Out of the Dark

by Natasha Cooper

  Straight off she knew someone was in there, even though there was no answer to the bell or Mikey’s knocking. Maybe it was a smell, maybe a noise, maybe just a feeling. But she knew.

  So he hasn’t gone to Spain, she thought. Maybe the police were right and he did do something on Tuesday night. Maybe the excitement of all that blood on Sunday had made him want another go two days later. Or maybe hurting a working girl had made him feel brave enough to carry out his drunken threats to give Jeannie Nest a good seeing-to.

  Lil nudged Mikey to one side and pushed up the flap of the letter box. ‘Gal, it’s your ma. Let me in. Come on, open up.’ She was sure it was him in there, even though he didn’t answer and there wasn’t any more noise. ‘D’you want me yelling my questions from out here? Come on, Gal. Let me in. It’s only me and Mikey.’

  At last the door opened he stood there, in his vest, unshaven, wearing more filthy trousers, and looking like the stupid mess he’d always been. He had a can of Special Brew in his hand and a fag, dropping ash everywhere. She wasn’t surprised Mikey was wrinkling up his nose. He’d always been a clean boy, always cared what he looked like.

  ‘We’re coming in.’

  Gal gave way, but he didn’t like it. Lil was sure that if she hadn’t had Mikey with her, she wouldn’t have got in. Gal was scared of his nephew. It had surprised her when she’d first seen it because she’d thought he could’ve smashed Mikey to one side without even breaking a sweat; now that she knew Mikey better, and listened to stories from her neighbours of his exploits in the gym, she understood her son’s fear well enough. They followed him to the lounge. She stood in the doorway, coughing.

  ‘Bloody hell, Gal! No wonder you can’t get a woman to stay with you for more than two minutes. This is a pigsty and you smell like a pig. You might open the window sometimes.’

  ‘Nan.’ Mikey’s quiet voice from behind her warned her she was going too far.

  ‘Still, it’s your choice,’ she said quickly. ‘Nothing to do with me. What’ve you been doing?’

  ‘Nothing, Ma.’

  ‘Don’t give me that. I had the police round at my place.’ She stared at him, forcing him to look back at her. ‘They wanted to know what you were doing Tuesday night. I told them I didn’t know and I hadn’t seen you. I thought you’d be on holiday.’

  ‘Tuesday?’ He wasn’t as good at lying as she was, and he couldn’t manage to look surprised enough. So he had been up to something on Tuesday, had he? She hoped it wasn’t the murder in Hoxton. That might get him out of her way for as long as she lived, but it would bring all sorts of trouble with it. She’d never get safely away to her cottage without anyone knowing where she was if there was going to be another murder trial.

  Gal’s eyes shifted as he looked from her to Mikey and back again. ‘Dunno. I think I was here.’ He waved to the piled beer tins all over the room. ‘Watching telly. Or wiv me mates in the pub.’

  ‘Likely enough. Well, they’ll get here soon, if they haven’t already been.’ His eyes flickered towards her, then back to his beer can. ‘Oh, so they’ve paid you a call, have they?’

  ‘Searched the place.’ He brightened a little. ‘That’s why it’s such a mess, Ma. They threw the stuff around, then they took a lot of me clothes. But there’s nothing to find. I ain’t done nothing. I’ve told them that each time they’ve come.’

  ‘What d’you mean, “each time”?’

  He did look surprised then. ‘They come first on Wednesday night, then different ones on Friday, and more over the weekend.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Why would I, Ma? Nothing you can do. Nothing anyone can do because I haven’t done nothing. I keep telling them that, but they keep coming back. Still,’ he said, cheering up, ‘they haven’t arrested me, have they? No evidence.’

  ‘Just as well. Why didn’t you go on your holidays, like you were supposed to? What happened?’

  He looked away, scratching again.

  ‘Lost your money, did you? Or your bottle? It was that, wasn’t it? You were scared of finding your way abroad.’

  He took a step towards her just as Mikey was saying, ‘Nan,’ again. But it didn’t stop either of them, so Mikey pushed her behind him and stood up to his uncle. ‘Don’t you lay a finger on her.’

  Gal took another step forward. Lil could smell his beery breath even from behind Mikey. But the boy didn’t move.

  ‘She’s not worth it,’ said Gal, turning away. ‘The old witch. You may think you’ll be quids in if you stick around, running little errands for her, licking her arse for her. But she’ll never give you anything. She’s a mean old bitch and you’d be better off without her. We all would.’

  Lil felt Mikey tense and knew that if he’d been any of the others, he’d have hit his uncle by then. She could feel him fighting it, the urge to lunge and batter. But he was stronger than them. When she felt the fury slinking back in him like a cat that’s seen the dog ahead is too big to fight, she said quietly, ‘Let’s go, Mikey. It won’t do any good to stay and argue. Don’t come asking for anything more, Gal, because you won’t get it. Not now. Not after this. And keep your damn nose clean.’

  When they were outside again, Mikey helped her into the lift. ‘Grandad phoned today, while you were in the toilet.’

  ‘Did he? Why?’

  Mikey shrugged. ‘He said he likes to keep in touch with the business, make sure you’re treating Gal right. He says you asked for a Visiting Order, Nan. Why? You hardly ever go to see him. What d’you want to do it for now?’

  Lil shivered. ‘I don’t. But your grandad likes to think he runs our business from inside. If I go to the prison once in a while, we can both pretend I’m doing what he tells me.’

  ‘But what’ll happen to the business when he gets out if he thinks it’s his?’

  Lil didn’t mind the sharp anxiety in Mikey’s voice. She could cope with that. And it was fair enough. He’d been working hard for her for four years now, ever since he’d come back from her sister’s after he left school. It was right that he should be thinking about taking over – and without interference from a grandfather he’d rarely seen. She’d always thought of Mikey’s twenty-first birthday as the day she’d hand over to him, and it would come in less than two months. Maybe she could retire then and forget all this.

  ‘He’s not likely to get out, and if he does, he’ll be too old to bother you.’ She patted his cheek, and he let her do it. ‘You’re a good boy, Mikey.’

  They walked by a pair of patrolling police officers, trying to look uninterested in them. Lil recognised one, and nodded to him. Further on they passed a sleekly polished dark-blue car without any markings. A man in a suit got out.

  ‘Afternoon, Mr Smith,’ Lil said, making her voice quiver. She clung to Mikey’s arm. ‘This is my grandson. Mikey, this is Chief Inspector Smith.’

  ‘We’ve met before,’ said the plain-clothes officer, nodding to Mikey. ‘Why’re you here, Lil?’

  ‘I come to find out what my Gal’s been doing,’ she said, making her eyes water as she looked up at him. ‘Two of your boys come round to my place this morning, asking about him. They wouldn’t tell me why. Seems like it must be something big.’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘You really think my Gal’s capable of something big?’

  He knew what she meant; she could see that. But she could see other things, too. This was definitely not about a simple beating. Chief inspectors didn’t come out for that. This had to be murder. And the victim was no prostitute. The filth didn’t care this much about working girls, even when they were dead.

  ‘Well, we’d best be on our way. Good to see you, Mr Smith.’

  Lakeshaw finished reading the reports that had come up from the Southwark team and was glad he’d reserved judgment on Waylant’s guilt. Gary Handsome had been seen passing out from drink in a local pub on the night she’d died. According to a whole crowd of witnesses, he couldn’t have swatted a fly in the state
he’d been in. And the only other feasible Handsome suspect, given that the old woman could hardly walk unaided, was her little mini-cab-driving grandson.

  He’d always been a fairly unlikely prospect, and now it seemed that he’d been on shift for most of the relevant night. The cab office had amazingly been able to provide dockets for all his journeys and a Day Book that recorded the money he’d turned in for the trips. He’d covered a lot of ground, even given the empty roads at night.

  Now that those two were out of the picture, at least until any new evidence turned up, Lakeshaw would have to spread the net wider. There must have been other men, outside Ron Handsome’s own family, who might have been prepared to take on the job of punishing the woman whose evidence had convicted him. They would all have to be identified and interviewed, even though the man himself hadn’t given them anything to go on. And, of course, now there was this Maguire character, who couldn’t be ignored.

  ‘Sue,’ Lakeshaw yelled, without moving from his desk.

  She looked round his door a couple of minutes later, her broad, healthy face as keen as ever.

  ‘I’m going to need you to fill me in on this bloke Paddy Maguire, but first find me the SOCOs’ list of the contents of the victim’s flat, will you? I want to know more about that scrapbook they found, OK?’

  Chapter 10

  Trish had another bad night, but she was up and dressing soon after seven on Monday morning. Antony Shelley wasn’t likely to get to chambers until nine, or even later, but she wanted to catch him before anyone else did. She ignored breakfast, calling in to Pret à Manger for a large cappuccino on her way to the Temple. She stopped off in the clerks’ room to leave a note in Antony’s pigeonhole to let him know she needed to see him.

  The coffee was halfway down the big cardboard beaker when she heard his voice. Looking up she saw him talking to someone over his shoulder. He was wearing a suit, although he wasn’t going anywhere near court today, and he looked well. Towards the end of a long case, his clothes would always be so crumpled that you’d think he had slept in them for a week, and his clenched muscles would have driven his shoulders up under his ears. His nails would be bitten then, and inky, and his skin would have the texture and colour of old mashed potato.

  But today, he had the kind of light tan that came from walking around in the heat rather than lying baking by a pool, and his shoulders hung at a comfortable level parallel with the base of his neck. Even his fingers were lying relaxed instead of bent into knotted clumps.

  He finished his conversation and came to drop into the client’s chair opposite Trish’s desk.

  ‘Horrid little room, this,’ he said, looking around it. ‘I had it for nearly six years myself. You should get a better one, Trish. Especially now.’

  ‘As soon as a decent alternative comes up, I might. But this is fine for the moment, Antony.’ She didn’t add that she wasn’t going to count her chickens too soon.

  Robert Anstey had been winding her up again about how she was bound to come a cropper over the case even before it came to court. Thank God he didn’t know about the treacherous note she’d persuaded Spindlers to send over.

  ‘How was Tuscany?’ she asked breezily, noticing that Antony was staring at her.

  ‘Good.’ He nodded as though confirming some tricky point of law, then smiled like a schoolboy. ‘And best when we’d got rid of all the guests and could just flop. My wife likes to fill the place with friends and children and children’s friends, and then have neighbours in for dinner too, until the whole place is as bad as the Old Bailey on a busy day. But when they’ve all gone, and it begins to get misty and silver in the mornings and wet in the afternoons and you need a fire in the evenings, it’s wonderful.’

  ‘I’m surprised you could bear to come back.’

  ‘Me too. We even thought we might spend Christmas there, which would be a first. But you and I have got Nick Gurles to sort out before I can think about that. How’s it been going, Trish?’

  She made herself smile slowly. It was fifteen years since she’d been a pupil. Any sign of fear at her age would be grossly undignified.

  ‘Well, there is one problem.’

  ‘Yes?’ He didn’t look particularly worried.

  Trish hadn’t felt as tongue-tied as this since her first few days in court. Rather than stumble and stutter and risk looking silly, she shoved her chair back, swivelling as it travelled so that she ended up facing the banks of lever-arch files. Selecting the dangerous one, she laid it open on her desk and began to explain.

  ‘Let me see,’ Antony interrupted.

  She pushed forward the photocopied document, marked with a scarlet mini Post-it and highlighted at the relevant paragraph.

  Antony withdrew from her completely as he concentrated. She’d never known anyone who could shut out every distraction quite as effectively. The first time it had happened, they’d both been reading case papers and she’d become so powerfully aware of absence that for a micro-second she’d wondered if he’d had a heart attack and died.

  The atmosphere warmed up as he stopped reading and looked up. ‘So?’

  ‘So, we’re stymied, Antony. We’re all set to claim that we never intended to misrepresent anything, that we were convinced from our mathematical modelling and all the old published studies, that the fund would generate the guaranteed return and no one would lose anything. Now, here’s this piece of paper that shows we knew all along that there might be a problem and we were concerned to make sure all the marketing literature disguised that and made potential investors believe we were offering a normal savings account.’

  Antony was staring at her as though she was a mute foreigner trying to mime a joke he didn’t find funny.

  ‘No, it doesn’t. The rest of this note is all about the MegaPerformance Bond Fund, but this paragraph here, the one you’ve highlighted, has nothing to do with that. It’s about “the other matter”, whatever that was. Not our problem.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Antony. You know it’s about our fund.’

  ‘Where does it say that?’

  ‘It’s implicit.’

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose you might argue that, but I shouldn’t find it very convincing. May I ask what you’ve done about this?’

  ‘Nothing. I only found it last week and I thought you should see it before I did anything.’ She saw an infinitesimal relaxation in the muscles under his eyes. ‘But clearly it’s discoverable, Antony. We will have to tell the other side.’

  ‘That’s debatable. And, as you very well know, we’re not allowed to say “discoverable” any more. It’s “disclosable”.’

  Trish was about to ask why he thought they had any option, but a different, more urgent question occurred to her. She tried to find an acceptable way of enquiring whether he’d already known about the document and thought he would get away with hiding it from her as well as from the defence.

  ‘Incidentally, Trish,’ he said before she could ask, ‘how did you get hold of this?’

  ‘I came on a reference to the main part of the note in one of the other documents, when I was checking the cross-references, realised we were missing this one, and asked Sprindlers for it.’

  ‘Ah, I see. You can’t have talked to Peter Loyle, so who sent it to you?’

  That pretty much answered the question she’d been too embarrassed to ask. Antony had obviously known all along that this note existed, and so had their instructing solicitor. Why hadn’t Antony told her? Was it a test – like tonight’s dinner party? And if they were tests, did she want to pass them?

  ‘Peter Loyle was away on holiday. I got a trainee, who was very helpful.’

  ‘I see. Thank you.’

  ‘Antony, what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Nothing. As I said, it isn’t anything to do with our fund. I’m surprised you’ve worked yourself into such a state about it, but we haven’t time to discuss it now. I’ll get someone to move the files into my room, and get cracking. And you might as well
go home and get some sleep. I’ve never seen you so peaky. You look as though you haven’t had a decent night in weeks.’

  ‘It does feel a bit like that,’ Trish admitted.

  ‘Because of this document? What’s the matter with you? You usually have a much better sense of proportion.’

  ‘The document and a few other things. Personal. Nothing to do with chambers.’

  ‘Everything is to do with chambers if it screws up your judgment this badly. Is it anxiety over the police interest in your past cases? Dave was telling me about this boy who was nearly killed outside your flat. Anything I need to know about that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on, Trish. It’s worrying you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it is.’ She hadn’t meant to sound so impatient, so she hurried to explain. ‘An eight-year-old child I’ve never met, apparently coming to find me in the middle of a Sunday night, is run down and nearly killed just outside my flat. Anyone would be worried.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’ She told him Dave’s theory about the foster-home runaway, adding, ‘But I’m still not convinced. He keeps saying “she” sent him to me, which sounds like an adult to me. The police will find out eventually and get him back to wherever he came from, but in the meantime, I do feel responsible.’

  ‘You’ve talked to him, have you?’

  ‘Yes. I visit him in hospital most days. He’s a sweet child. But something’s scared him so much that he won’t identify himself.’

  ‘My advice is to keep your distance, Trish. It’s not a good idea to get involved in this kind of thing.’

  ‘He has no one else.’

  ‘Nevertheless, it’s not your problem. Now, Dave tells me you’re in Maidstone tomorrow. You can do that sort of case standing on your head, so go home now, rest, and sort yourself out. I need you on top form for Nick Gurles.’