“Nigel Clapp is having the Dexter woman investigated?”
“That’s what he told me.”
“By whom?”
“He didn’t say. Then again, as you’ve probably gathered by now, Mr. Clapp is someone who, at the best of times, has difficulty with compound sentences. But, whatever about his interpersonal skills, he just might be the best solicitor I’ve ever worked with—utterly thorough, conscientious, and engaged. Especially in a case like this one—where he feels, as I do, that our client has been seriously wronged.”
“He told you that?”
“Hardly,” she said with a smile. “But we’ve worked together often enough that I know there are times when he’s passionately committed to seeing things set right. This is definitely one of those instances. Just don’t expect him to admit that to you.”
I certainly didn’t expect such an admission—though when I did ask him, during our next phone call, if he had hired a private investigator on my behalf, he suddenly turned all different and defensive, saying, “It’s . . . uhm . . . just someone who looks into things for me, that’s all.”
His anxious tone persuaded me to ask no further questions.
In the coming weeks, I concentrated on what I had to do: get this damn manuscript finished. Long days of work, the weekly visit with Jack, the twice-monthly consultations with Dr. Rodale and Jessica Law, the occasional phone call from Nigel Clapp, in which he would give me an update of how the case was proceeding—and also informing me that, as things stood now (and after consultation with Tony’s legal team), it looked as if the final hearing would last around two days. I had two further telephone conversations with Maeve Doherty, in which she cleared up a few points with me, and also assured me not to worry about whatever judge would be hearing the case—we wouldn’t know his name until the afternoon before the hearing.
Then, just two weeks before the date of this final hearing, I received a call from Nigel Clapp. It was nearly eight at night—an unusually late time for him to be calling me.
“Uhm . . . sorry to be phoning so late.”
“No problem. I was just working.”
“How’s work?” he said, in an awkward attempt to make conversation.
“Fine, fine. Stanley is actually talking about another proofing job to follow this one. It looks like I might have a steady income soon.”
“Good, good,” he said, sounding even more distracted then ever. This was followed by another telltale Clapp pause. Then, “If you were . . . uhm . . . free tomorrow afternoon . . .”
“You want to see me?”
“Well, I don’t have to see you. But . . . I think . . .”
He broke off. And I knew something was very wrong.
“You need to tell me something face to face?” I asked.
“It would be better . . .”
“Because it’s bad news?”
An anxious silence. “It’s not good news.”
“Tell me now.”
“If you could come to my office in Balham . . .”
“Tell me now, Mr. Clapp.”
Another anxious silence. “Well . . . if you insist . . .”
“I do.”
“Uhm . . . it’s twofold difficult news, I’m afraid. And the first part of it has to do with Ms. Law’s CAFCASS report . . .”
I felt a cold hand seize the back of my neck.
“Oh, my God, don’t tell me she ruled against me?”
“Not precisely. She actually reported herself very impressed with you, very impressed with the way you have handled yourself in the wake of being separated from your son, very impressed as well with your recovery from your depression. But . . . uhm . . . I’m afraid she was also very impressed with your husband and Ms. Dexter. And although it isn’t her business to make a recommendation, she has let it be known that the child is in very good hands with his father and surrogate mother.”
I felt the phone trembling in my hand.
“Do . . . uhm . . . understand that this doesn’t mean she’s advised that the child stay with Ms. Dexter—”
“And the second piece of bad news?”
“Well, this only arrived around an hour ago and . . . uhm . . . I’m still trying to digest it. It’s a letter to me from your husband’s solicitor, informing me that your husband and Ms. Dexter are professionally relocating to Sydney for the next five years, where Ms. Dexter has been engaged to start up a major new marketing concern.”
“Oh, God . . .”
“Yes . . . and their solicitor informs me they’re planning to take Jack with them.”
I was now rigid with shock.
“Can they legally do that?” I managed to say.
“If the hearing goes their way and they make an application . . .”
He broke off. I said, “Finish the sentence, Mr. Clapp.”
“I’d really rather . . .”
“Finish the sentence.”
On the other end of the line, I could hear him take a deep steadying breath before saying, “If the hearing goes their way—if they convince the judge that you are an unfit mother and an ongoing danger to your son—then you will have no say in the matter. They can take your son wherever they want to take him.”
THIRTEEN
THE ISSUE HERE,” Maeve Doherty said, “comes down to one central question: where does the child best belong? That’s what the court will be deciding—and because there have already been two legal decisions made in favor of the child’s father, it’s going to be our job to convince the judge that, at the very least, the child’s best interests are served by joint custody between his mother and father, preferably with him spending more time with his mother.”
“But if Tony wins custody?” I asked.
“Then you’ll have no say about where the child lives with his father,” Maeve said. “So if—as your husband’s solicitors have indicated—he and his new partner are planning to settle in Sydney for several years, then they can most certainly take him there, even if you do object to being so geographically separated from your son. Naturally, should this happen, we can argue, and probably win you, visiting rights—but that will hardly be satisfactory. Unless, of course, you’re willing to move to Australia.”
“Without a visa or a job? Sure.”
“Well, hopefully that won’t come to pass. The problem here, however, is that two court orders have indicated that you could be considered an unfit mother, and that your alleged behavior after the child’s birth indicated that the child could potentially be harmed by you. Which is what they are going to argue again. Now we can certainly call a variety of professional witnesses who can vouch for your mental stability, your fitness as a mother, and the fact that you were suffering from clinical depression at the time. How many statements do we have now, Nigel?”
“Eight altogether,” he said. “And . . . uhm . . . they’re all very favorably disposed toward Ms. Goodchild.”
“Which means we can count on eight favorable witnesses. The big sticking point, however, is the CAFCASS report. The court always pays attention to this report. It inevitably wields a considerable amount of influence on the final decision—as it can only be commissioned by the court, and it’s also looked upon as the definitive statement on the case from the social services. Which is why I’m rather worried about this report. Because it doesn’t come down firmly on your side, Sally. You concur with my worries, don’t you, Nigel?”
We were sitting in Nigel’s office. It was two days after the bombshell letter had arrived from Tony’s solicitors, announcing his intentions to move to Australia. Though she was trying to juggle around four briefs at the same time, Maeve Doherty considered the situation serious enough to find a free hour to get down to Balham for a meeting with the three of us. Which is how I found myself making only my second visit to Nigel Clapp’s office since he had started representing me.
“Uhm . . . in my experience,” Nigel said, “if the CAFCASS report doesn’t challenge the status quo, the court will usually allow the sta
tus quo to be maintained. Which . . . uhm . . . I’m afraid to say might mean that custody will be granted to your husband, but with more generous and unsupervised visiting privileges. Which still means that they can take him to Australia. So, uhm, I’m in agreement with Ms. Doherty . . . we need to strive for some sort of joint residence arrangement . . .”
“But Nigel,” Maeve said, “the problem here is not having any real ammunition against either Tony or his partner. Unless your ‘detective’ has turned up something.”
Nigel almost managed a small embarrassed smile at the mention of his “detective.”
“Shall I bring her in here to see what she’s managed to uncover?” he said.
“Your detective’s a she?” I asked.
Nigel started to blush.
“It’s . . . uhm . . . Mrs. Keating.”
“You’re kidding me?” I said, then suddenly saw that this comment made him anxious.
“She’s really rather good at it,” he said.
“I can confirm that,” Maeve said.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to imply . . .”
“Why don’t you get her in here?” Maeve said.
Nigel reached for the phone and dialed a number. From next door, we could hear Mrs. Keating answer her phone with a loud, “Yeah?”
“Would you mind coming in here for a moment, Rose—and could you please bring the Goodchild file with you.”
“Oh, yeah, right.”
She showed up a moment later. As she came in, I noticed brownish crumbs on her large floral dress. The remnants of bourbon creams, no doubt. Nigel reintroduced us. Though she had let me into the office only ten minutes earlier, she still looked at me as if I was some stranger whom she had never laid eyes on before. Nigel said, “Ms. Goodchild and Ms. Doherty would like to hear the results of your investigation into Ms. Dexter.”
“You want to read the report, or you want me to give you the condensed version?” she asked.
“Let’s . . . uhm . . . hear the condensed version, then we can make photocopies for both of them of your report.”
“Fine by me,” she said, parking herself in a chair, and opening the file. “Got all her specs here. Diane Dexter, born Leeds, 15 January 1953. Father worked for the local gas board, Mum was a housewife. She went to the local grammar school, a state primary. Bright girl—won a place at Leeds University in economics. Went to London after getting her degree. Ten years in advertising. Worked for some big firms—including Dean Delaney, and John Hegarty. Then got headhunted by Apple UK to run their marketing division. Five years with them. Branched into market research. Cofounded a company—Market Force Ltd.—in 1987 with a partner named Simon Chandler, with whom she was romantically linked for a time. When they broke up in 1990, he bought out her share of the firm, which she used to set up Dexter Communications, which has become super-successful over the last ten years, to the point where she’s now worth around ten million pounds, with houses in . . . well, you know all that from the earlier Lawrence and Lambert report in the file.
“Now, here’s what little dirt I could find on her. Two months’ hospitalization in 1990 at the Priory for ‘psychotropic dependence’—better known as cocaine misuse. The bad news is that there were no arrests for drug possession, in fact nothing criminal whatsoever, bar a couple of points on her driving license for speeding. And she’s been totally clean since the Priory stint in ’90. In fact, she’s actually given talks to youth groups about her past addiction, and has also raised money for a charity that sponsored drug education programs in and around Leeds.”
Great, I thought. A reformed druggie who’s remained clean for thirteen years—and now does good charitable work as a way of making amends for her wayward past. Oh, and she’s wildly successful and rich to boot.
“The cocaine angle is an interesting one,” Maeve Doherty said. “There might be something there. Anything else?”
“Besides the relationship with Simon Chandler, there have been two failed marriages: a two-year quickie to a chap she married out of university, and whom she divorced in ’75. He’s now a schoolteacher somewhere in Yorkshire. Then there was a six-year stint with a television director named Trevor Harriman, which ended when she met Simon Chandler in ’85. In fact, Chandler was named as corespondent in the divorce petition by her erstwhile husband. Since she and Chandler parted company in 1990, there have been a few affairs—including one with that thriller writer fellow, Philip Kimball, but nothing solid. Until she met Tony Hobbs in 1999.”
I interrupted here. “Now Tony insisted that, from the outset, they were just friends.”
“Well,” Rose Keating said, “they may have been ‘just friends,’ but she took him on a South African holiday in ’99, then scuba-diving on the Great Barrier Reef the following year, then spent a month with him in Cairo in 2001.”
“What month in 2001?” I asked.
“September.”
“That makes sense. We first hooked up in October of that year.”
“Hate to tell you this, but it was she who dropped him in September—on account of the fact that he wouldn’t come back to London to live with her.”
Maeve Doherty came in here.
“Did you manage to find out when they started seeing each other again?”
She nodded. “About twelve months ago—shortly after Mr. Hobb’s return from Cairo.”
I sucked in my breath. And asked, “How do you know that?”
“Ms. Dexter’s ex-housekeeper told me. He came over one afternoon to see her.”
Maeve Doherty asked, “But did the ex-housekeeper state whether he was just visiting her or actually visiting her?”
“Oh, it was definitely the latter. He stayed with her until about one in the morning . . . and they didn’t emerge from her bedroom until it was time for him to leave.”
. . . and to go home and tell me he’d been out boozing late with his chums.
Now I asked, “And according to the housekeeper, was he regularly at her place thereafter?”
“According to the housekeeper, yeah,” Rose Keating said. “He was over there all the time.”
Maeve Doherty asked, “I suppose Mr. Hobbs’s barrister could question the validity of the housekeeper’s testimony . . . especially as she was an ex-employee.”
“That’s right,” Rose Keating said. “Fired for alleged stealing.”
“Oh, great,” I said.
“Yeah, but the housekeeper got legal advice and forced Ms. Dexter’s hand. Turns out not only did she receive a written apology from her, saying the whole charge was false, but she also got a check for a year’s wages as a way of saying sorry.”
“And will this housekeeper be willing to testify?” Maeve Doherty asked.
“Oh, yes. She don’t think much of Ms. Dexter, that’s for sure. And she also told me where and when the two of them slipped out of town for a little romantic rendezvous over the past six months. Twice in Brussels, once in Paris. Got the names of the hotels, called them up, they confirm that Mr. Hobbs had company on both occasions. In fact, the concierge at the Hotel Montgomery in Brussels told me it was the same woman both times.
“Oh . . . one final important thing. Seems Ms. Dexter miscarried a child when she was big into cocaine. The year afterward, she tried IVF. Didn’t take. Tried it again in ’92 and ’93, by which time she was forty, and the game was kind of over. The thing is—according to the ex-housekeeper—having a kid has become something of an obsession with her, to the point where, in the mid-nineties, she considered adopting for a while until business stuff superseded . . . seems she ran into a little corporate financial problem for a while . . .”
I looked at Rose Keating, amazed. “How the hell did you find all this stuff out?”
She gave me a coy smile. “I’ve got my ways, dear.”
Maeve Doherty said, “The fact that they were carrying on while he was also married to you is good stuff. The fact that he has written that theirs was a friendship until your illness—and we hav
e proof otherwise—is also good stuff. And the fact that she’s been desperate for a baby all these years . . . well, we can certainly put two plus two together on that one.”
But then she looked at me directly and said, “However, I have to be honest with you here, Sally. In my opinion, while all this evidence is useful, it still doesn’t contradict, or undermine, the dirt they have against you.”
I suddenly felt in need of an extra dose of antidepressants. Just as I suddenly saw myself down at the Aldwych, lining up with other would-be emigrants at Australia House, explaining to some bored consular official how my ex-husband and his new wife won custody of my child, and I wanted a visa for the Land of Oz so I’d be able to have my weekly visit with my little boy. To which the consular official would undoubtedly ask, “And why did your husband receive custody of your little boy?”
“Uhm . . . Ms. Goodchild?”
I snapped back to terra firma.
“You all right, dear?” Rose Keating asked me.
“I’m trying to be.”
“The problem is,” Maeve Doherty said, “the final hearing is in twelve days. And unless . . .”
Nigel Clapp came in here. “Uhm . . . I think what Ms. Doherty is getting at is . . . uhm . . . well, to be completely direct about it, we need to find something else on either your husband or Ms. Dexter. As Ms. Keating has done such a thorough job sifting through Ms. Dexter’s life—”
“Can you think of anything about your husband that might be useful?” Maeve asked me.
“You mean, besides the fact that he dodged marriage for years and told me he never wanted kids?”
“But he still brought you with him to London when you became pregnant,” Maeve said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “His life was pretty much work and the occasional girlfriend before I came along. I can’t say he told me much about all that. In fact, the only time I found out anything about his old private life was when some journo in Cairo told me . . .”
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