I knew she liked a challenge,’ Peter said. For the first time in their acquaintance Harry saw the trace of a smile on his thin lips, although there was no humour in his eyes. ‘Even so, that must be the toughest yet. Improving the image of a firm of lawyers, eh? I’d say it was easier to rebrand Satan as the King of Hearts.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘We ought to talk,’ the voice on the phone said.

  Harry made a face at the receiver. We must talk. Everyone seemed to be saying it. Any moment now, he’d be contacted by counsellors who specialised in caring, sharing heart-to-hearts with people who stumbled over dead bodies. The Liverpool grapevine had worked with its usual efficiency over the past forty-eight hours. Everyone knew now that he’d been the one to find Carl Symons’ corpse. People must be wondering what he’d been doing there in the first place. He didn’t much care what they thought, as long as they didn’t guess the truth. All morning he’d been fending off questions from people hungry for titbits of inside information. At court, two lawyers who were no more than nodding acquaintances had invited him for elevenses in the cafeteria; in the office, Suzanne had offered him a chocolate eclair, an act of unparalleled generosity, as she tried to worm her way into his confidence. Now it was the turn of Ken Cafferty, a friend as well as chief crime reporter on one of the local rags, to ferret away in the hope of learning fresh and lurid details about the crime.

  ‘You sound like Liverpool’s answer to Oprah Winfrey,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve already told you everything I told the police. There’s no more to be said.’

  ‘There’s always something more to be said. Don’t you know that’s the first rule of journalism?’

  ‘What’s the second rule?’

  ‘Isn’t one enough to be going on with? Come on, Harry. We go back a long way. This is quite a story. “Police baffled” always sells newsprint. Can’t you help me out?’ He added in a throwaway manner, ‘For instance, why don’t you tell me a bit about the murder scene? Anything - unusual there?’

  ‘If there was, it was soaked in the blood.’

  A pause. ‘The blood, yes. Tell me about the blood.’

  Harry was staring at the framed certificates on the wall of his room; he kept them there as a reminder that he really was respectable, that he had actually qualified as a solicitor of the Supreme Court of Judicature. But in his mind he saw only Symons’ beheaded corpse lying on the kitchen floor. He didn’t want to mention the decapitation, even to Ken. Eggar had asked him to say nothing to anyone about the circumstances of the murder whilst the investigation was at a delicate early stage; it was a reasonable request and he intended to comply with it.

  ‘It was like a slaughterhouse. If that’s what you mean by unusual, yeah, it was unusual.’

  ‘There is one other thing.’ Ken seemed to be choosing his words with care more befitting a judge than a journalist. ‘What about the mirror?’

  ‘What mirror?’

  ‘Way I heard it, there was a broken mirror at the scene.’

  ‘Getting desperate, aren’t you? I can’t imagine it will fascinate your readers, but I did see fragments of glass on the floor in the hall, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Well, well, well. Interesting. Anything else that struck you as - odd?’

  ‘You’ve lost me. Stop trying to be enigmatic, it doesn’t suit you. What does a smashed mirror signify, apart from an enormous slab of bad luck for poor old Carl Symons? Maybe he gazed into the looking-glass once too often. Symons was no oil painting. He looked more like a bit part player from Papillon - and that’s off the record, by the way.’

  Ken gave a heavy sigh. ‘Come on. Be serious.’

  ‘Believe me, I wasn’t laughing when I found his body. I didn’t care for him, but no-one deserves a fate like that. All the same, I don’t see what you’re driving at. So there was a struggle when Symons was attacked by his killer. So what? Things do get broken when there’s a fight. Especially a fight to the death.’

  In the silence that followed, Harry could picture Ken pursing his lips as he weighed up whether it was worth probing further. Finally, he heard a long sigh. ‘All right. I’ll leave it there for now. But promise me one thing, will you? If anything occurs to you, call me first.’

  Returning to the magistrates’ court in the afternoon, Harry was conscious of surreptitious stares from people he hardly knew. Perhaps this was what celebrity was like: a prickly sensation on the spine as you sensed that your every move was being watched. An uneasy thought occurred to him: had he been in others’ shoes, he too would have been prey to ungovernable curiosity.

  Ten minutes before his case was listed for hearing, he was hailed by Nerys Horlock. ‘I’d been hoping to see you,’ she said, putting down her briefcase. ‘I think I owe you an apology.’

  Harry gaped at her. It was like hearing Margaret Thatcher say that on mature reflection she regretted all those nasty things she used to say about striking miners.

  ‘I didn’t mean to chew you out in the law library,’ she said, fiddling with the zip of her leather jacket. ‘I suppose I’d got out of bed the wrong side and, really, the idea of Carl and Suki having it off with each other was so ridiculous. Besides, I was wound up after hearing the news about Carl. Even though we had our fights, we were partners once.’

  ‘No problem,’ he said, still trying to come to terms with the notion of Cruella expressing remorse. ‘Think nothing of it.’

  ‘Funny, innit? Partnership’s a bond. Like I said, I’ve decided I’m one of life’s sole practitioners. But losing Carl - in a strange sort of way, it’s like the death of a distant relative. Someone who made your toes curl last time you met them at a wedding or a funeral. But once they’re gone - you regret all the harsh words that passed between you. All the wasted time. Families are strange like that, y’know.’

  ‘If you say so. My parents died a long time ago.’

  ‘Then you missed out,’ she said. ‘Seems a long time ago now, but my memories of childhood are still the most precious. That’s one of the reasons I take divorce cases so personally. It’s the kids I feel for. Their ruined lives.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said uneasily, unclear where the conversation was heading.

  Nerys squared her shoulders. ‘You didn’t mention that you were the one who found Carl’s body.’

  So she was getting to the point at last. ‘No,’ he said.

  A catarrhal laugh. ‘Don’t tell me it slipped your mind.’

  ‘I’d answered questions from the police for hours. I wasn’t in the mood for any more.’

  ‘All right, I can understand that. But now you’ve had a chance to get over it …’ She lowered her voice. ‘Did you see anything?’

  ‘I saw Carl Symons’ body. That was enough.’

  ‘I mean - anything that might give you an idea about who had killed him?’

 
Harry stared at her. ‘Nothing. Why are you so interested?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, forcing a smile as if to suggest that she was making a joke of it. ‘I wouldn’t like to think that someone out there had a grudge against former partners in Symons, Horlock and Young.’

  ‘Sorry. I can’t help.’

  ‘Oh well, I’d best be off. I’m due to see a client in the office in ten minutes and it will take me quarter of an hour to get through the traffic. I’ll see you around.’

  His day took an unexpected turn for the better when he secured an improbable acquittal for an elderly client, a grizzled and arthritic thief who was living proof of the adage that old burglars never die, they simply steal away. Bustling out of the courtroom in an unaccustomed haze of self-satisfaction, he cannoned into a woman carrying a stack of buff files. She gasped in surprise as a couple of the folders slipped from her hands, the papers they contained fanning out over the floor.

  ‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Here, let me help you pick up…’

  As he bent down to gather the documents, his voice faded as he realised who she was. Suki Anwar, the Crown prosecutor who had - according to Muriel - told Nerys that she wished Carl Symons was dead. Well, well, well.

  ‘Here.’ He handed her a few sheets and she slipped them back inside the file covers. Straightening, she smiled at him. She was as tall as him, with a lean, athletic build. Her hair was long and dark; she had a habit of constantly flicking stray strands of it out of her eyes. She was wearing dark red lipstick and a lot of eye shadow, more make-up than most of the women solicitors he knew. He wondered if it was a sign that she lacked confidence. Pity to think ill of the dead, but he couldn’t imagine any reason why a woman with a strong self-image would have a fling with anyone as unprepossessing as Carl Symons.