Babyface

I shovelled the new papers and the huge brief for the inquiry into a second bag, threw in an alarm clock, and my packing was finished. I glanced round the living room and reluctantly I carried two empty wine glasses and a used coffee mug into the kitchen. Then I picked up three old copies of the Guardian from the sofa, straightened the rug in front of the fireplace, and, having switched on the timer that worked the two lamps, I left.

TWOBirmingham (#ulink_df02aabb-b7a6-5039-ad05-43da0bd6b311)

Of course I didn’t miss the rush hour at all. Well, I missed it for a bit, but my car, an L-reg Renault, was taking it steady, so that by the time I got to the turn off for Luton Airport and was wishing I’d brought my passport, as I always do on that stretch of road, the rush hour caught up with me and stayed by my side, jostling and pushing, till we got past Watford Gap.

I arrived at Julie’s redbrick terraced house in Selly Oak at eight o’clock. Marnie, her fifteen-year-old daughter, answered the door. Ever since she was eleven I have been surprised each time I see her by the growing maturity of her appearance. She kissed me effusively then went back across the room to watch the TV. I made my way through the living room to the back of the house.

Julie was in the kitchen, looking at a pizza in the oven. You could tell Julie and I were blood relatives, neither of us liked cooking.

She hugged me and suggested I take my things up to my room before supper. ‘Marnie!’ she called, ‘show Frankie where everything is.’

Marnie stomped ahead of me up the narrow, dark staircase to the first floor, and then up another flight to the loft, the room that was to be my home away from home for as long as the inquiry lasted.

‘It’s great,’ I said. I hadn’t seen it since Julie had converted it into an extra room. Pale wooden floorboards, white walls and a television standing on a chest of drawers. I didn’t need anything else. I knew I would be happy here. At one end of the room was the bed, with a duvet in a royal-blue cotton cover. ‘That goes into a sofa,’ Marnie said, following my gaze. ‘And there’s this lamp.’ She switched on a small white lamp with a bendy neck. ‘That was mine,’ she said, with a trace of bitterness.

‘Well, I was intending to bring up some stuff of my own next week,’ I said, quickly. ‘Including a couple of lamps.’

She thought for a moment. ‘What if I like yours more than mine?’ she said.

‘We can swap,’ I said. ‘Thanks for a great guided tour, I think I can hear the TV calling you.’

In a second she had slipped out of the room.

As well as the futon there was a good-sized table and a sensible office chair, beside which stood an empty bookcase. I imagined the shelves filled with a few of my favourite books, looking colourful and interesting. My cassette player would fit just nicely on the bottom shelf. I turned to the clock radio by the bed and fiddled with the dial. Having found the easy rhythm of ‘The Way You Do the Things You Do’ I fell back onto the bed. With my hands behind my head and the Temptations harmonising gently round the room I felt content, and I had a sense that my problems were sorting themselves out.

My practice and my bank balance might actually improve as a result of doing this inquiry, which in turn could lead to a new car and some new clothes. And then, looking sleek and successful and driving a shiny new vehicle, I would inexorably start a rich and satisfying relationship, filled with passion, good music and true love. A relationship of my own, not sharing with anyone, not thinking mixed and angry thoughts about Kay, or just falling for the wrong kind of gal – although who could resist a woman singing soft and sexy love songs, in a red sequin dress with curves and high-heel shoes … ?

I was beginning to get maudlin, I could feel it, and the Four Tops were reminding me that they were ‘Standing in the Shadows of Love’. I jumped off the bed to unpack.

I laid my two briefs in neat piles on the bed. The brief in Simon’s case was small and narrow. I had wrapped it in a piece of the pink ribbon which grows at the bottom of all my work bags. It wouldn’t take long to read. I’d do it after supper.

My inquiry brief was enormous, but I’d read most of it. I skimmed through the latest thoughts of my inquiry clients. They had met as a group on their own several times, they had written letters, they had even organised demonstrations. Now they wanted some legal action, and they wanted to get started.

I made a few notes on matters I should raise with them tomorrow afternoon – whether they were still anxious to put our case first, double check exactly who wanted to give evidence, whether we should ask for a view of Haslam Hall, and remind them what the procedure at the inquiry was likely to be.

Then I closed my notebook and followed the smell of burning pizza down to the small dining room. Julie, Marnie and I sat round the square utility table covered in maroon oilskin, by the window that looked out over the side passage at the back of the house where Julie had hung pots of geraniums. Marnie ate her Hawaiian with extra caramelised pineapple in silence, sighing loudly from time to time, as Julie and I exchanged family gossip, mainly about our mothers, who were sisters.

When Julie said to me, ‘Your hair looks nice,’ Marnie looked at me and then back at Julie.

‘It’s just like yours,’ she said to her mother.

Julie’s hair was short at the back and had a floppy fringe that skimmed her eyebrows.

‘Your hair is really nice,’ I said to Julie.

Marnie tutted in disgust and stroked her own hair, which was pulled back from her face in a thick golden-brown ponytail.

As soon as she had finished her pizza she excused herself and slid back into the living room. Julie made tea and as we sat at the table, talking about GCSEs and the last time Julie had been out on her own and what films were on in town, I felt the comfort and security of staying somewhere with other people to talk to and discuss articles in the Guardian with. The words to ‘We are Family’ drifted through my head. I shook myself and made a mental note to be alert for further signs of the family vortex thing. So easy to slip into, so hard to climb out of.

It was a quarter to eleven when I sat cross-legged on the bed and began to read through the papers in Simon’s case. If I had done it earlier I might have rung Gavin back and shouted ‘Be serious!’ and laughed maniacally down the phone. Of course Gavin knows how I work, so he deliberately faxed me the papers just as I was leaving. He calculated how long it would take me to get to Birmingham, unpack, have something to eat, an hour or so of chat with my cousin, and bingo, it’s eleven o’clock and far too late to return the brief. I felt like ringing him up and laughing maniacally down the phone anyway.

For a start it quickly became clear that I had nowhere near enough papers. The ten sheets of paper that had come through my machine included the fax letter, and also the back sheet to the brief, which in terms of legal importance is the equivalent of an envelope. To attend court to sort out the final directions for a trial, which I read was listed to last for three weeks, I had eight pages of information. Kay is a very good solicitor and her instructions, dense and informative, ran to six pages. But she had obviously prepared the brief for tomorrow morning’s hearing thinking Simon was doing it; Simon who had had days to read everything.

From what she had written it was clear that somewhere – probably on the floor in Simon’s room in chambers – there were about six lever arch files containing statements, reports, interviews, even, I read, a couple of videos, in other words a detailed description of everything Danny Richards was meant to have done and how the prosecution were going to prove it. And I had eight pages of it. I just hoped the judge wouldn’t ask me any trick questions. Or any questions at all.

The last paragraph of my instructions read:

‘As counsel will remember, Mr Richards is a difficult client who has had much experience of dealing with the legal profession. Counsel is reminded that he has sacked one firm of solicitors and two counsel already. As well as doing his best at this hearing, counsel is required to ensure that Mr Richards is satisfied with the service he receives.’

And how would the difficult Mr Richards react if he knew that instead of the big, firm assertive Simon Allison, the smaller, slimmer family practitioner Miss F. Richmond was appearing on his behalf? Good job he wouldn’t be there to see it.

The last two pages of the fax were ‘the missing pages of his CRO as requested’ – information from the Criminal Records Office of Mr Richards’ previous convictions. If these were the missing pages I dreaded to think what the other pages contained and how many there were. These pages were crammed with entries. The first page covered the early seventies and the second the late eighties.

For a defence barrister this man was very bad news. Just looking at the pages I had I could see he had visited most of the juvenile courts in the South of England, on at least fifteen occasions. Not a local boy then. The pages revealed no violence against women, which was something. The first page ran from 1969 to 1974. Two of his convictions were for ‘common assault against another youth’ for which he had been bound over, which meant it was probably a bit of weekend strutting about, but his weakness had obviously been cars, stealing them, driving them away, without a licence, without insurance, without due care and attention. By the time he was fourteen, in 1974, he’d been banned from driving for twenty years.

Of course, looking at that sheet through the eyes of a self-styled liberal, it seemed as if he’d never had a chance. He was dealt with harshly from the start, sentenced to Intermediate Treatment, Detention Centre, Borstal. The second sheet jumped ahead eleven years, and was now based round Crown Courts in the Midlands. The inevitable had happened. It looked as if he had fallen in with a bad crowd in his late twenties, there was an affray in 1985 and in 1988, a serious GBH. He’d been sentenced to five years for that. In 1993 there was an attempted murder – a man had lost a leg – and Danny Richards had said goodbye to the outside world for nine years, but on appeal it was reduced to seven.

I wondered who the man with one leg was. I wondered what he thought about the reduction in Danny Richards’ sentence.

And now he was on a charge of murder. With an unlikely victim, certainly as far as pages three and four of the instructions were concerned. An underworld villain, Terry Fleming, had disappeared. He was a small-time crook and heavy man, who hired out his services to local businessmen, in between selling cars and playing a mean hand of blackjack. Some nine months previously, three days after Danny Richards had been released from HM Prison, Parkhurst, having completed five years of the seven-year sentence, Fleming had gone out for a birthday celebration, dressed in his finest and newest four-button, mohair grey suit, and never come home. His body had never been found. He had last been seen at one of Birmingham’s brightest and hottest nightspots, the Lambada Casino.

Perhaps there would be the chance of a night at the casino, I thought, to feel the atmosphere Fleming had been in, to see what he had seen. I could wear a cool black jacket, some black patent shoes, try a twist of the poker cards, slide some chips across the green baize, faire mes jeux.

But what was I thinking? I had no intention of having anything more to do with Danny Richards’ case after tomorrow. On the stroke of half past ten I would announce to the judge that my time was up, and I would rise and tie the pink ribbon firmly round the papers, write Simon’s name on the back sheet in large letters and walk out of the court building without a backward glance.

As you can imagine.

Of course the trouble with a good juicy criminal brief is that you get sucked in, you get involved and excited by the possibilities. I made a list of things I would do if this case were mine:

Check the Malaga coast line. No corpse can so often mean no murder.

Check police missing-persons files for reports of disappeared young, nubile women to see if Fleming had run off with someone (or nubile men – what better reason for a man to leave the country than if he thinks he’ll lose his reputation as a hard man if his sexuality is revealed?)

Investigate other reasons for wanting to disappear. Had he fallen out with someone? Was he trying to go straight? Was he threatening to tell all?

Consider the possibility of suicide – did he have any reason to commit suicide (see above)? Are there any forms of suicide that allow the body to self-destruct so that no traces remain – e.g. throwing oneself into a vat of acid?

Who might want to kill him? What would Danny Richards’ motive be?

According to Kay’s instructions, the prosecution case against Danny Richards was pretty weak, based on circumstantial evidence. The statements of the witnesses offered little information other than the fact that Danny and Fleming had never got on. There was a hint of a long-standing quarrel, a suggestion of an argument the night before he disappeared. No more than that. The case could well be thrown out at half-time, at the end of the prosecution case, after a stirring submission of no case to answer. From the way Kay was describing it, Simon could probably make that submission on the papers alone, before a word of oral evidence had been given.

This was good. This meant I could be extremely condescending to the prosecution, and swagger round the courtroom in controlled indignation.

But reading between the lines of her upbeat instructions, I could tell that Danny Richards was going to have an uphill struggle. He’d apparently said some fairly stupid things to the police, which could amount to admissions of guilt. It would be difficult to keep them from going in front of the jury without calling the police liars. That counted out the possibility of an early submission. It also meant the risk of the jury hearing about his previous convictions. The jury wouldn’t like him at all. And then, almost as a throwaway comment at the end of the instructions, there was a mention of the laughable ‘forensic evidence’ Simon was being asked to consider. From the instructions I couldn’t tell what it was. A finger print? A spot of blood? Fibres? Kay had written that it was harmless enough on its own but in the context of the trial, could be fairly damning. The possibility of an acquittal seemed remote.

But tomorrow my main task was to hang on to him. It was a good thing he wasn’t going to be there, to ask me hard questions like, ‘Am I going to get off?’

It was midnight. I could still ring up Simon and demand his limping attendance. Or Gavin, to demand his, to explain to the judge why Simon wasn’t there. But I couldn’t do that. It was beneath me. I had to take it like a woman.