Sour Grapes

by Natasha Cooper

  Chapter Seven

  Emma turned over the third sheet of Willow’s immensely long letter to read:

  And so you see I liked her. I’m not surprised she can’t bear the garden her husband made in memory of the boy. She took me down to see it, and I could hardly bear it either. In a way it’s very beautiful, but so depressing. It’s just a green court, rectangular and bounded by dense, perfectly trimmed yew hedges. In the middle is a statue of a young boy—not one of those pseudo-classical marble jobs one sees in stately-home gardens, but stainless steel and very modern, almost abstract. It’s brilliant—the nearest thing to the concept of misery in three dimensions that I’ve ever seen—but peculiar. Oh, yes: and on the plinth is a quote from Blake: ‘Everything that lives / Lives not alone, nor for itself.’ Which I take it means that Lutterworth just couldn’t separate the fact of the boy’s death from anything in the rest of his life.

  The statue is in the middle of four paths that cut the lawn into sections. Each of those is guarded by a pencil-like cypress tree, quite small and very dark. You know, the sort that grows in Italian cemeteries.

  You’ll probably be wondering what’s got into me, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so affected by a place. I’ve never felt upset in graveyards, perhaps because there’s something peaceful about them as though they’re an acknowledgment of lives that have been lived and are over. There’s been a kind of acceptance in all the ones I’ve ever visited, however sad they seem. I think that must be it. There’s no peace or sense of reconciliation in Lutterworth’s garden, just anger and that terrible unhappiness. Perhaps I imagined it all or have got sentimental because I sympathised with Jemima so much.

  Having met her, I’m even more interested in her husband than I was from what Jane told us. I won’t go on about her now, because this letter’s getting much too long, but if you want to ring me at some suitable moment (and I shall expect you to reverse the charges), I’ll tell you all the rest. Or, better still, drop in when you’re next in London. I’d love to see you. And I’d love to know how you’re getting on with Andrew L—and everything else about the thesis.

  By the way, Tom sends his love. We had a good long talk this evening and things seem to be going marginally better in Strasbourg. Hope all is well with you, and that Jag is continuing friendly. I would love to meet him, too. Why not bring him for a weekend soon? Just ring and say when you’d like to come.

  Love,

  Willow.

  PS This may be quite unnecessary, but I thought I ought to pass on a warning from Jane. She said that this man Hal Marstall she introduced you to is well known for charming people he thinks might give him useful information. Jane said a lot of thoroughly intelligent, sensible people have fallen for the charm and then been dumped as soon as he’d got what he wanted.

  Emma put the letter down on her desk next to Andrew Lutterworth’s polite refusal to see her and wondered why she did not feel more grateful for what Willow had done. After a moment she recognised that she did not feel grateful at all. Quite the opposite: what she felt was something pretty much like outrage that Willow had homed in on her work without warning or explanation.

  Well aware that she was being absurd, and horribly grudging, Emma told herself that Willow could possibly have been trying to rub her nose in her comparative lack of experience—or her poverty. Willow’s instruction to reverse the charges the next time Emma telephoned was a perfectly normal example of her usual generosity, not a suggestion that Emma could not afford telephone calls. And even if it had meant that, so what? It would have been almost true.

  After a while she managed to laugh at herself and took the time to reread Willow’s letter in a more suitably grateful spirit. As she reached the end of it she realised that, helpful though it was, it was also a kind of challenge.

  When she had first discovered that Andrew Lutterworth was not prepared to talk to her, she had considered dropping his case and looking for something else on which to build her thesis. Now that Willow had taken a hand, that was no longer an option. Absurd though she might be, Emma knew that she was going to have to prove herself capable of finding out everything she needed to know about him and without asking for any more help from Willow.

  The difficulty was that Willow would have been exceedingly useful. Not only could she pick her way through any tangle of fact and supposition better than anyone else, but she was also in a position to introduce Emma to all sorts of people who might have provided the information she was going to need.

  ‘Too bad,’ she said aloud, determined to get the necessary facts from other sources.

  The most immediately useful would probably have been Lutterworth’s colleagues at Hill, Snow, Parkes. Emma herself knew no one who worked there, but she was fairly sure that her half-brother would. A lot of his friends had become accountants; some of them must have found their way to Hill, Snow, Parkes.

  Emma wondered whether she could bring herself to go to him for help. She loathed having anything to do with him and disliked the idea of adding to his conviction that she was incapable of running her own life. On the other hand it was hard to see how asking for a simple introduction could lead to any serious trouble, and she really was going to have to get over her stupidity about him soon. Shrugging, she reached for the telephone and dialled his number.

  ‘Hello,’ she said when he answered. ‘It’s me, Emma. How are you?’

  ‘Fine. Fine. What about you? Sick of fossicking about in filthy prisons yet?’ He laughed with a familiar—and horribly patronising—assumption of mateyness that made her ears sing.

  ‘Certainly not. I find them fascinating,’ she said, lying. ‘And they’re not that filthy, you know. Nowadays prisons are remarkably clean. But that’s by the way. Anthony, I’ve been wondering whether you could give me a little help.’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘What is it you’re after?’

  ‘Just that I want an introduction to someone at Hill, Snow, Parkes, and I wondered if you knew anyone there.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t want to go to them, Sweet Thing. They’d be far too expensive for you, especially now that you’re wasting your money on this degree nonsense.’

  Even though she had always detested the nickname Anthony had bestowed on her years earlier, Emma said nothing. Having failed to make him understand why it irked her so much to be addressed as ‘Thing’, she had never even tried to explain her distaste for the word ‘sweet’. It was the least suitable description of the way she felt when she was anywhere near him.

  ‘Look, tell me what the problem is and I’ll have a word with my own accountants. Then if they need to talk to you direct, I can put them on to you and you won’t have to bother about the bill.’ He chuckled. ‘I don’t suppose whatever it is will take them long, and I’d be delighted to underwrite any fee they might decide to charge.’

  ‘That’s very generous of you,’ she said, trying to make herself feel grateful. ‘But actually it’s not professional advice I want. Do you in fact know anyone at Hill, Snow?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I do. What is it you’re after then, if it’s not accountancy?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. It’s to do with a case I’m looking into and I have to be discreet. I’m sure you can understand, Anthony. I’m sorry to have bothered you. I hope I didn’t take you away from anything too important’

  ‘It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Sweet Thing. You know that. And I’m hardly ever busy on Monday mornings. I’m glad you rang. We must make a date for you to come to stay. I miss you now that you’ve abandoned us for the oiks in St Albans. When can you come?’

  Emma thought of the days when one of Anthony’s favourite tricks had been to shut her in the big cupboard in the nursery and tell her that she would stay locked in until she died of starvation. Each time he let her out he told her that he had relented ‘just this once’but that she mustn’t expect such mercy again. She had always nodded, promising good behaviour, swearing not to tell anyone, be
gging him to let her go, but nothing she could offer him would protect her from the next stage in his game. Taking her right forearm between his hands, he would twist in opposite directions. He called it a Chinese burn and told her that it was only the first stage of what he would do to her if she ever talked. And now he claimed to miss her. It was horrible.

  ‘I’ll be a bit too busy for weekends away until I’ve broken the back of my thesis,’ she said, furious with herself for still not being able to confront him with her memories and tell him what she thought of him. ‘Give Grania my love, won’t you? I hope she’s OK.’

  ‘Of course, Sweet Thing. But I’ll get you back here in the end. Now don’t forget to let me know if you ever need anything. ’Bye for now.’

  Emma put down the receiver and rubbed her hands together, noticing how badly they had been sweating. It was absurd to react as though she were still frightened of him. He had no power over her any longer, and it was nearly twenty years since he had actually done anything, but she rarely managed a conversation with him without remembering the worst times.

  Siblings often fight, she told herself yet again, and lots of boys find their younger sisters exasperating and devise all sorts of torments for them.

  Shuddering at the memories she could not exorcise or rationalise, however hard she tried, she told herself that she must have been mad to set them off again by ringing him up. She should have known better. Ashamed of herself, feeling thoroughly cowardly and altogether absurd, she picked up her pen and started to write:

  Dearest Willow, Thank you for your long letter. You shouldn’t have bothered to do my work for me when you’ve got such a lot of your own. But it was kind of you to take so much trouble. Lutterworth’s refused to take a polygraph test, but I’m confident that I can find out enough from other people to use the case as we planned. I hope Lucinda’s better and that you’re well. I’d love to come for another weekend and will talk to Jag. I’ll ring asap.

  Love,

  Em.

  Hoping that she had been properly grateful rather than revoltingly hypocritical, Emma took the card out to the nearest postbox.

  When she got back to her room, she cleared her mind of everything but her determination to understand Andrew Lutterworth. As she reread Willow’s account of his son’s death, Emma could not help wondering why on earth his lawyers had not used it in his defence or at least in mitigation. Necrotising fasciitis was so rare and so horrifying that anyone who had had to watch his child die of it would have aroused sympathy. And most men convicted of killing, even by means of dangerous driving, would have wanted all the sympathy they could get.

  When the telephone rang, she was so deeply involved that for an instant she could not think what the noise meant. She shook her head as though that could sort out her muddled thoughts and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Emma?’ said a cheerful voice. ‘Hi, it’s Hal, here. Hal Marstall. D’you remember?’

  ‘Of course, I do. How nice!’ She felt quite breathless. ‘Sorry to sound so weird. I was in the middle of something and my mind’s sliding about it still. How are you?’

  ‘Fine. I was really just ringing to see whether there was anything else I could tell you about the shit Lutterworth.’

  ‘You are kind. Actually there is. I need to find out who his solicitors are. D’you happen to know?’

  ‘I do, in fact. Bricton and Bromere. They don’t do much crime. I suspect he went to them because he’d dealt with them on his clients’business. They’re one of the big city firms used by the sort of firms he worked for, and they do have a small crime department.’

  ‘Mainly for fraud, I suppose?’

  Hal laughed. ‘Spot on as usual, Ms Gnatche. Yes, but they manage to deal with other sorts of crime and misdemeanours. Careless driving is not that much rarer than fraud, even if most perpetrators are luckier than Lutterworth in hitting walls and bollards rather than people. Why d’you want to know?’

  ‘He’s declined to be interviewed for my thesis. I thought I might get hold of his lawyer and see if I couldn’t persuade him or her to put on a little pressure.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky. Those sort of firms are not only utterly clamlike, but also impregnable. Even worse than auditors.’

  ‘Thanks for the encouragement.’

  ‘Not at all.’ Hal laughed and she could not help joining in. “Look, I’ve got to come up your way this week on the trail of a story. Any chance of seeing you? Taking you out to dinner, perhaps?”

  ‘How nice!’ said Emma automatically. In the days when she had been trying to live the way her mother wanted, she had always obediently accepted invitations unless they were from people she positively could not bear and when she was not thinking she reverted to the old ways.

  ‘Great. I’ll check out the local restaurants with one of my mates who does a food column and pick somewhere really good.’

  ‘You are kind, Hal, but…’ Emma remembered the postscript to Willow’s letter.

  ‘But what?’ He sounded worried, which disarmed her.

  ‘Nothing. I was just going to say that I’m not all that keen on elaborate restaurants, you know with sixteen different sorts of plates and triple tablecloths and all that. But I don’t want to sound ungrateful.’

  ‘You couldn’t. And I agree with you. But I do like good food.’

  She laughed and felt reasonably confident of her ability to resist any attempt to charm her into indiscretion.

  ‘Me too,’ she said firmly. ‘It’ll be really good to see you. Thank you, Hal.’

  ‘I’ll ring when I know for sure which day, but it’s likely to be either Wednesday or Thursday.’

  ‘Oh, help. Wednesday’s out,’ said Emma, remembering in time that she and Jag had arranged to go to see a film together. ‘But Thursday would be great.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can swing it and let you know. ’Bye for now.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said. It was some time before she realised that she was still holding the receiver and that she was smiling.

  The next day a large brown envelope was sitting slantwise in her pigeonhole when she went past it on her way out to get some breakfast. She took the packet with her and opened it as she was drinking coffee and eating a stale Danish pastry, to find a thick pile of typescript with a handwritten note on top, which read:

  Dear Emma. It struck me last week that you might find a transcript of the trial useful and it was sent up from the dead storage just after we finished speaking. I’ve had it copied for you.

  I’ve sorted my diary and will be with you on Thursday, sometime around eight. Ring me if that’s a problem.

  Good luck and good hunting.

  Hal

  Grateful for his help, she castigated herself all over again for having been silly enough to have objected to Willow’s. There seemed no point eating the rest of the Danish pastry, which was sticky and yet tasted dusty. She finished the coffee, wiped her fingers and stuffed the typescript back in its envelope.

  Back in her room, she cleared a good space on the desk and settled down to read the transcript of Andrew Lutterworth’s trial.

  An hour later she stopped reading and turned back to look again at a brief question-and-answer session between Lutterworth’s counsel and the police officer who had been the first at the scene of the crash. Emma had always known that most of the evidence against Lutterworth had been circumstantial, but, having read everything that had been said in court, she was even more surprised that the jury had been persuaded to convict him. As far as she could see, the only fact connecting him to the crash was his ownership of the car.

  ‘If a man is really innocent until he’s been proved guilty,’ she muttered aloud, ‘then Lutterworth is innocent. They should never have convicted him. Never. However much they disliked him.’

  Skipping ahead again to the judge’s summing up, she read a fair description of what little evidence there was and a strongly worded warning that the defendant had no need to prove any
thing.

  No grounds for an appeal there, Emma thought. It must have been the confession that did for him.

  He had signed it under caution, and so it was admissible evidence even though he had later withdrawn it. The jury had not only been given the text of it in court, they had also been able to listen to the tape of his voice actually telling the police that he was guilty.

  Emma could hardly bear the frustration of being unable to talk to him directly. Without knowing what levers the police had used or how they had made him feel at the moment when he decided to confess, she would not be able to get any further unless she could persuade the police officers themselves to tell her what they had done. That did not seem impossible. After all, they had got the result they wanted at the trial and might well be prepared to discuss the likely reasons for Lutterworth ‘s change of plea with a bona fide researcher.

  Having cut herself off from Willow’s help, Emma realised that she could hardly ask Tom to intervene on her behalf as she might otherwise have done.

  Well, she told herself, it’ll probably do me good to fix it for myself; it’ll certainly serve me right.

  There were four police officers on her course, three men and one woman. She thought of each in turn and eventually decided to play safe and go for Janet Ranton. They loathed each other, but for some reason Janet seemed more approachable than any of the men.

  There was to be a meeting in Professor Bonmotte’s rooms that afternoon, at which one of the social workers was to read a paper on the psychology of serial sex offenders. Emma had not been planning to go because she had decided never to work with sex offenders, but she changed her mind.

  Dressed in unmockable, unthreatening black jeans and a long beige cotton sweater, she walked through the campus towards Bonmotte’s rooms just before three. It was a clear afternoon and most of the rain clouds that had been looming over the depressing concrete and brick buildings for weeks had gone. The air was almost warm and the tightly curled spears of the first daffodils were just beginning to show signs of yellow.