Free Yesterday's Papers by Martin Edwards

Harry stepped over the threshold of New Commodities House. He was a big, bearded man whose mane of hair was turning grey prematurely - something he always attributed to the strain of being in partnership with Harry Devlin.
    â€˜I gather the police case collapsed this morning.’
    â€˜In more ways than one.’
    â€˜So Ronald Sou told me. He reckons the odds are that the police authority will make a much-improved offer.’
    Harry groaned. ‘From the gleam in your eye, you’ve already spent the fees.’
    â€˜I wasn’t thinking only of the money. But of course, we ought to invest sensibly. New technology, that’s what we need. A bar-code system for recording the time we spend, visual display units for every typist, an upgraded accounts package. There’s a new debt-collection program on the market which...’
    â€˜Christ, the office will look like the Starship Enterprise by the time you’ve finished with it. Didn’t we leave Maher and Malcolm to escape the tyranny of computers? Talk about looking over your shoulder. That place made Big Brother look like someone who was happy to keep himself to himself. I don’t want Crusoe and Devlin to turn into a law factory.’
    Jim’s brow darkened. ‘Look, old son. The law’s no place for Luddites. We’re in business, remember? We need to compete, to provide a decent service.’
    â€˜I haven’t heard Kevin or Jeannie Walters complaining.’
    â€˜You’ve done a superb job, I’m the first to say so. But we must move with the times. We can’t keep living in the Dark Ages.’
    Harry shrugged and ambled back to his room. He knew his partner’s arguments were unanswerable and that in time he would have to surrender. His reluctance to agree to change was not born of stubborn stupidity, but rather of an unwillingness to acknowledge that he was first and foremost a businessman, that simply seeing justice done would never in itself pay the mortgage. He resented, not his partner, but the failure of the world to match his more romantic notions of what was right and what was wrong.
    A heap of messages awaited him, but the excitement in court had quenched any thirst he might have had for desk work. What he wanted was to take a look at the file he had retrieved from the Land of the Dead. He slipped off a couple of clips that held the old bundle of documents together and the papers spilled on to his desk. Statements of witnesses, correspondence, typed notes of evidence from the committal proceedings, instructions to counsel tied up with pink string, together with a couple of handwritten sheets in a young person’s unformed hand.
    He looked at those last two pages. They comprised a record of the trial at the old Liverpool Assizes. Cyril Tweats’ clerk had faithfully taken down every word uttered when Edwin Smith was tried for the murder of Carole Jeffries. Yet not much had needed to be said, in view of Edwin’s guilty plea.
    Once more Harry asked himself the question that had been nagging away at the back of his mind ever since Miller had first accosted him. Why was the man so sure Edwin Smith was innocent?
    He turned to the correspondence. Cyril had written the usual letters to his client and to the police. A reference in one letter made Harry pause for thought. He turned to the separate set of notes on the meetings between Cyril Tweats and Edwin Smith. Soon he found what he was looking for.
    One day in April, not long after his arrest, Edwin had asked to see his solicitor. When the two men were alone together, Edwin had insisted that he had not killed Carole Jeffries. His confession to the crime had been false.
    Harry caught his breath as he read the neatly typed notes. At last - an indication that Miller might be on the right track and that Carole could have been murdered by someone else. Yet Edwin had not denied the crime in court. Following his change of heart, what had gone wrong?
    The