The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [71]
I drove home that night feeling not a little pleased with myself; like a man who had just completed a good day’s work.
On entering the courtroom the following morning I noticed people were beginning to acknowledge other regulars and nod. I found myself falling into the same pattern and greeted people silently as I took my regular position at the end of the bench.
Sir Humphrey spent the morning going over some of Menzies’s other misdemeanors. We discovered that he had served in the Territorial Army for only five months and left after a misunderstanding with his commanding officer over how many hours he should have been spending on exercises during weekends and how much he had claimed in expenses for those hours. We also learned that his attempts to get on the local council sprang more from anger at being refused planning permission to build on a piece of land adjoining his house than from an altruistic desire to serve his fellow men. To be fair, Sir Humphrey could have made the Archangel Gabriel look like a soccer hooligan; but his trump card was still to come.
“Mr. Menzies, I should now like to return to your version of what happened on the night Miss Moorland was killed.”
“Yes,” sighed Menzies in a tired voice.
“When you visit a client to discuss one of your policies, how long would you say such a consultation usually lasts?”
“Usually half an hour, an hour at the most,” said Menzies.
“And how long did the consultation with Miss Moorland take?”
“A good hour,” said Menzies.
“And you left her, if I remember your evidence correctly, a little after six o’clock.”
“That is correct.”
“And what time was your appointment?”
“At five o’clock, as was shown clearly in my desk diary,” said Menzies.
“Well, Mr. Menzies, if you arrived at about five to keep your appointment with Miss Moorland and left a little after six, how did you manage to get a parking fine?”
“I didn’t have any small change for the meter at the time,” said Menzies confidently. “As I was already a couple of minutes late, I just risked it.”
“You just risked it,” repeated Sir Humphrey slowly. “You are obviously a man who takes risks, Mr. Menzies. I wonder if you would be good enough to look at the parking ticket in question.”
The clerk handed it up to Menzies.
“Would you read out to the court the hour and minute that the traffic warden has written in the little boxes to show when the offense occurred.”
Once again Menzies took a long time to reply.
“Four-sixteen to four-thirty,” he said eventually.
“I didn’t hear that,” said the judge.
“Would you be kind enough to repeat what you said for the judge?” Sir Humphrey asked.
Menzies repeated the damning figures.
“So now we have established that you were in fact with Miss Moorland some time before four-sixteen, and not, as I suggest you later wrote in your diary, five o’clock. That was just another lie, wasn’t it?”
“No,” said Menzies. “I must have arrived a little earlier than I realized.”
“At least an hour earlier, it seems. And I also suggest to you that you arrived at that early hour because your interest in Carla Moorland was not simply professional?”
“That’s not true.”
“Then it wasn’t your intention that she should become your mistress?”
Menzies hesitated long enough for Sir Humphrey to answer his own question. “Because the business part of your meeting finished in the usual half hour, did it not, Mr. Menzies?” He waited for a response but still none was forthcoming.
“What is your blood group, Mr. Menzies?”
“I have no idea.”
Sir Humphrey changed tack without warning: “Have you heard of DNA, by any chance?”
“No,” came back the puzzled reply.
“Deoxyribonucleic acid testing is a technique that shows genetic information unique to every individual. Blood or semen samples can be matched. Semen, Mr. Menzies, is as unique as any fingerprint. With such a sample we would know immediately if you raped Miss