‘It’s not late, Trish,’ Antony said when they’d got rid of Colin and the solicitor. ‘If I promise not to leer, will you have dinner with me?’
She couldn’t resist an invitation like that and said so.
‘Great. At this time of year we could probably get in anywhere. What would you like? The Ivy? The Ritz?’
‘Nowhere grand. Or smart. Somewhere we can sit with our elbows on the table and not have our ears burned out with noise.’ She fanned her face with her legal pad. ‘With air conditioning.’
He nodded. ‘I know just the place. It hasn’t been trendy for forty years, but the food is good and it’s always quiet. Cool, too.’
‘Sounds perfect, but I have to phone someone first.’
‘Fine. I’ll make sure there’s a table. Meet you outside in ten minutes?’
‘OK.’
She still hadn’t got used to her new room in chambers. The old one had been poky and dark, but she’d had it for years and it had become a kind of refuge, even though she’d usually had to have a pupil in it with her. Colin would have been fine, but some of his predecessors had been a lot less likeable and she’d have done anything to get rid of them if she could. Luckily they only stayed with each pupil master for six months.
This room was much lighter than her old one, and nearly twice the size. It also cost her twice as much. At first she hadn’t been sure she would ever fill it, but that hadn’t taken long, and now she found it comfortable. It was good, too, to have a window that opened onto a reasonable view, instead of the grimy walls of the lightwell at the back of the building. Of course, if they didn’t win this case against Furbishers, she’d get no fees and might have to retreat to her old room – and lose all the face she’d gained in the last couple of years.
The phone rang and rang; at last a woman answered.
‘Hello,’ Trish said. ‘Is that Susannah? Look, I’m really sorry but I don’t know your surname. Will always talks about you as Susannah. My name’s Trish Maguire.’
‘His barrister?’
‘One of them. Might I speak to him?’ she said, unable to understand the hostility in the other woman’s voice. Surely she didn’t think Trish was contravening her professional ethics. If Susannah knew anything about them, she’d know that now Will had finished giving his evidence they were free to talk whenever they wanted.
‘He’ll be sick to have missed you,’ Susannah said. ‘I made him go for a walk because he was driving us all mad jiggling about waiting for your call. Can you give me a number where he can reach you? He’s determined to talk to you tonight.’
Trish thought of the unsmart, quiet restaurant and knew she couldn’t have that disturbed by phone calls. She gave Susannah her mobile number, adding, ‘But don’t let him waste money phoning until after eleven.’
‘Thank you.’
‘That’s fine,’ Trish said. ‘Please tell him I’m sorry I missed him.’
Twenty minutes later she and Antony were sitting in a small dark-red room lined with portraits. It would have been old-fashioned
even when she was born. The menu read more like the record of a banquet from the fin de siècle than anything from the twenty-first century. Trish had never eaten classic French dishes of this kind and chose the simplest-sounding ones, hoping for the best. Antony insisted on ordering her a glass of champagne as an aperitif.
If anyone had told her at the beginning of her career that she would ever sit at ease in a place like this, let alone with a man like Antony, she would have laughed. She’d chosen the Bar as a career only because her stepfather had told her patronizingly that it wasn’t suitable for ‘a girl with your background’. He’d added that, being quite clever, she might well make a useful solicitor one day and he would talk to friends of his about getting her a training place in a reasonable firm somewhere in the provinces. She could still remember her fury and the determination it had given her.
It made her think of Kim and acknowledge her own luck. Trish’s stepfather had merely gingered up her ambition; Kim’s had traumatized her. Would Kim ever find a way to fight back against the damage Daniel Crossman had done?
Trish’s rage had taken her a long way, but it hadn’t helped when she’d come out of Bar school with excellent results and a massive chip on her shoulder. It had taken years for her to stop resenting the smoothly confident people she saw all around her. Now, she supposed, she was one of them. It was an odd thought.
The only other diners in the restaurant were a party of four in the far corner. They must have all been in their seventies, and they had a kind of civilized elegance that suited the place. Far too dignified to whisper, like people in most half-empty restaurants, they were talking easily about architecture with the authority of those who knew a lot and had nothing to prove.
‘So, Trish,’ Antony said when the champagne had been
poured, ‘with George and David away, who are you looking after now?’
‘Why should I be looking after anyone?’
‘With a heart that’s open to all comers and the social conscience of a Fabian, you’re never happy unless you are. And you’re so sexy these days, you have to be happy.’
She laughed, even though the thought of Kim was anything but funny. One day she’d tell Antony about Kim, but not now.
‘I just hope it’s not that poor tight-arse Will Applewood,’ he said, ripping his roll in two with a great explosion of brittle crust.
‘Why?’
‘Because he’d swallow you whole.’
She frowned. Nothing she had seen in Will had suggested any kind of greed, even if he had shown himself to be capable of lies and manipulation.
‘He needs too much,’ Antony added, raising his glass to her. ‘You’d do better with someone more secure, who wants only a little piece of you. Good. Here are my coquilles Saint Jacques.’
A smile made her lips twitch, but she didn’t say anything. Antony was looking towards the kitchen door to make sure her starter was coming too, but he didn’t miss her amusement.
‘I know,’ he said, holding her gaze. His lips softened into a smile of such self-conscious wickedness that she had to laugh. It was much better than the supposedly seductive version. ‘I should be eating oysters to make this scene all it could have been. But not while there’s no “r” in the month.’
‘In any case, oysters might have been a little too obvious.’
‘What about your asparagus?’
After that, it was hard to eat with any kind of dignity, but they were soon laughing too much for it to matter.
Later, he pressed her again about what was preoccupying her and she told him the truth. ‘It’s a child, damaged and terrified. And silent. The only person who might have been able to get her
to talk is incommunicado in hospital and someone’s got to get through to her before the weekend. The social workers have failed, and so has the psychiatrist in the case. So they’ve asked me to have a go. It’s a last-ditch thing. I thought I might nip out after court tomorrow. They couldn’t set it up in time for today. You don’t mind, do you? It shouldn’t take too long and I’d come straight back to chambers.’
‘As I thought, you have the social conscience of a Fabian,’ he said seriously, giving her story its due, then he pushed it away, adding a lighthearted reprise: ‘and a heart that’s open to all comers.’
‘Not quite all,’ she said, taking her tone from him.
‘No?’
‘No,’ she said more definitely.
‘Now that really is rather a pity. I’d been making plans for it.’ Antony picked up his fork and started to talk about the latest Covent Garden production of
Tosca.
Only his eyes told her that they hadn’t finished the other conversation yet. A frisson she hadn’t felt in years raised all the hairs on her arms. As though he’d felt it too, he suddenly interrupted himself to say, ‘You know you’ll never experience everything life can offer if you go on cutting off the highs and lows like this. You’re wasting yourself in this perpetual struggle for dreary balance.’
‘Only someone who’s never known the lows could think that balance is dreary,’ she said with feeling, and turned the conversation back to
Tosca.
‘Did you know there’s someone waiting for you?’ the taxi driver asked Trish as she handed over her fare.
‘Where?’
‘On them iron stairs behind you. He’s just stood up. He’s been reading the paper.’
‘In this light?’ Trish didn’t turn immediately. It wouldn’t be the first time that someone had been waiting to accost her
outside the flat. But tonight it seemed unfair: she was too relaxed to deal with anything difficult. ‘What does he look like?’
‘Handsome bloke with lots of dark hair and a square chin. Check shirt.’ The driver gave her some change.
‘Oh, him.’ Trish shook the coins in her hand until two pounds were between her fingers and thumb. She gave them back to him and nodded. ‘I know him.’
‘That’s all right, then.’ The taxi wheezed into life again and the driver made a U-turn, leaving her to Will. Antony’s warning echoed in her mind, displacing all the other things he’d said to her later.
‘Hi. Have you been waiting long?’
‘Not much more than a hour,’ he said. ‘It was good to sit after the walk. And it’s the first time I’ve felt cool in weeks. Susannah’s house is stifling, however many windows I open.’
‘You
walked?
From Fulham? But why?’
‘I always walk. It’s the only exercise I get these days, and moving stops me thinking too much and sending myself mad with regrets. Besides, I can’t afford the fares.’
‘But why not phone? Never mind. You’d better come on in and have a drink and tell me what the problem is.’ As she unlocked the door and switched on the lights she saw his face. The unhappiness in it shocked her into guilt over the way she’d abandoned him to joke and flirt with Antony.
‘You know the journalist I told you about?’ Will said abruptly. ‘He died outside Smarden Meats only a few weeks before we went there.’
‘What?’
‘It’s true. Didn’t I tell you that if there was a story, he’d know all about it?’
‘But there hasn’t been anything in the news,’ Trish said.
‘In fact there has, but it was only a few tiny paragraphs here and there. None of the papers gave any details. Even I missed it
and I knew his name, so I’m not surprised you didn’t pick it up.’
‘No wonder they were so jumpy at the abattoir.’ Trish remembered the hostility she’d seen in every face. She remembered the sounds, too, and the smells and tried to force her brain to shut them out. ‘They probably thought we were spying for the press. I’m surprised they let us in at all. What happened to him?’
‘The official line is that he committed suicide, as a protest against cruelty to animals, by lying down under the wheels of a meat lorry destined for Smithfield Market.’
‘That’s ridiculous. No one would do that. He can’t have meant to die. He must have been trying to stop the lorry leaving. How awful! And for the driver.’
Trish retreated to the kitchen to fetch glasses. She knew from something Will had said casually when they first met that he was a whisky drinker and she had a bottle of Glenlivet at the back of one of the cupboards. She poured him a stiff one. For herself, queasy with her memories of the abattoir, she took a bottle of Badoit out of the fridge.
‘You don’t believe it was suicide either,’ she said as she watched Will add a splash of water to the heavy tumbler. ‘Do you?’
‘No. They said his pockets were stuffed with animal rights and vegetarian leaflets and he even had a placard with him about pig pens. But that wasn’t Jamie’s style. I mean, it was never the animals he fought for; it was the people who had to eat them.’
‘Maybe he had a sudden conversion.’ Trish thought of Jess. ‘It happens.’
‘Not to Jamie. I told you, he was a hard-nosed investigative journalist, used to working undercover. He must’ve been at the abattoir to report on something they’re doing there.’
‘Who was he working for?’
‘It used to be the
Daily Mercury.
They denied all knowledge
of him when I phoned. Then I got on to someone who knew a bit more. He told me Jamie hadn’t had anything much published in the last few years.’
Will put the glass to his lips and breathed in the fumes, but he didn’t drink. His Adam’s apple, usually well hidden, moved as though he had swallowed. He looked up at her, and she saw that his eyes were dark with misery.
‘He was a good bloke, you know, Trish. He would have been furious about what happened to you and your police friend.’ This time he did drink, holding the liquid in his mouth, moving it back and forth across his tongue. At last he swallowed it down in one, like bitter-tasting medicine. ‘He did a terrific story once about dangerous chemicals and the additives that screw up children’s mental health.’
‘Then why hasn’t he had anything published recently?’
‘I asked the man at the
Mercury,
and he just said a big story Jamie had written went down in flames.’ Will was sitting with his knees wide apart, leaning forwards. His elbows were propped on his knees and he held his glass loosely between his big hands. Suddenly he stiffened and turned one of his feet on its side so that he could look at the sole. ‘I’ve been treading muck on your floor, Trish. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s OK.’ She looked back towards the door. It was true there was a line of dusty footprints across the pale polished wood, but they were hardly ‘muck’. Her cleaner would whisk them away in minutes.
‘Will, I’m really sorry you’ve had this awful news about your friend, and I wish there was something I could say that might help, but—’
‘That’s not why I came, Trish. Don’t you see? Jamie’s death means that there is something seriously wrong at Smarden Meats.’
‘Oh, come on, Will. There’s no—’
‘Listen. There’s too much coincidence in all this if he wasn’t
there to get evidence to back up a big story. Someone must have caught him and drugged him or forced him to lie under the wheels. It could even have been that bloke who nearly stabbed me.’