New Year’s Day in South London is slow. Coffee and more coffee and a shower turned blistering hot and then freezing cold. Joanna Denton bites her lip, shutting her eyes to the physical sensation, welcoming the pain and discomfort. This is what will make the hangover dissipate. Caffeine and agony.
Last night in the club she’d drunk tequila shot after tequila shot, trying to reach that place in her head where she could forget everything – as ‘Auld Lang Syne’ so aptly suggests. But the buzz had eluded her as she’d stood on the periphery of the club where her friends were jumping like jacks to House of Pain and she’d thought, Yeah, that sums it up.
So she’d left the club. Walked alone on the Embankment in shoes soaked with booze, breathed in the frosty London air and watched the lights of the city burn. As she’d left the river, she’d had the usual thoughts. The fear that her life was meagre in contrast to that of her friends. Where their lives gush with invitations – to parties and dinners; gallery openings; children’s birthdays; beach holidays – Joanna merely subsists. Day after day, rousing herself to do battle with better-paid lawyers in nicer offices with, unlike her, a supportive partner at home who listens sympathetically to tales of their day whilst pouring endless amounts of red wine.
Where was the joy for her? she’d asked herself for the millionth time, her feet sore and cold from the walk. For a brief moment, glancing up at a broken street light, she had felt like crying. Where was the sense that her life had meaning? That it fed something inside her, apart from the anger she had clad in armour for all these years?
She had wiped a hand across her cheeks crossly. What was the point of crying? She can’t forget her job. Can’t go and do something painless, something mindless, because always the loop returns to the fact that she can’t let it go. She can’t ever stop thinking about those people who leave so much pain in their wake, so much chaos. Those criminals who, in their selfishness – or their madness – reach inside another human being and rearrange the configuration of their spirit. Change them indelibly so that they are never the same soul as they were before it happened.
At last Joanna had arrived at her flat, wanting desperately to sleep but unable to block out thoughts of the stack of paperwork she could envisage waiting on her desk at the office or the memory of what drives her every day.
The image of two-year-old Kirstie Swann.
Her niece.
Brutally murdered in the gully of a long-disused canal. Beaten to death and then left to rot while her killer went home for dinner.
Joanna’s always thinking about her.
Kirstie’s killer.
And how she will never be allowed to leave prison while Joanna Denton has anything to do with it.
She dresses quickly, pulling on jeans and flat boots; an old university hoodie over a plain white T-shirt. Her only concession to vanity is to brush her long brown hair and tie it up in a bun, but then she is out of the door and striding for the Northern line back up towards Borough, where the Bang to Rights office is situated. As it is New Year’s Day, everything is shut up and quiet. The café where she normally buys her daily croissant is closed and the Tube is empty, seats stretching beside her filled with nothing more than the ghosts of the usual thousands of commuters.
Joanna reaches the office after she’s found an open Pret A Manger at Borough Tube and bought another coffee and an apple. She can’t stomach anything more. The tequila from last night still churns inside her, making her feel as though she could throw up at any moment.
She doesn’t expect Will to be there, but he is. The door is unlocked and his bike is blocking the tiny corridor of the small space they rent. Joanna and Will met at Manchester University over twenty years ago in their first contract law tutorial. In the Union bar they had become friends, drinking pints of beer and planning their future. They would both leave their childhood homes in the North and come to seek their fortunes in London. Will would work for a City law firm, learning how to merge and acquire, and – as Joanna would point out – survive on minimum sleep while making money for a bunch of men in suits who would barely know his name. She, on the other hand, would train at a high-street firm that specialised in immigration and criminal law, earning approximately a quarter of what Will would be paid.
Joanna would tease him that he would become a sell-out, wasting his life lining the pockets of people who didn’t deserve to benefit from his brain cells.
‘And what about you?’ he’d ask, fixing her with a stare. ‘How are you going to change the world, stuck out in Shepherd’s Bush helping a bunch of crims?’
Joanna wouldn’t answer this but sat silently instead, curled up on the ratty leather sofa, a cigarette dangling over the edge of one arm, ash lengthening until it dropped into the ashtray on the floor.
Then, just before they graduated, she had received the telephone call that had changed her plans forever. As intended, she had moved down to London to work.
But Joanna did not become a lawyer.
Throughout the entire trial of the killer of her niece, Joanna had sat holding her sister’s hand, making sure she ate enough; helping her to stand and leave the courtroom when it all got too much. And after that, she had begun working for Bang to Rights.
It was a tiny organisation that lobbied the government on behalf of victims. BTR liaised with Victim Support, it mediated between victims and the police, and it campaigned tirelessly for longer sentences proportionate to the crimes committed. Eventually, Joanna’s old boss had retired and she had taken on the running of the lobbying group herself. In that time, Will had married and, upon the birth of his daughter, resigned from his City law firm and come to work with Joanna. It meant that he took home far less money, but he insisted that he would at least be able to see more of his family and do so with a clear conscience.
Old habits die hard, though, and a workaholic nature is hard to tame.
‘But I’m not here for long,’ he says as he hears Joanna jogging up the stairs to the minuscule office they share. ‘Lucy’s at her parents’ house today with Jemima so I thought I’d put in an hour or two before heading there for lunch.’
‘I would have got you a coffee if I’d known,’ Joanna replies. ‘Thanks, Will. There’s so much to do,’ she continues, looking round at the piles of paper on every available surface. ‘We really need a secretary.’
‘Fat chance on our budget. How was last night?’
‘Oh, all right. Too much booze.’ She grimaces and puts her coffee to her lips. ‘There isn’t enough caffeine in the world today, frankly.’
‘Why didn’t you stay in bed then?’ Will asks, knowing what the answer will be. ‘One day isn’t going to hurt.’
Joanna sits down at her desk and reaches across to turn on her computer. ‘Yes, it will,’ she says. ‘Remember Mo Farah, William. Let us always remember Mo.’
Will grins, turning back to his own screen. Joanna had once read that the Olympian Mo Farah always trained on Christmas Day because, he said, other athletes would take it as a holiday, meaning he would be one day ahead of them in training.
‘Anyway, I’ve got that radio show today. Remember? The New Year’s debate on justice and sentencing?’
Joanna takes a gulp of coffee before clicking on to the BBC website and then exclaims, sucking in a breath. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she says in a voice like lead. She swings the computer screen around so that Will can see. It’s the third headline on the site, after the announcement of the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list and a bus crash in Wolverhampton. Joanna’s eyes scan Will’s face as he reads what’s before him.
‘Fuck,’ he says at last.
‘Yep,’ she answers, rubbing her palms over her face before staring up at the ceiling. ‘My thoughts exactly.’