‘He had to be. If that had been anyone else getting into his car, he’d have been face to face with our man, and then he’d have been a goner. Tonight, we double last night’s strength, in the area from the Castle to Holyrood Palace. Everyone warned about the car. And I want a dozen armed men in the area. That includes you and me.’
13
Rachel Jameson arrived home at 6.45 p.m. She still ached from the loss of Mortimer, but she had decided against asking the Dean to grant her leave from practice. Instead, she had chosen work as her solace. In her line of business, that had meant acting for the defence in a nasty rape trial in the High Court in Glasgow.
The first day had been taken up by the empanelling of the jury, and the opening statements of counsel. The second, which had ended that afternoon at 4.25 p.m., had seen the alleged victim spend four and a half hours in the witness box.
Patrick McCann, Rachel’s client, was a dark man in his late twenties. The rape of which he was accused was particularly brutal, with the victim having been mutilated after the attack.
The trial troubled Rachel; she knew with utter certainty that her client was guilty. The girl, who had been attacked in her own home, had known McCann by sight and reputation. The weapon had been found, with blood patches, consistent with the victim’s group, on the handle, and with clear prints of the accused’s thumb and two fingers.
All the forensic evidence backed up the Crown argument. To cap it all, the victim, who had been forced to have every kind of sex with her attacker, had described in detail a brown mole on the right side of the man’s penis.
Rachel’s advice to her client, endorsed by the instructing solicitor, had been quite clear. ‘Plead guilty. If you go to trial you will be convicted and the judge will probably give you a life sentence. Plead, save the woman the ordeal of a trial, and keep detailed evidence from the Bench, and I might, just might; be able to keep it down to about eight years.’
McCann had looked at her with the arrogant eyes of a psychopath. ‘No way, miss. She was wantin’ it all. The stuff with the knife she made up.’
Occasionally, an advocate will come across a client who is pure evil. Rachel recognised this in Patrick McCann. She knew that at fifteen, he had knifed a schoolmate to death in a brawl which had followed McCann’s attack on the boy’s sixteen-year-old sister. She knew also that he was the chief suspect in two recent, and still unsolved, murders of drug users.
But an advocate does not have the option of shunning such a creature Justice and the Faculty regulations demand that any person on a criminal charge should have the benefit of the best available defence. Rachel’s performance in the Chinese trial had added to her reputation as a High Court pleader. Her clerk’s recommendation that she should be given the McCann brief was sound and natural, and she was available.
All that day, as the Advocate Depute had extracted skilfully from the terrified victim, an account of the night that had changed her life, Rachel had looked on, hardening her heart against thoughts of sympathy. Occasionally, she had glanced across at her client. All the while that the woman stood in the witness box, McCann had kept his dark gaze fixed upon her. The victim’s evidence in chief had ended with the day’s session. Tomorrow Rachel would cross-examine.
Normally she would have been preparing her examination in her mind. Instead, as she soaked her neat little body in her pink bathtub, sipping occasionally from a gin-and-tonic on the cabinet by her head, Rachel wept softly.
Everything about the trial reminded her of Mike Mortimer, with whom she had made love in the same bathtub only a week before. It reminded her of his style of advocacy, direct, yet sympathetic, in difficult situations like the Chinese trial, where he had been as kind as possible to the parents of the victim, while fighting as hard as possible for his client.
She knew that in the cross-examination to come she would be unable to mix consideration with effectiveness. That poor woman was in for a hard time, just as hard as Lord Orlach, the trial judge, would allow.
And even as she planned her strategy for the next day, the secret fear which had been growing in her all afternoon came to the surface. The Crown’s proof was strong, but like all rape trials, the issue hinged on the credibility of the woman in the witness box, and on the jury being left in no doubt that she had been violated.
That woman today was a lousy witness, thoughtRachel. It was natural enough, but if she was scared under the kindly eye of the old judge, and under the protection of the Advocate Depute, how would she react when Rachel went on the offensive in cross-examination?
Suppose, just suppose, that she won a Not Guilty, or even just a Not Proven, the third option in Scotland’s unique trinity of verdicts. The animal McCann would be out on the street, to rape again undoubtedly, and in all probability, to kill.
It was a dilemma which all advocates know they may have to face. It was worst for women counsel in rape trials. But even as the tears for her lost Mike trickled down her face, Rachel had no doubt. She would go all out tomorrow. Justice demanded it. That was what the job was about.
As the bath water cooled, and as the ice melted in her gin-and-tonic, another worry, forgotten earlier gnawed its way through to the surface of Rachel’s thoughts. It centred around that stony, impassive Japanese figure sat on the back row of the public benches.
‘What the hell was he doing there?’ Alone in her bathroom, she asked the question aloud, as if Mike was still there to answer.
14
The night’s stake-out in the Royal Mile produced nothing, or almost nothing. At 4.15 a.m. an armed detective constable came within two seconds of opening fire on a black cross-bred Alsatian Labrador which had ignored three commands to stand still in a dark corner of Gladstone’s Land.
At 5.45 a.m. a uniformed policeman, the giant found by Martin to test the cutting edge of the weapon in the Mortimer killing, snapped a powerful armlock on a dark-suited man in Campbell’s Close, dislocating the man’s elbow. Detective Sergeant Brian Mackie, a firearms specialist called in for the night patrol, was taken for treatment to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary’s casualty department.
As he switched off his radio after standing his men down for the night, Skinner muttered to Martin, ‘Keystone bloody coppers, that’s us!’
They were wearier than their men. They had been on the move for more than twenty-four hours, having broken off only for a quick meal.
‘You know, Andy,’ said Skinner, trapping a butterfly prawn with his chopsticks, ‘the police who investigated the original Ripper murders claimed afterwards that they sensed when he had stopped. They said that the evil went out of the air in Whitechapel. I’ve always thought that was a load of fanciful shite. I’ve never accepted the Ripper mystique. He was just another bad bastard who didn’t get caught... Or maybe he did!’
Martin’s eyebrows rose over tired eyes. ‘Oh yes, who do you think did it then?’
Skinner smiled. ‘The novelist in me has always reckoned that it was the Duke of Clarence, and that the whole thing was hushed up. The Home Office was very careless with a hell of a lot of files, mind.
‘But like everyone else who hasn’t seen those files, I haven’t a clue. I’ll tell you what I wish, though. I wish I had ten per cent of all the money that’s been made by clever people writing books and making films about old Jack. If he’d been nicked, tried and topped, and had turned out to be just another run-of-the mill sadist with a taste for human kidneys, then a whole industry would never have been born. But going back to what I said earlier. I’ve got a funny feeling that we won’t see this fella back here.’