Martin Edwards - All the Lonely People

“I heard you’d been to the Fitness Centre,” said Coghlan. “What do you want?”

“Don’t you think a conversation between us is long overdue? We have something in common, after all.”

“Get to the point. You may be a brief, but you’re not charging me by the hour.”

“Liz tired of us both, you as well as me. I know how it feels, Coghlan, the fury of losing what you thought you had forever.” Harry leaned forward. “There comes a moment, doesn’t there, when you want to scream? Or, perhaps, to take revenge?”

Coghlan bared strong, white teeth. “You’re not making sense. Don’t piss me about.”

“Liz betrayed you, Coghlan.” The unpractised words began to pour out. “You treated her like the rest of your common tarts. She stood it for a while, but you couldn’t quench her. She met some other man. Hid it from you, for fear of what you’d do, but not well enough. You bullied her, terrified her. She slashed her wrists in a fit of despair. But then she learned she was going to have a kid and that changed everything. So she gathered up the courage to walk out.” Harry took a deep breath. The man he hated was gazing steadily at him now, brow furrowed, but giving nothing away. “You caught up with her, isn’t that right? I don’t know who killed her. You or one of your sidekicks, possibly, whilst you set up an alibi. The police haven’t been able to pin it on you yet, but they know that you’re their man. And I know too.”

Coghlan stretched out an arm across the table and grabbed Harry’s tie with a movement so smooth and economical that no one in the cocktail bar noticed it. “You’re crazy, Devlin. You’ve called at my house as well as the Fitness Centre. Oh yes, I’m well aware of what goes on in my absence. And now you interrupt me at a private club to pour out a load of garbage that I’d sue for if it wasn’t all so sick. You’re becoming a nuisance and that’s a risky thing to do.” He yanked the tie once, then let it go.

“You took Liz. There’s nothing else you can do so far as I’m concerned.”

“Don’t you believe it. I don’t take this crap from anyone, let alone a cheap brief from a back street without two pennies to rub together.”

“My wife is dead. And you’re responsible.”

With a snort of laughter, Coghlan said, “Wife in name only. Plenty of water under that bridge since she packed you in.” The contempt was unvarnished. “I’m not surprised you couldn’t handle her. You’re nothing much. You amused her, that’s all, like a child’s toy. When she wanted a man she had to try elsewhere.”

Harry’s beer glass stood on the table. He gripped the handle, tempted for an instant to grind it in Coghlan’s face, see the glass splinter and the jagged edges tear into the flesh, transforming the scorn to pain. But as he lifted up the pint pot, a hand was laid on his shoulder and a plummy tone enquired, “Michael, old chap. Long time no see. What’s your handicap these days?”

Blinking hard, Harry turned round. A tall man, gin and tonic in hand, was standing over them, smiling in an amiable, fellow-member’s way. Harry rose to his feet and said, “Guilt.” Then he walked out of the building without a second glance at either Coghlan or the interloper.

Outside, a thin drizzle had returned. The constable was still waiting patiently in the unmarked Escort. Harry got in at the passenger side of his car and sat down heavily. He could feel his heart pounding as violently as if he had completed a marathon. Against his expectations, the encounter with Coghlan had left him not so much angry as confused. Not because of anything that Coghlan had said, but as a result of realising, at the very moment of making out his case against the man as Liz’s murderer, that he did not wholly believe it himself.

“Harold, a word in your ear.”

Only one person in the world ever called Harry Harold. It wasn’t the name on his birth certificate, as Reuben Fingall was well aware, but for years the old rogue had kept pretending to forget. Like Lewis Carroll’s little boy, Ruby only did it to annoy, because he knew it teased. Adding insult to injury he put an arm round Harry’s shoulder and a smooth palm over the hairs on Harry’s hand.

They were in the hall outside the solicitors’ room in the Dale Street magistrates’ court. The corridor was airless and crammed with criminals and their defenders. A solitary, hard-backed chair was occupied by a stubbly drunk who was trying to contort his face into an expression of respectability deserving of one last chance. Harry had just said goodbye to the reckless driver whose licence he had somehow managed to save and was about to return to the office; he had come here from the West Liverpool via a sandwich shop in Fenwick Court which specialised in sardines and salmonella.

Detaching himself from Fingall’s clutch, Harry said, “What do we have to discuss?”

A smile looped around Ruby’s small mouth. He was in his early fifties, plump in a pinstripe, suit complemented by twinkling silver cuff-links and, on his index finger, a signet ring which bore his initals in curlicued lettering.

“A matter of mutual interest, shall we call it? Come now. I won’t detain you for long.” It was a remark with which he often prefaced lengthy closing speeches.

“Go ahead.”

“Really, Harold, I would prefer to speak with you in private. Perhaps I should add that this concerns my client Michael Coghlan.”

“Has he confessed yet?”

“Harold, please.” A hint of exasperation lay beneath the cajolery as he waved a hand in the direction of the exit. “May we?”

Harry shrugged. “Okay, where do you suggest?”

“My office is only a stone’s throw away.”

True enough. Ruby and his minions occupied three whole floors above a pizza parlour across the road from the court. For Fingall and Company, crime paid. The firm had been built up from nothing in the space of twenty years, its success attributable in equal measure to Ruby’s industry and his lack of professional scruples. Rumours about how in his early days he had paid a handful of crooked policemen to recommend newly arrested miscreants to use his services had hardened over the years into a thick crust of legend about legal aid fiddles and sharp practice inside and outside the courtroom. Ruby’s Porsche lifestyle fuelled plenty of saloon bar tittle-tattle, but most people were careful not to let him learn of it. He had sued for libel three times and slander twice in the past two decades and defamation damages had helped keep him in the style to which he had become accustomed. Meanwhile, his clients mostly survived to mug or steal another day and amongst the criminal fraternity it was a status symbol to boast that Reuben Fingall was your brief.

Ruby directed Harry towards a door at the rear of the building, unlocking it and clambering up the steep stairs two at a time. “This way,” he said breathlessly, “we avoid the hoi-polloi in reception, whining for their compensation and fretting over their latest summons.”

His office was on the third floor. Panelled in mahogany, it was sixteen feet square. Hockney prints hung on the walls and heavy blue velvet curtains lined the windows. Taking a seat behind a huge desk on which stood a notice saying SILENCE! LE PATRON TRAVAILLE! Ruby waved Harry into a leather-upholstered chair, picked up the telephone and said, “A pot of Earl Grey for Mr. Devlin and myself, Veronica.”

Harry said, “You wanted to speak to me about Coghlan.”

“Michael, ah, yes.” The beam faded. “It does seem, Harold, that you have been making a nuisance of yourself so far as my client is concerned. Calling at his home, his place of business, even interrupting him during a snatched hour of recreation at the West Liverpool this morning, I gather.”