‘It’s still a workplace and a place the public come when they need help. They could jazz things up a bit; some prints and, yes, softer chairs would be nice.’

  ‘You mean a bit like at the dentist?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  Constance giggled. ‘You suggest that to Dawson. I’m sure he’d agree.’

  ‘Talking about Dawson, I just wish he’d hurry up. Did you tell him we’d be here early?’

  ‘He said he’d do his best. He knows we’re in court this morning.’

  Then, just as the hands of the utilitarian clock on the wall shifted to two minutes past the hour, Charlie Dawson arrived, stamping his feet on the mat. This time there was no mistaking the all-pervading grey hue of his skin, the bloodshot eyes and the shuffle, as he passed them and led the way to his office.

  ‘You want to know about the visitor we had last night?’ he said.

  ‘Anything you can tell us. Have you reopened your enquiry? Are you going to stop Jaden’s trial?’

  Dawson sat down and switched on his PC. He unlocked his drawer and pulled out some papers, which he quickly perused.

  ‘OK. Here’s what we have. Male Caucasian, late twenties, walked in here around 9pm. I had gone home but they called me back in. Very agitated; said he wanted to talk to someone confidentially about a murder. His name is Luke Smith and he’s a games designer for a company called Valiant. They make computer games.’

  Judith and Constance exchanged glances.

  ‘He told me this long story about how his boss, one Eric Daniels, is a bit of a psycho, into kung fu and he knew Elizabeth Sullivan.’

  ‘Did he now?’

  ‘Apparently, she posed as a wealthy widow, interested in investing in Valiant; took Eric in; he wined and dined her and showed her their business plan. I would have just told him to get lost, called him a crank, but we’d just found those messages on her phone I sent over. You know – the ones from “Eric Valiant”.’

  ‘Yes. We made the link too. Do you think he killed Liz?’

  ‘This is where it gets a bit woolly. She was rumbled by Valiant’s finance guy as a spy, and they stopped seeing each other. Eric started telling Luke, when he was drunk, that he had “sorted her out”; that kind of thing. That’s why Luke thinks his boss might have killed her. Again, we might still have thought it was nothing. We all know that people say lots of things to their mates in pubs. But he also told us this Eric Daniels drives a very distinctive car, a black Porsche with personalised plates, and PC Thomas remembered the CCTV searches we did at the time picking up on a black Porsche in the area that evening. The boys are looking back at the footage, right now, to see if the plates match.’

  Judith stood up and paced the room a couple of times, one finger pressed against her lips. Dawson waited till she returned to her seat.

  ‘Have you told the prosecution any of this?’

  ‘We sent the phone messages over to them late last night, same time as we sent them to you. This information about Mr Daniels, not yet, but, of course, I’ll pass it on now. What do you think?’

  ‘I think Elizabeth Sullivan was truly intrepid and very determined. Her sister doesn’t know the half of it. Valiant gave evidence at the government review Liz participated in last summer. She must have latched on to this Eric after that – and maybe others too. We’ve been pushing for natural causes; you know that. Now I’m worried that she may have been murdered after all, Charlie, but not by Jaden. Will you pull him in, this Eric?’

  ‘We’ll have to, at least to see what he says about the messages on Liz’s phone and what he was doing on the night of the 1st of November. And we’ll swab him; look for matches.’

  ‘And Dr Williams? Don’t forget him. He was messaging her too.’

  ‘I spoke to him last night. He was very cooperative, claims he never came to see her after all. He has offered an alibi, which I have not yet checked out, given this latest development.’

  ‘So, you’ll stop the trial?’

  Dawson’s eyes blinked in slow motion. ‘I might have burst in like Rambo last time your friend Mr Winter asked me to, but I don’t have enough evidence this time around.’

  ‘Surely, you have more evidence than last time,’ Judith pressed.

  ‘If you remember, last time, as we keep calling it, I was under investigation. I didn’t really have anything to lose. This time I have…what? An edgy guy who says his boss knew Elizabeth Sullivan, that the boss was shouting stuff about her when he was drunk, and a colleague exchanging messages with her, with an alibi. And your client was still in her bedroom – and in her knickers – just before she died. I need to follow the correct procedure.’

  ‘All right,’ Judith said. ‘Keep us posted. We need to get going. Connie, can you wait for me outside please, just for a minute?’

  Constance frowned, then obeyed Judith’s order. When she had left, Judith pulled out her notebook, scribbled something down, then put it away and fixed her eyes on Dawson.

  ‘Are you ill, Charlie?’ she said. ‘I thought you might not want to say, in front of Connie. Pity of the young and all that.’

  Dawson sat back in his chair and tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘Is it so obvious?’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps more to me, as I hadn’t seen you in a while.’

  Dawson shrugged. ‘I had this pain in my back for weeks, took paracetamol, ignored it, thought it was just middle age. Turns out it’s pancreatic cancer.’

  ‘Ah. I’m sorry.’

  ‘They say they caught it early. I’ve been having treatment for a few months now. It’s not been too bad and I had a few pounds to lose. The wife is bitter, though; thinks the investigation last summer didn’t help; that bloody glove. She might be right.’

  ‘Will you keep working?’

  ‘For now. They may operate. Then I’ll be out for two months at least. I’m just taking one day at a time for now. But I know I don’t look great.’

  Judith got up and then, on the spur of the moment, she squeezed his arm companionably.

  ‘You can always call me, if you want to talk about it.’

  ‘Thanks. I generally prefer to ignore it, though; pretend it’s not happening. You know how it is.’

  ‘I do, yes.’

  Judith turned to go.

  ‘You know, I’m not afraid to admit it if we got the wrong person,’ Dawson said, ‘even though my reputation seems to take a hammering every time you and Constance get involved. Thankfully, I have enough convictions to my name to keep my stats healthy – healthier than my body, anyway.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘So, like I say, we’ll bring this Eric in, today, this morning and I’ll let you know if I got it wrong about Jaden, especially as I’m not really focusing on the long term, at the moment.’

  ‘I know you will. You’re a good man. Take care of yourself.’

  39

  Nick Marsh was springing lightly from one foot to the other, as if he was walking on hot coals, as he waited for Constance and Judith outside court. Judith stumbled on the steps on her way in and Constance caught her arm, before she fell.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d be better if I’d had more than one hour’s sleep, but, hey ho, it’ll all be over soon.’

  In court, Constance looked over at Jaden. He was staring at his feet, both thumbs in his mouth and, in that moment, she felt the weight of her responsibility. Jaden Dodds was just a boy playing at being a man, with no one in the world to show him the way. She wanted to hug him and tell him that everything was going to be just fine; that the trust he had placed in her and in Judith would be rewarded. But they had a way to go yet. All the steps of their complex dance routine had to fit together and they had had so little time to choreograph it.

  ‘My Lord, the defence is no longer intending to call Nathaniel Brooks. Instead, we will be calling Nicholas Marsh,’ Judith announced, when everyone was present.

  ‘I see. Is there a reason why Mr Marsh is not on my list?’

  ‘Yes, My Lord, the defence only became aware of his identity yesterday evening and, since that time, we have been speaking to him to understand the value of his evidence. We haven’t had time to put very much in writing, but my instructing solicitor, Miss Lamb, sent you an email, early this morning, with a summary of the areas he intends to cover.’

  ‘Oh yes, I did see that, thank you. You are saying, what? That Mr Marsh’s evidence shows that Dr Sullivan manufactured her meeting with the defendant, rather than the other way around. Is that the gist?’

  ‘That’s part of it, yes.’

  ‘Because she wanted his help in her studies?’

  ‘Mr Marsh’s evidence relates to one of those studies. In fact, the secret study Dr Williams mentioned that Liz Sullivan was working on, immediately before her death.’

  Nick appeared considerably more normal in a shirt and tie and with his hair combed back off his forehead, than his rain-soaked condition of the night before. But the jauntiness remained, a reminder of his anxious, on-the-edge state of mind. Constance had briefed Judith fully on what he could say, but there was always a chance he might clam up on the day.

  ‘Mr Marsh. How old are you?’ Judith began slowly.

  ‘I’m twenty-six.’

  ‘And when did you begin to understand that you might have a problem with online gaming?’

  ‘I don’t think I did understand, at first. But my parents started to complain about it, when I was around thirteen, I think.’

  ‘And what were they complaining about?’

  ‘It was things like I wasn’t doing my homework, because after school all I did was play games. And the games were different then. You really needed an X box or Wii console; you couldn’t just play off your phone or your laptop. But I’d saved my birthday money up, so they couldn’t say no to me and, at the beginning, it was fine. I would have friends over and we would play together. Then, like I say, I started to play all the time I could and my schoolwork suffered.’

  ‘How many hours, approximately, per day, were you playing?’

  ‘At least four hours on a weekday, more than six at the weekend. But it started to become more than that. I would get up to play, after my parents had gone to bed.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘I stopped going out. It didn’t happen all at once, but I just preferred to be gaming. And, once the multi-player games came along, I was in heaven.’

  ‘What are multi-player games, Mr Marsh?’ Judge Oliver brandished his pencil in the air.

  ‘Games where you can link up with lots of other people online and play against them. They’re incredibly popular now. My parents thought I wasn’t interacting with anyone. They saw gaming as this lonely pastime. But there was a whole community for me out there, of like-minded people. OK, I hadn’t met any of them in the flesh, but they were still my friends.

  ‘Then, next stage, I flunked my GCSEs and had to leave school. I signed up to a college course, but I never went. I played on my laptop and I hardly came out of my room. I went down to eight stone, because I would forget to eat. I was hospitalised for dehydration, because I once played non-stop for nineteen hours. When I was eighteen, my parents persuaded me to see a therapist and I did pretty well for a while, stopped playing, found a job and I met a girl, Madeleine. We moved in together.’

  ‘And how long did this continue?’

  ‘I was OK for a few years. Maddy knew about my problem. I never hid it, but I got a bit complacent, I suppose. I’d been told by the therapist not to play at all, a bit like alcoholics – you know, they mustn’t have even a tiny sip, in case they relapse. But I thought I was stronger than that. And it had been ages since I had played; I thought I was over it. So, one evening, I was at some friends and one of them had a new game. They were all pushing me, saying they had heard how I used to be really good. Anyway, before I knew it, I was playing again, keeping it secret from Maddy. And it started to take over, I lost my job, I got ill and Maddy left.’

  ‘When did you meet Dr Sullivan?’

  ‘About a year ago. I’d taken part in an online survey. Then, I progressed to some face-to-face sessions, where I was tested. I told Miss Lamb, I was patient A in the paper Dr Sullivan sent in to the WHO. She said I was “textbook” because of my symptoms.’

  ‘What did she tell you about the results of those tests?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t anything secret. She said my tendency to be impulsive was higher than normal, my self-control was much lower and that I was super-competitive. She also said I had low self-esteem, which I hadn’t realised, but I think it was right. My reflexes were incredibly quick, but I had poor decision-making skills. That last one bothered me.’

  ‘I’m going to show you a photograph now. It’s up on the screen.’ Judith projected an image of the picture Constance had found on Liz’s fridge.

  ‘Yes,’ Nick said, smiling as he recognised it.

  ‘Can you tell me who everyone is?’

  ‘That’s me on the left and the others were on the trial, – the one I just mentioned.’

  ‘Did Dr Sullivan take the photograph?’

  ‘My sister took it on my phone and I sent a copy to Dr Sullivan, I remember. Is that where you got it?’

  ‘My Lord, this photograph was located at Dr Sullivan’s flat. She kept it prominently displayed. There was something written on the back.’

  Judith showed an image of the message on the back and Nick laughed aloud.

  ‘I’d forgotten. I was patient A, like I said, and A was the worst. When I sent her the photo, I called us the A team; just a joke. It’s nice she kept it.’

  ‘And where are the rest of the A team now?’

  ‘Left to right, Ed is doing good, like me, back at work. Josh, I haven’t heard from in a while and Marc…’ Nick looked over at Judge Oliver and his shoulders gave an involuntary twist. ‘Marc died,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Judith spoke softly and was about to move on, when Constance dug her in the ribs.

  ‘Ask him how?’ she mouthed.

  Judith frowned at Constance and Constance nodded at her to do as she was told.

  ‘How did Marc die?’ she asked.

  ‘Suicide, they said,’ Nick replied. ‘Not one of the lucky ones, sadly.’

  ‘No, how very sad.’ Judith glanced over her shoulder at Constance. She wasn’t sure what that intervention had added, but she had a further thought. ‘Did Dr Sullivan know that Marc had died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And, after the study you were involved in, how did Dr Sullivan help you?’ Judith moved on.

  ‘Ah… I volunteered to be part of another special trial, an unofficial trial. Dr Sullivan gathered information about how my brain was working, while I was gaming, which she could use in her research. Not just me; she persuaded lots of others too, but it was always a bit close to the edge.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘To do the research she had to ask us to play a game, when there was always a risk it would cause a relapse.’

  ‘Couldn’t she just ask other people to play?’

  ‘The whole point was that she wanted to see if addicts – like me, and the others in the photo – if our brain patterns were any different from non-addicts, and, in particular, what happened inside our brains, when we were playing, especially for long periods of time.’

  ‘I have a photo here of you being tested in Dr Sullivan’s secret trial. This is one of your own personal photographs, I understand. Who took this?’

  ‘One of the other volunteers. We weren’t supposed to. But he thought I looked funny with the sensors on my head.’

  ‘And these sensors. What were they made of?’

  ‘I don’t know. They were soft, rubbery pads, a bit like those mats you can stick on the bottom of your bath. Dr Sullivan would carry them around with her, in her bag, and just stick them on us. They didn’t hurt, but they did leave a small mark on the skin, for a few hours afterwards.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘At the end of the trial, Dr Sullivan recommended I take a drug called Wellbutrin. She explained that it was usually used for anxiety. She also taught me some strategies to help avoid getting into situations where I would begin gaming, like I had used before, but more focused on me.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘It’s only six months, but I’ve completely stopped gaming and I have a new job.’

  ‘Ms Burton.’ Judge Oliver gave an exasperated sigh. ‘I am very delighted, as I am sure many of the jurors are, to hear both of Mr Marsh’s return to rude health and Dr Sullivan’s dedication. However, at present, I cannot see how any of this is associated with Dr Sullivan’s death?’

  Judith held up her index finger and nodded amiably. Now Judge Oliver’s lack of imagination was doing him a dis-service. Thankfully, the facial expressions of at least half the jury and the public suggested they were one step ahead of him.

  ‘I understand and all will be revealed very soon. Mr Marsh, why did you come forward yesterday and offer to give evidence?’

  ‘I was in court and I heard what the doctor said about the marks on Dr Sullivan’s head and the sticky stuff. And then what you said, about them fading later. She must have been wearing them herself, the brain sensors. They leave marks for a few hours and, sometimes, a trace of the glue is left behind.

  ‘I don’t know precisely what it’s got to do with her death, but I’m certain Dr Sullivan was testing herself, with the sensors on her head, in the hours before she died, the way she tested me and the others, in our secret trial.’

  ***

  Luke wondered where Eric was now. He pictured him seated in a police interview room, perhaps even the same one he had occupied last night, the taste of blood in his throat, his hands cuffed tightly behind his back. Would he be ruing the punch he threw at the police officer or persuading himself ‘the guy had it coming’?