Grounds for Appeal drp-3

by Bernard Knight

  This peaceful routine was given an injection of new activity by a phone call taken by Moira Davison late one morning. Richard Pryor had just returned from Monmouth and was talking to Jimmy Jenkins in the backyard, inevitably about his precious vines, which appeared to have become leafless and possibly lifeless, as the winter approached.

  ‘Should ’ave waited until the spring, doctor!’ growled Jimmy. ‘Or planted strawberries instead, like I told you.’

  The neat brunette appeared at the back door to break up this oft-repeated argument.

  ‘Doctor Pryor, there’s a call for you in the office. A solicitor from Bristol.’

  Leaving Jimmy to attach yet another Woodbine to his lower lip, Richard followed Moira back indoors and up the corridor to her office.

  ‘I think he said it’s about a murder Appeal,’ she whispered excitedly, as she opened the door. She had recently sat in Gloucester Assize Court to listen to her boss giving evidence for the defence in the trial of a veterinary surgeon accused of poisoning his wife and ever since she had been hooked on reading about real-life crimes. As Richard took the receiver, she busied herself with papers at the other side of the room, but her ears were flapping as he spoke. What she heard was not very exciting, just a brief agreement to visit the lawyer in his office next day, but afterwards, Richard took pity on her.

  ‘That was a solicitor from St Paul’s in Bristol. He wants a conference with me about an Appeal that’s coming up, for a woman who was convicted of murder a year ago.’

  Moira looked at him with admiration in her eyes. She had more than a soft spot for her employer; it was verging on hero worship.

  ‘St Paul’s? That’s a pretty run-down area of Bristol, isn’t it? Not far from the city centre.’

  Richard gave her one of his impish grins. ‘So probably plenty of criminal work for lawyers there! Though for all I know, the appellant might live in a grand mansion on Clifton Down.’

  Her brow furrowed in thought. ‘Appellant? That’s what they call the person who wants to appeal, is it?’

  ‘Yes, though very few succeed. In most cases, the Appeal is made on the grounds that there was some procedural fault in the original trial or investigation. It’s rare for the actual evidence to be challenged at this late stage, but it must be something to do with that or they wouldn’t be asking me to look at it.’

  ‘Will the Appeal be in Bristol?’ asked Moira hopefully, thinking of another chance to tag along to listen.

  He shook his head. ‘No, they’re all heard in London, at the Court of Criminal Appeal. That’s in the Royal Courts of Justice, in the Strand.’

  As Richard left the room, she sighed wistfully, aware that there was no chance of going to London with him. That was something reserved for Angela Bray, who had recently accompanied him there in connection with a War Office case that they had been involved in. She went back to the kitchen to wash a salad for the doctors’ lunch, feeling vaguely dissatisfied with the way her life was passing so quickly. Though she was eternally grateful for Garth House having lifted her from her chronic depression after the death of her husband, she felt that though having passed thirty, there was still plenty she could achieve — but she had no idea in what direction, though since coming here to work, her interest in the workings of the legal system had increased.

  Meanwhile, Richard had gone off to look at the microscope slides made by Sian from the sliver of bone he had taken from the Borth Body. They had taken longer than usual to prepare, as his technician had reported that the ‘marble bone’ had been very reluctant to soften up sufficiently for it to be cut on her microtome, a device like a very accurate bacon-slicer that could deliver transparently-thin wafers of tissue.

  A few glances at the pink slivers on glass slides, together with a quick check in a pathology manual, were enough to confirm that it was indeed Albers-Schonberg disease, with its dense overgrowth of calcium and alteration of the cells in the bone. He made a note about it in the file that they kept on every one of their cases, then leaned back in his chair and pondered what might be the reason for the lawyer from Middleton, Bailey and Bailey wanting to talk to him next day. Then his wandering thoughts drifted to the West Wales coast, as he wondered if any progress was being made with the murder investigation — and whether he would ever hear any more about it.

  In Borth that day, the incident room was being closed down, as no one could find any more work for it to do.

  In the two weeks since the body was discovered, virtually every house for five miles around had been visited by the police, a substantial task for so few officers. Absolutely nothing had come of these enquiries, which was hardly surprising given the years that had elapsed — especially as the actual number of those years was unknown, other than a vague guess by Richard Pryor that a decade might be a reasonable time-span. Added to this was the lack of any physical description, other than that the victim was of average height and had a tattoo on his right upper arm. Detective Superintendent Paul Vickers had already returned to ‘The Smoke’, rejoicing at his escape from deepest Cardiganshire and his sergeant was itching to follow him.

  ‘It’s a waste of time, I’m afraid,’ he said to Meirion, as they gathered up the last of their notes and made for the Wolseley that would take them back to police HQ in Aberystwyth. ‘There’s nothing I can do here that you can’t do better, with local knowledge. I agree with my guv’nor that the answer to this one is miles away from here — not that I think you’re ever going to know after all this time.’

  As they drove through the rain-soaked countryside, the local DI had to agree with him.

  ‘My gut feeling is that this is a wartime job. All sorts of damn queer things went on then — and in the couple of years after it finished. Lots of blokes knocking about the country in the army, plenty of black-market fiddles and other rackets.’

  Howard Squires, happy to be getting back to his home and family in Tooting, was inclined to agree. ‘We’ll keep in touch and if anything turns up at this end, we can come straight back. But I doubt you’ll strike lucky having drawn a total blank so far.’

  He was wrong, but it would be some time before this became apparent.

  Richard did two post-mortems at the dingy mortuary in the council yard at Chepstow, before going on to Bristol.

  One was a sudden death from coronary heart disease, the other more unusual, in that it was a fatal accident on a farm near Caldicot. Farms were dangerous places, mainly due to overturned tractors and falls from barns and hayricks, but this was unusual in that a worker had crawled into the outlet of a grain silo to clear a blockage, when tons of barley had suddenly fallen and suffocated him. Richard drove pensively the couple of miles to the ferry ramp at Beachley, thinking of how death could descend so abruptly even on a peaceful farm, just as harshly as on a battlefield. He never allowed such tragedies that he saw virtually every day to weigh too heavily on his mind, otherwise he would be unable to function. However, he tried to avoid the brashness of some of his colleagues who treated corpses with a boisterous nonchalance that he felt was an overreaction to a gruesome profession. Richard had noticed the same attitude in some mortuary attendants, policemen and even undertakers, who tended to refer to ‘stiffs’ and ‘meat wagons’, and talk and laugh with nervous exuberance to compensate for the macabre surroundings.

  His pensive mood was lightened by the short voyage across the swirling stretch of the River Severn to Aust, the scenery bright in the mid-morning air, now that last night’s rain had stopped. By contrast, as he drove the last few miles into Bristol, he saw again the rapid building activity that was both extending the city’s limits and restoring the gaps left by the extensive wartime bomb damage. Some of the new structures were ugly, unimaginative boxes, thrown up quickly and cheaply from designs apparently created by architects who could only draw rectangles with their pencil and ruler.

  Richard’s destination was St Paul’s, an old run-down residential area to the north of the city centre. Last evening’s study of a map in hi
s AA road atlas had given him a general idea of where he was headed and a final enquiry through his driver’s window of a Jamaican lady pushing a pram, directed him to Grosvenor Road.

  Cruising along a row of shops gave him the street numbers and he soon spotted the names of the solicitors in gold paint on the windows above a building-society office. Finding a parking space a few yards further on, he locked the Humber and walked back to a door alongside the shop, where a brass plate declared it to be Middleton, Bailey and Bailey.

  The narrow stairs took him to a small reception office, where a cheerful middle-aged woman took him along a corridor to a door which predictably had ‘D.G. Bailey LLB’ written on it.

  Douglas Bailey was unlike many of the rather desiccated, elderly lawyers that Richard had met in market towns in Wales and the West Country. He was what his father might have termed a ‘city slicker’, a slim man of about forty in a blue pinstripe suit which Richard suspected had shoulder pads. His dark hair was Brylcreemed flat on his head and he had a small Errol Flynn moustache.

  However, in spite of this unpromising appearance, Bailey proved to be well spoken, well informed and very much ‘on the ball’.

  After the usual courtesies and a cup of tea provided by the matronly secretary, they sat each side of a cluttered desk and got down to business.

  ‘I’ll just give you an outline of the problem, Doctor Pryor, then let you take the file away to study at your convenience. If then you feel you can assist us, we’ll meet again with Counsel to discuss the details.’

  When Richard nodded his assent, Douglas Bailey leaned forward on his elbows to tell his tale.

  ‘Our client is a woman, Millicent Wilson, though she went under the surname of her late partner, Arthur Shaw. I say “late”, as he’s the one who she was convicted of killing.’

  ‘I presume when you say “partner”, you mean it in the conjugal sense, rather than a business partner?’ asked Richard, thinking of his own relationship with Angela Bray.

  ‘Indeed I do. They lived here in St Paul’s — just down the road, in fact — but were not married. She is twenty-seven; he was thirty-nine at the time of his death. They lived in an old terrace house which was divided into a number of flats, though that’s a rather grand description for a scruffy collection of rented rooms and bedsits with a communal bathroom and kitchen.’

  He gently diverged a finger and thumb across his moustache, as if encouraging it to grow a little more.

  ‘Not to put too fine a point on it, this household was hardly genteel or sophisticated. A couple of the occupants, including Arthur Shaw, were well known to the police and some had done time in prison, mostly for theft, assault and general petty crime.’

  ‘Did that apply to your client as well?’ asked Richard.

  ‘She certainly had no convictions, but she may have worked the streets at one time, though not recently. Anyway, this charming character Arthur Shaw used to knock her about regularly, usually when drunk, which again is not all that uncommon in this part of Bristol.’

  He paused to drink down the rest of his cup of tea.

  ‘As I said, I won’t go into the details until you’ve read the papers, but in essence, Shaw had knocked her about a bit one evening, then she had gone with a friend to the cinema. He was at home, playing poker with some of the other men in the house. After she came home at about eleven thirty, sounds of a heated quarrel were heard from their rooms upstairs, but that was nothing unusual. She is seen to run out about midnight with a fresh black eye and cut lip, and goes to stay with her sister in the next street. In the morning, Arthur Shaw is found dead in their bedroom with a knife wound in his chest and a kitchen knife on the floor.’

  Bailey handed the file across the desk to Richard Pryor.

  ‘She denied killing him, but the prosecution medical evidence claimed that the time of death corresponded to her return to the house. The knife had her fingerprints on it, amongst others, though that meant very little as it was from the communal kitchen. But there were spots of his blood on her sleeve, though she maintained that it got there earlier when she had hit him on the nose with a milk bottle when he was assaulting her.’

  Richard tucked the file into his briefcase alongside his chair. ‘So she was convicted on mainly circumstantial evidence?’

  ‘Yes, convicted of murder, though the defence tried getting a manslaughter verdict. Not that it’s made that much difference, as the judge didn’t hand down a death sentence, but commuted it to life imprisonment. I think that was mainly because of all this current political discussion about abolition, though the defence tried to claim that it was because of their mitigation plea of severe provocation by an abusive partner.’

  Bailey sniffed to convey his opinion of the previous defence team.

  ‘I have to say that their efforts were not all that energetic. That’s why Millie Wilson changed solicitors for this Appeal. I hope we can do a better job for her, though trying to get the Court of Criminal Appeal to overrule one of their precious judges is an uphill struggle. Often, they even refuse to hear new evidence.’

  Richard tapped the side of his briefcase containing the file. ‘I gather the main issue as far as I’m concerned is the time of death?’

  ‘Yes, she’s got a cast-iron alibi when she was in the cinema and another when she got back to her sister’s place. It’s the half-hour interval in between that’s the problem.’

  He gave his moustache another few encouraging strokes.

  ‘Also, if there’s any mileage in disputing these blood stains, that would be useful.’

  ‘My colleague is very experienced in that area,’ Richard assured him. ‘She was a senior biologist in the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, so if there’s anything to be found, she’s the one to find it.’

  They spoke for a while longer, the solicitor telling him that the Appeal date had yet to be finalized but would probably be early in the New Year. Promising to send a preliminary report within a week, Richard took his leave and was back in Garth House a couple of hours later, having just missed a ferry at Aust.

  Far too late for his lunch, Moira had kept it warm in the Aga and he sat in the kitchen in solitary state to eat his steak-and-kidney pie with mashed potato, followed by apple tart and custard. He had been abroad throughout all the difficult post-war years, so did not fully appreciate the recent improvement in living standards, following a decade of shortages that in some ways had been as severe as the war years themselves. He had missed most of the rationing, the spartan clothing bought on coupons with their E41 economy labels, unbranded ‘Pool’ petrol and books printed on thin, coarse paper.

  As soon as he had finished, Angela, Priscilla and Sian came in to share the coffee that Moira was making and to hear what had happened in Bristol. He gave them a quick rundown of the case as he knew it so far, which was rather sketchy until he had read the case papers. ‘So basically, it’s an alibi problem. They say she did, she says she didn’t!’

  Sian, whose left-wing views ran in her family, was always a fiery advocate for the underdog, especially if they were female.

  ‘Typical Establishment stitch-up!’ she snapped. ‘Some poor woman gets regularly beaten up by some drunken thug and when she cracks and sticks a knife in him, she gets life imprisonment and probably told she’s lucky not to have been hanged!’

  Richard smiled at her predictably feisty reaction. ‘But she says she didn’t do it, Sian,’ he protested mildly. ‘And we’re being hired to see if we can prove she didn’t.’

  Moira put down her coffee percolator. ‘I thought the prosecution had to prove guilt, not the defence prove innocence?’ she objected.

  Angela looked at Richard and both their eyebrows rose.

  ‘We’ve got a budding lawyer in the house, folks! And you’re absolutely right, Moira. But in practice, the two things are not all that distinct, especially in an Appeal. The appellant’s lawyers try to torpedo the prosecution’s case.’

  Priscilla was listening with interest to this dia
logue.

  ‘I had a barrister boyfriend a couple of years ago and he used to say that evidence didn’t matter much in the Appeal Courts — they were more interested in procedural errors. If the trial judge put a foot wrong, that offered a better chance of succeeding with the Appeal than picking holes in the factual evidence.’

  Moira listened intently as the three doctors bandied experiences and hearsay about the rigid legal system. When there was a pause, she declared her fascination with the law. ‘I used to be a typist in a solicitor’s office, but it’s only since I came to Garth House that it seemed to come alive for me. Thank goodness this poor woman in Bristol didn’t hang, as she might well have done. I suppose it’s all this fuss about Timothy Evans and John Christie that has made them reluctant to carry out the death penalty?’

  ‘Evans came from my home town of Merthyr, poor chap,’ said Richard, soberly. ‘I see there’s a strong movement again to get him a retrospective pardon this year.’