Ranged along Anna’s desk were several blue counsels’ notebooks, a paper rack containing notepaper and envelopes, a shiny, perpetual-motion executive toy, and a telephone. Three textbooks stood on end, their spines facing Anna’s seat, a typist’s swivel chair, stark,
simple, good for the back. David picked up one of the books:
Scrutton on Charterparties.
He grimaced, then quickly replaced it.
He sat down at her desk and began to open drawers.
At first, nothing. Old circulars, still sealed, fee notes, bills, a few handwritten envelopes marked “Personal,” the usual flotsam shed by a professional person too busy to keep up with daily life. Then he came to the bottom right-hand drawer, of double depth, and as he pulled something clinked inside.
A vodka bottle, nearly empty. David stared down at it. Hell, all kinds of people kept alcohol at their places of work; it meant nothing by itself. If you were going to query a quick, companionable drink at six o’clock, you’d end up pointing the finger at most of the cabinet and their outer offices.
But no sign of any mixers. Or of a glass, come to that.
Anna drank. Often a lot. So, admit it—she might have a drinking
problem.
Then, he had to go a step further and confess that he didn’t really know her very well, perhaps hadn’t wanted to, because confronting her predicaments or, worse, trying to resolve them, would have needed more time than he was prepared to give.
For the first time it occurred to him that his love might have been blind….
It was the absence of a glass that bothered him most.
The top left-hand drawer would not open. The lock appeared flimsy. David, suddenly desperate to find an outlet for his unease, picked up a paper knife and used it to break in.
The drawer contained several bank books, check stubs and, right at the back, a small leather case, one of those folding albums with space for two photographs.
As David picked it up the feel of the bright red leather, tooled with a gold strip, told him it was sumptuous, the sort of thing you wouldn’t buy for yourself but might give a favored friend.
He opened it. One side was empty. The other contained a color snapshot, somewhat overexposed, of a woman standing in front of a white background. David looked closer. The whiteness belonged to the wall of a house, with a garish pine doorway just visible over the woman’s shoulder. Italy, maybe. Or Spain. Continental, anyhow.
The woman was positioned slightly to the left of center, her narrow face tilted away from the camera. Her right hand lay on top of a rugged wooden board, bearing letters. David peered closer and saw they were Greek letters, which solved the location. The edge of the photo excised the bottoms of the words, but the first two looked like
“i oikia,”
the house. The last word was obscure. David took a stab at it:
mikra.
The Little House.
The woman had dark hair, cut in a bob. She was wearing a large, loose jacket over a plain shirt. The outfit struck David as somewhat formal in such a setting; maybe she’d been traveling and this snapshot had been taken to celebrate her arrival. He tried to examine her features, but the focusing wasn’t perfect and too much light flooded the foreground. Attractive, in a cosmopolitan kind of way. She wasn’t Greek, he decided.
David took the photograph out and stuck it in his pocket. Then he looked at his watch. Duncan Broadway was in no hurry to meet him. Damn them, a senior barrister had disappeared, and now the head of chambers couldn’t even be bothered to see her husband on time.
When he went back to the clerk’s room, Roger glanced up without evident sympathy. “He’s still in con,” he said, as if to forestall any protest.
David’s face tightened. He began to pace about, nine steps up, nine steps down, every so often jerking his wrist from its sleeve to see how many seconds had ticked by since he’d last looked. As he completed one of these time checks his eyes met Roger’s. “Don’t do that,” the clerk’s expression said, “you’re putting me off and I’m late for the wife and the telly as it is.”
There were things David urgently had to find out, Broadway might hold the key. He needed to know, not tomorrow but
now!
David did a smart left wheel, all but ran down a passage leading out of the front office, and threw open the door at the end.
Duncan Broadway stopped in mid-sentence. “Startled” seemed too mild a word to describe his face; he looked shocked. The world did not intrude into barristerial meetings. The world had no place there.
“I’m busy,” he said frigidly. “Can’t you see that?”
The room held a lot of people. Everyone was staring at him, this representative of the world that they wished would go away, enabling them to resume communion with the man behind the desk, the leader.
Their
leader.
“I can see you’re holding forth,” David said shortly. “Which may or may not amount to being busy.”
A gasp went round the room. But Broadway only smiled and said, in a lower voice, “I’ll see you in a moment, David.” He followed this up with a nod of the chin and a narrowing of the eyes, a conspirator’s look: You and I are professional men, we realize that
hoi polloi
must be humored, but as soon as I have finished
with these distasteful people we can move onto our higher plane of consciousness.
“You’ll see me now, Duncan.”
Roger had silently materialized at David’s shoulder. “Is everything all right, Mr. Broadway?”
David turned through a half-circle. “Shove it.” He put his hand in the center of Roger’s Marks and Spencer tie and pushed with all his might. The clerk went sprawling backward against the opposite wall of the corridor, hands splayed in an attempt to keep upright.
“This is a monstrous intrusion …”
Broadway was standing ramrod straight behind his desk. But perhaps this opening struck even him as likely to be ineffectual, for he tailed off, and when he spoke again his voice was its usual conversational self. “Well, we were just finishing, anyway.”
David stood to one side while the acolytes filed out, careful to avoid looking at him. As tail-end Charlie shut the door, Broadway snapped, “What the
hell
do you think you’re doing, bursting in here like that? What do you think those solicitors thought, have you any idea? Three of those men,
three
of them, are partners in the finest firm of commercial solicitors the city has to show, and you come thrusting yourself in here like some thug off the streets.” He paused, and stuck both thumbs in his waistcoat pockets. “Sit down,” he commanded.
But David ignored him, going instead to stand by the window. “You gave me an appointment, fixed the time,” he said to the glass. “I came. You were late. When your lateness crossed the line into downright bad manners, I decided to play the same game. What’s wrong with that?”
“My God, you’ve got a nerve!” Broadway was swelling
up like a frog, his rounded stomach pressed against the black cloth of his waistcoat in a desperate fight for freedom. “And your rudeness to me, your personal rudeness, it defied all bounds of decency … of …”
“Duncan.” David turned away from the window. “My wife has run away and no one can tell me where she’s gone. They think it’s possible she may have taken an overdose of sleeping tablets before she went. People I don’t know are trying to convince me of things concerning Anna that I utterly reject. If you found yourself in my place, don’t you think you might behave badly too?”
Broadway lowered himself into his chair, continuing to survey David with coldness. His eyes were large, so large that they sometimes reminded people of a horse’s eyes. The center of his head was bald, but two neat manes of black hair still clung to the sides of his skull where his barrister’s wig did not prevent the air from circulating. His face was round, like the eyes, and he suffered from a surfeit of chins, but the feature that stayed with people meeting him for the first time was stubble. No matter what the time of day, the lower part of his face looked as if it had recently been dipped in soot.
David sat down opposite Broadway—the chair was still warm from one of the finest commercial bottoms the city had to show—and glared at the barrister.
“In the circumstances,” Broadway said, “I suggest we leave the topic of your disgraceful entrance and move on.”
David said nothing. I must keep up the pressure, he told himself. This man wears a suit but he’s a street fighter. Don’t yield.
“I’m glad you rang up asking to see me, David, because
the police have been here asking all kind of damn fool questions about Anna and I can’t trace her.”
David felt angry, afraid. The police …
“Do you know where she is?” Broadway asked.
“No.”
“So you’re as much in the dark as we are?” David nodded.
“Have you any idea how risky it was for us when we took her on? We’d never had a woman in these chambers before. But she came in and she did wonderfully well, worked all hours, charmed the clients, charmed
me,
I may say, got on famously with the bench. She had this gift of making people want to do things for her. Then suddenly it begins to go to hell and I want to know why.”
“Are you telling me that Anna hasn’t been working normally?”
“On and off.”
“But she was up for a judgeship, you told me so yourself, at that party.”
“Yes, last Christmas. It was true, then.”
“Then why—”
“Because she hasn’t been concentrating, that’s why!” Broadway’s voice had turned snappy and shrill. “There were times when she couldn’t keep her mind on the ball from one moment to the next. You’re her husband, surely you must have seen that?”
David seemed to hear the clink of glass on wood again and his gaze slipped from the accusing face opposite. “I knew she … she could be a little absent-minded. It’s a human enough trait, who isn’t?”
“Generalizations are dangerous.” Broadway had obviously decided to give his patronizing side an airing. “Particularly in the case of people close to one, where
habitual assumptions frequently take the place of accurate observation.”
“If you say so.”
“I began to hear murmurings from other tenants of these chambers, from people who’d always liked her. Her behavior was so out of character.”
“Just a minute. When are we talking about?”
“Different times, different tenants. Some of these complaints go back a good many years. Some are recent. Some people never had anything bad to say against her at all. She was moody. Unpredictable.”
“How did you deal with these … murmurings?”
“I played them down. On the whole, they related to minor matters. Anna’s always had her touchy side and I don’t blame her for that.”
“Anna? Touchy?”
“You have to be aggressive if you’re a woman and you want to get on at the bar. You have no alternative.”
“But—”
“Why, only a few months ago our best typist left because she couldn’t stand Anna’s complaints.”
“Mrs. Mayhew?”
“That’s right. I was surprised. Anna had seemed to be performing at her best, then suddenly—”
“Anna said …”
“What did Anna say?”
That Mrs. Mayhew had suffered a mental breakdown, they’d had to let her go.
“I … I can’t exactly remember. I didn’t get the impression that her leaving had to do with Anna.”
“I see. Well, you mustn’t think your wife didn’t get any sympathy. She was popular, you know, people were prepared to give her masses of leeway. Everyone
knew she was working under the most tremendous strain. She’d put in for the judgeship, she was probably going to get silk next time round, and then that writ landed on her desk. It’s enough to make anyone—”
“Writ?”
“The damages claim.” Broadway shunted some papers around, annoyed by the interruption. “Three million pounds is a pretty big claim in professional negligence terms. We carry insurance up to twenty-five million, but even so.” He glanced at David and his face changed. “You didn’t know?”
David shook his head. He felt winded. “Can you explain? Please?”
Broadway celebrated that “please” by making David wait. “Anna drafted an agreement, some years ago,” he said at last. “It involved the sale of a thriving business, with a number of subsidiaries, to a rather well-known public conglomerate. She was asked to include warranties as to the state of the company’s accounts, and so on. She appears to have …” He snapped his fingers, angry with himself. “It is
alleged
that she left out certain vital clauses. I won’t burden you with the details.”
“But … I mean, what’s the position?”
“Position?”
“Well, will she win? Will they win? How much …?”
“I think it’s unlikely the plaintiff will recover. But there are … factors. About which I’m not happy. Evidential considerations.”
“Explain that.”
Broadway’s face betrayed deep dissatisfaction. “It’s irregular. But you are her husband….” His voice
hardened. “Dammit, you ought to know at least something about this.”
“I agree. Please can you tell me what the problems are.”
The barrister unlocked a desk drawer, using one of the keys on the end of his watch chain, and took out a tome. David saw “1987” embossed in gold on the back.
“Two years ago?” he inquired.
“Yes.”
“Haven’t they waited a long time to make a fuss about whatever it is?”
“The problems only surfaced recently.” Broadway opened this office diary at one of many bookmarks and pushed it across the desk. “You see that entry, there?”
“Ten-thirty in court, a conference in the afternoon … something’s been rubbed out.”
“That’s the point. She had a lunch engagement that day. The date’s significant.”
“Why?”
“Because that afternoon conference related to the mess she’s got herself into, the one she’s being sued for. The other side are going to say she arrived late and appeared … ‘distraught’ is how they tactfully put it, as if her mind wasn’t on the case at all.”
David stared at him. “That’s the whole of their case?”
“Would that it were!
All
the pages I’ve flagged were days when Anna went out to lunch, stayed out a long time, and then erased the entries afterward.”