A Fatal Verdict (38 page)

51. New Trial

Another day, another trial. Sarah Newby placed the red ribboned brief on the ancient oak table in the centre of York Crown Court, and sat down to await the entrance of the judge. Beside her, counsel for the prosecution, Matthew Clayton QC, a short, dapper man with the spare physique of a long distance runner, smiled at her politely. She had not met him before, but he came with a formidable reputation. He surveyed the court with interest.

The public gallery was full, the air humming with the buzz of eager whispered conversation and feet hurrying over wooden floors. The jury were on Sarah’s right, the clerk and ushers ahead of her, the security guard and shorthand writers all in place.

The talk hushed as the accused came up from the cells between two security guards. Sarah turned to smile encouragement to her client as she entered the dock. Kathryn looked pale, calm and composed. She wore a blue two piece suit, with a brooch and a scarf at her neck. She looked what she was - a respectable educated woman in her early forties - except that she was thinner now than when they’d first met. So thin and pale, that Sarah had wondered if she might have cancer. But the stress of losing a daughter could do that to anyone - not to mention being tried for murder. Kathryn stepped forward to the edge of the dock and looked around her - a tense, frail figure surrounded by eyes - like Joan of Arc at the stake, a martyr to the mob.

The judge, his Lordship Robert McNair QC, entered, bowed, and took his seat, resplendent in red robes, sash and wig. The clerk read the charge:

‘Kathryn Elizabeth Walters, you are hereby charged that on the night of 16
^th
October last, you did kill David William Kidd, contrary to Section 1 of the Homicide Act 1957. How say you? Are you guilty, or not guilty, of that charge?’

‘Not ... I’m sorry.’ Kathryn coughed to clear her dry throat. ‘Not guilty.’

‘Very well. You may be seated.’

So that’s over at least, Sarah thought. Throughout their pre-trial conferences Kathryn had been so withdrawn, tense, and uncommunicative, that Sarah had sometimes wondered if she wanted to be convicted, and would surrender at the first challenge. Sarah dreaded putting her on the stand. Any competent prosecutor could make that sort of behaviour look like guilt; it was not a chance that Matthew Clayton QC was likely to miss.

He rose now to outline his case. Addressing the jury with a clear, resonant voice, his pleasant everyday tone somehow emphasized the horror of how David Kidd had died.

‘The pathologist will tell you that the cause of his death was drowning. Not surprising, you may think, for a man trapped inside a car under six feet of dirty water. Physical examination shows how he clawed at the roof and doors of that car, trying to get out, but failed. His lungs filled with water and he drowned.’

He explained how the presence of copious quantities of rohypnol in David’s blood made it impossible that this was an accident, since he would have been incapable of driving a car or performing any normal actions, let alone escaping from a car when he suddenly found himself trapped in it under water. And the car was far from the road, in the middle of lonely woods.

‘So, a suspicious death, at the very least. But what led the police to treat this as murder, and crucially for us, to identify Kathryn Walters as the murderer? Well, as in the best detective stories, a number of small clues led inescapably, so the prosecution say, to Mrs Walters’ door. The police witnesses will lay this evidence before you.’

The best detective stories!
Sarah snorted, just loud enough for Matthew Clayton to hear. He looked, she thought, faintly abashed. This was a serious matter, after all, not an entertainment, and he must know that the tightrope of logic he was about to lead the jurors across was painfully thin. One weak thread and they would fall into an abyss of doubt.

Glancing over her shoulder, Sarah saw Will Churchill sitting at the back of the court, so sure of himself, so smug - a man on the make, who needed convictions to rise to the top. He was the man she would have to challenge, if she was to have any chance at all of winning this case. And so far, the prospects looked far from good.

‘The first of these clues, from careful examination of the crime scene, showed a number of marks, on trees and the concrete around the tank, to suggest that the driver of the car - not Mr Kidd - had got out to move a fence, before driving the car over it. Then the fence had been replaced to make it look as though nothing had happened. Mr Kidd couldn’t have done that, clearly. Then secondly, footprints - or partial footprints - were found in the area, made by a size six training shoe - the same size and style as trainers found in Kathryn Walters’ house. And most conclusively of all, you may think ...’

Matthew Clayton paused, milking the moment like an impresario, meeting the eyes of each of the jurors in turn to ensure he had their full attention.

‘Several hairs were discovered, a cluster of female hairs, on a blue elastic hair bobble near the fence. And these hairs, when subjected to DNA analysis, proved to be identical to hairs taken from the accused, Kathryn Walters. Proof positive, you may think. How could Kathryn Walters’ hair possibly be near this abandoned fuel pit, unless Kathryn Walters had something to do with the murder of David Kidd?’

There was a soft intake of breath, and the eyes of the jurors, all twelve at once, turned towards Kathryn, where she sat pale and defiant in the dock. She must feel it, Sarah thought, like heat burning into her - or cold, perhaps, sucking her life away.

It was a lethal question, all right. That hair bobble might lock Kathryn away for life. And Clayton had introduced it in just the right way - as the killer clue in his detective story. The jurors would love that, just as Churchill would. After her conferences with Kathryn, Sarah had rung Terry Bateson to ask his opinion about the case. They’d met on a bench by the river. Over the past few months Sarah’s conflict with Bob had died down as he threw himself with apparent enthusiasm into his new job, and her relationship with Terry had reverted, more or less, to the professional friendship they had had before. Slightly to her regret, he had made few attempts to progress it further. He seemed too depressed to try.

The failure of David Kidd’s trial, followed by the arrest and prosecution of Kathryn Walters for his murder, had undermined Terry’s faith: both in the police service, as an organisation devoted to justice, and in himself, as a canny, successful detective. If Kathryn Walters
had
killed David Kidd, then a significant part of that was his fault; but if she was innocent, then someone, somehow, had fabricated the evidence against her.

‘I never believed it was her, perfect motive or not,’ he’d told Sarah when they met. ‘I mean, a woman of her age, how could she get near him, for a start? He loathed her, he’d have crossed the street to avoid her. If it had been Shelley’s father or daughter, perhaps. But he was with his mistress and she was in the States. So ...’

‘It has to be Kathryn?’

‘That’s what Churchill thinks, yes. But there could easily be someone else, couldn’t there? That’s what I told him. Some junkie or hooker like Lindsay Miller, the girl Shelley found him in bed with; some boyfriend or business associate he’d cheated - anyone really. This lad was one of nature’s pondlife - he was under every stone you could find. But I’m off the case, and slick Willie, he doesn’t want to know. It would take time, energy and resources to track down someone like that. Whereas if you can build a case against Kathryn Walters - bang! You’ve got it in one. With lots of choice headlines as well.’

‘But apart from these hairs, the evidence doesn’t stand up.’

‘Exactly. The day after she was arrested, SOCO wanted to close the crime scene down. But little Willy’s not satisfied. All they’d found was a few footprints, so they had to go over it again. Much moaning and strong words, but they do it because he’s the boss. And guess what? He was right all along. Next day they find these hairs, on an elastic bobble, that they missed before. Hairs with roots, that can be tested for DNA. And that’s it, done and dusted. Kathryn Walters, placed at the scene of the crime.’

Sarah studied him carefully. There was a bitterness in his face that she hadn’t seen before, a resentful, frustrated cynicism. ‘You think he planted the hairs?’

‘Why not? It’s not as though he hasn’t done this before. Think of how he exaggerated the statement of that shopkeeper Patel, for instance, in Kidd’s case. And Nick Bryant’s no idiot. His team had combed that site already. Churchill was the one who arrested Kathryn, searched her house. Easy to pick up a hair bobble.’

‘Terry, if you’re right, this isn’t a mistake. It’s a deliberate attempt to pervert the course of justice.’

‘I know. And if I could prove it, I would, but I can’t. So unless you can do something magic, your client’s going down.’

Sarah had walked back to her office deeply depressed. Churchill had  interviewed Kathryn a number of times, been to her house - it would have been so easy to pick up a hair bobble, take it to the woods, and leave it for the SOCO team to find next day. Easy, and almost impossible to challenge. She and Lucy had spent hours checking the chain of evidence that led from the scene of crime to the laboratory. Almost everything suggested that it was exactly what it appeared to be - a piece of brilliant, painstaking forensic detection, locating this tiny, vital clue in a dirty and unpromising crime scene.

Over the next few weeks Terry had tried, in the time he had left from the minor cases assigned to him, to investigate David Kidd’s death on his own account. But it was difficult; it was not his case, and few people on the team would talk to him about it. There was a wary, pitying look in their eyes that Terry was becoming used to. Everyone understood about the conflict between him and his boss, and what was happening to his career as a result of it. It could happen to them as well.

Nick Bryant, the SOCO, had agreed, cautiously, that his team had conducted a thorough examination of the crime scene the first time, they always did. But it was a messy place, with mud from the tractor that had hauled the car out, leaves, insects, and animal droppings everywhere. They were not supermen, they got tired and bored like everyone else. It was not impossible that they could miss a small elastic hair bobble. No one had seen Churchill anywhere near where it was found.

So Terry went back to the beginning, trying to see who else might have killed David Kidd. Surely he must have had other enemies than Kathryn.

He went back to where Kidd had kept his car, in a garage under the city wall, fifty yards or more from his flat. Churchill’s team had found an elderly colonel who’d seen David on the night he died, driving his Lotus out of the garage. There’d been a woman with him, the old man  said, in her thirties or forties, he thought, though he couldn’t be sure. She had fair hair, he was sure of that. How long it was, he was less certain. He’d glimpsed her face under a streetlamp and had picked Kathryn’s photo as resembling it more closely than the others he’d been shown.

Terry checked all the other flats and houses with windows overlooking the garage, and struck lucky - a woman, younger than the colonel and with arguably better eyesight, had seen the same thing, but with a subtle difference. She didn’t know David Kidd, but she remembered the Lotus Elise. And she described the female she’d seen getting into the car as a
girl
- a young woman in her twenties, she insisted, certainly not her late forties. She was certain of the date because it was the night before she went away on holiday; that presumably, was why Churchill’s team had missed her.

It wasn’t much, but it was a start. He looked at the map, and went for a weekend walk in the countryside, wondering how the murderer, whoever she was, could have left the scene of the crime without being traced. He enquired at the bus station in Wetherby, to see if anyone unusual had turned up that morning. Again, a young woman, bedraggled, tired, this time with short fair punk style hair.

But who was she? And how had she arranged to meet him? One night, thinking about this, Terry remembered suddenly that David Kidd had worked for a travel agency, leading safari holidays in Kenya. A trawl through the files of the case yielded a name:
Sunline Tours
, with an office in Hammersmith.  Next day he rang them and, to his surprise, a lead opened up.

Yes, they confirmed, after a long search through their records, a woman had arranged to meet him, as a matter of fact. A travel journalist had rung their office about an article she intended to write, and they’d fixed an appointment for her to meet David Kidd at the
Slug and Lettuce
in York.

‘Do you have a name?’ Terry asked, pen poised above his notebook.

‘Yes, I think so. Just a minute ...’ There was the sound of paper rustling on the other end of the line, and pop music playing in the background. ‘Here it is. Martha Cookson. She writes for the
Washington Star
. I’m looking for her article, but the cuttings agency don’t seem to have sent it, unfortunately ...’

‘Never mind,’ said Terry. ‘I’ll give her a ring, see if I can trace it that way.’

Matthew Clayton QC was approaching the end of his opening speech. Having described Kathryn’s failed alibi, he moved on to the question of motive.

‘But why, you may ask, would a woman like Kathryn Walters - a mother, a respectable  businesswoman, a pharmacist - do such a terrible thing? What would drive her to hate David Kidd so much as to cause his death? Well, unfortunately, the answer to that is all too clear.’