Gagged & Bound (13 page)

‘Try not to worry too much, Bee.’

Her only response was a sigh, which kept echoing in Trish’s mind all the way back to chambers. When she got there, only a little late, she found nothing urgent on her desk or in her voicemail. Antony had dropped in earlier, looking for her,
Nessa said, but he hadn’t seemed worried when he heard Trish wouldn’t be back till the afternoon. And Steve, the chief clerk, wanted to talk to her about a new brief when she had time.

‘Great. You’re a pupil in a million, Nessa. Thanks. Let’s go and find something to eat.’

 

Gillian Crayley peeled carrots and grated them over the egg mayonnaise salad, hugging the good news to herself. She longed to phone John and tell him he must have moved up the shortlist, now the authorities had started on another round of discreet positive vetting, but she thought she’d better not. He’d warned her about the possibility of being overheard on the phone, and she didn’t want to ruin his chances by giving the impression that he had an indiscreet mother. She hoped she’d said all the right things and none of the wrong ones. But you could never be sure.

It was a pity she couldn’t tell him. The news would have cheered him up and he needed something to distract him from poor Stephanie’s death.

If only he’d married her in the first place! She’d have made him so much happier than Lulu. He’d begun to miss Stephanie almost as soon as he’d moved out, but it wasn’t until after he’d married Lulu that he’d begun to display the tiny little signs of misery Gillian had learned to watch for in his childhood. No one else would have noticed them, but she could always tell when he was distressed from a particular way he breathed and a very slight tic in his left cheek. When it was really bad, there could be a roughening of some of his vowel sounds, too.

All the signs had been there last week, when he’d come round in the middle of the afternoon to tell her that Stephanie had been killed, but there’d been more too. If Gillian had been a drama queen like Lulu, she’d have said he’d looked like a man on the point of death. Standing on her hearthrug, shivering like someone with malaria, he’d said, ‘Stephanie’s dead, Mum. She’s been shot.’

Gillian had put her arms round him. For a second she’d thought he might relax and let her hold him as she’d done when he was a little boy woken out of a nightmare, but he’d pulled himself away, then patted her shoulder to make up for it. He’d gone into the kitchen to brew her a cup of tea, and sat with her while she drank it, as though she’d been the sufferer.

There hadn’t been anything she could say to comfort him then, and there was nothing she could do to make him feel less bad now. However much she loved him – and she would have died for him if it would have helped – she couldn’t bring Stephanie back.

All she could do was hang on to her discretion, cook his favourite food for Sunday lunch, and be as nice to Lulu as anyone could be, whatever the provocation. John would know what that meant without her having to say any of it. And he’d approve of the reticence. Neither of them had ever gone in for sentimental chatter.

Maybe she could give him the news about Ms Maguire after all. If she pretended she believed in the cover story about research for a book on adopted children, it might be all right. John would see the truth straight away, but no one who overheard them would guess she knew it too.

As she ate her salad, taking very small bites and chewing each mouthful to pulp, Gillian planned her shopping list and her announcement.

 

Steve and Antony between them mopped up most of Trish’s time after lunch. Antony had a gap between conferences and wanted an update on Bee’s state of mind and health. As soon as Trish had satisfied him and got back to her room, she was faced with Steve, wanting her to agree to write six separate opinions for clients who needed advice about potential litigation. He’d obviously taken her agreement for granted because he was carrying a tower of papers, which he thumped
down on her desk even before he’d told her what they were.

There would be hours of reading, with all that lot to get through, but she needed fee-paying work too much to turn any of them down. As Steve talked, she realised four would turn on aspects of law that particularly interested her, which was a bonus. Reading up the case law would be a positive pleasure. She listened more carefully.

It would be such a relief to get back to her own work that she was tempted to start straight away. But she knew she’d do it better if she could get Bee and Caro sorted out first and clear her mind of their problems. As soon as Steve had left her room and Nessa had nipped out to the loo, Trish phoned Benedict Wallsford and gave him a plausible excuse for her interest in organised crime in general and the Slabbs in particular.

He said he would have plenty of information to share if she were prepared to keep its source to herself and why didn’t they meet for lunch tomorrow? When Trish agreed in spite of her dread of yet another bout of eating he suggested Sheeky’s. She recognised that all information had to be paid for in one way or another, and told him to go ahead and book a table in her name.

Putting down the phone, she considered various sources of information and decided to head off to a library where she had reading rights and would be able to access all the major newspaper archives online.

The library was due to close at six, which concentrated her mind once she’d found a free computer terminal. She started with
The Times
and found plenty of index entries for Simon Tick. The first was from 1973, when he appeared as one of the signatories to a letter to the editor, supporting the National Union of Mineworkers and objecting to the imposition of the three-day week.

He didn’t appear again until the early 1980s, when he was running the housing department of a famously left-wing London local authority. Most of the articles about him and his
colleagues were scandalised accounts of homelessness in the borough, which nevertheless charged higher rates than any others, except places like Mayfair, where the richest of the rich lived. Apparently Tick’s council also had the worst record for the time taken to re-let their properties after they’d been vacated and among the worst for rent arrears. There was also an appalling amount of dilapidated housing that the council’s own workforce was supposed to repair but had not touched.

Maybe that’s why he was so angry with my daring to ask questions about homelessness, Trish thought. But it still doesn’t excuse the threats.

She stared at the screen again. Nowhere was there anything to suggest any connection with bombs, pharmaceutical companies, or Jeremy Marton. And nowhere was the nickname Baiborn mentioned. She read the whole of each entry under Tick’s name and found nothing of any use. The bell rang to warn readers the library would close in fifteen minutes. Frustrated, she thought she might as well see what she could find on the Slabbs while she was here. She typed the name into the search box.

There were just over one hundred results listed. It wasn’t nearly as many as she’d expected, but she knew she wouldn’t have time to read them all now. Still she might as well make a start until she was thrown out.

The current head of the family was believed to be Jack Slabb, a nephew of the previous boss, who had died in 1998. She found a photograph, which showed a thick-set man with a shock of grey hair, not altogether different from Bill Femur in shape and size but with much better clothes. Dressed in a suit and tie, Jack Slabb looked to be in his sixties and could have been the managing director of any big company.

Someone tapped Trish on the shoulder and she turned so quickly that she made her head swim. She could hardly have advertised her curiosity about the Slabbs more clearly than by
staring at a screen full of information and pictures of them somewhere as public as this.

‘Library’s closing now,’ said a quiet voice, which made her heart beat a little more slowly. There was no reason to think the Slabbs had informants in such places, whatever Femur had suggested. ‘You’ll have to log off.’

‘Sure,’ she said, turning to smile at the librarian who had admitted her. ‘Thanks. I’m sorry if I’ve kept you late. The links to new websites kept pulling me on like a will o’the wisp.’

Derision twisted his lips. He looked pointedly over her shoulder at the photograph of Jack Slabb. She wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Why draw attention to her search?

There was no way of hiding what she’d been doing, so she simply turned back and clicked her way out of the website. The keys slipped a little under her fingers. She could still feel the librarian behind her. Why hadn’t he moved away? There were readers at some of the other terminals. Why hadn’t he told them to log off?

‘Thank you,’ she said, turning to face the librarian and waiting until he’d moved away.

Five minutes later, when she’d collected her papers and was walking out of the building, she caught him looking at her again. He was on the phone, talking quietly, with one hand cupped around the receiver, as he kept watch on her every move.

Thinking of the depths of misery to which Bee had reduced herself by unnecessary angst, Trish told herself to stop being so paranoid. She flashed the librarian a brilliant smile and saw him blush. That was better.

 

Caro Lyalt was having a drink with Fred Walley, who had once done some time with the department that dealt with undercover work. Because she didn’t want to risk being overheard by any of their colleagues, she’d picked the Redan, a pub none of them
used. It had a bad reputation at the local nick, but it would suit her purpose tonight.

Only when she’d recognised at least three well-known ‘faces’, hard men who’d been involved in serious crime in the past, did she regret her choice. Trish’s warning rang in her ears, but she ignored it. There was too much at stake.

‘I’d hate going under cover,’ she said quietly, still watching the men at the bar, ‘never being able to relax, never able to forget you’re playing a game. How did you manage, Fred?’

‘I shouldn’t have thought that would be too tough for you,’ he said, sniffing his beer suspiciously, before tasting it and then taking a large mouthful. ‘You keep your guard high. You always did.’

‘That’s different.’

‘Not really. You get used to it. You have to tell yourself the story of who you’re pretending to be so often it becomes your life.’ He put down the glass and said lightly, ‘It used to worry me that I found it so easy to feel like a criminal.’

‘That would be scary.’ Caro laughed, hoping to make the next question sound casual. ‘Did you ever get involved with the Slabbs?’

‘Why d’you ask?’

‘They’re on my mind at the moment. Someone suggested it was they who had Stephanie Taft killed, but there’s no evidence and unless someone catches the lad who ran off over the roofs – and gets him to talk – there never will be any. That riles me.’

‘She a friend of yours?’

‘No. But I liked the little I’d seen of her, and I admired what she tried to do.’

‘The one-woman cleaning of the sewers, you mean?’ Fred drank some more beer, then put the glass down with a bang. ‘Trouble was, she often saw sewage where there was only shadows.’

His bitterness seemed excessive. Caro was about to ask why
when he wiped some foam left on his lips and said, ‘I doubt the Slabbs would’ve bothered to have her killed. What could she do to them? The word is it was an internal warning that went wrong.’

‘What?
Who could be so fucking irresponsible?’ Caro hardly ever swore and hated catching herself using the casual obscenity she heard a thousand times every day. But what he’d suggested appalled her.

‘I don’t know anything for sure, but I did hear that someone in her nick thought it was time she was reminded of what policing at the sharp end is like. No one expected a man with a shooter like that. They just wanted her to get smacked about a bit. Or more likely tripped by one of the squad and accidentally trampled by some of the others.’

‘Who? And how did they know she’d be first into the house?’

‘No one knows. And no one ever will.’

‘Unless someone else takes up Stephanie’s task of cleaning the sewers,’ Caro said, hoping she wouldn’t have to do it herself.

He shook his head. ‘Don’t even think about it. And if you do start thinking, remember what happened to Stephanie.’ He caught sight of her expression. ‘I don’t mean the way she got shot. I mean the way she lost all chance of promotion and a great relationship.’

‘What, with John Crayley?’ What a gift of a question! Caro tried to keep the grim satisfaction out of her face. ‘Is he a friend of yours?’

‘No. But I used to see them around. They did a lot of socialising when they first got together, and they were the kind of pair that positively sweats happiness. Know what I mean? You can’t miss it when you see it. If she hadn’t been so pigheaded, they could’ve turned into one of the golden couples.’

Caro knew exactly what he meant. In every police force in the country there were couples, usually with the man a few years
older and a rung or two higher up the ladder, but not always, who charmed and worked their way into all the best jobs. Effective, glamorous, delightful, they egged each other on and became infinitely more successful as a pair than either would have been alone.

‘I doubt Stephanie would ever have managed that,’ she said. ‘She had way too much angry baggage.’

‘Yeah.’ He shook his head again, perhaps to get rid of the emotions washing about in his mind. ‘What was it you were asking just now? The Slabbs. No, I never worked with them, I’m glad to say.’

‘Glad?’

‘I had a mate, years ago, who tried. They sussed him straight away, but pretended to think he was part of a rival firm rather than in the job and gave him a terrible kicking. He was in hospital for weeks and never worked again. Too shook, you see. Lived on disability ever since. They’re a nasty bunch. If Stephanie Taft had tangled with them, she’d have been lucky to get away with a clean bullet through the neck. Can I get you another of those?’