Death of an Expert Witness (7 page)

Howarth was irritated. This was one of those minor administrative details which Miss Faraker would never have dreamed of troubling him with. Miss Foley was, he guessed, expecting him to say something sympathetic about Scobie, to inquire whether the old man had been fit to cycle home. Dr. MacIntyre had, no doubt, bleated like an anxious sheep when any of the staff were ill. He bent his head over his papers. But Miss Foley was at the door. It had to be now. He made himself say: “Ask Dr. Lorrimer to come down for a few minutes, will you please?”

He could, perfectly casually, have asked Lorrimer to stay on after the meeting; why hadn’t he? Probably because there might have been an echo of the headmaster in so public a request. Perhaps because this was an interview he had been glad to postpone, even temporarily.

Lorrimer came in and stood in front of the desk.

Howarth took out Bradley’s personal file from his right-hand drawer and said: “Sit down will you, please. This annual report on Bradley. You’ve given him an adverse marking. Have you told him?”

Lorrimer remained standing. He said: “I’m required by the reporting rules to tell him. I saw him in my office at ten-thirty, as soon as I got back from the PM.”

“It seems a bit hard. According to his file, it’s the first adverse report he’s had. We took him on probation eighteen months ago. Why hasn’t he made out?”

“I should have thought that was obvious from my detailed markings. He’s been promoted above his capacity.”

“In other words, the Board made a mistake?”

“That’s not so unusual. Boards occasionally do. And not only when it comes to promotions.”

The allusion was blatant, a deliberate provocation, yet Howarth decided to ignore it. With an effort he kept his voice level.

“I’m not prepared to countersign this report as it stands. It’s too early to judge him fairly.”

“I made that excuse for him last year when he’d been with us six months. But if you disagree with my assessment you’ll presumably say so. There’s a space provided.”

“I intend to use it. And I suggest that you try the effect of giving the boy some support and encouragement. There are two reasons for an inadequate performance. Some people are capable of doing better and will if judiciously kicked into it. Others aren’t. To kick them is not only pointless, it destroys what confidence they have. You run an efficient department. But it might be more efficient and happier if you learned how to understand people. Management is largely a matter of personal relationships.”

He made himself look up.

Lorrimer said through lips so stiff that the words sounded cracked: “I hadn’t realized that your family were noted for success in their personal relationships.”

“The fact that you can’t take criticism without becoming as personal and spiteful as a neurotic girl is an example of what I mean.”

He never knew what Lorrimer was about to reply. The door opened and his sister came in. She was dressed in slacks and a sheepskin jacket, her blond hair bound with a scarf. She looked at them both without embarrassment and said easily: “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were engaged. I ought to have asked Inspector Blakelock to ring.”

Without a word, Lorrimer, deathly pale, turned on his heels, walked past her and was gone.

Domenica looked after him, smiled and shrugged. She said: “Sorry if I interrupted something. It’s just to say that I’m going to Norwich for a couple of hours to buy some materials. Is there anything you want?”

“Nothing, thank you.”

“I’ll be back before dinner, but I think I’ll give the village concert a miss. Without Claire Easterbrook the Mozart will be pretty insupportable. Oh, and I’m thinking of going up to London for the best part of next week.”

Her brother didn’t reply.

She looked at him and said: “What’s wrong?”

“How did Lorrimer know about Gina?” He didn’t need to ask her if it was she who had told him. Whatever else she may have confided, it would not have been that.

She went across, ostensibly to study the Stanley Spencer set in the overmantel of the fireplace, and asked lightly: “Why? He didn’t mention your divorce, did he?”

“Not directly, but the allusion was intended.”

She turned to face him. “He probably took the trouble to find out as much as possible about you when he knew that you were a candidate for the job here. It isn’t such a large service after all.”

“But I came from outside it.”

“Even so, there would be contacts, gossip. A failed marriage is one of those unconsidered trifles he might expect to sniff out. And what of it? After all, it’s not unusual. I thought forensic scientists were particularly at risk. All those late hours at scenes of crime and the unpredictable court attendances. They ought to be used to marital break-ups.”

He said, knowing that he sounded as petulant as an obstinate child: “I don’t want him in my Lab.”

“Your Lab? It isn’t quite as simple as that, is it? I don’t think the Stanley Spencer is right over the fireplace. It looks incongruous. It’s strange that Father bought it. Not at all his kind of picture, I should have said. Did you put it here to shock?”

Miraculously, his anger and misery were assuaged. But then she had always been able to do that for him.

“Merely to disconcert and confuse. It’s intended to suggest that I may be a more complex character than they assume.”

“Oh, but you are! I’ve never needed
Assumption at Cookham
to prove it. Why not the Greuze? It would look good with that carved overmantel.”

“Too pretty.”

She laughed, and was gone.

He picked up Clifford Bradley’s report and, in the space provided, wrote: “Mr. Bradley’s performance has been disappointing, but not all the difficulties are of his making. He lacks confidence and would benefit from more active encouragement and support than he has received. I have corrected the final marking to what I consider a more just assessment and have spoken to the Senior Biologist about the personnel management in his department.”

If he did finally decide, after all, this wasn’t the job for him, that snide comment should go some way to ensure that Lorrimer stood no chance of succeeding him as Director of Hoggatt’s.

At 1.48 precisely, Paul Middlemass, the Document Examiner, opened his file on the clunch pit murder. The Document Examination Room, which occupied the whole of the front of the building immediately under the roof, smelt like a stationer’s shop, a pungent amalgam of paper and ink, sharpened by the tang of chemicals. Middlemass breathed it as his native air. He was a tall, rangy, large-featured man with a mobile, wide-mouthed face of agreeable ugliness and iron-grey hair which fell in heavy swathes over parchment-coloured skin. Easy-going and seemingly indolent, he was in fact a prodigious worker with an obsession for his job. Paper in all its manifestations was his passion. Few men, in or outside the forensic science service, knew so much about it. He handled it with joy and with a kind of reverence, gloated over it, knew its provenance almost by its smell. Identification of the sizing and loading of a specimen by spectrographic or X-ray crystallography merely confirmed what touch and sight had already pronounced. The satisfaction of watching the emergence of an obscure watermark under soft X-rays never palled, and the
final pattern was as fascinating to his unsurprised eyes as the expected potter’s mark to a collector of porcelain.

His father, long dead, had been a dentist, and his son had taken for his own use the old man’s inordinately large store of self-designed surgical overalls. They were old-fashioned in cut, waisted and full-skirted as the coat of a Regency buck, and with crested metal buttons fastening high to the side of the throat. Although they were too short in the arm so that his lean wrists protruded like those of an overgrown schoolboy, he wore them with a certain panache, as if this unorthodox working garb, so different from the regulation white coats of the rest of the Laboratory staff, symbolized that unique blend of scientific skill, experience and flair which distinguishes the good Document Examiner.

He had just finished telephoning his wife, having remembered rather belatedly that he was due to help out that evening with the village concert. He liked women, and before his marriage had enjoyed a succession of casual, satisfactory and uncommitted affairs. He had married late, a buxom research scientist from Cambridge twenty years his junior, and drove back to their modern flat on the outskirts of the city each night in his Jaguar—his chief extravagance—frequently late, but seldom too late to bear her off to their local pub. Secure in his job, with a growing international reputation, and uxoriously contented with his comely Sophie, he knew himself to be successful and suspected himself to be happy.

The Document Examination Room with its cabinets and range of monorail cameras took up what some of his colleagues, notably Edwin Lorrimer, regarded as more than its share of room. But the Laboratory, lit by rows of fluorescent lights and with its low ceiling, was stuffy and ill ventilated, and this afternoon the central heating, unreliable at the best of times, had
concentrated all its efforts on the top of the building. Usually he was oblivious of his working conditions, but a sub-tropical temperature was difficult to ignore. He opened the door to the passage. Opposite and a little to the right were the male and female lavatories, and he could hear the occasional feet, light or heavy, hurried or dilatory, of passing members of staff, and hear the swing of the two doors. The sounds didn’t worry him. He applied himself to his task.

But the specimen he was now poring over held little mystery. If the crime had been other than murder he would have left it to his Assistant Scientific Officer, not yet returned from a belated lunch. But murder invariably meant a court appearance and cross-examination—the defence seldom let the scientific evidence go unchallenged in this, the gravest of charges—and a court appearance put document examination in general, and Hoggatt’s Laboratory in particular, on public trial. He made it a matter of principle always to take the murder cases himself. They were seldom the most interesting. What he most enjoyed were the historical investigations, the satisfaction of demonstrating, as he had only last month, that a document dated 1872 was printed on paper containing chemical wood pulp which was first used in 1874, a discovery which had initiated a fascinating unravelling of complicated documentary fraud. There was nothing complicated and little of interest about the present job. Yet, only a few years ago, a man’s neck could have depended upon his opinion. He seldom thought of the half-dozen men who had been hanged during the twenty years of his forensic experience, primarily because of his evidence, and when he did, it was not the strained but oddly anonymous faces in the dock which he remembered, or their names, but paper and ink, the thickened downward stroke, the peculiar formation of a letter. Now he spread out on his table the note taken from the
dead girl’s handbag, placing on each side the two specimens of the husband’s handwriting which the police had been able to obtain. One was a letter to the suspect’s mother written on holiday at Southend—how, he wondered, had they managed to extract that from her? The other was a brief telephoned message about a football match. The note taken from the victim’s purse was even briefer.

“You’ve got your own chap so lay off Barry Taylor or you’ll be sorry. It would be a pity to spoil a nice face like yours. Acid isn’t pretty. Watch it. A Wellwisher.”

The style, he decided, was derived from a recent television thriller, the writing was obviously disguised. It was possible that the police would be able to provide him with some more samples of the suspect’s handwriting when they visited the lad’s place of work, but he didn’t really need them. The similarities between the threatening note and the samples were unmistakable. The writer had tried to alter the slant of his hand and had changed the shape of the small
r
. But the lifts of the pen came regularly at every fourth letter—Middlemass had never found a forger who remembered to vary the interval at which he lifted pen from paper—and the dot above the
i
, high and slightly to the left, and the over-emphatic apostrophe were almost a trademark. He would analyse the paper sample, photograph and enlarge each individual letter and then mount them on a comparison chart, and the jury would pass it solemnly from hand to hand and wonder why it needed a highly paid expert to come and explain what anyone could see with his own eyes.

The telephone rang. Middlemass stretched out a long arm and held the instrument to his left ear. Susan Bradley’s voice, at first apologetic then conspiratorial and finally close to tears, squeaked into his ear in a long monologue of complaint and desperation. He listened, made soft encouraging noises, held
the receiver an inch or two from his ear, and meanwhile noted that the writer, poor bastard, hadn’t even thought of altering the distinctive cross-bar of his small letter
t
. Not that it would have done any good. And he couldn’t have known, poor devil, that his effort would feature as an exhibit in his trial for murder.

“All right,” he said. “Don’t worry. Leave it to me.”

“And you won’t let him know that I phoned you?”

“Of course not, Susan. Relax. I’ll settle it.”

The voice crackled on.

“Then tell him not to be a fool, for God’s sake. Hasn’t he noticed that we’ve got one and a half million unemployed? Lorrimer can’t sack him. Tell Clifford to hang on to his job and stop being a bloody fool. I’ll deal with Lorrimer.”

He replaced the receiver. He had liked Susan Moffat who, for two years, had worked for him as his SO. She had both more brains and more guts than her husband, and he had wondered, without greatly caring, why she had married Bradley. Pity probably, and an overdeveloped maternal instinct. There were some women who simply had to take the unfortunate literally to their breast. Or perhaps it was just lack of choice, the need for a home of her own and a child. Well, it was too late to try and stop the marriage now, and it certainly hadn’t occurred to him to try at the time. And at least she had the home and the kid. She had brought the baby to the Lab to see him only a fortnight ago. The visit of the prune-faced yelling bundle had done nothing to change his own resolution not to produce a child, but certainly Susan herself had seemed happy enough. And she would probably be happy again if something could be done about Lorrimer.