Fault Lines (7 page)

It had been particularly satisfying because there had been rather too many trials recently in which Trish had had to steel herself to argue an unattractive client’s case or make witnesses look untrustworthy to the jury, even though she herself had believed what they’d had to say. This time, from the moment she had first seen the case papers and read what the defendant had done to keep the girls under his influence, she had wanted him behind bars for as long as possible.

Sentencing had been postponed for the usual presentence reports, but she’d had few anxieties. And she’d been right. He had been sent down for the maximum of seven years, with a further sentence of five for unlawful wounding to run concurrently. Trish would have liked the sentences to be consecutive rather than concurrent, but she’d always known that was unlikely.

When it was over she emerged into Old Bailey and sucked in a great lungful of cold, exhaust-laden air then had to cough most of it out.

‘You sound as though you’re on sixty a day,’ said a familiar voice behind her. When she turned she saw Michael ffrench, an old acquaintance at the criminal bar, whose case must have just finished. He, too, was looking pleased with himself. ‘Share a taxi back, Trish?’

‘I think I’ll walk,’ she said. ‘I haven’t much to carry. But thanks.’

‘OK. See you.’

Hating gyms as she did, walking back to the Temple was almost the only exercise Trish ever took. As she emerged into Ludgate Hill she saw that some of the black clouds were grudgingly drawing apart to show glimpses of slightly paler sky, but the sun had set a good hour earlier so the only real light came from the street-lamps, glittering on the bumpers of cars and vans as they belched at the traffic lights. The orange glow made the faces of the hurrying people look even more ill than they did in full daylight, and most of them seemed to have chapped lips and dripping noses.

Ugh! A typical London winter. Trish shuddered. She didn’t want to loiter in the freezing damp, but she didn’t want to be back in chambers either. She was due to have a conference with Kara’s weird-sounding protégé Blair Collons.

Trish knew she had to meet him since she’d accepted the brief, but he’d sounded ghastly from Kara’s letter, and the case itself wasn’t of any real interest. Knowing she had a bit of time in hand, Trish decided to give herself a quick treat first. She turned back and took a short detour, crossing Ludgate Hill and walking down Carter Lane to Wardrobe Place, which was almost her favourite place in the City.

Built on the site of the King’s Wardrobe, which had been destroyed in the Great Fire, it was an enchanting secretive courtyard with a short row of Georgian houses down one side and decrepit shops opposite. Trish had first stumbled on it years earlier, late one summer’s night, and fallen in love with the place. One day it would probably be developed, but for the moment it was still the same as she’d first seen it. Pleased, she turned back towards the Temple, almost ready to face Blair Collons.

As she waited to cross Ludgate Circus, pulling her scarlet wool scarf higher round her neck to keep out the icy damp, Trish tried not to think too much about Kara. All the tabloids had been full of lurid details of what had been done to her, and to Trish they seemed to carry an insidious subtext of the kind of victim-blaming she most hated. Nearly all the articles had mentioned that Kara lived on her own, and several had included supposedly helpful hints about the ways other women in her situation could minimise the risks they took, which made it sound as though they thought Kara had almost invited what had happened to her.

One paper had even interviewed Jed Thomplon about the break-up of his relationship with Kara, eliciting, after the first routine expressions of horror and sorrow, several misogynist comments about the way feminism had destroyed women’s chances of safety and happiness by making them discontented with the kind of life that would have been right for them. The journalist had quoted Jed as saying that large numbers of his female patients suffered stress-induced illnesses that could be put down directly to the fact that they were trying to succeed in two mutually exclusive worlds.

Trish had her own views about the unreasonable demands made on women who did paid work all day and still shouldered the majority of their family’s domestic responsibilities, but she did not like the spin Jed had put on their difficulties. But then she wouldn’t have expected much better from him after the few things Kara had told her about their life together.

Trish was interested that he had let himself sound so bitter and took that as a sign that he knew he couldn’t be a suspect for the killing. Either he’d had an unbreakable alibi to give the police, who had clearly been all ready to suspect him, or else it had never even crossed his mind that anyone would think he could have been involved.

Like most of the journalists who’d written about Kara, Jed seemed to assume that she’d been the seventh victim of the Kingsford Rapist. Several articles lambasted the police for their incompetence in leaving him uncaught for so long.

The lights changed and Trish crossed Ludgate Circus. The traffic was even thicker than usual – there must be yet more road works higher up Farringdon – but there were also hordes of pedestrians, jostling, getting in the way, and not moving quickly enough. She pushed through eventually and made her way to Pret à Manger in Fleet Street for a cappuccino to go. With the tall cardboard cup in one hand and her briefcase in the other, her red bag slung across her back, she made her way across the crammed, noisy road into the peace of the Temple.

She stopped by the clerks’room to tell Dave what had happened in court and asked him to chase up some of her most outstanding fees. He looked hurt at the suggestion that he might not have done all he could to keep her income flowing in, so she reminded him that there were at least three cases she had done two and half years earlier for which she had still not been paid.

‘Well, you know how it is.’

‘Yes, I do, Dave. But I always have a lot of big bills at this time of year. It’s when I moved into the flat so all the annual things like insurance come up this month, and the January tax payment has cleaned me out. I
hate
this new system of paying tax in advance. Do your best for me, won’t you?’

‘Don’t I always? Now, you haven’t forgotten the con, with Mr Collons, have you?’

‘No, but I wish I could.’

‘It won’t take long and I know you’ll do a fine job.’ Dave was looking at her with qualified approval. That was rare enough to make her smile. As he opened his thin lips to smile back, his sharp teeth gleamed in the light of his cherished antique brass desk lamp.

He had once told Trish, in an uncharacteristically soft moment, that the lamp had come from what he called ‘Churchill’s bunker’ in the Cabinet Office war rooms. She didn’t believe the story, but Dave obviously did. She had occasionally seen him stroke the lamp when he thought no one was looking. Whenever he’d been particularly acerbic or difficult, it gave her a certain private satisfaction to think of his fantasising about being a great war leader, battling against the odds to get his troops to the front so that they could do their bit for King and Country.

She took her coffee back to her room and gave herself five minutes of self-indulgent relaxation before hanging up her gown, and tidying herself and her desk ready for her new client.

When he came, she was not impressed. He was a small man, probably in his mid-forties, with a tight, round belly pushing out the waist of his brown trousers. They were so deeply creased around the crotch that the suit couldn’t have been cleaned in years.

To be fair, Trish had to admit that he had done his best with the stains on the jacket. Even from across the desk she could see where the water he had dabbed on them had puckered the cloth and spread the grease way beyond the original mark.

He smelt faintly of stale sweat, bad teeth, and resentment, and he looked frightened. His thin brown hair was greasy and stretched across his scalp in unattractive strands. But he was hardly the first unappetising client Trish had ever had. She knew what she had to do.

Trying to look as though she was pleased to see him, she invited him to sit down and tell her all about his case. His solicitor, who was as clean and pressed as Collons was not, leaned forward to give Trish a crisp explanation.

‘I think, Mr Bletchley,’ she said, ‘that it would be of great benefit if I could hear about it from Mr Collons himself first.’ She turned to smile encouragingly at him again.

He stared back at her from under half-closed lids. Something in his eyes, the peculiar intensity, perhaps, suggested that he was trying to tell her something he couldn’t actually say.

‘Carry on, Mr Collons,’ she said cheerfully, as though she had not noticed. ‘How long had you been working for Kingsford Council before they sacked you?’

‘Nearly four years. In the finance department.’

‘As a bookkeeper?’

‘That’s right. I am … I used to be … I am an accountant, chartered, but bookkeeping’s been my job at Kingsford from the beginning. Needs must when the devil drives, you know.’

Trish only just stopped herself from blinking. He didn’t look like any chartered accountant she had ever seen. ‘I see,’ she said feebly, waiting for more. ‘And what exactly is it that the council thought you’d done?’

‘Falsified expenses, creaming off a slice for myself before paying out to the people who’d presented claims.’ His voice was indignant. There was no attempt at justification, just outrage. ‘When they showed me some of the dockets, it was easy to see that they’d been altered. It had been very clumsily done, but it hadn’t been done by me.’

‘Fine. Any idea who had done it?’

‘None. And since these particular expenses were all for petty cash, there’d been no cheques paid in anywhere, which would have provided some evidence.’

‘I see. And how much is involved?’ Trish had read all the papers already, but she wanted to make sure that the story the client would tell at his tribunal tallied in every respect with the documentary evidence.

‘The charge is that I’d been doing it ever since I arrived and had made something in the region of ten thousand pounds out of it.’

‘That’s a lot of money to be made out of claims for bus fares, even over four years.’

‘There was a bit more to it than bus fares, Ms Maguire,’ Blair Collons said pettishly, once more making peculiar faces at her.

Any minute now, she thought, he’s going to start winking at me. She was beginning to understand why his solicitor might not have wanted to represent him at the tribunal. Quite apart from his unsavoury appearance, the facial tic – or whatever it was – wouldn’t exactly enhance his credibility.

‘And yet they haven’t involved the police,’ she said. ‘Is that right?’

‘Quite right,’ said Bletchley, crossing his elegantly suited legs. ‘Which makes it clear that they can’t ever have had any hard evidence, which makes their sacking my client on what amounts to little more than suspicion quite outrageous.’

The phone on Trish’s desk rang, which surprised her. Dave and the junior clerks were usually scrupulous in refusing to put calls through during a con. Assuming it was something urgent, she picked up the receiver.

‘Ms Maguire?’ said Debby, the much criticised and put-upon secretary who worked in the clerks’room. She sounded anxious. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but there’s someone on the line who says he positively must speak to Mr James Bletchley and I know he’s in with you. Dave’s not here at the moment, or I’d have –’

‘Don’t worry, Debby,’ said Trish, anxious to hold back the flood of explanation. ‘I’ll tell Mr Bletchley,’ She put a hand over the receiver, forgetting that modern telephones are too efficient to be so easily muffled, and asked whether he was prepared to take the call.

‘Ah, thank you, Ms Maguire. Yes, I know what it is and it’s important. I wonder if I might take the call somewhere else? The clerks’room, perhaps.’

‘Fine.’ Trish was not sure that she wanted to spend any time alone with the peculiar Mr Collons but she could hardly say so.

As soon as his solicitor was out of the room, he said, ‘That’s lucky. Now, we haven’t much time, and I must speak to you alone. Kara told me all about you, and said she was sure you’d understand everything.’

So that’s what the grimaces were all about, thought Trish. Help. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said, doing her best to avoid sounding patronising, ‘that you’ll have to wait until Mr Bletchley comes back. The bar’s code of conduct means that you and I cannot discuss the case – or anything that might have a bearing on it – without your solicitor present.’ Trish thought of her meetings with Kara and decided they had been quite different, and just about acceptable. ‘But, as a friend of Kara’s, you might be able to help me. D’you know if there’s going to be a funeral? I wouldn’t want to miss it, but I haven’t heard anything about when it might be. D’you know?’

‘No. But, then, they wouldn’t tell me. It was only Kara who ever …’ He produced a surprisingly clean handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘But listen, Ms Maguire, it’s not the case that we need to talk about. Not really. I don’t mind Bletchley hearing about that, even though he thinks I’m guilty. You don’t, do you?‘

‘No,’ said Trish, surprising herself. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘Kara said you wouldn’t. She said she’d trust your judgement anywhere.’ He smiled, revealing chipped, discoloured teeth, but also a saner, slightly more attractive personality. ‘That’s why I said I had to have you in spite of all Mr Bletchley’s protests that you weren’t the right kind of barrister for me. Kara had recommended you, you see, and that was enough for me.’

‘That was nice of her,’ said Trish, still trying to keep him off the subject of his case. ‘Had you known her long?’

‘Not long enough. Not nearly,’ he said, as his eyes started to water. Trish quite liked him for that. ‘Only since she came to Kingsford. But she was wonderful to me. Really, really kind. I’ve never known anyone like her before.’

Trish nodded, wondering how much longer she could spin out the innocuous discussion.

‘She thought you were wonderful, too,’ Blair went on, his smile beginning to look a bit sickening. ‘She was always talking about you.’