Page 27 of Corrupt

“And Your Honour, the Crown also requests the court note the potential relevance of Section 73 and 74 agreements under SOCPA, should Mr Murphy choose to provide substantive assistance in ongoing operations.”

I didn’t know the words. Not properly. But I knew assistance agreements. Knew what they meant on the street. Deals. Leniency. Reduced sentences. Information traded for safety. Snitch-prep in legal fucking Latin.

Everything inside me snapped tighter than wire.

The judge nodded. “The application is noted.”

I heard the rest through a haze and watched Darren shaking in the dock, pale as death. His mum sobbed, shoulders collapsing. Cause he wasn’t going home today. I couldn’t get to him outside these walls and offer my own substantive assistance. He was heading back inside where the only people to get to him were the fucking investigators and everything of mine could unravel.

Movement at the corner of my eye caught me. Someone else got to their feet in the public gallery. Neat. Polished. Expensive suit. And this bloke leant forward to speak with the prosecutor, but when he turned his head, I recognised him in an instant. It was the same man I’d had thrown out of the Velvet Lounge last night so I could fuck his date.

His eyes caught mine.

My stomach dropped clean off its hinges, and I stood so fast the bench rattled. I kept my head down. And didn’t wait to see if Wolfe followed my movement or even knew who I was.

I left.

And stalked the corridor with a billion things burning through my skull.

Chapter six

Tristan

By four thirty, I felt scraped clean. Hollowed out.

By too many files, too many frightened parents, too many teenagers trying to act harder than they were because God forbid the world saw them as children. My suit was creased, my tie hung crooked, and the cheap fluorescent lights had left a dull ache behind my eyes throbbing with every heartbeat.

I finished my last hearing with a sigh. A sentencing motion going nowhere, with counsel on the other side too tired to fight, magistrates clearly desperate to get through the list before their own lives beckoned. The clerk thanked me with distracted politeness as if she couldn’t remember my name, which, to be fair, I could barely remember it myself by that point.

My phone had died hours ago.

I hadn’t even noticed.

I gathered my bundle, the papers stapled together with a clip barely holding on, and slipped them into my bag. The courtroom emptied around me, the shuffle of feet and low murmur of closing conversations blurring into white noise. God, I needed air. And maybe food. Definitely sleep. So I stepped into the corridor where Youth Offending workers slipped out with clipboards and a CPS lawyer I half-knew offered a brief nod while a defendant cried quietly into his jumper, a solicitor telling him the sentence “could have been worse.”

I reached the exit doors and pushed them open, stepping into the cool late-afternoon air. Highbury Corner was loud outside. Buses hissing, teenagers smoking, the usual London chaos. And for a moment, I let myself breathe. All I wanted was to go home, collapse face-first into my bed, and maybe forget that half the people tied to Razor’s world had materialised today in one of the last fucking places I wanted them. At a court building where my life was supposed to stay clean, separate, sterile.

I headed towards the station. But before I got there, a car rolled up alongside me in the bus lane, window humming down, and a sharp whistle cut through the noise of traffic and buses and late-afternoon chaos.

I turned.

Razor.

My stomach dropped as if I’d missed a step.

He angled his head. “Get in.”

I really shouldn’t. Firstly, he’d stopped in a bus lane. Secondly, climbing into that car screamed conflict of interest, possible impropriety, and about twelve different things that could put the last five years of training at risk. But he looked… wound tight. And was still in that suit from earlier, staring at me as if I was the only person who could decode whatever hell he was walking through.

Had he been waiting all day?

I glanced back at the court. At the life I was supposed to keep untouched. Clean. Then stupidly, inevitably, I walked around the car and got in. I’d barely got the door shut before Razor slotted the car back into the rush-hour choke of the A1. The engine growled, the traffic surged, and I clicked my seatbelt in, trying and failing, to steady the way my breath kept catching.

Razor dragged a hand down the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a battered cigarette packet. He dropped it on his lap and one-handed, eyes on the road, tapped out a cigarette, stuck it between his lips, and started working a zip lighter like a nervous tick.

“So you’re Billy Amos’s solicitor?” he asked, one hand tight on the wheel, the other flipping the lighter open-shut-open-shut.

“I’m not a solicitor. I’m a barrister. Pupil barrister. His counsel for today.”