I had this client.
Reginald Chesterfield was a seventy-five year old man who worked as a department store Santa every Christmas. With no previous, he’d sailed through the CRB checks and bagged himself the job with ease. And Christ… he looked the part, too. White hair, white beard, half-moon glasses.
A few weeks ago, he took his laptop in for repairs. Whilst it was being examined, the repairman stumbled upon some images of children. The really bad kind. As a department store Santa, it was a terrible revelation.
When I first represented him, he fed me a total bunch of crap. This terrible stuff was research for a book he was planning, he said. I advised him that it might help to inform the police of this during his interview. It would establish his argument at the earliest opportunity, if nothing else.
The police then bailed him for a CPS review.
But really, there was nothing that would prevent Reginald from being charged. He had over a thousand of those disgusting fucking pictures and I knew what the CPS advice would be. When I went back for the bail-return, the officer confirmed it. After telling Reginald the news, he looked at me over his half-moon specs and whispered, “That copper doesn’t like me much, does he?”
It freaked me out.
*
I was glad to be walking away from the police station after that. Glad to be out of the custody suite. No matter how often I saw the dour-faced cleaning ladies scrubbing the place down, I always left feeling sickened by the invisible filth of junkies, alcoholics and other degenerate wasters. I carried anti-bacterial hand-cleanser and squirted big dollops of the stuff in my palm, rubbing my hands together furiously as I headed back to my car.
Once inside, I sat behind the steering wheel, thinking for a while.
Reginald was a lost cause. He deserved prison. No two ways about it. And he’d never work as Santa again, that was for sure. He’d buckled under the strain of his rotten sexual perversions, feeding the industry of so-called ‘child porn’, and he should never be allowed to forget it.
But someone like him wouldn’t be able to handle prison brutality. If he was convicted and sent down, I was pretty sure the guards would find him hanging one morning. And it was a thought that pleased me.
With that, I put the car into gear and drove off. I didn’t know what I had waiting for me back in the office, but it didn’t matter. The resentment for my work had started some time ago, and days like this didn’t help at all.
*
Whenever I got back to the office after a police station call-out, my first port of call was Carol’s room. There, my secretary would thrust at me a stack of all the telephone messages she’d taken in my absence. As I stepped into her room, she looked up at me from behind her desk, her phone propped against her ear by a raised shoulder. She scribbled notes with one hand, and passed me a thick wad of telephone messages with the other, eyebrows raised as though chiding me for not being in the office to take the calls instead, and putting her to incredible inconvenience.
I stood in front of her desk for a moment, sifting through the pile. Most of it was the usual stuff. Stressed out clients demanding updates, police officers reporting extended bail-returns, barristers chasing missing papers from trial briefs. But among all the shite, there was one that made my guts suddenly turn.
I hadn’t spoken to Mum in years.
Why had she phoned the office?
I crumpled the message in my fist as I turned and walked upstairs to my office.
*
This is me aged eight:
I’m sitting alone at the dinner table eating my fish fingers and chips. I don’t really want to eat the peas, though, because I don’t like peas. I feel a slight pang of guilt because Dad went to the trouble of making them for me and I don’t want to make Dad feel bad. And anyway… he says ‘Eat your greens’ because your greens are good for you and make you strong and put hairs on your chest. I’m not really sure I want hairs on my chest, but I do want to be strong.
As I eat, I’m aware of my smallness in the room. Aware of the noises I make in the silence. Dad served my food up and took himself upstairs. If I listen carefully, I can hear him crying and it’s because Mum left to live with Frank and it still upsets him. She doesn’t love Dad anymore, and she said she didn’t want me to live with her and Dad could have me. That probably means that she doesn’t love me, either, because if she did, she’d surely want me to live with her. But it’s okay. I don’t really want to live with her because I don’t like Frank, and besides… Dad makes me fish fingers and I like fish fingers. And he gives me peas to make me strong, even though I don’t really like peas.
*
I closed my office door, dropped my briefcase beside my desk and sat down, staring at my phone. I was going to have to ring her. Phoning me at work was not something she’d normally do, so something was wrong.
I took a deep breath and reached for my phone. Punched in her number. She answered after just a couple of rings.
“Mum,” I said. “It’s me.”
“Jack. Sorry to bother you at work. I just phoned to let you know your Gran passed away last night. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Right,” I said. “Thanks.”
There was a pause. Several seconds of awkward silence. I heard her sigh.
“Is that all you have to say?” she said.
I closed my eyes again. “That’s terrible news,” I said.
“You could sound as though you mean it.”
“I’m busy, Mum. Text me the funeral details. I’ll see you there.”
Before she said anything else, I hung up.
*
“There are things you’re too young to understand, Jack. But you’re not too young to understand that Frank makes your Mum happy.”
At eight years old, I know that although I myself feel no pain, I’m capable of causing it in other people. And not just physical pain.
Gran sits at the breakfast table to the right of me, a mug of coffee in front of her. Her hands are laced together as she leans forward to get in close. I have a bowl of untouched porridge in front of me, and a glass of orange juice. I lean forward too, looking up into her face and listening to this familiar sermon. Every time she visits Mum and Frank, she finds an opportunity to sit me down and tell me these things.
She looks at me, nodding ever so slightly, reassuring herself perhaps, that her lesson is sinking in. She picks up her mug of coffee, lifts it to her lips but instantly puts it back down.
“And another thing…” she says, stabbing the table-top with her gnarled index finger. “Frank works hard. Earns a good living. Takes care of your Mum. Your Dad never did that. Only ever put himself first. Drifting from one job to another. Incapable of holding a good job, incapable of holding on to friendships. It’s a wonder your Mum put up with it for as long as she did.”
I look up at her and don’t say anything.
“You get on with Frank, right? You like him?”
I think for a moment. I bite my lip, because I’m not sure whether to say what she wants to hear or whether to tell the truth.
“Well? You like him, don’t you?” she says again.
“Not when he tries to hurt me,” I say, looking back up at her.
Gran frowns. Leans back in her seat and sighs loudly. Then she leans forward again. “That’s just his way of having fun with you, Jack. It’s difficult for him. Stepfather to another man’s child. He’s just trying to figure out how to have a relationship with you. And anyway… he can’t hurt you. You know that.”
This is true. I’ve never been able to feel pain. Not like normal people. Frank realised there was something wrong with me one day when he put a five-pound note on the table and said, “If you can touch it, you can have it.”
As I reached out a hand, he suddenly slammed one of those hard rubber-soled slippers down WHACK! on my fingers. Feeling nothing, I carried on until my hand was covering the note. In frustration, he walloped my hand two more times, total confusion all over his face. But I didn’t let go of the fiver.
“Congenital analgesia,” I heard Mum tell him later. “He’s never been able to feel pain. It’s been a major headache for me, over the years. He got it from him.”
Dad was the same, so she meant Dad.
But Gran was wrong. She was wrong about Frank. He wasn’t trying to have fun with me. He was trying to have fun at my expense.
*
The service was underway as I went crashing in through the double doors. Midway through the hymn, ‘Morning Has Broken’, the congregation turned, and momentarily, the singing trailed off into a chorus of mumbles. When they saw it was me, they turned to face the front again.
I’d arrived late on purpose, not wanting to run into either Mum or Frank. As I took position at the back, I glanced over to Mum, up at the front. She spared the briefest glance in return and promptly turned away. But not Frank. He lingered there, glaring at me over his shoulder, eyes drilling their hate into me, eyebrows raised. An arm wrapped supportively around my Mum.
(You’re a fucking failure, Jack! I always said so!)
I ignored the screaming insinuations from his glare and picked up an Order of Service, grimacing at the photo of Gran on the front. An almost perfect resemblance to Mum. Then I glanced back to Frank. He was deep into the hymn again, his back to me, hugging Mum in tight and close.
The singing continued.
Gran didn’t deserve my singing voice. Instead, I started playing with the words in my mind, fitting them in with the melody:
Moaning and croaking,
Like the last breath (of),
A cancer-man smoking,
Rejoice in her death.
After the hymn, everyone took their seats with a brief series of hushed shuffling sounds. The service proceeded with all the usual sycophantic bullshit. A wonderful woman, a beautiful soul. Oh, how she’ll be missed. I watched distant family members and barely recognisable friends weeping and hugging. When the congregation finally stood to listen to Michael Jackson’s ‘You Are Not Alone’ the coffin slid away. The curtains closed with an awkward squeaking and off she went with her express ticket to Hell.
*
I didn’t cause a scene. I could have. I could have exploded into a drink-fuelled supernova of hate but I remained calm and slunk from the crematorium before anyone noticed, deciding to give the wake a wide berth.
A few days later, a large envelope landed on my doormat. I opened it and shook out the contents. There were two smaller envelopes inside, one which had ‘Jack’ written on the front in my Mum’s handwriting, and one in my grandmother’s.
I decided to open and read Mum’s letter first:
Jack,
Your Grandmother left you some money and a letter (enclosed). We already know what your Gran left you, and we’ll get a cheque to you before probate is settled, as I’m sure you’ll be keen to get your hands on the money. Of course, Frank thinks you shouldn’t get a penny, but who am I to challenge the wishes of your kind and ever-loving Grandmother?
Mum.
I sneered at it and opened Gran’s. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to. There was a sudden sickness in my guts. But curiosity got the better of me.
It said:
Dear Jack,
I let you down. I am sorry,
Gran.
A while after that, the cheque turned up. It was for £50,000.
*
I’d taken a few days off work, playing the part of a grieving grandson. Taking time off was the sort of thing that other people would do and I’d realised some time ago that often in life it’s best to do what other people do. To look normal and fit in. In any event, my head was a mess. Tons of thoughts swirling around my mind, like the noisy rushing chaos of a tornado, not least of which was the money Gran had left me. The anger was still there; a bright fury that smouldered beneath the surface of my outward calm. But there was a massive sense of confusion, too.
Why would Gran do this? Why show no interest in me throughout my life, only to leave a grand gesture at death? Why hadn’t she spoken up before?
At first, I’d been tempted to rip the cheque to pieces. It was all just another head-fuck and it felt as though all my old scars had been torn open again. But in the end I kept it.
Fuck it, I thought. And when you’re talking about £50,000, most people probably would have done the same.
*
Returning to work was grim. There was nothing else going on to save me from the backlog of dreary paperwork but it was impossible to make any progress. My secretary pumped incoming calls through to me, one after another. Refusing to filter them like a good secretary was meant to. A queue of frustrated callers who’d been waiting for me to return, impatient and in need of the peace of mind that I just wasn’t interested in giving them.
I booted up my PC and perused the day’s news. Headed to the website of the city rag and immediately felt sickened.
The Tooth Fairy had struck again.
A family of three, brutally murdered in the early hours of the morning. Lance and Janice Wendle. Ten-year-old son Jeff. Found by a neighbour, tied to their own kitchen chairs, they’d been bludgeoned to death. Special care had been taken to smash their teeth out and each victim was found sitting on a £1 coin.
Someone had labelled this sick bastard The Tooth Fairy after the first family were killed, several months back. It wasn’t really hard to figure out why. There was a very clear echo of Thomas Harris’s serial-killer in Red Dragon. Some weird fucker breaking into people’s homes at night. Murdering entire families. Having some nicknamed monstrosity the focus of attention probably proved the morbid viewpoint that terrible news sells.
It made me want to puke.
Robert even joked that he hoped he was on duty the day The Tooth Fairy fucked up and got caught. A good earner, he’d said.
The idiot.
*
Robert had the gift of the gab. He could schmooze our clients and sweet-talk the magistrates. He was loud and domineering and knew all the right things to say to endear himself to anyone who didn’t have to spend significant amounts of time with him. He’d trained me up well, and I couldn’t really argue with that. But his grasp of law was pretty piss poor; he frequently had me confirm his theories with my fastidious recollection of very obscure points of law or, failing that, some speedy research to arm him with the required legal authority. And as far as the job went, we had a fairly efficient system going for a while.
But I’d long since been losing interest. It was a conflict, if anything. A conflict of moral priorities.
History is riddled with injustice. People convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Imprisoned for lengthy terms when innocent. People subjected to police misconduct. Evidence planted, hidden or contaminated. Judges sentencing excessively. It’s all there. Lawyers help prevent it happening. And trust me, when it’s happening to you it fucking matters.
Some people don’t appear to care whether the guilty are punished too severely. They say things like: How can you represent someone you know is guilty?
The answer is simple: I don’t know someone is guilty unless they tell me. But even then, the system still allows you to give a guilty person legal advice.
It works like this: I may have had my suspicions that a shoplifter was lying to me when he said that at the time of stuffing his pockets full of disposable razors he had no intention of stealing them. That his basket was full and he definitely intended to produce them for payment. That he got distracted because his mobile went off with a call from his girlfriend to say his son was ill.
I may have believed that this was bullshit, and that when the shoplifter promptly went dashing from the shop with several pounds’ worth of top-of-the-range razors bulging in his large overcoat, he fully intended to steal them. But my belief was not relevant.
Evidence is the key to proving someone’s guilt.
Sure, I could point to the strength of the prosecution evidence and the likelihood of his acquittal in the face of it. But if this guy maintained his position that he did not intend to steal the razors, I had to go with that.
The problems start when you compare actual justice with perceived justice.
Robert once won a bail application for some ex-smackhead charged with burglary after she broke into her ex-boyfriend’s house to steal his toothbrush. I don’t know why she wanted his fucking toothbrush… she already had a dismal history of mental health problems, and I think she’d pretty much lost it the day they broke up. Robert latched on to the sympathy vote and managed to convince the court to release her. Later that same day, she went straight back to her ex-boyfriend’s and stabbed him to death.
Robert agonised over that. Seriously. It kept him up at night. He thought he might have indirectly caused the death of the poor young man. And Lord knows, she wouldn’t have been back out on the streets had it not been for his bail application. But he eventually came to the conclusion that he’d simply been doing his job. He didn’t know what she was planning. There was no way he could have known. Any other lawyer would have done the same thing. The court had accepted Robert’s argument that she was safe enough to walk the streets, and they had no reason not to; he hadn’t lied to them. He was simply acting on the information available to him.
But still… it left a bad taste in the mouth knowing that when she was released, she freaked out and killed a man.
In terms of perceived justice, there hadn’t been any. And this ought to have been enough to rattle the foundations of any criminal lawyer’s moral boundaries. But there’s no shortage of lawyers out there willing to do unethical things for their clients. Lying, producing false witnesses, becoming selectively deaf to awkward instructions. Some lawyers just didn’t give a toss as long as they were known for never losing. What they cared about was keeping the clients rolling in.
I knew plenty of lawyers with a reputation like this, and I even lost some of my own clients to them. Tempted away by the promise of a miracle that would get them acquitted.
So here was my problem. As far as perceived justice was concerned, I was in a very unique position. I had access to a lot of confidential information. I knew only too well that criminals were getting away with their scumbag behaviour.
*
My last job of the day was to prepare a brief for a Crown Court plea-hearing on a serious assault case. I stayed and saw the brief off myself. Then I locked up the office, got in my car, and drove off. I couldn’t face the thought of cooking, so I called in at a McDonald’s Drive-Thru and ordered a quarter-pounder meal.
As I sat in the car eating my burger, I watched the autumnal darkness seeping slowly into the sky.
*
I could see in my rear-view mirror just one other car, and I didn’t think anything of it. I wasn’t even sure how long I’d been distracted by my own thoughts, so I was taken by surprise when suddenly there was a knock on the glass of my driver’s side window.
A hooded youth was standing there, bending slightly to look in at me. Gesturing for me to wind my window down.
I wound it down halfway.
“All right, mate,” he said. “Got a light?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t smoke.”
The youth glanced around. “Never mind,” he said. “I’ll just take your wallet and phone instead.”
It didn’t register at first. The conversational way he’d said it threw me off guard. But when I saw him produce a knife, I realised what was happening. I knew this wasn’t going to pan out well, but I wouldn’t go down without a fight.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
A look crossed the kid’s face. A momentary confusion. He was probably all too used to terrorising people into getting what he wanted. But then he snapped and lunged for the car door. Yanking on it forcefully. I got the window up quickly and within seconds, his two mates were there, one on the passenger side and one at the front. They started kicking and punching the car, yelling at me to get the fuck out. I tried to start the engine but the yob on my side was punching the window too, again and again and again. Before I could turn the key, the window suddenly exploded, spraying fragments of glass all over me.
The next thing I knew, the guy was reaching in, grabbing for me. I instinctively threw myself into some kind of thrashing fit, desperately trying to fight him off but he leaned away from my flailing arms and his hands wormed their way further in.
That was when I realised I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt.
His mates dashed round to my side, whooping with joy. With his hands now hooked beneath my armpits, he began to yank me out of the driver’s seat and through the car window. His mates all got their hands in, helping him drag me from the car in several heaving tugs. I crashed to the ground with a thump, aware of the fact that although feeling no pain, the damage that could be done to my body was still very real.
The three of them were suddenly kicking me in the gut, chest, back and head. Over and over the blows came, and they were painless, but they were disorientating. I managed to grab the main youth’s legs, and with a sudden yank, pulled them out from under him. He fell on his arse with a grunt, dropped his knife and I reached for it. He scrambled to his feet at the same time I did and I thrust the knife at him.
All three backed off.
“You still want my stuff?” I said, wiping blood from my nose with the back of my other hand.
“Fuck you!” said the ring-leader.
“Get moving,” I said, thrusting the knife again.
The main youth rounded up his mates with one gesture and the three of them retreated back to their car. They never let me from their sight. There were a few half-arsed gestures egging me back on. An attempt to retain their idea of dignity, I suppose. They were not willing to show their fear. If I’d gone at them then, I’m pretty sure they’d have suddenly run for it. But they slunk back to their car anyway. The main youth started the engine; the car lurched forwards and screeched off out the car park.
His mates were giving me the ‘wanker’ sign.
*
I threw the knife down. Already, my mind was thinking about evidence. The knife may have had prints on it. I glanced around to see whether there were any CCTV cameras and there were.
McDonald’s had been pretty empty, which was unusual. Just one family in the restaurant. But the incident had been so damn quick that it hadn’t drawn any attention. I walked through the doors into the bright, glaring florescence of the restaurant and up to the counter. An acne-riddled teenager approached me, and I clocked his look of good cheer melting into horror like a hot waxwork dummy.
“Mate, are you okay?” he asked.
“Phone the police,” I said. “I’ve just had the shit kicked out of me.”
Reginald Chesterfield was a seventy-five year old man who worked as a department store Santa every Christmas. With no previous, he’d sailed through the CRB checks and bagged himself the job with ease. And Christ… he looked the part, too. White hair, white beard, half-moon glasses.
A few weeks ago, he took his laptop in for repairs. Whilst it was being examined, the repairman stumbled upon some images of children. The really bad kind. As a department store Santa, it was a terrible revelation.
When I first represented him, he fed me a total bunch of crap. This terrible stuff was research for a book he was planning, he said. I advised him that it might help to inform the police of this during his interview. It would establish his argument at the earliest opportunity, if nothing else.
The police then bailed him for a CPS review.
But really, there was nothing that would prevent Reginald from being charged. He had over a thousand of those disgusting fucking pictures and I knew what the CPS advice would be. When I went back for the bail-return, the officer confirmed it. After telling Reginald the news, he looked at me over his half-moon specs and whispered, “That copper doesn’t like me much, does he?”
It freaked me out.
*
I was glad to be walking away from the police station after that. Glad to be out of the custody suite. No matter how often I saw the dour-faced cleaning ladies scrubbing the place down, I always left feeling sickened by the invisible filth of junkies, alcoholics and other degenerate wasters. I carried anti-bacterial hand-cleanser and squirted big dollops of the stuff in my palm, rubbing my hands together furiously as I headed back to my car.
Once inside, I sat behind the steering wheel, thinking for a while.
Reginald was a lost cause. He deserved prison. No two ways about it. And he’d never work as Santa again, that was for sure. He’d buckled under the strain of his rotten sexual perversions, feeding the industry of so-called ‘child porn’, and he should never be allowed to forget it.
But someone like him wouldn’t be able to handle prison brutality. If he was convicted and sent down, I was pretty sure the guards would find him hanging one morning. And it was a thought that pleased me.
With that, I put the car into gear and drove off. I didn’t know what I had waiting for me back in the office, but it didn’t matter. The resentment for my work had started some time ago, and days like this didn’t help at all.
*
Whenever I got back to the office after a police station call-out, my first port of call was Carol’s room. There, my secretary would thrust at me a stack of all the telephone messages she’d taken in my absence. As I stepped into her room, she looked up at me from behind her desk, her phone propped against her ear by a raised shoulder. She scribbled notes with one hand, and passed me a thick wad of telephone messages with the other, eyebrows raised as though chiding me for not being in the office to take the calls instead, and putting her to incredible inconvenience.
I stood in front of her desk for a moment, sifting through the pile. Most of it was the usual stuff. Stressed out clients demanding updates, police officers reporting extended bail-returns, barristers chasing missing papers from trial briefs. But among all the shite, there was one that made my guts suddenly turn.
I hadn’t spoken to Mum in years.
Why had she phoned the office?
I crumpled the message in my fist as I turned and walked upstairs to my office.
*
This is me aged eight:
I’m sitting alone at the dinner table eating my fish fingers and chips. I don’t really want to eat the peas, though, because I don’t like peas. I feel a slight pang of guilt because Dad went to the trouble of making them for me and I don’t want to make Dad feel bad. And anyway… he says ‘Eat your greens’ because your greens are good for you and make you strong and put hairs on your chest. I’m not really sure I want hairs on my chest, but I do want to be strong.
As I eat, I’m aware of my smallness in the room. Aware of the noises I make in the silence. Dad served my food up and took himself upstairs. If I listen carefully, I can hear him crying and it’s because Mum left to live with Frank and it still upsets him. She doesn’t love Dad anymore, and she said she didn’t want me to live with her and Dad could have me. That probably means that she doesn’t love me, either, because if she did, she’d surely want me to live with her. But it’s okay. I don’t really want to live with her because I don’t like Frank, and besides… Dad makes me fish fingers and I like fish fingers. And he gives me peas to make me strong, even though I don’t really like peas.
*
I closed my office door, dropped my briefcase beside my desk and sat down, staring at my phone. I was going to have to ring her. Phoning me at work was not something she’d normally do, so something was wrong.
I took a deep breath and reached for my phone. Punched in her number. She answered after just a couple of rings.
“Mum,” I said. “It’s me.”
“Jack. Sorry to bother you at work. I just phoned to let you know your Gran passed away last night. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Right,” I said. “Thanks.”
There was a pause. Several seconds of awkward silence. I heard her sigh.
“Is that all you have to say?” she said.
I closed my eyes again. “That’s terrible news,” I said.
“You could sound as though you mean it.”
“I’m busy, Mum. Text me the funeral details. I’ll see you there.”
Before she said anything else, I hung up.
*
“There are things you’re too young to understand, Jack. But you’re not too young to understand that Frank makes your Mum happy.”
At eight years old, I know that although I myself feel no pain, I’m capable of causing it in other people. And not just physical pain.
Gran sits at the breakfast table to the right of me, a mug of coffee in front of her. Her hands are laced together as she leans forward to get in close. I have a bowl of untouched porridge in front of me, and a glass of orange juice. I lean forward too, looking up into her face and listening to this familiar sermon. Every time she visits Mum and Frank, she finds an opportunity to sit me down and tell me these things.
She looks at me, nodding ever so slightly, reassuring herself perhaps, that her lesson is sinking in. She picks up her mug of coffee, lifts it to her lips but instantly puts it back down.
“And another thing…” she says, stabbing the table-top with her gnarled index finger. “Frank works hard. Earns a good living. Takes care of your Mum. Your Dad never did that. Only ever put himself first. Drifting from one job to another. Incapable of holding a good job, incapable of holding on to friendships. It’s a wonder your Mum put up with it for as long as she did.”
I look up at her and don’t say anything.
“You get on with Frank, right? You like him?”
I think for a moment. I bite my lip, because I’m not sure whether to say what she wants to hear or whether to tell the truth.
“Well? You like him, don’t you?” she says again.
“Not when he tries to hurt me,” I say, looking back up at her.
Gran frowns. Leans back in her seat and sighs loudly. Then she leans forward again. “That’s just his way of having fun with you, Jack. It’s difficult for him. Stepfather to another man’s child. He’s just trying to figure out how to have a relationship with you. And anyway… he can’t hurt you. You know that.”
This is true. I’ve never been able to feel pain. Not like normal people. Frank realised there was something wrong with me one day when he put a five-pound note on the table and said, “If you can touch it, you can have it.”
As I reached out a hand, he suddenly slammed one of those hard rubber-soled slippers down WHACK! on my fingers. Feeling nothing, I carried on until my hand was covering the note. In frustration, he walloped my hand two more times, total confusion all over his face. But I didn’t let go of the fiver.
“Congenital analgesia,” I heard Mum tell him later. “He’s never been able to feel pain. It’s been a major headache for me, over the years. He got it from him.”
Dad was the same, so she meant Dad.
But Gran was wrong. She was wrong about Frank. He wasn’t trying to have fun with me. He was trying to have fun at my expense.
*
The service was underway as I went crashing in through the double doors. Midway through the hymn, ‘Morning Has Broken’, the congregation turned, and momentarily, the singing trailed off into a chorus of mumbles. When they saw it was me, they turned to face the front again.
I’d arrived late on purpose, not wanting to run into either Mum or Frank. As I took position at the back, I glanced over to Mum, up at the front. She spared the briefest glance in return and promptly turned away. But not Frank. He lingered there, glaring at me over his shoulder, eyes drilling their hate into me, eyebrows raised. An arm wrapped supportively around my Mum.
(You’re a fucking failure, Jack! I always said so!)
I ignored the screaming insinuations from his glare and picked up an Order of Service, grimacing at the photo of Gran on the front. An almost perfect resemblance to Mum. Then I glanced back to Frank. He was deep into the hymn again, his back to me, hugging Mum in tight and close.
The singing continued.
Gran didn’t deserve my singing voice. Instead, I started playing with the words in my mind, fitting them in with the melody:
Moaning and croaking,
Like the last breath (of),
A cancer-man smoking,
Rejoice in her death.
After the hymn, everyone took their seats with a brief series of hushed shuffling sounds. The service proceeded with all the usual sycophantic bullshit. A wonderful woman, a beautiful soul. Oh, how she’ll be missed. I watched distant family members and barely recognisable friends weeping and hugging. When the congregation finally stood to listen to Michael Jackson’s ‘You Are Not Alone’ the coffin slid away. The curtains closed with an awkward squeaking and off she went with her express ticket to Hell.
*
I didn’t cause a scene. I could have. I could have exploded into a drink-fuelled supernova of hate but I remained calm and slunk from the crematorium before anyone noticed, deciding to give the wake a wide berth.
A few days later, a large envelope landed on my doormat. I opened it and shook out the contents. There were two smaller envelopes inside, one which had ‘Jack’ written on the front in my Mum’s handwriting, and one in my grandmother’s.
I decided to open and read Mum’s letter first:
Jack,
Your Grandmother left you some money and a letter (enclosed). We already know what your Gran left you, and we’ll get a cheque to you before probate is settled, as I’m sure you’ll be keen to get your hands on the money. Of course, Frank thinks you shouldn’t get a penny, but who am I to challenge the wishes of your kind and ever-loving Grandmother?
Mum.
I sneered at it and opened Gran’s. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to. There was a sudden sickness in my guts. But curiosity got the better of me.
It said:
Dear Jack,
I let you down. I am sorry,
Gran.
A while after that, the cheque turned up. It was for £50,000.
*
I’d taken a few days off work, playing the part of a grieving grandson. Taking time off was the sort of thing that other people would do and I’d realised some time ago that often in life it’s best to do what other people do. To look normal and fit in. In any event, my head was a mess. Tons of thoughts swirling around my mind, like the noisy rushing chaos of a tornado, not least of which was the money Gran had left me. The anger was still there; a bright fury that smouldered beneath the surface of my outward calm. But there was a massive sense of confusion, too.
Why would Gran do this? Why show no interest in me throughout my life, only to leave a grand gesture at death? Why hadn’t she spoken up before?
At first, I’d been tempted to rip the cheque to pieces. It was all just another head-fuck and it felt as though all my old scars had been torn open again. But in the end I kept it.
Fuck it, I thought. And when you’re talking about £50,000, most people probably would have done the same.
*
Returning to work was grim. There was nothing else going on to save me from the backlog of dreary paperwork but it was impossible to make any progress. My secretary pumped incoming calls through to me, one after another. Refusing to filter them like a good secretary was meant to. A queue of frustrated callers who’d been waiting for me to return, impatient and in need of the peace of mind that I just wasn’t interested in giving them.
I booted up my PC and perused the day’s news. Headed to the website of the city rag and immediately felt sickened.
The Tooth Fairy had struck again.
A family of three, brutally murdered in the early hours of the morning. Lance and Janice Wendle. Ten-year-old son Jeff. Found by a neighbour, tied to their own kitchen chairs, they’d been bludgeoned to death. Special care had been taken to smash their teeth out and each victim was found sitting on a £1 coin.
Someone had labelled this sick bastard The Tooth Fairy after the first family were killed, several months back. It wasn’t really hard to figure out why. There was a very clear echo of Thomas Harris’s serial-killer in Red Dragon. Some weird fucker breaking into people’s homes at night. Murdering entire families. Having some nicknamed monstrosity the focus of attention probably proved the morbid viewpoint that terrible news sells.
It made me want to puke.
Robert even joked that he hoped he was on duty the day The Tooth Fairy fucked up and got caught. A good earner, he’d said.
The idiot.
*
Robert had the gift of the gab. He could schmooze our clients and sweet-talk the magistrates. He was loud and domineering and knew all the right things to say to endear himself to anyone who didn’t have to spend significant amounts of time with him. He’d trained me up well, and I couldn’t really argue with that. But his grasp of law was pretty piss poor; he frequently had me confirm his theories with my fastidious recollection of very obscure points of law or, failing that, some speedy research to arm him with the required legal authority. And as far as the job went, we had a fairly efficient system going for a while.
But I’d long since been losing interest. It was a conflict, if anything. A conflict of moral priorities.
History is riddled with injustice. People convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Imprisoned for lengthy terms when innocent. People subjected to police misconduct. Evidence planted, hidden or contaminated. Judges sentencing excessively. It’s all there. Lawyers help prevent it happening. And trust me, when it’s happening to you it fucking matters.
Some people don’t appear to care whether the guilty are punished too severely. They say things like: How can you represent someone you know is guilty?
The answer is simple: I don’t know someone is guilty unless they tell me. But even then, the system still allows you to give a guilty person legal advice.
It works like this: I may have had my suspicions that a shoplifter was lying to me when he said that at the time of stuffing his pockets full of disposable razors he had no intention of stealing them. That his basket was full and he definitely intended to produce them for payment. That he got distracted because his mobile went off with a call from his girlfriend to say his son was ill.
I may have believed that this was bullshit, and that when the shoplifter promptly went dashing from the shop with several pounds’ worth of top-of-the-range razors bulging in his large overcoat, he fully intended to steal them. But my belief was not relevant.
Evidence is the key to proving someone’s guilt.
Sure, I could point to the strength of the prosecution evidence and the likelihood of his acquittal in the face of it. But if this guy maintained his position that he did not intend to steal the razors, I had to go with that.
The problems start when you compare actual justice with perceived justice.
Robert once won a bail application for some ex-smackhead charged with burglary after she broke into her ex-boyfriend’s house to steal his toothbrush. I don’t know why she wanted his fucking toothbrush… she already had a dismal history of mental health problems, and I think she’d pretty much lost it the day they broke up. Robert latched on to the sympathy vote and managed to convince the court to release her. Later that same day, she went straight back to her ex-boyfriend’s and stabbed him to death.
Robert agonised over that. Seriously. It kept him up at night. He thought he might have indirectly caused the death of the poor young man. And Lord knows, she wouldn’t have been back out on the streets had it not been for his bail application. But he eventually came to the conclusion that he’d simply been doing his job. He didn’t know what she was planning. There was no way he could have known. Any other lawyer would have done the same thing. The court had accepted Robert’s argument that she was safe enough to walk the streets, and they had no reason not to; he hadn’t lied to them. He was simply acting on the information available to him.
But still… it left a bad taste in the mouth knowing that when she was released, she freaked out and killed a man.
In terms of perceived justice, there hadn’t been any. And this ought to have been enough to rattle the foundations of any criminal lawyer’s moral boundaries. But there’s no shortage of lawyers out there willing to do unethical things for their clients. Lying, producing false witnesses, becoming selectively deaf to awkward instructions. Some lawyers just didn’t give a toss as long as they were known for never losing. What they cared about was keeping the clients rolling in.
I knew plenty of lawyers with a reputation like this, and I even lost some of my own clients to them. Tempted away by the promise of a miracle that would get them acquitted.
So here was my problem. As far as perceived justice was concerned, I was in a very unique position. I had access to a lot of confidential information. I knew only too well that criminals were getting away with their scumbag behaviour.
*
My last job of the day was to prepare a brief for a Crown Court plea-hearing on a serious assault case. I stayed and saw the brief off myself. Then I locked up the office, got in my car, and drove off. I couldn’t face the thought of cooking, so I called in at a McDonald’s Drive-Thru and ordered a quarter-pounder meal.
As I sat in the car eating my burger, I watched the autumnal darkness seeping slowly into the sky.
*
I could see in my rear-view mirror just one other car, and I didn’t think anything of it. I wasn’t even sure how long I’d been distracted by my own thoughts, so I was taken by surprise when suddenly there was a knock on the glass of my driver’s side window.
A hooded youth was standing there, bending slightly to look in at me. Gesturing for me to wind my window down.
I wound it down halfway.
“All right, mate,” he said. “Got a light?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t smoke.”
The youth glanced around. “Never mind,” he said. “I’ll just take your wallet and phone instead.”
It didn’t register at first. The conversational way he’d said it threw me off guard. But when I saw him produce a knife, I realised what was happening. I knew this wasn’t going to pan out well, but I wouldn’t go down without a fight.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
A look crossed the kid’s face. A momentary confusion. He was probably all too used to terrorising people into getting what he wanted. But then he snapped and lunged for the car door. Yanking on it forcefully. I got the window up quickly and within seconds, his two mates were there, one on the passenger side and one at the front. They started kicking and punching the car, yelling at me to get the fuck out. I tried to start the engine but the yob on my side was punching the window too, again and again and again. Before I could turn the key, the window suddenly exploded, spraying fragments of glass all over me.
The next thing I knew, the guy was reaching in, grabbing for me. I instinctively threw myself into some kind of thrashing fit, desperately trying to fight him off but he leaned away from my flailing arms and his hands wormed their way further in.
That was when I realised I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt.
His mates dashed round to my side, whooping with joy. With his hands now hooked beneath my armpits, he began to yank me out of the driver’s seat and through the car window. His mates all got their hands in, helping him drag me from the car in several heaving tugs. I crashed to the ground with a thump, aware of the fact that although feeling no pain, the damage that could be done to my body was still very real.
The three of them were suddenly kicking me in the gut, chest, back and head. Over and over the blows came, and they were painless, but they were disorientating. I managed to grab the main youth’s legs, and with a sudden yank, pulled them out from under him. He fell on his arse with a grunt, dropped his knife and I reached for it. He scrambled to his feet at the same time I did and I thrust the knife at him.
All three backed off.
“You still want my stuff?” I said, wiping blood from my nose with the back of my other hand.
“Fuck you!” said the ring-leader.
“Get moving,” I said, thrusting the knife again.
The main youth rounded up his mates with one gesture and the three of them retreated back to their car. They never let me from their sight. There were a few half-arsed gestures egging me back on. An attempt to retain their idea of dignity, I suppose. They were not willing to show their fear. If I’d gone at them then, I’m pretty sure they’d have suddenly run for it. But they slunk back to their car anyway. The main youth started the engine; the car lurched forwards and screeched off out the car park.
His mates were giving me the ‘wanker’ sign.
*
I threw the knife down. Already, my mind was thinking about evidence. The knife may have had prints on it. I glanced around to see whether there were any CCTV cameras and there were.
McDonald’s had been pretty empty, which was unusual. Just one family in the restaurant. But the incident had been so damn quick that it hadn’t drawn any attention. I walked through the doors into the bright, glaring florescence of the restaurant and up to the counter. An acne-riddled teenager approached me, and I clocked his look of good cheer melting into horror like a hot waxwork dummy.
“Mate, are you okay?” he asked.
“Phone the police,” I said. “I’ve just had the shit kicked out of me.”
