Becky Hurst had brought back a copy of the solicitor’s letter the paintballing centre had received. It carried the heading of a well-known legal practice in Edendale, Richmond Jones. Fry had dealt with them often enough, but only the partners specialising in criminal law. They were a favourite choice for defendants in local magistrates’ courts, because they had a reputation for being able to get you off a minor charge, no matter how guilty you were. Many police officers had returned angry and frustrated from court proceedings after listening to a Richmond Jones solicitor arguing the innocence of some notorious lowlife.
But this was a civil case, the threat of private action for personal injury compensation. That would be a different partner. The letter was signed simply with the company name ‘Richmond Jones’, which surely wasn’t actually a signature at all, since it wasn’t the identity of an individual. But at the top, under the heading, was a phone number and the information that the partner dealing with the case was Mr K. Chadburn.
Most of the solicitors in Edendale had offices in or around the Market Square. Diane Fry even knew why this was. Ben Cooper had once explained to her that it dated to the time when people from the surrounding area came into town only once a week, on market day. It was a major journey for them, and they wanted to do all their business in one trip – buy their vegetables, go to the butcher’s, stock up with paint and nails at the ironmonger’s, and visit the solicitor’s to sort out their wills.
Whether that was true or not Fry wasn’t sure. Cooper had tried to explain lots of things to her during the years she’d been in Edendale, and she was still convinced that he’d made some of them up. They sounded too bizarre, even for Derbyshire.
But it was true that the solicitors’ offices were all in old buildings and prominently located, probably some of the most valuable properties in the town.
The premises of Richmond Jones looked as if it might once have been the home of a wealthy merchant. Through an archway like the entrance to a coaching inn she glimpsed half a dozen expensive cars parked in a cobbled yard. The signs outside were discreet, and the front door was a heavy affair, with a bell that rang when she opened it to step inside.
Kenneth Chadburn was expecting her. He was exactly what she would have expected for a provincial solicitor. Middle aged, grey haired, wearing glasses and a faded pinstriped suit that was getting a little too tight for him. When she walked into his office, he seemed to be sweating. But that might have been because of the enormous radiator on the wall behind his desk. It was an ancient iron affair that would have been more suited to a hospital ward or a cavernous classroom in a Victorian school. She could feel the heat it was throwing out the moment she stepped through the door.
‘Yes, yes. Ah, yes.’
Chadburn was nodding agreement before Fry had even asked him a question. He shuffled through a set of files on his desk until he found the right one. It was fastened with a strip of ribbon, an archaic touch that contrasted sharply with the computer monitor displaying a familiar landscape screensaver.
For a moment, Fry wondered why lawyers insisted on retaining these ancient trappings and traditions when they had so much modern technology at their disposal. But then she remembered she was a police officer. Some of her colleagues flew in helicopters full of high tech equipment but others still wore headgear designed in the 1860s and modelled on Prussian army helmets. Solicitors weren’t alone in clinging to tradition.
‘Mr Turner. Yes, that’s very sad.’ Chadburn looked up at her over his glasses. ‘Do we know what happened?’
‘No, I’m sorry,’ said Fry.
‘Yes, of course. Confidential information.’
‘No, sir. We just don’t know what happened.’
‘Ah, well. Criminal law isn’t my area, I’m afraid.’
‘I thought I hadn’t seen you in court, sir. But I’m familiar with some of your colleagues.’
Chadburn cleared his throat and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.
‘Of course, confidentiality is our watchword here. And normally I wouldn’t be able to share any information with you about our client’s affairs. I’m sure you understand that, Detective Sergeant.’
‘But since he’s dead…?’
‘Yes, that does make a difference. And naturally we want to be of help to the police in discovering who perpetrated the crime. I, er … take it Mr Turner’s death was the result of a crime?’
‘We’re treating it as a murder inquiry,’ said Fry.
‘That’s what I understood. So how can I help?’
‘Well, we’ve been told that Glen Turner was planning to sue the Eden Valley Adventure Centre for injuries he sustained during a recent paintballing session.’
‘I thought that might be it. Well, it’s true – in a way.’
‘He did suffer injuries,’ said Fry. ‘They were visible on his body.’
‘Yes, of course. And, in fact, we have some photographs.’
‘Really? May I see them?’
Chadburn passed her a series of fairly low quality pictures, which looked as though they’d been printed on a standard laser printer. They showed Glen Turner with his shirt removed, from the front and from behind, the lesions on his torso clearly visible as painful looking red blotches, though the accuracy of the colour on the printouts was doubtful.
Fry recognised the background in the photographs. The red striped curtains, the computer work station with two monitors. They had been taken in Glen Turner’s bedroom at the cottage on St John’s Street.
‘Who took these?’ asked Fry.
‘I believe it was my client’s mother,’ said Chadburn.
Fry put the photos down. As evidence, they were dubious. Any one of Kenneth Chadburn’s colleagues on the criminal side of the practice could have demolished their validity in court in a few minutes. It was impossible to tell whether the marks on his body were genuine bruises or had been created using make-up. And they were taken in his bedroom by his mum?
‘Of course, they were relatively minor injuries,’ said Chadburn. ‘Soft tissue damage, causing considerable pain but with complete recovery expected within twelve months. Normally, we’d be looking for a level of compensation at around three or four thousand pounds. That would be in the case of a car accident, say, or if you slip on a spillage and suffer a fall in a supermarket. We deal with a lot of those.’
‘That’s probably why the price of shopping has been going up so much,’ said Fry.
He looked puzzled. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Never mind, sir.’
‘I see. Well, the big companies like supermarkets have policies for this sort of thing. If a customer reports an injury in one of their stores they offer a small amount of compensation – a discount on the next purchase, a few points on a loyalty card. You see, they rely on members of the public not being aware of the amount of compensation they might get or the right steps to take at the time, such as getting the names of witnesses. Those sort of cases can be a waste of time for us. But smaller companies are a different matter.’
‘Why so?’
‘They’re not used to it. When they get an incident, their staff often don’t know what to do. And they tend to get worried about the potential damage to their reputation, which makes them more willing to settle without a court hearing.’
Fry looked at the photos again. She remembered thinking how painful they looked. They’d given her the impression Turner might have been tortured before he died.
‘But you said yourself these are minor injuries,’ she said. ‘And paintballs are just gelatin capsules, surely?’
‘Yes, we did a little bit of research when Mr Turner came to us, of course.’ He referred to a note in the file. ‘It seems paintballs consist of a gelatin shell containing mostly polyethylene glycol and dye. They’re designed to break on impact. Even the dye washes out of most clothes. But when fired from a gun – more properly known as a marker, I believe – paintballs may travel at speeds up to three hundred feet per second. As you can imagine, they have the potential to cause considerable damage to a human target, depending on the velocity and angle and the particular part of the body they hit.’
‘What exactly happened to Mr Turner, then?’
Chadburn adjusted his glasses. A small trickle of sweat had run down his forehead on to the centre of the frame and he dabbed it from the lens.
‘Well, as you may know, these paintballing sessions were part of a team building weekend organised by his employers, Prospectus Assurance. There had been other activities during the weekend, which might not be of any relevance to you.’
‘Role playing, blind driving, motivational talks.’
‘Just so.’ The solicitor gave her a rather sad smile. ‘Legal practices like ours never go in for that sort of thing. The older partners would be horrified. But I sometimes think it’s rather a pity.’
‘I don’t think it’s all that much fun,’ said Fry.
‘No?’ Chadburn looked disappointed. ‘Ah well, on to the paintballing. In his statement to us, Mr Turner described how the staff at the adventure centre split his party from Prospectus Assurance into two teams. They explained that the objective of the game was to capture the other team’s flag without getting hit by a paintball. Anyone hit is effectively out of the game, I understand. If you get shot, you’re … Well, you’re…’
‘Dead,’ said Fry.
He cleared his throat. ‘Precisely. Dead. Well, then they were given safety goggles and loaded guns. In the first game, a gun misfired and a paintball hit Mr Turner in the, er … crotch area.’
‘The crotch area?’ repeated Fry.
‘Yes, erm … the crotch area. A largely unprotected part of the body, you understand.’
‘And that was an accident?’
‘According to my client.’
Fry didn’t need to wonder for very long why there was no photograph of that particular injury. Even Glen Turner wouldn’t have wanted his mother taking pictures of his genitals. Perhaps he hadn’t mentioned that shot to her. It was the sort of thing he could only share with his doctor or his lawyer.
‘Go on,’ she said.
‘Well, Mr Turner told me that this injury was particularly painful. And he admitted that … well, he gave expression to the pain rather loudly, I gather.’
‘He …? Oh, you mean he screamed.’
‘Ah. Yes.’
Fry nodded. She could imagine how that would have gone down with Turner’s colleagues. There was nothing like someone else’s discomfort for causing hilarity. She hardly had to ask the rest of the story. By screaming like a girl the first time he was hit, Glen Turner had made himself the preferred target for every trigger-happy employee on the paintballing field.
‘And it seems in the next game my client took several hits, some of them at point blank range,’ said Chadburn. ‘One shot hit him on his uncovered neck and others hit him in the side, on his back and on his stomach. At first he thought his neck was actually bleeding, but it was just the oily paint running down his skin. The bruises stung for hours afterwards, he said. But when he complained the other players just laughed at him and said he should think of them as battle wounds.’
‘Battle wounds?’
‘Yes, that was the phrase.’
‘Didn’t you say a few moment ago that when you were hit by a paintball, you were out of the game.’
‘That seems to be the way it works.’
‘So how was it that Mr Turner was hit so many times in one game? Surely he would have been out on the first hit?’
‘Indeed.’ Chadburn even smiled a little now. ‘Many of those shots must have been fired at him after he was officially dead. Very much against the rules of the game, I imagine.’
Fry nodded. ‘I assume the adventure centre must have public liability insurance.’
‘Of course.’ Chadburn looked smug now, as if he’d been saving this nugget of information to himself. ‘But perhaps I don’t need to give you many guesses who their insurance policy is with?’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Not at all. In fact, because of their existing business relationship with Prospectus Assurance, the adventure centre gave them preferential rates on their team building weekends.’
Fry shook her head in amazement. ‘Unbelievable.’
‘Deliciously ironic, I think.’
‘So do you think Mr Turner would have had a case against them?’
‘When he came to me on Monday, I told him he was unlikely to have a case against the adventure centre itself, as the injury wasn’t caused by an act of negligence on their part – and I believe he signed a waiver before the game started. I expect the safety briefing mentioned a ban on head shots and so forth. Volenti non fit injuria.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s Latin. To a willing person, injury is not done. It’s a common law doctrine, meaning that if someone willingly places themselves in a position where harm might result, they can’t bring a claim against the other party. But…’
‘What?’
‘Well, the person or persons who directly caused the injuries are a different issue. Consent wasn’t given to an actual assault. In my opinion, Mr Turner’s injuries might be considered to have resulted from the reckless act of another. I advised him that he could consider reporting the incident to the police as a criminal assault, possibly actual bodily harm. And I suggested that if he decided to pursue that course, he should get photographs taken of his injuries sooner rather than later. In fact, it provides more convincing evidence if the police take the photographs themselves. I’m probably telling you something that you already know, Detective Sergeant.’
‘But Mr Turner didn’t take your advice, did he? He never got to the point of reporting this incident as a criminal offence.’
‘No, I don’t believe so. I suspect he was having second thoughts. With all due respect to my client – my late client – he didn’t strike me as the most decisive of individuals. All I could do was advise him on his legal position. It wasn’t my place to persuade Mr Turner towards one course of action or another.’
‘What were his reservations?’
‘Oh, the consequences for the people involved. A criminal record, the loss of employment. It’s a serious matter.’
‘Did he name the individuals he believed caused his injuries?’
‘Oh, of course. After all, he knew everyone involved in that team building exercise. It was all in the family, so to speak. The named parties were two of his colleagues at Prospectus Assurance.’
Fry recalled Ralph Edge’s account of the staff being divided into teams based on their departments, which meant he’d been on the same team as Glen Turner. So who had they been competing against? Yes, that was it. Some of those women in Sales are merciless.
‘Are you going to tell me the names?’ she said.
‘Oh, well … I suppose that will be acceptable, in the circumstances.’
Chadburn made a performance of looking for a specific page in the file. He did it so slowly that Fry began to grow irritated. But she didn’t dare express her irritation out loud for fear that he might decide this was one detail he should claim confidentiality for.
‘Yes, here we are,’ he said finally. ‘The two gentlemen alleged to be responsible for my client’s injuries go by the names of Mr Nathan Baird and Mr Ralph Edge.’