No One Will Hear (Sam Williams Book 2)

by Joel Hames

  Willoughby paused, and gazed slowly and portentously across the room. I fought back a sigh of impatience. I’d worked with Elizabeth Maurier on one of her biggest cases, and a handful more that were noteworthy enough. I had a photographic memory, and Elizabeth Maurier was well aware of it. I was on the list.

  “The individuals in question,” Willoughby continued, finally, “are Lizzy Maurier.”

  All eyes turned to Lizzy, who nodded. She’d known this was coming.

  “Sam Williams.”

  I stared at the fly on the glass on the desk. Most of the people there had no idea who Sam Williams was or what connection he could possibly have had with Elizabeth Maurier.

  “And David Brooks-Powell.”

  To my credit, I managed to keep my gasp quiet enough that I didn’t think anyone had noticed. I turned and looked at him and he was staring at me, his mouth open, as shocked as I was. Too shocked for one of those nods, at least.

  The gathering broke up a few minutes later, with assurances from Willoughby that he would be in touch with each of the beneficiaries to discuss the arrangements regarding the various bequests. I’d managed to reach him before he vanished under a flurry of disappointed relatives, and learned that his phrasing had not just been a figure of speech: that retainer was, indeed, small. He would contact me in due course, he said, and not for the first time, I found myself wishing he didn’t know where to find me. I didn’t want Elizabeth Maurier’s records and rough memoirs, I didn’t want to delve into the past and turn it into a three-hundred-page eulogy, and I certainly didn’t want to work together with David Brooks-Powell any more than he wanted to work together with me.

  Lizzy Maurier had other ideas. I’d tried to escape as unobtrusively as possible, but evidently I hadn’t managed to escape unseen. She caught up with me on the pavement outside Willoughby’s office, December’s rain and wind a welcome relief from the oppressive calm inside, and took my right hand in both of hers before I could think what to do. The street was empty apart from the two of us and a man standing on the other side of the road behind a tiny green motorbike. It was parked on a double yellow line. He was watching us, I thought, or the door behind us, but as I caught his eye he ran a hand through his thick wet hair and turned to his phone.

  “Sam,” said Lizzy, gazing into my face.

  Lizzy Maurier. Little Lizzy Maurier, I remembered, that’s what we’d called her, that’s what her own mother had called her, Little Lizzy, though she was only a couple of years younger than I was. She’d always seemed somehow squashed, even her name a diminutive of her mother’s.

  “I’m sorry, Lizzy,” I stammered. I meant to go on, to apologise for declining the bequest, because that was what I was going to do, no doubt about it, and neither Claire nor Lizzy Maurier nor the long dead arm of her mother would stop me. Willoughby’s audience were still drifting out of his office and casting curious glances as they passed Lizzy and me talking in the rain, a whole wake of vultures of power and influence who would expect me to do my duty by Elizabeth Maurier, and they weren’t going to stop me either. Instead, I stopped myself. I’m sorry, Lizzy, I’d said, and she’d nodded. I’m sorry for your mother’s death. I’m sorry I haven’t seen you in ten years and have no idea what your life is, what you do, who you love, what you despise. We were friends, once – not close, not lovers or soulmates, but friends who shared a laugh and a drink and a wary complaint about that mother, and I’m sorry all that’s over. Poetry, I remembered. That had been her passion.

  “Do you still write poems?” I asked. It was a stupid question, a line from a film in black-and-white where people wore hats and spoke in clipped voices devoid of emotion until it swept through them in a squall. But there was nothing else. The rain had turned stronger and colder. Her mother had died. We were no longer friends. What could I ask?

  She shook her head and laughed.

  “Oh no, Sam. Not for a long time. I’m a scholar, now. A professor, no less.”

  Now I remembered. Elizabeth had been against the poetry thing. Too fanciful. She’d wanted a job for her daughter, with a salary, and Lizzy had turned to academia. What Elizabeth wanted, Elizabeth got.

  “Of course. Renaissance literature, right?”

  She beamed.

  “You remember! How charming! Yes, that’s right. I’m a Fellow of St John’s College. Oxford.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “That’s marvellous.”

  “I have to go, Sam, there are so many people I need to speak to. But I’m glad to have spoken to you.”

  She was still holding onto my hand. I smiled back at her.

  “Goodbye, Sam. I’ll be in touch about the memoirs. Won’t it be wonderful? I’ll get your details from Christian.”

  With that, she was gone, back into Willoughby’s offices, and I was alone on the street with the wind and the rain and a bequest as unwelcome as the weather.

  2: Life Coach

  NEITHER THE WEATHER nor my mood had improved when I reached the flat. Islington looked no more appealing in the rain than Mayfair had done, although the thought of Elizabeth Maurier’s bequest, of what I would be doing and who I would be doing it with, would have blackened the brightest of skies.

  Claire was on the phone. I could hear her as I turned the key in the lock. “OK, Jonathan,” she was saying. I thought I heard a note in her voice as she said the words, resignation, perhaps, or disappointment. The Tribune’s new editor, I assumed. Jonathan Thorwell. She spoke quietly, but the door was thin and the gap at the bottom large enough to let the cold air in and spill private conversation into the corridor.

  “I understand,” she said, as I walked in. She ended the call, put the phone down, turned to me and smiled, and whatever she’d been talking about, whatever shit I was going to have to endure at the hands of David Brooks-Powell, that smile let me push it all to one side.

  For about five seconds.

  She walked up and kissed me on the cheek and asked me how it had been, and even though I’d resolved on the way home not to let it bother me, even though I started out laughing about Willoughby and the vultures, by the time I’d finished it was like it had all just hit me for the first time.

  “So now I’ve got to work with that bastard and dig through Elizabeth Maurier’s history, and I’m supposed to be grateful?”

  I slumped down onto the sofa and looked at her. She was still standing, one hand under her chin and a frown on her face, our midget Christmas tree, thin on foliage and sparsely decorated, obscured almost entirely by her head. She didn’t answer.

  “I’m seriously thinking about just saying no, telling them I’m too busy or some crap like that.”

  Still nothing.

  I wasn’t busy and Claire knew I wasn’t busy, and she hadn’t shied away from reminding me of the fact in recent days. I’d just spent a fortnight in Manchester getting beaten up, watching people die, recovering from a nasty bout of septicaemia. I hadn’t earned a penny while I was up there and the only client I had was a lying Egyptian named Hasina Khalil who wanted me to stop her getting deported and couldn’t afford to pay me what she’d promised. Even Willoughby’s small retainer was more than I was getting anywhere else.

  She shrugged. She looked tired, I realised, paler than usual, dark pools around her eyes.

  “What do you reckon?” I asked.

  “What do you reckon?” she replied. “You’ve got to decide this yourself.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “I know. I know you are. Maybe you’re just not very good at it.” She sat down beside me and took my hand. “You’ve got to be honest with yourself.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, because I didn’t.

  “Ask yourself why. Why you don’t want to do it, why you don’t want anything to do with Elizabeth Maurier and David Brookes-Powell and all that shitty past you’ve spent ten years hiding from. No, wait,” she said, as I opened my mouth to protest. “I’m not saying you’re wrong. Sometimes it’s right to run. Sometimes it’s ri
ght to hide. You might have a good reason. But you need to know what that reason is before you know if it’s good enough.”

  I nodded, even though I knew I’d been right to get away from all that – not that I’d had much choice – and I’d been right to stay away since. “Thanks,” I replied, and she patted my hand, walked into the kitchen, and sat down behind her laptop. I stared at her back for a moment, and shuffled into the bedroom.

  That was the way we worked, when we were both at home, which we usually were, except on Thursdays, when Claire put in her weekly office appearance and trotted out an article or two. Me in the bedroom, feet up, laptop beside me, trying to keep my eyes open and focus on work instead of daydreaming or trawling the web. Claire at the kitchen table, straight-backed, frowning in concentration, neck deep in the story she’d been working on for two years already, and stopping only to raid the fridge or make us both a coffee. I’d surrendered the lease on my office a couple of months back, when it became clear I neither needed nor could afford it. Hours of silence could slip by, each of us lost in our work.

  The trouble was, I didn’t have enough work to get lost in. I checked my emails and sent a few myself, and made sure nothing surprising had happened to Hasina Khalil. Hasina Khalil had surprised me from the beginning, a self-proclaimed warrior for sexual equality who turned out to be a preening middle-aged woman who had no more interest in sexual equality than a sparrow, a pawn in a political power-game who turned out to be the wife of a petty embezzler, a millionairess who couldn’t even afford to pay me. If it weren’t for the fact that no one else wanted to pay me either, I’d have extracted myself from Hasina Khalil some time ago. As things stood, even a client who couldn’t pay was better than no client at all.

  I found myself checking up on David Brooks-Powell. Still a consultant, I noted, although from the various references to recent cases he’d been involved in it looked like he’d managed to bag himself a handful of clients. Brooks-Powell had been Elizabeth Maurier’s golden boy, edging out his rivals one by one, until I’d toppled him from that perch last year with a lawsuit against the firm and, by implication, its most aggressive partner. He’d gone from David Brooks-Powell, Partner, Maurier & Co, to David Brooks-Powell, Legal Consultant, and everyone in the business knew he’d been as good as fired.

  I changed tack and looked up Elizabeth Maurier, just out of interest. The firm’s website was choked with expressions of shock and sadness, ringing through all of them a clear message that the work would continue. Not just “work”, but “the work”. That was how they saw it at Mauriers. Less a business, more a crusade.

  There were obituaries everywhere. The legal press, but also the national dailies and even the BBC, buried half a dozen clicks away from the main page. I scanned them, one after another, hoping for something that would tell me why she’d decided to say her goodbyes by inflicting this torment on someone she hadn’t spoken with in years.

  There was nothing new, nothing surprising. Childhood in Oxfordshire. Her brother, three years older than her, had died from a misdiagnosed bout of meningitis when he was only nine. Elizabeth had always said it was this that inspired her to fight for those who suffered, but she wasn’t the only one. Her mother was a GP who went on to chair the General Medical Council. Her father was a respected intellectual and legal professor who mentored half a dozen cabinet members and a Prime Minister. She’d left the family home at eighteen – I remembered the house, which had eventually become hers, the drawing room and the smoking room and the gardens, plural – and gone on to excel at Cambridge. Then the early years making her name in the legal profession. Her marriage to an artist thirty years her senior, a man she had turned from alcoholic and serial philanderer to the very model of propriety, the perfect union of art and establishment. The birth of her daughter, Lizzy. The deaths of her parents, just one year apart. The establishment of Maurier & Co. The death of her husband. The landmark cases, including one I’d worked on. The lobbying to improve remand conditions and reduce the maximum time in custody before charge. The friends and connections among the great and good. The brutal and untimely death.

  I knew all this. I’d known it for years. It was burned into my brain, and I’d have known it even without the photographic memory. Elizabeth Maurier was a great woman who made the mistake of hiring a smug, supercilious bastard and not seeing him for what he was until it was too late. If she’d seen it at all – she’d named Brooks-Powell alongside me, after all, and the will had been reviewed and tweaked just six weeks before she’d died, so she’d had plenty of time to cut him out after the revelations in court.

  So if I knew all this, if I knew everything there was to know about the woman, if all that remained was the detail, the scraps from court records, the recollections of friends and colleagues – if I knew all this, then why the hell was I reading it? What was I looking for?

  I folded down the computer and walked back into the kitchen, where Claire was sitting exactly where I’d left her. She looked up as I came in, rested her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands and gave me that look that meant she had something to say to me. I waited.

  “Did you ask yourself?” she asked. “Did you get an answer?”

  I shrugged. We bounced things off each other, in normal times. I didn’t think we’d done much bouncing since I’d returned from Manchester. I’d been too caught up in Elizabeth Maurier’s death to have anything much to bounce. Claire was still throwing everything she had at her story, a piece of journalism on a group of men who had been smuggling girls into England for a decade, and selling them to sadists who killed them for pleasure. It had been more than two years in the making, this story, and for most of those two years Claire had been sniffing for scraps. A name here, a location there – none of it really helped. The men who’d done the killing had been caught, and no one except Claire seemed to be interested in finding out who’d brought the girls to England and delivered them to their murderers. Five girls. Five deaths. Five killers behind bars, and a dozen more who’d “helped”. Four of the girls didn’t even have names. “Girl A, Blonde,” the police called them. “Girl B, Brunette.” Claire had given them names, not their real names, nobody knew their real names. But names more real than “A” and “B”.

  A few weeks ago, that had changed. I’d been back from Manchester, just for the day, and we’d been trying some of that bouncing. She helped me, I helped her. She’d made a little progress and come to the tentative conclusion that two of the girls had been brought to the same industrial site in Sussex when they’d first arrived in the UK. She’d run checks on all the businesses on the site. She’d listed the names of all their directors. It was one of those tiny steps that usually went nowhere, but it was all she had.

  She’d shown me the list, and one of those names had chimed with something I remembered.

  Jonas Wolf.

  Buried deep in Claire’s files was a set of photographs taken from the security system of the apartment block in which Rosa had died. Rosa was a real name, the first of the victims, the only one to be identified. The men who’d been present when she’d died were all in prison, but the person who’d brought her there had never been found. Every individual who’d been buzzed through the main door of the apartment block in the twenty-four hours prior to the murder had been photographed by the security cameras, and Claire had worked for weeks to get hold of those photographs and identify those individuals. All thirty-six had been questioned by the police, and released without charge. Rosa herself couldn’t be seen on the shots, but Claire was convinced she was there, just out of sight, walking obediently to her death.

  I’d remembered those photographs and dug them up, and sorted through them until I’d found the one I remembered. A young, dark-haired man with a winning smile and a couple of days’ worth of stubble. Across his face, in Claire’s handwriting, were the words “Jonas Wolf”.

  Jonas Wolf ran a business on the site the traffickers may have used to bring the girls in. Jonas Wolf had been in the a
partment block in which one of the girls had died.

  Jonas Wolf should have been the beginning of the end. Claire delved deeper. After years of dead ends, there were suddenly names and addresses and clear, if circumstantial, evidence. Certain people had been in certain places at certain times. I’d told her it was time to celebrate, but she’d shaken her head and said she wasn’t celebrating until she was done.

  She still wasn’t done. Whatever she had, it wasn’t enough for the police. They weren’t interested. Instead of celebrating Claire was still sitting there, in that same spot, silent, typing and thinking, the way she’d been typing and thinking almost every hour of every day since I’d got back. No wonder she’d been so patient with me. My issues with David Brooks-Powell and the Mauriers were probably light relief.

  She took my silence as a negative, and sighed.

  “OK, then. I’ll answer for you. I’ll tell you why you don’t want to work on this memoir.”

  “Go on, then,” I replied, my voice more petulant than I’d intended. She ignored the tone.

  “You’re scared of David Brooks-Powell. That’s all this is. You’re scared of the man, even after what you did to him in court. I think you somehow imagined that would be the end of Brooks-Powell, that he’d melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West the moment you beat him, and you’re bitter and disappointed that he’s still around at all. I think you need to speak to him and realise he’s just a person, even if he is a twenty-four carat bastard. He can’t hurt you any more, but he’s got this power over you and you’ll never shake it as long as you think he’s more than human.”

  It was a long speech, but it wasn’t Claire’s. I knew Claire. Those weren’t Claire’s words.

  “More than human?” I asked, and back she came.

  “Yes. He had something over you, once. He knew you’d been cutting corners. He got you fired. Well boo-fucking-hoo. That was ten years ago. You can’t blame David Brooks-Powell for everything that’s happened since then.”