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122 pages

English

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On Leap Year Day in 1964, an attractive teenager called Carole Jeffries was strangled in a Liverpool park. The killing caused a sensation: Carole came from a prominent political family and her pop musician boyfriend was a leading exponent of the Mersey Sound. When a neighbour confessed to the crime, the case was closed. Now, more than thirty years later, Ernest Miller, an amateur criminologist, seeks to persuade lawyer Harry Devlin that the true culprit escaped scot free. Although he suspects Miller's motives, Harry has a thirst for justice and begins to delve into the past. But when another death occurs, it becomes clear that someone wants old secrets to remain buried - at any price...

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Thriller

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	13 septembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781781662816
Langue	English

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Extrait

Yesterday’s Papers
Book four of the Harry Devlin series
Martin Edwards

First published in 1994
This revised edition published in 2021 by
Acorn Books
www.acornbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 1994, 2021 Martin Edwards
Introduction Copyright © 2021 Peter Lovesey
The right of Martin Edwards to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Dedicated to Catherine

Where mystery begins, justice ends.
– Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society

Introduction
Like each of the Harry Devlin series, Yesterday’s Papers is a title based on a song, from a 1967 album by the Rolling Stones. And like each of the others, it is an inspired choice. No other title would be so right for a story that rests on the legal documents filed away from a case of thirty years ago. Typically, too, there are more echoes of the title in the fact that from the beginning Devlin is offered assistance by a crime reporter from the local press. Moreover, the music business is central to the plot. The victim was the girlfriend of a pop singer at the heart of the Mersey Sound.
Layer upon layer. Martin Edwards knows the music scene of the sixties as if he worked for the Melody Maker. His Merseybeat stars, Ray Brill, Clive Doxey and Benny Frederick, co-exist in these pages with the Beatles, Cilla Black, Gene Pitney and John Barry. How appropriate that Liverpool solicitors store their old files in a disused pier ballroom known to Devlin as the Land of the Dead – and how pleasing that his visit there is heralded by a mangled saxophone rendition of A Hard Day’s Night that would have John Coltrane turning in his grave, to say nothing of John Lennon. A wonderful concept, grippingly created.
Another rich seam is criminology. When I discovered the magic of reading, the first grown-up book I tackled at the age of nine (don’t ask) was The Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, by Edward Marjoribanks, a colourful account of the cases this great barrister was involved in. I’m sure it influenced me to become a crime writer. How pleasing, then, to find my boyhood hero Marshall Hall mentioned in these pages. He died too soon to have featured in Liverpool’s classic Wallace Case which is summarised in chapter two – but he would surely have secured an acquittal. The fictional crimes in the book get an extra cachet from references to the real murders studied by the odious Ernest Miller, the amateur criminologist who first approaches Devlin. As well as Wallace, other killers from Florence Maybrick to Myra Hindley lurk within the text, reminding the reader that even in a story rich in humour, horrors may be expected, too.
Then there is Liverpool itself. Martin Edwards was the first crime writer to think of setting a series here. Thanks largely to the Beatles, we all have some grasp of the unique character of the city and its witty people, but it takes a long-term association for a writer to convey it in totality, as he has through this engaging series of books. It’s a mark of his care for authenticity that he was once asked by an interviewer if he could name any gaffe he had made and he admitted to writing in Yesterday’s Papers about a set of railings in Sefton Park that don’t , after all, exist. A set of railings? I mention this because the confession is typical of the author’s thoroughness. The descriptions of the city aren’t set pieces. They are little more than glimpses – of the ferry terminal, the pierhead, the pubs, the courts where Harry earns his keep – yet they pinpoint the vitality of the place as well as its seediness.
I’ve almost done. If I go on much longer I’ll be revealing secrets from the plot, which is brilliant, producing surprise upon surprise, like a master magician. But I can’t finish without mentioning my favourite example of the author’s inventiveness – a policeman called Wedding Cake. Read on and find out why.
Peter Lovesey

Yesterday’s Papers

Chapter One
I killed her many years ago
‘Mr Devlin, I would like to talk to you about a murder.’
Harry Devlin stopped in his tracks on his way out of the law courts. For a fantastic moment he thought the man who had hurried to catch him up and lay a hand on his shoulder was an arresting officer.
Twisting his neck to see his assailant, Harry found himself staring not at one of Liverpool’s finest but at a scrawny old man in a soup-stained bow tie and a shiny blue suit. Although he was wheezing with the exertion, his bony grip was surprisingly fierce, as if he feared Harry was about to take flight. The thick lenses of his spectacles magnified the shape and size of his eyes and made them seem not quite human.
Harry guessed the fellow was one of the city’s courthouse cranks who sat in the public galleries each morning and afternoon, watching scenes from other people’s lives distorted by the fairground mirrors of litigation. Most lawyers disdained the spectators as voyeurs, brushing by them in the corridors and on the stairs, but sometimes Harry would pause in passing to exchange a casual word. He could not resist feeling sympathy for anyone whose life was so barren that this place became a second home.
‘Want to make a confession?’ he asked and gestured towards a man in an overcoat striding past them towards the exit. ‘The detective sergeant there specialises in them. Don’t worry, he doesn’t need much. Just give him your name and he’ll invent the rest.’
The man released his hold and bared crooked teeth in a conspiratorial smile. His shoulders were stooped, his wrinkled skin the colour of parchment. In one claw-like hand he was carrying a battered black document case and his breath seemed to Harry to have the whiff of mildewed books.
‘It is your help I need, Mr Devlin. No-one else will do.’
He enunciated each syllable with pedantic care, as if English was not his native tongue. But it was the urgency of his tone that quickened Harry’s interest.
‘Are you in some kind of trouble?’
‘No, no. You misunderstand. The murder I am speaking of occurred almost thirty years ago. Nonetheless, I believe you are able – if you will pardon the phrase – to assist me with my enquiries.’
‘Thirty years ago?’ Harry shook his head. ‘I sometimes screamed blue murder as a babe in arms, but I never committed it. Sorry I can’t help, Mr…’
‘Miller, my name is Ernest Miller. Let me explain. I am looking into one of this city’s most notorious crimes. You will have heard of the case, I’m sure. The newspapers, in their melodramatic way, dubbed it the Sefton Park Strangling.’
‘It rings a bell.’ Harry sifted through old memories. ‘Wasn’t it a young girl who was killed, the daughter of a well-known man?’
‘Yes, the case attracted a great deal of publicity in its day. Carole Jeffries, the victim, was only sixteen years old. More importantly, to secure her lasting fame in death, she was a pretty girl with a good figure and a taste for short skirts.’
‘And I seem to remember the murderer was a neighbour of hers?’
‘A young man named Edwin Smith who lived nearby was arrested, it is true. Before long he confessed to having strangled Carole, but twenty-four hours before his trial was due to open, he tried to anticipate his fate by hanging himself. In that, as in so much else during his short life, he failed. A warder arrived in time to cut him down and save him for the gallows. Even so, the day of reckoning was postponed. Although the court proceedings were expected to be a formality, the authorities were reluctant to hang a man with an injured neck.’
‘The executioner preferred more of a challenge?’
‘I see you indulge in black humour, Mr Devlin. The best kind, I quite agree. But I think you miss the point. In those days – we are talking of 1964, you will recall – the campaign to abolish capital punishment was intensifying. The establishment dreaded a newsworthy incident.’
‘Such as?’
Miller’s tongue appeared between his teeth. ‘They feared that a mistake might be made. If undue pressure were applied on the scaffold, there was a risk that the neck might snap and Smith would lose his head. Imagine, Mr Devlin, how the media would have feasted on that.’
Miller’s eyes sparkled as he spoke, causing Harry to feel as cold as if he had stepped naked into the wintry streets outside, but something made him ask, ‘So what happened?’
‘The trial took place at the end of November and Smith was duly sentenced to death. However, as you will know, the law required three Sundays to pass before such a verdict could be carried out – and in the meantime the House of Commons voted to abolish capital punishment. As it happened, no hangings took place after the August of that year. Smith could certainly have expected a reprieve.’
‘A lucky man.’
‘Not so lucky as you may think,’ said Ernest Miller. ‘Having escaped the noose, Smith finally managed to kill himself in jail. Once again the authorities were careless – as they so often seem to be. He slashed his own throat on a jag of glass on