Keep Me Alive (27 page)

Not again, she thought, knowing she’d never be able to resist that particular plea. She told herself that whatever the significance of Nick Wellbeck’s information, whatever the justification for Petra’s warning, Will was still the man she’d instantly liked and wanted to protect. But she couldn’t move.

‘
Trish
.’ He’d pushed open the letterbox now. Even though he wouldn’t be able to see her, he’d see the lights and smell the food and know she was there.

He’d broken a man’s neck. He might have killed a woman. And he’d lied to her. Could she persuade him that she still believed in him? If not, it would be better to pretend she was out, however unconvincingly, than let him in and risk provoking him.

But what if he
were
innocent? With his sensitivity to criticism, he’d know why she hadn’t opened her door. What would that do to a man so raw, so attuned to the slightest hint of dislike or contempt?

‘Trish, please.’

‘Coming,’ she called as soon as she’d got the mouthful down. ‘Sorry, I was choking.’

The latch seemed stickier than usual, but she managed to turn it eventually and opened the front door far wider than she wanted.

Will had one arm in plaster and several bits of transparent wound tape across abrasions on his face. His bottom lip was swollen as though one of his teeth had been driven into it, and he had a black eye. He was also leaning against the wall, a stick dangling from his good arm. Looking down, she saw that his left ankle was plastered too. She stood aside to let him in.

‘It’s wonderful that they’ve let you go,’ she said, struggling for the right amount of enthusiasm, and not specifying whether it was the hospital or the police she meant. ‘Fantastic. Come on in and I’ll heat you up some food.’

‘Can I really come in?’ He sounded as uneasy and unthreatening as ever.

‘Yes.’

‘Thank God.’ He stumbled as he crossed the threshold and landed in her arms, as the stick clattered to the ground. ‘Sorry. I wasn’t sure if you’d—’

She had to hold him for a moment to stop him crashing to the floor. Swaying under his weight, feeling the thud of his overstimulated heart all through her body, she used both hands to get him upright and balanced, before bending to pick up his stick. Touching him made her teeth clamp tight against each other.

‘Here,’ she said, making herself relax. ‘Come and sit at the table, if you can. Pour yourself a glass of wine, and I’ll go and get you some food. OK?’

He was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, as though something had hurt so much in the fall that it had made them water.

‘Great. Thanks.’

It was a relief to be out of sight in the kitchen. She could hear him lumbering around the table and manoeuvring his body and the stick so that he could lower himself into a chair. She still didn’t know what to think, or whether to ask him questions now. All she knew for certain was that he couldn’t do her any physical harm in this condition.

 

Later, when he had eaten and they were sitting over the wine and a bowl of rich, dark, imported cherries, in an atmosphere heavy with suspicion and fear, she asked him how he felt. It was a silly question, but someone had to say something.

‘Like shit,’ Will said. He let his eyelids lift and looked directly at her.

Trish had never seen his face so hard. Even when he’d been worried or frightened, he’d been able to produce a smile of sorts. Now, it seemed all masks were off.

‘The police have said they’ll want to talk to me again,’ he went on, ‘but at the moment they seem prepared to believe I didn’t kill Mandy.’

Trish fought down the question that surged up her throat, asking instead, ‘Who was she, Will?’

‘A girlfriend? A source? A threat? I don’t know,’ he said,
looking away, towards the window that framed the tower of the cathedral. Soon the light would go, but for now it was washing the stonework in a warm, golden glow. ‘That’s the trouble. I just don’t know.’

‘How did you meet her?’

‘When I went to Ivyleaf in search of information about the sausages. She’s … She was the receptionist there.’

‘And you became friends?’ Trish suggested when he left it at that.

‘More than that.’ He looked back at her. A faint flush seeped along his cheekbones. ‘I couldn’t believe it at first, but she … she took me to bed. I’m sorry, Trish … But that’s what happened. She seemed so sweet, so cuddly, that I felt awful for trying to get information out of her. Now it looks as if she was at it, too. All the time.’

Trish poured more wine into his glass and attempted a teasing tone of voice to hide all the inferences she was trying not to make about the way a man as vulnerable and emotional as Will might react to this kind of betrayal. ‘There’s nothing to apologize for. And I can’t believe you were reluctant.’

‘I wasn’t.’ Will blinked several times, then gulped some wine. ‘And I shouldn’t have been so surprised to find she knew Bob Flesker. Or so angry. I mean, they worked for companies that did business together, but I …’

‘Don’t make yourself go through it again, Will,’ Trish said, knowing she couldn’t hear a confession from him and not do anything about it. ‘You look exhausted, and you must have had to tell the story too often by now.’

‘Yes. But you need to know. I have to tell you.’ His voice was rising in excitement and his hands were clenched. Even the one at the end of his broken arm tightened into a fist. Those were the hands that had broken Flesker’s neck. She forced herself to look away from them and smile into his face. ‘It won’t take long. Please listen, Trish.’

‘OK.’

So he told her the story she’d already heard from Petra. Everything was the same, even the words he used. Trish recognized them all, sensible, disciplined, convincing in themselves, and now so obviously rehearsed they made her shiver.

‘I could never have hurt Mandy,’ he ended, ‘even to save my own life.’

‘Good.’

‘You do believe me, don’t you?’

Why did that sound so much more like a threat than a plea? Trish wondered even as she tried to put her mind into the right condition to answer.

‘By God, you don’t. What have I ever done to you to make you think I could …?’ His voice failed, but his eyes looked flinty.

She looked straight at them and forced herself to lie with yet another smile, hating what she was doing. ‘Of course I believe you. Don’t be silly, Will.’

‘That’s OK then. Good,’ he said, letting his hands flatten. She felt her lungs inflate again. ‘So, what are we going to do about Ivyleaf?’

‘I’m too tired to think about that now, and there are other priorities. Once the case is over, I’ll help you sort out a dossier, with all the facts and supporting evidence clearly laid out, to submit to the Meat Hygiene Service or the Food Standards Agency. They’re the people to get the whole Ivyleaf operation shut down for good.’

‘It can’t wait that long. It’s cost too much to get this far. Mandy’s dead. Trish, we have to—’

‘It
has
to wait,’ she said grimly. Then she made her face and neck soften again. ‘And you have to get home now. Does your sister know the police have let you go?’

‘She doesn’t know they ever had me.’ He was leaning across the table now, peering into her face. ‘Unless you told her.
Christ! You did, didn’t you? Trish, why have you turned against me? I thought you were on my side.’

‘Come on, Will, don’t look at me like that. I am on your side. Of course I am. I didn’t say anything to Susannah about Mandy; only that you’d been in a fight and were in hospital. Someone had to tell her that much, to explain why you weren’t coming home.’

‘Bollocks. This is nothing to do with her. She’s not my fucking keeper. What gave you the right to interfere?’

The only way of keeping this within safe limits was to behave as though Will were ordinarily angry and she still sure he was real and honest and safe.

‘You’re living in her house,’ she said quietly, ‘and she’s concerned about you. You’d better ring her now, then I’ll call you a cab.’

His nostrils flared, but he didn’t say anything. Every self-protective instinct screamed at Trish to get him out of her flat fast, before this got out of hand. She almost pulled the kitchen phone off the wall.

‘Sorry, love,’ said her local minicab company. ‘Hour and a half wait. It’s a busy night. Shall I book you in for then?’

‘No, thanks. Don’t worry. I’ll try someone else.’

All the numbers on the cards stuck round the phone produced similar results. Everything she’d eaten and drunk was rocking around in her gut, making her feel seasick.

‘Don’t worry, Trish,’ Will said from right behind her, making her jump. How had he moved so quietly with his plastered leg and his stick? ‘I can crash on one of your sofas. They’re big enough. And I won’t disturb you.’

‘With all your injuries, you need to be safe at home in your own bed,’ she said, grabbing at the excuse. ‘I haven’t had that much to drink, I’ll drive you back to Fulham.’

Tonight was obviously the time for breaking all her rules. But she knew she wouldn’t sleep if she had Will in the flat, even in
his wounded state. She nipped into the kitchen to grab a handful of coffee beans to chew to keep her mind focused and urged him out of the flat.

The edges of the road wouldn’t keep to their place as Trish drove back home from Fulham. Light from oncoming cars ballooned in her eyes. Her hands were clutching the steering wheel more tightly than at any time since she’d first learned to drive. She tried to reckon up how many glasses of wine she’d drunk tonight as a way of focusing her mind.

There’d been the bottle in El Vino, but Nick Wellbeck had drunk most of that, although she hadn’t been able to stop him refilling her glass when she’d finished it the first time. She’d left it there on the table though, and scooped up handfuls of biscuits. Or was handsful? Her hands were definitely full of steering wheel and guilt for this irresponsibility.

What had happened to the Trish Maguire who believed in the law and control and accepting the consequences of whatever you did?

She kept swerving away from all the ideas she couldn’t bear to confront, just as the car veered from the line it was supposed to take. It jolted suddenly, as though she’d run over a brick or a branch or something in the gutter. She wrenched the steering-wheel back to the straight. But she’d been too violent and the car charged towards the next corner at quite the wrong angle.

Correct it gently, she told herself, coming back to life and sanity just in time to avoid bouncing off a row of very expensive parked cars.

This couldn’t go on. She checked in her mirror, making a great labour of it. There was nothing behind her, so she stopped in an empty space by the pavement, and applied the handbrake as tightly as if she’d parked on a one-in-three hill. Then she took her feet off the pedals. The car jolted forwards as if it had been hit by a truck. Still no one in the mirror. She’d left the car in gear.

Pressing down on the clutch again, she waggled the gear lever to make sure it was free, then she turned off the engine, pulling the key from its lock. A minute later, she was out in the fresh air, weaving slightly. It was a pity it wasn’t colder, to shock her into sobriety, but the day’s heat still hung about her head and wafted up from the tarmac.

She was sure she shouldn’t be as drunk as this. A glass and a half in El Vino and two at home. That might be too much for any driver, and more units than a woman should take in one day if the health experts were to be believed, but it wasn’t nearly enough to make her behave like this.

The edge of the Embankment was comfortingly close. She lurched towards it, and leaned with her arms crossed in front of her, to gaze at the Hungerford Foot Bridge. She wasn’t used to seeing it from this side.

Her wobbly mind played around the blue light on top of each bunch of steel wires keeping the bridge suspended in the air. The bunches looked like transparent tents. What genius had been able to envisage this fantastical arrangement of wire, darkness and blue and white light? Each component was ordered and severe on its own, and yet together they were magic. And what a blue! Not navy or royal or turquoise or French or powder or any other kind of paint-card shade; just blue. Perfect.

Trish’s ears were still buzzing, but her sight was steadying, and the hardness of the stone she was leaning on helped bring her back to her senses.

It wasn’t only the drink that had thrown her so wildly off
course. There was also the suspicion that had been growing like a fungus in her brain since the meeting with Nick Wellbeck. She still didn’t want to think about it. Her subconscious would probably find ways to make it less awful if she could leave it alone for a few more hours.

‘Why didn’t he tell me?’ she asked the moon, which couldn’t have cared less. ‘He told me about his wife; about how much he hated farming and all the quarrels he’d had with his father. He even told me about his father’s stroke and what he felt after that. Some of it, anyway. So why the hell didn’t he tell me the truth about Jamie Maxden and his article about the illegal meat that must have come from Manor Farm?’

She’d known almost from the start that Will was cleverer than he usually let himself appear. Now she had to face the fact that for all his extravagant outpourings of words and emotion, there’d been more than one secret tightly withheld in his brain. What else might there be?

What if he hadn’t sold the farm because he’d hated getting up in the raw dawn for milking every day, as he’d claimed? What if he’d done it to make sure that no hint of a scandal about the meat from those same cows could damage him? What if he’d blamed Jamie Maxden’s investigation for his father’s death? What if he’d been biding his time ever since, taking pleasure in the ruin of the journalist’s career, until he could exact the maximum revenge? How much of the stories he’d told Trish had he invented?

Her mind kept lurching away from the rational. She was usually much better at analysis than this. The idea sobered her a little and she decided that Will couldn’t have been after revenge or he’d never have involved her in his drama.

Unless he was a lot more subtle than she’d guessed.

‘You all right, love?’

Trish pushed herself away from the supportive granite and looked round into the concerned face of one of a pair of
Community Support Officers. They were dressed in dark-blue uniforms with fluorescent yellow jackets on top. She couldn’t remember whether they had powers of arrest or any responsibility for traffic control. But maybe it didn’t matter. They couldn’t have any idea that the lanky dark-haired woman talking to herself as she mooned over the river could have had anything to do with the smart Audi parked on the opposite side of the road. Or that she might have been driving a murderer home to his caring sister in Fulham.

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ she said, watching her best warm, high court voice relax them. ‘I was just walking off dinner and admiring the bridge. Isn’t it wonderful?’

She assumed that would send them on their way, reassured that she was a harmless local eccentric.

‘Fantastic,’ said the second officer, in a rich Birmingham accent. He poked his chin towards the bridge. ‘Doesn’t look so good in the day, but at night it’s the best new landmark in London. Knocks spots off the one by the new Tate if you ask me. And as for that Gherkin! Words fail me.’

Trish nodded, words having failed her in a much more literal sense.

‘Take care now,’ said his partner, and the two of them set off with the steady swinging trudge that would carry them over the rest of their beat without too much damage to their calf muscles or the soles of their feet.

No wonder the London police were called plods, Trish thought, watching them. That’s exactly how they must have walked in the days when they still patrolled the beat.

She waited until these two had turned off the Embankment and disappeared. Then, almost sober, she turned back to face the river, wishing she had someone to consult about Will. But Antony was impossible; Caro, too ill and in any case too tied in with her police colleagues; and none of her other friends would be able to help with something like this, even if they were still
in London. It would be far too complicated—and expensive – to try to explain it all to George over the phone.

This was the flip side of the freedom that had given her back her wings. She’d forgotten what it was like to feel so lonely.

Loneliness has nothing to do with the physical absence of your lover, she decided. It’s being in a place where there are no landmarks because someone you trusted has destroyed them all. It’s a place where time doesn’t move and there’s no warmth and no safety. And the only way to avoid being there is never to trust a living soul.

One person might have been able to help, if only she hadn’t cut herself off from him. But how could she go to her father now? It would be impossible to say, ‘I’ve let another violent hurt man get through my defences. I’ve come to care about him. Now, I think he could be a killer. If he isn’t and knows what I think, I’ll hurt him nearly as badly as I hurt you. What can you tell me that might help?’

At last, she got back in her car and drove with the utmost caution back to Southwark.

 

Next morning in court, she sat behind Antony, waiting for Ferdy Aldham to make his closing speech in defence of Furbishers Foods. She didn’t have the headache she deserved for last night’s excesses, but she couldn’t get the thought of Will out of her mind.

Right from the beginning she had prided herself on picking the real facts out of his torrents of impassioned words. Had she in fact heard only what she’d wanted to believe?

What if his pleasure in her various summaries had been triumph at having so comprehensively deluded her? There had always been a distance between the friendly country-bumpkin persona he often affected and the sharp mind she knew it hid. She should have had the sense to probe more deeply before she had embroiled herself in his games.

Have I backed the wrong horse all along? she thought. If I have, then what does that say about the case? We
have
to win it, but if Will has lied, then what satisfaction could there be?

‘And so, my lord …’ Trish woke up to the fact that Ferdy must have been speaking for at least ten minutes. Thank heavens Colin was obediently writing notes of everything. She’d have a chance to read what she’d missed.

‘And so, my lord, we have here a group of small food producers, unfamiliar with the normal trading practices of major supermarkets and consequently unable to distinguish between their own enthusiasm and the realities of large-scale business,’ Ferdy said, flicking his papers disdainfully away from him, before launching into a panegyric of Furbishers’ importance and benevolence.

Trish settled down to concentrate and mentally redraft aspects of Antony’s speech to counter the few points Ferdy made that they had not expected.

 

At the end of the day, it was a relief to go back to chambers for the post-mortem. The last thing Trish wanted now was to be in the flat and accessible to Will. She’d had her mobile switched off all day and planned to keep it that way. It was a pity Liz Shelley was back; otherwise, Antony might have suggested going out for dinner again. Still, Trish could always drop in and see Caro and find out if there were any more news of Kim.

The meeting in chambers didn’t take long because there was so little Ferdy had adduced in his speech that they had not foreseen. Trish was walking up the hospital stairs at half past six.

She’d given up waiting for the lifts long ago. They always seemed to be monopolized by people going up and down a single floor. She pushed open the swing doors that led from the main passage into the ward and saw Caro, walking slowly towards her, held up by Cynthia Flag.

‘Hi, Trish! Don’t you think I’m doing well?’ Caro called.

‘Brilliantly. How are you feeling?’

‘Much better. I can’t tell you how different it is now. I even think they’re going to let me go home soon.’

‘You mustn’t rush it, Caro. It would be madness, having been through all this, to risk a relapse.’ Cynthia said. ‘Hello, Trish, how are you?’

‘I’m fine. We’re almost at the end of the case. Just our speech, then the verdict.’

‘Will you go out to Australia then?’ Caro asked.

‘Not worth it. George and David are due back at the end of the week in any case.’ Trish found herself smiling at the prospect.

‘Caro, would you be all right if I left you in Trish’s hands now? I ought to get home and she can take you back to your bay.’

‘Of course, darling. Thank you.’ Caro kissed her.

‘Nice woman,’ Trish murmured when Cynthia had gone. ‘How did you meet?’

Caro laughed, seeming almost back to her usual self. ‘She’s a probation officer. I found her when I first came to London. In fact, she and I were together for a while. She was my first, taught me what it was all about.’

‘Ah. I see. I must say, she’s gorgeous.’

‘Isn’t she? But that’s a recent development. She wasn’t confident enough to let herself look like that in those days.’

‘How’s Jess?’

‘Hanging on. It’s a pity she hasn’t got any work at the moment; that always cheers her up. Being around the flat all day, waiting for her agent to call, means she hasn’t got any distraction from her frets. That’s why Cyn moved in. She promised me she’d look after Jess until I could get home.’ Caro looked at her feet, then said, ‘I owe Cyn a lot more than I realized till now; taking care of Jess is only part of it.’

‘It looked to me as though she was doing a good job,’ Trish said, aware that yet again she’d been making wildly inaccurate judgements on inadequate evidence. She’d never do that on a case. When was she going to learn to apply the disciplines of her work to her personal relationships? Life would feel a lot safer if she started to do that. ‘I’d wondered how she came to be there.’

They were back at Caro’s bed now, which was lucky because she was beginning to tire. The colour had gone from her face and she was trembling. As she lay down, she said, ‘Did your meat man ever find out anything useful about the sausages?’

If Caro had been well, and if Will had not been facing arrest for murder, Trish wouldn’t have been able to resist confiding in her. In normal times, there were few people whose judgement she would rather trust. Now it was crucial to keep within the limits set by their different roles. Caro had always put her work ahead of every personal consideration. She wouldn’t be able to listen to anything that might help her colleagues in such a serious investigation without passing it on to them. Trish’s professional rules were equally stringent, but different. For the moment, she had to keep her anxieties about Will to herself.

‘He hasn’t found out anything yet,’ she said lightly, ‘although he’s still got all sorts of suspicions. But it’s looking more and more likely that it was some kind of local contamination, confined to that particular packet of sausages. That’s why the bugs attacked only you and me.’

‘I still don’t know why they went for me so much more ferociously than they did you.’