by Gary Bell
My hands clenched across the surface, cheeks aflame.
‘Well,’ Hayes said, raising his eyebrows, ‘I’ll leave you to your leads and see you in the morning.’
‘Bright and early,’ I managed through a dry mouth, and didn’t loosen my grip until he was across the car park and in his own car.
When I opened the laptop, I discovered two things. The screen was, thankfully, still intact, and there was a message blinking at the bottom of my browser.
When and where? X
When was nine o’clock.
Where was at the south-west entrance of Nottingham’s Arboretum Park on Waverley Street, appropriately close to Forest Road, the city’s old red-light district.
First, I watched him from a distance.
A dark, slender figure, he was there fifteen minutes early, hood up and leaning quite casually against one of the four stone gateposts, the black iron gates locked shut already.
I kept the brim of my hat down low, smoking and loitering some forty metres away at the junction with Cromwell Street against the wall of the cemetery that mirrored the park for a hefty stretch of the road. I was trying to make sure that his hulking guardian was nowhere to be seen, along with any companions who might be waiting to jump me on arrival, but the road was clear, the darkness empty. I’d left my own car parked at the Gooseberry Bush, the Wetherspoon’s round the corner to the south.
At two minutes to nine he started checking his phone, thin face glowing in the damp-blue light of the screen, and I knew I had to move.
Now or never. My palms were slick, heart hammering as I crossed the road towards the entrance of the park.
On his profile, it said his name was Luke, and so that’s what I started with when I’d made it within earshot.
‘Luke?’
He lowered his hood with a cool, friendly smile, revealing the face I could just about remember, the pronounced cheekbones of a model juxtaposed against the web of faded scarring around the right eye.
He was silent for a moment. Then the smile drained. ‘You!’
‘Wait!’ I tried, but he’d already bolted, scrambling nimbly over the park gate like a cat from a bag and landing softly on the other side. ‘Shit!’
I jumped onto the bars, heaved my bulk up and over the spikes, and slammed down without grace on the other side. My only lead was already a fair way off to the left, sprinting round the smooth black expanse of the pond. He was fast, and I was painfully slow; I cursed every damn cigarette I’d ever lit.
He glanced back over his shoulder – a momentary twist in the shadow rapidly shrinking into the surrounding black of the distance – and if he hadn’t done that, he would’ve made it. As it happened, there was a great crack as he pelted straight into an overhanging branch, and down he went, skidding like a jet without landing gear. Desperation, anger and exhaustion launched me on top of him with my entire weight, pinning him to the spot. His eyes were as wide and white as two autumn mushrooms on the lawn in the dark. The sound of panting filled the air.
I stood up, dusting the dirt from my knees, and then slumped against the trunk of the tree he’d hit.
‘Pig!’ he spat, rubbing his head and wavering from side to side as he stood. ‘What you want?’
‘I’m not a copper,’ I wheezed, ‘and all I want after that is a goddamn pint, that’s all.’ I rummaged for my smokes and held one out towards him. ‘What would you say to a drink?’
He seemed to be weighing his options, bright eyes shining in the dark, and then, just when I was afraid he wouldn’t take it, slowly, begrudgingly, he did.
Up close, in the light of the pub round the corner, he looked younger than the twenty-five years his online profile had claimed.
Perhaps it was the way he ate, as if he hadn’t seen a real meal in weeks, making short work of a large mixed grill and chips, half a rack of barbecue ribs, grilled halloumi and a dozen onion rings on the side. With the five pints he washed that away with, all on my wallet, it came to almost double the hour for which I’d had to pay.
‘Luke. Is that your real name?’
He shook his head, licking the blunt edge of his steak knife clean. ‘Louis, if you really want to know.’
‘How long have you been in the UK, Louis?’
He thought about it as if he hadn’t considered it for a while. ‘Three years.’
Those three years and their habits had yellowed his natural skin tone, though his accent remained. The scarring around his right eye was raised and webbed, a gruesome imitation of Paul Stanley’s star in scalding shades of pink and pure white. ‘You’re Spanish?’
‘Catalan,’ he replied sharply. ‘Just outside of Barcelona.’
‘Lovely city,’ I nodded, slicing a length from my own cut of beef. ‘I saw that Catalonia declared independence last week. That must be exciting?’
He didn’t answer. I’d just opened my mouth to try a different angle when a member of the floor staff – not quite a waiter here – was suddenly standing by our booth.
‘Everything all right with your meals? Can I get you any more sauces?’
‘Fine, thanks,’ I said brusquely, shooing him away, though when I looked up he was still hovering, treating us to a brief, disapproving stare before leaving again.
‘I come here to teach,’ Louis said, tearing his field mushroom to pieces. ‘Spanish at the university, I thought, but it doesn’t happen that way.’
‘I can see that. You still up in St Ann’s?’
‘No,’ he replied bitterly, glaring at me from beneath the scarred tissue. ‘Thanks to this capullo starting a fire, the landlord kicks us out.’
‘That was all just a misunderstanding,’ I said. ‘What happened to your pimp?’
‘My pimp?’
‘Big bloke, chased me out of there.’
He cocked his head and laughed, a surprisingly boyish titter. ‘Marcel? He’s no pimp. He’s protection.’
‘Protection from what?’ I asked, fleetingly hopeful, but he pointed the steak knife level across the table.
‘From people like you, friend.’
I turned to my own pint.
‘There was a girl when we work on the streets,’ he went on, finishing his drink and holding the empty glass high above his plate. ‘Group of men pay, but she doesn’t want all of them at once. She was pretty, so they boil a kettle, hold it over her face, and …’ He tipped the glass upside down, sending the last drops cascading, and caught them on his tongue. ‘Safer in houses. Safer together.’
I looked over his face, the searing glow of the scars, and nodded.
‘I need to talk to the girls,’ I said. ‘Anybody who was working down in Cotgrave about six months ago. I need to find out about their clientele. Could we meet them?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t know where they are. Girls come, girls go.’
I took the folded paper from my pocket – it looked as if I’d found it in a bin – and opened it out onto the tabletop.
‘This man. I need to know if you’ve ever seen him with the girls. It’s important. It could save his life. It could help to save even more.’
He leaned forward, looked at the mugshot, and, to my surprise, smiled.
Then he cut the rump of his lamb in half and stuffed it into his mouth.
‘Why?’ he asked through a mouthful of food. ‘What do you want to know about Billy?’
It was coming up to midnight when my phone rang, buzzing in my coat pocket, causing me to jump.
Zara.
‘Mr Rook!’ she panted from the other end. ‘I’ve found something! Holy shit, have I found something!’
‘What’ve you got?’
‘What haven’t I got?’ She sounded like she might explode at any moment. ‘I hope you’re sitting down, because you’re not going to believe this!’
I glanced back from the open doorway to the young Catalan sitting in the office behind me, Fraser Hayes, exhausted at his side, taking his statement down word for word.
‘I don’t
know about that,’ I said, rubbing my eyes, grinning in spite of myself. ‘I’m just about ready to believe anything at this point.’
32
I hadn’t slept.
Not for the first time, I felt the weight of the briefcase hanging from my fist, the presence of the danger inside, like a bomb I was carrying into the courthouse.
I’d got back to London at dawn, followed along the dark, empty motorway by the lights of Fraser Hayes’s chugging Peugeot, and went straight to the Bailey, unwashed, unshaven, and dressed in yesterday’s clothes.
If Zara had managed to get a minute’s sleep, it didn’t show, and what a shattered, ragged trio we must’ve looked when we gathered under the marble of the Great Hall.
‘You ready for this?’ she asked, robed and waiting with armfuls of freshly bound paper, the smell of warm printer ink still drying on crisp, white pages.
‘Ready as I’ll ever be. You?’
She managed a half-nod, ruffling the wig above her glasses, and blinked against the dark circles around her eyes. ‘Reckon so.’
Hayes yawned, checked his watch, and tousled his increasingly ratty hair to stop himself falling asleep on the spot. ‘I’m off to neck a few espressos before we start. Think I’m going to need them. Can I get you anything?’
‘Same for me, espresso,’ I said, ‘triple,’ and off he went to fetch them.
We hovered in the hall a moment longer, and Zara handed me copies of a document she’d drafted at some ridiculous hour of the morning.
‘Fantastic work,’ I said, checking the pages. ‘Well beyond your call of duty. You really are a fine junior.’
‘I know,’ she smiled. ‘Just tell me everything’s cool.’
‘I’m in my fifties. The day I tell you that everything is cool will be the day I need some serious assistance.’
‘I’ll remember that, Grandad.’ She gestured to the staircase. ‘Shall we?’
Bowen and Garrick were in the well, relaxed and refreshed, apparently ready to make their final putt.
Bowen looked me up and down. ‘I don’t know about DeWitt moonlighting as a clairvoyant, Rook, but you look like you’ve been moonlighting selling the Big Issue.’
‘Glad to hear that homelessness is amusing to you,’ I said. ‘I’m fresh out of Big Issues but let me give you a copy of this document to make up for that.’
‘What is it?’ Garrick asked suspiciously, snatching the papers from my hand.
‘A bad character application. It’s time the jury met the real Detective Chief Superintendent.’
Garrick flicked through the pages, face scrunching further with every new sheet, and shook his head. ‘You’re wasting your time and everybody else’s, Rook. Judge Pike will never allow this.’
I couldn’t help but smile. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’
Criticisms might be made of our criminal justice system, but the independence and fair-mindedness of the judiciary remains a shining beacon. The judge allowed it, and when we reconvened with the jury after our successful application, DeWitt having returned to the stand, I knew it was time to take the gloves off once and for all.
I took a drink of water, readying my throat. There was a long way left to go.
‘Superintendent DeWitt,’ I smiled, turning upon him, ‘you emigrated here from South Africa, is that correct?’
He shrugged, blasé, but with a twitch around the eyes. ‘That’s right.’
‘Whereabouts?’ I asked, though Zara had already answered that for me.
‘Pretoria.’
‘Ah, Pretoria!’ I clasped my palms together. ‘One of the country’s three capitals, an academic city of cutting-edge research, as I understand. When did you decide to relocate to the UK?’
His eyes were narrowing with each passing moment. ‘I came to England in ’96.’
‘In ’96?’ I repeated, raising my brow. ‘You said yesterday that you’ve been in law enforcement for thirty years. Now, the Bureau of State Security would have been replaced for some years by ’87, but it would still have been your duty to uphold apartheid, would it not?’
A shallow nod. ‘That was the law.’
‘Absolutely,’ I said, ‘and far it be it from me, of all people, to criticise the laws of any land.’
‘My Lord …’ Garrick sighed, shaking his head so hard it almost spun his wig. ‘Judging by those bags around their eyes, perhaps the defence have forgotten the point of this trial, but I can only wonder whether there’ll be any relevant questions any time soon?’
‘Indeed,’ Pike said, though he dipped his chin and eyed me with some modicum of unmistakable curiosity.
‘My learned friend is absolutely right,’ I said, ‘it was indeed a long and interesting night, and perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s put a pin in that for now, shall we?’ I rubbed the sting from my eyes, shuffled the papers in front of me, and stroked my palm along the coarseness of my jaw. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d shaved. ‘So, where were we? How about cell-site analysis? That was, after all, a hefty part of your evidence against the defendant, and placed him squarely in the vicinity of the killing at the recorded time of death, did it not?’
‘It did,’ DeWitt replied.
‘And yet, we can see in the report by the cell-site expert that only one phone mast was servicing the entire area at that time, from the social club to the scene of the death and beyond! Wouldn’t that, therefore, make every resident of Cotgrave a potential suspect, as their phones were, technically, all in use in that same vicinity?’
An icy smirk. ‘Our investigation was based on a lot more than that. Besides, there’s nobody quite like William Barber in that village. He has the most prolific criminal record in the area, and his fellow residents don’t post the same sort of racist, inflammatory garbage across the Internet.’
‘You’re right,’ I sighed, straightening my robes, as another sheet was handed to me – ‘Thank you, Miss Barnes’ – and I held it close to my face. ‘Here, for example, is a post from just last month. “Another attack in London by a loser terrorist. These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!” Is that one of Mr Barber’s?’
He nodded. ‘Sounds like the sort of racist drivel he’d come up with.’
‘Yes?’ I paused, frowning at the sheet. ‘Oh, my mistake, that post actually came from the personal Twitter account of the President of the United States. Should Donald Trump, consequently, be a suspect, too?’
‘Mr Rook!’ Judge Pike barked, reddening faster than a crustacean on the boil. ‘I will not have my court’s time wasted with pseudo-political statements!’
‘Hear, hear!’ Garrick declared, and Bowen banged his feet beneath our bench in agreement.
DeWitt was shaking his head. ‘I’ve heard some defences in my time, but this …’
We were losing the room already. I glanced to Zara, and she nodded. It was time.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I said, ‘but what options did we have? It’s not, after all, as if the defendant had an alibi to rely on, is it?’
‘Precisely my point,’ DeWitt said, flattening his tunic with both hands. ‘Now, if that’s all …’ He lifted one foot out of the box, ready to be dismissed.
‘No.’ I held up a hand to halt him. ‘That was actually a question, DCS DeWitt. Mr Barber didn’t have an alibi on the night in question, did he?’
Slowly, he moved back into the box, towards the microphone, and frowned. ‘You really must’ve had a late night. Have you paid attention to any of this case, Mr Rook?’
‘Oh, I’ve paid attention. We all have. We all heard, for example, the failure to disclose the evidence of the DNA found under the victim’s fingernails.’
‘It was a partial profile, and the results were inconclusive.’
‘And yet they were conclusive enough to rule out the defendant as the source of the DNA?’
He blinked hard. ‘There’s plenty more evidence against the defendant.’
‘As th
e jury have heard. But could there, similarly, have been anything else that you forgot to disclose to the CPS?’
He leaned forward, wrapping his fingers around the balustrade of the stand, and for the first time I noticed how large his hands were. ‘If you have a point, Mr Rook, why don’t you get to it?’ he snarled.
Fair enough, I thought, and lit the fuse.
‘DCS DeWitt, are you familiar with a young man by the name of Louis Galos?’
His lower lip shifted, a hairline fracture in the concrete facade he’d maintained so well, and his fingers tightened around wood. ‘No.’
‘Really?’ I cocked my head. ‘You do not know Mr Galos?’
He shrugged. ‘Never heard of him.’
‘Huh …’ I turned to survey the bemused expressions of the faces across the jury, up in the gallery, before coming to rest on Billy.
The rage, the absolute, earth-shattering terror in his face; as soon as I saw that, I knew it to be true.
‘Well,’ I said, turning back to the witness, ‘the two of you have met. You’ve personally arrested the young man on four separate occasions, in fact.’
Another shrug. ‘I’ve arrested a lot of people. You expect me to remember them all?’
‘What I expect, DCS DeWitt, and all I ask for, is honesty. What do you know about Mr Louis Galos?’
‘Rook!’
The voice was Billy’s, but I, like everybody else in the room, kept my eyes squarely upon the witness. I would not, could not, be stopped.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘would you like to tell the court, Superintendent DeWitt, or should I?’
His eyes had turned to stones in his skull, jaw tight as a vice. He didn’t say a word.
I sighed and glanced back to Billy. The look of devastation that had gripped his squashed-up features meant little to me now. I was thinking instead about the humiliation and the cruelty, the arrogance, violence and manipulation.
You wanted me to win at any cost, did you? How about the truth?
‘Mr Galos is a sex worker,’ I said, turning back to the sweating brow of DeWitt. ‘A Spanish immigrant currently based in the centre of Nottingham. Six months ago, however, Mr Galos was sharing a small house on East Acres, a residential road in Cotgrave, which happens to fall precisely along the route between the Welfare Scheme Social Club and the country park, beyond which is the site of the killing.’
