The Brief Read online

  THE

  BRIEF

  THE

  BRIEF

  SIMON MICHAEL

  urbanepublications.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2015

  by Urbane Publications Ltd

  Suite 3, Brown Europe House, 33/34 Gleamingwood Drive,

  Chatham, Kent ME5 8RZ

  Copyright © Simon Michael, 2015

  The moral right of Simon Michael to be identified as the author of this

  work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

  in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

  mechanical, photo-copying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual

  persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

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

  ISBN 978-1-910692-00-4

  EPUB 978-1-910692-01-1

  MOBI 978-1-910692-02-8

  Design and Typeset by Julie Martin

  Cover by The Invisible Man

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  urbanepublications.com

  The publisher supports the Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®), the leading international forest-certification organisation. This book is made from acid-free paper from an FSC®-certified provider. FSC is the only forest-certification scheme supported by the leading environmental organisations, including Greenpeace.

  “Chilling suspense and climactic surprises”

  Publishers Weekly

  “…well out of the ordinary and far into the realms of seriously good storytelling… superlative courtroom drama…”

  New Law Journal

  “The court room scenes are good… entertaining”

  The Guardian

  For the Rt Honourable Michael Gove, MP, Lord Chancellor, and Secretary of State for Justice:

  “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”

  – HENRY VI, PART 2

  Contents

  Part One 1960, London

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two The Trial

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Three 1962, Payback

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Part Four on the Run

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Part Five

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  1960, LONDON

  CHAPTER ONE

  Still in his pyjamas, the unshaven man sprawled in an old armchair, one leg dangling over its worn arm. He’d kicked off a slipper and was absently picking at his toe nails with one hand as the other turned the sports pages of a tabloid newspaper on his lap.

  The armchair sat in the centre of a bedsit. It was the only non-essential piece of furniture and from its stained embrace the man could have stretched his arm to touch the bed behind him, the small table against the wall opposite, and the stove to his right.

  Music crackled from a transistor radio sitting on a sticky plastic cloth covering the table and the smell of curried goat drifted through the open window from the kitchen one floor below.

  The man hummed along with Adam Faith as he asked his baby what she wanted if she didn’t want money. The man was in his 40s. He looked 50, perhaps older. Although quite tall, what little muscle he had once possessed had turned to slack, grey flab.

  The telephone rang. It was also within reach – perched on the dusty windowsill – but the man ignored the ringing for some time. Then, with a great effort, he picked up the handset.

  ‘Yeh?’ he said, still reading.

  ‘Del?’

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you no’ recognise the voice Del? It’s Robbie.’ Del’s eyes widened and his stubbly jaw dropped. ‘Are ye there, Plumber? It’s Robbie Sands.’ Sands’s voice was hard, Glaswegian. Del Plumber stood up, the paper falling to the floor, and turned the radio off.

  ‘Yeh, yeh,’ replied Del, ‘you just took me by surprise, that’s all. When d’ja get out?’

  ‘Last week,’ said Sands.

  ‘Yeh?’ Plumber paused, his jaw gradually closing as he forced his brain into activity. ‘Well, I’m honoured, Robbie, that you should look me up so soon after your release,’ he blustered in his fast Cockney. ‘Very…wossname… thoughtful.’ The forced humour failed to hide the palpable nervousness in his voice.

  ‘Cut the crap Del. I need tae see you.’

  ‘Yeah, that would be…fantastic. Sure. But I’m a bit tied up at present. P’raps I could give you a ring in a few – ’

  ‘Tonight.’

  Plumber paused. His eyes darted around the tiny room, calculating how long it would take to clear it and disappear. ‘Look, Robbie…see…well, things is different now, since you went inside…’

  ‘Och, dinnae fret yoursel’ Derek. I’m no’ mad at you. I just wanna talk, right? Just talk. Tonight at The Frog.’

  ‘I can’t tonight, honest. I’ve got something on. Next week maybe?’

  ‘What about now? I know where ye are. I could be there in an hour.’

  ‘No, no, no! Blimey, I dunno. I suppose I could slip in a quick one this afternoon.’

  ‘Five o’clock then.’

  Plumber reached a decision. ‘Alright, around five. Just a quick one, right?’

  ‘I’ll be there. Dinnae let me down now.’ The line went dead.

  Plumber put the handset down slowly. ‘Fuck,’ he said quietly.

  •

  The clerks’ room was its usual, frenetic, five o’clock worst. Stanley was holding conversations with two solicitors on different telephones, Sally was fending off questions from two members of Chambers while scanning the Daily Cause List, and Robert, the junior, was optimistically trying to tie a brief with one hand while pouring a cup of coffee for the head of Chambers with the other. Sir Geoffrey Duchenne QC had returned from the Court of Appeal ten minutes before, muttering that Lord Bloody-Justice Bloody-Birkett was to the law of marine insurance what Bambi was to quantum physics, ejected another barrister’s conference already in progress from his room, and then slammed the door. He could still be heard giving a post mortem of the day’s defeat to the senior partner of the firm of solicitors that had instructed him. Superimposed on all this was the clatter of the two typists generating an apparently endless stream of fee notes to go out in the last post.

  Charles Holborne poked his head into the clerks’ room and wondered if he would be able to make himself heard. He watched with a smile as Sally – pert, cheeky Sally from Romford, two ‘O’ levels and a nice line in caustic sarcasm –
politely told Mr Sebastian Campbell-Smythe, a senior barrister of fifteen years’ call, to return to his room and not to disturb her. If he caused her to miss his case in the List, he would not be best pleased, would he? Sally, thought Charles, not for the first time, was ideally suited to life as a barristers’ clerk. She was quick-witted and quick-tongued enough to keep twenty-six prima donna barristers in line (all her senior in years, supposed social status and intelligence) without actually crossing the line into rudeness. At the same time she was attractive enough to flatter the crusty solicitors who sent work to Chambers. Stanley, the senior clerk, had high hopes of her.

  Sally turned towards the door and saw Charles. She smiled. She liked Mr Holborne. He was alright, one of the few members of Chambers who didn’t talk down to her.

  ‘Going to Mick’s,’ he mouthed, making saucer and cup-lifting motions with his hands.

  ‘Hang on, sir,’ she called as he disappeared. His head reappeared round the door. ‘Don’t forget you’ve got a con in half an hour,’ she said. She reached over for the diary and looked for his initials. ‘The buggery,’ she said, as nonchalantly as if the case had been a vicar summonsed for careless driving, ‘case of Petrovicj.’

  Charles nodded, waved, and departed. He’d already read the case papers, and there was time for a cup of tea and a bite to eat at the café on Fleet Street before his client and the solicitor arrived for the conference.

  Pulling his coat around him, Charles stepped out from Chancery Court into the rain. A gust of wind bowed the bare branches of the plane trees towards him and threatened to dislodge his hat. He jammed the hat more firmly on his head and walked quickly across the shiny cobbles towards the sound of traffic. He still loved the sensation of dislocation he experienced every time he walked through the archway from the Dickensian Temple onto twentieth century Fleet Street. The Temple had barely changed in three hundred years, and the sense that it was caught in an accidental fold in time was always strongest in the winter, when mist regularly drifted in off the Thames and the gas lamps were still lit at four o’clock each afternoon by a man armed with what appeared to be a six-foot matchstick. The Benchers responsible for running the Inn were debating the installation of electric lights and Charles knew it would only be a matter of time, but he would miss the hiss of the gas, the fluttering flames and the shifting shadows.

  Charles turned onto Fleet Street and walked in the direction of St Paul’s Cathedral, its dome barely visible in the murky light, and through a small steamy door. He was greeted by a hot exhalation of bacon fat and cigarette smoke.

  Mick’s offered cheap meals for fourteen hours a day and was second home to both Fleet Street hacks and Temple barristers. Its all day breakfast, a heart-stopping pyramid of steaming cholesterol for only 1s 6d, was legendary. Charles loved the feel of the place, the easy conversations and ribald jokes about cases, clients and judges. The tension of a long court day – particularly the miseries of the unexpected conviction or swingeing sentence – could here be assuaged in a fog of smoke and chip fat. It was also a welcome change from the rarefied air of 2 Chancery Court, where most of Charles’s chambers colleagues dealt in the bills of lading, the judicial review, and the leasehold enfranchisement of civil work. It was, Charles thought with a wry grin, exactly the sort of place Henrietta detested.

  At this time of day, with courts adjourning for the night and Mick’s being on the route to and from the Old Bailey, the clientele was more barristerial than journalistic, although Charles saw and waved to Percy Farrow, a hack and friend who’d covered several of his cases.

  Charles negotiated his way through the narrow gap between the tables towards the formica counter and ordered tea and toast. He looked for somewhere to sit, but Percy was deeply engrossed with a colleague, so Charles squeezed his way to a stool at the end of the counter, picking up a discarded Daily Mirror from an adjacent table. He turned to the back to check the football pages. West Ham had had a decent start to the season but they were playing Spurs that weekend, and Spurs were flying – odds-on to do the double.

  When he returned to Chambers twenty minutes later, Charles could hear an argument in progress before he even opened the door. A tall barrister in pinstriped trousers was shouting at Stanley from the door of the clerks’ room. He whirled round to confront Charles as he entered.

  ‘There you are! Now look here, Holborne,’ he said, using the formality of Charles’s surname to show his displeasure, ‘this is positively the last time. I’m going to take it up at the next Chambers’ meeting.’

  Charles looked up at the man. His name was Laurence Corbett. He was six inches taller than Charles, blond and handsome. ‘Is there a problem, Laurence?’ asked Charles quietly, pointedly using the man’s first name.

  ‘Yes. That!’ replied Corbett, jabbing his finger in the direction of the waiting room.

  ‘Your con’s arrived, sir,’ explained Stanley.

  ‘And?’ asked Charles.

  ‘And my fiancée has been sitting waiting for me in that room with that rapist of yours!’

  ‘Yes?’ inquired Charles.

  ‘Don’t act the fool, Holborne. I know for a fact that you’ve been asked by several members of Chambers to keep your smutty clientele out of Chambers during normal office hours.’

  ‘Is Mr Petrovicj with the instructing solicitor?’ Charles asked Stanley.

  ‘Yes, sir, your client is sitting between Mr Cohen and his outdoor clerk. Mr Smith’s conference is waiting in there too, sir.’

  ‘Well,’ continued Charles, turning to Corbett and quickly stepping backwards to allow Robert to scurry past with an armful of briefs, ‘I would have thought it unlikely that your betrothed would be ravaged in front of five witnesses, even assuming that my client was interested in her, which I doubt. Irresistible though you no doubt find her, Mr Petrovicj is charged with buggering another male. He’s not, if you’ll excuse the pun, into women.’ Charles smiled.

  ‘That makes no difference at all, Charles – ’

  ‘I thought it was “Holborne”,’ corrected Charles.

  ‘ – as you well know.’

  ‘I would have thought it made quite a deal of difference, particularly to Mr Petrovicj. However, if you’ll let me go and start my con,’ said Charles, turning his back on Corbett, ‘I can remove the evil influence from the room.’

  Charles opened the door to leave, and then paused. ‘By the way, Laurence, I know you don’t do crime, but I’d’ve thought even you knew that a man is innocent until proven guilty. Mr Petrovicj isn’t a rapist, or a bugger for that matter, till the jury says he is.’

  •

  ‘Over here, Del!’

  Robbie Sands waited for Plumber at a table in the corner of the bar, two empty spirit glasses before him. The Frog and Nightgown was the boozer most frequented by south London’s professional villains. Here you could buy or sell anything, recruit for any criminal enterprise, and get yourself killed if you bumped into the wrong man at the wrong time. It was reckoned to be one of the toughest pubs in London, but at this early hour Sands’s was the only occupied table. Plumber’s eyes flicked around the bar for possible danger and made his way over and sat down opposite the other man. Sands’s lean face had acquired a couple more scars since Plumber had last seen him at HM Prison Durham. The Scotsman assessed Plumber, his hard blue eyes narrowing, and shook his head sadly.

  ‘My God, you’ve got soft,’ he concluded. Plumber smiled and shrugged. ‘You must ha’ put on two stones since I last saw you.’

  ‘I suppose so. I’m older,’ said Plumber. ‘How you been?’

  ‘Och, no’ bad, all things considered.’

  ‘Had a bit of trouble?’ asked Plumber, nodding towards Sands’s face.

  ‘What, this?’ replied Sands, fingering a long scar on his left cheekbone. It was healed, but still pink, relatively recent. ‘You know what they say: you should’a seen the other guy. He was in the hospital wing for a month. Well,’ he said, after a pause, ‘are you gonna buy me a drink
or no?’

  ‘Sure, sure Robbie. What’ll you have?’

  ‘I’ll have another large Bells thank you very much.’

  Plumber bought the drinks and returned to the table.

  ‘So, what have you been doing for the last four years?’ asked Sands.

  ‘Nothing. That’s what I was trying to tell you on the blower. I ain’t done a single job since that one. I reckoned it was a warning, with what happened an’ all that, and I gave it up.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So nothing. I do a bit of decorating when me cousin can get me the work, and I’m drawing wossname, dole, you know.’

  ‘How’s Mary?’

  ‘Dunno. She left two years ago. Ain’t heard a word since. My eldest, Maureen, she had a postcard from… wossname… Ireland once, about a year ago. That’s it.’

  ‘You must be happy,’ said Sands with heavy irony.

  ‘Me? Oh, I get by,’ replied Plumber disconsolately. ‘Anyway, Robbie,’ he said, knocking back his drink, ‘I’ve got a lot on this evening, and I really – ’

  ‘Patience,’ said Sands, putting his hand firmly on Plumber’s arm, ‘is a great virtue.’ Plumber sat back in his seat reluctantly. Sands took a small sip from his whisky, looked about him, and lowered his voice as he spoke. ‘There are two things I want from you Derek, and the first is the whereabouts of a certain Connor Millar.’

  Plumber looked surprised. ‘Didn’t you ’ear?’

  ‘Hear what? Do you no’ remember where I’ve been for the last four year?’

  ‘Yeh, well… he’s dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeh. Heart attack. He was in the laundrette doing his smalls or whatever, and keeled over. Dead as a… wossname.’

  ‘Bastard,’ said Sands, with venom.

  ‘Yeah, well, I get how you feel Robbie, given the circumstances, but the bloke’s dead, so what’s it matter now?’

  ‘Dead? He’s not half as dead as he would ha’ been if I’d got hold of him! That fat slob always was lucky.’ There was a long pause while Sands nursed his drink.