by Neil White
He buried his face into her clothes and took another deep breath. Her scent lingered in the air as he zipped up the suit carrier.
He hung his head as he thought about how it was all over. He stayed like that for a moment, then he put the suit carrier back into the wardrobe, making sure it was in the right place, before walking slowly towards the room next door. His parents’ bedroom.
He didn’t go in there much. It was the place where he weakened. He leaned against the doorframe as he pushed at the door, opening slowly to reveal the bed. He could still smell the mustiness of a Sunday morning, the room heady with warm bodies and stale booze.
His mother’s clothes were in an old wardrobe along the wall next to his room. He looked down at the floor before he stepped over the threshold, his tongue running over his lip as his foot pressed into the carpet. It was thicker than anywhere else in the house, dark brown swirls that spoke of a different time.
The wardrobe door clicked as he opened it and he gasped as the odour rushed at him, swamping him in memories of being clasped against her, his face buried in her clothes as she held him close, her arms around him, protecting him, the rage from his father muffled.
He held one of her dresses against his face and she was still there. Stale cigarettes and cheap perfume. Nights in front of the fire rushed back to him. Music and booze, laughter and dancing. Two people swaying in the flickering light. Until things changed. It always went wrong.
His eyes dampened and his throat felt thick. By moving on, he’d be leaving this behind too. Could he do that?
But with the identity of his captive in the cellar confirmed, he knew he had no choice.
The boy had ruined everything. All of his memories would be snatched from him.
The vibrations came back. He would make him pay.
Twenty-six
Joe had wanted to avoid the office after his meeting with Mary Molloy, so he decided to go back further into the story, to a person who was one of the subjects of Mary’s anger: Hugh Bramwell, Aidan’s solicitor at Honeywells.
Joe had joined Honeywells after falling out with the people at the firm where he trained, when his fiancée decided she preferred the attentions of one of the married partners to Joe’s. Hugh had given him a way out, allowing him to take over as the criminal lawyer at Honeywells when the older man retired.
Hugh Bramwell had been one of the last old-school defence lawyers in Manchester, full of country-set charm, well-spoken and impeccably dressed, in tweed three-piece suits and a pocket watch, as if setting himself apart as the city’s eccentric would get him more clients. And it did.
The law didn’t attract characters like Hugh any more. Joe had been drawn to it because of what had happened to his sister. It was a way of keeping alive his hope of meeting her killer. For most young lawyers the returns in crime were too low, so criminal law had become a magnet for chancers, failures, and those who lived lives not too far from the clients they represented.
Joe contacted Hugh and arranged a meeting, and as it could be his last week at Honeywells, he decided to have the meeting in a pub.
He paid the taxi driver and stared up at the Horse and Jockey. It looked like an old country pub, with Tudor beams and a low roof, except that it was in leafy suburbia, with its view over what people called ‘the Green’ lending a village feel, although in reality it was just a triangle of tired grass with an old Victorian lamp in the centre.
He texted Gina.
Out for the rest of the day. It’s relevant to Aidan’s case. Will fill you in tomorrow.
A reply shot back.
You’ve got a client at 4.
Send him away.
Joe set his phone to silent. He didn’t want to be distracted.
It had been a few years since he had been in the Horse and Jockey. It was in the Chorlton area of the city, an area settled by the urban professionals, those who wanted the buzz of the city and to enjoy the thought that they were just a short drive from some of Manchester’s roughest edges. They were only ever places to drive past, though, not stop in – danger experienced through a windscreen. He knew Kim Reader didn’t live far away, in a first-floor apartment in one of the high Victorian buildings, with large windows and peaked roofs. Kim had opted for original features over the bland newbuilds. It had been a few years since Joe had been there, too.
Joe spotted Hugh sitting outside, as he said he would be, drinking from a foamy pint that sat on one of the long dark tables.
As Joe got closer, Hugh lifted his glass as a welcome before he drained what was left.
‘It looks like it’s my round,’ Joe said.
‘I knew you’d get the message,’ Hugh said, chuckling to himself.
Joe dipped his head to get in through the doorway, returning shortly afterwards with two pints of bitter, the head running down the side of the glass like spilled cream.
Hugh didn’t say anything until he had made the top three inches disappear.
‘I thought they’d ruin this place by letting the children in,’ Hugh said, ‘but they make up for it with the beer.’
‘The barman knew what you wanted.’
‘I’m here whenever the sun comes out.’
Joe was about to ask him what his wife thought of that, a throwaway comment, but then he remembered with a jolt why Hugh had retired: his wife was dying of cancer and he had wanted to be with her. Joe had heard the news that she had died a year earlier. As that came back to him, he looked more closely at Hugh. His clothes looked worn and in need of a wash, and he had stubble on his cheeks, whereas in work he had always been immaculate. His eyes were red and his veins were showing as tiny red scratches across his nose and cheeks. Joe guessed that sitting in the Horse and Jockey was better than sitting in a silent house, with only his memories to keep him warm.
‘How’s retirement, Hugh?’ he asked, knowing the answer.
Hugh looked over. ‘Slow,’ he said, smiling softly, realising why Joe had asked. ‘But I’d rather be here, where the beer is good, than where you are, wasting your years.’
‘Not for much longer,’ Joe said. When Hugh raised his eyebrows, grey and bushy, strands pointing skyward, he added, ‘Honeywells are ditching crime. There just isn’t the mark-up any more so they’re packing it in.’
‘When?’
‘They won’t see out the year, is my guess. They want me to trim the department or give it up altogether.’
‘But they’ll miss the post-Christmas bonanza. The burglaries, the pub fights, the family arguments that end up as brawls. It’s a time of great joy.’
Joe smiled. ‘They don’t share it.’ He paused. ‘Don’t you miss it? Truthfully?’
Hugh took another swig before he answered. ‘I do, but not the way it is today. I miss the theatre of the courtroom, and seeing the other lawyers, and the police. I miss the clients sometimes, although not quite as much. But it’s not the same these days. It’s bureaucracy and form filling and box ticking, everything regimented and scripted. There’s no room for someone with a little panache any more.’ And he emphasised the word panache with a flourish of his hand. ‘The Law Society had me doing so much in the name of quality control that I never had the time to do anything that needed controlling.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I’m well out of it.’
‘There aren’t many who think the law is a good place to be any more,’ Joe said, his voice heavy with weariness. ‘There’s a long line of students ready to step in, but only because they are weighed down by debt. Once they get in, most with any sense want to get out again.’
‘And do you, Joe?’
Joe sighed. ‘I just want to enjoy it again. Is that too much to ask?’
‘So you’ve come to me, an elderly sage, so that I can scatter wisdom down onto you and make you love the law again?’
Joe laughed, despite himself. ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I like your company?’
Hugh leaned forward and put his hand on Joe’s forearm. ‘What is it, Joe?’ he said, his voice low. �
�You can talk to me.’
Joe moved his arm away and took another drink of his beer. ‘I’m here about a case, an old one of yours. Aidan Molloy.’
Hugh’s eyes widened. He took a long pull at his beer until he emptied it. He held up his glass. ‘I’ll need another one for this. And fill yours too. I don’t like to watch people playing catch-up.’
Joe shook his head, smiling, as he went back into the pub. As he glanced back, he saw Hugh looking down, as if the solitude weighed heavily on him the moment it arrived. It wouldn’t harm anyone if Joe kept him company for a while.
When Joe returned with two more creamy beers, Hugh looked up, and Joe saw that some of the joy had faded from his eyes.
‘Aidan Molloy,’ Hugh said solemnly. ‘The one that got away.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They don’t come along very often, but now and again you get a client accused of something serious when you think they’re innocent. And I don’t mean not guilty; that’s a whole different thing. No, I mean innocent, as in he didn’t do it.’
Joe settled back into his seat. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘It was just the way he was. All the way through the case, he was different from the rest. You know how most are, that they feign some outrage and anger, but only because they want to make someone else believe them. With Aidan, it was different.’
‘How so?’
‘It was disbelief, not anger. I remember the way he looked at his mother when he was convicted. She couldn’t watch the trial until after she had given her evidence, but she was there for the verdict, and when it all came crashing down around him Aidan looked across at her and just shook his head and cried, as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. That’s when I believed him.’
‘And before?’
‘He was a client. It didn’t matter whether I believed him or not.’
‘So did you try to do anything about it?’
Hugh took a drink of his beer and, once he had wiped away the foam from his mouth, said, ‘There was nothing to do. I took advice from counsel as to whether there were any appeal points, but there weren’t. The judge summed it up just right, so it was all down to how the jury saw the evidence, and Aidan. The verdict was a reasonable one.’
‘But a wrong one?’
‘I think so, but you can’t appeal it just because you don’t like it, not without any other evidence. Once we gave Aidan the news, he sacked us. His mother took up the campaign on Aidan’s behalf. She started out by slandering the firm, but we threatened her with legal proceedings, so all of her attention was directed towards persuading people by the strength of her will. The one thing she couldn’t see, however, was that she was one of the problems.’
‘I met her today. She’s suspicious of everyone and angry at everything.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ Hugh said. ‘She was the same back then, and it was easy to take a dislike to her. The jury did.’ Before Joe could say anything, Hugh raised his hand. ‘I know, I know, it’s not a talent contest, but sometimes all the witness has is the hope that the twelve people on the jury like and believe them. If they don’t like someone, it makes it easier for them to think they’re lying.’
‘Lying? Is that what you think?’
‘No, I don’t, for what it’s worth, but it didn’t take much for the jury to think she was.’ Hugh sighed. ‘We tried to talk her out of giving evidence, told her she would only make it worse for Aidan, but she was insistent, which made Aidan insistent. In their eyes, we were part of the conspiracy, lawyers who all pal around together, so her opinion always won over mine.’
‘Why was she such a problem?’
‘Two reasons: the alibi and her character, and both reasons were intertwined.’ Hugh jabbed his finger at the table. ‘If she’d have listened to us, perhaps Aidan would have just swung enough reasonable doubt his way, but I was there when she was in the witness box, and you could see the faces of the jury harden. It was where the doubt slipped away and became a certainty of Aidan’s guilt.’
‘What was wrong with the alibi?’
‘She changed it,’ Hugh said. ‘When they first pulled Aidan in, he told the police that he had got home at twelve thirty. That could still have made him the killer but would have ruled him out as the person dumping the body. Once Aidan had given them a time, the police spoke to her, before Aidan could get her to change her mind. She told the police two thirty, which meant that he could have been the person dumping the body. But she was insistent that she had got it wrong, that she had been tired when she heard him come in through the front door and had quickly glanced at the clock, not spotted the one before the two.’
‘And when did she discover her mistake?’
‘Once she had spoken to Aidan, who convinced her that she must be wrong. She wanted to tell the jury that.’
Joe shook his head. ‘I can guess what happened,’ he said.
‘The prosecution waved her statement at her, the one she had given to the police, with the declaration of truth at the top, where she said it was two thirty, the first time she had been asked to recall it, and accused her of changing the truth just to help out her son. It was an easy point to make.’
‘A very easy one.’
‘And it wasn’t the first time,’ Hugh said.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Three or four years before the trial, Mary Molloy went to prison for perverting the course of justice. Six months. Her boyfriend was caught on a speed camera and he persuaded her to say that she was driving, except that they didn’t think to ask to see the photograph before they embarked on their lie. Her beau had a lush dark beard and the camera captured it just beautifully. It split them up, because she resented him so much for it. When the police asked him about it, he said he had no idea about it, that Mary must have done it as an act of love. She went to prison. He didn’t even get as far as a courtroom.’
‘So she had told a lie before to try to get someone off,’ Joe said, nodding to himself. ‘If she would do that for a speed camera offence, how far would she go for a murder case?’
‘Exactly,’ Hugh said. ‘The jury thought she was covering up for her son, and if they thought that, they thought he was guilty.’
‘Why couldn’t you stop her? You didn’t have to call her.’
‘The client was insistent, and you know how it is. We might be the lawyers, but sometimes we have to look after ourselves.’
Joe sat back and took a drink. Hugh didn’t need to spell it out. Joe had had many cases like it, where the last thing the case needs is for the client to get into the witness box, as all the hard work of creating doubt in the prosecution case can be wiped out by a defendant’s lame excuses. But most defendants want to explain themselves, to have their say. Some will listen to good advice to quit while they are ahead, but others are so insistent that all you can do is give them their hour or more in the spotlight; if you don’t let them and the verdict comes down as guilty, the lawyer gets the blame. It must have been the same in Aidan’s case, where eventually Hugh had let Aidan dictate his defence, where the desire for Hugh to avoid a complaint was stronger than the need to do the right thing by Aidan, even if Aidan couldn’t see it.
‘What did you think of the witnesses?’ Joe said.
‘The couple who saw the car seemed decent enough, although they wouldn’t budge on the type of car, or the partial plate. And the three young women who reckoned Aidan had threatened the victim?’ Hugh shrugged. ‘Why would they lie? Aidan’s mother had a reason to lie. They didn’t.’
‘To say you believed him, you’re putting up a good case for the prosecution.’
‘No, I’m just saying why the conviction wasn’t a surprise. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t wrong.’
They sat there in silence for a few minutes, enjoying the beer. Joe began to feel his muscles relaxing, his worries about his future slipping away.
It was Hugh who broke the silence. ‘So what are you going to do?’
&n
bsp; Joe looked at him. ‘I’m going to look into it.’
‘Why?’
Joe thought about that, and said, ‘I want to love my job again, to do something good, to right a wrong.’
‘Your idealism is always the first victim to the job.’
‘It doesn’t mean it has to be gone for ever.’
‘Promise me one thing,’ Hugh said.
‘What’s that?’
‘If I got something wrong, if I overlooked something that I should have spotted, know that I’m sorry. Truly sorry. If you can get him out of prison without ruining my reputation, I would be grateful, but if you can’t…’ And Hugh just sighed. ‘Just get that man out of jail.’
