by Gary Bell
‘No,’ I said. ‘The client has instructed us to take this all the way, so that’s what we’ll have to do. Anyway, defending before a jury isn’t playing poker. It isn’t about holding the highest hand. It’s about casting doubt. The burden of proof should always belong to the accuser, but the prosecution naturally starts with the upper hand. It’s their charge, built on enough police work to take it to the courtroom, so the defender usually comes out fighting on the back foot. That’s normal, and it doesn’t necessarily mean an instant loss. It’s our job to challenge the evidence and find a hole in the prosecution’s case. Not to prove that he definitely didn’t do it, but to prove that he may not have done it. We need to give the jury reasonable doubt.’
‘OK,’ she said, ‘so what do we know so far?’
I flicked back through my most recent pages of notes, tracing over my own cluttered, meandering scrawl with one finger while running the other hand through waves of my hair. ‘The victim was found halfway along a disused stretch of railway, the old pit line, which runs between the country park in Cotgrave, six miles outside Nottingham city centre, and the River Trent to the north. She was discovered by a dog walker at seven thirty on the morning of Saturday the fifteenth of April. Post-mortem interval determined her time of death to have been between two and four o’clock in the morning. Blood analysis came back clean of drugs and alcohol. The contents of her stomach were partially digested, her legs were broken posthumously, and there was no, um, vaginal bruising to indicate forceful penetration …’ I said the last part very quickly, hesitated, and then drained my drink.
‘It’s always dog walkers who find them, isn’t it?’ Zara muttered quietly. ‘Puts me off ever having a dog. Must be the nose, I guess …’
‘Hmm. Apart from some CCTV footage and a couple of correlating statements from around Cotgrave, there’s not much to explain who the victim was, where she’d come from, or how she spent her last day. The police didn’t manage to find any evidence of her presence before then, or even determine her name. There’s footage of her purchasing coffee with cash from the service station in the village, but the only thing close to an interaction was when she stopped to use the loo of the Welfare Scheme Social Club at almost midnight on Friday. She spent approximately fifteen minutes in there, before walking north in the direction of the country park and, beyond that, her death.’
‘Concurrently,’ Zara interposed, ‘Barber spends his Friday drinking across Nottingham city centre, kicking off the Easter bank holiday weekend as soon as the pubs start serving. His ex-wife Carol waits all morning for him to pick up their son Michael for the weekend, but he never shows. There’s a list of CCTV recordings and witness statements from various bar staff to corroborate his movements between the pubs from ten o’clock in the morning until mid-afternoon.’
‘We’ll submit those statements as agreed facts,’ I explained. ‘There’s no need to call every witness to the stand over indisputable evidence like that, so their statements will be summarised and presented to the jury as agreed material. What we’re looking for is any witness whose statement can be disputed.’
‘All right,’ she said, ‘so, he’s what? An unemployed estranged father to different households, rattling around pubs all day on his own. Why? Is he gearing himself up for something, I wonder? What’s he planning?’
‘I don’t think there’s anything to be inferred from a man drinking in his own company,’ I countered.
Back to her notes. ‘Barber gets into his first scrape of trouble late afternoon, after leaving the Roebuck Inn and heading on to Maid Marian Way, where he has a brief altercation with a man using the cash machine there. “Twenty-five-year-old Ali Abdul Nazir”,’ she read, adding sarcastically, ‘I wonder what that could’ve been about. Nazir says Barber was belligerent and verbally provocative, attacking him without cause. The twist comes when Nazir, who turns out to be a semi-pro boxer, floors Barber in retaliation and bolts, leaving him dazed and semiconscious in the road.’
I nodded. ‘There might be camera footage from the cash machine. I’d say that gives us grounds to contest Nazir’s statement, get to the bottom of what really happened between them.’
‘Really?’ She caught my eye and quickly bit her tongue, opting for another long pull on her glass instead. ‘Fair enough,’ she conceded, swallowing hard, wincing as the alcohol hit. ‘So, one could argue that Barber is angry, probably humiliated, when he gets on the bus back to Cotgrave. By now he’s been putting drinks away for more than seven hours, so it’d be fair to assume he’s steaming drunk. He doesn’t show up again until he walks into the same Welfare Scheme Social Club at around eight o’clock in the evening. He keeps to himself mostly, propping up the bar and telling anybody who’ll listen about getting jumped that afternoon. He’s still there when our victim shows up to use the toilet, hours later, and he leaves only five minutes after her, staggering off in the direction of the country park and, beyond that, the railway.’
I ruffled through my untidy scattering of papers. ‘Who saw him heading that way again?’
‘“A Mrs Donna Turner”,’ she read. ‘Same woman who identified the victim leaving. Barber was next to her having a fag out the front when The Girl came out. It was Donna Turner he spoke to, when he said –’ She straightened up, gritting her teeth. ‘“What the fuck’s that Paki doing in Cotgrave? She’ll be lucky to make it through the night.” Then he wanders in the same direction, away from his own home, which his phone’s GPS corroborates.’
‘Right, right,’ I sighed, ‘so that’s almost midnight, and it’s the last anybody sees of him until just before six o’clock in the morning, when his neighbour in the upstairs flat is woken up by smoke coming in through her bedroom window, and uploads this to Facebook …’
I turned to the printout of her public post included in the evidence, a screenshot captured before the post was deleted once the gravity of the situation had started to become clear. I reread the caption:
MY KIDS WAKING UP TO SEE THIS DISGRACE OUT OF THEIR WINDOW! CHARMING! HAPPY EASTER TO US!
On the same page was a separate enlarged copy of the attached photograph, taken on her phone from the second-floor window. There was Billy, quite clear in the pale light of the April dawn, slumped back against a splintered gate, eyes closed and completely naked apart from one remaining white sock, the rest of his clothes burning fiercely in the open maw of a chimenea. Above a bloated drinker’s stomach tattoos covered his broad chest, and his flaccid penis looked particularly sad in its nest of thick, wiry hair.
Zara finished up the sorry tale.
‘The same neighbour then rings the police only ten minutes after posting that, as soon as she hears Barber throwing his weight around downstairs, arguing with his wife. By the time the officers get there, a further twenty minutes later, Mrs Barber has a black eye, the kid is hysterical, and our dear client is passed out in the shower with the water running cold, one sock still on his right foot.’
‘And the blood is gone and the clothes are ash, and the body is found within the hour,’ I added gloomily.
We were quiet for a couple of minutes after that, both mentally digesting the story.
‘It’s scary, isn’t it?’ Zara murmured.
‘The case?’
‘To be found like that, with nobody to claim you. It’s so sad. It’s awful.’
My mind flashed briefly back to my mother’s funeral, the community all packed in around me for the service, my hand-me-down suit a little short on my limbs after a sudden pre-pubescent growth spurt, her sisters all standing in a line like varying reprints of the original magnificent work, and I agreed with Zara. It was very sad.
‘He did it though,’ she added quietly, ‘didn’t he?’
Probably, I thought.
‘It’s not our place to decide. There’s only one person who knows with any certainty what really happened on that night, and the dismaying fact is there’s a good chance we’ll never know the truth.’
‘But statistically t
his kind of crime is more likely to be committed by a man than a woman,’ she said, ‘and subjectively, I think that this particular crime is more likely to have been committed by this man than almost any other. Granted, I haven’t met any killers before now, not to my knowledge, but if I were on this jury, it’d take a hell of a lot to convince me to acquit him.’
‘It’ll all come down to the evidence, and without those clothes, without DNA, without the missing tooth or fingernails, a lot of this evidence is still only circumstantial at best.’
She nodded, and I saw her jot down the words circumstantial at best in her elegant handwriting at the bottom of her little spiral-bound jotter. Grim surroundings aside, it afforded me a pleasant warmth, having somebody there to take my words on board, and I briefly wondered what sort of teacher I might’ve made if I’d never seen that Jaguar at the roadside, and my life had followed a different direction instead. An argumentative one, I supposed.
Zara popped the end of the pen into her mouth and resumed her study on the iPad, so that when she next spoke, it was around a mouthful of plastic.
‘It says here that the prosecution plans to make an application for bad character and have the defendant’s “form” submitted as evidence before the jury. What exactly does it mean by form again?’
‘His record,’ I groaned, flicking through to the same page in my papers. ‘They’ll use his previous convictions to demonstrate a propensity to commit certain offences, and then use that pattern to adduce a motive for murder.’
‘Oh,’ she murmured. ‘Shit. That’s not good.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
Since I’d left town, Billy had been busy. Zara read the highlights out loud.
‘“Twice convicted of displaying written material likely to incite hatred or cause fear. Convicted of posting material online that was threatening, abusive or insulting. Convicted on three counts of distributing a terrorist publication to a proscribed far-right organisation, contrary to the Terrorism Act. Eight convictions of actual bodily harm; served three years in Nottingham for a Section 20 unlawful wounding. Burglary, battery, assaulting a constable in the execution of his duty …” Looks like he’s been inside almost as often as he’s been out, and I’d bet those are just from the victims who actually dared report him.’
The sinking sensation of guilt came back harder for dragging her into this, but it was chased away by the sound of Billy’s voice vaulting straight at me like a fist from her iPad.
‘Out!’ it yelled. ‘We’ve got to get out!’
Zara uncurled and dragged her chair over, turning the screen so we could both watch Billy standing there, dressed in a scruffy cap and sweatshirt under an overcast sky in Nottingham city centre, cigarette burning in one hand, skull jerking from side to side.
‘What’s this?’ I asked. ‘Where’d you find it?’
‘The Nottingham Post, via Google. He’s all over the paper’s site. I guess this is one of those vox-pop pieces from the run-up to the referendum last June.’
‘Great.’
He looked positively wired, gritting his teeth and pointing a stubby finger into the camera lens and, by proxy, into the faces of millions.
‘It’s time we took our country back, by any means necessary! We want sovereignty! We want our jobs! The public has been betrayed for too long, our Christian land has been flooded, and it’s time we stood up once and for all and said it out loud! You’re not wanted here!’
‘He’s a charmer,’ Zara sighed.
I dropped my head heavily in my hands, covering the heat in my cheeks, afraid that she might see right through the facade to a time when my own beliefs had been nurtured by similar xenophobic mindsets, inspired by not only the people around me, but also the seventies television standards of Bernard Manning, Love Thy Neighbour, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, and the like.
Thankfully, she wasn’t looking my way when I glanced back up.
Instead, she’d closed the video and started to scroll down through the field of search results on the Post’s website, each article’s headline as damning as the last, almost all accompanied by the same unflattering mugshot of a middle-aged Billy in a striped polo shirt, collar turned up to his ears with a blackened left eye opposite the Celtic cross.
‘Local Thug Charged with Battery’, ‘Ecstasy Ring Busted’, ‘Nottingham Neo Nazi Back Behind Bars’, ‘Local Thug Charged with Battery Again’. The list went on and on.
‘Huh, there’s a piece here from March about the railway itself …’ she muttered, adjusting her glasses and leaning closer towards the screen. ‘“Both Cotgrave and Radcliffe-on-Trent Parish Councils have backed a proposition for a brand-new multi-user green trail to be set up for the pedestrians, cyclists and equestrians of Nottinghamshire, with the planned resurfacing of the couple of miles of disused railway line that once connected the former colliery in Cotgrave, now the site of the country park, to the main railway network north of the town …”’ She paused. ‘What’s a colliery?’
‘A coal mine!’ I replied in disbelief. ‘I thought you were from Nottingham?’
‘Millennial problems,’ she said simply. ‘This was published before the killing. I guess they must’ve added his name to the search criteria after his arrest. Seems a bit premature, considering he’s only on remand …’
She scrolled through the rest of the article, murmuring the quotes from local councillors under her breath, until a picture at the bottom of the screen caught my attention like gold through silt.
‘Wait!’ I reached out for the screen. ‘That picture there!’
‘What?’ She followed my eye to the image. ‘Oh, that’s just a link to another feature in the Community section.’
‘The caption underneath …’ I squinted over the desk. ‘What does it say?’
She zoomed closer. ‘“Inspector Sean McCarthy celebrates Harvest Festival with pupils from Cotgrave Church of England Primary School.” What about it?’
‘Huh …’ I ran a hand slowly over my cheek, leaning back into the chair, wheels turning in my skull. Could it really be him? It seemed impossible.
He’d grown into a handsome man, far from the gangly Irish lad I’d known. Now he had a sheet of grey hair and sharp cheekbones, and in uniform he was almost unrecognisable from the teenaged Forest hooligan I’d grown up with.
Almost.
I heard my words fall out with a sigh. ‘I’m going to have to go to Nottingham. I need to make some inquiries.’
‘OK,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘When are we going?’
10
At the time of its sinking, Cotgrave Colliery was set to be one of the National Coal Board’s super pits, a crowning glory of the British mining industry; its purpose-built estate would bring the families of fifteen hundred miners along for the voyage into prosperity, with seams that would, they said, provide for more than fifty years.
My family was late to the party, relocating to Cotgrave in the early seventies after our eviction notice had been served and our first home – a tiny red-brick pre-regulation two-up two-down terrace built for the urban poor in the Industrial Revolution in the centre of Nottingham – was demolished under slum-clearing legislation.
In just a few years the rural population of Cotgrave, on the edge of the picturesque Vale of Belvoir, had grown from a couple of hundred villagers to a colony of more than five thousand workers, with bricklayers, joiners, electricians and clothiers as well as the clerical, medical and canteen staff required to keep the coal coming up to the surface. For my young parents, who had up until that point been raising their firstborn son in a bare brick house without electrical sockets, sharing one outdoor lavatory with seven neighbouring families, the new estate was akin to luxury; for me, a city boy from the slum, the endless meadows and rolling woods that circled the village were boundless grounds for adventure.
But I was only ever a miner’s son, and never a miner at heart.
The Barber boys, on the other hand, were born of coal.
Despit
e their unwieldy proportions, the men of the family – all the uncles, cousins and grandparents alike – were well suited to life down at the deep hard seam, where it was pitch-black and jagged, an unforgiving labyrinth of armour-plated machinery and stone. As rippers, they took on the toughest roles in the pit, tunnelling through the rock face with deafening drills, buried and blinded by the downpour of black dust, hands shuddering under the strain of machinery until they grew like heavy, twisted boughs, tearing coal out of the seam.
The dust covered everything. Not only was it poisonous in the lungs, eyes and ears, it was also highly explosive. After leaving school, my own short-lived career in the pit consisted of lugging back-breaking sacks of stone dust – broken cement – down through the roadways, a mile underground, to spread over the surfaces and neutralise the chance of it igniting. I lasted a few weeks, but the men of the colliery kept on, as only they knew how to do.
Even when the National Union of Mineworkers declared the strikes of ’84, the men of Cotgrave marched into the shafts, not for allegiance to the government, but for the humble sake of keeping on, and keeping their families fed. To this day, Nottingham Forest supporters are often berated by opposition fans, particularly from Yorkshire and South Wales, as scabs.
The recompense for their allegiance came less than a decade later, the very same year I sat the Bar finals more than 130 miles to the south, when the mineshafts were capped and filled with concrete, the towers and associated buildings were brought to the ground, and the economy was razed along with them.
Hard times, and, like the coal dust I’d quenched with stone, the bitterness that remained buried under that picturesque countryside was only ever a haphazard spark away from igniting.