The Scribe

by A A Chaudhuri

  And this time she was going for someone more her own age.

  But there was no point in upsetting the professor further. He’d been good to her, and she owed him for putting in a good word with the partners at Channing & Barton.

  ‘You think your reputation’s not already in tatters?’ he bit back.

  Then again …

  She might have been grateful to him, but that didn’t mean she had to take that kind of abuse. She wasn’t the sort to let anyone walk all over her. No matter who they were.

  ‘My reputation? Ha!’ Sarah’s eyes bristled with scorn. ‘That’s a bit rich coming from you. You think you’re this …’ she did the quotation mark sign with her fingers, ‘… supposedly whiter-than-white law professor, but you don’t really believe you’re beyond reproach, do you? I mean, if anyone should worry about their reputation, it should be you. It’s only because of your wealth and contacts that you’ve kept your job. If word got out what you’re really like, you’d be finished.’

  Anger bubbled up in Stirling. His ego badly dented, her catty remarks having veered closer to the truth than he’d have liked to admit, he darted back onto the bed and struck the back of his hand across the side of Sarah’s face.

  He’d never been violent towards her before. Unlike Suzanne, who was weak and clingy, who got on his nerves and pushed him to the limit repeatedly.

  Sarah doubled back in horror, her right cheek – bright red with the force of the blow – throbbing. But she quickly regained her composure, her gaze full of contempt and revulsion. ‘You miserable, pathetic bastard,’ she said coldly, scrambling off the bed, and sweeping up her clothes which had been lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. ‘I can’t believe I ever fancied you. You’re fucking crazy.’

  ‘Sarah, look, I’m sorry,’ Stirling started to apologise. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘Save it,’ she snarled, zipping up the back of her dress. ‘And don’t you even think about screwing with my job at Channings.’ Her eyes were hard and meant business. ‘If you so much as say one word to jeopardise my career, I’ll send you and your career to the cleaners. Your wife, your employers, the whole fucking world will know about your fetish for screwing your innocent pupils. What’s more, I’ll bring an action for assault. Got it?’

  Stirling nodded, still seething inside.

  ***

  Friday, 31 October 2014

  ‘What did you find at her flat?’

  It was 8 am and Carver and Drake were sitting in a twenty-four-hour café opposite Liverpool Street station. It looked and felt like an upmarket greasy spoon, with a menu offering standard British fare but consisting of posher ingredients served with Michelin-star finesse. The air smelt of crisp bacon and roasted ground coffee, and the clientele was a mix of businessmen, tourists and blue-collar workers, all tucked into cosy padded booths set against cream-tiled walls.

  Carver sipped black coffee, his nose buried in a copy of the Guardian, while Drake dug into a classic fry-up. He hadn’t eaten much to speak of in the last forty-eight hours and, with another taxing day of interviews ahead of him, he took the chance to recharge his batteries with something hearty.

  Carver, on the other hand, seemed able to live on air and black coffee. That morning, he’d already spoken to his technical expert who’d confirmed that the CCTV camera at Channing & Barton had been installed with remote internet access enabled by default, together with weak password security which failed to lock out a user after several wrong guesses – a classic recipe for security failure that would have allowed the killer to remotely tap into video feeds and control the direction and zoom of the camera. Carver had been amazed to hear that this was commonplace and that three of the most popular brands of CCTV cameras on the market were sold with remote internet access.

  ‘Not much to speak of, sir.’ Drake plunged his fork into a sausage. ‘No sign of intrusion, nothing out of the ordinary. She lived alone. We found some family photographs, but she didn’t appear to have a boyfriend. At least, not a regular one.’

  ‘Have her parents confirmed that?’

  ‘They have, sir.’ Drake recalled the horrendous conversation he’d had with Sarah’s distraught parents. They’d just arrived home from a fortnight in the Caribbean when the devastating news of their daughter’s murder was given to them. The mother could barely speak between sobs, while the father, although it was clear he was trying to be brave and answer Drake’s questions without breaking down, couldn’t conceal his grief.

  No, their daughter didn’t have a boyfriend as far as they knew; she’d been enjoying her training too much to have time for a relationship, and she’d been looking forward to qualifying and making a name for herself. They’d given Drake the names of a few friends – non-lawyers – who Sarah occasionally socialised with, and confirmed the timeline of her all-too-brief life to date.

  They’d been looking forward to having their daughter and son over for a family dinner at the weekend.

  But instead they had their youngest child’s funeral to plan.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘It appears she was something of a workaholic. Routinely stayed late at the office. Not many friends to speak of.’

  ‘So? Some of us like it that way.’ Carver’s attempt at humour was accompanied by a light chuckle. Drake wasn’t sure whether this was his cue to laugh back. He played it safe and gave his boss a friendly half-smile.

  ‘Of course, sir, and there may be nothing in it, but I just wondered if her ambition possibly rubbed colleagues up the wrong way? She was bright and very attractive. It seems a bit strange that she didn’t have a boyfriend or many friends. Plus, when we spoke with Mark Warren yesterday, he said she’d made it clear that she’d do anything to qualify into his department. Also that she didn’t appear to be especially friendly with her fellow trainees.’

  ‘It’s a theory, Drake, I’ll give you that,’ Carver nodded, ‘but still too early to say. The trainees we’ve spoken to so far have been rather non-committal. Not a bad word to say about her between them. Which doesn’t add up with Warren’s comments.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘But we may have a better idea of whether you’re on to something there once we’ve spoken to everyone.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Carver looked back down at his paper. ‘But well done for thinking laterally,’ he murmured, eyes locked on the print.

  Drake felt his heart swell with pride. It was only a passing comment, muttered under his boss’s breath, but it was a start. Maybe there was a soft centre within that hard exterior of Carver’s after all.

  ***

  ‘How are you bearing up?’

  The question wasn’t asked out of love or concern. It was born from contempt and stained with malice.

  ‘What do you mean?’ James Stirling lowered his copy of The Lawyer and looked across the dining table at his wife, who was absent-mindedly pushing the cereal in her bowl back and forth with a spoon. She was staring at him in that cold, irritatingly poised way of hers.

  Once, he’d found it sexy. Now it just made him hate her more.

  ‘She was one of your students, as we all know. Or should I say one of your little floozies? You must be devastated.’ She paused, then said quietly, provocatively, ‘Or maybe you’re not?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Elizabeth,’ Stirling snapped. ‘Have you stopped taking your medication?’

  Elizabeth rolled her eyes, made a tutting sound. ‘Oh please, don’t play that card with me. I saw you with her, remember? Arriving at one of your shady little hotels. I watched her leave alone, after she’d cut you loose; before you moved on to another tramp like her. What a way to meet her Maker. Or maybe it’s not her Maker she’s gone to meet, the little bitch.’

  Stirling regarded his wife with a mixture of pity and loathing. It wasn’t like her to get verbally aggressive. Even when she was mad about something, she rarely raised her voice, despite the anger being evident in her gritty tone. Sometimes, he wished she was de
ad. That way he could be rid of her without the public scandal of a messy divorce. He couldn’t take the chance she wouldn’t broadcast his extracurricular activities to all and sundry if he left her.

  There was scarcely anything left of the woman who’d once put a check on his roving eye and made an honest man out of him. She’d been exquisitely beautiful when he’d first met her at Oxford in the third year of his law degree. With her feline eyes, slim build, long dark hair, low rasping voice, there had been something almost ethereal about her, drawing him in under her spell.

  And then there was her ability to send you to heaven when she played the piano or the cello, her every performance overflowing with such passion, such heart. Oh, how he remembered the first time he’d watched her on stage performing the Moonlight Sonata, one of his all-time favourites. He’d sat in the audience, enchanted. As if only he and she had existed in the room, and everything else was immaterial.

  But deep down, she’d always been a cold fish, and what she’d put into her music, she’d failed to put into her sex life, her marriage.

  They’d married a year after finishing at Oxford, and for a while, were happy. But then, having discovered she was unable to have children two years into the marriage, Elizabeth slowly drifted into her shell. More and more detached with every passing month. As if she had no more purpose in life, as if sex with her husband was now pointless. As if their love was cursed. She became nothing more than an anorexic husk of a wife, who spent much of her day crafting inane ceramics at her pottery wheel upstairs in her windowless studio. Taking her pain and self-loathing out on her husband and sending him back to what he’d always been: a womaniser, an adulterer, a sex addict.

  And a man who lashed out when his anger got the better of him. Just like his father before him.

  He’d fooled himself into imagining Elizabeth would never confront him about his affairs. That maybe she preferred a life of frigidity and was even relieved that he got his kicks elsewhere. But it was as if something had snapped in her. She’d followed him and Sarah that unseasonably frosty evening in April 2010. To the same cheap hotel in Ealing they always used.

  She’d parked right next to his BMW, sorely tempted to stick something sharp in its tyres. And there she had remained all night, waiting for them to reappear.

  Like a murderess lying in wait for her victims.

  A glut of emotions had raged through her tiny frame as she’d waited. Anger, hurt, betrayal, humiliation. She just couldn’t sit back, go home, turn a blind eye. She had to confront them. See what the filthy slut and the cheating rat had to say. And a little after 10 am the next day, having dozed off for a couple of hours, she’d stirred just in time to see the girl – so beautiful, so fresh – surface from the hotel entrance. She’d looked uptight, her face twisted into an ugly grimace, flushed with tension rather than love. This had given Elizabeth some gratification. But not as much pleasure as seeing the look on her husband’s face when he’d emerged looking equally fraught thirty minutes later and she’d sprung out of her car and surprised him. Challenged him before he’d even had the chance to open his door.

  Of course, he’d denied it. Made up some cock-and-bull story which only served to make his lies more pathetic and intensify her wrath. And from then on, things between them had got worse. Her life was one long treadmill of self-hate and misery, and she saw no way of getting off it.

  Until now.

  ‘They’re bound to find out,’ she said snidely as the carriage clock on the mantelpiece chimed the hour, piercing the sombre silence. ‘Bound to question you. You know as well as I do that you weren’t home that night.’

  ‘Let them.’ Stirling stood up, thrashed the magazine down on the table. ‘I have nothing to be sorry for.’

  ‘If that’s what you think,’ Elizabeth muttered as she watched him leave the room, ‘then you’re more of a fool than I thought.’

  She knew he was still cheating on her with his students. And Suzanne, of course. That wretched woman he went back to when there was nothing better on offer. When his fat ego needed massaging. She should never have married him. Her mother, God rest her soul, had warned her not to fall for his charms. But she hadn’t listened. She hadn’t wanted to listen. He’d been handsome, witty, clever, just like her father whom she’d adored, but who had broken her mother’s heart and drank himself into oblivion.

  Facing up to him that day had done nothing to stem his compulsion. She should have just left him. But since then, she’d decided that was far too easy. That was letting him off the hook lightly, and she’d be damned if she let him escape scot-free the way her father had.

  She had something much bigger in mind. A plan she’d recently set in motion.

  A plan designed to make him pay.

  ***

  Maddy took a moment to collect her thoughts before knocking on the door. She felt her pulse accelerate, unable to recall the last time she’d been this nervous. She’d yet to meet Carver personally, but having seen him in action, she found the prospect daunting. Several of her colleagues who’d already had the pleasure had made it clear the experience wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.

  The core of her apprehension lay in revealing her history with Sarah, particularly their recent argument, for fear of opening a can of worms she wouldn’t be able to contain. But she knew that if she said nothing, and Carver discovered down the line that she hadn’t been completely honest with him, she might be making things a whole lot worse for herself. No, it was much better to be candid from the start.

  ‘Okay, here goes,’ Maddy said under her breath before knocking.

  She was told to enter, and as she did so Carver and Drake instantly stood up. Drake gave her a warm smile. He looked about her age. With his clean-shaven skin and tidy chestnut-brown hair, he looked so wholesome, so presentable, in stark contrast to his boss, donning a face that said it had been through the wars, and didn’t enjoy a great deal of sleep.

  Conference room twelve was the smallest of the firm’s fifteen meeting rooms. Carver and Drake were standing behind a small rectangular desk positioned in the centre of the room, the larger round conference table having been pushed to one side against the wall.

  ‘I don’t feel comfortable conducting my interviews at such a large table,’ Carver explained, having noticed Maddy eyeing the new arrangement. She felt herself blush, having thought she was being subtle. Clearly, he doesn’t miss a thing. ‘It creates too much of a barrier, and I like things to be a bit more informal. I’m here to solve a murder after all, not negotiate a business transaction.’

  Drake gave Maddy another smile, as if to offer her encouragement. Classic good cop, bad cop, she thought. Client meetings suddenly seemed like a piece of cake, and she found herself wishing she was in one right now.

  ‘Yes, thank you. I can understand that,’ she replied calmly, although her guts were churning. The room was like an igloo. She tried not to shiver. It was late October and winter was looming, but it felt like it had already arrived within those four walls. Carver had the air con on full blast. Perhaps it was designed to keep his interviewees awake and on the ball. She wished she hadn’t left her suit jacket on the back of her chair.

  ‘Take a seat, Ms Kramer.’

  She did as instructed.

  ‘So, you’re a one-year-qualified litigation associate?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You trained here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how well did you know Ms Morrell?’

  Straight to the point. Okay, this is it, be honest.

  ‘Quite well actually.’

  Carver’s attention was caught. He leaned forward like a runner at the blocks, heightening Maddy’s nerves.

  ‘We didn’t train together. I knew her before she came to Channings. We were in the same year at the Bloomsbury Academy of Law.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Just off Bloomsbury Square, near Tottenham Court Road. Like me, Sarah didn’t read law as her first degree. W
e both had to pass the Graduate Diploma in Law before being able to take the Legal Practice Course like other law graduates.’

  Drake took notes as Carver led the interview, his gaze never leaving Maddy for a second.

  ‘I see. But you qualified ahead of Ms Morrell, despite being in the same academic year?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Sarah took a year out. I was offered a training contract before starting law school, so there was a place waiting for me as soon as I finished the LPC. Sarah landed hers with Channings around six months into our first year at the academy, but they could only offer her a place in the next intake, which, if I remember correctly, was March 2013.’

  ‘I see. These training contracts are hard to come by?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maddy nodded, feeling marginally more relaxed, ‘incredibly. There are just so many applicants for so few places.’

  ‘Sounds tough.’

  ‘It is.’

  Silence. Maddy’s discomfort returned. She wondered what was coming next.

  ‘And were you and Sarah good friends?’

  She knew he’d ask this. Even so, her stomach flipped again. What will he read from my answer, my hesitation? No one got on with everyone; that wasn’t how the world worked. But that didn’t mean they went around killing each other. She had nothing to hide.

  ‘No, we weren’t.’

  She felt the tension levels rise. Drake instantly looked up from his notepad. Observed her with a new-found degree of suspicion.

  ‘I see,’ Carver said coolly. ‘Can you elaborate, please?’

  ‘Sarah had a habit of getting on the wrong side of people. Especially her peers.’ Maddy paused. ‘Especially her female peers. Right from the beginning, she made it clear that she wanted to excel and be the best, and seemed to resent anyone else doing well, or at least, doing better than her. Always shooting her hand up to answer, always wanting to get the upper hand. And I guess because I’m reasonably intelligent, and okay-looking …’ she knew she was more than that – she was extraordinarily bright, and exceptionally beautiful, but unlike Sarah, she wasn’t the bragging type ‘… Sarah viewed me as a threat to her dominance. She was the same with all the other attractive, intelligent girls on the course. Much less so with the men, and the plainer girls. Although she could be spiteful about them too.’