Tony Hill u Carol Jordan 08 - Cross and Burn

chuckle. ‘You know which buttons to push, Ms Jordan.’
    ‘I had an excellent teacher. Do we have an appointment?’
    ‘It had better be good. It had better be very good.’
    Carol smiled. ‘I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.’ She ended the call and changed down to third gear to negotiate a series of bends that climbed over the moor top before the descent into Bradfield. It hadn’t been easy to maintain her composure during the phone call to the toughest criminal defence lawyer she’d ever jousted against. To say her feelings about the course of action she’d settled on were mixed was like saying the government had racked up a few debts. Her gut was churning and her hands were clammy on the wheel. Part of her wished she’d managed to ignore Paula altogether.
    But she hadn’t. When Paula had stormed out, Carol had barely paused before she gave chase. She caught up with her before she was halfway to her car. It didn’t take much to persuade Paula back inside, where she gave Carol the kind of briefing that had been second nature when they worked together. The more she heard, the more Carol had been inflamed by the absurdity of what had happened to Tony. ‘Not all evidence is created equal,’ she’d protested. ‘More often than not, it’s coloured by its connections. You look at someone like Tony and your starting point is, this man didn’t kill two women. So how is it that the evidence seems to point towards him? You don’t just go, “Here’s a bit of evidence, it must be you.” That’s not how you get justice.’
    And so of course she had to wade in. It wasn’t quite that simple, though. She couldn’t entirely escape the notion that she’d been played by Paula. She suspected the detective had motives that went beyond unpicking Fielding’s over-hasty decision. But if Paula thought she had set Carol on the road to reconciliation with Tony, she was in for a disappointment. This was about justice, pure and simple. The only sense in which it was about her and Tony was that their past history meant she knew him well enough to understand he wasn’t a killer. On a personal level, she wasn’t averse to the idea of him rotting in jail for something he didn’t do, since the law had no way to punish him for what he had done. But that would leave a killer at large, and that was unacceptable. She might not be a cop any longer but Carol understood what justice was about.
    That was more than she could say for Bronwen Scott. Having to get into bed with Scott was almost as hard as having to stand up for Tony. For years, Scott had been a thorn in her side, exploiting every weakness in the law to help the guilty. In theory, Carol held fast to the idea that everyone deserved a defence, no matter what their crime. But its manifestation in practice made her want to weep. She hated Scott for the maxim the lawyer regularly delivered with an air of injured innocence – ‘Do your job, Detective. Then there would be no technicalities for me to exploit.’ She despised Scott’s cavalier ability to defend clients who were manifestly guilty. Most of all, she hated the way she felt when criminals walked free because Scott had played on sentiment and emotion in the teeth of evidence.
    But now she no longer had the power of the job on her side, she’d have to exploit Scott’s skills if she wanted to see justice done. Crucially, there was no doubt in Carol’s mind that someone had to speak for the two dead women. Fielding wasn’t doing that and because she wasn’t, Paula couldn’t. Somebody had to fill the breach. Getting Tony off the hook was merely the first step on a journey to the truth.
    All these high-flown ideals were a perfect distraction. The more Carol wrapped herself in the flag of justice, the less she had to consider her feelings for Tony. The notion that she was reaching for a way to bridge the distance between them was one she would have dismissed with contempt if she’d allowed herself even to admit it as a possibility. It wasn’t about forgiveness. It was simply that she didn’t want him in her life.
    Driving into Bradfield was a strange sensation. It had been months since she’d travelled city streets and although she could still easily navigate routes that used to be second nature she felt like a tourist following a map she’d learned by heart. This had been her home for years but she had cut her ties and already there were changes to the traffic flow. Nothing major; the odd lane