No One Will Hear (Sam Williams Book 2)

by Joel Hames

  I gave up looking for obvious trails and started again, a third attempt, this time digesting every word and consigning every detail to that bit of my brain where they’d slumber in steel-trapped isolation until I chose to recall them. That was the way it was supposed to work, of course; that was the way it had once worked. I realised, as I flicked past the second week before her death and into the third, that this was the way I’d got things done before the Grimshaw case, before everything had gone sour. Use the material. No preconceptions. Use the material and find the thing that jarred. It was a cold way to work, but it had brought results. I hadn’t done anything like this in years, and I wasn’t sure I could do it any more. For one thing, that steel trap wasn’t as solid as it had been. I’d found myself, over recent months, forgetting things I wouldn’t have forgotten ten years earlier. The date of Claire’s parents’ anniversary. The precise mix for the perfect vodka martini. The words my own mother had used when I’d informed her that I was leaving Mauriers to set up on my own.

  But I hadn’t tried anything like this in all that time, either. Perhaps, I reasoned, it was all about use, a machine that had grown rusty through neglect but could be sharpened and burnished to a bright fiery point once set in motion. And Claire was still asleep and Colman hadn’t called and the Hasina Khalil case was stalled and it wasn’t like I had anything else to do, anyway.

  Halfway through week three I found something, not a revelation or a jar, more a curiosity. I locked it away and continued, hoping for further reference to it, but there was nothing, and no more curiosities, either. I shut the file – I’d gone through six months, which I felt could count as a heavy morning’s work by recent standards – and returned to it.

  Elizabeth Maurier had described one of her dreams. Again, not something I’d have associated with the woman, but it seemed it was a regular habit of hers. She mentioned a man called Derek Case on a number of occasions, and the name rang a bell, so I flicked through one of the earlier files until I found it. An old friend of her mother’s, it seemed; an aristocrat and dilettante who’d made a habit of interpreting his friends’ dreams back in the fifties, at some of the more unusual Maurier soirees.

  But Case wasn’t the curiosity. In this particular dream she had been standing in a large white room. At the other end of the room, a man had stood and smiled at her. She omitted any mention of his features – perhaps he had been featureless, or so forgettable as to defy the waking recall. But his hands had been moving, up and down and side to side, movements of finesse and detail, and the whole time he had carried on smiling at her. She could not see what he was doing with his hands, what he was holding or folding or creating. She had found herself walking towards him, and slowly his activities had come into sharper view.

  The man was working with thread. Gossamer-thin, as she put it, fine, almost invisible, or perhaps entirely invisible other than to her sleeping eyes. He was still moving, carefully, eyes on her the whole time but with small, precise movements that suggested a lifetime of practice. She drew closer, unable to see what object he was weaving.

  And then – she could not recall why – she chose to stop. Only, she could not. She continued to move, walking jerkily towards him, unable to bring herself to a halt.

  Only when she was within touching distance of the man did she see it. He was weaving a web, a brilliantly complex network of node and thread with lines crossing and extending in all directions. Some of those lines were looped around her, around her arms and legs, her neck, her fingers and feet. As she gazed down at herself – it was unclear at this point whether she was just looking down at her torso and legs, or had left her body entirely and was watching from above – it became apparent that the thread was everywhere, was wrapped around her so thoroughly that she was all but cocooned. And the man continued to smile, wider and wider, drawing her closer and closer in no little fear until she woke, suddenly, cold and afraid, and, she wrote, required a large whisky before she felt able to go back to sleep.

  Curious, in itself, but still not what had caught my attention. Elizabeth had made no detailed attempt to deconstruct the dream; there was no mention of the ubiquitous Mr Case in this fragment. But underneath it all she had written a single sentence, and it was this that had caught my attention.

  I do feel a little guilty, it said, about ignoring Dr Shapiro.

  The name meant nothing to me. But the jump, from the surrealism of the dream to what I assumed was a flesh-and-blood human being, had seemed striking. I’d be looking up this Dr Shapiro.

  I opened up the laptop and hit a few keys, but it was old and slow to wake up. Slower even than Claire, who dragged herself into the kitchen while I was making another coffee.

  “Morning!” I called, with a brightness I didn’t feel; I’d been lost in Elizabeth Maurier and her dreams.

  “Hmmm,” she replied, and shuffled over to take the cup I was offering. The winceyette had been complemented by a greyish dressing gown that had seen better days and a pair of slippers with semi-detached soles that slapped forlornly at the floor every time she took a step. I turned to look at her, properly, and she glanced at me and then away again, but the glance lasted long enough to appreciate the extent of her hangover.

  She looked awful. I’d seen Claire in some pretty bad states, I’d held her hair back as she vomited a day’s worth of food and a lifetime’s worth of tequila onto the floor inches from a toilet bowl, but I hadn’t seen her look like this, pale with odd blotches on her face and bags under her eyes that could have done for a week’s skiing. I toyed with the idea of reviving our conversation of the previous night, but there was no point. I knew what the problem was, what had turned her from a normal woman into a zombie on a hair trigger. We’d been through it. She knew what I thought. It would crack or it wouldn’t. More work, small steps, that was the answer. Small steps, and distance. Instead I asked her, quietly, if she wanted some paracetamol, and she nodded gently, a fraction of a nod, as if anything stronger might sever her neck. I poured her a glass of water and handed her the pill, and watched as she knocked it back and returned to the bedroom without a word, closing the door behind her.

  I finished my coffee and opened that door a crack. She was face-down on the bed, sleeping, but not happily; twitching and jerking every now and then as if she were trying to shake off a curse. I backed out and returned to the computer.

  Ten minutes later – before I’d found out anything about Dr Shapiro other than that there were several hundred Dr Shapiros in England alone – the house phone went off. I answered on the third ring.

  “Hello, is Claire there?” asked a smooth upper-class voice I didn’t recognise.

  “Who’s calling?” I replied.

  “It’s Jonathan, at the Tribune,” he said, and I realised with a start that it was Thursday, Claire’s one day at the office each week, only she wasn’t fit for her own kitchen let alone the noise and chaos of the newsroom.

  “She’s not very well,” I lied, “can I ask her to call you when she’s feeling better.”

  “Please do. It’s nothing urgent. And do send her my best wishes for her recovery.”

  He’d seemed pleasant enough, I thought, but he’d been parachuted in from an American magazine owned by the same proprietor, over a number of long-serving and well-qualified Tribune stalwarts, and from what Claire had said the previous night he wasn’t proving the most reliable of editors. I decided not to wake her. Whatever Jonathan Thorwell wanted to talk to her about – and I suspected it might be something to do with her role at the Tribune – she’d be better off hearing it after she’d had more sleep.

  I finally tracked down the right Dr Shapiro after realising that he might have had some involvement with Elizabeth’s work. I was right, or at least, I was on the right track: Dr Ian Shapiro had been a forensic psychiatrist who had examined and testified in the cases of dozens of people accused of crimes at the nastier end of the spectrum. He had retired four years earlier, following the rather public discrediting of certain
of his methods that had led to the conviction of a Tyneside rapist. The conviction had been quashed and the man had walked free, only to rape – again was the word the newspapers weren’t allowed to print – three weeks later. I remembered the case, although not Shapiro’s name. There were no obvious links to Elizabeth Maurier that I could see, but it wouldn’t have been unusual for her to come across someone like Shapiro in her day-to-day work.

  Dr Shapiro was living in Norfolk and chaired the board of governors of the local primary school, which meant tracking him down was easier than it might have been. I winkled his home telephone number out of the cheery-sounding school secretary – past halfway through the working week and already looking forward to four o’clock on Friday, I guessed – and found myself speaking to the man himself before Claire had stirred again.

  Ian Shapiro (“don’t call me doctor, dear boy, those days are long gone”) spoke softly and slowly, with a tendency for pauses so long that I kept checking my phone to make sure we were still connected. I cut straight to the chase: I’d come across his name in Elizabeth Maurier’s notes, which I was reviewing in order to compile her memoirs; could he tell me anything of her and the nature of their relationship?

  “Ah,” he said, and then stopped again for nearly a minute. “Yes. Elizabeth Maurier. Remarkable woman. How is she?”

  So he didn’t know. I guessed Ian Shapiro wasn’t the type to keep up with news and current affairs in his retirement; Elizabeth’s murder had been all over the television, radio and press. I had the sense of a man who tended his garden, grew his own vegetables, ignored the outside world. I didn’t relish bringing it to his door, but he had to know.

  “I’m afraid she’s passed away, Ian.”

  “Oh,” he said, an exhalation fraught with meaning I couldn’t decipher through the phone. “Oh,” again, after a mercifully short pause. “I had no idea. I hope it was painless.”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Elizabeth was murdered.”

  This time there wasn’t even an exhalation, just a long unbroken silence that seemed not so much an absence of sound as a real, solid thing. There was no noise from the street outside, nothing from the bedroom, not even a crackle down the line. I imagined the sounds Dr Shapiro was hearing, wind through a wheatfield, the drone of bees, the lowing of a distant herd. For a moment I could almost hear them myself. And then he was back and the silence had gone.

  “Well, I must say, that comes as rather a shock.”

  I’d thought he would ask for details, given his background, but he didn’t; those days, as he’d said, were long gone. I waited again, just in case, and this time he came back with something I wasn’t expecting.

  “If you’d like to talk about her,” he said, “feel free to drop by. I’m a little out of the way, and I’m not sure there’s much I can tell you, but it’s probably best we talk face to face.”

  I was on the verge of arguing the point, since a trek into the depths of East Anglia wasn’t high on the list of things I’d planned for the next week or so, but I stopped myself. I could spare the time, and it might do me good. Perhaps I could even persuade Claire to join me. I agreed to his suggestion and we fixed on Saturday morning – two days’ time – for my visit. I warned him that I might not be alone, and he laughed and assured me that he’d be very much alone, and would relish the company.

  Claire finally emerged as I was taking down directions and saying goodbye. She looked better than she’d looked earlier, but only marginally. A shower and some more coffee might help, I thought, and went to get the coffee started.

  “Feeling any better?” I asked as I walked past, kissing the top of her head. She shrugged and offered a weak smile.

  “A little.”

  “Thorwell called.”

  She sighed, like someone who’d been cornered by the boss on the way out of work and had an extra shift landed on them.

  “What did he want?”

  “Wouldn’t tell me. Wants you to call him back. I told him you weren’t well.”

  She smiled again, and collapsed onto the sofa. When I brought her the coffee two minutes later she was already asleep.

  The ringing of the phone twenty minutes later brought her back to life; I’d tried to catch it before it disturbed her, but it was ringing six inches from her head with a sound that would have woken half the dead Mauriers and possibly the living one a few miles west.

  I answered with the standard “Hello?”

  “Hello,” echoed a voice in an accent I couldn’t place. “I am sorry to bother you. Please could I speak to Claire?”

  “Can I ask who’s calling?”

  “Please tell her it is Viktor.”

  I’d never heard of any Viktor, but Claire was awake and sitting up with one hand stretched out for the phone. I gave it to her and returned to Elizabeth’s notes, listening to her murmurs and short, broken sentences with half an ear.

  “Who’s Viktor?” I asked when she’d finished.

  “Tanya’s dad,” she said, and I nearly dropped my coffee. Tanya was one of Claire’s murdered girls, not that she was Tanya at all, really. Tanya was the name Claire had assigned to “Girl A, Blonde”, on the basis that someone early on in the investigation had thought she might be Russian.

  “Only,” she continued, “her name’s not Tanya after all. It’s Yelena. And she’s not from Russia. She’s Ukrainian.”

  Close enough, I thought.

  “I can’t believe you found him. I didn’t even know you were looking. That’s brilliant work.”

  She looked up at me – those bags hadn’t shrunk much, and it seemed the act of raising her eyes was costing more effort than it should have done – and shook her head.

  “I didn’t. He found me.”

  I shrugged.

  “Either way, that’s got to be good news. You’ve got a relative now. More to put in front of Thorwell. More pressure on the police to prosecute, right?”

  “Hmmm,” she said, and went back to staring at her coffee. I was surprised she hadn’t mentioned Viktor when we’d talked the previous night; I was surprised she was taking the whole thing so calmly. Finding a relative could only help. I looked at her and wondered and decided she was working on that distance I’d told her she needed. Good move, I thought, and I was about to say it out loud when she got up and walked into the bathroom. A moment later I heard the shower kicking into life.

  I returned, slowly, to the Maurier files. There was so much I hadn’t known about Elizabeth, but little of it would be of interest to anyone reading her memoirs, if we ever wrote them, and none of it would help DC Colman. I skipped back a little, and started seeing names I knew only too well.

  Little Bill Badman. Pierre Studeman. Edward Trawden.

  All clients. Each one a victory, for Mauriers and for me, personally. Or so it had seemed at the time.

  Badman was a dealer. Low-key and small-time, but not small enough to escape the notice of others who weren’t so low-key and didn’t want to be small-time themselves. He’d managed to get himself beaten up outside Camden police station, beaten so badly he was lucky he’d lived. He was luckier still that he found Elizabeth Maurier and she was lucky she had me on the case and I was still young and fresh and actually cared what I was doing, because what I found earned him quarter of a million in compensation and a mass of good publicity for the firm. I had no idea what Badman was up to these days, I’d always assumed he’d burn through that quarter million in a year or two and be back on the streets and his regular rotation between police station and hospital until he found a hole he couldn’t climb out of.

  Studeman was the last case I’d worked on at Mauriers. Studeman had the misfortune of having the couldn’t-give-a-fuck-any-more Sam Williams acting for him, but even that Sam Williams could get the right results, for a fee. By then I’d stooped about as low as I could, paying off police officers for tips on procedural errors that might get my client out of jail. I’d wondered, at the time, whether I was paying them for the tips o
r paying them to get those errors made in the first place, but tried not to dwell on it. As it turned out, it didn’t much matter. Someone talked to the wrong someone else, and Brooks-Powell, who’d hated me since we’d both started at Mauriers, went running to Elizabeth like a good little puppy. Elizabeth told me if I left quietly, without a fuss, she wouldn’t feel obliged to tell the police and the Law Society. Going solo had never been my plan, but I didn’t have a choice.

  And Trawden. Trawden was what turned young, fresh Sam Williams into that couldn’t-give-a-fuck-any-more Sam Williams. Edward Trawden was serving forever-and-a-day for killing young Maxine Grimshaw, who’d lived next door to him on a cosy Warrington cul-de-sac, but Trawden had never stopped telling everyone who’d listen that he was an innocent man. Robbie Evans, a convicted paedophile and killer, was said to have claimed he was Maxine’s killer, and might have coughed up to it in court if he hadn’t been stabbed to death in prison. It didn’t matter. Elizabeth Maurier took on Trawden’s case. I sifted through the files. The police insisted Evans had been a hundred miles from Warrington when the murder took place. I put him on the scene, right day, right time. In court two weeks later, Trawden walked, and I punched the air, silent, victorious. And then I turned and saw the parents, Bill and Eileen Grimshaw. This was no victory for them. They’d sat there in court listening to it all, the whole thing, the nature of the injuries, Eileen’s discovery of her daughter’s body, the street cordoned off, the lights and the tape, the journalists and the forensic tests. Twenty years to bury it, and we’d dug it all back up again. If this was justice, I’d thought, why did it have to hurt so much?

  I shut the files, which had shed no new light on those cases, closed my eyes on the living room and its miserable excuse for a Christmas tree, and pushed myself back a decade. That moment had killed it all for me, the thrill, the ambition. I’d not exchanged so much as a word with the Grimshaws, but for all that, I was too close. So I built up a distance. I didn’t care. I won cases, but I won them the easy way. Better to keep the pain at bay. I’d let that slip, in Manchester. That hadn’t worked out so well.