A Game of Proof by Tim Vicary Read Free Book Online

worked, you could succeed. As she had done.
    One by one the other barristers, the clerk and the secretaries called out their goodbyes and left the office.  By seven thirty, Sarah looked up and saw that only Savendra had his light on across the corridor. His door was open; she could see him in his shirtsleeves and red braces, making detailed notes at his desk. She yawned, and stretched her arms over her head with her fingers linked, easing the joints in her stiff neck and spine. Savendra looked up and smiled.
    ‘Finished already?’
    ‘Yup.’ She crossed the corridor, leaning on his door frame curiously. ‘What’s your brief?’
    ‘Mass poisoning.’
    ‘What, you? Advocate for the Borgias?’
    ‘Hardly. My client’s a farmer who let his slurry pit overflow into a village borehole. Diarrhoea and vomiting all round.’
    ‘Charming. Still, you know what they say, don’t you?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Where there’s muck there’s brass. A case like that should make you stinking rich.’ She ducked as he flung a paper clip at her. ‘I’m off home.’
    She crossed the corridor to her own room, leaving her door slightly ajar, just to tease Savvy who knew what happened next. She kicked off her court shoes and took off her jacket, hanging it neatly on a hanger behind the door. Then she stepped out of her skirt. Savendra whistled softly. Sarah strolled across her room, took a black leather jacket from a hook on the wall, pirouetted as she put it on, and blew him a kiss. Then she sat on the edge of her desk and pulled on some black leather trousers, smiling as they creaked around her. Finally she pulled on some heavy black boots, locked her door, and waved to Savvy as she went downstairs.
    Her office was on the fourth floor of an old Victorian building in Tower Street, a stone’s throw from the courts. The barristers had chambers on the top floors; the solicitors, where Lucy worked, were downstairs. The building had lots of disadvantages - the narrow stairs, the small rooms, the fire risk - but one good part of it from Sarah’s point of view was the servant’s passage leading to a small back yard, where the Victorians had once had a loo and a coal shed. Now the lawyers had transformed it. There was an array of potted plants, some expensive wrought iron garden furniture; and in the coal shed were two gleaming motorcycles.
    One - the larger - belonged to Savendra; the other, a jet black Kawasaki 500, was Sarah’s. She regarded it with a mixture of amusement and excessive, secret pride. She had bought it first as a solution to the problems of traffic and parking, but it meant far more to her than that now.
    It was a joy she only shared with Savendra, when they compared, with sparkling eyes, the beauty of the machines and their accessories. She had grown to love everything about the Kawasaki - the shining black paintwork and gleaming chrome; the smooth responsive purr of the engine and the bike’s sensitivity to the slightest shift of her weight in the saddle; the sensuous creak of leather; the glorious freedom of weaving through traffic and accelerating to speeds that, though perfectly legal, seemed to her risky in the extreme. She loved the style of it too - black helmet, black leather clothes, black bike -  and the way it marked her out, made her at once anonymous and different, her own person, not like the rest.
    Not like a wife or a mother. Like a free spirit, like no one at all.
    It was something, perhaps, to do with her desire to become a barrister in the first place. A free spirit who was faster than others, who played to win. A similar instinct, no doubt, had led Julian Lloyd-Davies QC to drive a black Jaguar with LAW 2 on the numberplate. Sarah couldn’t afford that - in fact her bike was cheaper than a small car - but it marked her out as someone to be taken notice of, someone not to mess with. And that was how she wanted to be. Not a victim ever again, but a person who made things happen.
    Whose life belonged to