Питер Джеймс - Find Them Dead

Just off to South America — a couple of weeks?

A response came back almost instantly.

I’m sure they will wait. You have exactly the background they need!

Despite all the horror in court just a short while ago, she felt a sudden burst of optimism. She’d not felt like this ever since the accident. For the past five years she had been living her life in survival mode, more like existing than living, being there for Laura. This was the first time she felt a real frisson of excitement about the future. Going to see Laura! Laura was safe, she was fine. Possibly a new and really good job when she got back!

Had she ever actually been in danger or were they just using Laura as a bargaining chip and a threat? Should she now go to the police, she wondered? But tell them what? And what would that achieve? She would simply be implicating herself and, at the end of the day, she hadn’t really done anything wrong — she’d made the right moral decision in finding Gready guilty. It was now time to move on. Hopefully, they no longer viewed her as useful to them. But would she ever feel really safe again? Only time would tell, but there was no point worrying about things she couldn’t change.

The real excitement at this moment was reuniting with her daughter. There was just one cloud on the horizon — telling Laura about Horace. She’d been trying to think of ways to cushion it.

Guinea pigs had a lifespan of around five years. Poor Horace had been close to that, she calculated. She’d bought him for Laura as a coming-home-from-hospital companion after the accident. Maybe she would tell her he’d died peacefully in his sleep, slipped away in his old age.

After all the lies she’d heard in court over the past few weeks, this seemed a pretty tame one.

‘Dead?’ Roy Grace said, in near disbelief. ‘Stabbed by his co-defendant, in the dock, in broad daylight?’

It was just gone 2 p.m. Glenn Branson stood in front of him in his office, nodding. ‘Yep.’

Grace shook his head.

‘You all right, Roy, you seem very distracted recently?’

He waved a hand, dismissively. ‘More grief about Bruno. Cleo had a call from the school this morning, he was really rude to a teacher. Anyhow, we’ll deal with that later. So, tell me. How the hell did he get a weapon in through court security?’

‘Did I tell you Starr has a prosthetic right arm? He must have spent hours — days — on it, turning it into a weapon — a shank. It was plastic so wouldn’t have been picked up by the metal detector.’

‘Doesn’t sound like Terence Gready is a big loss to the human race but, shit, I’ve never heard of that happening, ever.’

‘No doubt Cassian Pewe will find a way to hold you responsible, boss,’ Branson said with a sardonic smile.

‘No doubt.’ He shrugged. ‘So, talk me through what exactly happened.’

Branson gave him chapter and verse. When he had finished, Roy Grace was pensive. ‘So, first Starr pleads guilty, to get a reduction in his tariff. Next, his brother, Stuie, his raison d’être for his “guilty” plea, is murdered. Then, in court, he negates his potential reduced tariff by murdering his co-defendant in cold blood. Why?’

‘Anger?’ Glenn ventured.

‘He must have planned the attack on Gready for at least several days. He would have known it would have blown out his reduced tariff — and given him a much longer sentence. What triggered him to do that?’ Grace was pensive for some moments. ‘In my view, he must have suspected Gready was behind his brother’s murder. Perhaps, as was mooted earlier, Gready had ordered Stuie to be beaten up, as a warning to Starr to keep schtum. And the beating went too far?’

‘What about if there was an ulterior motive?’

Grace frowned. ‘Such as?’

Branson smiled. ‘Bear with me. That shit, Conor Drewett — who the Mercedes was registered to and who we nicked yesterday morning — squealed pretty quickly on his accomplice when we offered to tell the judge he’d been a good boy. The accomplice was totally wasted when we picked him up. Derren Skinner. Before he was even interviewed, in the car on the way to the custody centre, he’d told the arresting officers who’d hired him and Drewett. Probably because he was shitfaced on something.’

‘Grassed him up?’

Branson nodded. ‘Perhaps ratted on him would be a better word for Skinner — horrible little creep.’

‘So, who was behind it — tell me?’

Glenn Branson spun the chair in front of Grace’s desk, sitting down on it the wrong way round, placed his arms over the backrest and leaned forward, a big grin pushing across his face. ‘I think you are going to like this. I mean, really like it! You’ve told me before that we can do all the planning in the world, be as professional as all our training has taught us, but that one elusive thing we can’t count on is luck. I think we just got lucky.’ He smiled. ‘Like, very seriously lucky!’

Nick Fox was feeling very seriously lucky.

He was sitting at his desk in the deserted Hoxton offices of his law practice, shortly after 7.30 a.m. He liked to be in well before the rest of the team, whenever he wasn’t attending a trial or client meeting out of town. And while the Gready trial had been in progress, he’d barely been in the office at all, which meant he had a mountain of catching-up to do. But that was fine. Today, everything was fine!

And it wasn’t going to be for much longer that he had to put up with the never-ending criminal scumbags he had to deal with. Truth was, much though he put on a smiling, positive facade, he mostly despised his clients. Whining lowlifes, protesting their innocence, swearing blind they’d been fitted up by the police — or as many of them called them, the filth.

Throughout his career, he’d kept his eye out for opportunities. Playing the long game had always been his tactic. And he had been playing a lot of different clients — all in the criminal arena. Just like that old Biblical parable: Some fell by the wayside; some fell on stony ground; some fell among thorns. But others fell on good ground and brought forth fruit.

And with one, he had struck gold. His client Terence Gready. Over the past twenty-five years, Gready had brought forth so much fruit. And some of it truly low-hanging.

Fox knew he had been lucky — lucky that Gready trusted him implicitly, lucky that, with Gready’s scheming mind, the Brighton solicitor had, all those years ago, set a trap, miscalculating the risk that it might one day backfire and help to ensnare him. Just like himself, Gready played the long game, too, always carefully covering his back. But, Fox knew, almost everyone, at some point, makes a mistake, even the cleverest people. The safety deposit box account was Gready’s first mistake and where it had all started to unravel.

As a hedge against ever getting investigated, Terence Gready had made sure it was always going to be Mickey Starr who took the fall, not him. With the deposit box, he’d made it look as if Starr had forged his signature. He’d also left the key in the shed, which could have been accessible to Starr or someone else. He’d been scrupulously careful not to be seen together with Mickey, and all contact they had was either by burner phone or where they would not be seen. By not having cameras and alarms at his house there was always the chance that someone, possibly Starr, could have planted the evidence that the police found. This concoction he always felt would be enough to distance himself if he was ever to be part of a police investigation.

Like so many successful criminals before him, Gready had become complacent. For many years, his network of drug distribution and, more recently, his system of importing drugs concealed in high-end classic sports cars, had worked brilliantly. Complacency had been his second mistake. He thought he could easily manipulate a jury. His third had been to entrust so much to Mickey Starr, who had a vulnerability. Stuie.