Cat O'Nine Tales and Other Stories - Jeffrey Archer [67]
Henry stepped out onto the pavement and hailed a taxi. The detective grabbed the next one. She followed his cab as it made its way across Putney Bridge and continued its journey along the south side of the river. The taxi finally came to a halt outside a block of flats in Wandsworth. DS Seaton made a note of the address and decided that she had earned a taxi ride home.
The following morning, DS Seaton placed her report on the chief inspector’s desk. He read it, smiled, left his office and walked down the corridor to brief the chief superintendent, who in turn phoned the chief constable. The chief decided not to mention it to the chairman of the watch committee until after an arrest had been made, as he wanted to present Sir David with an open-and-shut case, one that a jury could not fail to convict on.
Henry deposited the cash from the Butterfly Ball in the overnight vault of Lloyds TSB just a couple of hundred yards away from the hotel where the Masons were holding their annual dinner. He must have walked about another thirty yards before a police car drew up beside him. There wouldn’t have been much point in making a dash for it, as Henry wasn’t built for a change of gear. And in any case he had already planned for this moment, right down to the last detail. Henry was arrested and charged two days before the watch committee was due to meet.
Henry selected Mr. Clifton-Smyth to represent him, a solicitor whose accounts he had handled for the past twenty years.
Mr. Clifton-Smyth listened carefully to his client’s defense, making copious notes, but when Henry finally came to the end of his tale, the lawyer only had one piece of advice to offer him: plead guilty.
“I will of course,” added the lawyer, “brief counsel of any mitigating circumstances.”
Henry accepted his solicitor’s advice; after all, Mr. Clifton-Smyth had never once, in the past two decades, questioned his judgment.
Henry made no attempt to contact Angela during the run-up to the trial, and although the police felt fairly confident that she was playing Bonnie to his Clyde, they quickly worked out that they shouldn’t have arrested him until he’d gone to the casino a second time. Who was the woman seated at the bar? Had she been waiting for him? The Special Crime Unit spent weeks collecting bank stubs from casinos right across London, but they couldn’t find a single check made out to a Ms. Angela Forster, and even more puzzling, they didn’t come up with one for a Mr. Henry Preston. Did he always lose?
When they checked Angela’s events book, they discovered that Henry had always taken responsibility for counting the cash, and signed the receipt. Her bank account was then picked over by a bunch of treasury vultures, and found to be only £11,318 in credit, a sum that had showed very little movement either way for the past five years. When DS Seaton reported back to Miss Blenkinsopp, she seemed quite content to believe that the right man had been apprehended. After all, she told the detective, a St. Catherine’s gal couldn’t possibly be involved in that sort of thing.
With the murder hunt still in progress, and the drugs stash not yet unearthed, the chief superintendent sent down an instruction to close the St. Catherine’s file. They’d made an arrest, and that was all that would matter when they reported their annual crime statistics.
Once the Treasury solicitors had accepted that they couldn’t trace any of the missing money, Henry’s solicitor managed to broker a deal with the CPS. If he pleaded guilty to the theft of £130,000, and was willing to return the full amount to the injured parties concerned, they would recommend a reduced sentence.
“And no doubt there are mitigating circumstances in this case that you wish to bring to my attention, Mr. Cameron?” suggested the judge as he stared down from the bench at Henry’s Silk.
“There most certainly are, m’lord,” replied Mr. Alex Cameron QC as he rose slowly from his place. “My client,” he