She has three weeks until she gives evidence against the men she found. The officer guarding her must never hear a word of it.
A forensic accountant due to testify in a laundering trial, and the protection officer who runs her days but must not hear her evidence.
Completed · 18 chapters · 3h 22m
WarmSensual tension; intimacy fades to black.Yearning · Dark & dangerous
Violence, Organised crime, Witness intimidation, Grief
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Dear Maeve,
I keep every receipt, because a receipt is the only thing anyone gives you that says what happened. Two years ago I noticed that sixty-one flats paid their rent in cash and were never once late, and I’ve spent twenty-two months proving what it meant.
Esther Mayhew noticed that sixty-one flats paid their rent in cash, in round sums, and were never once late. She walked five of them. They were empty. Twenty-two months later she is the prosecution's key witness against the men who own them, and on a February morning someone leaves a photograph of her swimming under her windscreen wiper. Aled Pryor has spent fourteen years in police protection being the man nobody remembers. He was in the inspector's office for forty minutes before she saw him. He gives a reason for every decision, asks permission out of habit, and has one rule of his own: he cannot hear her evidence. If she starts to tell him, he will leave the room. For the three weeks until she goes into the witness box he decides where she sleeps, which windows she may stand at and whether she may see her mother. Esther, who reads the habits of money, writes it all down and asks him what that makes him. He knows. So he gives her terms, and his inspector's direct number, and the right to have him moved without saying why. In a farm cottage in Somerset and a flat above a shut bakery, she reads his whole life off a petrol receipt, and every conversation has to go round the case, so they talk about everything else. But on the duty rota she read upside down on her first afternoon, he was down for four nights, and he has not done one. Anything between a witness and her officer could hand the defence the argument that the police shaped her evidence. And the one person she most wants to tell is the one person who is not allowed to hear it.
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On Monday somebody photographed me swimming. Lane three, orange hat, the pool clock at 07:21. By twenty to ten I was on my own pavement with a holdall, and the man I had taken for the driver was holding a car door open. He had been a yard behind me in the inspector’s office for forty minutes. I never saw him.
He gave me eleven minutes. I asked for one true thing about where we were going. He said somewhere with no neighbours, and that he couldn’t tell me the name. The second half got me in the car.
He decides where I sleep, which windows I may stand at, whether I see my mother. I wrote it all down, eleven items, and asked if he knew what that made him. He said yes. Then he wrote his inspector’s number on the back of my list, in case he ever made me feel I couldn’t say no to him.
He has one rule of his own: he cannot hear my evidence. Today I started to tell him anyway, and he was gone before the fourth word.
There are four chairs in that kitchen. In two and a half days I have not once seen him sit down, and I’d like to know why.
From The Man Assigned to Guard Her
Read this if you want a trial date and a man who never sits down.
Read this if you want the wait to be three weeks to a witness box.
Read this if you want the rule to be a trial.
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