Post Mortem, Gary Bell [best fiction novels .txt] 📗

acting under an existing brand, so to speak?’

‘Then I’d say that we are well and truly up shit creek. Instead of providing us with a defence, Elliot, you have just postulated an almost airtight case for the prosecution.’

‘Oh.’ I looked down into my drink, thinking it through. ‘Yes, it seems I have.’

She shook her head. ‘Now, do me a favour, won’t you? Take that planet-sized brain of yours and do the exact bloody opposite.’

Unfortunately, I couldn’t.

26

As soon as I was clear of the pub, I phoned Zara and told her to do a little digging into her sick juror.

‘Tell them to look for aconitine,’ I said, puffing on a cigarette. ‘It’s a poison, often undetectable unless the hospital staff know what they’re looking for, but if it’s left untreated then it can be –’

‘Whoa! Slow down, it’s all right. Percy got word back about the sick juror after you’d run out on me this afternoon. Food poisoning. She’s better now. The trial is going ahead as scheduled on Monday.’

‘Thank God for that.’ I flicked my filter off into the evening.

‘Are you going to tell me what the hell happened tonight?’

So I lit another cigarette and did just that.

I spent most of that rainy Saturday with my head buried in the case, but it was a jigsaw that remained impossible to piece together without Charli’s honest input. As Lydia had rightly pointed out, every bit of evidence I’d scraped together did nothing but incriminate my client. Things were starting to look rather desperate.

Zara took the Tube up to mine late on Sunday afternoon, and together we walked Scout through Regent’s Park. The weather had turned cold again, the mercury crashing back down to almost zero, and we were wrapped up in layers and mostly quiet on our walk.

‘This feels wrong,’ I said, using all the strength of one arm to keep Scout in check as she lunged for another dog walker in the distance.

‘The muzzle?’ Zara asked, gesturing down to Scout’s new mouthpiece. ‘I know it looks sort of cruel, but if she’s going to keep losing her shit every time she sees another dog then –’

‘No, I mean the trials. Both of them. We’re missing something major, something obvious. I feel as if it’s at the outermost edge of my vision.’

‘Yeah,’ she said glumly, hands in the front pocket of her hoody, beanie hat pulled down to her glasses. ‘It’s like an eye floater.’

‘A what?’

‘Those little squiggles you get on your eyes sometimes. Like, translucent shadows moving around. Something that vanishes every time you try to focus on it.’

‘Exactly.’

‘You know what the most likely explanation is, don’t you? To both cases.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Meadows did it. She did it all, almost precisely as her prosecutors are suggesting.’

‘But you don’t believe it?’

‘No.’ I sighed. ‘For some reason I can barely begin to fathom, I don’t believe it.’

‘At least we’ve only got one more night until our final showdowns begin. I don’t know how much longer I could handle sitting here on the last mile like this, just waiting around.’

‘Yes, at least there’s that.’

‘I guess it’d be stupidly irresponsible of us to go out for a couple of drinks tonight, wouldn’t it?’

‘Outrageously so,’ I replied. ‘We’ll have to drop the dog off first.’

‘I’m game if you are.’

‘All right, but before we get too bladdered, how would you feel about heading up to chambers?’

She laughed without humour. ‘Why the hell would you want to go up there on a Sunday evening?’

‘There’s something in the original Meadows paperwork I’d like to check before we resume tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Her brother is paying the legal fees, which often requires the solicitor to do a check for laundered money. That’d include copies of his identification, as well as Charli’s.’

‘You want to check for a change of name, don’t you? You still think they have something to do with Roy Macey.’

‘Am I that predictable?’

‘Yep. But if it’ll help you sleep tonight, then whatever. At least that way we can go to the Templar on Chancery afterwards. Wetherspoon prices suit me fine.’

We dropped the dog off at mine and then took the Central Line back to Chancery Lane.

Instead of walking down Chancery itself, we took the shortcut through Furnival Street and onto the pedestrianised strip that connected to the bottom end of Took’s Court. It was gone half past six, almost the exact same time that Ernie had caught me smoking in my room nearly two weeks before, but the changing season had already pulled the darkness of that night back to a cloudy, cold, indigo dusk; as we walked, I couldn’t help but worry about Ernie. More to the point, I worried about it being my fault.

Around this end of the court there was a stand for bicycle parking and motorcycles. Parked up on this strip was a single moped with its engine running.

‘I bet every barrister in the country has got their feet up at this time on a Sunday night,’ Zara said, briefly checking herself out in the rider’s reflective visor as we passed. ‘Chilling out with their other halves, watching Netflix, ordering Chinese. Everybody except us, anyway.’

I turned the bend, unlocked the front door of our building and crossed the threshold into the reception area.

‘Everybody except us.’ I nodded, moving for the narrow staircase. ‘Although it looks like there are lights on upstairs, so at least somebody else is here.’

It wasn’t until I turned off the staircase at the third floor that I crashed into a total stranger and almost elbowed Zara back down the entire flight in my surprise.

‘Jesus!’ I choked, catching her before she went toppling backwards. I rounded on the man. ‘You scared the shit out of me!’

Equally startled, the stranger had dropped both his phone and a heavy bunch of keys, and he hurriedly bent down to collect them from the hallway carpet. ‘S-sorry, Mr Rook,’ he stammered, stuffing the keys and phone into the pockets of his overalls. He straightened and tapped the logo of an iron