‘Trish,’ he called. He was holding out his hand as he came towards her, looking as though she was his dearest friend. ‘How lovely to see you! How’ve you been getting on?’
Sally muttered something and slid out of the room with her bucket. He didn’t look at her. All his attention was on Trish.
‘Not too badly,’ she said, getting to her feet to shake hands. There was the sound of feet in high heels running down the stairs, followed almost immediately by the slamming of the front door. A cabinet of antique glasses shook and the walls vibrated in the aftershock.
‘My wife,’ he said easily. ‘She does so much that she’s usually late, and always in a rush. Now, to Debbie’s business.’
As he walked into the light from the double windows overlooking the street, Trish saw that the argument had left its mark after all. There was hurt in his eyes, which she hadn’t seen there before, and his smile seemed more vulnerable. For the first time she saw the damaged child in him, and that had its usual effect on her.
When he touched her hand and urged her to sit down again, she felt that she knew him much better than their one meeting justified. She liked him. She wanted to comfort him. Warmth filled her, and confidence. She knew her eyes were shining with affection, and she could see his immediate response. She moved closer to him, the warmth increasing, until she realised what she was doing and cut it off at its source.
She knew that her response to other people’s unhappiness was part of her own subconscious need. It had got her into a lot of trouble in the past, and in the end done little good for the people she had tried to help. Slowly she was learning how to use her instinct and channel it into her work so that she didn’t wake expectations in friends and acquaintances that she was never going to meet.
Malcolm Chaze was a source of information, she told herself, and quite possibly PR for Anna’s programme. He was not a hurt child. His unhappiness was no reason to like or trust him.
She controlled her smile and sat at the far end of one of the sofas. He joined her, sitting much closer to her than necessary. She described everything she’d been doing for Anna, censoring only her own anger at Anna’s unreasonable demands. Her professional detachment was clear in her voice and she was glad to see him move back towards the far end of the sofa.
‘It sounds excellent,’ he said, when she finished her account. He was gazing at her as though he had adored her for years and she was the most brilliant, beautiful woman on the planet. Recognising the operation of his own instinctive need to make people respond to him, she felt better about herself. ‘You’ve got much further than you suggested on the phone.’
‘Not nearly far enough. And there’s something that’s really worrying me.’
‘Oh? What’s that?’
‘I detested the doctor.’
‘That seems quite fair,’ Chaze said, laughing. ‘He sounds utterly detestable.’
‘I know. But don’t you see? When Deb encountered him that last time, she was already raw. She needed help and he didn’t give it to her. There was no one else.’
Chaze was still watching her admiringly.
‘If it had been me in her place, his patronising dismissal could have tipped me over the edge, made me do something I’d never—’
‘You mustn’t think like that, Trish. Not ever.’ The words came out very fast. They sounded sincere. But he was a politician: he would be able to turn on sincerity like a tap. ‘I’ve told you already, Trish. I know Deb couldn’t have committed murder.’
‘Even though her father was driven to constant verbal cruelty by the pain he was in, and her mother was being broken a little more with every turn of the wheel as she struggled to care for him?’
Chaze shook his elegant head. His hair didn’t move. He got up to pour himself a goblet of wine to match Trish’s.
‘If you can’t accept that she did it deliberately, then how about an accident? Say she was so desperate to relieve his skin condition that she gave him some of the antihistamines that had helped her in the past, unaware of the danger of mixing them with his own?’
‘No, Trish.’ A hint of impatience scratched at his voice. He gulped some wine in a way that made her stare. ‘Not even an accident makes sense to anyone who knows Debbie.’ Chaze drank again, as though to give himself courage. Catching her eye, he deliberately put the glass on a silver coaster on the table beside the sofa arm. ‘It’s not sentimentality,’ he said, wiping his hands on a large white cotton handkerchief. ‘Or even the vanity of a man who thinks he has only to sleep with a woman to know everything about her.’
She acknowledged that one with a smile, thinking, So he does know something about himself.
‘You see, I know Debbie. Even though it’s years since we were close, I know how she thinks and what moves her; what makes her angry and how she behaves when she loses her temper.’
‘How?’ Trish asked urgently, remembering Adam’s fear.
‘She runs away, and cuts the person who made her angry right out of her life. She doesn’t stay for a confrontation.’
‘She could have changed. You said her marriage had done things to her.’
‘True. But however much she’s changed, I know she couldn’t kill.’
‘But …’
He stretched out a hand and laid it palm upwards on the striped cushion between them. The skin was faintly shiny, but did not look damp. Liars usually sweated buckets. But then he’d have had plenty of practice: politicians were always having to lie – or at least shade the truth, which came to much the same thing.
‘Trish, I believe in Debbie. And I have to see her free. That would—’ He broke off, apparently unable to say any more.
Trish noted the wobble in his voice and the slow moistening under his eyelids. It was years since he’d had anything to do with Debbie. What was going on in his mind? He coughed.
‘It would make up for some of the things I’ve got wrong in the past,’ he said more firmly, hiding behind the big wineglass again. It was empty when he put it down.
‘We all make mistakes when we’re young,’ he told her seriously, even though she hadn’t asked for any explanation. She wondered how much of his determination to help Deb came from his need to prove his wife wrong about his motives and character. ‘We misjudge people, make the lives of the ones we care about more difficult than they need to be. I’ve done my share of that, God knows. More than my share. If I can help Debbie now, I can … I suppose it would allow me to believe in myself again.’
Trish had to exert considerable will not to look up at the thin ceiling.
‘It must sound very selfish: to want to help Debbie because it would make me feel better.’
She could hear the subtext shrieking at her: reassure me; reassure me; tell me I’m an OK person. She resisted her urge to do exactly that and produced the most austere piece of comfort she could find: ‘Selfishness wouldn’t matter if it got her out.’
‘Thank you,’ he said quietly, still looking vulnerable.
It was time to wind this up and get home. ‘So, as far as I can see,’ she said briskly, ‘our only real hope of getting her out is to come up with another source for the astemizole and a doctor who’ll say that it was enough – in combination with the prescription drugs – to kill him without any suffocation at all.’
‘That’s a terrific idea,’ said Chaze, losing most of his sadness and looking almost energetic again. ‘But are there any doctors who’ll do things like that?’
‘Only if it’s true,’ Trish said drily. ‘Anna’s got researchers checking out all the medical details, but nothing’s come through yet.’
She wondered why she hadn’t counter-attacked when Anna complained of her lack of progress. Something must be softening parts of her brain, and Anna’s.
‘And then, of course, there will still be the terfenadine overdose to be explained.’
‘You’ll do it, Trish, if anyone can.’ Chaze settled back into the sofa’s softness, recrossing his long legs. His face was la
nguorously peaceful again and he looked at her out of eyes that seemed full of confidence.
She couldn’t help noticing that his suit was made of superfine wool and that the cut was so good it didn’t ride up anywhere or crumple. She had a feeling she was meant to have noticed.
‘But I’m not surprised you sounded depressed on the phone,’ he said, comfortably re-established now in the master’s role. ‘It’s a tall order. I’m so glad that Debbie’s got you on her side. The one piece of luck the poor girl has ever had.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I hope when it’s all over and we’ve got her home, you and I will be able to work together again.’ He patted the sofa cushion beside him, as though inviting her to cosy up to him. ‘I think we make an excellent team, you and I. You’d be an immense help to me in my war on drugs.’
‘You know, I’ve been thinking that what really needs changing in this country isn’t so much the obvious wickedness of drug-dealers as the everyday mistreatment of the elderly. You could do a lot worse than taking that on.’
‘Trish, Trish! I’ve got more than enough on my plate. I’ve set my hand to the plough; I can’t abandon it now.’
Were clichés and mixed metaphors worse than franglais? she asked herself. Aloud she said, ‘But lots of people are campaigning for that. There’s even a Drugs Tsar. But there isn’t any Elderly Tsar that I’ve ever heard of. No one’s in charge. Look what happened to Deb’s parents: middle-class, articulate and reasonably well-off, but desperate. Think what must happen to people of that age who don’t have resources like theirs.’
‘The state can never take the place of the family,’ he said, parroting his party’s latest back-to-the-hearth campaign.
‘You mean, Deb should have abandoned husband, children and job to be her parents’ nurse-housekeeper?’ Trish said. ‘Is that what you’re saying? Or do you think Cordelia should have given up her business and become a drain on the benefits budget?’
His face took on the withdrawn but faintly smiling expression every politician learned to use when put on the spot and made to face the real human cost of some piece of spin-doctor’s rhetoric.
‘The welfare state was built on the assumption that women’s domestic labour was free and would be freely available for ever,’ Trish said, recognising the soap box only as she got on to it. ‘Sorry. This isn’t a political meeting. But something needs to be done.’
‘I’m sure you’re right. And if you start a campaign, I’ll lend you my support. But I’m already committed. Now, how are you getting on with Phil Redstone, by the way?’
‘He’s not being co-operative at the moment, which is understandable. Deb’s appeal is mostly based on his incompetence. The idea of being pilloried in a television programme as well must be vile. I keep telling Anna that I won’t be party to a witch hunt, but I know she’d like to see him publicly humiliated.’
‘Professional solidarity,’ Chaze said, with a bitterness that sat oddly with his smooth professional persona. ‘The curse of all miscarriage-of-justice cases. Doctors, lawyers, car dealers, police officers … you’re all the same.’
Trish withheld her defence and got to her feet, holding out her hand. Chaze took it, gripping lightly and pulling her towards him so that he could kiss her cheek. His own was smooth as cream.
‘I’m just worried about Debbie,’ he murmured, his lips moving against her skin. ‘It makes me bad-tempered. Will you forgive me? As I said, you’re doing a fantastic job and we couldn’t do without you.’
Smooth bugger, Trish thought uncharitably, as she left the house.
Chapter 12
Letting her head turn sideways on the pillow, Trish saw that George was still asleep, flat on his back, mouth a little open. He looked comfortable. Safe. He had arrived at the flat a couple of hours after she’d left Malcolm Chaze last night, saying that the legal dinner had been excruciatingly dull and could he stay?
They had made love, avoiding the subject of each other’s broodiness, and Trish had slept better than she had for weeks. She stretched now under the sheets, feeling sleek and serene as her long legs slid luxuriously under the light summer duvet. The flakes of the digital clock flicked over for half past six and the radio burst into sound.
George’s faintly blue eyelids twitched but did not open. His hand reached for her and brushed her thigh. She moved her leg a little closer to him.
‘MP Malcolm Chaze was found shot in the front hall of his house in Pimlico at half past eleven last night,’ said the newsreader.
Trish shot up, the thin coverings falling away from her body. George coughed and muttered a protest, dragging the duvet back. His eyes opened and began to focus.
‘Laura Chaze, the MP’s wife, found him when she returned from the theatre. He was lying, shot in the head, just inside the front door. The couple had no children.’
Trish felt George’s arm round her shoulders, pulling her back against the pillows. She remembered Chaze’s farewell gesture last night and gripped the edge of the duvet between both hands.
George buried his face in her neck. She felt his lips moving and heard his voice buzzing against her skin.
‘What? I can’t hear.’
‘I was just weak-minded enough to be thanking God that you’d left his house in time,’ George said, moving back and blinking. He reached for his glasses, then his dressing gown. ‘I need coffee. Shall I make you some?’
Trish glanced at the clock, no longer hearing the news-reader’s voice. ‘Why not? There’s just time. But then I’ll have to run.’
Alone, hearing the sound of George’s bare feet slapping against the wrought-iron treads of the spiral staircase, Trish thought about Malcolm Chaze and how he’d died – and why.
‘Did you like him so much?’ George asked, when he brought up her big, white cup almost overflowing with strong coffee.
‘What?’ She stared up at him. ‘What d’you mean? I hardly knew him.’
‘You look horrified,’ he said. ‘Your eyes are huge, and I bet your pulse is racing. I’ve never seen you so stary, except the time they rang to tell you about Paddy’s heart-attack.’
She shook her head, taking the cup from him. When she’d drunk some coffee, she licked her upper lip to get the foamed milk off it. ‘I quite liked Chaze, I suppose, even though I still wasn’t sure I could trust him, but it’s not that.’
In spite of the heat and the coffee, she was shivering and felt very sick. Being pregnant must be like this. She wasn’t sure why she’d ever thought she might like to bring a child into such a world.
‘A lot of it’s probably shock,’ George said, perching on her side of the bed. He didn’t try to touch her, which was lucky. She felt her face clench.
‘I’m not trying to belittle your feelings, Trish,’ he said, reading her without difficulty, ‘but it is a shock – and to hear it like that, as you burst out of sleep. Not surprising it’s affected you.’
She put down the cup and leaned against him, taking some solace from his warm solidity. ‘I think,’ she said slowly, ‘it’s the thought that this might have something to do with his campaign to free Deb Gibbert.’
George pushed her away from him so that he could look at her face. ‘Are you telling me you think someone out there could be so afraid of what Malcolm Chaze might turn up about the killing of an old man in Norfolk that he had Chaze shot?’
‘Put like that it sounds a bit melodramatic,’ Trish said, reaching for her coffee cup. She was proud of the steadiness of her hand.
‘Come on, Trish. Chaze was a politician. He must have had a million enemies.’
‘Maybe. But it is a bit pat, isn’t it? His death coming just twenty-four hours after he first publicly announced that he was going to prove her innocent. Didn’t he say something about “If it’s the last thing I do”?’
‘I need some of your coffee,’ George said, grabbing the cup. ‘Trish, will—’
‘I will be careful,’ she said, taking the cup back.
‘And
will you talk to the police?’
She appreciated his use of a question, knowing how much he wanted to issue instructions. ‘Shit! Look at the time, George! Are you bathing this morning?’
‘If that won’t get in your way.’
‘Great. I can have the shower then. Budge up out of the way.’
Their morning routine was so slick that they moved off in their separate directions, meeting at intervals as they fetched ironed shirts from the hangers in Trish’s long wardrobe and more coffee from the kitchen, but never getting in each other’s way. George’s shaving took about as long as Trish’s makeup, so they met again at the front door, impeccably tidy, briefcases in hand, ready to face their clients.
Dave was hovering in the doorway of the clerks’ room when Trish ran into chambers. He wasn’t holding a stopwatch, but he might have been. She felt like reminding him that she employed him and not vice versa.
‘What, Dave?’ she said, not stopping but merely slowing down as she passed him.
‘I need to talk to you about the Greer case. We—’
‘Not now, Dave. I’m in court this morning.’
‘I know,’ he called bitterly down the passage after her. She closed her ears to the words and their implication and shut the door of her room so that she could gather herself and her papers together in peace.
Trish spent a bruising day in front of a judge who had always been hostile to her and today kept interrupting as she examined her witnesses. Trying to think of her fury as a spoiled lapdog that had to be kept quiet, she smiled at the bench, answered all the irrelevant unnecessary questions, waited patiently while the judge made notes of what she said, then returned to her proper job.
The lapdog had a good run once she was back in the robing room, but even there she tried to keep it on the lead. If she were ever to take up Heather Bonwell’s suggestion of applying for silk, she’d need judges and senior members of the Bar on her side. Slagging off one of them where she could be overheard would be idiotic.
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