by John Fairfax
‘That is absolutely false,’ cried Collingstone, rising to her feet. ‘I did not want to have a relationship with Andrew Bealing.’
‘But you did. And it happened. Kym Hamilton saw you canoodling. So did Tina Sheldon. Everybody did.’
‘I wanted nothing to do with him.’
‘Then why scratch his back?’
Collingstone almost shouted her reply. ‘Because I made a mistake, because he’d been chasing after me, saying he wished he’d never left me.’
‘But you were chasing him,’ whispered Glencoyne. ‘You bombarded him with phone calls, at work and to his mobile. He’d had to tell Kym Hamilton that he was out, because he couldn’t get you off his back.’
‘I only wanted to know when the settlement would be finalised. He’d done nothing with regard to the finances and I was worried he might be stringing me along.’
‘I thought you were all hot and bothered about health and safety manuals? Or was that a lie as well?’
‘I was too scared to tell the truth.’
‘That’s what you said the last time you tried to explain away a lie – to Mr Benson, right here in this court. Let’s finally get to the truth, shall we? Andrew Bealing told you the affair was over, didn’t he?’
‘No, that is not true.’
‘You went to Hopton’s Yard to talk money and you got sex and afterwards you felt used.’
‘No, no, no.’
‘He told you he was staying with Debbie, and you felt the old rage. He was dropping you again, wasn’t he?’
‘No, no.’
‘And all that humiliation and desperation you’d felt at sixteen came back, as he walked down the corridor.’
‘No.’
‘He was off to sunny Spain while you’d been dumped by the sewage works in Hounslow.’
‘No, no, none of this is true.’
‘You lost control of yourself. You smashed the bottle on the edge of the table and you went after him. And when you caught him by the door, you stabbed him.’
Collingstone’s shoulders were heaving. ‘It’s not true.’
‘And then you watched him crawl like a wounded beast to his death. You followed him, making sure he didn’t reach the street.’
‘No.’
‘What did you say to him, Miss Collingstone?’
‘I didn’t say anything, I couldn’t have done, I wasn’t there.’
‘You let him call for help and then you kicked the phone out of his hands.’
‘I wasn’t there, I was at home, listening to a story.’
‘And then you stood over him while his blood drained on to the concrete.’
Collingstone was shaking her head and even Mr Justice Oakshott didn’t compel her to answer. Glencoyne watched her patiently, as Collingstone had seemingly watched Andrew Bealing. And then, as if no one could save her now, Glencoyne said, ‘You made him pay in the end, didn’t you? You murdered him.’
Collingstone lifted her contorted face. ‘I did not, I swear I didn’t, on my son’s life.’
Glencoyne paused to write down these last words. Then, eyeing them, she said, ‘You really have no limits, do you? You’ll even use Daniel’s life. You’re lying now. You can’t stop yourself. It’s in your DNA.’
Glencoyne sat down and Benson rose, his back and legs on fire with pain. There was nothing to clarify in re-examination. There was nothing he could do to repair the damage. He let Collingstone return to the dock. When she was seated, head in her hands, he faced the bench ready to call his next and final witness, but he felt a tug on his gown. It was Tess.
‘Ralph Collingstone has just collapsed,’ she whispered. ‘An ambulance is on the way. Looks like a heart attack.’
43
After the case had been adjourned until the following morning, Tess and Benson pushed their way through the cameras and went to a pub on Cutter Street. They found a corner with an angle on to a big screen. Sky News was on with the sound off. Sarah Collingstone’s collapse was already up there, on the band of text moving beneath the presenter. So was Ralph Collingstone’s admission to hospital. How could a jury ever ignore the onslaught of information and comment? The Hopton Yard killing was just everywhere. On the front page. On the radio. On the telly. On Twitter. So was Benson. His face appeared on the screen. But he couldn’t see it, because his back was to the room and Tess was the one with a viewing seat.
‘It’s over,’ she said, folding her arms.
Benson agreed. Glencoyne had run a ‘prince and the pauper’ storyline to honour the dead and then dropped it for ‘Bealing was a bastard’, but only once she was sure it wouldn’t harm her case: once she needed it to show why the mother of a son with special needs might lose her head and kill his father. Collingstone’s denials had sounded like the death throes of a pathological liar.
‘Camberley warned me,’ he said, ‘and I still didn’t see it coming.’
‘There’s nothing you could have done.’
‘I should have chased all my assumptions to ground and I didn’t.’
Tess glanced up. A man was approaching their table. He was stepping sideways, trying to get a look at Benson’s face. She tensed and fear stopped her reacting quickly. The man was suddenly at Benson’s side.
‘Mr Benson, I just want to say thanks.’ The man lowered himself, taking a look over his shoulder. ‘I killed a man once. I didn’t mean to. He’d been tracking my daughter and she was frightened and I hit him, just once, and he went down. One-punch manslaughter. I did time, fair enough. I’ll never get away from what I’ve done. My daughter won’t speak to me and I can’t get a job, because, well, I killed a man. So I just want to say thanks for what you’re doing. For showing we can still be decent upright people. Thank you.’
He walked off, quickly, before Benson could respond, not wanting to hear a reply. He’d delivered his message; that was all he wanted. He shouldered his way to the door and ducked into the crowd going about their business. He’d come, he’d gone.
‘Well, that’s answered my question,’ said Benson, opening a packet of crisps.
‘What question.’
‘I was wondering, what’s the point? Last night I got thrown into the back of a van and was beaten this side of senseless. They were ex-army, or police, or the ninjas, I don’t know. But they knew what they were doing.’
‘Beaten?’
‘Yes. Up and down my back, my thighs, my buttocks. So I can’t wear clothes or sit without pain. They left me the soles of my feet. Which shows you how stupid these people are. Because if they really wanted to stop me, they should have left my back and legs alone and beaten the soles of my feet.’
Tess was appalled. Benson’s stand had literally unleashed forces that no one could control. But there was a huge issue at stake, and the stupid couldn’t be allowed to win the day. It had to be decided by reasoned argument.
‘You can’t give up, Will,’ she said. ‘You represent something very important. It can’t be beaten off the agenda.’
Tess felt something warm in her hand. She looked down and saw she was holding Benson’s wrist. She’d gripped him. Quickly taking her hand back, she said, ‘For what it’s worth, in the court of public opinion, you’re winning.’ She nodded at the screen and he turned.
Richard Merrington was being interviewed outside Westminster. Underneath, the moving text reported the state of play in the war of petitions. ‘Paul’s Law’ had reached 432,791 signatories; the ‘Everyone Deserves a Second Chance’ corner had garnered 437, 254. Benson turned back, frowning.
‘I didn’t set out to represent anything or anyone,’ he said. ‘I’m just someone who’s fought tooth and nail to find a way of living with a verdict I can’t overturn.’
No, you can’t, thought Tess. But I can; and I will. If you’re innocent.
44
Tess left Benson on Gray’s Inn Road and went back to Coker & Dale. Seated at her desk with a second-floor view on to Ely Place, a cul-de-sac and the last privately owned street in Lond
on, she picked up the phone and rang Denis Stockwood, her contact at HM Revenue and Customs.
‘I need a favour,’ she said.
‘Don’t you always? You want it yesterday and faxed?’
‘Yep.’
Tess gave him Paul Harbeton’s name, date of birth, address, national insurance number and the name of his last employer, all culled from the Benson brief.
‘I just want his employment history.’
‘Okay. It’s like you never went AWOL. Bye.’
The remark sent Tess into a reverie. She gazed out of the window at the beadle’s stone gatehouse and the gold-tipped railings. It was a world away from Strasbourg, and a world away again from Benson’s fishmonger conversion in Spitalfields. A world away from the sorts of client who were drawn to Benson. For all of his insistence upon elements of a vanishing legal world, he was closer to the needs of desperate people than anyone she had ever met before. Somebody out there moved . . . standing by the gatehouse was the man who’d been wearing a bomber jacket. He was in a tracksuit now.
‘How are things?’
Gordon Hayward had popped his head around the door. He came in, looking desperate, in a way that even Benson couldn’t assuage. Tess glanced back towards the street entrance but the man had gone.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Gordon.
‘Yes. Fine. Grand.’
She gave him the rundown, composing herself with a flood of words, wondering why the nutter outside had shifted his attention on to her from Benson. Why was he hanging around the gatehouse? She became calmer, focusing on the bombsite of Court 1.
‘It’s been a disaster. We asked her if she wanted to change her plea, and she still refuses. After everything that’s happened, she’s still saying she didn’t kill him. She’s locked into a world of her own making. I suppose that’s why she killed him. He offered her too much reality.’
And if it was a disaster for Collingstone, it was a disaster for Benson. Because he was tarred with the same brush. Her lying and pretence had smeared an already dirtied name. One commentator was already suggesting that he must have known about Collingstone’s past and that he was implicated in her attempt to hide it. Tess hadn’t said anything, but key quotations had appeared in the text band beneath the Sky presenter. Observers were within a hair of suggesting that Benson must have known that Collingstone was guilty of murder, like him, and he’d used every legal means possible to mislead the court.
‘A bad day, then?’ said Gordon.
‘Yes.’
‘I was wondering—’
‘No thanks, Gordon, I’ve got too much to do, I’m sorry.’
‘Of course. But you’re missing a treat. I’d thought of seafood and Chablis.’
Tess opened the file on her desk. ‘It’s a prawn sandwich for me, I fear.’
Gordon didn’t leave. He was still in the chair facing her. He was one of the legal profession’s loud dressers. Subdued grey suit and a violent-blue striped shirt. He opened the button on his jacket, revealing wide yellow braces, which said everything. ‘Tess, I’ve got something to tell you.’
Oh God. ‘I’m really busy, Gordon, honestly.’
‘This is important.’
‘So is this.’ She pointed at the opened file.
‘No, this can’t wait. I have to tell you.’
Tess closed the file, knitting her fingers together. He was a nice guy. There was someone out there for him, someone he’d find one day when he stopped trying so hard.
‘This Benson business,’ he said. ‘It’s dividing the firm.’
‘And so it should, Gordon. It’s an important question.’
‘I don’t mean about Benson. I mean about you.’
Tess gave her mind a shake. This wasn’t news and it wasn’t unexpected. Douglas had already told her the partners were unhappy. She raised an eyebrow.
‘You’ve only been with us four months, Tess.’
‘How could that change anything, Gordon? Would you want me to play safe until I’ve been here years?’
‘No, of course not.’ He ran a hand over his shining head. ‘It’s why I like you, Tess. You’re not scared of upsetting the applecart.’
She felt a flush of liking for this clumsy messenger. ‘Gordon, it’s simple. People will have to see past me to the issues and the issues can be argued over.’
‘No, Tess, you’re missing the point. You’ve only been here four months. Your probationary period ends in two weeks. You’ve divided the people who can decide whether you stay here or not.’
She hadn’t seen that coming; like Benson hadn’t seen Glencoyne’s shift in strategy. God, the legal world was a nasty, twisted place sometimes. In their own way, people tipped yoghurt on your head and beat you up in the back of a van. She no longer cared about the bearded bastard in the bomber jacket. If he came anywhere near her, she’d kick his teeth in.
‘What’s your advice, Gordon?’ she said.
‘You don’t need my advice, because you know what to do. I was only warning you.’ He got up and went to the door, where he turned, colouring slightly. ‘The sandwich. With or without mayonnaise?’
45
Benson retrieved the damp Sobranies from the bin and placed them in the microwave. He gave the knob a quick turn and then paced his boat, trying to penetrate Sarah Collingstone’s mind. Papillon watched from a dining room chair.
The atmosphere in the holding cells had been tense beyond description. He had felt like one of those bomb disposal experts, wondering which wire to cut, the yellow or the green? He’d looked her in the eye, coming uncomfortably close to her face.
‘Sarah, your father is in hospital, your son is with a social worker, and you are off to Holloway on remand because this judge doesn’t trust you any more. All this could have been avoided. Why didn’t you tell me the truth? Lie to your father for most of your existence, but why me? I represent you in a court. I’m trying to save your life.’
‘Mr Benson, if they’d convict me for having sex with him on the night he was killed, what chance would I have had if I’d told them he was the father of my son, a son he abandoned even before Daniel was born? Look at my life, Mr Benson. It’s a mess. It’s full of disappointment and failure. Full of hopes that never got off the ground. I survived a car crash for this. And all I’ve got that gives me meaning is someone who most people turn away from. They can’t understand how I could love him as much as I do. Do you know, once, I was standing by a bus stop in Richmond and a woman came up to me, looked me up and down, looked at Daniel, and then she said, “Why don’t you put him in a home?” That’s my world, Mr Benson. People look at me living by a sewage plant with my boy in a wheelchair and they think she’d kill the man who put her there. That’s what Miss Glencoyne said. You heard it yourself. I was convicted the day I was arrested at Dover. I lied because even you wouldn’t have been able to help me.’
‘Sarah, please tell me, did you kill Andrew Bealing? If you plead now, I’ve got some mitigation. Hopefully, it’ll shorten the number of years you go down.’
‘Mr Benson, didn’t you hear me? Or are you like Miss Glencoyne? I swore on Daniel’s life. I left Hopton’s Yard at six-thirty, feeling filthy and used and angry, and I went home to my dad and my son.’
The bright lights of the cell had blown away all the shadows from her face. Even the fine pencil lines had vanished. She’d been pale, her auburn hair disarranged, her lips cracked.
‘Okay,’ Benson had said. ‘I’ll do what I can.’
Something popped in the microwave.
After cleaning up the mess, Benson went to bed. And he thought how strange it was that the memory selects something and brings it to mind much later, without any obvious explanation as to why it selected that something in the first place. Because for no apparent reason, Benson remembered Tess de Vere’s shoes. He told Papillon all about them:
‘They’re made of black suede on the sides with black patent leather on top. They’ve got a low heel and a square toe.’
; Benson kept the rest to himself: he’d loved her ankle bones. They’d been like strange fruits on a vine.
Benson woke.
His mobile was ringing. The damn thing was out of reach, on a dresser. He swung his legs out of bed and growled in pain. He hobbled in the dark, banging a toe on the bedstead.
‘Yep, this is Benson.’ He’d got there just before voicemail kicked in.
‘Do you want to know who killed Andrew Bealing?’
Benson’s mouth was dry; he was still half asleep; he said he did, but—
‘There’s a warehouse in Shadwell.’
‘Just hold on, who are you?’
‘No questions, Mr Benson, just listen very carefully.’ He was a Scot and spoke slowly with precision, as if making a recording. ‘I repeat, there is a warehouse in Shadwell. Bewell Street. Written on the front is ‘T. W. Hesketh and Sons’. It is abandoned. You will find a door on the south-east wall facing a yard. The door is now open. I have placed a carton of milk by this door. Enter the building, turn right and go up a metal staircase. There will be night lights to guide you. On the second floor you will find another carton of milk by another door. Go through the door on to a landing. You will see a railing. Hold that railing with both hands and wait there for further instructions.’
‘When do I—’
‘I said no questions, Mr Benson. The night lights will burn for two hours. They have been burning for five minutes. You will find a bicycle secured to your railings. The key is in your post box. You have roughly three miles to cover. You come alone and you contact no one, not even Miss de Vere. Move silently. Wear trainers. Do not bring your phone. One final instruction, Mr Benson. I am a professional. This is how I earn my living. If you deviate from what I have told you to do, I will know. Roger Grange and his wife will end up dead, so will you, and there’s a chance I might as well. Speaking for myself, I would like to live a little longer, so do only as I say. Have you understood?’