by Gary Bell
Was it the wrong place at the wrong time, or something more?
The smell of the fuel hit hard, cutting right through me, and I was flung back to the night before, the fire, and how utterly stupid I had been.
One rash, desperate decision that could’ve cost lives. If the flames had spread, it would’ve been manslaughter, at least. My great legacy as Queen’s Counsel would’ve come to its abrupt end on a fellow silk’s Crown Court agenda, with God only knew how many bodies choked on smoke around my forgotten shoes …
The pump handle kicked back against my grip, snapping me out of my self-loathing, and I paid up and got back on the road.
More miles. I cycled between radio stations for news bulletins, dreading what might’ve happened in that house after I left, but nothing came up. I settled on Radio 2, where Jeremy Vine was discussing the ongoing trial of a young homeless man who had been taken in by a generous family, only to return and fatally stab them a year later.
I was just wondering who had got the case, when Zara interrupted my train of thought.
‘Do you think people are bad?’
She’d spoken so quietly that for a moment I thought it was another caller on the radio.
‘Do I believe, what, that people are Old Testament evil?’ I asked, referring to the topic on the air. ‘No, I don’t think it’s as black and white as that. Not to start with, anyway.’
‘I don’t mean criminals, or whether criminals are born or made, I just mean people, in general. You’ve been around longer than I have, thought maybe you’d have some perspective on it all. Some wisdom or whatever.’
‘Some wisdom?’ Thoughts of Billy, the flash of a flame in a houseful of vulnerable women. A fleeting anxiety asked if she was reading my mind, if she knew what I had done.
‘My family,’ she grumbled. ‘My ex. Everybody back home, actually. They can all do one, far as I’m concerned.’
I shifted into the left lane and loosened the pressure on the accelerator to show I was listening and glanced across. ‘Bad night?’
She shrugged, lowering her head, indicating yes. ‘Let’s just say it didn’t take me long to remember why I wanted to get away from there in the first place. They’re supposed to be my mates, but I swear they’re all just waiting for me to fuck up and come crawling back home. Just because their world begins and ends in Notts.’ She sighed, exhaling more alcohol into the air. ‘Then I wake up to my mum going ballistic because of this trial, as if I need that on a hangover.’
‘The trial? What about it?’
‘Oh, just everything. She’s been reading up on the case. Can’t seem to get her head around me defending a racist. Started throwing up a lot of crap from our past, the things she went through to get here, you know? Says it could’ve been me out there on the railway, and if I do this, if I get him off, I might as well be killing her myself. Can you believe that?’
I could hear her voice breaking at the edges.
‘She says I should be ashamed, sticking up for a man like that. I told her that the right to a fair trial is what makes this country great, in case she’d forgotten, and oh, she didn’t like that. Not one bit.’
I didn’t know what to say; I wasn’t sure if she was about to cry.
‘I’m sorry,’ she went on, ‘it’s just, yeah. Bad night, that’s all. I guess you wouldn’t understand … It’s not easy where I come from, you know? I feel like I have to fight twice as hard as everybody else just to get anywhere, but all I get is crap for even trying.’
I nodded stiffly.
The tyres rumbled, the radio played on to itself, and all I could see littered on the grey road ahead was fire, those naked breasts, a tattooed lad drinking milk from the bottle, a young girl’s body, broken on the tracks, a million dead fish floating limply under toxic algae, and Jenny’s smile, lost to the years, all swelling against the walls in my chest, pounding, growing until, before I could stop it from happening, it happened.
‘I’m recently divorced. I didn’t go to Eton. In fact, I left school without a single qualification. I was born in St Ann’s, I grew up in Cotgrave, and I was convicted of conspiracy to defraud in 1983, a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday.’
Catharsis by guilt.
An overwhelming deluge of truth, the whole truth, and nothing but.
Still the tyres rumbled, and the radio played on to itself, and slowly, very slowly, Zara turned to face me.
‘You … Wait, what?’ She adjusted her glasses, clearly only just noticing the scuff marks across my head, the thin darkness growing around my eye. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘It’s not a joke.’ I kept my eyes on the road, which suddenly seemed a lot clearer; when I switched lanes to overtake a lorry, the car manoeuvred as if it were a great deal lighter. ‘I’d appreciate it if you kept that between us, it’s not something I’m prone to shouting about, you understand?’
I could feel her blinking up at me, waiting for a punchline that wasn’t on the horizon. ‘Which … which part?’
‘All of it.’
‘So, you didn’t go to Eton, but everybody seems to think you did?’
‘Assumptions, mostly. I suspect there are plenty of Old Etonians who have never been near the school.’
‘You were born in St Ann’s, you grew up in that village, and you failed to mention that yesterday, or at any point over the past week?’ Her voice was getting stronger now; wilder, almost.
‘It’s my personal business, and I keep it that way.’
‘Hold on!’ she blurted. ‘You’re a convicted criminal?’
‘Conspiracy to defraud, 1983. Suspended sentence.’
‘But you’re silk! I didn’t even think that was possible!’ She fell quiet then and stayed that way for a couple of minutes. ‘Why are you telling me this?’
I wasn’t sure. You’d be surprised what punishments people will seek, I thought, quoting my own words.
‘Because you shouldn’t be entertaining the idea that your background will affect your future. Only you, and your actions from this moment, can do that. You have to fight hard to get anywhere? Then fight hard! Do whatever you have to do. There’s nothing holding you back except for yourself.’
It sounded good before I said it – I thought so anyway – but didn’t have quite the impact I was aiming for.
‘With all due respect, Mr Rook, you’ve hardly been open about your background. In fact, it looks like you’ve mostly made it this far by being dishonest.’ She had a point, and it tossed another weighty stone back into my gut. ‘Conspiracy to defraud? What the hell did you do?’
It was something I hadn’t spoken of for many years, but, as any cross-examiner worth his wig ought to know, once there has been a glimpse of a guilty man’s truth, the rest usually follows. A copper in the Met once told me that was why so many thrillers end with the bad guy’s self-incriminating monologue; by nature, we are storytellers all.
‘I had a lot of shit jobs in the years between losing Mam and becoming a barrister,’ I told her, and in my accent, as in my dialogue, I could hear myself slipping into the past. ‘One of them was for a company testing fruit machines in the early eighties, making sure every machine was paying out the required eighty per cent. Course, it would’ve taken forever to do that with coins, so the fronts of the machines were opened up, and I just had to sit there all day, clicking up credits on the meter by pushing a metal wire that lay across the coin chute.
‘It was slow work, so I went home and drilled a hole into a ten-pence piece, tied a fishing line to it, dangled it into the slot until it hit the wire, and it clocked up a credit. I lifted it back out, dropped it in again, and sure enough, it worked. So, I told the boss to shove it, and spent the next year travelling the Midlands, emptying machines in every pub I came across.’
In the complete silence that followed I glanced to the left, anxious, and saw that her jaw had gone slack.
‘You robbed fruit machines?’
‘Regrettably, I did, until an undercover officer nicke
d me in Southwell. Wasn’t easy trying to run with a couple of hundred quid’s worth of ten-pence coins in my pockets, I can tell you.’
And then she did something I hadn’t been expecting; she laughed, and laughed hard, slamming her palms on the dashboard.
‘I’m sorry!’ she panted, wiping her eyes under her glasses. ‘I am, but it’s hardly Ronnie Biggs, is it?’
A sting of humiliation, but then I, too, found myself grinning like a fool in spite of myself. ‘I didn’t say I was proud of it, did I? Besides, I was only eighteen, I didn’t have any O levels, what did you expect?’
‘I don’t bloody know!’ she crowed, ‘I thought you were about to let me in on some Ocean’s Eleven sort of heist or something, not fruit machines!’
‘I made a fair few grand from it, I’ll have you know! Problem was, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I let a few blokes in on the secret, who passed it on to a few more, and by the time I was nicked, there was a whole network I’d never met robbing thousands across the country. Hence, conspiracy to defraud. I had my sentence suspended on account of my age, and the rest were banged up at HMP Nottingham.’
Her laugh faded, but she was still shaking her head in utter disbelief.
‘That’s mad. Like, actually mad. Was that the worst job you’ve had then, testing fruit machines all day? It doesn’t sound so bad.’
‘The worst?’ I cried. ‘God no! Just before that I spent an especially hot summer scrubbing the festering bins out behind restaurants. That has to make the top three.’
‘Bins?’ She waved it off with both hands. ‘You should try working a few pubs on the student circuit during freshers’ week, then you’d see some real filth.’
‘I was a fireman once,’ I recalled, mentally thumbing through the back pages of a book I’d left long closed.
‘You weren’t!’
‘I bloody well was,’ I said. ‘Times were different then. A three-month residential training course was all it took, although I didn’t actually see a blaze before, ironically, I was fired.’
‘Fish factory in Hull,’ she countered. ‘Mopping up the guts for fourteen hours a day. I reckon that’s got you beat.’
‘No chance. Try a coal mine in 1981. Dust in your eyes and your lungs, nearly two miles underground. Read ’em and weep, Rookie.’
‘All right,’ she sighed. ‘You’ve got me there.’
She turned to face the window once more, but I caught her smiling back to herself in the wing mirror, and then, in the rear-view, I caught myself smiling, too.
I might have looked like I hadn’t slept for scrapping but felt like I’d lost fifty pounds of baggage.
In fact, it seemed like the first time I recognised myself in as long as I could remember.
21
I left Zara at the cramped, overcrowded house she shared in Brixton, where kids were sitting outside smoking, dressed in the paisley linen garb of backpackers, despite it being a Thursday afternoon. It reminded me of the homeless crowd at the Bullring in the eighties.
I told her to take tomorrow off, to rest, and then come back fresh on Monday. Still painfully hung-over, she seemed grateful for the offer.
I planned to make the trip into chambers as brief as possible, drawn by the thought of my own bed waiting nearby, so I raced the stairs up to the fourth floor, pretending not to see Percy hailing me from the clerks’ room below, and blundered into Rupert’s office.
It proved a total waste of energy.
The latch had barely caught behind me when a brusque knock rattled the door, bouncing it back open, and Charles Stein pushed his head in through the gap. From his desperate panting, I could only assume that he’d been at my heel up every flight.
‘Something wrong with your phone, Rook?’ he wheezed, eyes on my tattered golf shoes.
‘At least fifty things I can think of,’ I said, collapsing into my usual wingback, and pulled the ridiculously dated flip phone out of my pocket for effect.
Straight faces all round. ‘Well, I need a word after you’re done here with Mr Stubbs, if it isn’t too much trouble.’
Rupert was standing by the windows, dressed in a bow tie and polka-dot braces, which he pulled at with both thumbs while watching me down his strong nose. ‘Might I ask what it’s about?’
‘Certainly!’ Stein said, clearly hoping he might, and pushed his way into the office, closing the door behind him. ‘Perhaps you’ll be able to offer some outside opinion on whether or not I’m being unreasonable here.’
‘By all means,’ Rupert said drily, welcoming him into the room with a sweep of his arm.
In the emerald lamplight, Stein looked almost as rough as I felt, his characteristically slick chestnut hair frayed, tie hanging lower than usual over his enormous gut. ‘Did you know already, Rook? Tell me you didn’t know before you roped me into this.’
I shrugged, batting back and forth between the two of them. ‘Know what?’
‘Am I right to assume,’ Rupert interjected, beginning to pace in his brogues, ‘that this is regarding the fraud case you are working on together?’
‘Together?’ Stein raised his eyebrows. ‘The generosity, our newest silk, inviting me onto this train wreck! Twenty-eight solicitors accused of systematic fraud, of robbing the legal aid fund blind, and yet they can’t even prove between themselves whether half of their clients exist, let alone account for the hundreds of thousands of hours they’ve billed them for. The summaries alone come to 150 pages of evidence!’
‘Summaries I produced out of seventeen tonnes of paperwork,’ I reminded him. ‘You’re welcome to start over, if it doesn’t meet your high standard, of course.’
‘Don’t be facetious,’ Rupert rebuked, and Stein pursed his lips.
‘Did you know about the mask?’
I glanced into the corner; Rupert’s full-bottomed wig stared back at me, always judging.
‘Mask?’ Rupert asked. ‘What mask?’
Stein was carrying a briefcase of black leather and brass fittings, which he now swung up onto Rupert’s spotless desk, opening the latches with a fast double-click, as if he was loading a shotgun pointed at my skull.
‘Eight days I’ve found so far,’ he replied, parting the case. ‘Eight days on which our client, the first defendant, has billed the legal aid fund for working in excess of twenty-four hours per day!’
Rupert frowned. ‘That’s prima facie impossible, of course.’
‘Oh, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?’
Rupert shrugged, catching my eye, as I realised what Stein was reaching for inside his briefcase. Sure enough, out came the cardboard contraption hanging limply from its elastic bands, the same mask I’d already advised the client to destroy and never show to another living person.
Rupert leaned over his desk, palms flat on the walnut, frowning harder still. ‘This is a mask?’
‘Not just any mask!’ Stein cried. ‘Oh no, what you behold is a feat of both engineering and sheer physics! With this contraption, our client intends on showing the court that he can split his vision down the middle, and read two sets of documents simultaneously!’
He pushed the mask up to his face, his Hugo Boss suit swinging out madly from underneath it, and if it had been anywhere else, at any other time, I might have burst out laughing. When he pulled it away, however, and tossed it back into the briefcase, I found all eyes turning on me, and not a trace of humour in sight.
‘I have already strongly advised the client not to present that as evidence,’ I tried. ‘At least you got the bloody thing away from him.’
‘Oh, no need to worry about that, Rook! He told me I could keep it! Said he’d just make another, and it was really no problem at all!’
‘Be fair now! You know that we can only advise our client, and if he wants to go ahead and use that as his defence, then it’s his decision!’
‘Well, next time you need a junior,’ Stein snapped, shutting the briefcase, ‘perhaps you ought to let them in on the full extent of the case’s failings
beforehand! Speaking of which, Barnes is supposed to be my pupil, is she not? It’d be nice to actually see her one of these days, as I could really use a hand with this mess, while you’re off doing … whatever it is you’re doing!’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ I said. ‘I have total confidence in your performance. I’d say we have our best man on the job.’
‘There’s a reason nobody wants to work with you, Rook,’ he said, and he was still shaking his head and muttering under his breath when he slammed the door behind him, quaking the books on the nearest shelves.
Once he’d gone – footsteps stomping off towards the clerks’ room downstairs, for what would undoubtedly be another round of furious protests – Rupert let out a long, pensive sigh.
‘Is there any particular motive for torching every bridge available to you at the moment?’
I shrugged, a cornered schoolboy once more, and he retired into the chair behind his desk, an instant warning; Rupert rarely sat down to talk, except in the gravest of situations.
‘You have another, far greater problem than that of Charles Stein, and it has forced me into something of a quandary.’
‘Which one?’
‘Theodore Bowen.’
Ted. Of course.
In the ever-mounting catalogue of shit I had to handle, I’d inadvertently let that slide to the very bottom.
I groaned and squeezed my eyes between forefinger and thumb. ‘Has he gone to Bar Standards?’
‘Not yet he hasn’t, though I suspect it’s a near inevitability …’ He sounded positively furious at my total lack of surprise. ‘Did you intend to let me know about this?’
‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘You assaulted him in broad daylight?’
‘Assaulted?’ I slammed my fists down against my lap. ‘Please! He has no evidence, does he? It’s his word against mine, and I’m pretty sure that he’d already been drinking on the morning in question. What’s he going to do about it, really?’
He didn’t answer immediately, and I could feel my years peeling away, stripping me back to a younger man.
‘It will do neither you nor chambers any good to have the whole of the Criminal Bar learn about your past,’ he said. ‘Do you really wish for all and sundry to know about your homeless years? Your criminal record?’