Before the Fire (15 page)

The building was dimly lit and smelt of dust; long blue carpets trailed along corridors and up stairs; matching blue chairs sat in lines against the walls; and more notices:
No mobiles in
court, No food or drink in court.
Stick walked slowly. He’d woken up with a fizz in his stomach, like a kid at Christmas. This was justice. Owen Lee wouldn’t be able to say
‘no comment’ in court. They’d make him explain and then they’d send him down.

Mac’s ma and Rob the police guy sat outside court twelve. She was wearing the black dress from Harvey Nichols – the egg mayo stain cleaned off, but still visible. Stick had his
Primark suit on again, with the blue tie his mum had brought home for him the day before. He didn’t like it, but it was nice of her. Plus she said she’d thought about it, and she would
call the GP about the plugs, and then she’d laughed in a panicked way, so Stick had taken the tie and smiled and said, great, thanks.

The hearing was scheduled for three, but they sat on the blue chairs until twenty past, when the court door opened and a man wearing a suit and a black gown leaned out and said, ‘The case
of Mr Owen Lee. Court twelve,’ without even looking at the three of them sat there waiting.

The courtroom was smaller than Stick had expected, like a crap school hall, rather than somewhere grand where people got made to account for themselves. He searched the room for Owen Lee amongst
the people in gowns and suits but couldn’t see him. The dock was empty. Stick pictured him being led in wearing an orange boiler suit and cuffs, a guard’s hand on each arm, gripping
hard enough to leave a bruise.

‘Officer?’ A man, sitting at a table in front of the judge, spoke into a desk microphone. Next to the microphone, a digital clock with large red numbers counted off the seconds.
‘Can you bring Mr Owen Lee?’

‘I’ll get him now,’ a voice said, and Stick saw something move on a huge plasma screen mounted on the far wall. It showed an empty room: the curved edge of a table, a plastic
chair, and behind that a dark-grey curtain.

Stick turned to Mrs McKinley, who was staring straight ahead. ‘He’s coming here, right?’ he whispered. ‘He’s here?’

She didn’t respond and Stick turned back to see a man walking into the camera’s frame and lowering himself onto the chair behind the table.

Owen Lee. He looked the same as in the newspaper photo, only in colour, and wearing a suit. His face pale. Small dark eyes. A sharp nose. Nothing special about him. He just looked like some man
you’d sit next to on the bus.

‘Are you Owen Lee?’ the man at the desk said into his microphone.

The man nodded. ‘Yes.’ His voice was flat.

Stick felt the skin on his cheeks burn red, his whole body itching like there were ants crawling over him. He turned back to Mac’s ma and hissed, ‘Why’s he not here?’

Rob leaned forwards and put his finger to his lips. ‘Video link,’ he mouthed.

‘Video link?’ Stick raised his voice and one of the gown-wearing men glanced over at him.

‘It’s normal,’ Rob whispered. ‘For a preliminary.’

In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, a small square showed a view of the court. The man at the desk was listing the name of the judge, then the lawyers. Each time he said a name
someone moved the camera so it pointed to the relevant person. He didn’t introduce them though. He didn’t point the camera at Mrs McKinley.

Stick was sweating now and shaking his head, his hands clenched into damp fists on his knees.

One of the lawyers, a man with grey hair and stooped shoulders, stood up. ‘This is a preliminary hearing,’ he said. He had a soft, posh voice. ‘The court suggests a provisional
trial date of 14th February 2012. A plea and case management hearing on Thursday 11th August, with papers served on Monday 1st August.’

February? Stick tapped Rob on the knee. ‘February?’ he whispered.

Rob nodded, glancing up at Mrs McKinley, who was sitting, staring straight ahead like she was made out of stone. ‘It takes time,’ he whispered back. ‘They have to get their
case together.’

Stick counted in his head. February was six months away.

‘And could you outline the issues in this case?’ asked the judge. He was perched on a high-backed chair, raised up above the court, a small, serious-faced black man wearing a white
wig and a gown with a purple stripe down the front. He sounded bored. Stick pushed his hands under his thighs and pressed his lips together, tried to make his breathing quieter.

‘The defendant has been charged on the basis of strong circumstantial evidence. We have CCTV placing him very near the scene and witness statements confirming an argument between the
defendant and the victim on a bus minutes before the attack.’

Paget Street. Stick had gone back again yesterday. Apart from the lamp post with a couple of bunches of dying flowers taped around it, there was nothing to show that anything had happened. No
scraps of police tape, no squashed grass, no blood.

‘Very near?’ the judge said.

The man fussed at his papers. ‘We have no CCTV of the incident, your honour, but we do have footage of the defendant approaching the scene and then hurrying away, which matches the
estimated time of death. We are also awaiting forensics for blood found on the defendant’s shoes and fibres found at the scene and on the victim’s clothes, which we believe match a
jumper retrieved from the defendant’s home and which is also identified on the CCTV footage.’

Stick stared at Owen Lee, who sat with his hands on the table in front of him, his eyes blank. That’s just pixels, Stick thought. That’s just pixels on a screen. That’s not
really him.

‘Any early plea?’

A red-haired woman whose gown was ripped at the shoulder got up and shook her head. ‘No, your honour.’

The man stood up again. ‘We have had no cooperation from the defendant.’

The judge sighed, as though personally annoyed. Owen Lee’s face seemed to register nothing. Not a flicker. Stick stared until his eyes hurt, as if by doing so he could get Owen Lee to see
him.

‘So we have a provisional trial date of 14th February 2012.’

Mrs McKinley let out a quiet cough and Rob turned, whispered something in her ear.

‘PCMH on Thursday 11th August,’ the judge continued. ‘We’ll have the prosecution go first. Evidence to be served on Monday 1st August. Let’s hope it’s good.
Defence papers on Friday 5th.’ He spoke slowly, writing as he did so. Then put his pen down and raised his face to the screen. ‘Mr Owen Lee, can you hear me?’

Owen Lee’s eyes widened a fraction. ‘Yes.’

‘Your next appearance in court will be via video link on Thursday 11th August. Do you understand?’

The man nodded. ‘Yes.’

The judge brushed his hand down over his mouth and chin. ‘That is the end of this hearing,’ he said.

‘What?’ Stick stood up, shaking. ‘The end?’

The judge glanced towards him, his eyebrows raised a little. ‘We will move on to the next case,’ he said.

Stick saw Owen Lee pushing his chair back and standing up, a man in a brown uniform stepping towards him.

‘You haven’t asked him,’ Stick shouted.

‘Come on, Kieran.’ Rob was ushering Mac’s ma out of her seat. ‘Come on.’

Stick shook him off. ‘All you asked him was his fucking name,’ he shouted. ‘Everyone knows what his name is.’

‘If the gallery could be cleared?’ the judge said.

Rob took Stick’s arm and pulled him towards the door, just as a tall wide man in a black suit came in, looking stern.

‘We’re going. He’s going,’ Rob said. ‘He’s just upset.’ He got behind Stick and pushed him out of the courtroom.

‘Seven minutes?’ He should have found the camera, got his face right up against it and spat in the lens. ‘They didn’t ask him anything.’

‘It was just a preliminary,’ Rob said, keeping his voice soft. ‘It’s just the business part of it.’ He was looking at Stick’s face, but Stick kept his eyes
fixed on the blue carpet. ‘That’s why they use a video link,’ Rob said. ‘To save them driving prisoners around. I’m sorry, I should have explained it all to you as
well.’

‘It’s a fucking joke.’

‘It’s the way it works.’ Rob looked over to where Mrs McKinley was staring out of the window at the building site below. ‘You’re not helping her,’ he said
quietly.

It felt like something breaking, as though he could almost hear the snap inside of him. ‘Well, no one’s fucking helping me either,’ Stick said, his voice cracking, and even
when Mrs McKinley turned from the window, her face pale and miserable, he couldn’t stop his breath coming out too fast and his eyes blurring and his legs taking him out of the shitty court
building into the too-bright afternoon, and his mouth saying, ‘fuck you, fuck you, fuck all of you,’ over and over again.

It started raining just as he ducked under the railings. The space looked the same. Empty. Full of shit. He kicked at a piece of broken plastic that might have been a bucket
once, the kind kids build sandcastles with. It bounced across the ground and then settled on its side. He couldn’t breathe straight. Couldn’t think straight. The rain tapped a quiet
rhythm on the leaves of a plant with purple cones of flowers, on the metal fence, on the piles of rubbish. Damp patches gathered across Stick’s suit, the material pressing cold and wet
against him. He wanted to climb out of his skin and go somewhere quiet, get rid of the noise inside his head, but he couldn’t work out how.

Why would a man like Owen Lee – an ordinary, boring man with an ordinary, boring face, wearing an ordinary, boring suit – want to kill Mac? It didn’t make any sense. Mac was
just doing his Mac thing – being a knob, a bit pissed, a bit gobby. He was just being Mac. Stick kicked one of the dead handbags. It hardly moved, so he stamped on it instead, brought his
foot down again and again into a squelch of fake brown leather.

It wasn’t enough. Stick roamed over the wasteland, his breath still too fast and too loud, his hands shaking. In the far corner he found a building he hadn’t noticed the first time,
even sitting up on the window ledge with J. It was small – a brick shed – nearly the whole of the inside taken up with three metal boxes, each with grey mesh along the front, and
inside, fans that looked like propellers. They were spinning, even though they couldn’t be attached to anything any more. Just the wind, blowing through the broken-down entrance, turning the
blades.

Stick kicked at the mesh, hard enough to hurt his foot. The noise echoed around the small space. He kicked it again. And again. And again. It didn’t help. It made his body feel like his
limbs weren’t connected together right. The noise made his head hurt. But he carried on doing it, kicking and kicking until the sheet of mesh caved and split, and he could kick at the crappy
propeller fan until it stopped turning, and then he could pull and kick at the blades. They wouldn’t break, but he carried on trying, tugging until his arms ached and his hands hurt, and the
sweat ran down his back, kicking with the heel of his foot, his toe, getting down on his knees and shoving at it with his shoulder. And all the time his breath like a steam train and his head
roaring with white noise.

He didn’t hear J calling him. She must have said something before she stepped inside the shed and put a hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t hear her and her touch made him jump. A
little cry came out of his mouth before he could stop it.

‘Kieran? Stick?’ Her hair was blue, the edges curled from the rain. Her eyelids were coated with shiny blue powder and a thin black line ran around each eye with a tiny flick where
the lids met. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, over the noise of the rain battering the metal roof. She was looking at him like she felt sorry for him. He didn’t need her pity.

He turned back to the nearest fan and kicked it hard.

‘I don’t think that’s going to help.’

Stick kicked the metal again.

‘You’ll break your foot.’

‘Fuck off.’

She put her hand on his shoulder again. He pulled away from her. ‘I said fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off.’

J’s eyes widened, her eyebrows lifting, but she stayed where she was. Behind her he could see the piles of rubbish and broken-down walls, and behind that, the angled warehouse roofs and
the bulk of Strangeways. His insides were too big for his body – his heart and his lungs and his stomach blown up like balloons – he could feel them, squeezed against his skin so hard
he was shaking with the pressure.

‘Did it not go well?’ she asked.

Stick laughed, a loud harsh laugh.

J nodded like she understood. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. No one could except Mac and he wasn’t fucking there.

‘They didn’t ask him anything,’ he said.

J nodded again.

‘They asked his name and then said the trial’s in fucking February. February?’

‘They’ll get all the evidence together, right? Get a good case against him.’

‘He was supposed to—’ Stick felt like the block of flats on the TV programme, the building collapsing from the inside in a storm of dust and rubble. It must have made a noise,
but when they’d shown it – filmed from a distance – it had seemed silent: one minute whole, the next minute gone.

J pulled a pack of fags out of her coat pocket. ‘Lawyers and police and all that takes for ages.’ She held the pack out. ‘You want one?’

Stick shook his head. He watched her light one, draw in the smoke and puff out three perfect white rings. It made him think of Mac, stood outside the bar dressed like a twat, smoking Mr
Dunne’s shitty cigar.

‘I said fuck off, didn’t I? I said fucking get out of here.’ His voice cracked around the words but he kept on shouting because otherwise he’d cry.

But J didn’t go. She stepped forwards, opened her arms and hugged him, her hair wet against his cheek. He tried to back away but his legs were already up against the metal box. He could
feel the tears just beneath his skin. It helps to cry, his mum had said after the funeral, it can really help. But if he started he’d never fucking stop. He couldn’t breathe with her
holding on to him.

‘Get off me!’ He was just trying to get her to let go, but he ended up shoving her backwards and she stumbled, crashing into the door frame.