by Peter James
A discussion followed between the counsels about the various trial dates before they were able to fix a date in early May.
His Honour Richard Jupp, addressing Starr, said, ‘Stand up.’
Starr obeyed.
‘I intend to sentence you at the end of the trial of your co-accused, which is likely to be late May. You may sit down.’
Gready had to wait, patiently, for the next twenty minutes, while the court dealt with a number of administrative matters. Finally, the judge addressed the dock officers.
‘You can take the defendants down.’
Gready followed Starr to the rear of the dock. Then, as they descended the steps and he was out of sight of the judge, he grabbed Starr’s shoulder.
‘Mickey, a gentle reminder not to talk to the cops – you’ve got nothing to say.’
20
Thursday 28 March
Accompanied by a dock officer, Nick Fox went down to the holding cells beneath Lewes Crown Court, to where Terence Gready was sitting. Fox entered and the door clanged shut behind him.
Gready shook his head. ‘Mickey’s got an agenda. You already told me he was asking about what kind of reduction in his sentence he could get by pleading guilty. I bet his next step will be to see what he’d be offered by turning Queen’s evidence. Don’t you think?’
Fox was silent.
‘Nick? Don’t you think?’
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘My defence relies on Starr saying he doesn’t know me, and he’s never met me. He needs to be in the box for me, not the prosecution. It’s time to play hardball. Even with all the reductions he might get, he’s still going to be inside for a few years. You’d better tell him that if he wants his brother protected, properly protected, then he’d better keep his trap shut. Time to teach him a lesson. Get the boys to go and see Mickey the day before the trial starts, to keep it fresh in his mind. Tell them to go and have a little chat with Stuie, know what I’m saying? That way it’ll get back to his brother.’
Fox smiled. ‘Smack him about a little?’
‘Yep. Smack him about good and proper. Then let Mickey know that’s just the beginning. If he thinks he’s giving evidence against me, life for Stuie is going to be hell. Proper hell.’
‘Understood.’
‘And make sure Mickey understands, gets the message loud and clear.’
‘I know just the right people to do it.’
‘Of course you do.’
21
Friday 3 May
Roy Grace’s last day in his post as Acting Commander of the Metropolitan Police Violent Crime Task Force, began much the same as his first day had. With his job phone ringing in the middle of the night.
Grabbing it and hitting ‘answer’ as quickly as he could, to try to avoid disturbing Cleo, he slipped out of bed and went through into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. ‘Roy Grace,’ he said, instantly awake and alert.
‘Sorry to disturb you, boss,’ said the familiar voice of the on-call SIO, Detective Inspector Davey. ‘We’ve a fatal stabbing in north Croydon.’
‘Thanks, Paul. What details do you have?’
‘Sketchy at the moment, but it sounds like a wrong-time, wrong-place. A young lad walking his girlfriend home. From what we have from her, so far, they were surrounded by a bunch of youths making sexual innuendos and he answered them back. The next thing she knew, he was lying on the ground, bleeding heavily from the neck, and they all ran off. She phoned in hysterics and stayed with him whilst the operator talked her through staunching the blood loss and CPR, but he died at the scene. I know it’s your last day, but I thought you might want to attend as usual, so I’ve dispatched a car to collect you. It can be with you in thirty minutes, if you want to come up?’
‘I do. Where’s the girl now?’
‘Being treated for shock at the hospital, but she’s a plucky kid and has given us some good descriptions. We’ve a pretty good idea who one of the offenders is. I know it’s early, but I’ve already got uniform officers there doing house-to-house and we are sitting on the suspect’s home.’
Despite the tragedy of the situation, Roy Grace knew that when he returned to Sussex, one thing he would miss was the sheer number of officers the Metropolitan Police were able to deploy to a crime scene – and the speed at which they could do it.
Another thing he would miss was having a driver at times like these, he thought. Especially after last night, when he’d had farewell drinks at a pub with his team. He’d grown fond of them all in the short time he’d been in London and would miss them.
Thanking Davey, he started collecting his thoughts about this murder and the day ahead, as he showered and shaved. He needed to be looking sharp for an 8 a.m. breakfast meeting with Alison Vosper – which she had requested, somewhat to his surprise.
He waited downstairs, dressed in his uniform, sipping a strong coffee as he was eyed by a half-awake Humphrey, licking his paws. When he heard the sound of a car pulling up outside, he went upstairs, finding Cleo awake now and sleepily putting on a T-shirt. He apologized for waking her, held her head in his hands and gave her a big kiss. Then he hurried back down, grabbing his laptop and go-bag, and climbed into the back of an unmarked Audi.
Too wired to go back to sleep, he spent the thirty-minute, high-speed, blue-light journey on his laptop, going through the case files of the trial of Dr Edward Crisp.
‘This is as close as we can get, sir,’ his driver announced, bringing the car to a halt.
Grace looked up, surprised they were here already. A street-lit residential road. A couple of low-rise apartment blocks and post-war semis on both sides. Ahead, through the windscreen, he could see a blaze of blue flashing lights, and just beyond, with a uniform scene guard, police tape sealing off the road. It was a hive of activity. A large number of police vehicles, including a marked Transit van and a Crime Scene Investigation truck.
Leaving his laptop on the rear seat, he climbed out with a heavy heart. Every knife-crime murder that happened under his watch he considered to be a failure. A failure down to him.
Opening the boot of the car, he pulled out a protective oversuit, shoes and gloves from his go-bag, wrestled into them, then walked towards the cluster of vehicles and a group of people, mostly youths, hanging around the outer cordon. He showed his warrant card to the scene guard, signed the crime scene log and ducked under the tape.
A short distance ahead was a group of people similarly attired to himself, standing in the glare of temporary floodlights around a tent, the generator powering them rumbling close by. Several POLSA, in blue gloves, were on their hands and knees on the pavement doing a fingertip search, taking advantage of the so-called ‘golden hour’.
The words of the Murder Manual were ingrained in his brain, if not his soul, playing to him as he approached.
Who? What? Why? When? Where? And very importantly – How?
Davey turned to greet him as he approached.
‘What do you have, Paul?’
‘Only what I told you, boss. Nothing more at this stage, I’m afraid. Pathologist is on his way.’ He opened a flap in the tent and stepped aside to give Grace a view of the victim.
A black kid, eighteen years or so old, with a massive wound in his neck. Vacant eyes wide open. Short, bleached dreadlocks. A white, blood-soaked tank top. Dark tracksuit bottoms. Brand-new trainers. A large stain of pooled, drying blood on the pavement.
‘He wanted to be a doctor, his girlfriend told the first officers who attended,’ Davey said.
Anger flared in Roy Grace. Anger against the perpetrators, whoever the hell they were. The same anger he had felt so many times during the past six months. Anger at his impotence. Yes, he had made a difference. During his time here in this role the number of knife-crime deaths had reduced. But there were still far too many.
Just one was too many.
It was easy to look at statistics and feel smug about them. Hide behind them. Much harder to look at a dead te
enager who had wanted to be a doctor, murdered for trying to walk his girlfriend home. Murdered, most likely, by a group of youths so dispossessed by society that this was their vile, pathetic way of achieving some kind of status.
Murdered, by default, by a succession of governments whose politicians were just not interested in understanding the different strata of society they were responsible for.
The pooled blood was black beneath the harsh glare of the lights.
Black like the dead youth’s skin.
Black would give the politicians all kinds of mealy-mouthed excuses to explain about divided communities.
Bollocks.
This dead young person, with his £200 trainers and his ambition to be a doctor, deserved better than the hand he’d been dealt.
Failure. He looked at the boy, thinking, Failure by all of us to create a society that recognized your ambition and talent.
Shit. Grace knew how awful it was to tell a parent that their child would never come home again. A dreadful thing.
He turned away, his eyes stinging with salty tears.
22
Friday 3 May
Many criminal law barristers worked long hours for a relatively modest living, frequently alternating between prosecuting and defending. But some, like Primrose Brown, had carved a niche for themselves through winning high-profile trials for their clients against the odds – clients who were only too aware that no price was too steep to pay for freedom.
Brown was a QC – a Queen’s Counsel, or ‘silk’ as they were colloquially known – with an impressive track record. A short and ferociously bright woman of fifty-five, her fair hair pulled tightly and severely back and gripped by an ornate hairslide, she had a penchant for voluminous, sombre dresses, chunky jewellery and expensive shoes.
For many years Terence Gready had regularly entrusted clients to her when he needed the services of a QC, and they could afford her, and she seldom disappointed, either in the eye-watering size of her fees or in the evisceration of the prosecution’s case. At an age when many of her colleagues had opted for less stressful, but also less lucrative, positions as judges she had made the career decision to remain at the Bar, because she loved the work and was endlessly fascinated by the characters she encountered. But during these past months it was Gready himself who was now dependent on her skills of advocacy – and at the mercy of her fee notes.
At 11 a.m., seated opposite him at the metal table in the cramped, grotty interview room at Highdown Prison – away from his home patch of Brighton and Hove – Primrose Brown brought a rare dash of glamour into the numbing drabness of the place, Gready thought, and the fragrance of her scent made a welcome change to the cheesy ingrained smell in the room. To her left was her junior barrister, a smartly turned-out man in his late thirties called Crispin Sykes, who spoke little but had made copious notes at every meeting since Gready’s arrest. Primrose would not normally attend this type of meeting, leaving it to her junior counsel, but she had made an exception today due to her long history with Terence Gready.
To his left was Nick Fox. This was their last meeting before the trial.
Primrose Brown’s voice over the years had refined from a Yorkshire accent into London legal posh. But a trace of the gravelly North Country still remained. ‘I have to level with you, Terry, it’s not looking good,’ she said, peering at him through half-frame glasses.
And he wasn’t looking good, either, she thought. He’d lost weight and looked a decade older than when he’d first been incarcerated, just over five months ago. Prison did that to people, she was well aware; the diet, the drugs, the lack of fresh air – and perhaps all the other mental stuff, including loss of self-esteem, that went with the territory of being banged up. She’d met plenty of recidivists who looked twenty years older than their real age, but all the same she was shocked this change had happened so quickly.
‘Tell me about it, Prim,’ he said. ‘The police seized my laptop and phones. They took all the office computers, and the Law Society have closed me down. All my cases and colleagues have gone to other firms. In addition, all the proprietors of every takeaway I’ve helped set up, out of my community spirit, have suffered the indignity of being questioned, and it’s affected their trade for some months. Not to mention the effect this has had on my family.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said. ‘Luck doesn’t seem to be going our way on this case, at the moment. We’ve got Stephen Cork as lead prosecutor.’
Gready started at the mention of the name, as did everyone else in the room. ‘Shit,’ he said.
There were good and bad prosecutors, and Cork was renowned as one of the toughest. He was an experienced criminal barrister with a chip on his shoulder because he’d never become a QC. While training for the Bar, his pupil master had been disbarred for manipulating evidence – and while Cork had never been accused of taking part or having any knowledge, the taint of that episode had dogged him throughout his career. He blamed it as the reason why he had never taken silk.
Brown peered hard at her client. ‘Look, Terry, I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but you’ll understand why I have to.’ She gave him a quizzical look.
Gready shrugged. He sat on the hard chair opposite her, hunched but defiant. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Despite all your bank accounts being frozen, you’ve been able to come up with my original retainer, which was not insubstantial. You’ve met all my fees during these past months, and you’ve now been able to pay a further substantial retainer for my estimated fees for your trial. I need to know where this money has come from.’
‘It’s a loan from a mate who believes in my innocence,’ he said, guilelessly.
She glanced down at her files. ‘Mr Jonathan Jones, who resides in Panama?’
‘Yes. I helped him out years ago when he was in financial trouble. He’s since made a fortune in property out there and he’s repaying an old mate.’
Silently, she jotted down a note and slid the pad over to him for a signature. As soon as he had complied, she said, ‘Good, that’s out of the way. And my next question is, your instructions to me are that you still wish to proceed to trial having entered “not guilty” pleas on all counts, is that correct?’
He stared back at her levelly. ‘As I’ve maintained all along, Primrose, I’ve been fitted up. You understand better than most how much the police loathe us lawyers. Give them any opportunity to hit back and pot one of us and they’ll seize it with open arms. I’m a victim. An innocent victim. This is all a huge embarrassment for me.’
She glanced down and made another note, then looked back up at Gready and their eyes locked.
Her expression was deadpan, but there was the hint of humouring him in her bright blue eyes.
They both knew the score. Two pros. Fighting on the same side. No moral judgements. The trial that began next Tuesday in Court 3 of Lewes Crown Court, in Sussex, like all jury trials, was never going to be about delivering justice. It was going to be a game where personality ran roughshod over evidence. It was going to be about convincing twelve ordinary citizens that the family guy standing in the dock with a pleasant smile in the dark-blue suit and nice tie could not possibly be guilty of the allegations.
It was about those one or two words the foreperson would read out after the jury had retired to deliberate their verdict. Quite binary, really.
Guilty.
Not guilty.
Or in a barrister’s more colloquial terms –
Win.
Lose.
Fox remained behind after Brown and her junior barrister left the room. He gave Gready a reassuring smile. ‘We’ll sort it, Terry,’ he said.
‘What’s the update on Mickey Starr?’
‘No news – a lot depends on the outcome of your trial. If you were found guilty – heaven forbid – you’d both be sentenced together.’
‘And he’s kept schtum?’
‘Appears to have done. He doesn’t feature in any of the trial documents. Wan
t him as a character reference?’
‘Funny,’ Gready said, bitterly.
Fox was silent.
Gready went on. ‘You said a while back he’s looking at the wrong end of fifteen years plus?’
Fox nodded again. ‘For that amount of drugs, yes, plus his violence at Newhaven. He’d likely serve half actually inside, less what he’s done already on remand, the rest out on licence.’
‘How much reduction do you think he’d get for ratting me up?’
The solicitor was evasive. ‘Depends. You know the score, Terry, you’ve been in that situation with clients yourself.’
‘I know – but I’m finding it hard to think straight sometimes, at the moment. Depends on what?’
‘On how valuable the prosecution thinks what he has to say is. He could be looking at a substantial reduction in sentence.’
Gready smiled. It was a while since he had last smiled. But Nick Fox would sort it, he knew. They had their plan. King of the Jungle. He always sorted everything.
23
Friday 3 May
‘You look tired, Roy. Are you OK?’ Alison Vosper asked.
They were in a booth of a hotel on the Embankment, close to New Scotland Yard.
‘I’m good, ma’am,’ he said, grateful for the strong but bad coffee that had been poured into his cup. He sliced open a poached egg, the yolk running across the toast and avocado. ‘Just sad about the stabbing victim I saw earlier.’
The Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Met shrugged. ‘I know how well you’ve picked up on the fact there are huge cultural differences between communities. Not all our officers get it, but you do. I’m really impressed with what you’ve achieved in your short time with us – and it hasn’t escaped the attention of my boss and the Home Office. You’ve done what I thought was impossible when I took on this role.’
He smiled. ‘What is it they say, ma’am? The impossible we do immediately, miracles take a little longer?’