Pinpoint

by Sheila Mary Taylor

  P I N P O I N T

  by

  Sheila Mary Taylor

  ISBN 1461049148

  EAN 978-1461049142

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  'Pinpoint' was first published by Night Publishing, a trading name of Valley Strategies Ltd., a UK-registered private limited-liability company, registration number 5796186. Night Publishing can be contacted at: http://www.nightpublishing.com.

  'Pinpoint' is the copyright of the author, Sheila Mary Taylor, 2011. All rights are reserved.

  The cover image is the copyright of Muriel Clutten, 2011. All rights are reserved.

  All characters are fictional, and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is accidental. Although some of the places and establishments in and around Manchester, East Cheshire and Derbyshire UK, which form the physical background to this story, are real, or were once real, there are also some born purely of the author's imagination.

  Strangeways Prison, Manchester, England (September 1994)

  I’ve represented many murderers and am often surprised at how normal they appear. But this one is different. As he walks into the interview room he stops dead. His mouth drops open. His eyes bulge. His elbows clamp to his sides as though a knife has plunged into his back. And he looks straight at me unlike most who bow their heads till I say something to make them feel at ease, and who look past me when they tell me their stories. Not this one.

  ‘Please sit down,’ I say. His name is Smith. Sam Smith. This is what it says on his file cover. It’s what he called himself when he was interviewed by the police.

  ‘I know it seems stupid,’ I say, ‘but can I ask you to confirm your name. Your full name.’

  I don’t know. I just don’t see him as a Sam Smith. Stupid name anyway. Nobody calls their kid that. Maybe I’ll know from the way he tells me. The name, when he says it himself, will either sound like it belongs or like he’s pretending.

  ‘Sam Smith,’ he says, and something in the timbre of his voice gels with the curve of his lips and the way his slightly protruding eyes follow mine . . .

  And now he’s nodding his head. Or am I imagining it? And there’s an almost imperceptible smile on his face. That smile. And those eyes. I grip the desk. I can’t breathe. My skin turns cold, clammy. My fingers tingle. A fragment of long forgotten memory skitters through my head then vanishes . . .

  There’s only one person I’ve ever known with eyes like those. And my darling twin brother died twenty-six years ago. Before my real life began.

  Scary coincidence.

  But let’s get on with it and start the job - it’s going to be a long haul, and he’s got a lot to do to beat the charge. Murder. Horrible, cold-blooded, psychopathic, sexually motivated sadism.

  And I think I know him.

  FRIDAY

  Eight Months Later

  - 1 -

  The door to the jury room swung open. The seven men and five women filed in and took their seats. Julia Grant glanced at the dock. Perched behind the thick protective glass Sam Smith looked immaculate in a fresh white shirt, the blond beard newly trimmed, nothing moving except those marble-blue eyes.

  She noticed that Detective Chief Superintendent Paul Moxon was already back with the small group of officers who had gathered, sitting opposite the jury benches and eyeballing the jurors throughout the trial. Old trick, hard to get the judges to move them away, to persuade them that they are engaging in deliberate psychological warfare for the jury’s votes. Paul smiled at her ─ a slow half smile and a slightly raised eyebrow, as if to say that for only one of them would today's verdict spell success.

  She smiled back. Defence versus Prosecution. Part of the day's work. Only this time the stakes were higher than usual.

  She looked towards the dock and saw that Sam Smith was also watching her. Their eyes met, but there was not a blink of recognition, his face so alien it was hard to imagine how the thoughts haunting her in the eight months she had been preparing his defence had ever entered her mind. Eight months studying his face across the narrow interview table for some tell-tale sign. But right now there was nothing in that face she could relate to. Nothing that even hinted at a link. Nothing that drew her to him. Good-looking men seldom delivered what their looks promised, she thought. Some unsuspecting female might be attracted until she looked into his eyes. Fish eyes. Cold and hard. Shut off from the rest of the world except for rare fleeting expressions of sadness when they seemed to drift into the past ─ and drag Julia with them.

  The Clerk of the Court rose to his feet. ‘Court stand,’ he blurted in his usual offhand way.

  The door opened. Mr Justice Dale strode to his red leather chair, scarlet and ermine robes flowing, wig well down his forehead. He nodded to the crowded court and sat down.

  Julia pressed her shoulders against the back of the solicitors’ bench. Another five minutes and it would all be over. And what then?

  He might be free, but would she ever be?

  The Clerk of the Court cleared his throat. ‘Will the foreman of the jury please stand.’ He looked directly at the foreman. ‘To the charge of murder, have you reached a verdict upon which all of you are agreed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Something made her glance at Smith again as if he’d called her name out loud. Instead of looking at the foreman, who was the person about to pronounce on the rest of his life, his gaze was fixed on her, waiting for her to turn and look at him, knowing that she would. Oh, that stare. That look. He thinks he has some power over me, she thought. Some right of claim. Men always expect to have power over women. One way or another. Even Sam Smith.

  Or whoever he really was.

  ‘Do you find the defendant guilty, or not guilty?’ the Clerk of the Court asked in his precise, clipped voice.

  Even a hardened criminal like Smith must surely feel some trepidation now. But there was not even a flicker to show he registered one iota of emotion.

  Julia sat back in her seat, determined not to look at Smith again.

  The hushed court waited.

  The pause between the Clerk’s question and delivery of the reply was like a gap in the fabric of time, allowing her mind to wander through the whole of her experience of dealing with this man. From prison to this court, through all the painful sessions of trying to get to know him. And of giving up her inner self to him. The hours she had spent in the interview room at Strangeways Prison fast-forwarded through her mind as bit by bit she’d wrenched from him the facts, piecing it all together so that she could convince QC Geoff Atherton, who would try to convince the jury that Sam Smith had not raped, tortured, knifed, mutilated and strangled to death seventeen year old Joanne Perkins.

  ‘Guilty,’ the foreman said.

  ‘You bastard!’ someone in the gallery yelled. There was no one rooting for Smith.

  She looked straight ahead. Remembering what Ben Lloyd had told her this morning, she cringed with embarrassment. ‘You’re one of the best criminal solicitors in Manchester, but I just can’t see how the firm is going to win on this,’ he’d said. ‘If he’s acquitted you’re the bent brief who got him off to the disgust of the general public. If he’s convicted you’ll be the laughing stock for having taken on the case in the first place. How are you going to uphold your reputation?’

  A fat lot of good her reputation was doing her now.

  She forced herself not to turn around again. Smith could signal as much as he liked with those slightly protruding eyes and Michelangelo lips, but her part in this was finished. It was all over bar the sentencing. And that was
a foregone conclusion. No adjournment for reports here, no expectation of leniency.

  She wondered, with a gut wrenching emptiness, why she still cared what happened to the man. She had listened to the evidence, weighed up the judge’s closing speech. She knew in her heart it was a true verdict, beyond appeal. Her client was guilty. He had shown no mercy and was not about to get any now from Dale. Not a chance. So the pain in her heart was another part of the mystery of being this man’s lawyer. Why couldn’t she let it go - consign him to the dustbin of her no-hoper cases?

  Ignoring the rumble from the public gallery, Mr Justice Dale invited Atherton to address him on sentence. Julia and Geoff had rehearsed how this phase of the case should be dealt with if the verdict went against Smith. They had persuaded Smith without a fight that it would be best to just get on with it: recite the facts of his painful history ─ the abuse, neglect, alienation and detachment from real childhood. All they had received from their client on the subject was a cold, unemotional, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ And so Geoff reeled off, with little ceremony, his prepared comments. ‘My client will, I know, not accept the jury’s verdict, My Lord, but he knows the matter is now in your hands.’ Barely allowing anyone in the courtroom to have time to shift in their seats or mutter a comment to their neighbour, Dale addressed himself to the dock.

  ‘Sam Smith, you have been found guilty of one of the most heinous crimes known to mankind. There is only one penalty the law can impose on you and that is a sentence of life imprisonment. I find the wickedness of your crime, your contempt for your victim, and your complete lack of remorse so repugnant that I will recommend to the Home Secretary that the sentence be served by you for at least thirty years.’

  Julia’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. It was as if the words had been directed at her instead of to her client. She almost found herself turning to Smith to say sorry, but caught herself just in time. She was so confused she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. And she didn’t dare look at Paul Moxon.

  ‘I cannot order that you spend the rest of your life in jail,’ the judge continued. ‘But if this were possible I would further recommend that no parole be granted until you have drawn your final breath. This is the only way society can be adequately protected, and you can be properly punished. Take him down.’

  Julia leaned back. Thank God, she thought, dismissing the notion that was invading her thoughts.

  A weight of silence bore down on her as though she was under water. No, she told herself, taking a deep breath. Apart from the colour of our hair . . . but her thoughts still refused to line up into any semblance of logic.

  She glanced at Geoff Atherton, sitting immediately in front of her. At that moment he turned and looked at her. His face showed none of the irritation he must be feeling. As one of Manchester’s most revered Queen’s Counsel, he wasn’t used to losing a case, especially one for which he had received instructions from Julia. He smiled a half smile. He shrugged a win-some-lose-some shrug. She half-smiled back. Then with a theatrical flick of her eyelids she looked up at the ceiling, flexed the tension from her shoulders and began gathering up the files in front of her. She had to keep making this look like a perfectly ordinary case.

  Behind her a voice pierced the silence of the courtroom like a shot from a gun.

  ‘Julia!’

  She spun round towards the dock. Two dock officers were holding Smith between them. Like a coil of spring-steel he burst free from their grip. Two more officers appeared and manacled his hands behind his back. As they hauled him to the top of the stairs leading to the cells, he twisted round to face her.

  'You’ll pay for this, Julia fucking Grant.’ His voice soared above the hubbub in the court. ‘And for everything else, you fucking bitch. Just you bloody wait.’

  - 2 -

  The hubbub in court rose rapidly to a crescendo as files were gathered up into boxes and counsel who had been at each other’s throats for the past fortnight exchanged jokes. Police officers engaged in self-congratulatory, macho banter, and news reporters circled for whatever sensational comment could be swept from the air. Julia, blocking her ears, fled down the stairs and pushed through the smoky glass doors of the Crown Court.

  Dodging the gaggle of voice recorders and long-lens cameras, she dismissed the dozens of reporters and TV cameramen with a polite ‘No comment’ and walked in a daze into the wide-open space of Crown Square. She glanced over her shoulder. Geoff Atherton was obliging the cameramen with a statement that would be televised around the country within the next few hours.

  With Smith’s threat still ringing in her ears she stopped to take a revitalising breath of fresh air. The fragrance from the newly cut lawns mingled with an enticing whiff of coffee wafting from the Bar San Georgio. A coffee would save her life. She walked quickly past a Piccadilly Gold news car, then stopped and turned back to face the court, her thoughts drawn against her will to Smith.

  Yet another television crew was besieging Geoff. Was he telling them about Smith’s threat? Usually she knew exactly how her clients would react to their verdicts, yet nothing had armed her for Smith’s outburst from the dock. Nor for his final poisoned look.

  He’s down there now, she thought, locked in the cells below the court. I should be light-headed with relief. I’ll never see him again. After an outburst like that, she had a good mind to write a terse letter, expressing her disappointment at the result, but making it clear that she would not tolerate, under even the most extenuating circumstances, being threatened and abused as he had just done. Smith had just given Julia her get-out. If he needed further advice, he should nominate alternative solicitors and she would pass the file to them.

  But would it be as easy as that? Would she ever be able to forget the voice, those eyes, that hauntingly familiar look?

  She was torn between believing and not believing. Between wanting and not wanting. Between loving and not loving. Such a situation had no precedent, she was sure. Nothing in her legal training had prepared her for this. She felt as though her sense of logic had been turned upside down, threatening to make her act contrary to the legal principles she normally upheld, actions contrary to the advice she gave to her clients. She hated herself for this apparent weakness, but seemed powerless to overcome it. When she thought of her long lost dead brother, and Smith, in the same mental breath, she found the paradox offensive, but she had no idea why she could not keep her sacred, almost mythically precious thoughts of her brother separate from those of this callous, manipulative and deeply depraved man.

  The gaping hole in her memory had started twenty-six years ago on the very last day she saw him. All she remembered after that was being told that her twin brother was dead. And then being adopted by David and Jessie, when a new life with no past began.

  The question had been gnawing away at her soul since almost the very first moment of meeting Smith: Is he, could he be, that loved and longed-for brother whose name she could not even remember? The idea was as ridiculous as it was impossible to dismiss from her mind.

  That day at Strangeways, when he had walked into the interview room for the first time, he had sensed something too, of that she’d been certain. But even now she was confused about why she had almost had a panic attack. For twenty-six years she had dreamed the dream of a child, that her brother would be restored to her. Now she sometimes doubted he had ever existed. She longed for what was surely only an impression in her unconscious, a nebulous sensation of loss rather than of any specific being.

  And never a person such as this.

  Coincidence? she asked herself. It couldn’t be anything but.

  Maybe, Julia. Maybe, she mused, looking round in case anyone could see her mouthing these words to herself and begin to question her sanity. Maybe something that happens by chance in a surprising or remarkable way is how most people would categorize coincidence, wouldn’t they? Yes, but too often in my career I see happenings which appear to occur by chance but are never just coincidence. They’re always part o
f a chain of events which can be manipulated to go one way or another. Sometimes you’re not even aware of this manipulation. You reach a crossroads. You can’t decide which way to go. But somehow your subconscious is busy computing that chain of links. It comes up with an answer. You start marching down one of the roads. Afterwards you have no idea why you chose this particular road but surprisingly, just by sheer chance, it is the right one.

  Come on, Julia. It’s simple. If you were to trace backwards through that chain you’d eventually reach a solid brick wall through which you could no longer see the event that “just by chance” triggered the one that followed. Maybe then, but only then, you could say that it was just a coincidence.

  Forget it, she told herself. Your imagination has been blazing unchecked. Smile. It’s over. It doesn’t matter who he is. He is who he says he is. And if he isn’t it’s none of your business. He’s just a killer who’s got his just deserts. The faint likeness you thought you saw was clearly the twisted result of your obsessive yearning for your lost twin brother, the only person in those desperate days before your adoption who was kind to you.

  She stopped walking, and stood rooted to the ground as though this would sharpen her memory. But he tried to protect me, she thought, though not knowing why. And the thought would not go away. The only person who had loved her . . .

  No, Julia, she said emphatically to herself. Not your bloody brother. Just a nasty piece of work you had the misfortune to represent, who nearly manipulated the life blood from you and tapped into your sense of longing after you foolishly showed him too many - far too many - of your personal cards. The hand you shouldn’t show to your clients. More fool you, Julia. This man called Smith is behind bars now. Removed for all intents and purposes from this world. Amen.

  There you are. Nothing could have been easier. The door is locked. The key thrown away. Now, get on with your life.