There was no one in the hall of the big redbrick building when she reached it, and no one to ask her business as she walked past the empty reception desk. The first person she saw was a woman in her twenties, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, coming down the wide staircase. She smiled at Trish as they passed in the hall, their shoes clattering on the old encaustic tiles.
‘Hi, Trish said before she lost the opportunity.
‘Hi?’ said the younger woman, coming to a halt.
‘My name’s Trish Maguire. I’m looking for Frankie Mason. Is she in today, or is she still recovering … ?’
‘Isn’t it ghastly?’
‘Awful,’ Trish said, glad of the opening. She might not have to betray her ignorance of the name under which Jeannie Nest had been living. ‘And they’re no nearer finding who did it, I gather.’
‘No. The police have been round here, asking millions of questions, but we were all gobsmacked. I mean, everyone admired her. Loved her, too. She’s …’ The woman’s eyes were filling, rather as David’s had done. ‘She was just the best, you know. I wish she’d told us about the stalker and how scared she was. She could have. Anyone would have given her and David a refuge while the police dealt with it.’
‘I know,’ Trish said soothingly. ‘But I really need to talk to Frankie now. D’you know where I could find her?’
‘In her office, I think. It’s the first door on the right as you get to the top of the stairs. But I don’t know whether she’s …’
‘Thanks,’ Trish said, already halfway up the first flight.
She knocked on the door at the top of the stairs, and a weary voice invited her to come in. Pushing open the
plain door, made even heavier than the Shelleys’ by the fire-protecting spring closure, Trish saw a small woman dressed in long, droopy plum-coloured cotton with an acid-pink Indian shawl around her shoulders. She had untidy dark-red hair, almost covering long gilded earings, and a face that had been a battleground between warmth and cynicism for a long, long time.
‘Yes?’
‘Frankie Mason?’
‘Yes.’ Suspicion was tightening every muscle in her face, making her look like a shrivelled old cat. ‘Who are you?’
‘Thank heavens I’ve found you,’ Trish said, surprised to hear her voice shaking. ‘My name’s Trish Maguire.’
Frankie’s amber-coloured eyes widened just enough to tell Trish a lot of what she needed to know. She hurried on.
‘I’m so sorry to bother you, but you’re my only hope now. I need to know more about David. And
why
she sent him to me. No one else can – or will – tell me anything. I know you were her friend. Please help.’
‘Do the police know you’re here?’
‘No. It’s private enterprise.’
‘So how did you find me?’
‘David told me your name. I worked out the rest. It wasn’t that difficult.’
Frankie got up. Trish saw she was lame, pivoting on her left leg while she swung the whole of her right hip, as though she had to kick the whole world along with every step. Was this why Jeannie hadn’t thought her capable of looking after David?
‘I tried to get her to talk to you herself years ago,’ Frankie said, pulling herself along the long window sill so that she could remove a pile of books from the only spare chair. ‘Have a seat. I told her it was mad not to get in touch with you. But she said she couldn’t. She said she knew you’d protect David in an emergency,
but she didn’t want to have anything to do with you herself.’
Frankie looked embarrassedly around her room, as though trying to think of something that might soften the rudeness. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
Trish nodded and thanked her. Boiling the kettle took a while, but eventually they were both sitting holding thick white mugs, waiting for the tea to cool enough for drinking.
‘But I don’t understand,’ Trish said, having burned her tongue, ‘why she was prepared to trust me with David if she felt like that about meeting me herself.’
‘All she’d ever say was that she knew your father wouldn’t harm
you,
and therefore David would be safe with you. There wasn’t anyone else who’d be able to guarantee that.’
‘What?’ Trish felt the chair sway beneath her. ‘Are you telling me she thought my father might have done something to David?’
‘That’s what she said, and it was hard enough to get even that much out of her. She was far too terrified of him to say any more.’
‘She couldn’t have been. Not recently. They hadn’t had any contact for years; not since before David was born. My father didn’t even know David existed.’
Frankie Mason looked at her in pity. Pretend it’s a brief, Trish instructed herself as she fought to hold on to reality. There has to be something in all this that makes sense.
‘Did she actually tell you in so many words that she was terrified of Paddy Maguire?’
‘Of course. As I said, it wasn’t at all easy to get it out of her. She was too scared to volunteer anything. But, you see, I knew something was terribly wrong. Her migraines were getting worse and worse, and she was losing more weight every week. It got so that she was scared, of her own shadow; any sudden noise would make her sweat.
And she couldn’t bear strangers. I told her I had to know what the problem was if she was to go on working here. Eventually, she poured out the whole story.’
‘Look, how much did she tell you about the trial?’
Frankie had the bunched-up end of her pink scarf pressed against her mouth. Over the bright cloth, her eyes looked blank.
‘What trial?’ she asked, letting the scarf fall. ‘There wasn’t ever a trial. Your father wasn’t prosecuted. You can get an injunction without that, thank God.’
‘This wasn’t anything to do with my father. She was the chief prosecution witness in a murder trial just before she moved up here.’
‘No, you’ve got that wrong. She never said anything about that. And she would have told me. I’m sorry.’
In Frankie’s patent sincerity, Trish began to see a different story, and one that might make sense. Breathing more easily than she had for days, and therefore feeling less stiff with every moment, she checked it through for gaps and flaws. As far as she could tell, it held up.
In this version, Jeannie Nest would have obeyed all the rules of the witness-protection programme, and kept to herself everything about the Handsomes and the danger they might be to her and her son. But, needing a story to satisfy this woman, who’d seen her fear and wouldn’t stop asking questions about it, Jeannie had used Paddy as a decoy. That way, she’d have been able to tell one kind of truth, talk frankly about an assailant and how frightened she’d been, and get back all the warmth and support she must have longed for, without ever risking the real secret.
‘Did she say anything to you about what happened this time to make her so much more scared than usual?’ Trish asked. ‘I mean, she’d never sent David to me before. There had to be something new – different – to make her do it.’
Frankie bit her lip, then bent down to put her mug on the floor beside her chair.
‘She only admitted any of it that once. I tried to find out more, but she got almost hysterical and said the questions made her migraines worse. I knew it wasn’t the questions doing the damage but her own fear.’ Frankie’s eyes were full of misery. ‘I had to tell her so, but it made her very angry. I explained that the migraines were a psychosomatic manifestation of her anxiety and until she faced it and worked out a rational way of dealing with it, and one which did not involve the ludicrous risk of teaching David the way to your place weekend after weekend, the migraines would go on getting worse. They were bad enough as it was, with projectile vomiting and days of blinding headaches. Something had to change, but she wouldn’t even try.’
‘So you quarrelled,’ Trish suggested as her mind span off into a whole new story with new lead characters and a new dénouement.
‘No. There wasn’t an actual falling-out, but she never confided in me again.’
‘And yet it was you who found her, wasn’t it?’
As a deep shudder ran through Frankie’s body and she retched, Trish tried to speak gently. ‘Why did you go looking if you were no longer such close friends?’
Frankie found a tissue to wipe her mouth and then her eyes. ‘She hadn’t appeared in college for three days, and she always rang if she was ill or had a migraine. This time there’d been nothing. I kept trying her phone, and all I got was the answering machine. By Wednesday morning, I was sure something was wrong. The police wouldn’t believe me, but I made such a fuss they sent a constable with me to break into the flat on Thursday, and we found …’ The scarf was back against Frankie’s lips.
‘And it was then, was it, that you told them about Jeannie’s terror of my father?’ Trish’s whole world looked
different as she awaited confirmation of the source of Lakeshaw’s suspicions.
She couldn’t believe he’d been so credulous. This woman had had no reason to reject the story she’d been given, but Lakeshaw should have known better. He’d had access to all the facts about Jeannie’s real identity and therefore the true reason for her fears. It was monstrous that he’d come after Paddy.
‘I think so,’ Frankie said, squinting at Trish. ‘But I can’t remember exactly. I had so many interviews with Sergeant Baker, and …’
‘Who? Haven’t you been seeing DCI Lakeshaw?’
‘No. She was only a sergeant, and her name was Baker.’
Trish realised she’d been so hung up on Lakeshaw’s pursuit of her father that she’d forgotten there must be several lines of enquiry and probably dozens of officers working on the case. She’d touched only the edge of it.
‘But it doesn’t matter,’ Frankie went on. ‘I mean, the police knew all about it all along. She always told Martin Waylant every time she was scared, all about the people who followed her and the silent phone calls and the rest of it.’
Trish drank some tea at last. It was tepid now, and had far too much milk in it for her taste. But she didn’t care.
‘Was Martin Waylant her boyfriend? David said there was one called Martin.’
‘He was the nearest thing she had to that. You see, your father ruined every chance she might have had of a proper adult relationship with a man of her own age. Martin wasn’t much more than a boy when it started, and he’s a police officer. That made her feel safe for a while, which was good for David.’
‘Why? Wasn’t she a good mother the rest of the time?’
Frankie looked away, fiddling with the scarf again. ‘Mostly. But when the migraines were bad, she could be so snappy that she’d terrify him. And sometimes, I’d see
him trying to get through to her, to wake the old fun and affection, and she’d just shut him out. It was fear that made her do it … understandable fear, but it damaged him.’ Her voice strengthened as she looked directly at Trish’s face again. ‘That’s your father’s fault, too.’
‘And yet David cries for her in hospital.’
‘You must know how that works,’ Frankie said, impatience making her spiky again, ‘after all your experience. He had no one else, so he had to make his mother into a good person, in his mind at least.’
‘What do you know about my experience?’ Trish asked.
‘She told me all about you, when I was trying to stop her taking David to your flat. She’d kept a scrapbook full of cuttings of your cases, which she showed me then. It was her way of proving to herself, I think, that you weren’t like your father. She really admired the work you were doing – and the fact that you lived there in Southwark in amongst all that crime and poverty.’
Trish thought of her huge, art-filled loft and blushed. Then she thought about the scrapbook and wondered how long Jeannie’s murderer had spent in the flat and whether he’d found it, too. Had it been he who’d been following her today and broken into her car?
Fear was very odd, she thought, struggling for detachment. It made your mouth taste of metal and your brain feel mushy.
‘You will look after David now, won’t you?’ Frankie said. ‘She was so sure she could trust you. I couldn’t bear it if …’
Trish wasn’t going to make any promises she might not be able to keep, even to a stranger she would probably never see again.
‘I’ve taken up enough of your time,’ she said, standing up and ignoring the disappointment on the small cat-like face. ‘Thank you.’
As she left the building, she rang Paddy on her mobile.
He was hiding behind his office voicemail and his home answering machine, but Bella answered her own mobile.
‘Hi, it’s Trish.’
‘Ah. Yes. What can I do for you?’ Bella said, as coldly as if she was speaking to a stranger.
‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with Paddy, and I can’t find him.’
‘Can’t you leave him alone? Haven’t you caused enough trouble already?’
That hurt. ‘Bella, don’t. As it happens, it wasn’t me who put the police on to him. I’ve just found out who it was, and now I know why they suspected him. It’s all a mistake. That’s what I wanted to tell him. It’s only coincidence that I was also asking questions about the woman they think he killed.’
‘I’ve never believed in coincidence, and there have been far too many in this case.’
Trish thought about passing on everything she’d learned today and explaining how the only real coincidence in the whole miserable business was that she had bought a converted warehouse flat so near the grim estate where her father had once had a girlfriend. Sylvia Bantell might be sure Jeannie had been moonlighting as a prostitute, but on this one Trish was inclined to believe her father. Still, until she had filled in the last missing parts of the story – such as who really had murdered Jeannie – there was not much point trying to explain anything.
‘D’you know where he is? I mean, they haven’t arrested him yet, have they?’
‘“Yet”? What d’you mean, “yet”, Trish? No, they haven’t – because he didn’t do it. But he’s staying out of everyone’s way just now. He’s had enough.’
‘Has he told you about David?’