‘You’re late!’ complained Suzanne as he approached.
He couldn’t deny it. Already the clock showed ten past nine. He had overslept after a night interrupted by two or three wakings from grim dreams in which the sight of Ernest Miller’s corpse was a recurrent and inescapable image.
‘Never mind that. What’s going on?’
‘We’ve been burgled!’ said the girl, opening her eyes wide and making a dramatic gesture with her arms.
His immediate reaction was amazement rather than shock and as if reading his mind, Jim Crusoe walked through the door, accompanied by a young woman constable to whom he was saying, ‘Who would want to rob us? After all, most of the petty thieves in Liverpool city centre are our own clients.’
‘If this is the work of anyone I act for, you shouldn’t be short of clues,’ Harry told the policewoman. ‘Fingerprints, fibres, driving licences, you name it, my clients usually scatter them at the scene of the crime. They aren’t exactly master criminals. I sometimes think Charlie Pearce must be spinning round in his grave.’
A faint smile spread across the woman’s face. ‘Burglars just don’t take a pride in their work these days.’
‘This is Detective Constable Lynn DeFreitas,’ said Jim. ‘Lynn, meet my partner, Harry Devlin.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said, extending a hand. She was slim and pretty and had an air of quiet authority. ‘Well, at least you seem to have got off quite lightly.’
‘Much taken?’ asked Harry.
Jim shook his head. ‘Not as far as I can see. The door into the book-keeper’s room hasn’t been forced and the typewriters and office equipment seem to be all present and correct.’
Harry could have sworn there was a note of regret in his partner’s voice. No excuse to buy a new computer system on the contents insurance, then.
‘Looks like the work of one of two kids,’ said Lynn DeFreitas. ‘I gather you don’t keep much money on the premises.’
‘Barely enough to pay for an hour of your overtime,’ said Harry. ‘It makes more sense to rob a church poor box than a solicitor’s office. Mind you, there are blank cheques, of course…’
‘Not touched,’ confirmed Jim.
‘Did the alarm go off?’
‘It was disabled. The buggers knew what they were doing.’
Amazing, Harry thought gloomily. The salesman had sworn it was a state of the art system and it had certainly caught him out on his nocturnal office visit last December. So much for security technology. ‘Is that my window they came in through?’
‘Yes. They seem to have started there and begun working their way back through the building before leaving in a hurry. Maybe they were disturbed.’
They had reached Harry’s door. ‘Anything of mine gone?’
Jim gestured toward the paper-strewn room and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Frankly, old son, who can tell?’
Harry winced as he stepped inside. The files he kept stacked on every available surface had collapsed on to the floor, spilling their contents everywhere. ‘You don’t understand my methods, that’s all. Normally, I can always lay my hand on a file any time I want it. But now it looks like a bomb has hit the place. Christ, I don’t know where to start.’
‘Personally,’ said Jim to Lynn DeFreitas as they followed him in, ‘I think this room looks just the same as usual. Tidier, if anything.’
‘Could they have been looking for anything in particular amongst your working papers?’ she asked.
‘In Harry’s room?’ scoffed Jim. ‘Talk about needles in haystacks. They’d have had to stay all night.’
‘But might there be sensitive information in one of your files?’ she persisted. ‘Something that someone would like to be kept quiet?’
Harry ran through his current caseload in his mind before shaking his head. ‘I can’t think of anything out of the ordinary.’
Lynn DeFreitas tiptoed through the mess towards the door. ‘Perhaps it was spite? A client who feels you’ve let him down?’
‘There are no such people,’ said Jim hastily. ‘This feller somehow manages to have the villains eating out of his hand.’
‘Chummy with the criminal classes, are you?’
‘Don’t worry, we know when to keep our distance.’
‘The last solicitor who said that to me is in Strangeways at present, serving eighteen months for assisting a client to escape from police custody.’ She smiled again to soften her words and Harry noticed the frank interest with which Jim returned her gaze. Pleasantly, she said, ‘Looks like common or garden vandalism, then.’
‘I guess. And thank God, it could have been so much worse.’
Harry followed them out and back down the corridor, but he said nothing. It had occurred to him that in his briefcase was one set of papers which would have meant nothing to any of his clients yet which might have been the object of the burglar’s search. He must look again at Cyril Tweats’ file on the strangling of Carole Jeffries.
He left Jim and the policewoman deep in conversation and his secretary Lucy to the thankless task of bringing a semblance of order to the chaos of his room. He had a date in court with Tina Turner.
Unfortunately, Bettina Mirabelle Turner, a twenty-seven-year-old white Caucasian female from a tower block in Dingle, was less glamorous than her celebrated namesake, although equally vivacious. This Tina was up for the umpteenth time on a soliciting charge and when the magistrates imposed a fine that she could pay off with a couple of afternoons’ work in one of the big city centre hotels, she blew them a kiss in relief and almost found herself locked up for contempt of court.
‘How’s business?’ asked Harry outside. He knew perfectly well that if the prospect of AIDS or a beating did not deter his client from her chosen profession, judicial sanctions were hardly likely to do so.
‘Never better, chuck,’ said Tina, showing countless teeth in a vast smile. ‘If I had another pair of legs, I’d open up in Manchester. Mind, some of me clients have fallen on hard times, like. Last week I asked this feller if he’d like a blow job and all he wanted to know was whether it would affect his dole money.’
Harry laughed and said goodbye, but rather than heading back for the office, he ensconced himself in the passenger seat of his MG and began to reread the Edwin Smith file.
Not one word, not one unguarded sentence gave him an inkling as to why any burglar might be desperate to steal the file from him. The only suggestion that Smith was innocent of the killing of Carole Jeffries came in the note of his prison cell retraction, which in turn had been so speedily retracted. Harry reflected that Lynn DeFreitas’ assumption that the break-in had been the work of a juvenile vandal, like so many simple solutions to seemingly baffling puzzles, was probably correct. He sighed and set off for his meeting in Sefton Park.
Everywhere was quiet as he parked his car opposite the lake. The trees were bare and the wind was sweeping through the wide open spaces. The place was deserted apart from the usual dauntless dog-walkers, a couple of truanting schoolboys and Ernest Miller, who was sitting on a bench overlooking the water, deep in thought. An empty plastic sandwich box, a thermos flask and the document case which seemed to act as his comfort blanket were at his side. Not until Harry was within a dozen yards did the old man look up.
‘You have made good time, Mr Devlin. Thank you for coming.’ The muscles around his mouth twitched in a smile as he waved a hand towards a neatly tended shrubbery. ‘So this is where it happened, all those years ago. Carole’s body was found over there, look. She was attacked on the path you see to your right and her killer then pulled her as far as a clump of bushes which used to grow where I am pointing.’
Harry contemplated the scene. It seemed so quiet and empty that a man with less imagination would have found it impossible to picture the crime. But the words from Edwin Smith’s confession statement echoed in Harry’s head. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but I really fancy you. Could this conversation with Carole on that fateful day have been fiction? Or was Miller mistaken and everyone else right all along?