Beyond Reasonable Doubt

by Gary Bell

  Somewhere deep inside, that hurt. ‘It was all declared to my Inn years ago, and, with all due respect, that’s a dirty move – you knew the score when you gave me pupillage.’

  ‘Pupillage with a condition,’ he said. ‘The condition that you leave your past behind, and become the best you could be.’

  ‘And I did. I have.’

  ‘Yet here we are, twenty-three years on … You think I don’t know why you took this case? The client knows something, doesn’t he? Something you’ve kept close to your chest …’

  I didn’t respond, and so he leaned further across the desk, scrutinising my face in the light.

  ‘Is that a black eye forming?’

  ‘Fucking Bowen!’ I barked, straightening up. ‘Sneaking around like a dirty little snake, going tit for tat. He’s a grown man for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘As are you! Perhaps you ought to remember that, and start getting your act together, Elliot. I’m sure an apology wouldn’t go amiss for starters.’

  ‘An apology? If he really has a problem with me, then he’s more than welcome to say it to my face and take me on any time, anywhere.’

  ‘Then this might just be the perfect opportunity,’ he replied curtly. ‘Your murder at the Bailey. Bowen will be junior on the prosecution.’

  ‘The CPS must really be struggling for advocates if they’re hiring him for outside counsel again, considering the mess he made of their last trial! How’d he even manage to get this?’

  ‘A favour from the leading counsel, I’d imagine.’

  This piqued my interest. ‘Why? Who’s leading him?’

  ‘Harlan Garrick, with Merton Pike presiding.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ I muttered. ‘As if this couldn’t get any better …’

  He nodded solemnly, smoothed his shirt with both hands, and spun his chair to the window. The light was falling fast there, smothered by a thick grey cloud that blurred the line between sky and London granite.

  ‘Don’t go back up there before the trial,’ he said. ‘Whatever you’ve been doing, leave it behind. Go home and spend the next week preparing as you ought to, as I taught you to do, and then win the case. Win it, and leave all this where it belongs. In the past.’

  22

  Gloucester Place is a lengthy stretch of classic London town houses in Marylebone, NW1, four blocks from Baker Street Station and, beyond that, Madame Tussauds, Regent’s Park and London Zoo.

  Its close proximity to tourist town meant that the twenty-minute journey to chambers would, more often than not, take me at least an hour whether I faced the crowds on the Underground or the queues on the road. I preferred to drive into work, but my car would often have to spend the night on Chancery Lane while I dried out on the Tube home.

  Each Marylebone town house was a perfect reprint of its nondescript neighbour, with six neat windows rising up to the third floor in pairs, separated from the pavement by black, spiked iron fencing, and steps leading down below street level.

  That’s where I lived, in a rented studio flat basement.

  In the year of doing so, I’d made not a single impression on the decor of the bedroom–kitchen–living area, nor the cupboard-sized bathroom at the rear. No frames hung from the walls, no rugs brightened the faded carpet. It stank of recent divorce, from the cardboard toilet-roll tubes and empty cans of shaving foam mounting by the toilet – seat almost always upright – to the muddle of whites and darks in the overflowing clothes basket, and the bare, grotty fridge, containing only a few beers, a half-bottle of imitation ketchup, and a jar of English mustard.

  I didn’t have a wardrobe, but the free-standing garment rack I’d bought for a tenner from Argos had started to bow under the weight of my extra-large shirts, suits and sweaters; the rest hadn’t fitted me since the millennium, but I liked to tell myself that they might. The dozens of boxes of paperwork made my office seem bare by comparison.

  This was all I had. I’d gone into my marriage with nothing; it was only proper I’d come out of it the same.

  I went straight there after leaving chambers and collapsed like a deadweight onto the futon; ordered a kebab from the Istanbul Grill down the road and stared blankly at the television until its busy light faded into nothing.

  That was the first evening I had the dream, which would recur every night until the trial.

  In it, I was lost. Stumbling through impossible darkness, using only my hands, my sense of touch, to guide me. I could feel rock on either side, worn smooth by the thin flow of freezing cold water that rolled across its face without direction, and I groped stalactites that hung from above. Somehow, despite the running water on the walls, the floor was always dry, the smell of dust and raw iron inescapable.

  A distant feminine scream rebounded from every surface and I tried to hurry towards it, but when I moved my hands down I felt a sack of stone dust tied to my waist, holding me back, impossible to lose.

  On and on I staggered blindly, legs like shackles, for what seemed to be hours in that illogical sense of time beyond consciousness, until the scream led me towards a glimpse of white-blue light coming from round a final corner. Thousands of black motes hung perfectly static there, clouding the beam, as if time had now stopped altogether.

  But it was never The Girl I found there.

  It was Aidan Barber, his face still young but smudged, warped at the edges by my own failing memory; a lamp glaring into my eyes from the top of his head.

  We stood in silence – the utter, damp silence of the deep underground – until a single trickle of blood came rolling down thick as syrup between his eyes, and he asked a question, which was more of a sensation than actual sound.

  ‘Where were you, mate?’

  And then I woke, and had to get a cold beer to wash the taste of thirty-year-old soot out from the cracks between my teeth.

  I’d ended the meeting with Rupert by reluctantly giving responsibility for Zara back to Stein to help with the fraud preparation, and so I spent almost all of the next week at home away from chambers in something of a mental slough, trying to organise my thoughts, preparing for what was to come, and hiding what had quickly developed into an obvious black eye.

  There’s a great deal of work involved in a Crown Court trial, especially for the defence.

  Prosecutors are often able to work like session musicians, turning up and plugging in, sometimes only receiving the brief on the first morning of the trial. I suspected, however, that Bowen might just find the time to ensure that this would be something of a nail in my coffin, especially with Harlan Garrick QC at the prosecution’s helm.

  Garrick, and my great defeat of 2012.

  He hadn’t been silk back then, but it was a big case, and I thought I had it in the bag before it ever started.

  I didn’t.

  I was acting for Stephen Stilwell – yes, that one – Match of the Day’s golden boy of the time, who had woken up one Sunday morning with a severe hangover, and a charge of grievous bodily harm.

  The victim, a retired police officer, was blinded in one eye. He claimed that my client had attacked him with a bottle over an autograph request outside a nightclub in Soho.

  My client accepted that, yes, there had been a confrontation, but the bottle was dropped by an onlooker in the chaos, and the victim’s injuries were sustained after drunkenly falling face first into the glass.

  It almost came down to a doomed dispute between the statement of a humble former officer and that of the drunken, overpaid premiership striker, but I had a surprise witness.

  Not merely a bystander, but a Baptist reverend from the church across the road, who had seen the entire incident, and whose independent statement corroborated that of my defendant to the absolute letter.

  ‘Oh, heaven must have sent you, honey,’ I sang to myself on the way into the courtroom.

  I had to give it to Garrick. He did such an expertly ruthless job of dismantling my holy witness – who, it turned out, was a season ticket holder for the defendant’s team, an
d regularly wore their colours beneath his cassock – that the jury took no more than ten minutes to find my man guilty.

  I hadn’t faced Garrick since, but I did hear it that the client in question had turned to peddling heroin since his release from prison, unable to slot neatly back onto the football pitch.

  It was Saturday night when I opened my laptop and punched Detective Chief Superintendent John DeWitt into the search engine.

  I had Songs of Leonard Cohen growling from the record player, and the gravelly, brooding tone was the perfect mixer for a few otherwise neat drinks. I cooked myself dinner – or rather, poured baked beans onto white, heavily buttered toast, with half a block of Cheddar melted in the mix – and washed it down with warm, potent, corner-shop whiskey.

  I’d been thinking about DeWitt a lot, and it wasn’t just his heavy-handed tactics that were bugging me. What was an esteemed DCS doing patrolling the streets of the city like an average beat copper in the early hours of a Thursday morning?

  There wasn’t a great deal to find online about DeWitt, and I knew that Zara would’ve been better at the task, young, adept and computer-literate as she was.

  Citations throughout BBC News placed him in Sheffield until around five years ago. I remembered his biggest case well, as it turned out. The grim cause célèbre of ’99, it was the racially motivated murder of a fourteen-year-old stabbed to death by a gang of white youths in broad daylight in the centre of the city. Notorious as the killing itself had been, its investigation was infamously botched from the start, and highlighted massive failings in the South Yorkshire Police’s handling of witnesses and suspects, in that grey area of slow change between Stephen Lawrence and the Black Lives Matter movement.

  Only one detective had risen above the controversial shitstorm, and spent five years single-handedly hunting every one of the killers down.

  Far from the common plod, it was quickly apparent that DeWitt was a fierce, old-school copper, sharp as flint and hard as stone. The Gene Hunt of our time. I could just picture him leathering a few crooks where the bruises wouldn’t show, and it came as little surprise to read that he’d been cleared in several unspecified misconduct hearings around that time, right before finding himself relocated to Nottingham. He was younger in the photographs they had online, but still rocked the moustache with its pure kicking-down-doors, seventies-detective vibe.

  Sean was probably right, I thought. Ours would almost certainly turn out to be a hell of a day in court.

  He had no Twitter, Facebook or social media presence whatsoever, which wasn’t unusual for man of his age, particularly one of the law. I hadn’t had a Facebook profile since the one I’d been roped into sharing, in true middle-aged style, with Jenny – Elliot and Jennifer Rook – and that had been promptly deleted after the first crazed members of the public read my name in the papers and sought me out there.

  HOW CAN YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT DEFENDING THAT PIECE OF SHIT? SCUM!

  Deleted.

  Once I’d found all I could on DeWitt, which wasn’t a great deal, and after the Internet had got me well and truly lost in stories of a South African man with the same name, I held my fingertips stiffly over the keyboard, preparing for my next step.

  I was suddenly hesitant. Paranoid about IP trackers, cookies and whatever else might be warehousing my searches in those surreptitious government databases. I relocated a couple of metre or so from the futon to the kitchen worktop, sat beside the sink, opened the window there, lit a fag, poured another drink, and blew the smoke out and up onto the pavement of Gloucester Place, clouding the shoes of occasional passers-by.

  When I eventually typed the brothel madam’s words into the browser’s search engine, clamping the cigarette tightly between my teeth, it took only a millisecond to return its top result.

  Red Sheets: adult service provider, directory, webcam, movies and more.

  ‘Here we go,’ I muttered to myself.

  With one final, furtive glance up to the empty pavement, the moonless sky beyond, I clicked on the only available link. Enter.

  Inside, there was a catalogue of women organised by thumbnail photographs. A few actually showed faces, captured from slightly above the head and doused in soft lighting, smoothening the skin and brightening the eyes, but the majority were snapshots of naked breasts in every colour, size and degree of maturity imaginable. Usernames accompanied the images, ranging from the likes of CzechMaria, 25, and JuicyKate, 19, up to the more blush-inducing SluttyGrandma, 67. I narrowed the field down to the Midlands, and began to work through the seventy-odd results.

  Each escort was rated by Field Reports, starting with pre-set options – out-call or in-call, time, cost, value for money, accurate representation, etc. – and almost always including good English as a positive attribute, highlighting a running theme in the girls.

  I trawled through every review, hoping against hope that I’d stumble across one left by Billy, as if it could all have been so simple, but the users were anonymous, the reviewing process vague. I had to google acronyms such as OWO and CIM to understand what the clientele had been paying extra for, and none brought me closer to whatever answers I was looking for.

  My initial apprehension soon gave way to a deeply shameful sense of arousal, fuelled by the drink and the dozens upon dozens of vulgar, pornographic images, until I came out the other side, entirely desensitised by the overwhelming amount of bare flesh available to order at the click of a button. I wondered if that was how psychopaths viewed the human form, a menu of meat of varying shades and sizes.

  Everything adapts, I reasoned, even the oldest profession on the planet.

  Leonard Cohen went from ‘So Long, Marianne’ to ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’, and, alongside those bodies, his tales of loneliness and loss took my mind to forfeitures and hurt.

  There was a time when I was reasonably good at sex. I’m sure there was. There are memories, distant now, of moderate athleticism between the sheets; whole days lost in bed with scrapes on my shoulders, the excitement and intimidation of those exploratory years when there were still firsts left to be had.

  At some point – perhaps slowly over the years, one night at a time, or maybe in a sudden exodus, but almost certainly behind my back – my prime had been left behind. Like my denial of cigarettes, and how I’d assured myself that I only enjoyed an occasional smoke, it was much too late when I faced facts and admitted that I had in fact been a smoker for years, and my lungs were likely blackened beyond saving.

  I continued my research, as I kept calling it in my head, for another half an hour or so, but it was useless. The website operated with total anonymity.

  At least, it did to any member of the public, but to the police?

  I stumbled to my coat, which had been slumped over the garment rail for almost two whole days, and rummaged through the pockets, ignoring the brief sting of cold metal as the abandoned gold ring brushed across my hand.

  The card was still in there. It took almost two minutes for him to answer.

  ‘Hullo?’ He sounded half asleep, and I realised I should’ve checked the time before ringing.

  ‘Sean? It’s Elliot.’

  ‘Whu …? Rook?’ A long, tired groan. ‘It’s nearly half eleven, mate, and the kids –’ He held the phone away, covering the mouthpiece with one hand, but I could still hear his snappy, impatient replies. ‘No, it’s just work … No. No, I know, I’m … Yeah, I know they’re in bed! … Will you? … Yeah, but … You know what, Trace, will you get off my fucking back?’ He cleared his throat, removed his hand from the mouthpiece. ‘Look, I really can’t talk now, the kids are in bed and Tracey’s up for work in five hours.’

  ‘I just wanted to ask if you’d heard of Red Sheets.’

  He sighed, and it crackled through the speaker. ‘Just, give me a sec, will you?’

  I heard his feet bumping along a landing and down a flight of stairs, a door unlocking, opening, the spark of a lighter close to the phone, a deep inhalation, and another si
gh.

  ‘Escort agency. Some seedy website for whores and pervs. Why d’you ask?’

  ‘Did you ever find evidence of Billy using it?’

  ‘Barber?’ I pictured him shrugging, standing at the door of Ralph Dickinson’s old house, most likely in nothing more than underwear, but quite possibly pyjamas, menthol in his right hand, phone in the left. ‘I wouldn’t know, but the techs analysed his phone, and if it had been relevant, you’d have heard about it.’

  ‘You reckon you can find out for me? Maybe take another crack at it?’

  ‘What the hell d’you want me to do, Rook?’ He was considerably less chirpy near the witching hour. ‘I’m not bloody MI5.’

  ‘Come on, just do me a favour. Talk to the analysts, see if they had anything to say.’

  I could almost hear his thought pattern through the phone, the buzzing of synapses, lured, as I so often was, by the prospect of a mystery.

  ‘I suppose I could have a word with the Kerb Crawling Taskforce, see if they have a list or something, or if he’s ever popped up on their radar.’

  ‘Thanks, Sean, that’d be a big help. I owe you a drink.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah …’ he sighed. ‘I’d better get off, Tracey’s going to go through the fucking roof. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.’

  ‘Cheers again, appreciate it, mate.’

  ‘In a bit, Rook.’

  And just as he rang off, I heard what must’ve been Tracey’s shrill voice rising from the background, gearing up for what would inevitably be a blazing row. I felt bad, but that’s the way it went sometimes.

  Marriage was complicated, after all.

  23

  I didn’t see Billy again until the end of the week.

  I was back in Belmarsh, beyond the scanners and sliding bars, three days before the trial.

  Alone, together, he was eyeing the yellowing ghost of the shadow upon my brow.