Free Truth or Dare by Tania Carver Page A

there?’
    ‘Won’t be for long, though, will it, Mr Looker? You’ll do your magic. You always do. You’ll find something. You’ll get me out.’
    Glen Looker sighed once more. ‘Leon, let me explain. If you don’t work with me here, if you don’t see things the way I see them, if you don’t think the way I’m telling you to think, do the things I’m telling you to do, then you won’t be getting out. Do you understand?’
    Leon looked hurt, as if he was about to cry.
    ‘Let’s try it again, Leon. You went to Chicken Cottage to get a meal for your family. On the way back someone ran into you. It was Milton. He was bleeding. You ran away from him. You didn’t want to get involved with whatever had happened. People knew you and Milton didn’t get on. You didn’t want to be blamed for what had happened to him. You just wanted to get home and give your family the meal you had bought for them.’
    ‘Don’t get my mum nothin’. She’s a skank.’
    Glen sighed. Continued. ‘And you slipped in the blood. And that’s why your trainers ended up with Milton’s blood on them. Right?’
    Leon shook his head. ‘Lot to remember.’
    ‘Yes it is, Leon. Yes it is.’
    He scrutinised the oversized child in front of him, sitting there in his prison-issue jogging suit. According to the local media, Leon was one of the city’s most feared and dangerous gang members. Maybe I could plead diminished responsibility, Glen thought. As in he’s too fucking thick to understand what he was doing. Trouble was, he wasn’t too thick. Leon had been tested and found to be fully cognitive. Glen couldn’t use that defence this time. He had tried.
    ‘I don’t know if I can do it, Mr Looker.’
    ‘Practise, Leon. Practise. You can do it. Come on. Give it a go.’
    Leon stared at him.
    ‘Come on, Leon.’
    ‘What, you mean now?’
    Glen sat back, arms folded, stared at the ceiling. ‘I wonder if it’s not too late to be a fireman…’
    ‘What, Mr Looker? You leaving?’
    He sat forward once more. ‘No, Leon, I’m not. Come on. You’ve heard me say it, you try now.’
    Leon screwed his eyes up in concentration. ‘I went to Chicken Cottage to get a meal for my family.’ He looked at Glen, beaming. ‘I’m doing well, aren’t I, Mr Looker?’
    ‘Brilliant, Leon. Worthy of an Oscar. Now keep going.’
    Leon screwed his eyes tight once more, reaching back in his mind for the words, trying to assemble them in the correct order. ‘I like to provide for my family. Even my mother. ’Cause she doesn’t. Skank.’
    ‘You’re going off the script now, Leon.’
    ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ He refocused. ‘I like to provide for my family. Give them somethin’ healthy an’ nutritious.’ He beamed once more. ‘You like that, Mr Looker?’
    ‘Brilliant, Leon. You’re a marvel. Keep going.’
    Pleased with himself, Leon kept talking. ‘And then I saw Milton who I had a beef with.’
    ‘No, Leon, don’t say that.’
    ‘Why not? I did. Everyone on my end knows I did.’
    ‘Yes, but you have to persuade the jury that even though you and Milton didn’t get on —’
    ‘We had serious beef.’
    ‘Indeed. But you have to forget that and persuade the jury that you had nothing to do with his death. Right? That it was all an accident. Right? You have to stick to the story that I just told you. That’s the one you have to tell. The only one you can tell. Do you understand?’
    Leon closed his eyes and frowned for such a long time that Glen thought he had drifted off to sleep.
    ‘Yes, Mr Looker,’ he said eventually, snapping open his eyes. ‘It’s like we’re tellin’ a story, innit? An’ we have to make the story sound true so they believe us. Yeah?’
    Glen smiled. ‘That’s exactly it, Leon.’ He swallowed a yawn. ‘Shall we give it one more try?’
     
    Once outside Birmingham Prison, on the way to the car, and with Leon’s woeful attempt at his testimony still ringing in his ears, Glen Looker checked his messages. What