Frank laughed in admiration.
‘My God, Tom, you’re a cold fish.’
‘No, merely devoted.’
Thomas looked out of the window of the cab and watched the rain begin. Bloody January. Cold and dark and a good time to die. He wanted to be back in his homely office in Lincoln’s Inn, where he could watch the rain from the window. It occurred to him as he watched a girl running for shelter, teetering on high heels and hopelessly dressed for the weather, that Marianne Shearer had also been inappropriately dressed for her death. That ridiculous skirt. He felt utterly depressed, covered it with words.
‘I’m only doing what you told me to do, Frank. What I suppose she would have wished me to do. Which is to look inconvenient facts in the eye and twist them if possible, especially if there’s anything to be gained, no matter how small. That’s what she would have done.’
‘Good, Tom, good. Keep at it. You can drop me off here.’
Disgusting man. Disgusting servitude. A bloody mess, but at least the rain had stopped. Thomas Noble took a turn round Lincoln’s Inn Fields to calm down. He could not yet admit to Frank Shearer what a legacy his sister had left, not just a mess, but also a deliberate mystery. Somewhere there was a record of what she really wanted; there was a sense of threat if he did not find it. He must explore the looming possibilities of the affair, the existence of some secret, trusted person holding her papers and unwilling to come forward. It would have to be a man, a lover of sorts since she neither trusted nor liked women. Maybe someone who did not even know she was dead. He could see Marianne jeering. He had the policies, the deeds to the flat, and the minimal mementos sent on from her chambers, the bulk of it being the transcript of that damn trial and that was all. As if the transcript was everything. Nothing personal, she was saying, talking through a mist in which her ugly face became blurred.
It was grey and misty in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He hesitated at the door of the John Soane museum, wanting to go inside for the solace of beauty and its celebration of the collector’s constructive greed, but he saw the queue and walked on. Marianne loved it in there: the use of space was as crafty as she was. Thomas walked round the rim, watching the people walking their dogs, or rather, the dogs walking the people, and noticing, not for the first time, how animals and owners resembled each other.
It was indeed depressing to realise that one became quite like one’s own client, rather like people came to look like their dogs. Why was he doing this, when he would have loved it if Frank Shearer never got to inherit a single undeserved penny? Frank did not improve with acquaintance. He had a habit of touching the person who was nearest on the arm or shoulder which made Thomas want to recoil because it was the opposite of affection; more a desire to control with his own bulk or to tease a homosexual man with his heterosexual superiority. A little bit of suppressed violence, always poking at things in order to feel for weakness. He did not like to think what Frank was like around women. A womaniser, Marianne had told him. Been sacked for it, couldn’t keep his hands off them, which is why he ended up selling cars. Without doubt, a rather male environment.
So why was he working so hard for him? Because it was second nature to give the maximum effort to any client, just as it was instinctive to try every trick in the book to get the better of insurance companies, the Inland Revenue and all the manifestations of the State. It was a game, and it did not matter for whom he played it. It was all about his bounden duty to save the client’s money and there was something perverse and personal in his attitude to the current project. First, he did not want the verdict to be suicide, he really would rather she had been murdered or simply mad enough to think she could fly; and secondly, he had the feeling she was manipulating him, amusing herself at his expense, giving him a challenge to prove the friendship from beyond the grave and watching what he did with some other purpose in mind entirely.
Not that the body of Ms Shearer could be given the courtesy of a grave as yet. The remnants of it remained in a mortuary and he did not like to think in what condition. The scant possessions in her hotel room were being delivered to him, along with, God help him, the clothes she had worn.
He was fond of his tiny office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, because of its associations and because of the view. The room was small, its old-fashioned ambience the result of deliberation and neglect, with the result that clients of a certain age found it reassuring, and the younger clients, of whom Thomas had very few, disliked it for lacking anything obviously associated with efficiency. He had all the technology of computer, fax and phone, of course, and a receptionist shared with the other occupants of the building. Sole practitioners in the law were anachronistic and rare these days – few lawyers would take the risk – but Thomas only needed the clients he had chosen, most of whom only defected way beyond death. He specialised in probate, personal problems, personal services and debts. He was a sounding board, a keeper of secrets, and the clients stuck with him not only because he was cheap, but because he knew where the bodies were buried. So his morals were malleable, his consistency admirable, and his discretion was guaranteed. The pickings were adequate and this way he could devote himself entirely to one client at a time.
There were features of this office space that made it invaluable to Thomas’s unusual practice. There was the lease that meant he was secure for life and then there was the position. Proximity to the Inns of Court where most of the barristers lurked ensured him a steady stream of clients who mostly came via word of mouth. He liked the cachet of Thos Noble, the lawyers’ lawyer, although it was scarcely true. The highest flyers and top earners would always go elsewhere, which was entirely up to them; more fool them since when it came to the matter of sorting out estates, the amount of money involved really did not matter or make it more or less complex. Testators could be equally mischievous and divisive in the way they wrote their wills whether the sum to be inherited was large or small, while the inheritors themselves would fight for their so-called rights to a hundred pounds as viciously as they would for a share in millions. It was the same process, requiring a dogged brain rather than Einstein.
The third irreplaceable feature of Thomas’s office was the room itself. There were tall sash windows going down to the floor, giving a view on to the large square that was Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In high summer, it was Thomas’s joy to gaze out, not at the trees and greenery which afforded their own different pleasures in spring, but at the people, shedding clothes on hot days, eating lunch on the grass and lolling like puppies. In all seasons, mid morning, he watched the older man who practised tai chi on the lawn by the tennis courts. Persons of other persuasions leaned out of windows on the far side of the Fields to watch girls play netball. He was drawn to the dog walkers with their frolicking, ambling dogs and found he envied them most of all although he was never tempted to pat. Dogs were allowed without a lead; people were encouraged to sit semi-naked on the grass; really, Lincoln’s Inn Fields was a hotbed of quiet depravity. In the depths of winter, like now, when he arrived and departed in the dark and the view of people was limited by the light to see them by, he could draw down the blinds and turn his contemplative gaze towards the fireplace. It was a gas fire with convincing flames and it seemed a proper addition to an essentially Victorian lawyer’s office, even more vital than books. With the fire lit, he could imagine himself as a young Bob Cratchit, wielding a quill pen and warming his chilled hands against the flames, flexing his fingers the better to avoid mistakes. The fire, although rarely lit, was a positive aid to ambience and concentration.
Quietly seething with rage, Thomas was now contemplating the question of rights. Not Human Rights in the larger sense, but people’s personal and largely misconceived rights to inherit money. No one had the right to either property or money unless they had earned it. He had no quarrel with the inequalities of earning power, as in a pop star or footballer earning millions while the receptionist downstairs earned peanuts, as long as it was earned. You could only earn inheritance righ
ts by loving someone faithfully. It was the right to grab what you had not earned in any way at all which infuriated him; it was clients and the children of clients talking about their rights to Daddy’s cash and Mummy’s house, while really, they had no rights at all. What was the legal phrase? Spes succession, hope of succession, was no hope at all. Frank Shearer’s right to his sister’s property was not really a right, it was an unjust windfall which the law turned into a right, and dammit, he had the duty to make sure the frightful man got every penny. Still, he supposed that was marginally better than letting the whole thing go to the State.
Coroners’ Courts made him sad. He had attended one too many, never with quite such an enraging sadness. It would pass: everything did. He turned from the fire to the window, trying to see whatever he could in the fading light and wishing Marianne would talk to him.
There was a man on the bench on the other side of the railings sitting and looking up at Thomas’s first floor window. He saw Thomas looking at him and turned away. The man was wearing one of those awful, vaguely mustard-coloured camel hair coats which he rarely saw round the Inns of Court now, except on older men or misguided younger ones who thought such a coat made them look establishment. It was what he called a member of the ruling classes coat. The last time he had seen such a coat, it had been earlier in the day. A coat looking incongruous on a plastic chair.
There were plenty such coats: they were built to last. Like the moss-coloured German variety and the bomb-proof Burberrys which he did not like either. Camel hair belonged on camels.
Thomas was thinking to himself how much Marianne would have enjoyed that observation when the receptionist phoned from downstairs and said a man wanted to see him. About making a will, or something. Thomas never denied the walk-in trade who had included his better clients, directed by someone else who knew this convenient address. The plate outside advertising his presence was very small. One had to know. When the man in the camel hair coat walked in, Thomas was pleased and unsurprised because after all, he wasn’t the first to wait outside on a bench before coming in and he himself desperately needed distraction. Even hardened lawyers regarded consulting another lawyer on a private and confidential matter as something akin to going to the dentist, but all the same, it was unusual to wait in winter. Never mind the coat; the tone of voice adopted by the downstairs receptionist suggested that this one not only passed muster but was OK to look at. Shirley knew his criteria for acceptability in the male of the species, which were roughly similar to her own. Any man allowed into the premises without an appointment had to be reasonably dressed and body-odour free. Being perfectly formed was a bonus.
The man who came into Thomas’s office had shed the camel coat, which he carried, and emerged from it as an athletic figure, in fitting jeans and short leather jacket which offset a neatly turned bum, a narrow waist and slim hips. His eyes really were the most startling blue against a tanned skin. He had an innocent way of turning and shutting the door behind him that showed every aspect of his physique with the modesty of a shy schoolgirl. He seemed to be twirling and asking, Should I do this? Where would you like me to sit? Is this the right thing to do? What he said was, ‘How kind of you to see me, may I sit here?’ speaking in a pleasant, low-pitched voice, while extending his hand. Thomas took it, charmed.
‘Rick Boyd,’ the man said.
Then the handshake made him whimper, disgracefully. The man had a hand as big as a spade. It enclosed Thomas’s hand up to the wrist and felt cool and almost metallic. His thumb seemed to gouge Thomas’s palm painfully, so that he breathed in sharply, and gritted his teeth for the brief moment the sensation lasted and once released, disguised his reaction in the quick business of sitting behind his own desk. Rick Boyd sat gracefully, maintaining eye contact with Thomas, smiling and pleading for his attention with a slightly apologetic air. Once he was seated, he looked smaller and vulnerable and Thomas decided that the brutality of the handshake was either sheer clumsiness or his own imagination. He was trying to remember why the name was familiar and registering the fact that Boyd was really quite alarmingly attractive.
‘What can I do for you, Mr Boyd?’
A familiar name, only just swimming into focus. Someone he had heard about rather than met. Rick Boyd ran his huge hand through his black hair, making it stand on end, adding to his air of uncertainty and making him look youthful. He had the kind of face that would always look young, what with high cheekbones, those eyes and white teeth, although he must have been thirty-five at least. Thomas was no good at guessing ages, everyone seemed young to him. Boyd: Marianne. Something clicked.
‘Wills and probate are my main trade, Mr Boyd,’ Thomas said, putting on his well-rehearsed avuncular act. ‘But you do look a bit young for that kind of thing.’
‘I haven’t come about making a will. I came to ask about Marianne Shearer. The late Marianne Shearer.’
He emphasised the word late, with exaggerated respect and kept his voice low.
‘Oh.’
‘Perhaps I should have written, but I was passing by, and I was away, and I only just heard, and I went to the inquest, and, oh dear . . .’
He looked as if he might be overcome with emotion, then recovered and leaned forward, clasping the enormous hands over his knees as if he was afraid to let them out of his sight.
‘Your name was on the record at the inquest, so I thought you might be able to help. I wondered if, as her executor you could tell me why? Such a lovely woman. So successful, so professional. We were close, Mr Noble. Extremely close. The fact is, I wanted to find out if she had left me anything. I don’t mean money, I mean a memento.’
Thomas gazed at him. A beautiful, disproportionate man whose name he remembered, now. Not a toy boy, although it would not have surprised him if Marianne had at least one of those about her person. She might have been over fifty but there was nothing wrong with her appetites for any number of things. Mr Boyd and Ms Shearer had certainly been close and she had talked about him at length, without ever alluding to his charisma. Other people had, though, and Thomas could feel the first stirrings of acute unease. In the face of it, ignorance was the best policy and he let his own blandness speak for itself.
‘Why?’ Rick Boyd murmured, brokenly. ‘Why did she do such a thing? I can’t understand. She knew I was coming back. She knew I would have helped. Why didn’t she say anything? She promised she would send everything to me.’
Thomas resorted to pomposity to hide his surprise.
‘Really, Mr Boyd, I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything about what might have led to my client taking her life, let alone the manner of it. It’s a mystery to us all and I’m afraid I don’t know anything about her extensive acquaintance, or to whom she was close. I’m relying on everyone else to enlighten me, I’m merely an administrator. Please accept my sympathy. Time may unravel the mystery, it very often does.’
Boyd placed his hands in a position of prayer and spoke with greater determination. He did not seem to like platitudes. Thomas gazed at him, finding the flaws in a handsome body, the hands too big, the curved torso too long for the rest of him.
‘Having done time myself, Mr Noble, I can understand that, but I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I’m not after money, and I’ll wait for explanations, but she had something she promised to send me. She had something of mine, to say nothing of what she had of my heart. I poured my heart out to her, you see and she recorded it. She made notes about me on paper, on her laptop, her phone and she would have kept them all. She said she would send them all back so no one else would ever see them. She’s the only one who knows me, and since we adored one another, I’m sure she’d want me to have what she promised.’
Thomas had been disposed to like the man because of the way he looked, but the demanding tone irritated him. He had him placed now and his appeal faded abruptly. Boyd, as in R v Boyd, Shearer’s last big case. The subject of that messy box of paper, over there. A triumph for a maligned man, she said, but that
surely did not entitle him to anything, not even ten minutes of his, Thomas Noble’s time, not even if he had the novelty value of being the first, the only person to express grief over her death.
‘A dead person’s personal effects, their notes, love letters, records, their whatever else, remain theirs until disposal, Mr Boyd. Her brother, Mr Frank Shearer, has the final say in that. He’s the sole heir of her estate. I’ve no idea what precisely it is that you want, but Ms Shearer’s notes and records are hers and hers alone.’
‘I don’t want them all, sir, I just want the confidential information which relates to me. I’d like it now, before it falls into the wrong hands.’
He was out of his seat now, advancing towards the desk with his fists clenched and then, as if realising what he was doing, he retreated back to his seat with his head held in his hands, sobbing.
‘I loved her, Mr Noble, I loved her. She saved me, you see.’
Thomas maintained his best inscrutable look while clenching his own hands under the desk to keep himself under control. He loathed displays of emotion, especially when they failed to convince him and he had begun to find the person opposite more than a little frightening. Boyd. Charged with kidnap, abduction, rape, grievous bodily harm, and in Marianne’s words, Quite deliciously ruthless, dear, but only a danger to very silly women. Nonsense. Involuntarily, his gaze shifted from Boyd to the boxed transcript in the corner of the room. Boyd wiped his eyes. Genuine tears, but so were those of crocodiles. Thomas wanted him to leave. He wanted it with an intensity of revulsion that unnerved him and it occurred to him that Boyd would not go unless given some sort of promise. He would stay where he was with his big hands and his intimidating weeping. Thomas managed a smile.
‘Mr Boyd, let me explain. As Miss Shearer’s executor, I shall have to go through her effects and find anything that is relevant to her estate, as well as anything that could be relevant to the mystery of her death. At least that’s what I’m going to have to do when I can lay hands on her records, which I’m afraid I haven’t been able to do so far.’
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