Babyface. Elizabeth Woodcraft

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СКАЧАТЬ last paragraph of my instructions read:

      ‘As counsel will remember, Mr Richards is a difficult client who has had much experience of dealing with the legal profession. Counsel is reminded that he has sacked one firm of solicitors and two counsel already. As well as doing his best at this hearing, counsel is required to ensure that Mr Richards is satisfied with the service he receives.’

      And how would the difficult Mr Richards react if he knew that instead of the big, firm assertive Simon Allison, the smaller, slimmer family practitioner Miss F. Richmond was appearing on his behalf? Good job he wouldn’t be there to see it.

      The last two pages of the fax were ‘the missing pages of his CRO as requested’ – information from the Criminal Records Office of Mr Richards’ previous convictions. If these were the missing pages I dreaded to think what the other pages contained and how many there were. These pages were crammed with entries. The first page covered the early seventies and the second the late eighties.

      For a defence barrister this man was very bad news. Just looking at the pages I had I could see he had visited most of the juvenile courts in the South of England, on at least fifteen occasions. Not a local boy then. The pages revealed no violence against women, which was something. The first page ran from 1969 to 1974. Two of his convictions were for ‘common assault against another youth’ for which he had been bound over, which meant it was probably a bit of weekend strutting about, but his weakness had obviously been cars, stealing them, driving them away, without a licence, without insurance, without due care and attention. By the time he was fourteen, in 1974, he’d been banned from driving for twenty years.

      Of course, looking at that sheet through the eyes of a self-styled liberal, it seemed as if he’d never had a chance. He was dealt with harshly from the start, sentenced to Intermediate Treatment, Detention Centre, Borstal. The second sheet jumped ahead eleven years, and was now based round Crown Courts in the Midlands. The inevitable had happened. It looked as if he had fallen in with a bad crowd in his late twenties, there was an affray in 1985 and in 1988, a serious GBH. He’d been sentenced to five years for that. In 1993 there was an attempted murder – a man had lost a leg – and Danny Richards had said goodbye to the outside world for nine years, but on appeal it was reduced to seven.

      I wondered who the man with one leg was. I wondered what he thought about the reduction in Danny Richards’ sentence.

      And now he was on a charge of murder. With an unlikely victim, certainly as far as pages three and four of the instructions were concerned. An underworld villain, Terry Fleming, had disappeared. He was a small-time crook and heavy man, who hired out his services to local businessmen, in between selling cars and playing a mean hand of blackjack. Some nine months previously, three days after Danny Richards had been released from HM Prison, Parkhurst, having completed five years of the seven-year sentence, Fleming had gone out for a birthday celebration, dressed in his finest and newest four-button, mohair grey suit, and never come home. His body had never been found. He had last been seen at one of Birmingham’s brightest and hottest nightspots, the Lambada Casino.

      Perhaps there would be the chance of a night at the casino, I thought, to feel the atmosphere Fleming had been in, to see what he had seen. I could wear a cool black jacket, some black patent shoes, try a twist of the poker cards, slide some chips across the green baize, faire mes jeux.

      But what was I thinking? I had no intention of having anything more to do with Danny Richards’ case after tomorrow. On the stroke of half past ten I would announce to the judge that my time was up, and I would rise and tie the pink ribbon firmly round the papers, write Simon’s name on the back sheet in large letters and walk out of the court building without a backward glance.

      As you can imagine.

      Of course the trouble with a good juicy criminal brief is that you get sucked in, you get involved and excited by the possibilities. I made a list of things I would do if this case were mine:

      Check the Malaga coast line. No corpse can so often mean no murder.

      Check police missing-persons files for reports of disappeared young, nubile women to see if Fleming had run off with someone (or nubile men – what better reason for a man to leave the country than if he thinks he’ll lose his reputation as a hard man if his sexuality is revealed?)

      Investigate other reasons for wanting to disappear. Had he fallen out with someone? Was he trying to go straight? Was he threatening to tell all?

      Consider the possibility of suicide – did he have any reason to commit suicide (see above)? Are there any forms of suicide that allow the body to self-destruct so that no traces remain – e.g. throwing oneself into a vat of acid?

      Who might want to kill him? What would Danny Richards’ motive be?

      According to Kay’s instructions, the prosecution case against Danny Richards was pretty weak, based on circumstantial evidence. The statements of the witnesses offered little information other than the fact that Danny and Fleming had never got on. There was a hint of a long-standing quarrel, a suggestion of an argument the night before he disappeared. No more than that. The case could well be thrown out at half-time, at the end of the prosecution case, after a stirring submission of no case to answer. From the way Kay was describing it, Simon could probably make that submission on the papers alone, before a word of oral evidence had been given.

      This was good. This meant I could be extremely condescending to the prosecution, and swagger round the courtroom in controlled indignation.

      But reading between the lines of her upbeat instructions, I could tell that Danny Richards was going to have an uphill struggle. He’d apparently said some fairly stupid things to the police, which could amount to admissions of guilt. It would be difficult to keep them from going in front of the jury without calling the police liars. That counted out the possibility of an early submission. It also meant the risk of the jury hearing about his previous convictions. The jury wouldn’t like him at all. And then, almost as a throwaway comment at the end of the instructions, there was a mention of the laughable ‘forensic evidence’ Simon was being asked to consider. From the instructions I couldn’t tell what it was. A finger print? A spot of blood? Fibres? Kay had written that it was harmless enough on its own but in the context of the trial, could be fairly damning. The possibility of an acquittal seemed remote.

      But tomorrow my main task was to hang on to him. It was a good thing he wasn’t going to be there, to ask me hard questions like, ‘Am I going to get off?’

      It was midnight. I could still ring up Simon and demand his limping attendance. Or Gavin, to demand his, to explain to the judge why Simon wasn’t there. But I couldn’t do that. It was beneath me. I had to take it like a woman.

      The best thing to do was to get a good night’s sleep to be fresh and clear-eyed for the judge.

       THREEWednesday Morning – Crown Court

      But it wasn’t just the judge, it was Danny too. Because of course, they brought him.

      I went to the cells, just in case, and asked nonchalantly whether they had him.

      ‘Oh yes, madam.’ The jailer had a cup of tea and a copy of the Sun open on the desk in front of him. I gave him my name. ‘Just you is it?’ he asked in the false anxious tone they use to wind-up women barristers. ‘You want to go in on your own?’

      Gavin had assured me that, whatever impression the papers might give, the client СКАЧАТЬ