'This had better be good.'
She found him in a corner of the restaurant by the floor-to- ceiling window overlooking a large, shallow pond in which a flock of flamingos huddled against the cold. On a dismal February afternoon the large dining room was almost empty.
McAvoy pushed aside his empty plate and reached for his coffee. 'You want something?'
'Just to know what the hell this is about.'
'What d'you tell the jury?'
'That they could have the afternoon off.'
'You'll be popular. How's Mrs Jamal?'
'She followed me all the way to my car insisting that Dani James was a whore who'd been put up to blacken her son's name.'
'Have her arrested for contempt. Can you imagine anyone barracking a Crown Court judge like that?'
'Yeah, right.'
McAvoy said, 'She always was a pain, poor woman. I expect she's right round the bloody bend by now.'
'She has her moments.' Jenny's eyes skipped around the room, checking no one was watching them. The tension of a court day had worn her medication thin. It wasn't yet three o'clock and she was feeling jumpy and raw.
'She should be grateful the poor wee bastard had a shag before he went. She'd have had him hanging off her teat until he was forty.' He nodded out of the window towards a clutch of chilly looking flamingos. 'D'you know they still don't know why those things stand on one leg. One of the great unsolved mysteries of science.'
'I heard it was so they still had one left if they got bitten by a crocodile.' She fetched a legal pad out of her case. 'Can we get on now?'
'I'm not making a statement.'
'Fine, we'll call it notes.' She uncapped her fountain pen. 'But this was your idea, remember?'
He grunted as if he'd rather forget. 'We can deal with Simon Donovan for a start. The cops were all over him from April '02 in a fraud investigation. He was a personal accountant back then: used clients' tax cheques to buy rental property and borrowed off the equity to pay the Inland Revenue. In a rising market it worked like a dream until he bought six flats off plan that never went up. One of my partners was defending his co-defendant, a mortgage broker. It was set down for trial in August. Next thing he knows Donovan's a witness for the prosecution against four of his tax-evading clients and he's made his statement about the missing boys. All the charges against him and the broker were dropped.'
'So he cut a clever deal on his case - why would IDing the boys be part of it?'
'Have you any idea how lazy coppers are? I've known them piss in a pint pot to save a walk to the gents.'
'Donovan just happened to be down at the station in the right frame of mind?'
'More than likely. Plus they'd have been desperate to get it off their patch. Get a statement putting them in London and it was someone else's problem.'
'What about the Security Services?'
'The police hate them - they make them do things.'
'You really think they'd give them a false statement?'
McAvoy grinned. 'What are you, born again every morning? I thought you'd bloodied your knuckles as a lawyer.'
'I was mostly involved with childcare proceedings.'
'Then there's nothing you shouldn't know about the shitty side of human nature. What you've got to remember about cops, Mrs Cooper, is that lying gets to be a way of life. They start off gilding the lily when they write up their first arrests and end up framing innocent lawyers.'
Jenny made a note, though she wasn't hopeful that it would be of much help. Neither Donovan nor the police were likely to admit to fabricating evidence, and Donovan's ID statement was disconnected enough from the fraud charges not to be obviously linked.
'Tell me about your involvement in this case,' Jenny said.
McAvoy told her that Mrs Jamal and Mr and Mrs Hassan - shopkeepers from Birmingham - came to see him early in the October. They'd had moderately regular contact with the police in the first few weeks after their son's disappearance, but by early autumn it had tailed off. They'd written to MPs and councillors for help, but were referred back to the police, who wouldn't even pay for a missing poster. They had come to him in desperation. He wrote to the police and four weeks later obtained copies of the witness statements they'd taken. He picked up on Dani James's sighting of the possible intruder and wrote again asking what they were doing to follow it up. He never received a reply.
In December both families received their letters from DS Owens stating that the investigation was being shelved. McAvoy wrote back to protest and got nowhere. Over the Christmas holiday Mrs Jamal took to phoning him all hours of the day and night, obviously having some kind of breakdown; then at the start of the new year the Hassans wrote to say they had decided to end their retainer.
'Any idea why?' Jenny said.
'They were conservative people. Their boy had been gone six months. The way they saw it, he'd either deserted his family or he was up to no good.'
'And Mrs Jamal?'
She detected a trace of guilt in McAvoy's expression. 'To be honest, I was trying to avoid her. I like to give the benefit of the doubt, but even I was beginning to think they'd hopped off to a training camp somewhere.' He stared out of the window at the pond, as if confronting a painful memory. 'That's what I told her . . . She threw a fit, accused me of collaborating with all the forces of darkness, so I offered to get a private investigator onto it. She had five hundred pounds. It scarcely bought us two days, but this guy I knew - dead now - knocked on some doors down in St Pauls. He found a little old lady who said she'd spotted a black people carrier sitting outside her house on the night of the 28th. It was right along from the bus stop the boys used to get back to college, about two hundred yards from Anwar Ali's place. There were two white men in the front. From her description it sounded like a Toyota. It was late in the evening and she thought they looked suspicious. She was picking up the phone to call the police when she heard it take off.'
'That's it?'
'More or less. I phoned the bus depot and tried to find out whether the police had spoken to any of their drivers who might have spotted them that night. I was told they couldn't discuss it. I tried to be reasonable, assured them there was no legal reason why they couldn't, but it was a stone wall. I went back to the police to ask them what their problem was and got the same response. A week later a pretty girl came into my office saying she might be able to help out a client of mine who was up for armed robbery at the time. I took her alibi statement. Next morning I was dragged bollock naked from my bed and didn't see the outside of a cell for two-and-a-half years.'
'You believe the two things are connected?'
'I'll admit there were lots of reasons the cops wanted me out of the way. The fact I'd got two guys off a murder charge and had a DI nicked for perjury the previous year were two of them. In fact, for the best part of six months that's what I thought it was all about.'
It was McAvoy's turn to sweep the room with his eyes. Only when he was satisfied that none of their elderly companions were undercover detectives did he turn his gaze back to Jenny.
'Two things changed my mind. First, I remembered something. A couple of nights before I was arrested I'd been out with a client; we were both drunk as hell. I got a call on my mobile, my private number, and this American-sounding voice said, 'What do you know?' I was that lashed I could hardly make him out. He said it again, 'What do you know, Mr McAvoy?' No threats, nothing. I took him for a crank and rang off.'
'And you remembered this when?'
'Sometime in the middle of '03. Lying on my bunk waiting for my room-mate to finish his business on the potty.'
'Nice. What was the second thing?'
'This phone call starts going round in my mind - you get like that inside. The Law Society's struck me off, my wife's fucking somebody else, I want to know what the hell's going on. I phoned the investigator again - Billy Dean
