Dick Francis - Silks

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.

An Englishman’s house is his castle, at least so they say. So I sat in my castle with the drawbridge pulled up and thought about what was happening to me.

I had decided against my usual walk through Gray’s Inn to the bus stop in High Holborn, the ride on a number 521 to Waterloo and a crowded commuter train to Barnes, followed by the hike across the common. Instead, I had ordered a taxi that had come right to the front door of chambers to collect me, and had then delivered me safe and sound to Ranelagh Avenue, to my home, my castle.

Now I sat on a bar stool at my kitchen counter and looked again and again at the sheet of white paper. TAKE THE STEVE MITCHELL CASE – AND LOSE IT. From what I had heard from Bruce Lygon there wouldn’t be much trouble in losing the case. All the evidence seemed topoint that way. But why was someone so keen to be sure that it was lost? Was Steve correct when he said he’d been framed?

DO AS YOU ARE TOLD. Did that just mean that I must take the case and lose it, or were there other things as well that I would be told to do? And how was the attack by Julian Trent connected? Next time, I’ll smash your head, he’d said. Next time, I’ll cut your balls right off. Maybe being beaten up had absolutely nothing to do with Trent’s trial last March. Perhaps it was all to do with Steve Mitchell’s trial in the future.

But why?

I had once had a client, a rather unsavoury individual, who had told me that the only thing better than getting away with doing a crime was to get someone else convicted for having done it. That way, he’d explained, the police aren’t even looking any more.

‘Don’t you have any conscience about some poor soul doing jail time for something you did?’ I had asked him.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he’d said. ‘It makes me laugh. I don’t care about anyone else.’ There really was no such thing as honour amongst thieves.

Was that what was going on here? Stitch up Steve Mitchell for Scot Barlow’s murder and, hey presto, the crime is solved but the real murderer is safe and well and living in clover.

I called my father.

‘Hello,’ he said in his usual rather formal tone. I could imagine him sitting in front of the television in his bungalow watching the early evening news.

‘Hello, Dad,’ I said.

‘Ah, Geoff,’ he said. ‘How are things in the Smoke?’

‘Fine, thanks. How are things with you?’ It was a ritual. We spoke on the telephone about once a week and, every time, we exchanged these pleasantries. Sadly, these days we had little else to say to one another. We lived in different worlds. We had never been particularly close and he had moved to the village of Kings Sutton, near Banbury, from his native urban Surrey after my mother had died. I had thought that it had been a strange choice but perhaps, unlike me, he had needed to escape his memories.