Page 7 of Claim

He nodded, as if that were a sufficient metric. To be fair, in here it was.

Ellwood opened the file, though I doubted he needed it. Whatever had changed since their last visit, they hadn’t shared with me yet, and judging by the way he avoided my eyes, it wouldn’t be good.

“Let’s be clear where we are.”

I let him talk.

Ellwood had been the duty solicitor on the night of my arrest, rolled over into representation because that’s how the system worked when your money wasn’t clean. And mine wasn’t. Every penny I’d ever touched traced back to Cormac O’Rourke and the empire he’d built on other people’s blood.

Cormac wasn’t paying for this. They were legal aid.

Which meant I was on my own.

The cash I’d squirrelled away when no one was looking was for Keeley and the baby. That was untouchable. She would have known to take it, hide it or use it the moment I hadn’t come home. I wasn’t burning their future on a defence for a verdict that was already written.

Even if I wasn’t guilty.

Not of what they said I’d done that night, anyway. I’d made sure of that. But innocent? No. I’d never been that, and everyone knew it. The screws. The briefs. The man on the street. Razor Slade was guilty of plenty—of being a cog in a much bigger machine, understanding exactly how dirty money moved and choosing to keep it moving. I’d been turning those wheels for years before the night they picked me to carry it. Before I’d hesitated. Before I’d stopped following instructions.

So yeah…I was going down. For a long time.

It didn’t matter that I’d been lining Cormac’s pockets since I was fifteen. Nor how many nights I’d bled for his organisation. When it came down to it, he’d let me go without a backward glance. Cause he knew I’d tricked him.

So here I was. Back where I’d started.

Piss fucking poor.

And being poor meant I didn’t get to choose.

Much like what Mum used to say when she handed me my burnt dinners as a kid: I got what I was given.

“We’re still awaiting further disclosure from the CPS.” Ellwood dropped his gaze to his notes. “They’re citing complexity.”

Ellwood had done what he was paid to do. What the courts expected. He’d lodged the bail application, then watched it die on its feet. He’d chased disclosure that arrived late and thin, as if by design. He’d challenged the arrest enough to irritate the bench but ultimately changed nothing.

All competent.

All useless.

I snorted. “What’s complex about it?”

Ellwood didn’t take the bait.

“You’re remanded on the supply charges. The other investigation remains live, but no further charges have been brought.”

Yet.

We all knew what that other investigation meant. Murder. A body they wanted to hang round my neck, whether it fitted or not. I wasn’t guilty. Not in the way they were suggesting. But that had never stopped them before. They needed a shape to pour it into, and I was already here. Present. Named. Convenient.

Time would do the rest.

Keeping me inside meant I couldn’t fight it properly. Couldn’t steer the narrative. Move pieces. Nor remind anyone that I wasn’t just a name on a charge sheet and how I’d had no reason to torture, maim, or kill Kyan Gibbons.

The problem, though, was that my fingerprints were everywhere. On places they shouldn’t have been. Anyone else’s prints would have been scrubbed clean by now. That was a given.

What I did know though, through the grapevine of Pentonville remand, where most of us had moved in the same circles long before we ended up caged together, was that Kyan’s family had vanished. House cleared. Phones dead. No forwarding address. One week they were there; the next, they weren’t. Could’ve been the money I’d pushed their way. Could’ve been courtesy of less corrupted money. Someone, or some organisation, making sure they stayed out of reach.

Either way, it told me what direction this was heading.