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 years. 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.
“Mike, you know I seldom take legal aid cases?”
“Seldom is good enough for me, sir.”
“But now and again?
“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 years. 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.
“Mike, you know I seldom take legal aid cases?”
“Seldom is good enough for me, sir.”
“But now and again?
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