Murder in Court Three Read online

  The door opened and Reginald Buchan returned, followed by the woman and boy in the photo. She stood for a moment, as if inspecting the officers then sat on a sofa well to Flick’s right, forcing her to turn in her chair. The boy sat beside her and Reginald found an armchair on the other side of the room.

  In the silence that followed the woman first stared at Flick’s bump then ran her eye up and down di Falco. His flashing smile of encouragement was answered by a faint raising of her eyebrows. These eyes have not been crying much recently, Flick thought as she contrasted them with those of the boy, which were bloodshot and red-rimmed.

  ‘Lady Eloise …’ Flick began.

  ‘Mrs Knox will do, thank you,’ the woman cut in. ‘It’s much easier.’ Her lips formed a cold, superior smile.

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Fortune and this is Detective Constable di Falco. We are very sorry about your husband.’

  ‘Our condolences,’ di Falco said quietly.

  ‘There are a number of questions we have to ask you, and it might be better if your brother and son were not present. I hope you don’t mind.’

  While Mrs Knox scowled, her brother was indignant. ‘Is this necessary, Inspector? I mean, her husband’s just been murdered. This whole thing is quite traumatic for her.’

  Glancing meaningfully at the boy, Flick said firmly, ‘It would be better for all concerned, sir.’

  Mrs Knox said quietly, ‘It’s alright, Spare. I’ll be fine.’

  From her Googling Flick had learned that, after giving birth to three daughters, the Duchess of Lochgilphead had borne two sons, the elder of whom was the heir. Reginald was the spare.

  Flick thought he was going to prove awkward, but he too looked at the boy and nodded. ‘Come on, Ranald,’ he said kindly. He put his arm round his nephew’s shoulder as they left the room. Before rising from the sofa, Ranald shot Flick a glare full of unhappy resentment.

  ‘He worshipped his father,’ Mrs Knox said quite brusquely.

  Flick nodded at di Falco, who sat in the chair vacated by Buchan.

  ‘We have to find out what happened on Friday night between ten and eleven,’ di Falco said. ‘Can you tell us what you did then and who you saw?’

  Mrs Knox responded with a shrug. ‘It’s hard to remember exactly,’ she said slowly, the accent clipped. ‘I last saw Farquhar after dinner. He left the table then and didn’t return. I never saw him again.’ She paused for a moment. Her voice catching, she continued, ‘I went to the Ladies then watched the archery. I stood for a time with Molly Bertram, but she saw someone she wanted to speak to and I moved about a bit. It was quite difficult to see at times. I did chat to Kenny Cuthbert. The Cuthberts and the Bertrams were in our party. After the contest was over I went outside to Parliament Square for a cigarette, or maybe two. There were a few of us. I didn’t know most of them. I do remember John Logan. He’s one of the bar’s smokers and we’ve become allies.’ She reached into a pocket of her linen skirt and withdrew a packet and a silver lighter. Her hand shook as she lit up.

  ‘What was happening when you returned?’ di Falco asked as Flick recoiled from the smoke, waving her hand in front of her.

  ‘The band started. Dancing.’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘There was a seating area in the library. I made for it but Kenny and Jen Cuthbert press-ganged me into a Dashing White Sergeant. You do it in threes and it’s always the first dance of the night,’ she added, seeing Flick’s puzzled expression. ‘Once it was over I went to the library and stayed there. Jen Cuthbert and Molly Bertram will vouch for me.’

  ‘Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill your husband?’ he asked.

  ‘Several.’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘Farquhar didn’t go out of his way to be popular. But no. I cannot think of anyone who would have actually wanted to kill him.’

  ‘You left with the Cuthberts, I believe, assuming your husband had gone without telling anyone?’

  ‘Farquhar could be infuriating but he was never boring and he had a very low boredom threshold. He hated dancing and had been making fun of the Archers through dinner, humming Robin Hood, Robin Hood when the Captain-General, their head man, passed our table. I took it he’d drifted off to some pub.’

  Di Falco’s charm had worked. Flick decided it was time to get to the point. ‘Examination of your husband’s body has shown that he had sex minutes before he died. I have to ask if you know anything about that?’

  Mrs Knox stiffened and exhaled in Flick’s direction. ‘I do not,’ she said with emphasis.

  Flick wrinkled her nose and blew at the smoke. Trying not to sound irritated, she asked, ‘Have you any idea who he was with?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does the name Lynda Traynor mean anything to you?’

  Mrs Knox’s mouth twitched and she looked away. She inhaled deeply before stubbing out her cigarette forcefully, then fidgeting with the lace-trimmed handkerchief she had in one hand. Neither Flick nor di Falco noticed the door opening. A tall, silver-haired man wearing beige chinos and an open-necked light blue shirt strode in and stood in front of Mrs Knox. ‘Eloise,’ he said, ‘are you alright?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Henry, but I think these officers were about to go.’

  Flick produced her warrant. ‘My colleague and I are investigating a brutal murder and we need to speak to Mrs Knox alone. We are not yet finished.’

  ‘That’s up to Mrs Knox, officer, as you well know. Would you like me to stay, Eloise?’

  ‘Yes, please, Henry. You’re very kind.’

  The man sat on the sofa beside her and looked inquiringly at Flick.

  ‘You can’t just barge in like that, sir. Please don’t make our job more difficult than it is.’ di Falco sounded stern.

  ‘What is your name, sir?’ sensing trouble, Flick’s tone remained polite.

  The silver-haired man sat upright and looked coldly at her. His face was long and thin, with a disproportionately short lower jaw. He spoke grandly, with no trace of a Scottish accent. ‘I am Lord Hutton. In case you didn’t know, I am a High Court judge and I live next door to Mrs Knox. You are both aware that you have no right to badger this lady with detailed questions, and I’m surprised you should have troubled someone so recently widowed. I suggest you ask any questions you may have once and once only, then leave forthwith.’

  Di Falco opened and closed his mouth like a fish. Flick knew the interview was going nowhere but she was not going to be browbeaten, even by a High Court judge. ‘Does the name Lynda Traynor mean anything to you, Mrs Knox?’ she repeated.

  ‘It does not.’ The answer came quickly.

  ‘Did you see your husband talking to anyone in particular after dinner on Friday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Were you suspicious that he might be having an affair before he died?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What were you wearing on Friday night?’

  ‘A long, navy blue dress.’

  ‘Was your marriage happy at the end?’

  Mrs Knox’s face crumbled. Hutton stood up and advanced towards Flick. ‘That’s quite enough, officer. Please leave now.’

  There was nothing for it but to depart with such dignity as they could muster.

  In the car di Falco said, ‘I think you hit a raw nerve with these last questions, ma’am.’

  ‘Definitely, but how much is she not telling us, and why?’

  * * *

  ‘I think you’d better continue the cross this morning.’ Mark Radcliffe QC had a twinkle in his eye as he spoke. Melanie Arbuthnot was appalled.

  ‘No, I … I couldn’t,’ she spluttered.

  ‘There’s a tradition of the crown junior taking over when the senior becomes unavailable. It happened in the Manuel trial in the 1950s. The Advocate-Depute prosecuting the case was suddenly taken ill and the judge turned to his junior, who’d been at the bar for five minutes, and told him to get on with it. It was important, too, as Manuel was a mass murderer. He was
hanged,’ Radcliffe added as an afterthought, winking at Baggo.

  ‘I will help you all I can,’ Baggo said earnestly. He fancied Melanie like mad and loved the way she was blushing at the wind-up. At first Radcliffe had reminded him of a mannequin in an up-market fashion display for middle-aged men, but he clearly had a sense of humour.

  ‘I’ll sit beside you, so there’s no need to worry,’ Radcliffe continued soothingly. By now he was grinning.

  The penny dropped. ‘You, you, you … beast,’ she said, her relief obvious.

  ‘To the criminal fraternity a beast is usually a sex offender,’ Radcliffe pointed out. His mouth was turned down but his eyes twinkled again.

  Melanie raised her eyes to heaven but said nothing.

  Baggo had been impressed by Radcliffe’s mastery of the prosecution brief after only a weekend’s study. The three of them had spent more than an hour dissecting Knox’s cross-examination of John Burns on Friday afternoon, Baggo looking for anything that might have made someone want to kill him. Knox had laboriously taken Burns through e-mails that had passed between him and his co-accused, whom he was blaming for thinking up the scam. Burns had given evidence with great confidence, but the holes in his story were obvious. While the other two were fascinated by every small point, Baggo was glad he had not become a lawyer. His boredom threshold was too low.

  ‘Cut-throat defences seldom work,’ Radcliffe mused. ‘It’s always good news for the crown when the different accused are at each other’s throats. Burns is clutching at straws. Of course he’s the one we really want to nail.’

  ‘You’ll have seen he was acquitted of a timeshare fraud in the High Court a few years ago,’ Melanie volunteered. ‘Not enough evidence, apparently.’

  At quarter to ten Radcliffe thanked the other two for their help and went off to have a smoke then change for court. Before Melanie left, Baggo asked her if there was anything that Knox said or did on Friday that might have led to his death.

  Lines of concentration creased her plump face. ‘There was one e-mail he took a lot of time over. Far more than I thought necessary. Do you remember? It was from Burns to Maltravers, the planning consultant, quite early on. It gave lots of detail about the project, boring stuff like what sort of soil and grass they’d be working with. It showed Burns was driving the whole thing, but he pretended he didn’t understand his own e-mail. It was pathetic, really. But that’s not a reason for anyone to kill Knox.’

  ‘I agree. Your new boss, Mr Radcliffe is a bit of a character.’

  ‘Quite. He really had me going with that wind-up. But he’s a nice man.’

  Baggo nodded slowly. ‘He seems very bright.’

  ‘Yes. And he’s always immaculate. He spends most of his time in the small print of contracts that are worth a fortune but as clear as mud. He was advised to prosecute for a while to develop his career, but he seems to be enjoying it. He’s really fair and that makes him deadlier.’

  ‘Knox was impressive, too.’

  ‘Yes, but far more aggressive. You’ll notice the change of style straight away.’ She frowned. ‘I’d better go and change, but there was something Knox said after court on Friday that I didn’t understand. He’d been wiping the floor with Burns then came out of court and muttered something about us having to re-think the whole thing.’

  ‘Did you not ask him what he meant?’

  ‘He didn’t encourage questions from his junior.’

  ‘And you have no idea what he meant?’

  ‘No. Now I must go and change.’ As she left the room, he admired her slightly too tight skirt and generous hips. She did not wear a wedding or engagement ring. He would definitely ask her out, perhaps after court today.

  He ambled along to take his seat in court, all pine panels and artificial light. He sat just behind and to the side of the dock, where he might possibly overhear something the accused whispered, and got his notebook and biro ready. He looked round and exchanged nods with Lance Wallace, who was sitting beside a man in his forties with a craggy face. This man wore a dark suit and had the stern demeanour of a reluctant guest at a wedding or funeral. Baggo recognised him as PC McKellar, uncomfortable out of uniform but not to be messed with.

  The clerk took his seat at the table in the well of the court and told the judge’s macer to call the case. Flapping the wide sleeves of his black gown, the small, bald official hurried off with the cheery self-importance of a master of ceremonies.

  Three men slowly rose from different areas of the public benches and sat in the dock. They neither looked at the others nor did they speak. Lachlan Smail, ruddy-faced with thinning ginger hair, stared straight ahead. To his left, Gideon Maltravers, the tallest at well over six feet with a lightly-tanned complexion, inspected his fingernails. His light blue linen suit gave an impression of style and arrogance. To his left was Joe Thomson, the eldest of the accused, whose misshapen nose, punched back into a leathery, brick-coloured face, made Baggo think of pub brawls. They were joined by a fourth, younger than the rest and handcuffed to a security officer. John Burns’s dark eyes flashed round the court in a manner that was street-wise yet desperate. The officer shuffled him past the other accused to sit on the right of Smail.

  As counsel took their places round the table, Baggo noted how Melanie had secured her long, brown hair in a French Roll, making the curls of her white wig stick out at the back. She sat up straight, pert and demure, her Parker ball-point ready to resume note-taking.

  Baggo’s increasingly erotic imaginings were cut short when the macer shouted ‘court’ and everyone stood for the judge’s entrance. Lord Tulloch, a big, lumpy man with incongruously delicate pince-nez glasses, strode in and bowed. The lawyers bowed back then everyone sat down.

  The judge, an imposing figure in his white gown adorned with red crosses, got straight to the point. ‘I have not brought the jury back yet because there is something I want to say. Everyone will no doubt be aware that the Advocate-Depute prosecuting in this case, Mr Knox, died suddenly during the weekend. This is neither the time nor the place to pay tribute to a very fine lawyer. We have another experienced counsel to take his place and so the trial may proceed. When I bring the jury back, I am minded to say that Mr Knox has died during the weekend, and he has been replaced by another Advocate-Depute. They must not speculate about Mr Knox’s death. Nor must they allow it to affect in any way their view of the evidence in this case. Does anyone have any submission they wish to make?’

  There were mutters of ‘No, my lord’ from counsel. The jury were brought in, the judge addressed them, Burns resumed his place in the witness box, and Radcliffe stood up. ‘Good morning, Mr Burns,’ he said, a pleasant smile on his face.

  As Melanie had said, Radcliffe was nicer than Knox, and much more polite, but Baggo found him even more boring. Cross-examination was a bit like cricket, he thought, only with an important difference: the questioner kept on bowling at the witness, but no matter how often the batsman was caught out, he never moved from the crease.

  It was not long before his thoughts drifted back to Melanie.

  6

  ‘Now we’re off to the Grange. The Dean of the Faculty of Advocates is expecting us,’ Flick told di Falco as he reversed the car out of the India Street gutter, causing a van coming down the hill to swerve. ‘Do you know your way round Edinburgh?’

  ‘Not very well, ma’am,’ he admitted.

  ‘I don’t think that matters. The council kept changing the road lay-out for the tram works. Apparently the public money that’s been lost through the Nicklaus golf course fraud is dwarfed by the cost of these trams, which no one wanted.’

  After an interminable wait at temporary traffic lights and an inspired change of lanes which caused a lorry driver to wave his fist, they reached a quiet road, again cobbled, with large grey stone houses set back from the street behind front gardens full of rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias.

  Flick was undecided about how much information she should give the Dean. As di Falco p
ut the Police card back on the dashboard she took a deep breath.

  A clump of lily-of-the-valley was flowering beside the front step. Flick inhaled its clean scent as the heavy door opened. A tall lady wearing a maroon skirt and a red blouse smiled at them. She carried no fat and held herself upright. Her brown hair was in a short bob and her pale skin had no make-up. She had applied some dark red lipstick and Flick could see hair on her upper lip. ‘Good morning, officers,’ she said.

  Di Falco produced his warrant. ‘Good morning, ma’am. Is your husb …’

  Flick cut in quickly. ‘Dean of Faculty, thank you for seeing us.’

  ‘Not at all,’ the Dean said, her eyes drawn to Flick’s belly. She put her hand on di Falco’s arm. ‘You’re not the first and you won’t be the last to make that mistake. You are Detective Inspector Fortune and Detective Constable di Falco, I presume.’

  As di Falco stammered his apologies, the Dean led them into a study and gestured to seats facing the massive desk in the centre of the room. As she fetched coffee and biscuits, the officers took in the shelves on three walls groaning with legal books up to shoulder height. Above the bookshelves, paintings of still life and city scenes dominated the space up to the high ceiling. Flick thought she recognised the bold colours and confident brush-strokes of Morocco. Family photographs in an assortment of frames sat on the bookcases. This time there were no dead animals. Most of the photos had been taken in cities or on sunny beaches. One showed the family, all open-mouthed on a Disney ride. The Dean’s husband was a cheery-looking man, slightly shorter than his wife. They had a son and a daughter, both teenagers. Flick had to look twice to identify the happy mum, usually in jeans, her hair tousled, as the Dean.

  ‘You will want to know what I can tell you about Mr Knox.’ Coffee poured, de-caf for Flick, the Dean got straight to the point. ‘The answer is not much, I’m afraid. I saw him early on Friday evening and said hello, but that was it. I can’t remember seeing him after dinner.’