Claim (Pretty Poison #3)

Chapter One Tristan

Chapter One

Tristan

“Your Honour, with respect, the Crown’s position relies on absence masquerading as evidence.”

The words left my mouth evenly, as if they’d been waiting there all along. They had. I’d turned the counterargument over so many times it had worn smooth. Instinct now, not thought. I could have delivered it in my sleep.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t.

I was on my feet, shoulders squared, black gown falling correctly from my frame, horsehair wig heavy and faintly abrasive over my scalp.

I’d stopped registering the irritation sometime around mid-morning.

There were worse sensations than discomfort.

Most of them I’d learnt intimately over the past eight weeks.

The courtroom went quiet.

Not bored quiet. Listening quiet.

Because, honestly, the application itself was absurd on its face.

I was standing up for a defendant with no prior convictions, arrested for low-level acquisitive crime. Yet the Crown was opposing bail. Not on what they had, but on what they suggested might exist beyond the charge sheet. It was too familiar for me not to get riled up about.

“Mr Hale-Fitzroy, the Crown has served an addendum.” The usher leant in while the judge was still settling her papers.

I tried hard not to roll my eyes as I took the papers from the usher. Three pages. Freshly printed. Warm. Designed to look incidental while changing everything. I skimmed. Because the problem with late disclosure was that it always arrived dressed as courtesy.

And there it was.

A reframing. No new evidence. They were careful about disclosing that.

They’d tightened their language enough to sharpen implication.

No co-defendants named, no recovered devices linked to wider offending, no evidence of coordination.

Just intelligence-shaped phrasing designed to imply scale.

Intelligence suggests. Ongoing lines of enquiry.

Phrases that did the work of accusation without ever carrying its weight.

The Crown knew what it was doing. Drop it late.

Force me to choose between responding half-prepared or appearing evasive.

I rose. “Your Honour, before we proceed, may I address the Crown’s supplemental submission?”

Judge Milson looked up. She was tired. That was always the trick. Judges were most dangerous when you asked them to be patient.

“You may,” she sighed. “Briefly.”

I turned, just enough to orient myself, not enough to look back. The defendant stood behind me in the dock, nineteen and shaking, fingers white where they gripped the rail. But I didn’t meet his eyes. I couldn’t afford to anchor myself to panic. Panic was contagious.

I held the pages up. “The Crown’s addendum served moments ago introduces speculative material not previously disclosed, framed in language implying gravity without substantiation.”

The prosecutor scrambled to his feet. “Your Honour, this is standard—”

“With respect,” I cut him off before he could piss all over my argument, “standard practice does not extend to smuggling conjecture into bail submissions under the guise of clarification.”

A ripple moved through the public gallery. Not any noise. Interested noise. It spurred me on. So I kept going.

“There is still no forensic link. No contemporaneous identification. No evidence placing my client at the scene beyond inference retrofitted after the fact. The Crown cannot cure an absence of proof by italicising suspicion.”

My voice sounded older than it had eight weeks ago. That wasn’t imagination. Something in me had flattened. Sharpened. Grief had a way of sanding people down until there were fewer soft edges left to catch on things.

The judge held up a hand, silencing the prosecutor. “Mr Hale-Fitzroy, are you suggesting bad faith?”

Her Honour Judge Milson was in her late fifties, I guessed, with a particular brand of exhaustion coming from seeing the same mistakes made by different people over and over again. She looked at me, assessing rather than reacting.

I held her gaze. Her appraisal.

Once, months ago, I would have been acutely aware of my surname in moments like this. Of what people assumed when they saw it on the case list. Hale-Fitzroy. Old chambers. Old money. Older expectations.

Now, I barely thought about it.

“No, Your Honour.” I let a beat pass. “I’m suggesting gravity inflation. Which the courts have been clear is impermissible.”

The room recalibrated. Papers stilled. Shoulders squared. Attention narrowing to the line I’d drawn. This wasn’t academic any longer. This was procedural combat. And this…this was where an overworked, overtrained, and desperate to keep over occupied mind earned its keep.

The Crown tried again. “The defendant is part of a wider—”

“—alleged wider operation,” I cut in again with a rise of my hand this time.

“Which has produced no co-accused, no recovered proceeds, and no evidence of planning beyond supposition.” I adjusted my gown.

“If the Crown wishes to rely on broader investigations, it must do so properly. Not by implication.”

Silence.

Judge Milson read the addendum again. She didn’t like being manoeuvred. No one did. Finally, she looked up.

“I will disregard paragraphs three and four. They carry no evidential weight.”

The Crown sat and I finished my submissions without flourish. Conditions. Address. Sureties. Electronic monitoring. Reporting. I made it boring. Judges trusted boring.

When it was done, I sat.

The decision came quickly.

“Application granted,” Judge Milson said. “Conditional bail as outlined.”

A sound broke from behind me. Sharp and involuntary.

Relief splitting fear open like ice under sudden weight.

I bowed my head once to the bench, gathered my papers.

Only then did I notice my fingers trembling.

I pressed them on the edge of my file until the movement stopped.

Control was never the absence of reaction. It was choosing where to let it show.

The Crown rose again. “Your Honour, the Crown would ask that the record reflect our concern regarding the manner in which defence submissions were advanced.”

I stayed seated.

Judge Milson’s expression hardened a fraction. “That concern is noted. And dismissed.” She turned her gaze on me. “And Mr Hale-Fitzroy?”

I looked up.

“Competence is admirable.” She peered at me under her lashes. “But tone matters. Particularly when challenging the Crown. Ensure in future that your confidence does not stray into discourtesy.”

I nodded. “Understood, Your Honour.”

That had been a warning. Wrapped in civility.

But the clerk called the next matter and names spilt into the room with bureaucratic indifference, each one briefly animated before being flattened back into the process. Another defendant. Another future balanced on procedure and luck and timing.

I removed my wig.

Only then did I fully register what I’d done.

I’d secured bail for a nineteen-year-old mobile phone thief.

A boy, really. Caught skimming devices in a shopping precinct, frightened enough to cry in the cells, compliant enough to look sorry in all the right places.

He’d go home tonight. Back to his mother’s flat.

To reheated food and a bed smelling of safety.

He would wait for a trial that would almost certainly end in a suspended sentence, because the prisons were full and everyone in that room knew it.

Prisons were always full. Overflowing with people on remand. Waiting. Suspended in legal limbo, presumed innocent in theory and punished in practice. Men waiting to prove they hadn’t done what the state suspected. Men waiting to admit if they had.

But I had to keep believing in the law.

Even when it hurt.

Call it indoctrination. Cowardice. Hale-Fitzroy blood, inherited along with the certainty that rules mattered and institutions endured.

Or maybe it was worse.

Maybe it was because if I stopped believing in the law, if I admitted it was nothing more than another blunt instrument wielded by men with power, then I would have to accept that losing him had been for nothing.

I folded the wig carefully into its box as the courtroom rearranged itself around the next case, the next name, the next life briefly exposed and then sealed away again. A solicitor two rows ahead glanced back at me. Approval, perhaps. Or recognition.

“Good argument,” he said as he passed me. “You’re getting a reputation.”

The words followed me out of the courtroom like a shadow.

Justice, it turned out, was not blind so much as crowded.

And outside Court Two, the noise rushed back in.

Footsteps on stone, muted conversations, the echo of raised voices bleeding through thick oak doors.

The Royal Courts of Justice had been in my life so long it almost felt like home.

The CPS junior I’d just bulldozed brushed past me, too close to be accidental. “Enjoy the victory,” he sneered. “They don’t always last.”

I slowed. Turned my head.

There had been more of this lately, too. Others seeming keen to see me stumble. Another Hale-Fitzroy stepping onto the floor, another name they didn’t want owning the room. Trouble was, they’d sadly misjudged the inheritance.

“Neither does overreach,” I called back and walked on.

I shrugged out of my gown and folded it carefully over my arm.

I was meticulous about that now. About everything.

Sloppiness invited scrutiny. Scrutiny invited questions.

Underneath, my suit was dark charcoal, conservative to the point of anonymity.

White shirt. Black tie. Nothing to suggest ambition or rebellion or personality.

I’d learnt quickly that the safest thing to be, was forgettable.

Imogen Barrett KC appeared at my shoulder as if summoned by thought alone. “You didn’t chase it.”

“No.” I shook my head. “There was no need.”

She watched me for a moment, taking inventory. Imogen missed nothing. She never had. “You trusted the bench.”

“I trusted the law.”