Chapter 66 Leila
Leila
The stillness. That’s the most chilling thing about it.
It sounds ridiculous, but after being hit so hard with something so heavy, I expected him to be in a different state, gushing blood, gurgling and writhing around on the floor or something, begging for help.
His skin has turned white. He looks dead.
“Fuck, Leila! What have you done?”
Jack’s voice is overcome with panic and fear. We both stare at Anton, lying on the floor. I watch as a thick trickle of dark blood starts to run out of his right nostril while the sound of loud house music vibrates through the floor.
“I…I just panicked.”
Jack leans over him to see if he’s breathing. I remain standing, not daring to move. My lawyer instinct is already screaming, Don’t get closer than you need to. I gently place the kettlebell down on the floor. As I do, I catch myself being filmed by Jack’s phone, which is leaning up against the TV.
“It’s still recording,” I whisper, running over and pressing the red button to stop it.
“He’s barely breathing. We need to call an ambulance!” Jack says urgently.
I don’t move. I stare at Anton, lying motionless on the floor. He’s going to die.
“Leila!”
My breathing is fast and shallow. In a split second, my life has changed. All of our lives have changed.
“I’ll be prosecuted for murder,” I say calmly. “I’ll get life imprisonment. I won’t get out.”
“You won’t, you won’t…you were defending me. Shit!” Jack cries. “He might not die. It’ll be OK. We just need to keep him alive. Call an ambulance!”
He doesn’t understand. Why would he? All I can think about is my past, who I really am.
There’s no way it would stay out of court.
Even if the childhood abuse was used to try to justify my actions, my career, my life as I know it, would be over.
Having my past raked over like that, even with the best intention from a defense barrister, is a risky move.
Something I’ll fight tooth and nail to stop from happening.
Jack looks at me like a scared little boy. I’m the responsible one, the lawyer, the one with the answers. And yet, I have nothing. His head keeps turning toward Anton, who is edging closer to death by the second.
“What are we going to do? We can’t just do nothing!”
“Let me think,” I tell him calmly.
Patience.
My mind moves at speed. What’s the best way out of this? How does this look to the police? How would it look to a jury?
How can we play this?
After a few minutes it becomes brutally clear.
“He can’t leave this room alive,” I say bluntly.
“What?” Jack looks at me, incredulous.
“If he leaves this room alive, my life is over.”
The color drains from Jack’s face. I need to be the authority here or he will crumble.
“But…it’s a man’s life!”
“It’s his or mine,” I interrupt, standing in front of him in nothing but a pair of knickers and an oversized T-shirt. I’m shaking so much, my legs are knocking together.
“There must be another way. We could both leave. Claim to have nothing to do with it.”
“There’s far too much evidence linking us here.
Besides, it’s your flat. Our best way out is for one of us to be arrested and then get the best defense team there is.
Juries are unpredictable. There’s always a chance of a win.
No matter how cut and dried it might first appear.
We need a jury to find one of us not guilty. That’s our only option.”
The words leave my mouth, but they don’t feel real. How is this real?
“You could do it,” he suggests, after a few seconds.
“What?” I ask, as though I’m not already ten steps ahead of him.
“I’ll let them arrest me for it. You can defend me. No one can understand this case better than you.”
Still, I hesitate. “I can’t let you do that for me.” And I mean it. I know it’s our best chance but the thought of losing him is too much to bear. Then again, I can’t destroy everything I have, everything I’ve built.
I would rather die.
“Yes, you can.”
“I’m not guaranteed to win,” I remind him. “I’ve never led a murder trial before. I might not even be allowed. You’d have to insist I be your barrister.”
“I will. I’ll make them let you do it. I believe in you, Leila. You’ll win because it’s me. And because you were here. I didn’t kill him and that’s the truth.”
Can I pull it off?
The person I am now can’t. But I know someone who can.
Delilah.
I need to bring her back. The most dangerous, destructive, toxic, ruthless parts of me. The person I’d finally managed to escape. She’s my only hope of getting out of this mess.
From now on, no more of this emotionally driven, weak Leila crap. She’s the reason I’ve ended up here to begin with. My dad was right. The rules protected me all those years, and they’ll protect me again. Until after Jack is acquitted, I need to be that girl again.
Well, I say girl. I don’t think that part of me is even human anymore.
It’s just temporary. As long as I don’t allow her to consume me, I’ll be fine.
“The first thing we need to do is get rid of that,” I tell him, pointing at Jack’s phone.
We sit down and I go through exactly how I’ll run the trial with him.
There is no room for error—every step must be meticulously planned.
Jack fills me in on what happened between Lewis and Quinn, why Anton was at Jack’s apartment in the first place.
I can’t believe he didn’t tell me before now.
Yet more information to process on top of everything else.
Breathe.
I tell Jack that the second I receive the brief, I need to prepare it as if I know nothing about the case. I’ll need hard evidence to present to a jury and will need to go through the motions of collecting it, so as not to arouse suspicion.
Suspicion, however, will be raised around why Anton was here to begin with.
Suddenly, I know exactly what to do. The phone will be vital evidence because it has the video of Quinn killing Lewis on it.
But we can’t let the device itself be found, since the recording of everything that just happened now is on it as well.
Even if deleted, it could be retrieved by a digital expert. How do I fix this?
I stand up, start pacing. Quinn killed someone.
He can be our linchpin here. I’ll take the phone to just outside Anton’s house as soon as I leave and switch it on when I’m there.
I know where he lives—I remember going there years ago for some awful garden party when I first started dating Julian.
Cell site analysis will pick it up, and I’ll plant in the jurors’ heads that Quinn stole it to get rid of it.
I’ll then store it safely at Audrey’s house, the place that has become my alibi for the affair for the past seven months.
It’s been a godsend, being able to nip off to my mother-in-law’s house on a Friday night, go in for five minutes, and then leave.
The best part about it is she doesn’t even remember if you’ve been or gone.
We need to plant more female DNA around the flat to muddy the prosecution evidence.
I run downstairs to Innocence, picking up a few used glasses on the way.
Thank god they don’t have CCTV here. Nipping into the girls’ loos, I compliment some random girls on their hair, running my hands through their locks to collect some strands, before running back upstairs and placing them around Jack’s flat.
I swipe a lighter that has fallen on the floor to take up, too.
If we raise self-defense at trial, there has to appear to have been a struggle, so I tell Jack to pick up Anton’s left hand and bang his knuckles on the floor. I hit Jack in the face a few times as well, to corroborate evidence of a confrontation. I do it quickly and devoid of emotion.
Delilah is in charge now.
We turn Jack’s shirt inside out and back to front to corroborate the story he was having sex when Anton knocked on the door. We also need to locate a struggle in the kitchen, so I pour Coca-Cola down his T-shirt and leave the remainder of the bottle spilling onto the floor.
I’m on autopilot now. I’ve crossed a line and there’s no going back.
One thing that works well in serious trials is intrigue.
So I wipe my prints off the kettlebell and place it back in its doorstop position.
It’ll look as if I was trying to hide it, and in doing so, slipped up; a seasoned criminal like Jack would never make that mistake.
But a poor, panicked woman would. Jurors love trying to figure out these kinds of things.
This theory will be corroborated by Jack presenting as an “honest criminal” at trial; we’ll agree to the jury knowing about his previous convictions under the guise of having nothing to hide.
I spray some perfume in Jack’s bedroom. It’s vital that a woman’s presence is hinted at, but not enough that the prosecution investigates it.
It needs to be appropriately pitched so when Jack does the big reveal at trial, it makes the prosecution look incompetent and Jack’s story 100 percent plausible.
Jack tells me Quinn came to see him at Temptation the day of the murder and that he led him into the only room with CCTV.
Incredibly, I made reference to this room in my conference notes at the last trial.
I will use this as a vehicle to make our knowledge of it believable to the solicitor.
He also tells me there will be CCTV footage of Quinn being aggressive with him the week prior from Diamond Lounge.
I’ll admit this to evidence, but it’ll have to be done after Jack’s evidence, for maximum impact.
Jack must hint at this incident when he’s being cross-examined, which will allow me to introduce it in reexamination.
The prosecution must not be told the truth about Lewis until trial.
It is vital that this be the first time Eddie hears about Quinn killing his son.
I’m hoping he has an explosive reaction and will attempt to assault Quinn in court.
Chaos recalibrates a jury, and it becomes more about them and less about you.
Taking Quinn down will be the key to winning this trial.
Just before the jury retire to consider their verdict, I’ll collect the phone from Audrey’s house and anonymously send the police the video of Quinn killing Lewis.
It’ll be admitted as last-minute evidence and corroborate everything Jack has said.
I change the PIN of his phone to something only I would know.
After what feels like seconds but also hours, I look down at Anton on the floor. Planning how to get away with the murder of a man—a judge—who isn’t even dead yet is a new low, even for me. There’s one aspect I daren’t bring myself to think about.
The CPS will probably instruct Julian to prosecute. Going up against him in a murder trial frightens me more than anything, but the alternative is unimaginable.
I will do whatever it takes to win.
After thirty minutes, Anton’s breathing becomes shallow. He starts gurgling. It sounds like he has blood in his airway.
“I don’t think he’s got long left,” Jack says, handing me his mobile phone.
“No,” I reply. “I should get going. Give it five minutes, then use the main landline to call 999.”
“It’s going to be hard seeing you but not…you know.”
“I know,” I whisper, placing my hands gently on either side of his face.
He kisses me softly, but passionately. We don’t have long. It’ll be the last time we do this for a long, long time. Possibly forever.
Reluctantly dragging his mouth away from my lips, his eyes meet mine.
“I love—”
“Don’t,” I interrupt him, placing my finger on his lips. “Please don’t make this harder than it already is.”
I can’t hear that. If I do, I’ll crumble. I can’t be Leila right now.
Taking a deep breath, I look at the almost dead man by my feet.
Just stick to the rules one more time. You can do it.
For Jack.