“I think maybe a holiday,” I said. “Somewhere hot, with a beach. Just for a few days.” The more I thought about having a holiday, the more sense it made. After being cooped up for so long with so many other people, sitting on a deserted beach somewhere appealed a lot. I’d be fine on my own, I’d even prefer it.
Andy and I spent the rest of the evening sitting in his lounge, watching nonsense on television. He’d suggested the pub, but I’d declined. I was happy just chilling out and, if anything, had found going to The Buck overwhelming. Andy popped out at one point to the corner shop and came back with a couple of bottles of wine, but after one glass I’d had enough. The two pints from earlier had pretty much finished me anyway, and the last thing I wanted to wake up to the next day on my first proper day of freedom was a hangover. At around ten o’clock, I decided that I’d go to bed, and I let Andy faff around me for a bit. He showed me the bathroom, gave me a towel and a spare toothbrush, and showed me into what he called the guest room. It was only just bigger than my old prison cell, with a single bed and a small set of drawers. As far as I was concerned though, it was paradise.
I lay in bed for a while, enjoying the luxurious feeling of both the soft mattress and what must have been the cleanest duvet I’d been under in months. I could hear Andy moving around the flat, and after around half an hour I heard him close the door to his bedroom. For the next hour, I tossed and turned in the narrow bed. Although I was exhausted, both physically and mentally, sleep evaded me. I gave it another twenty minutes, and then decided to get up and find a book to read. If the flat had been bigger I would have put the television back on and moved to the sofa, but I didn’t want to disturb Andy. I swung my legs out of bed and made my way as quietly as I could to the lounge.
On top of the bookcase in the lounge was a photograph I’d noticed earlier. It was of Jennifer and me on our wedding day, and was another one of David’s unposed snaps. I had my back to the camera, and Jennifer was looking over her shoulder at the camera. She had a broad smile on her face that was so genuine it hurt. I could feel a lump forming in my throat, and sat on the sofa with the photograph in both hands. As I touched Jennifer’s face with the tip of my thumb, I let the tears flow. There were no sobs, no clenched fist pressed against my mouth, no gripping pain in my chest. Only tears.
I put Jennifer’s picture back on the top of the bookcase once I’d decided that I’d cried enough for that evening, and picked a book out from Andy’s small selection without looking at it. I didn’t really care if I’d read it or not. I just wanted something to take my mind off not being able to sleep. On the way back to the guest room, I diverted to the kitchen to see if there was any wine left. Maybe a large glass would help me get to sleep, I reasoned with myself as I filled the largest one I could find to the brim. Putting the glass and the book back in my room, I padded to the bathroom for a pee. On my way past the photographs of Andy on the wall, I looked again at the one of him about to smack a ball for six. There was definitely something odd about it.
I was mid-pee when I realised what was off about the picture. I finished my business and washed my hands before returning to the hallway, turning on the light as I did so. Leaning forward to examine the photograph, I could see that I was right. It was the wrong way round. I looked at the scoreboard behind Andy’s shoulder and realised that it wasn’t the photograph that was the wrong way round, it was Andy. His right shoulder was toward the camera when it should have been his left if he held the bat the way I would hold it. The only reason he would face the way that he was would be if he was left handed. I looked at his hands, gripping the cricket bat so hard that even in the photograph I could see his knuckles had whitened.
My mind went back to the night I’d attacked Robert, and I looked over at the coat stand. I picked up a hat that was hanging on one of the arms and looked at it in profile. Beneath it was a dog’s lead, hanging from the same hook. My heart rate increased a notch as I realised that I recognised the shape of the hat. When had Andy got the dog? Just after Jennifer had died, he’d told me. Dogs had to be walked. I knew that as I’d seen the silhouette of a dog walker that night. A dog walker wearing a hat just like the one in my hand. I looked back at Andy’s hands wrapped around the cricket bat and imagined them wrapped around another type of bat.
I moved back across to the photograph of the team and looked at the man with his arm draped over Andy’s shoulder. Although there were no names on the photograph, I didn’t need them to recognise the man. The widow’s peak was less distinct in the photograph than it was now, but there was no doubt in my mind I knew him. Paul Dewar.
Behind me, I heard a soft click as Andy’s bedroom door opened. I turned to see Andy peering around the door. His hair was awry, and his eyes were half closed against the light.
“Are you okay, Gareth?” he asked, glancing at the hat in my hand. “I heard the toilet then saw the light come on under my door.”
“Sorry, Andy,” I replied, not sure what to say. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.” I put the hat back on the stand. We stood in silence for a few seconds, and I waited to see if Andy would say anything else. When I realised that he wasn’t, I carried on. “I see that you’ve known Paul Dewar for a while,” I said, my finger pointing at the team photograph. A slow smile appeared on Andy’s face as he smoothed his hair over his head.
“I have, yes,” he replied. “We go back a way, Paul and I.”
“You kept that quiet.”
“Not really, no reason for you know,” Andy said. “Shall we have a drink? A proper one? I think a chat is needed, don’t you?”
Andy and I sat in the lounge, a bottle of whisky on the table in front of us. When I drank whisky, I always went for quantity over quality, but tonight I had both. Andy had poured out two very generous measures into tumblers, adding a splash of water to each from a small jug he’d brought through from the kitchen. It was all done in silence as I contemplated what to say to him. With a glance at Jennifer’s smiling face on top of the bookcase, I decided how to approach things.
“So, you’ve known Paul since school?” I asked.
“Yes, we’re old friends,” he replied, curling his fingers around the glass in his hand.
“Did you ask him to look into my case?”
“I may have mentioned it to him,” Andy said, almost in a whisper. “I do know he likes a challenge.”
“But I don’t understand why you’d do that, Andy. Unless you knew I was innocent, that is.”
“But you always said you were, Gareth. Right from the start. Is that not enough for me, to take you at your word?”
“But what if it’s not enough?” I replied. “What if you knew for certain I was innocent? Because you knew who the real killer was?”
He put his glass down on the table, and I took a large sip of whisky from mine. As the liquid burned its way down my throat, Andy looked at me with his eyebrows raised.
“And how would I know that, Gareth?” He was smiling, his eyes no longer wrinkled with sleep.
“What’s your dog’s name?” I asked. His smile faltered for a second before returning.
“She’s called Phoenix,” he replied. “I didn’t name her. That was the name she already had when I got her from the rescue centre, but it seemed apt in any case.”
“Were you walking her the night Robert died?” I asked. There it was, out in the open. The killer question, as it were.
We sat in silence, both knowing the reply to the question would change both our lives. The knowledge that we would share of who had really killed Robert Wainwright, who had really avenged Jennifer’s death.
“When I saw you convicted, Gareth,” Andy said after a few minutes. “I knew I couldn’t let that go. I couldn’t see the man who loved my daughter being convicted for a crime I’d committed.” He looked at me, his eyes serious and unwavering. “What sort of a man would that make me? If Paul hadn’t managed to get the conviction overturned, my next step would have been to take your place.”
J
ennifer stared at us both from the top of the bookcase. Two men who’d loved her, one who’d wanted to kill for her, and one who actually had.
“Your toast in the pub, to blind justice,” Andy said, picking up his glass from the table. “It was very apt. But justice isn’t always blind. Sometimes she just needs a bit of a hand to see the light.”
“Maybe another toast is called for?” I replied. “What would you suggest?”
Andy raised his glass in the air and looked over at Jennifer’s picture, tilting his glass in her direction.
“How about we toast that young lady over there?” He got to his feet, and I followed him. We both raised our glasses toward the photograph on the bookcase and spoke in unison.
“To Jennifer.”
THE END
I hope you enjoyed reading Blind Justice as much as I enjoyed writing it. I wonder if I could ask you two small favours if you did like it? Independent authors like me live and die by reviews. Maybe if you have a few spare minutes you could leave a review for Blind Justice? It would mean a lot to me, and be a really big help to me in the future. The second favour is, again if you enjoyed the book, maybe you could tell a friend?
Before you go, I have included the first two chapters of my next book, The Butcher. It’s very different to the one you’ve just read, but I think you might enjoy it…and after the extract there’s another message from me. If you like the extract, you’ll love the message!
Thanks for coming this far with me! I’d love to stay in touch with you, so visit me at nathanburrows.com/bj
In the meantime, happy reading!
Nathan Burrows
Norma Potter dried her hands and looked through cloudy eyes at the joint of pork on the kitchen table in front of her. It was indeed, as the butcher had told her, a fine cut. She clasped her arthritic fingers across her thin chest, as if she were about to say a prayer like she did every evening before she went to bed, and thought about what she needed to do with the joint of meat before putting it in the oven. With a quick glance at the kitchen clock, its hands large enough to make out through her cataracts, Norma inhaled a satisfied breath before blowing it out of her cheeks.
Later that evening, Norma’s only granddaughter was coming round for supper. She was bringing her new boyfriend, the young man who might well be ‘The One’. Norma patted the pork with a tea towel, enjoying the sensation as she did so, half-listening to a bunch of politicians arguing about import and export something or other on the radio. Whatever they were arguing about, it was getting quite heated. Norma tuned them out, her thoughts drifting to her granddaughter. The poor little thing had been in an awful place for about a year after travelling halfway round the world with some young upstart. He’d been, according to her granddaughter, utterly in love with her. It turned out he hadn’t, and the poor girl had come back to Norfolk with a broken heart and an equally broken credit rating. Norma had put her up for a little while, just until the youngster had got her feet back on the floor and found a decent job.
Shuffling her way to the cupboard to get the salt she needed to rub into the joint, Norma squinted at the photograph on top of the fridge. Although she couldn’t see it very clearly these days, she knew the photograph well. It was of Peter, her husband, standing next to Norma in front of the Eiffel Tower just over ten years ago. The year before The Lord had taken him. Norma had disagreed a lot with The Lord at the time, arguing that it wasn’t Peter’s time. The Lord didn’t need him yet in her opinion, but Norma hadn’t won that argument.
Peter had popped out to the allotment one sunny evening, saying to Norma as he left he was just nipping out to earth up the potatoes, and that he might be a while. Norma had smiled, knowing full well he would spend some time at the allotment, and an equal amount of time at the pub. He’d be back later, smelling of beer and Polo mints. Except he hadn’t come back that night, or any night after that. Another allotment owner had found Peter face down in his King Edwards, dead as a dodo. The hospital had said he’d had a heart attack, he wouldn’t have suffered. But that wasn’t the point, not to Norma. When The Lord did decide that it was time to take Peter, she’d wanted to be there herself, holding his hand and letting him know how loved he was. But Norma knew it wasn’t her sad, smiling, face that Peter had seen just before he’d died. It was a pile of King Edward potatoes, which still needed earthing up, rushing toward his face at a rate of knots.
Norma shook her head, just as she always did when she got all maudlin about Peter, and peered into her kitchen cupboard to find the salt. After walking back across to the joint of pork, she put the salt down next to it and got her best knife out of the drawer. It was that sharp, Peter used to joke, that he could shave with it. The knife had been honed so many times since Peter had gone that soon Norma would have to buy a new one and that would cost money she didn’t really have. Not since Brexit anyway. She gripped the knife in her gnarled fingers and drew it across the fatty top of the meat. Norma noted with satisfaction the way the knife cut through the skin just to the right depth for the salt. Norma was sure the crackling would be perfect. Her granddaughter liked the crackling, and Norma hoped that the new boyfriend would as well. She concentrated hard on what she was doing. This joint was a real treat, what with the price of pork going through the roof since all the foreigners had stopped buying British. It hadn’t helped that the British, in return, had stopped buying foreign.
Putting the knife on the side, Norma sprinkled a generous amount of salt onto the joint of meat and rubbed it in with a satisfied smile on her face. The pork felt perfect underneath her fingers. Firm but not too firm, pink but not too pink. The butcher had promised her a special joint for a special occasion, and he hadn’t disappointed her. As Norma brushed the excess salt off from the skin, she noticed with a frown that there was one of those animal marking tattoos on the joint. It must be the farm’s symbol or maybe the animal’s number, she thought. Hopefully by the time the skin was crackling, the marking would have disappeared.
Norma didn’t follow football. She never had, and neither had Peter. It wasn’t something that either of them were the slightest bit interested in. If she had been keen on the beautiful game, and if her eyesight had been better than it was, Norma might have recognised the tattoo for what it actually was.
It wasn’t a farm symbol, or animal number. It was a tattoo. A proper tattoo of a Manchester United crest. There was also another thing that Norma didn’t know about the joint of pork on her kitchen table.
It wasn’t pork.
###
TWO MONTHS EARLIER
Emily Underwood sat in the driver’s seat of her increasingly unreliable ten-year-old Mini, tapping at her laptop keyboard. With a couple of clicks on the trackpad, she brought up the previous health inspection of the Chinese takeaway that she’d come to inspect. She glanced across at the closed takeaway, pushed her seat back to give herself some more room, and started reading. What she read wasn’t very pleasant at all.
The Chinese takeaway that she was sitting outside was called ‘The Wong Way’. Whether this was an unsuccessful attempt at irony, or just a reflection of the fact it was run by an elderly chap called Mr Wong, Emily didn’t know and didn’t care. One thing she did know was that the takeaway had only just remained open after the last inspection. It was safe to say that Emily wouldn’t be eating from the place any time soon, if at all.
Since qualifying as an Environmental Health Inspector three months ago, Emily had gone on five visits, all to establishments like this one. Eateries with track records of less than ideal conditions behind the public areas. This visit was going to be different, though—it was the first one that she was doing on her own. With a carefully trimmed fingernail, she tapped at the trackpad again to read the next page of the report.
Emily heard a rattling noise from the takeaway, and looked up just in time to see the sign on the door flip from ‘Closed’ to ‘Open’. A young Chinese woman dressed in a bright red kimono twisted the lock, and pulled the door ajar a couple o
f inches. This was it, Emily thought. Showtime. She grabbed her briefcase from the rear seat, smoothed her short blonde hair back behind her ears, then got out of the car. She took a deep breath, straightening out some creases on her trousers. The Environment Agency didn’t have an official uniform, so she was wearing the unofficial uniform. A trouser suit, one of three she now owned. Today, Emily had chosen her navy blue one. The advantage was that they were practical, especially on farm visits. Emily could tuck the trouser legs into a pair of wellies with no problem at all. The downside, at least according to her flat-mate, Catherine, was that they made her look like a lesbian.
Pushing the door open, Emily stepped into the takeaway as a bell tinkled above the door to announce her arrival. While she waited for someone to come out from the kitchen area, she looked around the room, taking in the musty smell of old Chinese food. It reminded Emily of her ex-boyfriend’s flat on a Sunday morning, but his flat also had the added odours of spilled beer, sweat and, very occasionally, sex. There were many reasons why he was now an ex-boyfriend, but housekeeping and personal hygiene—or rather, a distinct lack of both—had been the key ones. A budding Health Inspector like Emily had no place being with an absolute slob like that, no matter how good looking he was. At least that was what her friends had told her at the time. If Emily had realised how difficult it was meeting a ‘nice young man’ in Norfolk she might not have been as hasty in getting rid of him, but what was done was done.
The walls were decorated with the obligatory dragon wallpaper and adorned with rice paper calendars advertising The Wong Way restaurant. It was, according to the calendars at least, a taste of the Orient in Norfolk. Set into one of the walls was a fish tank, filled with murky green water. Emily took a step toward it, peering into the gloom. A large fish appeared out of nowhere and stared at her with unblinking eyes, making her jump. Laughing, she took a step back. As she did so, the door behind the counter opened and the woman in the red dress walked through. She was just as slim as Emily, shorter than her by a couple of inches, and had jet black hair cut into a similar bobbed style. The two woman stared at each other for a few seconds. Emily smiled, trying to get the girl to relax.
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