‘I thought you were quitting,’ Zara said as I lowered my window and blew smoke out of the moving car. We were over the Westway, returning east along the elevated dual carriageway.
‘I did for a couple of days. They say stopping smoking is good for your health, so why deprive your body of the benefit by never smoking in the first place?’
‘Must be hard.’ She was scrolling through her phone. Instagram, I guessed from an absent glance. The usual. Next thing I knew she seemed to be staring straight through me. I followed her gaze to the right and saw the gutted ruins of Grenfell Tower standing like a charred monolith over the west of the city. Seventy-two people had lost their lives in the enormous block of flats the previous summer. ‘Do you think that would’ve been allowed to happen if …’
‘If what?’
‘If the residents had been on the other side of the poverty line, maybe. It’s the same for most of the inmates back there. People like Andre.’
‘You think social hierarchy would’ve made a difference in that fire?’
‘No. I don’t know. Maybe. I can see what you’re thinking, by the way.’
‘What am I thinking?’
At her lap, she locked the screen and pocketed her phone. ‘You think I’m fond of him or something. Andre. Like I’m taking a shine to him because of what happened to my family. That’s not the case.’
I didn’t answer immediately. I didn’t want to lie, so what I told her was the truth. ‘I trust your intelligence. I know your head is in the right place … but it’s common for barristers in the early stages of their careers to want to throw everything they have into their first big cases. Not because it is the correct thing to do, which it is, but because they truly wish to see their client freed. You believe him, don’t you?’
She hesitated, seemingly considering the ramifications of admitting this aloud. ‘Yes.’
I smoked, changed lanes and twice knocked ash out of my window. I wanted to tell her how dangerous that could be, but I had to remind myself of my own recent doings, which took most of the wind out of my desire to tell her off. ‘The more of yourself that you invest into a case, the more you’re opening yourself up for potential disappointment. I just want you to be cautious, that’s all.’
‘You think he’s lying, then?’
‘I think he’s full of excuses. Then again, he really might just be the unluckiest young man in London. It’s whether the jury believes him or not. Have you asked your solicitor to speak to the staff of this pub? You might be able to fish some witnesses out of there.’
‘Tried and failed. The bar staff don’t want anything to do with this. In fact, I think the woman who was working that night has actually quit just to distance herself from it all. The solicitor requested copies of their CCTV, which should have at least shown evidence of Andre’s separate arrival, but all the footage covered was the bar and the till. Nothing useful. We’ve tried getting images from the surrounding roads as well. All they show is fog.’
‘He might well be telling the truth about jogging, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t also trying to flush his own wares when the police stormed the building.’
‘True,’ she replied, ‘but there’s also a chance he’s being fitted up.’
‘I’m not sure why they would bother. What’s the use in framing one defendant when they have five more bang to rights?’
‘Well, considering we haven’t been working together for half a year yet and we’ve already proven two coppers to be lying headcases, you really reckon it’s so far-fetched that a few more might’ve planted drugs on some black lad from Newham?’
‘Far-fetched?’ I shook my head. ‘No, but not entirely likely either. We did have quite the case last year, but it won’t do you any good to maintain this idea that the police are villains. That was something I saw a lot of growing up, and it didn’t make for a healthy culture. This idea of the working class versus the police. ACAB. You ever heard that?’
‘All coppers are bastards,’ she said. ‘It was scrawled all over the parks when I was a kid.’
‘Yes, you used to see it tattooed across knuckles, mostly in the seventies and eighties. We all hated the police until we needed the police, then it was a case of dial 999 and all is momentarily forgiven. The truth is that there are far more decent coppers than bad. The vast majority are just ordinary people trying to do a little good between paydays.’
She grunted non-committally. The vacuum from my open window was whipping her hair into a frenzy behind her head. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘so where would you start with this?’
I took a measured, thoughtful drag. ‘I’d pay more attention to the raid itself. Were the police prowling the area in anticipation? Did they have a warrant, or did they simply follow Andre Israel on a hunch and end up striking gold? And what did he mean when he said it wasn’t a win for the police?’
‘I’ve no idea. He’s not mentioned anything like that before.’
I looked to my hand; the filter was now cold between my fingers. I tossed it. A mental wave was sweeping all of the disparate details up inside my head and then dropping them back into chronological order like sediment beneath the tide. It was a while before I spoke, and when I did, I was contemplating dates. ‘Even if Andre wasn’t carrying that night … the raid must have placed five verified dealers into Wormwood Scrubs only days before thirteen inmates died, supposedly as a result of tainted drugs.’
I closed my window, quietening the inside of the car. From the corner of my eye, I saw Zara’s hair fall flat with the change in pressure. ‘That’s why you came this afternoon! Your new case has something to do with those deaths from the news, doesn’t it? You sat there implying that any information he gave you could improve his chance of getting bail, but it was just to help with your case?’
‘I don’t believe that my case does have anything to do with those deaths,’ I replied truthfully. ‘Not directly, anyway. But yes, I am defending an employee accused of smuggling drugs into that prison.’
‘Bastard!’ Her fierceness caught me by surprise. ‘Oh, not you. This guard. He’s supposed to be responsible for keeping those inmates safe.’
‘The accused is a woman.’
She groaned. ‘Well, you could’ve told me earlier. You should have. I don’t like being used.’
‘I wasn’t using you. I was worried that my case might prove a little too close to home, all things considered.’
‘Still, it wouldn’t have hurt you to keep me in the loop.’
A moment’s silence followed, and I was relieved when my phone started vibrating in the cup holder between us. ‘Could you check who that is for me?’ I asked.
She did. ‘Landline. London number.’
‘Answer it, won’t you? See what they want.’
She straightened up, cleared her throat rather aggressively, and answered.
‘Hello, this is Elliot Rook’s phone, he’s driving at the moment. Can I take a message?’ She listened in silence while I negotiated the lanes on the carriageway. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, but I think you have the wrong number … That’s right, this is Mr Rook’s phone, but … No. No. No, he definitely doesn’t have a dog.’
My hands clenched around the steering wheel. I glanced across and caught her frowning. Heat spread through my face.
‘Oh,’ she said, her voice flattening out. ‘Oh, I see … Last night, was it? OK, well, I think it might be best if he rings you back, he doesn’t bother to share these things with me, apparently. Is this the number to call …? Victoria Blue Cross. OK, and when you say she’ll be euthanised, what exactly does that –’
‘Wait!’ I blurted. ‘Tell them we can be there in ten minutes.’
We made it in nine.
Zara stared down at the dog for quite some time before speaking.
‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘I just … I don’t get it.’
‘It’s a blood sport,’ I told her quietly. ‘Werner had been breeding some to fight to the death, and others to sell on as guard dogs.’
‘No, I understand that,’ she muttered. ‘But why did you have to get involved?’
‘It comes back to something a drug dealer called Isaac Reid told me. He’s been convicted of assassinating rivals in Margate, and he wants me to conduct his appeal. His defence was that the place he allegedly burst into was protected by a Dogo Argentino, an extremely rare breed of fighting dog originally from South America. He suggested – and fairly, I thought – that if he’d turned up at a rival’s front door with a knife, as it appears the killer or killers did, he wouldn’t have been welcomed into the property, and he certainly wouldn’t have made it out again without at least a few bite wounds. Last week, Jacob Werner was accused of running fights with similar breeds, so I thought it was worth a look.’
I stuffed my hands into my coat pockets like a wayward schoolboy and watched the dog sleep soundly on its blanket in the cage.
‘Isaac Reid?’ Zara said. ‘When did you meet him?’
‘I haven’t yet. The information came from paper instructions. We’ll be meeting him in Belmarsh for a conference later this week.’
‘We?’
‘Well, if you want – I need a junior, and you’ve got to admit that we make a great team.’
‘Hmm.’ My attempts at flattery did nothing to lighten her mood. ‘So,’ she said, ‘because of paper instructions from a prospective client that you’ve never met, you decided to break into private premises. Premises that you suspected were being guarded by rare, vicious fighting dogs.’
‘Well, yes. It sounds a lot dafter when you put it like that.’
‘Daft?’ She clicked her tongue. ‘You could’ve been disbarred.’
‘I know.’
‘You could’ve been arrested.’
‘Yes.’
‘You could’ve been killed. Did you ring the police?’
‘No. There’d be too many questions. The animals would’ve been put down. I couldn’t do it.’
She leaned her face closer to the bars, studying the pattern of scars, watching the dog’s back quiver slightly as it rose and fell, rose and fell.
‘Did you hurt him?’ she asked. I didn’t answer. When she eventually turned to face me, her expression was as cold and hard as a stone on a riverbed. ‘I hope you did.’
Footsteps approached from behind. We’d been standing alone in a room lined with cages along one wall, not entirely unlike that place in which I’d found the dog last night, except that this one smelled of antiseptic and the patients were all heavily sedated. The cages were stacked on two levels with the smaller animals on top. Most of the animals wore bandages and cones around their heads.
‘Dogfighting,’ the vet said as we both turned to face her. She wore an intense shade of red dye in her neatly tied hair, but otherwise looked very formal in her scrubs and stethoscope, flicking through the file she’d left us to go and retrieve. ‘They call the fights urban rolls when they’re at amateur level like this. Gangs host them in parks, warehouses, fields. This one here is the bait dog, most likely the runt of a separate litter bred for sport. Tied up like a punchbag for the other dogs to cut their teeth on. Somebody’s been at her mouth with a rasp file, blunting her teeth to stop her fighting back. You say you found her running stray?’
‘Yes. I was the one who dropped her off with the emergency vet last night.’
‘She’s had a lucky escape then. Trainers usually prefer to get every last bit of value out of their bait dogs, right up until they’re in pieces. She’s about two years old, we think, which makes her ancient for the world of dogfighting.’
‘What will happen to her now?’ Zara asked.
‘She’s suffered a lot of puncture wounds in her life, as you can tell, and from the scar across her neck I suspect that her jugular has been lacerated at some point. She’s completely deaf in her damaged ear, and the missing lip can never grow back. Severely dehydrated, undernourished, exhausted … That’s just the physical damage. As for the psychological … a dog like this will always be difficult to rehome. She’s wary of people, terrified of other dogs, and almost certainly going to pose a risk to any other animal, possibly even children. You did the right thing getting her here, and we’ll re-evaluate her progress overnight, but I’m sorry to say that the most likely result will, as I said on the phone, be euthanasia.’
‘I see,’ I replied limply. I hadn’t been sure that my interfering with Werner could’ve done much good, but I’d at least felt justified since saving this animal’s life. Now, knowing it would likely be for nothing, the feelings that had bolstered my walk to work seemed vacuous.
‘I think I know a place,’ Zara said. ‘A place she could go.’
I turned to Zara and shook my head. ‘Not with you. It’s too much to put on yourself, and I don’t think that a shared house would be the right place for her.’
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘I was thinking of somewhere quieter, where she isn’t likely to be disturbed by friends or excitement. Somewhere boring.’
‘Boring?’ I replied. ‘Where do you think is – oh …’
I sighed. Frankly, I should’ve seen it coming.