51
‘Has anyone ever told you you’re more persistent than an alley cat?’ Conall grinds the words between his teeth as he approaches from across the vast courtyard with a reprimand burning in his eyes.
Clouds have swallowed the sky above the magistrates’ court, where the last remaining heir to the Crane line is to make his first appearance. It has drawn every reporter in London out of whatever den they work from. The clamour does nothing to soothe my nerves.
‘Persistence is a noble quality,’ Inga supplies as she lifts her chin stubbornly – reminding me that some traits crop up on every branch of the family tree.
‘In certain doses,’ Conall corrects. ‘Properly supervised.’ He looks at me.
‘Preferably nowhere near active criminal proceedings, armed men or prisons.’ His glare sharpens.
‘The world may admire a stubborn survivor, Leandra, but even stubborn survivors need to know when to sit down before they bleed on the furniture. Take it from an Irishman.’
I cross my arms. ‘Is that what you did when you realised how deep this goes? Stood down?’
He squares his shoulders as his mouth pulls taut.
‘Exactly. The Irish have made an art form out of being told to stand down and taking that as an invitation to continue out of spite and principle until shit gets done.’
His brows lift.
‘Alley cat,’ he reiterates, turning towards the courthouse. ‘Fucking hell… You’d better be sure about this, Leandra.’
Am I sure about this wild plan I keep improvising at every turn?
Uh-huh. Super sure. Now all I need to do is convince myself of that. ‘Let’s get him.’
Conall received a fraction of my conversation with Cromwell – after he stopped heaving and decided against hauling me to the nearest church and dunking my head into holy water.
As we make our way towards the entrance through shifting shoulders and black garments, my gaze catches on a familiar face.
MacLeish stands near the lower steps, notebook tucked against his chest, his attention snapping to me. The smile he gives is small, smug and far too pleased, as if he has already written the headline and is only waiting for tragedy to supply the punctuation.
My insides lurch as he lifts the notebook, clicks his pen, and begins to write.
‘Where’s Sindre?’ Henrik asks when we start up the stone stairs.
Busy. He is very busy.
I don’t say it aloud. Mostly because my nerves won’t allow it.
‘I think he tagged along just because he wanted a free holiday,’ Inga grumbles ahead. ‘He’d better not be feeding the dog crap food.’
‘Olle will make sure of that, you know how he is around animals,’ Henrik adds.
Inside, I take my place in the public gallery with Inga, palms damp and my pulse beating unevenly in my breastbone. My eyes climb up to where a dormant video-link screen hangs with large black speakers in each corner.
Everything about the space is built for procedure. For order. For deciding what happens to human lives.
I remind myself what Conall had made painfully clear: this is Elias’ first appearance, not a trial. The murder charge will be sent to the Crown Court before any major decisions happen.
Knowing that changes nothing as I stare at the empty clock overhead.
My giant can survive the wilderness and fight wolves, but can he fight the ones here?
Like the one watching me from the other end of the gallery now.
Cromwell sits back, perfectly at ease. Expects me to smile. Expects me to cower.
Expects me to disappear like the rest.
As soon as this is over, there is no doubt in my mind he’d make a move to remove me alongside everyone else involved in this. I’m not gullible enough to think otherwise.
A door beside the dock opens with a heavy mechanical clunk, and every sound inside the courtroom falls away.
Two officers enter first. Elias comes between them.
Everything inside me seizes.
He is dressed in black trousers and a plain grey T-shirt that strains across his shoulders. But it’s not the clothing that drags over my nerves.
It’s the steel, joining his wrists in front of him. Again.
Their rattle reaches into me, tearing open the memory of the first room in which I ever saw him.
Concrete. Institutional lights. His body folded behind a table too small for him. A great man reduced to narrow space.
Back then, the chains had seemed like the only thing keeping everyone else safe. Now they look like punishment for the monster everyone had spent years convincing him he was. A man walled up behind his own eyes, suffering without bending to the oppression.
His head is lowered as the officers guide him. Dark curls fall across his brow. There are bruised shadows beneath his eyes and a weight pulling at his mouth.
Then he looks up.
Finds me.
The chains snap taut between his wrists.
Surprise breaks across his face, gone almost before I can be certain I saw it. And rage sets in.
His brows drag low, eyes turning glacial as they rake over me, then move to Conall and the rest of the Norwegian horde.
The accusation reaches me from across the room without him saying a word: What are you doing here?
The officer beside him touches his elbow. He turns on him so quickly that both men tense, hands shifting towards their belts. I nearly spring to my feet. The chain chimes as he checks himself halfway through, both officers bracing. ‘I’m calm. I’m calm.’
And finally, his gaze comes back to me.
The fury remains, but his eyes run over me once more before they settle, as though counting the pieces of me I’m barely holding on to, making certain they’re all still in place.
They move to my hands last.
Devoid of Frida’s ring.
His fingers curl and he focuses on the tiles as they guide him forward.
When he steps into the secure dock, one officer unlocks the cuffs through the narrow hatch. The red impression blooms around both wrists. The violence in him fractures when it meets the outrage in me.
His eyes stay on my bare hand. The tension in his face eases. But barely.
A question passes between us in one silent beat, because wanting me anywhere near this is precisely what terrifies him.
Though the chains are off, I can still hear that faint, metallic tremor of steel on him – the beginning of us.
I hold his gaze without a smile. He holds mine the same. But I feel his hand pressing into mine without him doing it.
His jaw works once. You should not be here.
I lift my chin. Try to stop me.
My fingers clench around the edge of the bench.
Conall half-rises from his place behind counsel, but as he opens his mouth, a burst of static tears through the courtroom, followed by Cromwell’s voice: ‘…stamps a shipment without opening it… cash… Arthur knew nothing, but Melody Crane did… shame she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.’
Every muscle in me locks.
Finally.
People recoil, and Elias’ eyes narrow before they flick to Cromwell, but when he finds the uncertainty on the man’s face, worry darkens his own. His hands close around the ledge inside the secure dock.
The district judge looks up sharply. ‘Clerk, what in the world is going on with the media system?’
The clerk fumbles for the controls. One of the court security officers moves to the door while another speaks urgently into his radio.
The recording cuts, then catches on another part of yesterday’s conversation – when Cromwell talked about the dead Cranes with far more knowledge than an innocent man should possess.
Hearing it again is different. In his office, I’d been too busy surviving the conversation to grasp how ugly it really sounded.
Elias goes rigid. His eyes leave Cromwell and slowly drag to find me.
At first, there’s the confusion that had taken hold of everyone.
But when my own faint voice breaks alongside Cromwell’s, I watch the pieces align behind that blueness.
The moment he realises I had gone to see Cromwell on my own, he surges against the ledge.
Guilt gives a vicious kick against my sternum.
I knew exactly what he’d think about this, but I did it anyway.
The custody officer beside him steps closer, one hand rising towards his shoulder.
‘Mr Crane,’ he warns.
Elias deflates before the man touches him, but every part of his demeanour remains aimed at me. His shoulders draw hard beneath his T-shirt as fury strips the exhaustion from his face until he looks as if he might break through all that wood, but then the devil’s voice fills the room again.
People jerk upright like a single outraged organism. The usher hurries towards the side door, the clerk speaks into a telephone beneath the bench, and someone near the rear calls for the sound system to be isolated.
‘Turn it off!’ the judge snaps. ‘Nobody is to leave the courtroom!’
I meet Conall’s eyes – his face is drained of colour.
The prosecutor is already on his feet, talking over the chaos about unlawful recording, prejudice to proceedings, contempt and other big, legal words.
My confidence loses a little of its swagger, but the fire is, at least, spreading.
‘Sit down!’ the judge warns the barrister. ‘This material is not before the court and will not presently be treated as evidence.’
Beyond Conall, Elias holds his gaze on me.
The rage is still there, but his lips are now parted as fear takes the stand. For me.
As the voices keep rolling from the speakers, his attention travels from them to Cromwell.
The bastard’s face has gone a blotched kind of red. He finds me across the courtroom and gives me a look that could level mountains.
The soundless threat from his office is stark within it.
I pull myself straighter anyway. The moment extends until the doors at the back burst open, and a court officer stumbles in, breathless, one hand pressed to his earpiece.
‘Judge,’ he says, waiting until the judge acknowledges him, ‘the audio has been published online. The media outside are already playing it.’
A vicious satisfaction unfurls inside me.
The room goes still around the next loop of Cromwell’s voice.
Phones begin vibrating across the press row despite every warning to silence them. Reporters stare down at their screens, then towards Cromwell’s seat.
There’s no taking it back now.
I had sent MacLeish the recording of my conversation with Cromwell, and he had done a wonderful job of releasing it into the wild two minutes before the hearing started. With Sindre making certain it travels across the country without anyone inside this room being able to contain it.
I don’t know if it will do any good in court. But things like this won’t just drown in public. Cromwell might bury files and frighten witnesses. Delay proceedings. Keep Elias buried under paperwork while evidence slowly disappears.
But he would never be able to force thousands of people to unhear his voice.
I lift my eyes to Elias’ face. One corner of his mouth moves – he’s much too furious with me for it to be a smile, but it’s almost there.
Demon, he mouths.
My lips threaten to betray me. I press them flat before anyone can see as his gaze sweeps the room, while the staff scramble to restore order.
The bald head rises among the chaos of people springing to their feet. Cromwell makes it three steps towards the aisle before two uniformed officers move into his path. One touches his earpiece, listening.
Cromwell’s expression hardens, his gaze lancing through the speakers, then shifting to me. Whatever he is about to say disappears. One of his men shifts behind him, spouting something about absurdities. The officers, however, remain where they are, keeping him in one place.
I don’t hear every word over the objections, but I do see Cromwell’s spine snapping straight.
And then—
One of the officers takes his arm. He guides him out, but before he’s swallowed by the cluster of uniforms, his gaze cuts through the courtroom and latches on to mine.
There is no smugness left in it now.
Just a dark promise.
Wood resounds sharply from the dock. Elias’ body has pitched forward, eyes trained on Cromwell. He saw that look, too.
The custody officers catch him by the arms. He doesn’t fight them, but every muscle in him strains towards Cromwell with such naked aggression that the people nearest the dock jerk away.
I know exactly what he wants to do. A ruined part of me almost wants to let him.
‘The hearing is postponed,’ the judge says, striking through the noise. ‘No material arising from this interruption is to be treated as evidence until it is properly obtained, authenticated and disclosed.’
Conall appears to my right, shaking his head.
‘You may have just handed Cromwell’s barrister an argument before we’ve even reached Crown Court.
’ He runs his palm over his face and sighs as he leans in and says in a low voice, ‘You’re going to give me the original file.
You are going to say nothing to the press.
You are going to let me try to keep this from eating the case alive. ’
The triumph I’d been nursing shrinks considerably.
I nod. ‘The original is on the recorder attached to Brute’s harness.’
After I’d seen Cromwell, Sindre had taken the dog for a walk – all the way to the hotel room where his laptop waited to receive the files. Just in case something happened to the recorder, a copy was uploaded directly to my cloud storage.
The Irishman gives me a look containing several centuries of undisclosed profanity.
One look at it and the victory lap is cancelled.
I’m not stupid, though. Cromwell may be answering police questions. The reporters may have their headline. Investigators may finally be looking towards the truth.
But Elias remains behind secure glass. Cromwell’s arrest probably changed the direction of the investigation, but it hasn’t cleared my wild bear.
At best, the evidence has given investigators something new to authenticate – and Conall another reason to start tearing through Cromwell’s version of events.
Thankfully, the judge doesn’t let the chaos of the morning breathe for long.
He starts laying out rules and procedures, then adjourns the court. His gaze moves lethally across the room. ‘I strongly advise everyone present to remember that this is still a court of law.’
Law.
Perhaps.
Sometimes, though, the law needs a boost.