Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby) (60 page)

BOOK: Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby)

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‘So I still have my family around me,’ Sarah said, to the man beside her. ‘That’s the most important thing, really, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose it is,’ said Terry Bateson, watching anxiously as his youngest daughter carried six cups piled on top of each other into the kitchen. ‘Those are the people who really matter, after all.’

He studied Sarah critically, seeing the arm still in plaster, a half-healed scar on the side of her neck. She looked pale, he thought, thinner than he remembered, and there were lines on her face he hadn’t noticed before. ‘How are you coping, really?’

‘Me?’ She turned to face him, a wry smile playing on her lips. ‘Not so bad, all things considered. I wake up screaming in the night now and then, but that’s par for the course, so they tell me. I’ve got rid of the bike, at least - wrong image for a granny, Simon says. I hardly need it here, anyway.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. But I really meant ...’

‘How I’m coping with Michael’s death? Yes, I know.’ She looked away, at the young leaves on the trees on the riverside walk. ‘It hurts, of course, and I sit here shaking sometimes, picturing the way he went. That’s the worst, but ... I’m still here, with my family, and friends, and my career. He’d lost all of that, you know. So had Alison too. One crazy moment when they were kids had poisoned the rest of their lives. They never really recovered from it, either of them.’ She turned back and smiled at him. ‘I’m not like that, Terry. Never will be, I hope. Neither are you.’

‘No.’ Terry remembered how Sarah had nearly lost all hopes of a career when she’d become pregnant with Simon at the age of fifteen, and thought of his own trauma, too - the death of his wife. ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, so they say.’

‘If you let it, it does. But Terry, since you’re here, I wanted to ask - what’s become of my client? Former client, that is.’

‘Jason Barnes, you mean?’

‘Yes. Since he tried to murder me, I’m excused from representing him further. It’s a rule the Bar Council have introduced. Very humane of them.’

Terry smiled. She hadn’t lost her sense of humour. ‘He confessed, as you know. But he didn’t give us the full details until last week, when he came out of hospital. Your son Simon wasn’t exactly holding back.’

‘Reasonable force, Terry. He was rescuing his mother.’

‘Don’t worry, he won’t get prosecuted, we’re not that stupid. After all, I wouldn’t have been there to arrest Jason if he hadn’t called in. But anyway, this confession was quite satisfying, in its way.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it explained where we went wrong.’ Terry sighed. ‘You know we arrested a young sex offender, Peter Barton - the one who’d been stalking women and pestering them all around the city? Well, he made a full detailed confession too. He didn’t just claim to have killed Alison, he told us exactly how he’d done it, and almost everything he said matched the evidence. So we had to take him seriously. The one thing that threw us was a scrap of cloth on the barbed wire fence which we sent to be tested for DNA. When Peter confessed, we thought it must be his. But when FSS eventually found the cloth, which they’d lost, and tested it, it had Jason’s DNA on it, not Peter’s. If we’d known that before ...’ He shook his head.

‘You’d have arrested Jason before he did all this damage.’

‘If we could have found him, yes. At least he would have been our main suspect.’

‘So what actually happened that night, when Alison died?’

‘Well, Jason stole a car in Leeds, drove it to Crockey Hill, crept across the fields, and broke into Alison’s house. Then he murdered her almost exactly as Peter Barton described. He found her in her bath, dragged her downstairs, and hanged her. She probably confessed to him before he died; that’s how he found out that Michael was involved in Brenda’s death as well. So he stole her mobile phone and took a picture of her which he sent to Michael later. Then he drove to Leeds and torched the car, hoping her hanging would look like suicide. But what he didn’t realise, of course, was that this sad little pervert Peter Barton was watching his every move through the windows. Which was why he broke into the house later, fantasising that he’d done it all himself.’ Terry shook his head wearily. ‘The older I get, the more I think there’s no limit to the evil that people can get up to.’

‘Not everyone, Terry,’ Sarah said after a pause. ‘Most people just get along. And some even try to do good.’

‘Yes, well.’ Terry looked behind him into the flat, where a sudden squabble had erupted between his daughters over the last slice of chocolate cake. He turned to go in, with an apologetic smile at Sarah. ‘We can always try, can’t we?’

Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby) (60 page)

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