“He was. I noted it at the time but attributed it to academic interest.”
“And now he’s your client.” Gerald set the transcript down. “Viv, this is a conflict of interest regardless of intent. You can see that.”
“I can see that.”
“You cannot represent him.”
“I understand.” I paused. “But there’s something else.”
The something else was this: the alibi strategy Marcus Fell had used — the specific approach, the structuring of witnesses, the documentation layering — was not a strategy I had described in our conversation. I had described weaknesses in alibi evidence in general terms. What he had deployed was more sophisticated than anything I had outlined, and it incorporated elements that were, in fact, effective against the prosecution’s specific approach in this case.
He had not used my seminar as a blueprint. He had used it as a starting point and then built something better.
Which meant someone with more technical knowledge than a conference delegate had helped him build it. Someone who understood prosecution strategy in financial fraud cases from the inside. Someone who could anticipate how the Crown would construct its case and engineer the defence structure accordingly.
I said all of this to Gerald, who listened with the particular quality of attention he reserved for things that were becoming more complex.
“Are you suggesting,” he said carefully, “that someone inside the prosecution — or with access to prosecution strategy — helped construct this defence?”
“I’m suggesting the alibi structure is too precise to have been built from a general seminar alone.”
“That’s not your problem to solve,” Gerald said. “That’s a matter for whoever takes over the brief.”
“I know,” I said. “But the prosecution included my transcript in their disclosure. They know about our conversation at the conference. Someone flagged it.”
“That’s standard disclosure. They flag all prior contacts.”
“Gerald,” I said. “The conference was academic. It was not publicly recorded. The only people who would have known I spoke to Marcus Fell at that conference were people who were there, or people he told.”
A pause.
“Or people who were monitoring him,” Gerald said quietly.
I handed off the brief that afternoon to a colleague with a clean file and no prior contact. I documented everything: the transcript, my reasoning, the timeline of the conference conversation. I sent a formal note to the Bar Standards Board as a precaution. I did everything the process required.
Then I did something the process did not require.
I went back to my notes from the conference — I kept notes from every professional event, a habit from my first years at the bar — and I found the page from March. The academic who had asked me about alibi evidence had written his affiliation on the back of a business card I had kept clipped to the page. I had not looked at it since.
The card said: Consulting Research Group. A name and a number. No institution, no university, no web address.
I searched the name. Nothing on any academic database. Nothing on Companies House. A consulting research group with no public footprint, no registered address, no online presence.
I called the number on the card. It rang four times and connected to a voicemail. The voicemail said: This number is no longer in service.
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