The Aladdin Trial Read online

  An elderly local artist plunges 100 feet to her death at an overstretched London hospital, and the police immediately sense foul play . . .

  The hospital cleaner, a Syrian refugee and a loner, is arrested for her murder. He protests his innocence, but why has he given her the story of Aladdin to read and why does he shake uncontrollably in times of stress?

  Judith Burton and Constance Lamb reunite to defend a man the media has already convicted. Together they uncover not only the cleaner’s secrets, but also those of the artist’s family, her lawyer and the hospital.

  A new Burton and Lamb legal thriller from the author of the acclaimed The Pinocchio Brief.

  Yorkshire-bred, ABI SILVER is a lawyer by profession. She lives in Hertfordshire with her husband and three sons.

  www.eye-books.com

  For more information, please contact: Dan Hiscocks ([email protected], 07973861869)

  For Sales information: Hugh Brune ([email protected])

  Published in 2018

  by Lightning Books Ltd

  Imprint of EyeStorm Media

  312 Uxbridge Road

  Rickmansworth

  Hertfordshire

  WD3 8YL

  www.lightning-books.com

  ISBN: 9781785630750

  Copyright © Abi Silver 2018

  Cover by Shona Andrew/www.spikyshooz.com

  Typesetting and design by Clio Mitchell

  The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  This one’s for you, Mum

  Contents

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE

  1

  The body lay unnoticed for hours. This was not startling; the area behind St Mark’s Hospital was hardly a magnet for revellers or a main thoroughfare, and it had been night time when she had fallen. But it might have surprised the corpse – before she died, of course – given the manner of her launch from the platform above and the spectacular splintering of her skull against an exposed tree stump.

  As a young art student, she had tried many times to imitate Picasso’s style in his Cubist period, before tiring of painting portraits in vibrant colours with one eye bigger than the other. It might have been comforting to her to imagine her own face appearing that way now, one side swollen and disfigured, the eye bulging, out of proportion, a mass of yellow and purple, rather than the more gruesome reality of her situation.

  And if she had had time to reflect on things, the deceased might have conceived of her plunge as a glorious swan song, a piece of intense performance art to herald her departure from this world and her arrival in the next, worthy of a standing ovation.

  But in truth, there was almost nothing of any note; the crack of her head’s destruction, the snap of her neck and then her body listing to one side before settling quickly into the undergrowth, its flamboyant fall a distant memory. And then silence. No trumpets or fanfares, no applause, no rush to her aid. Barbara Hennessy’s life came to an end much as she had lived: erratically and with a burst of great drama.

  This was how she was found by a walker around 5.30am, his dog first romping towards her crumpled body then pausing, its head turning one way and the other, enveloped in sensory confusion. Now the area was a hive of activity; forensics and police and local people, including hospital employees and workers, trying to get a glimpse on their way into work.

  Barbara was still wearing her nightdress and hospital wrist tag. If she had been allowed to choose her own attire for such an occasion, she would have preferred the Stella McCartney number she had picked up from a car boot sale in Tring, and her Boho bangle. Sadly, those items were languishing in the bedroom of her modest flat in Primrose Hill (closer to Chalk Farm but she had persisted with the Primrose Hill tag), the dress hanging in the wardrobe, the bracelet in the drawer by her bed.

  Perhaps, if considering the matter objectively (which was not actually Barbara’s forte) she would have appreciated the aesthetics of the scene: her forget-me-not blue nightgown complemented the rose bay willow herb and set off the last of the bluebells. And her fiery orange Vivienne Westwood rinse blended in with the carpet of crisp, fallen oak leaves she lay upon.

  Chief Inspector Dawson lifted the flap of the makeshift tent erected over the dead woman. He was no art-lover and paid no attention to the colours or hues or shapes of what he saw. ‘Cause of death’ was what interested him first and foremost, and whether, as a result of what he could glean from the body and the attending pathologist, he would be heading up another murder enquiry.

  Later, after a few direct questions to the pathologist, Dawson would go into the hospital, ride the crowded lift, and stand with furrowed brow at the place from which the deceased had perhaps plunged to her death. She had fallen – or been pushed (no conclusions had yet been drawn; all options were being assessed and weighed up) – not from her allotted bedroom but a staff room at the end of the corridor. So, for all Dawson’s complaints about ‘contamination’, in truth there was no way to secure this crime scene. This was a hospital. It was impossible to move any other patients out from their rooms. Even if he could negotiate the administrative minefield of where to relocate private patients in an NHS hospital, there weren’t any spare beds. And the staff needed somewhere to go, or they’d be changing in the corridor.

  He would sniff the air in the woman’s room and smell only disinfectant and a mild, sweet scent from the roses next to her hospital bed. But here, again, the evidence was damaged. When the nurses had been alerted to the grisly discovery eleven floors below, they had rushed into Mrs Hennessy’s room (he knew her name now, although while he was outside and she was spread on the ground in front of him, she had been very much ‘the woman’ or ‘the body’), tweaking the bed and its covers, opening and closing doors.

  One nurse admitted later on that she had crawled underneath the bed; ridiculous given Mrs Hennessy’s age and the fact that the gap beneath the bed was visible from the door. But perhaps the nurses had needed corroboration of what they had been told? How could effusive Barbara Hennessy, who had chatted to them animatedly about the effective use of elephant dung in paintings (they had been rather disgusted), and sitting as a model for Lucian Freud (they had pretended to know who he was, but it made her sound eminent in any event), really be lying dead on the ground below?

  It was much simpler to imagine the former inhabitant of room 3 as having been discharged a little earlier than expected; all that remained was for a relative to return to pick up her things.

  Inspector Dawson would placate himself with the conclusion that there was little of note in Mrs Hennessy’s room to assist his investigation: three pillows at the head of the bed, suggesting her last position had been fairly upright; the bed covers turned back as if she had exited in a hurry. A paperback book, The Arabian Nights, lay on the table, a bookmark showing limited progress through its pages.

  And when Dawson exited, he would notice the blinds were closed across the glass-panelled door. For a second, he had a vision of a man w
ith gloved hands, wearing a surgical mask, creeping in during the hours of darkness, sliding the blinds closed and rushing forward to strike the helpless woman as she lay asleep in bed. Dawson shook his head. He should stick to the facts and where they led him, and avoid extrapolation. He reached out to touch the glass and then hurried off to give express instructions for fingerprinting to dust that area down thoroughly when they arrived.

  ‘What can you tell me?’ he asked the pathologist, gruffly, acutely aware of the staleness in the air beneath the canvas. ‘And don’t hold back, I’ve already been put off my lunch.’

  2

  Constance Lamb was basking in the delightful aroma of her newly brewed coffee when her mobile rang. She toyed with ignoring it but then snatched it up on the last ring before it transferred to voicemail. Thirty seconds later she was considering how best to broach, with Mike, the subject of yet another early morning summons to the cells.

  Mike lay on his side in the bed they shared, with his eyes closed. Constance hovered in the doorway, cup in hand, preparing herself to speak but, at the same time, certain that he had heard the ringtone and the snatched conversation which followed and knew what it heralded. This feeling that Mike was ‘all-knowing’ was borne out by prior experience.

  Mike had that impact on other people too; after meeting him for the first time, her mother had remarked that he had ‘a presence.’ There were other things she had wanted to say to her daughter about Mike but she had held back.

  It was hard to explain why he commanded such authority. He wasn’t enormously tall or dazzlingly handsome, and his voice was not piercing or resonant. Perhaps it was the opposite: his ability to focus long and hard on the task in hand, engendering the belief that he was a deep thinker, that nothing, however insignificant, would pass him by. This single-mindedness was what had attracted Constance to him that very first time she had spied him in Sammy’s bar, two years earlier.

  He had been drinking a beer with ferocious intensity, and she had found herself peering at him over and over again. When he had drained it to the bottom, he had placed the bottle down deliberately in the centre of the table, lifted his eyes and smiled at her. Although now she knew him better, she sometimes doubted if that absorbed, intense personality was ‘the real Mike’ or only the image he had wanted to portray.

  Constance crossed the room and retrieved her black trousers from the chair in the corner. They had almost made it back into the wardrobe the previous night, but Mike had interrupted her to ask if they had run out of cereal for his late-night snack and she had forgotten to put them away. She heard Mike’s breath leave his body in a short burst. She interpreted this as a sign of annoyance, but she wasn’t sure; she had finally taken a day’s holiday, they had planned to spend the day together, finishing up with the press night of a new play. Mike’s friend – well, rival might be a better description, as they had both auditioned for this part – had bagged the lead, and had graciously handed out tickets.

  ‘Mike,’ she whispered, receiving no response. ‘I’ve got to go out. I’ll probably only be an hour.’

  Now Mike twitched his head away from her and lay still again. This time all traces of breathing stopped. He had performed this respiratory deception before and she wondered if it were a party trick he had used to impress previous girlfriends: ‘play dead’ so they would make a fuss of him. But she didn’t have time for his games this morning.

  She pulled a white shirt from the wardrobe, tugged it over her head and buttoned it up. Then she sat down next to him, kissing his exposed neck above the covers. Mike remained unnaturally still but, unperturbed, she kissed him a second time and ran two fingers down his cheek ending on his lips, then returning them to her own. She shook her head almost imperceptibly. God he was stubborn.

  ‘Don’t go anywhere. When I get back I’ll fix you a huge breakfast. OK?’ she tried a final time.

  When he failed to respond, Constance stood up and slipped her feet into her shoes before twisting her hair around into a tight bun and securing it with a hair pin. Five minutes later she was striding out into the cool air of the May morning, wondering how long she would have to wait for a train.

  3

  Ahmad Qabbani removed his jacket and hung it in the staff cupboard. The day was warm but, after three years in England, he knew better than to place any trust in the weather. He had learned the hard way that even the brightest start could be smothered and drenched in the time it took to unwrap his lunch, leaving him shivering and damp on his journey home.

  He opened his locker and extracted his white apron, replacing it with the one he had carried home two nights before. His third and final apron had been delivered to Aisha, his wife, for washing only last night. He repeated this process every day to ensure he was always wearing a clean uniform. Not that he got really dirty, not often anyway, but you couldn’t see most germs and he had always had a spotless uniform in his previous life, before coming to England, so why should he change things now?

  Aisha didn’t complain about the washing, she didn’t complain about anything at all. She accepted Ahmad’s apron each evening, or sometimes in the mornings when he worked nights, and there was always a clean replacement folded by the front door, together with a homemade meal for every day he went to work.

  Maia, the other hospital cleaner, had worked through the night; not on this floor – they didn’t clean the private rooms during the night unless they received a special instruction – but they both had their lockers up here and their cleaning materials in the store room. She had left him a note on top of the bucket; she did that sometimes, scribbled on the back of a Tesco receipt. It read ‘Mr D room 6 very sick.’ And she had drawn a sad face with its tongue sticking out.

  Ahmad grinned. Some days he and Maia worked at the same times and took breaks together. She was only twenty and from Romania, and had big dreams of marrying a doctor and living in a mansion overlooking the heath. Then she would have her own cleaner. He interpreted her note as a warning both to be prepared for whatever he may have to clean up in room 6, and also to enter quietly. Ahmad always did this anyway. He had learned the hard way that English patients really don’t like to be woken up when they have ‘just got off to sleep’ even if, in reality, they spend most of the day and night snoozing.

  He checked his phone for messages. Only last week the school had called to say that Shaza, his daughter, was ill and he had had to return home almost as soon as he arrived, although it was still early – not time yet for school. He switched the phone to silent; he was not allowed to take calls on the ward.

  Ahmad unpacked the pie Aisha had baked for his lunch and took a moment to savour the pungent aroma of zaatar before placing it in the staff fridge. The day she had visited the local shops and bought thyme and sumac and ground up her own zaatar, he had begun to hope she had turned a corner, that things might return to some semblance of how they used to be. But even though he had zaatar pie for his lunch, with olives and a pot of fatoush salad, little else of the joy of their former life had returned. How could it?

  As he placed the apron over his head, he became aware of pounding footsteps in the corridor and raised voices speaking over each other. Ahmad peered out to see the cause of the commotion. Three nurses were standing outside Mrs Hennessy’s room talking in an animated way. One of them reached her hand out to touch the door handle and then withdrew it. Then a second nurse did the same. Ahmad watched them huddled together stepping forwards and back, stretching out and retracting their arms, rather like a bizarre form of dance. Maia would have thought it funny. She would have copied them, turning it into a loud, raucous Eastern European version of the hokey-cokey.

  Ahmad considered offering to help but decided against it. Sometimes the nurses were friendly but not all of them and not always. He would wait to be asked.

  He collected his bucket, mop and trolley from the cupboard and checked that all his cleaning materials were intact
. But then heavier steps thundered past him and he heard a deep voice he recognised as Dr Mahmood, one of the senior consultants, delivering orders. Ahmad had little direct interaction with Dr Mahmood, although he frequently saw him on the wards and corridors. On the first occasion they had come across each other, he had nodded politely. On the second, Ahmad had tried to make eye contact, had tentatively craved recognition or kinship, from this English-adopted countryman of his.

  But Dr Mahmood had merely reflected Ahmad’s bow of their first encounter and averted his eyes, and Ahmad had chewed his lower lip and chastised himself for his impertinence. After that, when he saw Dr Mahmood heading in his direction he stepped back and busied himself with something else. It was better that way.

  4

  Tracy Jones removed a KitKat from the cupboard and unwrapped it hurriedly, snapping the bar in two cleanly along its perforation. She almost shoved the first piece in her mouth then and there but suddenly remembered those ‘tips for dieting’ which recommended that you always sit down before eating, and assess clinically and rationally if you really want to consume something unhealthy before doing so. Huffing, she sat down at the table, held the KitKat under her nose for five seconds then, muttering ‘oh sod it’ under her breath, she ate both halves simultaneously.

  Reaching forward, she grabbed the pile of letters which had accrued through the week, and began to leaf through them. Eventually she stopped and opened one brown envelope. She read its contents and scowled before moving on to the next one. She continued the shuffling and selection exercise, followed by opening, reading and a grimace, until all had been examined, the ripped envelopes forming an impromptu fan on the table top.

  Then she read through each one again, placing them in a pile in her own order, at times holding one next to another to compare and contrast, all the time her tongue working around her mouth for the last vestiges of the chocolate she had just consumed.