The following morning, I was still feeling strangely exhilarated. I decided on a whim to forgo the usual options of Tube or car and instead chose to walk the two miles into work.
The pavement was hardly any quieter than the Underground or roads might’ve been – this was Monday in central London, after all – but there was an upbeat ambience noticeable from the very moment I stepped out of my front door onto Gloucester Place, as tangible as the first valiant daffodil to push up from dirt into sunlight. Last week had ended below freezing point, the tabloids relishing headlines like KILLER FREEZE, THE BEAST FROM THE EAST and ICE AGE BRITAIN, but this morning the mercury was already up to double figures. The date was 5 March, and spring was finally returning to our great city.
It took me ten minutes to walk the length of my road, then a left turn at the bottom took me onto Oxford Street. All I had to do from there was amble eastward through that straight commercial pantheon for another thirty minutes. I got myself a warm pain au chocolat for the journey, my diet forsaken at the first hurdle for yet another week, and then wended my way between the hundreds of workers dressed in suits or various retail uniforms. The gigantic window displays were already flaunting red-and-white bunting, despite the World Cup being three months away, and I was momentarily overcome with nostalgia for Spain 1982: the simplicity of being seventeen years old and caped in a St George’s cross, all gathered around the colour screen in the Miners’ Welfare for every match. Simple times.
It wasn’t until I glanced down to brush the flakes of pastry from my coat that I saw the dog hairs caught up like wires in the black wool there, and all at once it made me feel giddy and arrogant, like a teenager carrying the dirty, thrilling secret of losing his virginity the night before.
I wanted to feel bad for demeaning the legal system I’d upheld for so many years, but the guilt wouldn’t surface. Somewhere over the course of this long, dark winter a part of me had changed, and I couldn’t tell if it was ever going to change back. Compulsions, such as the one that had sent me out to that launderette last night, had been coming upon me like coughing fits in a silent courtroom. The more I’d tried to suppress them, the more suffocating they’d become. I hadn’t found exactly what I needed to appeal against Isaac Reid’s conviction, but it was obvious that the Dogo Argentinos were being bred for some seriously unpleasant people.
I’d driven the Staffy to an emergency vet, who had agreed to take her on to the Blue Cross in Victoria once it opened this morning. I gave the vet cash for his troubles and hoped that the dog would be all right. There was nothing more I could do. I swept the hairs away and they disappeared like dandelion seeds into the sluggish rush-hour swell of black cabs and crowded double-deckers.
Soon, a short, dumpy figure dressed in a shabby deerstalker and red sleeveless jacket shuffled into my path. ‘Big Issue?’ she called indifferently, and then looked over the stack of laminated magazines and into the shadow beneath the brim of my hat. ‘Oh, hey, Rook.’
‘Morning, Margaret. Hope you kept out of the snow last week.’
‘Who, me?’ She beamed proudly, showing brown teeth, and lifted a copy to show me the headline: UNDEFEATED: OUR VENDORS WHO WRESTLED THE BEAST AND WON! There were photos of half a dozen vendors standing diligently in powdered white. One was dressed in a recognisable deerstalker.
‘Impressive,’ I said, fumbling through my pocket for change.
‘I’ll be on the cover of Vogue next,’ she winked. I paid her double for the copy and she managed a stiff curtsy, keenly eyeing the shirt collar and tie peeking through my coat. ‘Say, did you ever get yourself a wife?’
‘Once.’
‘You’re not looking for another?’
I shook my head and smiled. ‘Once bitten.’ I rolled the magazine under my arm, tipped my hat and carried on.
It took two cigarettes to walk the whole repetitive sprawl of Oxford Street – another Next store, another River Island, the third or fourth McDonald’s – and then I was back in law-land, the place that still made the most sense to me, passing the open green of Lincoln’s Inn Fields where I used to spend my nights.
I cut straight through the grounds of Lincoln’s Inn itself, winding between the ancient stone buildings that had housed the chambers of various legal firms for generations, then crossed Chancery Lane and continued into the cobbled Took’s Court, coming to rest at the bronze sign for Miller & Stubbs Criminal Barristers. I paused there for a minute, savouring silence. Then I opened the heavy red door and stepped up into the town house.
Immediately they swarmed me.
‘Morning, Mr Rook!’
‘Good morning, sir!
‘Can I get you something to drink? Tea? Coffee? Water?’
‘Need a hand with that briefcase, Mr Rook?’
Pupils. They were everywhere. I moved like a great white through an undertow, aiming for the staircase at the other side of the lobby. I caught the eye of Bronwyn, our receptionist, standing at her desk. She gave me the familiar pitiful smile, the sort that most in the building had adopted since reading about my divorce in any one of the intrusive articles printed over the course of winter: Rook made the chilling discovery after dropping his wedding ring, the final memento of ex-wife Jennifer, into the snow … God save our country’s right to journalistic freedom. Thankfully, the reporters hadn’t bothered stretching too far into my past. I wasn’t quite a household name, but the national coverage had brought work flooding into chambers from all over the country. To the horde of new pupils enlisted to deal with the surge I was practically a celebrity.
Fortunately, my room was up on the third floor, away from all the chaos.
For two decades I’d been crammed into shared rooms, elbow-to-elbow with my fellow junior barristers, but now I enjoyed the benefits of being one of only four silks in our set. I had myself a spacious, private nest in which to retreat.
Or, at least, I should have.
I was still grousing to myself when I walked into my room and shut the door behind me – ‘Can’t get a moment’s peace … let me get into the building, why don’t you? Bloody pupils …’ From the rear corner of the room, which should have been empty, came a familiar voice.
‘Oh? And what’s your problem with pupils?’
I stopped, and made a show of rattling the door handle behind me. ‘This must be broken,’ I said, ‘because I’m almost certain I locked it before leaving for the weekend.’
‘No, you did. I got Ernie to let me in. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Mind?’ I tossed my hat, briefcase and Big Issue onto my desk, and took a seat, or rather a slouch. Zara Barnes was sitting with her back to me, bent over her iPad and a spread of documents on the old writing bureau across the room where she so often squatted. ‘Why would I mind? There’s nothing in here except for a few dusty books, a tatty old wig and boxfuls of confidential papers that might be priceless to any number of criminals across the city. Who am I to question the authority of Ernie, our revered caretaker, when he decides which locks shall be undone?’
‘He guessed you’d say something like that.’
‘Did he now?’
She turned to face me, scrunching her eyes up behind her heavy glasses and adopting a dreadful impersonation of a cockney accent. ‘Whale, Miss Bornes, ol’ Rook ain’t gonna begrudge you no space to work, consid’rin’ ’ow you saved his life a few months ago. Withart your quick thinkin’, ee’d be good as brown bread!’
I staved off a smile and started arranging last week’s paperwork from my briefcase into the plastic in-tray on my desk. ‘You’re sure this was Ernie you spoke to? It wasn’t Bert the chimney sweep?’
‘Undoubtedly.’
I shook my head. ‘Whatever happened to that aspiring young go-getter we used to have around here who would always have the coffees waiting?’
‘She emptied her overdraft and maxed out all her credit cards. As soon as she can afford one, the round’s on her. I’ve got a meeting with the bank later this afternoon, so you never know …’
She hadn’t said it with any kind of resentment, but it made me feel acutely selfish all the same. Zara’s assistance had proven invaluable in the fraud case that had occupied most of my last two months, but as a pupil she hadn’t been paid for her time, and she was left scraping together a living out of the scant fees brought from her cases in the magistrates’. I’d twice suggested that she take some of my own payment and her reaction had taught me well enough to drop the subject. I probably would’ve acted the same way at twenty-four. In fact, at fifty-two, the fraud case had only just put my own finances back into the black.
In short, I should’ve bought the coffees.
‘You’ve been working a lot of cases lately,’ I said. ‘Haven’t they fetched you any decent fees yet?’
‘Sure, another few hundred shoplifters and I might be able to afford this month’s rent.’ She leaned back into a straight slice of pale light that crossed the room from the window and fell serious. ‘Not that I mean to sound ungrateful, you know I love what I do here.’
‘It’s fine. I know how frustrating it is living from hand to mouth.’
‘Especially when everything comes with a London price tag. I ordered two pints last night and gave the barman a tenner. I thought I’d misheard him when he asked for fourteen quid. Honestly, there has got to be an easier way to make a living.’
‘Easier?’ I nodded. ‘Certainly, but everything comes at a cost. Don’t forget that this is only temporary. You won’t be a pupil forever.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I won’t,’ and went back to her tablet in silence.
Since I’d first invited her into chambers last September, Zara had grown from a nervous stranger into a near permanent fixture in my room, as much a part of the decor as the towering, overcrowded bookshelves or the faded Tabriz rug. She’d even taken it upon herself to fill the compartments of the bureau with her own personal touches: a blue-and-white ceramic pot from her mother’s side of the family in Multan, Pakistan; novelty erasers shaped like pieces of sushi and whole wedges of rainbow-coloured Post-it notes for her to stick all over the place; the emergency charger for her iPad and phone; and a mug declaring her to be the No. 1 Barrister in London, which matched the No. 2 version she’d concurrently gifted me for Christmas.
I knew what she was doing. Like any casual partner leaving a toothbrush in the bathroom, she was staking out her ground. I didn’t mind, though I couldn’t help but worry about the weeks to come. Zara had been accepted into chambers on a six-month pupillage, the final stretch of unpaid learning necessary to become a qualified barrister, and those six months would end in three weeks’ time.
By all rights she should have been offered a permanent tenancy, not least because she had saved my own life and quite possibly the lives of others with her bravery not so long ago, but that wasn’t something that could be quantified on paper. There seemed to remain a deep-rooted, unspoken attitude among a great many of my fellow barristers – not so much a direct prejudice but most definitely an outdated typecast – for what was considered a suitable candidate in chambers, and I still feared that a gay woman of mixed race with a council-estate background and thick Nottinghamshire accent might prove a step too far for such limited sensibilities. She suspected it too. I could tell by the dimming of her mood each time another public-schooled pupil was drafted in to manage the increasing workload.
There would be only one permanent position available in chambers, and in twenty-one days its allocation would come down to a vote.
We didn’t talk about it much, just as we didn’t talk about what had happened up in Nottinghamshire all that often. Occasionally, Zara would joke about the events of that winter, as she had done this morning, but more often than not the safeguard of humour wouldn’t come, and I’d catch her plummeting into deep reveries beyond which the slightest disturbance would put her on edge.
We both had our own ways of dealing with the horror of it all, I supposed.
‘So,’ she said, talking down into her iPad, ‘what’s happening?’
‘With what?’
‘Good weekend?’
I hesitated, focusing on the brief in my hands: Regina v. Jacob Werner. I quietly filed it as finished and moved on. ‘Nothing to report.’
‘Oh.’ It was the kind of response that comes with an audible full stop. I looked back up. She flicked a twist of lint from her trousers onto the floor. ‘Thought you might’ve had something going on, since you didn’t reply to my text last night …’
‘Your text?’ I rummaged for my phone and opened the message that had come through while I’d been searching Werner’s launderette. ‘Must’ve fallen asleep before looking at it …’ For a moment I felt like telling her the story of Jacob Werner and his tortured animals. What stopped me was not the fear of her disapproval, but rather the inkling that she would have wanted to come along. ‘You were asking for help with your case?’ I said apologetically, reading the message. ‘Did you try asking Stein? You are his pupil, I’d say it’s the least he could do after dumping more work on you.’
‘He didn’t dump this on me,’ she said tetchily. ‘It’s a massive case for me. Besides, have you been down to see Stein? The second floor is a madhouse. They’ve got six juniors in every room and that’s without these new pupils. I’m not getting help from there.’
‘I avoid the lower floors like the plague,’ I remarked. ‘Percy hasn’t been up with my papers?’
‘Not since I’ve been here. You know Mondays.’
I checked the time: twenty to ten. My impromptu walk had cost me an extra half an hour, but I couldn’t start work on my new case until our senior clerk had printed off my papers. The legal world was rapidly turning digital, and cases were often distributed via email, but I still preferred papers I could hold, mark and tab. I liked to think of myself as a traditionalist; Zara called me stubborn.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m yours until my new brief arrives, and then you’re on your own.’
The change in her mood was instant and electric. ‘You’re the best, Mr Rook.’
‘I’ve told you a hundred times to stop calling me mister. The correct way to address another barrister is by surname.’
She bundled her paperwork up into her arms along with the iPad and dragged her chair towards me, stomping Doc Martens and grinning.
‘What’s the charge?’
‘Drugs,’ she said proudly, wasting no time in filling what little space I’d cleared on my desk. ‘Possession with intent to supply.’
‘Class?’
‘A.’
‘Really? That is a big case for a –’ I faltered.
‘A pupil?’
‘Yes,’ I admitted, looking down at the papers. ‘What’s the catch?’
‘I guess you might call getting nicked red-handed a catch.’ With both hands she parted the falling strands among her tangled black hair, which had grown long over the last couple of months. ‘The magistrates’ declined jurisdiction and sent it to Crown court. I’ve explained to the client that if he pleads guilty he’ll get the standard third off, and if we plead on a limited basis it could be much more than that, but he’s insisting on a trial. He says he’s not guilty.’
‘Lose at trial for intent to supply Class As and his sentence might be approaching double figures,’ I said. ‘He was really caught red-handed?’
‘By the police, but there’s more to it than that.’
‘There always is.’
‘I’ve got a meeting with the client after lunch. I put your name down when I booked in case you wanted to, you know, tag along.’
‘Tag along?’ I frowned. ‘You know I have my own workload, don’t you? My new case goes to trial in a week and I know next to nothing about it.’
‘Yes,’ she said guiltily, ‘but it’s easier for me to turn up at the prison without you than it is for me to add you at the last minute if you did want to come. The client’s asked me to submit a second application for bail, but that requires a change in circumstances.’
‘And you’re not sure if his circumstances have changed?’
‘Pretty much. That’s where I could use a little bit of that silk magic.’
I thumbed through the top pages of her case papers. ‘When do you go to trial?’
‘Next Monday.’
‘Your client can’t tough it out on the inside for one more week?’
‘I think he’s been assaulted in prison. Beaten up. He’s a really interesting guy, actually, and you have such a good intuition for these sorts of things. I’ve been to see him a few times down at Wormwood Scrubs, and –’
‘The Scrubs?’ I glanced up, and then hesitated. Something quiet and almost glacial shifted between us. ‘He’s on remand at the Scrubs?’
She didn’t answer. Just a nod, pseudo-casual.
‘How many times have you been to see him?’
‘Well, not that many …’
She went quiet. Uncomfortable silences were rare between us, but this one stretched a while. Before I opened my mouth to carry on, there was a sharp knock at the door. Our senior clerk, Percy, entered with a buoyant stride.
‘Rook!’ He looked almost ready to clack his heels together. Financially, it had been a very good month for chambers, and as Percy was on a percentage of the turnover, it had been a very good month for him too. He was the image of debonair, with straight teeth and classically handsome features, but he drank and consequently tended to surf through his mornings on suave perkiness instead of allowing any hangover to bring him down. When he approached my desk, he practically yelled. ‘A fine morning to you, my learned friend!’
This was followed by a noticeably stiff yet amicable nod to Zara, garnished with a bemused half-smile. Percy had made no secret of his initial distaste for her, but now he tolerated her as if she was some bizarre pet roaming the rooms of a shared house; he was clearly grateful for the cash our combined efforts had brought into chambers, but no doubt comforted by the belief that her presence was finally drawing to an end.
He produced a clutch of papers from behind his back like a skinny amateur magician. ‘Your instructions in the case of the Crown versus Charli Meadows. Smuggling drugs into prison. Private payer,’ he added cheerily, and laid the papers down directly over Zara’s. ‘You’re scheduled for a conference with the client at ten thirty this morning.’
‘Cutting it fine,’ I said. ‘Where?’
‘Right here.’ He gestured to the space occupied by Zara, and without a word she started gathering up her work.
‘Anything I should know?’ I asked, peering over the cover sheet of instructions, which were bound together with unbroken pink ribbon like an early Easter present.
‘Only that there is plenty more where that came from, so work your magic and aim for a swift conclusion.’
I didn’t have to see Zara’s unimpressed expression; I felt it like a draught over the desk. Percy must’ve sensed whatever silent charge passed between us because he hooked his thumbs under his fine leather belt, hung his head like a sulky adolescent and pushed out his lower lip.
‘Christ almighty!’ he said, forcing an exaggerated sigh. ‘I’ve never seen such disappointment at the prospect of paid work. Lighten up, the pair of you!’ He leaned lower, coming between us in a blond cloud of rich cologne and last night’s vino, and shared with us a sly, devilish smirk. ‘Haven’t you read the papers? Our dear London is once again in the midst of a crime spree! So smile! It’s reaping time for the lawyers.’