“The Gazette could publish Chris’s story. Now. Before the jury is sequestered.”

“You know I can’t tell the press his defense strategy—I’d be disbarred. And they wouldn’t publish it without confirmation of the source.”

“Nathanial Dolan might. If you had something to trade.”

The tone of his voice suggests I do, in fact, have something to trade. I top his glass up.

“Nathanial Dolan wants to join Mrs. Chalmers’s establishment.”

“And you would know this how?”

He shrugs. “I’m quiet. People forget I’m there. They talk, and I listen.”

“And how do you know that Mrs. Chalmers may be something I can offer him?”

He blushes, a sudden raspberry bloom across his cheeks. “I saw the… er… video.” Then he smiles at me.

“Fuck!” There is pride in my voice. He’s right. I grab my suit jacket from the back of my chair and run from the room. “Jemima!” I bellow as I pass the door to the small office she shares with another junior staff member. “We’re going to the pub. Right now.”

So, what do you do when you have a load of evidence that you can’t use in court, but which is the only way to ensure your client has a hope in hell of winning at trial? Because whatever he did, whatever crimes of poor judgment he committed when he lied about his past to his wife, or when he started an affair with her sister, he is not a murderer.

First things first, I need a way in with Nathanial Dolan.

“I’ll tell him about us.”

“You wouldn’t.” Her eyes flash with anger.

“Wouldn’t I?”

“You’d get in trouble.” She takes a sip of wine. An act.

“Jemima. Who do you think will care?”

“You bastard.”

I spread my fingers out across the table and grin at her. “Yep.”

“Will it work?”

“It can’t hurt.”

“You bastard.”

In two days, the jury will enter the courtroom for the first day of the Hardcastle trial. From that point on they will not be able to read or watch the news, they will relinquish all contact with the outside world as they are shown the facts of the trial, to ensure they are not unduly influenced. But until then, they are an audience I can still reach. With the help of a certain chinless wonder’s rather chinless father. And the newspaper he publishes to millions upon millions of people every day.

Jemima takes out her phone.

I realize I am crossing my fingers behind my back.

It has taken over a year to get to trial. A year in which my client has sat in a holding cell waiting for his moment to tell his version of events. I will be honest though, the prison look suits him. His skin is pale, almost translucent. His pallor speaks of lost liberty and a man imprisoned needlessly.

He has lost weight too, although this has only served to chisel his features further. We debated for an hour last week over whether he should be clean-shaven or sport a tidy beard. In the end I told him to shave. Beards could cause suspicion among some of the jury, and the lack of facial hair accentuates those cheekbones. The suit I have bought for him is half a size too big. He looks like a man almost broken by the allegations against him; but still someone the ladies will fall for and whom the men would quite like to have a drink with.