Brian Freemantle - A Mind to Kill

‘I do not make mistakes in my analyses.’

Jennifer couldn’t properly recognize the noise in her head. It was a groaned, near wailing sound: despair almost. Jennifer didn’t want to challenge at that moment – was still nervous of challenging – but she thought: Jane has lost. Not me that beat her. Jeremy Hall. But she’s lost. And then she waited for a diatribe but nothing came. There was still a tingle but her skin was much cooler, no longer physically irritating or sensitive to the touch.

‘I’m greatly obliged to you for establishing that in the court. You just didn’t lift blood from the window: you lifted the fingerprints picked out in that blood, didn’t you, doctor?’

‘Yes.’

‘Whose fingerprints?’

‘Mrs Lomax’s.’

‘What proof did you have that they were Mrs Lomax’s?’

‘They couldn’t have been anyone else’s!’

‘Why not?’

‘That’s where she’d stood, with her hands splayed against the window.’

‘You’d seen her stand like that?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

‘How do you know that’s how she’d stood?’

Less belligerently, Billington said, ‘I was told, by the police.’

‘By whom, of the police, exactly?’

‘Detective Inspector Rodgers. He was there with Superintendent Bentley when I arrived.’

‘And they pointed out to you Mrs Lomax’s fingerprints on the window?’

‘She was slumped directly beneath them.’

‘That wasn’t my question, Doctor,’ said Hall, letting nothing slip past. ‘Did Superintendent Bentley and Inspector Rodgers identify fingerprints in blood upon the window as those of Mrs Lomax?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they later provide officially taken fingerprints of Mrs Lomax, for you to make a scientific match?’

Billington hesitated, looking for guidance to Keflin-Brown, who remained unhelpfully with his head sunk against his chest. Finally Billington said, ‘No.’

‘So there was no proper scientific, forensic comparison between the bloodstained fingerprints upon Gerald Lomax’s office window and fingerprints taken from Mrs Jennifer Lomax?’

Billington was no longer deathly pale. His face blazed, in odd contrast to his red hair. He looked hopefully again to the prosecuting barrister, who steadfastly refused to answer the plea. ‘No.’

‘That means, doesn’t it, Doctor, that your evidence of the bloody fingerprints being those of Mrs Lomax has no forensic or scientific basis or value? The police told you whose they were and you accepted it, entirely upon their word!’

Billington didn’t reply.

‘Doctor Billington?’ demanded Jarvis, all his waspishness transferred.

‘Yes, it does,’ finally admitted the forensic scientist.

‘There were two types of blood upon the knife…’ At Hall’s gesture, the usher offered it to the perspiring witness. ‘… What were they?’

‘AB Rhesus Positive and O Rhesus Negative.’

‘And fingerprints?’ persisted Hall, relentlessly.

‘The same as those upon the window.’

‘As the Home Office’s first choice – its leader – in forensic examination, would you consider yourself an expert in fingerprint comparison?’

‘It is not my particular discipline but I am practised in it,’ qualified the scientist.

‘You have a chart of those bloody fingerprints, among the documents in front of you, do you not?’

‘Yes.’

‘I fully accept that these are not what you would consider proper scientific conditions, but would you compare these prints against the chart you claim to be Mrs Lomax’s fingerprints?’ asked Hall, gesturing again to the attentive usher to take the offered sheet to the scientist.

Billington spent several minutes studying the two sheets, side by side, at one stage taking a pocket magnifying glass from his strained suit. At last he looked up and pronounced, ‘They do not match.’

‘You mean they are the fingerprints of two different people?’ persisted Hall.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you need to take them away to a laboratory, for more detailed examination?’

‘I will of course do so if the court orders it. But I do not think it is necessary…’ He waved with his pocket device like a flag of surrender. ‘Even under this magnification the difference is obvious. One set is peaked, the other whorled. And the linear difference between the two is obvious, almost to the naked eye.’

‘You also found – and eliminated – another set of finger-prints in Gerald Lomax’s office: those of the cleaner?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you compare what I have just handed you with those prints you lifted?’

It did not take the man as long this time. ‘Again they are quite different.’

‘You found some hair strands in Gerald Lomax’s office, did you not?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Billington, cautiously.

‘Whose were they?’

Billington’s sigh filled the hesitation. ‘I was told they were Mrs Lomax’s. She’s blond. So was the hair.’

‘By whom were you told?’

‘Superintendent Bentley.’

‘Did you make comparison tests, from proven samples of Mrs Lomax’s hair?’ The earlier, half-formed idea was hardening in Hall’s mind. He’d been demeaned, humiliated and shat upon by a pompous legal establishment and he wanted every ounce of revenge – and humbled recognition – that he was owed.

‘None was made available to me.’

‘Answer the question, Doctor Billington.’

‘No, I did not make any comparison.’

‘What about a B Rhesus Positive blood group?’ demanded Hall, abruptly and intentionally going in yet another direction.

‘I don’t understand that question.’

‘Did you, from anywhere in Gerald Lomax’s office, lift blood subsequently identified as B Rhesus Positive?’

‘No.’

‘From the extensive sampling you took, do you believe you would have found B Rhesus Positive if there had been traces in Gerald Lomax’s office?’

‘Yes.’

‘From your forensic examination of Gerald Lomax’s office how many people were in it, at the time of his murder?’

‘Two.’

‘No-one else?’

‘No. It isn’t possible.’

‘Doctor Billington, what explanation can you give the court when I tell you that the fingerprints I have just made available to you are those of Mrs Jennifer Lomax, taken last night in the presence of a number of witnesses, including the police? And that Mrs Lomax’s blood group, again taken last night to confirm five different earlier samplings, is not O Rhesus Negative, but B Rhesus Positive? Or that the hair you early testified before this court to be that of Mrs Lomax is quite different, in colour, from that taken last night and which is, as we talk, being subjected to DNA analytical comparison.’

The scientist shook his head. ‘That isn’t possible.’

‘It’s more than possible, Doctor Billington. They are unarguable facts, witnessed among others last night by my learned friend for the prosecution, Mr Keflin-Brown.’

It was several minutes before Billington was able to reply. Then he said, ‘I can’t explain it… it’s beyond explanation…’ He looked apprehensively across the court at Jennifer. ‘… It’s too frightening to explain…’

Everyone else in the court was looking at Jennifer at that moment. And there was very little noise.

There was a great deal, however, in the cells during the lunchtime adjournment. Twice the force of Jennifer’s convulsions threw not just herself but both wardresses trying to support her off their feet. The harangue in Jennifer’s head was so loud it made her scream with pain. She defecated and urinated at the same time but because her dress was up around her waist in a struggle with the wardresses it wasn’t stained. Jennifer was too distraught – too possessed – to be embarrassed that it happened in front of Hall and Perry or that the corridor outside was crowded with onlookers. Everything Hall tried to say to her was drowned beneath obscene, shouted invective and so he stopped trying.