Beyond Reasonable Doubt

by Gary Bell

  ‘That’s why you’re here, anyway,’ he said. ‘You’re gonna make a case. You’re gonna find witnesses. You’re gonna get your fat arse home and bang on fucking doors if you have to, and you’re getting me out of this shit.’

  ‘“Bang on doors”?’ Tiredness was starting to outweigh my apprehension; I was feeling irritable with the whole pantomime. ‘The investigation is over, Billy. I’m not a detective. I present the facts to the jury, and the fact remains that without an alibi or an explanation, the cops have got you bang to rights.’

  He only shrugged. In that moment, he hardly seemed to care. ‘You’re meant to be the clever cunt, aren’t you? I’ve read about you, your cases. Follow some leads! The lass who died was a Paki. Wouldn’t surprise me if it was one of them shame killings you hear about. Probably sucked too many cocks and got offed by her brothers or summat.’

  I was already on my feet before he’d finished.

  ‘We’re not doing this, Billy. I’m not doing this.’ I swept the papers up into a bundle, but wouldn’t meet his eye. ‘Good luck with the trial.’

  I had one hand curled and pressed to the door, ready to knock for the warder to open it from the other side, when he spoke again.

  ‘Those two lads, what were their names?’

  I paused, so near to getting out.

  ‘What lads?’ I swallowed.

  I suspected I knew.

  ‘Two big fuckers,’ he drawled. ‘Did you and our kid over in, what, ’82? Fucked Aidan’s leg up for the rest of his life.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  I did. Their names were Robbie Senior and Jonno Morse.

  Aidan and I were relatively big fish in our little pond by then, but these two thugs were considerably bigger and already approaching thirty when they jumped us after a night out. Aidan ended up sharing my ward in the hospital.

  Bigger fish they were, but they didn’t know about the shark in the Barber lineage.

  ‘Pulled a blade on you, didn’t they?’ Billy went on. ‘Slashed your chest up, sent the two of you to A&E, and who did you run off to once you were out? Not the coppers. Nah …’

  I turned back from the door; he was staring off into the deep dark past, head jerking all the while, light shining off his scalp or else swallowed by tattoos.

  ‘The bigger one … Johnny something? His teeth got stuck in my new Docs. Fucked those soles up good and proper. Ha!’

  The noise of his laugh was like breaking glass. More than thirty years had passed, but I could still see him standing there in the night, younger but every bit as enormous, slick with blood, as he stamped and stamped on our attackers at our request, and how justified it had all felt. How thoroughly deserved. How fucking good.

  I blinked the image away, dissolving it in spots behind my eyes, and came back to the present.

  He had me. He had me, and he knew it.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he snarled, catching my gaze and reading my mind, ‘so sit the fuck back down.’

  He held his stare like a dog on a leash, humourless and ready to pounce, and even there, under the watchful eye of the camera, his unpredictability left me too wary to turn my back again. Slowly, cautiously, I returned to the chair.

  ‘I’m just saying,’ he went on, as if there had never been an interruption, ‘it’s worth looking into, isn’t it? Old Bill’s too scared to rattle a few mosque doors these days. Cowards. You know they send girls like her into marketplaces, don’t you? Nail bombs strapped to them. They dress them up first. You don’t know what they’re capable of.’

  I realised from the intensity of his glower that he believed it entirely, and that belief gave him a sense of power.

  As a violent, irrational youth he had been dangerous.

  As an empowered, righteous adult, he was downright deadly.

  ‘This attitude isn’t going to help in your defence,’ I told him. ‘If you’re going to stand a chance, you’ll have to knock it on the head. Furthermore, my junior out there, Miss Barnes, she’s going to be representing you alongside me, if you’re lucky. You need to treat her with respect, because she’s part of the package. You don’t get me without her, and you don’t get her without respect.’

  He blinked, another spasm. ‘I reckon you’re misunderstanding the situation here. Almost sounds like you’re in charge.’

  ‘I’m not the one on trial. I can walk out of that door and forget you ever existed.’

  ‘Well, I won’t forget about you. About the things you got up to.’

  I almost laughed, so surreal was the turn of events. ‘You’re adding extortion to the list as well?’

  ‘Extortion?’ He tapped his feet under the table. ‘Wasn’t that what you almost got sent down for? Or was it just fraud?’

  Whatever colour that remained must’ve drained out of my face.

  ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Turns out my memory’s not so bad after all …’ He slid his elbows closer across the table. ‘You’re going to sort this, Rook. You’ll do what you have to do, or we’ll see which side of the court you end up standing on.’

  I felt a nod betray me. With nothing more to say, I stood, careful not to turn my back on him again.

  ‘One more thing, before you go,’ he added. ‘Good thinking, bringing one of them over to our side. That’ll play nicely with the jury.’

  And then the door swung open and I stepped out backwards, just about as quickly as I could manage.

  8

  I was twenty-two years old when I decided to become a barrister. Not the most conventional resolution for a young, homeless fraudster to make, perhaps.

  I remember the precise instant as if it came upon me like a beam parting the sky, one of those life-changing, light-bulb moments; in actuality, the idea rolled right up to my feet in a mass of steel, walnut and leather heaving to the kerb alongside me.

  I’d only just returned from Europe, which is where I’d headed after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud in Nottingham Crown Court. My age had, fortunately, seen my six-month prison sentence suspended for two years, and I didn’t take any further chances. I acquired a one-year passport, hitchhiked my way to Dover, and spent what little I had on a ticket across the Channel.

  Though my journey didn’t help me find myself in any grandiose, spiritual sense, I did see as much of the Continent as the mid-eighties had to offer to a young man with a patched-up tent and no money, and I followed the warmth wherever it took me, from sleeping under the stars in the Jardin du Luxembourg, to cleaning out bilges along the Mediterranean for petty cash. Eventually, however, it had to come to an end.

  I couldn’t face returning home, there was little for me there any more, so I stayed south, riding in the back of a lorry to London, and found myself sleeping rough again, this time at the Bullring, just north of Waterloo Station. Commonly referred to as Cardboard City, the Bullring had become the nation’s symbol of homelessness, its community of more than two hundred vagrants banding together to doss on the concrete of the huge open-air space, drinking, smoking and shuddering against the nights. For six weeks, I lived there without purpose, using my backpack as a pillow and wrapping my sleeping bag in cardboard and polythene for warmth, quickly finding myself upon the horns of the miserable homeless spiral; I couldn’t get a job without an address, and I couldn’t get an address without a job.

  I was stuck, too poor to eat, too proud to beg. I had no parents to bail me out and couldn’t bear to burden my sisters, who were now under the care of our aunt, with any more grief.

  And then I saw the car.

  For it was, of course, a car that put an end to my aimless itinerant lifestyle.

  A brand-new Jaguar XJ6, a gorgeous stretched sedan of fine British engineering, growling as loud as its namesake and driven by a lad not many years my senior in a tailored suit with a stunning brunette at his side. For an aimless waif of twenty-two, the sight was seductive enough to stop me dead in my tracks, if ever I’d had tracks to follow.

  ‘Hey, mate!’ I shouted as
he stepped out of the car into the daylight. I’d been shuffling through the West End with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

  The driver turned, bewildered and on guard.

  I must’ve been a real sight, bouncing on my toes, cupping a burning fag down by my side. ‘What do you do for a living?’

  ‘I’m a barrister,’ he replied flatly, a little smugly, and then the two of them disappeared inside the bustling restaurant on the opposite side of the road.

  And that was that. For the first time in my life I had a plan, and it stretched out like a straight tunnel before me, with that pristine Jaguar parked up and waiting at the other end for my arrival.

  I got there, eventually.

  However, I didn’t manage to afford one until well into the nineties, and what was a brand-new release in ’87 was now thirty years old when it coughed its way down to Belmarsh after racking up more than 180,000 miles. The cream leather was faded, stained and shrinking, the exterior, once a racy Bordeaux red, was now victim to the relentless death-march of rust, and the engine rattled and moaned at every stationary moment. It was, to put it bluntly, a relic.

  But it was my relic, the reward for my efforts, and I loved every scratch.

  One of the few benefits of such a dated car was the cigarette lighter receptacle, and I clicked it in with my thumb as soon as we came up to a red light outside of Belmarsh, grinding my foot up and down on the stiff, tired clutch to spare it from stalling. It was raining now, raining hard, and the frayed wipers squealed across the windscreen as they threw bucketfuls into the road. On my back seat were my loose golf clubs, untouched since I’d found myself buried by the fraud case, and they rattled across the leather like bones.

  ‘Mind if I smoke?’ I asked, unable to stand the discomfiture in the car any longer.

  ‘No.’ Zara kept her face firmly to the passenger window, as she had since setting off, and we returned to the deafening silence beneath the sound of water hitting steel.

  ‘You want one?’

  ‘No.’

  I sparked up and lowered the window for the smoke, letting the weather soak my shoulder, and longed for the light to change already.

  ‘What happened in there was inexcusable,’ I said. ‘If you’d rather not assist me in defending him, I can find somebody else to lead in this and we’ll set you up with something else.’

  She didn’t answer straight away. When I glanced across I caught her expression reflected in the wing mirror, smeared by water. She didn’t look upset. She looked offended, and that made me feel so much worse.

  ‘There were more than a thousand graduates from my year at Bar school,’ she said, ‘with a backlog of another three thousand applicants waiting for pupillage, and only four hundred positions available across the country. I thought I’d made it into King Edward’s chambers last year because I’d never lost a moot, not a single debate, and that wasn’t down to luck. I worked my arse off, Mr Rook. While the other students were out drinking, I was studying. Before that, in Hull, I worked three jobs around my full-time uni hours to earn the twenty grand to get into Bar school. I’m not telling you this to sound like some preachy, working-class hero, it’s just …’

  ‘You wanted it that badly?’

  ‘I did,’ she nodded, face still turned to the window. ‘I didn’t have a choice. Average degree, average background. After all that effort, you know what they said to me at the end of my year at King Edward’s?’

  ‘What did they say?’

  She took a long, steady breath and removed her glasses. ‘They told me I’d been the perfect candidate because they’d been looking for some diversity in their pupils that year. It was only afterwards that I heard about the investigation into King Edward’s by the Equality and Diversity Committee that was going on at the time. My acceptance had nothing to do with my work. I was the first working-class woman of mixed race they interviewed. They rolled me out like a mascot, took my photograph for their website, and then let me go.’

  I sighed, exhaling smoke. ‘You’re certain that was the case? As you said, tenancies attract a great deal of competition.’

  ‘I know it,’ she said. ‘I suppose I knew it all along.’

  The rain sounded more like hail now; the light stayed red, but there was no traffic crossing the junction.

  ‘Not all chambers are like that,’ I said. ‘You’ve had a lousy first experience, and it’d be enough to put some people off the Criminal Bar for life, but you’ve stuck it out. You’ve worked hard to get here. You should be proud of yourself.’

  ‘I’m not doing it just for myself,’ she said. ‘It’s for …’

  I waited for her to finish. She didn’t. The light finally changed.

  I tossed the cigarette, sealed the window, and watched the fences of Belmarsh shrink into grey in the spattered mirrors. ‘For what?’

  She hesitated. ‘I lost my cousin a few years back on my mum’s side. Hazeem.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she added quickly. ‘I mean, he lived with my uncle in Birmingham, and we hadn’t seen each other much since we were kids, but still … that sort of thing really hits a family hard, you know?’

  I nodded. ‘What happened?’

  ‘A stupid argument. Some lads got into a fight, I guess. Somebody brought out a knife, and somebody died. Hazeem wasn’t there. He barely knew the people involved. Still, his name was somehow thrown out by a witness, another Asian to add to the list, and he was charged with conspiracy. His defence counsel took one look and talked him into pleading guilty for a reduced sentence. He was so scared he did what he was told. He ended up in Wormwood Scrubs, started on the drugs there, and killed himself five months later. He was nineteen years old. Never been in trouble before. He wanted to be a surgeon.’

  ‘Damn.’ I didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘If he’d had the right defence, somebody willing to look past legal aid and do their job properly, then maybe things would’ve turned out different. Maybe not. All I know is that if I have to face a thousand killers, one way or the other, at least I’ll be able to say I worked to the best of my ability. So, if taking me off this murder case is down to your professional opinion, and you think my presence might incite a response from the client that will impede any progress, then that’s fair enough. But if you’re saying this for my sake, then I should let you know that I’ve never let anything hold me back before, and I’ve no intention of being bullied out now. I will be a barrister, Mr Rook, and a good one at that.’ She replaced her glasses, folded her arms, and lowered her voice. ‘As for William Barber, well … I should’ve told him to go fuck himself.’

  I smiled. It seemed almost silly, finding myself encouraged by the words of a twenty-four-year-old pupil I’d brought in to help with the paperwork, but I couldn’t help it. There was something about her that reminded me of somebody I hadn’t seen in a very long time. She had all the fire and naivety of a young barrister by the name of Elliot Rook, who had once been ready to take on the world.

  9

  The case papers for Regina v. William Barber read like the exposition of a pulp thriller novel.

  My eyes moved sluggishly, pages turning deeper ivory as the afternoon grew late beyond the cluttered windowsill of my office, rain exacerbating the gloom.

  Zara was sitting in the opposite corner by the old bureau I’d emptied out for her to use, the small stereo it had previously housed now balanced on top of the nearest stack of cardboard boxes, her boots kicked off and feet tucked up and underneath her on the chair.

  She was using her forefinger to swipe across the screen of her iPad, Percy having already forwarded her a digital copy of the brief, and her progress seemed to be matching my own wearisome pace.

  Despite my attempts after the interview, I couldn’t ignore the palpable tension in the room, and wished I was alone.

  I was halfway through the evidence section when I had to turn on the lamp. Receiving copies of the forensic photographs was rare and unfortunate, partic
ularly for Zara’s first case; these days, case files are ordinarily filled with simple diagrams of the injuries.

  Here was The Girl purchasing coffee at a service station in the village. The image from the security camera had added a slight fuzz to her face, but her physical beauty was undeniable. She was remarkably tall, at least six feet, and even at sixteen she could’ve been a model.

  A turn of the page, and here she was again, only much clearer now, her face blue, swollen and cold. The posthumous breakages in her long legs had caused them to splay unnaturally from her hips, eternally caught in their sad, widened vulgarity, and the softer skin on her back had split like over-ripened fruit.

  From across the room, I could hear the pace of Zara’s breathing quicken in fits and starts, and when I looked over I caught the same images reflected in the lenses of her glasses. The sudden realisation that the victim had not been entirely dissimilar from the girl sitting across from me sent a wretched turn through my chest.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. Disassociation, isn’t it?’

  I nodded dolefully – correct – and yet something about this attack being perpetrated so close to home, most likely by a man I knew, with fists that had once injured on my behalf, made it more physical than any case I’d ever worked on. I couldn’t silence the swelling of my conscience, the whispering voice that asked how things might’ve been if I’d acted otherwise in years long past.

  It made my palms sweat, dampening the papers at the edges, and I found myself impulsively opening the small compartment underneath my desk, in which I kept a couple of bottles concealed.

  Zara must’ve heard the clinking of glass, and spoke without looking up from her screen.

  ‘Don’t suppose any of that is going spare?’

  ‘Course …’ I shook the dust from two heavy glasses and poured a couple of whiskeys out, while Zara started to read aloud.

  ‘Counsel’s opinion,’ she said, ‘“Client is unwilling to correspond with counsel on even a fundamental level. His unwavering hostility undermines any redeeming qualities in his character – of which I’ve discovered none thus far – and jeopardises any decent prospect of him standing before a jury. He appears to lack not only remorse for the victim, but any basic sense of empathy as a human and, in my opinion, continues to present a physical risk to anybody in his presence …” And that’s from his former counsel! No wonder he let him go. Oh, thanks.’ She took the glass, thinking hard. ‘I take it he doesn’t want to enter a plea?’