They were a mile from the Snaresbrook complex. Nathaniel Wilson had walked over and, after his lengthy association with players in serious and organized crime and a lifetime of sitting in court listening to police evidence, he had good perceptions of the arts of close surveillance. At one moment he had been sitting on the bench behind the barrister, the next he had been gone — as if needing a comfort call — and he'd been walking hard to be clear of the place. Only if he'd given a telegraphed warning, and looked furtive, would there have been the possibility of a tail. He'd done the routines including two dog-legs in side-streets and was happy enough that his security was intact. The business needed total secrecy if the Nobbler was to have a chance.
'I don't come cheap, Nat.'
'But your reputation says you're the best, Benny, and no one's expecting you to do it for charity rates.'
'Those blaggers, are they dumb? I thought blagging, going into jewellery shops waving guns, went out with the Ark. Why don't they do coke, smack, like everyone else?'
'See that as beneath them. I think it's the adrenaline rush…No, don't ask me. They make a healthy living from whatever they do, pleasantly healthy. I'm not authorized to bargain, but I'm permitted to offer — take it or leave it — the sum of fifty K win or lose on a retrial and paid up front, a further twenty-five K paid in the event one juror becomes the Great Persuader and it's an acquittal. Then there would be, also up front, twenty-five K as an inducement should it be a carrot rather than a stick. How does that sound?'
'That's all cash?'
'Cash and handed over on trust.'
'Handed over when?'
'Tomorrow — it's in place.'
'When I'm satisfied I don't argue.'
A hand snaked across the table, took the solicitor's, shook it gently, and the reverberation of the deal's conclusion slid through Nathaniel Wilson, as the implications invaded his whole body. Why? Why get involved? Something about perceived slights from established lawyers in the distant past, something about sneered and curled lips when he was young, had had suit trousers with a shiny seat, and had put together a basic law degree at night classes and from correspondence courses. Truth to tell, he had some admiration for the criminal classes, their esprit, their limited code of honour, even their bloody-minded — arrogant and obstinate — determination to breach the system: it was not something he often thought of. He leaned closer across the empty coffee cups. 'I've done some notes on the jury. There's five males and five women — does the sex matter?'
He made a show of ignorance that was not justified. Nathaniel Wilson had not used Benny Edwards as a Nobbler before but he'd been on defence teams who had, and he could recognize that they now moved on to high-risk territory. Yes, he knew very well what the answer would be to his question.
'Carrot and stick, right? I don't like using women. Dangle the carrot; but women aren't that interested in cash — they don't worry about the mortgage arrears, and don't give a stuff if the credit card's stacked with debt. Wave the stick and women are likely to throw the big wobble, tears and screaming, shrieking and howling, and then it's all gone out of control. No, men are the better bet…Five, you say?'
That morning, in court, before he slid off his seat, Nathaniel Wilson's note-taking had not involved the evidence given by Ozzie Curtis. Instead he had jotted down a description of each juror and their clothing. He pushed the single sheet of paper across the table. The Nobbler scanned it. His finger rested on the new foreman for a moment, then eased on down the sparse pen-portrait of the Afro-Caribbean, the young, keen one, the moaner who looked to have a permanent ache in his ear or his tooth, then to the one who could barely stay awake and wore a purple shirt with bloody sandals. When he'd read it, absorbed it, the Nobbler took a cigarette-lighter from his pocket and burned the paper, leaving the flakes to fall into the table's ashtray. Then he gave a first name and an address to which, the next day, a suitcase of banknotes should be delivered.
Nathaniel Wilson hurried back to court eighteen.
Eight more full working days to go.
Sitting in his small, closed-in territory as though he were a subsistence farmer with minimal ground, Naylor's mind scraped over the wretched, irritating little spat before he had left home that morning. The sniped exchange with Anne weighed on him.
'Dickie, you're just a sore-headed bear and making a fuss about the inevitable. For Heaven's sake, everyone has to retire and pack it in. Daddy accepted it — and started a new life — and so can you,' she'd said, exasperated.
Her father's new life, and he'd responded churlishly with it, had been three mornings a week on a south-coast links course and membership of the golf club's catering committee. It had gone downhill from there. Unwisely, he'd commented that he wanted more from the future than worrying about the price of breaded cod fillets served up in a golf club bar and whether tartare sauce should be served in a bowl or from sealed sachets. She'd retaliated that her father had carried a burden of greater responsibility when he'd finished than Dickie had ever been given, and he'd flounced away to the cupboard under the stairs for his raincoat and umbrella. He'd been bending to pick up his briefcase from its place under the hall table when she'd punched him, verbally, in the flab of his stomach.
'Oh, I forgot — Mary in your office rang yesterday, quite slipped my memory'
'I was sitting a dozen feet from her all day. What did she want that she couldn't have said to me?'
'God, you're in a foul mood. Mary— she seems a sweet girl — rang, behind your back, to talk about the leaving bash they're giving you, and what you'd like as a present. The DG can't make it, and the deputy DG is on leave, but one of the assistant DGs hopes to be there…Anyway, your present. Well, I said that we had clocks littered all over the house, and didn't want another. I also said that we had a perfectly good cut-glass drinks set and no room for more of the same. I suggested a greenhouse, not a big one, but where you can grow tomatoes in the summer and keep the geraniums and fuchsias in the winter, somewhere you can potter. That's what you're getting — Mary thought it an excellent idea. There'll be vouchers for it.'
He should have gone on out through the front door, after kissing Anne's cheek, and should have started out on a brisk walk to the station. He'd turned. Said malevolently, 'And what did Daddy have, bloody golf clubs?'
'You know he did.'
'And was the director general at his bash to make the speech and hand them over?'
'You know he was.'
Then, too late, he'd tried to do the kiss but her head had turned away and his lips had pursed against thin air. He'd snorted and gone. It had been a cross he'd carried since his first day with the Service, thirty-nine years before, that his father-in-law had not only been an iconic counterintelligence figure with legendary status and the right to take an early-evening sherry or gin with successive DGs, but had put a word in an ear that had ensured his son-in-law was recruited for employment as a junior general-duties intelligence officer. He had never matched the importance in the Service carried by Anne's father — but only when he goaded her was he reminded of his failings. Her, father, before heading off to the golf links, had tracked traitors, the pathetic, dangerous creatures who had sold out their loyalty to their country and passed military secrets to the agencies of the Soviet Union. Those creatures had gone to the Old Bailey for high-profile trials and inordinately long sentences of imprisonment. Dickie Naylor, after thirty-nine years' hacking at anything thrown down on his desk, had never rivalled her father's favoured position. The proof of it for all to see: the top cats would not be at his party, and he would be getting a flat-pack greenhouse — if he were ever able to assemble it — for tomatoes and frost-endangered plants. All arranged by Mary Reakes.