Cornish was the same. He just smiled and insisted on a lawyer.
The duty solicitor was Mr Lou Slade. He was disturbed over his supper, but insisted he wished to see his clients before turning in for the night. He arrived at Dover Street just before nine. He met both his new clients and spent half an hour closeted with them in an interview room.
‘You can now conduct the interviews in my presence if you wish, Detective Inspector,’ he said when he emerged. ‘But I have to say my clients will make no statement. They deny the charge. They say they were nowhere near the place in question at the time in question.’
He was an experienced lawyer and had handled similar cases. He had got the measure of his clients and believed not a word, but he had a job to do.
‘If you wish,’ said Burns. ‘But the case is very strong and building steadily. If they went for an admission, I might even believe the victim hit his head on the pavement as he fell. With their records . . . say, a couple of years in the Ville.’ Pentonville was known locally as the ‘Ville’.
Privately, Burns knew there were a score of kick marks on the injured man, and Slade knew he knew.
‘Stinking fish, Mr Burns. And I’m not buying. They intend to deny. I shall want all you have got under the disclosure rules.’
‘In due course, Mr Slade. And I shall need any claim of alibi well in time. But you know the rules as well as I.’
‘How long can you keep them?’ asked Slade.
‘Seven fifteen tomorrow night. Twelve hours extra from my super would not be enough. I’ll almost certainly want an extension in custody from the magistrates tomorrow, around five p.m., the last hearing of the evening.’
‘I shall not oppose,’ said Slade. He knew not to try and waste time. These were two thugs and they had half-killed a man. The magistrates would extend the custody remand without a blink. ‘As for your interviews, I suppose you will insist, even though on my advice they will say nothing.’
‘’Fraid so.’
‘Then as I am sure we both have homes to go to, may I suggest nine tomorrow morning?’
It was agreed. Slade went home. Price and Cornish were locked up for the night. Burns had one last call to make. When he was connected to the Royal London he asked for the duty nurse in the ICU. The injured man might, just might, have come to.
Mr Paul Willis was also working late that night. He had operated on a young motorcyclist who seemed to have tried to break the land-speed record coming down Archway Hill. The neurosurgeon had done his best, but privately he gave the motorcycle rider a fifty-fifty chance of seeing out the week. He heard about Burns’s call after the staff nurse had put the phone down.
The twenty-four hours since anaesthetic was administered had elapsed. With its effects gone, he would have hoped for the first signs of stirring. Before heading home he went to look again at the limping man.
There was no change. The monitors indicated a regular heartbeat, but the blood pressure was still too high, one of the signs of brain damage. On the Glasgow Scale the patient still hovered around 3 over 15, deep coma.
‘I’ll give it another thirty-six hours,’ he told the staff nurse. ‘I was hoping to get away this weekend, but I’ll come in on Saturday morning. Unless there is a happy sign of recovery, in which case, not. Would you leave a note that I be informed of a change for the better, either here or at home? If there’s no change by Saturday, nine a.m., I’ll want a rescan. Please book it for me.’
The second day ended with Price and Cornish, stuffed with fried food, snoring ox-like in their cells at Dover Street nick. The victim lay on his back wired to three monitoring machines under a low blue light, locked into some faraway private world.
Mr Willis cast thoughts of patients from his mind for a while and watched an old Clint Eastwood spaghetti western in his elegant house in St John’s Wood Terrace. DS Luke Skinner was just in time for a date with a very pretty drama student from the Hampstead School whom he had met in the crush bar at a Beethoven concert a month earlier. This was the sort of taste (Beethoven, not girls) that he emphatically did not discuss in the Dover nick canteen.
DI Jack Burns returned to rustle up some baked beans on toast in an otherwise empty house in Camden Town, wishing that Jenny and the boys would return from their holiday at Salcombe, in his native Devon, where he dearly wished he could have joined them. August, he thought, bloody August.
DAY THREE – THURSDAY
The interviews with Price and Cornish turned out to be useless. It was not Jack Burns’s fault; he was a skilled and experienced interrogator. He took Price first, knowing him to be the more dense of the two. With Lou Slade sitting quietly by his client’s side, Burns took the line of sweet reason.
‘Look, Mark, we’ve got you bang to rights. There’s a witness, saw it all. Everything. Start to finish. And he is going to testify.’
He waited. Nothing.
‘For the tape, my client declines to make a statement,’ murmured Slade.
‘Then he hit you right on the nose, Mark. Broke your ruddy hooter. No wonder you lost your rag. Why on earth did an old guy like that do it?’
Price might have muttered, ‘I dunno,’ or, ‘Stupid old git.’ That would have gone down well with the jury. Admission of presence at the scene. Bang goes any alibi. Price glared but stayed silent.
‘Then there’s your blood, Mark. Pouring out the broken nose. We’ve got samples, laddie.’
He was careful not to say he only had blood from the T-shirt, not the pavement, but he did not tell an untruth. Price shot a panicky glance at Slade, who also looked worried. Privately the lawyer knew that if samples of his client’s blood, proved by DNA tests to be Price’s blood and no-one else’s, had been found on the pavement close to the beaten man, there would be no defence. But he still had time for a change of plea, if necessary. Under the disclosure rules, he would insist on everything Burns had got, and long before any trial. So he just shook his head, and Price’s silence went on.