Fade to Grey E-Book

John Lincoln

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Longlisted for the 2019 CWA Gold Dagger Gethin Grey is the man you call when there's nowhere else to turn. His Last Resort Legals team investigates miscarriages of justice. But Gethin is running out of options himself: his gambling is out of control, his marriage is falling apart and there's no money left to pay the wages... Izma M was sent down years ago for the brutal murder of a young woman. In jail he's written a bestseller and become a cult hero, and now the charismatic fading-film-star Amelia Laverne wants to bankroll Gethin to prove Izma's innocence. For Gethin - low on luck and cash - the job is heaven sent. But is Izma M really as blameless as his fans believe? This seemingly cold case is about to turn very hot indeed...

Leseprobe

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR JOHN LINCOLN

(aka John Williams)

‘John Williams’s Into the Badlands opened up the world of American crime fiction for me and a generation’ – David Peace

‘A synthesis of thriller and literary fiction, teeming with dangerous Cardiff lowlifes’ –Independent

‘Cardiff has never been so vibrant as in Williams seductive and strangely moving novels’ –Sunday Times

‘An acute journey, alive with the stark and the surreal’ – GQ

‘Part travelogue, part interviews, stuffed with anecdotes, critical asides and astute observations, Into the Badlands brings personality and pleasure into the stuffy and sombre world of literary commentary… a refreshingly vital approach’ – City Limits

‘I learned a few things. There is vital sociological and moral comment here too’ – Patricia Highsmith

‘An interesting, engaging literary travelogue’ – Independent

‘A vital mixture of literary criticism, personality profiles and imaginary geography’ – New Statesman

For Anna with love

2015

One

The subject line simply read ‘Ismail Mohammed’. That was enough. Gethin Grey picked up the email on his way into work and couldn’t stop smiling as he parked the car and headed over the road to the Coal Exchange.

The Coal Exchange, in the heart of the old Cardiff docklands, was a grand but faded relic of the time when the city was the globe’s busiest port. Apparently the first ever million-pound cheque had been written on its trading floor. For a while it had been used as a music venue – Gethin had seen both Van Morrison and Patti Smith play there – but now it was a decrepit health hazard waiting in vain for someone to come along and redevelop it. The only life in the building came from the smattering of small businesses which rented office space along its faded corridors.

Gethin’s own small business was Last Resort Legals, an organisation that offered help not to mariners lost at sea but to those unhappy souls who believed they were the victims of a miscarriage of justice.

Normally, the approach to the office depressed the hell out of Gethin. The peeling paintwork, the pervasive smell of damp, the ancient lino beneath his feet, all made him feel like he was engaged in a doomed and hopeless enterprise. Today, though, he just saw the latent grandeur.

Indulging his good mood, he took a little detour, walking out into the middle of the old trading floor and looking round at the fine wood panelling that lined its walls. One day all this would surely be renewed. And today Last Resort would begin their own small revival. Today their luck had changed. Not only were they being asked to take an interest in the long running saga of Ismail Mohammed’s battle for justice, but the request came from none other than Amelia Laverne, the actress and celebrity activist.

Gethin felt possessed by the energy of the Victorian entrepreneurs who’d swarmed across this trading floor in its glory days. It was time to get serious. He was being offered a chance and this time he was determined to take it. A thought came to him out of left field. Perhaps he should start wearing a suit? Catriona would like that. She would say it was appropriate to his age – mid-forties. She’d say it was time he stopped dressing like a REM roadie, ditched his black jeans and plaid shirts, cut his shaggy hair short, and got with the programme. Maybe she was right. New era: new haircut. Cometh the hour, cometh the man in a suit. Maybe.

Surfing this unaccustomed wave of positivity he walked into the office. Bex, the office manager, was there already seated at her desk, having her customary Facebook session before she embraced the working day proper.

Lately, Gethin had been finding this sight irritating – Bex sitting there all complacent and happy, cooing over her friends’ baby pictures or rolling her eyes at the latest miracle diet that offered to change her considerable size. Now he just thought how lucky he was to have her, this supremely unflustered young woman, without whose managerial skills Last Resort would have been out of business years ago.

‘Hey,’ he said, once she looked up from the screen. ‘You want to guess who’s just emailed us to get involved in their campaign?’

Bex shook her head. ‘No idea. Just tell me, Geth.’

Before he could answer, the door opened again and in came Lee, Gethin’s right-hand woman and lead investigator, carrying a tray of coffees from the Portuguese deli.

‘Hey, Lee,’ said Bex. ‘Bossman says he’s got us a new client.’

‘Anyone we know?’ Lee handed over the coffees.

‘You could say that,’ said Gethin. ‘It’s only Ismail Mohammed.’

‘Yeah?’ said Lee. ‘The black Muslim guy? Sounds good.’

Gethin was expecting a bit more of a reaction.

‘Not bad, eh?’

‘Nah, it’s sweet’ said Lee. ‘You know I actually read his book.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, most of it. Was good. Reality. And Monica liked it.’ Monica was Lee’s girlfriend, a dental hygienist. They were a funny looking pair – Monica all neat and blonde and Nordic-looking; Lee older than her, closer to Gethin’s age, but still irredeemably boyish with her short dreadlocks and her gap-toothed grin.

‘So, you know this could be a massive deal for us.’

Lee shrugged: ‘Guess so.’

Gethin frowned at his workmates. ‘Don’t either of you read the papers? This is actually a really big deal.’ Then he thought of something. ‘All right, Bex, how about this then? You know who’s going to be paying our wages? Amelia Laverne, that’s who.’

Finally, he got the desired outburst of enthusiasm.

‘Oh… My… God!’ said Bex, her mouth cartoonishly wide open. ‘You are not serious. I love Amelia. Absolutely fucking love her.’

Gethin and Lee both laughed at that. Bex was a laid-back, slow-moving woman who’d been a probation officer before joining Gethin’s motley crew, and it took a lot to get a visible reaction out of her.

‘Well, that’s something. Okay, five minutes to sort ourselves out and then we can get cracking.’

Seated at his desk, sipping his coffee, Gethin allowed himself to wallow briefly in self-satisfaction. This was how far Last Resort Legals had come in the five years they’d been in operation. They’d had some real successes along the way: the Greenpeace Two was the case that had gained them the most attention, but there had been a good few others too. Of course, the last few months had been a bit quiet, but no matter. Now they were on the verge of getting involved with one of the highest profile miscarriage of justice cases for years, since all those Irish trials back in the day. Ismail Mohammed – Izma M to his fans – was the nearest thing Britain had yet produced to Malcolm X, a properly inspirational civil rights leader.

Anyone who followed politics knew his name and the basic outline of his life story, as set out in his bestselling book Izma M – A Street Life. He wasn’t Muslim by birth, he was a black Briton called Tyrell Hanson. He had had a troubled childhood – brought up by his grandmother with stints in children’s homes. He’d lived down to expectations and turned into a drug-dealing gangster type. While living in Bristol, he’d been convicted of a murder he didn’t commit – or at least that’s what he said. It was while he was in prison that he’d turned his life round, changed his name and embraced Islam. Not the radical anti-western Islam that most of the pissed-off youth went for, but spiritual, peaceful Sufi Islam like Malcolm X himself had come to believe in by the end of his life. Izma’s politics were still pretty militant – anti-racism, anti-capitalism, all that – but his take on his new religion was all peace and love, not hate and war.

The book had caught on in a big way. Normally, when people started banging on about moderate Islam, it was just some old beardy bloke who was obviously being paid by the government to tell the kids to behave themselves, and no one paid attention. But with Izma M, because he’d actually lived the life, people were taking notice and, of course, all the left-wing media were wetting themselves in excitement. They were always asking him to write stuff in the papers. Especially after the 2011 riots. Since then he’d been popping up all over the media, even though he was still in prison.

Before long, his new supporters had started looking into his original conviction. He’d been accused of murdering a white girl back in Bristol. There wasn’t much evidence against him – no murder weapon, no motive – but he had had sex with her not long beforehand, he didn’t have much of an alibi, and he totally fitted the bill as far as the police were concerned.

Gethin hadn’t looked into it in much detail, but the basic shape of the case sounded all too familiar. When people were killed in urban situations, and there wasn’t an obvious murderer at hand, the police often just went for a local gangster who looked the part. Juries generally didn’t pay too much attention to the details they just saw a guy who looked as if he might do something like that, and that was enough for them. And anyway, who was going to start campaigning for some street thug, just because the crime he’d been sent down for wasn’t the one he’d actually committed?

Last Resort Legals and a few campaigning solicitors did what they could, but, for the most part, no one gave a damn. Not unless the guy wrote a bestselling book and was in the Guardian every other week. That’s what it took for people to start paying attention, or at least start sharing the story on their timelines. And now Last Resort would be in the thick of it. Fighting for justice for Izma M. OMG, as his daughter Hattie would say.

‘Right,’ said Gethin, once Bex and Lee were seated at their desks, looking expectant. ‘Before we get cracking with Izma, let’s get this pile of crap out of the way.’

The ‘pile of crap’ was the stack of unsolicited letters. Every week they would receive a dozen or so letters from serving prisoners, all claiming to be victims of miscarriages of justice and all hoping that Last Resort would ride to their rescue. On top of the pile was a missive from a murderer called Warren Harker. Gethin passed copies round, then read it through himself. ‘So, what do we think?’

Lee went first: ‘Obviously guilty.’

‘You think so?’

She rolled her eyes in a pantomime of cynicism.

‘So… are you going to enlighten us as to why you’re inclined to disbelieve this heartfelt cry for help?’

‘Yeah,’ said Lee, ‘it’s all typed in capitals. I hate that.’

‘Ah,’ said Gethin, ‘I see. Just because this poor benighted individual currently serving a life sentence for murder in the inhuman brutal surroundings of…’ he peered at the address, ‘… HMP Belmarsh… happened to have accidentally leaned on the Caps Lock key we should consign to the dustbin of history his despairing plea for justice?’

‘That and the fact that it’s just a whole heap of whiny bullshit.’ Lee’s phone beeped and she picked it up immediately, obviously considering the subject closed.

Gethin was buzzing. God it was good to have something serious on the go again. Now he could face all these tawdry begging letters with a smile on his face. ‘You sure about that?’

Lee reluctantly looked up from her phone: ‘Okay, for one thing he’s not actually denying he did it.’

‘No. He does indeed admit causing the death of…’ Gethin looked down at the paper again, ‘… Ryan Hedges. He does, however, claim that…’

‘It wasn’t his fault.’ Lee rolled her eyes again.

She picked up her copy of Warren Harker’s letter from prison and started reading. ‘I know it was wrong what I did to Ryan, but it was an honest mistake. I had been told by a trusted friend, open brackets Chloe close brackets, that Ryan had had relations with Tasha and that is why I went to see him and then he come at me with the knife which is what led to the tragic event for which I am very sorry but it’s not my fault because it was a case of mistaken identity and it is Chloe what is responsible.’

Lee tossed the letter down: ‘Dickhead.’

Gethin started to smile but then the sorry reality behind the letter struck him: the pointless loss of life and the stupidity of it all – the number of grown-up children running around this world with the tempers of babies and the weapons of adults.

He sighed and turned his chair round so he could see his office manager at her desk in the adjoining office. ‘Bex,’ he called out. ‘Did you check him out? Warren Harker.’

‘Absolute no-hoper,’ said Bex without looking up. ‘Family washed their hands of him and didn’t have a pot to piss in anyway.’

‘Cheers,’ said Gethin. ‘So, we agreed then? Category Five for Warren Harker?’

Lee nodded and made a thumbs down gesture. Gethin picked up the copies of Harker’s letter from the table and deposited them in the Category Five holding pen, a large stainless steel bin on the floor.

‘Right, let’s see what our next lucky contestant has to offer.’ Gethin reached for another photocopied letter and winced immediately. Another bloody rapist. Gethin hated the rape cases. Mostly because of the crime itself, of course, but also because they were timewasters. The evidence was almost always so nebulous, so based on one person’s word against another, that proving a miscarriage of justice was enormously difficult and even if you did get a result – and Last Resort had on a couple of occasions – nobody thanked you.

Odd really, Gethin thought: you get some gangster acquitted of a murder charge and all the Guardian types are going on about what a fighter for liberty you are, but you get a rapist acquitted and everyone looks at you funny, like you’re just a gang of misogynists who’ve found a loophole. They did their best to take each case on its merits, Gethin and his team at the Tuesday morning client trawl, but no one had much enthusiasm for the rape cases, just wanting to move them on to Category Five as fast as possible.

The incoming mail was divided into five categories: The no-hopers were Category Five. Category One were those rare birds, the convicted criminals who seemed to have both a good case to be made for their innocence and the resources available to pay Last Resort’s fees. Category Two were the troubling cases where there seemed a fair chance that the correspondent was innocent but very little chance that he – or occasionally she – would be able to raise the money. Category Three were the even more troubling cases where the potential client looked guilty as sin but did appear to have the funds available. Category Four, finally, were the all too common ones where the initial letter was so confusing that making any judgment on likely innocence or guilt would have called for the services of a psychic. And hiring a psychic would have been a step too far even for an organisation as unorthodox as Last Resort Legals.

It didn’t take long to dispatch the rapist to Category Five, nor the three more letters that came after that. Gethin sometimes wondered why they bothered, these obviously guilty men writing to Last Resort Legals in the hope that there might be some sort of loophole that could see their conviction overturned. Then again, there wasn’t that much to do in prison.

There were plenty of weeks, like this one, when there was nothing at all of any merit in the Tuesday meeting. Lee had suggested a while ago that they should scrap it, stop taking submissions straight from prisoners and only take referrals from solicitors who genuinely thought their clients had had a bad deal. But Gethin was stubborn and the fact was that several of his best cases, the ones that had made Last Resort’s name, had come from letters arriving out of the blue. And, at worst, there were usually a few laughs to be had, reading out these tissues of self-serving lies. Not this week, though. This week Last Resort Legals were stepping up a level.

Two

Gethin was on a high all afternoon. When it came to their regular quitting time, six o’clock, he didn’t want to leave, suggesting they all go over to the pub to discuss things some more and have a celebratory drink-up. Lee had to pick up Monica’s kids from the after-school club, though, so it was just Gethin and Bex who headed over to Mischief’s in the September sunshine.

Mischief’s Café Bar was one of the few ungentrified hangouts left in Cardiff Bay. For donkey’s years it had been called the Ship & Pilot. Shirley Bassey used to sing in the back room when she was fourteen. Gethin used to play pool in that same back room in his teens, mostly before going to the Casablanca Club around the corner for a night of reggae or punk as seen through a fog of herbal cigarettes. The Casablanca was a car park now, though, and the Ship & Pilot had been made over as Mischief’s, essentially an eighties disco bar thirty years too late. But the beer was cold on a hot afternoon and you didn’t need to queue and there was always a chance you might pick up some new business. There weren’t many of Mischief’s clientele who hadn’t had dealings with the law at some point.

Bex was rummaging through her bag when Gethin brought the drinks outside – beer for him, glass of prosecco for her. After a bit she gave a small grunt of relief and produced a shoulder length blonde wig.

‘Who are you being tonight then?’ asked Gethin. Bex supplemented her earnings from Last Resort by singing in a bewildering variety of tribute bands.

‘Claire from Steps. Doing a big hen night in Newport.’

Bex stuck the wig on haphazardly over her own short bob – ever changing in hue but currently a sort of lilac – and mimed a quick formation dance move.

‘Which one was she then?’

‘The blonde one, der!’ Bex poked her tongue out. Then she stuffed the wig back in her bag and they got down to talking about the case.

Bex was in a state of uncharacteristic excitement about it, mostly because it was Amelia Laverne who had initiated the contact. It turned out that Bex really did love Amelia. Her eighties debut, Mary’s Prayer, was Bex’s favourite film. Gethin let her chat on, while mentally running through all the stuff he’d read about Izma on the internet that afternoon, wondering what the best way into the case would be, where to find the loose thread that they could tug away at till the case against him disintegrated.

The drive home hardly registered, not that there was much to it. From the Coal Exchange it was just twenty minutes driving from ring road to motorway to dual carriageway and then up the lane that wound through the village he’d been calling home for the last couple of years.

Gwaelod-Y-Garth sat high up on the side of the great wide valley that leads north of Cardiff. Once upon a time, it had been home to the better-off people who made their livings from the coal mines that used to line the valley floor. Now, though, it was the haunt of fashionable professionals – lawyers or media folk looking for somewhere a little bit special to bring up their kids.

All the houses in the village were built on a slope, but Gethin’s place had a particularly precarious setting. You had to put the car into first gear to be in with a chance of getting up the lane that led to it. Then you had to park on a quarried out ledge before climbing up a steep flight of steps to the house itself. The house was spread over four storeys, but with only enough space for a couple of rooms on each floor as the building clung to the mountainside. The bedrooms were on the bottom two floors and the living areas on the upper storeys, so everyone called it the upside-down house. Once you reached the third-floor level, there was another small plateau off to one side that had been landscaped as a garden and was accessible from the main living room through the French windows. The views from this and every other room were spectacular, as was the level of strain on your calf muscles any time you approached the house on foot.

Catriona, Gethin’s wife, loved it and so did their daughter, Hattie. Gethin wasn’t so sure, though he kept his doubts to himself. He liked the house itself all right. It was an amazing place to live, no question. He was less sure about the village with its upwardly mobile vibe. He didn’t fit in, but that was nothing new. He’d always been an instinctive outsider.

He stretched as he left the car, feeling looser then he had done for ages, and realised that, right now, he didn’t give a damn about the neighbours. He had the case he wanted, a family he loved and an upside-down house. Tonight, he just wanted to enjoy it all. He pressed-down on the key fob and locked the car, an eight-year-old Nissan Primera he’d bought because he wasn’t remotely interested in cars and the man at the garage said it would run for ever given a rudimentary level of care, which was all Gethin was likely to provide. Then he climbed the steep steps to the front door, followed by two floors’ worth of internal stairs before arriving in the garden, lured outside by the sound of Hattie’s laughter.

‘Hey, babe,’ he said, as he saw Cat on the patio with a book, one of those ‘what if your husband was really a murderer?’ type psychological thrillers. She looked relaxed for once, fresh from a shower, reading in the evening sunshine, one eye on Hattie and her friend Lauren doing acrobatics on their compact lawn.

‘Hi,’ said Cat, smiling at him. ‘What happened? I was about to call you and see if I needed to slow down the dinner.’

‘Ah, nothing, well no, not nothing – good news! Really good news.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘I’ll tell you now,’ he said, ‘but why don’t we have a glass of wine? I feel like celebrating.’

Cat raised her eyebrows: ‘On a school night? Must be quite something.’

Gethin went inside and found a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc hidden behind a huge bag of salad at the back of the fridge. He picked up a couple of glasses and brought them out to the patio.

Pouring himself a generous glass, he started to fill Cat’s, but she stuck her hand out almost immediately to stop him giving her any more than the merest taste. Then she carefully screwed the top back on to the bottle. Gethin couldn’t help feeling a flicker of annoyance. He appreciated the way Cat acted as a brake on his wilder impulses, but it was a bit of a buzz kill. What was wrong with celebrating once in a while?

He managed to keep his irritation to himself, though, and, as the sun gradually disappeared behind the Garth, he told Cat all about his new case. He could see the relief flooding into her face as she took in that this was something serious and not just another of his pipe dreams.

When he finished, Cat hugged him and told him how happy she was, and how much he deserved this shot at a big-time case. He liked the way she said shot so it sounded like ‘shoat’, a little trace of the Glasgow accent she’d mostly lost over her twenty years in South Wales. But even as she hugged him he felt a trace of impatience. Her enthusiasm was genuine, yet somehow she made him feel like a kid being over-praised by his mum for producing a perfectly ordinary painting

He knew he was lucky to have Catriona in his life. She was a great mum to Hattie; she had a good and responsible job working in the NHS as a psychiatrist; she was still an attractive woman for all that her blonde hair was shot through with grey and the crow’s feet around her eyes bore witness to the strains of her job and her marriage. And if she wasn’t as much fun as she had been when they were young, well he knew he was largely to blame for that. She’d stuck with him through thick and thin, put up with his bad behaviour with her Scottish Presbyterian resolve, but it had all taken its toll. He had no right to resent the way she looked after him; the way she sometimes seemed more like a mother than a lover. But he did. From time to time he definitely did.

He took a deep swallow of the wine, shook his head and wished away the negative thoughts. There was a ring at the doorbell and Hattie’s friend had to head off home. Gethin was free to hug Hattie and breathe in the pure scent of her shampoo and to be grateful that there was one relationship at least in his life that felt completely straightforward.

After dinner – a chicken salad followed by a scoop of homemade ice cream – all three members of the family had work to do. Hattie disappeared downstairs to her bedroom to do her homework and no doubt ignore the strict instructions to stay off all social media till she was finished. Cat went to her study to write up a couple of case files. She was working on a new drug rehab project in collaboration with several different agencies doing their best to cope with the disastrous reliance on self-medication common amongst the disenfranchised of the Valleys. Gethin took the opportunity to discreetly remove the bottle of wine from the fridge and head into the living room where he fired up the desktop to do a little more research into his potential new client.

He was focusing on the case against Ismail Mohammed, going back to the original newspaper reports of the trial. They were fairly sketchy. The trial hadn’t attracted a huge amount of publicity at the time, which seemed surprising till you remembered that Ismail wasn’t famous back then, he wasn’t even Ismail. He was Tyrell Hanson, just another young black man who’d got himself into a world of trouble. There was a certain amount of interest, given that the victim was a pretty young white girl. The right-wing papers had played up that angle, while the Guardian had hardly covered the case at all, probably for fear of stoking up racial hatred. Anyway, once you allowed for the prejudices of the different newspapers, the basic facts seemed clear enough.

The victim, Hannah Gold, had been found floating face down in Bristol’s River Avon on 8 June 2005. At first, she’d been taken for a suicide, but then the post-mortem revealed that she’d suffered a severe blow to the head before going into the water. The post-mortem further revealed that Gold had had sex not long before her death. Whether it was consensual or not was unclear, but semen was present and a DNA test had produced a match with Tyrell Hanson, a man known to the Bristol police as a player in the local drug dealing scene.

Gethin made a note to check out this thoroughly – DNA evidence wasn’t always as clear cut as it sounded. A few minutes later he crossed out the note. It turned out that Tyrell had admitted he had indeed had sex with the dead girl. To make matters worse, there was CCTV footage of him with the victim in a Bristol bar, just hours before her presumed time of death. According to his version of events, he had simply met Ms Gold in the bar on a first date. They had hit it off and gone to have sex on the Downs, not far from the river. Afterwards they had gone their separate ways and he had no idea how she had ended up dead in the water.

Gethin winced as he read it. It wasn’t hard to see how Tyrell had ended up with a murder conviction, Worst of all, at the time of his arrest he’d been in possession of an unlicensed gun. The photos of the trial suggested he hadn’t done himself any favours there. He looked the same in all the pictures: a bearded light-skinned guy with his mouth set in a permanent scowl and a baseball cap jammed low over his eyes like he knew he was guilty, and was trying to hide his face from the world.

Now, though, surely it would all be different. Izma M was a changed man – the appeal judges would see that at once and then they’d look at the evidence against him properly, see how flimsy it was. Gethin could feel the buzz building, the conviction that he, Gethin Grey, would be able to overturn Izma M’s conviction. In six months or so, Izma M would be a free man and Gethin would be famous as the man responsible. Last Resort Legals would be swamped with important work, and all the struggles, the ups and calamitous downs, of the past few years would be done with. He would be the man he’d always hoped to be, the man Cat always believed he could be. Cat! God, he neglected her, took her for granted. How long was it since they last… a week? Two weeks? He saved his work, drained his glass – lord, he’d finished the whole bottle – got up from his desk and went to find her in her study. As he started massaging her shoulders, she turned to him, smiled and closed her eyes and leaned back against him.

In bed, it was intense the way it sometimes can be but mostly isn’t when you’ve been married for nearly two decades. Each one of them was as hungry as the other, their kisses meeting ready mouths, their fingers finding hardness and wetness without need for coaxing. Afterwards, she pulled him to her, buried her face in his neck and started crying.

‘Oh, Gethin,’ she said, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

Gethin started to protest but stopped himself just in time. She was right. The past year he’d been present in body but not in mind. He’d made it through, he hadn’t relapsed into the old bad habits, but he’d done it by going into himself, by shutting her out of his thinking. Now, in the afterglow, he resolved to do better.

A little later, when Cat came back from the bathroom, she lay in his arms, the way she always used to, and he told her about his latest case, the way he always used to.

‘The good news is that all the evidence is basically circumstantial.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, at least as far as I can tell. He definitely had sex with this girl, and he seems to have been the last person anyone saw her with before her death, but no one saw him attack her or dump her in the river or anything like that. And there was no murder weapon and no obvious motive that I can see.’

Cat scowled. ‘Bloody typical. I’ll bet if he’d been a nice middle-class white boy the case would never have got to court.’

‘No,’ said Gethin, ‘probably not. People would have suspected and whispered, and the girl’s family would have been begging for a trial, but I doubt the CPS would have fancied it.’

Gethin stared up at the ceiling and wondered if it had been as simple as that. Had Tyrell been convicted just because he was a black gangster with a gun and a bad attitude? He nodded to himself: quite likely it was that simple. That was how things went, how the world turned. Bad luck and prejudice could easily be enough to see an innocent man convicted. If the case were to come to trial again, Gethin suspected that, given a decent barrister, an inner-city jury and an image makeover on the defendant, there was a fair chance Tyrell would be acquitted. There was reasonable doubt all over the place.

‘So, do you think there are grounds for appeal?’

‘I’m not sure yet. Like I say, all the evidence looks circumstantial but that’s not enough. If a jury thought that was good enough to convict, there it is. We can’t just apply for a retrial on the grounds that the jury got it wrong the first time and we’d like to have another go.’

‘That’s so unfair.’ Cat turned off her bedside light and prepared to put in her earplugs, but paused to add, ‘You’ll think of something, won’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Gethin, ‘I hope so.’ He kissed the back of her neck, before rolling over and turning off his own bedside light. Soon Cat was asleep but Gethin just lay there with his mind buzzing.

To have an appeal, there had to be either significant new evidence or a clear indication that there was something amiss with the original trial. The first of these options was the more exciting one but, in Gethin’s experience, the second option was much more common and more likely to end up with his client walking free.

If you could prove that the police hid evidence or pressurised witnesses or bullied your client into confessing, you stood a good chance of getting a result. And that would certainly be one line of attack for Gethin. He’d talk to the original lawyers and read through all the accumulated paperwork and look for a loophole. But on the basis of what he’d read in the newspaper accounts, he wasn’t too hopeful.

Perversely, the prosecution case was going to be hard to attack precisely because it was actually weak. There wasn’t much evidence to have thrown out of court because there wasn’t much evidence at all. Just a suspect who fitted the bill. So, if there was to be an acquittal, the likelihood was they’d need to come up with new evidence. And that was okay. That’s what Last Resort Legals were good at. That’s why they’d been brought into the game.

Kyrenia, Northern Cyprus 15 August 2001 20.15

Danny didn’t notice the change in the music at first. He’d been doing his best to ignore the combo on the little outdoor bandstand. Like every other combo in every other Mediterranean beach bar, they’d been grinding their way through the obligatory Eagles and Bob Marley covers, these three long-haired guys with their big fake grins.

What they were playing now was a long way from ‘Hotel California’, though. The guitarist had swapped his Strat for a bulbous stringed instrument, and he’d started playing a winding, mournful melody that was beginning to grab Danny’s attention. Danny was obsessed with music, London dance music especially, and even if this eastern-sounding stuff wasn’t what he was into, anything was better than the bloody Eagles.

The drummer came in next, just tapping out an ominous pulse, like a slowed down heartbeat. The fiddle player added a stark and ghostly accompaniment that put Danny in mind of the ancient burial chambers he’d seen on the island. The tune built and built for a couple of minutes, gradually drawing the attention of the other diners; mostly Brits like him and his parents. Then, all at once, the three men stopped playing and started singing together acapella-style, a high keening harmony which had the diners staring at each other in bewilderment. Finally, the music started up again, the guitarist leading the others into an increasingly impassioned restatement of the original theme.

Danny was riveted by the end. Something old and profound had reached into this tourist restaurant. He looked round to see if his fellow diners had felt the same thing. After the tune finished there was a bemused silence. Then the diners clapped politely and the band went back to their regular instruments and started playing ‘Lay Down Sally’. Danny’s mum was staring off into space, which was par for the course. His dad, true to his smug philistine form, had obviously tuned out the music completely, and was busy waving for someone to take their order. Danny wondered, not for the first time, how he could have so little in common with his family.

The waiter came over and Danny’s dad, Lenny, ordered the steak, just like he did every night, ‘Nice and bloody, Mehmet’, then laughing as if he’d said something funny.

Usually, Danny just mumbled his order, ‘houmous and pitta and salad please’ – there weren’t a whole lot of options for a vegetarian at the Topkapi – but this time he actually looked Mehmet in the eye and asked: ‘What was that music?’

Mehmet looked embarrassed. ‘It was an old Turkish song. A special request.’

‘It sounded terribly sad,’ said Sally, Danny’s mum. This wasn’t an unusual observation for Sally. She was prone to finding everything sad after her third bottle of white wine of the day.

‘Yes, madam,’ said Mehmet. ‘It’s a funeral song.’

‘Really?’ said Lenny. ‘Someone died, have they?’

‘No,’ said Mehmet, looking like he really didn’t want to discuss this further. ‘No sir, nobody died. It was just a request.’

‘Oh yeah?’ said Lenny. ‘Who from?’

‘The gentleman sitting near the bar.’

All of them turned their heads to see, but the table Mehmet was pointing at was empty.

Three

Gethin was in work at half seven the next morning, He’d hardly slept. His mind just wouldn’t stop racing. The alcohol hadn’t helped, of course, and he’d felt the familiar longings coming over him in the dead of night. Surely, he’d earned the right to let off steam a little? He’d had to wrestle with the temptation to dress quietly and slip out of the house, drive back into town and land in trouble. He’d fought it, though, had run through the mental exercises he’d learned to use whenever he had difficulty sleeping. He’d concentrated on his breathing, then made himself try to remember the exact line-ups of the Liverpool football teams of his youth, anything to assist his mind to calm down, to help him sleep instead of urging him to rise from his bed and let a little danger back into his life. Around half four, it had finally worked. Or maybe it was just the knowledge that it was finally too late for trouble. Anyway, he’d managed a few hours of fitful rest before rising early and leaving the house just as Cat and Hattie were waking.

The Portuguese bakery wasn’t open yet, so Gethin headed straight inside the Coal Exchange, said ‘Hiya’ to Al the doorman and took the stairs up to the office. Inside, he made himself a cup of tea and fired up his computer. He still felt anxious and jittery, but excited at the same time. Stage fright. It was okay to be a bit edgy: that’s what he had to keep telling himself.

He obviously wasn’t the only one who was excited about the new case. Bex was in at half eight, checking her emails to see if there was any further communication from Amelia Laverne, and Lee was at her desk by half nine, which was absolutely unheard of. She was carrying a copy of Ismail Mohammed’s book.

A few minutes later, Bex called out in excitement. An email had come in from Amelia Laverne’s PA. Amelia was delighted that Last Resort Legals were to be involved. Ismail’s lawyers would be sending over all the trial papers by courier later that day and Amelia would be in touch personally, either by Skype or, if possible, on a visit to Cardiff.

‘Nice,’ said Lee.

‘And the money,’ said Gethin. ‘Did dear, dear Amelia say anything about our fees?’

Bex gave him a look, like how dare he joke about the goddess Amelia. ‘She says the fees are absolutely no problem. There’ll be an upfront advance and, thereafter, we just need to invoice at the end of each week.’

‘Excellent.’

‘Yes,’ said Bex, ‘the bank will be pleased.’

Last Resort’s finances were not a subject Gethin liked to dwell on. The last year had been difficult, well paid work had been thin on the ground. It shouldn’t have been too much of a problem, a quiet patch, as there should have been a surplus in the bank from the year before but that had mysteriously disappeared, syphoned off by Gethin for ‘investment in special projects’, everyone had known what that meant, he supposed, and he knew no one was happy about it, but it was water under the bridge now. The last year he’d been good and at the end of the day it was his business and, as long as he kept paying their wages, he could do what he liked with his money. It had been stressful, though, bumping along just below their overdraft limit.

This case, however, should have them back in the black in no time. Last Resort’s services did not come cheap. Some people were surprised and horrified by that – like they felt Gethin and the team should be working for free, out of the goodness of their hearts. Same went for all sorts of charitable activities he supposed, but the fact was that wages across that whole sector had gone up in leaps and bounds over the past decade or so. All the big charities paid wages that compared with most commercial employers so why Last Resort – which didn’t even claim to be a charity – should be an exception, Gethin couldn’t imagine. And at least they didn’t spend a fortune on marketing or glossy brochures. So there you go, he had nothing to apologise for. He provided a necessary service for a fair price. End of.

The only problem with such a juicy case falling into their laps was that now no one wanted to proceed with the stuff they already had on their books. Still, the paperwork wasn’t arriving till later on, so Gethin figured they could spend the morning clearing the decks.

He was just writing a quick email to a Manchester law lecturer, politely declining an offer to speak at some conference, when the lanky figure of Deano Wilson, Last Resort’s part-time investigator, sloped into the office. Deano had been Gethin’s first success. His life had turned round after he’d been released on appeal, a year after being convicted of a whole raft of crimes, up to and including attempted murder, in relation to a major series of car thefts in the ‘M4 Five’ case.

These days Deano was hardly recognisable as the wannabe gangster of yesteryear. Instead he looked like a typical modern-day dandy with his beard and tattoos and stupid hat. Though there was something in his eyes that let you know you might want to think twice before telling him it was a stupid hat.

‘S’up, boss?’ Deano slid into a chair opposite Gethin and pulled the brim of his hat down low over his eyes.

‘Same old,’ said Gethin, then he corrected himself and told Deano about the Izma M case.

‘Sweet,’ said Deano. ‘Seriously. Anything you need from me, you know? Got a few contacts in Bristol like, so…’

‘I’ll bet,’ said Gethin. ‘And definitely we’ll need you; there’s going to be a lot of work for all of us. Now, how about the Newport business?’

Deano was working on the case of two kids who’d been caught up in rioting in Newport a couple of years earlier. They’d only had a few weeks in prison each, but they were nice middle-class student types and their parents were desperate to have their convictions overturned so they’d be able to work as lawyers or politicians or whatever in due course. It all boiled down to exactly who it was that had lobbed a paving stone through the front windows of the new university building by the river. As far as Deano had been able to discover, the two boys were absolutely bang to rights. However, he told Gethin he suspected he might be able to find a couple of other boys, already inside for more serious crimes, who’d suddenly remember it was them who did it in exchange for ‘a little favour or two on the outside’.

‘Oh yeah?’ said Gethin. ‘How much do they want?’

Deano shrugged. ‘Ten grand each is what they’re asking for. Reckon they’d be looking at another three months on their current sentences, though it could be six, or even a year if the judge decides he has to make an example.’

Gethin thought about it. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask the families. Tell you what – knock them down to nine each and I’ll tell the parents it’s just the same as an extra year’s university fees. And only half the money up front. The other half is strictly payment by results. Once our little student boys have their convictions quashed, your two mates receive the rest of the money.’

‘I’ll get on it,’ said Deano.

Deano was a natural at this kind of criminal realpolitik. He saw the justice system as essentially a game – a game rigged in favour of the police but a game nonetheless. And why wouldn’t he think that, Deano, whose whole experience had confirmed it? When he was young he’d done six months for a burglary he hadn’t committed. When it came to the M4 Five case, though, he was bang to rights, but he’d got out on appeal.

It was Gethin who had found the grounds for Deano’s appeal – on the proverbial technicality – while he was doing a few shifts as a paralegal for his mate’s law firm. Deano had found himself back on the streets after serving just over a year. Meanwhile, Gethin had had the idea to start Last Resort. He’d needed an investigator from time to time, someone with good connections on the criminal side of the street, and Deano had jumped at the chance to put his underworld contacts to a better use.

Despite their very different backgrounds, there was a natural empathy between them. Both of them had found a second chance in life. Gethin was always meant to be a lawyer. His father was one, had ended his career as a judge. Gethin had started along that path before managing to take himself out of the game by being sent to prison when he was twenty-two. And, unlike Deano, the first time he went down, Gethin was definitely guilty. Even then he might have got away with it if he’d let his father pull some strings, but he’d refused all that, had opted to take the same medicine as any other stupid young man.

Part of him had been thrilled that his career path had been ripped up. He’d been free to find out what he really wanted to do. Ironically, after a lot of misadventures, it turned out that the law was, after all, the thing that fascinated him. Unable to become an actual lawyer thanks to his criminal record, he’d worked as a paralegal for a while before seeing the gap in the legal market that he’d started Last Resort to fill. As for what he went to prison for, he didn’t like to talk about it.

After Deano left, Gethin sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, wondering why he didn’t feel more outraged by the kind of transaction he was about to facilitate. He was sure they’d go for it, the concerned parents, as long as he dressed it up a bit and let them delude themselves into believing that justice was being done and not simply bought. The thoroughly depressing thing was that there were plenty of guys sitting in jails up and down the land who’d be happy to do the same deal – take nine grand in exchange for some more time inside. Christ but people’s lives were cheap.

He sighed and made the first parental call – to the offices of a discount furniture factory in Caerphilly – and set up an appointment to see the boss, Jim Cooke, the next day. This was not going to be a conversation you wanted to have over the phone. Then he left a message for the other concerned parent, the dentist from Whitchurch, and put the phone down. He waited to see if a wave of self-disgust followed. It was hard to predict when it would strike, but right now there was nothing, just another incremental increase to his burden of world-weariness. Thank God the liberal press and all the bleeding hearts who supported his work didn’t see this side of the justice game. And thank God for the Ismail Mohammed case and the chance to do some actual good.

He called Lee into the office next. She was mostly working on a long-running case, a guy called Karl Fletcher who’d been inside for fifteen years for murdering his entire family. He was a deeply unsympathetic character and the evidence against him looked pretty damning. It wasn’t one of those cases that had any public support, but there were a few inconsistencies, and, most importantly, there was someone prepared to pay Last Resort’s fees, a rich widow who had taken an interest in the case – and was apparently now engaged to Mr Fletcher.

Gethin didn’t realistically see it coming to anything: so far, trying to find convincing new witnesses to the events of fifteen years ago had got them nowhere. But, for the time being, they were taking the money and Lee was knocking on doors, tracking down old neighbours who might have heard something. ‘Wasting my fucking time, boss’, as Lee herself summed it up.

‘Put it on the back burner for a bit, shall we?’ asked Gethin.

‘Fucking right,’ said Lee. ‘I’m sick of it. And Karl blatantly did it. You seen those videos of him, right after it happened, when he was pretending to be all upset and appealing for witnesses to come forward? Makes your flesh crawl looking at him. Hundred to one on: he did it.’

‘Yeah,’ said Gethin, ‘I know.’

‘Only thing is he’ll go mental if we dump him. You know last time I went up to Long Lartin he threatened me, said he’d hire a hitman to kill me if I didn’t get him an appeal soon.’

‘Christ, why didn’t you say so? I’d have cut him loose right away. Are you worried about him?’

Lee laughed. ‘Not worried about him. He’s banged up 23 hours a day. Bit wary of her though, the next Mrs Karl Fletcher. Fucking mental serial killer groupie that she is.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Nah, let’s just knock it on the head. We can afford to do without her money now, can’t we?’

‘Yeah, we can,’ said Gethin, thanking God once again for the intervention of Izma M and the chance to be back on the side of the angels, but also making a mental note to monitor the Mrs Karl Fletcher situation.

He worried about Lee at times like this. She had such a big presence it was easy to overlook the fact that she was ultimately a small, physically vulnerable woman. Lee had arrived in Gethin’s orbit three years earlier, when she approached him about attaining justice for an old girlfriend, Maria, who had been crudely fitted up by the police on brothel keeping charges. Gethin had persuaded a couple of witnesses to come forward to testify that they’d heard a couple of local coppers threaten Maria with being busted unless she paid them protection money. It had looked like another victory for Last Resort, but somehow word of their case had leaked out.

The two witnesses had had the fear of God put into them by the rogue cops and didn’t show to testify at the appeal. Lee herself had been badly beaten up but she had shown up in court anyway. It wasn’t enough, though. Maria had ended up serving eighteen months. Meanwhile Gethin had been impressed and charmed by Lee’s mix of humour and steely determination. And, like Deano, she knew a lot of the sort of people who had trouble with the law, so she’d been a natural choice when Gethin decided he could afford an assistant.

* * *

The paperwork started to arrive that afternoon: boxes and boxes of it. There were three boxes that contained the documents actually used at trial – the witness statements, forensic reports and so forth – and another eighteen boxes containing unused material, probably mostly irrelevant witness statements. The early stages of a murder investigation tended to generate loads of these.

Hopefully, they wouldn’t need to go through all of the extra boxes. Looking for a needle in a haystack, when you weren’t at all sure there was a needle there in the first place, was not a rewarding activity. They would begin with the trial material. Bex cleared the conference table. Gethin and Lee sat down.

They started from the top of the first box. Gethin read each item first and made notes on his iPad, then passed it on to Lee, who wrote in a notebook and passed it on to Bex, who entered all the key details into her desktop.

It was a slow and painstaking process: effectively, the three of them were reliving the seven days of the trial itself, as the papers were laid out more or less in the same order they were submitted to the jurors.

Lee and Bex both begged off around six, but Gethin couldn’t tear himself away. He called home at half past and told Catriona he would be late. She didn’t complain, just sounded pleased that he was caught up in a case again. And she was right to be pleased, he thought. He did feel a new surge of energy. It struck him how sometimes you don’t notice when things are going badly, you just keep on keeping on, deal with the work you have and try not to think that most of it is pointless and depressing. It’s only when things are better, when you have a job that fully engages you, that you can acknowledge it. Same way you get through winter, not dwelling on how much you hate it till the first day of spring comes.