The holding cells below the Old Bailey lead directly up to the courtrooms and so Ruben Shavers appeared in the dock as if by magic, not there one second and there the next, a large man in handcuffs flanked by two police officers in blue short-sleeve shirts and black stab-proof jackets. They were both carrying assault rifles. One of them was Jackson Rose.
There was a shocked silence at Shavers’ abrupt appearance that was broken by a suppressed cough from the public gallery.
I looked up and saw it was Frank Lyle, leaning forward to stare as if in disbelief at one of the men who had taken his daughter. The old cop was painfully thin now, as if all his meals were fed into his arm by drip, and he had the ragged stubble of the long-term hospital patient. Sitting between his wife Jennifer and his son Tommy, holding their hands, he looked as though he been carried from his hospital bed. But terminal cancer was not going to stop him seeing justice done for his daughter.
Further along the same row were Snezia Jones and her boyfriend. She wept soundlessly and shook her head, as if coming here had been a mistake.
And in the back row on the end seat, looking like he was ready to make a quick getaway, was Harry Flowers.
They sat surrounded by the usual occupants of the public gallery at the Central Criminal Court, that odd mix of the curious, tourists, and journalists who had not been able to find a place in the crowded press box. They all watched Ruben Shavers while he stared blankly at a random point on the wall, his thick arms limp and useless in handcuffs.
Jackson caught my eye and nodded.
There were two more SFOs at the back of the public gallery, two at the rear of the courtroom and more around the main entrance of the Old Bailey, highly visible in their helmets, goggles and body armour, their assault rifles in that at-ease 45-degree angle.
‘All rise,’ the bailiff said.
Court Two of the Old Bailey rose obediently to its feet as an elderly woman in the scarlet robes of a high court judge entered, her shoulder-length wig more mouldy grey than white. She took her time settling in her seat.
Ruben Shavers was asked to confirm his name and the charges against him were read out.
The kidnapping of Jessica Lyle.
The false imprisonment of Jessica Lyle.
The murder of Jessica Lyle.
The judge peered at the defendant, her eyes bright and beady over the top of her reading glasses.
‘How do you plead?’
Shavers cleared his throat.
‘Not guilty, My Lady.’
I heard a broken whimper from the public gallery. I thought it was the family of Jessica Lyle. But the faces of Jessica’s parents and brother showed no visible emotion. The moan had come from a woman of about forty, her skin the light orange tan of the long-term sun-bed addict.
I had taken her for a tourist. Now I saw her tears and knew this had to be the partner of Ruben Shavers, the mother of Louis, six, and Lilly, eight.
The day’s proceedings were over in a few minutes.
Ruben Shavers was remanded in custody and would come back around two months from today for his trial.
‘All rise,’ the bailiff said, and I could feel the sense of anticlimax in the public gallery but I had been in enough courtrooms to know that there would be no drama today.
And then it happened.
As the judge was turning to leave, Shavers swung his handcuffed wrists left and high, catching the armed officer next to him full on his chin and putting him down. Jackson, on the other side of Shavers, had a split moment to react and stepped back against the side of the dock, rolling with Shavers’ clubbing blow that caught him on the temple, hard enough to spin him around but not enough to put him on the ground.
And enough for what Shavers wanted.
Suddenly he was over the dock and in the well of the court. I made a move towards the exit, expecting him to make his break for freedom.
Because the only alternative was dying in this courtroom.
And I saw that was exactly what Ruben Shavers wanted.
He was crossing the courtroom, away from the exit door and any hope of escape, his long strides taking him past the parallel desks of the defence counsel and crown prosecutor, their backs towards him, but the lawyers turning to look, their faces aghast at the sight of the defendant on the loose. The court registrar and court reporter were directly facing him but they shrank back behind their shared desk, paralysed, willing him to go straight past them, and he did, brushing past the bailiff standing there white-faced with shock, and the grey-wigged old judge in her red robes finally turning to look down at Ruben Shavers over the top of her glasses as he made a mighty leap, taking one step off the front of the bench to propel himself upwards and seizing the hem of her robe with his manacled hands.
‘Stop – armed police!’ Jackson said, stone-cold with calm, and his warning seemed to echo around the room as the armed officers at the exit door of Court Two of the Old Bailey called out the same warning a split second later.
Shavers still had a fistful of the judge’s red robe in his hand when the single shot rang out, brain-piercing in that confined space.
The judge, slipping out of her robes, squirmed away and was gone into the door in the wall behind her.
You can’t hear a shot fired that close to your head without cowering and it felt like the entire courtroom ducked our heads as one as Ruben Shavers slid to the floor, the scarlet robes of the judge still held in his dead hands.
There are Family Liaison Officers for the victims of crime.
Some FLOs are ineffectual, all of them are well-meaning, but none of them are there for the relatives of those who commit the crimes.
That was why I found Mrs Ruben Shavers sitting alone on the pavement outside the Central Criminal Court, overcome with shock, stupefied by it as the world rushed on around her, the police and emergency services hurrying towards Court Two while the lawyers in their wigs and robes ran for their lives in the opposite direction.
‘Mrs Shavers?’
I had my warrant card in my hand. I told her my name.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said.
Then I held out my hand.
And she took it, limp and weak and too stunned to refuse.
‘What’s going to happen to our children?’ she said.
I drove her home.
Her name was Lilly – like her daughter – and she was a former ring girl at York Hall, one of the beautiful young women who hold up the round number as they parade the squared circle.
They still have them in boxing rings, professional beauties with nailed-on smiles, wearing minimal outfits whatever the season, but you don’t see them in many other places these days. She had met Ruben Shavers when she was eighteen and had been with him ever since.
‘On and off,’ she told me as we crawled through the traffic. ‘On and off and sometimes somewhere in between.’
She did not weep for her husband. Not yet. Sometimes our tears have to wait a while.
The flat was empty. It was a former council property in Finsbury Park that had been sold off when politicians were encouraging people to own their own homes. And although the flat was modest, it felt like a home. You could smell the musky stink of some pet rodent, a hamster or guinea pig, brooding in its little cage. Lilly Shavers was one of those women who build a home for her children even if the man of the house comes and goes, even if their relationship is on and off and somewhere in between.
There was new tech everywhere – iPads, a couple of laptops, a giant HDTV. No toys, I noticed. Perhaps children don’t play with toys any more. The children, she said, Lilly and Louis, were staying with her mother. She sat in the living room, staring at the switched-off HDTV, while I made two cups of tea. I loaded three sugars into her cup without asking how she liked it.
I sat in silence as she sipped her tea. I waited until she had finished it. Her breath was changing, her eyes were brighter. There was panic there now, and grief, and emotions I could not place. Lilly Shavers was coming out of shock. Her sunbed tan was a shade darker.
‘Did you find anything?’ I said.
She looked at me as if surprised to find me in her home. As if seeing me truly for the first time.
‘When your husband was arrested,’ I said. ‘When we took Ruben. You knew he wasn’t going to be coming home for years and perhaps never coming home again. Most wives – all wives, I suspect – they would look through their husband’s personal belongings. They would try to make sense of this life they shared and maybe knew nothing about. Some men keep secrets from their wives. But all wives want to know the truth, don’t they?’
We had drunk our sweet tea. Too much sugar, Max.
‘So did you find anything?’ I repeated.
She laughed and shook her head.
‘You bastard,’ she said. ‘And I thought you were being nice. I thought you were being kind.’
‘Who was kind to Jessica Lyle?’ I said. ‘Who was nice to her?’
We stared at each other.
‘I found everything,’ she said.
She had it spread out on the marital bed, as if it was evidence for a prosecution that was never going to make it to court.
There was a lot of paperwork. Most of it seemed to be credit card bills that she had scored with bright green marker pen.
‘There are receipts for presents that he never gave me,’ she said. ‘Nice presents. Jewellery, mostly. Bags.’
She gave me a bitter look.
‘The things that women like,’ she said.
The paperwork spilled off the bed and on to the carpet.
On the bedside table there was a photograph of Ruben Shavers grinning in hospital scrubs, a new-born baby in his arms.
‘There are hotel bills for rooms that I never slept in,’ Lilly Shavers told me. ‘I had looked at his phone, of course, but he was too experienced to have anything incriminating on there. But I found this.’
Near the pillow of the bed there was an old-style BlackBerry. I had not seen one of those in years. It gave me a mild pang of nostalgia, like seeing a steam train or a Spitfire.
‘Plenty of photos on there,’ she said, nodding at the old-style BlackBerry. ‘Some of them adult in nature. Do you know what I mean, Detective?’
She held it out to me, this dedicated phone that she had never seen before, and I remembered the second phone of Harry Flowers, and I wondered if they had both come up with the idea independently, or if one unfaithful husband had recommended a second phone to the other, an illicit dating tip.
‘What is heartbreaking is that you learn to suspect everything, don’t you?’ she said. ‘I wonder if he had any feelings for me at all. I wonder if he had any love for our children. Or if all he cared about were his whores.’
She was crying.
‘What was Ruben scared of?’ I said.
Defiance and pride in her now. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘You ever see him fight?’
It was not true. There was something that terrified Ruben Shavers. It made him too afraid to talk. And it made him too afraid to go on living.
I gestured at the bed covered with all its paperwork of betrayal.
‘Is this all of it?’ I said.
‘Almost,’ she said.
She went to the bedside table that displayed the picture of Ruben as a proud father.
She opened the bedside drawer and took out a set of keys.
She held the keys out to me.
‘I’m a widow, aren’t I?’ she said. ‘Wow. How can I be a widow? How did that happen?’
I was looking at the keys.
‘What do they open?’ I said.
‘God only knows,’ she laughed.
I took them from her.
A Yale and a Chubb, the brass worn smooth with time.
A set of keys to the secret life of Ruben Shavers.