Boiling Point

by Frank Lean

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘In the greenhouse. He’ll see you there.’

  She led me through the kitchen which was decorated with religious pictures and encouraging proverbs and out by a back door. She motioned towards the greenhouse with the same spare signal she’d used at the front door.

  ‘Thanks,’ I muttered.

  My impression of Morton V. E. Devereaux-Almond was that he didn’t live up to his name. He had the length of body but not the grandeur to be a Devereaux-Almond. A tall beanpole of a man, there was something indecisive about him. He seemed young to have retired. He was holding a small brass watering can in one hand and a trowel in the other and was finding it difficult to decide which to discard as I approached. I held my hand out and made sure the smile on my face was in full working order. The handshake gave him a problem. He havered for a moment and then transferred the can to the hand holding the trowel. Then he put both down, wiped his hands across the front of his multi-pocketed gardener’s waistcoat, and shook my hand limply.

  ‘You must excuse me, Mr Cunane. Can’t neglect these little beauties,’ he said, gesturing at a tray of seedlings. His voice was high-pitched and uneven, putting me in mind of a delicate plant.

  ‘I’ve come on Marti King’s behalf. She wants me to investigate the circumstances of her father’s trial to see if there’s any chance of getting him out of jail.’

  ‘A difficult task then. Almost an impossible one. He’s a stubborn man, King. He could have tried for parole after doing two thirds of his sentence.’

  ‘That’s the problem, isn’t it? He insists he’s innocent of the crime he’s doing time for. He also claims that his trial was somehow rigged.’

  Devereaux-Almond stepped back as if I’d slapped his face. He puffed his cheeks up and slowly expelled a stream of air.

  ‘Rigged trial, eh? That’s off the wall even for King. We don’t rig trials in this country. Procedural irregularities, that’s all I suggested in the letter.’

  ‘You seemed to be hinting that James McMahon should have insisted on a retrial when that juror overheard those comments he made to you.’

  ‘I never hint at anything,’ he said, turning to his seedlings.

  ‘Marti, that is Mrs Carlyle, drew that inference from your letter.’

  ‘Mr McMahon was a very experienced barrister. He took silk early, a brilliant man, one of the leaders of the Northern Bar. He himself suggested raising the issue before the Court of Appeal and they thought that the judge’s directions to the jury were entirely proper, so I’m afraid that this is one hare that just won’t run.’

  ‘I’m sorry we’re at cross purposes. Marti takes your letter as evidence that there were serious errors in her father’s trial – not just McMahon, but the judge was at fault for directing the jury to ignore the defence of manslaughter which McMahon introduced even though King was adamant that he never fired at anyone.’

  I pulled out a handkerchief and mopped my forehead. The temperature and humidity in the greenhouse were oppressive.

  ‘You’d better come along here,’ Devereaux-Almond suggested. ‘You look like an England cricketer opening against Sri Lanka in the monsoon season.’ He led me out to a garden seat under a cherry tree.

  He must have caught the interrogative glint in my eye because he went on: ‘My wife died some years ago. Bernadette, her elder sister, acts as my housekeeper. I hope she didn’t give you her usual frosty treatment on the doorstep. She takes a rather protective attitude towards my privacy.’

  I smiled politely, refraining from pointing out that he obviously needed someone to look after him. His waistcoat was wrongly buttoned up and he was wearing odd socks.

  ‘No, what happened at the trial was this. Mr McMahon thought King’s best chance was to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter – that he shot the victims when they attacked him and that his reaction was instinctive and the result of intensive military training. King wouldn’t hear of it, but James McMahon wanted to keep it as a line of last defence. You know it often happens in these cases that the accused sees how well the prosecution is going and then changes his mind about the plea. Of course King was too stubborn to do that despite the overwhelming evidence.’

  ‘According to King the evidence wasn’t overwhelming.’

  ‘Naturally, but, be that as it may, Mr McMahon’s well-intentioned efforts to bring out King’s excellent military record backfired. The Crown was able to plant the idea in the jury’s mind that King was a cold-blooded killer despite never having been involved in violence in his previous criminal career.’

  ‘I thought a brief was supposed to accept the client’s instructions – as relayed through you, of course.’

  Devereaux-Almond’s expression darkened.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he piped, his voice rising to a squeak. ‘I wish I’d never written that letter now, but Mrs Carlyle seemed so desperate when she phoned. I’m afraid I was too kind. I just wanted to reiterate that McMahon, as he himself admitted, may have mishandled the defence. You know it’s one possible line of approach to the Appeal Court, especially since the Criminal Appeals Act 1995.’

  I sat for a moment listening to the birds singing and trying to work out what to ask next. Devereaux-Almond beamed at me in a vague, unfocused way.

  ‘How’s the cricket going?’ he asked. ‘I went out to Australia for the last Test series.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t have the radio on in the car.’

  ‘It’s your office location,’ he said, tapping my business card which I’d given him. ‘Just down the road from Old Trafford. You must have lots of opportunities to slip off there for an afternoon. I’d have loved that, but I was stuck up here in Rochdale up to my eyes in conveyancing and wills.’

  ‘I don’t get much time to watch cricket.’

  ‘Pity,’ he said.

  Light finally dawned on the thought that had been stumbling about in the shadows of my mind.

  ‘Can I ask you a question, Mr Devereaux-Almond? How did you come to represent Vince King? Did he choose you, or did someone ask you to act for him? You weren’t the duty solicitor, after all, and King was arrested in Salford.’

  Devereaux-Almond started fiddling with the zippers on his waistcoat.

  ‘I don’t see the relevance of these questions,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Would you mind telling me how many murder cases you’ve been involved in? I’m only trying to follow the same line of enquiry you suggested about Mr McMahon.’

  Devereaux-Almond abruptly jumped up from the garden seat and began striding around the lawn, his fingers fidgeting with one zip after another. I know a certain amount of eccentricity is considered amusing in legal circles, but Morton V. E. Devereaux-Almond was expanding the envelope. My sessions of gazing out of the office window have made me a connoisseur of walks. Ludicrous was the only word for Morton’s walking action. Watching it induced nausea. His legs were completely uncoordinated with his arms. It was as if his brain had to send a conscious signal for each movement and he’d somehow got his wires scrambled.

  Faith in his abilities would be the only reason to choose him as your defence solicitor, abilities that weren’t very evident so far.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no further point to these enquiries,’ he said after a few minutes of pacing. ‘If you see King tell him he’d be well advised to show repentance if he doesn’t want to spend the remainder of his life behind bars.’

  ‘You can hardly expect him to repent if he is innocent.’

  ‘Rubbish! The world and his wife knows that he killed those two men, and now if you don’t mind . . .’

  ‘I don’t care much for Vince King myself, Mr Devereaux-Almond,’ I said evenly, ‘but his daughter does, and somebody seems to have bowled him a googly somewhere along the line.’

  Devereaux-Almond’s lips puckered with distaste and he drummed his fingers against his forehead as if keying a message to his brain. ‘It seems that the awkward Mr King has found a remarkably suitable representative in you, Mr Cuna
ne,’ he said, enunciating clearly and slowly as for an idiot. ‘Let me assure you that the man’s defence was conducted as well as it possibly could have been, and if you think there’s money to be gleaned by smearing his defence counsel and myself, go ahead. Your efforts will take you precisely nowhere.’

  ‘But your efforts have taken you somewhere, haven’t they?’ I said cheekily.

  ‘If you mean to imply that I didn’t do my best for King, or that there was some kind of murky conspiracy involved in his conviction, that’s a damned lie.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me how much experience you have in murder cases.’

  ‘Get out of my garden, you squalid little man,’ he yelped. On cue, the sister-in-law appeared at the kitchen door like a square leg umpire. I accepted my dismissal.

  14

  NO SOONER HAD I pulled out onto the main road back through Rochdale than my mobile rang. I pulled onto the verge to answer it, expecting it to be Celeste with an urgent summons back to the real world of debt collection, fake insurance claims and no time to watch cricket matches.

  It was Marti.

  ‘Dave, can I see you again?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure, but why? Has something come up?’

  ‘You might say that, but I’d rather talk to you face to face.’

  ‘OK, where?’ I asked agreeably. After the interviews with Paddy and Almond my feelings towards Marti had softened. If she’d asked me to come to Leeds again I’d have agreed. That’s the way my mind works, I do things by opposites.

  ‘You sound pleased with yourself,’ she said.

  ‘No more than usual. Bigheadsville, Oklahoma; that’s where I live, baby.’

  ‘Hey! Less of the baby, big boy! Bring that solicitor’s letter with you. I’ll see you at that wine bar where we met before at about two.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ I told her. ‘I’ve got an interview with the Northern Mutual Insurance Company then. They pay for my services with coin of the realm.’

  ‘You don’t mind twisting your knife in the wound, do you? I’ve said I’ll pay you when I can.’

  ‘It’s not like that at all, chuck. I’m on your case now. I just hate a client to get ideas above her station.’

  ‘What? Have you found something?’

  ‘My office at four,’ I said.

  I was back in Manchester in time to grab a sandwich at the office and then scuttle over to the head office of the Northern Mutual Insurance Company. They hang out in a shiny modern office block in the commercial centre of town. Northern Mutual are a tight-fisted bunch, but they’ve put the butter on my bread for the last few months. I’m not entirely happy about working for them because at times they seem too anxious to snatch the crust out of some poor widow’s mouth, but with the false claim business becoming a major industry they provide work for characters such as myself. I have to make some compromises to survive. In this case the trade-off between honour and starvation involved working with Ernie Cunliffe, senior claims executive at Northern Mutual.

  It was a case of old school tie in reverse, or that’s what I tell myself. I sat next to Ernie for five years at school and a pretty obnoxious creep he was then. Sly farts and peevish titters were what he specialised in. Time hadn’t improved him. Ernie, who came from a rough part of Salford and whose father worked in one of the few remaining coal mines, left our Alma Mater at sixteen and went into insurance. I stayed on for sixth form and university entrance. Isn’t education wonderful? Anyway, despite sharing a classroom we inhabited different worlds then and I saw little of Cunliffe after he left until he emerged as a purchaser of my services.

  Ernie’s one of those people who never miss a chance to remind the less fortunate how well he’s done in the world. A real high flyer, he is. I mean, OK, if you think driving the latest BMW and having a big house in Wilmslow with pillars by the front door is what life’s all about then Ernie has something to shout about. Employing me as a lowly claims investigator seems to give him a buzz. I wasn’t snobbish at school, or I don’t think I was, at least not intentionally. But I suspect that there’s a little worm of resentment gnawing away somewhere under the Cunliffe cranium.

  That’s another thing. Ernie Cunliffe is almost completely bald on top, his shiny dome crowned with a few pale wisps combed up from the side like snow drifting off Mont Blanc. Every time we meet he asks if I dye my hair.

  I like to respond by combing my fingers through my shaggy locks to prove that I’m not wearing a toupee or a wig. These fancies were weaving their way through my thoughts as I waited to be ushered into Cunliffe’s superb minimalist, ultra high-tech Scandinavian office on the top floor of the NM building, itself a nightmare of Toytown architecture. A dream or a nightmare of blond wood and bare boards, every time I visit the important Ernie they’ve redecorated. There’s always some new touch. This time it was a tiny spotlight on a long stem, carefully beaming a soft, pinkish light to bring the best out of Ernie’s waxy green complexion. He saw me giving the room and himself the once-over as I went in. He was wearing a standard flavour-of-the-month charcoal-grey suit.

  ‘Don’t look down your long nose at me,’ Cunliffe told me when I handed over the video showing that the claimant, a council worker called Carl Russell who said that his lumbar vertebrae had been bruised so badly that he was permanently crippled, was well enough to play football on the close where he lived. I got the long lens sequence through the fence of a nearby cemetery after three days’ observation. The cemetery backed onto the small estate where Russell had a flat and he must have felt safe enough from prying eyes in there. The job hadn’t been cheap. I had to bring in two part-timers disguised as gardeners to maintain the surveillance.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said hastily. ‘I don’t think anyone should get more than he’s entitled to.’

  ‘Why the long face then?’

  ‘I was just wondering if you ever investigate employers as thoroughly as you do these little creeps. I mean, the guy was crushed when a skip fell on him and it was his firm’s fault.’

  ‘It’s up to the Health and Safety people to sue, Dave. You know that. I’m going to throw the book at this bugger. Fraudulent claims are going through the roof. We’ll have him jailed.’

  ‘Is that necessary? I mean, you can see in the video . . . he was moving awkwardly.’

  ‘Still an old softie, aren’t you?’ As Cunliffe lifted up his hands to tick off his points like a teacher hectoring a backward child, I noticed that he was wearing a new signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. There was a beautiful brown and yellow tiger’s eye cabochon set in it. ‘One. Russell has fooled the medical establishment. Two. He’s fooled his employer. Three. He’s gone round in a wheelchair for a full year, all in the hope of collecting from his employer’s liability insurance. However, he’s not going to. Move back six squares and go to jail, that’s him.’

  ‘So Russell does time for fraud. Some fat cat employer has an accountant showing him how to evade tax, and if he kills someone in his factory he gets a thousand pound fine.’

  ‘All right, Dave, if your conscience is too tender for this work . . .’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Look, this guy thought he could rip us off for half a million or more. We’re not talking charitable donations here.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I assured him. Looking into Cunliffe’s cold grey eyes I didn’t need any reminder that the Northern Mutual had nothing to do with charity.

  ‘Fine, your cheque will be in the post tonight and I’ll send you the file on another interesting mobility problem that’s come up. They’re all the rage at the moment.’

  ‘Thanks, Ernie,’ I said sincerely, smiling until my face hurt.

  I left the insurance building a few minutes later after the usual detailed account of how well his children were doing at their private school, of how nicely the new BMW cornered and how good his golf handicap was. The thin wisps of hair on Ernie’s head glowed like a halo in the glare from the spotlight.

  I walk
ed along Market Street. I couldn’t help noticing how many men of my own age and above there were. Mooching around aimlessly, most of them, with a half stunned look on their faces. Their clothing was anything but prosperous – faded blue jeans, dirty trainers and tatty T-shirts that looked as if they’d seen service mopping the floors of Oxfam shops. Wealth was trickling down to the masses all right. At this rate it would have to go on trickling for another millennium before some of these people got a decent bite at the cherry.

  I strolled through St Ann’s Square with its better dressed people and younger, more hopeful faces and headed for my office. Soon I turned the corner into the narrow street where the headquarters, indeed only quarters, of Pimpernel Investigations stand.

  Flashing ambulance lights strobed out from the pavement in front of my office. My jaw dropped open with a click. Two paramedics were kneeling over the prone figure of a man. They were working frantically to staunch blood which was dripping off the pavement into the gutter. A little ring of spectators was being held back by a PC. I joined them. Even at this distance there was something familiar about the man on the ground.

  As I got closer the paramedics started hauling the injured man into the back of their ambulance. I got a glimpse of his face. It was Lou Olley, the minder who’d accompanied Charlie Carlyle that day in the spring. The crew had fitted him up with an oxygen mask but it didn’t take a PhD in pathology to see that he was as dead as a mackerel. His arms flopped limply off the stretcher.

  A female PC began to block access with police tapes strung between lamp-posts.

  ‘I’ve got to get through, my office is down there,’ I explained. My heart was beating so strenuously I was sure she would hear it.

  ‘Sorry, you can’t pass. You’ll have to go round,’ she insisted.

  At that moment a white van arrived and more uniformed police piled out into the narrow street. Simultaneously, the ambulance started pulling away in the opposite direction. The young woman officer hurried away to report and another fresh-faced copper, this time an Asian lad aged about twenty, replaced her.