Prey to All (11 page)

‘I see. One of the hazards of the medical profession, I imagine,’ Trish said, feeling more sympathy for the doctor. No wonder he’d reacted so strongly to talk of euthanasia. ‘Thank you for telling me. It clears up a lot.’

‘Good. Give our love to Debbie, will you, when you next see her?’ said Mrs Blakemore, taking her husband’s arm. ‘We don’t write. She wouldn’t want letters from us. But I’d like her to know we think of her. If you think it would help.’

They moved slowly away, the retriever charging ahead of them and having to be called back to heel. Trish tried not to think too much about old age, concentrating on the benefits of staying in London instead of being lost in this endless flat space, miles from anyone and anything that might help.

The car was full of the disciplined passion of Bach’s cello suite, played by Sue Sheppard. Trish had thought it would be suitable music for the drive back to London, with the solo cellist having to provide both the melody and the accompaniment. Anna’s expectations and Deb’s need were weighing on her.

The half-dancing, half-austere throbbing sound put some welcome distance between her and her memories of the doctor. But it couldn’t stop her thinking of Deb going to the surgery in desperation and meeting hostility and rejection. Imagining Deb’s feelings on the drive back to her parents’ house made Trish feel as though she might have let her liking for the woman make her dangerously credulous.

No music on earth could have stopped her mind working to rearrange the few facts she had, first one way and then another, trying to see how they could be made to fit the story she so much wanted to believe.

At first it had comforted her to find that Foscutt was quite as awful as Deb’s account had made him sound. But the more she thought about him the less happy she became. Deb had turned to him because there was no one else. When he failed her she must have felt like an animal in a trap.

And she wasn’t stupid, whatever her father had told her all her life. She’d have known his death would spring the trap at once, and for ever.

Back in the cool sanctuary of her Southwark flat, Trish made her coffee strong and reread the whole of the trial transcript, searching it for hints of evidence that could have been misused or mislaid. She couldn’t find anything to confirm any of the stories.

Impatient with herself, and with Anna for involving her in so much work on such a hopeless project, Trish decided to abandon the case for the moment. She knew she’d have to check her answering machine for urgent messages before she got back to her own work, but she dreaded hearing Anna’s voice.

It burst into the room as soon as the machine’s clicks had stopped, and that was only the first of four messages, all harping on the same theme. Have you found the real killer? What
have
you found out? Why aren’t you working harder? What are you going to do next? Trish had spoken to her twice the night before and once before she set off for Norfolk.

Her father, her work, her friends, her own needs: none of these seemed to have impinged on Anna’s consciousness. Trish finished her coffee as she listened to the rest of the messages, even though she knew the caffeine wouldn’t improve her temper. Then, deliberately calm, she rang back.

‘What have you found out?’ Anna demanded, as soon as they were connected.

‘Not a lot,’ Trish said, with impressive calm. At least, she thought it impressive; Anna didn’t notice. ‘I’ve just got back from the doctor.’

As she described their meeting, she drew stick figures of all the characters in the story. A female emerged on the paper, clumsily drawn, carrying the screwed-up polythene bag in her hand. Trish drew a doorway, then a passage and another door. She redrew the figure with the bag entering the second door.

Helen Whatlam was said to have been shorter than her daughter. Trish drew another basic stick figure, then added a balloon for her stomach and a slight hump to her back and a walking stick dangling from one hand. Deciding that the sketch looked more like an emu than anything human, she put down the pencil. Her imagination was much more effective.

In her mind she could see Helen Whatlam gingerly opening the door into her husband’s bedroom. She used her stick carefully and quietly to help her across the long expanse of carpet between the door and the bed. There was a pillow under her arm. Reaching her husband’s bed, without waking him, she put the pillow over his face and leaned on it, the pillow and the body taking the place of the stick that usually kept her from falling.

It could play, Trish told herself, as she said into the phone: ‘After all, it is what Helen Whatlam said she’d done. I’m not surprised Phil Redstone tried to make the jury believe it.’

‘Yeah, but he failed.’ Anna’s voice was packed with impatience, like an unexploded bomb. ‘We have to do something different, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Maybe. But you’re luckier than Phil was. You can dramatise the story, have actors playing the parts and a seductive voiceover putting Deb’s version of what she did with the plastic bag, making it much more convincing than a hammy playlet of the prosecution’s invention. You’re not constrained by the rules of evidence. You might swing it.’

‘It’s not enough,’ Anna snapped. ‘We need evidence that someone else killed him, even if not the name of the person. Can’t you see that, Trish? You of all people! I thought that’s what you were going to do, not just waste time regurgitating all the old arguments that we all know aren’t going to do anything for anyone.’

Trish took a moment to bite her tongue. ‘And what have
you been doing to further
your
project, while I’ve been flogging up the M11 for you?’

‘Now, just hang on a moment.’ Anna sounded nearly as angry as Trish felt. ‘I’ve been working my socks off. You’ve no idea how much is involved in getting together the proposal for a film like this before the commissioning editors will even look at it.’

‘Anna …’

‘I’ve got to put together a whole team from best boys and gaffers to cameramen and props buyers, but I can’t hire them until I’ve got a commission. I’ve got to use people I can trust, people I’ve worked with before, and the good ones are booked up months and months ahead, so I spend hours keeping them on side, promising that I’m nearly there. I’m researching locations, finding a studio we can afford, working out budgets, finding a good scriptwriter, editors, sound mixers … Besides cutting every possible cost to the bone. It’s a nightmare.’ She moderated her machine-gun voice a little. ‘But I suppose I can’t expect you to understand. It’s not your field.’

‘Anna—’ Trish broke off as she heard her mobile ring. It was probably just as well. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll ring later. ’Bye.’

‘Trish?’ said a vigorous, masculine voice over the mobile.

‘Malcolm Chaze here. I rang your chambers, but they said you were working at home. I wondered if you were still on Deb’s case, and if there was anything I could do to help.’

That was so much more tactfully put than Anna’s demands that Trish was able to say she hadn’t yet managed to find anything very useful, but was still hoping to get somewhere in the end. She didn’t add that she was beginning to wonder about Deb’s innocence. Trish could hear the doubts in her voice. She wondered if he would.

‘You sound nearly as frustrated as I feel,’ Chaze said
sympathetically. ‘Would you like to come round and have a drink? We could cheer each other up, brainstorm our way through what little there is and see if we can’t come up with a useful plan of campaign. Or at least some more helpful lines of inquiry. How would that be?’

Trish thought it might be good. George wasn’t due to come to the flat that evening and she’d had enough of her own company and Anna’s nagging. If the phone rang once more, she thought she might lose it and scream at the unfortunate caller. She said she could be at Westminster at whatever time would suit.

‘Why don’t you come here, to Pimlico? It’s much more civilised and we can talk without worrying about being overheard. Would you mind?’

‘Not at all. Give me the address.’

 

When she emerged at Pimlico tube station, she was furious with London Transport, herself, Anna, the passengers who wouldn’t get a move on, and the poor tourists who hadn’t yet learned that they couldn’t stand on both sides of the escalator without driving regular commuters into a state of murderous fury.

Upstairs, at street level, the air seemed a little cooler, even marginally fresher. Trish checked her directions and turned right. Chaze’s house turned out to be in the middle of one of the better Pimlico streets. It was a tall white building with two windows on each storey and neat little black-iron balconies on the first floor.

Trish rang the bell and was admitted by a scared-looking young woman who said she was Malcolm’s secretary, Sally Hatfield, doing a bit of overtime to clear things up after the end of the Parliamentary session.

The fear in her face interested Trish, who had not put Chaze down as a frightening man.

‘I’m fantastically sorry, Ms Maguire,’ Sally went on in the kind of gaspy, exaggeratedly grand accent that always set Trish’s teeth on edge, ‘but Malc’s a bit tied up just at the mo. Could you bear to come back in a bit? You know, in about half an hour?’

‘About’ came out as ‘abite’. Trish’s teeth felt like millwheels mashing the last few husks of the day. ‘He told me to come now,’ she said, checking her watch. ‘Look, I’m sorry if it’s inconvenient, but I don’t particularly want to hang about in a pub, or go home and have to flog out again. It’s too hot for that. Can’t I wait for him here?’

Sally looked ready to burst into tears or be sick, but she shrugged, then tried a smile. ‘Well, OK, yah. I s’pose. I mean, do come in. Fine. Right. Come into the drawing room and have a drink. I’ll try to get him to hurry up.’

‘Thank you.’ A little puzzled by what sounded like incipient hysteria, Trish followed her guide into a long yellow-painted double drawing room, where a well-stocked drinks tray stood on top of a low mahogany bookshelf, heavily decorated with gilded swags. The books were an eclectic collection, obviously there because someone had read and valued them, not because they were beautifully bound or fashionable. Trish liked what she saw.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Sally asked, in a quite unnecessarily loud voice.

Trish accepted a glass of wine and couldn’t imagine why the other woman was making such a noise crashing bottles around and kicking things that got in her way. Then, as a bitterly angry female voice echoed down through the ceiling, Trish understood: Malcolm Chaze was having a stonking great row upstairs, presumably with his wife, and his young secretary was embarrassed at the thought of a stranger’s overhearing it.

‘You’re making a fool of me, Malcolm. And I won’t have it.’

The secretary shuddered as she handed Trish her wine in a heavy cut-crystal goblet and asked her, almost shouting, whether she enjoyed working at the Bar.

‘Yes. Thank you. Don’t worry about it.’ Trish gestured towards the ceiling. ‘This sort of thing happens to everyone. I’m not going to gossip about it.’

The young woman gave her a huge, wavering smile. ‘You are a brick. Thanks. That’s really good of you. They’ll stop soon,’ she said, in a much less offensively posh voice.

But the insults that fell through the ceiling became more and more violent. It was impossible not to listen to them. Trish sat on one of a pair of matching tangerine-and-yellow-striped sofas, while Sally perched on a kilim-covered ottoman in front of her, crossing her slender legs so that the patent-leather pump dangled from her left foot.

Glass crashed on glass upstairs, as though a heavy scent bottle was being banged down on the glass covering of a dressing table. ‘I’m prepared to put up with your hours, the fact that you’re never available when
I
need a walker for a work dinner even though you always force me to trot out with you when you need someone.’

There was a low, buzzing murmur. Chaze, probably aware that Trish had arrived, must be trying to damp down the row.

‘I don’t give a shit. I’m even prepared to watch these idiot girls rolling over for you. What I’m not prepared to do is take any steps—’

There was another crash of glass, followed by splashing sounds as Sally Hatfield dropped her drink. She slid off the ottoman, down on her knees, dabbing at the puddle with a tissue she’d been keeping up her sleeve. She was whispering vicious self-criticisms. Trish saw her cut her hand on a sharp stalagmite of lead crystal and offered to help.

Sally stood up suddenly, dripping blood, muttering that she
really had to get it strapped up and find a cloth and would Trish mind being left on her own for a sec?

‘No. You carry on. Don’t worry about me. I’ll wait here till he’s free.’ It would be much easier to listen to the row if she didn’t have to keep pretending not to for Sally’s sake.

Mrs Chaze was still batting away upstairs: ‘I can see it makes them work themselves into the ground for you, and I don’t much mind falling over their lapdog bodies whenever I come home. I’m even prepared to go your revolting constituency once in a while. But I am not, absolutely not, prepared to watch you making a fool of yourself over an old girlfriend who everyone knows killed her own father. You’re making me ridiculous and you’re risking your one asset: your reputation for brains and common sense.’

‘No, I’m not.’ This time Chaze’s voice was clearer. ‘Deb Gibbert is part of my campaign for better access to real justice. I’ve told you over and over again. Everyone knows that. It has nothing to do with you or my past with her, which was over donkey’s years ago. There’s going to be a high-profile campaign, which will do nothing but good for us both. It’ll be a winner for us both in the publicity stakes. You’ll see.’

Trish could feel her eyebrows crawling up towards her hair. What an unpleasant bloke he was making himself sound! But if his wife had been Lady-Macbething him to greater heights, perhaps it was the only way he could think of to get her off his back.

‘Don’t be childish,’ she snapped. ‘One, it’ll only help if you do get her out, and from all I’ve heard that’s shooting at the moon. Two, everyone knows she’s one of your innumerable exes. And worse. The story going round is that you’ve been carrying a torch for her for years and you’re still besotted. If you do make this idiotic television programme, I’ll—’

‘You’ll what?’ At last Chaze sounded as though he was as angry and contemptuous as his wife. ‘Leave me?’

‘I might.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. It helps your business to be married to an MP. Don’t think I don’t know that’s why you stay, or that you’d been planning to leave when you thought I wouldn’t get the seat back at the last election.’