The Darkness Around Her

by The Darkness Around Her (retail) (epub)

  Dan put his head back and blew out. Pat meant so much to him.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Pat said. ‘How long? They think they’ve caught it early but that depends on how fast it spreads. It’s all those years locked in small rooms with clients smoking like it was about to be taken away from them. An occupational hazard.’

  ‘Jeez, Pat, I don’t know what to say. You need to look after yourself, fight this thing. You know I’ll cover for you if you need to take time off or… whatever.’

  Pat smiled, but it was thin and watery. ‘It’s not just that. It’s Eileen.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Pat leaned forward. ‘She says I should retire now, that I’ve got just the one shot at life and, if what I have left isn’t long, I shouldn’t be spending it at the office. I should be at home with my family. And she’s right.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Pat chuckled, despite himself, although it quickly broke into a cough. ‘For once in my life, I’m going to do as I’m told. I’m going to go home and fight this.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘You don’t have to say anything. My retirement was always going to happen. I’ve just been forced into a decision a bit earlier than I’d planned. You can ask me the question, though, because it doesn’t have to be only about me.’

  ‘What question?’

  ‘When do I go?’ Pat held up his hand as Dan started to object. ‘It’s only natural that you’ll worry about your job.’

  Dan looked out of the window as he tried to process everything he was being told. He had a murder trial starting the following day, his first one on his own. Now, his future seemed suddenly uncertain.

  ‘The end of the month is the answer.’

  That made Dan turn round. ‘So soon?’

  ‘I don’t know how long I’ve got left. I’m going to write to my clients, perhaps have a party or two, say goodbye to a few special people, and then I close the doors.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  Pat smiled. It was weary but there was some sparkle to his eyes for the first time. ‘There is another way.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Molloys could be yours.’

  ‘What? Me, buy the firm? I can’t afford it, for a start.’

  ‘I don’t mean the building. I own that; it’s my pension and my children’s inheritance. If I close the firm, I’ll sell the place. But you could carry it on. Just pay me rent, and when I’m gone, pay it to Eileen. The rest of the firm is free of charge.’

  ‘How do you mean, free of charge?’ Dan scratched his head. ‘This is all going too fast.’

  ‘Think about it, Daniel. What do I actually own? Some goodwill from some of Highford’s criminals? That’s not the same as a proper client list. I’ve got no repeat contract work or a cabinet full of civil claims waiting to be cashed in. No, we’ve got the regular churn of criminals, most cases wrapped up and billed within a few months. There’s no value in that, because the punters swap and change depending on how they’re feeling and who’s available when they make the call, or how their last attempt to avoid jail went.’ He held out his hands. ‘No, you’ve earned the firm. If you want it, I’ve got just one condition.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘You keep the name of the firm as it is. If I’m going to die’ – and he held up his hand – ‘I’ll die, I know that, because we all do, but if I die soon I want to leave a legacy, and my name on the window is just that.’ He looked down for a moment. ‘It’s not much, I know, some gold-edged lettering on a window in a small grey town, but it’s all I’ve got.’

  ‘How can I think about that right now?’

  ‘You’ll need to see the books.’

  ‘Pat, stop it.’

  ‘I’m serious. Do you think I’d joke about this?’

  ‘It’s a big decision.’

  Pat winked, some colour coming back into his cheeks. ‘Your sentiment didn’t last long.’ He put the envelope he’d been carrying on the table. ‘I’ve printed these off for you already. The balance sheets for the last ten years, and the profit and loss accounts. You can see how it grows and shrinks, perhaps even work out how to run the firm more cheaply.’

  Dan stared at it. ‘Are you sure about this? Just handing it over, you mean?’

  ‘I’m not being that generous. If you don’t want it, you’ll leave and get a job somewhere else. Who’ll carry it on then? I’ll just end up closing the door and that will be it, my name scraped from the window and you’ll be after a redundancy payment. You’ll have earned it too. I’ll sell the building and live off the proceeds, but I want more than that.’

  Dan picked up the envelope. ‘Why today, though? I’ve got a murder trial starting tomorrow, and now you throw this at me.’

  ‘I’ve had a long weekend with Eileen, and I made her some promises. This was going to come, cancer or no cancer. It’s just been brought forward.’

  Dan stared at the envelope for a few seconds before saying, ‘When do you need an answer?’

  ‘By the end of the week.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘I’m going at the end of the month. I need to know whether I’m putting a FOR SALE sign outside.’ He smiled, more warmth there now. ‘Have a bottle of wine tonight. Think about it.’

  ‘I might do now. I didn’t want to go into court tomorrow stinking of booze, I’ve got the judge on my back as it is, but then you hit me with this.’

  ‘Ah yes, the hopeless cause. How’s it going?’

  ‘It’s a strange one. He won’t talk to me. He stayed silent during the police interviews and won’t talk about the case with me. All I can do is attack the prosecution case.’

  ‘Have you got anything to go at?’

  Dan lifted the report that he’d been reading earlier. ‘The lab used for the DNA result got in trouble last year. A couple of employees were manipulating blood tests. They were caught and went to prison, so I’ve got an expert to describe how easy it is for DNA samples to become contaminated, talking about that lab in particular. He even found a couple of errors with the paperwork.’

  ‘That’s something then.’

  ‘But not enough. We needed to get our own testing done. Because if Peter Box is innocent, if that blood on her shoe isn’t his, the prosecution case crumbles.’

  ‘Have you done that?’

  ‘Peter won’t co-operate. He’s a man saying nothing, with an injury to his head that looks pretty heel-shaped. The jurors will want more than that to find him not guilty.’

  ‘You can only advise, Daniel, not lead. How are you finding it, doing it all on your own?’

  ‘Challenging, but good to be in charge, to do it all my way.’

  Pat pointed at the envelope. ‘There’s your answer. If you want to keep it that way, make my place yours. I’m not just here about the firm, though.’

  ‘Go on.’ Dan’s voice was filled with caution.

  ‘There is one stain on my career, which is another reason why I came today. I’m sorry about this, and I wasn’t going to tell you, but it’s about your trial.’

  ‘Peter Box?’

  ‘Yes.’ Pat leaned forward. ‘Do you remember Sean Martin?’

  ‘The Sean Martin? How could I forget?’

  ‘There is something about that case I haven’t told you, not told anyone, but I want you to know. This could be a long story. It might be early, but I’ll need a drink for this.’

  Five

  He watched the entrance to the cobbled yard from his car on the other side of the road. It wasn’t the first time he’d been there. He’d followed Dan Grant home from his office one night, two cars behind, just to know where he lived. It’s always good to know these things. He hadn’t got any closer to him though.

  He put his head back and closed his eyes. It was becoming too much. There’d been too many deaths. They weighed too heavily, a line stretching back through the years, those missed by the police, written off as suicides or a
ccidents or unexplained missing persons. That had to stop. They had to recognise it. They had to recognise him.

  The faces of the dead flashed through his mind, snapping him alert. They did that sometimes. They came to him in his sleep, or when he relaxed for a moment, as if forgetting wasn’t allowed.

  He rubbed his chest. It hurt whenever they jumped back into his head like that. Too much pressure, but he couldn’t act. Not yet. There was someone in there with Grant. An old man, worn down and grey.

  Instead, he kept his focus on the view ahead, towards the stone buildings of the town centre. It was quiet, the Sunday trade confined to the out-of-town retail parks. It made him conspicuous. Perhaps he wanted that, to be noticed.

  All he could do was wait.

  * * *

  Dan was confused. ‘Sean Martin? I don’t understand.’

  The Sean Martin case had been Pat’s biggest victory, the one that got him a speech on the court steps that was played out on every national news bulletin, his story dominating double-page spreads.

  The case had caught the media’s attention quickly.

  Sean Martin’s fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, Rosie Smith, had been stabbed to death with a thin sharp instrument as she’d been walking along the canal towpath to meet Sean.

  He’d arranged to meet her off the bus after she’d spent the day at a friend’s house, except that they lived on the other side of the town to the one-way system that the bus was funnelled along. He’d told her to get off the bus and walk the hundred metres along the canal, where he would be waiting for her. When she didn’t arrive, he went looking for her, finding her on the towpath, blood pooling around her.

  He’d rushed to her and held her close, listened out for her breathing as he lifted her from the ground, his hands and clothes covered in her blood as he searched for any sign that she was still alive.

  Suspicion hadn’t fallen on Sean Martin straightaway, but when the police started to delve into Rosie’s life, they were disturbed by some of the messages that passed between Rosie and her stepfather. It was the early days of social media, still used mainly by young people, but Sean Martin was quick to get on it as well. It seemed as if whenever Rosie posted a picture of herself in a pose that was a young teenager’s attempt to look sexy, Sean Martin posted a comment that appeared to cross the line. Rosie might have wanted her classmates to say that she looked hot, but perhaps not her stepfather.

  It was the blood mist that changed everything.

  A blood-spatter expert had examined his clothes. There were the expected contact stains, from where Sean had held her after he found her, but there were other blood stains, microscopic spots of blood on his fleece jacket and his shirt collar, invisible to the naked eye. The expert said that these had come from the mist of blood created during the attacker’s frenzy, as her murderer leaned over her to strike the fatal blows to her chest. They made Sean the killer.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Dan said. ‘Sean Martin was your biggest success.’

  ‘Let me talk about your client first. Peter Box. Has he mentioned Sean Martin at all?’

  ‘No. Why should he?’

  ‘Because when Sean was awaiting trial, Peter Box came to my office and tried to claim responsibility for Rosie’s murder.’

  Dan stood up, his arms splayed out, his mouth open in shock.

  ‘What the hell, Pat? Why are you telling me now, the night before the trial?’

  ‘Think about Sean Martin.’ He stopped to cough. ‘What do we know about him? He was acquitted in the end, innocent in the eyes of the law after his retrial. If I’d told you, how would it have helped Peter Box for you to think he’d killed before?’

  ‘I was a trainee when I sat through Sean’s first trial, and it was what, twelve years ago now? I don’t remember the possibility of another suspect ever being mentioned.’

  ‘I went to see Sean without you, because I thought I was breaking great news by telling him there was someone else the police could focus on. It didn’t go as I expected.’

  ‘Why? What did he say?’

  ‘He told me to ignore it. As simple as that. Said Box was probably some fantasist, and that if there was any evidence linking anyone else, they’d have found it. He said it would make him look desperate.’

  ‘So that was that?’

  ‘I pressed him on it, don’t worry, and I ran it past the QC to see what he thought, and he agreed that it was too risky. We didn’t know enough about Box, and you know the rule: never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer. What if we asked the police about him and there was a history of false confessions? How desperate would that make Sean look? It was Sean who gave the most noble answer, that he knew what it was like to be wrongly accused of a crime, and that his conscience wouldn’t allow him to let it happen to someone else.’

  Dan sat down. ‘But why are you telling me now? I can’t use it, because it doesn’t matter what people think of him, his retrial turned him into an innocent man wrongly accused, haunted by the memory of holding Rosie as she died, while the killer is still out there roaming the canals. They’ll look at Peter Box and wonder whether Sean Martin had been right all along, that he was innocent, and that now, after all this time, they have a chance to nail her killer.’

  ‘I can’t die with this case hanging over me.’

  Dan looked down for a moment. ‘I’m truly sorry you are ill, and I can’t stand the thought of you dying, because you’ve been my boss, my hero, but I’m the wrong person to grant you redemption. Take this the right way, Pat, because you’ve done so much for me, but if the stain is that you stayed silent about Peter Box and he’s murdered someone else, you’ve come to the wrong person. I’m not conspiring to get Peter Box locked up. I’m here to defend him.’

  Pat shook his head. ‘Peter Box isn’t the stain. Think back to Sean Martin. He’d been the victim of a police force determined to convict someone for Rosie’s murder, a prosecution that had latched onto minor pieces of evidence and exaggerated them. But when I’d given him someone to blame he’d turned away from that path: a man of principle, stronger than I could ever have been. You remember how he stuck by me even though we lost his first trial? I fought for him, Dan. I believed in him.’

  ‘I remember. I was proud of you.’

  ‘The police had fastened onto any old morsel: like the fact that no one else knew that he’d made the arrangement with Rosie, and that he went out too early to meet her, or that her phone disappeared, as if there was something to hide on it.’

  ‘I remember the innuendo about their relationship, the press calling it “complex”.’ Dan made the sign of inverted commas with his fingers. ‘There was no actual evidence that Sean had any sexual interest in Rosie but they repeated the whispers anyway, suggesting that she was about to make accusations against him, so he had to silence her. But you fought hard, Pat. His conviction is no stain. You got it overturned.’

  Pat reached out and grabbed Dan by the forearm. ‘You misunderstand me. Getting nearer to death has allowed me to reassess it all. I took his conviction badly because he was so reviled in the press, and I got some backlash for that in Highford. It felt like I’d failed him. He wrote to me all the time, and he had supporters and campaigners, and I was determined to get him out, to rescue him. I was able to find my own expert to say that Rosie could have been breathing as he held her, because looking dead isn’t the same as being dead. The poor girl might have covered him in the blood mist as she took her last breaths. Or it could have been expelled when he lifted her. It was enough, just enough. He got his retrial and doubt was found, because it was possible that the blood mist got there while he held her during the last moments of her life, rather than while he leaned over her as he killed her.’

  ‘And Sean hasn’t been bitter about it,’ Dan said. ‘He’s put his experience to good use and become the go-to man when they start talking about miscarriages of justice. That’s down to you, Pat.’

  ‘Yes. He’s advised ministers. He’s
a real star.’ There was no pleasure in Pat’s voice. ‘That’s why he’s my stain. Sean Martin, not Peter Box.’

  ‘Sorry, Pat, but you’ve lost me.’

  ‘Do you remember the night of his release? The party we held?’

  ‘How could I forget? Most times, we help guilty people to walk away from their crimes. For a change, we’d done good. It’s not often we can say that.’

  ‘All of Sean’s supporters were so happy. It was a grand old night. Until later.’ Pat let out a long breath that turned into a coughing fit, grimacing until it subsided. ‘Do you know what he said to me that ruined it?’

  Dan drummed his fingers on the table. ‘Do I want to hear this?’

  ‘You need to hear it.’ There was some of the old fire in Pat’s eyes now. ‘It was almost the end of the evening and everyone was a bit drunk, but not Sean. I realised then that he hadn’t been drinking too much, but I put it down to the fact that he’d spent his time talking and perhaps felt bewildered after six years in prison. I was wrong. He was staying in control, that’s all, because he doesn’t like to lose control. He pointed towards his supporters, all wearing the same black T-shirts. Do you remember them, with that giant yellow ribbon logo, twirled into the initials SM? He leaned over to me and said, “What’s funny is that they never found the murder weapon.” ’

  Pat held out his hands. ‘What could I do but agree? But he didn’t stop there. He wagged his finger at me and whispered, “Because I hid it well.” ’

  Dan’s eyes widened. ‘He said that?’

  ‘Oh, he did, all right. He said something else, too: “By the western corner, just under the surface, below the mason’s mark – an itch you can’t scratch.” I thought I’d heard him wrong, or perhaps it was a joke, but when l looked at him he nodded and winked and said, “But you can’t tell anyone because you’re my lawyer. I just thought you might like to know.” ’

  ‘What the hell did you say?’

  ‘I asked him whether he’d killed her. I told him that new forensic evidence could mean a new trial, that not guilty in a murder case doesn’t mean he’s off the hook for ever.’