Martin Edwards - Yesterday's papers

God forbid, thought Harry, but aloud he said, ‘Sort of, Cyril.’

Cyril gave a comfortable nod. He always liked to say that he had had a marvellous education in the university of life and he saw nothing risible in the idea that a professional colleague might seek to benefit from his accumulated wisdom.

People said he had only scraped through his exams because the Law Society could not face marking any more of his resit papers. The principal who had signed his certificate of fitness to practise once he had completed his articles had been either drunk or simply desperate to get rid of the lad. After gaining a little more experience at the expense of a series of luckless clients, Cyril had put up his own nameplate outside an alcove in the Cunard Building, less from a desire to become a sole practitioner than from a growing awareness that no-one else would have him. He made a vow early on not to narrow his horizons through specialisation and as a result he applied his inverse Midas touch to an infinite variety of legal problems. His conveyancing clients ran the risk of finding a main road running through their back yard within months of completion and people who came to him for advice on a divorce could count themselves fortunate if they were not reduced to penury by the financial settlement. Yet for all that, his unflappable, if insensitive, good nature coupled with a native Liverpudlian’s ability to talk himself out of trouble helped him to make ends meet. And then one day, Cyril Tweats struck gold.

It began in a small way, as causes celebres often do, when he was consulted by a Toxteth resident aggrieved by the noise and smell from a local glue factory. Impressed by Cyril’s talk of taking the attack to the multi-national which owned the offending premises, the client encouraged a dozen of his neighbours to make similar complaints. Cyril duly wrote a ferocious letter to the company and when its failure to disclose any realistic cause of action prompted the managing director to consign it to the waste bin, he issued a writ and promptly forgot about the matter.

As the proceedings lumbered along, head office in Illinois was informed and hotshot in-house lawyers came on to the scene. When their powerful defence failed to persuade the litigants to throw in the towel, they sent a letter making a token offer of settlement with a view to saving time and expense. Cyril, as was his custom, ignored the offer and in due course the Americans increased it in the hope of ridding themselves of the case once and for all. Further correspondence and telephone calls provoked no reply and as time passed a degree of panic set in. The company was engaged in a fierce takeover battle and needed to be squeaky clean. As the day of the hearing drew near, the commercial cost of the dispute mounted and before long the need to resolve it became a cornerstone of boardroom policy. Cyril had scarcely turned his mind to details like the need to brief counsel when nerves finally cracked on the other side of the Atlantic. The lawyers put forward a proposal designed to make every plaintiff rich. When Cyril laughed at it, they took him to be hell-bent on making legal history rather than simply unable to credit the sum being mentioned and so they hurriedly doubled it. The name of Tweats and Company became the toast of Toxteth; Cyril’s reputation was made. Thereafter he was often described as a pioneer of English environmental law.

Yet he was not a man to brag. ‘Ah yes, the case of the glue factory,’ he would say. ‘Damned sticky business.’ And he would smile in his charming manner.

‘So what can I do for you?’ he asked when Dolly had served tea in china cups and a plateful of biscuits.

‘Cast your mind back thirty years. Do you remember a client by the name of Edwin Smith?’

‘Remember him? As if it was yesterday, my dear boy, how could I ever forget? The press were buzzing round like wasps over a rotten apple. The city hadn’t seen a bigger murder trial since the Cameo Cinema case.’

‘I happened to look at the old file the other day. I have it here.’ Harry slid the folder across the table. ‘I hadn’t known that he actually retracted his confession.’

Cyril frowned. ‘Well, yes, I recall that he did. Of course, they often do.’

‘Who?’

‘Criminals, of course. For all manner of reasons, but mainly because they hope to get off. And quite frankly, given the state of justice in this country nowadays, they are usually in with a good chance of that.’

‘So it never crossed your mind that the retraction might be genuine and his confession to the police false?’

‘Good heavens, no.’

‘But with the benefit of hindsight, might you think differently?’

‘Whatever for? The chap was as guilty as a monk’s thoughts in a nunnery.’

Harry bit his tongue. ‘Tell me about him. What sort of man was he?’

Cyril dipped a biscuit into his drink and took a bite out of it as he collected his thoughts. ‘Unprepossessing lad. Freckles, no chin, too much neck. In a word, shifty. No backbone. Far too much of a mummy’s boy.’

‘I see from the papers that mummy paid your fees.’

‘Quite correct. Young Edwin could never keep a job down, never made two pennies of his own to rub together. All the same, there was money in the family. The father had died years before, a stroke, I think, but he was in cotton in the days when there was still something to be made from textiles and he left his widow a few pennies, as well as an enormous house on Sefton Park. She was a forceful character too, but the boy was a sore disappointment. Her own fault, I suppose, all that mollycoddling. Unhealthy. Of course, a heavy price was paid. Poor young Carole Jeffries wasn’t the first person he’d molested.’

‘He was hardly a major criminal. I gather from the file that he had a history of exposing himself and stealing knickers from a washing line.’

Cyril clicked his tongue. ‘You know as well as I do that with such a pathetic specimen, one thing invariably leads to another. As it did with young Smith. One day, he simply went too far.’

‘He had had a girlfriend of his own, though.’

‘Yes, I believe there was someone, but that only made things worse. He admitted she’d finished with him around the time he strangled the girl, if memory serves. Obviously, the rejection tipped him over the edge.’

‘Name of Renata Yates, according to his statement. Did you ever see her?’

‘Lord, no. She’d made herself scarce and besides, I could tell she was going to be bad news. I mean, from the little he said about her she was no better than a street-walker.’

‘So you never heard any suggestions that her evidence might have exonerated Edwin?’

‘Good gracious me, certainly not. Wherever did you get such an idea?’

‘From the same person who tells me that Edwin was an attention-seeker, the sort who might admit guilt simply to claim his fifteen minutes of fame.’

‘Look, Harry,’ said Cyril in his most fatherly manner, ‘don’t you believe all that you hear in those saloon bars of yours.’

‘Okay, okay, so tell me about the victim, Carole. What was she like?’

‘Pretty girl. Headstrong, by all accounts, possibly rather spoiled. Her mum was a bit of a tartar, I remember, but Carole was the apple of her father’s eye, he thought she could do no wrong. Her death finished him, you know. He’d been a powerful figure in the Labour movement, but after his daughter’s death, he was never the same man again. Of course, you might say that’s the inevitable fate of people who devote themselves to the Labour movement. Even so, I often thought that he was Edwin Smith’s second victim.’

‘Although he survived Edwin by — what? — nearly fifteen years?’

‘Yes, killed himself on the day Margaret Thatcher came to power, would you believe? Ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. You don’t need me to tell you she was the finest Prime Minister this country ever had. And how did her own party reward her?’