‘How long did you stay there?’
‘For another couple of hours. In the end, my patience snapped. I felt I’d been short-changed. I didn’t laugh at him, Mr Devlin, I’m not one of those women who mock a man who can’t perform. Christ, if I was, I’d have been murdered myself a dozen times over. But I’d had enough.’
‘What did Edwin do?’
‘Begged me to stay, didn’t he? I often wonder, you know, if things would have turned out differently if I had. But I’ve learned it’s no use fretting over what might have been.’
It was a lesson of life Harry was still struggling to absorb. He signalled for more drinks and asked, ‘What time did you leave?’
‘I was dressed again and out of the house by ten past six. I went out through the back gate, so as not to attract any attention. For once in my life, I wanted to be on my own. I felt bitter and frustrated, you have to remember that. The gate gave on to a path which took me to the main road and I caught a bus home. My mum was there, pissed out of her mind as per usual. I never had a father.’
‘And after you got home?’
‘Packed a bag and caught the last train to London, didn’t I? I thought maybe I’d make a fresh start. I didn’t leave a note, mum would only have used it to light the fire.’
‘How long did you stay down there?’
‘Until the winter. By then I’d realised the streets weren’t paved with gold. And after I get back here with my tail between my legs, what do I find? Only that Edwin Smith has just topped himself and everyone thinks it’s good riddance to a self-confessed strangler.’
‘Did the police ever approach you?’
She took a sip from her replenished glass. ‘No, why should they? As far as I can make out, Edwin never put me forward as an alibi. Too ashamed of his lack of performance, I suppose. And I didn’t even hear about the murder in Sefton Park while I was down in London.’
‘Seriously?’
‘I didn’t have a telly in those days and I never bothered with the London papers. It was only when I got back that I read a few snippets in the Echo about the case. I worked out that this Carole was his neighbour, the girl he’d watched from the window. At first I thought that after I left he must have gone out himself, caught up with her and done her in. But then I realised it simply wasn’t possible.’
‘Why?’
She banged her glass down on the bar and concentrated her attention on him. In a fierce voice she said, ‘Listen, I arrived at the house at half two. Looking forward to afternoon tea in the lap of luxury, bloody young idiot that I was. The earliest Edwin could have strangled the girl was a quarter past six.’ She drained her glass, as if in need of strength. ‘Yet the Echo said Carole Jeffries was murdered sometime between four o’clock and five at the latest. I couldn’t make sense of it, so I rang the reporter, telling him some cock-and-bull story. But he was definite: there was no mistake. They could fix the time because Carole only left her parents’ house at four and by five a courting couple had started canoodling on a bench only yards away from the bushes where her body was found. As the man said to me, the pair of them may have been engrossed with each other, but no murderer in his right mind was going to take the risk of dragging a corpse right under their noses whilst they were snogging.’
‘Did you discuss this with anyone?’
‘Who? Edwin had confessed, hadn’t he? If he’d wanted to take the blame, who was I to stand in his way? Besides, he was beyond my help by then. It wasn’t as though he was about to be hung — or even spend the rest of his days inside.’
‘And what about his mother? She had to live with the belief that her son was a murderer.’
‘I was seventeen,’ said Renata helplessly. ‘I’d never met her and besides, I didn’t want to be any more involved with the police than I had to. While I was down in London, you see, I’d picked up a conviction. Soliciting. So much for the bloody glamour and the bright lights.’ She finished the rest of her drink. ‘Any chance of another?’
When it came, she tossed it all down in two or three gulps. ‘Look, when I saw Miller’s advert, I knew I had to give him a call. I’ve been married twice and had more men that you’ve had hot dinners, but until last week I’d kept my secret in silence. It’s been preying on my mind for so long. When I spoke to Miller, it was like a dam bursting.’ She shook her head. ‘All this time, I’ve been wanting someone to realise that, for all his faults, that pathetic little creep Edwin never murdered anybody in his life.’
And as Harry watched, she cradled her head in her hands and, oblivious of the barmaid’s baffled stare, began to weep for the young man she had walked out on thirty years before.
Chapter Sixteen
Next morning Harry was back in the bargain basement of the legal system, down at the magistrates’ court appearing on behalf of a couple of careless drivers and a positively negligent car thief who had managed to leave a letter to him from the social security office tucked under the dashboard. When the last case had been heard, he paused on his way out to look at the news-
stand adjacent to the courtroom entrance. The face of Jeannie Walter beamed out at him from under a banner headline saying JUSTICE IS DONE — BUT WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG?
Edwin Smith and his mother might ask much the same question, he reflected. In the small hours, he had finally poured a sobbing Renata into the taxi he’d called to take her back home. By then she had become maudlin and was blaming herself for Edwin’s suicide. ‘If only I’d stayed with him,’ she kept saying, ‘he would still be alive today.’
‘You can’t rewrite the past,’ he’d told her, although he had himself often wanted to do exactly that.
At least, he thought, in death both Edwin Smith and Ernest Miller had been vindicated. Edwin was no killer and the strange old man’s hunch about the case had been proved right. Harry could imagine Miller, following his retirement, recalling what his wife had once told him about Edwin’s short-lived attempt to withdraw his confession; perhaps she’d had more sense than Cyril Tweats and had realised that it rang true. But only once one understood how Edwin knew what Carole had been wearing did it become clear that the corroborative evidence so crucial to the assumption of his guilt really had no substance at all. When, following the humiliation with Renata, he had confessed to the crime, he must have guessed at the ligature used by the real killer, knowing already that Carole had been strangled and was wearing a scarf when she took her last stroll through the park. Harry thought the conversation with Carole was too vivid to have been a total fabrication. He guessed Edwin had tried to chat her up on a previous occasion and received the crushing rebuff he had described to the police. As for Miller, what had he learned from Ray Brill about the case — and who had called at the scruffy house in Everton on the evening of the fatal asthma attack?
‘Wondering how many copies to buy of Jeannie Walter’s exclusive interview?’ asked Kim Lawrence in his ear.
He turned to face her. ‘I don’t think I’ll bother.’
‘Why not? You’re bound to be mentioned.’
‘I don’t think my ego would stand the strain. Besides, I’ve already come to earth with a bump after yesterday’s excitements. Petty crime, fines and probation. No travesties of justice this time. How about you?’
‘A shoplifting single mother. She turned up with a bruise under her eye — her boyfriend’s been beating her black and blue.’ Kim sighed. ‘Any news about your Sefton Park case?’