“That’s right—twelve. Between eight and twelve, the judge will listen but take it only in conjunction with other elements of the evidence. Whatever that means! Fewer than eight—forget it.”

“Hmm …” Joe traced the photographs of smudgy prints with the end of his pencil, frowning. “We’re on thin ice here then. We have five. Decidedly dodgy. I’ll see what I can do. I shall just have to make a little go a long way. It convinces me but then—that’s why we have judges and juries. Look, Orford, I want you to be present to back me up. Don’t worry—I shan’t tell any whoppers but I may make an odd emphasis or two. All deniable. If I’ve got the wrong man it will soon be evident. I shall make a grovelling apology and off he’ll go, cursing me for a time-waster and ringing up his uncle in the Home Office. But I don’t think that’s how it’s going to turn out. You were in on this right from the beginning. It’s still your case. I’d like you to make the arrest. Can you buzz off and organise two uniformed coppers to stand by and … yes … a Black Maria, I think would be a fitting conveyance to the local nick. Vine Street, I suggest.”

CHAPTER 26

“I’m glad that Sam and Joel are not present to hear this, Commissioner.”

Colonel Swinton spoke more in sorrow than in anger. “They had formed a considerable regard for you, were you aware? They’d never met a senior policeman before and, far from being an ogre of the type they’d heard stories of, they found you to be ‘a real gentleman and sharp with it.’ I fear they would now have to revise their judgement on the official who, pompously and with not a jot of evidence, sits before me ranting of murder, despoliation of corpses, suppression of evidence and what was the other thing …? Oh, yes. High treason.”

His grin was disarming. He stirred in his seat on the other side of Joe’s desk and leaned closer. “I say—would you like to send your inspector out to get some tea or something? Wouldn’t want to embarrass the top brass in front of the minions, would we? I’ll wait.”

Seeing that Orford, having got over his initial astonishment, was now beginning to flush with righteous rage, Joe decided it would be politic to send him out. And the colonel might well, in the absence of any witness, be more freely indiscreet.

“Tea? I expect you’re gasping for one, Colonel. Thank you, Orford.”

Joe looked across at the bland broad face with its slight sneer and wondered why he hadn’t seen the unpleasant features below the mask of respectability the last time he’d sat in that chair. On that occasion he’d been flanked by his gardeners. Sam and Joel with their Suffolk grace and good manners had lent him cover, two angels hauling him up to heaven, Joe reckoned. Impossible to think badly of a man who employed men like that. Their shining innocence implied a reciprocal blameless goodwill, a kindly fatherliness on the part of the employer.

“Orford is nobody’s minion and nobody’s fool,” Joe heard himself snap back when the door had closed behind the inspector. He began patiently to re-evaluate the evidence Swinton had just dismissed with derision.

“The body of the dancer. She was not the nameless, unclaimed derelict you and your friends had assumed. She has a name, you know. Marie Destaines. A talented young ballerina and beloved of her grandmother. Marie died—not by any malice, I’m sure—at the clinic of which you are a director and major shareholder. Whilst her body lay in storage pending enquiry into her identity and next of kin, neither of which she had declared, an emergency arose. In collaboration with Miss Kirilovna, whom we believe to have been your associate in things other than management of the clinic, you evolved a scheme in which the apparently unwanted body might be put to use as part of a political plan to unsteady, unseat, send mad, or otherwise discommode an American senator, guest of this country.

“You knew well ahead of Marie’s death of the scheme to dowse the riverbank. It occurred to you that if the body were unearthed in the dramatic way it was, it would turn the screw on the senator further. Nothing left to chance. You’d already prospected the area, you had the table of Thames tides to hand. If the body were washed away in spite of your careful calculations as to depth—well, no matter. One problem would have ebbed away with the tide. A slight hiccup in confidence perhaps when it came to preparing the body for ‘burial’ and amputation of toe? Or merely a theatrical gesture? You put a copy of a gold coin—you have, I’m told, three genuine examples at least in your possession, and several copies—under the girl’s tongue. You may well have accompanied this hocus-pocus with a funeral oration in Latin. Some dark flourish from the Aeneid? An impressive gesture.” On an impulse he added, “Matron must have been charmed by it.”

Joe paused and watched the bluff features puff up in outrage. Joe congratulated himself on having guessed one of the man’s secrets.

“Your mother might have approved too. I’m sure we need look no further for the inspiration for all that witchery about the beetle and the unkind cuts. A Shakespearean actress, I understand? Friend of Ellen Terry? You were raised in a lively theatrical household until your militaristic father sent you off to be schooled.”

Another glower dismissed this effort at understanding.

“But your burial party didn’t go unobserved. Your men—Onslow and Cummings, would that be?—caught a destitute seaman watching their activities. He had a name too. Absalom Hope. Absalom it was who took the trouble to get close to your Maybach and make a note of its registration number. Did you have to break his neck?”

“A destitute man? One of the thousands littering the streets and the riverbanks. He probably died in a fight. They’re always at it. Feeble-minded perhaps? Still collecting numbers of cars that take his interest. He could have recorded the Maybach on one of its many trips through the West End. Matron will confirm she drove a patient home along the Chelsea Reach a fortnight ago. The men probably misunderstood their instructions regarding conveyance of the body to the undertaker’s. I’ll have enquiries made. Look, I’m getting pretty fed up with doing your work for you.”

He looked at his watch.

“I’m sure Matron will back you to the hilt. But even Matron cannot rearrange the fingerprints we have taken from the coin found in Marie’s mouth.”

“As you say—there are many such in London. Not all declared as they were not legitimately acquired. You know this! You know also that my prints were bound to be found on it as I handled it on the morning of the discovery. I put it into my handkerchief for safe keeping. Everyone is aware of the dangers of contamination.”

“But not all are aware of the stickiness and tenacity of the secretions from the human finger when it comes into contact with a flat metal surface. We discussed that, if you remember, at the time.”

Joe took a large brown envelope and extracted the sheets from it. “The results from our forensic evidence laboratory. Wonderful work! Are you familiar with the terms ‘whorl,’ and ‘loop’ and ‘arch?’ No? In order to ascribe a print to its owner we must establish in a scientifically acceptable way that it could belong to none other. We require a high number of matching whorls and arches and bifurcations before we allow ourselves to announce an identification and present the evidence in court. Though, I have to say, once such scientific demonstration of guilt is put before them, juries always seize on it as utterly reliable. As it is.”

Joe selected a sheet and pointed at it with his pencil.

“Now, this is where the lab has something fascinating to say. Two people, as you point out, handled the coin after discovery. Professor Stone has left some beauties. Here and here, for example. Your prints are less easy to identify as you carefully took and held the coin by its rim. So truncated are they that we wouldn’t use them in evidence even if we needed to, which—and again, I’ll allow—we don’t. So far, so dull. But according to Sam and Joel and everyone else present on the riverbank, the professor it was who extracted it”—Joe waited for the slight nod—“and you after that. It follows that, had you, by chance, put your fingers anywhere on the surface, your prints would have obscured—overlaid—the professor’s.”