Dan stared at his notepad as the first witness gave his evidence.
It was the man who’d alerted the police to the discovery of the body, an early-morning jogger catching the first strands of daylight. He’d slipped in the blood, congealed and sticky on the path. He didn’t know what it was at first, until he investigated the area behind the bench and flashes of liquid colour caught the early sun.
There was no real need for him to give live evidence, the statement could have been read out, but it was all about impact. Make the jurors hate the killer. The photos would follow, and evidence from the person who last had contact with Mark, all raising the emotions of the twelve men and women tasked with coming to a verdict. Dan heard the court fall silent, the witness’s words echoing around a still courtroom.
It was more than just the drama of the discovery though; the witness talked about how he was compelled to act and call the police, his voice cracking with the memory, because what else could a person do? The jury would hear a more callous tale from Nick Connor, how he discovered the same thing but stole a wallet instead.
Dan forced himself to look up. He was projecting a sense of defeat, that he was just a legal aid lawyer expected to defend a hopeless cause. So, he feigned calmness, almost disinterest. He hoped to repair some of the damage in the closing speech. Hate Nick Connor for what he did, that he was nothing but a worthless thief, a man who’d amounted to little and offered little, a burden on Highford. And Dan knew they’d be nodding along with him, believing him, all the time leading them to one conclusion: that if they thought that, they believed something else too: he wasn’t a murderer. He wasn’t on trial for stealing a wallet but for brutally murdering Mark Roberts.
Dan almost laughed at the absurdity of it, that for the jury to find Nick not guilty, they had to decide he was a feckless waster who didn’t even have the drive to kill a man. To secure his acquittal, Dan was relying on Nick to come across as pathetic, that he would be exactly the sort of person who would panic and run when he found a body, but not before he took the man’s wallet.
The weakness, of course, was that if the wallet was still there for Nick to find, it wasn’t a robbery gone wrong but a planned attack, and there was a vital piece of the picture still missing.
There were other strands, crucial strands, and he needed them all to come together. He looked at the entrance, looking out for Jayne, even though he knew it was too early.
All he could do was wait.