The Red Road (3 page)

The door to the court snapped open and Morrow jumped in her seat. The macer, the court usher, looked in. She was slight, swamped by her black gown, dirty blond hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. She looked hassled and tired.

‘DI Alex Morrow.’

The macer disappeared down the steps and Morrow heard a silence fall in the courtroom beyond. Everyone in the court would be watching the doorway and every second’s delay gave her a bigger build-up.

Morrow stood up, carrying her briefcase, wishing it wasn’t so big. She couldn’t leave it in the witness waiting room or in the car. It had her laptop in it and losing those files was a sackable offence. She had to take it with her but it looked as if she was going on a short holiday.

Through the door, down five steps and into the well of the court.

Wrong shoes. Her solid heels sounded like a slow handclap on the wooden floor. Michael Brown was staring at her; she could see his outline from the corner of her eye. She felt, again, intense discomfort at his presence and tiptoed up to the witness box. She kept her eyes on the well of the court as she bent to tuck her briefcase against the side of the dock.

Standing up, she looked around the room. The jury were already a comfortably coherent group, had notebooks and pens out. A roll of mints was being surreptitiously passed along the back row.

Everyone official looked to the noter, sitting just below the judge. He nodded to all that the recording equipment was working and they could start.

Drawing a breath, the judge led Morrow in the oath. She had said it a hundred times. She followed the prompts fluidly, taking in the room in her peripheral vision.

Michael Brown was sitting in the dock, staring at her, trying to catch her eye. It was important not to look back. None of her testimony should look personal and Brown made her so uncomfortable that it might register on her face. The jury would see that she was afraid of him. They might suspect that it had coloured the case against him. It hadn’t. The case was good, she knew that.

Most cops at her level knew to just hope for the best and expect the worst but Morrow was too deep into it: she wanted Brown to get a long sentence. She was surprised to see a journalist there, in the press seats which were provided with a flip-down table. He looked real too, not a camouflage-trousered crimezine journalist, but wearing a shirt and a jacket. She couldn’t imagine why he was there as he couldn’t print any of it.

Oath done, James Finchley, the prosecuting counsel, stood up and went over to the podium next to the jury. Taking his time, Finchley opened his manila folder, looked through two sheets of paper, turned a page over, making them wait.

Finchley was short and priggish. His black gown always looked pressed, his wig freshly powdered, his diction clipped. Morrow knew that out of court he was warmer than he seemed in court. He was thorough but dull to watch.

Anton Atholl for the defence was quite a different man. Atholl was a minor celebrity and an earl, but people liked him because he didn’t use his title. Exploiting his flair for drama and loopholes, he gave angry interviews to the local news, drank prodigious amounts and wore his wavy grey hair too long. He would certainly appeal when Brown was found guilty. That’s why Prosecutor Fiscal put Finchley up for the prosecution: thorough but dull.

Today Atholl seemed to have dressed himself while spinning around; everything was slightly askew: his wig, his gown, the papers in his file. Clever, thought Morrow. Atholl was the only interesting thing to look at in the room. He was contrasting himself with Finchley. Even she was looking at him.

Finchley looked up from his folder, asked Morrow to say her name, which station she worked at and detail her length of service. He asked the questions in lawyerese, curt and wordy at the same time, conventions of a profession which valued precision but billed by the hour.

And on that day in May, at what time precisely, could she say, was the warrant for a search of the premises executed, exactly?

Morrow said that they knocked on the door at seven thirty-five a.m. Some of the jury members glanced over at Brown, sitting in the dock. They were wondering if he would be up at that time, what sort of pyjamas he wore, maybe, trying to picture the scene.

Brown watched her from the witness box and her eye flicked over him. He looked grey, not at all the suntanned bully they’d spent hour after hour questioning. But he’d already had four months in custody and was flanked by two burly security guards who had been outside enjoying the summer.

Too late, after her eye had left him, Brown tried to sneer. He glanced over at her now, trying to make eye contact, almost pleading with her to look back. Morrow kept her eyes on Finchley.

Finchley moved on to a series of questions about the search of Brown’s home: on that date how many officers did she have with her? Seven other officers. Were some of those officers from the armed division? They were. Why were those officers there? It was suspected that Mr Brown had firearms in his house.

She remembered the house vividly: a brand new suburban four bedroom with en suite this, en suite that. It was on a luxe estate in a shit area. Brown was living in one half of one bedroom, everything else in the house was untouched. He had kitted his living space out exactly like a Shotts prison cell: TV and single bed, small wardrobe, a table and chair. Brown grew up in prison. He’d only been out on licence for three or four years.

Was Mr Brown helpful during the search? Not at all, he refused to unlock the padlocked rooms and physically tried to restrain two officers. Did they find arms in Mr Brown’s house? Not in the house but they were found buried in grounds behind the house.

Was there proof that Mr Brown knew they were there? They had his fingerprints on them. And they were in his garden? Yes, she said. They were in his garden.

Atholl smirked and scribbled on his notes. He knew she and Finchley were playing a game, implying that Brown knew. Possession of a gun, even without knowledge, now carried a mandatory five-year minimum. A postman with a parcel containing a gun could get five years. But guns buried in the garden didn’t count as possession. Brown burying them in the garden was a response to cases the ink was barely dry on. Someone was carefully keeping abreast of the case law and she didn’t think it was Brown.

Finchley moved it on: what else did they find, therein? A lot of money, shrink-wrapped. Why was that significant? It suggested that the money was about to be—

‘Objection.’ Atholl was on his feet, muttering about conjecture.

Fine. How much money? Half a million in twenty-pound notes. What else did they find that was of interest to the police? Forty iPhones, still in their boxes. Where did they come from? They had been legitimately bought in a number of shops. Each had a receipt sellotaped to it.

Atholl was on his feet again: if the iPhones had been legitimately bought they could not be said to be ‘of interest to the police’. He was wrong, and he knew it, but Finchley conceded. The Crown would have to present another case if they went into the iPhones, a complex case they knew about but had no evidence of.

Drugs money was moved out of the UK through international networks called hundi. A Scottish heroin dealer could visit a hundi man in Scotland and deliver three-quarters of a million pounds in cash. Within a few hours, or even less, the equivalent in Pakistani rupees would be delivered by the hundi contact, often via motorcycle courier to a dealer in Lahore. It was not always drugs transactions, though – sometimes perfectly innocent informal transfers of cash by people with no bank account or faith in conventional banking. But the innocent and the criminal were indistinguishable because the hundi networks had become so complex and fragmented: the cashier was now separate from the hundi man in Pakistan, debt enforcers were separate again and hardly knew who they were working for. Brown was one of many pawns and over the course of their interviews Morrow had become convinced that he knew nothing about who or what he was involved with. Someone knew though, and some lawyer was giving up-to-the-minute legal advice about guns and boundaries, about buying iPhones and sellotaping the receipts to them.

They knew that the forty iPhones would be sent to Pakistan as an end-of-the-quarter settling up between the two hundi contacts. They all knew Brown was the fall guy, the cannon fodder, holding the phones and guns. Only a disposable foot soldier ever held the guns. But they had no evidence and Brown had no interest in helping them lift the veil between the lawyers and the clients. He needed the bad-boy credit points for his triumphant return to prison.

Finchley looked slowly through his file and Morrow shuffled on her feet. She didn’t like being on someone else’s turf. The formality, the wigs, the gowns, the archaic language, the accompanying solicitor to whisper to; all of that was designed to let everyone know this was their turf, they were the big boys in this playground.

The macer brought over an evidence bag for her to look at: a clear bag containing a single gun. Everyone in the court shrank back from it. Morrow agreed with Finchley that she had witnessed it being put into the evidence bag and that it was indeed an SA80 assault rifle.

SA80s were standard issue to service personnel in conflict zones abroad. They were automatics, had thirty-round clips, and sights perfect for snap shooting, which meant swinging around and blowing away someone you’d barely had time to look at. The guns had the ID numbers scratched crudely off the barrels but they sliced through the metal and found the number in the deep indentation from the stamp. They had all been lost during the conflict in Afghanistan, where 90 per cent of the world’s heroin came from. Someone was bringing them back and hawking them to gangsters. She was disturbed at how powerful the guns were, that and their history: they had all been used in the sand and dirt of a conflict zone. Morrow felt as though a little of that distant overseas chaos was seeping back onto her turf.

From the corner of her eye, Morrow saw Brown sitting up tall to see the bag.

The macer saw him shift too and stiffened, the security guards sat straighter, the judge leaned forward, everyone suddenly aware that this was the sort of firepower Brown had at his disposal. Brown sat back and Morrow imagined that he was pleased by the fearful atmosphere in the room. He relished the discomfort of others.

Finchley alone didn’t flinch. He rolled through the weapon’s specifications, asking her to agree with them as the macer put the assault rifle safely away. Everyone in the courtroom stood down a little.

Brown’s fingerprints had been found on the money, the iPhones and the guns. Finchley only asked Morrow about her part in the evidence chain: no, Brown hadn’t touched any of them when they were brought out. They’d ask the fingerprint expert to give evidence on the rest of it.

Finchley looked backwards and forwards through his notes, being thorough, being dull. Morrow stole a glance at Brown and saw him whisper to the guard next to him. He looked worried, spoke urgently behind his hand.

Finchley decided that he’d finished, packed his notes neatly into the folder. As he made his way back to his seat the security guard next to Brown beckoned him over and whispered something to him.

Lord Anton Atholl rose, took a sip of water and a small smile rippled across his face. He lifted a messy file and began to speak as he strode across the room.

‘DI Morrow,’ his sonorous voice rumbled around the room, ‘can you tell me something?’

He sauntered to the jury’s side as if he’d spontaneously decided that he wanted to go there and be near them. Actually, it was where he was required to stand. ‘How
long
did you say you had been in the service?’

Atholl wasn’t looking at her, but at the jury. The jury, she was pleased to see, were not looking back at him. They were looking at her.

Morrow answered: ‘Um, coming up for twelve years.’

He nodded, keeping it conversational. ‘I see. And in that
time
have you, yourself, ever attended a warranted search where the subject of the search was
themselves
happy, and willing, to facilitate yourself, or whomever else was conducting that search, to come into their home and/or place of business?’ Atholl raised his bushy eyebrows, incredulous. He had a tic, she’d been told by another officer, of speaking quickly, sounding argumentative, trying to get you off balance. Morrow was good at this game. She did this all the time. She let him wait for the answer, pretending to ponder.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m not really clear what you mean.’

From the corner of her eye she saw Finchley on his tiptoes at the bench, whispering up to the noter.

Atholl affected surprise at her statement. He gave a little laugh towards the jury, currying support. He paused and rephrased: ‘Is it
usual
for a person having their house searched at seven thirty in the morning, by eight officers, some of whom are armed and wearing bullet proof clothing, to simply
throw
the doors open and invite those officers in?’

She thought for a moment, and answered in kind. ‘In my experience, you really can’t say what’s usual or unusual. Every search is different.’

He swung to face her. ‘A simple yes or no will suffice.’

Again, she let him wait. She took a breath. ‘I can’t answer that with a yes or no.’

‘It’s very simple.’ He looked at her angrily. ‘Yes or no: at seven thirty a.m. do most people welcome a search, by eight officers, of their home or not?’

Atholl was making a mistake using this technique on a police officer with her experience. It was a member of the public question.

‘Yes,’ she said, and left it.

‘“
Yes
”?’ He gave them suppressed outrage.

‘I can think of instances where people have been welcoming when we arrived with search warrants. So sometimes: yes. Also, sometimes no, but you said I have to choose one. So I did.’

Atholl looked at her then, a slow-rising eyebrow acknowledging that he’d been trumped. He liked her. She could tell.

‘DI Morrow, I find that
very
hard to
believe
,’ he said with finality.