No One Will Hear (Sam Williams Book 2)

by Joel Hames

  “Did you find anything?” asked Claire, sitting down beside me with her own coffee. That faint coconut smell washed over me, her shampoo, the scent that was entirely her to me.

  “Nothing much,” I replied. “Nothing I didn’t already know, anyway. Unless Lizzy’s been hoarding the good stuff somewhere else this is going to be a very thin memoir.”

  She nodded, leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

  “You’ll get there, lover boy. You always find the good stuff in the end.”

  I sat back, smiled, and drank some coffee. Lover boy was what she’d called me back at the start, the expression she still used from time to time to remind me, I thought, that we were more than just two people who happened to share a flat.

  “I hope so,” I replied.

  “And what about your mysterious phone call? Who was that?”

  “Colman. The DC, the one who’s working on the Elizabeth Maurier case.”

  Claire nodded. “And? Did she have any great insights at half past two in the morning?”

  I studied her face as she spoke, looking for signs of anger or resentment, but if that was what she was feeling she was hiding it well.

  “No. Not this time.”

  The words had slipped out before I’d thought about them, and she was onto them like a shark.

  “This time?”

  I reached for my coffee. I needed a moment to think. Just a moment, though, because this was Claire. She was a journalist, true, but whatever I’d said to Colman about confidentiality – and I wasn’t entirely sure where we’d left that particular detail – Claire was the one person I trusted.

  “There was something,” I replied, setting my empty cup down on the coffee table and turning to her. “At the police station.”

  I watched her eyes widen and her mouth fall open as I went on to tell her about the board, Martins’ reaction to my presence, Colman in the café afterwards, the obscure name in the elusive diary. When I’d finished she sat back and exhaled, and asked me what Colman had said when I’d woken her in the middle of the night. I grinned and explained that I hadn’t woken her at all, but I did appear to have interrupted something a little more active than sleep. She started to laugh, and then the phone rang, and she picked it up and disappeared into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. I picked up my coffee, clambered awkwardly to my feet, and wandered over to the kitchen. The files sat there like yesterday’s leftovers, a meal I’d hoped to enjoy but had got little out of. I owed them another look, but I reckoned it could wait.

  Fifteen minutes later Claire emerged and handed me the phone.

  “Maloney,” she mouthed, and I put the phone to my ear.

  “Hello, mate, what’s new?” he asked.

  “Nothing much. Oh, except I had lunch in The Reform Club with a Lord yesterday.”

  He laughed. “Yeah. Claire told me. And what’s this I hear about the pair of you going to Brooks-Powell’s for dinner tonight?”

  He’d been talking to Claire for a long time, I realised. Not that there was anything wrong with that. They’d always got on well enough. It just seemed unusual. I realised Maloney had fallen silent and was waiting for me to say something.

  “So what’s up with you?” I asked, finally, ignoring the question about tonight’s dinner.

  “Just wanted an address for Roarkes. Thought I’d send him a card.”

  That was normal enough, too. Maloney and Roarkes might have sat on opposite sides of the law, but they’d always had a grudging respect for one another. So what if my gangster friend was writing letters to my police officer friend? So what if he was talking to my girlfriend, too? I had to stop jumping at shadows, I realised. I scrolled through my phone for the address and gave it to him.

  “Cheers,” he replied, and that was the moment for me to kill the call and forget about it.

  I’ve never been very good at forgetting things.

  “So what did Claire have to say, then?”

  “Why don’t you ask her yourself,” he shot back, quick as a bullet. I shut my mouth on the fuck off that was coming to a boil in there and opted for silence instead. After a few seconds he backed down.

  “Not a lot, really. Just venting. Think it does her good, talking to someone other than you.”

  I wondered what she was paying Adrian for if it wasn’t talking. At least Maloney was free.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I reckon she could do with a night out. Or an afternoon. Forget it all. Get away from everything for a few hours. What do you think?”

  “I’ll have to check my diary,” I said, wondering whether Maloney could hear the sarcasm through the line.

  “Your diary ain’t what counts, mate. I meant me and Claire. I’ll take her to the Mitre, not one of them poncy places you like.”

  I stopped, stunned.

  “Really?”

  “Why not?”

  I cast about for a reason, and couldn’t find one. If Claire wanted to spend the afternoon in a filthy run-down boozer watching Maloney throw expensive beer down his throat, then fine. She was a big girl. She could look after herself.

  Which was what she promptly did. I looked up and she was standing in front of me wearing a smart cream duffel coat and a smile.

  “I’m off now,” she said, bent down to kiss me, and left before I had a chance to ask where.

  I heard a voice in the distance and realised I was still holding the phone and Maloney was still talking.

  “Sorry,” I said. “What was that?”

  “What about this article, then? Got you good, that fucker.”

  I paused, waiting for my brain to tell me what he was talking about. My brain remained silent.

  “What are you on about, Maloney?” I asked.

  “Not seen it? Get on that website. What’s it called, you know, Big News or something?”

  “Real World News?”

  “That’s the one. You’re the star of the show, mate. The notorious Sam Williams. Have a read.”

  He was gone before I had a chance to ask anything else, and I waited, fuming, while my laptop connected and then disconnected from the internet three times before the right page would load. When it finally did, I found myself wishing it had never connected at all.

  Bad Luck or Bad Lawyer?

  That was the headline. Underneath there was a photograph of me and Trawden standing just outside the door of the Reform Club. I was looking back over my shoulder, and because I was looking down – I’d spotted Rich Hanover at the bottom of the steps, and I was at the top – the image was one of superiority, not helped by the suit and tie or by my self-satisfied smile as I realised Hanover wouldn’t be able to follow me in.

  The photograph had its own caption. “Sam Williams dines at London’s exclusive Reform Club with sinister ex-prisoner Edward Trawden, who served decades for the murder of a child before Williams managed to secure his release.” I supposed, if you put it like that, it didn’t sound great. And then the article, which pulled together a whole heap of unrelated facts – my meeting with Lizzy, Elizabeth’s murder, Trawden, my “assault on this journalist, in connection with which I am currently taking legal advice”, and the “tragic affair in Manchester, during which, among several violent deaths, a lawyer with whom Williams was said to be extremely close took her own life.”

  I didn’t come out well. I sat there fuming and wondering what I could do about it and what Hanover’s lawyer would tell him about the so-called assault. I had punched the man, I supposed. The assault, like everything else in the article, wasn’t actually untrue.

  Just misleading.

  I couldn’t do anything, I decided. Hanover didn’t have enough to have me arrested or sue me. Maloney might have read the thing but he’d be in shallow company. In audience numbers, Real World News wasn’t exactly the BBC.

  I tried to put it out of my mind.

  The afternoon passed uneventfully, my fruitless rereading of the Maurier files interrupted only by a call from Colman, whose opening comment was
“Beating up journalists isn’t a bad idea, but try to keep it quiet next time.”

  Maybe I’d been wrong about those audience numbers.

  She wasn’t calling just to taunt, me, though. She’d done some digging. Elizabeth’s phone call to Trawden was real enough; he hadn’t made it up. There had been three calls, it emerged, but Trawden had the same line I did: they hadn’t spoken, the calls had gone to voicemail, he’d have called her back eventually, if she hadn’t gone and died on him. Trawden had no idea what Elizabeth wanted to speak to him about, and the police didn’t either, but they weren’t concerned either way. According to Trawden they spoke once or twice a year anyway, just catching up, never an important matter to discuss. I had, I realised, been jumping at shadows again. Blennard was on the level. Trawden was on the level. The phone call wasn’t even a dead end, because there wasn’t a road to follow. That spark that had awoken in the café over Elizabeth Maurier’s diary was down to a dull glow. Vicky Colman and her delightful boss could carry on digging into Elizabeth Maurier’s death. The only thing that concerned me was her life.

  Claire showed up shortly before six, just as I was starting to worry that she might have forgotten our dinner engagement and wonder whether calling her would be taken as charming or overprotective. She breezed in clutching a pair of shopping bags and wearing a Santa hat over that duffel coat.

  “I know, I know,” she said, catching my inadvertent glance at my wrist. I’d lost the watch months back, but the habit persisted. “I just need to get changed. I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

  I didn’t doubt it. One of Claire’s many admirable qualities was the ability to transform in the briefest of times. Not that she needed much transformation right now.

  She disappeared into the bedroom, and then the bathroom, and emerged seven minutes later wearing the sort of clothes where naming them doesn’t do justice. Pale woollen jumper. Black leather trousers. Blonde hair and those eyes and that smile. A year, I thought, a year and change we’d been together, and I didn’t see myself wanting that to end. Not soon. Not ever.

  Claire was in a good mood. I was in a good mood. Even the prospect of dinner with the Brooks-Powells couldn’t dent that.

  12: Crystal

  WE KEPT UP a decent conversation on the tube, whispering about Lizzy Maurier and grinning over what we’d find at Brooks-Powell’s place. The trains were running smoothly, and the light drizzle that had been coming down when we went underground had dried up by the time we resurfaced. Everything, in fact, was fine, until the moment we turned a corner and found ourselves outside the address Brooks-Powell had given me.

  Rich Hanover had beaten me to it. There he stood, grinning, in front of his bloody bike and behind his bloody phone. He held it up for a minute while I tried to position myself between Claire and the lens. Whatever this was, it wasn’t her problem. I turned to explain it to her, but she shook her head and said “Don’t worry. I read the article. Man’s a prick,” and a moment later I heard an engine gunning and Hanover was gone.

  We turned our attention to the house. I’d always known Brooks-Powell would do well for himself. He’d come from money, he wasn’t a bad lawyer, for all that I’d willed him to be the worst, he knew a thing or two about getting to the top. I’d been expecting a smart flat in a smart block with an underground car park and a gym no one used.

  There was no flat. There was no block. Instead there was a four-storey mansion set back from the road, with what looked like a hundred windows staring back at us as we stared in. Lights on in most of them. I couldn’t imagine Brooks-Powell giving much thought to the electricity bill. The wrought iron gates that opened silently as we approached must have cost what I made in a good year.

  The theme continued inside. The door was opened by Brooks-Powell himself – I’d been expecting an army of servants or at least a butler, but there he was in the flesh, jacket and tie and the same old sardonic face. He looked pale. He’d always looked pale, I reminded myself. And its severity had always surprised me.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said, and introduced himself to Claire, who responded with a half-smile and a brief nod of the head. Whatever else was happening, she hadn’t forgotten everything I’d told her about the man.

  He took our coats and showed us into an ornate living room with chandeliers and a grand piano and, half-reclined on a sofa big enough to house a family of four, a woman in a black dress who I assumed was Mrs Brooks-Powell.

  She had her back turned to us as we entered, and stayed like that for long enough that I started to think she hadn’t heard us come in. Her husband had left, with our coats. For all I knew the room he was putting them in was fifteen minutes’ walk away. I found myself staring intently at that back, at the triangle of white flesh sliced neatly by the sheer black dress, and then she moved her head, turned towards us, and rose, a thin smile etched across her face like a scar.

  Another blonde, I thought, but as different from Claire, in her woollen jumper and leather trousers, as one could imagine. The dress accentuated the pallor of her cheeks; below each ear hung a crimson drop that finished the job. Mrs Brooks-Powell was as close to bloodless as made no difference. Perhaps that was her husband’s doing; perhaps they were drawn to one another, these pale, elegant creatures.

  There was also, I thought, something familiar about that face.

  She was walking towards us, and I hadn’t moved. Claire, seeing me motionless, stepped past me and extended her hand.

  “Claire Tully,” she said, a warmth in her voice that might or might not have been real. “It’s so kind of you to invite us.”

  The wraith smiled again and took the proferred hand.

  “Nonsense. It’s a pleasure to have you. Melanie Golding.”

  I started forward, my own arm already outstretched.

  “I thought I recognised you,” I said, before I could stop myself, and she nodded, eyes cast to the floor as she shook my hand. Now the house made sense. The money made sense. Melanie Golding Asset Management was big enough that even I’d heard of it. And its founder and chief executive wasn’t one to shy away from the cameras.

  She turned again, and for a moment I thought that was it, she’d done her bit, introduced herself, and now she was going back to staring at the walls or whatever it was she’d been doing when we arrived. But instead she sank back into the sofa and patted the cushions either side of her.

  “You must be Sam Williams,” she said as I sat, and I realised I’d forgotten to introduce myself. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “Oh dear,” I replied automatically, and she laughed, a surprising, full-bodied laugh that pulled her out of the ether and grounded her.

  “I wouldn’t worry, Sam. You’re in decent company. David doesn’t have a good word to say about anyone these days.”

  I wondered about that, about these days, about whether that was a reference to my case against Mauriers, his humiliation and departure from the firm, whether it was the slow, relentless uphill gradient of middle age, or something else entirely.

  “Seems he and Sam have more in common than they’d care to admit,” said Claire, and Melanie turned and favoured her with a smile, and then, to my astonishment, she reached out with both her hands and gathered Claire’s right hand into them.

  I stared, transfixed. Claire was gazing mutely at the hands, the strange trio, the one-potato-two-potato weirdness of it all. I edged forward on the sofa so that I could see Melanie’s face; the smile was still there.

  “So pleased to meet you, Claire. I don’t know what’s going to happen between these two men, but I hope they can keep it between themselves. Does that sound fair to you?”

  Another brief nod from Claire, the same she’d offered Brooks-Powell on our arrival. She was playing a role, I decided. Whatever happened, fireworks, reconciliations, friendship or hatred, she would be above it all.

  “Eminently,” she replied.

  “Excellent,” said Melanie, and then stood abruptly and called out to the unseen
presence of her husband. “Come on, David! Aren’t you going to offer our guests a drink before dinner?”

  There was a moment’s silence, and then the disembodied voice of David Brooks-Powell, floating in the semi-darkness.

  “With you in a minute,” it said, and his wife sat herself back down with a groan.

  “Useless,” she muttered, quietly but distinctly enough for both of us to hear. “He’s been useless since that…well, you know.”

  I knew. And I knew the part I’d played in it. But I wasn’t apologising for getting my long-overdue revenge, any more than Brooks-Powell had apologised for all the trouble he’d caused in the first place. I glanced at her and realised I must have been playing out my feelings on my face, because she was smiling softly at me and shaking her head.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, and patted me on the shoulder. “It’ll all work out for the best.”

  I doubted that. I smiled and nodded back at her and thought that everything turning out for the best was about as likely as a friendly chat with DI Martins.

  Just as the smiling and nodding were entering awkward territory Brooks-Powell strode in, a bottle in one hand and four champagne glasses dangling from the other.

  “Some fizz, I think,” he announced, looking pleased with himself. He set the glasses down on a sideboard and started pouring before any of us had a chance to demur. At least he hadn’t given us the vineyard and vintage, I thought, and then he did. Rare and expensive, no doubt, but it meant nothing to me.

  I smiled and said “Thank you”, and found I rather liked the champagne after all. But after the first few sips there had to be words, conversations, questions, recollections. Everything I’d dreaded. I answered the questions politely, and asked a few of my own, safe questions, about the house, how long they’d lived there, whether Brooks-Powell had heard anything from Lizzy Maurier or the police. It wasn’t easy. Tight work, finding that safe narrow space with his job (which I’d cost him) at one end and her work (which was probably paying for everything) at the other, with a dead woman overhead and a court case underfoot. And I was onto my second glass of champagne, which didn’t help. Claire was ahead of me and sipping on a glass of Chablis. I told them about Rich Hanover’s presence outside the house. They hadn’t heard about the latest article, which made two people in the world who hadn’t. And they didn’t care about Hanover. Melanie, at least, would have been used to the unwanted attentions of the press.