The Children Act (19 page)

Berner’s client was a twenty-three-year-old from Dalston, a somewhat dreamy young man whose chief fault was a degree of passivity. And a failure to keep appointments. His mother was a drunk and a drug addict; the father, with similar problems, was mostly absent from Wayne’s childhood, which was one of chaos and neglect. He loved his mother and, he insisted, she loved him. She never hit him. Much of his adolescence was spent being his mother’s main carer and he missed a lot of school. He left at sixteen, worked at low-level jobs—in a chicken-plucking factory, as a laborer, in a warehouse, stuffing junk mail through letter boxes. He had never claimed unemployment or housing benefit. Five years earlier, at the age of eighteen, he was maliciously accused of rape by a girl, was held in a young offenders’ prison for a couple of weeks, then tagged and put under strict curfew conditions for six months. There was good mobile phone text evidence to prove the sex was consensual, but the police declined to investigate. They had targets to meet in rape cases. Gallagher was just their sort of man. First day of the trial, damning evidence from the accuser’s best friend caused the case to collapse. The supposed victim had been hoping for money from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority. She was keen on buying a new Xbox. She had texted her intentions to her friend. Prosecuting
counsel was seen to hurl his wig to the floor and mutter “Stupid girl.”

“Another blot on his record,” Berner said, “was that back when Gallagher was fifteen he knocked a policeman’s helmet off. An idiotic prank. But down on the record as ‘assaulting a police officer.’ ”

Spring has come, my precious. It’s the blessed month of lovers
.

The barrister was by her left elbow, in front of the music stand. In tight black jeans and black polo-neck sweater he reminded her of an old-fashioned beatnik. An impression only modified by the reading glasses suspended by a cord around his neck.

“D’you know, when Cranham told these lads what to expect, two of them said they wanted to start serving their time immediately. Meek as lambs, turkeys queuing for the oven. So Wayne Gallagher had to go with them, even though he wanted to be with his partner for one last week. She’d just had their baby. So I had to travel all the way out beyond east London to this dump to see him. Thamesmead.”

Fiona turned the page of her score. “I’ve been there,” she said. “Better than most.”

So come onto this mossy bank and let’s talk about our wondrous love …

“Get this,” Berner said. “Four London lads. Gallagher, Quinn, O’Rourke, Kelly. Third- or fourth-generation Irish. London accents. All went to the same school. A not-bad comprehensive.
The arresting officer saw the names and decided they were tinkers. That’s why he didn’t bother going after the other four. That’s why the CPS went for joint enterprise. They use it for gangs. Very tidy. Nice clean lazy sweep.”

“Mark,” she murmured. “We should get to work.”

“I’m almost done.”

As it happened, the brawl took place in full view of two CCTV cameras.

“The angles were perfect. You could see everyone. And in muted colors. Pin bloody sharp. Martin Scorsese couldn’t have done it better.”

Berner had four days to get his mind around the case, to play and replay the DVD and memorize the shifting movements of an eight-minute brawl caught from two camera positions, to learn by rote every step of his client and the other seven. He watched the men’s first contact, on the wide pavement between a shuttered shop and a phone box, an angry verbal exchange, a little pushing, puffed chests, male swagger, the amorphous crowd swaying this way and that, spilling at one point over the curb, onto the road. A hand gripped a forearm, the heel of another hand shoved a shoulder. Then Wayne Gallagher, who was at the back of the group, raised an arm and, unfortunately for him, struck the first blow, and then another. But his fist was too high, he was too far back, his movements were impeded by the beer can in his other hand. His blows were ineffectual and the man he hit barely noticed. Now the group split untidily
in two. At this point, Gallagher, still on the edges, threw his beer can. It was an underarm toss. The intended target brushed away some spots of beer from his lapel. In retribution, one of the other four stepped round and whacked Gallagher hard in the face, splitting his lip and terminating his involvement. He stood still, dazed, then moved away from the fighting, out of the cameras’ view.

The fight continued without him. One of the school friends, O’Rourke, stepped in and, with a single blow, floored the one who hit Gallagher. As soon as the man was down, another friend, Kelly, kicked him and fractured his jaw. Half a minute later, a second man went down, and this time it was Quinn who kicked him, breaking his cheek. When the police arrived, the fellow who hit Gallagher got to his feet and ran off to hide in his girlfriend’s flat. He was concerned about being arrested and losing his job.

Fiona looked at her watch. “Mark …”

“Almost done, My Lady. The point is, my guy just stood there waiting for the police. Face covered in blood. As much sinned against, et cetera. Bones were broken, so it’s GBH. The police charged all four on various counts. But in court the prosecution pushed for joint enterprise and sentence at level 2 GBH on the guidelines, which are five to nine years. Same old story. My client played no part in that violence. He was about to be sentenced for crimes that others committed and with which he wasn’t even charged. He’d pleaded not guilty.
He should have owned up to an affray, but I wasn’t there to advise. Legal aid should have showed the jury the police photo of his bloodied face. In any case, the chap with the fractured jaw refused to file a victim statement. Came to court as a prosecution witness. Said he didn’t understand the fuss. Told the judge he hadn’t needed treatment, went on holiday to Spain two days after the fight. First couple of days he had to sip his vodka through a straw. End of story—his very words. It’s in the court transcript.”

Continuing to listen, she spread her fingers over a chord but did not play it.
Let’s head for home, laden with wild strawberries
.

“Obviously, nothing I could do about the jury’s verdict. I spoke for seventy-five minutes, trying to detach Wayne from the rest, trying to get the GBH down to level 3. Guidelines are three to five years. Also, made a solid case that the law owed him six months’ liberty on the groundless rape charge. Then he would have been within reach of a suspended sentence, which was all this stupidity was worth. The other three legal-aid counsels spoke for ten minutes each for their clients. Cranham summed up. Lazy bastard. Okay, level 3, thank God, but he wouldn’t let go of joint enterprise, and completely forgot to address what I’d said about the time the law owed my client. Gave them all two and a half years. Lazy and perverse. But in the gallery the parents of the others were sobbing with relief. They’d been looking at a minimum five years. I’d done them all a favor, I suppose.”

Fiona said, “The judge used his discretion to go below the guidelines. Count yourself lucky.”

“Not the point, Fiona.”

“Let’s start. We’ve got less than an hour.”

“Hear me out. This is my resignation speech. All these guys were in employment. They’re taxpayers, for heaven’s sake! My man caused no harm. Against the odds, given his background, he was turning out to be a hands-on dad. Kelly was running a youth football team in his spare time. O’Rourke worked at weekends for a cystic fibrosis charity. This wasn’t an attack on innocent passersby. It was a scuffle outside a pub.”

She looked up from the score. “A broken cheek?”

“All right. A brawl. Between consenting adults. What’s the point of stuffing the prisons with these guys? Gallagher swung two harmless punches and tossed a near-empty beer can. Two and a half years. GBH on his record forever for offenses he wasn’t charged with. They’re sending him to Isis, that young offenders’ place, you know, inside the walls of Belmarsh. I’ve been out there a few times. The website says they have a ‘learning academy.’ Total crap! I’ve had clients there in the cells twenty-three hours a day. The courses get canceled every week. Understaffed, they say. Cranham with his put-on weariness, pretending to be too irritable to listen to anyone. What does he care what happens to these kids? Poured into these dumps, turning sour, learning to be criminals. D’you know what my biggest mistake was?”

“What?”

“I tried to make the point that this was a case of drink and high spirits. The violence was consensual. ‘If these four gentlemen had been members of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford they wouldn’t be before you now, Your Honor.’ On a horrible hunch, when I got home, I looked Cranham up in
Who’s Who
. Guess what?”

“Oh God. Mark, you need a holiday.”

“Face it, Fiona. It’s bloody class warfare.”

“And in the Family Division it’s all champagne and
fraises des bois
.”

Without waiting, she began to play the ten bars of introduction, the softly insistent chords. From the corner of her eye, she saw him putting on his reading glasses. Then the fine tenor voice, obedient to the composer’s marking of
dolce
, swelled sweetly.

For fifty-five minutes they forgot about the law.

IN DECEMBER, ON
the day of the concert, she was home from court by six and in a hurry to shower and change. She heard Jack in the kitchen and called a hello to him as she passed on her way to her bedroom. He was bending over by
the fridge and grunted in return. Forty minutes later she emerged into the hallway in a black silk dress and high-heeled shoes of black patent leather. They gave her good leverage with the pedals. Around her neck she wore a simple silver band. Her perfume was Rive Gauche. From the sitting room’s rarely touched hi-fi came the sound of piano music, of an old Keith Jarrett record,
Facing You
. The first track. She paused outside her bedroom door to listen. It had been a long time since she’d heard that hesitant partly realized melody. She’d forgotten how smoothly it gathered confidence and leaped into life as the left hand plunged into a strangely altered boogie which became an unstoppable force, like an accelerating steam locomotive. Only a classically trained musician could set his hands free of each other the way Jarrett did. That, at least, was her partial judgment.

Jack was sending her a message, for this was an album, one of three or four, that formed the sound track of their long-ago courtship. Those days, post-finals, after the all-women
Antony and Cleopatra
, when he persuaded her to spend first one, then dozens of nights in the room under the eaves with the east-facing porthole. When she understood that sexual ecstasy was more than an overinflated term. When, for the first time since she was seven years old, she screamed in pleasure. She had tumbled backward into a remote unpeopled space, and later, lying side by side in bed, sheets to their waists like postcoital movie stars, they laughed at the din she had made. No one in the flat below, fortunately. He, cool long-haired Jack, told her
it was the greatest compliment he’d ever received. She told him she could not imagine regaining the strength, in her spine, in her bones, to go back there again. Not if she was to return alive. But she did, often. She was young.

It was during this time, when they weren’t in bed together, that he thought he might further seduce her with jazz. He admired her playing but wanted to prise her loose from the tyranny of strict notation and long-dead genius. He played her Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” and bought her the sheet music. It wasn’t difficult to play. But her version, smooth and unaccented, sounded like an unremarkable piece by Debussy. That was fine, Jack told her. The great jazz masters adored and learned from him. She listened again, she persisted, she played what was in front of her, but she could not play jazz. No pulse, no instinct for syncopation, no freedom, her fingers numbly obedient to the time signature and notes as written. That was why she was studying law, she told her lover. Respect for the rules.

She gave up, but she did learn to listen, and it was Jarrett she came to admire above all others. She took Jack to hear him at the Colosseum in Rome. The technical facility, the effortless outpouring of lyrical invention as copious as Mozart’s, and here it was again after so many years, still holding her to the spot, reminding her of who she and Jack once playfully were. The music was artfully chosen.

She went along the hall and paused again at the entrance
to the sitting room. He had been busy. A couple of lamps with long-expired bulbs at last lit. Several candles around the room. The curtains drawn against the winter evening’s light rain and, for the first time in more than a year, a well-established fire in the grate, logs as well as coal. Jack was standing by it with a bottle of champagne in his hand. In front of him, on a low table, a plate of prosciutto, olives and cheese.

He was wearing a black suit, white shirt without a tie. Still sleek. He came over, put in her hand a champagne flute and filled it, then poured his own. His expression was severe as they raised and touched glasses.

“We don’t have much time.”

She took him to mean that soon they should be leaving to walk over to the Great Hall. It was madness to be drinking before a concert, but she didn’t care. She took a second mouthful and followed him to the fire. He offered her the plate, she took a lump of Parmesan, and they stood on each side of the fireplace, leaning against the mantelpiece. Like giant ornaments, she thought.

He said, “Who knows how much. Not many years. Either we start living again, really living, or we give up and accept it’s misery from here to the end.”

An old theme of his.
Carpe diem
. She raised her glass and said solemnly, “To living again.”

She saw the slight shift in his expression. Relief and, beyond it, something more intense.

He refilled her glass. “Concerning which, the dress is fabulous. You look beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

They held each other’s gaze until there was nothing to do but go toward each other and kiss. They kissed again. His hand was lightly on the small of her back and he did not move it down across her thigh as he used to do. He was taking this in stages, and his delicacy touched her. If a grand musical and social obligation had not been laid upon them, she did not doubt where this release would have led them. But her sheet music was behind her on the couch and their duty was to stay fully dressed. So they drew together tightly and kissed once more, then separated, picked up their glasses, touched them in silence and drank.