Beyond Reasonable Doubt

by Gary Bell

She brought her hands out from behind her back, took my own, and placed something there.

  I didn’t have to break eye contact to recognise what it was; even after so long abandoned to the back seat, it fitted my grip like a tailored glove.

  ‘Tell her to come inside already, mate!’ Sean said cheerily. ‘You’re letting all the damn heat –’

  He didn’t finish.

  I turned back with the perfect swing, feet apart and rolling like thunder, and brought the golf club screaming up into his jaw. My heavy iron. Lucky number 9. Goodnight, Inspector McCarthy.

  There was a spray of blood as he clamped through his tongue, a scattering of teeth, and he went down hard, crashing on to the tiles, beer can rolling into the pile of unwashed clothes.

  ‘Holy fuck!’ Zara screamed, plunging her hands into her hair. ‘I thought you were going to, like, threaten him or something!’

  ‘Tell me you rang the police.’

  ‘Of course, but isn’t he the police?’ she sputtered. Sean made a long, thin, whining sound.

  He turned onto his back, blood and saliva pooling upon his jumper, and reached towards his waist. I held the club high, eyes on the truncheon, but he didn’t touch it. Instead, he slipped his fingers into his jean pocket and pulled out the decaying, broken tooth from the garden.

  Even with the lower half of his face misshapen as it was, I could’ve sworn the bastard smiled as he shoved that hunk of tooth into his own blood-soaked mouth; he swallowed hard, and then his eyes rolled back, and he was out cold.

  ‘Fuck!’ I yelled, grabbing his mangled, swelling jaw with one hand, cracking it as wide as the bones would still allow, but it was already gone. ‘The tooth!’

  ‘The what?’ Zara cried.

  ‘The Girl’s missing tooth! It was here, our only evidence, and he just swallowed it!’

  ‘He swallowed it? What the fuck do we do now?’

  ‘We find evidence, fast,’ I said, wiping spit and blood from my hand onto a nearby tea towel, ‘or else we are fucked.’

  Zara was shaking so much I thought she might be having a fit. ‘G-GBH on an officer,’ she stammered, ‘aggravated burglary … attempted murder …’ She fell against the open door, wheezing.

  I tried to gather my thoughts. My eyes traced over Sean, back to the living room, to the staircase and the open cupboard beneath it. ‘What else were you hiding, you piece of shit?’

  ‘M-Mr Rook?’

  ‘Go outside,’ I told her flatly. ‘Keep an eye out for the police.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Take this,’ I stuffed the club back into her trembling hands. ‘He’s unconscious. He can’t do any more harm.’

  She managed to compose herself enough to nod, tearing her eyes away from the blood on the tiles and holding the iron like a baseball bat over her right shoulder, and then disappeared into the snow. I waited until the crunch of footsteps was out of range before moving.

  As I stepped over Sean’s body, stalking towards the cupboard beneath the staircase, I felt physically sick; not because of the violence behind me, but for whatever I might find ahead. My heart was beating so fast it hurt.

  The cupboard was dark, tight, and I had to crawl inside on my hands and knees, fumbling through the smell of dust and worn leather. The safe was around the size of a shoebox, the steel kind often found in hotel rooms, and it looked as if it had been buried under several anoraks and dust sheets for quite some time until Sean had dug it out only minutes before. The door was still open.

  I caught my breath, deafened by my own pulse, and reached inside blindly.

  My fingertips found two objects.

  The first was heavy steel, cold to the touch: the barrel of a semi-automatic handgun. Sean hadn’t been lying about that. I snapped my fingers away from it, only now remembering to exhale.

  The second item was smaller: frayed cardboard, a rectangular box, it took me no time to recognise it as a standard pack of playing cards, but when I picked it up in one hand the weight was far too light for a full deck.

  I backed out of the cupboard on all fours, box quaking in my grip, and glanced up over my right shoulder as I came out into the light.

  I didn’t see Sean. Not really, but there was just enough time to distinguish sleek black metal before the truncheon smashed down above my forehead. Agony drove through my skull, snatching the air from my lungs, and my vision went white.

  An enormous weight collapsed on top of me – Sean, moments after his vengeful swansong – as blood ran through my hair and onto the nape of my neck like water from a kettle.

  My eyes cleared, and I saw the golf club fall to the carpet, Zara standing over us both, screaming at Sean to stay down, but the sound had gone out. I reached for her, playing cards still in my hand, but she faded to a dream, the ghost of a girl I’d never seen alive, with a halo of blue light around her face.

  Then the blue light was pulsing, a strobe across the ceiling, and I finally let go, heat pouring over my face, cold spreading through the rest of my body, and allowed the impossible weight of my eyelids to simply sweep the world away.

  42

  I was on a hospital bed. That much was clear.

  The white ceiling, the sound of machines beeping along the corridor, the smell of antiseptic.

  My head felt as if I’d been playing chicken on the old railway, like some of the Cotgrave kids used to do, only I’d refused to retreat and my skull had been smeared halfway back to the village.

  I turned slowly to the left, peering through fog, and saw a face I just about recognised.

  A petite woman in full uniform, blonde hair tied back. Not a nurse, I realised, but Constable Louise Shepherd of Rushcliffe South Police. I must’ve groaned out loud; seeing that I was awake, she disappeared from view, but I could hear her voice outside.

  ‘Looks like he’s awake, sir.’

  ‘Is that so?’ someone replied, and into my fading delirium strolled none other than Detective Chief Superintendent John DeWitt.

  He was dressed in the same brown barn coat I’d seen him wearing by the roadside, smoothing his moustache out with one hand, peering down at me as if I were something caught beneath his shoe.

  ‘Before you ask,’ he boomed, coming to rest in my narrow frame of vision, ‘you aren’t in heaven.’

  I coughed, ruffled my face, and felt the tightness of glue and dressings all pulling from somewhere above.

  ‘How long was I out?’ I croaked weakly, as if upon waking from the strangest comatose dream; I imagined a beard all over my face by now.

  ‘How long?’ He looked at his watch. Shrugged. ‘About forty-five minutes, give or take.’

  ‘Oh …’ I lifted myself and leaned back against the pillows. It felt as if I’d gained a few extra kilos in my skull. ‘Zara?’

  ‘Being questioned.’

  I looked down. Somebody had stripped me of my shirt and replaced it with a thin white gown that hung over my trousers. ‘Am I under arrest?’

  ‘Right now?’ He shook his head. ‘No charge yet. We’ll need a statement in the morning, and you’re staying here tonight.’

  ‘No chance, I’ve got to –’ But he silenced me with one swiftly raised hand, and if I’d been any more alert I might’ve flinched. I crumpled down, relenting, and sighed. ‘Sean?’

  ‘McCarthy is receiving urgent medical care. He doesn’t have much jaw left to tell us anything right now, thanks to you, but it’s only a matter of time.’

  I blinked. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘We have a good enough idea for now,’ he sniffed. ‘First thing in the morning, Rook. You have a lot of explaining to do.’

  ‘It’d be my pleasure,’ I said, and I truly meant it.

  A few moments of silence passed between us, uncomfortable and strained.

  ‘It was my kid,’ he said eventually. ‘Oscar. He threw up over the back seat of my car on Good Friday, and I had to take it in to get cleaned. We’re not insured for domestic use, so I didn’t volunteer that information. It wasn�
�t exactly something I’d expected to have to answer.’

  I nodded, heard the dressings crinkle on my scalp.

  He turned on his heel and made it to the door before stopping.

  ‘I was an officer in BOSS, yes. After that, I had to get out of the country. I came to England. My first real case was a teenager stabbed to death in broad daylight. Took me half a decade to hunt down the bastards who did it. Said they did it for a laugh. Nothing more. Just a laugh. They’d spread like rats from a sinking ship, right out across the country, but I did what I had to do. I got them all, Rook. It wasn’t pretty, and I had to bend the rules to do it, but I got them.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know that now.’

  ‘Did you also know that they’re all free men? That kid is still buried, his mother was sectioned after a total nervous breakdown, but they’re all out because their barristers struck a plea deal before the trial ever made it to court.’

  I sighed, looking over to the frost on the window, the white clouds parting beyond. ‘Noble cause corruption is still corruption, Superintendent DeWitt.’

  He walked out of the room without another word and I was left alone, to close my eyes again.

  The next time I woke, it was to see Zara snoring in the plastic chair by the bed, head tipped back, jaw hanging wide open.

  Clenched in her hands, buckled upon her lap, was my hat, retrieved from the scene.

  I watched her for a minute or two, warmth filling my chest. I’d never felt so proud of anyone in my whole life. She must’ve sensed that I was awake because she opened her eyes and wiped the dribble away from her chin with the back of one hand.

  She caught my eye and grinned, all the way from the boots up, and it really did suit her entirely.

  ‘Thought you were worm food,’ she said, tossing the hat onto my middle.

  I clutched my temples with both hands. ‘Wish I was.’

  She nodded stiffly. When I looked closer, I could see tears brimming up in her eyes; one escaped, only one, and it rolled down the softness of her cheek. ‘You found them. You actually found them.’

  ‘Found what?’ I frowned.

  She wiped her face with one sleeve. ‘Names. IDs. Travel papers. He’d kept them all. He’d kept their names. Five altogether.’

  She lunged forward, catching me off guard, and threw her skinny arms around my shoulders. We stayed that way for what felt like a long time, and when the sting of tears crept into my own eyes, I told myself it must’ve been a symptom of the head injury and nothing more.

  ‘We got him together,’ I said. ‘We did it.’

  She fell back into the chair and blew her nose into a tissue from a box beside the bed. ‘But there’s still the trial, you know. What if he gets away with it somehow? What if he walks?’

  To this, I only smiled. ‘Not without us representing him he won’t. The fucker hasn’t got a chance.’

  A realisation came upon me then. Billy Barber had been right all along: this case would end up with me standing on the opposite side of the courtroom, after all.

  ‘So,’ Zara said, ‘what do we do now?’

  I pulled my hat over the dressings, swung my feet off the edge of the bed, and grimaced at the dizzy barb of pain it sent behind my eyes.

  ‘What time is it?’ I groaned.

  ‘Coming up to midnight.’

  ‘Know anywhere we can still get a drink at this ungodly hour?’

  ‘Well, yeah, but DeWitt told me that you’re not supposed to …’ Her voice faded away, she cocked her head, and smiled once more. ‘You know what? I reckon I know just the place.’

  I looked down at my gown, weighing it against the bloody shirt in the corner of the room, and pulled my coat on over it. ‘Think I’ll fit in, looking like this?’

  ‘About as well as I do in chambers, I’d imagine.’

  We stepped out of the hospital arm in arm, my thoughts still tangled on Sean: the secrets he’d kept, the lies he’d told, and all the terrible things he’d done. Like the light of so many dead stars above us, only just coming into view. I shuddered, and Zara tightened her grip on my elbow.

  ‘You all right, Mr Rook?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I think I will be. So, where do we go, Rookie?’

  ‘Rookie?’ Zara shook her head and gave my arm another squeeze. ‘Didn’t I say it was a serial killer all along?’

  I laughed. It was entirely inappropriate but warm and natural, right from the belly up, and together we walked into the darkness of the city.

  That railway – the final fragment of Cotgrave colliery – was torn up the following February.

  The route was resurfaced only a month after Sean McCarthy was convicted and, after his sentencing, news of The Girl’s death finally made it back to her family in Lebanon.

  Her name was placed upon her remains, wherever they’d been interred, only to be forgotten in good time, like all, destined to become nothing more than coal under this green earth.

  Her name was Sonia, for whatever it was worth.

  And worth a great deal it was.

  Acknowledgements

  My name is the only one on the cover of this book, but the words inside it are a true collaboration between my co-writer, the brilliant wordsmith Scott Kershaw, and me. I would like to thank our inspirational agent Rory Scarfe, who had the vision to put Scott and me together. Scott’s industry, and the sheer brilliance of his prose, had me feeling at times that my role in our collaboration was akin to Andrew Ridgeley’s in Wham. As soon as the first draft of the book was finished Rory sent it to Bloomsbury where, within days, it was snapped up by the Raven Books Editorial Director Alison Hennessey. After further polishing of our work by the extraordinarily talented Alison, it was ready for publication. Here’s to a glittering future for me, Scott, Rory, Alison and, of course, Elliot Rook QC.

  Note on the Authors

  Born into a coal mining family, Gary Bell was an apprentice mechanic, production line worker and door-to-door salesman before being arrested for fraud in his mid-twenties. After taking his exams at night school, he went on to study law as a mature student at Bristol University and has now spent over thirty years at the Bar, before becoming a QC specialising in criminal defence in 2012.

  Scott Kershaw is the author of two novels. Prior to becoming an author, Scott worked as a professional chef for several years, and travelled the continent as a music journalist.

  First published in Great Britain 2019

  This electronic edition published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Gary Bell 2019

  Gary Bell has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

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  ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-0612-9; TPB: 978-1-5266-0613-6; eBook: 978-1-5266-0614-3

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