Blind Justice Read online

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY ONE

  TWENTY TWO

  TWENTY THREE

  TWENTY FOUR

  TWENTY FIVE

  TWENTY SIX

  TWENTY SEVEN

  TWENTY EIGHT

  TWENTY NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY ONE

  THIRTY TWO

  THIRTY THREE

  THIRTY FOUR

  THIRTY FIVE

  THIRTY SIX

  THIRTY SEVEN

  THIRTY EIGHT

  THIRTY NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY ONE

  FORTY TWO

  FORTY THREE

  FORTY FOUR

  FORTY FIVE

  FORTY SIX

  FORTY SEVEN

  A note from the Author

  The Butcher

  Another note from the Author

  I jumped as the thick metal door slammed shut. It wasn’t just the sound, but the physical force of it closing that affected me. The pressure changes inside the small cell were palpable. I could feel it in my ears, like that feeling you get on an aeroplane, and my heart thudded in my chest a couple of times before returning to normal. If only the rest of me could calm down, things would be a lot easier.

  I looked around the cell, taking in the four white walls that would be my home for the next fifteen years. They seemed so close, almost suffocating. The cell was maybe six feet by ten. There was a small window high on one wall with a glow coming through it I knew was from the streetlights outside. I’d considered trying to see out, but even if I climbed up to the window, I wouldn’t be able to see anything through the opaque reinforced glass. The only other light in the room was a bright fluorescent shaft of light from the observation window set into the green metal door. Even though it was my first night, I knew in about ten minutes that light would disappear as the prison guards turned off the main lights to the wing.

  Other than the bunk-bed I was sitting on and the bare toilet in the corner, the only furniture was a small table with a chair and a cabinet bolted to the wall near the window. I lay back on the bottom bunk, wriggling to fit myself into the bed. They weren’t made for people my size. That much was for certain. I’d been told that my cellmate, who was in the hospital wing for a few days, had already claimed the top bunk. I couldn’t see any point in making a scene about it. Not on my first day, anyway.

  The events of the last few weeks ran through my mind as I examined the bottom of the mattress above me. Being arrested, being remanded, and being tried. Being found guilty.

  Maths had never been my strong point, but I tried to do the sums in my head. I wanted to know how many times the cell door would slam before I would be eligible for parole. There were three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, so I needed to multiply that by fifteen. When I realised it was over five thousand, I gave up trying to work it out. Fifteen years was a long time, but it was the minimum term for my crime.

  Murder.

  I remember meeting Jennifer for the first time like it was yesterday. God knows I’ve relived it in my mind hundreds of times over the last couple of months. I’d gone to the pub to meet Tommy, my business partner, for a drink and a chat. Calling him my business partner isn’t quite true. He was more my partner in crime. Tommy and I had been what the police would call ‘petty thieves’ since we both left school at fifteen without a single GCSE between us. Our careers, such as they were, had begun ten years ago back in the winter of two thousand and seven. Aged fifteen, we had both clambered over a fence into a builder’s storage yard and relieved the owner of some tools that were lying around. Later that evening, as we sat in the park drinking the cheap cider we had bought with the proceeds of our endeavours, I realised that we had earned twenty-five quid between us for what was around fifteen minutes work.

  Our futures started to look a lot different from that point on until here I was in the pub with Tommy, years later. I looked at him now over the top of my pint of lager. He was wearing what he usually did — a threadbare hoodie — even though he was way too old for them. I’d told him many times that blokes in their mid-twenties didn’t wear hoodies, but he wasn’t having it. As I looked at him, he scratched his head through untidy black hair, somehow making it even scruffier.

  It was a cold, miserable night in November. I had just bought us both another pint of lager and was sitting with Tommy facing the door of the pub. We were expecting the third member of our little crew, David, to arrive at any moment. As Tommy talked about a business he had cased earlier on in the day with less than effective security, I took a sip of my pint and half listened to him. We had a few rules we were all happy with — no residential properties, no violence, and only low-risk jobs. Tommy had been in prison twice. They were both short stretches, but still long enough to put him off going back. It didn’t stop him getting prison tattoos, as the dark green spider web on his hand showed. David, the third musketeer, was late as usual.

  “Maybe David’s been nicked?” Tommy said with a smirk as I checked my watch for the second time in as many minutes.

  “It wouldn't surprise me,” I replied. David wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box at the best of times when it came to burglary. His day job was working as a courier, but his real skill was with anything electronic. This made him handy to have around, but he wasn’t good at the more physical elements of the job. He was also the least likely of the three of us to keep to our unofficial rules and often supplemented his income with what he called ‘other opportunities’.

  The pub we were sitting in was a typical drinkers’ pub on the eastern edge of Norwich. It was called The Heartsease after some flower and run by an ex-boxer and part-time criminal, Big Joe. He wasn’t called Big Joe because he was fat. He was known as Big Joe because he was a hard-looking bastard. His main talent, other than the fact he was as nasty as he looked, was his discretion. How the place even stayed open was beyond me as there never seemed to be more than four or five people in it at any one time. Tonight was no different even though it was a Saturday night. Apart from Tommy and I, there were only three other people drinking. I looked around the pub, taking in the yellowed walls which hadn’t seen fresh paint since before the smoking ban had come in years ago, and at the mismatched, battered tables and chairs. It was a depressing place.

  I looked up as the door to the pub swung open, expecting to see David’s greasy-haired head pop through it. It wasn’t David though, but a bloke I didn’t recognise. He looked around the pub as if looking for someone or checking to see who else was there. Behind him was a woman who looked even more out of place than he did. They were both dressed as if they were going for a night out somewhere else, somewhere far posher than The Heartsease, which they might have been. I had no idea. The man was about five feet nine with a runner’s build and smart, freshly ironed shirt and trousers. The pub we were in wasn’t the sort of place where you wore smart trousers, so that marked him out straight away. He strutted his way to the bar and the woman with him followed. My first impression was that the woman, how can I put this without sounding crude, was stunning. She was shorter than him by one or two inches and was wearing in a canary yellow short summer dress under a thin coat which reached to just above her knees. The woman wasn’t dressed for the weather. From what I could see, her legs were slim, toned and tanned despite
the time of year. I’ve always had a thing for legs, and hers ticked all the boxes.

  As she followed him across the pub rubbing her hands up and down her arms, she glanced around, and our eyes met for a few seconds. She had the deepest, most striking green eyes I’d seen in a woman for a long time. To be fair though, I didn’t spend that much time around women. She looked away almost immediately, and I wasn’t sure if she’d noticed me at all.

  “Gareth?” I heard Tommy say. “Gareth?” I looked at him and caught the smile on his face.

  “What?” I said, annoyed with him for breaking my concentration.

  “You’re staring, mate,” he said, laughing. “With your mouth open.”

  “Piss off, Tommy,” I replied. “I was not.” He picked up his pint glass from the table and took a sip of lager.

  “You bloody well were.”

  “Whatever,” I replied. The door to the pub swung open again, and I looked across to see David walk in. I looked at my watch and frowned. “About bloody time.” He ambled his way across to our table, dressed in a T-shirt advertising a heavy metal band I’d never heard of. The crotch of his trousers hung somewhere halfway down his thighs, revealing the upper band of his grubby boxer shorts. They made him look every inch the loser he was. He ignored the woman in the yellow dress, and she didn’t look at him either. Neither of those things surprised me. I liked David. He was a mate, but he wasn’t a ladies’ man by any stretch of the imagination.

  The three of us sat deep in conversation for the next twenty minutes, Tommy describing the off-licence he’d been having a look at over the last few days. There were CCTV cameras inside and out that Tommy swore were fake, and he and David were talking about the best way of finding out if they were real. As David prattled on about camera feeds and power supplies, my attention drifted back to the smartly dressed couple. They’d moved away from the bar and were sitting at a table on the other side of the pub. Their conversation didn’t look quite as companionable as ours, though. The woman was leaning back in the chair, her arms folded and her legs crossed. My earlier assessment had been correct. She had very nice legs indeed. Her drinking partner was doing most of the talking, punctuating whatever he was talking about with a pointed finger on the surface of the table between them. Occasionally, she would take a breath as if she was about to say something, only for his finger to thud the table and silence her. I’d always enjoyed watching people — I even daydreamed about going back to school and studying psychology — but I didn’t need to be an expert of any kind to tell that they were in the middle of the mother of all arguments.

  That might explain why they’d come here. Maybe it was neutral territory for their discussion? Maybe one of them lived around here, although looking at the way they both dressed, I doubted that. I watched them, wondering what the bloke could be saying that needed such dramatic punctuation. She glanced back in my direction, holding my gaze for a few seconds longer than before. I raised my eyebrows a few millimetres, unsure if she’d be able to see the gesture from across the pub. Her green eyes were something else. That was obvious even from this distance.

  David drained the last of his pint and scraped his chair backwards.

  “Right then, I’m off. Got stuff to do.” He got to his feet and swept his fingers through his hair. I hoped that he wouldn’t put his hand out for us to shake. “I’ll have a look at those cameras tomorrow, Tommy, and come up with a plan of some sort.”

  “That’d be good. Cheers. See what you think,” Tommy replied before finishing his own drink and clunking the empty glass back onto the table. “I’d better bugger off as well.” I looked down at my glass. I was about half a pint behind them.

  “Alright then, gents. I’m going outside for a smoke, so I’ll see you both tomorrow,” I said, raising a hand to them both. “Same time, same place?” They both nodded in unison before heading for the door, and I smiled as I saw Tommy’s unsteady gait. I’d suspected earlier that he’d been in the pub for a while before I arrived, and it looked like I was right.

  I stood outside in the dismal excuse of a beer garden. In reality, it was a small concrete walled yard with a well decorated table and bench set. Well decorated with graffiti, at least. I lit my cigarette and read the clumsy writing, wondering if Jane actually did perform the sexual act the graffiti suggested she did for twenty quid a time. Even if she did, I wouldn’t touch her with a barge pole. As I enjoyed my cigarette, thinking not for the first time I should give up, I could hear raised voices coming through the cold night air from the other side of the wall. First a man’s, and then a woman’s. Being a nosey chap, I stepped up onto the bench to look over the wall and see what was going on.

  The couple from the pub must have left at around the same time as Tommy and David. They were now standing on a street corner about twenty yards from the pub entrance. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about — shouting would be more accurate — but I was close enough to read their body language and see the clouds of their breath in the cold night air. He was waving his arms, pacing. She was standing still, her arms folded across her chest. It was obvious the woman was scared.

  I crushed my half-smoked cigarette into the broken flower pot that served as an ashtray and walked back through the pub, nodding to Big Joe as I left through the front door. As I approached the arguing couple, I slowed down. All I wanted to do was to make sure that the woman was okay.

  Ever since I was a kid, I’d always hated bullies. One advantage of being quite a big lad was that I didn’t get bullied. At least, not for long. The first proper fight I ever had was with a boy called Marcus who fancied himself as the top boy in the playground and preferred other children’s money to his own. To his credit, he was a quick learner, although the bloodied nose and black eye I gave him almost got me expelled.

  Remembering Marcus and the satisfaction I’d got from putting him on his back, I stopped about ten feet away from the woman in the yellow dress and her companion. With my hand clasped in front of me in the classic bouncer’s pose, I cleared my throat.

  “Everything okay?”

  The woman looked at me, her green eyes striking even in the glow of the streetlights. The look of fear on her face being replaced by relief still haunts me to this day, and it told me everything I needed to know in an instant. I took a step closer to the couple, rolling my shoulders as I did so. Her companion glanced up at me. I was a fair bit taller than him and had at least a two-stone weight advantage. None of it fat. I’m big, but I’m not a bloater. Lucky genes, I guess. It’s not from the gym.

  “Nah, we’re good, mate. Thanks.” He reached his hand out and grabbed the woman’s arm just above the elbow before trying to drag her away from me. I took another step closer as she resisted.

  “Let go, Robert,” she said, trying to pull away from him. Robert? What a poncy name. The least he could do would be to shorten it to Rob. I took another step closer and was now well within arm’s reach of Robert. Close enough to see the grooves in his hair from too much gel. “Please, you’re hurting me.” The woman looked up at me, her eyes wide. This was the nearest I’d been to her, but I didn’t want to take my eyes off Robert for long to see what she looked like up-close.

  “Robert,” I said. “I think you need to let go of the lady.” My voice was low and full of menace.

  “Piss off, fella,” he replied, tugging again at her arm. I could see white patches on her skin around his fingers. “This has got fuck all to do with you, so just leave it, would you?” He looked at me with a dark expression on his face. He was either brave, stupid, or both. Being brave and stupid was usually a road to nowhere in my experience. I relaxed my arms, letting them hang at my side, and flexed my fingers before bunching them into loose fists. A recognisable signal to most people that things were about to get serious.

  “Robert, let go. Now,” I said, almost whispering. Another signal. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

  In response, Robert took a step backwards. The woman let out a squeal of pain, ra
ising her free hand to prise his grip off her arm. That was the decision made right there for me. I stepped towards him, snapping my right arm up as if I was going to smack him under the chin with a deft uppercut, but I didn’t ball my fist. Instead, I shot my hand out and grabbed him by the neck, forcing his head back. I dug my thumb and middle finger deep into the soft tissue between his jaw and ear and pushed him back, away from the woman. As I’d predicted, he let go of her as he tried to get me to loosen my grip on his neck. I took a step forward, moving him away from her, and tightened my fingers. I’d had the same move done to me once, so knew how bloody painful it was. All you can do is try to release the pressure under your ears. It’s a sensitive spot which was why I’d chosen it. He had both his hands on my right arm, leaving my left one free. All I wanted was for him to let go of the woman, which he’d already done, and to send him a message.

  “Are you listening, Robert?” I asked, easing up on his neck so he could speak.

  “Yes,” he replied through clenched teeth. His face was already red from the pressure on his throat.

  “I’m going to let go of you in a minute, and you’re going to walk off nice and quietly,” I said in a soft voice. “Because if you don’t, you’re going to get hurt.” I squeezed his neck to illustrate the point. “Really hurt. You got that?” He nodded in response, so I lived up to my word and let go of him, taking a half step backwards in case I needed to use my hands. Robert took a deep breath and stood there, looking at me with a mixture of fear and anger on his face. He rubbed at his neck where red finger-shaped welts were forming. I pointed over his shoulder.

  “Go on Robert,” I said. “Off you fuck.”

  He stared at me, and for a moment I thought he was going to claw back some of his pride with a swing. Instead, his gaze flicked over my shoulder. I could tell he was thinking of something to say to the woman behind me. Probably something impolite from the look on his face, so I took half a step towards him. He backpedalled and then saw sense, turning to walk away. I watched him for a couple of seconds, until I was sure he’d not retreated for a run up back at me, and then turned to the woman. She was watching Robert walk away, rubbing her arm where she had similar welts to the ones on his neck. What goes around comes around.