Lover in Law (27 page)

He looks good. Slightly darker, which makes him even more exotic. And somebody out in Mozambique has been having a bit of fun with his hair. There are no longer just orange streaks. He now has a splash of red ones too. They’re stylish, not garish. Somehow he pulls them off. Nonetheless I wonder if Maxwell Hood QC has seen him yet because honestly, there’s probably some crusty old judge out there who, on a bad day, would hold Anthony in contempt for his appearance alone. 

“I didn’t really do much. Just hung out, you know, but it was nice to spend some time with my family. I don’t see them often enough. You’ll understand, when the baby comes along, how much more family seems to matter.”

He looks me up and down as if he hasn’t seen me for years, which is just as well. He can take my shifting about, agitated, as being uncomfortable under the spotlight, rather than a reaction to his last comment. I don’t look bad. I’ve not overdone it on the weight front and my bump is neat. I found this fabulous pair of maternity trousers, black, tight fitting, with flare bottoms, which I now wear every day, together with a figure-hugging black vest under a long-sleeved white T-shirt. Anthony, however, remembers me as willowy and svelte. I feel a far cry from that now.

“I can’t believe how much bigger you’ve got,” he says. “Can I touch?”

I remove my hand from my stomach to make room for his. It’s strange how when you’re carrying a child, your stomach kind of becomes public property. A lot of people don’t even ask permission. They just cop a feel anyway, as if it’s their divine right. Anthony’s touch is deeply warm and the heat spreads, tingling. The baby responds with a whopper of a kick. Anthony leaps back, gleeful.

“Did you get that, did you get that?” he yelps.

 “I certainly did,” I smile.

 “He kicks like David Beckham!”

He pulls up his sleeve and plants his hand back on my belly, hoping for some more. He’s not disappointed. Once again, the baby responds, only this time with a series of kung fu moves that would do Jackie Chan proud. I’m moved in many ways. I’m moved by Anthony’s response, by his excitement and wonder. I’m moved by how the baby reacted. More uncomfortably, I’m moved sexually. Anthony touching me, for the first time in months, awakens a whole load of repressed emotions. I haven’t felt sexual since I found out I was pregnant, but sitting here, with my feet on his lap, him leaning forward, so close, the memory of how it was, with him, gushes to the root of every hair on my body, making them stand to attention. It’s at this point, in the past, I’d have scuttled out the room, awkward and confused, but in my current condition, I don’t scuttle very well. Besides, I’ve a lot still to tell. He needs to know that, despite my best efforts, I’ve failed to find a forensic expert to counter the Prosecution’s claims that Rupert Simon’s car had been tampered with. Everyone I’ve instructed to examine the car agrees unequivocally that a steering linkage had been undone, which led to the front wheels of the vehicle eventually losing control. Only someone with a reasonable knowledge of cars could have done it. When I’d broached my client with this damning new evidence, he’d immediately countered that Rupert Simons had been embroiled in a load of wheeler-dealer schemes which had gone belly up. Apparently he owed a lot of people a lot of money. I’ve since checked that out and found his finances to be in impeccable order. “And if they think that I did it,” Scott Richardson had defended, “then they’re very much mistaken. I know absolutely nothing about cars, except for how to drive one.”

***

Anthony told me not to come, that it wasn’t part of my remit, but I’d insisted. Time’s ticking by and our case could be a lot stronger, so I’ve come back to Scott Richardson’s flat, looking for any elusive information that could help. I felt braver before the event, insanely perceiving my baby to be some sort of mortality shield. Nobody messes with an expectant woman. As I make my way to the toilet, my usual first pit stop, I realize that my client and I are not alone. The door on the left that had been so mysteriously locked on every other occasion is open, revealing what is more a walk-in closet than a room. The clutter and junk carpeting the space is a complete contrast to the tidy minimalism of the rest of the apartment. In the middle of the debris sits a man on a low chair with his back to me. He flicks a remote at a small TV set and swivels round as he hears me pass.

“Hello chief.”

Startled, I jump, clapping a hand over my chest. I make a frightened, elongated ‘ah’ noise that lingers in the air. Because this man isn’t any old person, it’s ‘Four Finger Freddie.’ I remember who I am and why I’m here and bravely approach with palm outstretched. As his long, hairy digits suffocate my grip, crushing my little finger, the junk debris becomes clearer. There’s pile on pile of backdated newspapers. Video case on video case has been chucked onto the floor. Random bloodsucking titles splatter in my face:
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
,
Slaughter
,
The Art of Dying
,
Psycho
.  

I stand glued, stunned to the spot, wondering what the hell Freddie Foster is doing in my client’s flat, soaking up a cinema of horror. Is the macabre reality of his life not good enough? He nods that I should leave, gets up, turns off the light, shuts the door, turns the lock and takes out the key. He raises an eyebrow at me, unsmiling.

“All set to win then?”

His intonation indicates that this is a veiled threat, not a question. Whilst it does frighten, I’m not sure what difference it will make to the outcome. On reflex, I curl my little fingers into tight squares. He hands the key to Scott, who’s loitering in the vicinity, and heads towards the front door without saying another word.

“You kept that well hidden!” says Scott, looking down at my belly. 

There’s no twinkle in his eye and no upward turn to his mouth. I sense the charmer in him is taking a siesta. I open my mouth, about to ease the tension, make some vacuous comment or other about being full of surprises when he interrupts, terse. 

“So, who’s the lucky father?”    

Four Finger Freddie slams the front door shut. 

“Sorry?” I gargle.

 “Come on, Ali,” he says, waving the key to the door carelessly, menacingly in the air, as if it were a weapon of mass destruction. “It’s obvious you and Anthony are having an affair.”

“Sorry?” I croak again.

How dare such a serial philanderer pull me up on my behaviour? If I weren’t so defencelessly rooted, if he weren’t so bang on, I’d be outraged. I nonetheless take offence that he of all people has reminded me of my situation. Anything that has me vaguely resembling my client leaves me cold.

An adrenaline rush kicks my heartbeat into overdrive, my imagination into overload. If Scott IS guilty of murdering Rupert Simons and indeed William Nichols, as my anonymous letter suggested, if Scott DOES have a history of bumping off women’s partners when they get in the way, then perhaps it’s Anthony on top of his current hit list. Freddie Foster has been hired for his professional know-how.

“Come, come,” he says, his voice silky smooth, a sinister glint in his eye as he pockets the key, “I bet you’ve modelled those pink panties for that colleague of yours.”

I reply with what is now the truth.

“You’re very much mistaken. Anthony and I are nothing but colleagues.”

My tone is quiet, controlled, and crisp. I will not let this man smell my fear. I take off my jacket, casually hook it over the back of one of the dining table chairs and head towards the sofa, ironing down my trousers to rub some action into my jelly legs.      

“Why don’t we move onto the real reason I’m here. How are things going with you?” I ask, sounding completely nonplussed as I sit down. Luckily lawyers are the masters of disguise. “Anything new?”

He smiles beatifically, transformed in a lip curl, the schmoozing public persona returned. A wave of relief washes over my body.

“Actually, there is something,” he says, approaching. As he leans over a small glass coffee table to my left, starts sifting through an ordered mountain of papers, I put my professional hat back on. I keep trying to piece this thing together, presuming Scott Richardson is indeed innocent. Rupert Simons caught my client in bed with his wife, Elizabeth. A car chase ensued, which led to Rupert being hospitalized and subsequently dying. Cameron Matthews, who went to school with my client and is now an Accountant at his TV network, went to the police making allegations that Scott Richardson intended to murder Rupert, having overheard him saying something to that effect on the phone to Elizabeth. My client claims this is one gigantic set-up, that for reasons unknown Cameron must be out to get him, but so far the best I can do is paint a picture of Cameron as an odd bloke, a bit of a loner, with an obsessive personality. I haven’t yet been able to discredit him entirely, to find a motive, a reason why he would possibly want to frame my client. To be sure of getting Scott off, that’s what I need to be able to do.  He pulls a piece of paper out from the pile and a whole load of other documents float to the floor. I shift in my seat, moving to pick them up, but he tells me not to worry.

“I was going to mention this on the phone earlier,” he says, “but then I thought I might as well wait to show you, face to face. This came a couple of days ago.”

He passes over a letter, which I open. It’s a two-line note, handwritten, in a child-like scrawl: 

‘U always thought you were top of the class, but you’ve got no class u arse. In fact, you’ve got arse, not class. U r so going down’.

I’m inclined to side with the author, but I raise my eyebrows in commiseration nonetheless. Could this anonymous writer, I wonder, be the same as the one who wrote to me about William Nichols?

“Well, this is a new take on fan mail,” I say. “Is this the only one?”

“Thankfully yes, well, of its kind. I’m used to getting hate mail, it’s par for the course when you put yourself in the limelight, but it was always respectfully penned stuff, about not agreeing with something I’d said on the show, or finding fault with my line of questioning. Nothing quite like this! And nothing that’s come to my home either.”

“Any post code?” I ask.

Scott hands over the envelope. ‘By Hand’ is written in the far-left corner, in the same child-like scrawl as the letter.  

“We need to give this to the police,” I say. “You never know, they might be able to trace it. I presume you don’t know who it’s from?”

He shakes his head, starts pacing up and down, his back to me, digging his hands in and out of his trouser pockets. This, I’ve learned, is his trademark walk, when he’s deep in thought, concentrating. He spins round, suddenly.

“You know, I’m starting to understand how Sahara felt when she started getting really obscene mail a while back. It’s really disconcerting. You don’t want to let it get to you, but it does all the same. I don’t think I showed her enough sympathy.”

The first time Sahara came up, after I saw her photo on his toilet wall of fame, it didn’t cross my mind that there might be something there to help our case. It’s probably a red herring, there’s probably no connection, but when you’re looking for something, for anything, you clutch at straws. So I ask Scott if he can remember any more. As he starts recalling what he can, I kneel down on the floor, to pick up the papers that fell earlier. I’m a tidy person by nature, can’t bear mess. I’m shuffling the sheets into a pile when I notice that one of them is a City and Guilds diploma. I scan it quickly:

“This is to certify that Scott Arthur Conrad Richardson has successfully completed Part 1 Practical and Part 2 Theory in basic car maintenance.”

It’s dated January of this year. So, Scott Richardson knows nothing about cars, does he? I slide the certificate into the middle of my collection, discreetly place the whole load onto the coffee table and carry on listening.   

Chapter 31

I’d been running late by almost an hour after leaving Scott’s, thanks to the Sahara lead. Nobody had been warned because I’d been busying up my mobile on some important calls. So I fully expected Anthony to have left by the time I got back and Kayla to have got very pissed off. As if living together weren’t enough, we’d arranged to meet after work. She was coming up to town anyway, thought it would be good for me to go out, properly. A drink at some funky bar in Soho, followed by a meal, before I got too ridiculously big that I didn’t feel like it. In any event, I’d been itching to hear the juicy Paul gossip she’d promised.  The two of them have carried on seeing one another, despite the growing rift between Adam and I.

It was with much surprise, therefore, that when I got back to chambers I caught Anthony and Kayla all nice and cosy in my office, chatting away like old friends. I could have sworn Kayla was flirting. Whilst Anthony wasn’t responding with indifference, he may just have been acting respectfully. She is my sister after all. Shortly after my return, Kayla and I had made an exit. We, actually Kayla, had asked Anthony if he wanted to join us, but he’d politely declined. I mean, how awkward would THAT have been? He doesn’t even know that Kayla knows about us.

No sooner than we’d hit the cobbled pavement, my sister was telling me what she thought of him.

“Blimey, I see what you mean,” she’d said.

“What do you mean?” I’d replied.

I didn’t yet get her drift.

“I can see the attraction,” she’d said.