Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) (22 page)

I’ve been to the Old Bailey many times down the years, mainly to give evidence, but it’s my first ever visit that stands out and against which all others are measured.

My father would take me into London once a week, in school holidays maybe twice, to see the sights, to become familiar with my heritage, the one he’d fought for as a teenage conscript. He believed, without voicing it as such, that it was part of my education, and looking back I can’t think of many places we didn’t visit, usually just the two of us, without my mother. Perhaps that was the attraction for him, the quietness, the chance to be himself as opposed to living up to her expectations. We took in places as varied as Madame Tussauds and the Tower, the British Museum and Lord’s Cricket Ground, St Paul’s Cathedral and the Inns of Court, and he was surprisingly knowledgeable about them all. Either that or he made it up as he went along...

The day we visited the Old Bailey, we walked up from the river towards St Paul’s and he suddenly took me to one side, twisted his cigarette end under foot and told me that for the next two hours I was to be fourteen years old. Did I understand? Not fully, but it gave me an unfathomable sense of pride that in his eyes I would have no trouble playing two years older than I actually was. The reason for this charade was that then, as now, a child under the age of fourteen wasn’t allowed into the public galleries.

As we turned into Old Bailey, the actual street, I was overcome by the building’s power which to this day I can’t explain. It seemed to stand alone – indeed there was no extension to it then – and it demanded a quiet respect, a kind of fear which my father honoured by speaking in a whisper for the next three hours. I can’t remember the case we saw, or the court it took place in. A butcher had been robbed, my father managed to tell me, and two policemen were being cross-examined, but why these bewigged adults were so formal to one another, talked in such stilted language, bewildered me. My father explained later that it was custom, principle, tradition, and where would we be without them? I didn’t understand that either. At lunch time we went to a nearby café and I had baked beans on toast and a cup of tea.

On the morning I chose to attend Flaxman’s trial, I went into a Caffè Nero on Newgate Street, one I’d used in my police days. It was much the same as I remembered it: large, dusty, big leather sofas and hardback chairs at wooden tables, and on two walls hung black-and-white photos of celebrities who had drunk the coffee and lived to tell the tale. The third wall had the chalked-up prices of what was on offer. They’d gone up since my last visit.

At the counter I asked an Australian barista if he would look after my rucksack which contained my phone, an illegal self-defence spray and keys to the Land Rover. The first two were pure anathema to any court in the world. That would be twenty quid, the Aussie said. To a charity. Baristas in Need? I suggested. He smiled. I handed him both bag and money and he gave me a card with the number 3 on it, then asked if I wanted coffee. Was that extra or thrown in? It was £3.40. I loosened my collar, despite the fact that I was wearing a T-shirt under the leather jacket.

When I turned into the Bailey, the sense of awe I’d felt as a boy had become more one of foreboding. The quietness I’d recalled still prevailed, broken occasionally by the clang of scaffolding being dropped nearby, voices a hundred feet in the air shouting instructions. Outside the main entrance the press had gathered, not all for the Flaxman trial but mostly. From experience, I could pick out relatives of the accused, their faces betraying a mess of raw emotion, mainly fear disguised as bravado. A couple I took, from their age and self-consciousness, to be Flaxman’s parents were dressed in their finest and stood apart, strangers to London if not to courtrooms. I was just about to go over and introduce myself when the front door was opened and we entered at a shuffle. I was last in the queue.

When you step from the pavement into that oppressive little reception area you become an immediate cause for concern. Fair enough, given the Provos’ attempt to flatten the place in 1973. But there are ways of voicing that concern, and the guy who came over to me before I’d taken my third step wasn’t familiar with the polite versions.

“Yes?”

He was four inches taller than me, ten years younger and completely bald from choice to give himself an edge he didn’t really need. He had a complexion similar to my kitchen table: grainy here, a darkened knot there, scarred in several places and scrubbed to a false shine. He was dressed in a black suit, white shirt and house tie.

“I’m here at the request of Henry Sillitoe, solicitor in the Flaxman hearing, court 4.”

“Name?”

“Nathan Hawk.”

He held up a hand. “Wait.”

He turned to his superior behind the desk. The superior was dressed in the same garb; he was older, fatter, and his head was gleaming with sweat even this early in the day.

“You can’t,” he said.

“Can’t what?”

“Sir James Garrod has asked that you be kept out of the courtroom.”

“Can he do that?”

“He has done. The judge has ruled.”

The last of the visitors had gone through the scanners, leaving just the three of us and a huddle of security cameras watching our every breath.

“I’d like to talk to your head of security,” I said.

“He’s in a meeting.”

“Then will you call Marion Bewley? She’s Sillitoe’s assistant...”

“No can do. Strict instructions.”

“Who do I talk to, then?”

“Me.”

“Not good enough. I want the organ grinder, not the monkey.”

He rose from his chair. He was certainly flabby but a little more dangerous than I’d first thought. For a start he had within reach all the bells and whistles that would lock the place down and bring armed security running.

“You’re becoming abusive,” he said.

“You’re the reason for that. I’ve been asked by the prosecution...”

“And I’ve just told you, that’s been ruled against. Both sides have agreed.”

“Any explanation?”

“The judge doesn’t have to give one...”

“All this is bollocks and you know it!”

He pointed at me. “Language! Your presence would be prejudicial to the case, I’ve been told, but you’re welcome to observe from the public gallery. Out the door, turn left, twenty yards down, Warwick Passage.” He paused. “You can go now.”

This minion, who hadn’t once addressed me as ‘sir’, was dismissing me. His junior colleague went back to the door and held it open. A ski mask of anger seemed to slip over my head and begin to tighten. The Kitchen Table would be a problem, the sweaty man behind the desk not so much of one: short fist to the nose across the counter, burst open his face. Would it be worth a day in the Old Bailey cells, though, white tiles with mouldy grouting like a lavatory on an old railway station?

I walked over to the desk, heard the door clatter shut and the Kitchen Table walk up behind me. I reached into my inside pocket, at which point they should have leaped on me and tied my arms in a knot. They weren’t to know that all I’d take out was The Map. I spread it on the counter, then took out the imaginary spectacles and put them on. The two men stared at me. I wasn’t dangerous after all; I was just weird. I closed my eyes, raised a forefinger and brought it down on a far more agreeable place. Winchendon. My own garden.

How anger can turn to sentimentality in a snap, I’ll never know. Maybe the two states of mind aren’t so very different to begin with. I could see Fee and Yukito, strolling beneath the big beech tree, hand in hand. She appeared to be laughing. So was he. I’d never credited the Japanese with a sense of humour.

I took off the glasses, folded up The Map and returned both to my inside pocket.

“Sorry, where did you say the public gallery was?”

The Kitchen Table replied as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. “Out the door, turn left, Warwick Passage. Go in, up the stairs, knock and wait.”

“Thank you.”

I may even have dredged up a smile. On balance, I think it’s unlikely.

Warwick Passage runs alongside the new extension, beneath the court offices. Halfway down there’s a doorway, a slab with a tiny window in it. ‘Public Galleries’, it says on an enamelled plate. The walls nearby are festooned with notices telling you what you can and can’t do in a gallery, what you can’t bring in. Some of the instructions are contradictory, there to disconcert rather than inform.

I climbed up the stone stairs – Christ, there was even a notice telling me how many steps there were ahead of me – and when I reached the first landing I knocked on the wired glass doors to courts number 4 to 8. I waited and in time a gallery officer, a short, round Scotswoman of microscopic charm, came to the door and asked what I wanted. Court 4, I said. She told me to wait and disappeared. Ten minutes later she returned to inform me that Sir James Garrod was in the middle of opening for the prosecution; I would have to wait till he’d finished before I could enter. ‘Wait’ was fast becoming the word of the day. It’s a word I’ve never had much time for...

In time the Scotswoman returned and repeated, in a Glaswegian accent, everything I’d read on various notices, then led me to the gallery above the court where Aaron Flaxman was being tried. She told me exactly where to sit, alongside thirty other people crammed into the gods of this second-rate theatre.

Courtrooms are easy to read, once you’ve been in a few, and this one was pretty basic. The judge sat at the front, elevated. In front of him, lower down, was his clerk, a young black woman, her striking face ridiculed by the traditional wig. Facing them at floor level were the two barristers, pro and con, behind them the instructing solicitors. Sillitoe was leaning towards James Garrod, probably telling him what a marvellous job he’d just done, setting out the prosecution case with so little to work with. Behind them, in the glass-fronted dock, sat Flaxman with his solicitor, a middle-aged Indian. Aaron didn’t see me enter. He was more interested in staring out the multi-ethnic jury of seven women and five men who, after hearing Garrod, were beginning to wonder if this was going to be the fun experience they’d hoped for.

Beside them, at a distance, sat the two people I’d rightly assumed were Flaxman’s parents. The mother was looking up at me; in fact she didn’t take her eyes off me until the defence barrister rose to speak. Her name was Charlotte Thornton, fifty years old and a couple of stone overweight, showing mainly in her face thanks to the black gown. Posh, pedantic voice which delivered a nice line in sarcasm disguised as reasonable argument.

“My Lord, the defence’s case can be expressed quite simply. My client, Mr Flaxman, had no motive whatsoever for murdering Frederick Trent and Victor Wesley and furthermore could not possibly have done so because he was not present at the scene of the crimes when they were committed. He was at his parents’ house throughout the afternoon of March 12th, that being his mother’s birthday, and as your lordship knows I shall be calling Mr and Mrs Flaxman in due course. A lively business discussion ended at 4.00 pm, at which point my client returned home to his rented flat in Wragby. My learned friend has implied that, since neither Speaker’s Wood nor the village of Wragby is festooned with CCTV cameras, we have no proof that my client returned home rather than meeting up with Mr Trent and Mr Wesley, murdering them and then disposing of the bodies...”