Sam Nixon parked his car and looked out of the windscreen. He used to like sunrise—it made even Blackley look pretty—but the view had lost its charm years ago.
Sam’s office was in the middle of a line of Victorian bay fronts, with stone pillars in each doorway and gold-leaf letters on the windows, legacies of Blackley’s cotton-producing heyday. The town used to rumble with the sounds of clogs and mills, and the mill-owners’ money would end up in the pockets of the lawyers and accountants who spread themselves along this street. Blackley’s life as a Lancashire cotton town had ended a couple of decades earlier, but it was marked by its past like an old soldier by his tattoos.
Sam could see the canal that flowed past the end of the street. The towpath was overgrown with long Pennine grasses, and ripples in the water twinkled like starbursts as they caught the early-morning sun. The old wharf buildings were still there, three-storey stone blocks with large wooden canopies painted robin’s-egg blue that hung over the water, but they were converted into offices now. The sounds of a new day filled the car, the whistles of the
morning birds as they swooped from roof to roof, the rustle of leaves and litter as they blew along the towpath. It was heritage Lancashire, lost industry repackaged as character.
But it was the only bright spot. The factories and mill buildings further along the canal were empty, stripped of their pipes and cables by thieves who traded them in for scrap, left to rot with broken windows and paint-splattered walls. Those that were bulldozed away were replaced by housing estates and retail parks.
Blackley was in a valley. A viaduct carried the railway between the hills, high millstone arches that cast shadows and echoed with the sound of the trains that rumbled towards the coast. Redbrick terraced streets ran up the hills around the town centre, steep and tight, the lines broken only by the domes and minarets of the local mosques, the luscious greens and coppers bright dots of colour in a drab Victorian grid.
Beyond those, Sam could see a cluster of tower blocks that overlooked the town centre, bruises of the sixties, dingy and grey, where the lifts reeked of piss and worse, and the landings were scattered with syringes. They had views to the edges of town, but everything looked bleak and wet from up there, whatever the weather.
Sam closed his eyes and sighed. He was a criminal lawyer in Blackley’s largest firm, Parsons & Co. As soon as he hit the office his day would be taken up by dead-beats, drunks, junkies and lowlifes, a daily trudge through the town’s debris. Criminal law was budget law, the most work for the least reward, so he had to put in long hours to keep the firm afloat. He started early and
finished late, his day spent fighting hopeless causes in hostile courts, and most evenings wrecked by call-outs to the police station.
He used to enjoy it, the dirt, the grime. A legal service. A social service. Sometimes both, with a touch of court theatre, just the right phrase or the right question, maybe just a look, could mean guilty or not guilty, jail or no jail.
But then the job had worn him down. He had two children he hardly saw, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had hugged his wife.
And he was sleeping badly. He was staying up too late, and when he did finally fall asleep he woke up scared, bad dreams making the day start too soon. They were always the same: he was running through doorways, dark, endless, one after another, someone crying far away. Then he would be falling. He woke the same way each time: a jolt in bed and then bolt upright, drenched in sweat, his heart beating fast.
He opened his eyes and sighed. He rubbed his cheeks, tried to wake himself up. He couldn’t put it off any longer: he had to start the day.
His head was down as he walked towards his office and fumbled for the key. He had to put his briefcase down to search his pockets, and that’s when he saw him.
On the other side of the street was a man, stooped, old and shabbily dressed, his clothes hanging loose from his body. His hands were clutched to his sides as if he were stood to attention, and his eyes were fixed in a stare, unblinking, unwavering.
Sam felt uneasy. The courtroom usually protected
him, shrouded in respect and court rules, but defence lawyers pissed people off. Victims, witnesses, sometimes just the moral majority. He felt himself grow nervous, checked his pocket for his phone, ready to call the police if a knife appeared. But the old man just stared at Sam, his face expressionless.
Sam eventually found his key. He took one last look into the street. The old man hadn’t moved. He was still watching him.
Sam made a mental note of the time and turned to go inside.
As Egan walked towards them, Laura could sense his self-importance. He was jogger-trim, his nose tight and hooked, his hair bottle-dark and cut just too neatly, not a strand out of place. His white shirt was bright and crisp, to emphasise his suntan, she guessed, which seemed more salon than sunshine.
Pete smiled. ‘He’s going to be pissed off about this.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the last time I saw him he was at one of the press conferences for the abducted children, preening himself. There isn’t much airtime in this case, and he’ll want to get in and out quickly. He won’t give up a place on the podium for what might be just a bad domestic.’
Laura looked at Pete. ‘If he’s involved in the abduction cases, why doesn’t he stick with those?’
Pete looked at Laura and said under his breath, ‘I suspect it wasn’t his choice.’
DI Egan looked around as he took in the scene. He almost stepped on Laura’s toes before he noticed her. She saw his quick appraisal, eyes all over her body, ending
at her bare ring-finger. Lesbian or prey, in his eyes she could see that she was either one or the other.
He spent too long looking at the identification she had hanging around her neck and then asked, ‘So what do we have, Laura?’ He looked away before she had a chance to answer, so she ended up talking to the back of his head.
‘Deceased is called Jess Goldie. It looks like she died from strangulation, sir, but it wasn’t quick,’ she said, trying to hide the fatigue in her voice. The early start was catching up on her.
Egan started to show interest. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I saw her neck before the doctor arrived, and there were a lot of marks, as if she had been strangled over and over.’
‘What, you mean sex games? You know, strangle, release, strangle, release?’
Laura thought she saw a twinkle of excitement in his eyes. ‘Can’t say I do,’ she replied, weary of cops who saw the quick thrill in everything. ‘She died in her clothes. If it was kinky, it was shy kinky.’
Egan pursed his lips and looked away.
‘And there was something else.’
Egan turned back, his eyebrows raised. ‘Go on.’
Laura glanced at Pete. ‘She’s missing her eyes and tongue.’
‘What do you mean, “missing her eyes and tongue”?’
‘It means that she hasn’t fucking got them any more,’ said Pete, his voice rich with sarcasm. ‘What do you think it means, that she left them on top of the fridge or something?’
Egan spun around, eyes angry, so Laura interrupted. ‘She was tied to a chair, and her eyes and tongue have been cut out.’
Egan continued to stare at Pete, who just stared back. Eventually Egan turned away. He sighed and then began to chew at his lip. Laura sensed that he had just seen this investigation stretching a long way into the future.
‘I bet you could do without this,’ said Pete to Egan, as he raised his eyebrows at Laura. ‘On top of the abductions, I mean.’
Egan’s top lip twitched.
Laura looked down and tried not to smirk. She had quickly figured out that Egan’s eyes were on the career ladder. She had seen his type before: delegate everything and then take all the credit. Look pert and enthusiastic in strategy meetings and then ditch the work onto others. She could guess why Pete hadn’t climbed very far.
‘Is it drugs?’ asked Egan, looking around, trying to change the subject. ‘Some kind of revenge attack?’
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Laura said. She was new to Blackley, but she knew enough to know that this wasn’t a drug neighbourhood. It was full of new-build town-houses, all shiny red bricks, narrow paths and neat double glazing, brightened up with cottage fascias and potted plants. It was a first-time-buyer estate. Drug dealers don’t bother with the housing ladder; they stay low until they can move really high. ‘I checked with intel half an hour ago, and she’s not on our radar. Just a nice, quiet girl, so the neighbours say.’
‘How was she discovered?’
Laura and Pete exchanged glances before Laura
replied, ‘The call came around four this morning. Some old boy, Eric Randle, said he went round to check on her. He found her tied to a chair, dead.’
‘Went round to check, at four in the morning?’
‘That’s what I thought.’ Laura raised her eyebrows. ‘Said he’d had a dream.’
Egan smiled, almost in relief. ‘This sounds like a quick one.’
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ she said. ‘I saw the body, and I saw him, and he doesn’t seem a likely. But he doesn’t have an alibi.’ Laura thought back to the meeting she’d had with the old man. He hadn’t spoken much, seemed in shock.
‘So is he suspect or witness?’ asked Egan, watching her carefully.
‘Suspect. Everyone is, this early into it.’
‘So did you arrest him?’
Laura noticed the tone of Egan’s voice, slow and deliberate, making sure it had been
her
decision. He would stand by her only if it looked like she had got it right.
She paused for a moment, thought about what they had in the way of evidence. The old man had been visibly upset, but Laura had checked him out for wounds or scratch marks. Nothing. His clothes had been seized, to check for blood-spray, and he’d agreed to a DNA swab, for elimination purposes she’d told him, along with his fingernail clippings, but nothing in her instincts told her that he was the killer.
‘No,’ she said, after a moment. ‘He’s of interest, but no more than that.’
Egan nodded, a thin smile on his lips, and then headed up the path towards the front door.
‘Crime scenes are still in there,’ she shouted.
Egan stopped, looked back at her. Laura thought he appeared irritated, as if she had somehow insulted him. Before he had a chance to speak, a uniformed officer appeared at her shoulder.
‘We’ve got a neighbour who says she heard something last night.’
Egan looked over and then moved back down the path towards them.
‘Who is it?’
The uniform pointed behind him to a house a few doors away, at the edge of the cul-de-sac. On the doorstep stood a woman in her fifties, wrapped in a quilted dressing gown, her hair messy and eyes bright with fear.
‘What’s she got?’ Egan barked the questions, sounding impatient.
‘She says she heard a car leave very late, well after midnight. It had been parked at the entrance to the cul-de-sac. A nice car, Audi TT, navy blue. When it left, it screeched away.’
‘Did she get the number?’
The uniform held up a scrap of paper. ‘Not last night. But she remembered it this morning when she saw the police arrive because it was one of those personal ones.’
Egan looked down at the piece of paper and grinned. ‘We need to do a vehicle check on this.’
The uniform smiled. Already done it.’
Egan pursed his lips a couple of times, like a nervous tic, and then asked, ‘Who’s the keeper?’
‘Someone called Luke King.’
‘Is he known to us?’
‘His father is.’
‘Go on.’ Egan was sounding impatient again.
‘He’s Jimmy King.’
Egan looked like he’d been slapped.
‘Who is he?’ Laura whispered to Pete.
Pete sighed. ‘Some would say a local businessman, one of the most successful in Lancashire.’
‘And what would others say?’
‘The most ruthless and sadistic person they have ever come across.’
She was going to ask Pete something else when she noticed that Egan had started to pace. She sensed that if Egan was about to feel the strain, she was about to get even busier.
It was over an hour before anyone else showed up at Sam’s office. It was the same most mornings, quiet until just after eight. He preferred it that way normally, away from the office chatter, but it was different this morning. He was edgy, troubled by the old man outside the office. Every time he looked out of the window, he was there, staring up, watching him work.
And Sam was trying to work. The early-morning office time was important. Being a criminal lawyer could be a full day. All-day courts and all-night police stations, with clients and witnesses to see in between. Sam had a diary full of appointments, although he knew most of those wouldn’t attend. They’d turn up instead on their trial dates, expecting him to defend them when they hadn’t even bothered to tell him their story.
So the early morning was when Sam caught up, the office fresh with the smell of furniture polish after the attentions of the dawn cleaner. He briefed counsel, compiled witness statements from a jumble of notes, or dictated the stream of correspondence demanded by the Legal Services Commission.
The younger lawyers did it differently. They went for visible overtime, working late into the evening, hoping to be noticed. But it made no difference. Only one thing mattered, and that was the figures. How much money was made. No one asked
when
it was made.
At Parsons & Co, whatever problem needed sorting, there was always a lawyer willing to bill you for it. Crime had always been Sam’s thing, but when Harry Parsons had started out, he’d done everything from divorces to fighting evictions. As the firm grew, it sprouted departments. The criminal department was the most precarious, because the work was so unpredictable. Police budget cuts could lead to fewer arrests, or if a lawyer upset one of the bigger criminal families the department would find itself with fewer clients. The claims department was the money-spinner. It used to help people who called into the office, victims of
real
accidents. Now it just handled referrals from those claims farmers who advertised on television, the promise of free money slotted in between debt-firm commercials, and now the lawyers settled claims for people they never met.
Harry Parsons himself still worked in the office, but he didn’t venture out much, working instead from a room along a dark corridor of worn carpet and faded paint. A local legend, he’d built up the practice from virtually nothing, but he ran it now from a distance, trusting the departments to deal with the day-to-day domestics. Everyone else was jostling for position: the old man was due to retire in a couple of years, and they were all hoping for a share when he went.
They didn’t have the ace card that Sam held, though: he had married Harry’s daughter, Helena, and given him two grandchildren. As far as Sam was concerned, he was at the head of the queue.
Sam was looking out of the window when he heard the other lawyers and clerks begin to trickle in. They gathered in a room along the corridor and drank coffee, exchanged insults. Sam would wander in when he finished what he was doing. He was on his third cup of coffee and he could already feel his heart thundering, but he needed the kick. He had a morning in court to get through and the broken sleep was getting to him. He looked round when he heard a knock on the door. It was Alison Hill, the newly qualified lawyer in the firm, spending some time in crime until she decided what she wanted to do with her career. She would move on, he had seen the ambition in her eyes, but until then Sam liked seeing her around the office. She wore her hair back in a ponytail, clasped by a black clip, and her blonde locks gleamed. Whenever they met, Sam automatically toyed with his wedding ring, felt himself smile too much. She was tall and elegant, with a bright and easy smile, her green eyes deep and warm.
He nodded towards the window. ‘Do you know him?’
Alison walked over and looked into the street. Sam could smell her perfume, something light and floral.
She shook her head. ‘Never seen him before. Why, is he bothering you?’
He shrugged it off, but as Alison turned away from the window, Sam noticed she had a file in her hand.
‘Everything okay?’ he asked.
Alison looked down, almost as if she had forgotten she was holding it. ‘I’ve got this today, for trial,’ she said.
‘What is it?’
‘Johnny Jones, for assault.’
‘What’s the problem?’
She looked awkward for a moment, and then said, ‘He seems guilty. I’ve looked at every angle and I can’t see a way out. He attacked the karaoke man because he missed his turn. Half the pub saw him do it, and it’s on CCTV.’
‘Sounds like a classy place.’
She grimaced. ‘It reads like the worst night of your life.’
Sam smiled, found himself playing the elder statesman. ‘Don’t worry about Johnny Jones. He’ll be convicted, guaranteed, but he won’t listen to your advice. He’ll want an acquittal out of pity, but he won’t get one. Just call it character-building.’
‘How come? It’s a complete no-hoper.’
‘Would you rather lose a no-hoper or a dead-cert winner?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Nothing you can do will get him an acquittal,’ Sam continued, ‘and the prosecution will give him a hard time for having the trial. He will get the verdict he deserves, and maybe even get the sentence he deserves. But’, Sam raised his eyebrows at her, ‘if you mess up a dead-cert winner, when you have made promises you thought you could keep, you’ll see your client’s eyes every night when you go to sleep, that look in his eyes as he gets taken down the steps. Fear, anger, confusion. Trust me, that’s worse.’
Alison sighed and then smiled. ‘Thanks, Sam.’
‘Any time.’ As she went to leave, Sam said to her, ‘Don’t forget the magic words, when you get to your feet.’
She looked confused. ‘Magic words?’
‘“Client’s instructions.” When you are asked if the “not guilty” plea stands, just say that those are your client’s instructions. It just gives a hint that you don’t believe in what you are doing.’
‘Why should I do that? It won’t help Johnny Jones.’
‘Forget about your client. You’re the one who matters, and for your sake the court needs to know which one of you is the idiot. There is only one thing worse than a lawyer making a hopeless application, and that’s a lawyer not knowing it is hopeless.’
‘Bang on the table, you mean?’
Sam grinned. He remembered that from law school, the old adage that if you are strong on the law, argue the law, and if you are strong on the facts, argue the facts. If you are strong on neither, bang on the table.
‘Bang it hard,’ said Sam. ‘Take every point, regardless of how pointless, just so that the punter thinks you’re a fighter. He won’t know you’re talking nonsense, but if you fight the case he will think you’re the best young lawyer in Blackley.’
Alison nodded, looking more relaxed now. ‘Okay.’
‘Remember, you’re Harry’s golden girl.’
She blushed, although they both knew that there was some truth in that. Helena, Sam’s wife, had once been a lawyer at Parsons, but had given it up when she’d had children. It seemed like Harry saw Alison as Helena’s replacement.
Sam looked back out of the window. The old man was still there.
‘If I get killed today, remember his face.’
‘Can I have your office?’
‘Get out.’
She was laughing as she went.
When he was alone in the room again, Sam watched the street life. The pavement was getting busy with lawyers from other firms, big egos in a forgotten Lancashire town. They barely noticed the drunks who congregated at the end of the street and shared cheap cigarettes and stolen sherry.
He watched the lawyers walk by for a while, waved at the ones who looked up. When he looked beyond them, he noticed that the old man had gone. He checked his watch and then stepped away from the window. He made a note of the time. Like most lawyers, he lived his life in six-minute segments.