by Jo Kessel
“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.
Did she mean that SHE was attracted to him, or she could understand MY attraction to him?
“Your point being?” I’d asked.
“I can see why you didn’t say no.”
This from the woman who told me in no uncertain terms that I had to finish things with Anthony because of Adam. Although I do, of course, have my own mind.
“What are you saying here?”
Was she asking permission to go for it or telling me I’d made a big mistake?
“I don’t know,” she’d said evasively. By then we’d hit the tube station, were distracted working out which line we needed to go on and the topic wasn’t brought up again. Perhaps we both sensed it was a thorny area seeing how things have panned out. Anyway, what Kayla really wanted to do was to talk about her, about her blossoming relationship with Paul which, against the odds, seemed so far so good.
***
“Did you find my sister attractive?” I ask Anthony, daring him with my eyes.
Kayla and I might not have discussed my colleague in any greater detail, but their meeting has got to me. I’m not sure why. Neither of them did anything untoward, but I couldn’t sleep afterwards. Seeing Anthony with Kayla sparked off something. It wasn’t jealousy towards Kayla per se. It was the fact that if SHE found him attractive, then loads of other women would too and suddenly, for the first time since meeting Louise, that thin, blonde, bombshell Solicitor with a personality at Maxwell’s party, I feel territorial. I don’t want anybody else having him.
“Excuse me?” he looks quite bemused.
My question was pathetically juvenile, but I can hardly take it back. He was sitting minding his own business, nose buried in papers, scratching the front of his head when I’d stormed in, first thing, hands on hips, and shut the door firmly behind me.
“Well, she does look just like you,” he jokes.
He evades the question. My face gives away that I consider his answer affirmative.
“Don’t be stupid Ali,” he says. “What do you take me for? She’s your sister for Christ’s sake.”
The longest silence ensues. I’m not sure where to go with this.
He gets up, comes round to my side of the desk, perches a while, arms folded, with more twinkle in his eyes than the Milky Way. Then he steps forward, puts a hand on each of my shoulders and leads me to the sofa, physically forcing me to sit. When I have, so does he, right beside me. His proximity throws me off-guard. I want to sense danger, yet I feel safe. I want to hit him and kiss him and hate him all together.
“What’s this all about Ali?”
His voice is mellifluous and soothing. His question is good. I don’t want to answer. I just want to cry.
“What do you mean?” I whisper.
“Is this about us?”
I shake my head, bite my lip, fending off tears.
“Tell me what this is about then?”
I can’t tell him, because I’m not sure myself.
“Are you still with Louise?” pops out.
I didn’t mean to ask him that. His gaze is so direct, so piercing, that I turn away, cast my eyes to the floor.
“This isn’t about her, Ali. I know you better than you think. You can’t have it every which way. You were the one that ended it.”
I nod. What can I say?
“You’ve got a boyfriend and a baby on the way. It’s probably just the jitters and the hormones clouding your vision, don’t you think?”
My lower lip feels numb from biting so hard. My eyes fill up.
“Maybe,” I mumble, still looking down.
He puts his hand on my stomach. The baby, who’s been sleeping all morning, wakes with a start. That’s what does it. That’s what triggers the first tear to plop out, to trickle in slow motion down my cheek.
“This is what matters Ali. This is what’s important,” he says.
His tone is quiet and sensitive, caring almos
t. It forces me to look up, to meet his deep brown eyes. I am transfixed, almost trance-like, waiting for divine inspiration. In the end, it’s not hard to work out what to do.
“Anthony, there’s something I have to tell you,” I start.
My voice is controlled and clear. I feel more level, more together, lighter than I’ve felt in months at the prospect of shifting this heavy load. I take a deep breath, open my mouth, ready to launch, when Maxwell Hood QC knocks, pops his head round the door and asks Anthony if he has a minute.
***
I pick up the phone to make an important work call to a computer geek called Sebastian, trying to put Anthony to the back of my mind. I try to push the image out of my head of him mouthing, with a slightly conspiratorial nod, that we’d catch up later. The whole episode had been more divine interruption than divine inspiration. I’d left his office wondering if perhaps I’m just not meant to come clean. Perhaps Anthony is just not meant to know. That’s how it felt, when Maxwell hit his cue so bang on. The timing was perfect. I’ve always been a firm believer that timing is everything.