Corrupted: Murder and cover-up at the heart of government (Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers Book 4) Read online

  CORRUPTED

  Charles Holborne Thrillers

  Book Four

  Simon Michael

  For Kay, Alastair, James and Roxanne, my adult children, one of whom might, one day, read one of my books.

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  HEAR MORE FROM SIMON

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ALSO BY SIMON MICHAEL

  PROLOGUE

  In later years, Ronnie and Reggie Kray will joke that Maurice Drake, known to his associates as Mo, was the only member of the Firm ever to die in his sleep. It isn’t strictly true. Several elderly members of the Firm who survive the Krays and their brutal rule of London will indeed die peacefully in their beds, having paid their debts to society by serving varying terms of imprisonment. But the twins possess a certain black humour, which will no doubt stand them in good stead during the life terms that follow their eventual conviction. But that is to get ahead of ourselves in our story.

  Perhaps it is more accurate to say that in the seconds before Mo’s death, he’s asleep in bed. That bed is to be found in the L-shaped bedsit he occupies on the draughty top floor of a terraced house in Middlesex Street, a five-minute walk from Aldgate East, East London, and close enough to Liverpool Street Station to feel the day and night rumble of trains.

  It is the early hours of 29 June 1964, a Monday, and Mo has been at a party of a particular, and select, group of men, hosted by Ronnie Kray at the latter’s Walthamstow flat. He stumbles into his bedsit, having drunk quite a lot of alcohol and on the way down from a couple of dexies. He starts making a cup of tea but is so drunk he forgets what he’s doing.

  He manages to strip to his underpants before falling face down onto his pillow, and within a short time he is snoring gently. Importantly, as it turns out, he forgets to take off the heavy gold-coloured chain around his neck. Within five minutes he is deeply asleep, his breathing shallow and regular.

  It is a further ten minutes before a dark shape rises silently out of the shadows. A hand stretches out and is lowered, inch by inch, until it hovers just above the chain resting on the nape of the sleeping man’s neck. The hand starts to move up and down gently, minutely, until it is synchronised with the rise and fall of Mo’s body. A second hand is brought up to meet the first. In it is clenched a metal comb with a long handle. The tweezers of the fingers close on the chain and it is lifted very, very carefully above Mo’s neck. Then, with speed and precision, the hilt of the comb is slid under the chain and twisted rapidly. Simultaneously the would-be murderer launches himself onto Mo’s back, straddling the widest part of his ribs.

  Mo coughs into confused wakefulness but the chain is twisted again and again, this time with a hand at each end of the comb as if turning a propeller. The chain digs deeply into Mo’s windpipe and now he can’t inhale. Fully awake, he tries to force himself onto his knees but is surprised to find a weight across his back and, in response, the comb is twisted again.

  There is a Snap! as something collapses inside Mo’s windpipe and he’s suddenly overwhelmed by the certainty that he’s about to die. His lungs bursting, he has to draw breath but his throat is completely closed. He thrashes even more violently and manages to roll onto his side, but his attacker remains behind him and continues to twist with all his strength, maintaining the pressure despite the steel teeth of the comb digging painfully into his palm. The comb feels slick and sticky in his hands, but with whose blood is unclear.

  Mo’s attempts to reach behind him grow feebler. Gradually he subsides and, at last, he is still.

  The murderer rises and walks silently to the cracked basin in the corner of the room. He turns on the cold water and lets it run over his aching hands for a while. The blood makes the water almost black in the half-light. After a while he turns off the tap, dries his hands calmly on a dishcloth, and opens the curtains a few inches to allow more yellow sodium light from the street to filter into the room.

  Even in the poor illumination he can see that Mo’s face is suffused a dark red, almost purple colour. His eyes are wide open and there are tiny burst blood vessels, resembling the branches of miniature trees, covering the whites. There’s a considerable quantity of blood and macerated skin on the pillow and the chain is so deeply embedded in the soft tissues at the front of his crumpled neck that it actually disappears from view. The murderer carefully peels it out of the deep groove, lifting Mo’s body slightly by one shoulder to free it.

  Five minutes of scrubbing and several changes of water later, and the blood and skin paste filling the gold links has disappeared down the plughole. Held up to the dim light, the chain is a glittering golden snake, swinging gently.

  With a final check round the room, the murderer opens the bedsit door and creeps silently down the three flights of stairs into the night.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Three days earlier,

  Friday, 26 June, 1964

  The thump-thump of feet on pavement is the only sound that breaks the silence of the Hampstead dawn. The runner passes Jack Straw’s Castle, the pub reputed to have been a favourite haunt of Charles Dickens, Karl Marx and Bram Stoker, and turns right into Whitestone Walk. The pond to his left is still, the reeds at the edges just a whisper of movement. The night chill has already dissipated and it promises to be another hot summer’s morning. Thunderstorms are again predicted for the afternoon and evening.

  The man looks like an Italian truck driver. His forearms are enormous hams that complement tree-trunk legs. His shoulders are of a width that requires bespoke tailoring and he possesses black eyes, dark curly hair and an olive complexion. He currently sports a healing cut to his left eyebrow and faint evidence of a black eye, and a careful observer might note that his nose is no longer quite straight. Such an observer might thus conclude that the sweating, swarthy man pounding the streets of north London is a boxer on an early training run. In fact, Charles Holborne, né Charlie Horowitz, is a cultured and successful criminal barrister, one at the top of his game.

  Charles’s new daily circuit constitutes one of the few benefits he can identify of the move to the cavernous house on Platt’s Lane. He’d been sleeping poorly even before the move, but in the week since the removal men left the boxes collected from his and Sally’s separate homes, he’s barely slept at all. For two nights he watched with increasing fretfulness as the hands of the bedside clock crawled through the hou
rs, and on the third he got up at four o’clock, changed into his running gear, and went on a two-hour lap around the Heath. That has been the pattern since.

  Charles knows himself well enough to recognise that when he can’t sleep there’s usually something bothering him, often something he has yet to pin down. This time, however, he can’t work it out. His practice at the Bar is better than ever; he is solvent, and has just bought a beautiful house in fashionable Hampstead; he believes himself in love with Sally, the woman who presently warms his bed; and he is even on speaking terms with his family — although that doubtful blessing, he knows, is unlikely to last.

  When Charles changed his name from Horowitz and married out — married a Gentile — his parents sat shiva for him: they said prayers for the dead, tore their clothes and never spoke his name again. It was only the murder of his wife and his run from the police that finally softened his mother’s heart, but Millie Horowitz’s heart is an unforgiving organ; the rapprochement, at least from her perspective, was reluctant and bitter, and has been wearing increasingly thin since Charles let her down again by, in her words, ‘living in sin with another shiksa’. So it’s certainly not his mother’s disapproval that’s keeping him awake; her disapproval has been the one constant in his life since he started to walk.

  So, for reasons unclear, he can’t sleep; he can’t work out why not; and it’s making him increasingly grumpy.

  Sally on the other hand is happy. Although they’ve known one another for years — she was the junior clerk at his former chambers — theirs was a slow-burn romance, at least on Charles’s part. Sally had begun to wonder if he would ever commit but, by buying the house and moving in with her, he has, and she is joyous. So, while she sleeps like a baby, Charles tosses and turns through the night; when she leaps out of bed at dawn, bursting with plans and energy — so many boxes to unpack, lists to make and rooms to redecorate — he crawls out, more exhausted than when he lay down the night before.

  Charles has offered to pay for builders and decorators — he has even offered his own doubtful home improvement skills as soon as the current trial ends — but Sally is nest-building with exuberant, personal delight and wants no one’s assistance.

  The traffic noise is becoming heavier as Charles jogs back towards the house. He collects a newspaper from the corner shop as it opens up for the morning and skims the headlines while walking through the wrought iron gates and up the drive: more rioting in US cities against the Vietnam war and the Beatles due to return to Liverpool for the premier of A Hard Day’s Night. He makes a mental note to ask Sally if she fancies going to Leicester Square to see the new film.

  He skirts round to the back of the house and opens the kitchen door quietly, expecting to find Sally still asleep in bed, but sees that there are lights on upstairs. He can hear her singing above him. The singing stops.

  ‘Charles?’ she calls out from the landing.

  ‘Yes, it’s me,’ he replies, going into the hallway and slipping off his canvas shoes.

  ‘Another bad night?’

  ‘A bit. I’m rather muddy; let me get changed and I’ll come up.’

  Sally’s feet appear, followed by her legs as she descends the staircase. She wears tight slacks which end at her shapely calves and which emphasise her tulip shape, but her upper half is covered by one of Charles’s old jumpers which hides her contours and which, judging from the dried paint, has been lost to the redecoration. She is elfin, only just over five feet tall, with an open child-like face and black hair cut in a new Vidal Sassoon bob. Her wide eyes and innocent face contrast sharply with her curvaceous form and the way she moves. It was that which first attracted Charles to her.

  She descends the stairs until she is almost the same height as he, tilts her head upwards and kisses him on the mouth. ‘I wanted to get going,’ she says. ‘So much to do. The kettle’s boiled. Shall we have breakfast together in our new home?’

  Charles slips his hands inside his old jumper and snuggles into her, inhaling her scent. ‘Can’t, sorry. Need to get into Chambers as soon as I can.’

  ‘OK,’ replies Sally in a bright but brittle voice, not quite hiding her disappointment. ‘And this evening?’

  ‘Well, I’ll be in the City anyway, so I thought I’d go to the gym for a bit. I need a really good workout.’

  ‘Yeah?’ says Sally in a neutral tone, slipping from her recently acquired RP into her native Cockney, a warning sign unremarked by Charles.

  ‘I thought it might help me sleep, you know, if I got well and truly exhausted.’

  ‘And punched several times in the face,’ she adds, tracing her forefinger lightly over Charles’s injured eyebrow.

  Charles grins. ‘Well, the idea is to avoid that. “Bob and weave”, you know?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says again, this time with obvious sarcasm. She disengages and steps past him towards the kitchen. ‘You’re getting quite good at that.’

  An hour later, Charles pushes open the double doors of the Old Bailey robing room, heavy slabs of oak darkened and made shiny by years of barristers’ sweaty palms. At ten o’clock this is usually the busiest time of the day, but the end of the Trinity court term approaches and the robing room is only half full, as barristers whose cases have finished and whose children have already returned from their boarding schools slip away early for summer holidays before the state schools break up.

  It is only weeks since Charles’s highest profile case yet, a dock brief still being referred to in the newspapers as “The Thames Murder Case”. Despite all the odds, most of the evidence, and several corrupt police officers ranged against him, Charles secured an acquittal and saved the lives of both his client and himself. Since then he has been deluged with work. Today’s speech in Court 1 of the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, will conclude the second back-to-back murder trial in which he has been instructed — both, importantly, for the Crown — and two more await his attention in Chambers. It’s being said, once again, that he’s the up-and-coming junior destined for great things.

  Charles elbows his way gently past counsel jockeying for position in front of the mirrors to tie their bands and adjust their wigs. He is amused to note how many make the effort to greet him and smile, a sharp contrast to the year before when he was persona non grata with his professional colleagues. Being charged with murdering your wife, the daughter of the viscount who was also once your head of Chambers will do that, he thinks wryly. Being an East End Jew with a bit of a past didn’t help either.

  Now, however, the public face of his profession professes him fully rehabilitated: cleared of murder and of proven integrity — despite all rumours to the contrary. Now, he is tipped for silk: promotion to one of “Her Majesty’s Counsel learned in the law”, next April. Having spent all his life as an outsider, Charles finds himself inexplicably popular. He has even reached a form of uncomfortable truce with the twins whose lives he cannot disentangle from his, however he tries; those community-spirited sociopaths who refuse to remain in his past, the gangland rulers of London, Ronnie and Reggie Kray.

  So, Charles smiles, without for a second trusting this new-found popularity. It’s an illusion, he reminds himself, as he reaches his locker at the end of the row; painted smiles on whoreson faces. Whatever they say to my face, I’ll still be outside the circle. His mother is wont to express it in blunter terms: ‘Scratch any Englishman, and beneath the surface you’ll find an anti-Semite.’ Millie Horowitz, lately of Mile End and now of leafy Hendon, milliner and devoutly inward-looking Jewess, could never feel comfortable in English society and will never understand why her elder son wanted to join the ranks of a profession that would despise him.

  Charles is prone to remark that his mother acts like a first-generation frightened immigrant, not someone whose family has in fact lived in London for four centuries. In the Jewish East End, surrounded by kosher butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers, living a few hundred yards from her synagogue in one direction and the family business in the othe
r, she never needed to venture outside her own community. ‘Outside’ on the other hand, is unknown and daunting, and her son’s choices, to anglicise his name, to marry out — in short, to be part of a wider world — are incomprehensible to her; they constitute an unforgiveable rejection of everything she holds dear.

  Charles stands in front of his locker which bears a card in an elegant copperplate hand proclaiming that it belongs to Charles Holborne, Esq. He places his circuit tin on the enormous oval table where it joins a shoal of other identical shiny black tins, and opens it to take out his wig. He smells the yellow and grey horsehair tentatively, and reluctantly acknowledges that the last weeks of high-stress sweat-inducing murder trials will require the wig to be professionally cleaned again during the vacation. He hates the seventeenth-century anachronism represented by his court dress and refuses to wear the wig until the last possible moment before the judge enters court. It’s an idiosyncrasy by which he has become well known, and for which he has been berated on a couple of occasions when caught out by judges returning unexpectedly to their benches.

  Charles finishes changing, closes his locker and collects his papers. He leaves the chatter of the robing room behind him and descends the staircase to Court 1. He pushes open the doors and walks down the aisle. The dock towers above him but it is vacant, as are the barristers’ benches and the jury box. Higher still, in the public gallery, the first spectators are filing in. Charles slides into the junior barristers’ bench, wondering if this time next year he’ll be occupying the bench in front as a QC, and pulls the bow on the white ribbon on his brief. The white ribbon is also new: red for defence briefs, white for prosecution.

  Twenty minutes later, the court is packed with barristers, solicitors, members of the public and the jury. At a nod from the judge Charles rises to deliver his closing speech. The accused, a thirty-year-old woman, is supposed to have murdered her abusive husband by hitting him over the head with a rolling pin after one complaint too many concerning the quality of her cooking. Her defence — self-defence — had appeared almost hopeless when Charles first read the depositions. The police found plenty of evidence that the deceased had thrown his supper at the accused — on their arrival she’d been sobbing on the kitchen floor next to her husband’s body, gravy and shards of crockery in her hair and a cut to her forehead — but Charles hadn’t thought it possible to elevate a thrown plate into such a fear of attack that it became reasonable to bash the late gourmet several times over the head with a rolling pin. Nonetheless, defence counsel had made the most of a thin case and had the advantage of a jury composed, unusually, of eight women and four men.