Page 4 of Claim

“Yes.” She arched an eyebrow. “It is.”

I nodded my thanks for letting me know then continued on to my room, the one small concession of permanence chambers afforded me. I shut the door and leant back against it, the wood cool through my jacket. That was interesting. CPS didn’t ring chambers to make conversation. They didn’t ask about availability unless they expected someone to be needed. Or managed.

Either way, it meant the same thing.

I was no longer incidental.

I straightened, cataloguing what that visibility would cost me. Which cases I could take, which ones I couldn’t, and how carefully I would need to move from now on. I removed my tie, folding it carefully before placing it on the desk and sitting down. I opened my laptop. Emails filled the screen. Case updates, administrative notices, diary adjustments, requests for skeleton arguments at short notice. A polite note of congratulations from someone who had once supervised me and would never quite admit they’d expected me to fail. Or, failing that, to coast quietly beneath my father’s shadow. Hale-Fitzroy nepotism neatly packaged and politely unspoken.

I had worked hard to burn that assumption out of my career.

There were no personal messages.

Not that I expected any.

That was deliberate. I’d made sure of it. That line, drawn hard and fast, hadn’t emerged out of cruelty, but necessity. It was the only way I survived.

Still, the absence pressed at me like a shift in pressure. Invisible, constant. I had adjusted to it. Learnt how to breathe around it. How to function. But adjustment wasn’t the same as acceptance. Eight weeks was long enough for shock to cauterise into something colder. Long enough for grief to be stripped of drama and repurposed into resolve.

I opened a CPS update I’d flagged earlier that morning. Laundering matter. Peripheral defendants. Nothing dramatic. I read it carefully, annotating margins, tracking dates. A name appeared twice, half-buried in footnotes.

Lord Adrian Wolfe.

The cursor blinked at the bottom of the screen. Then the document refreshed, and a grey banner slid across the top.

ACCESS AMENDED — PARTIAL RESTRICTIONS APPLIED

I stared at it for a moment too long, then checked the timestamp. Less than thirty seconds ago. I saved a local copy anyway and read on, noting what the summary presented rather than exhibited. Intelligence referenced without provenance. Witness statements paraphrased instead of appended. Sloppy.

Or guided?

I leant back in my chair and opened the remand tracker.

Slade, Richard. HMP Pentonville. Status unchanged. Under investigation in relation to a fatal incident.

No charge.

Still no charge.

Eight weeks. Long enough for routine to harden. For men like Razor to become statistics instead of people.

I shut the laptop and stood, crossing to the window.

Outside, the Inner Temple gardens lay stripped and grey, paths slick with winter rain. Students hurried past below, collars turned up, unaware of how small decisions made in rooms such as mine could alter lives they would never see.

I thought, suddenly and with an ache that surprised me, of Razor’s hands. The way they’d rested on my spine that last night, solid and real and terrifyingly tender.

That solidity was gone now.

In its place was resolve.

I straightened, compartmentalising the ache, and reached for my coat.

Chapter two

Razor

“Slade!”