the worst night of your life.’
Sam smiled, found himself playing the elder statesman. ‘Don’t worry about Johnny Jones. He’ll be convicted, guaranteed, but he won’t listen to your advice. He’ll want an acquittal out of pity, but he won’t get one. Just call it character-building.’
‘How come? It’s a complete no-hoper.’
‘Would you rather lose a no-hoper or a dead-cert winner?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Nothing you can do will get him an acquittal,’ Sam continued, ‘and the prosecution will give him a hard time for having the trial. He will get the verdict he deserves, and maybe even get the sentence he deserves. But’, Sam raised his eyebrows at her, ‘if you mess up a dead-cert winner, when you have made promises you thought you could keep, you’ll see your client’s eyes every night when you go to sleep, that look in his eyes as he gets taken down the steps. Fear, anger, confusion. Trust me, that’s worse.’
Alison sighed and then smiled. ‘Thanks, Sam.’
‘Any time.’ As she went to leave, Sam said to her, ‘Don’t forget the magic words, when you get to your feet.’
She looked confused. ‘Magic words?’
‘“Client’s instructions.” When you are asked if the “not guilty” plea stands, just say that those are your client’s instructions. It just gives a hint that you don’t believe in what you are doing.’
‘Why should I do that? It won’t help Johnny Jones.’
‘Forget about your client. You’re the one who matters, and for your sake the court needs to know which one of you is the idiot. There is only one thing worse than a lawyer making a hopeless application, and that’s a lawyer not knowing it is hopeless.’
‘Bang on the table, you mean?’
Sam grinned. He remembered that from law school, the old adage that if you are strong on the law, argue the law, and if you are strong on the facts, argue the facts. If you are strong on neither, bang on the table.
‘Bang it hard,’ said Sam. ‘Take every point, regardless of how pointless, just so that the punter thinks you’re a fighter. He won’t know you’re talking nonsense, but if you fight the case he will think you’re the best young lawyer in Blackley.’
Alison nodded, looking more relaxed now. ‘Okay.’
‘Remember, you’re Harry’s golden girl.’
She blushed, although they both knew that there was some truth in that. Helena, Sam’s wife, had once been a lawyer at Parsons, but had given it up when she’d had children. It seemed like Harry saw Alison as Helena’s replacement.
Sam looked back out of the window. The old man was still there.
‘If I get killed today, remember his face.’
‘Can I have your office?’
‘Get out.’
She was laughing as she went.
When he was alone in the room again, Sam watched the street life. The pavement was getting busy with lawyers from other firms, big egos in a forgotten Lancashire town. They barely noticed the drunks who congregated at the end of the street and shared cheap cigarettes and stolen sherry.
He watched the lawyers walk by for a while, waved at the ones who looked up. When he looked beyond them, he noticed that the old man had gone. He checked his watch and then stepped away from the window. He made a note of the time. Like most lawyers, he lived his life in six-minute segments.
I watched Bobby as he watched television. Parenting was all new to me, but I loved Laura McGanity, and she and Bobby came as a pair.
Ambition had taken me to London a few years earlier, and I had fulfilled that, carved out a small niche in the crime circuit: Jack Garrett, crime reporter. It had come at a price, though, most nights lost chasing down drug raids or shootings, or writing exclusives on scams and gangsters, losing sleep as I waited for the door to crash in.
But then my father was killed a year ago. We had grown apart before that; we were like strangers when I went south, but since his death I had needed to come home to Lancashire. I didn’t know why, couldn’t work it out. Maybe it was as simple as guilt, trying to make up for the years when I had been away, chasing excitement, chasing dreams. Whatever the reason, I was back in Turners Fold, the small Lancashire cotton town where I grew up, all tight alleys and millstone grit; the town I had worked so hard to escape from.
It was harder for Laura, though. We’d met on a case -she was one of the detectives, while I was the reporter prying for a story. She was London to her boots, at home in the noise, the movement, the youngest daughter of a City accountant. I had given up a lot to move up north: my social whirl, my contacts, my new life in the city. But Laura had given up everything familiar.
I sat down next to Bobby. His eyes stayed fixed on the television—SpongeBob SquarePants— and I wondered how the move would affect him. Laura had divorced Geoff, Bobby’s father, not long before we got together and contact had been sporadic at first. As soon as I’d arrived on the scene, things had miraculously improved. But now I had dragged Bobby two hundred miles north, away from the urban clutter of his toddler years and into the open spaces of Lancashire moorland. We had settled in an old stone cottage, with a slate roof and windows like peepholes. At night the cottage seemed to sink into the hillside, the lights from within like cat’s eyes flashing in the dark.
I looked towards the window. I could see old redbrick mill chimneys in the town below us, the lines of terraces like slash marks in the hills. The town-centre streets were still cobbled in places, the edges worn smooth by the Lancashire rain. I’d forgotten about the rain. It was the reason for the cotton industry, the moist air good for working with cloth, but the cotton had gone now, leaving damp streets, dark and foreboding against slate-grey skies. Between the town and us was a rich green hillside, broken by dry-stone walls and clusters of trees. This was the Lancashire that people didn’t expect, the rolling open spaces. Only the brooding shadow of Pendle Hill at the other end of the valley broke the mood.
I checked my watch. Bobby had to be at school in half an hour. It was my turn today, Laura had been snatched away by a murder in Blackley, the next town along.
I felt my fingers drum the table. Was there a story in it? I needed something, because a child was still missing. They usually stayed away for a week, sometimes longer. Connor Crabtree had been gone for six days, and the nationals in town were all on countdown. It made it harder for me. I was just a freelancer, trying to sell stories to newspapers who had their own people at the scene, like I was a dog at the dinner table, waiting for scraps. I did best when the press weren’t there and I could get the early quotes.
I had sold a few stories though, small articles on the people affected by the abductions, and on the town itself, but they were just padding. Now Laura was at a murder scene and I was at home, doing the school run.
‘Are we going to school soon, Jack?’ asked Bobby, his voice quiet, almost a whisper.
I
