When court rose for lunch, I came into the crowded hall and saw Ray Dodworth at the far end. He was unmistakable at any distance both because of his height, which was several inches over six foot, and because of his fondness for slick Italian-style suits and spivvy haircuts. A peacock among sparrows, he looked like a successful crook or a policeman on the take, neither of which seemed to prevent people from giving him information.
We went to the pub round the corner, newly renovated with replica Victorian windows and replica Victorian furniture, bought in at vast expense to emulate the genuine Victorian furnishings that had been torn out during a previous refit. The ersatz effect was reinforced by canned music, ham-filled baguettes, and ten different kinds of lager. I knew the pub well: in less pressurized times it had been one of Paul’s regular watering holes.
‘Bennett, the dentist,’ Ray began as soon as we had found a gloomy table. ‘Very helpful. Told me he’d made two crowns and four veneers for Grace Dearden. That Thursday was due to be her last session with him, to have any problems sorted. Rough spots, fit not quite right, whatever. Until that day she’d always turned up for her appointments regular as clockwork. Always seemed very charming, Bennett said. And very pleased with the work.’ He gave a dry smile. ‘Well he would say that, wouldn’t he? Norfolk CID called him just a few days ago to confirm that she hadn’t shown for that last appointment.’ He looked over his notes. ‘That’s it on the dentist.’ Still a policeman at heart, he examined the next page of notes before proceeding.
Ray was over fifty but could have passed for less. His hair was short and thick and swept back, and if the uniformity of its blackness owed something to the regular use of a bottle, it didn’t seem to do him any harm with the numerous women who came and went in his busy life. Wives, long-term girlfriends, ladies of shorter acquaintance: he seemed to keep them in separate orbits. His companionable easy-going manner belied a firm determination to order his life precisely as he liked it.
‘Right…the restaurant,’ he began again. ‘La Brasserie in Knightsbridge. There are two other restaurants of the same name in London, but this is the fashionable one. Big clientele, something like a hundred-and-twenty seater. Different waiters on different days, though. Some work a six-day week, some three, some only do days, others do evenings, and sometimes they swap around. There’s quite a turnover in staff too. Won’t or don’t keep them long. One waiter did think he remembered seeing Grace Dearden, but he couldn’t remember who she was with—man, woman, one person, three—so not a lot of help there. They did let me have a glance at their old booking ledgers, though.’ I had never worked out how Ray persuaded people to do him such favours. A quiet authoritative manner, perhaps, or the gift of the gab, though what line he strung them I couldn’t guess. Going by his invoices he didn’t use bribes regularly, not unless he’d found a foolproof technique for hiding them in his expenses. Either way, I never enquired too closely.
‘The bookings weren’t made in her name, as we know,’ Ray went on in his soft voice. ‘Now, I couldn’t find a name that booked for lunch on all five dates you gave me, but I did find one that booked for four of them. The name of Gordon.’ He turned it into a question with a lift of his eyebrows.
I searched my memory, knowing there was no Gordon there.
‘This Gordon was booked for two December dates and two January. Table for two. They don’t keep a record of genders. No Mr or Mrs.’
‘What about a telephone number, in case of a no-show?’
He gave me a look of mock reproof for robbing him of his small moment of surprise. ‘Normally they don’t bother for lunch bookings. Never that busy. But near Christmas they got much busier, and then they did take numbers.’ He swivelled the notebook round and showed me a central London number.
‘Got an address for it?’
‘There’s no Gordon in the book with that number. Checked with my BT contact—no go there, either. It’s ex-directory. Tried calling it. No reply, no answering machine. It’s a Knightsbridge exchange, so can’t be too far from the restaurant That’s all I can tell you for the moment.’
There was a small silence that was entirely familiar to us. It was the silence in which I judged how badly I needed the information and Ray worked out which of his police contacts he could go to if I really pressed him.
But Ray preempted me. ‘My other source, the one I can usually rely on—it’ll be no go.’
‘Oh? Any particular reason?’
‘How shall I put it? Our name is mud at the moment.’
‘The Ronnie Buck case?’ I knew it could be nothing else.
‘Quite a lot of people are feeling a bit upset about it.’
Something about his tone made me ask, ‘What’s the word on it, Ray?’
He hesitated for a moment. ‘The word is that the witness was bought.’
I knew it was possible, I knew it would be Buck’s style. ‘The neighbour?’
‘The neighbour who just happened to be standing at her window at dead of night and supposedly saw the officer climb the wall,’ he said, showing nothing in his face.
For argument’s sake, I said, ‘But it’s always meant to be a setup, isn’t it?’
‘The officer was a good bloke, Alex. Tony James. Much liked. But even allowing for that, the word is very strong.’
He was telling me that it was almost certainly true. In which case a lot of people had been misled: Paul, Ray, the firm, not to mention the jury.
‘You had no doubts about her at the time, this Karen Grainey?’ I asked.
Ray gave me a startled gaze, followed by a look of dawning comprehension. ‘I never worked on the case, Alex. Never met the woman.’
‘Who did Paul use, then?’
He looked slightly embarrassed. ‘I believe he used someone in Chislehurst, someone who knew the patch.’
All my half-acknowledged fears about the Buck trial leapt to the fore. I’d assumed that Paul had used Ray because that was what he always did. Now I saw powerful reasons for Paul to avoid using Ray, powerful reasons to let himself be talked into using another investigator. I saw, too, why he should have failed to mention any of this to me, and unease crept into my stomach, a sliver of ice.
‘Oh well,’ I said to break what had become a long silence. ‘The Bucks of this world always get their comeuppance in the end, don’t they?’
Diplomatically Ray made no reply to this, and after a last moment of awkwardness we turned back to Grace Dearden’s planned trip to London.
‘The cancelled six-thirty appointment…’ I said, with a sigh that belonged to the last subject.
Ray went back to his notes. ‘Avon Court is a block of flats. Expensive, uniformed porters, car park at the rear, views of Regent’s Park out front. The penthouse went for a million not long ago. Arabs and foreigners mainly, by the look of the Rollers and stretch Mercedes and the people using the lobby. Problem is, the porter won’t give out on who lives at number twenty-five. Muttered about terrorism. That’s the trouble with having Arabs about. Everyone gets paranoid. Though he did swear blind that it wasn’t anyone with the initials AWP. Couldn’t get any more out of him. I tried him with AW, AP, you name it. No go. I’ll keep trying, but no promises. Could the flat belong to a third party? Could she have been using it to meet this AWP?’
‘Impossible to say. But there’s no mention of any AWP before.’
‘Likely to be having an affair?’
I was on the point of dismissing this when I forced myself to consider this possibility with more care. Accustomed to the tumultuous world of my regular clients, whose lives were a wide-open book of adultery, broken homes and abandoned children, it was all too easy to associate the quiet ordered existence of Grace in her beautiful home at Deepwell with contentment and marital fidelity. Yet if experience had taught me anything it was to distrust assumptions. ‘Unlikely,’ I said, thinking aloud. ‘She lived in the country, she seemed very happy in her marriage, she was very involved in her local community. She came to London once a we
ek or once every two weeks. Shopping mainly, and lunches. If she was seeing anyone in London, it must have been a very part-time relationship.’ Voicing this, the possibility seemed to grow more unlikely. ‘I’d say not. No—too happy, too busy.’
Accepting this, Ray said, ‘I’ll give the Regent’s Park flat another try later. Night shift, different porter. Might have a more positive attitude.’ For Ray, half the fun was the challenge of obtaining the unobtainable. ‘I’ll keep trying this Gordon person in Knightsbridge as well.’ He took a bite of his baguette and frowned as the ham and shredded lettuce filling spilled out over the table. ‘What about where she lived?’ he asked, salvaging what he could of his lunch. ‘Do you want me to do anything there?’
I gave him the list of the suppliers and tradespeople from her diary. ‘That’s it for the moment.’
‘No indications of what might have happened to her?’
‘No.’
‘The suicide type?’
‘Very unlikely.’
‘Victim of a stalker?’
‘Only if he had an exceptionally low profile. No suspicious people lurking in the area.’
‘Husband, then?’ Seeing my reaction, Ray added quickly, ‘Just asking. A friend?’
‘Yes.’
He nodded, eyeing me thoughtfully. ‘There was a missing person once. Years ago, when I was young and green, first CID job, with the Surrey Force. Looked for this woman everywhere. Allotment, shed, common, lovers’ lane. Kept passing this rough ground near her house, covered in big clumps of gorse and bramble. I thought, that’s a place to look. But I thought, well, they’re bound to have given that a good going over, aren’t they? Didn’t dare open my mouth. Didn’t want to make a fool of myself. Finally, two days on, took a look in my own time. Just shone a torch into all these clumps.’
‘And she was there.’
‘She was there.’ He gave up on the baguette with a grimace and washed the taste away with a long swig of beer. ‘I’m only saying it’s always worth checking the obvious.’
With five minutes until court resumed, I slipped into the lawyers’ room and called Corinthia for my messages. The Norfolk Police had just phoned, she told me, wanting to know if Mr Dearden would be free to take part in a national TV appeal on his wife’s disappearance tomorrow at four p.m. in Norwich.
Moving closer to the window to get the best of the mobile air waves, rehearsing what I would say, I called Will at Marsh House. I had tried him last night but the line had been permanently engaged, or he had taken the phone off the hook. Now the number rang without reply and the answering machine didn’t pick up. I tried his mobile, but a robotic voice informed me that the phone was switched off and invited me to try again later. To be certain I hadn’t misdialled, I called the house again. Listening to the distant ring, I pictured the shiny kitchen, the photographs in their silver frames, the undented cushions and pristine carpet, I heard the hush and stillness of the empty rooms. My mind carried me outside, beyond the garden to the marshes, but they too were empty.
Abandoning the call, the tension escaped me in a rush, and I hurried into court, reflecting on the power of emotional memory.
My last case came up at two thirty, the possession of drugs, who turned out to have a previous for drug-dealing which, all too predictably, he had omitted to mention to me. He seemed an unpleasant piece of work and I wasn’t too upset when he failed to get bail.
I came out into a hall that was almost empty. Making for the stairs, I recognized a familiar figure going through the double doors ahead of me and called out to him. Dave Adamson was one of the few policemen with whom I was on reasonable terms. For most police officers, defence lawyers were the enemy, almost as contemptible as the offenders themselves, amoral touts who sold their souls for devil’s gold and used trickery to undo all the police’s painstaking work. But Dave Adamson was made of more pragmatic stuff. We went back five years or so, to a missing-child case. He had done me a favour then, and I’d been glad to defend his brother-in-law on a drink-driving charge a couple of years later. Now and again he slipped me information though, typically, nothing that would get either of us into trouble.
Normally the first to say hello, Dave greeted me with something like coolness.
‘What a day!’ I exclaimed, while I tried to work out what might be wrong. ‘I was Duty. Got everything under the sun. How about you, Dave? How’re things?’
We went through the pleasantries, but all the time there was awkwardness in his manner.
I dropped the presence of jollity. ‘I do something. Dave?’
‘Nothing personal.’
I knew then that the new reputation of the firm had gone before me. ‘Ah. The Buck case?’
‘Tony James was a friend of mine.’
‘I hadn’t realized. I’m really very sorry.’
Accepting this, he nodded solemnly and we started down the stairs.
‘You know how it is,’ I said. ‘Someone has to take these cases on.’ The old argument, old as the law. I was sounding like Paul.
‘Sure, I know that,’ he said. ‘Sure, but…’
I glanced at his steadfast face. ‘But?’
He halted at the bottom of the stairs. ‘There’s talk,’ he said uncomfortably.
‘Yes, I know.’
He looked at me curiously, though whether it was the fact that I’d heard the talk which surprised him or my offhand reaction to it, I couldn’t tell.
‘Dave, I can only say that no defence team would ever go ahead with a case if they thought anyone was perjuring themselves.’
He gave me another odd look. ‘Maybe not,’ he said without conviction. ‘But this one really cut deep. This one really…’ But whatever he was about to say, he thought better of it. ‘I see Tony every week. Can’t speak, can’t feed himself.’ He tapped a forefinger to his temple. ‘Everything scrambled inside. Won’t ever get better. I see his family struggling to give him some sort of a life. And now they’re going to have a battle to get the full compensation because the records have it that he was disobeying orders, climbing walls and trespassing. That makes him partly responsible. That’s how they see it anyway, that’s how they measure it up. Not entitled to the full whack. Not entitled to everything he’d have got if it had been attempted murder during the course of duty, pure and simple.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Sometimes the system does not serve,’ he declared, with rare passion.
I couldn’t argue about that, and we stood for a moment in silent agreement before making for the revolving doors.
I said, ‘I hope he gets the full award.’
‘Nice to think so.’ He paused with a hand on the door. ‘But he could win the lottery, couldn’t he, and it still wouldn’t buy him his brain back.’
I got away from the office in good time and drove towards Kensington, taking the Embankment and cutting up past the Palace to Hyde Park. The twilight had the clarity that comes with prolonged cold and absolute stillness. The sky was deep blue and transparent as glass, while the taller buildings were tipped with a vivid and dashing pink.
I thought of Norfolk, and knew that such windless conditions would bring a fierce overnight frost. I remembered the winter mornings of my childhood, the way the marshes would be covered in a thick crust of rime and the smaller creeks in sheets of star-crazed ice, how the cold would settle low in a thin white mist. On the Gun one harsh January, Will and I had slithered along the frozen ditches, and dared each other to slide across the wider stretches of fresh-water ice. On the half tide we had taken Pod to a broad expanse of salt-marsh that for most of the winter was too boggy for walking and found the frozen mud hard and crunchy beneath our feet.
Picturing the ice, another image flew into my mind without warning, an image so vivid, so startling that I gripped the wheel involuntarily. I saw a transparent sheet of ice and beneath it, trapped, Grace’s body, frozen in all its beauty, arms out-stretched, hair spread in a golden fan around her head, like the Gaia symbol. Her skin w
as still perfect, full of colour and lights her features serene, and it was the incongruity of this that made the image evaporate as rapidly as it had come. I had seen dead people, young and old: they did not look beautiful or frozen or pink, they looked grey, diminished, void. I loosened my grip on the wheel and, breathing deeply, drove on.
The road was in a smart residential area behind Kensington High Street, in a devious oneway system designed to deter through traffic. Parking amid Mercs and BMWS, I tried calling Marsh House again, but there was no reply and no answering machine. Will’s mobile didn’t answer either, while Maggie’s number seemed to be permanently engaged.
In the streetlights I double-checked the address. Grace’s mother lived in a flat on an upper floor of a grand white-stuccoed house, next to an embassy whose mother country one would be hard-pressed to locate with any precision. At the top of a short flight of marble steps there were smart shrubs in china pots and large mirrored half-lanterns on either side of a glossy black front door. The five bells were marked with numbers, no names. A notice warned: STRICTLY NO HAWKERS, NO SALESMEN, NO CIRCULARS.
I pressed the bell of Flat 3 twice before the intercom crackled into life. I gave my name.
‘Who?’ the voice cried.
I reminded her that we had spoken on the telephone that morning.
‘But the name.’
I repeated it.
‘I thought it was Wood-something. William said you were called Wood-something.’
‘Woodford was my maiden name,’ I explained. ‘My married name is O’Neill.’
‘Well, really,’ she complained, with a sharp sigh. The intercom went dead and the electronic door-release gave a fierce buzz. Flat 3 was on the first floor. It was a while before the door was unbolted and opened. Veronica Bailey was a tall woman with a long gaunt face, a slash of scarlet lipstick and the sort of upswept hairstyle that can only be maintained by frequent trips to the hairdresser. Her hair was an indeterminate shade, somewhere between mouse and blonde, and her skin seemed to blend into the pallor of her rheumy eyes.
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