‘Thanks,’ I said, and went on through to my room.
I called Bruce Lygon. He had left a message after the magistrates’ hearing but I needed him to do more.
‘Bruce,’ I said when he answered. ‘I want to visit the crime scene. Can you fix it with the police?’ The lawyers for the accused were entitled to have access to the scene but at the discretion of the police, and not prior to the collection of forensic evidence.
‘With or without me?’ he asked.
‘As you like,’ I said. ‘But as soon as possible, please.’
‘Does this mean you will act for him?’ he asked.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ I said. ‘Not yet. It might help me make up my mind.’
‘But only his representatives have access,’ he said.
I knew. ‘If you don’t tell the police,’ I said, ‘then they will never know.’
‘Right,’ he said slowly. I felt that he was confused. He was not the only one.
‘And can you arrange an interview for me with Mitchell at Bullingdon?’
‘But you’re not…’ he tailed off. ‘I suppose it might be possible,’ he said finally.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow would be great.’
‘Right,’ he said again. ‘I’ll get back to you then.’
Bruce had been a lucky choice. He was so keen to be representing his celebrity client that he seemed happy to overlook a few departures from proper procedure, to bend the rules just a little. I decided not to tell Arthur what was going on. He wouldn’t have been the least bit flexible.
Steve Mitchell was very agitated when I met him at noon the following day at Bullingdon Prison. I currently didn’t own a car as I found it an unnecessary expense, especially with the congestion charge and the ever-rising cost of parking in London. However, I probably spent at least half of what I saved on hiring cars from the Hertz office on Fulham Palace Road. This time they had provided me with a bronze-coloured Ford Mondeo that had easily swallowed up the fifty or so miles to Oxfordshire.
‘God, Perry,’ Steve said as he came into the stark prison interview room reserved for lawyers to meet with their clients. ‘Get me out of this bloody place.’
‘I’ll try,’ I said, not wishing to dash his hopes too quickly.
He marched round the room. ‘I didn’t bloody do it,’ he said. ‘I swear to you I never did it.’
‘Just sit down,’ I said. Reluctantly, he ceased his pacing and sat on a grey steel stool beside the grey steel table and I sat on a similar stool opposite him. These functional items, along with two more identical stools, were securely fastened with bolts to the bare grey concrete floor. The room was about eight foot square with sickly cream walls. The only light came from a large, energy-efficient fluorescent bulb surrounded by a wire cage in the centre of the white ceiling. Absolutely no expense had been wasted on comfort.
‘I didn’t do it,’ he said again. ‘I tell you, I’m being framed.’
As it happened, I believed him. In the past I’d had clients who had sworn blind that they were innocent and were being framed, and experience had taught me not to believe most of them. One client had once sworn to me on his mother’s life that he was innocent of setting fire to his own house for the insurance money, only for the said mother to confess that she and her son had planned it together. When she gave evidence against him in court, he had shouted from the dock that he’d kill her. So much for her life.
However, in Steve’s case I had other reasons for believing him.
‘Who’s framing you?’ I asked him.
‘I’ve got no bloody idea,’ he said. ‘That’s for you to find out.’
‘Who is Julian Trent?’ I asked him calmly.
‘Who?’ he said.
‘Julian Trent,’ I repeated.
‘Never heard of him,’ Steve said. Not a flicker in his eyes, not a fraction of hesitation in his voice. Asking questions for a living, I believed I was a reasonable judge of when someone was lying. But I was not infallible. Over the years I had frequently believed people who were telling me lies, but it was not often that I discovered that someone I thought was lying was actually being truthful. Either Steve was being straight with me, or he was fairly good at lying.
‘Who is he?’ Steve asked.
‘No one important,’ I said. It was my turn to lie. ‘I just wondered if you knew him.’
‘Should I?’ he asked.
‘No reason you should,’ I said. I decided to change the subject. ‘So why do the police think you killed Scot Barlow?’
‘Because they just do,’ he answered unhelpfully.
‘But they must have some evidence,’ I said.
‘It seems that it was my bloody pitchfork stuck into the little bastard.’ I could imagine that Steve referring to Barlow as ‘the little bastard’ hadn’t gone down too well with the police. ‘And would I be so stupid to have killed the little bastard with my own pitchfork? At least I would have then taken the bloody thing home again.’
‘What else do they have?’ I asked him.
‘Something about spots of his blood and some of his hairs being found in my car, and his blood being on my boots. It’s all bloody nonsense. I was never in his house.’
‘So where exactly were you when he was killed?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘They haven’t told me when he actually died. But they did ask me what I was doing between one and six on Monday afternoon. I told them I was riding at Ludlow races. But I wasn’t. The meeting was abandoned due to the bloody course being waterlogged.’
That was really stupid, I thought. Lying wouldn’t have exactly endeared him to the police, and it was so easy for them to check.
‘So where were you?’ I asked him again.
He seemed reluctant to tell me, so I sat and waited in silence.
‘At home,’ he said eventually.
‘On your own?’ I pressed him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was alone reading all afternoon.’
Now he was lying. I was sure of it and I didn’t like it.
‘That’s a shame,’ I said. ‘If someone was with you, they would be able to give you an alibi.’
He sat silently.
‘Do you know what the word “alibi” means?’ I asked him. He shook his head. ‘It’s Latin. It means “somewhere else”. An unshakeable alibi is proof of innocence.’ I tried to lighten the atmosphere. ‘And even you, Steve, couldn’t be in two places at once. Are you sure you were alone all afternoon?’
‘Absolutely,’ he said, affronted. ‘Are you saying I’m a liar?’ He stood up and looked at me.
‘No, of course not,’ I said. But he was. ‘I’m just trying to make sure you remembered correctly.’
I rather hoped he would sit down again but he paced round the room like a caged tiger.
‘I’ll tell you what I do remember,’ he said to my back. ‘I remember that I’ve never been in Scot Barlow’s house. Not on Monday. Not ever. I didn’t even know where the little bastard lived.’
‘What about the text message?’ I said. ‘The one saying you were coming round to sort him out.’
‘I didn’t send any bloody text message,’ he replied. ‘And certainly not to him.’
Surely, I thought, the police must have the phone records.
He walked around in front of me and sat down again.
‘It doesn’t look too good, does it?’ he said.
‘No, Steve, it doesn’t.’ We sat there in silence for a few moments. ‘Who would gain from Barlow’s death?’ I asked him.
‘Reno Clemens must be laughing all the way to the winning post,’ he said. ‘With Barlow dead and me in here, he’s got rid of both of us.’
I thought it unlikely that Clemens would go to the extent of murder and a frame-up to simply get rid of his racing rivals. But hadn’t someone once tried to break the leg of a skating rival for that very reason?
‘I didn’t do it, you know.’ He looked up at me. ‘Not that I’m sorry he’s dead.’
‘What was there between you two?’ I asked. ‘Why did you hate him so much?’ I thought that I wouldn’t ask him about the incident in the showers at Sandown. Not yet. Much better, at the moment, if absolutely no one knew I had seen Barlow lying in the shower, and what he had said to me.