‘What are you doing now?’ he asked the girl.
‘Sorting files, sir.’
‘That can wait. We’re going to look at a cemetery. Come along.’
Skinner drove, as usual. The WPC, who came from the borough, directed. It was a big cemetery, hundreds of graves, in rows. Council owned and ill maintained. They started at one corner and began to patrol, taking a row of headstones each. It took nearly an hour. The girl found it first.
They were withered, of course, but they were oxeye daisies, dying in a jam jar of stale water. The headstone indicated that it covered the earthly remains of Mavis June Hall. There was a date of birth, the date of death and the letters RIP. She had been dead twenty years and even then she would have been seventy.
‘Look at the date of birth, guv. August 1906. Last Tuesday was her birthday.’
‘But who the hell was she to the limping man?’
‘His mum, perhaps.’
‘Maybe. So perhaps his name is Hall,’ said Burns.
They drove back past the Armitage flower shop and Miss Verity identified the daisies as almost certainly hers. At the Dover nick, Skinner contacted the Missing Persons Bureau for the name Hall. There were three, but two were women and one a child.
‘Someone must have known this bugger. Why don’t they report him missing?’ fumed Burns. It was getting to be one frustration after another.
The pretty and bright WPC went back to her files. Burns and Skinner went down to the cells where Price and Cornish were formally charged with inflicting grievous bodily harm on an unidentified adult male. At quarter to four they set off for Highbury Corner, where the chief clerk had exceptionally managed to find a last-minute slot in the sitting schedule. This time, the two thugs would not be returning to Dover Street. Burns intended that they should be lodged in a real prison on a week’s remand, probably Pentonville.
Things had changed at the court. They were in Number 1 this time, where the prisoner’s dock is dead centre, facing the bench, rather than in one corner. The magistrate was now a stipendiary, or ‘stipe’, in the form of the experienced and highly qualified Mr Jonathan Stein.
Price and Cornish arrived by police van again, but another van in the livery of HM Prison Service was on standby to take them to jail. Mr Lou Slade was at his table facing the bench, but for the CPS a young barrister would make the remand submission.
Years ago, it was the police who handled their own prosecutions up to and through the magistrates’ courts and many old-timers preferred it that way. But for a long time all prosecutions have been handled from the first appearance to the final trial, if any, by the unified structure of the Crown Prosecution Service. Among their tasks is to assess whether a police-prepared case has a realistic chance of a conviction before a judge and jury. If the CPS thinks not, the case is withdrawn. More than one disgruntled detective, seeing a case on which he has worked long and hard against a real villain withdrawn from the lists, has referred to the CPS as the Criminal Protection Service. It is not always a happy relationship.
A big problem with the CPS is that it is underfunded, overstretched and pays in peanuts. As a predictable result, it is sometimes regarded as a mere stepping stone for the young and inexperienced before they move into private practice and on to better things.
Miss Prabani Sundaran was very bright and very pretty, the apple of her Sri Lankan-born parents’ eye. She was also on her first major case. But this should not have been a problem.
The remand in custody was going to be a formality. There was no way Mr Stein was going to grant bail to Price and Cornish. Their records for violence were appalling and he had them in front of him. Remands can only last for a week, so there would be several more yet to come before the defence was chosen, engaged, prepared and ready. Then would come the process of committal, when the prosecution evidence would be produced in full and the magistrate would commit the thugs for trial at the Crown Court, complete with judge and jury. By then, Miss Sundaran would be assisting a full-fledged Treasury Counsel, possibly even a Queen’s Counsel, who would be engaged by the CPS to try to achieve a conviction. All she had to do was go through the motions. The procedures, just the procedures.
At a nod from Mr Stein she rose and, reading from her notes, gave the briefest outline of the charge. Slade rose.
‘My clients will deny the charge and in due course will enter a full defence,’ he said.
‘We seek a remand in custody for one week, sir,’ said Miss Sundaran.
‘Mr Slade?’ The stipe was asking if Mr Slade intended to ask for bail. Slade shook his head. Mr Stein gave a wintry smile.
‘Very wise. Remanded in custody for one week. I shall . . .’ He peered at both lawyers over his half-moons. ‘Put this down to be heard before me next Friday morning.’
The entire court knew perfectly well that he meant he would listen to, and grant, a further remand in custody for another week, and so on until both prosecution and defence were ready for committal to Crown Court.
Price and Cornish, still handcuffed but now flanked by prison officers, disappeared below decks in the direction of the Ville. Mr Slade went back to his office knowing that by Monday morning he would have an answer to his application for Legal Aid. His clients clearly had no assets with which to pay for their own defence, and he would have to try to find a barrister from one of the four Inns of Court to take the case for pretty small pickings.
He already had in mind a couple of chambers whose all-powerful chief clerks would consider it, but he knew he would probably get a freshly qualified sprog who needed the experience or an old blowhard who needed the fee. No matter. In an increasingly violent world a GBH does not set the Thames on fire.
Jack Burns returned to Dover Street. His desk was full. He still had a huge workload, now forming a backlog. And on the matter of the limping man he had some problems to solve.
DAY FIVE – SATURDAY
Mr Paul Willis came in at nine a.m. on the Saturday as promised. There had been no change in his patient and he was becoming worried. The rescan was quickly effected and the surgeon studied the results acutely.
There was certainly no fresh haematoma to account for the continuing coma. The blood vessels he had tied off remained leak-proof. No blood was pressing on the brain. It had expanded quickly to its full and usual size. No fresh leaks had developed to create pressure from a different source.