Yesterday's Papers by Martin Edwards Page A

nose.
    â€˜â€œSMITH, EDWIN, MURDER.” All right?’
    â€˜Jock, you’re a genius. Thanks.’
    â€˜So what is all this about?’ asked the little man as they picked their way back through the detritus. ‘A murder case thirty years ago - where do you come in?’
    â€˜I don’t know yet that I do come in. But I’ve been asked to look into the old papers, see what I make of them.’
    Jock raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ve heard you have a name as a part-time private detective. Tramping the mean streets of Merseyside.’
    â€˜So someone’s told you I’m a nosey sod? Well, I don’t suppose I’ll be sueing for slander. I can’t deny I have an inquisitive streak. And yesterday I met a man who thinks there may have been a miscarriage of justice in the case of Edwin Smith.’
    â€˜Get away.’ Jock flourished a dog-eared Ross Macdonald paperback which he had pulled from the back pocket of his jeans. ‘Fact is, I like a good murder mystery myself. You’ll have to let me know what you discover. Who knows? I might get a chance to play Watson to your Holmes.’
    â€˜Don’t hold your breath. The man I spoke to may be way off beam.’
    â€˜But if he isn’t?’
    â€˜Let’s see what yesterday’s papers tell me. Whether Smith was guilty as charged or just unlucky in his choice of defence lawyer.’
    Puzzled, Jock stroked his jaw. ‘But Cyril Tweats was a good brief, by all accounts. He may not have known about keeping proper records, but he was a champion of the ordinary man, not any kind of fool.’
    Harry gave a sceptical grunt and nodded back towards the endless shelves of old documents.
    â€˜You know what they say - doctors bury their mistakes and architects build them. Solicitors simply file them.’

Chapter Six
    and I feel no sense of guilt at all .
    When Harry emerged into the open air, the Pierhead was as cold and grey as before. Yet in comparison to the Land of the Dead, it suddenly seemed as bright and warm as Malibu.
    On his way to Derby Square, he wondered again whether there could be any doubt that Edwin Smith had strangled Carole Jeffries. A thin layer of dust lay over the papers in the folder tucked under his arm. Cyril Tweats hadn’t agonised over the case, hadn’t kept going back to it, striving to find a way to prove Smith’s innocence. Once Smith’s mother had paid his bill, he’d closed his file and consigned it to the vaults. Harry could picture him discussing the trial at his club, shaking his head and saying that it was a sorry business, but although he had done his best, the evidence had damned his client. Yet, Harry reminded himself, the conviction of Kevin Walter had once seemed equally sound.
    On Kevin’s twenty-fifth birthday, a jeweller’s home in South West Lancashire had been burgled. He had been watching television when a masked man brandishing a gun burst in and bound and gagged him before stealing rings, watches and silver worth a small fortune. The jeweller was a mason, a member of the same lodge as several senior officers in the local force, and the investigating team was under pressure from the start to find the guilty man. Kevin Walter, a robber with a violent streak whose curriculum vitae read like a teach-yourself guide to the British penal system, headed the queue of the usual suspects.
    Under questioning, Kevin claimed that on the evening of the break-in, he and Jeannie had quarrelled furiously because he had accused her of seeing another man. He had hit her and then stormed out to celebrate his birthday with a one-man pub crawl. But he could not provide an alibi and after eighteen hours in the cells, his nerve snapped. He confessed and said his accomplice was a man he’d met in a pub whom he knew only as Terry. It had all been Terry’s idea, of course, and Terry had conned him good and proper: he’d never seen any of the proceeds