Silks

CHAPTER 7

By the time of the Steeplechase Festival at Cheltenham in March, Steve Mitchell had been in prison for four months and his name had all but been erased from the racing pages of the newspapers as well as from the considerations of the punters. With both Mitchell and Barlow out of the running, Reno Clemens had built up a commanding lead in the battle to be this year’s champion jockey and much was expected of him at the festival. Most of his mounts would start as favourite.

Bruce Lygon had done his best at Oxford Crown Court in November to get Steve Mitchell bail but, unsurprisingly, the judge had listened to him with courtesy and then had promptly declined his application. I had sat beside Bruce in court but I hadn’t really helped him much. I don’t think it would have made much difference if I had. Letting murder suspects out on bail was never going to endear a judge to the general public and a few recent high-profile cases where the suspects had murdered again while out on bail had put paid to even the slimmest of chances.

I hadn’t actually planned to attend the bail hearing but I had received another little reminder from God-knows-who two days before it was due to take place. It had been another slim white envelope delivered as before to my chambers by hand. It had been found on the mat inside the front door and no one had seen who had left it there. Again, in the envelope there had been a single sheet of folded white paper and a photograph. Thankfully the message hadn’t been backed up this time by a personal visit from Julian Trent. However, the memory of his previous visit had remained vivid enough in my consciousness for the sweat to break out on my forehead as I had held the envelope tightly in my hands.

As before, there had been four lines of black print across the centre of the paper.

GOOD LITTLE LAWYER

I WILL BE WATCHING YOU IN OXFORD ON WEDNESDAY

DON’T GET MITCHELL BAIL

REMEMBER, LOSE THE CASE OR SOMEONE GETS HURT

The photograph had been of my dead wife Angela. In fact, to be accurate, it had been a photograph of a photograph of Angela in a silver frame. Around the sides I could see a few of the other things on the surface on which the frame had stood. I had known those items. The photograph of Angela was the one of her smiling that I had placed on her dressing table in our bedroom soon after she died. I said ‘good morning, my darling’ to that photograph every day. Someone had been into my house to take that shot. It made me very angry, but I was also more than a little afraid. Just who were these people?

I sat at my desk in chambers twiddling my thumbs and thinking. It was Monday morning and I was having a few easy days. In order to prevent a repeat of last year, when I had been stuck in court instead of jumping my way round Cheltenham on Sandeman’s back in the Foxhunter Chase, I had instructed Arthur to schedule absolutely nothing for the whole week.

I had recently finished acting for a large high-street supermarket in an out-of-date food case, which my client had won. Such relatively low-key cases were the bread and butter of many junior barristers, and highly sought after. In the big, high-profile criminal cases, the lead for the defence was almost invariably taken by a silk, a Queen’s Counsel. However, many companies, especially large well-known firms, often preferred to engage a junior in cases where they were dealing with the ‘little people’, mostly their staff or their suppliers, or with simple breaks in hygiene regulations. To turn up at a magistrates court with a QC in tow seemed to imply they were guilty, quite apart from the excessive fees of a silk. Many a junior has made a fine reputation and an excellent living from the work. Some juniors, indeed, declined the chance to be promoted to QC for fear of losing their fee-base altogether.

Personally, I enjoyed the criminal Crown Court work far more, but I earned most of my money either in the magistrates’ courts or at the disciplinary hearings of professional institutions.

But not this week. I was determined not to miss out again on a ride in the Foxhunters. Sandeman had qualified partly by virtue of winning the race last year and Paul had assured me at the end of January that the horse was fitter this time, implying that failure to win again this year would not be Sandeman’s fault. It had been a direct warning to me not to be the weak link in the partnership, an explicit instruction to get myself fit.

For weeks now I had been running every day, mostly at lunchtime, which had the added advantage of avoiding the temptation to eat with fellow counsel either in the Hall at Gray’s Inn, or at one of the many hostelries situated close to our chambers.

In addition, in mid February I had been skiing for a long weekend in Meribel in France and had pushed my aching legs time and again down the mountains. I loved to ski but, on this occasion, it had been ski boot-camp. I had risen early each morning in the chalet I’d shared with four other complete strangers whose sole passion in life was the snow. We had spent the whole day on the slopes, catching the very last lift of the day to the highest point and arriving back at the chalet exhausted, just as the daylight faded. Then I would spend hours in the sauna, sweating off the pounds, before a high-protein dinner and an early bed.

By the second week in March I was toned like I hadn’t been since my time in Lambourn fifteen years before. Bring on Julian Trent, I said to myself. I was at my best fighting weight and relished the chance.

Arthur came into my room. In spite of an excellent internal telephone system, Arthur was of the old school and liked to talk face to face when making arrangements. ‘Sir James would like to have a conference about the Mitchell case,’ he said. ‘I have scheduled it for nine thirty tomorrow. Is that all right with you?’

‘I asked you not to schedule anything at all for this week,’ I said to him.

‘But you’re not going to the races until Thursday,’ he said. ‘You will still be able to watch the Champion Hurdle tomorrow afternoon. The conference won’t last all day.’

I looked at him. How did Arthur know I wasn’t planning to go to Cheltenham until Thursday? It would be no good asking him. He would reply in the same way as he always did. ‘It’s my job to know everything about my barristers,’ he would say. I wondered for the umpteenth time if he knew more about my little problem than he was letting on.

‘Nine thirty tomorrow will be fine,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘I thought it might,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell Sir James.’

Sir James Horley, QC, was now the lead in Steve Mitchell’s defence. When Bruce Lygon had finally called Arthur to engage counsel for the case, Sir James had jumped at it. He could never be accused of not being eager to take on a prominent celebrity client, even if, as in this case, the ‘celebrity’ status of the client was somewhat dubious and the evidence was stacked up against him. Sir James loved the limelight. He adored the television cameras waiting each day outside court so that they could show him on the six o’clock news replying ‘no comment’ to each of the journalists’ questions.

My heart had dropped when Arthur told me that Sir James would lead and I would be acting as his junior. Sir James has a reputation of doing very little, or nothing, in preparation for a trial while still expecting everything to be in order and complete on day one. He also had a reputation, richly deserved, for publicly blaming his junior whenever anything went wrong, whether or not they had anything to do with it. He seemed to expect his juniors to have powers of clairvoyance over the facts, yet be unable to stand up in court to question a witness, something he reserved solely for himself.

Needless to say, I still had not yet told anyone of my encounter with the murder victim in the showers at Sandown, even though I had been sorely tempted to do so in order to disqualify myself from acting alongside Sir James. But it had been so long since I should have said something that I couldn’t really do so now without placing myself in a very compromising position. I would be damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t, but, in the latter case, only if anyone else knew about it from Barlow. Was I prepared to take that risk? Perhaps I should simply plead insanity, excuse myself from the case altogether and commit myself to a mental hospital until it was all over. By then Steve Mitchell would have been tried, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for a crime for which I didn’t believe he was responsible. I would then be safe from Julian Trent and life could go back to normal. That is, until the next time someone wanted to manipulate the outcome of a trial, and young Mr Trent and his baseball bat were sent to pass the message.

The news that I was no longer acting as the sole barrister in the case had spread far and wide to ears I didn’t know, but ears of those who most definitely had an interest in the outcome.

Within only a few hours of the appointment of Sir James Horley as defence QC being posted on the courts’ website, I had received a call on my mobile.

‘I told you to take the Mitchell case,’ the quiet well-spoken whisperer had said. ‘Why are you not listed as the defence barrister?’

I had tried to explain that a QC would always have to lead in such a high-profile case and I wasn’t one. I had told him that I would be assisting.

‘You are to ensure Mitchell loses,’ he had said.

‘Why?’ I had asked him.

‘Just do it,’ he had said, and then he’d hung up.

As before, and as expected, he had withheld his number.

Why, indeed, did they, whoever ‘they’ were, want Mitchell to lose? Was it solely to have someone else convicted of their crime or was there something else? Was it anything to do with Mitchell himself? Had Mitchell in fact done the crime and they were just making sure he got his just deserts? But how would they know he was definitely guilty unless they were there with him at the time?

No, I still believed that Steve was being set up. All the disclosed prosecution evidence put together would be very convincing to a jury, although any single part of it on its own could be described as circumstantial. No one questioned that the pitchfork, the murder weapon, had belonged to Steve Mitchell, but, as I had seen myself, his pitchforks had not been kept locked away and anyone could have taken one of them from the open feed store to stick into Barlow’s chest. Blood and hairs from the victim had been found on a pair of Mitchell’s wellington boots as well as in his car, but the boots had been kept in the same feed store as the pitchfork, and Mitchell swore that he had left his car unlocked on his driveway, as he always did, on the day of the murder. The Defence Case Statement stated that Mr Mitchell was being framed for the crime that someone else, unknown, had committed. And that the crime in question had been premeditated and planned meticulously so as to appear to have been perpetrated by our client.

The prosecution had been unable to establish definitively that Mitchell had indeed sent the text message to Barlow threatening to ‘come round and sort you out properly you sneaking little bastard’. In spite of the message being signed with Mitchell’s name, it could only be determined by the police that it had been sent by a free texting service accessible from any computer, by anyone, anywhere in the world.

The betting receipts, however, did indeed belong to Steve Mitchell and he had been stupid enough to have his own name on them. They were, in fact, debit-card receipts from a bookmaker rather than actual betting slips. Steve denied that they were his but even I knew he wasn’t telling the truth. I had explained to him that the time for lying about betting was now over, he had more serious allegations to deal with, but he was so used to denying that he gambled that it came naturally to him to continue to do so.

Add the mass of physical evidence, the well-known and well-documented antagonism between the victim and the accused, the lack of any semblance of an alibi and the defence’s seeming inability to demonstrate who or why anyone would want to frame him, and I could imagine a jury returning a unanimous guilty verdict so quickly that they would hardly have to retire from the courtroom.

I had explained to Steve, during another trip to talk with him in prison, that if he had an alibi he must declare it prior to the trial. To suddenly produce one in court would not assist his case. The jury would be invited by the prosecution to draw whatever inferences they wished from the fact that no previous mention had been made of an alibi. However, he had remained adamant that he had been on his own at home reading all afternoon on that Monday.

‘Steve,’ I had implored. ‘I am afraid I don’t believe you. If you were with someone, perhaps someone you shouldn’t have been with, you must tell me now. At the trial or afterwards will be too late.’

‘I tell you I was on my own,’ he had said. ‘That’s the truth. What do you want me to do? Lie?’

I had thought that it would be counter-productive to say that I knew he had lied to me before, about the ending of his affair with Millie Barlow.

‘Don’t you realize the mess you are in?’ I’d shouted at him while banging on the grey metal table with my fist. ‘You’re facing a long stretch in prison for this. It’s not some game in the park, you know.’

‘I can’t,’ he had said finally.

‘Yes, you can,’ I’d screamed at him. ‘No one would expect you to keep quiet if it meant you would be convicted of a murder you didn’t do.’

‘It’s not that simple,’ he had said, looking down at the table.

‘Is she married?’ I had asked, guessing the reason.

‘Yes,’ he’d said emphatically. ‘And I don’t even think I was with her when that bastard Barlow got himself killed. It was only a last-minute lunchtime bonk, arranged when the racing at Ludlow was called off. I’m certainly not embroiling her in this mess when it wouldn’t even give me an alibi for the right time.’

The prosecution case was that Barlow had died sometime between two and four in the afternoon. His body had been discovered around six by a policeman responding to an anonymous call to Newbury police station’s front desk about an intruder at Honeysuckle Cottage. As the caller had used the local landline and not the emergency 999 service there had been no record of the telephone number or any recording of the conversation.

This fact was one of the few plus points for our side because, as I had pointed out in our Defence Case Statement, Mitchell was hardly likely to call the police if he had, in fact, murdered Barlow, and the prosecution case was that he had acted alone in the killing. It was a minor point in the face of the wealth of prosecution evidence, but one I planned to exploit to the full at the trial.

‘The fact that you were not alone all of the time from one o’clock until six might help to plant some doubt in the minds of the jury,’ I had told him. ‘And, at the moment, we need all the help we can get.’

‘She was gone by two thirty at the latest,’ he’d said. ‘So what difference would it make? Barlow’s bloody house is only ten minutes’ drive from mine. I could easily have been there well before three anyway so it’s not a bloody alibi.’ He’d paused. ‘No. I won’t get her involved.’

‘Tell me who it was,’ I had said to him. ‘Then I can ask her if she would be prepared to give a statement to the police.’

‘No,’ he had said. And he had been silent on the matter ever since.

I had also asked him about Millie Barlow and why he hadn’t told me about her death at our first meeting.

‘I didn’t think that it was that important,’ he’d said.

‘Of course it was important,’ I had shouted at him. ‘You tell me absolutely everything and I’ll decide whether it’s important or not.’

He had looked at me with big eyes, like a scolded puppy. ‘I’m in a bit of the shit here, aren’t I?’

‘Yes,’ I’d said. ‘Big shit.’

‘I didn’t do it, you know,’ he’d said mournfully.

‘Were you drunk that afternoon?’ I’d asked him. ‘Or high?’

‘Nothing like that,’ he’d replied quite sharply. ‘We’d had a bit of red wine, I suppose, but not more than a bottle. That’s why I stayed in after. Because I didn’t want to get done for drunken driving.’

Shame, I’d thought, being banged up for a bit of driving under the influence would have provided a cast-iron alibi for Barlow’s murder.

‘So did Barlow blame you for his sister’s suicide?’ I had asked him.

‘All the bloody time,’ he’d replied. ‘Kept going on and on about it. Called me a bloody murderer. I told him to shut up or I’d bloody murder him.’ Steve had suddenly stopped and he had looked up at my face. ‘But I didn’t, I promise you I didn’t.’ He had then buried his head in his hands and begun to sob.

‘It’s all right, Steve,’ I’d said, trying to reassure him. ‘I know you didn’t do it.’

He had looked back at my face. ‘How do you know? How can you be sure?’

‘I just am,’ I’d said.

‘Convince the bloody jury then.’

Maybe that is what I should do, I thought, sitting here at my desk. Perhaps I should tell the jury that I had been threatened to make sure I lost in court. That was it. I must tell Sir James that I had been approached and intimidated. Then I could become a witness instead of a barrister in the case and I could tell the jury all about baseball bats and Julian Trent. But would that be enough to help Steve? Probably not. The judge might not even allow testimony concerning intimidation of one of the lawyers to be admitted. It was hardly significant evidence in the case, irrespective of what I might think. It might just be relevant if the defence could use it as support for our belief that Steve was being framed. But in the face of the prosecution case, would the jury believe it?

And where would that leave me, I wondered. Did I just sit and wait to have my head smashed in and my balls cut off? And how about my elderly father in his holey green jumper? What danger would I be putting him in?

It seemed to me that the only solution to my multiple dilemmas was to discover who was intimidating me and then show that they were the true murderers of Scot Barlow, and to do it quickly, before any ‘next time’.

Simple, I thought. But where do I start?

Julian Trent. He must be the key.

The following morning, I didn’t tell Sir James Horley QC anything about intimidation, or anything about an encounter in the Sandown showers. He and I sat on one side of the table in the small conference room in the lower ground floor of chambers. Bruce Lygon sat opposite us. For two hours we had been once again going through every aspect of the prosecution case. We had received their secondary disclosure, but there was nothing new to help us.

The prosecution was required to disclose to the defence anything that they, or the police, had discovered which would assist us based on our Defence Case Statement. The response had been short but to the point. Their letter simply stated that they had no information other than that already disclosed in their primary disclosure and Statement of Case. We hadn’t really expected anything.

‘Are you sure that Mitchell shouldn’t plead guilty?’ said Sir James. ‘The case against him is very strong.’ I wondered, ungraciously, if Sir James liked the idea of a guilty plea to save him a courtroom loss. Maybe he was having second thoughts about taking this case.

‘He says he didn’t do it,’ I said. ‘He’s adamant that he will not plead guilty to something he didn’t do.’

‘How about a plea based on a lesser charge?’ said Bruce. ‘Or on diminished responsibility, or temporary insanity.’

Insanity was right, I thought. They were clutching at straws.

‘Our defence is that our client didn’t do it and is being framed, so we shall have no guilty pleas to anything, OK?’ I said firmly.

‘Then we had better find out who’s framing him,’ said Sir James. ‘Otherwise we shall have egg on our faces. Trial date is set for the second week in May at Oxford. That’s eight weeks from now. I suggest we meet again in two weeks to see if we are any further on.’ He stood up and tied the papers together with ribbon and bows, as if they were Christmas presents. The ribbon was pink. Pink for defence. Prosecution briefs were tied up in white ribbon.

Papers so tied could not be looked at by any member of chambers except those acting for the appropriate side in that case. It was not unusual for different counsel within chambers to be acting for both sides in the same trial. I had once been prosecuting an armed robbery case while a colleague who normally shared the same room as me was acting for the defendant. We had temporarily been separated to opposite ends of the building, but we still needed to be very careful not to discuss aspects of the trial in the other’s hearing. Arthur had even installed segregated photocopiers so that a document carelessly left in one machine would not fall into the other camp’s hands.

I went back to my room and looked at the desk of that colleague. As always, it was almost impossible to see the wood from which it had been constructed. The tough old English oak was doing its duty supporting stack upon stack of papers and box files. I was the tidiest of the three of us who shared this space, and even my area could look like a war zone at times. Stuff that couldn’t fit on our desks was stacked in boxes on the floor or in the full-length bookshelves down the side of the room, opposite the windows. But nothing was ever lost. At least that’s what we told everyone and it was almost the truth, although maybe not the whole truth.

There had been a large white envelope in my box in the clerks’ room and I sat at my desk and looked at it. This envelope, however, had been expected and contained no sinister threatening note, and no photograph. I had ordered a full transcript of the Julian Trent appeal hearing from last November and now I eagerly scanned its close-typed pages looking for a certain name.

Josef Hughes of 845 Finchley Road, Golders Green, north London, was the rogue solicitor who had forced the appeal in the first place. It was his supposed intervention with the jury that had got Trent off. If, as I suspected, he had been coerced into giving his evidence to the Court of Appeal, then he might be prepared to help me find out how and why Julian Trent was connected to Scot Barlow’s murder. I went to Golders Green first thing on Wednesday morning.

Josef Hughes went white and his knees buckled as soon as I mentioned Julian Trent. I thought he was going to pass out completely in the doorway of his bed-sit, one of half a dozen or so bed-sits crammed into the large 1930s-built semi-detached house at 845 Finchley Road.

He might have collapsed right down to the floor if I hadn’t held him by his left elbow and helped him through the door and into the room. He sat down heavily on the side of the double bed that took up most of the available floor space. We were not alone. Ayoung woman, not much more than a child, sat on an upright wooden chair nursing a young baby. She didn’t move as I helped Josef over to the bed but sat silently staring at me with big brown, frightened eyes.

I looked around. Apart from the green blanket-covered bed and the chair there was a small square table under the window, another upright chair that matched the first, and a tiny kitchenette in the corner, half hidden by a thin curtain that was badly in need of a wash.

I went over to the kitchen sink to fetch Josef a glass of water. There were no glasses visible but there was a moderately clean though badly chipped coffee mug upturned on the drainer. I splashed some water into it and held it out to him.

He looked up at me in real horror, but he took the mug and drank some of the water. The colour in his face improved fractionally.

‘It’s all right,’ I said in as comforting manner as I could muster. ‘I haven’t been sent here by Julian Trent.’

At the sound of the name, the young woman gave out a slight moan and I was suddenly afraid that she too was about to pass out. I stepped towards her as if to catch her baby but she pulled the child away from me and curled her body round it as protection.

What on earth had Julian Trent done to these people to make them so afraid?

I looked around the room again. Everything was very basic, with threadbare carpets, paper-thin curtains and bare cream-painted walls that were overdue a redecoration. A plastic tubular travel cot was folded and leaned up against the wall behind the door with three blue baby romper suits hanging on it to dry.

‘We used to have the big flat on the top floor,’ said the girl, watching me look. ‘With our own bathroom. Then Joe lost his job and we had to move down here. Now, we share a bathroom on the landing with three other rooms.’

‘How old is the baby?’ I asked her.

‘Eight months on Friday,’ she said. I thought she was close to tears.

‘What’s his name?’ I asked her, smiling.

‘Rory,’ she said.

‘That’s nice,’ I said, smiling at her again. ‘And what’s your name?’

‘Bridget,’ she said.

We sat there in silence for a while, Josef and me on the bed, with Bridget holding Rory on the upright chair.

‘What do you want?’ Josef said eventually.

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said quietly.

Josef shivered next to me.

‘It was a man,’ said Bridget. ‘He came here, to our flat upstairs.’

‘No,’ said Josef suddenly and forcefully.

‘Yes,’ said Bridget back to him. ‘We need to tell someone.’

‘No, Bee,’ he said again firmly. ‘We mustn’t.’

‘We must,’ she pleaded. ‘We must. I can’t go on living like this.’ She started to cry.

‘I promise you,’ I said, ‘I’m here to try and help you.’ And to help myself.

‘He broke my arm,’ said Bridget quietly. ‘I was six months pregnant with Rory and he came into our flat, hit me in the face and punched me in my stomach. Then he broke my arm by slamming it in the door.’

‘Who did?’ I asked her. Surely, I thought, Julian Trent had been in prison.

‘Julian Trent’s father.’