Thursday started off strange.
I was approaching the outer gates of the court’s grounds when my phone began vibrating against my knuckles in my coat pocket. I expected it would be Zara telling me she was running late, but it was Percy.
‘Morning, Rook. I hear that you’ve offered to help Barnes out this morning. Have you left for Snaresbrook already?’
‘Left? I’ve just got off the Tube – I’m walking up to the courthouse as we speak.’
‘You shouldn’t have bothered.’
‘Why? What is it?’
‘Her trial has been stood out for the day.’
‘Stood out?’
‘Apparently so,’ he said. ‘One of the jury is unable to attend.’
I came to a stop on the pavement. ‘Sick?’
‘Must be. Hospital, I think. The listings officer just called.’
‘Does Zara know?’
‘Yes, I just spoke to her. How else would I know where you were going? I don’t have a tracker planted in that tramp’s hat of yours, you know.’
‘Goodbye, Percy.’
‘Wait!’
I sighed. ‘Yes?’
‘If you’re looking for something else to do with your day, I was thinking that you could come into chambers instead. Perhaps have a sit-down with the rest of the pupils and give them a few first-hand lessons on how a silk goes about organising and preparing for a major –’
‘You’re breaking up, Percy, I can’t quite hear –’ I hung up without finishing and dropped the phone into my coat pocket. Close call.
Pedestrians were stepping around me, flocking towards the court’s gates ahead, but I remained there for a while, a static body with racing thoughts.
Something cold had settled in my gut. Something like poison. It was something I hadn’t felt since that snowy night in Radcliffe. It accompanied me back into the station, and it was still there when I boarded the westbound train for home.
Yesterday had been the first sign of a break in Zara’s case, and now a member of the jury had fallen ill? Hospitalised. What if our cases really were connected, only somebody didn’t want that getting out? What if they’d got to Charli? Her children?
‘The next station is Leyton. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform.’
I told myself that I wasn’t going to repeat yesterday’s trip to Low Hall Lane. This time I was going to remain in my seat, that’s all I had to do. Even as the train came to its stop and the doors glided open, I was telling myself not to move.
‘This is Leyton.’
No. I would have the whole day to myself. I would take the dog out for an hour, maybe two, and just unwind in Regent’s Park like any ordinary person. I would read a novel. I would forget about work for a while. I might even enjoy myself for once.
These lies were still echoing in my head when I barged out of the sliding doors and landed with both feet on the platform.
Last night it had taken ten minutes to get to Charli’s in the taxi. I estimated that I could check in on her and be back on the Tube within half an hour. A minor detour. Nothing but a courtesy call. Easy enough. So, why not ring?
It was just past nine o’clock, and Leyton Station was about as busy as it had been yesterday afternoon, its remaining morning commuters preferring the semi-calm that borders both sides of every rush hour. I approached the barriers with my contactless bank card ready in my right hand, still denouncing my own poisonous thoughts as paranoid nonsense. I was already swiping the reader when a small freckled boy with an oversized rucksack shoved his way into my barrier’s lane from the other side. The gates opened and then snapped shut like mechanical jaws behind him and he walked straight into me, earphones blasting, apparently oblivious to me standing directly in front of him.
‘Pardon me!’ I said sarcastically, but he didn’t bother to meet my eye. He just glowered and carried on walking, ten years old and ready to fight the world. ‘Little bastard!’ I called back, refusing to let my voice be lost under his music. ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’
He didn’t hear me, or more likely ignored me altogether.
I was still complaining to myself about the cheek of it all, and having to swipe twice, as I exited through the barrier.
I made it four steps before coming to a frozen halt. There’d been something in that scowl, in the blaze of his green eyes, that was impossibly familiar. I glanced back over my shoulder and caught sight of him once more before he got onto the staircase. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes.
It wasn’t just because I recognised his trainers. It was the rucksack. More to the point, it was the thing hanging from its zip, a very unique sort of lucky charm for a ten-year-old boy to be flaunting: a chrome jaguar.
‘You’ve got to be fucking joking me.’
I tripped back through the barrier, that coldness in my gut now boiling, screaming for me to run up and catch him like a mouse by the tail. I somehow managed to summon restraint and instead followed him through to the platforms. Westbound. He stepped straight onto the waiting train and I shadowed his movements, entering the next carriage along and watching him through the connecting windows, now continuing in the same direction I had been going before. I was aware that my poorly practised, irresponsible stalking had already got me into more trouble than I could afford. I just didn’t really care.
He got off a stop later at Stratford and, of course, I did the same. I maintained as much distance as I dared, though between his music and the course he was on, the boy seemed isolated and ignorant to much of anything going on around him. I wondered if, after a dose of full beams to the eyes, he’d be able to recognise my face anyway. I hadn’t been wearing my hat at the time, and, though I was now grateful for the perpetual shadow it cast over my features, I knew it wouldn’t look good for a large man to be seen following a small boy. This was an explanation I wouldn’t ever want to be asked for.
Together, and yet not really together at all, we walked through the connecting shopping centre and into Stratford International, where the boy approached one of the large touchscreen ticket machines and started punching his selections in without discretion. He chose the 9.32 Southeastern train.
He was going to Margate.
He paid in cash and pocketed the receipt. Not just pocketed. He folded it carefully and placed it into his wallet, an unusually conscientious move for a boy of his age. My eyes moved to the weight of the rucksack on his back. The mystery prize.
Margate: the land of Isaac Reid’s Tinderellas and two butchered drug dealers.
It was twenty past nine when the boy disappeared through the barriers for his platform.
It was twenty-five past when I purchased a ticket and followed.
Despite the run of fine weather, there weren’t many Londoners bound for a Thursday at the seaside and the platform was almost empty. I waited on the staircase for the boy to board and then hurried for a separate carriage just as the alarms at the doors began to sound, signalling that the train was about to leave.
It was an hour and twenty minutes to the end of the line. I already knew who’d be waiting at the other end. I’d only been to Margate once before, on an early date with Jenny. I could still remember the Shell Grotto and Dreamland, the amusement park, but what I oddly recalled more clearly as the train got going was that T. S. Eliot recovered there after his mental breakdown.
‘On Margate Sands I can connect nothing with nothing,’ I muttered to myself. ‘You and me both, Eliot.’
After sixteen minutes, the train passed through Gravesend, where my phone must have picked up signal, because it started vibrating with message alerts in my pocket. In fact, in those sixteen minutes I’d missed two calls from Percy, one from Lydia, and four from Zara. The last began to ring again, and I moved into the empty area that connected my carriage with the boy’s before answering. Outside, London had disappeared, and open greenery was pouring past the windows.
‘Is everything all right?’ I asked.
‘Where are you? Are you coming into chambers?’ She sounded unusual. Offish.
‘I’m on a train to Margate.’
‘Margate?’
‘I think I have a lead on Deacon. If I’m correct, there’s a whole bagful of Spice heading straight towards him on this very train, and you’ll never believe who’s carrying it!’
She didn’t try to guess. I heard her swallow. ‘You haven’t heard?’
‘Heard what?’
‘They … Deacon … saying it’s …’ Her voice was fading in and out. The floor rumbled underfoot.
‘Hello? I’m between stations, I’m losing signal again.’
‘You need … come back to London … get to chambers!’
‘Chambers?’ Here it was: all at once, the cold returned. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Deacon! It’s Deacon! The police have got him!’
And with that, the line died. ‘Zara? Hello, Zara? Bollocks!’
Deacon had been arrested, and in circumstances that required me to return to chambers as soon as possible. It sounded as if the case was already over, and I was stuck on a train bound for the very edge of the country. I was missing all the action. I pocketed the phone, crept to the doorway of the next carriage and peered inside. I could just see the boy’s blond hair sticking up above his seat. He was facing away from me. Through speakers overhead, the driver announced that we would shortly be arriving at Strood.
‘Please collect all personal belongings before departing.’
All personal belongings. My belongings.
I pressed the button and winced as the door hissed open, but the boy didn’t turn. There was nobody else in here except for an elderly man who was dozing at the far end. The train was slowing down. I got onto all fours and peered under the seats, hoping to hell that nobody would be watching a live feed of the carriage’s CCTV. The rucksack was there underneath the boy’s chair.
Reduced to crawling like an animal, I slipped into the footwell of the seats behind him and carefully reached under, my hands coming within inches of his stylish trainers, which were tapping rhythmically to whatever drill music was pounding through his headphones. Slowly, I pulled the bag towards me by the jaguar. I held my breath as I opened the zip, still undecided on how I would deal with the boy and the inevitable mountain of rolling tobacco in the bag.
I looked inside and saw … nothing.
Nothing out of the ordinary, anyway. A scrunched-up jumper. A phone charger. A couple of snapped biros, some textbooks for Key Stage 2 SATS exams and a stack of papers with revision notes on them. Less cautious now, frantic with disbelief and rage, I opened the front and side pockets, rifling through the empty folds. Defeated, I undid the knot holding my jaguar emblem and pushed the bag back to its original position.
The train came to a standstill and, as my phone caught the town’s signal, it began to vibrate again. I got up, clenching my fists only inches behind the head of the boy who had ruined my car, and stormed off the train just as the doors began to close. They locked behind me and the mechanics under the carriage hissed back into life. My phone was still jittering as I walked along the platform, but before I answered it I got to the window where the boy was sitting and pounded my fist against the safety glass. He looked around, startled, as the train began to pull away.
I was holding up two hands. In one, my jaguar roared. In the other, I returned the two-fingered salute he’d once flashed in my rear-view mirror. The look on his face was worth it. He scrambled down under his seat, yanking the rucksack out, but before he had chance to spit his dummy out proper the train had whisked him away and I was left on the empty platform, howling with laughter.
Yes. Absolutely worth it.
My phone stopped ringing and started up again.
I took it out of my pocket, swinging the jaguar from my other hand, and answered more brightly than before. ‘Zara! So, they got the bastard, did they?’
‘Deacon? Yes.’
‘Where is he now? Where are they holding him?’
She was quiet for some time. ‘At Waltham Forest mortuary, I think.’
I froze, the car’s emblem hanging limply from one dead arm. ‘What?’
‘They found him … Shit, they found him dead under the allotment, Mr Rook. It’s Meadows. Charli Meadows has been arrested for his murder.’