He watched the entrance to the cobbled yard from his car on the other side of the road. It wasn’t the first time he’d been there. He’d followed Dan Grant home from his office one night, two cars behind, just to know where he lived. It’s always good to know these things. He hadn’t got any closer to him though.
He put his head back and closed his eyes. It was becoming too much. There’d been too many deaths. They weighed too heavily, a line stretching back through the years, those missed by the police, written off as suicides or accidents or unexplained missing persons. That had to stop. They had to recognise it. They had to recognise him.
The faces of the dead flashed through his mind, snapping him alert. They did that sometimes. They came to him in his sleep, or when he relaxed for a moment, as if forgetting wasn’t allowed.
He rubbed his chest. It hurt whenever they jumped back into his head like that. Too much pressure, but he couldn’t act. Not yet. There was someone in there with Grant. An old man, worn down and grey.
Instead, he kept his focus on the view ahead, towards the stone buildings of the town centre. It was quiet, the Sunday trade confined to the out-of-town retail parks. It made him conspicuous. Perhaps he wanted that, to be noticed.
All he could do was wait.
Dan was confused. ‘Sean Martin? I don’t understand.’
The Sean Martin case had been Pat’s biggest victory, the one that got him a speech on the court steps that was played out on every national news bulletin, his story dominating double-page spreads.
The case had caught the media’s attention quickly.
Sean Martin’s fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, Rosie Smith, had been stabbed to death with a thin sharp instrument as she’d been walking along the canal towpath to meet Sean.
He’d arranged to meet her off the bus after she’d spent the day at a friend’s house, except that they lived on the other side of the town to the one-way system that the bus was funnelled along. He’d told her to get off the bus and walk the hundred metres along the canal, where he would be waiting for her. When she didn’t arrive, he went looking for her, finding her on the towpath, blood pooling around her.
He’d rushed to her and held her close, listened out for her breathing as he lifted her from the ground, his hands and clothes covered in her blood as he searched for any sign that she was still alive.
Suspicion hadn’t fallen on Sean Martin straightaway, but when the police started to delve into Rosie’s life, they were disturbed by some of the messages that passed between Rosie and her stepfather. It was the early days of social media, still used mainly by young people, but Sean Martin was quick to get on it as well. It seemed as if whenever Rosie posted a picture of herself in a pose that was a young teenager’s attempt to look sexy, Sean Martin posted a comment that appeared to cross the line. Rosie might have wanted her classmates to say that she looked hot, but perhaps not her stepfather.
It was the blood mist that changed everything.
A blood-spatter expert had examined his clothes. There were the expected contact stains, from where Sean had held her after he found her, but there were other blood stains, microscopic spots of blood on his fleece jacket and his shirt collar, invisible to the naked eye. The expert said that these had come from the mist of blood created during the attacker’s frenzy, as her murderer leaned over her to strike the fatal blows to her chest. They made Sean the killer.
‘I don’t understand,’ Dan said. ‘Sean Martin was your biggest success.’
‘Let me talk about your client first. Peter Box. Has he mentioned Sean Martin at all?’
‘No. Why should he?’
‘Because when Sean was awaiting trial, Peter Box came to my office and tried to claim responsibility for Rosie’s murder.’
Dan stood up, his arms splayed out, his mouth open in shock.
‘What the hell, Pat? Why are you telling me now, the night before the trial?’
‘Think about Sean Martin.’ He stopped to cough. ‘What do we know about him? He was acquitted in the end, innocent in the eyes of the law after his retrial. If I’d told you, how would it have helped Peter Box for you to think he’d killed before?’
‘I was a trainee when I sat through Sean’s first trial, and it was what, twelve years ago now? I don’t remember the possibility of another suspect ever being mentioned.’
‘I went to see Sean without you, because I thought I was breaking great news by telling him there was someone else the police could focus on. It didn’t go as I expected.’
‘Why? What did he say?’
‘He told me to ignore it. As simple as that. Said Box was probably some fantasist, and that if there was any evidence linking anyone else, they’d have found it. He said it would make him look desperate.’
‘So that was that?’
‘I pressed him on it, don’t worry, and I ran it past the QC to see what he thought, and he agreed that it was too risky. We didn’t know enough about Box, and you know the rule: never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer. What if we asked the police about him and there was a history of false confessions? How desperate would that make Sean look? It was Sean who gave the most noble answer, that he knew what it was like to be wrongly accused of a crime, and that his conscience wouldn’t allow him to let it happen to someone else.’
Dan sat down. ‘But why are you telling me now? I can’t use it, because it doesn’t matter what people think of him, his retrial turned him into an innocent man wrongly accused, haunted by the memory of holding Rosie as she died, while the killer is still out there roaming the canals. They’ll look at Peter Box and wonder whether Sean Martin had been right all along, that he was innocent, and that now, after all this time, they have a chance to nail her killer.’
‘I can’t die with this case hanging over me.’
Dan looked down for a moment. ‘I’m truly sorry you are ill, and I can’t stand the thought of you dying, because you’ve been my boss, my hero, but I’m the wrong person to grant you redemption. Take this the right way, Pat, because you’ve done so much for me, but if the stain is that you stayed silent about Peter Box and he’s murdered someone else, you’ve come to the wrong person. I’m not conspiring to get Peter Box locked up. I’m here to defend him.’
Pat shook his head. ‘Peter Box isn’t the stain. Think back to Sean Martin. He’d been the victim of a police force determined to convict someone for Rosie’s murder, a prosecution that had latched onto minor pieces of evidence and exaggerated them. But when I’d given him someone to blame he’d turned away from that path: a man of principle, stronger than I could ever have been. You remember how he stuck by me even though we lost his first trial? I fought for him, Dan. I believed in him.’
‘I remember. I was proud of you.’
‘The police had fastened onto any old morsel: like the fact that no one else knew that he’d made the arrangement with Rosie, and that he went out too early to meet her, or that her phone disappeared, as if there was something to hide on it.’
‘I remember the innuendo about their relationship, the press calling it “complex”.’ Dan made the sign of inverted commas with his fingers. ‘There was no actual evidence that Sean had any sexual interest in Rosie but they repeated the whispers anyway, suggesting that she was about to make accusations against him, so he had to silence her. But you fought hard, Pat. His conviction is no stain. You got it overturned.’
Pat reached out and grabbed Dan by the forearm. ‘You misunderstand me. Getting nearer to death has allowed me to reassess it all. I took his conviction badly because he was so reviled in the press, and I got some backlash for that in Highford. It felt like I’d failed him. He wrote to me all the time, and he had supporters and campaigners, and I was determined to get him out, to rescue him. I was able to find my own expert to say that Rosie could have been breathing as he held her, because looking dead isn’t the same as being dead. The poor girl might have covered him in the blood mist as she took her last breaths. Or it could have been expelled when he lifted her. It was enough, just enough. He got his retrial and doubt was found, because it was possible that the blood mist got there while he held her during the last moments of her life, rather than while he leaned over her as he killed her.’
‘And Sean hasn’t been bitter about it,’ Dan said. ‘He’s put his experience to good use and become the go-to man when they start talking about miscarriages of justice. That’s down to you, Pat.’
‘Yes. He’s advised ministers. He’s a real star.’ There was no pleasure in Pat’s voice. ‘That’s why he’s my stain. Sean Martin, not Peter Box.’
‘Sorry, Pat, but you’ve lost me.’
‘Do you remember the night of his release? The party we held?’
‘How could I forget? Most times, we help guilty people to walk away from their crimes. For a change, we’d done good. It’s not often we can say that.’
‘All of Sean’s supporters were so happy. It was a grand old night. Until later.’ Pat let out a long breath that turned into a coughing fit, grimacing until it subsided. ‘Do you know what he said to me that ruined it?’
Dan drummed his fingers on the table. ‘Do I want to hear this?’
‘You need to hear it.’ There was some of the old fire in Pat’s eyes now. ‘It was almost the end of the evening and everyone was a bit drunk, but not Sean. I realised then that he hadn’t been drinking too much, but I put it down to the fact that he’d spent his time talking and perhaps felt bewildered after six years in prison. I was wrong. He was staying in control, that’s all, because he doesn’t like to lose control. He pointed towards his supporters, all wearing the same black T-shirts. Do you remember them, with that giant yellow ribbon logo, twirled into the initials SM? He leaned over to me and said, “What’s funny is that they never found the murder weapon.” ’
Pat held out his hands. ‘What could I do but agree? But he didn’t stop there. He wagged his finger at me and whispered, “Because I hid it well.” ’
Dan’s eyes widened. ‘He said that?’
‘Oh, he did, all right. He said something else, too: “By the western corner, just under the surface, below the mason’s mark – an itch you can’t scratch.” I thought I’d heard him wrong, or perhaps it was a joke, but when l looked at him he nodded and winked and said, “But you can’t tell anyone because you’re my lawyer. I just thought you might like to know.” ’
‘What the hell did you say?’
‘I asked him whether he’d killed her. I told him that new forensic evidence could mean a new trial, that not guilty in a murder case doesn’t mean he’s off the hook for ever.’
‘And?’
‘He just laughed and said nobody was going to find it. And if the police ever came after him again, he’d know who’d tipped them off, because I was the only person he’d told.’
Dan sat back, perplexed. ‘Why did he tell you that?’
‘To taunt me, because I’d been so pleased with myself, and he wanted to puncture me. He enjoys cruelty, and it worked. It felt like the air had been sucked out of me.’
‘He might have been just winding you up.’
‘He wasn’t. I saw it in his eyes right then. But he knew I’d think it was a sick joke so he sealed the deal. He smiled at me, mocking me, and said, “That dirty little slut would have given me away, and I couldn’t allow that.” And then he left me to circle the room, talk to his supporters, knowing that I was bound to keep my silence.’
Dan shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it. Sean Martin was guilty after all?’
‘The one part of my career I wish I could rewrite, to walk away from him when he was first convicted. That’s why he didn’t want us to look into Peter Box, because he would have been discounted easily. It wasn’t Peter, but Sean all along.’
‘And you’ve kept this quiet since then?’
‘Client privilege, you know how it is. And what could I do? I couldn’t bring Rosie back and it would have ruined my reputation. I’d have been the lawyer who’d freed a murderer. It’s a poor excuse, I know, because I could have made an anonymous call. If he had complained about breach of privilege, he’d have to admit that what he’d told me turned out to be true, but I’d have been disciplined for betraying a client. Cowardly, I know, but I can’t change the past.’
‘But now things are different?’
‘I want this removed from my conscience.’
‘How does this involve me?’
‘Peter Box.’
Dan stood up and went to the window, tried to conceal his frustration. ‘I’m not using my case to ease your conscience, Pat. I just can’t.’
‘Don’t you see? Peter Box came to see me and tried to confess in Sean Martin’s case. Either Sean Martin killed Rosie or he didn’t, but my gut tells me that he did, which makes Peter flaky. It might explain why he’s keeping quiet, because he has a habit of incriminating himself for things he didn’t do. If nothing else, it will explain his silence.’
‘It won’t explain the DNA, and if I introduce a murder he tried to claim responsibility for, where a man has been cleared, the jury will think Peter killed Rosie too.’
Pat stayed silent, to let the obvious sink in.
It dawned on Dan slowly. ‘You want me to go after Sean Martin.’
Pat nodded. ‘Find out why Peter came to see me all those years ago. What’s the connection with Sean Martin? You already have an expert to discredit the DNA lab. All you need to do is explain Peter Box’s silence, and you do that by showing that he’s falsely claimed to be a killer in the past.’
‘And I do that by proving that Sean Martin killed Rosie?’
‘Exactly. If you can prove that Sean Martin killed Rosie, you can show why he stayed silent.’
‘How do I do this?’
‘We find the murder weapon, first of all, and do more digging on Sean Martin.’
‘The trial is tomorrow. I’ve no time.’
‘And neither have I, but I want to do it, and it’s relevant to Peter’s case. But I have a warning for you.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Sean delighted in the cruelty of the things he said. Remember, too, why he killed Rosie: to keep her quiet. If you go down this path, you are in danger. Me too, because he will know where the information has come from, but it’s the right thing to do. Not just for me, or for Lizzie Barnsley, but for Rosie too. Let me go to my grave knowing that I’ve scrubbed away this stain.’
Dan couldn’t think of a good reason to say no. But he knew something else too: Peter Box’s trial had just got a hell of a lot more complicated.