‘Yes.’
She smoothed the thin khaki sheet over him. ‘I should think they’ll give you an instructor’s job now. You won’t have to go back again. Not for a fourth time, Captain.’
His eyes filled with tears and he took another big chunk of his moustache between his teeth. ‘Do you think so, Nurse?’ he said when he’d got back enough control to let his jaw unclench.
‘Yes. You’ve done your share already, Captain Coot. More than your share. They won’t ask you to go out again now.’
‘No one can say that until it’s over. It could go on for ever so that we all have to go on going back.’
‘It will end,’ she said, remembering all Jean-Pierre’s reassurance.
The tempo of the rattle changed.
‘We’re slowing down.’
Helen braced herself. This was the moment she most dreaded for herself rather than for any of her patients. What if Jean-Pierre’s friend were not at the station to collect the tubes of paintings? What if one of the orderlies asked too many questions? Or one of the doctors insisted on having a tube opened? What if she were arrested?
She thought of Edith Cavell. At least she had been working for her country. Helen felt her child kick in her womb and put her hand over the bump. Someone would notice soon. This had to be the last time, even if she disappointed Jean-Pierre. She couldn’t take any more of it.
Captain Coot groaned, cutting off the sound almost as soon as it escaped his lips. This was the important thing. Even more important than Jean-Pierre and his paintings.
‘I’m just going to take these bracing tubes away now,’ she said carefully, pulling them away. ‘I don’t want them getting in the way when they move you on to the ambulance.’
As soon as she had a free moment that evening, Trish phoned Buxford. A woman answered and said that her husband was out and could she take a message?
‘That’s very kind. My name is Trish Maguire.’
‘Ah. Yes, Henry has told me all about you. Is this about Toby? Henry said you’d very sensibly backed out of all that.’
‘It’s only peripherally to do with Toby. Could you say to Henry that I’ve just realized Helen was a mule.’
‘That sounds like code,’ Lady Buxford said with a light laugh. ‘I’d better write it down. Hold on a moment. Yes, here’s a pencil. Did you say: “Helen was a mule”?’
‘I did. Thank you.’
Trish put down the phone and went to turn off David’s light.
‘Will you hear my lines again?’ he asked. ‘I kept getting them wrong when Nicky tested me this evening.’
He was lying in bed, looking very tired, his white face marked with deep bruises under his black eyes. Even though this anxiety over his part in the play could only be a displacement for whatever had upset him at the museum, Trish thought she knew exactly how he felt.
‘Wouldn’t you rather have your light out and get some rest so that you’re fresh enough to run through the lines tomorrow? We could easily rehearse over breakfast.’
‘No. I must try again now.’ There was a new shrillness in his voice, and his bottom lip was swollen, as though he’d been chewing it. ‘I tell you I kept getting them wrong with Nicky. And in the last rehearsal. It’s only days till the play. If I don’t get them right before you put out my light, I won’t get to sleep. Please.’
‘Of course, I’ll hear your lines,’ she said, smiling down at him. ‘But you mustn’t worry too much if you don’t get them right tonight. You were word-perfect last week. I think you’ve been doing too much worrying and rehearsing. That can make even the best speakers forget what they know perfectly well. You need to be relaxed to do yourself justice. Now, where’s your copy of the play?’
He fished it out from under his pillow. Trish, who knew it backwards now, rather approved of the way the English master had updated the familiar story of the homeless stranger calling for help on Christmas Eve. In this version, the first house he tried was a rich banker’s and he was turned away with contempt because he was ragged and dirty. David was to be the spokesman for the second house, which in this production was to be a council flat inhabited by the family of a police officer.
‘It’s cold outside,’ Trish said, prompting his first line. ‘Have you got a blanket to spare?’
‘Come on inside, my friend. There’s food here. Hot food. And we’ve plenty to share.’
David was staring forwards, and his hands were clenched on the edge of his duvet. He gave no expression to the words. Trish remembered Mrs More’s saying to her once that he had turned out to be a surprisingly good actor. He didn’t look like any kind of actor now. She tried to help him by thinking herself into the part of the tramp:
‘I’m too dirty to come into your house.’ She thought of poor Mer, whose part she was reading, who ate rust, was terrified of his father and – or – the giant who had broken his arm, and was loathed by everyone in his class. It didn’t seem the most suitable part for him. Or had Hester More pinned her hopes on the fact that the despised tramp turned out to be a messianic figure in disguise? Probably. Trish hoped it would work for Mer.
‘Dirt is only—No. Sorry, Trish. Only dirt is—No. You see, I can’t do it. I can’t. I always get the dirt bit wrong. I don’t know what to say.’
‘You mustn’t worry about it. The real line is: “Dirt is only on the outside. What matters is what’s inside. I’ll take you to the bathroom before we eat, so that you can wash.”’
She saw him close his eyes and fight whatever block his mind had put up against these particular words. There were deep lines between his eyebrows and on either side of his mouth. He looked like an old, old man.
A waft of aromatic steam reached her, making her turn away. George was cooking again. She couldn’t leave him alone much longer. It was his turn now. She got up off the edge of the bed. David’s hand moved, suddenly gripping hers. She covered his with her other one and waited. Neither of them spoke. After a while, his breathing eased and he let her go. She watched him for a moment longer, bent to kiss his forehead, then turned off his light and went to join George.
‘That took a long time,’ he said. ‘Is he all right?’
‘Panicking about forgetting his lines. At least that’s the presenting anxiety. But there’s still a hell of a lot left below the surface he can’t bear to let out. And I don’t know how to help him do it.’ She shook her head. George was probably bored rigid by her anxieties. ‘That smells wonderful.’
He put a warm plate in front of her, then laid two covered dishes on the mats between their places. ‘Help yourself. It’s an experiment. It may be disgusting.’
‘If so that’ll be a first. It’s amazing that you can cook at all after ten hours in the office, let alone this sort of elaborate stuff. How was it today?’
‘Hellish. Staff, partners, professional-indemnity insurers and, of course, clients. I had the most appalling row with Jeremy Carfield. He wants something that is simply not possible within the law and he thinks he can get it by yelling at me. He can’t, but we can’t afford to lose his business either, so I’ve been walking a tightrope all day.’ He patted his generous gut and laughed. ‘As you know, I’m not built for tightropes. Honestly, Trish, I sometimes think it’s only cooking that keeps me sane. D’you mind?’
‘I love it.’
‘Liar,’ he said, ladling some more sauce over the chicken he’d put on his plate. ‘Eat whatever you can or it’ll spoil. And tell me how you’re getting on with persuading your father to come to the Christmas play.’
‘Not well,’ Trish said, hating herself for having forgotten to leave another message on Paddy’s answering machine.
‘Don’t beat yourself up, Trish. He’ll come round in the end. And you can’t force the pace.’
She looked down at her plate. The food wasn’t in fact up to George’s usual perfectionist standard, and the sauce was far too sweet. She felt her stomach jump and tighten at the thought of eating any more.
‘Go on,’ he s
aid. ‘There’s no need to finish it. Go and phone.’
As she went, she thought how easy her life was, with its phones and text messages and emails, compared with Helen Gregory’s. She had waited fifty years for a man who never contacted her, and still believed she would see him again.
Trish couldn’t imagine such endurance – or self-deception – but then she hadn’t been trained through the war to end all wars, when news was as rare as survival on the front line.
Chapter 20
‘The great man wants to see you, Trish,’ Robert said, breaking into her close study of the disputed clauses of an architect’s contract for four multi-storey blocks of flats. ‘But he’s in a mega strop this morning, so be careful.’
‘Thanks for the warning.’
‘Pleasure, Trish, but before you go, tell me something.’
‘What?’
‘Did Peter Chanting jump or was he pushed?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Haven’t you read the paper this morning? How extraordinary! Presumably childcare at breakfast means you just don’t have the chance to keep up. It’s no wonder you’re losing your touch if you have no idea what’s going on in the world outside the nursery.’
The last things she wanted to discuss were blunted edges and maternity-fuddled brains. ‘What has Peter Chanting done?’
‘Such innocence! You are good at it.’ The synthetic admiration in Robert’s voice would have sounded excessive in a daytime TV game-show host. ‘But will you be able to keep it up when the police come to feel your collar? I hope you’ve got a really good criminal silk up your sleeve.’
‘Stop messing about, Robert, and tell me what you’re talking about.’
He laughed. ‘You remember that body in the river with a bullet in its head?’
‘Yes. Why? Are they saying Chanting killed him?’
‘Even more lovely innocence, Trish. I do admire your thespian abilities, you know. But you’re wasting time and the great man’s not going to be very pleased with you. He was expecting you to whiz off to his room straightaway.’
The sound of Robert’s laughter echoed down the dusty corridor behind her and continued to ring in her ears as she opened Antony’s door. He looked at her over the top of his half-moon glasses.
‘Henry seems to have forgiven you for backing out, but I’m not sure I have. Come in and sit down.’
‘There was nothing more I could do,’ she said, refusing to give in. But she did take the offered chair.
‘Only you could be the judge of that. What concerns me now is what you’re going to do with the information you did collect. I find that Robert already knows you’ve been working for Henry, and I wonder who else does.’
Trish smiled. She wasn’t going to bring George into this, or any other inhabitant of her private life. They were none of Antony’s business.
‘I hope you’re not planning to turn the Gregory Bequest’s problems into a good story for an entertaining evening in El Vino, Trish.’
She stood up. ‘I don’t know how much Henry may have shared with you of the little I was able to find out for him, but it is far too serious – and dangerous – to pass on to anyone else. Was there anything else you wanted to discuss this morning?’
‘I don’t think so.’ He sounded blander than the bland now, as he watched her over the top of his half-moon glasses. She wished she knew what was going on in his mind.
She felt like an angry muttering fool as she left his room, but at least she hadn’t demeaned herself by begging for reassurance that he wasn’t planning to find ways to punish her for her failure to help Henry Buxford.
‘Steve?’ she said as she looked round the door of the clerks’ room, ‘have you got a paper this morning?’
Without a word, he leaned towards his wastepaper basket and removed a neatly folded newspaper. Having shaken a cascade of pencil shavings from it, he handed it over. Trish soon found the story Robert had used to tease her under a photograph of a good-looking man with eyes narrowed against the sun and mountains in the background.
The body found in the Thames by Blackfriars Bridge three weeks ago has been identified as that of Peter Chanting. He lived an exotic life, dividing his time between Nepal and London. He is thought to have been involved in smuggling Shatoosh shawls (see fashion editor’s comment on page 23), and been afraid of discovery. The police are not looking for anyone in connection with his death.
‘So they think it was suicide, do they?’ she muttered, making Steve peer at her as though checking for symptoms of serious illness. ‘But how can they? No one could walk naked through London without being spotted.’
As she walked back down the corridor to her cell-like room, wondering what Toby had been doing on the night Chanting’s body went into the river, she was mentally drafting a letter to his father. When she reached her desk, she remembered the coldness with which Martin Chanting had talked about his son. She picked up her pen and after several hopeless attempts, produced two simple lines.
Dear Mr Chanting,
The news in today’s papers has shocked and saddened me. I am so sorry about your son’s death. I wish I could have met him.
Yours sincerely,
Trish Maguire
Toby felt weightless, as though he was floating a few inches from the floor. There seemed to be no brains or blood or anything else in his head. That must be why he felt so light, but nothing except shock explained why the laws of gravity had been suspended.
He read the paragraph in the paper again and again, trying to feel, trying to understand the extraordinary last line. But he couldn’t. All he knew was that Peter had been found dead in the Thames on the day after he had come to the house and Jo had turned him away.
Had he killed himself out of guilt for blabbing the Clouet secrets? Or had he tried his blackmail trick on other people, too, and been killed by one of them?
Toby felt something disgusting and looked down. He had forgotten the banana he’d been about to eat for breakfast. He’d squeezed it so hard that the skin had burst and the pulpy flesh was oozing across the backs of his hands.
He heard someone unlocking the front door from outside, and he dropped the mangled mess. He reached mechanically for a cloth and was still holding it, wiping his hands over and over again, as he opened the door to see Jo climbing up the stairs in tears, with a newspaper clutched between her hands.
It was hard to believe he’d ever thought her pretty, with her blotched face and chapped lips.
‘And what are you crying about?’ he said, shocking himself with the cruelty of his voice.
‘The man who came to see you that night.’ She pointed to the folded newspaper. ‘It’s him, isn’t it? He came here, wanting you, and then when he didn’t get to talk to you he killed himself.’
‘That’s what it looks like, yes. And if you hadn’t screwed up, I’d have been able to find out what he wanted, and I might have saved him.’
‘Toby, I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m really sorry. I just didn’t know it was that important, and I was so angry with you for making all those unfair accusations about lost messages and things that I didn’t write down the phone number he gave me. I’m really, really sorry.’
Toby turned on the stairs and went back into the private flat, shutting the door on her. It was the only way he knew to stop himself smashing her face against the wall.
Trish barely noticed the time as she ploughed on through her case notes that afternoon. Her room hardly ever had any daylight in it and so the gathering dark didn’t impinge on her consciousness until she looked up and caught sight of her own reflection in the window.
The circle of light thrown by her Anglepoise reading lamp just fitted her neat dark head, white bony face, thin shoulders and long arms, balanced now either side of the neatly piled papers. Stretching her left arm only a fraction meant that the hand was in almost complete darkness.
It didn’t matter that she’d spent longer in chambers than she’d meant
because Nicky was in charge at home this evening. Trish stretched her aching neck and at last looked at her watch. It was after seven. No wonder her muscles were tight. She rubbed her hands through her hair, forgetting that she’d lost her spikes, and wiped her gritty eyes.
For some reason that reminded her of Paddy. Yet again he hadn’t returned her call. She reached for the phone and automatically dialled his number without even thinking about it. This time he answered it himself.
‘Paddy?’ she said, fighting against the shock of his voice. ‘It’s me, Trish.’
‘And how are you now?’ he asked, his voice sounding scarily Irish. He only ever reverted to the lilting accent and intonations of his childhood when he had something to protect.
‘I’m fine. Busy.’
‘So what’s new?’
‘Nothing except work. Lots of it.’ She smiled. There were some things the two of them didn’t even have to explain. He would be quite as busy. They both used work as a life raft. ‘I wondered if you’d come to any decision about David’s play. It would be great to have you there, and you might enjoy it.’
‘D’ye really think it’s after being my kind of thing, Trish? I never went to your school to see you act, now did I?’
Don’t I know it? she thought. But at least he was putting her and the boy in the same category, in however sidelong a way. ‘No reason not to start now. It’s a ticketed event. So you’ll need to decide in advance.’
‘Bella can’t come. She has an important meeting. But I suppose I could, Trish.’ Now his voice was as English as could be. ‘Will that fat solicitor of yours be there?’
Did Paddy always have to bait her? He knew George’s name perfectly well, and Trish had protested about the rude description of him often enough. In any case, he wasn’t fat; just big. Or well padded. Still, tonight she wasn’t going to rise.
‘Unless some awful crisis comes up he will. OK, I’ll get tickets for the three of us and I’ll post you yours so that you can still get in, even if George and I are both held up.’
A Place of Safety Page 22