‘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 teenager 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.