Julia McGann was already running late when she made her final check in the hall mirror. She brushed her dark bob, applied mascara under her large blue-grey eyes and pouted for the crimson O. Looking reasonable, she thought. Thirty-nine, yes, but still as petite as when she left school. Then she spotted her tights. She groaned to herself. Straight out of the packet today. Bloody pound shop rubbish, a false economy. A small tear would have been okay until she had a chance to change at chambers. But this was a monster rip, the kind of ankle-to-thigh ladder suitable for rescuing the occupants of high-rise buildings.
Not today, of all days.
Cursing to herself, she ran back to the bedroom and rifled through the underwear drawer with the speed of a crack-addled burglar. Finally, a pair of old reliables: dark, woolly, thick and yes, a little baggy, but nothing an extra tug to the waist and an extra notch on the belted skirt wouldn’t fix. A ten-second wriggle and she was ready, grabbed her briefcase and fled for the bus stop.
That two-minute delay cascaded.
She missed the bus, then caught another less direct service five minutes later. The best stop still left her a ten-minute walk. She could hardly believe that at her age, a practising barrister for almost four years, she was still struggling with the basics of earning a living. While still on the bus she rang in, hoping against hope that Hogarth wouldn’t pick up. She was in luck. Receptionist Veronica answered, her vowels crisply enunciated.
‘V&I Barristers, good morning.’
‘Veronica, it’s me. I’m running late.’
‘Oh dear, filthy Duster let you down again?’ she giggled, a delightful tinkle. Julia’s car, an ancient and grubby yellow Dacia Duster, was still in a garage in Surbiton after breaking down a week ago. The cost of the repairs exceeded the vehicle’s value, but she needed it fixed and she had maxed out both credit cards. The question was, where was the money to come from?
‘No, missed the bus. The Duster’s out of commission for now. How’s his mood?’
‘Hogsy’s not a happy bunny, I’m afraid.’
The dreaded Clive Hogarth, chief clerk.
Only in his mid-forties, Hogarth had the wattles and paunch of a Dickensian uncle. He wore exactly the same grey suit and a pale blue shirt every day, with tightly laced Oxford shoes, polished to a regimental shine, his swollen ankles spilling over the top. And he had a spiteful demeanour. Never judge a man by his title. In many occupations, a clerk is a lowly creature. But in the world of barristers, the chief clerk is king. Hogarth, a great obese warthog of a man, controlled every aspect of V&I, which stood for the Latin veritate et iustitia, truth and justice. The staff considered it a pompous overstatement.
Loosely self-employed, barristers famously eat only what they kill, and it was Hogarth and Hogarth alone who decided which case each barrister would get their teeth into. His spreadsheets mapped out the entire legal resource of the organisation, making promises to clients and lawyers alike, and quite often breaking them. Hogarth had grown up in Enfield, that vast characterless sweep of suburbia on the fringes of North London. His father had been a legal clerk, and he’d known from the age of eleven that he would be one too. There were only two things that the junior barristers needed to know about Hogarth. One was his fanatical devotion to the local football team Enfield Town, on whose results his mood would swing. The other was his halitosis, a consequence of severe gingival disease. His teeth were stained and jumbled, his gums a febrile, swollen magenta.
Julia had been warned about him on day one at V&I. Her fellow juniors had advised that you didn’t want to sit too close to Hogarth, and should never agree to go for lunch. You didn’t want to make him laugh. And you certainly didn’t want to make him shout. Hogarth wasn’t stupid, he was aware of what only your best friend will tell you. He kept a big supply of extra strong mints on his desk and crunched them noisily throughout the day.
It was Hogarth who had interviewed Julia on the first day of her induction to V&I. Sitting her in the principal reception room, a cross between a library and a Victorian pub snug, he’d eyed her as if she was a piece of fresh meat.
‘You’ve been chosen for pupillage by Christopher, our star barrister.’
‘That’s great, thank you,’ Julia said.
‘Don’t thank me, you weren’t my choice,’ he said. ‘We lost the one we really wanted.’
That was the thing about Hogarth. He liked to remind you of your status, and in V&I Julia had begun at the very bottom, powerless, which is where he wanted her.
Pupillage under Christopher turned out to be an even broader learning experience than expected. A blond Flashman with perfect teeth and a public-school delivery, his eloquence seemed quite capable of converting an Ulster Unionist to ardent Catholicism. Yet underneath the charm he was a hard taskmaster, expecting long hours of research and preparation from Julia for the cases she was helping him prepare. But equally, her time with him involved long boozy lunches, expensive evening meals apparently charged to commercial law clients, and finally, and with no great surprise, Julia’s seduction. Later, she regretted surrendering her briefs to him so easily (his joke, which she was certain he had used before on others), but Christopher was a force of nature who could not be refused.
Ironically, it was Christopher himself who taught her in the first week of her pupillage how to assert herself in the world of men. Standing up straight, shoulders back, with a forthright chin was originally a military imperative, but, as he told Julia, it does wonders for women too. The courtroom is a theatre, and you must deliver every verbal volley with panache as well as accuracy. Hour after hour they had role-played advocate and judge, or cross-examining a difficult witness, continuing over an expensive meal at one of the many restaurants where Cadwell was a habitué. After the first bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape he had mesmerised her with his wide blue eyes, and said, ‘How do you defend a rapist?’
‘Well, it depends.’
‘Very little, actually. As you are well aware, the vast majority of rapes in the age of the smartphone aren’t even brought to trial by the CPS, because of the difficulties of consent. The mobiles of victims are very often full of various shades of come-hither texts exchanged between perpetrator and victim. Jurors have great difficulty in setting aside a context of banter and suggestion, for which they do have firm electronic evidence, to convict for an accusation of rape, for which they have no proof but the word of the victim.’
‘But the law is clear about consent to an individual act, which can be withdrawn.’
‘Yes. But juries, women perhaps even more men, are quicker to excuse male lust than female caprice. “Okay, he was a slave to hormones, but she was a slut.”’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘Terrible, yes, but true. And be aware, rapists are going to want you defending them, not me. If an attractive, mature woman believes him, he can’t be that bad. That’s the thinking, and you’ve got to be ready for it.’
And the very next day after Christopher had given that balanced and pretty speech, Julia became aware that he had been boasting to other men within chambers about having bedded her. James Cheetham, married and known womaniser, as well as being Christopher’s closest pal, had invited her on a date. When she’d refused, he’d said: ‘Oh, come on, Moggy, be a sport.’ It was her playground nickname, used only by her closest friends. She had foolishly disclosed it only once, when in bed with her indiscreet and clearly two-faced pupil master.
Christopher had proved himself a slippery bastard.
That had been five years ago, but throwing off the reputation had involved many haughty refusals to colleagues who fancied their chances. It was probably why her status within chambers had only microscopically improved in all that time. Her workspace reflected that. Yes, she now had her own office, of Victorian virtues: character and pokiness. It was a rhomboid book-lined nook of dark wood off a steep staircase between the first and second floors of the chambers. The mezzanine nature of the space meant its grand twelve-foot ceiling, cornice and ceiling rose wasn’t matched by useable lateral elbow room, which was at best six foot by nine. A big bite from one side had been taken out of the room to provide additional storage space for the second-floor chamber above, now occupied by Christopher, and on the other side the top of a first floor ladies’ bathroom intruded like a three-foot-high plywood blister under a table, adding the occasional refrain of cisterns and gurgling pipes. It left her with enough room for a small desk, so long as she didn’t mind being pinned against her own bookcase when the external door was fully opened. True, she did possess a tiny mullioned window overlooking an alleyway, but because of an ill-fitting frame it served better to funnel in noise and traffic fumes from outside than to allow in adequate light.
When anyone used the stairs, the entire room creaked like a galleon in a storm. It had only taken her a week to be able to distinguish the tread of each member of the chambers, from the light pattering footsteps of the junior clerk Sharon Smith and the crisp heels of Edwina Pym, to the brisk well-shod feet of Christopher, right up to the ominously slow and heavy tread of Hogarth himself.
And it was the approach of the latter that she was now hearing. Hogarth was on his way down from Cadwell’s room, and stopped outside hers, his breath stentorian.
Julia had been sitting at her screen going through the details of the never-ending KL Beach Resort Investment fraud case.
‘Ms McGann, may I come in?’ Hogarth said, pushing open the door regardless. A sulphurous taint like a recently struck match filled the room. ‘I think I’ve got a case for you.’ His fat fingers felt into his jacket pocket and he pulled out an extra strong mint, popping it into his soft wet mouth. ‘Maybe we’ll finally get some fees out of you.’
‘Clive, as you are perfectly well aware, I have several tens of thousands of pounds owing—’
The clerk held up his large flabby hands and smiled, having succeeded once again in getting her to rise to the bait. ‘I know, but it’s all about cashflow, my dear. Now, we have this huge National Crime Agency case, sixty odd villains seized all over the country. As you may have heard, Mr Cadwell has been requested to represent the head of the gang, Callum Sinnott.’
‘Yes, I’m aware of that.’ Julia had overheard Christopher crowing about it to Edwina. The Sinnott crime family had been untouchable for years, and the newspapers had been full of the ever-larger reach of this Birmingham-based gang. Callum Sinnott had built the business on amphetamines but had expanded into cocaine with links to the ’Ndrangheta, the all-powerful Calabrian mafia. With the NCA’s huge raid bringing in dozens of hardened criminals, there were a lot of spoils for lawyers to fight over.
‘Well, a certain Mr Terrence Bonner, who I understand is chief consiglieri to Sinnott, had also requested Mr Cadwell. They are obviously going to need separate representation, so I’m going to take the risk of suggesting you.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, not sure that thanks were actually the appropriate response to such a half-hearted recommendation.
‘Well, we are a bit stretched. James Cheetham is booked solid until Christmas, and Edwina Pym has got a series of urgent dental appointments.’
Julia felt deflated by Hogarth’s continued failure to ever make a virtue out of a necessity. ‘So is this a late return, Clive?’ Such last-minute substitutions were often arranged by a clerk whose big hitters were overbooked, but they were a pain to the junior barristers who were forced to take them on at short notice.
‘I suppose you could say so,’ he chuckled. ‘But you’re used to them aren’t you? Plea and committal at ten tomorrow, Nottingham Magistrate’s Court.’
‘Nottingham! Can’t the solicitors deal with that?’
‘Yes, but the solicitor wants to meet you. The client had his heart set on Mr Cadwell, so you have a sales job to do.’
Her heart sank. ‘Which solicitors?’ she asked.
‘Ropes, Peel, Deaton.’
She had vaguely heard of them, a northern firm now expanding in the south.
‘They are a new client for us, and I want to keep them happy,’ he said. ‘They’ve big offices in Leeds and Manchester, so if we impress them with the depth of our talent, they’ll offer us more work down the line.’
Julia was very sceptical of this, but held her tongue. If the client had insisted on Christopher Cadwell but had been offered her, whom they presumably had never heard of, they would already be disappointed. She would have a hill to climb to show that she could do as good a job as her more illustrious colleague. Hogarth had made no secret of the fact she was not even second choice.
‘I’ll get right onto it,’ she said. ‘Who am I meeting?’
‘Alasdair Dicks, senior partner. He’ll have a couple of juniors with him. He wants to have a quick chat with you first at nine thirty in the Primavera Cafe, near the Justice Centre.’
‘In Nottingham! My car’s off the road.’ It would have been bad enough even if the filthy Duster been working. By train it was going to be a silly-o’clock start.
Hogarth surveyed her with a jaundiced eye. ‘I’ll leave the travel arrangements up to you, Ms McGann. However, I hope your timekeeping tomorrow is a little better than it was this morning.’