The Hook by Raffaella Barker

you.’
    He pressed his palm flat against the glass and I did the same, my hand fitting into his so it looked as though I’d drawn round it. This was how we held hands now.
    Mick liked being in court. Right from the first day he had power even though he was handcuffed. The security around his case was crazy. Even the barristers were searched with metal detectors, once at the front door and once outside the courtroom.
    Mick applied to the Judge to have the handcuffs removed a week after the case was opened. His arm was sore from the days spent tethered to a shifting rota of police officers.
    â€˜It’s not as though I’m going to do anything, Your Honour,’ he said to the Judge with a grin. I thought he shouldn’t be smiling, he should be pleading, but Mick wasn’t like that and anyway the Judge almost smiled back. ‘I’d have to be crazy, wouldn’t I, to think about escaping with two dozen men with guns crawling around this building?’ He lifted his right arm, dragging the policeman beside him to reluctant attention. ‘I’ll be ending up deformed, Your Honour. I’m already blistered and bruised enough – you can see the bandage right here.’ He pointed with his unyoked hand at the greying fabric on his captive wrist.
    The Judge considered him, head on one side, wig awry, heaped up like suet.
    â€˜No, I don’t think we’ll uncuff you, Mr Fleet.’
    Mick scratched his scalp and ran his fingers through his hair slowly; the policeman’s hand hovered useless above his own.
    â€˜I suppose it might be prejudicial to the prosecution,’ said Mick. ‘For sure it’s prejudicial to the defence that I am handcuffed.’
    The Judge straightened up in his chair shaking his head and shuffled small hands among his papers.
    â€˜No, Mr Fleet. I cannot allow that. You cannot talk like that in the courtroom.’
    I didn’t see why it mattered. The jury were always sent out when the Judge and Mick, interrupting his barrister, had this sort of conversation, and they had it often. Mick couldn’t help treating the Judge like someone he knew. He was always demanding reasons and explanations for the way things worked. The Judge allowed far more than I expected. He seemed to like Mick, even though Mick was fired up and emotional sometimes.
    â€˜This is the rest of my life being debated, Your Honour. I need to know what you all think you’re doing with it in here.’
    The Judge was like a slap of water in his responses.
    â€˜Yes, yes, but you cannot go against the legal structure,’ he explained time after time.
    Mick had a talent for making other people feel important. He gave me a role when all I really needed was to be there. But maybe he was right to. He sucked me into his trial so deep that I could not have got out if I had wanted to. I didn’t want to. I was his route to the outside world, and I was vital. Mr Sindall, Mick’s barrister, had a team of solicitors who darted around me nipping information from me before returning to their notes and files. Members of the public who came to watch the trial smiled at me; one or two spoke, just making conversation: ‘It’s a lovely day,’ ‘Traffic’s bad on the ring road, I hear,’ ‘Do you know when thecanteen opens?’ I knew what they were doing. Each sentence came with a searching gaze, their ears flared when I responded and they tucked my words into their gloating minds and hoarded them to tell their friends later. ‘I spoke to his girlfriend. She was friendly, not like you’d expect one of them to be.’ I could hear them marvelling as if I was with them, back in their safe worlds where court was a source of excitement and glamour. I was a part of that glamour and it would have been a lie to say I didn’t love it.
    Maisie kept Tuesday evenings free for experimenting on Christy. It was a ritual that had evolved long before