LOST SOULS. Neil White

needed sorting, there was always a lawyer willing to bill you for it. Crime had always been Sam’s thing, but when Harry Parsons had started out, he’d done everything from divorces to fighting evictions. As the firm grew, it sprouted departments. The criminal department was the most precarious, because the work was so unpredictable. Police budget cuts could lead to fewer arrests, or if a lawyer upset one of the bigger criminal families the department would find itself with fewer clients. The claims department was the money-spinner. It used to help people who called into the office, victims of real accidents. Now it just handled referrals from those claims farmers who advertised on television, the promise of free money slotted in between debt-firm commercials, and now the lawyers settled claims for people they never met.

      Harry Parsons himself still worked in the office, but he didn’t venture out much, working instead from a room along a dark corridor of worn carpet and faded paint. A local legend, he’d built up the practice from virtually nothing, but he ran it now from a distance, trusting the departments to deal with the day-to-day domestics. Everyone else was jostling for position: the old man was due to retire in a couple of years, and they were all hoping for a share when he went.

      They didn’t have the ace card that Sam held, though: he had married Harry’s daughter, Helena, and given him two grandchildren. As far as Sam was concerned, he was at the head of the queue.

      Sam was looking out of the window when he heard the other lawyers and clerks begin to trickle in. They gathered in a room along the corridor and drank coffee, exchanged insults. Sam would wander in when he finished what he was doing. He was on his third cup of coffee and he could already feel his heart thundering, but he needed the kick. He had a morning in court to get through and the broken sleep was getting to him. He looked round when he heard a knock on the door. It was Alison Hill, the newly qualified lawyer in the firm, spending some time in crime until she decided what she wanted to do with her career. She would move on, he had seen the ambition in her eyes, but until then Sam liked seeing her around the office. She wore her hair back in a ponytail, clasped by a black clip, and her blonde locks gleamed. Whenever they met, Sam automatically toyed with his wedding ring, felt himself smile too much. She was tall and elegant, with a bright and easy smile, her green eyes deep and warm.

      He nodded towards the window. ‘Do you know him?’

      Alison walked over and looked into the street. Sam could smell her perfume, something light and floral.

      She shook her head. ‘Never seen him before. Why, is he bothering you?’

      He shrugged it off, but as Alison turned away from the window, Sam noticed she had a file in her hand.

      ‘Everything okay?’ he asked.

      Alison looked down, almost as if she had forgotten she was holding it. ‘I’ve got this today, for trial,’ she said.

      ‘What is it?’

      ‘Johnny Jones, for assault.’

      ‘What’s the problem?’

      She looked awkward for a moment, and then said, ‘He seems guilty. I’ve looked at every angle and I can’t see a way out. He attacked the karaoke man because he missed his turn. Half the pub saw him do it, and it’s on CCTV.’

      ‘Sounds like a classy place.’

      She grimaced. ‘It reads like the worst night of your life.’

      Sam smiled, found himself playing the elder statesman. ‘Don’t worry about Johnny Jones. He’ll be convicted, guaranteed, but he won’t listen to your advice. He’ll want an acquittal out of pity, but he won’t get one. Just call it character-building.’

      ‘How come? It’s a complete no-hoper.’

      ‘Would you rather lose a no-hoper or a dead-cert winner?’

      She didn’t answer.

      ‘Nothing you can do will get him an acquittal,’ Sam continued, ‘and the prosecution will give him a hard time for having the trial. He will get the verdict he deserves, and maybe even get the sentence he deserves. But’, Sam raised his eyebrows at her, ‘if you mess up a dead-cert winner, when you have made promises you thought you could keep, you’ll see your client’s eyes every night when you go to sleep, that look in his eyes as he gets taken down the steps. Fear, anger, confusion. Trust me, that’s worse.’

      Alison sighed and then smiled. ‘Thanks, Sam.’

      ‘Any time.’ As she went to leave, Sam said to her, ‘Don’t forget the magic words, when you get to your feet.’

      She looked confused. ‘Magic words?’

      ‘“Client’s instructions.” When you are asked if the “not guilty” plea stands, just say that those are your client’s instructions. It just gives a hint that you don’t believe in what you are doing.’

      ‘Why should I do that? It won’t help Johnny Jones.’

      ‘Forget about your client. You’re the one who matters, and for your sake the court needs to know which one of you is the idiot. There is only one thing worse than a lawyer making a hopeless application, and that’s a lawyer not knowing it is hopeless.’

      ‘Bang on the table, you mean?’

      Sam grinned. He remembered that from law school, the old adage that if you are strong on the law, argue the law, and if you are strong on the facts, argue the facts. If you are strong on neither, bang on the table.

      ‘Bang it hard,’ said Sam. ‘Take every point, regardless of how pointless, just so that the punter thinks you’re a fighter. He won’t know you’re talking nonsense, but if you fight the case he will think you’re the best young lawyer in Blackley.’

      Alison nodded, looking more relaxed now. ‘Okay.’

      ‘Remember, you’re Harry’s golden girl.’

      She blushed, although they both knew that there was some truth in that. Helena, Sam’s wife, had once been a lawyer at Parsons, but had given it up when she’d had children. It seemed like Harry saw Alison as Helena’s replacement.

      Sam looked back out of the window. The old man was still there.

      ‘If I get killed today, remember his face.’

      ‘Can I have your office?’

      ‘Get out.’

      She was laughing as she went.

      When he was alone in the room again, Sam watched the street life. The pavement was getting busy with lawyers from other firms, big egos in a forgotten Lancashire town. They barely noticed the drunks who congregated at the end of the street and shared cheap cigarettes and stolen sherry.

      He watched the lawyers walk by for a while, waved at the ones who looked up. When he looked beyond them, he noticed that the old man had gone. He checked his watch and then stepped away from the window. He made a note of the time. Like most lawyers, he lived his life in six-minute segments.

       Chapter Six

      I watched Bobby as he watched television. Parenting was all new to me, but I loved Laura McGanity, and she and Bobby came as a pair.

      Ambition had taken me to London a few years earlier, and I had fulfilled that, carved out a small niche in the crime circuit: Jack Garrett, crime reporter. It had come at a price, though, most nights lost chasing down drug raids or shootings, or writing exclusives on scams and gangsters, losing sleep as I waited for the door to crash in.

      But then my father was killed a year ago. We had grown apart before that; we were like strangers when I went south, but since his death I had needed to come home to Lancashire. I didn’t know why, couldn’t work it out. Maybe it was as simple as guilt, trying to make up for the years when I had been away, chasing excitement, chasing dreams. Whatever the reason, I was