Chapter Five Tristan
Chapter five
Tristan
I parked in what I decided must count as a space, though it felt more like a gap someone had given up on.
Cars weren’t so much parked here as abandoned.
Nosed up on kerbs at odd angles, tyres half-sunk, doors scarred and mismatched.
Tatty Fords. Old Peugeots. A transit with one wing mirror taped on and rust blooming along the sill like a rash.
My deep-blue Mercedes didn’t belong among them.
It sat too clean. Too shiny. As if it were waiting to be noticed.
Father’s gift, delivered with the same unspoken expectation that had accompanied every milestone in our family.
I hadn’t asked for it. But Hale-Fitzroy children were rewarded, regardless.
Lavishly. Pointlessly. Marcus had received a Range Rover for his wedding despite already owning his Porsche.
Amelia had been given a pony, as if she didn’t already have a stable full of horses.
So I should have expected it when I’d completed my pupillage, though I knew I didn’t deserve it.
Still, it was useful. Especially now.
I cut the engine and stepped out, closing the door with an obscenely expensive click.
I locked it, then buttoned my woollen coat, conscious of the clean lines of it, the expense of the fabric, the way it didn’t belong here either.
And when my polished brogues met uneven ground, water slicking across cracked concrete, that realisation became even more prominent.
The building ahead was low and stubborn, brickwork darkened by rain and age.
A hand-painted sign hung above the door, letters faded and uneven, the name of the youth boxing club barely legible beneath peeling paint.
Someone had tried to patch the frame with a different colour of wood.
It hadn’t worked. The place looked tired. Still standing, but only just.
My nerves tightened then. Not fear, exactly. Closer to awareness.
I didn’t belong here. Every instinct I had told me that. My voice, my clothes, my assumptions. Everything about me would read wrong the second I opened my mouth. This wasn’t a courtroom where polish passed for authority. This was somewhere men earned space by existing correctly within it.
But I had to be here.
For a second opinion. One that didn’t come wrapped in precedent or politics.
So I drew in a breath, cold and damp, let it settle in my chest, and crossed the short distance to the door. The wood was scarred where fists had struck it over the years, the grain worn smooth in places by hands that didn’t hesitate.
I pushed it open.
Heat rolled out to meet me. Sweat. Rubber. Old canvas. The air was thick with it. Warm, damp, alive. Undercut by the sharp, percussive thud of gloves striking bags in a steady rhythm.
I stepped inside, and out of everything I knew.
A girl sat behind what passed for a reception desk, which was more a folding table cluttered with pamphlets and a chipped mug. She wore an oversized hoodie, hair scraped back into a knot that had given up trying to be neat, chewing absently on her thumbnail as she scrolled on her phone.
“Hi.” I stepped closer, waited until she noticed me. “Is it alright if I go through?”
I gestured past her, towards the gym beyond.
She glanced up over the edge of her phone, gave me the faintest shrug, completely uninterested.
As if I were an inconvenience that would sort itself out, eventually.
I wasn’t quite sure what her purpose was at the front desk other than maybe to offer a pamphlet on youth teams and support services in the local community.
I nodded anyway, offered a smile that felt useless, then moved past her.
The corridor narrowed into changing areas smelling of damp towels and disinfectant before opening into the gym proper.
A boxing gym. Equipment lined the walls.
Ropes, bags, benches, things I couldn’t name.
A handful of boys were dotted about, absorbed in their own efforts, muscles tight with concentration.
And in the centre, the ring.
Lennon stood inside it, pads strapped to his hands, braced as a kid swung at him with determined, clumsy force.
“That’s it. Good. Another. Hook…good.” He then glanced up, noticed me and promptly took a solid hit to the pads he hadn’t quite raised in time.
“Oi!” He stepped back from the kid. “Hold up.” Then he looked at me again, properly this time, as if checking his eyes hadn’t lied to him.
“Si,” he called out behind him, ripping off the pads. “Take over. Spar with Billy.”
The boy abandoned his weights, bounced up eagerly, pulling on headgear as he took the pads from Lennon.
And with Lennon’s gaze still locked on mine, he ducked through the ropes and dropped to the floor.
Up close, he smelt of sweat and effort, skin dark and slick beneath the harsh gym lights, face flushed, energy barely contained.
He was so like Razor it hurt. Not in features or colouring, but in the way he occupied space. In sheer presence.
“You look like you’ve come to evict us.” He raked his gaze down me. “Or you want in on some promotion.”
I glanced down at myself. The suit. The shoes. The wool coat. Hair styled. “Yeah, I suppose I do.” I nodded back towards the ring, watching the boys move, recognising one of them. “Is that Billy Amos?”
Lennon sniffed, wiped sweat from beneath his nose, and glanced over his shoulder. “Yeah. He got an order to join.” He turned back to me. “You here for him? Make sure he’s doing what your courts told him to?”
“Uh, no.” I swallowed, the truth catching awkwardly in my throat. Billy being here wasn’t really because of me. Not entirely. It traced back to the man I was here about. “I was hoping you might have a couple of minutes. To talk. Somewhere private.”
Lennon studied me for a beat longer, then jerked his chin towards the back of the gym. I followed as he reached for a towel, dragging it over his face and neck.
“I’ll assume this is about a mutual acquaintance of ours?” He eyed me. “Our incarcerated friend.”
My stomach twisted. Hearing him reduced to a status, flattened into a word the system could use and discard, hit me hard.
Yet, at the same time, the relief of being able to talk about him at all was overwhelming.
I’d carried it quietly, locked away, never forgotten but never spoken.
Trapped in my head, circling the same thoughts with nowhere to put them.
Now, finally, I could speak about him without consequence.
“Yeah.”
Lennon picked up a bottle of water from the floor and took a long swig. “You seen him?”
“No.” I shook my head. “That’s not… I can’t. It wouldn’t be appropriate at this stage.”
Lennon snorted, unimpressed. He probably assumed it was because of whatever he thought had existed between us. The messy, half-hidden thing that Razor had probably filed under unspoken history. As if that were the reason. As if I had that luxury.
It wasn’t.
“Have you?” I asked.
He twisted the cap back on the bottle and set it down. “No.”
I glanced down at the floor, my chest tightening.
“That why you came all the way out here?” Lennon tilted his head. “Find out how he’s doing inside?”
“Partly.”
“Wasted trip then.” Lennon shook his head. “No one knows how he is. He’s refusing visitors. Not even Keeley. Fucking moron.”
“Why would he refuse visitors?”
“Because he’s him. Thinks he’s doing everyone a favour.
Protecting people.” He scoffed. “Don’t see what it’s actually doing.
His sister barely sleeping. Her and her baby staying at mine cause she’s shit scared to stay in a house belonging to Cormac.
His mum’s drinking and snorting more than she ever did.
Both looking over their shoulders, wondering if they’re being watched or worse.
” He widened his eyes at me. “You get what I‘m sayin’?”
I did.
I hated that I did.
But that, right there, was why I was here.
Why I couldn’t leave this alone. It wasn’t just about a disastrous entanglement, or the way we’d fallen into each other’s beds like idiots who should have known better.
It wasn’t about a doomed, reckless thing that had always had an expiry date stamped on it.
Or even the possibility that, to him, I’d only ever been somewhere warm to disappear into. Someone convenient. Temporary.
It was this.
The fact he was sitting in there alone, deliberately cutting himself off from the only people who loved him.
And the sickening certainty that part of that isolation was because of me.
“He’s got a lot to answer for,” Lennon said quietly.
“Yeah.” I didn’t argue. God knew I wanted those answers too. Wanted to know why he’d left my bed, walked out of my flat, and straight into handcuffs. “I’m sure he’ll want the chance.” I stood straighter. “Which is why I’m here.”
Lennon frowned. “Yeah?”
“His defence team stepped back.”
He stared at me. “What does that mean?”
“It means he’s in limbo. His solicitors are still technically on record, but they’ve withdrawn from active conduct. No barrister instructed. No one steering the case.”
“Again, what the fuck does that mean?”
“It means he has no real representation. No defence. His case slows to a crawl and as he’s on remand, he could be in prison for a very long time just waiting.”
Lennon scowled. “But he’s entitled to representation.”
“He is. In theory.” I inhaled sharply, my chest rising with the implication. “In practice, cases like his don’t get snapped up.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the names attached to it.”
“Cormac.”
“Among others.” I chewed the inside of my cheek, trying to keep inside that the other names were closer to me than they were to Razor.
“And this isn’t circulating through the usual routes.
The firms that would take it, the ones used to cases like this, expect private funding.
Lots of it. And that isn’t on offer here. He’s on legal aid.”
“How come?”
“I’ll assume because he doesn’t have the money to instruct anyone himself.”