Eve of Destruction: A Harry Devlin Mystery Read online

  Also by Martin Edwards

  All The Lonely People

  Suspicious Minds

  I Remember You

  Yesterday’s Papers

  Northern Blood (editor)

  Northern Blood 2 (editor)

  Anglian Blood (co-editor)

  Eve of Destruction

  Martin Edwards

  A Foul Play Press Book

  W. W. Norton & Company

  New York • London

  Dedicated to my mother

  Love is merely a madness and, I tell you,

  deserves as well a dark house and a whip as

  madmen do, and the reason why they are not

  so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so

  ordinary that the whippers are in love too.

  William Shakespeare, As You Like It

  Contents

  Discovery

  Before

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  After

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Discovery

  Shaun could not see the bodies, but he knew where they were buried.

  The house beyond the trees had once been a church and these grounds were the old graveyard. He was trespassing, but he told himself he had as much right as anyone to be here. After all, his grandmother had worshipped at St Alwyn’s for fifty years, until the powers-that-be decided it must close. They blamed falling congregations and the cost of maintaining a cold and cavernous building. When the vicar retired, they merged neighbouring parishes and put the place up for sale. St Alwyn’s was deconsecrated and Shaun’s grandmother had wept at the betrayal.

  ‘They should have let the dead rest in peace,’ she had complained, her leathery cheeks damp with tears.

  Shaun never understood why she made so much fuss. He did not believe in anything he could not touch or see. The old woman’s lifetime of faith had counted for nothing when a clot of blood formed in her brain. So why worry about a little breaking and entering if the chance arose?

  He had been pebble-kicking his way past the high sandstone walls, killing time on a hot July evening. Since his grandmother had died, his mum spent more time than ever out on the Liverpool streets, sidling up to any man who reminded her of the father Shaun had never known. He did not resent being left to his own devices: it was best to be able to do as you pleased. He was on the lookout for a car in which to practise handbrake turns, but he’d seen nothing to tempt him so far. A white Mercedes which would have been a supreme prize raced past him, heading for the city centre. Then he noticed that someone had left the back gate to St Alwyn’s ajar. He did not hesitate. Forbidden territory fascinated him and there might be rich pickings if no-one was around. He was used to living on his wits. If anyone from the house accosted him, he would turn on his cheeky smile and ask if there were any odd jobs going.

  The thought of the bodies underground did not trouble him as he sidled along the sunken path with his hands in his pockets. Corpses only came alive in the videos he watched late at night. He was unshackled by superstition: fifteen years old and feeling lucky. Ladders were for walking under, mirrors were made to be broken.

  On either side of the paving slabs, brambles and couch grass formed a thick tangle. The tombstones had been removed, each memorial to the dear departed hauled away, leaving the old bones stripped of their last claim to identity, not only out of sight but also without a name to be remembered by. A chipped cross had been propped up against the inside wall next to a couple of abandoned tablets. A melancholic rhyme on one of them bemoaned the brevity of life, but Shaun could not decipher all the weathered lettering and anyway, what was the point? The words meant nothing, had no connection with a particular patch of earth, or the dead interred beneath it.

  His grandmother had called it sacrilege. On behalf of those who could no longer speak for themselves, she had railed against the bureaucrats who had decreed that times must change and that a house of God should be transformed into a private hideaway for the rich. She had been a lifelong socialist and although the Labour Party had let her down even more often than the Lord, she could never have been untrue to the convictions that had seen her through three quarters of a century. Every time she had hobbled past St Alwyn’s, she had been consumed by a mixture of rage and curiosity. What were those incomers doing in her church?

  At the time of the deconsecration there had been vague talk about rights of way, but the people who bought the house were careful to discourage visitors rambling through their garden and the gate at the back was usually kept shut. Shaun said to himself that if he managed to steal something from them it would be no more than they deserved. Maybe even his grandmother would not have disapproved, would have regarded him as a sort of Robin Hood. The kind of man he imagined his father to have been, despite all the old woman’s muttering about fecklessness and prison sentences.

  Fragments from a shattered urn crunched under his feet. On his left, the marble face of a stone angel simpered at him: he stuck his tongue out in reply. The sky was overcast, the atmosphere humid. His tee shirt was stained with sweat and sticking to his thin frame. The trainers he had lifted from Woolworth’s were chafing his toes. Clouds of midges buzzed under the oak branches and he noticed a squirrel half a dozen paces ahead of him. Its little eyes glistened and seemed to dare him not to venture further. He threw a pebble at it and the creature scuttled away, furtive as any petty criminal. This corner of the churchyard was entirely overgrown. Dandelion seeds drifted lazily through the air and foxgloves and ivy encroached upon the path. He moved forward, careful to brush aside each low branch which threatened to scrape out his eyes. A bend took him out from under the canopy formed by the spreading oaks and the bulk of St Alwyn’s loomed ahead of him.

  He knew nothing of architecture, yet even he could recognise that this was a place intended to inspire awe. It dated back to Victoria’s reign and he’d heard from his grandmother more about its history than he cared to recall. Only one story stuck in his mind. An earlier church had once stood on this site, but it had been destroyed by a bolt of lightning which had struck during a December evensong. The organist had been killed and so had the boy who was blowing the bellows.

  The stone walls were stained with soot. The new owners had cut a couple of windows into the steeply pitched roof above the old nave to let in more light and the squat bell-tower was adorned with a burglar alarm. Shaun knew the alarm’s red light would have been winking if it had been set. Approaching the porch at the side of the church, he saw that one of the double oak doors was ajar. The temptation was overwhelming and he was in no mood to resist it. He pushed at the heavy brass handle and the door swung open with a disconsolate whine.

  As he crossed the threshold, he realised that everything was about to go wrong. The place was cold after the heat outside, but it was more than that. The silence was stifling. No unlocked house in the heart of the city should be so quiet or smell so strangely of decay. He wasn’t afraid of being caught: what frightened him was that there was something here he could not understand. His flesh began to itch and his throat had dried. Facing him was an arched entrance with a pair of flung-back door
s. Beyond, the vestibule opened out into a vast hall. Unable to help himself, he inched forward until he stood underneath the arch, then froze. The largest rug he had ever seen stretched across the centre of the hall. Once the rug had been beige, but now it was disfigured by dark spreading marks.

  The sight of the bodies hit him like a kick in the face. Not all the dead of St Alwyn’s were safely underground. There was a great deal of blood, more than Shaun had ever seen in any of his midnight movies. He felt his gorge rise and he tried to force his eyes shut, but they refused to close. Some of the blood had splattered the far wall, as if a mad artist had taken it as his canvas. Three people were sprawled across the floor. Two of them reached towards each other, as though in the moment of death they had striven to unite in a final embrace. The third, barely alive, mumbled something Shaun could not quite catch and stretched out an arm, seeming to point at an object which lay a couple of feet away. As Shaun began to retch, he saw that the object was a small and sightless furry animal. A young child’s toy teddy bear.

  Before

  Chapter One

  ‘The wages of sin is death!’ cried the pavement prophet.

  Not necessarily, thought Harry Devlin as he followed Shaun Quade out of the juvenile court. It was the week before Shaun would make his discovery at St Alwyn’s and Harry had been watching his young client get away with murder – or, at least, with the theft of enough cars to fill a main dealer’s showroom. The outcome owed less to advocacy or even innocence than the Crown Prosecution Service’s failure to notify the key police witness of the trial date. The prosecutor’s shame-faced application for an adjournment had been rebuffed by the bench and Shaun had pumped Harry’s hand with delight. Perhaps those at fault had deserved the taxpayer’s thanks. Shaun’s last conviction had entailed a character-building adventure holiday in Snowdonia on which he had been accompanied by a team of experts in counselling. Yet the experience had failed to convince him that crime did not pay. After nodding a cheery goodbye to Harry, he headed up Hatton Garden in the direction of the Kingsway Tunnel car park with a recidivist gleam in his eye.

  The doom-monger had placed an upturned trilby over a manhole cover. Spidery purple capitals on a placard next to it exhorted passers-by to toss in their spare cash. Davey Damnation’s sales pitch combined pitiable homelessness, with hellfire preaching. He’d earned his nickname from the courtroom hacks he harangued each day. Many of them confessed privately to a sense of fellow feeling with him: they knew what it was like to argue an unprovable case.

  Harry tossed a pound coin into the hat, telling himself it did no harm to keep on the right side of the fire-and-brimstone brigade. You never knew.

  Davey glowered. Gratitude was not part of his stock-in-trade. He had the physique and fashion sense of a scarecrow but his long bony fingers were perfect for pointing in accusation. ‘Remember the words of the Book of Revelation!’

  Harry had enough trouble keeping up to date with Archbold on Criminal Pleading, Practice and Evidence. Lawyers called the big book their Bible, but at least the original Holy Scriptures did not keep changing with each new Home Secretary. He gave Davey a nervous smile and hurried on. Dale Street was hot and dusty and the air was thick with traffic smells. His eyes felt sore and his head was beginning to ache. All through the long months of winter, people had sniffled with colds and complained about the rain; now, after a single week of unbroken sunshine, hay fever sufferers had become paranoid about the pollen count and everyone kept saying that the weather was far too warm to work.

  He glanced upwards, shading his eyes against the glare. High above ground level, a spy in the sky seemed to follow his every move. Whenever he walked in the line of vision of the closed circuit television cameras that scanned the city centre, he was conscious of a prickling sensation at the back of his neck. The awareness of being under constant observation was enough to induce a sense of guilt in anyone: except, perhaps, Harry’s thicker-skinned clients. Franz Kafka would have felt at home in present day Liverpool, Harry reckoned. If he’d set The Trial in the Dale Street magistrates’ court, Joseph K.’s best hope would have been for the prosecuting solicitor to lose the file.

  Stopping off at a sandwich bar, he picked up a salad bap and a can of diet cola. For the past ten days he had been making one of his periodic attempts to adopt a healthier lifestyle: forsaking junk food and running up the stairs each evening when he returned to his flat at the Empire Dock. His efforts usually came to predictable grief with a visit after a long day in the office to the saloon bar in the Dock Brief followed by a trip to the Baltic Takeaway. After his third pint, the virtues of clean living always began to seem over-rated. He doubted whether he would ever develop a taste for bean curd, blackstrap molasses or alfalfa. Besides, he kept up with the news from the tabloid papers in which Rene at the Baltic wrapped his regular cod and chips.

  On the last lap of his journey to Fenwick Court, a Salvation Army lady rattling a collecting tin and a spaniel-faced guitarist playing ‘All You Need Is Love’ relieved him of the rest of his loose change. For a moment he considered strolling round to Kim Lawrence’s office, but then he thought better of it. She had not returned his last call since arriving back from a fortnight in Cyprus and he feared the message he inferred from her silence. No point in turning up on her doorstep uninvited. He needed an excuse that would enable him to seize the chance to talk to her again and find out if their relationship had run its course – even before it had properly begun.

  A tubby blonde woman with a clipboard stood opposite Fenwick Court and Harry slowed his pace as he approached her. He was not in the mood for work and he would have been glad of an excuse to dawdle for ten minutes, expounding upon his likes and dislikes of various consumer goods. Yet as he passed her, she was careful not to meet his eye. It was coming to something when he could not even captivate a market researcher.

  He reached his firm’s office and stuck his head round Jim Crusoe’s door. His partner was cradling his head in one huge hand. An abstract of title to unregistered land was spread out over the desk in front of him.

  ‘Any joy with the advertisement?’

  Jim rubbed his eyes. His craggy features had seemed increasingly careworn lately. A little while ago he’d had his shaggy hair and beard neatly trimmed, but in Harry’s opinion the change made him seem much older. ‘Nothing yet. It’s still early days, I suppose.’

  Sylvia, his assistant, had married in the spring and had announced the previous month that she was pregnant. Jim had often said she was irreplaceable and in view of the dearth of replies to their box ad for a locum in the Echo, Harry was beginning to believe him.

  ‘Has anyone applied for the job at all?’ Unemployment was high in the city but suitably qualified lawyers looking for a short-term assignment were thin on the ground.

  A shrug. ‘Last night I interviewed a chap who was a partner in Windaybank’s until ten years ago. He’s looking to get back into the profession as a clerk and he’s prepared to accept our rate of pay.’

  ‘Why haven’t you bitten his hand off?’

  ‘I checked him out with the Law Society this morning. He has a poor memory.’

  ‘You’re not telling me they have a blacklist of forgetful lawyers?’

  ‘When I met him, it slipped his mind to tell me that he’d been struck off in 1986 for fraud.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Jim scowled. ‘I’m all in favour of rehabilitating offenders, but the way he kept firing questions about our accounting systems did make me nervous.’

  ‘So the search goes on?’

  ‘It’s scarcely begun. I’ve even wondered if we should contact that firm of headhunters who called you the other week.’

  ‘I thought we agreed they were sure to be greedy, unscrupulous and full of bullshit?’

  ‘We’re solicitors, who are we to talk?’

  ‘What’s got into you today? You make Davey Damnation seem full of joie de vivre. Let me cheer you up. Shaun Quade got off.’

 
‘So you’re pleased with yourself?’

  ‘I can’t claim much credit, but I had thought they would throw the book at him.’

  ‘Last time they did, wasn’t it The Good Hotel Guide?’

  Jim’s sourness was out of character and Harry paused for a moment, tempted to ask what was wrong. He had always regarded his partner as a rock to lean on, but for weeks now Jim had seemed more like a rolling stone. He had started taking long lunches and missing appointments. At times his manner was brusque, more often uncharacteristically abstracted. As old friends, they had shared many secrets over the years and what bothered Harry most was that Jim had not shown any sign of wishing to confide in him. Might there be money worries? Jim took charge of the business side of the partnership. The auditors had recently produced the annual accounts and although the long rows of figures meant less to Harry than a lyric sheet at the National Eisteddfod, he had seen nothing in them to keep him from sleeping at nights. Crusoe and Devlin would always lead a hand-to-mouth existence, but their overheads were low and in a city where litigation was a way of life, there would always be work in saving clients from themselves as well as from the system. So what was the problem? Harry could not guess, but he trusted his partner’s judgement above any other man’s – it had saved them from disaster more than once – and he decided it was best to wait until Jim was ready to speak.

  Once behind his own desk, he finished reading the morning paper whilst consuming his frugal lunch. His invariable habit, adopted in youth and never abandoned, was to read newspapers from back to front. Sports pages first, of course, to see what was happening in the real world before he tackled the main news items. Fighting in the Middle East, starvation in Africa and gossip about the Royal Family in dear old England. The crime stories always caught his eye. A professor advocated fining car owners careless enough to have their vehicles stolen; a jury had been discharged for making use of a ouija board in its deliberations; and an editorial fulminated about the collapsed prosecution of Norman Morris. The police had suspected Morris of being the Scissorman, who during the past eighteen months had murdered three prostitutes in the north of England, on each occasion driving a pair of domestic scissors into their back or breast with tremendous force. Morris was a convicted kerb crawler with a record of violence who fitted the offender profile perfectly, but forensic evidence to connect him with the crimes was lacking. A woman officer had been deputed to tempt him into bragging about his crimes and one drunken evening Morris had obligingly fallen into the trap and boasted of being the man the police could not catch. But the judge had thrown the case out with a ringing condemnation of the tactics employed and the hunt for the Scissorman was back to square one. Harry shook his head and was in the act of consigning the paper to his bin when the telephone rang.