Chapter 14: The Trade

My father's friend of thirty years edited a Sunday paper, and he kept me waiting in his glass office for four minutes.

He was a stout man with reading glasses pushed up into his hair.

He listened to the hospital recording with his chin on his fist.

I played him the study recording after it, and Crispin's voice said, "I hired a man for the cliff path, and you stopped to tie your shoe."

When it ended he took the glasses down and looked at my father, who sat beside me with his hat on his knee.

"Giles, I can't print a tape," he said. "It can be cut, and his lawyers will say it was.

"I need his face and his mouth, in front of people, saying it."

"Then you'll have both," I said.

"When?"

"Tomorrow at eleven, in a church in Chelsea.

"I'm supposed to marry him there, with two hundred guests and Honoria's photographer filming from the roof."

He sat back, and I saw the idea reach him.

"And you want what for it?"

"A solicitor at the police station in the next hour, for a man called Clement Ardley.

"Honoria Ladbrook wrote the charge he's held on.

"And your people at the church tomorrow, with a lawyer standing by, and an editor who won't flinch when it starts."

"That's the trade? Your exclusive for a solicitor?"

"The whole story," I said. "Every page of it, with the evidence."

He looked at the recorder in my hand.

Then he picked up his desk phone and said to someone, "Get me our lawyer and tell her she's going to Savile Row station."

It was ten past two.

At six I stood on the pavement outside the station with my father's driver idling behind me.

The door opened and Clement came out between two officers.

His coat hung over his arm, and a bruise was coming up on one wrist.

The solicitor, a brisk woman in a green coat, walked at his elbow and spoke to nobody.