Summary Justice: 'An all-action court drama' Sunday Times (Benson and De Vere)

by John Fairfax

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then make your decision.’

  46

  Benson found everything as the man had said. He followed the small candles up the stairs. He opened the door and stepped on to the landing. He could make out the railing in the light thrown from the tiny flame. He gripped it with both hands. It was like the landing in HMP Beckham Heath.

  ‘Take off your shoes and socks, Mr Benson.’ The voice came from the far side, from another landing. ‘Undo your trousers. Now put both hands back on the railing. Close your eyes and keep them closed.’

  A bright light came on, directed at Benson’s face.

  ‘For the purposes of this conversation, you can call me Jock. I belong to an undercover police unit that does not exist. We do not even feature as a secret directory within the Serious Organised Crime Agency. For the purposes of this conversation, I will call it SOCA22. I am based in Liverpool, but we are working with a sister non-existent unit based in London. We’d been watching Andrew Bealing for five years. Tapping his phone. Tapping Grange’s phone. And Wellborn’s, when he was alive. Their houses are wired. So was Hopton’s Yard, and the rest.’

  Benson could only see orange and purple spots. Somehow, being blinded, the words seemed louder, their meaning clearer. Bealing was distributing legal highs for a Chinese gang, the Hong Hua. Gogaine. Nopaine. Burst. Banshee Dust. That lot were banned in April. After that he was moving ‘4-MeTMP’ and ‘HDEP-28’. They were banned in June. And so it went on. Goes on. The Hong Hua just find a compound that escapes the chemical definition in the law. Before he was killed, Bealing was their man. He carried on spreading the stuff like it was salt on his dinner. He made a lot of money.

  ‘So what went wrong?’ asked Benson.

  ‘He wanted out. Went to the police – the ordinary police – and told them he’d trade information for a new identity. He’d give them names. He wanted the Chinese off his back. And he’d had enough of Debbie. The nurse could look after her.’

  ‘So how did he end up dead?’

  ‘We’ve got an agent in the Hong Hua. A prize. Someone who tells us everything we want to know about rival gangs. Other importers. And distributors like Jack Felbridge who was shifting Class A round the country. Heroin. Crack. The lot. Put your hands back on the rail, Mr Benson. Keep your eyes closed.’

  Benson’s trousers were slipping. He widened his stance, listening to Jock’s slow and precise voice. In effect SOCA22 was permitting the free flow of legal highs in order to keep one step ahead in the war against drugs. It was the lesser of two evils game, only Bealing’s bid for a new identity wouldn’t only end the game it would compromise a vital source in the Hong Hua, who’d probably end up dead.

  ‘I’m just a cog in a wheel, Mr Benson. I do my part and someone else runs the machine. But it’s clear what happened. Bealing went to the Drug Squad. The Drug Squad decision-makers went to SOCA22. We warned our agent. Our agent told the Hong Hua that Bealing was intending to compromise a good arrangement. My guess is that Bealing’s contact in the Hong Hua was our agent. Our agent faced exposure.’

  ‘So Bealing was sacrificed to keep a source in place?’

  ‘It’s what happens in the real world, Mr Benson. It’s how we keep as many kids as possible out of a grave. It’s not nice. But it works.’

  ‘So why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Because this isn’t what I signed up for. Things have got out of hand. First Wellborn was killed, then Bealing, and now a woman faces a murder rap for a crime she didn’t commit, with her father in hospital and her son in care. No, this isn’t my idea of keeping the streets clean at a price.’

  Benson stared into the splashes of orange and green and blue. ‘You said Hopton’s Yard was wired?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you heard Bealing being killed. It’s not a guess. You listened to him being stabbed and you listened to him crawl and die.’

  Jock didn’t answer immediately. ‘You’re fast, Mr Benson.’

  ‘You know for sure it wasn’t Sarah Collingstone?’

  ‘I do, yes.’

  ‘But you’re not prepared to step from behind that light?’

  ‘No. I’ve got family who depend on me; and I want to live. That’s why we’re here speaking in this way. This conversation isn’t even happening.’

  Benson felt a flush of anger. He felt trapped. His trousers were slipping, his feet were cold and he couldn’t let go of the rail. But Jock was here. Jock was talking. Jock must have a plan.

  ‘What am I to do?’

  ‘Roger Grange and his wife are in danger. So is Obiora. They’re next, once the trial has died down. Their only chance is to speak out, and this trial is the best way. That was Bealing’s mistake. He should never have gone to the police. If he’d gone to the press, he’d have been safe. No one would have touched him. Once everything’s out in the open, no professional outfit would risk ordering a hit. Only the Italians do that sort of thing. They can’t control themselves.’

  Benson could see the logic. He liked the joke, too. ‘What do I do if they won’t listen? They’re frightened people out of their depth. Can’t you give me the recording? The recording of the killing is decisive. No one would know you’d leaked it. The operation against Bealing is over. All his assets have been liquidated. No one would be compromised. Jock? What do you think? Why not? I could play it to the judge and prosecutor and the case would be dropped. No one would know why. Jock?’

  Benson waited but there was no reply. He took his hands off the rail and there was no reprimand. He opened his eyes and he fastened his trousers; he put on his socks and shoes, and he left the building. But not before he’d retrieved the torch and camera tripod from the far landing. And the milk. Benson took the milk. He’d run out.

  47

  Tess opened her eyes and sat bolt upright.

  She’d heard a crack against her first-floor drawing room window. Fully awake, she listened intently. Then the window shattered. They’d come back, as she’d expected. Only this time the glass was Georgian and irreplaceable. Grabbing the Webley 455 Battlefield Service Revolver on her bedside table – at Oxford, she’d won all the target shooting competitions (organised around punch and spam fritters), so she knew what she was doing, even when drunk – she made straight for her bedroom window and quietly opened it. A man was heading off. Quite sure he couldn’t prove who’d fired the shot without incriminating himself, Tess pulled the trigger, aiming for the right buttock.

  The cry was a voice she knew.

  ‘It’s only an airgun. I’m so terribly sorry.’

  ‘Well, it damn well hurt,’ said Benson.

  ‘I thought you were one of those toe-rags who’d done my other window in.’

  ‘It was a pebble, only a pebble.’

  ‘You should have called.’

  ‘I don’t have my phone. And what are you doing with a gun anyway?’

  ‘I’m Irish. It’s part of the lets-get-rid-of-the-Brits thing. It’s in my genes. My great-grandfather was at the General Post Office in 1916. Beside Connolly.’

  ‘It’s a pity he wasn’t shot as well.’

  Benson went looking for the pebble but soon got distracted by the books. The mews was a sort of annex to the library back home in Ireland. The shelves were a window into her father’s academic career as a historian and her mother’s passions as a musician. Benson was looking at the titles, the biographies. They were all out of order: Bach, Hendrix, Walton, Elgar, Armstrong . . . he was following the shelves towards a second bookcase . . . with volumes on the Famine, the Rising, the Troubles . . . and Benson’s own trial papers, laid out on a nearby table. He was standing right next to it, eyeing a framed letter from James Connolly on the wall.

  Tess raised her voice, and it was almost shrill. ‘You’ll have some tea?’

  Benson backed away. ‘Absolutely fascinating. I didn’t know you were so interested in history.’

  ‘I’m not. They’re my dad’s.’

  ‘History,’
he mused, following her into the kitchen. ‘It’s always hard to know what really happened when all the main players are dead, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which is why I like trials. Because a trial is an investigation into the past, too, only we get the chance to speak to the people who were there.’

  ‘Yes, I agree.’

  ‘We’ve got a better chance of getting it right. If we find someone we can trust.’

  ‘Absolutely.

  ‘Which is why I am here at three in the morning throwing stones at your window.’

  He glanced back into the sitting room and the packed bookcases, and the table covered in trial papers.

  ‘Sarah Collingstone is innocent,’ he said. ‘I thought you ought to know.’

  48

  Tess couldn’t help but reflect on the quality of fear. It’s why the torturers torture. Sure, people might simply tell you what you want to hear; but they’ll also tell you what they know. The same is true of a death threat. Threaten to kill someone and locked doors swing open.

  It transpired that Roger Grange didn’t have lung cancer and he wasn’t having chemo. But he was scared as hell and so was Amanda, which is why they’d decided to mislead Tess. They wanted nothing to do with the Hopton Yard killing for fear of ending up dead themselves. But once she had passed on the warning and message, they were ready to cooperate. Like Benson they could see the logic of protection by exposure. The more they were in the public eye, the safer they were. And in relation to what they knew about Bealing, no harm would be done to the Chinese interests by anything Grange might say, because those interests were no longer operating through Bealing’s haulage company. An examination of Bealing’s records would reveal nothing illegal. All the police would find were contracts for tea, slimming machines and circuit breakers. And so on. The Banshee Dust had been and gone and could never be traced back to its source. If there was any danger, Tess emphasised, it was remaining in the shadows where no one knew they were there; where the Chinese might want to cover their backs and clean up the past.

  And so Roger Grange dictated and signed a witness statement. He agreed to appear at the Old Bailey in the Hopton Yard killing trial.

  Kingsley Obiora was contacted by his daughter. He’d been staying with friends in Lewisham. But he came back home pretty quick when Abigail told him that a contract had been taken out on his head. She’d let her imagination torque up the state of play but at least it got him moving; he was now on the other side of a table in Merton and listening. And Tess told him what she’d told Roger Grange: that a non-specific threat had been brought to her attention and that one way of neutralising that threat was to tell the court what he knew about the secret life of Andrew Bealing.

  He, too, signed a witness statement and agreed to enter the witness box. Tess also called Peter Winchley. She wondered if he might be prepared to . . . but he interrupted her with a maxim distilled from forty-six years in haulage: ‘Questions produce answers and answers get you involved.’ So, no, he wouldn’t be answering any questions.

  But Tess now had two witnesses whose evidence would reconstruct Sarah Collingstone’s defence out of the ashes left by Glencoyne’s cross-examination. Tess wondered how she’d take the news.

  49

  Benson had secured an adjournment until 2.30 p.m., pending service of an amended defence statement, an amended Notice of Intention to Call Defence Witnesses, and a Part 34 Notice to introduce hearsay evidence under Section 116 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. All three documents had now been served on Glencoyne. She read them without displaying the slightest reaction. It was 2.15 p.m.

  ‘I’m pretty sure that Bealing was a shit,’ she said as if reciting a poem for an elocution competition. ‘I’m pretty sure that Kym Hamilton’s a shit, too. And her husband. I’m pretty sure that anyone involved in the running of the Hopton business empire was a shit. Which includes Roger Grange and Kingsley Obiora. I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them in the air.’ Glencoyne tossed the papers on to the conference room table. ‘So you’ll forgive me if I refuse to take this seriously. What strikes me, however, is this. It’s only when your client finally shows the world who she really is that these two knights in shitty armour decide they have to save her. It’s too good to be true.’

  ‘But it is true.’

  ‘Let’s pretend, then. Grange and Obiora could have told DCI Winter what they knew ages ago. Why come forward at the last moment, in the middle of a trial?’

  Benson couldn’t answer the question because ‘Jock’ wanted to stay alive. And even if he did tell her, Glencoyne wouldn’t believe him. She’d think that ‘Jock’ didn’t exist, any more than SOCA22 did: that Benson had made up a story to twist their arms. Because when it came to throwing people in the air, she didn’t trust Benson either. ‘Are you behind this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you paid them?’

  Benson refused to acknowledge the insult; but he turned white with rage.

  ‘You’re smart, I’ll give you that,’ said Glencoyne. ‘You’ve got me hamstrung. I can’t ask the jury to draw adverse inferences against the defendant for coming up with this nonsense overnight, first because she didn’t, you did, and second because you’re going to say it’s all DCI Winter’s fault. That he should have listened to the ravings of Debbie Bealing.’

  ‘If he’d listened, he might have questioned Grange and Obiora,’ said Benson. ‘But he didn’t listen. And I came up with nothing overnight. All I did was—’

  ‘You set him up, didn’t you?’ Glencoyne eyed Benson with distaste. ‘You asked DCI Winter about Chinese gangs on Friday and lo and behold you have evidence about Chinese gangs on Tuesday. It stinks, Benson.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what stinks. Not bothering to tell me that Bealing was Daniel’s father – that Collingstone had first met Bealing when she was sixteen.’

  ‘You already knew.’

  ‘I did not.’

  Glencoyne began arranging her wig, making sure none of her black, sharply cut hair was showing. ‘When you served that Section 101 notice on the Crown before introducing David Hamilton’s bad character, I have to say I was surprised. You’d followed the rules. You’d been straight.’ She paused to appraise him, as she’d appraised him in HMP Denton Fields nine years ago. ‘This is what I was frightened of when you applied to join the Inner Temple. I thought there was a chance – a small chance – that you just might drag the profession into the gutter. And you have done.’ She cast a sneer at the recently served paperwork. ‘This sort of thing doesn’t work in the long run. You’ll be found out. And Camberley will have to accept that she made a mistake in joining her name to yours. You see, Benson, the Bar is an honourable calling. You can never belong.’

  He followed her on to the concourse and into Court 1. He felt the choking impotence of his first night in jail. There was nothing he could do. The door had been locked. Someone else had the key. And when the door opened, another inner door would always remain closed; for he was forever a prisoner to his past. He would never get away from the stench of ordure. His own. That of Needles and Jaffa. And the security guard at Hopton’s Yard. And the man who’d come into the pub on Cutter Street. They were all so much sewage.

  50

  In truth, though, Glencoyne was hamstrung. Benson had no difficulty explaining to Mr Justice Oakshott the reasons for a seismic shift in the defence’s position and the late notice to call potentially devastating witnesses. Benson did say it was all DCI Winter’s fault. Because it was. And he got a certain pleasure in stressing the point. Glencoyne couldn’t object and she didn’t. She was then compelled to agree with Mr Justice Oakshott that while DCI Winter had enjoyed eight months to investigate the case, Mr Benson had raised the issue on Friday and produced the evidence by Tuesday. The concession from Glencoyne’s lips – in those precise terms – was music to Benson’s ears. Unknown to the judge, of course, was the true state of relations between counsel. Glencoyne had never trusted Bens
on. Now she despised him. He could feel it; and it gave him a violent hunger to win – and not just this trial but all the others to come. In his guts he felt the defencelessness of all the Sarah Collingstones yet to appear before a court, frightened people, disbelieved and despised. And he would be their defender. The jury were summoned into court and Benson called his witness.

  Roger Grange looked like a man who’d lost a lot of weight quickly. The skin on his face was pale and loose. His eyes were large in their sockets. He seemed to be wearing a suit borrowed from a broader man. A wasted neck rose from a large white shirt and tie. The slight tic – a twitching round the mouth before he spoke – created a sense of urgency and tension. He was speaking out of fear and the fear was viral.

  ‘Andy came to see me in September. He was beside himself. He wanted to organise his finances into a trust, putting day-to-day control of money out of Debbie’s reach. He was worried she wouldn’t be able to cope on her own. I told him he’d have a hell of a fight, because she could contest it, but I said I’d look into it.’

  ‘Did the matter go any further?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they got to him.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘He was hit. Murdered.’

  ‘Did Mr Bealing indicate why he’d decided to put his wealth into the hands of trustees?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please tell the jury.’

  ‘He was worried for his life. He was convinced someone was going to kill him?’

  ‘The mother of a child with special needs who was trying to bite £2.5 million out of his backside – to cite another witness?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he ever mention Sarah Collingstone to you?’