It was Luke Skinner who came up with an idea.
‘The first constable who reached the scene. He bent over the man and saw his face before it began to swell. And the first paramedic, the one who tended him on the pavement and in the ambulance. If we put them together with a police artist . . .?’
Burns traced the paramedic through the London Ambulance Service and the man, hearing his patient had died, agreed to help. He was on an early shift the next day, but could be free after two p.m. and would happily give his time.
The police constable was right there in Dover Street station and was traced through the duty roster and incidents log. A skilled police sketch artist agreed to come up from Scotland Yard the next day at two.
Burns finished his day in a long tactics session with Alan Parfitt. The chief of detectives examined every scrap of evidence Burns laid before him and finally agreed.
‘We can get a result here, sir. We have the evidence of Mr Patel, two identifications of the men by Patel, the blow to the nose, the repair three hours later by Dr Melrose and the wallet. We can send them down for life.’
‘Yes, I think we can,’ said Parfitt. ‘I’ll back you. I’ll be seeing a senior bod at the CPS tomorrow and I think I can persuade him that this one will go all the way.’
There were statements, statements and more statements. The file was two inches thick. The full reports from the post-mortem and the fingerprints department had yet to come in and be added. But both men agreed it was a ‘go’ and Parfitt was sure he could persuade the CPS of the same.
DAY EIGHT – TUESDAY
Price and Cornish were back in the dock at Number 1 court, Highbury Corner the next day and Mr Stein presided. Miss Sundaran represented the Crown, and her parents beamed with pride behind the glass panel shielding the public gallery as she handled her first murder case. Mr Slade looked somewhat glum.
Mr Stein kept it short and efficient. The clerk read out the new charge, murder, and Mr Slade rose to say again that his clients denied the charge and reserved their defence. Mr Stein raised an eyebrow at Miss Sundaran, who asked for a new remand in custody for one week.
‘Mr Slade?’ he asked.
‘No application for bail, sir.’
‘Then granted, Miss Sundaran. Hearing is set for next Tuesday at eleven a.m. Take them down.’
Price and Cornish were led away to the prison van. Miss Sundaran now had the entire file and was pleased with what she had. Back at her office she had been told that this would almost certainly go to trial and that she would be involved. Hopefully the file would be passed by the CPS to Mr Slade in the next twenty-four hours. Then preparation for the defence could begin.
‘Some ruddy defence,’ thought Slade, even this early in the case. ‘I’m going to need a genius in a wig to get them off this one.’
The sketching session went well. The paramedic and the constable agreed on the approximate appearance of the man on the pavement a week earlier and the artist went to work. It was a team effort. The artist sketched, erased, sketched again. A face came into view. The cast of the eyes, the short-back-and-sides grey hair, the line of the jaw. Both men had seen the man only with his eyes closed. The artist opened the eyes and a man was looking at them, a man that once was, now battered and sawn meat in a refrigerated drawer.
Luke Skinner took over. He had a senior contact in the Scotland Yard press office and he wanted a spread in the Evening Standard for the following day. The pair of them met the chief crime correspondent later that evening. They all knew August was the ‘silly season’. News was thin. This was a story. The crime correspondent took it. He could see his headline. ‘BEATEN TO DEATH. DID YOU KNOW HIM?’ There would be a panel to accompany the sketch, with a full description, stressing the once-shattered right leg and hip, the pronounced limp. It was, Skinner knew, about as good as they were going to get, and the last chance.
DAY NINE – WEDNESDAY
The Evening Standard is London’s only evening newspaper and covers the capital and most of the South-East pretty intensively. Skinner was lucky. News through the night had been exceptionally light, so the Standard ran the sketch of the staring man on the front page. ‘DID YOU KNOW THIS MAN?’ asked the headline above it, then came a note to turn to more details inside.
The panel gave approximate age, height, build, hair and eye colour, clothes worn at the time of the attack, the belief that the man had been visiting the local cemetery to place flowers on the grave of one Mavis Hall and was walking back to the bus route when he was attacked. The clincher was the detail of the leg shattered about twenty years earlier and the limp.
Burns and Skinner waited hopefully through the day, but no-one called. Nor the next, nor the next. Hope faded.
A brief coroner’s court was formally opened and immediately adjourned. The coroner declined to grant the borough the right to bury in an unmarked grave, lest someone might yet come forward.
‘It’s odd and very sad, guv,’ said Skinner to Burns as they walked back to the nick. ‘You can live in a bloody great city like London, with millions of people all around you, but if you keep yourself to yourself, as he must have done, no-one even knows you exist.’
‘Someone must,’ said Burns, ‘some colleague, some neighbour. Probably away. August, bloody August.’
DAY TEN – THURSDAY
The Hon. James Vansittart QC stood in the window bay of his chambers and gazed out across the gardens towards the Thames. He was fifty-two and one of the most notable and successful barristers at the London Bar. He had taken silk, become a Queen’s Counsel, at the remarkably early age of forty-three, even more unusual in that he had only been at the bar for a total of eighteen years. But fortune and his own skill had favoured him. Ten years earlier, acting as junior for a much older QC who had been taken ill during a case, he had pleased the judge, who did not wish to abandon the case and start again, by agreeing to proceed without his leader. The senior QC’s chambers had taken a gamble, but it paid off with a triumphant acquittal of the defendant. The Bar agreed it was Vansittart’s forensic skill and oratory that had turned the jury, and the later evidence that showed the defendant was not guilty did no harm.
The following year, Vansittart’s application for silk had met little opposition from the Lord Chancellor’s office, which was then in the hands of a Conservative government. His father, the Earl of Essendon, being a Tory whip in the House of Lords, was probably not unhelpful either. It was generally thought at the Bar and the clubs of St James’s that the second son of Johnny Essendon was the right stuff. Clever, too, but that could not be helped.
Vansittart turned from the window, walked to his desk and pressed the intercom for his chief clerk. Michael ‘Mike’ Creedy ran the affairs of the thirty barristers in these chambers with oiled precision and had done so for twenty yea
rs. He had spotted the young Vansittart shortly after he came to the bar and had persuaded his then head of chambers to invite the young man to join. His judgement had not been wrong; fifteen years later the former new junior had become deputy head of chambers and a star in the legal firmament. A charming and talented portrait-painting wife, a manor in Berkshire and two boys at Harrow completed a pretty successful picture. The door opened and Mike Creedy entered the elegant, book-panelled room.