‘Fine,’ Antony said. ‘Now that we’ve got all that emotion out of the way, we must press on with the facts of the case.’
Trish wanted to get up and walk out, but she’d committed herself now. Nothing Gurles had actually said surprised her; it was the venom with which he’d talked about his investors’ greed that had given her the shock.
Later, when he and the Sprindlers partner had gone, Antony said quietly, ‘So, Trish: better or worse?’
‘Both.’
‘And you wish we were for the depositors?’
‘Of course. But then I’ve always preferred being for victims.’
‘Nick Gurles is one of those.’
‘Only just.’
‘But enough for you to do your best?’
‘I’d do that anyway, as you very well know. But yes, I think he is. Just.’
‘And you’re sanguine about the document?’
‘I have to be. Nick claimed that “the other matter” had nothing to do with the bond fund, so I have to accept it.’ She hesitated, then said, ‘Do you ever feel, Antony, as though you’re counting—’
‘Angels on a pinhead? Of course. That’s part of the job. And one of the most entertaining parts. But you know that, Trish. You’re bloody good at it yourself. One of the tough guys in spite of your white face and your scruples. Ouf, it’s been a long day. What about a drink? I don’t have to be home for another forty minutes.’
‘I’d love to, but I have to get back. I’ve got this business of the boy from the car crash to sort out still.’ And I’ve got to find out whether my father’s been arrested for murder yet. She opened her mouth to tell Antony about it, then shut it fast. It couldn’t happen. Paddy
had
to be innocent. Therefore there couldn’t be any evidence against him. Therefore the police would never arrest him.
‘Is the boy giving you problems?’
‘Nothing I can’t handle. It’s all just a bit emotional.’
‘Ah. Well, I’m sure you’ll sort it out. You’re good at emotion,’ he said, talking so fast he was almost gabbling. He couldn’t have made his intentions clearer if he’d written them out on a hoarding:
Do not try to embroil me in your personal life.
He was right, too. It wasn’t his problem. But it might be George’s. And it was time now to talk about it. Walking home towards the bridge, Trish hardly noticed her favourite view of the piled, pinkish-white buidings, topped by the great grey dome of St Paul’s, or the fact that a strip of sunlight was lying along the Thames like a gold sword. She was sure now that she would have to take David to live with her, whatever happened to Paddy.
As Frankie Mason had pointed out, David’s mother had trusted Trish to look after him. And she was his half-sister. But there would inevitably be problems, and she wasn’t at all sure that George would welcome them. If it came to a choice between the two, what would she do?
It couldn’t come to a choice. There wasn’t one to be made. She couldn’t abandon her brother to the care system, and she couldn’t face life without George. Treacherous thoughts sneaked into her mind about how much easier solitude was than dealing with other people. But she was long past that stage. George had taken her into a world where being open to someone else was not only possible but essential. She couldn’t go back.
There were windows open in the flat, which meant he’d let himself in and was probably cooking something nutritious in the hope of tempting her to eat again. She realised she was hungry for the first time in weeks.
The door opened while she was still four steps from the top and he stood there, holding out his arms, with the glorious scent of his own version of bouillabaisse floating all round him.
‘Hello, Shorty,’ he said, kissing the top of her head. She tipped it back on her neck, feeling the tendons crunch, to kiss him properly. Then her lips stiffened.
‘What, Trish?’ George sounded as though his patience was held on a short leash. ‘What is it now?’
‘I’ve just thought of something. I must make a phone call.’
‘No! Unless someone’s in danger of life and limb, Trish, you must have your soup first.’
‘I’m fine, George. I had lunch – a sandwich. I’m fine.’
‘Well, I’m not. I’ve spent the past two hours making this soup and I’m not having it thrown in my face.
Is
anyone in danger of life and limb?’
There was enough reality mixed with his mocking voice to make her stop. She smiled, and completed the kiss before putting her arm round his waist and sweeping him into the flat.
‘Sorry. I got carried away. The soup smells wonderful. Let’s have it, while I tell you what I’ve just realised.’
He grinned and tapped her cheek with one saffron-coloured finger. ‘OK. Pour the wine. I’ll just fry the croutons and then we’re there.’
The soup poured from his ladle into warm white bowls like rosy cream with chunks of white fish in it. He sprinkled cheese on top, then spread even more vibrantly coloured
rouille
on to his newly fried rounds of mini-baguette, before floating them like votive coracles across the surface of the soup.
Trish picked up her spoon and tasted it. Like almost everything George cooked, it was ambrosial. She gave it, and him, the compliment of silent eating until she was halfway down the bowl. Then she drank some of the sharp, cold wine, sat back, and said, ‘You’ve been very patient with all this hassle about my father. Not asking qustions and all that.’
A sardonic smile twisted his face. ‘You were in that
mood where questions only make you miserable – or angry. I didn’t fancy dealing with either and I knew you’d tell me in the end. You always do. More soup before you start?’
She shook her head, admiring the way he managed his feelings so neatly, with so little waste of spirit. She’d learned a lot from him, but she still hadn’t got the trick of this. ‘No. I’ll finish this while I tell you, then we can have hot seconds while you point out where the gaps in the argument are. You always see those far better than I do.’
He blew her a kiss, then picked up his own spoon again.
She told him again about the night David crashed into her life, her gradual realisation of who he must be, and Bella’s recent confirmation that he was, indeed, her half-brother. Trish waited there in case George wanted to say anything, but he just nodded and reached a big hand for more croutons, which he spread with great delicacy, handing her one.
The physical softness of the orange emulsion lying between her tongue and palate made the fiery taste even more shocking. But it was the kind of shock she enjoyed. In a way it seemed rather like George himself. Apparently gentle, domesticated, almost as
padded
as his well-covered bones, he packed a real punch. He was full of the kind of acerbic intelligence anyone else would have paraded at every possible opportunity. Not George. It was there for anyone who bothered to find it, but he’d never use it for aggrandisement – or aggression.
He’d never have made it at the Bar, she thought with a hidden spurt of laughter as she considered the mix of self-importance and histrionics so many of her colleagues felt was essential to their calling.
Swallowing the laughter and the crouton, she went on to tell him the story from the other end. She repeated
everything she’d heard from Frankie, from David himself, and from Lakeshaw’s hints and evasions.
‘And it’s David’s comment about the eyes, you see. He knew they weren’t a cat’s because they were too high, though if the cat had been sitting on the wall they’d have been too low.’
‘So?’
‘So, my father once told me that Jeannie Nest was my height or a little taller. David also said that Mrs Tiggywinkle liked to sit on the wall and lick his mother’s nose. Now that sounds as though Mrs Tiggywinkle’s eyes would have been about on a level with Jeannie Nest’s. Which suggests that the person whose eyes scared David so much was shorter than his mother.’
‘This is all very speculative, Trish,’ he said, as usual not letting her get away with any sloppy thinking. ‘You’re about to tell me that it couldn’t have been your father because he’s taller than you and would therefore have had eyes easily as high as the wall. Am I right?’
‘Absolutely bang on.’
‘I’m far more convinced by your story of Jeannie Nest having to talk about her fear but having to conceal the truth of it and using your father and her history with him as a blind. Have you run that theory by Lakeshaw?’
‘I might have, but he won’t speak to me. And I didn’t think it was fair to use Caro as a messenger. And then again …’ she paused and waited for George to fill in the gap.
‘Just in case it’s not the truth, and your father is arrested, you want to keep this for the defence to use to get him off,’ he said.
‘Exactly. It would be irresponsible to hand it over now and waste it.’
‘You’d do that, Trish, even if you thought he was guilty?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Of course you would. You’d have to. It’s your job to do your best for your clients.’
And yet I got so prissy about the thought of one ambiguous handwritten document that I was prepared to throw everything away, she told herself. Moral standards don’t count when you apply them randomly. You have to be consistent. Jeannie was.
Yes, said a rather different voice in her mind, and look where it got her. And her son. What ultimate good did she do at such an appalling cost? Apart from getting one murderous thug put away for life, of course.
‘Stop frowning, Trish. There’s no need for all this torment. It makes perfect sense to me, and whatever your nightmares tell you, I do not believe your father is a killer.’
She grabbed another crouton, smothered it with rouille and ate it in one bite, wishing as she tried to chew that she, like snakes, could dislocate her jaw to deal with the enormous mouthful. George was laughing at her by the time she got it under control, then leaned across the table to kiss her.
‘And now the rest. Have you got a suspect for these eyes that are too near the ground to be your father’s?’
‘No. But I do wonder if it’s the person who’s been following me.’ She tried to sound scientifically detached, but she knew her voice had quivered.
George’s face hardened. ‘Trish, for God’s sake! Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I suppose because I kept trying to persuade myself I was making it up.’ She manufactured a smile, hoping to see George relax. ‘I did tell Lakeshaw early on, but he wasn’t very impressed. And nothing ever happened, you see. It was just a feeling I had that someone was watching me. To have talked about it would have made it seem as though I was giving in to neurotic fantasy. But now I think he could’ve been real all along.’
‘Who is he?’
‘I don’t know, that’s the trouble. To start with, I thought he was the young man who answered my questions on the Mull Estate when I first went there. I told you about him when you first got back from San Francisco. I’ve been thinking a lot about how he pretended he knew nothing about anyone called Jeannie Nest. I don’t see how anyone could’ve been living there for four years and not have heard the story. Could they?’
‘I shouldn’t have thought so.’ George’s face was changing as his concentration turned inwards, away from her. ‘You’re not talking about a slight chap with fair hair, by any chance? And very clean clothes and an engaging smile?’
‘You’ve seen him, too, have you?’ Trish said as her spine started to prickle.
‘Yes, one day when I was coming here to cook. I had bags of food and I was concentrating on getting them out of the car so I didn’t look up till I got to the bottom of the steps; then I saw him, up at the top by your front door. I challenged him, and he said he was a cab driver, called out by someone whose name I can’t remember. I said he’d got the wrong address and saw him go back to his car and get straight on the radio. It all seemed so plausible that I never thought to tell you about it.’
‘I bet it’s him. And I bet he is the one who tried to get past Maria with stories about coming from the freeholder to inspect my dilapidations. George, you do see why I
have
to call Lakeshaw, don’t you?’
‘Yes. And then we must sort out what we’re going to do about David.’ The ‘we’ that sat between them was comforting. ‘I can see the temptation of taking him in, Trish. Believe me.’
Now beside the ‘we’ was an unspoken ‘but’, digging holes in the reassurance. She waited again.
‘He sounds thoroughly engaging, and I know he’s your
half-brother. But, Trish, think about everything you know from your work. It’s hard enough to bring up a child who hasn’t been damaged, especially when both parents work as hard as we do.’
‘We don’t know that David’s been damaged.’
‘Oh, come on. Of course we do. He’s lived in fear almost all his life. He witnessed the killing of a man, and his own mother being beaten up, when he was two. He felt her blood dripping on him and even if he doesn’t remember that, he’ll remember her fear. He’s going to find trust even harder than you do.’
Trish flinched and thought about explaining that it was herself she didn’t trust, not George – or David. ‘And he may have inherited a tendency to violent temper, if not actual physical violence. You’ve forgotten to remind me of that family failing, George, along with my inability to believe in other people.’
He looked as if the last of his patience was fast disappearing. She knew he loathed what he called ‘drama’, which usually meant her expressing strong feelings too vigorously.
‘Sorry,’ she said abruptly, not wanting to hear the reprimand again. ‘I need a pee.’
She fled up the spiral staircase, not sure whether she was saving George from the irritation of her presence or getting out of the way before she yelled at him. In the bathroom she stared at her reflection in the big mirror over the basin. Antony Shelley had once told her not to look so anguished. Now she knew what he’d meant. She looked ill, too.
Was it just delayed after-effects of the miscarriage and anxiety over Paddy, or was she really in danger of cracking up again? As she stared, her reflection shimmered and changed and in the place of the cool, slightly funky woman with the spiky hair was a witch with hollow cheeks and eyes like hot black charcoal and a mean red slash of a mouth.