Dan Grant stood in front of the mirror. He was in his court dress: long black gown, stiff collar with bands, just two strips of white cloth drooping from it, stark white against the deep black of his waistcoat. But it wasn’t his clothes he was checking. It was his nerve. He was looking for a flush to his cheeks, a giveaway look in his eyes, but everything looked as it should. Strong chin, resolute stare.
‘Is it always like this?’
Dan turned around. It was Jayne, looking around the room.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Busy, noisy. Full of arseholes.’
They were in the robing room of the local Crown Court, where the barristers and solicitor-advocates readied themselves for the courtroom. It was cramped, with wall space taken up by lockers, the room lit by the large lattice windows that gave views over the wrong end of the city centre. Betting shops, an amusement arcade, a small paved precinct that led to the bus station which acted like a wind tunnel in the worst days of winter, litter blown into one corner. Everyone spoke in loud voices, the air heavy with stale cigarette and cigar odours but almost overpowered by too much perfume.
He raised an eyebrow and gave her the faint trace of a smile. ‘Yes, mostly.’
The day was just starting, the room so different to the hush of the corridor outside, where footsteps echoed and people spoke quietly. The room was filled with the chatter of a new week, with talk of evenings out and cricket, whether anyone had tried the new restaurant out towards the hills, punctuated by the smack of leather bags landing on the tables as people pulled out their robes and papers.
‘Mondays are always like this,’ Dan said.
‘Why?’
‘It’s when most trials are scheduled to start. Everyone is buzzing around, trying to plea-bargain the cases they were preparing last night. Tomorrow, it will be different. Trials will have been sorted, late guilty pleas entered, that kind of thing, slots in the court diary freed up, so it’s back to juggling whatever cases are left.’
‘And by Friday?’
‘Sentencing, mostly. All those heartfelt pleas they don’t mean.’
‘They? You’re part of them.’
‘You think so? I thought you knew me better than that.’
‘Yeah, sorry,’ Jayne said. ‘Don’t ever be like them. The way they talk, the way they act.’
‘It’s all affectation, a performance. Take him, for example,’ and Dan gestured towards a man sitting nearby, with smooth skin and slicked hair, peering over glasses he’d allowed to slip down his nose. ‘He’s not much past thirty but talks in a deep bumble, like he’s some kind of retired colonel, and I can bet you he didn’t talk like that when he was propping up the student bar a few years ago. It changes you, this job. Or rather, they let it change them.’
‘Why hasn’t it changed you?’
‘Because we have different heroes. These lot,’ and he gestured with a flick of his hand. ‘They all want to be the whisky bore, the old country gent in front of the stone fire.’
‘And you?’
‘Just trying not to lose myself.’ He looked down at her. ‘And as for you, well, you look very nice.’
‘Nice?’ She grimaced as she ran her hand down her clothes: a dark trouser suit, plain white blouse. ‘I don’t think I do nice. It doesn’t feel right.’
‘This is how it’s got to be. I need you in and out of court all week, keeping me updated. The judge has got to see you today, know that you’re my caseworker. It’s the only way you’ll be able to sit behind me. I don’t know how this thing is going to go.’
‘Is it just you?’
‘No, of course not.’ He pointed to a woman sitting at a table in the corner, a dirty-looking horsehair wig on the table next to her, the grey turned to light brown. Her own hair was dyed deep brown and pulled back into a clasp, her cheekbones sharp, her nose pointed. ‘She’s my QC. Hannah Taberner.’
‘Does she know what we’ve been up to?’
‘No, and she doesn’t need to know.’
‘What happens when she finds out?’
‘It won’t matter. And she might not find out anyway, unless Robert Carter changes his story. He’s the client.’
‘Do you think he will?’
‘I’ve no idea. All I know is that it’s safer for us if he doesn’t.’
‘And if he does?’
‘I don’t do this job for the easy stuff.’
‘I’m scared, Dan.’
He sighed. ‘You’re allowed to be.’
‘What about you?’
‘Apprehensive, but trials are like that, the fear of the unknown. Whatever we think will happen, it will probably turn out differently. Something unexpected will happen.’ He picked up his court bag. ‘Come on, let’s get to the courtroom.’
‘Shouldn’t you wait for her, the QC?’
‘Leave her with her thoughts. She’s the main attraction, not me. Let her concentrate and focus, and we’ll do what we have to do. There’ll be time for you to get to know her later.’
‘Is she any good?’
‘Damn good. The jury will love her, and you will too, but right now, she’s got a murder trial about to start and won’t want some jumped-up solicitor-advocate like me distracting her.’
Dan threaded his way through the room, exchanging greetings with those who’d come up the same way he had, scrapping it out in the local Magistrates Court before ending up in the gown at the Crown Court, many solicitors choosing to do the work that had once been the preserve of barristers. The nods and greetings from the barristers were more brittle, their once exclusive club becoming eroded, most niceties stemming from the need to keep the work coming. Dan had no sympathy for them. The good ones were very good, but many had taken too much cash for not doing enough. They were never the ones in the police station at midnight, or taking the early morning calls from drunken clients.
The door closed behind them and shut out the chatter of the robing room, replacing it with the peace of the court corridor, tiled in black and white that echoed the clicks from leather soles.
There was talk of a new, modern building, but Dan liked the history of the place. It had dealt with murderers and the rest since Victorian times, with people sent to the gallows from the rooms on either side of the corridor. Modern buildings were more suited to the work, with better acoustics and heating that didn’t clank in winter, but they couldn’t match the shadows of the past.
DI Murdoch was ahead, with a small group of people, talking in a tight cluster. He recognised them as the family of Mary Kendricks, the young woman murdered in a shared house a few months before. Dan was there to represent the man accused of her murder. The family stopped talking and glared at him as he got closer to the courtroom door. Dan looked away. There would be no point in saying anything.
The door to the courtroom was heavy to keep out any noises from outside. Once inside, he let out a long breath. This was it, the start of it.
The courtroom was empty, but soon it would become the focus of the drama, someone’s tragedy played out as a public spectacle. The aim was to find the truth, but Dan wasn’t there for the truth. His role was to conceal it, to distort it and present a different version of it. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth came second most often.
‘I don’t like courtrooms,’ Jayne said, from behind him.
‘You’re the proof that justice can be done.’
‘That doesn’t make it a good memory.’
‘It does to me.’
Jayne was a former client who’d once been accused of murder. After her acquittal, Dan suggested that she acted as his caseworker and investigator. Jayne had agreed, provided that she wasn’t employed by him. She wanted the freedom she’d almost lost and, in the two years since then, she’d come in and out of his life whenever a case demanded it.
Dan looked around as he put his bag on the floor. The courtroom was vast, with high ceilings and walls lined with dusty paintings of judges, the windows covered in long green drapes. The lawyers’ seats were wooden rows, the dock just behind, raised high and protected by security glass, the defendant sat like a specimen in a lab, the public gallery behind.
‘Are you ready for this?’ Dan said.
‘I think so. We’ll make it work, whatever the cost.’
Dan took a deep breath at that. It was how much the case would cost him that worried him the most.