Dan checked his watch as he rushed up the hill from the courthouse. He’d finished his cases and was keen to clear some paperwork at his office before the usual afternoon scramble.
Mornings had a familiar routine, with a couple of hours of sitting around in court, broken only when his cases were called. First-come, first-served applied to the defendants, not the lawyers, so he’d had to endure Conrad Taylor at his insincere best, although he hadn’t seemed interested in hanging around, as if his spat with Dan had thrown him off somehow.
He’d tried calling Shelley but her phone was switched off. He’d visit her once he’d got rid of his afternoon clients.
As soon as Dan walked in, he saw there were three people waiting to see him. The waiting room hung heavy with the smell of their clothes, pungent with stale cigarettes and not enough washes. Margaret pointed towards someone in the corner of the room, his head against the wall, his mouth gaping open, soft snores drifting out.
‘Your one-thirty has arrived early,’ she told him. ‘And your father called an hour ago.’
‘Did he say why?’
‘Something to do with his satellite channels not working.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘And these two want to speak to you.’ Margaret gestured towards two skinny young men in black jackets, their faces too pale, dark stubble in contrast.
Dan read her obvious disapproval.
They stood up and walked towards him.
Dan shook his head as soon as they got close.
‘What do you mean, no?’ one said.
‘I gave you money last week,’ Dan said. ‘It was a one-off, a gesture of goodwill for all your past custom, but it’s not going to become a regular thing.’
He opened his mouth as if offended. ‘It was only a tenner, man. They’ve cut my money.’
‘Yeah, and they keep cutting ours too.’
‘We send you work. We come here and get other people to come here.’
‘You send me scraps.’
‘That’s it then?’
‘Look, I get your problem, but you can’t keep coming here whenever you get short.’
‘You get my problem?’ The man shook his head. ‘No, you don’t. You just pretend like you do, but you’re just a fancy lawyer, thinking that you’re better than us.’ He went to the door, his friend just behind him. ‘Yeah, thanks man. I’ll remember this,’ and then he slammed the door, making the dozing man jolt in his chair before settling down again.
Margaret tutted. ‘You can’t keep giving money away.’
‘It’s part of the job, you know that, and sometimes I’m a sucker for a sad story.’
Margaret shook her head, but being a criminal lawyer wasn’t just about the courtroom. It was a social service, sometimes a friend to turn to, the one person who won’t look down on them when they’re at their worst. Clients often asked for money, usually under the guise of a bus fare home from court or just something to get them through a couple of days, and sometimes Dan gave it, if they caught him in the right mood. His clients weren’t often happy if he refused, but they stayed loyal, and the argument was never mentioned the next time Dan saw them, which was usually through the hatch in a cell door.
‘What’s that?’ Dan pointed towards a large box on the reception desk.
‘A courier dropped it off. Pat says that it’s for you, so you’ll have to carry it up the stairs.’
Dan lifted the lid, although he knew what it was: the Robert Carter file, copied and bundled into separate folders.
‘It looks like it will keep you busy,’ she said.
‘No more than a fortnight.’
‘Something interesting?’
‘I’ll tell you when I’ve read it.’ Although he guessed that Margaret had already looked through the box. ‘Give me a call when sleeping beauty rejoins the world.’
‘Will do. Are we expecting any more?’
‘I’ve got a two-thirty and a three-thirty, but they won’t turn up. They never do.’
‘Don’t forget your father,’ she shouted, as he went upstairs with the box.
He dropped it on to his desk. It landed with a thump and made his coffee-stained mug rattle. It must have alerted Pat to his return, because after a couple of minutes he appeared in the doorway.
‘How was court?’
‘Routine. Everyone wanted to plead guilty and the sunshine made the Magistrates lenient.’
‘Not many go to prison these days.’
‘You’re sounding nostalgic.’
‘Sometimes your clients need to expect prison, so you can be the hero for keeping them out. Now? We just process people.’
‘That’s right, people. My ego isn’t important.’
‘Not ego, old boy. Reputation, that’s what it is, and it makes people come through that door.’
‘I saw Conrad Taylor at court,’ Dan put his hand on the box lid. ‘Why didn’t he know about this transfer?’
‘Why should he? Robert Carter was Shelley’s client, not his.’
‘But Conrad’s the senior partner. He didn’t know the legal aid had been transferred.’
‘Shelley can make her own decisions, and she saw a conflict of interest. Her professional integrity was on the line, and she knew he wouldn’t see beyond the money.’
‘It sounds like she’s got more important things to worry about now. She rolled her car last night, with rumours of booze involved. She’s in hospital.’
Pat closed his eyes for a moment and pinched his nose. ‘How is she?’
‘I don’t know. I’m going up later.’ Dan pointed to the box. ‘I need to read this first.’
‘Good man, I’ll leave you to it.’ Pat went towards the door but paused and looked back. ‘Ignore Conrad Taylor. Do what you think is right.’
Dan smiled. ‘I always do.’
Once Pat had left the room, Dan closed his eyes. He needed a moment’s pause before he started to look at the file. Conrad Taylor might think that Dan’s job was to babysit the case, but Conrad didn’t want to be the person hauled in front of the judge for missing something, or cited in the appeal courts. For as long as the case was his, he’d do what needed doing.
He needed the pause though, because as soon as he turned the first page, he’d be involved. Professionally, emotionally, morally. He cared about the verdicts, about justice, because for Dan it wasn’t just an outcome. For some lawyers, the verdict meant the end of a case, nothing more to do than submit the bill. For Dan, the end of a case was a test of how he’d done, of whether his client’s trust had been misplaced or not. It didn’t matter that Robert Carter had chosen Shelley as his first lawyer. He was his client now, and Dan wasn’t going to let him down.
He reached out and grabbed the first binder. He started to read.
The following hour was lost to Dan as he became engrossed in the case. He marked points of interest or things to explore with a red pen, but it was really about getting to grips with the facts.
There was a knock on his door. He wanted to ignore it, but the second knock was more insistent.
‘Yeah?’
When the door opened, Jayne Brett walked in.
She looked dishevelled. Her hair was shoulder length but tangled and she had dark rings under her eyes. Her T-shirt hung loose over the waistband of her jeans, a green combat jacket over the top. Her white pumps looked ragged, a toe showing through.
She sat down on the chair at the side of the room. ‘Is that the case?’
‘No hello?’
‘I’ve had a tough morning.’
‘Work?’
‘Life.’
‘Who was he?’
She shrugged in apology. ‘I never asked. Or if I did, I forgot.’
Dan laughed. ‘I need your focus for this case. It’s a murder case and the trial is in two weeks.’
‘Won’t all the work have been done?’
‘I’m not interested in what other people have done. It’s what I do that’s important.’
Jayne lifted her feet on to the seat so that her arms were wrapped around her knees. Dan had spotted that look before, defensive whenever a murder case was being discussed, as if she was bracing herself against being reminded of her past.
‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘You’ll know it. Robert Carter.’
Jayne put her feet down, her eyes wide. ‘The teacher case? Wow.’
The case had attracted a lot of media attention when the victim was first found; the pretty victims always do. She was Mary Kendricks, a young redheaded teacher who’d been found stabbed in the neck and body.
It wasn’t just the murder that drew the press, although her good looks helped. It was the behaviour of the people who discovered her: one of her housemates, Lucy Ayres, and Lucy’s boyfriend, Peter. As others were approaching the scene with flowers, ready to lay them at the end of a brick alley, Lucy and Peter watched from a distance, holding each other, kissing, almost as if they had no interest in what had happened in the house. For two days, the press reported on them, questioned what had really happened, focused on the two young people who were not displaying the public grief expected of them. That stopped when Robert Carter was arrested, and the media talk died right down once he was charged. They would have to wait for the verdict before they published anything else they’d found, the subjudice rules keeping everyone silent.
‘Tell me about Mary,’ Jayne said.
‘She worked at a local primary school, not long from college. She couldn’t afford her own place so she moved into the shared house. She’d lived in the house for a year or so when she was killed. Her friends make her sound pretty special.’
‘They always do when they talk about the dead ones.’
‘No, I think there’s something in this. Fun, decent, studious.’ He held up a photograph of Mary grinning for the camera, carefree and young, just starting to carve out her life. Her ginger hair caught the sun in the picture, and the light had brought out the freckles that spotted her nose.
Jayne reached out for the picture and studied it. ‘She looks nice.’ As she handed it back, she said, ‘How did it happen? I remember some of the media stuff, but not the real detail.’
‘It was at the end of a night out, Mary and her friends were at the Wharf. You know, the pub by the canal? All cask beers and stone floor.’
‘A bit sedate for a night out with the girls.’
‘Saturday night, they put bands on in the room upstairs. When Mary and her friends arrived, my new client was there, Robert Carter. Alone. He pestered Mary, something he’d done before. He made no secret of the fact that he liked her, but she didn’t feel the same. Robert didn’t seem a threat, but he imposed himself on Mary whenever he saw her. Mary was too polite to tell him to go away, but her friends said she resented him for spoiling her nights out.’
‘Her housemates?’
‘No. Two were away on a hen weekend and Lucy Ayres was with her boyfriend all night. They were in the throes of new love at the time so she didn’t want to be away from him.’
Jayne made a gesture as if sticking her fingers down her throat.
‘Yeah, and the next morning Lucy found her, stabbed,’ he went on.
Jayne blinked at the word stabbed. ‘How did Robert Carter end up there?’
‘This is the part where his story makes no sense. Mary walked home with her friends, but she lived the furthest away, so she did the final half-mile on her own. According to Carter’s interviews, he met up with her by chance and offered to walk her the rest of the way.’
‘Some coincidence.’
‘It doesn’t look good, particularly as he lives on the other side of town.’
‘So how did she go from walking home with him to being dead?’
‘He said she invited him in for coffee, the old cliché, to say thanks. After half an hour or so, he went outside for a cigarette and Mary went upstairs to get ready for bed.’
‘Didn’t he take the hint?’
‘Seems not. He was on the front step when he heard something in the house, as if there was someone else there, and then Mary screamed. The front door had closed and he waited outside, but when it had been silent for a while, he went around the back and went inside. Mary was injured, a neck-wound, blood everywhere. He tried to stop the bleeding but couldn’t, and he panicked and ran out.’
‘If there’s any truth in that, it was a shitty thing to do, to leave her like that.’
‘That’ll be the hardest part, persuading a jury to like him after what he did. That’s our case though, that he behaved like a coward and doesn’t deserve our sympathy, but that doesn’t make him a murderer.’
‘How was she when Lucy found her?’
‘You’re sure you’re okay to do this?’
‘After Jimmy, you mean?’ She shrugged. ‘I need the money.’
Dan passed her a bundle of photographs. He didn’t need to say anything as Jayne flicked through. He’d had to suppress his own sadness. It wasn’t the blood or injuries that got to him, it was the waste of such a young life, vibrant and filled with so much hope, her dignity erased by the harshness of the flash bulb.
‘When Lucy returned the following morning, the house seemed empty, but she sensed something wasn’t right. She went into Mary’s room, and there she was, just like in the pictures.’
Dan saw the photos again as Jayne looked through them a second time. Mary’s body was on the bed but the duvet was over her head, just her bare feet sticking out. The pictures moved on to Mary with the duvet moved. She was naked, her jeans thrown to the corner of the room, her knickers and bra with them. Her white shirt was on the floor by the bed, soaked by the blood from a deep wound in her neck. There were some smaller puncture wounds in her side, with small trails where blood had trickled to the carpet.
‘Didn’t Lucy look under the duvet?’ Jayne asked.
‘She screamed and collapsed as her boyfriend called the police. But look at the blood. It’s dried out and it looks obvious that Mary was dead. Who would want to look?’
‘How did they catch him?’
‘Carter’s bloodied fingerprint on the wall by the door, inside the bedroom.’
‘So where do I start?’ Jayne took a deep breath as she handed the photographs back to Dan.
‘Carter says that he wasn’t in the room when it happened, so we need to show that someone else could have done it. There must be witnesses the police haven’t found. A woman who lives on the street reckoned she heard a scream at around eleven-thirty. If we’re looking for new suspects, we need to put them in the timeline, but a scream might have made people look out of their windows.’
‘But the police will have done door-to-doors.’
‘Yes, but people don’t always like to talk to the police. That’s where I want you involved. You can do it differently. And look into the other housemates, see what people say about them.’
‘Won’t the previous lawyer have done this already?’
‘I don’t care what Shelley did.’
‘Can we do it in two weeks?’
‘We’re about to find out.’
‘Anything else?’
‘We’ll see if any leads come back.’
She stood up. ‘I’ll meet you later to update you.’
‘Where?’
‘There’s a new Italian that’s just opened, Pizza Roma, on the High Street.’
‘Okay, I’ll see you in there at eight.’
Just before Jayne left, she paused. ‘Why did Carter cover her up?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, what’s the case? That it was an intruder unknown to her, a stranger attack, a burglary gone wrong as Robert Carter smoked outside? Or was it a revenge attack for something, Mary targeted for reasons we don’t know about? If it was either of those reasons, why was she still in bed, under the sheet? Carter said that he’d tried to help her but realised that there was no point and panicked. So why cover her up, if he was panicking? He’d just run, wouldn’t he? No, it feels more like the killer was ashamed of it, couldn’t stand looking at her.’
‘Like passion wound up and let loose, and then the come down?’
‘You said it,’ she said, and left.
As he watched the door swing closed, Dan knew that he’d taken on a surefire loser.
He smiled. Those were the challenges he liked the best.