Chapter 97: The Trade
The offer came in a room with a table too large for four people.
Fourteenth floor, glass on two sides, carpet tiles the colour of wet ash.
I counted the exits without meaning to. One door. One fire door behind a coat stand that had not been moved in years.
Ruth Okonjo sat on my left with a legal pad she never wrote on while clients were watching.
Opposite us sat a man called Hallam, who acted for the family, and a younger woman whose name I did not catch and never learned.
Hallam had a folder in front of him. He did not open it. He talked about it instead.
“There's a version of this,” he said, “where everybody goes home.”
He sat with his weight forward on his forearms, the posture of a man who believes he is being generous.
The version was this.
Damon would provide a further statement to the Crown. It would soften. He would say he could no longer be certain how he came to be on the floor.
Without him the prosecution had twenty-two guests who had been drinking and a dress collar with a tear in it.
The Crown would review the case. The Crown would very likely offer no evidence. The charge would fall away.
In exchange I would sign two documents.
The first settled the financial claims from the marriage. Ruth had read it twice. It was ungenerous and lawful.
The second was four pages long and used the phrase “the Willow Bank matter” nine times.
It said I would not communicate with any regulator, local authority, coroner's officer, journalist, or member of a resident's family regarding the operations of Wrenfield Care Group.
It said I would return every copy of every document and confirm in writing that I had retained none.
It said that none of this constituted an admission of anything by anybody.
Hallam used the word commercially three times.
Ruth asked whether the second document was a condition of the first.
Hallam said the documents were a package.
Ruth wrote one word on her pad. I could read it upside down. It said package.
I had knelt on Margot Ashford's floor eleven times in three years and had never once been given a reason I could argue with.
This was the first time anybody in that family had put the price on the front of the thing.
“Can I ask a factual question,” I said.
Hallam turned his hands over. Please.
“The twenty-seven medication records. How many of those people are still alive?”
He said that was not a question he was in a position to answer.
“It's twenty-two,” I said. “It was twenty-four in March.”
I looked at the folder and thought about sleeping in a room nobody was evicting me from.
My right hand was flat on my thigh under the table. It had been there since I sat down.
Twelve years of putting that hand back had taught me what it costs to want a thing and not take it.
This was the reverse. This was being handed a thing and having to not take it.
“No,” I said.
Hallam did what men do, which is to treat the word as the opening of a negotiation.
He said the trial estimate was five days. He said the Crown's case was not weak. He mentioned my record.
He said the word custody once, mildly, the way you mention weather.
Ruth said, “My client has answered.”
“She has answered quickly,” Hallam said.
“She has answered,” Ruth said.
I said: “The offer is that I trade twenty-seven people for one person. I'm the one person. It's a bad trade, and I know I won't be offered a better one.”
That was the longest sentence I spoke in that room.
The younger woman looked at me for the first time.
Hallam closed the folder he had never opened, which took less time than it should have.
He said the offer would remain open for fourteen days and after that it would not.
He said the family's position would then be, in his phrase, fully defended.
In the lift Ruth stood with her back against the mirror.
“You understand what I have to say to you now.”
“Say it.”
“You had an offer that would have ended the criminal proceedings. You refused it. I record that in writing and you sign that you were advised.”
“Fine.”
“And I have to tell you the twenty-seven will move at the speed of a regulator, and you will move at the speed of a court, and the court is faster.”
The lift stopped at the eighth floor and took on two men, and we said nothing after that.
Outside it had begun to rain in the flat vertical way it does in February.
I took the bus. The car was in Julian's name and had gone back to Julian.
Ten days later the listing office sent Ruth a date.
The date was the twelfth of March.