10

‘You think she’ll be happy to talk with the two of us ambushing her like this?’

We were sitting in my car late the following afternoon, back in Walthamstow, kerbed while I checked the address on my paperwork.

‘It’s a gamble,’ I confessed, ‘but I don’t want to give her time to work herself up again.’

That was a half-truth. What I really wanted was to speak to Charli Meadows and without her brother and her solicitor.

I studied myself in the mirror. I hadn’t slept well, and I feared it showed. At worst, I’d expected the dog’s presence to amount to a low, steady breathing sound. Something peaceful. Instead, she’d walked in tight, unsettled circles as soon as the lamp was out, rattling off the walls of her cage and crying softly, every noise amplified by darkness. For the first hour, I wouldn’t get out of bed to open her crate. In my exhaustion, I worried that she might claim her revenge on mankind by taking those blunted teeth to my throat as soon as I was unconscious. But I let her out, eventually, and after a few more pointless laps of the room she flopped like a warm, rolled-up carpet onto my lower legs.

In the dark, I hadn’t been able to keep my mind from Lydia Roth. I’d faced gangland killers without breaking a sweat, but the thought of a woman – any woman after my marriage – made me anxious. It brought about images I wasn’t ready for, and I had decided not to ring Lydia back even to arrange this meeting. I resolved to see Charli Meadows without her.

After yesterday’s traipsing back and forth across the city, and today’s paperwork, I was feeling quite drained. I sensed a migraine on the horizon. If Meadows had just been straight with me from the beginning, I suspected, it would’ve saved me a great deal of time.

She lived on Low Hall Lane, an incredibly narrow, curved, almost-rural road with houses lining only the south side. All these houses faced a vast greenery of allotments that stretched off behind wire fencing on the opposite side of the road. I left the car under a canopy of the allotments’ overhanging trees and we walked the curvature of the lane on foot while I looked for the correct address. The houses were small, terraced, squashed up together like drunks in a crowd.

‘It’s this one?’ Zara said as I stepped through a front gate onto gravel that was more dandelion than stone. ‘She’s no Tony Montana.’

I got to the front door and lifted a knuckle to knock politely, but I didn’t manage to make a sound before a massive, snarling dog threw its entire weight into the glass from the other side. I jumped, catching my footing before falling backwards onto the gravel, and Zara burst into laughter.

‘Jesus Christ!’ I fumed. ‘If I haven’t had enough of damn dogs for one week!’

Even through the door’s frosted pane, it was obvious that the dog was a huge white beast of postman-eating proportions.

‘Who’re you?’ somebody called out from behind us.

We turned. Directly across the thin road, standing in a patch of grass that looked particularly wild among the tended allotments, was a boy of around eleven or twelve years old. In his concern, it wasn’t difficult to spot the family resemblance.

‘I’m looking for Charli Meadows,’ I said loudly over the dog’s baying through the closed door behind us. ‘Your mother?’

The boy’s face tightened. ‘School send you?’

‘School?’ We came back out through the front gate and stepped into the empty road. Dusk was coming softly, and the allotments smelled sweeter for it. ‘No, the school didn’t send us.’

His eyes darted between us, knees twitching under what appeared to be an almighty fight-or-flight struggle. ‘That bitch Miss Rotenberg put you on to me? I’ve been sick.’

‘I don’t know Miss Rotenberg. We’re not education welfare officers, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

He scowled. ‘What are you then? Pigs?’

‘Do I look like a pig?’ I asked. ‘Actually, no, don’t answer that. We’re helping your mother out with a problem at work.’

‘Lawyers?’

‘Barristers,’ Zara answered, ‘but close enough.’

He eyed us for a moment more, still resentful, then turned away to yell: ‘Mum!’

Some distance off, from a tiny potting shed: ‘What?’

‘Someone’s here for you!’

‘What?’

‘Here!’

We waited, separated by the fence. I looked at the nearby sign: Honeybone Allotments. To the boy, I jabbed a thumb over my shoulder and smiled. ‘Dogs, eh? I just got one myself. Yesterday, actually, and they really are –’

‘You going to get my mum off?’

No messing with this boy. I discarded the smile. ‘We’re going to do our best.’

From the potting shed behind him, Charli Meadows appeared, trailed by two little girls. She was wearing a pair of gardening gloves, hair tied up in a bandana, soil stains on the knees of her jogging pants. She looked worried. ‘Mr Rook? What’s going on? Is everything all right?’

‘Quite all right,’ I said, looking past the boy’s unbreakable glower.

‘Where’s Lydia?’

‘Quite busy preparing for the trial,’ I told her. I had no clue. ‘This is Zara Barnes, one of our brightest young stars at Miller & Stubbs. We were in the area and I thought I ought to swing by and see how you were getting on.’

‘You were in Walthamstow?’ she asked doubtfully.

‘At the court,’ I lied, lighting up a cigarette; Snaresbrook was only fifteen minutes away. ‘We pass through here on the way back to chambers.’

‘Oh, of course.’ She was wringing her gloves together as she led us to the nearby gate in the mesh – her on the grassy side, us in the road – and then she opened the gate and invited us through. There’d been a lock on the gate, but it was broken off. She noticed me noticing. ‘Kids were trying to grow weed out here earlier this year, I think. Can you believe it? They cut the lock off to get in.’

‘Not really the climate for it, I’d imagine.’

She shrugged.

‘So, how have you been?’ I asked.

‘I’m getting on all right. Keeping busy. Not much else I can do with myself, now I’m out of work.’

‘For now,’ I noted, stepping over a terracotta plant pot. ‘Keeping busy is the best way to handle this situation. You actually have an allotment here?’

‘I do!’ For a moment, she did something quite remarkable. She smiled, and beckoned us to follow between rectangles marked into the earth and a forest of bamboo stakes. ‘I know they’re for pensioners but, whatever, I like it. After spending every day moving between locks and bars, stuck behind concrete, you’ve got to get some space wherever you can find it in this bloody city …’ She paused, a shadow crossing her face, then shook it away. ‘Been renting it for two years now. We don’t have much of a back garden, so I thought it would give Roland and his sisters a nice place to come and get a little sunlight. You still help me out, don’t you, Ro? Whenever I can get you off the PlayStation.’

The boy didn’t answer; he was still standing close to the fence, watching us negotiate the crowded terrain towards his mother’s shed at the back of the land with something very like jealousy.

‘This patch here will be peppers,’ she said, showing us a strip of overturned dirt with an enthusiasm I would never have imagined possible back in chambers, ‘and this will be tomatoes, as long as I can figure out how to keep clear of the damn aphids this time. Over here by the shed I have these paving slabs, you see they’re actually different shades? Been wanting to get them down as a sort of border ever since I saw something similar on Pinterest, but I haven’t had time since …’ All at once, she sobered up, lost to the thought. Silence fell, and I was sorry to hear it.

‘It’s very nice,’ I said. ‘Peaceful.’

She gave a perfunctory nod. The brief gleam in her eyes had been snuffed out to leave something remarkably sad.

I cleared my throat. ‘Might we come inside the house for a brief chat? There are a couple of things I’d like to discuss before we get to court on Monday. Things we didn’t get around to yesterday.’

‘I don’t think that’s such a great idea,’ she said quietly. ‘Coming inside, I mean. The dog – he’s a bit of a handful.’

‘Yes, I saw.’

‘I just wanted a dog because I’ve been having a bit of trouble in the area.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘People disliking the fact that I work at the prison, I guess. To them it’s as bad as being police, and there are plenty of people with family on the wrong side of the law. Come sit down, though.’ She gestured to a stack of wooden planks that had been arranged as walls around her intended tomato patch. There was netting over the soil, but beneath that I could see soft, vulnerable green shoots peering through. ‘Roland, go inside and take your sisters with you.’

‘Uh-uh.’ He stood defiantly at the fence, some fifteen feet away, eyes moving between the three of us.

‘Roland!’

‘Why should I?’ he spat, rattling the fence behind him with a backwards kick and stretching as tall as the last of his stubborn childhood would allow. ‘I’m the man of the house!’

It was an odd statement, almost Dickensian, coming from this skinny boy who probably weighed eight stone wet and was still a year away from puberty. The tantrum might’ve been laugh-out-loud funny, if it hadn’t been such a poignant reflection of the state of the Meadows household. Charli didn’t even argue. She sighed and left him standing there. ‘What do you want to know?’

I felt awkward getting into it in front of her children, but she wasn’t giving me much of an option. ‘The Tuesday before your vehicle was searched, the night those thirteen men died in their cells. Were you at work?’

I watched closely for any change in her expression. Thinking towards this bombshell through the small hours, I’d expected a telltale widening of the eyes or a nervous twitch, if not a full-on wail of guilty horror, but there was no alteration whatsoever. Perhaps because her nerves were so permanently frayed. ‘I wasn’t on shift until the next morning. The ambulances were lined up outside when I got there.’

‘Must’ve been shocking,’ I said, ‘pulling into work and seeing that.’

‘Only a little. The ambulances are often called out several times a day.’

‘Because of the drugs,’ Zara added; it wasn’t soft, and it wasn’t a question.

A few seconds of dead air followed. I had this awful, sweeping feeling that I’d made a crucial mistake in bringing Zara here. That she might have planned this whole encounter just to get face-to-face with precisely the sort of smuggler responsible for her cousin’s death in the Scrubs all those years ago. Thankfully, neither one of them bit, and my concern was only fleeting.

‘Because of prison,’ Charli replied simply. ‘Convicts or not, though, deaths on the wings seem to hit officers and staff harder than they do the other inmates. I’ve always thought so, anyway. To some cons, we’re just the faceless screws trying to keep them inside, but the reality is that we’re there to keep them safe. Nobody wants to have a man end his life on their watch. Nobody. Losing so many in one night, that hurt the whole prison from the governor down to admin.’

‘Did you know any of the deceased?’ I asked.

‘Barely. Band 3 staff – officers – they would’ve known them well enough, but they’re each responsible for up to a hundred inmates. The prison holds an average of thirteen hundred at any time with over two thousand moved in and out each month. I’d usually process anywhere from, Jesus, fifty to a hundred newcomers a day.’

‘Were you blamed?’ Zara asked in a tone I didn’t like, one that was entirely opposite to the one she’d adopted with Andre. ‘After your car was searched, did your colleagues turn on you?’

‘Some. The ones who found the bodies.’ She turned her face to the potting shed, an adjustment of only a couple of inches that somehow took her miles away. ‘I don’t resent them for that. We’re supposed to be on the same team. Nobody wants to find a cheat on their team, do they? But they’re wrong. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened. I feel for their families, of course. Their parents …’ She turned back to us; more accurately, to Zara. ‘But nobody forced them to smoke that crap.’

I could actually see the strain on Zara’s face, her sharp, occasionally brilliant mind working overtime to veto whatever her mouth wanted to say.

‘Who searched your vehicle again?’ I intervened. ‘It wasn’t colleagues of yours?’

‘No, they were independents from the Prison Investigation Unit.’

‘And you don’t have any grudges with anybody at work, or outside of work for that matter?’

‘Not that I know of,’ she said. ‘And the neighbours wouldn’t go that far.’

‘What about the fathers of your children?’ I asked.

‘God no. They’re long out of the picture.’

I nodded, eyes trailing to the back of the land; there was a fence there, and behind it the flowers grew wild and purple. They looked almost exotic. ‘And there definitely wasn’t anybody else that might’ve had access to your car?’ The subject had been well traversed, but I was looking for a fresh response now that we were out of the blanket of her brother’s presence. ‘There was nobody who – I don’t know – might’ve slipped the contraband in there to encourage you to take it into the prison grounds?’

A hint of a frown knitted her eyebrows below the edge of her bandana. ‘Nobody has access to my car except for me.’

‘I appreciate that, but with all due respect, as I said yesterday, if you truly were the only person capable of getting into your vehicle, and the drugs really were found inside your vehicle, which by all accounts they were, then it doesn’t present the jury with a whole lot of reasonable doubt, does it?’

She didn’t answer. Whatever frown had been forming crumbled back to that familiar melancholic gaze.

‘However,’ I went on, ‘as I also mentioned before, if we submit that you were acting under the assumption that you were carrying plain tobacco onto the premises, then I think we have a serious shot at challenging the prosecution’s ability to prove your mens rea. The punishments for smuggling List C articles are considerably more lenient than those involving List A drugs.’

Still no answer. A mumble perhaps, almost inaudible.

I decided to get serious. ‘We’re running out of time to update our defence statement. If we delay it much longer, and then you decide to change your story, it may result in the jury drawing an adverse inference against you before we’ve even begun. The prosecution will jump on that. A trial is only fair if both sides, prosecution and defence, disclose their full plans of attack to one another in advance, to grant the opposing side a reasonable chance to prepare a counter-argument. If, on the other hand, you knew what was in your car all along, and somebody else did put you up to it, if you were pressured into smug—’

‘If my mum says she didn’t know,’ Roland interjected hatefully from the fence, ‘then she didn’t know.’

In our ludicrous quartet we were quiet then, as if this twelve-year-old boy’s really was the ultimate word.

Then, before we could continue, music started blaring from somewhere nearby. I wouldn’t have paid it any mind if not for Charli’s face, which visibly blanched at the sound.

The music circled the perimeter of Honeybone Allotments, drawing nearer; a high-performance engine growled through twin exhausts, and the combined racket reverberated from the perfect horseshoe of buildings across the road until it sounded like something out of Apocalypse Now, except that ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ had been replaced by Wagner’s lesser known foray into thumping jungle beats.

Whatever change I had been looking for in Charli Meadows finally occurred. Her brown eyes swelled. She yanked off her gardening gloves and bandana. That same fight-or-flight tension that had marred her son’s reception of us now stiffened her into a fragile, scarecrow paralysis. Zara and I followed her gaze back to the road and we all sat as erect as a trio of meerkats assessing the Kalahari.

The car, an immaculate white Audi RS8, came to a smooth stop, leaving a foot between the kerb and its custom gold alloys. The music followed its engine into deathly silence as the driver stepped out.

During this arrival, it was something altogether subtler that stole my attention. It was the downstairs window of the house next door to Charli’s on the right. At the sound of the car, the netting had twitched aside, and a tiny old lady had appeared, shaking her head. By the time the driver had opened his door, the netting had fallen back into place.

For all his former attitude, Charli’s son Roland now looked like a much smaller boy, eyes popping as if Father Christmas had just parked up his sleigh and brought his bottomless sack to Low Hall Lane. ‘Deacon!’ he cried, not bothering to accuse this much cooler customer of being a spy sent here from the school.

It wasn’t a bottomless sack that Deacon was carrying. It was a shopping bag in the distinguishable shade of Harrods green. I placed him as being six or seven years younger than Charli, late twenties, a white lad with stylish jeans and a tight Stone Island jumper that spoke of a body he’d earned in the gym. His inquisitive eyes glinted out at us like broken diamonds from beneath his baseball cap as he sauntered straight for the allotments’ gate.

Roland, looking as if he was about to wet himself with excitement, ran to meet him there.

‘Wagwan, little man?’ Deacon asked, and they clasped hands as he stepped through onto the grass.

‘You know how it is, D!’ Roland said, aiming for cool while his treacherous, boyish voice cracked and wavered. ‘Just chillin. What you got in the bag? What is it?’

‘What, this?’ Deacon shrugged one shoulder. ‘Ah, it’s nothing …’

‘Don’t play with me!’ Roland jumped between the allotments and booted the flowerpot I’d previously stepped over. ‘What is it? What is it?’

Deacon held on to the bag a while longer, watching the kid bounce around like a firework in a tin box – he flashed a wink across the gardens to Charli, somehow failing to notice that the mother was a sculpture of mortification – and then yielded and tossed the bag to Roland. ‘Now, if I hear about that damn dog getting anywhere near these …’

The kid screamed. Screamed. He tossed the bag onto the vegetation behind him and what was left in his hands was a black shoebox. I had to blink. It really said Gucci. ‘Sick! Sick! Siiiiick!’ He took the lid off and aimed the contents at us all, showing off a pair of white trainers with green-red-green striping on the sides and a distinctive bee embroidered in gold. ‘D, you’re the man! Wait until my boys see these! Just fucking wait!’

‘Language!’ Deacon said, aiming a playful slap at the boy’s head, but Roland was already sprinting across the road towards the house. He opened the front door, moving quick enough to catch the dog inside, and slammed the door behind him. I caught only a glimpse of the animal before Charli recaptured my attention.

‘Deacon!’ she managed through gritted teeth. If a hole had appeared in the overturned soil right then, I would’ve put money on her climbing into it. ‘I thought you weren’t coming tonight.’

‘I’m only popping on the way from the gym, babe.’ Deacon grinned with sly, childlike defiance as he strolled through the bamboo maze towards us. ‘What? I can’t treat the boy for helping his mum out? Kid’s going through enough shit lately.’

Nobody answered until my mouth did it for me. ‘Gucci for skiving off school? Wish you’d been around when I was a boy.’

Those eyes, once playful jewels in the shadow of his cap, dulled. He looked me up and down, measuring my black coat, white shirt, black tie, hat. ‘Who’re you? Messengers of the Watchtower? You look like you’ve come to bless the ground.’

‘Deacon,’ Charli coughed, ‘this is Elliot Rook, my barrister.’

‘Barrister?’ That caught his attention. ‘What happened? They cancel the trial?’

‘Not that I know of,’ I told him. ‘I had some things to discuss with my client.’

‘Your client?’ He passed us for Charli’s side, leaving a draught of syrupy cologne between us, smells of a post-workout shower. ‘I thought she was Lydia’s client. You some new sort of barristers that make house calls?’ He slipped an arm around her waist. She allowed it but didn’t appear to like it. In fact, she looked very much like most liars do when their deception is unexpectedly revealed to the court. She was smart enough to know what I must be thinking: if she had lied about having a boyfriend …

‘They were in the area,’ she answered for us, trying to stay onside.

‘Where?’ he asked. ‘Snaresbrook?’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘You know it?’

He smirked. ‘Shithole.’

‘You have much experience in Crown courts?’

The following silence spoke loudly, and what it said was ‘almost certainly’. Charli’s face pulled back from regular humiliation into a bewildered grin of disbelief. The sun was going down now; Deacon adjusted the brim of his cap a degree to the right and sniffed.

‘Still,’ he said, ‘I don’t get what was so important that you couldn’t arrange a proper meeting.’

‘Dead men,’ I told him flatly. ‘Thirteen of them.’

I was glad to see the wind momentarily knocked out of his sails. He looked between us. ‘They’re adding those dead druggies to her charge?’

I didn’t respond. I’d already had my fill of answering to the men in Charli’s life and I didn’t appreciate being lied to by my own clients. ‘We should be going. Anything further we can discuss on Monday morning.’ I was already on my feet when I motioned to Zara. ‘Let’s go.’

We were passing back through the gate into the road when Deacon shouted us, arm still wrapped around his woman’s waist. ‘Rook, is it?’

‘Yes?’

‘Maybe don’t come around here again. You want to talk, you can sort out a meeting and make sure her solicitor is involved, all right?’

I looked at Charli for confirmation. She looked away.

I tipped my hat. ‘Whatever you say, D. Whatever you say.’ And left.

Zara and I didn’t speak until we’d circled the curve in the lane and made it back to my car, which was parked well out of sight of Charli’s plot.

‘What was that all about?’ she asked, settling into the passenger seat. ‘I’m guessing by the look on her face that she didn’t mention her flashy fella before today?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘In fact, she outright denied having a partner.’

‘That’s interesting.’ She met my eye knowingly. ‘Very interesting.’

‘Not as interesting as the dog,’ I said. ‘That was a Dogo Argentino.’