The Night Lawyer Read online

  The Night Lawyer

  Alex Churchill

  Published by RedDoor

  www.reddoorpress.co.uk

  © 2020 Alex Churchill

  The right of Alex Churchill to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author

  Excerpt from ‘Little Gidding’ from FOUR QUARTETS by T.S. Eliot, published by Faber and Faber Ltd. Reproduced with permission.

  Excerpt from ‘Little Gidding’ from FOUR QUARTETS by T.S. Eliot. Copyright ©1942 by T.S. Eliot, renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Names, places and incidents are either imagined by the authors or are used in a fictitious context. The legal aspects of the story are as accurate as is possible within the context of a novel, but there may be inaccuracies, for which we apologise.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Cover design: Clare Connie Shepherd

  www.clareconnieshepherd.com

  Typesetting: Jen Parker, Fuzzy Flamingo

  To Paul, Francesca and Katya

  David, Freddie and Rosie

  ‘We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.’

  Excerpt from ‘Little Gidding’ from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  Book Club Questions

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  ‘You’ll be all right here on your own?’

  Chris, the night editor, looks at me, coat and briefcase in hand.

  I nod and turn back to the screens on my desk.

  He hesitates a moment longer, then walks away. I can see his stocky figure reflected in the window; a ghostly outline overlaying the city lights outside. He walks with a rolling gait, like a cowboy or a sailor, although as far as I know, he rarely leaves the office except to go home and sleep. I hear the faint electronic echo announcing the lift’s arrival, followed by the silence of an empty building.

  This is my eyrie. I have a hawk’s view of London, outlined in circles, boxes and towers of lights. Random patterns of white, yellow, red and green mark out the roads, the traffic and the landmarks up to the darkness of the horizon. Pinprick aeroplane lights inch across a wide arch of black sky. You can’t see the stars but an occasional tiny satellite hovers brightly.

  I work at the centre of the hub, ‘on the bench’, sitting next to the night editor so that he can consult me for an instant decision as the papers go to press. He always wants to know exactly how far he can push a story before it becomes libellous. Sometimes he even steps over that line.

  The section desks stretch out like spokes from the editor’s desk – features, news, foreign affairs and, in the far distance, the magazine and lifestyle sections. I work here on Friday evenings, after my week in court, arriving at seven o’clock in the evening when most of the journalists are still working at their desks. But as it gets later, the lights go off at desk after desk as computers are closed down and journalists leave, until the room is lit only by the eerie glow of the giant news screens up on the walls and the city lights outside the huge windows.

  Just before midnight, I sit in the only pool of light left in the vast office, scrolling down my screen, trying to make sense of what is happening to my life. I follow the online trails, carefully going through the second, third and fourth pages of Google, burrowing deeper down the rabbit holes of information than I have ever gone before.

  Everything seems clearer up here. I can think. I feel more real. For a moment, I just sit and watch cars move along the roads like brightly lit ants. The London Eye has halted for the evening, outlined in a circle of red light. I go over and over the words I’d heard in the robing room that afternoon, picking them apart for explanations. I run Theo’s name through various search engines. He’s been in hundreds of cases and been interviewed many times by small legal publications and blogs, so there are thousands of hits on his name. Every now and then a different Theo Frazer pops up too; one that is too old or too young.

  Sometimes I go down dead ends, or get distracted, straying down the tunnels of my subconscious, following words and phrases by instinct rather than by reason. I don’t find anything I hadn’t known before. I’m just beginning to think that it is all gossip, nothing more.

  I send an email to Lydia Brennan to ask her what she had meant, rewording and deleting it dozens of times. Eventually, I just click ‘send’.

  I jump as my mobile phone echoes shrilly in the silence. I look at it. Not Theo.

  ‘Yes?’ I half drop it trying to answer, catching sight of Philip’s number flashing up. ‘Philip? Aren’t you asleep?’

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you.’ Philip sounds tired, as if he hasn’t properly woken up.

  ‘No, no. It’s fine. I’m at the paper.’ I watch a tiny light inch across the vast black horizon outside the windows.

  ‘The police have just called. It’s Adam Harris.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Harris,’ he says. ‘The case at Bullingdon you turned down. He’s escaped from prison. A guard’s in hospital and lucky to not be dead.’

  Hundreds of online references to Theo are still on one of the screens in front of me and tweets roll down on the other screen, along with headlines about Uganda, the President of the United States, a baby scandal in the North of England and an incident involving refugees in Europe. At both ends of the room, there are eight giant screens, most silently tuned to different news programmes. One records how many hits the online paper got for each story, and how long people spend reading that story. This is a continually changing leader board, so we can see what people are interested in on a minute-by-minute basis. It is fairly quiet at this time of night, and the order remains unchanged for minutes at a time.


  I am practised at sounding calm. But in reality, I am just as capable of feeling panic as anyone. It drenches me in white hot fear and the room temporarily seems brighter and sharper, tilting temporarily as my world destabilises. But we professionals know we must keep these things concealed. It’s what gives us our edge. Fear is not weakness. Fear is survival. And when you forget that, you are truly in danger.

  ‘There’s nothing up about it yet, oh, no wait, here it is.’ I read aloud. ‘“Escape from Bullingdon Prison. A prisoner, Adam Harris, 32, got hold of a razor…” He’d have needed more than a razor, surely, to get out of a secure prison? Oh, I see, he seems to have escaped while being transferred to court. “…with two other men, who have been recaptured. The public is advised that he’s extremely dangerous”.’

  Adam Harris’s prison photo comes up. His dead, penetrating eyes stare out of the screen at me.

  ‘They think he’s coming to find you,’ says Philip.

  ‘Me? Why?’ I remembered that I thought I had smelt cigarette smoke and heard the sound of footsteps behind me when I’d emerged from the Tube station that evening. But I’d forgotten about it by the time I reached the office.

  ‘When they searched his cell, they discovered some notes. All about you. And I have the prison psychiatrist’s report here. There’s a credible diagnosis of erotomania as well as psychosis and a few other things.’

  ‘What?’

  Philip clears his throat. ‘Apparently he told one of the other inmates that you’d turned his case down because it wouldn’t be ethical for you to represent someone you were in love with.’

  ‘I turned his case down because he’s a violent rapist who tried to burn his last victim to death, and who expected me to say that he was innocent. There’s a ton of forensic evidence against him. There was no way I could defend him. He must be mad.’

  ‘I think that is rather the problem,’ says Philip. ‘He’s mentally unstable and very violent. The police are going to visit you tomorrow about providing security at home, but they wanted me to advise you to be very careful tonight.’

  I look up from my desk, through all the chest-high glass partitions that mark out individual workstations to the big glass double doors to the lift. ‘I’m in a newspaper office, with about three levels of security between me and the outside world,’ I remind him. ‘I really couldn’t be anywhere safer. Anyway, he wouldn’t know I worked here.’

  ‘A man who can get out of Bullingdon can probably get into a newspaper office,’ says Philip. ‘Be careful, Sophie. Just be very careful.’

  I forget about Adam Harris and stop listening to him, as an email from Lydia lands in my inbox, with information about Theo. I say goodbye to Philip without hearing anything else he says, so that I can open the email and study it carefully. When one woman tells you something about your husband, you expect it to be about sexual betrayal – he’s seeing another woman, you have a rival. But this was quite different. It was worse.

  I’m not ready to accept her words. I’m a barrister and you always test the evidence before believing an allegation. You don’t condemn someone on hearsay. But this email cuts through the protective shield of what I believe about Theo, like a sharp fragment of glass from a broken mirror.

  Theo and I had made a sanctuary together, or so I thought. I take off my glasses and rest my head on my hands. My eyes are gritty with tiredness and I close them for a second. I haven’t slept properly for several days.

  The room is so dark I can barely see. Candles flicker, illuminating the dull gold of the icons in the corner. It is so quiet in here that I can hear the scratching of a branch against the low windows, but it is cold too and my feet are bare. The moon slips out from behind a cloud and I can see that the room is filled with flowers, cascades of roses and lilies, their smell pungent and underlaid with something sickly that sticks in my throat. I see the coffin on the table, and the white shroud of the body but I can’t see who it is. I start to walk towards it. I am cold and afraid but my curiosity is stronger than my fear.

  ‘Oh no, she is sleepwalking again… Take her away! Don’t wake her. Don’t let her see…’ The whispers surround me like a mist, and I am lost.

  I jerk awake, my heart thumping and my blood icy with fear. I know this nightmare. I’ve had it before. But not recently. Not for many years. Each time I creep a little closer to the coffin, closer to seeing who is lying there. And once my heartbeat returns to normal I know that, in a strange way, I value this dream. It’s my equivalent of a smoke alarm. It tells me that there is something wrong in my life – that something is seeping silently in, curling itself around me, choking the oxygen out of the air. But I also know it’s not about Adam Harris. In the law, we meet people like him every week. They are violent and cruel but they do not penetrate our dreams. They are our work, not who we are.

  No, the dream is about something more dangerous – to me personally. It tells me that I’m not looking in the right direction, and that something is behind me or ahead of me, where I least expect it. And something has woken me. I think I can hear someone, but the flooring is soft and noise-absorbing. And surely anyone walking across the office would activate the lights as they moved?

  I don’t turn round. If there’s someone here, I don’t want them to know that I have seen them. But I look at the reflections in the windows, stretching down the length and height of the room. I can see my own reflection, in jagged fractions, a slight, insubstantial ghost sitting at a desk. If an intruder could see me, they wouldn’t expect me to fight back. And there is nothing in the office I could use as a weapon. But maybe they would think I’m just another trick of the light. There is so much reflected in the windows and outside.

  And there. A man, a Cubist impression of a man, in layers of reflections against the darkness, stands very still by the entrance to the office. Unmistakably taller and stronger than I am. He is between me and the way out. Just as I convince myself again that I’m imagining things, he moves, and the light above him goes on.

  I realised that however careful you are, however often you check your locks, however much you protect yourself and follow the rules, and however hard you run… sometimes you still overlook the real danger.

  ‘Hello, Sophie,’ he says.

  CHAPTER 1

  THREE MONTHS EARLIER

  When I woke up at five, I instinctively put out a hand to touch Theo, only to find his side of the bed cold and empty. Of course, I remembered, he was in Birmingham on what should be some profitable commercial work. So he had passed me a case at Bullingdon prison. It looked unpleasant, but no more so than many of the other cases I had worked on. It had come to us via Philip Meadowes, a solicitor Theo worked with who handled both high-income commercial cases and cases on legal aid. Theo rated him and I was looking forward to meeting him.

  After showering and drinking a coffee made on the expensive coffee machine that Theo had insisted on buying, I left the house in a hurry. But before I got to the bottom of the front steps, I realised I had forgotten my passport. It would be needed as ID at the prison. I rushed back in, and took it out of the desk drawer. It wasn’t until I was on the underground, heading for Paddington, that I realised I had forgotten to look in the mirror when I left the house for the second time.

  My father always said it was bad luck to not look in the mirror if you had to go back into your house when you had forgotten something. But he was Russian. He came from a world where superstition was sometimes all there was to protect you. Random terrible things happened every day, people disappeared from the streets and were never heard of again. People made up rules to help themselves feel safe. I’d found it irritating when I was younger, but now it just reminded me to ring my parents if I had a moment. I found a window seat and watched the rain as we jolted out of the station. The mud meadows and leafless trees of the Oxfordshire countryside sped past.

  I opened my laptop and scrolled through Philip
Meadowes’ instructions. The defendant was one Adam Harris. He had been arrested two months ago and charged with rape and attempted arson. It seemed very little progress had been made and I only had the prosecution case without any of the defendant’s comments. On the face of it, the evidence against him was overwhelming.

  In September, the victim, Juliet Monroe, a sex worker, had been found by her landlord after he had broken her door down. He had smelt petrol fumes coming from her flat and she had not answered his knocking. When he broke in he found her lying on the floor, bound and gagged. She had been raped.

  The entire carpet had been soaked in petrol and a pile of spent matches were found by the letterbox. Clearly someone had tried, and failed, to set the apartment alight. Harris had two previous convictions for assaulting women. He had found his victims travelling alone on public transport and tried to chat to them. In both cases the victims had ignored him and he had lost his temper and hit them. Harris had been captured on CCTV following Juliet at three in the morning. About half an hour later, a neighbour, a shift-worker, had spotted him acting suspiciously outside her flat.

  The scene of crime officers had picked up DNA and debris from the flat and identified the type of petrol that had been sprayed around. Using facial recognition software and a photofit description given by the victim, the police had identified Harris from the CCTV, matching him to an arrest twelve months before. Results on the DNA had not yet come back but spots of petrol had been found on his shoes and trousers when the police searched his flat. They had also recovered a picture of the victim’s bedroom from his mobile phone. The case seemed hopeless.

  Philip was waiting in a car for me when I reached Bicester station, as he lived near Milton Keynes. Although I’d never met him, I knew he was well respected for his meticulous criminal work as well as being highly rated as a commercial solicitor. But he wasn’t ostentatious – his neatly trimmed beard, well-fitting dark grey suit and white shirts were reassuringly plain and understated. I had never done work for Bravos, the firm he worked for, so this would be my chance to work for a significantly more high profile firm of solicitors than my usual high street ones. Although the public could now talk directly to a barrister in some cases, most of our work was still channelled through solicitors. The client approached the solicitor, and the solicitor contacted the barrister’s clerks. The clerks passed the work to us.