Chapter Six Tristan
Chapter six
Tristan
By four thirty, I felt scraped clean. Hollowed out.
By too many files, too many frightened parents, too many teenagers trying to act harder than they were because God forbid the world saw them as children. My suit was creased, my tie hung crooked, and the cheap fluorescent lights had left a dull ache behind my eyes throbbing with every heartbeat.
I finished my last hearing with a sigh. A sentencing motion going nowhere, with counsel on the other side too tired to fight, magistrates clearly desperate to get through the list before their own lives beckoned.
The clerk thanked me with distracted politeness as if she couldn’t remember my name, which, to be fair, I could barely remember it myself by that point.
My phone had died hours ago.
I hadn’t even noticed.
I gathered my bundle, the papers stapled together with a clip barely holding on, and slipped them into my bag.
The courtroom emptied around me, the shuffle of feet and low murmur of closing conversations blurring into white noise.
God, I needed air. And maybe food. Definitely sleep.
So I stepped into the corridor where Youth Offending workers slipped out with clipboards and a CPS lawyer I half-knew offered a brief nod while a defendant cried quietly into his jumper, a solicitor telling him the sentence “could have been worse.”
I reached the exit doors and pushed them open, stepping into the cool late-afternoon air.
Highbury Corner was loud outside. Buses hissing, teenagers smoking, the usual London chaos.
And for a moment, I let myself breathe. All I wanted was to go home, collapse face-first into my bed, and maybe forget that half the people tied to Razor’s world had materialised today in one of the last fucking places I wanted them.
At a court building where my life was supposed to stay clean, separate, sterile.
I headed towards the station. But before I got there, a car rolled up alongside me in the bus lane, window humming down, and a sharp whistle cut through the noise of traffic and buses and late-afternoon chaos.
I turned.
Razor.
My stomach dropped as if I’d missed a step.
He angled his head. “Get in.”
I really shouldn’t. Firstly, he’d stopped in a bus lane.
Secondly, climbing into that car screamed conflict of interest, possible impropriety, and about twelve different things that could put the last five years of training at risk.
But he looked… wound tight. And was still in that suit from earlier, staring at me as if I was the only person who could decode whatever hell he was walking through.
Had he been waiting all day?
I glanced back at the court. At the life I was supposed to keep untouched.
Clean. Then stupidly, inevitably, I walked around the car and got in.
I’d barely got the door shut before Razor slotted the car back into the rush-hour choke of the A1.
The engine growled, the traffic surged, and I clicked my seatbelt in, trying and failing, to steady the way my breath kept catching.
Razor dragged a hand down the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a battered cigarette packet. He dropped it on his lap and one-handed, eyes on the road, tapped out a cigarette, stuck it between his lips, and started working a zip lighter like a nervous tick.
“So you’re Billy Amos’s solicitor?” he asked, one hand tight on the wheel, the other flipping the lighter open-shut-open-shut.
“I’m not a solicitor. I’m a barrister. Pupil barrister. His counsel for today.”
“What’s the difference?” Razor kept worrying his lighter instead of actually lighting the cigarette wobbling dangerously between his lips.
“I’m still in training. I don’t choose clients. I go where chambers send me. Duty cover. Bail hearings. Youth lists. Whatever needs a warm body in a suit. Billy’s case came up, and I got handed the file ten minutes before walking into court.”
Razor cut me a glance. Sharp, searching, as if taking apart the words to see what lay underneath. “Does he pay you? His mum can’t afford that.”
“No. It’s legal aid or pro bono. Most of the people I represent don’t pay anything. That’s what pupils are for.”
“Pupils?” He snorted, rough and incredulous. “Thought you were some kind of Master?”
“I quit the Master’s.” I watched the city through the window.
Buses, neon, the crush of commuters. “I’d already been called to the Bar before I enrolled, so I could apply for pupillage.
” I looked at him. His blank expression told me none of that meant a thing.
So I simplified it for him. “I’m in training.
Which basically means I get paid less than minimum wage to shepherd terrified kids through a system designed to chew them up. ”
Razor huffed. “Thought you were rich.”
“I am. Or… my family is. I float on the surface of it. I get an allowance. Technically, from a trust fund my grandfather set up, practically from my father. And my flat’s theirs, so I don’t pay rent. That’s the only reason I can afford pupillage while earning less than minimum wage.”
Razor’s lighter clicked. Once. Twice. A threat of flame.
“But none of it’s really mine. It’s money with strings. I get a cushioned landing and the big payout at thirty if I stay in line. Follow the rules.”
Click. Click. Click.
“Are you going to light that?” I pointed at the lighter. “Or give it a panic attack?”
Razor gave me a devastating stare, then flicked the flame, hovered it by the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and tossed the lighter onto the dash. Smoke curled out the open window, sharp and warm in the car.
I used to hate smokers. But right then, it was an aphrodisiac.
Maybe I was drawn to poison.
“What rules?” he asked through the smoke.
“I have a long list.” I dropped my head back onto the rest. “And one of them I’m breaking right now.”
Razor took another drag, gaze cutting to me sideways. “Bank of Mum and Dad has a clause about you not fucking drug dealers, eh?”
“Pretty much.”
He swore under his breath. Low, angry, maybe hurt, then jerked the car down a side street, away from the traffic and pulled over in a quiet gap between tall, terraced houses, engine humming low, the whole vehicle vibrating with that same restless, pent-up tension rolling off him.
He didn’t look at me. He kept chugging on that cigarette, holding it between his two fingers, exhaling through the window before finally throwing the butt out. The air between us thickened with smoke, breath, sweat, and nerves. As if the car itself knew what was happening inside it.
“We really are from different worlds.” He bowed his head.
“Yeah.” I looked back at him. “We are.”
But the space between us didn’t feel wide right then.
It felt impossibly small. Heavy. Charged.
As if the truth were inching its way to the surface.
Razor’s grip on the wheel loosened, and he turned his gaze on me.
My heart stuttered. Because behind those eyes, the ones that had captured me that first time down a dark alley, sat fear.
Confusion. All the things he didn’t let anyone else see.
I thought he was going to bare his soul to me, and I was unsure if I was ready for it.
I’d absolutely take it, anyway.
So it was a small mercy when instead he asked, “What’s a SCOPA reference?”
I blinked. Taken aback. “Sorry, what?”
“Section something fucking something SCOPA. Seventy-four, whatever the fuck.”
“Oh.” I frowned. “You mean SOCPA?” I studied him, the tension in his shoulders, the way he wouldn’t quite look at me. “S-O-C-P-A.”
“Don’t need you to spell it, pretty boy. Need the meaning.”
“It’s complicated. SOCPA covers a lot. Where did you hear it?”
“A hearing for someone who got bust in a raid eight months back.”
Ah. Fuck. One of his. I inhaled.
“That’s…” I paused, searching for the least explosive phrasing. “SOCPA is part of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.”
Razor’s frown deepened. “Once again, I need the explanation, not the dictionary definition I could have looked up on my phone.”
“It’s… a type of agreement. Or the possibility of one.”
“A possibility for what, exactly?”
The car suddenly felt too small. Too warm. Too close.
“A Section 74 reference means the prosecution is acknowledging that under the right circumstances, a defendant might provide assistance to law enforcement in exchange for a reduced sentence.”
Razor stared at me. “Kid’s flipping?”
“It doesn’t mean they are doing that. It doesn’t even mean discussions have happened. It just means the Crown wants the judge to know that option exists in this kind of case.”
“So…they’re… what? Offering a deal?”
“It’s not an offer. It’s a legal framework. It’s routine in some organised crime-related cases. The prosecution mentions it so the court is aware of all possible directions the case could go. Nothing more.”
He gripped the steering wheel. “But it means someone could talk.”
“It means the mechanism exists.”
He let out a jagged breath. Not quite a laugh, not quite despair, but dropped his head back against the rest with a thud. Then another. Another. As if trying to knock the thoughts clean out of his skull.
“I’m gonna guess that when they say the defendant is to be assessed for appropriate safeguarding arrangements, that means prison, yeah?” He looked at me. “No bail. No random visitors. Locked down.”
“Can do, yes. Controlled environment. Where they’ll be considered safer.”
He thudded his head again. “Fuck.” Another. “Fuck.” Another. “Fuck.”
Something inside me snapped. Instinct. Empathy. Madness. I didn’t know but whatever it was, it had me reaching out, sliding my hand behind his head, catching him before he hit the seat again.
He froze. Completely. Resting his head in my palm.