‘Mr Wallace-’ My uncertainty must have come through because he interrupted me before I could say more.
‘Please,’ he said, gripping the edge of the seat. ‘Please.’ He implored me but there was strength, not weakness in his plea.
Objections leapfrogged over each other in my mind. A hopeless case, I’d be going over the same old ground, I can’t do anything your lawyer can’t do, the trail will be stone cold, it’s months ago, they’ve got a witness, he may be guilty, these tragedies happen. But I couldn’t turn him down. His conviction, his passion about his son’s innocence was too powerful.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘but these are my terms.’
Driving back through the city centre was even slower than getting there. I felt exhausted by meeting Mr Wallace and the intensity of his emotional state. I had an image I couldn’t shift of the knife in Ahktar’s chest. I don’t like knives. I was stabbed once. Please don‘t, I’d begged. He raised his arm…the knife shining…No. I shook the memories away.
My shoulder was stiff and aching. I rolled it back round and round as I queued up to get onto Princess Street. We inched forward a couple of cars at a time when the lights changed, but the traffic ahead was hardly moving. There’d been a crash. I crawled past wanting to avert my eyes, needing to look. A woman in one of the cars had a neck brace on. She was being lifted out by two ambulance men. I sighed with relief; no blood, no dead bodies or worse, no decapitated driver or twitching limbs imprinted on my mind for the rest of my life.
If Ahktar had been stabbed outside the club as everyone was coming out, surely there would have been more than two witnesses? There’d have been blood, a skirmish; people would have glanced, looked, stared. There would have been the unmistakable atmosphere of violence, the scent of danger and death that we all recognise instinctively, that speeds up our heartbeat and raises the hairs on the back of our neck. I needed to find some of those witnesses. Six months after the event it wouldn’t be easy, and acting for the defence we could hardly get a slot on Crimewatch to pull people in. I’d start with the list Mr Wallace had given me, but from what he’d said none of the witnesses had come up with anything substantial the defence could use. Before I talked to anyone though, I’d book a visit to Golborne and meet Luke, assess for myself whether I thought he was wrongly accused. As an independent operator I had the freedom to choose who I worked for and what the terms were, and I’d said to Mr Wallace that I would only take the case if I felt comfortable working for Luke’s release.
Sheila rang. They were reopening Victoria Station so she hoped to travel home the following day. The news continued to be dominated by the bomb. Television and newspapers featured devastating pictures of the Arndale Centre and surrounding buildings; the gaping windows, twisted metal and fragments of concrete. It still made my stomach churn. Much was made of the bridge that linked Marks & Spencers with the Arndale Centre. It had literally jumped several feet in the air with the force of the blast, yet had fallen back into place in one piece – albeit unsafe. And a red pillar box close to the centre of the blast had inexplicably survived while everything about it was smashed to smithereens.
There were tales of folly and bravery, of interrupted weddings and miraculous escapes. Hundreds of people were still unable to get to work, to visit their businesses, retrieve their cars, return to their homes. I read it all.
On page eight a headline caught my eye. MYSTERY WOMAN AT BELLE VUE SUICIDE SCENE. I recalled the look of shock on Mrs Grady’s face, the ominous sound of flies busy at the corpse.
Local resident, Mrs Grady, 62, claimed she’d been alerted by a mystery caller ‘She wouldn’t say who she was or what she was doing there. She wouldn’t have her photograph taken. I thought that was a bit odd at the time. I’d no idea who she was. She left as soon as she could.’ I groaned. They’d had to put a spin on it. Rather than just relate the facts of Mr Kearsal’s death they’d spiced it up with a whiff of intrigue.
