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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Skelton's Casebook
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
A woman's dismembered corpse is discovered in a suitcase, and police quickly identify her husband, Doctor Ibrahim Aziz, as their chief suspect. Incriminating evidence is discovered at his home and his wife was rumoured to be having an affair, giving him clear motive. With his reputation for winning hopeless cases, barrister Arthur Skelton is asked to represent the accused. Though Aziz's guilt does not seem to be in doubt, a question of diplomacy and misplaced larvae soon lead Skelton to suspect there may be more to the victim's death. Aided by his loyal clerk Edgar, Skelton soon finds himself seeking justice for both victim and defendant. But can he uncover the truth before an innocent man is put on trial and condemned to the gallows?
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SKELTON’S GUIDE TO SUITCASE MURDERS
David Stafford
To Ted and Ev
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
Saturday 2nd November 1929
Andy, Spud and Reg had been coming down the gravel pit since they were eight or nine. You weren’t supposed to. A kid had died there once. The story they’d heard was that the ground just opened up and ate him. They could believe it. Sometimes you saw it. The gravel would start sliding about for no reason and make holes easily big enough to eat somebody.
So, after the kid had died, some blokes came and fenced it all in and put signs up saying it was dangerous. Andy, Spud and Reg took no notice. They just climbed over the fence and carried on as normal. It was good for playing war. There were lots of places to hide and the sandy bits were like trenches. But they’d grown out of war. Andy and Spud were fourteen now, and Reg thirteen, so mostly they sat in the shed up at the end and played cards and smoked and talked about girls.
None of them had ever had a girlfriend. This was a shame because the shed would be the perfect place to bring a girl. Much better than the back row of the Regal, or the waste ground behind the rope works which was where Andy’s big brother used to take his girl.
Andy got the cards out and they went inside the shed for a game. Usually they played three- or five-card brag for matchsticks, or pebbles when they’d run out of matchsticks. They’d like to have played for money, but they didn’t have any. Andy had tried to teach them cribbage once, but Spud said it was as bad as sums at school and he’d rather stick with brag. Or nap. Sometimes they played nap.
After a bit they got fed up of cards, so they just lay down and smoked Spud’s fags. He’d nicked a packet of Rhodian off his mum.
It’d been drizzly earlier on but now it brightened up, and they could see the sun was a good bit lower than they’d thought. Usually their bellies told them when it was time to get home for tea, but Mr Ingram had been chucking out three-day-old breadcakes earlier and they’d filled up on them. All the same, Reg said he had chips for tea on a Saturday and his brothers and sisters’d nick them all if he was late, so they headed for the gap in the fence.
They skirted the big puddle they called ‘the lake’. Andy spotted something in the water.
‘Wasn’t there before,’ Spud said.
One of the great things about the gravel pit was, just like it had ate the kid who died, sometimes it sicked stuff up.
‘It’s a box,’ Andy said.
They could have done with a stick to help pull it out but there was never a stick to be had in the gravel pit, so Andy had to put one foot in the water, testing the ground very carefully before putting any weight on it.
Closer, he saw that the box had reinforced corners.
He managed to pull it far enough over for Spud and Reg to grab hold, and between the three of them they pulled it onto dry land.
It was a suitcase. A big one. Not metal or leather, made of fibre stuff. One side had gone soft in the wet. The catch wouldn’t give so Reg gave it a bash with a stone. A couple more bashes and it fell away.
They opened it.
CHAPTER ONE
Thursday 28th November 1929
The rain that had been falling heavily all day held off for a few minutes as Arthur Skelton emerged from court. There was a bounce to him. He had won his case. The press photographers, sheltering under the portico, spotted him immediately. It wasn’t difficult. A skinny six foot three, he loomed over any crowd, his pebble-lensed glasses twinkling. The press mob pushed their cameras into his face, and he smiled obligingly until they saw the meatier prey of his client, Addison Lyle, the BBC announcer.
Some weeks earlier, Lyle, while announcing a talk entitled ‘What is Right?’ given by the eminent philosopher, Sir Harold Overton, had mispronounced ‘Overton’ as ‘Overdone’. It’s doubtful whether one in a thousand listeners noticed the mistake, but it put Overton off his stride. His talk was fraught with stumbles. The phrase ‘fundamental principle’ came right only after several attempts and an entire paragraph about the contribution made in the field of ethics by the seventeenth-century German philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf caused so much trouble he abandoned it entirely.
After it was all over, the microphone turned off and the studio door opened for ventilation, Hilton Scott, another announcer, and Margery Desmarais, the mezzo-soprano, chatting in a hospitality room a little way down the corridor, heard angry words being exchanged between Lyle and Overton, then sounds of a scuffle. They went to investigate and found Overton lying unconscious on the ground with a telephone in his hand. Lyle was poised above him, brandishing a Marconi-Reisz carbon granule microphone with table-stand.
A doctor was summoned.
When he regained consciousness, Sir Harold claimed that Lyle, as appearances had suggested, had struck him with the microphone. Furthermore, he claimed that Lyle had mispronounced ‘Overton’ because he was falling-down drunk; and indeed, had, upon arrival at the studio, actually fallen down. After the broadcast, the two men had had words, and Lyle, inflamed with drunken rage, had attacked him.
The police took Lyle into custody.
He was the first BBC announcer ever to be arrested for a crime committed during the course of his duties. For the newspapers, leery of the effect that wireless was having on their circulations, it was Christmas and birthday all in one. They called the BBC the ‘Bish Bash Corporation’ and suggested that the entire organisation was a ‘coven of dipsomaniacs and mountebanks’.
The BBC, worried that their reputation as a God-fearing bastion of moral rectitude might be in the balance, put the matter in the hands of their own solicitors, who instructed Arthur Skelton, the Yorkshire barrister who had recently found fame for winning a couple of apparently hopeless cases.
Skelton did try to point out that, in this case, the evidence weighed so heavily in the plaintiff’s favour that it was not so much apparently hopeless as plain hopeless.
Sir Harold was seventy-two years old. His voice was a measured rumble that hypnotised the listener with its seashore cadences. He was Master of St Luke’s College Oxford, adviser to the League of Nations and a Nobel laureate. During the war he had spoken in favour of pacifism but never with the vehemence required to merit an arrest. He had played tennis with Gandhi.
Addison Lyle, on the other hand, was a BBC announcer with all that that implies.
Lyle claimed that he had acted in self-defence. Overton, he said, irrationally enraged by the harmless slip of the tongue (‘I once introduced Vita Sackville-West as Rita and she didn’t seem to mind’) had started it. The Master of St Luke’s had bludgeoned him several times with the telephone, leaving him no option but to strike back with the first thing that came to hand, which was the microphone.
Skelton pictured the scene in court. Sir Harold looking the picture of innocence, his rheumy eyes blinking behind his horn-rims, would sit upright and dignified, his white hair peeping through the bandage he still felt compelled to wear despite several weeks having passed since the assault. Sir Thomas Peebles KC, leading the prosecution, would point at him and, in a voice oozing sceptical contempt, say, ‘And this is the man you accuse of striking – nay, “bludgeoning” you – unprovoked – with a telephone?’
The jury would snigger, Lyle would stammer and that would be the end of that.
The first gleam of hope came when Skelton saw the list of character witnesses Peebles intended to produce. There were seven of them, eminent academics, peers of the realm, distinguished clergymen.
The best Addison Lyle had been able to rustle up was the leader of a jazz orchestra, a lithography teacher from the Chelsea School of Art, and Joseph Mitchell, the manufacturer of Mitchell’s Hygienic Spray. But that, Skelton thought, wasn’t the point.
Wasn’t it surprising, when Overton’s reputation and integrity had never been brought into question, that Peebles thought it necessary to call even one character witness, never mind seven?
Did it suggest that there was more to Overton than met the eye; a dirty secret, perhaps, that needed, in the event that it should crop up, an army of witnesses to deny?
It could only be a matter for conjecture. Finding somebody to spill the beans would mean first of all knowing what the beans might be, and Skelton couldn’t even be sure there were any beans in the first place.
On the way into court, he spotted Lord Esterbank, one of the character witnesses, getting out of his Rolls-Royce assisted by his liveried chauffeur.
Esterbank was reaching the end of a distinguished career in public service. He had served every Conservative Prime Minister since Balfour in one capacity or another and now offered clamorous opposition to the Labour government in the Lords. His appearance was not, however, imposing. He was a tiny man, with jaundiced skin and a gargoyle face. His clothes were stained and rumpled in the way that bespeaks great rank and privilege. On his way out of the car he handed the chauffeur an umbrella, a newspaper, a book, a parcel wrapped in brown paper and a cup. Barely noticing that the cup had emptied its contents down the chauffeur’s front, Esterbank waited until the umbrella had been raised, then, under its shelter, took the few steps from the car to the portico, dismissed the chauffeur and surrendered himself to the attentions of a court usher.
The chauffeur put the clutter back in the car and looked down helplessly as the contents of the cup, an unctuous, pale fluid, dripped from his jacket and waistcoat. He reached into first one trouser pocket then another, looking for a hanky.
Skelton pulled out his own and offered it.
‘Thank you very much, sir, that’s very kind.’
The chauffeur dabbed.
‘What is it?’ Skelton asked.
‘Horlicks. His Lordship likes it, hot or cold.’
‘Very messy,’ Skelton said. ‘Milk-based, and the malt would make it stickier.’
They both nodded knowingly, the way men do when a technical assessment is made.
‘It’s gonna stain, all right,’ the chauffeur said, ‘Mr Lightfoot’s gonna have my guts for garters.’
‘Who’s Mr Lightfoot?’
‘His Lordship’s valet. Good with stains and the like, but short-tempered. Little drop of oil and he goes through the roof at me. As if you can do a job like this without getting a drop of oil on your clothes now and then.’
‘Or a cupful of Horlicks.’
The chauffeur laughed.
‘Tell you what,’ Skelton said. ‘There’s a haberdasher just around the corner run by a very nice lady called Violet, who can work miracles on stains with fuller’s earth and oil of camphor and suchlike. It’s up a side street, a bit difficult to find. I could show you, though. Won’t take a minute.’
‘That’s very generous. Streep’s the name.’
‘Skelton.’
They shook hands.
‘I thought it was you,’ Streep said. ‘I’ve seen your picture in the paper. And, of course, the voice gives it away. You’re from up north.’
‘Leeds. Yorkshire.’
‘One of the maids is from up that way somewhere. Says “bath” instead of “barth”. Do they all talk like that up there?’
‘Yes. And you’ll never believe this but in Leeds they’d think it was funny to hear somebody say “barth”.’
The chauffeur threw his head back and said, ‘Chhh! Takes all sorts, dunnit?’
They walked on. ‘And you’re doing the thing in the court, are you? The one His Lordship’s come for?’
‘I am,’ Skelton said.
‘Sir Harold bloody Overton.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Nasty piece of work.’
‘Is he?’ Skelton asked.
‘He set about me with a starting handle for taking him from Marston Moretaine to Aylesbury via Woburn.’
‘Which way did he want you to go?’
‘He wanted me to go via Dunstable.’
‘Dunstable?’
‘And Princes Risborough. I said it’d add twenty miles at least to the journey. He said I should know better than to take him anywhere near Woburn Abbey because of the Duke of Bedford.’
‘What’s he got against the Duke of Bedford?’
‘No idea. He made me stop the car just by Sheep Lane and he started shouting at me and swearing, and then he got the starter handle and hit me with it. Four times. He did the same with Billy Fleming.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Footman,’ Streep said.
‘With the starter handle?’
‘With a billiard cue. In the billiard room. Billy was just standing there with a tray of brandy waiting for him to finish a shot. His Lordship misses the shot and takes it out on Billy with the thick end of the cue, swinging it round his head. Nearly broke Billy’s nose. Half an inch higher and he could have gone blind. I mean, he was sorry afterwards. Gave Billy ten bob.’
‘Did you get ten bob?’
‘Fifteen. Difference between a chauffeur and a footman, I suppose,’ Streep said.
Violet did a marvellous job on the chauffeur’s jacket and waistcoat. There wasn’t even a smell afterwards.
In court, Esterbank was second up. When he’d finished telling Peebles that Overton was the finest human being ever to have drawn breath, Skelton had his turn and asked, ‘Did Sir Harold once assault your chauffeur, Mr Streep, with the starter handle of a motor car?’
Esterbank was under oath. He looked sheepishly at Overton and Peebles, but had no option other than to say, ‘Yes.’
‘And was this assault prompted by a slight difference of opinion about the best route to take from Marston Moretaine to Aylesbury?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know the exact details.’
‘So, you didn’t witness the assault?’
‘No.’
‘But you did witness another assault when Sir Harold hit your footman with a billiard cue, almost breaking his nose.’
‘I thought it was broken,’ Esterbank said. ‘It’s never looked the same since anyway.’
After that everything fell into place nicely.
Next up was a bishop who, in response to, ‘Have you ever witnessed an assault similar to the attacks on Lord Esterbank’s chauffeur and footman?’, told garish tales of Overton attacking a curate with a leather-bound copy of Richard de Courcy’s sermons and a nun with his bare fists.
Peebles stopped calling witnesses after that.
Skelton’s only witness was Addison Lyle himself, who told his story and, despite being a BBC announcer, was believed.
Edgar Hobbes, Skelton’s clerk, a precise, barrel-chested man with tiny feet, joined his chief under the portico.
‘You look like a man who deserves cake,’ he said.
‘Ooh,’ Skelton said.
They set off towards Kembles, a tea room they favoured at the Aldwych end of Drury Lane.
It was famous for its uncompromisingly modern decor. Black and silver arranged in arrow motifs dominated. The cloakroom had a screen made of beige celluloid. Mirrors were positioned so that wherever you sat you could see the back of your own head, and the lights, which hung from the ceiling on thick chromium rods, had shades in the shape of beehives.
Skelton was unmoved by celluloid cloakrooms and the back of his own head, but the cakes at Kembles were good, the buns fresh and the tea excellent.
The cafe attracted a theatrical clientele. Sometimes Ivor Novello could be seen dipping his perfect profile into an egg rissole or a Dresden cream, and once, Edgar had heard, just as the cafe was closing, Noël Coward had swept in with a retinue but swept out again when he discovered that Veuve Clicquot could not be obtained.
Norman, the cafe’s proprietor, was proud of his celebrity clientele and counted Skelton, who had had his picture in the paper a few times, among them. It had its advantages. If extra gravy was required, there was no mucking about. It was there on the table almost before you’d finished asking for it.
As they sat down, Edgar, a keen theatregoer, scanned the room to see who was ‘in’.
‘Don’t look now, but that’s Cathleen Nesbitt. Doesn’t look a day over twenty-five, but she must be at least forty.’
Skelton didn’t know who Cathleen Nesbitt was and probably wouldn’t have cared if he did.
They ordered the sandwich assortment along with some mocha fingers, coconut kisses and a pot of tea.
Edgar glanced at The Evening News he’d bought on his way over from court and sighed.
‘What is it?’ Skelton asked.
Edgar showed him the headline: wakefield suitcase murder, dentist sought. ‘It’s preposterous,’ he said.
The ‘Wakefield Suitcase Murder Mystery’ had been in the papers for the past three weeks. Some boys had found a suitcase containing the mutilated and partly decomposed body of a woman in a quarry on the outskirts of Wakefield. The police were having difficulty establishing the identity of the corpse and were hoping a dentist somewhere would be able to recognise the woman’s false teeth.
Edgar’s principal grievance had nothing to do with the horror of the murder. Skelton knew this because he’d mentioned it several times before. It was luggage-related.
‘The Bournemouth one was the Bournemouth Trunk Murder. The Widnes one was the Widnes Trunk Murder. So why are they calling this one the Wakefield Suitcase Murder?’
Skelton took out his pipe and slowly filled it. This, he knew, could take some time.
‘I have three suitcases,’ Edgar said. ‘Nice leather ones. I bought them two years ago at the Army & Navy in a sale. Small, medium and large. I’d say the large one’s as big as a suitcase can get before you’d call it a cabin trunk.’
Skelton lit his pipe and, between puffs, said, ‘I’m not really sure of the precise differences between a suitcase and a trunk.’
‘It’s a matter of handles,’ Edgar said. ‘A suitcase has one, a cabin trunk many.’
Skelton nodded. ‘So presumably, the container they found the mutilated body in only had one handle, so they’re calling it a suitcase murder rather than a trunk murder.’
‘You’re missing my point.’
‘Sorry … go on.’
‘As I say, my large suitcase is as big as a suitcase can get without it needing more handles and becoming a cabin trunk. And yet, even with careful packing, I can’t see how you could get a complete corpse in there. Arms, legs and possibly torso, but you’d need a separate Gladstone bag for the head.’
Their attention was distracted by a small party, visible in the mirrors along with the backs of their own heads, who came in shaking umbrellas and delivering soaked mackintoshes to the chap behind the celluloid screen. Edgar registered that none of them was famous and lost interest.
‘You could get a corpse in my suitcase,’ Skelton said.
‘Which one?’
‘The big one.’
‘The Revelation?’
‘What?’
‘Your big suitcase. It’s a Revelation. Revelation is a brand of suitcase.’
‘Is it? I didn’t realise you’d ever seen my big suitcase.’
‘Of course I have. I even carried it briefly when we were at the Gloucester assizes.’
‘For the indecent assault?’
‘Exactly. And you’re mistaken.’
‘Am I?’
‘Yes, it’s big. It’s a big suitcase. Nobody could deny that. But it’s nowhere near big enough to contain a whole corpse with the head.’
‘It expands.’
Edgar bridled. ‘What?’
‘It’s got sort of ratchets so that you can make it deeper.’
‘A lot deeper?’
‘Perhaps double the original depth.’
‘Deep enough for a head?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Well, there’s food for thought,’ Edgar said. ‘I take it all back.’
Outside the rain had got worse. They sheltered in the doorway of Kembles, hoping it might slacken off enough to avoid a soaking.
‘Did you hear that?’ Edgar said.
‘What?’
‘When Norman asked the waiter to get my coat and hat.’
‘What?’
‘Norman went over to the cloakroom and asked the chap to get my coat and hat. But he didn’t realise that I had followed him, and I was standing right behind him.’
‘Yes?’
‘And he said to the chap, “Can you get Mr Hobbes’ coat and hat?”, and the chap said, “Which one is Mr Hobbes?”, and Norman said, “The portly gentleman.”’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I heard him say it. I’m portly.’
‘You’re not,’ Skelton said.
‘I’m a portly gentleman.’
‘Do you want to stop coming here, then?’ Skelton asked.
‘Why?’
‘Well, if Norman was rude to you—’
‘He wasn’t rude to me. He was merely stating the truth. I’m fat.’
‘You’re not fat.’
Edgar stood to one side to let a customer, trying to get into the restaurant, pass. It wasn’t exactly a squeeze, but it was close.
‘There,’ Edgar said. ‘You see?’
CHAPTER TWO
On the Saturday evening, Skelton let himself into his house as quietly as he could and took his shoes and socks off in the hall. He was wet through.
He hated having to go to town at the weekend, but it would have been churlish to have missed Evan Leslie’s retirement do. Leslie had given him a great deal of help and useful advice when he was first starting out. But attending had meant changing into evening clothes at his chambers in Foxton Row, then back again before getting the train home. The first soaking had come while he was trying to get a cab on the Strand. The second came when the Bentley, which he’d left parked at Lambourn Station, had refused to start. He’d had no choice other than to walk home. The rain was falling sideways by this time, so his umbrella provided no protection whatsoever.
A light had been left on in the dining room. Mila was in there, hunched over the table, absorbed by something in front of her.
Skelton hovered in the doorway, unwilling to startle her, knowing a suspected intruder would come off worse in any encounter with his wife.
‘Are you making puddles on the parquet?’ Mila asked, without looking up.
‘I didn’t think anybody’d still be up,’ Skelton said. ‘I’ll go and towel off.’
He went upstairs, hung his suit, shirt and waistcoat from the window ledge in the bathroom so that they could drip in safety, dried himself off and put on his pyjamas and dressing gown. Downstairs he packed his shoes with newspaper and placed them by the embers of the kitchen fire to warm. This, he knew, was the right thing to do with wet shoes, but he had no idea why.
He put some milk on to boil and went back into the dining room.
‘I’m making cocoa. Do you want some?’
‘Yes, please. Did you enjoy your evening?’
‘Not really. A pigeon got into the Great Hall.’
‘Did it go away again?’
‘Grantby asked somebody to get him a 12-bore, but then Montague pointed out that the timbers date back to 1490 and the stained-glass windows are among the few to have survived the Reformation. So, a member of staff who keeps pigeons fetched a ladder and, rather deftly I thought, covered the bird with a cloth, brought it down and released it outside. Why are you doing a jigsaw?’
‘It’s The Laughing Cavalier.’
‘I didn’t know you liked jigsaws.’
‘I don’t.’
Skelton ran back to the kitchen and caught the milk just before it boiled over. By the time he returned with the cocoa, Mila had completed a decent sized bit of lace collar.
‘You’re doing well,’ Skelton said. He picked up a piece and tried to fit it.
‘Please don’t mess with the pieces,’ Mila said. ‘They’re organised according to a system.’
He pulled a chair from under the table and sat down. ‘You’re in a mood,’ he said.
‘Lawrence was supposed to go boating on the river with John and Susan Turner and their parents.’
Lawrence was their elder child – the ten-year-old. Elizabeth, the younger, was a whimsical eight.
‘But it was cancelled because of the rain,’ Mila continued, ‘so he took out his disappointment on me.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He played the gramophone.’
‘“I Lift up My Finger and I Say Tweet-Tweet”?’
‘Over and over again.’
‘They break very easily.’
‘Children or gramophone records?’
‘Sometimes if you ask him nicely—’
‘I did ask him nicely and he obliged by playing the other one.’
‘Which other one?’ Skelton asked.
‘“You’re the Cream in my Coffee, You’re the Salt in my Stew”.’
‘I am so sorry.’
‘So, I got the jigsaw out to distract him. But after half an hour he said it was too hard.’
‘So, he went away, and—’
‘Played the gramophone again,’ Mila said.
‘And you had to finish the—’
‘Of course.’
Skelton examined the picture on the box. ‘There is ever such a lot of brown.’
‘If you look closely, some of the brown is more greyish.’
‘What time did you start?’
‘At around four o’clock.’
‘So, you’ve been at it for’ – Skelton looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was twenty-five to one – ‘eight and a half hours. Is this a bit of moustache?’
Mila spoke with the mournful regret of a Chekhov heroine asking about the meaning of life. ‘How many times have I picked up that piece thinking it was moustache?’
‘It looks like moustache,’ Skelton said.
‘They design these things deliberately to undermine your sanity.’
‘I’d stop if I were you.’
‘I can’t.’
The note of desperation in her voice caused Skelton to put his cocoa down and gently take her hand. She allowed it to be taken and turned to look at him. Were her eyes glistening with tears?
‘The wallpaper is coming off the walls,’ she said.
Skelton looked up at the corner of the room, above the window. A corner of the paper had folded back on itself revealing something black, green and living beneath it. He’d been meaning to get up there with some glue and stick it back again but wasn’t sure it was wise to do so without knowing what the living stuff was first.
‘I’ll get somebody to look at it,’ he said.
‘Also the kitchen range is smoking,’ she said, ‘Lawrence uses the gramophone as an instrument of torture, Elizabeth informed me today that her ballet teacher told her that fairies are caused by God sneezing, Mrs Bartram won’t talk to Dorothy because she left the lid off the biscuit tin at teatime and the ginger nuts have gone soft …’ Mrs Bartram was their daily and cook, Dorothy the nanny, ‘… and then this arrived.’
She picked up a newspaper from the pile strewn across the other side of the table. Mila read a lot of newspapers but had recently cut her consumption to just four a day. The paper was already folded to the right page. She thrust it towards her husband, clearly irked.
Between arrivals at the zoo – giant frog and silver fox and mr thomas on the coal situation was a headline: mrs pemberton lands safely in cape town.
Mrs Pemberton, Skelton read, was an aviatrix who, accompanied by her flying instructor, had piloted an aeroplane from Casablanca to Cape Town, making her the first woman to have flown the African continent from north to south.
It took him a moment to realise why Mila found the story so irksome.
Mrs Pemberton, née Cissy Thornbury, had been at school with Mila. They were rarely on speaking terms. When Mila became captain of hockey, Cissy became captain of lacrosse. When Mila had taken up archery and became county champion, Cissy had taken up tennis and, if it hadn’t been for one unlucky serve and a disputed net call, might have beaten Suzanne Lenglen at Wimbledon.
Cissy had married Franklin J. Pemberton, an American millionaire and amateur artist who had spent several years living la vie bohème in Paris before settling in an eighteenth-century pile with parkland in Leicestershire. Here he showed off the fine collection of increasingly fashionable impressionist and post-impressionist paintings he’d acquired, for the most part, from the artists themselves, bathed naked in the lake and shot anything feathery or furry that moved. Then he’d had the decency to get killed in France while doing something intrepid, leaving Cissy magnificently wealthy and with the freedom to become the first woman to fly to South Africa.
Mila, meanwhile, had married Arthur Skelton from Leeds and was on her way to becoming the first woman in Lambourn to complete a jigsaw puzzle of The Laughing Cavalier in less than twenty-four hours.
She heard news of Cissy Pemberton, either from the newspapers or from other school friends, perhaps twice a year. Each time it brought her to the brink of despair.
‘I didn’t realise old Cissy could fly an aeroplane,’ Skelton said, trying to sound jolly.
‘She can’t.’
‘Well it says—’
‘It says she had her instructor with her. Like Amelia Earhart.’
‘I thought—’
‘No, she didn’t. Amelia Earhart sat in a passenger seat all the way across the Atlantic like a sack of potatoes while men piloted the aircraft.’
Skelton was reading to the end of the story. ‘It said she landed the thing herself at Khartoum in a sandstorm.’
‘And then in Cape Town,’ Mila said, quoting the newspaper verbatim and speaking a little more loudly than was consistent with the children being in bed, ‘“She was greeted by a military band. And Mr J. H. C. Farley, President of the Cape Town Aviation Society, presented her with a baby lion.” I am thirty-four years old, and what have I done?’
This could have been a rhetorical question, but the subsequent pause and raised eyebrows suggested an answer was invited. Skelton knew that the fate of his marriage and the fragile balance of his domestic tranquillity could depend on what he said next.
‘Well, you have two fine children,’ he said.
‘A girl who believes in fairies and a boy who listens all day to “I Lift up My Finger and I Say Tweet-Tweet”. They are ninnies!’
‘Lawrence would have gone boating if it hadn’t been for the rain.’
‘A motor yacht on the Thames is not “boating”. When I was his age, I rowed across Djurgårdsbrunnsviken in a tempest.’
Mila’s grandfather was Swedish. She had spent many childhood holidays in Stockholm or at the family’s summer house on Vaxholm.
‘What else?’ she asked.
‘Pardon?’
‘What else have I done?’
‘You’ve got your … causes … and your discussion group in Maidenhead. There’s your teaching work at the Lambourn Academy.’
Mila took a Saturday morning archery class at the local girls’ school.
‘Miss Gladwell has made it clear that under her headship physical education will always take second place to domestic science, needlework and the madrigal group,’ she said. ‘I am wasting my life. By the time she was my age Gertrude Bell had been around the world twice and had had an alpine peak named after her. Mary Kingsley had travelled by canoe up Ogooué River and braved the ferocity of the Fang people.’
‘There’s a very active rambler’s group in Slough,’ Skelton said.
‘Piloting an aeroplane is no more difficult than driving a car,’ Mila said. ‘Easier, because apart from trees when you’re going up and the ground when you’re coming down, there’s nothing to hit except birds. I shall form an Association of Women Pilots. We will fill the airways. Flying isn’t a matter of brute strength; it’s a matter of endurance. And women endure. Women endure.’
‘Yes, they do. I’ve noticed that.’
‘I shall call in at Woodley Aerodrome tomorrow. Next year I shall buy an Avro Avian and fly it to Australia.’
Skelton collected the empty cocoa cups and put them in the kitchen sink ready to be washed in the morning.
He knew he had to tread carefully. There was no doubt that Mila had the endurance required to fly an aeroplane halfway around the world, but he wasn’t sure that aeroplanes did. Cars, he knew, could be very unreliable, but when a car breaks down it stays pretty much where it is. An aeroplane doesn’t do that. It falls a thousand feet into a jungle or the sea, where the occupants, in the unlikely event that they survive the crash, are eaten by lions or sharks. His children would be motherless, and he prostrate with grief.
On the other hand, offering a word of discouragement would only stiffen her determination to go through with it. For now, it would be best to stay calm, smile and go along with anything she said.
The dining-room fire was almost dead. He put the fireguard in place and cleared the hearth of anything that might catch if a spark should escape. He’d already bolted the front door.
‘How long does it take to fly to Australia?’ he asked.
‘Last year an Australian called Bert Hinkler did it in under a month.’
‘Perhaps I could sail out with the children and meet you at the other end. It’d be an adventure for us all. I’m for bed, anyway,’ he said. ‘Are you coming?’
‘Not until I’ve finished.’
The cavalier’s sash and brocade sleeves were coming together nicely.
CHAPTER THREE
Edgar followed the tea tray, borne by one of the lads, into Skelton’s room at 8 Foxton Row some weeks later, bringing the post with him.
The two men sat, as was their custom, in the easy chairs, one either side of the small table. Edgar lit up a Gold Flake and poured the tea. Skelton filled his pipe.
‘Have you ever had tea with lemon?’ Edgar asked.
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘Some people like it.’
‘Russians, you mean?’
‘I thought they had it with jam.’
‘I’ve never actually believed that. Flies in the face of reason.’
‘I read that tea with lemon instead of milk and sugar is very good if you’re on a reducing diet.’
Skelton sighed. ‘You’re not portly.’
‘I am.’
‘You’re not.’
‘I see my full-length profile in shop windows as I pass. It’s very dismaying.’
Edgar added just enough milk to make his tea opaque, then turned to the briefs. There were three of them.
‘What order do you want them in? Keep the best till last?’
‘Of course.’
‘Right. Rex versus Thomas Winthrop.’
‘Yes?’
‘Winthrop, a lorry driver, stands accused of stealing, from a warehouse in Billiter Street, three lorryloads of ostrich feathers.’
‘Of what?’
‘By weight, ostrich feathers are more valuable than diamonds,’ Edgar said. ‘Except that while fifty thousand pounds worth of diamonds could be slipped into a coat pocket, or at least an evening bag, you’d need something around the size of Wigmore Hall to accommodate the same in feathers. They mustn’t be crushed, you see, because it damages the curl.’
‘Strong prosecution case?’
‘Not very. There’s no doubt at all that Winthrop went to the warehouse three times, presented the apparently appropriate documentation to collect the feathers, helped load the lorry and delivered them to their destination.’
‘What was the problem, then?’
‘The problem was that the documentation he presented was false and the warehouse he took them to, in Ealing, West London, was, when the police got there, empty.’
‘So somebody had taken the precaution of removing the feathers to a third warehouse.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Who’s the solicitor?’
‘Banham.’
Banham had instructed Skelton twice before. Sound man. Knew his stuff.
‘Defence?’
‘Winthrop claims he was hired to do the job in good faith with no idea that the paperwork was forged or that he was in fact stealing the feathers.’
‘Good character?’
‘No previous convictions. Excellent references.’
‘Should be all right, then. What’s next?’
Edgar poured the hot water into the pot so as to brew for a second cup.
Skelton watched him, thoughtfully. ‘It’d mean an awful lot of fuss,’ he said.
‘What would?’
‘Going into Brixton gaol to see a defendant. The warders offer you a mug of tea. And you say—You couldn’t do it, could you?’
‘I could take my own,’ Edgar said.
‘A lemon and a little knife?’
‘I could keep the lemon in an oilcloth tobacco pouch, like yours, to stop the juice leaking.’
‘You’ve given the matter some thought, then.’
‘I am a fat man with bad feet.’
They both looked at Edgar’s feet. To the naked eye, their only remarkable feature was their size. They were disproportionately small. Skelton had often wondered whether the troubles he had with them were essentially a question of bad design. In terms of structural engineering, Edgar was the equivalent of an upside-down Eiffel Tower. The weight would crush the little pointy thing that should have been at the top.
‘Do they hurt a very great deal?’ Skelton asked.
‘They’re agony,’ Edgar said. ‘The chiropodist tells me there’s little hope. It’s a malformation of the bones. He told me it was just one of the things that can happen when you reach a certain age.’
‘You’re no age at all.’
‘That’s easy for you to say. In your prime at—’
‘Thirty-seven.’
‘I’m forty-six at my next birthday. That’s nearly fifty. By the time you’re my age I’ll be nearly sixty. And crippled with bad feet.’
Skelton had been born with a displaced hip, spent his childhood in pain and traction, still limped and suffered agonies when he was cold, wet or tired, but he knew better than to mention it when Edgar was complaining about his feet. He had once known a chemist in Slough, who, if you went in for a headache pill, would show you the scars left by two bullet holes in his head and say, ‘That’s what a headache looks like.’ He went out of business within a year.
Edgar looked up at the top of the bookcase, as if inspecting for dust, then, after a moment, took up the second brief.
‘Rex versus Ashworth and Jeanes. Motor bandits. Luton town centre.’
Over the previous six months or so, the newspapers had been using the phrase ‘motor bandit’ to describe any criminal who, during the course of his business, used a car. Headlines condemned ‘the plague of motor bandits’ and called motor banditry ‘the scourge of our times’. One theory had it that the similarity of some of the crimes, particularly the wages snatches, suggested that there was a mastermind for whom all the ‘bandits’ were working. Others took the view that the car was an evil contraption, so it should come as no surprise that it would promote criminal activity. Old colonels in Petersfield and Guildford began writing letters pointing out that they never had these ‘motor bandits’ threatening public order when they were lads, but neglecting to mention that this could have been because they didn’t have motors.
‘Young woman working for a jam factory picked up the week’s wages from the bank on a Friday morning,’ Edgar said. ‘The “motor bandits” stopped, leapt out, bashed the girl, snatched the bag with the wages and drove off.’
‘Bashed the girl badly?’
‘Pushed her over. Scraped a knee. No harm done.’
‘Is this from Aubrey?’
Edgar nodded.
Aubrey Duncan, reputedly the best criminal solicitor in the country, had his offices in Hogg’s Yard, just around the corner from Foxton Row. A trust had grown. They were practically family.
‘Defence?’ Skelton asked.
‘The only evidence against them is that, according to inattentive witnesses who’ll probably crumble as soon as you look at them, the robbers looked a bit like the defendants – Reginald Ashworth and Leonard Jeanes – inasmuch as they were two men, somewhere between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, dark hair, slim build, grey or brown suits. Ashworth and Jeanes are eighteen and nineteen respectively and vaguely fit the description. Both have been in trouble with the police before and neither can give an adequate account of their whereabouts at the time the robbery took place.’
‘Do they look like felons?’
‘In photographs, yes. But Aubrey has seen them in court and says they can look like angels when they stop scowling.’
‘Ask Aubrey to do the usual. New Woolworth collar and tie, sixpenny pot of brilliantine and some shoe blacking. When they come to court make sure they call everybody “sir”, blush when spoken to and mention their mothers as often as possible, even if they have no mothers. And try to slip in a reference to the King. Oh, and see if Aubrey can get one of his minions to find out how many men between fifteen and twenty-five there are living in Luton, and how many blue and grey suits Burton sells in a week. It’s always good to have some numbers to bandy about. Pass us the biscuits.’
Skelton took one. Edgar looked at them mournfully, restraining himself.
‘D’you not think a reducing diet might make you miserable?’ Skelton asked.
‘Being portly makes me miserable. I shall make my way through a tunnel of deeper misery to find the light of trim happiness at the other end.’
‘What’s next?’
‘Rex versus Dr Ibrahim Aziz.’
‘Ah, the Wakefield Suitcase Murder. You did save the best till last, didn’t you?’
The identification of the body in the suitcase had been an ongoing saga in the newspapers since the beginning of November when it was discovered. The suitcase itself offered few clues: a standard, cheap fibre one made by Tookey & Sons in Birmingham, the lining torn but nothing concealed within it, the only identifying feature being a tiny number, probably a stock number, on a gummed label inside the lid. The papers had printed pictures of the label, and the police had checked every luggage shop and department store in the West Riding of Yorkshire, but nobody had recognised it.
The breakthrough came from the victim’s dentures. A dental plate, manufactured in some unorthodox way using Bakelite, stainless steel and something called ‘cobalt-chromium’ was found rammed halfway down the woman’s throat. Details had been published in the British Dental Journal, and fifteen dentists who had made plates along the same or similar lines came forward. Closer examination led a Wakefield dentist, a Mr Broadley, to recognise the plate as his own work and identify the wearer as Mrs Edna Aziz, the wife of Ibrahim Aziz, a respected local doctor.
Everything fell into place after that. The quarry where the suitcase was found was less than half a mile from Dr Aziz’s house. A search revealed a bloodstained rug bundled in the doctor’s coal shed for which he had no credible explanation. Neighbours reported they’d heard arguments and even screams not long before the murder was presumed to have taken place.
Aziz had admitted that he and his wife had had arguments. After one of them, he said, his wife had left and gone to stay with a sick aunt in Whitley Bay, Northumberland, to whom she had paid frequent visits over the course of the previous year. He believed that the corpse had been misidentified and his wife was still alive. As proof, he produced a postcard from her, sent just a few days earlier, saying she was well.
Police enquiries, however, had revealed that the aunt in Whitley Bay had died some months earlier.
Aziz’s solicitor, a Wakefield man who mostly dealt with petty offences and matters of contract and property, was sensible enough to recognise that he might not be the right man for this particular job and had advised Aziz to go to Aubrey Duncan in London. Almost inevitably, the brief had now found its way to Skelton’s desk.
‘It doesn’t make sense, does it?’ Skelton said, when he’d read it through.
‘What doesn’t?’
‘This thing’s been in all the papers for a month. Aziz is an educated man, a respected doctor. We’ve every reason to assume that he’s careful, methodical. So why would he make such a botch job of killing his wife? Why would he dump the body in a quarry just up the road? He’s had weeks to think up a credible explanation of his wife’s disappearance and he must have known the neighbours would have heard their screaming matches, but all the same, the best he can come up with is “She’s gone to Whitley Bay to visit an aunt.” Why not “She’s gone to China to be with her lover the Emperor” – that’d be a good bit more difficult to disprove, wouldn’t it? Or, even better, “We had terrible rows because she told me she had fallen in love with a man she called ‘Bonesaw Harry’ and, deaf to my pleadings and warnings, she ran off with him.”’
‘I take your point,’ Edgar said.
‘If you’d killed your wife and wanted to appear innocent, you’d report her missing to the police, wouldn’t you? The whole thing’s shot to pieces. Who’d keep a bloodstained rug in his coal shed all this time? Why didn’t he burn it? Or wrap the body in it and dispose of the lot down – I don’t know – a disused mine shaft in Cornwall, or weight it with pig iron and chuck it off a cliff somewhere? None of it makes sense.’
‘Perhaps that’s your defence. Unsound mind. Only a madman would make such a mess of it all.’
‘Or for some reason he wants to get caught.’
‘That’s good, too. The act of a madman.’
‘Or he’s so ridiculously overconfident he thought he’d never get caught.’
‘Again, insane behaviour.’
‘Or, most likely as far as I can see … he didn’t do it.’
That gave them both pause for thought.
‘Not much of a defence, though, is it?’ Edgar said. ‘He must be innocent because there’s too much evidence proving his guilt. And a clever man like him would have been more careful. And that’s beside the fact that the jury will find him guilty before they’ve heard a scrap of evidence and probably before they even clap eyes on him.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘He’s Egyptian.’
Skelton saw the point. Foreigners, unless they conformed to one of the acceptable stereotypes, rarely played well with juries. Aziz was Egyptian – which might possibly have been excusable if his name had been Old King Tut, but he was neither a pharaoh nor made of gold. He was just a doctor from Wakefield. Worse still, his photograph, which had been in the morning papers, suggested that he had olive skin.
To a certain – frighteningly large – section of the British public, this alone would be enough to hang him.
Some years before, Sir Edward Marshall Hall, often described as the greatest advocate England has ever known, had played hard on the jury’s bigotry in his defence of Marguerite Fahmy, a Frenchwoman who had shot and killed her Egyptian husband, Prince Fahmy Bey, suggesting that the gun was the only defence a decent European woman would have against the vile sexual habits of a more exotic foreigner. It worked. Despite the weight of evidence against her, the jury acquitted and she walked free.
If a white woman could kill an Egyptian and get away with it, an Egyptian who killed a white woman would not stand a chance. Skelton imagined counsel for the prosecution suggesting, if not overtly stating, that foreigners who marry Englishwomen only do so in order to make it easier to cut them up and put them into suitcases.
It wasn’t just the man on the Clapham omnibus that harboured these prejudices either. Luminaries like H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell had all spoken out in favour of the science of ‘eugenics’, advocating it as a possible solution to mankind’s problems. They all believed in ‘selective breeding’ of the human race and more particularly the British race. Some suggested a ‘procreation licence’ so that only those judged to be mentally and physically tip-top would be allowed to breed at all. Others favoured compulsory sterilisation of the weak and feeble in body or mind. Still others – although none of the beliefs were mutually exclusive – sought to forbid marriage between British men and women, and people of other races.
Skelton wondered what they’d make of him, born with a defective hip and married to a woman who was one-quarter Swedish. He couldn’t see the sense in any of it. ‘Selective breeding’ never worked. A ratty old mongrel, for instance, is nearly always tougher and lives longer that a pure-bred King Charles Spaniel – or even a British Bulldog.
‘They’ll convict him as soon as they look at him,’ Edgar said.
‘Was it Duxford who used to say that the presumption of innocence is the bedrock of English common law,’ Skelton said, ‘which is why it doesn’t apply to foreigners? And a foreigner accused of killing an Englishwoman—’
‘She’s not actually English.’
‘No?’
‘Scottish. And, I suppose, technically, she’s Egyptian.’
