Page 51 of The Quarterlands (Dark Water #4)

“Tyler was hopping mad that Alex had got away. Of course, he knew that Solange had helped Alex. He made her watch Alex being punished because he knew she’d be upset.

She and Alex were close, really good friends.

Not at the beginning because of how he felt she’d betrayed him.

But they became real close over time. I can still see her face.

She was crying, horrified by what Tyler was doing to Alex.

He was beating him so hard. I was worried because I thought he was gonna kill Alex.

I’d never seen Tyler like that – he lost control.

Solange ran forward and yanked at Tyler’s arm, and he kept trying to shake her off.

Then he grabbed hold of her hair and hit her several times.

I ran forward to stop him, but I was too late.

He hit her across the face so hard that she fell against the fireplace and her head cracked back…

and then she was gone. It all happened so fast.”

Josiah glanced at the jury. They looked touched by his story, perhaps on their way to being won over. They’d clawed back a little of the ground they’d lost.

Byrne finished questioning Ted, and HMS stood up.

“I have a few more questions. So, Mr Burgis, your houder is beating the woman you proclaim to love, and you just stand there and do nothing until it’s too late?” he asked in a sceptical tone.

Ted looked as if someone had punched him. “You gotta understand, we were all scared of Tyler,” he said. “All of us were beaten at some point. We expected it.”

“It’s illegal to beat an indentured servant,” HMS said.

Ted laughed. “Well, that must mean it never happens then, like all illegal stuff.”

The jury gave a little laugh at that.

“So, if this beating was as bad as you say, then it stands to reason that Mr Lytton would still have scarring?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Ted shrugged.

“Scars like these, perhaps?” HMS clicked, and images of Alex flashed up on the smartwall.

They showed his back with the faint, silvery scars that Josiah was familiar with.

“These pictures were taken at the time of Mr Lytton’s registration as an IS, long before the events of the night in question.

I’m sure you’re aware that Mr Lytton was involved in a serious duck accident at the age of seventeen.

His mother was killed and his brother was seriously injured.

Mr Lytton was found guilty of causing that accident by taking the street drug known as crocodile tears before getting behind the wheel.

The scars on his back are a result of that accident, not some frenzied assault by one of the country’s most respected and successful businessmen. ”

Alex buried his face in his hands. Josiah rested his hand on his thigh and squeezed gently. How hard it must be to have the facts of your life rewritten in this way. Tyler had obviously falsified those photos, as he had so much else, but the balance of probability was slipping away from them again.

Josiah knew that Alex’s medical records would have been transferred to Tyler’s keeping for the duration of his servitude.

There had been plenty of time and opportunity to have them altered.

Byrne could put Charles and Noah on the witness stand, have them testify as to what they knew of Alex’s injuries, but Charles had been unconscious for days after the crash, and Noah had been in shock.

HMS wouldn’t have to do much to paint their recollections as unreliable without traducing their characters as he had Ted’s.

Ted stepped down from the stand. Medical experts from both sides were then called to testify as to whether the scars on Alex’s back were consistent with a beating from a whip or whether they could have been caused by the road accident.

While the truth seemed perfectly obvious to Josiah, Tyler had enough medical experts in his pocket to cast doubt on the issue.

There was a recess for lunch, and Alex ran to give Ted a hug once they were outside the courtroom.

“Bloody hell, mate, I didn’t expect it to be that bad,” Ted said shakily. Trudy came to stand beside him, and he reached for her hand, holding on tightly.

“At least my Trudes knows me,” he said, smiling at her.

“We all do, Ted,” Josiah said, shaking his hand firmly. “You did well up there. ”

“They made out I was a stalker. That I was after that cow pretending to be Solange.”

“Solange loved you, and you loved her,” Josiah said firmly. “We all know the truth. Don’t let them get into your head.”

“It’s not going well, is it?” Ted asked. “That bastard is gonna get away with it, like I always knew he would. System’s rigged, Joe, no offence.”

“None taken. I agree, it’s not looking great at the moment, but we have a long way to go yet, and I’ve seen trials turn around out of nowhere before.”

“How are you holding up, Alex?” Ted asked kindly. “Must be hard for you to listen to all that bollocks when we were there and know what happened. I saw you bleeding all over Tyler’s fancy white sofa.”

“I’m okay.” Alex gave a strained smile.

Josiah was worried about him, they all were.

His friends and family knew what he’d been through to get this far, and the mental health struggles he’d battled.

He stood to lose far more than the rest of them if Tyler was found not guilty.

The pressure had to be almost intolerable, but Alex was fulfilling his vow to Solange, and Josiah knew that was sustaining him right now.

Mick gave evidence next. Even dressed up in his best suit, he still looked shabby. Both he and Ted were such unsophisticated witnesses compared to Martin Bagshaw and Fake Solange.

Byrne took him through the events of that night, which he described in much the same way as Ted had. Then HMS stepped up. Josiah was coming to loathe the way the man sallied forth like a ship in full sail, awash with smug righteousness.

“Mr Reynolds, you worked for Mr Tyler as a security guard for many years.”

“Yeah, I did.” Despite his size, Mick looked diminished on the witness stand, cutting a forlorn, pathetic figure. He was clearly overawed by the proceedings and utterly out of his depth.

“What were your duties?”

“I guarded his property.”

“By which you mean? ”

“His houses and stuff but also people. Well, mainly Alex… Mr Lytton. None of the rest of his indies needed it, really.”

“Well, Mr Lytton was expensive,” HMS said. “He was a well-known public figure owing to the success of his brother and his father’s business endeavours. He also attracted a considerable amount of notoriety owing to his role in the AV crash that killed his mother and maimed his brother.”

Josiah noticed how often HMS reminded the jury of the crash.

“It’s not unreasonable that Mr Tyler might have wanted dedicated security for such a person, for his own safety, is it?”

“Well, no,” Mick answered, taken aback. “But that’s not really what we was doing. I mean, we weren’t protecting him against people trying to hurt him. We was there to stop him escaping.”

“Was Mr Tyler a good houder to you?”

“He was okay.” Mick shrugged.

“Come now. After you left his service, he entered you into his IS Leavers’ Scheme. You were given money and helped to find decent accommodation. In fact, that continued until very recently, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, but that was to pay for me staying quiet about what went on that night with Solange.”

“There are hundreds of ex-indentured servants in Mr Tyler’s leavers’ scheme. Were they all there that night? It must have been very crowded in that room.” HMS bounced up and down on his heels, looking very pleased with his joke. A few members of the jury smiled.

“I dunno about anyone else. I dunno about any leavers’ scheme, either.”

“Well, it’s an officially registered scheme.

There is detailed paperwork, which we’ve submitted to the court, and which the jury can examine later.

” HMS smiled at the jury, then turned back to Mick.

“The truth is, Mr Reynolds, that until recently Mr Tyler was very generous towards you, more than was required by the terms of your contract. In fact, he only stopped payments to you when you were convicted of illegal trading. Under the terms of the scheme, anyone acquiring a criminal record is automatically expelled.”

Mick’s face went bright red and he glanced furtively around the court. “It was only some fags and booze,” he muttered. “Black market stuff. Everyone does it.”

“And crocodile tears. You were dealing in drugs too. In addition, you have several criminal convictions for drunk and disorderly behaviour.”

Byrne objected, but the judge allowed it, saying Mick’s reliability as a witness was pertinent to the case. Josiah sighed. He’d always known it was risky putting Mick on the stand.

“I put it to you that you were angry that Mr Tyler cut off the small stipend he was paying you, and that is why you agreed to testify against him. It was revenge, pure and simple, towards a man who’d been nothing but generous to you.”

“Nah,” Mick growled. “That’s a fucking lie.”

The judge intervened to remind him that he was in a court of law, while HMS glanced at the jury with a raised eyebrow as if to say, “See what kind of man this is?” Josiah was confident the jury were going to happily discount Mick’s testimony.

Each night, he and Alex drove home in glum silence, ate sparsely from Alex’s stash of pre-prepared meals, then sat on the sofa for a couple of hours watching mindless shows before crawling off to bed.

They barely spoke. Did Alex blame him for not putting together a better case?

He blamed himself; if only he’d found the blackmail footage, or convinced Rebecca Lang to speak out.

The press made lurid headlines out of their misery every single day, and now Josiah forced himself to listen to News-Spec as a kind of torture, hearing his and Alex’s names dragged through the mud by every caller. Nobody believed their version of events. It all seemed so improbable, so far-fetched.

Mel was called to the stand to go through the DNA evidence. She was as professional as always, managing to make the dry nature of the subject easy for the jury to understand.

“In my professional opinion, the victim was killed by a blow to the head,” she said .

“Is it hard to extract DNA from a body that’s been underwater for a long time?” Byrne asked.

“Hard, yes, but not impossible. This is a field that has gone through rapid advances since the Rising.”

“Have you any way of knowing how long that body was in the water?” HMS asked. “Could it be a very old skeleton? Perhaps dating back to the Rising or even before?”

“Unlikely. I mean, it’s hard enough extracting DNA from a corpse that’s been underwater for seven years, so seventy is even harder.

You might get partial mitochondrial DNA suitable for maternal lineage identification, but a full nuclear DNA profile for individual identification would be much less likely.

The fact we were able to get a full DNA profile indicates the body hasn’t been underwater longer than, probably, a decade, at most.“

HMS asked her another question, but Josiah missed it because his holopad vibrated. He glanced at it to find it was Reed. He knew it had to be important for Reed to call him during a trial, so he slipped out into the hallway to answer it.

“You need to come back to the office right now,” Reed said urgently. “There’s a man here who says he has important information about Tyler, but he’ll only speak to you.”

When Josiah strode into the SID a little while later, he found Reed talking to a tall, dignified-looking man in his early forties, with a completely bald head and skin like burnished mahogany.

“Who’s this?” Josiah asked as he strode up.

“Jabir Aldaba. He’s the major-domo of Tyler’s hacienda in Spain.”

“Oh, really?” Josiah felt his heart skip a beat. He’d had no luck with any of his Spanish investigations, so this was something of a development. He stepped forward and shook the man’s hand. “I’m Josiah Raine, the chief investigator on the Tyler case.”

“Yes, of course. I recognise you from the news, sir.” Jabir bowed his head nervously.

“What can we do for you, Mr Aldaba?”

“I wasn’t sure what to do.” Aldaba spoke perfect English. “Mr Tyler has been good to me, but I couldn’t remain silent any longer. May God forgive me if I do him wrong.”

“You have information for us?” Josiah asked, hoping against hope that he did.

“No.” Josiah’s heart sank. “I have something else.” Aldaba lifted a large rucksack and spilled its contents onto Reed’s desk.

“Many months ago, Mr Tyler came to the hacienda in a hurry and deposited these in his safe under the cover of night, and the next day he left, also in a hurry. I cannot say what is on them, but…”

Reed gave a low whistle. In front of them were hundreds of nanodrives, neatly arranged in little boxes. Reed and Josiah exchanged glances. Was this the blackmail footage?

Aldaba looked troubled. “I know I will lose my job for bringing them here. I have wrestled with my conscience ever since I found out about the charges against my employer. As I said, he has always been good to me. But, despite that, I do not believe he is a good man.”

“What makes you say that?” Josiah asked, while Reed grabbed one of the drives and inserted it into his screen.

“The way he treated that poor young man.” Aldaba shook his head. “I saw the bruises on him, and I know how he came by them, but he never once complained. He never said a bad word against Mr Tyler. I hope I’m doing the right thing.”

“You are,” Josiah told him firmly. He turned to Reed. “Cam – anything?”

Reed shook his head. “It’s heavily encrypted. It might take weeks to crack, if that’s even possible. Given what we believe is on them, Tyler would hardly make it easy, would he?”

Josiah put his hands on Reed’s shoulders and gave a firm squeeze. “You’re the best, Cameron Reed, and I know you’ll crack that encryption and get access to whatever’s on those drives. That’s why we pay you the big bucks.”

“Those bucks aren’t nearly as big as they could be,” Reed grumbled, but he was already engrossed in his work, his fingers flying across the keyboard as he tried to gain access to the encrypted files.

Josiah turned back to Aldaba. “Thank you for doing this.”

“It might be nothing, I don’t know, but I do know from reading about this trial that we are being asked to choose between Mr Tyler’s and Mr Alexander’s version of events.

It seems that most people believe Mr Tyler, so I had to ask myself, having spent a little time with both men, which one would I believe? ”

“And?” Josiah asked.

Aldaba sighed. “Mr Alexander haunted the hacienda then, and he haunts me still. I wish I could have been more of a friend to him.” He took Josiah’s hand, as if seeking absolution. “I hope that now, by doing this, I am finally righting a terrible wrong.”