Martin Edwards: All the Lonely People

With the task of sifting through the morning’s crooks finished, he could not keep his mind off Liz. Why, if Coghlan’s behaviour had caused her to attempt suicide, had she failed to mention it to him? Liz always found it hard to resist ending any story with a histrionic flourish. He would have expected her to play for more sympathy, to point to her wrist and exclaim. “Look, this is what he drove me to!” Even if she had taken good care not to injure herself too severely, even if it was nothing more than a half-hearted cry for help of some kind, it would be unlike her not to exploit the drama of a brush with death. The inconsistency bothered him more than that nonsense about Coghlan wanting to kill her. Provided, he thought with a pang of unease, that it was nonsense…

Ronald Sou poked his head around the door, scattering the litter of Harry’s speculations. “Have you seen the listing details, Mr. Devlin?”

“What? No, I was just about to.”

“I had a word with the court clerk,” said the Chinese man. “You’re on in five minutes. The Benjamin case.”

They had jumped to the head of the queue. “Ronnie, how do you manage it?”

The clerk smiled and held the door open. The hall outside had become congested with people and more were flooding through the main doors with every minute that passed. Everyone was talking at once. Newly arrived solicitors elbowed their way towards the notice board on which was pinned the computer print-out with its list of the morning’s defendants and the times of their cases. Mutterings of disgust came from those facing a long wait as they turned to complain to anyone within earshot. There were no chairs anywhere, just wooden benches like those downstairs, screwed into the walls so as to deny souvenirs to the city’s cheekier thieves. All around, lawyers were interviewing their clients, bellowing so as to be heard above the hullabaloo.

The sour smell of failure and decay was everywhere. The building reeked of it, with plaster flaking from green-grey walls and cobwebs spiralling down from the ceiling. Solicitors bustled this way and that, directing helpers laden down with files, seeking out the courts where they were supposed to appear, checking to see if their clients had arrived, calling out names, arguing with anyone who got in the way.

“Mr. O’Shaughnessy?” piped a clerk from Windaybanks in Harry’s ear.

The youth’s boss, Quentin Pike, put a clammy hand on Harry’s shoulder before he could reply. “Sorry, old chap. You’re a dead ringer for my unlawful sexual intercourse. Wouldn’t happen to have a twin with a penchant for schoolgirls, would you?”

“Pike, you utter shit.” The rich bass belonged to Reuben Fingall, doyen of the local legal fraternity, who had appeared behind them. He smelled as if he had bathed in after shave. “You touted a rapist from my clerk on Monday.” Flicking back into place a single errant strand of grey hair, he raised his eyebrows in contempt. “Is business so bad that…”

Harry caught sight of a tall West Indian wearing a suede full-length coat and standing at the other side of the hall. He raised a hand in greeting and left his colleagues to their professional bickering.

“Peanuts, there you are.”

The black man showed shark’s teeth in a lazy grin and drawled, “Man, this place give me the heebie-jeebies. Shouldn’ regular customers get preference? A chair, maybe even a private changing room?”

In fact Peanuts Benjamin looked as if he had already devoted a couple of hours to dressing for the occasion. Beneath the unbuttoned coat he wore a pale fawn suit with matching silk tie and handkerchief, as well as a white shirt that one of his ladies had ironed to perfection. Jewellery glinted from his cuffs and Harry could see his reflection in the shine of the Italian leather shoes. Peanuts had been bailed twenty-eight days previously to appear today on a charge of living off immoral earnings. The prosecution evidence was so strong that not even the time-honoured option of asking for a trial in the Crown Court and relying on a Liverpool jury’s narrow conception of criminal guilt could be expected to result in an acquittal. Peanuts’ best hope of avoiding imprisonment rested on the Home Office’s directive to magistrates not to add to prison overcrowding.

They went into court number three and as they waited their turn, Harry’s mind obstinately drifted back to Liz. He kept telling himself that it was pointless to worry about her and absurd to put any credence in the idea that Coghlan would care enough about his mistress’s infidelities to want her dead. All the same, he was glad when Peanuts’ case was called, robbing him of any further chance to dwell on what his wife had said the previous night.

The trial, as ever, proved less of an exercise in nerve and temperament than in the hassle of coping with bureacratic routine. The plea of mitigation was no different from hundreds of others. Harry explained that his client had obtained a new job with prospects, starting Monday. To jail Peanuts, he suggested, would serve no useful purpose to society; the man had learned his lesson.

“Judging by the number of people who come before us claiming they will be starting work the day after their trial,” said the chairman of the bench, a middle-class sceptic, “unemployment in this city ought to be a minus figure.”

But the result was what mattered. The three magistrates conferred briefly and announced the sentence, without bothering to adjourn and ask for further assessment reports on the accused. Twelve months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years, and a fine. Harry didn’t tempt fate by making the customary request for time to pay.

When they got outside, Peanuts punched the air in jubilation. “Man, my girls can earn that much in a night!”

Harry winced. Sometimes he wanted to forget he was a defence lawyer, paid to protect his clients, not to sit in judgment.

Peanuts responded with a shameless wink. “Yeah, yeah, I know. But if you can’t be good, be careful. Don’ worry, man. I learned a lot from this. I’ll watch my step. They won’ catch me again.”

They said goodbye. Harry watched the tall black man push through the crowd, heading back to Toxteth and his twilight world. Again he thought of Liz and his anxieties flooded back. She was someone else who couldn’t be good. The trouble was, she never managed to be careful either.

By noon Harry was walking back to the office. He had sent Ronald Sou ahead with a message to the switchboard girl that if his wife called, he would be free to see her at one o’clock.

“At the usual place,” added Harry.

Ronald bowed. “I will tell her.”

The usual place — Mama Reilly’s in Harrington Street. During their marriage, they must have snatched lunch there a hundred times, but Harry had never returned after the separation. It would be good to go back together. He made up his mind to ask her about the damage to that wrist. However determined she might be to step out of his life, he still had the urge to discover what had happened to her during their two years apart.

The firm of Crusoe and Devlin occupied a cheap slice of a three-storey building in Fenwick Court. It was a turn-of-the-century building, still blackened by grime from the years before the clean air laws and unredeemed by any hint of architectural merit. Property agents’ signboards festooned the exterior; half the floorspace in New Commodities House was to let. Steps at the front led down to a scruffy second-hand record shop where Harry spent too much money and time. His firm shared the ground floor with a lottery company and a place where you could heel your shoes or get keys cut. Scratched nameplates on the wall recalled past tenants who had failed to make their businesses pay.