Death of an Expert Witness Read online

  Brenda Pridmore had been allowed to collect the exhibits-received book from the counter and, white-faced but outwardly composed, was checking the previous month’s figures. The book took more than its share of the available table space; but at least she had a legitimate job. Claire Easterbrook, Senior Scientific Officer in the Biology Department and, with Lorrimer’s death, the Senior Biologist, had taken from her briefcase a scientific paper she had prepared on recent advances in blood grouping and settled down to revise it with as little apparent concern as if murder at Hoggatt’s were a routine inconvenience for which, prudently, she was always provided.

  The rest of the staff passed the time each in his own way. Those who preferred the pretence of business immersed themselves in a book and, from time to time, made an ostentatious note. The two Vehicle Examiners, who were reputed to have no conversation except about cars, squatted side by side, their backs against the steel book-racks, and talked cars together with desperate eagerness. Middlemass had finished the Times crossword by quarter to ten and had made the rest of the paper last as long as possible. But now even the deaths column was exhausted. He folded the paper and tossed it across the table to eagerly awaiting hands.

  It was a relief when Stephen Copley, the Senior Chemist, arrived just before ten, bustling in as usual, his rubicund face with its tonsure and fringe of black curly hair glistening as if he had come in from the sun. Nothing was known to disconcert him, certainly not the death of a man he had disliked. But he was secure in his alibi, having spent the whole of the previous day in the Crown Court and the evening and night with friends at Norwich, only getting back to Chevisham in time for a late start that morning. His colleagues, relieved to find something to talk about, began questioning him about the case. They spoke rather too loudly to be natural. The rest of the company listened with simulated interest as if the conversation were a dramatic dialogue provided for their entertainment.

  “Who did they call for the defence?” asked Middlemass.

  “Charlie Pollard. He hung his great belly over the box and explained confidentially to the jury that they needn’t be frightened of the so-called scientific expert witnesses because none of us, including himself of course, really know what we’re talking about. They were immensely reassured, I need hardly say.”

  “Juries hate scientific evidence.”

  “They think they won’t be able to understand it, so naturally they can’t understand it. As soon as you step into the box you see a curtain of obstinate incomprehension clanging down over their minds. What they want is certainty. Did this paint particle come from this car body? Answer Yes or No. None of those nasty mathematical probabilities we’re so fond of.”

  “If they hate scientific evidence they certainly hate arithmetic more. Give them a scientific opinion which depends on the ability to divide a factor by two-thirds and what do you get from counsel? ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to explain yourself more simply, Mr. Middlemass. The jury and I haven’t got a higher degree in mathematics, you know.’ Inference: you’re an arrogant bastard and the jury would be well advised not to believe a word you say.”

  It was the old argument. Brenda had heard it all before when she ate her lunchtime sandwiches in the room, halfway between a kitchen and a sitting room, which was still called the Junior Mess. But now it seemed terrible that they should be able to talk so naturally while Dr. Lorrimer lay there dead upstairs. Suddenly she had a need to speak his name.

  She looked up and made herself say: “Dr. Lorrimer thought that the Service would end up with about three immense laboratories doing the work for the whole country with exhibits coming in by air. He said that he thought all the scientific evidence ought to be agreed by both sides before the trial.”

  Middlemass said easily: “That’s an old argument. The police want a local lab nice and handy, and who’s to blame them? Besides, three-quarters of forensic scientific work doesn’t require all this sophisticated instrumentation. There’s more of a case for highly equipped regional laboratories with local out-stations. But who’d want to work in the small labs if the more exciting stuff went elsewhere?”

  Miss Easterbrook had apparently finished her revision. She said: “Lorrimer knew that this idea of the lab as a scientific arbiter wouldn’t work, not with the British accusatorial system. Anyway, scientific evidence ought to be tested like any other evidence.”

  “But how?” asked Middlemass. “By an ordinary jury? Suppose you’re an expert document examiner outside the Service and they call you for the defence. You and I disagree. How can the jury judge between us? They’ll probably choose to believe you because you’re better looking.”

  “Or you, more likely, because you’re a man.”

  “Or one of them—the crucial one—will reject me because I remind him of Uncle Ben and all the family know that Ben was the world’s champion liar.”

  “All right. All right.” Copley spread plump hands in a benediction of appeasement. “It’s the same as democracy. A fallible system but the best we’ve got.”

  Middlemass said: “It’s extraordinary, though, how well it works. You look at the jury, sitting there politely attentive, like children on their best behaviour because they’re visitors in an alien country and don’t want to make fools of themselves or offend the natives. Yet how often do they come up with a verdict that’s manifestly perverse having regard to the evidence?”

  Claire Easterbrook said drily: “Whether it’s manifestly perverse having regard to the truth is another matter.”

  “A criminal trial isn’t a tribunal for eliciting the truth. At least we deal in facts. What about the emotion? Did you love your husband, Mrs. B.? How can the poor woman explain that, probably like the majority of wives, she loved him most of the time, when he didn’t snore in her ear all night or shout at the kids or keep her short of bingo money.”

  Copley said: “She can’t. If she’s got any sense and if her counsel has briefed her properly, she’ll get out her hankerchief and sob, ‘Oh yes, sir. A better husband never lived, as God’s my witness.’ It’s a game, isn’t it? You win if you play by the rules.”

  Claire Easterbrook shrugged. “If you know them. Too often it’s a game where the rules are known only to one side. Natural enough when that’s the side which makes them up.”

  Copley and Middlemass laughed. Clifford Bradley had half hidden himself from the rest of the company behind the table holding the model of the new Laboratory. He had taken a book from the shelves at random but, for the last ten minutes, hadn’t even bothered to turn the page.

  They were laughing! They were actually laughing! Getting up from the table he groped his way down the furthest bay and replaced his book in the rack, leaning his forehead against the cold steel.

  Unobtrusively Middlemass strolled up beside him and, back to the company, reached up to take a book from the shelf. He said: “Are you all right?”

  “I wish to God they’d come.”

  “So do we all. But the chopper should be here any minute now.”

  “How can they laugh like that? Don’t they care?”

  “Of course they care. Murder is beastly, embarrassing and inconvenient. But I doubt whether anyone is feeling a purely personal grief. And other people’s tragedies, other people’s danger, always provoke a certain euphoria as long as one is safe oneself.” He looked at Bradley and said softly: “There’s always manslaughter, you know. Or even justified homicide. Though, come to think of it, one could hardly plead that.”

  “You think I killed him, don’t you?”

  “I don’t think anything. Anyway, you’ve got an alibi. Wasn’t your mother-in-law with you yesterday evening?”

  “Not all the evening. She caught the seven-forty-five bus.”

  “Well, with luck, there’ll be evidence that he was dead by then.” And why, thought Middlemass, should Bradley assume that he wasn’t?

  Bradley’s dark and anxious eyes narrowed with suspicion. “How did you know that Sue’s mother was with us last nig
ht?”

  “Susan told me. Actually, she telephoned me at the Lab just before two. It was about Lorrimer.”

  He thought and then said easily, “She was wondering whether there was a chance he might ask for a transfer now that Howarth has been in his post a year. She thought I might have heard something. When you get home, tell her that I don’t propose to tell the police about the call unless she does first. Oh, and you’d better reassure her that I didn’t bash in his head for him. I’d do a lot for Sue, but a man has to draw the line somewhere.”

  Bradley said with a note of resentment: “Why should you worry? There’s nothing wrong with your alibi. Weren’t you at the village concert?”

  “Not all the evening. And there’s a certain slight embarrassment about my alibi even when I was ostensibly there.”

  Bradley turned to him and said with sudden vehemence: “I didn’t do it! Oh God, I can’t stand this waiting!”

  “You’ve got to stand it. Pull yourself together, Cliff! You won’t help yourself or Susan by going to pieces. They’re English policemen, remember. We’re not expecting the KGB.”

  It was then that they heard the long-awaited sound, a distant grinding hum like that of an angry wasp. The desultory voices at the tables fell silent, heads were raised and, together, the company moved towards the windows. Mrs. Bidwell rushed for a place of vantage. The red and white helicopter rattled into sight over the top of the trees and hovered, a noisy gadfly, above the terraces. No one spoke.

  Then Middlemass said: “The Yard’s wonder boy, appropriately, descends from the clouds. Well, let’s hope that he works quickly. I want to get into my lab. Someone should tell him that he’s not the only one with a murder on his hands.”

  4

  Detective Inspector the Honourable John Massingham disliked helicopters, which he regarded as noisy, cramped and frighteningly unsafe. Since his physical courage was beyond question either by himself or anyone else, he would normally have had no objection to saying so. But he knew his chief’s dislike of unnecessary chat, and strapped as they were side by side in uncomfortably close proximity in the Enstrom F28, he decided that the Chevisham case would get off to the most propitious start by a policy of disciplined silence. He noted with interest that the cockpit instrument panel was remarkably similar to a car dashboard; even the airspeed was shown in miles per hour instead of knots. He was only sorry that there the resemblance ended. He adjusted his earphones more comfortably and settled down to soothe his nerves by a concentrated study of his maps.

  The red-brown tentacles of London’s suburbs had at last been shaken off, and the chequered autumn landscape, multi-textured as a cloth collage, unrolled before them in a changing pattern of brown, green and gold, leading them on to Cambridge. The fitful sunshine moved in broad swathes across the neat, segmented villages, the trim municipal parks and open fields. Miniature tin cars, beetle-bright in the sun, pursued each other busily along the roads.

  Dalgliesh glanced at his companion, at the strong, pale face, the spatter of freckles over the craggy nose and wide forehead, and the thatch of red hair springing under the headphones, and thought how like the boy was to his father, that redoubtable, thrice-decorated peer, whose courage was equalled only by his obstinacy and naïvety. The marvel of the Massinghams was that a lineage going back five hundred years could have produced so many generations of amiable nonentities. He remembered when he had last seen Lord Dungannon. It had been a debate in the House of Lords on juvenile delinquency, a subject on which His Lordship considered himself an expert since he had, indubitably, once been a boy and had, briefly, helped organize a youth club on his grandfather’s estate. His thoughts, when they finally came, had been uttered in all their simplistic banality, in no particular order of logic or relevance, and in a curiously gentle voice punctuated by long pauses in which he had gazed thoughtfully at the throne and appeared to commune happily with some inner presence. Meanwhile, like lemmings who have smelt the sea, the noble lords streamed out of their chamber in a body to appear, as if summoned by telepathy, when Dungannon’s speech drew to its close. But if the family had contributed nothing to statesmanship and little to the arts, they had died with spectacular gallantry for orthodox causes in every generation.

  And now Dungannon’s heir had chosen this far-from-orthodox job. It would be interesting to see if, for the first time and in so unusual a field, the family achieved distinction. What had led Massingham to choose the police service instead of his family’s usual career of the Army as an outlet for his natural combativeness and unfashionable patriotism Dalgliesh had not inquired, partly because he was a respecter of other men’s privacy, and partly because he wasn’t sure that he wanted to hear the answer. So far Massingham had done exceptionally well. The police were a tolerant body and took the view that a man couldn’t help who his father was. They accepted that Massingham had gained his promotion on merit although they were not so naïve as to suppose that being the elder son of a peer did any man harm. They called Massingham the Honjohn behind his back and occasionally to his face, and bore no malice.

  Although the family was now impoverished and the estate sold—Lord Dungannon was bringing up his considerable family in a modest villa in Bayswater—the boy had still gone to his father’s school. No doubt, thought Dalgliesh, the old warrior was unaware that other schools existed; like every other class, the aristocracy, however poor, could always find the money for the things they really wanted. But he was an odd product of that establishment, having none of the slightly dégagé elegance and ironic detachment which characterized its alumni. Dalgliesh, if he hadn’t known his history, would have guessed that Massingham was the product of a sound, upper-middle-class family—a doctor or a solicitor, perhaps—and of an old established grammar school. It was only the second time they had worked together. The first time, Dalgliesh had been impressed by Massingham’s intelligence and enormous capacity for work, and by his admirable ability to keep his mouth shut and to sense when his chief wanted to be alone. He had also been struck by a streak of ruthlessness in the boy which, he thought, ought not to have surprised him since he knew that, as with all good detectives, it must be present.

  And now the Enstrom was rattling above the towers and spires of Cambridge, and they could see the shining curve of the river, the bright autumnal avenues leading down through green lawns to miniature hump-backed bridges, King’s College Chapel upturned and slowly rotating beside its great striped square of green. And, almost immediately, the city was behind them and they saw, like a crinkled ebony sea, the black earth of the fens. Below them were straight roads ridged above the fields, with villages strung along them as if clinging to the security of high ground; isolated farms with their roofs so low that they looked half submerged in the peat; an occasional church tower standing majestically apart from its village with the gravestones planted round it like crooked teeth. They must be getting close now; already Dalgliesh could see the soaring west tower and pinnacles of Ely Cathedral to the east.

  Massingham looked up from his map-reading and peered down. His voice cracked through Dalgliesh’s earphones: “This is it, sir.”

  Chevisham was spread beneath them. It lay on a narrow plateau above the fens, the houses strung along the northerly of two converging roads. The tower of the impressive cruciform church was immediately identifiable, as was Chevisham Manor and, behind it, sprawling over the scarred field and linking the two roads, the brick and concrete of the new Laboratory building. They rattled along the main street of what looked like a typical East Anglian village. Dalgliesh glimpsed the ornate red-brick front of the local chapel, one or two prosperous-looking houses with Dutch gables, a small close of recently built, semi-detached boxes with the developer’s board still in place, and what looked like the village general store and post office. There were few people about, but the noise of the engines brought figures from shops and houses, and pale faces, their eyes shielded, strained up at them.

  And now they were turning towards Hoggatt�
�s Laboratory, coming in low over what must be the Wren chapel. It stood about a quarter of a mile from the house in a triple circle of beech trees, an isolated building so small and perfect that it looked like an architect’s model precisely set in a fabricated landscape, or an elegant ecclesiastical folly, justifying itself only by its classical purity, as distanced from religion as it was from life. It was odd that it lay so far from the house. Dalgliesh thought that it had probably been built later, perhaps because the original owner of the mansion had quarrelled with the local parson and, in defiance, had decided to make his own arrangements for spiritual ministrations. Certainly the house hardly looked large enough to support a private chapel. For a few seconds as they descended, he had an unimpeded view through a gap in the trees of the west front of the chapel. He saw a single high-arched window with two balancing niches, the four Corinthian pilasters separating the bays, the whole crowned with a large decorated pediment and topped with a hexagonal lantern. The helicopter seemed almost to be brushing the trees. The brittle autumn leaves, shaken by the rush of air, flurried down like a shower of charred paper over the roof and the bright green of the grass.

  And then, sickeningly, the helicopter soared, the chapel lurched out of sight and they were poised, engines rattling, ready to land on the wide terrace behind the house. Over its roof he could see the forecourt patterned with parking lots, the police cars tidily aligned and what looked like a mortuary van. A broad drive, bordered with straggling bushes and a few trees, led down to what the map showed as Stoney Piggott’s Road. There was no gate to the driveway. Beyond it he could see the bright flag of a bus stop and the bus shelter. Then the helicopter began to descend and only the rear of the house was in view. Through a ground-floor window he could see the smudges of watching faces.