Hussain left a set of papers in R v Anderson with Adey. He’d managed to scrounge a full bundle of depositions as well as transcripts of the interviews. They were only missing the unused material.
Adey couldn’t wait to get to work. She didn’t believe a word of Anderson’s account to the police. To her it was obvious – he’d messed up. Probably had a fight with a hooker over money and crashed the car. If anyone knew how to get out of a situation like that, it was a prosecution barrister. He might be able to take Hussain for a ride, but not Adey Tuur. She’d been around the block too many times. She’d uncover the truth soon enough. But there was something about John Anderson that drew her. An austere man, yet such a commanding presence. His quiet charisma was almost magnetic. She remembered him bursting into the office full of anger. Adey had never met anyone remotely like him before. Like her, he seemed so lost, yet their lives to date couldn’t have been more different.
Born in Somalia during the civil war, Adey knew little about her father, only what her mother told her, and that was almost nothing. A white Englishman, he’d said he was an aid worker, but was more probably a gun-runner. Adey had never got to the bottom of whether her mother had had a one-night stand on the evening of her conception or whether she’d been raped. She would often look into Adey’s eyes before she died, and comment on the miracle of how someone so beautiful had come out of something so terrible. Her uncle, who lived with them in Mogadishu when she was young, had been involved in politics. She still had nightmares about the men who came to their home during the night. Tattooed on her memory, peeping out from the bedroom door with her brother, Bahdoon. She remembered the torchlights glistening off the machetes, raining down on her uncle. The sound of flesh being chopped – blood-spattered walls. Her mother sobbing as she surveyed the dismembered corpse, confused as to which body part to cling to.
After the withdrawal of UN forces in March 1995 her mother had fled, taking Adey and Bahdoon to the UK as political refugees, eventually settling in Moss Side, Manchester.
Unable to come to terms with the traumatic events in her life, Adey’s mother committed suicide when Adey was fourteen, leaving her and a sixteen-year-old brother to fend for themselves.
With Hussain out at court she treated herself to an extra notch on the electric heater, then set about trying to find out something on Heena Butt.
She started with the basics: Facebook and Twitter. Nothing. Maybe she’d made a mistake with the spelling. She flicked through the brief. To her surprise, there was a hole in the prosecution case − no death certificate and no evidence to prove the identity of the deceased. Paramedics described finding a body in Anderson’s vehicle, pronounced dead on arrival by doctors at the hospital, but no one had confirmed her name. The only reference to the name Heena Butt was from the police officers in Anderson’s interview, but she couldn’t work out where they got it from.
Even basic searches of the electoral role were hopeless without a date of birth or address. And with no details to go on, other searches were pointless. She was stumped, unable to progress this aspect of her preparation until the prosecution disclosed the schedule of unused material. She could only hope that would turn up something. Fortunately for the client, it meant a stay of execution.