Dan Grant rubbed his forehead and gazed towards the desk.
His case had ended and he was waiting for the verdict, a drink-driver who claimed that he hadn’t been driving the car he was twenty yards from, the keys in his pocket, his name on the documents, the engine ticking as it cooled down and he urinated against the wall of a shop.
He was in his local Magistrates’ Court, none of the glitz and gravitas of the Crown Court. The glamour ended at the door.
It was grand from the outside, with steps rising between columns of grey millstone to high wooden doors. Once inside, however, there was just a waiting area filled with rows of plastic chairs, bolted to the floor to stop them being used as weapons, because sometimes the courthouse is where warring factions meet. The courtrooms were at the end of the waiting area, accessed through more wooden doors that clattered when they closed.
When Dan first started out, the court corridor was always busy, people summonsed to court for even the most minor offences. That didn’t happen anymore. There was more pressure to deal with them away from the courtroom, because it was cheaper and they could still be recorded as a win. Now, the court corridor seemed deserted, as always, with the few lawyers still willing to scrap it out for the available clients hovering at one end, like hyenas feasting on a carcass.
Once inside the courtroom, Dan could insulate himself from the quietness outside, because it was the same as always. His skills against a prosecutor’s skills. It was why he did the job: for the conflict, the combat. When he’d first started out twelve years or so earlier, the courts had been like a bear pit, the snarling of wily old practitioners coming up against police officers brought up on the old rules. That was the career his former boss had enjoyed: Pat Molloy, a man who’d thrived on eccentricity. He’d died a year earlier, and it felt sometimes as if he’d abandoned Dan to the wasteland, because it seemed as if the courts were being run dry, kept only for the big cases, until one day they could be closed altogether, everything dealt with by some kind of virtual penalty scheme. Input your reference number and your sentence will be emailed to you.
As he looked around, the courtroom was as jaded as the system. The walls were painted a soft yellow that must have seemed calming when first applied, but it had faded to dirty, with large bubbles in the plaster that sent dust falling to the benches below.
The prosecutor leaned across: Pam Smith, in her forties and formidable, her smart business suit and gleaming dark hair concealing someone who fought hard. ‘What do you think?’
Dan switched on a smile. ‘The case? It will probably go your way. They do most times.’
Pam looked doubtful. ‘The witnesses weren’t good, and these…’ and she gestured towards three empty chairs: the magistrates’ chairs, the three upstanding members of the community who acted as judges in their spare time. ‘They’re too unpredictable. I’ve come across the chairman before. I wouldn’t trust him to judge a flower show.’
‘You win more than you lose.’
‘But we’re supposed to win nearly all of them, because they wouldn’t be in court if they hadn’t done it.’
‘Ah, the wisdom of the righteous.’
Pam smiled. ‘You sound jaded. You’re too young for that.’
‘Do I? I don’t mean to be, but it’s, well, you know, everything’s changed.’
‘Pat Molloy?’
‘He ran the firm, made all the decisions, and now it’s all down to me.’
‘You’re a fine lawyer, Dan.’
‘But now I’m a boss, an administrator, doing all the things I didn’t sign up for when I first started out.’
‘Pat Molloy was a good man, a good lawyer. We don’t get many like him these days.’
‘No one with a brain comes into crime.’
‘Clean up then, if you’re one of the few good ones left. If it gets tough, bail out. We’re always recruiting.’
‘Me, a prosecutor?’ Dan laughed. ‘I can’t quite see that.’
‘Why not? The hours are better for a start.’
‘Because it’s not why I do it, putting away the bad guys.’
‘You think keeping them free is a more noble thing?’
‘No, it’s not that. I don’t mind which way the case goes if it’s the right way, based upon the evidence. Everyone deserves a fair shout though, a chance to defend themselves. If it lets a few guilty ones go free along the way, that’s just the price. It’s a lot better than the innocent ones being locked up.’
‘Innocent ones? Really? I’ve not seen many. There are the guilty ones where the evidence is good, and there are the guilty ones where the evidence isn’t, but they’re still guilty.’
‘You’re not looking hard enough, that’s all.’
‘And your guy today? An innocent one?’
Dan smiled. ‘I don’t think so, but if he gets away with it, doesn’t that make it your fault somehow, not mine?’
Before Pam could respond, the court clerk came back in. She seemed irritated as she said, ‘Can you get your client, Dan?’
‘Why are you so angry?’
The clerk gestured with her hand towards the door to the magistrates’ retiring room, where Dan could hear someone laughing. ‘They’ll believe any old rubbish.’
‘Should I be getting the probation officer as well, in case they want to hear more before sentence?’
‘There won’t be a sentence. It’s not guilty.’
Pam hissed something under her breath and clenched her jaw. She tugged on her jacket as she fastened it, something to occupy her hands to stop her throwing her pen across the desk, not wanting to be scrabbling underneath as the magistrates came back into the courtroom.
Dan headed for the door to get his client, trying hard not to give away that he knew the verdict already.
That’s when he noticed her.
He didn’t know how long she’d been there, but she’d been watching the case. That wasn’t unusual, the seats reserved for the public attracted the curious, but it was the look she gave him as he went to the door, as if he was the focus.
She was close to sixty, elegantly dressed in a blue blazer and cream trousers, her hair in a neat side-parting and dyed a rich chestnut. Pearls hung over a black top and her fingers were adorned with chunky rings. She was too smart to be hanging around a crumbling court building in Highford.
He waved to his client, who’d been sitting on the steps outside the building, joking with his friends, the courtroom appearance just another bad day.
As he went back in, his client behind him, the woman stepped towards him and passed him a note.
He pocketed it and gave her a curious glance as she went back to her seat.
Dan sat back in the lawyers’ benches and listened as the chairman read out the reasons why his client was not guilty, none of it making much sense in a real-world setting, but some magistrates don’t like to convict anyone, and some like to convict everyone. That was the game.
As he listened, he opened the note.
Mr Grant. We need to talk.
As he frowned and looked back to the woman, she nodded and folded her arms.
He put the note back into his pocket. Whatever she wanted, it didn’t look like good news.