Chapter Eleven Razor #3
Imogen looked up. Slowly. Interlacing her fingers over the files. “Excuse me?”
I regretted it immediately, but it was out there now, and I needed to explain why I’d unwittingly thrown my best friend under a bus.
“Henry Redmayne. He’s a doctor. Lives in Chiswick. No connection to the investigation, no ties to organised crime. Entirely removed from Mr Slade’s usual environment. He’s an upstanding—”
“And who,” Imogen interrupted, rubbing her temple, “in God’s name is Henry Redmayne?”
“An acquaintance.” Even to my own ears the word sounded thin. Fragile. I hadn’t asked Henry. I wasn’t even sure I could. And worse, who was he to Razor? Nothing that would satisfy a judge. A medic who’d stitched him up once. A name dragged in because I was grasping.
Christ.
Imogen rocked back in her chair, studying me with a look stripping away every illusion I’d been clinging to. “Of the defendant?”
“They know one another.” I chewed my lip. “Yes.”
“Tristan,” she sighed, pressing her fingers to her temples. “You have the makings of an excellent barrister. Your background gives you instincts most people have to learn the hard way. You have judgement, precision, and a regrettably effective talent for getting under people’s skin.”
She looked at Mercer, then back at me.
“And because of that, I’m going to pretend that suggestion was never made. Mr Mercer is going to pretend he didn’t hear it. And the last five minutes of this meeting are not going in any attendance note.”
Mercer closed his laptop without comment.
Imogen glared at me. “You do not invent bail addresses out of desperation. You do not offer well-meaning professionals because you are emotionally invested. That way lies professional embarrassment at best, and catastrophic compromise at worst.”
I nodded, heat creeping up my neck.
“Now,” Imogen picked up her pen again, “we do this properly. You will leave this room, you will regain your composure, and you will find me an address that can withstand judicial scrutiny. Only then do we move.”
Mercer stood, smoothing his tie. “I’ll prepare the draft pending confirmation.”
I gathered my papers, my mind racing ahead of my body. As we stepped out of Imogen’s office, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Unknown number. I answered automatically, putting the phone between my chin and shoulder.
“Tristan Hale-Fitzroy.”
There was a snort on the other end. “Don’t you posh boys ever answer with hello like the rest of the world?”
I knew that voice. My chest tightened. “I do. When I expect friends. Are you one?”
A baby wailed in the background. Then another. Lennon sounded breathless. “Guess we’re going to have to be.”
I turned back into my room and sat at my desk, chucking my stuff down to hold the phone properly to my ear. “I’d like that.”
“Well, answer hello next time.”
“I will. What’s this about?”
“I had a call.” Lennon sounded as if he were rocking a baby. Maybe two. “From a mutual friend. Courtesy of Pentonville.”
My pulse spiked. “When?”
“Half an hour ago. Call cut off before he could get to the point properly, but I gathered I was meant to speak to you.”
“About?”
“Him staying with me.”
My heart stuttered.
“If he gets bail,” Lennon went on. “Said he needs an address.”
“Yeah, he does.”
“Right. So is that something you need for your files or whatever?”
I leant back in my chair, almost not believing the timely convenience of it all. So I had to check this was legitimate. Agree. Not forced. “And you’re… willing?”
“Guess I have to be.”
“No.” I shook my head. “You don’t. That’s why this matters. Thank you. Truly. You may have just saved this case. If not his life.”
“Don’t put that on me.” He exhaled hard. “But look. There’s still a problem.”
“What kind of problem? You’re employed? No criminal record?”
“Yeah. And no. But it ain’t that.”
“Then what?”
“Space.” He paused, a baby fussing faintly in the background before he murmured something soft and came back to me.
“I can get Amara and the twins to her mum’s for a few days.
Give Rich room to breathe. But it’s his sister I’m worried about.
I can’t have her going back to a house Cormac paid for.
Not her. Not Maisie. And his mum…I don’t know how much he’s told you, but she’s not…
stable. Drinking. Snorting. Mental health.
It’s been bad for years, and since Rich got banged up it’s tipped over.
Guessing she can’t get her supply no more.
But they’re both vulnerable. So, I don’t know if legal aid stretches to moving them.
Or at least his sister. Witness protection or something.
She’s sixteen. A kid with a kid. I thought I’d ask. ”
I chewed the end of my pen. “Legally?” I sighed. “No. He’s not an active informant. Witness protection doesn’t apply. And funding is… limited.”
“Right.” A pause. The soft hush of someone soothing a baby. Then, quieter, “Can you make him?”
“Make him what?”
“Grass.” His voice hardened. “Inform. Blow the whole fucking network that’s had him in a chokehold since he was fifteen. Get that protection for him. For his family.”
I drew a careful breath, my pulse thudding. It always sounded so simple when people said it like that. As if speaking were a switch to flip and everything else falls into place.
“It’s complicated,” I said as if that summed up the whole clusterfuck that was government protection.
“How?”
“It isn’t something I can initiate for starters.
That has to come from him. And talking doesn’t get him out.
It doesn’t speed bail. It doesn’t stop the remand clock.
If anything, it delays it. Assessments are done.
He stays inside while they decide whether what he knows is useful.
” I paused, choosing my next words with care.
“And nothing is guaranteed. Not protection. Certainly not for his wider family. And if even a whisper gets out while he’s still inside, if anyone thinks he might talk, he won’t make it to trial. ”
The thought lodged in my chest, sharp and unwelcome.
“I can’t push him into that.” I rubbed my forehead. “Not legally. Not professionally.”
“But personally?”
“Personally is not an option I have. Not while I’m his defence counsel.” I waited a beat before explaining more. “And you should understand that if that road is taken, it isn’t just a new address. It’s no contact. No old ties. No you.”
And no me.
But I didn’t say that.
“He’d belong to the state. For the rest of his life. That isn’t freedom. It’s a different kind of cage.”
Silence stretched.
Then quietly, “So a kid and her baby are what? Left in the path of danger?”
I closed my eyes again. “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll call you back. Not on this number.”
A huff of laughter. “On a burner?”
I smiled despite myself. “And you can answer with whatever greeting you like.”
“He’s a fucking lucky man, that Richie Slade.”
“With friends like you, he is.”
I ended the call, opened my laptop, and stopped thinking like a man in love.
And started thinking like a lawyer with no margin for error.
Informing wasn’t a solution. It was a trade.
People liked to pretend informing was an exit.
Say the right names, trade the right secrets, and walk away.
But at best, it meant survival through erasure: a life stripped down to conditions, compliance, and constant monitoring, valued only while useful.
At worst, it meant dying twice. Once to the people who’d raised him, and again to himself.
Razor had already lived under control his entire adult life, first by men with knives and rules written in blood, and informing would only swap them for men in suits and surveillance logs.
Different language. Same outcome. The state didn’t protect out of mercy; it protected assets.
And when the asset was spent, so was the protection. That wasn’t freedom.
So I had to give him the only thing that might be—a legal way out.
One that didn’t require erasing him to save him.
Which meant that now, immediately, I had to get his sister out of harm’s way.
And my first instinct was my flat. Baron’s Court.
I could ask Henry to take me in. He had a three-bed semi in Chiswick I could rent out the spare room from.
Then move Keeley and the baby into my place.
On paper, it was neat. No one would blink at me moving back in with my oldest friend from Harrow.
But that solution collapsed the moment I followed it through.
My flat was owned by my father. He could drop by at any moment.
I couldn’t tell him I was subletting it to a defendant’s sister.
Plus, Wolfe knew where that flat was, and if he was already circling this case, alert to any overlap between my professional life and my personal one, I could not risk him catching a scent trail leading back to me.
I could ask Henry to take them all instead.
Keeley. The baby. Even her mother. But Henry still orbited Zara in that maddening way men did when they pretended they were finished with someone.
Pot, kettle, yes, I know. But Zara worked in Westminster.
Adjacent, at best, to Lord Wolfe’s ecosystem.
That was not shelter. That was exposure.
Next option: the local authority.
On paper, Keeley qualified. Minor. Infant.
Property tied to organised crime. Clear safeguarding concerns.
I could frame it as a child-in-need referral and push for emergency accommodation.
In reality? That meant hotels. Temporary placements.
And a process that would first explore family placements.
Keeley’s parents, the baby’s father’s family, anyone who could plausibly step in would be asked first. People I could not trust to say no.
People who might mean well and still hand her straight back into danger.
And even if I could force it through, local authorities were stretched thin.
Brutally so. Without police escalation, she would sit low on the priority list. Waiting. Exposed.
I leant back in my chair, heaving out a sigh.
Fuck.
Here I was, a Hale-Fitzroy, with access to property, money, influence, and not a single way to use it cleanly without contaminating the case or putting her at further risk.
I picked up my pen, then hurled it across the desk. It clipped the frame of a family photograph of us at Marcus and Eloise’s wedding.
The irony tasted bitter.
Privilege everywhere.
And not a single safe place to put a sixteen-year-old girl and her baby.
Then it hit me like a fucking bolt.
I stood, grabbed my stuff, and ran out of Chambers.