Post Mortem by Gary Bell (free children's ebooks pdf .TXT) 📕

herself shortly after we’d been checked into the prison’s electronic system.

‘You can mention him, you know. Hazeem.’

We were sitting in an empty holding room awaiting a guard to lead us further into the building. There weren’t enough staff members to go around, it seemed, especially now that one had found her way onto my schedule. We’d dumped all of our belongings into lockers except for the standard: Zara’s loose case papers, plain paper for writing and two pens. Above us, there were two more cameras. Only one still had its lens.

Zara had mentioned her cousin Hazeem to me only once before, not long after we’d met, but I remembered the details well enough. An argument between teenagers had turned into a fight, and the fight had ended in a fatal stabbing. A case of mistaken identity led to Zara’s cousin being picked up for conspiracy to murder. His counsel talked him into entering a plea for a reduced sentence. It was a poor, idle defence and Hazeem ended up in the Scrubs.

‘Your cousin,’ I said. ‘He was sent here, but didn’t he live in … where was it again? Birmingham?’

‘He was studying medicine at UCL.’

‘Ah. How long was he in here …?’

‘Before he killed himself?’ She was staring blankly at the locked door ahead. ‘Five months. He pleaded guilty to a crime he didn’t commit on his shitty counsel’s shittier advice and died a drug addict in this shithole five months later.’

I looked down at my shoes. I didn’t want to be sitting here any more. I felt guilty for coming in the first place. Zara believed I was here to help, as if I possessed some mystical talent for gauging strangers that might earn her client bail or provide a winning defence by the end of our meeting. I hadn’t told her about the smuggling case because I hadn’t wanted her to feel used when I’d abruptly agreed to join her this afternoon. After a long pause, I spoke. ‘This client of yours … I trust you didn’t go out of your way to represent him as a way of, I don’t know, perhaps –’

‘He deserves the best defence I can give,’ she replied tightly, ‘same as anybody else. That’s all there is to it.’

Her voice was neither reproachful nor hurt. Just oddly flat, in a way I’d rarely heard in her before.

‘Good, because that’s all you can do, remember? Your best.’

I dropped a hand briefly onto her shoulder. It was supposed to be something warm and paternal, but without having had much experience of such things it landed heavier than I would have hoped, like a slab of meat dropped onto hard bone. Still, I saw a murmur of gratitude lighten her features, and that was about all I could’ve hoped for.

It was another ten minutes before we were led deeper into the prison. That’s where the cracks began to show. What was originally built to be the best prison in the world was now widely considered the worst in the country. We passed walls engraved with graffiti ranging from coarse doodles and slapdash gang signs to outright death threats. The floors felt grimy beneath my shoes and many of the lamps were dead in their fittings. Shattered windows were held together by wire-mesh innards, with broken shards available for exploiting.

Zara’s client wasn’t faring much better by the time we found him hunched over a table in one of the prison’s small conference rooms.

His face was buried in his arms and it took me a moment to realise that he was, in fact, fast asleep when we entered. Only when the door was shut behind us did he jump to attention, snapping upright in a kind of cautious terror.

‘Miss …’ He sighed, easing at the sight of her. ‘Wasn’t sure you was still coming.’ His face revealed the colourful leftovers of a fairly recent hiding. His left eye was swollen to a blackened slit and his dark skin blushed in nuances of yellow, green and purple across his cheekbones.

‘Andre!’ Zara gasped. ‘What happened now?’

‘What, this?’ The young man shrugged it off coolly as if he’d hardly noticed taking a good kicking. ‘Nothing. You know how it is.’

Zara dropped the papers to clasp a hand over her mouth, and leaned closer across the table to inspect the damage. ‘Tell me you’ve reported this!’

‘Oh, yeah.’ He managed a pained smile. ‘They’ve got some crack team coming down tomorrow. Bringing Sky News, cameramen, newspapers and shit … What do you think?’

‘Was it because of the case? Those other men who were –’

‘No,’ he interrupted sharply. His gaze turned onto me.

I was standing silently in front of the closed door with my arms folded, watching their repartee closely. He was obviously very happy to see her, and I couldn’t blame him for that. There is value in a familiar face that you don’t realise until you’re deprived of them completely. That was something I learned during my own time locked up.

Where Charli Meadows might have challenged society’s archetype of the inner-city drug dealer, Andre Israel had the unfortunate look – as far as any jury might be concerned – of a young man who had been rolled right out of a statistician’s paperwork: he was black, twenty-one years old, born and raised in Newham, east London, with a gold canine tooth in the left side of his mouth, a patchy, juvenile goatee and hair that might once have been stylishly faded, which had now grown out to a standard jailhouse fuzz. His plain T-shirt hung off his chest and shoulders as if he’d recently embarked on a crash diet or fallen gravely ill. His knuckles were clean; he’d had no chance to fight back.

‘Oh, sorry.’ Zara twisted round in her chair. ‘Andre Israel, this is Elliot Rook.’

He started a little but held on to whatever nonchalance was his standard setting. ‘The silk man from that serial killer madness?’

I arched my eyebrows disapprovingly at Zara. She’d already looked away, but I could see