‘I’m not mad, you know, Hen. Really I’m not, but coming out here and sitting in the midst of it, well, it’s the only way of feeling alive. I have to get very cold so that I can feel the warmth, if you see what I mean.’
Hen did not see. She saw an awkward woman with an infectious grief she refused to relinquish. She said nothing, pushed open the door and watched with some satisfaction as her mother was propelled over the step by a gust of wind. The stairs to the second floor faced the entrance to the house. Ellen clutched the banister as if shaking hands with a long-lost friend and went straight up. Soon there would be the sound of running water, the prelude to a deep, hot bath in which she would stay so long that Hen would begin to worry about her all over again. She went into the living room on the left, where her father still sat by the fire, apparently absorbed by the television and entirely unperturbed. Hen could have throttled him, too. She decided to ignore the fact that he was entitled to relax after a morning in the storage warehouse, which was his business and his pride and joy. The worker of the house was entitled to the fire.
‘All right?’ He asked, smiling.
‘She is, yes. I suppose so. Would you have gone after her if I hadn’t?’
‘Eventually. Maybe, maybe not. Why don’t you sit down? You never sit down, you’re always standing or leaning. You’re so restless, Hen.’
‘You would have left her, wouldn’t you?’
Hen realised she was shouting and moderated her voice. It made less of a strident sound in this room, what with the shifting crackle of the fire in the grate and the sound of the old plumbing filling a bath.
‘Sit down!’ he said quietly as if he was training a dog. It made her feel like a disobedient thirty-one-year-old bitch. Called Hen. She sat.
‘I need to talk to you.’
‘I’ve been trying to talk to you for days.’
‘It’s not always the best thing, Hen. Not always appropriate. I don’t go after your mother when she goes for a walk because I think she knows what she’s doing. She’s only trying to get some sensation into her bones.’
‘By freezing herself to death and then boiling herself alive?’
He sighed.
‘It’s probably as good a cure as any. Like having a sauna and running out into the snow, only in reverse. Look, Hen darling, I think you ought to go.’
She sat, stunned. Her father was telling her to go. Fetch. Come. Sit. Go. Her utterly dependable father: the man who could bore for Britain on the subject of removals and self-storage. The man who never dismissed anyone.
‘Go?’ she echoed stupidly. ‘Go?’
He nodded. ‘Go. As in leave this house. Go. To your own home and your own life.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you simply aren’t helping here. You’re making it worse. Oh, I know it’s with the best intentions, but that’s what you’re doing. Making it worse. We can neither of us rest with you around.’
A wave of heat rose from her neck and into her face. There was an instinct to weep, scream and also to remain completely still, numb with hurt. This was her home. She looked at the framed tapestries on the wall. All sewn by the restless, painstaking hands of her mother. Hen wished Ellen could sew now.
‘You don’t want me here.’
‘We’ll always want you here, Hen. But not at the moment.’
‘If you’re telling me to go, I might never come back.’
He was silent for a moment and then smiled again.
‘When you were a child, you were always threatening never to return,’ he said. ‘And you always did.’
‘But all the same, it’s a risk you’re prepared to take.’
He was, she could see it in his averted eyes. Her dear, ineffectual father. There was nothing she could do. You could never make people love you and you couldn’t mend anything by simply loving them. She knew that, but what she had not realised until now was that her presence was an irritant. Her mother shrugging away her supporting arm should have told her that, likewise her father turning a goodnight hug into a pat on the shoulder. They may as well have loathed her. All they wanted was Angel, and Angel was dead. Angel had used her secret cache of pills to overdose herself into endless sleep; if only they had not left her in peace. There, there, they had always said to Angel, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. And in the end they blamed Angel for nothing and Henrietta for everything. If only Hen had not interfered. You never know when to leave a thing alone, Hen. She saw the newspaper he had stuffed behind the cushion of his armchair, where it had remained because he could not throw it away. She had thought that dramatic photograph of that hateful woman in free fall would have helped, but it had not. He was not that kind of man. Watching her watching him, he took the newspaper and threw it on the open fire.
‘Poor woman,’ he said. ‘Do you know what I dreamt last night? I dreamt you’d killed her. I don’t know how you would have done it but I wouldn’t put it past you, Hen. You didn’t kill her, did you?’
‘No, Dad. I wrote to her, that’s all.’
Henrietta Joyce went upstairs, past the locked bathroom door where her mother hummed in the bath, into the tiny bedroom which had been designated hers since childhood and had always been too small. She packed a few things into her single holdall and was back downstairs again within minutes, picking up her coat from where she had dropped it in the hall. There didn’t seem much point in saying goodbye. It was not so much the fact that her mother and father did not like her much, but the fact that they did not know her at all. They would not have dreamed that it was she, Henrietta Joyce, who needed them. Being in danger had always been Angel’s sole prerogative. Her privilege, her inalienable right. Angel always had to be rescued: Hen, never.
She walked along the promenade in the opposite direction to the one her mother had taken, moving easily with the wind behind her towards the centre of town. There was a train at five thirty: she knew the train timetable by heart. Anger gave way to mourning, and the sea seemed to mourn with her. It took twenty minutes to reach the station. She had made this journey to London hundreds of times.
Sitting on the slow train, she tried to feel relieved. An hour and a half would take her to a different world of light, bustle and optimism. Work, friends. She might never have to make this journey again. The heaviest thing she carried in the carpet bag was the file. She had covered it with a binding of red rust velvet, the colour of dried blood, because she liked to handle soft material and the luxury of the cover belied the nature of the contents. The colour was accidental, but it went with the muted, autumnal colours in the material of the bag itself, which sported a motif of abstract flowers growing from the handle and over her shoulder as she strode along. People remembered the bag. The file was beginning to wear a hole on one corner.
The file contained a history of everything that had happened to Angel, from the moment when she herself had found out and intervened. Found Angel and dragged her back, which was not exactly what Angel had wanted. There was stuff in there she had never shown anyone and never let out of her possession, not quite knowing whom she was protecting. She had found Angel in a dump and everything of his that could go into the carpet bag had gone with them. Shame there had been no money. The photographs were obscene, enough to convict him of something if ever they had been used, but Angel had wept and said no, never.
I am thirty-one years old, thought Hen. I’m not going to look at this file now, although I shall when I get home. I have the older-sister syndrome of knowing best. I am still so angry about everything that happened I give it off like an infection. And it’s all over, or it would be if I had not written to her. I wonder if she was inspired by that other woman who jumped? One hour to go on this train and all those stops ahead of me and I can’t even bear to read. Paddock Wood, Tonbridge, into London commuter land. She rummaged in the bag and brought out her sewing, leant against the window and made stitches with quiet precision.
Peter Friel got on the train at the penultimate stop
before London, on his way back from his brother’s house and aiming for home, relieved to be returning to normality after a day with other people’s children, marvelling at the carnage created by a birthday party for his four-year-old niece and considering that life in the suburbs really was red in tooth and claw. A quiet drink or three, accompanied by adult food and possibly a phone conversation with Thomas Noble was what he had in mind for the rest of the evening, and then he saw that bag, alongside a woman sewing. It was the bag he recognised first because he had seen and admired it often enough before. Then he registered the novelty of a young woman sitting and sewing in a half empty train carriage, knew who it was, Angel Joyce’s sister, the nondescript girl who had come to court with her, sat with her patiently through the long delays, always accompanied by that colourful bag. The girl who gave evidence first, was cross-examined first, and then kept apart, waiting outside Court One while her sister was grilled, bullied and humiliated inside, until she could bear it no longer. Angel’s blotchy face and badly tinted black hair made a mockery of her name and Marianne Shearer had cut her to ribbons. Peter had always resented the fact that a good-looking victim was always more convincing. It gave them confidence, and Angel had none of that. It seemed unfair. The last time he had seen Angel’s sister, she had been running away from the building and he had wanted to stop her.
Peter hesitated, then went and sat opposite the girl whose name he could not immediately remember, although he could remember the words of her statement. Last time he had seen her he had been in disguise, a faceless lawyer/junior prosecutor wearing a wig, part of the legal team who had thrown Angel Joyce to the wolves in the interests of justice and had been powerless to protect her. It was the case that had shattered his belief in the system, the vision of her collapse haunting him for months now, coming back in strength because of what had happened this week. He had to talk to her. It occurred to him that he would be the last person in the world she would want to speak to, but by that time it was too late. Hen carried on sewing a hem on a piece of emerald green silk the size of a handkerchief. The train trundled through London Bridge station. He had five minutes to do what he had wanted to do six months ago. Apologise.
‘Ms Joyce?’
Henrietta, that was the name. A jolly-hockey-sticks kind of name that did not suit her any more than Angel had suited her sister. She folded up the piece of cloth and began to stuff it into the bag, ignoring him. She closed the bag with a clumsy leather clasp he also remembered and began to move out of her seat.
‘What are you making?’ he asked. ‘It’s a beautiful colour.’
She looked at him warily, poised for flight. Of course she recognised him. The features and the roles of every person involved in that case were etched in her memory, wigs or no wigs. She had watched them come and go and despised them.
‘I was junior counsel for the Crown, last May, and . . .’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘And what?’
‘I wanted to apologise. I wanted to say how sorry I was.’
The train was pulling into the station. They were standing by the door, with her clutching the bag and refusing to listen. He found himself talking to her urgently. The doors opened: in a moment she would be able to run.
‘Look Ms Joyce, please listen to me. Can I buy you a drink?’
She took off down the platform, hoisting the bag, and he caught her at the ticket barrier when she stopped, cursing, and started fishing in the pockets of her long coat for the damn ticket. No bloody ticket. A second chance, then, as she crouched by the bag and began to search through it. The ticket was wrapped up with the material she had been sewing. Fate intervening again. It had to be right.
‘Can I buy you a drink? Please?’
She suddenly looked weary, her hand holding the ticket shaking as she went through the barrier and turned to face him, some instinct either of manners or tiredness making her stop. She had no energy to run any more.
‘Why the hell should I talk to you?’
What was there to say?
‘Because it isn’t all over,’ he said. ‘And because I need you.’
He did not know the magic in those final words, more particularly the word need. Plus the fact that he had eyes like a dog pleading for food and he was as thin as a rail, and she did not want to go towards her own, empty, complicated home just yet. She shrugged.
‘OK.’
Why not? Someone had said they needed her. After all, Hen thought to herself, I’m a makeshift daughter whose parents have at long last told me to fuck off, and I’ve been waiting all my life for that to happen. I’ve got nothing to lose.
And he’s right. It can’t be all over, because that bitch jumped.
CHAPTER FOUR
She had been in almost silence, trying to talk for the last ten days and then she had been told to go. Later, Henrietta Joyce used that as her excuse for why she agreed to go for a drink with a virtual stranger she had met by unhappy accident on a train. It was the sight of crowds which did it, the prospect of remaining in a place full of chattering people, instead of the view of the sea from an upstairs window and a house full of silent recrimination. Also, the knowledge that if she had not found the ticket, the man with the Labrador eyes would have paid the fine, all for the privilege of sitting with her. She must have something he wanted, and if she was not wanted for herself, this was a good substitute.
She did not trust him as far as she could have thrown him, but that did not matter. This wasn’t personal. Whatever else was on his agenda, it did not include flirtation.
‘It may seem strange to you,’ he said, far more composed after he had done his manly thing and steered her towards empty seats in a pub within fifty yards of the station and bought a bottle of red wine, ‘but I’ve dreamt of meeting you. To say sorry.’
She let him do the talking and did not acknowledge the apology. It was, as a lawyer would say, irrelevant. Hen had never blamed the secondary people for the debacle of the trial that featured her sister as victim, even though their powerlessness amazed her. They were not the enemy. The Defendant was the foe, along with his Defence Counsel, Marianne Shearer, QC. She shook her head, dismissing his words. She was here, she told herself, because it was cold out there and warmer in here, and a part of her was back with her mother on the seafront, instead of being vaguely, indeterminately, needed, which was one step away from rejection. It clarified the mind. Let him talk first. She was starved of chat, with a head full of things she wanted to articulate: she would have talked to a dog.
‘But the other reason for seizing the opportunity to talk to you . . . well there are many. I keep thinking of it all, you see, especially now. And then Marianne Shearer . . . well, she died. Did you know that?’
‘Jumped. Yes. She was in the paper. Front pages, too, I expect she would have liked that.’
He nodded vigorously, ignoring the bitchy note in her voice.
‘It set me thinking all over again – as if I’d ever stopped – because it means it isn’t all over, is it? I can’t help wondering why she died. I know that the officer in the case thinks Rick Boyd may have something to do with it. Maybe he got to her somehow. May even have seduced her, too. Heaven knows, he wasn’t fussy about looks. Oh God, what an awful thing to say, I shouldn’t have said it.’
He seemed like a man who frequently said things he should not have said and that reassured her. Not such a careful lawyer as he had seemed six months before, nodding and bowing in Marianne Shearer’s wake like a dinghy behind a yacht. They had all done that, even the Judge.
‘Yes, you should. There’s no point pretending that my sister was beautiful, but she did have youth on her side, and naivety, and lack of confidence. Sorry, Mr Friel, but I can’t see that bastard having a crack at a dried-up old walnut like Shearer, she’d have seen him coming a mile off. You mean he might have seduced her after he was acquitted, but why bother? He specialised in the insecure, didn’t he? She wasn’t one of those. And what would be the point? She’d served her pur
pose brilliantly. Although you might be right, and he manipulated her, too.’
That was the greatest number of words she had said so far and at least it proved that he had her attention. He sat back and sighed; most of him consisted of legs and arms, with a concave torso, a bad haircut and amazing colouring. Pale skin, red hair, freckles, and casual clothes that appeared, on a second glance, to be spattered with egg. Not a man who noticed his own appearance.
‘Boyd might have put pressure on Shearer because she knew so much about him. Maybe she was going to have a word with the police about all the other things she knew. Join up all the dots so they had a proper profile of him for next time. No, she wouldn’t do that. It would be like being human and socially responsible. Maybe she was simply influenced by that other woman, Mrs Ward, who also jumped and got a headline.’
He was thinking aloud, talking to himself as if he had known her for ever, as if they had something instantly in common simply because they were discussing a subject about which they knew more than anyone else. Hen had noticed the same syndrome when she was working; the rapport of otherwise isolated experts, fascinated by an obscure book or a design, ready to gnaw at ideas forever with complete strangers made instant friends by rare, shared knowledge, but still she bristled. She did not want to talk about Ms Shearer, QC, except venomously.
‘Mrs Ward was sad and depressed, pour soul,’ Hen said. ‘She’d tried to kill herself before, hadn’t she? It was spontaneous desperation in her case and it’s insulting to her to equate her with Marianne Shearer in any way. She was a good woman, for a start. Not like Shearer at all. It looks to me as if Shearer staged it all for effect, probably hired the bloke who filmed it. It would be nice to think she killed herself for shame,’ Hen continued. ‘After all, what had she done with her life but defend scumbags and get them off?’
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