Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

‘But isn’t he guilty, Rumpole? Isn’t that obvious?’

‘Of course he’s not guilty. He’s completely innocent. And will remain so until the jury come back into court and convict him. And that is to be their decision. And what the judge wants will have absolutely nothing to do with it!’

I may have gone too far, but I felt strongly on the subject. Judge Graves, however, seemed completely impervious to my attack. He stood, still smiling, warming his tweed-covered backside at the fire and repeated, ‘We really mustn’t discuss the case we’re involved in at the moment. Let’s remember, it is Christmas.’

‘Yes, Rumpole. It is Christmas.’ Hilda had cast herself, it seemed as Little Lady Echo to his Lordship.

‘That’s settled then. Look, why don’t I book a table for three at dinner?’ The judge was still smiling. ‘Wouldn’t that be tremendous fun?’

‘What a perfectly charming man Judge Graves is.’

These were words I never expected to hear spoken, but they contained the considered verdict of She Who Must be Obeyed before we settled down for the first night of our Christmas holiday. The food at dinner had been simple but good. (The entrecôte steak had not been arranged in a little tower swamped by tomato coulis and there had been a complete absence of roquette and all the idiocy of smart restaurants.) The Gravestone was clearly on the most friendly of terms with ‘Lorraine’, the manageress, and he and Hilda enjoyed a lengthy conversation on the subject of fishing, which sport Graves practised and on which Hilda was expert after her study of the back number of Country Life in the residents’ lounge.

Now and again I was asked why I didn’t go out on a day’s fishing with Hilda’s newfound friend the judge, a question I found as easy to answer as ‘Why don’t you take part in the London Marathon wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and a wig?’ For a greater part of the dinner I had sat, unusually silent, listening to the ceaseless chatter of the newfound friends, feeling as superfluous as a maiden aunt at a lovers’ meeting. Soon after telling me how charming she had found The Gravestone, Hilda had sank into a deep and contented sleep. As the moonlight streamed in at the window and I heard the faraway hooting of an owl, I began to worry about the case we hadn’t discussed at dinner.

I couldn’t forget my first meeting in Brixton Prison with my client, Hussein Khan. Although undoubtedly the author of the fatal letter, he didn’t seem, when I met him in the company of my faithful solicitor Bonny Bernard, to be the sort who would strike terror into the heart of anyone. He was short and unsmiling with soft brown eyes, a quiet monotonous voice, and unusually small hands. He wasn’t only uncomplaining, he seemed to find it the most natural thing in the world that he should find himself locked up and facing the most serious of all charges. It was, he told us early in the interview, the will of Allah, and if Allah willed, who was he, a 22-year-old undergraduate in computer studies, to ask questions? I was, throughout the case, amazed at the combination, in my inexplicable client, of the most complicated knowledge of modern technology and the most primitive and merciless religious beliefs.

‘I wrote the letter. Of course I did. It was not my decision that she should die. It was the will of God.’

‘The will of God that a harmless woman should be shot for writing something critical in a book?’

‘Die for blasphemy, yes.’

‘And they say you were her executioner, that you carried out the sentence.’

‘I didn’t do that.’ He was looking at me patiently, as though I still had much to learn about the faith of Hussein Khan. ‘I knew that death would come to her in time. It came sooner than I had expected.’

So, was I defending a man who had issued a death threat which had then been obediently carried out by some person or persons unknown in the peaceful precincts of a south London university? It seemed an unlikely story, and I was not looking forward to the murder trial which had started at the Old Bailey during the run-up to Christmas.

At the heart of the case there was, I thought, a mystery. The letter, I knew, was clear evidence of Hussein’s guilt, and yet there was no forensic evidence – no bloodstains on his clothing, no traces of his having fired a pistol with a silencer (there must have been a silencer, because no one in the building had heard a shot). This was evidence in Hussein’s favour, but I had to remember that he had been in the university building when the murder had taken place, although he’d already been sent down for writing the letter.

As the owl hooted, Hilda breathed deeply. Sleep eluded me. I went through Hussein Khan’s story again. He had gotten a phone call, he said, when he was at his parents’ restaurant. (He had answered the phone himself, so there was no one to confirm the call.) It had been, it seemed, from a girl who said she was the senior tutor’s secretary and that the tutor wanted to meet him in the university library at ten o’clock that evening to discuss his future.

He had got to the William Morris building at nine forty-five and had told Mr Luttrell, the man at the main reception area, that he was there to meet the senior tutor at the library. He said that when he had arrived at the library, the tutor wasn’t there and that he had waited for over an hour and then went home, never going near Honoria Glossop’s office.

Of course the senior tutor and his secretary denied that either had made such a telephone call. The implication was that Hussein was lying through his teeth and that he had gone to the university because he had known that Professor Glossop worked in her office until late at night and he had intended to kill her.

At last I fell into a restless sleep. In my dreams I saw myself being prosecuted by Soapy Sam Ballard who was wearing a long beard and arguing for my conviction under Sharia law.

I woke early to the first faint flush of daylight as a distant cock crowed. I got up, tiptoed across the room, and extracted from the bottom of my case the papers in R v Khan. I was looking for the answer to a problem as yet undefined, going through the prosecution statement again, and finding nothing very much.

I reminded myself that Mr Luttrell, at his reception desk, had seen Honoria and her husband arrive together and go to her office. Ricky Glossop had left not more than fifteen minutes later, and later still he had telephoned and couldn’t get an answer from his wife. He had asked Luttrell to go to Honoria’s office because she wasn’t answering her phone. The receptionist had gone to her office and found her lying across her desk, her hand close to the bloodstained letter.

Next I read the statement from Honoria’s secretary, Sue Blackmore, describing how she had found the letter in Honoria’s university pigeonhole and taken it to Honoria at her home. On Honoria’s reaction at receiving it, Ms Blackmore commented, ‘She didn’t take the note all that seriously and wouldn’t even tell the police.’ Ricky Glossop had finally rung the anti-terrorist department in Scotland Yard and showed them the letter.

None of this was new. There was only one piece of evidence which I might have overlooked.

In the senior tutor’s statement he said he had spoken to Honoria on the morning of the day she had died. She had told him that she couldn’t be at a seminar that afternoon because she had an urgent appointment with Tony Hawkin. Hawkin, as the senior tutor knew, was a solicitor who acted for the university, and had also acted for Honoria Glossop in a private capacity. The senior tutor had no idea why she had wanted to see her solicitor. He never saw his colleague alive again.