‘I don’t know. If he hadn’t liked it, he’d hardly allow them to
go on using it, would he? But he does, which is why I’m facing this appalling horror now.’
‘I honestly don’t think it’s as bad as all that,’ Trish said as she watched Beatrice’s eyes redden again, ‘even if Lord Tick doesn’t let the claim drop. I’d have to check, but I think there’s still a defence of unintentional defamation you could use if your barrister decides there’s enough to make this claim stick.’
‘What would I have to do?’
‘Offer to have an apology read out in court and pay some fairly nominal sum in damages, I think. Probably not much more than a few thousand pounds.’
‘Only I haven’t
got
a few thousand pounds,’ Beatrice said, in a voice that was all the more effective for being not much more than a whisper.
Trish stared at her expensive-looking clothes and hair.
‘And because of this bloody book, for which I’m never going to earn anything,’ she went on, sounding more ordinary, ‘I’m six months late with the one I was contracted to write, which means I’ve got six months’ worth of unpaid bills stacked up, and I’m up to my ears in debt as it is, and …’ She put a hand over her mouth, coughing. ‘Sorry. You don’t need to hear this.’
Trish thought of the huge risks involved in letting any libel case go to court. Even if Beatrice successfully defended the claim and was awarded costs, which was the best possible outcome, she might never get anything out of Tick. She’d be left to pay her own legal fees, which could come to hundreds of thousands of pounds. If she lost …
‘It’s so unfair!’ Beatrice rubbed both eyes with a handkerchief, leaving streaks of mascara all over her face. ‘It’s not even as though the book’s been a success. None of the papers took any notice of it – they didn’t even review it.’
‘I’d have thought it was exactly the kind of thing that would catch an editor’s eye.’
‘We all thought so, but we were wrong. Unless they ignored
it because it would have shown them up as callous and lying for the stories they ran after Jeremy’s suicide. But because there’ve been no reviews or features, hardly anyone’s bought it. Booksellers are already sending copies back to the warehouse in pallet-loads. It’s been a disaster all round.’
Trish had been wondering what she could possibly do to help. Here, at last, was something simple.
‘I’ll buy one, if you tell me the title. Or have your publishers withdrawn it?’
‘Not yet. But you’ll have trouble finding it in the shops. If you’d really like to read it, I’ll lend you a copy. I’ve got one here.’
Beatrice took a slim hardback out of her bag. The glossy laminated cover showed a black-and-white photograph of a young man, not much more than a schoolboy. He was sitting on the edge of a table, looking down. He had a broad pale forehead under a shock of dark hair and big round spectacles. The impression given by the photograph was of shy, scholarly gentleness.
Trish looked up. ‘You know, if you did stand up to Lord Tick and let him take the case to court, the press would have to pay attention. It might be possible to whip up such a scandal that it became a bestseller. You’d have to put up with a lot of flak, but people would definitely read it. You might even earn enough to clear your debts.’
Beatrice’s nauseated expression made Trish like her even more. Her publishers weren’t likely to be so squeamish. The forthcoming meeting could be a worse ordeal than she feared.
‘Look, let me read it tonight,’ Trish said. ‘Then, I’ll be a bit more clued-up if you’d like to talk again. If your publishers give you a hard time, I mean. We could discuss your options. Would that help?’
‘It would be
wonderful
,’ Beatrice said, winding the messy handkerchief round and round between her fingers. ‘But I
couldn’t afford you. Antony only saw me today as a favour. I haven’t any money for legal bills.’
‘So you said. But don’t worry. We can put this down to friendship, too.’
Everyone in chambers did a bit of pro bono work here and there, and this wasn’t really even work: just a few hours of reading and a phone call. Trish owed Antony a lot more than that. Without his support, she might still have been pigging away on the dreariest of commercial cases, earning peanuts and fighting to convince her clerk that she could hold her own in court when it mattered.
‘While I’m at it,’ she said, ‘I’ll find out who’s really good at defamation, so that if the case does go ahead, I can recommend someone who knows what they’re doing and won’t cost you more than they should. How would that be?’
‘It would be incredibly kind. I don’t understand why you’re taking so much trouble for me.’
‘I’m intrigued by the whole story,’ Trish said with the reassuring smile she used to offer her youngest clients in the days when she’d practised family law. ‘And I think you’ve had a rotten deal.’
Beatrice smiled back. She was looking a little more like the distinguished writer and pundit she was. But there were still black streaks around her eyes.
‘Shall I show you the washroom before I go and tell the great man it’s safe to come back?’ Trish said.
She found him drinking her latte and watching Nessa, who was getting on with her work as though she was quite alone. Good for her, Trish thought, remembering how easily the strongest could be reduced to dancing, flirting acolytes in his presence. She said his name and watched his expression change to a grin that showed he knew more or less what she was thinking.
‘Have you sorted Beatrice?’ he said.
‘Only for the moment. If she’s in this much of a state now, I don’t know how she’ll cope with the next few months. Whatever her publishers decide to do, the tension’s going to get a lot higher. D’you think she’ll hack it?’
‘God knows. She’s had a lot of practice at dealing with disaster: hellish family background; husband with MS; slightly hopeless son; dry rot in the roof timbers; unmarried daughter with a baby; huge debts. That sort of thing. And she’s the only real earner in the whole outfit. This could be just one more thing she manages to bear, or the last straw. It all depends.’
‘If she’s that badly off, no one’s going to expect her to pay vast damages. Why on earth is this man Tick going after her at all?’
‘If I could see into the minds of people who go to law, I’d be …’
‘Even richer than you already are?’
He laughed. ‘How did you leave things with her?’
‘I said I’d read the book.’ Trish waved it at him. ‘Then be available tomorrow if she wants to talk about whatever her publishers say in this meeting. Will that be enough to keep you … what was it you said? Loving me for ever?’
His brooding expression broke into another vivid smile. ‘If you can get her off my back and my conscience, it will be. I’m completely swamped with work at the moment. If I’d realised how much reassurance she was going to need, I’d never have offered to see her in the first place. Weeping women have never been my thing. But I know you’ll cope, Trish. You always do.’
‘I wish I had a tape recorder running to replay that the next time you savage me for letting you down.’
‘Would I?’ Self-conscious amusement lightened his expression. He was probably remembering some of the insults he’d thrown at her in past moments of great stress. ‘Oh, well, maybe I would. By the way, how were the Caymans? I’ve hardly seen you since you got back.’
‘Great. I thought I might take David and George there next winter. The beaches are fantastic. Now that the two of them have decided that swimming is their greatest pleasure, it would—’
‘What’s Steve got you working on now?’ said Antony quickly. He’d taken a dislike to hearing Trish talk about her partner.
‘Apart from Clotwell v. Markham, which won’t come to court until the autumn, nothing very much. My most immediate brief is a dreary contract case involving a garage and a car-leasing company. So far I can’t see any particular problems – or excitements.’
‘I’m glad to hear Bee and I aren’t dragging you away from anything too thrilling.’
Monday and Tuesday 12 and 13 March
‘Swmg w G. CUL8er. D’
Trish decoded the text message without difficulty. David had persuaded George to meet him at their favourite swimming pool in an expensive gym in Farringdon after he’d finished his prep, which meant she had no reason to rush home.
When he’d decided at the beginning of term that he was old enough to do without an escort to and from school, Trish had protested, but she hadn’t got anywhere. Sounding almost as reasonable and fatherly as George, David had said that it was really absurd for her to chase round trying to find a stand-in to collect him from school whenever she had a conference at going-home time or was likely to be stuck in court miles away. In any case, there wasn’t much point her interrupting her work just so she could come home to watch him doing his.
‘I wasn’t being neurotic,’ she said aloud to the empty room as she clicked off her phone, remembering the old battles. ‘Just responsible.’
David had had a terrifying childhood. When he was no more than a toddler in a buggy, he and his mother had seen a man killed. The two of them had been taken into the witness-protection scheme and moved all over London. Even that hadn’t saved his mother, and David had learned that it was never safe to trust anyone.
Trish had sometimes despaired of helping him, but he’d gained a lot of confidence recently. He had a new best friend at school, a quiet, day-dreaming boy called Julian, who needed a lot of looking after. David seemed to like that, which she could understand, and he’d lost his fear of letting anyone see what he really felt. Not even her greatest triumph in court had given her as much pleasure as watching him relax.
Knowing he was safe in the pool with George, she decided to stay on in chambers to skim through Beatrice Bowman’s book. It was only ninety-six pages and printed in fairly large type, so it shouldn’t take long. She tilted her chair back and swung her feet up on the desk to read in comfort.
The story behind Jeremy Marton’s crime was simple enough. He had gone to West Africa to work with Voluntary Service Overseas between school and university, where he was to study medical biochemistry. His VSO responsibilities included teaching very young pupils to read.
As an only child himself, he’d always wanted to be part of a big gang of siblings, and he soon found in the affection of the village children something of the warmth and fun he felt he’d missed. He became friends with several of their families and admired the way they dealt with a poverty he would have found unendurable. The number of children who died at birth or in their first few months shocked him into wondering whether he ought to make his life there, doing whatever he could to help.
Trish could see why Beatrice had defended him so vigorously. Despite the photograph on the jacket, she had thought of him as a grown man, not a boy just out of school. He couldn’t have been much more than eighteen, only six years older than David, when he went to Africa. She read on.
After a while, he noticed several of the children developing mysterious ailments. The trouble was insidious, sometimes starting with a kind of mental sluggishness. At first he was irritated, assuming they were slacking, then he noticed several
other symptoms, often different in each child, as they grew weaker and weaker. When three had died, he knew he had to do something. As a first step he approached the doctor in charge of the local charitable clinic, who was as puzzled as he.
It took them several weeks to see a correlation between the strange collection of symptoms and a drug given to the children whenever they suffered a flare-up of a painful and disfiguring skin infection endemic to the area. Jeremy wrote up careful notes of his interviews with twenty of the affected children and their parents, as well as recording everything the doctor told him of the generosity of the pharmaceutical company that provided the drug at less than cost price.
Suspicious, and deeply concerned for all the village’s children, Jeremy returned to England at the end of his two-year stint, determined to find out more. It didn’t take much research in medical journals to find out that the forerunner of this particular drug had been abandoned because of its rare tendency to induce auto-immune disease in people who took it, turning the body’s natural repair system against its own healthy organs and tissue. By this stage, no one in the UK or America was being treated with the drug, and he was outraged to think that the African children might be being used in the place of experimental animals to test a modified version.
Once he was sure of his facts, Jeremy wrote to every major newspaper, but none of his letters was published. He wrote to the pharmaceutical company itself and got back a bland letter, telling him there was nothing to worry about and that everything the company did complied with the law.
He spent most of his first two terms at Oxford trying to make someone take an interest in his campaign. Friends and enemies began to jeer whenever he raised the subject in the pub or lab. He lost his confidence and hardly ever went out any more. Eventually his tutor, while expressing sympathy and admiration for his humanitarian instincts, reminded him that
he was at university to work and get his degree. This kind of protest should be the province of journalists, not undergraduates.
Feeling more sympathy for Jeremy than ever, Trish turned to the next chapter:
It was at the start of Jeremy’s third term at Oxford that the man who operated under the codename Baiborn came into his life. The leader of a group of radical activist students, he followed the familiar terrorist practice of keeping its separate cells well away from each other so that none could lead – inadvertently or with malice – to any of the others. No real names were ever used and no one knew details of any operation in which he – or she – was not directly involved.
Jeremy had originally planned only to chain himself to the front door of the pharmaceutical company’s headquarters, but Baiborn said no one would care; any man who did that would be dismissed as a ‘harmless loony’. Baiborn said only a bomb would do.
In the end Jeremy agreed, but he still insisted that no one should be hurt. He didn’t mind a hole being blown in a wall or two, but he wasn’t prepared to take risks with people’s lives. While Baiborn organised the making of the bomb itself, Jeremy watched the comings and goings at the headquarters building. He decided the safest time to do anything would be between ten and eleven in the morning. Everyone who worked there was well inside by ten and no one left for lunch before twelve at the earliest. Deliveries were all made at the back of the building, from a separate slip road.
When Baiborn asked why they couldn’t do it at night, Jeremy explained that there were randomly patrolling guard dogs and he couldn’t risk any harm coming to one
of them. Baiborn laughed and told him there was no place for sentimentality in their world, but Jeremy wasn’t prepared to risk an animal’s life any more than a human being’s.
Even when he’d found what he thought was a safe time, he didn’t risk putting the bomb in the building itself, afraid the blast would break windows into dagger-like shards of glass that could do terrible damage to skin, eyes and flesh. Instead he planted it beneath the enormous logo at the entry to the car park. He believed the destruction of the company’s arrogant sign and the likely creation of a big crater in the road, which should stop anyone going in or out of the car park for an hour or two, would be enough to fulfil his purpose.
Having hidden the bomb and set the timer, Jeremy went back to Oxford, to wait alone in his room in Christ Church, listening to the news on the radio. It was an appalling mischance that sent a busload of primary-school children, on their way to an educational tour of the building, into the car park at precisely the moment the timer was set to explode.
As soon as he heard the report of what happened to the children, Jeremy knew that he, Baiborn and the actual bomb-maker had to give themselves up. Having written a passionate apology to his parents and tidied his rooms, Jeremy asked for a crash meeting with Baiborn.
Trish was curious about how that had been done, but there was no indication in the text. All there was to end the chapter was a direct quotation from Jeremy’s diary:
Why did I assume Baiborn cared about the African children? It doesn’t even bother him that we killed twenty English ones today, and maimed yet more. How could I
have been such a fool? He despises me. When I said we had to give ourselves up, he just laughed. Then when he saw I meant it, he went very cold. He said I could throw my life away if I wanted, but that if I gave the police any information about him or any of the others, he’d have my parents killed. It was so casually said it didn’t seem real. But I know it is. So I’ve got to do this on my own. I don’t know if I’ll be able to persuade the police it was only me, but I’ve got to. Oh, God, I’m so frightened.
More and more sympathetic, Trish flicked through the rest of the book. It continued with a bare description of his years in prison, then there was a much longer section, again filled out with diary extracts, devoted to the shelter he’d organised for homeless men. He’d written so touchingly about the tragic, exasperating stories of how they’d ended up on the streets that she found herself wishing she’d known him.
As a coda, Beatrice had simply given the suicide letter he’d sent his mother, apologising for abandoning her yet again but saying that all he could give her now was relief from the trouble he kept causing her.
Trish thought the quotations from the earliest diaries showed a boy of exceptional vulnerability, who became steely – almost heroic – after the disaster. He resisted all attempts, both by the police and by his defence team, to persuade him to admit anyone else was involved or to provide any useful names.
When his lawyers tried to persuade him to change his plea to not guilty, or at least let them argue that he’d been tricked into placing the bomb by someone else, he said again and again that he had acted alone. He took full responsibility for everything that had happened and was prepared to pay the price. He claimed he couldn’t remember where he’d obtained the explosives. No one could shake him, even though no one could
believe him either. Trish could imagine the lawyers’ and investigators’ frustration. She wondered who they’d been and made a note to remind herself to ask.
One diary extract kept drawing her back. Jeremy had written it before any plans were made to bomb the pharmaceutical company’s headquarters.
Baiborn says it’s not enough to care. You have to do something, risk something. His group includes a bomb-making cell. They could provide an explosion big enough to
make
people notice. Maybe he’s right. After all, the suffragettes had to smash windows before anyone would listen to them. Maybe I
have
been pathetically idealistic to believe words could ever make any difference.
The soft but relentless ticking of the big clock on the wall told Trish she ought to go home, but she couldn’t resist stopping off in the chambers library to look up Lord Tick of Southsea in
Who’s Who,
to find out what kind of man he might be. There wasn’t much in the disappointingly brief paragraph. All she found was that his marriage to the Lady Jemima Fontley had been dissolved in 1995, that they’d had a son and daughter, and that his entire career had been in local government, specialising in housing and homelessness. There was nothing about his education, just as there was no mention of his nickname, so Trish took another few minutes to make an Internet search for it. Nothing came up, except a question asking if she meant some word with a quite different spelling.
She beat George and David back to the flat by half an hour, more than enough time to take a shepherd’s pie out of the freezer, defrost it in the microwave, then give it a good blast in the real oven to brown the cheese on top. They burst into the flat, stinking of chlorine and very pleased with themselves, just as she was dressing a salad to go with it.
David grabbed a raw carrot from the fridge and started to gnaw. He’d grown at least two inches in the last year, and she thought he was definitely going to have her height. His face was like hers already, with the pointed chin that seemed so incongruous beneath the aquiline nose, and his hair and eyes were just as dark. Tonight they looked almost black against the pale skin.
‘Hadn’t you better rinse out your trunks?’ she said, fighting her impulse to do everything for him, as though that could make up for his terrible past.
He sighed heavily, then grinned. ‘Nag, nag, nag. OK, Trish. If I must. George, shall I do yours while I’m at it so she doesn’t start having a go at you, too?’
George laughed. ‘Great. Thanks.’
When David had gone, trailing the two swimming bags behind him like some primitive agricultural machine, rucking up the rugs on the way, George put his arms round Trish as she stood at the stove.
‘Mmmm. You feel lovely,’ he said, pulling her back against him. She waited for an extravagant compliment. ‘All dry and fragrant with cheese and onion.’
She twisted her head to kiss his chlorinated chin. ‘With all those expensive facilities at the club, I can’t think why the pair of you don’t have proper showers and dry your hair, instead of dripping back here all clammy and chemical.’
‘Only wimps use hairdryers, and David and I are real men,’ George said, flexing his pectorals so she could feel the movement against her back. ‘You should know that by now. What’s for supper?’
‘Caveman!’
She thought she’d wait until after they’d eaten to ask him whether he’d ever heard anything useful about Jeremy Marton or Lord Tick of Southsea.
‘I can understand your sympathy for Beatrice Bowman,’ he said much later, when David had gone to bed and they were sharing one of the sofas beside the great empty fireplace. ‘But there’s nothing you can do for her that a defamation specialist couldn’t do better. Bloody Antony Shelley should never have tried to involve you.’