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

as their case is called; they walk into the dock, the door is locked behind them, the guard takes them out to a small anteroom to be searched, then they return to the dock. Andre, on the other hand, would be brought directly from the Scrubs to one of Snaresbrook’s twenty-two cells.

In legal aid trials, it’s quite rare for solicitors to actually come into court, but Lydia had told me she was planning on flitting between our two trials as well as those of the additional defendants on her agenda. She walked into the Bar mess sometime after our coffee cups were empty, struggling to carry a weighty stack of loose paperwork under one arm, and cheerily asked how our weekends had been.

‘My weekend?’ Zara replied blankly. ‘Thanks to the prosecution opposing bail, I spent almost every minute of it checking my phone to see if my client was still alive. So yeah, you know, I’ve had better.’

Lydia pulled a wish I hadn’t asked sort of face, then turned her smile on me. ‘Elliot?’

‘Nothing much. Work.’

‘Ah, of course.’ She repeated the same expression. ‘Work and the dog.’

‘Looks like you have a lot on yourself this morning,’ I noted, gesturing to her paperwork.

‘It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Trials are organised online with access to the case papers via computer, but the defendants aren’t allowed to have a computer in the dock. Every week I have to print them all off and dish out hard copies. I’m developing biceps like Schwarzenegger. Still, every client is another bill paid.’

Zara’s eyes jerked towards her; I knew that cold look well enough by now to recognise the danger, but Lydia didn’t notice. She was still grinning when she walked away and left us in our thoughtful silence.

For the entire weekend, I’d been debating whether or not to tell Zara about the threat finding its way into my former letter box. After seeing the concern already behind her eyes, I decided not to add to it.

It was about nine o’clock when I changed into the familiar silk and horsehair. I bundled the rest of my belongings into a locker and then clocked in for the day on the robing room’s computer. Zara had gone down to the cells to see Andre, while I’d agreed to meet Charli in a small conference room outside our court before anybody else arrived. She was already waiting by the entrance when I got there, gazing vacantly down at her shoes. She looked miserable. As soon as I saw her, any longing I might have had to rant about Deacon withered to a feeble choke.

‘Charli?’

She looked up gradually. She’d dressed smartly in a dark grey suit, but her eyes were raw, glassy and crimson as if she’d been crying all weekend. She didn’t speak. I swallowed and opened the door and she followed me at a shuffle.

‘It always comes in threes, doesn’t it?’ was the first thing she said upon sitting. I had the strangest idea that she was referring to my car; if she hadn’t heard about it first-hand from her boyfriend by now, then she would almost certainly have found out from her brother at the garage. But, of course, she was not. ‘First, I’m arrested for a crime I know nothing about,’ she said. ‘I lose my job because of it. And now, right before I’m due in Crown court, this …’

I bent forward to sit my briefcase between my shoes. ‘Has something else happened?’

She nodded, just a twitch, and then sighed. ‘Biggie, our dog. He died over the weekend.’

‘Oh.’ My stomach lurched, thinking of Scout. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Was he old?’

‘Only a puppy.’

‘Jesus. What was it? Traffic?’

‘No, nothing like that. He got poorly.’

‘Poorly?’ Something about this word struck me as peculiar. I assumed it was simply because I’d seen this dog, albeit through a frosted door, and such a sweet, juvenile expression did not correlate with my memory at all; then my thoughts turned to something a great deal more sinister. ‘I must admit that Biggie didn’t strike me as being particularly sickly when he was trying to take your front door off its hinges last week.’

‘No, that’s the worst thing about it. We’ve never had a problem before. With his health, I mean. Not one. It was all so sudden. It happened so … so quickly …’ She began to cry but the tears were small, as if her ducts were almost spent. She reached into her bag and retrieved a tissue, with which she dabbed the make-up from her face in dark umber patches. ‘He must’ve got hold of something in that damned allotment. I had him tied up out there on Saturday. All I did was take my eye off him for five minutes to nip into the house. Five minutes …’

In my stomach, a lump was growing heavy. ‘Something in your allotment?’

‘That’s all I can think of. It has to be. I don’t know what. Some poison, I guess.’

‘Poison?’

Charli blew her nose into the tissue. ‘Leeks, onions, garlic, they’re all poisonous to dogs. Grapes, even. Chocolate, but the kids know better than to leave it laying around. I’m sure they do. Slug pellets, maybe. All those weeds at the back behind the fencing, it wouldn’t surprise me if half of those were toxic, but I’ve always made sure his chain couldn’t reach that far. Always. Then again, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was one of the neighbours. They all hated him. But he was harmless. He was part of the family, even though we’ve only had him for a few weeks. He was family, and to die like that …’

‘Where did it happen? At the vet’s?’

‘No. I came back across the road and he was on his side, shaking in the plants. Convulsing. He started throwing up blood. I screamed for Deacon, and the kids came across, hysterical. He was dead in minutes.’

‘Sounds horrendous.’

She nodded, catching the last of her tears, and then scrunched the tissue to a ball and returned