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not.
    Anyway, tomorrow she had Sharon to deal with.
    On the way out of the court Sarah nodded at a couple of the barristers from Court Two. They would know she was defending a difficult rape case on her own, which was a step up. If she did well, her status would rise. And she didn’t intend to lose; not without a fight, anyway. From her point of view, the prejudice and weight of evidence against Gary were a bonus. If she lost, few people would blame her, but if she won, more serious cases would follow.
    She walked out into the afternoon sunshine. The eighteenth century architect had not designed the elegant court building so that people could look out of it, so it was easy to forget, in the windowless dome of the courtroom and the claustrophobic cells beneath, that there was a quite different world immediately outside. In front of Sarah tourists queued up to visit the Castle Museum and the Norman castle, Clifford’s Tower. Tourists and children carrying balloons and ice cream glanced up idly at the statue of Justice above the court. For a moment Sarah stood on the court steps, breathing in the soft breeze and luxuriating in the warmth like a cat.
    But the machinery of justice ignored the weather. Below Sarah the prison van waited, its tiny cells with square blackened windows designed to ensure that neither Gary nor any of the other prisoners had even the smallest sensation of freedom between York and their remand cells in Hull.
    Sarah watched it go. Then she and Lucy walked briskly down the steps and turned left to Tower Street, their offices, and work.

Chapter Three
    W HILE SARAH went back to her office, Terry Bateson collected his colleague, DC Harry Easby, and drove south of York to investigate an incident that had been reported the day before. Easby stopped the car on a bridge over the A64, and the two policemen gazed at the muddy desolation of a building site half a mile ahead. Grimy yellow JCBs toiled like great insects in the mud, while a crane with a wrecking ball casually demolished an abandoned hospital.
    ‘Looks like progress, sir,’ Harry offered, breaking the oppressive silence between them.
    ‘Progress?’ Terry grimaced. ‘More like the battle of the Somme, you mean.’
    ‘That’s how uniform see it,’ Easby nodded. ‘But they pushed the buggers out of their trenches last week, any road. Just look at the hairy sods.’
    He nodded towards a wood behind the JCBs. The building site was protected from the wood by an elaborate boundary of eight foot high wire fences, security men and dogs. The fence was festooned with flowers and scraps of paper, and a long whitish banner floated between two tall trees. SAVE OUR TREES, SHOP IN TOWN, it read. The leafy treetops also supported a network of aerial walkways and tree houses, where the eco-warriors lived.
    The park-like woodlands that had surrounded the old maternity hospital were being redeveloped for an out-of-town designer shopping centre. Trees planted by Victorians had reached their full, beautiful maturity just in time to become a hindrance to a late twentieth century plan for floodlights, car parks and up-market designer units. The shops would market a style of beauty which would be packaged, bought, worn and replaced every year with something newer, fresher, and more up-to-date. Against this the useless, magnificent trees stood no chance. After all, they made no money and offered nothing but the same, endless, wearisome repetition of natural style - every autumn, every spring the same.
    News of the project, however, had spread to the hairy unwashed army of eco-warriors, who had a profound and perverse lack of interest in style, markets and fashion. They came from every hedge, cave, bender and battered caravan in the country. They moved swiftly, with energy, secrecy and determination. The developers’ chain saws were confronted by an army of bloody-minded economic rejects whose main aim, it seemed, was to be seriously injured by the lackeys of global