Patchwork Man (3 page)

‘That’s crap really. No-one can jump universes. You’re jarring me man. Don’t yer know nuthin
?
And I weren’t there anyway.’

The social worker shook her head apologetically. ‘Mr Juste is trying to help you, Danny. He’s very high up in the courts.’ She nodded meaningfully at me, presumably implying she wanted me to follow suit. ‘Important – almost a judge.’ I took a deep breath and joined the charade.

Although, possibly I was. My appointment as High Court Judge, and a real knighthood, had to be on its way soon, with time already under my belt as Crown Court Recorder and Deputy High Court Judge. All the noises from the Lord Chancellor’s Department were positive and as 1999 prepared to slink into the past one newspaper hack in particular was having a field day with me – dubbing me the harbinger of the new order for the year 2000. No longer merely plain Lawrence Juste. Mr Justice Juste in waiting – a true peer of the modern order – embarrassingly before the LCD had. I’d dropped the Kenneth long ago. The Kennys of this world were yobs, not barristers; and Kenny was the name on my criminal record anyway. But Kenny was in serious danger of re-surfacing if my enthusiastic and curious hack dug too deep into Mr Justice Juste in waiting’s past, and Margaret’s inexplicable list found its way into the open. Anyway publicity wouldn’t do me any good with the LCD, even if it was good publicity. The list and my chequered past was definitely bad publicity, and any publicity raised my profile just a little too high under current circumstances. This looked dangerously likely to continue that.

‘If you’re so important why am I still in here? This is long. I want out.’

Long? What the hell did that mean?

‘Gangsta – all the kids speak it now,’ my clerk whispered in my ear. Not so easily floored all the time then.

My aquiline face and stern expression often stared back
long
and grey from the newspaper at the moment. ‘Distinguished’ they described me as – whether that meant in looks or career. One dimensional was how I felt. A billboard for sterility now Margaret was dead and life was truly based only around work. A choice that now, whilst offering comfort through its encompassing of every spare moment of my time, gave me no warmth or love back for my loyalty to it. My private emotional over-reaction to this case and this child was the nearest to humanity I’d felt in a long time – angry at the inequality, irritated by the child’s belligerence, and disturbed by the similarity to me. One of the last disagreements Margaret and I’d had was over my ‘coldness’ as she put it when we’d discussed, disputed and I’d eventually disposed of her tentative suggestion that we might still have a family one day. Perhaps Margaret’s plan had more to do with that, than the boy’s defence? At least my future prospects were encouraging, if I could navigate the press, even if the boy’s weren’t.

‘Then you need to spill if you want to get out of here – by telling me what I need to know to defend you. Otherwise your time spent inside will be
long
– get it,
gangsta
?’

The social worker raised her eyebrows at me and I admonished myself silently. It should have been one of his parents there, but she’d been designated as the ‘appropriate adult’ in their stead. It seemed neither of them were. She explained her current role as link between Social Services and to facilitate communication between Counsel and the boy, since he had little more to say than in the statement his solicitor had prepared with him. He still wasn’t saying anything more, and I had no reason to expect him to from the pysch’s report on him, but I was still irritated by the sullen refusal to admit facts. Nevertheless I knew how to remain stoic; how to cut off the world.
Do it now, you fool.
Forget the distractions and petty annoyances. This one has to be seen through in the public eye – no mistakes here. Whatever Margaret’s ultimate intentions, she had at least picked it well for its human rights appeal, and played her part even better than usual in inducing me to take it – in her absence, ironically. The boy seemed to be able to cut off the world as effectively as me. His face closed further in on itself and he folded his arms protectively across his chest. The social worker frowned at me and tried to persuade the boy to talk. I let her. It allowed my mind to wander – and it was anywhere but here today.

The acknowledgement that Margaret wouldn’t be hovering in the hallway when I got home, dutifully solicitous as to how the interview had gone, and whether I needed a drink to wind me down after it, brought an unexpected raw ache of – what? I didn’t recognise it, but it felt disturbingly like how I remembered feeling when I was sent to the children’s home in Eastbourne. Small, anxious and very lost. I shook the sensation away by focusing instead on easing something more useful out of the boy. Very few made High Court Judge. It had been my wildly ambitious target since the time I’d first dragged myself out of the gutter. I wasn’t going to let an unexpected personal loss and a curved ball of a case stop me achieving it.

‘Perhaps if you could explain to Danny what will happen if he doesn’t help you, he might understand how important it is?’ the social worker prompted.

I’d give her that – she was trying to help. I took a closer look at her. Unexpected stirrings of something approaching desire surprised me. She was attractive in a not-my-cup-of-tea kind of way. Then shame at the designation of Margaret as an unexpected personal loss took over. It made it seem like I was equating her with losing my watch or my diary, although honesty dictated I admit that ours had been no grand passion.

‘OK, it goes like this Danny, yours is an indictable offence. Someone died because of what you’re accused of so there’s no choice but that you’ll go to court. Therefore you have to defend yourself or ...’

She’d initially performed exceptionally as one of the Chambers’ clerks and then diligently as my wife – even apparently accepting our childless state as a pre-qualifying condition to the title of Mrs Juste. She’d set herself to painstakingly oiling the right wheels to speed her husband on his rapid journey to the top with her charm and social ease, until she’d walked under the wheels of a different kind of speed freak. She was several years my junior, arriving in Chambers when I was finally starting to make a name for myself just nearing forty, and following me faithfully down the aisle four years later when I was forty-four and she in her early thirties. Five years on and here I was contemplating another guest list, but this time for a funeral. The number potentially on the list was testimony to her popularity, but I knew barely a handful of the names better than to acknowledge them politely in passing. Margaret was the socialiser; I was the work horse. People had long since become mere stop-off points along the way to the top – safer like that. No chance to be rejected or used as I had been as a child. Margaret had been the exception to the rule in getting past my barricades, although I’d never fully figured out why, apart from her persistence and my necessity. By the time she came on the scene it was apparent it was going to be necessary to have some form of social respectability after a period of excess. A wife more than fitted the bill – although that might well have been what Margaret had told me at the time. Now I still needed her, even if I didn’t grieve for her.

My monologue concluded with the plea options – guilty unless he opened up and talked. ‘So?’ I waited, casting another glance at the social worker to see how she was reacting. She had brown eyes – deep and rich, like dark chocolate. She flicked a glance at me when she caught me watching her. We both looked away too quickly.

‘Danny?’ she prompted.

‘Shut up will yer? I’m thinking.’

It was a fortnight since the accident and the social requirement to be supportive of the bereaved was beginning to fade. Already the obsequious mourners were forgetting to patronisingly ask how I was and I guessed that once the funeral was over, the invitations to dinner or drinks
to cheer you up
would also diminish from a flow, to a trickle and ultimately to a dry river bed. Not that I accepted so I didn’t mind. They had been Margaret’s friends, not mine, but the sensation of being wholly on my own again, as I had been as a child, was disconcerting; bewildering even. I’d dug myself into work to dispel it. After the initial horror at the boy’s case, its strange similarity to my past had woven a kind of appalled fascination. Tricky to plead without antagonising the social hordes baying for blood at the death of an innocent – his victim – but also difficult to side-step because of
my
fascination for a certain member of the press. The careful side-stepping of my past it required, of course, was another consideration. The red and ermine of the High Court were almost within my grasp. I just had to get the little bastard to co-operate and not be dragged into the swamp of emotional turmoil that had begun to swill around me because of him. And still he was
thinking
...

I sighed audibly. ‘Danny, I haven’t got all day. You need to get past thinking and start talking now.’ The boy didn’t answer me, just scowled as I would have liked to have done. I tried another tack, remembering the way Margaret had shown me how to take my irritations and ball them into a fist before mentally flinging them away. I clamped my fingers into a claw shape and put the annoyance with him inside it. Control returned. I sensed rather than saw my clerk watching me curiously. I tried again. ‘Danny, I really can’t help you unless you help me. The police have you nailed at the crime scene so it isn’t helping either of us if you insist on lying. One of the most important things we need to agree on is that you tell me the truth as you know it.’

I paused, hoping that the unsaid rest of the rule might dawn on him without me having to ram it home – that was of course if he ever decided to start to tell me
anything
. Judging by the mulish expression, I doubted his brain would engage before his defiance or his mouth, but I’d briefly thought I’d sensed a canny sharpness in the narrowed blue eyes. I continued carefully, trying to transfer the understanding of how it was in the world of criminal defence from me to him without putting it into words.

‘So what you tell me I will know. What you don’t tell me, I won’t know, so
whatever you tell me
must be the truth ...’ I left the obviousness of the omission unsaid. ‘And maybe now you can tell me what you know?’

A small smile spread across his face and I thought the penny had dropped. I relaxed. Here we go – and then I could hand it over to the clerk to push on with until the actual hearing. Maybe it would be easier than I’d anticipated after all.

‘Oh, I get it. You want me to land meself in it so you can get rid of me sharpish and go back to your golf or whatever you toffee-nosed fuckers do.’

‘Danny!’ The social worker was horrified. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Juste.’ I waved away her apology – the second of the day. The faintest flush of pink tint stained her cheeks and made the white of her eyes even whiter against the dark of her skin and pupils – dilated pupils. Margaret had told me that meant something.

The adult language sounded wrong from him, yet I knew the harsher kind of world he was learning it from would soon be the only one he’d know unless he backed down and talked. You had to be seen to be hard at all times to survive in the world he was entering. It was simply another form of defence.

‘No,’ I spoke slowly and clearly as if he was hard of hearing – or more likely, an imbecile. ‘I want you to tell me enough
true
facts to enable me to get you as far off the hook as I can.’ He looked at me as if I was flicking a knife at him. I waited. His lips twitched and half-opened then reverted back to their grim line.

‘Weren’t there. Didn’t do it,’ was all he said at length. I sighed and looked across at his social worker. She grimaced back. She had an expressive mouth too. I resisted the inclination to sigh again.

‘You
were
there, and you
did
do something. The police have it on record. Maybe you mean you didn’t
mean
to do anything?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ He beamed at me and I was taken aback by the transformation. With the grin in place of the sneer, the thin-faced thug became simply a child – a child just like the carefree one who had played shooting practice with a home-made catapult in the back yard of our flats, or tumbled noisily down the hill at the front with his small back street gang of best friends and siblings. Briefly the image of Win asserting leadership over Georgie, Jim, Pip and me in battle – fighting imaginary dragons in the thin strip of trees beyond the yard – almost fazed me. This boy could be me.

I wondered if he would have joined in as enthusiastically as I had, recklessly liberating the bag of gobstoppers Jonno and his gang had stolen from old Sal’s, and then scrambling up into the tree branches to hide when they came to raid us back. We were the Juss kids – snotty-nosed, scabby-kneed but basically all right, and
happy
. I guessed he probably would. I knew from the notes that he had siblings too – three brothers and two sisters. As that disarming beam momentarily softened my heart he became Danny, not merely the kid I had to defend, and I imagined him playing ragamuffin.

‘I didn’t mean to do nothing so I didn’t do nothing.’ The smile faded and he was sly-faced and wary again. The little bubble burst. I could deal with cold-blooded murderers, greedy embezzlers and unprincipled blackmailers, but how did you deal with recalcitrant kids? I knew nothing about them and nor did I intend to. The boy’s lips remained in the thin white line and I knew from the social worker’s report that it meant he was likely to clam up for the rest of the session. Quixotic – and deadlocked. I hadn’t the patience or the will to be perspicacious today.

‘OK, I think we’re done for today. Maybe you’ll be more co-operative another time.’ I looked at his set face. ‘Or maybe not. Your choice.’ I shrugged and sat back in my chair, feeling it give in the rickety way all interview room chairs seem to. The social worker looked as if she was about to say something but bit her lip instead. Soft lips.