Authors: D.B. Martin
It was 4pm, and for the next hour or so, the clerks in Chambers would be glued to phones nagging solicitors for outstanding briefs, clock-watching or chattering idly. Gregory would be blustering at their laziness, and presiding over the fax like a DX Hitler, whilst the clerks tried to evade him and his pompous interference. The immersion in avoiding him generally kept them as busy as their Silks so they could escape when the clock hands ticked over to five. No-one would be bothering with the basement now. It would be mine until the cleaners and security did their rounds just after six. Two hours to find it.
I risked turning the lights on at the far end of the room. They could have been merely forgotten if anyone did stray down here in an unexpected fit of enthusiasm for filing. The cabinets were ranged in rows, interspersed between bookcases full of dusty tomes. Law Society publications and case law from years back. Why the hell did we still have all this outdated crap down here? I pulled one of the books out at random and the dust it brought with it made me want to sneeze. It smelt of snuff and old men. Musty, rotting and consumed with age. It reminded me of the way the old judge had smelt the last time I’d visited mere days before he’d died. Far from disgusted, I found I now felt regret that it had been the way it was with him. In many ways he’d also been a good friend. Time can temper memory too, it seems, as well as grief. Perhaps it is better to be able to take out and re-examine the better parts of memories whilst overlooking the less palatable? I wished I could do that with more of mine.
Odd that I could about the old judge, and not about Win, my own brother, even though part of our childhood had contained camaraderie and affection. Indeed much of my time with Win, pre-children’s home, had been golden. He, Georgie and I had been the Juss boys; small scrape-kneed warriors with dirty faces, scruffy clothes and vivid imaginations. We’d fought Indians, Germans – even marauding Vikings, having learnt all about long boats and our Saxon ancestry one year at school; possibly the only class Win genuinely listened in. There was always much of fighting in our game-playing, but there were also dens and adventures and shared excitement. Such innocence – misplaced on entering the children’s home, and lost forever after living in it.
I pushed the book back into place, and with it the memories. I hadn’t time to become maudlin down here, apart from which it was the place I would be least likely to want to linger out of choice. Louise’s comment about the mice unnerved me enough without allowing memories to come willy-nilly to haunt me. There were too many of the cold and the dark and the dirty. Rubbing the dust from my fingertips, I skirted the bookcase and peered at the labelling on the filing cabinets next to it. 1997-8, 1996-7, 1995-6 and so on, mainly running in blocks of one year until they stretched back to 1988. Before that the cabinets covered three, even four years at a time, and the drawers were subdivided ‘won’ and ‘lost’. For every one ‘won’ there were two or three ‘lost’. 1988 had marked the divide, as in my memory. Before and after. Before iniquity and after. The case Win had been referring to had been won in late 1988. The landslide victory that had precipitated my fall and our runaway success as an up and coming Chambers. It was so far buried in the box that I had to dig deep to remember the name of the accused. The facts we’d been allowed and the circumstances that were proscribed were burned there with a branding iron.
Stay within guidelines – no manoeuvring; our brief.
Jones, James, Johns? Johns. Wilhelm Johns. Bastard of this parish, but not a murderer.
I had to rummage through to the back of the bottom drawer before I found it. I was just about to retrieve it and shuffle the papers either side of it closer to hide the gap removing it made when the door at the top of the stairs burst open.
‘It’s mean though, isn’t it?’ The high girlish voice of the Louise of the archive information twittered through it. ‘Oh, someone left the lights on.’
‘It’s what it does. Go on.’ Gregory. What the fuck was he doing there? He never deigned to descend to the basement – king though he was of the paper kingdom. I crouched down as low as I could behind the mounds of yesterday’s misdeeds and held my breath. If they ventured downstairs and found me I had no idea what excuse I could make for being there.
‘I’ll leave the water at the top of the stairs then.’ There was the sound of shuffling and then the light clicked off and the door closed. Black deeper than the pit of hell descended. I could feel my heart begin to pound wildly and my ears sing with racing blood.
It’s only dark. There’s nothing here. You know what’s here. Files, folders, books – no rats.
Still my breath came raggedly as the patchwork man unravelled with his fraying fear.
Get a grip, man!
I took a deep unsteady breath and consciously tried to calm the racing heart, quieten the ringing ears.
In, out, in, out. Nothing – silence – see? No rats. In, out, in, out – silence. No, not silence – something moving in the dark. Something else in here with me. Rats – fuck, shit – help me. Rats!
I scrabbled to my feet, and stumbled along the row of bookcases and cabinets, knocking books inwards and paper piles into dishevelled heaps. A turning pack of cards falling behind me in an insane run of disaster and mayhem, breath panting, body sweating, spine tingling – and still the noise followed me.
The lights – where were the fucking lights?
Patting wildly along the wall, the scratching, nipping, gnawing tracked me, stalked me, attacked me... I flicked on the lights.
It was a cat. A small brown tabby glaring at me, back arched and ready to spit. We stared at each other and then I burst out laughing, stifling it hastily in case the madman in the basement became as famously discovered as the madwoman in the attic at Thornfield Hall. The cat thought I was mad, too, but it softened considerably towards me when I smoothed its back and scratched under its chin. It wound ingratiatingly round my ankles, looking dotingly up at me before following me back along my haphazard pathway to the dismantled filing cabinet.
‘So what’s your job, cat? Mouser? Weeding out the vermin? You and me too.’ There was a case for including myself in that category now though.
I found the beribboned parcel where I’d dropped it and covered my tracks as best I could. I couldn’t un-disturb the dust, but with luck no-one else would come searching down here for a while and another layer would eventually fall to obliterate my excavations. I left the cat somewhat guiltily, understanding Louise’s reluctance. It seemed cruel to leave it there in the hated dark, but it didn’t seem too bothered. It wandered off as I repacked the filing cabinet and all I saw as I left was a flurry of sandy-brown fur as it scrambled under a shelf, no doubt in pursuit of its prey. I shivered. The idea had the same effect on me as rats and Win.
The office workers in the area were leaving for home in a steady stream and I had to be careful not to bump into any from Chambers. Head down and package stowed tightly under one arm, I felt like a Bond spy. It amused me to imagine what I actually looked like compared to how I imagined myself – a whimsical idea I doubted I would have been capable of in the height of Margaret’s heyday. Kat seemed to have influenced not only my inner self but also my inner mind, whilst still barely influencing my real-time world. The moments together so far had been barely even snatched. What would full-scale invasion be like? I made it back to the car immersed in that stimulating thought.
You asshole – you’re no more Bond than Win is the Pope! You’re a specious fool who couldn’t keep his prick in his pants when it mattered – then or now.
*
T
he package made its home alongside Danny’s case folder. I poured myself another brandy even though it wasn’t even six and downed it in one. I gagged but didn’t puke this time. The rat claws still crawled over my body if my mind let them. I poured a second and took it over to the desk. Win’s card still lay in the centre and Margaret was still on her back. Pushing up the daisies soon, I thought cruelly and the meanness of the thought made me feel better. It was her fault I’d got dragged into this, even though it was probably a hit and run inevitably waiting to find me some day. Yet ultimately the crime was mine.
I sat for some while, letting the warmth of the brandy soak into me, starting with the burn in my gut and ending up in my brain, soothing and softening. There were three steps to closure. One: read the old brief notes and try to see beyond them to what was being hidden – the real murderer. I suspected the name was there, somewhere. I’d simply stuffed it in the box before I could identify it. Two: make a deal with Win after finding out who knew what, and what they were planning to do with the knowledge. Three: talk to Kat and extract myself from Danny Hewson’s case. If there was a fourth, it would have been to meet Kimberley again, but I hoped that would be encompassed by Two, and what Win could tell me without me having to find it out for myself. My God, even when faced with fathering my sister’s child, I planned my course of action like a campaign. What had I become? I wasn’t merely damaged goods, I was goods beyond repair. I resolved to stay clear of Kat after all and shelved Three. I’d hand the case to someone else to complete. I could at least do right by her and Danny.
I remembered most of the facts and a lot of the detail of the case once I got started. It had been cleverly constructed with all the evidence, which undoubtedly also pointed to the real murderer if we had but looked for them, also being equally direct-able towards Johns. He’d gone ‘No comment’ in all the interviews and then it couldn’t be held against him, but still it did him no favours. Two years later and it would have sealed his fate, but even then it, and the lack of good contemporaneous notes when he waived legal representation, hadn’t helped his cause. Why the hell had he done that? Without assistance from him the defence could come up with nothing and we simply went along with the little we’d got. We completed what someone else had no doubt set up, and acquitted it with style. No-one wanted to delve too deep anyway. We were knee-deep in blood just from the crime scene alone. There was virtually nothing to do yet what little we had done seemed to reach all the right ears, judging by the work that had flowed our way afterwards. Even then I’d been surprised, but as usual, I allocated a box for it to nestle in without bothering me and carried on. But that wasn’t what I was looking for. I was looking for the name behind the name. It wasn’t there, but what was confounded me.
It had no place there, surely? It was almost lost in the list of evidence – labelled ‘Unidentified, NWP’. Not worth pursuit. A photograph of a small red nail clipping found attached to the bag covering the victim’s head, almost lost in the sea of blood that surrounded it.
The girl had not only been suffocated, she’d been macerated; her torso mutilated beyond belief – barely even recognisable as a body so the actual cause of death was almost irrelevant. Whoever had done it was an animal. The suggestion was that it was directly related to the fact that she’d given birth recently – a stillbirth, apparently – but it was still ghoulish. The nail though, it was a very specific red – one I knew well now, and that it was difficult to get hold of – that very particular shade of nail varnish. Margaret’s nail varnish. She ordered it online from the USA when it became too difficult to find here. Why the hell was it there? How the hell was it there?
Ridiculous, but so was the unexpected connection which I couldn’t possibly have anticipated, yet now having been made, confounded me even more. The client’s name was there after all too. How, in God’s name, could I have missed that? John Arthur Wemmick Jnr – the same surname as the old judge, but this was a relation I couldn’t place. I scrutinised the scribbled note. Of all people, Margaret had made it and stuffed it behind a witness statement. I hadn’t missed it. It couldn’t have been there when I’d looked at the papers pre-court appearance because neither had Margaret. Of course, I’d been pretty wound-up at the time because of the nature of the case so I’d applied myself to the facts without allowing myself to think about the ramifications of other possible interpretations. I’d boxed all of it, but there was no doubt Margaret hadn’t been in Chambers when we’d taken the case.
The similarity to Jaggers’ modus operandi was almost too circumstantial for it not to have been him, and Win’s interest in it, of course, but there was no connection otherwise. I ran through all the other possibilities in my head and drew a blank. The cowardly part of me was relieved but the anomalies involving Margaret and the note still screamed at me. She couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it – and yet she apparently had. Boxed? It was clearly time to think outside of it, because if Margaret had also been delving inside this particular one that had somehow to link to what she’d foisted on me.
I set the problem aside too and instead rang Win. Step two.
‘It’s me.’ Inane, I know, but I knew he would know who ‘me’ was immediately. He would have been waiting impatiently for my call ever since he’d left.
‘And?’
‘OK, so I have what you want, but what you expected to be in there isn’t.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You thought the murderer was Jaggers, didn’t you? You thought you would get the dirt on him and then use it to – I don’t know – whatever you wanted to do with it.’ There was no answer, just stertorous breathing on the other end of the line. It must be sleight of hand or my mind tricking me that made me convinced he could come and go so silently. The man was a walking iron lung! I continued. ‘There’s nothing to point to him – or anyone else actually.’
‘I want it anyway.’
‘Why?’
‘I just do.’
‘You’ll have to do better than that.’
‘He was me mate.’
‘Who? The victim was a woman.’
‘No, Willy Johns. I met him again in clink. He were a good friend to me there – kept the fags off of me until I could stand on me own two feet. He died in there when they sent him down for that murder. Some nark knifed him.’ I hadn’t known that. It made the rough justice less just.