Silks

CHAPTER 3

‘And did you?’ I asked.

‘Did I what?’ Steve replied.

‘Murder Scot Barlow?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course I bloody didn’t.’

‘Have the police interviewed you?’ I asked him.

‘Not yet,’ he said in a somewhat resigned tone. ‘But I think they plan to. I asked to call my lawyer. So I called you.’

‘I’m hardly your lawyer,’ I said to him.

‘Look, Perry,’ he said, ‘you’re the only lawyer I know.’ He was beginning to sound a little desperate.

‘You need a solicitor not a barrister,’ I said.

‘Solicitors, barristers, what’s the difference? You are a bloody lawyer, aren’t you? Will you help me or not?’

‘Calm down,’ I said, trying to sound reassuring. ‘Where are you exactly?’

‘Newbury,’ he said. ‘Newbury police station.’

‘How long have you been there?’ I asked.

‘About ten minutes, I think. They came to my house about an hour ago.’

I looked at my watch. It was ten past ten. Which solicitors did I know in Newbury that could be roused at such an hour? None.

‘Steve,’ I said. ‘I can’t act in this matter as at the moment you need a solicitor, not a barrister. I will see what I can do to get you a solicitor I know to come to Newbury but it won’t be for a few hours at least.’

‘Oh God,’ he almost cried. ‘Can’t you come?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It would be like asking a brain surgeon to remove your teeth. Much better for you if you get a dentist.’ I was sure that, as analogies go, and with more time, I could have done better. And not many solicitors I know would have been happy to be called a dentist, not least by some brain-surgeon barrister.

‘When will this bloody solicitor arrive?’ he asked, again sounding resigned.

‘As soon as I can arrange it,’ I said.

‘The police have told me that, if I want, I can talk to the duty solicitor, whoever that is,’ Steve said.

‘Well, you can,’ I replied. ‘And for free, but I wouldn’t if I were you.’

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘At this time of night he’s likely to be a recently qualified young solicitor, or else one that can get no other work,’ I said. ‘You are facing a serious charge and I’d wait for someone with more experience if I were you.’

There was a long, quiet pause from the other end of the line.

‘OK, I’ll wait,’ he said.

‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘I’ll get someone there as soon as possible.’

‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘And Steve,’ I said earnestly, ‘listen to me. You don’t have to answer any questions until he arrives. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ he said with a yawn in his voice.

‘What time did you get up this morning?’ I asked him.

‘Usual time,’ he said. ‘Ten to six. I was riding out at seven.’

‘Tell the police that you are tired and need to sleep. Tell them that you have been awake for nearly seventeen hours and you are entitled to have a rest before being interviewed.’ Strictly, it may not have been true, but it was worth a try.

‘Right,’ he said.

‘And when the solicitor does arrive, take his advice absolutely.’

‘OK,’ he said rather flatly. ‘I will.’

Did he, I wondered, sound like a guilty man resigned to his fate?

I called a solicitor I knew in Oxford and asked him. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he replied in his Australian accent, he was too busy teaching some gorgeous young university student the joys of sleeping with an older man. I had learned from experience not to ask him if the gorgeous young student was male or female. However, he did rouse himself sufficiently to give me the name of a firm in Newbury that he could recommend, together with one of their partners’ mobile phone number.

Sure, said the partner when I called, he would go. Steve Mitchell was quite famous in those parts, and representing a celebrity client accused of murder was every local solicitor’s dream. To say nothing of the potential size of the fee.

I returned to my, now cold, pasta and thought again about last Saturday at Sandown. I went over in my mind everything that had been said, and particularly I recalled the strange encounter with the battered Scot Barlow in the showers.

It was not unknown for barristers to represent their friends and even members of their own families. Some senior QCs, it was said, had such a wide circle of friends that they spent their whole lives defending them against criminal or civil proceedings. Personally, I tried to avoid getting myself into such a position. Friendships to me were too important to place in jeopardy by having to lay bare all one’s secrets and emotions. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is rare even amongst the closest of chums, and a friend would far more resent being asked a question he didn’t want to answer by me than if a complete stranger had done it. Victory in court may cause the friendship to founder anyway due to too much intimate knowledge, and if one lost the case then one lost the friend for sure.

So I usually invented some little ruse to avoid the situation. I would often say that so-and-so in my chambers was much better qualified or experienced to accept the brief, or that I was too busy with other cases and that so-and-so could devote more time to preparing the defence case. I always promised to keep abreast of the facts in the case, and sometimes I even managed to.

However, this time I didn’t need to invent an excuse. I couldn’t act for Steve Mitchell because I was privy to some material evidence and was far more likely to be called to testify for the prosecution than to be one of the defence counsel. But, I thought, there had been no other witness to the exchange between Barlow and me in the Sandown showers, and now Barlow was dead. To whom, I thought, should I volunteer the information? And when?

The murder of top jump jockey Scot Barlow was the number one item on the eight o’clock television news bulletin the following morning. A reporter, standing outside the property, claimed that Barlow had been found lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen of his home with a five-foot-long, two-pronged pitchfork embedded in his chest. The reporter also stated that someone was helping the police with their enquiries. He didn’t say that the someone was Steve Mitchell, but he didn’t say it wasn’t.

My mobile phone rang as I was buttering a slice of toast.

‘Hello,’ I said, picking it up.

‘Is that Geoffrey Mason?’ asked a very quiet well-spoken male voice in a whisper.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Do as you are told,’ said the voice, very quietly, but very distinctly.

‘What did you say?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Do as you are told,’ the voice repeated in the same manner.

‘Who is this?’ I demanded, but, in response, the caller simply hung up.

I looked at the phone in my hand as if it would tell me.

Do as I was told, the man had said. But he hadn’t told me what I had to do, or when. It couldn’t have been a wrong number; he had asked me my name. How very odd, I thought.

I checked through the list of received calls but, as I expected, the caller had withheld his number.

The phone in my hand rang again suddenly, making me jump and drop it onto the kitchen counter. I grabbed at it and pushed the button.

‘Hello?’ I said rather tentatively.

‘Is that Geoffrey Mason?’ asked a male voice, a different male voice.

‘Yes,’ I replied, cautiously. ‘Who is this?’

‘Bruce Lygon,’ said the voice.

‘Oh,’ I said, relieved. Bruce Lygon was the solicitor from Newbury I had called the night before.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I thought you might be someone else.’

‘Your friend seems to be in a bit of a hole here,’ he said. ‘The cops think there’s not much doubt he did it. That’s clear from their questions. We’ve been at it since six this morning. We’re just having a short break while the detectives have a conference.’

‘What’s the evidence?’ I asked him.

‘They haven’t revealed much as yet but I gather that the victim was stabbed with some sort of fork.’

‘They reported that on the television,’ I said.

‘Did they indeed?’ he said. ‘Well, it appears that the fork belongs to Mr Mitchell.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Yeah, and that’s not all,’ he said. ‘As well as Mr Barlow, there were some betting slips also impaled on the fork and they belonged to Mr Mitchell as well. They had his name on them.’

‘Oh,’ I said again.

‘And,’ he went on, ‘there was a text message received yesterday afternoon on Barlow’s mobile from Mitchell saying that he was going to, and I quote, “come round and sort you out properly you sneaking little bastard”.’

‘And what does Mitchell have to say?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ said Bruce. ‘But then again, I told him not to. He just sits there looking pale and scared.’

‘But what has he said to you privately?’ I asked.

‘He mumbled something about being framed,’ Bruce replied, but I could tell from his tone that he didn’t believe it. ‘Do you want me to stay here?’

‘It’s not my decision,’ I said. ‘Steve Mitchell is your client, not me. Ask him.’

‘I have,’ he said. ‘He told me to call you and to do whatever you said.’

Bugger, I thought. I just could not get involved with this case. I knew too much about it for a start, and it looked like it was pretty much a foregone conclusion, and that was another good reason for not getting involved. Acquiring a reputation in chambers for having too many courtroom losses wouldn’t help my potential QC credentials either.

‘You had better stay then,’ I said, ‘but remind Mr Mitchell that it’s you and not me who’s acting for him, and I can’t make those decisions. Have they charged him yet?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘More questioning first. And I know they are searching his place. They told him so. There will be more questions from that, I expect.’

Under English law, the police could only question a suspect prior to charging.

‘When’s their time up?’ I asked him. The police had a maximum of thirty-six hours from when he first arrived at the police station before they either charged Steve, brought him before a magistrate to ask for more time, or released him.

‘According to the record, he was arrested at eight fifty-three last night and arrived at the police station at nine fifty-seven,’ he said. ‘So far they haven’t asked for more time and I think it’s unlikely they will. I don’t think they need his answers. Their body language says that they have enough to charge without them.’

‘So you’ll stay until he’s charged?’ I asked.

‘Only if they charge him before six,’ he said. ‘After that I’m taking my wife out to dinner for her birthday, and I’d rather face the Law Society than fail to do that.’ There was laughter in his voice. Steve Mitchell might be facing the toughest contest of his sporting life, but it was still just a job to Bruce Lygon. ‘But don’t worry, there’ll be someone here from my firm if I’m not.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Please keep me informed, but I’m not actually representing him.’ But, like everybody else, I was curious about murder, especially as I also knew the victim.

‘I will if I can, but only if he says so.’

He was right, of course, client confidentiality and all that.

Steve Mitchell’s arrest was the front-page story on the midday edition of the Evening Standard. I grabbed a copy as I dodged the rain outside Blackfriars Crown Court on my way to a local café for some lunch. ‘TOP JOCK HELD FOR MURDER’, shouted the banner headline alongside a library picture of a smiling Scot Barlow. The story gave little more detail than I already knew, but the report speculated that the murder had been in revenge for Barlow giving the racing authorities details of Mitchell’s illegal gambling activities.

I turned on my mobile phone. There was one voicemail message but it wasn’t from Bruce Lygon. It was from the quiet, well-spoken male whisperer. ‘Remember,’ he said menacingly, ‘do exactly as you are told.’

I sat in the window of the café eating a cheese and pickle sandwich, trying to work out what on earth it was all about. No one had told me to do anything, so how could I do it? I would have dismissed it as mistaken identity except that the caller this morning had asked if I was Geoffrey Mason. And, indeed, I was. But were there two Geoffrey Masons? There must be, but there was only one with my phone number.

I decided to ignore that problem and concentrate on the matter currently in hand. The judge that morning had not been very helpful and he had not been greatly swayed by my arguments concerning the admissibility of prior convictions in the conspiracy-to-defraud trial of the brothers. It made the case more difficult to prosecute, but not impossible. After all, the brothers had admitted having done it. All we had to do was convince the jury they had done it for gain.

I called Bruce Lygon.

‘Any news?’ I asked him.

‘No.’ He sounded bored. ‘They are apparently waiting for the results of some forensics. From his clothes and shoes, I think. And his car.’

‘How is he?’ I said.

‘Pretty fed up,’ he said. ‘Keeps saying he should be riding at Huntingdon races. Asks when he can go home. I don’t think he fully realizes the extent of the mess he’s in.’

‘So you think he will definitely be charged?’ I asked.

‘Oh yeah, no question. They haven’t even bothered to question him for the past four hours. They’re sure he did it. One of them said as much to him and asked whether he wanted to confess and save them all a lot of trouble.’

‘What did he say?’ I asked.

‘Told them to get lost, or words to that effect.’ I smiled. I could imagine the actual exchange. Steve didn’t talk to anyone without at least a few bloodys sprinkled in.

‘Well, for your sake, I hope they charge him by six,’ I said, thinking of his wife’s birthday dinner. ‘Will it be you that goes with him to the magistrate’s court in the morning?’

‘Will I? Are you kidding?’ he said. ‘It’s not every day I get a case that leads on the lunchtime news. Even the wife says to stay here all night if I have to. Don’t let him out of your sight, she said, just in case he finds himself another solicitor.’

Maybe it was more than just a job to Bruce, after all. But if he thought representing a guilty but popular and celebrated client would bring him any respect he was much mistaken. Two years before I had been dramatically unsuccessful in defending a much-loved middle-aged comedy TV actress from a charge of deliberate shoplifting and the subsequent assault of the store detective. She had committed the crimes but it had been me who had been universally denounced in the press for failing to get her off. Everyone knows it was George Carmen QC, who, in the face of overwhelming evidence, secured an acquittal for Ken Dodd for tax evasion, but no one remembers the counsel who failed to keep Lester Piggott out of jail on the same charge. Such as it is in life, and such as it is in racing. Winning is all. Coming second is a disaster, even if it’s by the slightest margin, the shortest of short heads.

The afternoon was little better than the morning had been. The judge in the case seemed determined to be as unhelpful as possible, continually interrupting my questioning as I tried to cross-examine one of the defendants. In true Perry Mason style I was trying to trap him in a lie but, every time I thought I was getting close, the judge stopped me and asked if my line of questioning was relevant. This gave the defendant time to recover and recoup. He simply smiled at me and went on telling the jury his lies. I knew they were lies, and he knew they were lies. But, from their facial expressions, I realized that the jury were believing them. It was very frustrating.

I was beginning to think that I was about to notch up another courtroom loss when the elder of the brothers carelessly stated in response to my questions that you couldn’t believe what a previous witness for the prosecution had said because, he claimed, the witness was a convicted felon and a proven liar. On such things do trials turn. Because the defendant had called into question the character of a witness against him, we, the prosecution, were now entitled to call his character into question as well, and all his previous convictions were suddenly admissible into court. Hurrah. The poor defending barrister sat there with his head in his hands. He had done so well to keep the information from the jury through the judge’s earlier ruling, only for his own client to mortally hole the defence below the water line. Asinking was now inevitable.

The judge adjourned proceedings for the day soon after four o’clock with the prosecution well on top. Perhaps I would actually win the case.

I took a taxi back to chambers with my box of papers and my laptop. It had been a miserably wet autumnal November day in London and the daylight had fully gone by the time I paid off the cabbie on Theobald’s Road near the gated entrance to Raymond Buildings.

Julian Trent was waiting for me between two rows of parked cars. Whereas, the previous evening, I had been somewhat wary crossing Barnes Common, I hadn’t really been seriously concerned that I would be attacked. I had dismissed Trent’s posttrial threats as mere bravado, a lashing-out reaction to losing the case. And why would he want revenge from me when he had got off anyway? But here he was, with his trusted baseball bat, oozing menace and danger.

I didn’t actually see him until I had walked beyond his hiding place because I was concentrating on hunching my body to keep my computer dry as I balanced it on the box of papers. My peripheral vision detected a movement to my right and I turned in time to glimpse his face just before he hit me. He was smiling.

The baseball bat caught me across the back of both legs about half way up my thighs. The blow caused my knees to buckle and I was sent sprawling to the ground, my box of papers spilling out in front of me. The suddenness of the strike left me gasping for breath. Far from leaping to my feet to defend myself, I lay face down, immobile on the wet tarmac. Strangely there was no pain. My legs felt numb and somehow detached from the rest of my body. I used my arms to roll myself over onto my back. I was determined that he wouldn’t be able to knock my brains out without me seeing it coming.

He stood above me, swinging the bat from side to side. There was no one else about in the private road but he seemed not to care anyway. He was clearly enjoying himself.

‘Hello, Mister Clever-Dick Lawyer,’ he said with a curl to his upper lip. ‘Not so clever now, are we?’

I didn’t reply, not out of some feeling of defiance but because I couldn’t think of anything to say.

He raised the bat to have another swing and I felt sure that my time was up. I put my arms up around my head to protect myself, closed my eyes and waited for the crunch. I wondered if I would die here with my head beaten to a pulp. I also wondered if Angela would be waiting for me on the other side. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.

The bat landed with a sickening thud but not on my head, not even on my arms or hands. Trent hit my unprotected laptop computer with all his might and it obligingly disintegrated into several parts that scattered noisily across the road.

I opened my eyes and looked at him.

‘Next time,’ he said, ‘I’ll smash your head.’

Next time! Dear God, I didn’t want there to be a next time.

He then stepped forward and trod hard on my genitals, putting all his weight on his right foot and crushing my manhood between his boot and the road. This time there was pain, a shooting, stabbing, excruciating pain. I moaned and rolled away sideways and he thankfully released the pressure.

‘And next time,’ he said, ‘I’ll cut your balls right off. Understand?’

I lay there silently looking at him.

‘Do you fucking understand?’ he repeated staring back at me.

I nodded ever so slightly.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now you be a good little lawyer.’

Then he suddenly turned and walked away, leaving me lying in a puddle, curled up like a baby to lessen the ongoing agony between my legs. Could this really have happened in central London just yards from hundreds of respectable high-earning fellow professionals? This was the sort of thing that happened to some of my clients, not to me.

I was shaking and I didn’t know whether it was from fear, from shock or from the cold. Tears had come quite easily to me over the past seven years since Angela had died and I cried now. I couldn’t help it. It was mostly due to the relief of still being alive when I had been sure that I would die. It was the body’s natural reaction to intense emotion, and I had been frightened more than at any time in my life.

Only a few minutes had elapsedin real time since I had stepped out of the taxi but my life had changed from one of discipline and order to one of chaos and fear. How easily I had been castrated of my courtroom authority. How fearful I had so quickly become of castration of another kind.

In my line of work one encountered fear and intimidation on an almost daily basis. How self-righteous and condescending I imagined I must have been to potential witnesses too fearful to give evidence. ‘We will look after you,’ I would say to them. ‘We will protect you from the bullies,’ I would promise, ‘but you must do what is right.’ Only now did I appreciate their predicament. I should have told Julian Trent to go to hell but, in fact, I would have licked his boots if he had so asked, and I hated myself for it.

Eventually the intensity of the pain in my groin diminished, only to be replaced by a dull ache from the backs of my thighs where the baseball bat had first caught me. The shaking also gradually abated and I was able to roll over onto my knees. It didn’t seem to help much but at least I was looking at the world the right way up. My computer was well beyond repair and all my previously neatly ordered court papers were blowing along the road in the rain, hiding beneath parked cars and flying up into the branches of the leafless trees. My gown and wig, which had also beenin the box, were soaking up the water from another puddle. But I didn’t really care. It was as much as I could manage to stand approximately upright and stagger the few yards to the door of my chambers. And still nobody appeared.

I leaned up against the board with all the barristers’ names painted on it and looked at the blue front door. I couldn’t remember the code for the security lock. I had worked in these chambers for almost thirteen years and the code hadn’t been changed once in all that time, but still I couldn’t recall it now. So I pushed the bell and was rewarded with Arthur’s friendly voice from a small speaker.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Who is it?’

‘Geoffrey,’ I croaked. ‘Geoffrey Mason. Can you come and help?’

‘Mr Mason?’ Arthur asked back through the speaker. ‘Are you all right?’

‘No,’ I said.

Almost immediately the door opened and Arthur, my rather tardy Good Samaritan, at last came to my rescue, half carrying me through the hallway into the clerks’ room. He pulled up a desk chair and I gratefully sat down, but carefully so as not to further inflame the problems below.

I must have been quite a sight. I was soaked through and both the knees of my pinstripe suit were torn where I had landed on the rough tarmac. My once starched white shirt clung like a wet rag to my chest and my hair dripped rainwater down my forehead. It is surprising how quickly one becomes wet from lying in persistent rain.

‘Goodness gracious,’ said Arthur. ‘What on earth happened to you?’

I hadn’t expected Arthur to be a ‘goodness gracious’ sort of chap, but he did spend his working life in close proximity to barristers who acted like they lived in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, and some of it must have rubbed off.

‘I was mugged,’ I said.

‘Where?’ he asked.

‘Outside,’ I said. ‘My stuff is still on the road.’

Arthur turned and rushed outside.

‘Be careful,’ I shouted after him, but I didn’t really expect Julian Trent still to be there. It was me he had been after, not my clerk.

Arthur returned with my gown in one hand and my wig in the other, both dripping onto the light green carpet. He had just a few of my sopping papers stuck under his arm, and I suspected that most of the others had flown with the wind.

‘Is that your computer?’ he asked, nodding his head towards the door.

‘What’s left of it,’ I agreed.

‘Funny,’ he said. ‘Muggers normally steal things, not break them. Is anything missing?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said patting myself down. I could feel both my wallet and my mobile in the soggy pockets of my jacket.

‘I’m calling the police,’ said Arthur, moving round the desk and lifting the phone. ‘Do you need an ambulance?’ he asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But a change of clothes would be good.’

Arthur spoke to the police, who promised to send someone round as soon as possible, though it might be some time.

While we waited I changed out of my sodden clothes into a track suit that Arthur found in one of my colleagues’ rooms, and then I tried to make some sort of order from the saturated paperwork. After a second attempt, Arthur had recovered about half of what had been in the box and I spent some time laying the sheets out all over my room to dry. I couldn’t reprint them as nearly all the files had only been on my computer.

I thought that calling the police would be a waste of time and so it turned out. Two uniformed constables arrived about forty minutes after the call and they took a statement from me while I sat in the clerks’ room with Arthur hovering close by.

‘Did you see the mugger?’ one of them asked me.

‘Not at first,’ I said. ‘He hit me from behind with a baseball bat.’

‘How do you know it was a baseball bat?’ he asked.

‘I saw it later,’ I said. ‘I assumed it was what he hit me with.’

‘Whereabouts did he hit you?’

‘On the back of my legs,’ I said.

They insisted that I show them. Embarrassed, I lowered the track-suit trousers to reveal two rapidly bruising red marks half way up the backs of my thighs. Arthur’s eyes were almost out on stalks.

‘Funny place to hit someone,’ said the other policeman.

‘It knocked me over,’ I said.

‘Yeah, it would,’ he agreed. ‘But most muggers would have hit you on the head. Did you get a look at his face?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It was dark.’ Why, I thought, had I not told them that it had been Julian Trent who had attacked me? What was I doing? Did I not stand up for justice and right? Tell them, I told myself, tell them the truth.

‘Would you know him again?’ the policeman asked.

‘I doubt it,’ I heard myself say. Next time, I’ll smash your head, Trent had said. Next time, I’ll cut your balls right off. I had no wish for there to be a next time. ‘It was all a bit of a blur,’ I said. ‘I was looking mostly at the bat.’

‘But you were sure it was a man?’ he asked.

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘Black or white?’ he asked.

‘I couldn’t say.’ Even to my ears, it sounded pathetic. I hated myself, again.

They asked me if I wanted hospital treatment for my injuries but I declined. I’d had bruising worse than this due to an easy fall in a steeplechase, and I had ridden again in the very next race. However, there was a big difference this time. Racing falls were accidents and, although the laws of chance might imply that they were inevitable, the injuries produced were not premeditated, or man made.

The two policemen clearly thought that I was not a helpful witness and I could sense from their attitude that they, too, thought that the process was a waste of time and that another mugging would go unsolved, just another statistic in the long list of unsolved street crimes in the capital.

‘Well, at least you didn’t have anything stolen,’ said one, clearly bringing the interview to a close. He snapped shut his notebook. ‘If you call the station later they’ll give you a crime number. You’ll need one for any insurance claim on your computer.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Thanks. Which station?’

‘We’re from Charing Cross,’ said one.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’ll call there.’

‘Good,’ said the other, turning for the door.

And with that, they were gone, no doubt to interview some other victim, on another street.

‘You weren’t much help,’ said Arthur, rather accusingly. ‘Are you sure you didn’t see who it was?’

‘I’d have told them if I had,’ I said quite sharply, but I wasn’t sure he completely believed me. Arthur knew me too well, I thought, and I hated myself again for deceiving him more than anyone. But I really didn’t want a ‘next time’, and I had been frightened, very frightened indeed, by my confrontation with young Mr Julian Trent. This time, I was alive and not badly damaged. And I intended to keep it that way.

∗

I sat at my desk for a while trying to recover some of my confidence. ‘Be a good little lawyer,’ Trent had said. What had that meant? I wondered. If I really had been a good little lawyer I would have told the police exactly who had attacked me and where to find him. Even now, he would be under arrest and locked up. But for how long? He wouldn’t get any jail time for hitting me once on the back of the legs and smashing my computer. I had no broken bones, not even a cut, no concussion or damaged organs, just a couple of tears in my trousers and a rain-spoilt barrister’s wig. A fine, or maybe some community service, would be all he’d get. And then he’d be free to visit me again for ‘next time’. No thanks. And was he anything to do with the ‘do as you are told’ whispered phone message? I couldn’t imagine so, but why else would he attack me? Something very strange was going on.

Arthur knocked on my open door and came in, closing it behind him.

‘Mr Mason, he said.

‘Yes, Arthur,’ I replied.

‘May I say something?’ he said.

‘Of course, Arthur,’ I replied, not actually wanting him to say anything just at the moment. But there would be no stopping him now, not if his mind was made up.

‘I think it is most unlike you to be so vague as you were with those policemen,’ he said, standing full-square in front of my paper-covered desk. ‘Most unlike you indeed.’ He paused briefly. I said nothing. ‘You are the brightest and sharpest junior we have in these chambers and you miss nothing, nothing at all. Do I make myself clear?’

I was flattered by his comments and I was trying to think what to say back to him when he went on.

‘Are you in any trouble?’ he asked.

‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘What sort of trouble do you mean?’

‘Any sort of trouble,’ he said. ‘Maybe some woman trouble?’

Did he think I’d been attacked by a jealous husband?

‘No, Arthur, no trouble at all. I promise.’

‘You could always come to me if you were,’ he said. ‘I like to think I look after my barristers.’

‘Thank you, Arthur,’ I said. ‘I would most definitely tell you if I was in any sort of trouble.’ I looked him straight in the eye and wondered if he knew I was lying.

He nodded, turned on his heel and walked to the door. As he opened it he turned round. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘This came for you earlier.’ He walked back to the desk and handed me an A5-sized white envelope with my name printed on the front of it, with By Hand written on the top right-hand corner.

‘Thank you,’ I said, taking it. ‘Do you know who delivered it?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It was pushed through the letter box in the front door.’

He waited but I made no move to open the envelope, and he eventually walked over to the door and went out.

I sat looking at the envelope for a few moments. I told myself that it was probably a note from a colleague in other chambers about some case or other. But, of course, it wasn’t.

It contained two items. Asingle piece of white paper folded over and a photograph. It was another message and, this time, it left me in no doubt at all that the whispered telephone calls and Julian Trent’s visit had both been connected.

Four lines of printed bold capitals ran across the centre of the paper:

BE A GOOD LITTLE LAWYER,

TAKE THE STEVE MITCHELL CASE – AND LOSE IT.

DO AS YOU ARE TOLD

NEXT TIME, SOMEONE WILL GET BADLY HURT.

The photograph was of my seventy-eight-year-old father standing outside his home in Northamptonshire.