by Gary Bell
‘But there’ll be an investigation, won’t there? There has to be …’
I couldn’t say. She picked at her nails, fiddled with her collar and sighed.
‘The Girl,’ she said, eyes locking onto mine. ‘Where will she end up?’
I tapped the end of my cigarette onto the steps. ‘Do you really want to know?’
She thought about it for a moment. Looked to her shoes and nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘I’d imagine she would’ve been kept on ice until now. She is evidence until conviction.’
‘So if Barber is convicted and the case is closed?’
‘That’ll be up to the coroner,’ I said. ‘There are more than a hundred unidentified bodies found in the UK every year. They’re often used for teaching.’
‘You mean they’ll butcher her up some more for trainees to study?’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Then what?’
‘She’ll be burned.’
‘Or buried in an unmarked grave,’ she added.
We didn’t say another word until the door behind us opened several minutes later.
‘Mr Rook? Miss Barnes?’
Fraser Hayes was standing there, fiddling with his tie.
‘It’s time.’
35
‘Will the defendant please stand?’
Billy raised himself on weary legs, and looked up to the public gallery. His wife hadn’t returned, nor had most of his family.
In the end, I thought, perhaps you really do get what you deserve.
‘Would the foreman please stand?’
The elected forewoman stood. It was, to my surprise, Number 4, the oldest woman with the nicest blouse. She adjusted her glasses and looked up to the bench, wetting her lips.
‘Have you, the jury, reached a verdict upon which you are all agreed?’
She took a deep breath. ‘We have.’
‘And on this indictment, that William Barber did, on the morning of the fifteenth of April this year, commit murder, do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?’
The quiet that followed seemed to stretch on for a thousand years.
Something warm gripped around my forearm, and I looked down to see Zara’s white-knuckled fist welded to my robe.
The forewoman cleared her throat, and nodded to the bench.
‘Not guilty.’
PART FOUR
THE TRUTH, AND NOTHING BUT
36
It was December when I decided to make a start on organising my life.
There was no single leaf to turn. Clearing out meant chipping away, hour by hour, one old case file at a time, and that was just the physical work. My wedding ring, like so much more bric-a-brac, I’d got used to carrying around in my coat pocket, still unwilling to renounce it entirely.
Baby steps, I kept on saying to myself. Let’s start with the litter and the paperwork and take it from there. There’ll be plenty of time to face the trivialities of divorce, obesity, alcoholism and cigarettes.
We were finally on top of the prep for the fraud case, and I hadn’t heard anything of Billy in almost six weeks. I suspected – and hoped in no small measure – that I never would again. That’s the way it is, being a barrister. Lives hang in the balance, and we give it our all, but once the verdict comes, they’re just another case file in the stack.
I did think about the Barber household from time to time though, and on more than one occasion I found myself wondering if we’d done the right thing, outing him in the way we did.
At those times, usually in the darkest, loneliest hours of the night, I had to remind myself that justice is a concept that reaches far beyond the pages of English law, and all we’d done was present the facts to the best of our ability. Nothing more, and nothing less. The holes are often the ones we dig entirely for ourselves.
As for DeWitt, there’d been only the briefest mention of repercussions in the news at the conclusion of the trial, some whispers of an internal investigation, but nothing had ever surfaced. I wasn’t sure if anything would, but Zara seemed to hold on to the belief of some greater justice, and I could still see the thought of the killer at large come back to her in quiet moments.
If there was anything for the pupil to have learned from her first trial, it was that the whole truth is rarely uncovered, in the courtroom, prison cell or beyond.
Sometimes the client walks, and sometimes the client doesn’t, but our lives go on all the same. The jury verdict always includes the word guilty; it’s the not, three letters, that changes so much.
It was a Friday when the door to my chambers opened without a knock shortly before lunch, and I didn’t even turn; I was well used to her comings and goings by now.
‘How’d it go?’ I asked, shaking the dust of old paperwork from my hands.
She collapsed into the chair by the bureau I’d emptied out for her and buried her face in her hands. ‘Shit,’ she grunted.
I sighed. ‘Don’t beat yourself up about it. The magistrates can be harder than you’d think. What was the sentence?’
She managed less than two seconds before I spotted the grin breaking out between the strands of falling hair. ‘Acquitted!’
‘You’re a terrible liar,’ I laughed as she leapt up out of the chair.
‘Honestly, Mr Rook, you should’ve seen me! I totally smashed it!’
‘Never had a doubt about it. What did Stein have to say about it?’
‘Haven’t seen him yet, I came straight here. And, as if that wasn’t enough, look outside! It’s snowing!’
‘Really?’ I’d spent the morning so buried in files that I hadn’t noticed the weather. I looked out past the stacks of semi-organised boxes ready for storage to see spots of white clinging to the glass. ‘So it is.’
‘We should celebrate!’ She reached over to the nearest shelf, three rows beneath the first-edition copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and picked up the bottle of whiskey that Rupert had sent down after Billy’s trial. It was still sealed, and his simple, elegant note – Well done, Pupil – remained around the neck. Strangely, I hadn’t felt up to opening it yet. I couldn’t ignore the feeling that, though the trial was most certainly finished, the case hadn’t ended as it should have.
She plonked the bottle on the desk, and I indicated the clutter around us. ‘I don’t know, I’ve really got a lot to be getting on with here …’
‘Ah, come on!’ she beamed, bouncing around in her boots. ‘That’s what New Year’s Resolutions are for! Live now, tidy later, that’s what I always say, don’t I?’
‘I have not once heard you say that. Besides, I’ve already got my resolutions sorted. No more pupils under my feet, and that’s just for starters.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said, ‘I didn’t hear you complaining when I was traipsing through all of these!’ She tapped the nearest box with the toe of her boot. ‘Come on, this is my last week before I go home for Christmas!’
‘Don’t remind me,’ I groaned. ‘I can’t bloody wait for my brother-in-law to regale me with all the countless benefits of being a self-employed plumber, as he has done every other time I’ve seen him. He’s his own boss, don’t you know? Humbug!’
It was to be my first Christmas with the family for more years than I could remember, and I told myself that it was pure coincidence I’d organised it only a day after Billy walked out of the Old Bailey, alone. I was already anxious, but it was too late to rescind the invitation now.
I kept thinking about my mother. I kept thinking about family, and the importance of a name. Mostly, I kept thinking of The Girl, and how she’d left the world with neither, and how sad that really was.
‘I’m not buying that Scrooge crap,’ Zara snapped, rummaging through what little progress I’d made in sorting the boxes. ‘I think one of the reasons my mum gave up on religion after meeting Dad was for Christmas. It’s the best.’
‘Isn’t there some irony in that?’ I asked. ‘What are you looking for anyway?’
‘Didn’t you used to have some old speak
ers in here somewhere?’
‘They’re not that old,’ I grumbled, and pointed to the wires emerging from the middle of one of the stacks, still sitting precisely where I’d dumped them after clearing the bureau out for Zara.
‘Yeah, right, they could’ve come from Noah’s Ark.’ She heaved the topmost box off, kicking up a cloud of dust and loose paper, and weighed it in her hands. ‘These were the first boxes I ever went through here. Took me the whole of that first week to get through about a billion bank statements and receipts, remember?’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘just be careful, before –’
She dropped the box before I finished, upturning it, and hundreds of loose papers went spilling out across the floor like a good dealer’s cards over a table.
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Just when I was actually getting somewhere …’
‘Sorry!’ She started scooping handfuls of the sheets back up into her arms. ‘I’d actually forgotten how much there was in –’
And she stopped. Froze entirely, in fact.
‘What’s up? Seen something that’ll save this bloody fraudster before the trial begins?’
But she didn’t laugh. Didn’t smile. She was staring at the paper in her hands.
‘Parinda Malik …’
‘Beg your pardon?’ The name did ring a bell, but the bell was far away, almost forgotten altogether. ‘Parinda what?’
‘Look!’ She thrust the page over my desk, complexion draining. ‘Right here! I knew I recognised the name!’
It was a copy of a billing record. A list of maybe two hundred names and consultations submitted for reimbursement from the legal aid fund. Every so often, a name had been circled in red ink, representing those clients whose identity we hadn’t been able to confirm. It was only as I met Zara’s eyes once more that it clicked.
‘Oh shit.’
We cleared the narrow staircase down through the building, leapt out into the flurry of snowfall and ran, Zara a few paces ahead, coats unfastened and billowing, to my car, which was parked at the top of Chancery Lane.
Ice cracked as I threw open the door, leaned over the gearstick, and scrambled through the clutter inside the glovebox.
And there she was, all but forgotten, paper cold to the touch.
My phone was at my ear before I’d even made it out of the car.
‘Kessler speaking,’ the voice said after a couple of rings.
‘This is Rook,’ I panted. ‘We need you to come into chambers.’
‘All right,’ our client said, and I heard the rustle of pages. ‘Hmm, what day are you thinking? Have you found something in the case?’
I handed Zara the clutch of posters, where the face of Parinda Malik was staring out from the top, missing now for more than three years.
‘Now,’ I told him. ‘You need to come here now.’
Kessler hadn’t been especially thrilled about rushing through the city snow to sit in my ransacked office, that much was immediately obvious, but when I handed him the makeshift poster, complete with Arabic annotations, he quickly progressed to a state somewhere between livid and mystified.
‘What am I looking at here?’ he asked, glancing between us both.
‘Parinda Malik,’ I said, giving him the billing receipt. ‘You billed for giving her an hour of legal advice, here.’ I pointed to the date circled in red Sharpie.
‘So? You’re telling me you’ve tracked her down? That’s good, right?’
Zara was sitting by the bureau; she shook her head. ‘We need to know what she came to you about. It’s important.’
‘To the case?’ He leaned closer to the small print and shook his head. ‘This was a consultation in Nottinghamshire, more than three years ago. It would have been somebody else in the firm.’
‘Who?’ we both asked at once. Snow was building up the lower half of the window by now, and the lamp on the desk was fighting a losing battle against the gloom.
‘I have no idea,’ he said, scratching his jaw. ‘I’d have to check the online records.’
I slid my laptop across the desk towards him, knocking a couple of sheets of paper onto the floor. ‘By all means, Mr Kessler.’
He rolled his eyes and went into his coat pocket. ‘My phone is fine.’
A long, slow minute passed. I found myself looking at his fine Italian shoes, his manicured hands, and decided that, guilty or not, he clearly had no compunction dressing ostentatiously.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘She attended one of the free consultations with Jack Aaronson, one of our junior solicitors.’
‘You have this Aaronson’s number?’
He frowned, wary, and looked back to the poster, the pinholes still visible in the corners. ‘What’s this all about, Mr Rook?’
‘Parinda Malik spoke to one of your representatives on the nineteenth of June 2014. According to this poster, that was only a day before she went missing from the Nottingham area. We have to know what she spoke to your man about.’
‘Why? I mean, even if Jack could remember, and I can all but guarantee you that he won’t, you know full well that we can’t disclose that sort of information. Why do you think we had more than thirty tonnes of paperwork independently vetted down to the seventeen tonnes you were given? I’m lucky I haven’t been suspended pending investigation; I can’t breach legal professional privilege – these regulators would tear me a new arsehole if anybody found out, you know that.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to put my foot down here. There’s no requirement for me to break legal professional privilege on this.’
‘Oh, come on, Kessler! I’m not asking for much here. I’ve spent months working through all this, and –’
‘And that’s precisely what you’ve been paid to do – and nothing more than that.’
Stalemate. Snow turned grey on the windowpane, muddying the world outside, and wind rattled the wood of the frame.
‘If there’s nothing else …’ he said, standing, pocketing his phone and striding impatiently towards the door, ‘I’d appreciate it if we can keep future meetings to my trial, thank you very much.’
‘Hang on …’ Zara’s voice came slowly from where her bureau was. ‘You said that Miss Malik attended a free consultation, and yet you’ve billed the legal aid fund for the session … How does that work?’
He paused in the doorway, turned back into the room, checking the hallway behind him.
‘You’ve always done great work for me, Rook,’ he said quietly. ‘Always done right by our clients, and for that reason, I’ll give you a name, but you did not get it from me …’ He leaned further into the room. ‘Flora McNally – find her, and maybe you’ll find whatever it is you’re looking for.’
Zara had the name up on the screen of her iPad before the door had even closed behind him.
‘Well, Rookie?’ I was pacing back and forth, plunging my hands into my hair.
‘This can’t be right,’ she muttered, scrolling. ‘That guy’s full of shit – I bet he pulled the name out of thin air to keep us busy.’
‘Why? What have you found?’
‘Well, there’s an eighty-one-year-old Flora McNally up in Glasgow, another currently living out in Spain, and a Professor Flora McNally lecturing at Birmingham Uni.’
‘A professor? What’s her subject?’
‘Um … English Language and Applied Linguistics, apparently.’
I stopped pacing. She caught my eye over the glow of the screen and read my mind in an instant.
‘That’s what they were claiming the legal aid for …’ she gasped.
‘Yes.’ I was already reaching for my keys. ‘An interpreter!’
37
Birmingham’s College of Arts and Law is situated on a leafy campus of grand old red-brick buildings, and each was a hive of studious young people sheltering from the snowfall, cramming in last-minute essays before the holidays, when we turned up more than three hours after leaving chambers.
Zara had wanted to phone ahead, and
fretted over it several times after we’d found ourselves trapped behind a procession of salt spreaders on the treacherous journey up the sleet-battered M40, but I’d told her it was a bad idea; asking a stranger to surrender her professional ethics seemed especially difficult to do over the phone. Fortunately, we managed to find the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics before our woman had disappeared for the evening, and were promptly invited into her cramped little office at the rear of a winding corridor.
‘Professor McNally,’ I started, ducking into the room and pulling the door to as she powered on a halogen heater in the corner, ‘what’s your role here at the university?’
‘Please, call me Flora.’ She spoke with the lingering trace of a Scottish accent; mid-forties, nothing stern or immediately intimidating about her for such an educated woman. ‘I run both the Applied Linguistics MA, and the night school for teaching English to speakers of other languages.’
‘We understand that you’ve done some work with solicitors.’
‘Sure. I’m often engaged as an interpreter for the courts. Assisting with trial proceedings for asylum seekers, mostly. People who can’t afford an interpreter and have no family or friends to do it for them. Defence solicitors hire me to translate for defendants and, likewise, the CPS has me translate for prosecution witnesses.’
‘What languages do you work with?’ I asked, genuinely impressed. I’d seen only a handful of the courts’ interpreters at work over the years, and always been a little envious of the skill.
‘Oh boy …’ She blew a mouthful of air. ‘Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish, Farsi, Azerbaijani … It’s mainly hearings, appeal forms, property disputes in civil courts, domestic violence and forced marriage in family courts.’